Atropos (24 page)

Of course, real luck would have been if Borzov’s man had simply had the horses to pick up the nomination on his own. That way, they could have kept Senator Van Horn on the hook for some other purpose. But no matter how much power you grab, you can never overpower time. This was their candidate’s moment; the press, party leaders, everyone who shaped the political climate had proclaimed that this year it was going to be Mr. A or Mr. B. If either of them had decided to pass, he would have looked as if he’d chickened out. It would do nothing to enhance his chances four years down the road.

And there was the personal angle. Borzov wouldn’t be alive four years down the road. He knew it, Gus knew it; all you had to do was look at him. He’d conceived this operation, had nursed it through long years of Cold War and Detente and whatever the current catch phrase was. Now, with the present Chairman apparently genuinely wimping out with this
perestroika
nonsense, Borzov didn’t want to trust his vision to a successor who perhaps shared the Chairman’s Utopian ideas.

Gus couldn’t blame him.

So they would take the shot. If it failed, Gus would be in no worse shape than he was now, and that wasn’t too bad. If it worked ... well, then, things would get interesting. Their boy looked good, and he spoke okay, and he could handle a press conference. But he was so used to taking orders, he was going to need a lot of good advice running the country.

And Augustus T. Pickett was going to be around to see that he got it. Gus would, in fact, more or less run things his way, with the support and cooperation of the Soviet Union. They may have been going soft, but not so soft that when they got handed the United States of America on a silver platter they were gonna give it
back.

Gus smiled.

I’ll do a good job for them, Gus thought. And for me.

Power. Lots of it.

I win, Gus thought.

A
MBER WAVES OF GRAIN
flanked the interstate. The farther Joe Albright got from the state capital, the more out of place he felt. He’d had the Congressman’s research people check it out before he’d left Washington. There were 70,000 black people in this state, and 68,300 of them lived in the capital. Joe wondered how far he could follow Gus Pickett into the middle of a wheat field before he really started to stand out.

Gus Pickett had been Joe Albright’s special project since last month. He didn’t tail him all the time, of course, but when he wasn’t, he was supervising the people who were. He supposed he should have been flattered. Trotter had told Joe that watching Pickett was a job of incalculable importance; that the only reason Trotter wasn’t doing it himself was that he was watching Van Horn, disguised as a mild-mannered reporter. The idea there was that Trotter was going to follow the Senator around until he endorsed either Abweg or Babington. After that, he’d think of some other excuse. In the meantime, Joe was to stick to Pickett (who had never met Joe, something that was untrue of practically everybody else in this case, which, Joe suspected, was the real reason he’d drawn this assignment) like a bad reputation and to keep his eyes and ears open.

Joe looked at the car in front of him, a white Ford Taurus, personally rented by Augustus T. Pickett, eighty-some-odd-year-old jillionaire, at a Thrifty Car Rental office nine blocks from his hotel. Joe had seen him walk by three other places. They probably charged an extra three cents a mile or something.

The old bastard was driving himself, too. Not badly, either. Joe hoped Pickett was concentrating mightily on the road ahead of him, mainly because he didn’t want him thinking too much about the road behind him. The Bureau could teach you a lot of useful things about tailing another car, but they had yet to come up with a technique to let you avoid detection when you and another car are on a perfectly straight road in the middle of perfectly flat land. The wheat wasn’t even tall enough yet to hide in. Joe’s mother frequently said something was “as obvious as a bug on a plate.” Now he knew how the bug felt. It was beginning to be a pain in the ass.

Because Uncle Gus was full of surprises. When he’d left his farm in Virginia this morning (the one Hank Van Horn had been spirited off to) there was no indication that he was going anywhere. No luggage, none of the servants saying, “See you next week, Mr. Pickett, have a nice trip.” The FBI operative who’d been watching overnight (they were using Rines’s people in the D.C. area) had had a hunch and enough self-confidence to share it. He’d decided that from the roads Pickett’s limo had been taking, they were on their way to Baltimore-Washington Airport instead of the more convenient Dulles.

Joe didn’t put much store in hunches, at least not in other people’s, but he couldn’t afford for this kid to be right and himself to have done nothing about it. He hauled himself out of bed and made it to Balt-Wash just in time to spot Pickett’s arrival. He made a mental note to recommend the kid for a raise.

When the old man got out of the car, he had a suitcase. Obviously packed the night before and stuffed in the trunk of the limo while it was still in the garage. Joe wasn’t a Special Agent for nothing.

Pickett carried his own bag through the airport. That was either for extra security (to keep the number of people who knew he’d come to the airport to a minimum) or because Pickett was too cheap to tip a redcap. Considering how famous the man was, Joe leaned toward the latter.

Joe got close enough to the check-in desk to find out where Pickett was going. He let the old man get out of earshot, then talked his way onto the same plane without having to pull his badge. The flight itself was uneventful, though there was a tense moment at O’Hare, between connecting flights, when Pickett seemed to disappear. Joe was trying to work out a plan that would let one man search an entire terminal by himself when he spotted Pickett coming out of the men’s room. Obviously one of those people who didn’t like to use the Johns on the plane.

At their destination, Joe eavesdropped again, this time as Pickett told a taxi driver where to take him. Joe ran back into the airport to the Hertz desk, and arranged for a car to be left for him at the same hotel. It was a breeze to find out what room Pickett had at the hotel—he just asked. So much for the high-security scenario.

Joe checked in himself, but didn’t go to his room right away. Instead, he walked up to Pickett’s to get a fix on where it was in the building. That done, Joe would go up to his own room, phone home for help, get Pickett staked out, get a meal and go to sleep. This would, of course, entail leaving Pickett unguarded (Joe would knock on the door to make sure Pickett was in, if he had to) for a few minutes, but a one-man surveillance was an impossibility anyway. The best time to leave a man unattended was when he’d just settled in after a long plane flight. Sometimes you just had to take a chance.

And sometimes fate arranged it so that you never got the opportunity to take a chance.

Joe was just getting off the elevator when he ran into Pickett getting on. The old bastard was
never
going to give him a chance to get any rest. He was still carrying the little overnight bag. Joe sprinted for the stairs and made it to the lobby first. The desk clerk called him over, handed him a set of keys, and pointed to a red Chevy Camaro parked outside.

“Thanks,” Joe said.

“We’d appreciate it if you’d move it as soon as possible,” the desk clerk said. “It’s a no-parking area.”

“Just a couple of minutes,” Joe said. The elevator arrived and let Gus Pickett and a bunch of people wearing Babington buttons out into the lobby.

“We’d appreciate it,” the desk clerk said again.

Joe looked at the desk clerk, fighting mightily against the urge to turn around to see where that peripatetic old bastard was headed now. Gus Pickett had seen altogether too much of Joe’s face in the last few hours.

“Yeah. Well, I’m going out right now; I’ll move it.”

“The hotel has an excellent garage just around the corner on Marshall Street.”

Joe picked up his quarry with his peripheral vision. He was going out the front door, right past Joe’s car, in fact.

Joe renewed his promises to the desk clerk and beat it. Outside, he squinted in the bright midwestern sunshine as he looked around for Pickett. There he was, down the block, just about to cross the street.

If Joe had had to make a U-turn to follow him, he would have forgotten all about his promises to the desk clerk and taken off after Pickett on foot. Since the old man was walking in the same direction the car was pointed, Joe hopped behind the wheel and started up. Besides, even though the billionaire was on foot right now, there was the possibility that he could hail a taxi at any second, or be scooped up in a car he had arranged to have meet him.

But no. He just walked until he found a car-rental place with a price he liked. Joe found a parking place (smaller cities did have some advantages) and waited until he saw Pickett’s white hair and rimless glasses behind the wheel of the Taurus.

That had been over an hour ago. Joe was getting hungry. He should have thrown some potato chips or something into his little go-to-hell bag while he was at it. A couple of cans of soda.

They had left the interstate now. Joe was even more paranoid about being spotted. On the interstate, he could simply have been someone driving to Utah or California. On this road, he could be nothing but someone interested in something that was going on in the wheat fields.

A few miles down the road, Pickett hit his brakes, then signaled for a right turn. He was headed, apparently, to a group of gray-white buildings set about a half mile back off the road. It looked like a landing field for UFOs, but, in another flash of brilliance, Joe deduced that they were grain elevators. When the wind blew the wheat aside, Joe could just make out the tops of trucks and the plumes of their diesel smoke. Some of these were undoubtedly the trucks that had passed him and Pickett on the road.

Joe drove by the place where Pickett had turned off. There was a two-lane blacktop road with a cloud of truck-raised dust rising five feet above it, and a sign that said “SkyGrain, Inc.—A Division of ATP Industries.”

Oh, great, Joe thought. I’ve tailed this guy through a night and a day and traveled over a thousand miles to see him go to work.

Still, he was a trained and dedicated agent, and he knew he had to hang around to see if he could learn something. He played with the steering wheel a little to make it look good, then pulled his car off the road. He hurried to the front of the car, pantomiming anger. He knelt by the right front tire, slipped a knife out of his pocket, and stuck the blade into the tread. Then he cursed loudly, in case anyone was listening. He went around to the trunk and got out the jack and the spare.

Trucks were starting to come away from SkyGrain, Inc. Joe figured they had either picked up or left off truckloads of wheat.

A truck about one-third the size of the others came out, turned in Joe’s direction, and stopped. The door opened and a young man got out. “Help you with that tire?” he asked cheerfully.

Mark Van Horn.

In blue jeans and a work shirt. Coming out of the other door, dressed the same way, was Senator Henry Van Horn. The work clothes suited the Senator as well as spats would a rooster.

Joe decided to stay and play it out. He’d been at their party, but they might not remember him. He’d talked to the Senator, but there he’d been a Congressman’s nurse; he’d been wearing a tuxedo; and he hadn’t been talking like Aunt Jemima’s favorite nephew, which he intended to start doing in three seconds. There was no reason they should recognize him.

Of course, there was no reason for them to have stopped, either. Joe banished the thought from his mind.

“Man, I sho could. Thank you, mistuh.” Joe was making himself sick. He told himself not to be an asshole. He’d make it up to black people everywhere some other time. Right now, he had to get out of this.

Joe wiped his brow. “I swear,” he said. “Hot enough to cook aigs inside the hen, today.”

“Well,” Mark Van Horn said, “we’ll have you out of here soon enough. Where’s that jack?”

They put the jack together and spun lug nuts. Mark Van Horn lifted the car while Joe got the spare from the Senator and lined it up. They got the new tire on, Mark lowered the car, and the Senator tightened the connections while Joe put the punctured tire in the trunk.

“That ought to take care of it.”

“It sho should. I do thank you. Get that tire fixed right away,” Joe said.

Joe was suppressing a grin. Not only had he gotten out of it, but he’d conned two members of perhaps the most powerful family in America into helping him change a tire. Now all he had to do was get the trunk closed and get back to Washington with the news that the Senator and his son, wearing clothes that amounted to a half-assed disguise, and driving a truck that only added to it, were meeting with Gus Pickett in the middle of nowhere.

Then Mark Van Horn said, “How about it, Dad?”

“I
think
so,” the Senator said. “I can’t be sure.”

“Think hard, we can’t take any chances.”

To hell with the trunk. Joe started making for the driver’s-side door. Slowly. Unobtrusively, he hoped.

“Sorry, son, I’ve done the best I can.”

“Shit,” Mark Van Horn said.

Joe heard quick movement behind him. He turned around just in time to see the flash of sunlight on the jack handle before it crashed into his head.

I
T WAS A SIMPLE MATTER
of fact that Sean Murphy had not crawled into a bottle and pulled the cork in after him in the wake of his talk with Regina Hudson. He had no idea
why
it should be true; it just was.

“It’s all right, Sean,” she kept saying. “It’s all right. I trust him. I know all about him, or at least as much as I want or need to know. So don’t worry, it’s all right.”

“It’s all right that he’s a spy? It’s all right that he’s using you?”

“He’s not using me.”

“Well, he’s for goddam sure using the Hudson Group as a cover for whatever he’s up to. Is it all right that his very presence here corrupts our journalistic integrity?”