In an out-of-the-way corner of Little Odessa, Charlie found a peeling four-story building whose hand-painted sign read and in smaller letters beneath that, as if in afterthought, the translation: HOTEL. According to the same sign, the establishment rated five stars.
He slid three tens and a five through a chute in the bulletproof glass encasing the front desk. In return he received a room for the night. The hotel also let by the hour. If all went according to plan, his stay would be less than that.
A drinking song warbled from one of the rooms as he made his way up the stairs. As a result he nearly missed the chirp of his new cell phone.
He answered, “What?”
“That you, professor?” came Grudzev’s voice.
“You can talk to me at my office, mister,” Charlie said, snapping shut the phone.
The exchange meant Grudzev and his men and guns were a go-a triumph. Charlie recognized it was only a small part of the battle, though.
He hurried up to his small, third-floor room, which, while surprisingly tidy, smelled like a butcher’s shop. What mattered was the casement window, or, for his purposes, the escape route. The roof of the adjacent massage parlor was a short jump. He unlocked the handle and let the window glide inward a half inch. To get out in a hurry, he would need only tap it the rest of the way and jump through.
Taking a seat on the magazine-thin mattress, he dialed the number of the Washington Post on his cell phone. He reached a night operator and conveyed enough urgency to be transferred to a junior reporter, the lone person on duty in the newsroom at this hour-3:43, according to the phone. The clock radio bolted to the nightstand was flashing 12:00.
“This might be hard for you to believe-it’s hard for me to believe,” Charlie told her. “I’ve been targeted by a black ops group working under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency. The thing is, if I can disclose what they’ve been up to, their secret will no longer be a secret, which means they’ll no longer have incentive to ‘neutralize’ me. So I was hoping you’ve got a free megabyte or two on your tape recorder.”
“Better you start with the broad strokes,” she said. “You have to understand, we get a lot of these calls.”
Charlie took “these” to mean “crackpot.”
“Have you ever heard of the CIA covert ops unit known as the Cavalry?” he asked.
“No. What’s the story?”
“They began in the early nineties as a collaboration between the agency’s counterproliferation division and counterintelligence, then they went deep black, and, it turns out, too deep.”
“How so?”
“First, let me give you a small amount of background?”
“How small?”
“One column inch?”
“Okay.” The woman emitted a low-energy laugh.
“In the late sixties, our Special Forces scattered boxes of ammunition along the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong-”
A key snapped open the door bolt, startling Charlie. The ancient floorboards in the hallway were so whiney he’d anticipated he would be able to hear a caterpillar’s approach. The door popped open, and in sailed the man who introduced himself the other night as Smith, attorney with an expertise in negligence suits against boiler manufacturers. His real name was Dewart, Charlie had learned since. It took a beat to recognize him with the swollen face, which was Drummond’s handiwork. As was the right wrist-stabilized now in a splint that permitted him full use of the hand. In the hand was a sound-suppressed SIG Sauer.
“Why would our Special Forces leave ammunition for the Vietcong?” came the reporter’s voice. She sounded intrigued.
Dewart pantomimed for Charlie to hang up.
Charlie glanced out the window. A man now stood just below, on the massage parlor roof, apparently inspecting the elevated water tank.
Charlie sighed in dismay. “Listen, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he told the reporter. Over her protest, he ended the call.
“What do you say we go grab a cold one, sport?” Dewart said.
“Gee, that’d be fun,” Charlie said.
He followed him out of the room, head lowered in defeat.
Really he was elated. He’d counted on their coming. He wanted them to think he’d gone to ground at an out-of-the-way fleabag. He wanted them to believe he’d gone so far as to plan an escape route to the neighboring building. Hopefully they’d heard every word of his call to the Washington Post and accordingly believed he would have spilled the beans if Dewart hadn’t broken into the hotel room when he did. In fact, Charlie would have revealed little, if anything, that the reporter couldn’t have found in the archives of her own paper. But if the Cavalry thought of Charlie Clark as a bean spiller, they would worry that the call to the Washington Post wasn’t the extent of it and that their secret could be making its way into the blogosphere now or onto the morning news. So they would question him. And the response he had at the ready would enable him to get to Drummond.
Dewart didn’t ask him anything, though. On the way out of the hotel, all he said was, “The car’s just up the block.”
As he drove them out of Little Odessa, Dewart listened to music on the car radio, humming along. “Silent Night,” of all things.
When the song ended, he unpocketed a pill bottle and tipped two white capsules into his mouth. “Your old man did a number on my wrist, I’ll tell you that,” he said, swallowing the capsules. He chased them with a mouthful of bottled water, then glanced at Charlie. “You’ve probably done painkillers before, right?”
Ignoring the implication, Charlie shook his head.
Dewart guzzled more water. “The pharmacist said cotton mouth was one of the side effects, but this is ridiculous.”
Charlie looked out at Manhattan’s sparkling skyscrapers as they began to appear from behind the big dark shapes on Brooklyn’s side of the East River. Maybe Dewart was waiting until they reached “Cuba” to ask questions. Or maybe he just lacked the requisite clearance.
Instead of taking either the Williamsburg or the Brooklyn Bridge, the most direct routes to Manhattan, Dewart followed the Brooklyn shoreline north, into a stretch of darkened warehouses and factories. The East River here was notorious as a gangland corpse depository. Charlie began to think he’d wildly miscalculated. He contemplated opening his door and leaping out. With no traffic to contend with, the car was cruising at fifty. To strike the pavement at that speed would be to do Dewart’s job for him.
Dewart swung the car toward the Queensboro Bridge’s Manhattan-bound ramp. With an eye at the rearview, he said, “Well, if anyone tailed us, they’ve perfected the invisible car.”
Charlie smiled as if amused, but really because he was pleased to be going across the East River rather than into it.
Dewart continued into Manhattan, traversing Central Park at 86th Street. He parked on West 112th, between Broadway and Riverside. By day the block was a ruckus of chatter and honking and boom boxes. Now, at 4:10 A.M., the only signs of life were a gypsy cab prowling for a fare and a few Columbia students who had stayed in town through Christmas break.
Dewart prodded Charlie toward the Perriman Appliances’ building. The six-story Georgian postwar was faced with a creamy granite browned by the Manhattan air to match its neighbors, a mid-sized apartment building and a parking garage.
Inside, Perriman was as shoddy as Charlie remembered. Cramped offices surrounded the support staff’s network of plastic workstations. The stagnant air smelled of copier toner. The poor souls who answered the phones and tabulated the legitimate end of the business probably hated this place, by design-diminishing the chance that curiosity would lead them downstairs to the moldy basement and over to the grimy utility closet, then down the flight of stairs the “utility closet” opened to.
Charlie and Dewart took precisely that route, arriving in a subbasement nearly as big as a hockey rink. Unlike the basement-which had been stacked with file boxes, worn-out furniture, and old computers no longer worth the expense of hauling away-the subbasement was free of clutter. No reason to maintain the pretence here, Charlie thought.
At the far wall, Dewart pressed a cinder block, which slid aside, revealing a small scanner. He leaned his right eye into its glass screen. A few seconds later, locks within the wall clicked open. A rusty, seven-foot-high ventilation grate swung outward, exposing a bare concrete tunnel two city blocks long and wide and high enough to accommodate a light truck.
Charlie gazed into the facility in awe of its history. He was also terrified-the Cavalry’s decision to make him privy to it was effectively a statement that they had no intention of letting him leave. More than anything, though, he was glad he’d been right.