Strangers (62 page)

But at least those reprogrammed memories, those tissues of lies, were dissolving, allowing the truth to show through. Dom was grateful for that much. In time, they would uncover the entire story—if Colonel Falkirk did not first come after them with heavy artillery.

•

Monday morning, while the group at the Tranquility ate breakfast, Jack Twist was being escorted to a safe-deposit box in a vault of a Fifth Avenue branch of Citibank, in New York. The attending bank employee, an attractive young woman, kept calling him “Mr. Farnham,” for that was the false identity under which he had acquired the box.

After they used their separate keys to remove the box from the wall of the vault, when he was alone with it in a cubicle, he opened the lid and stared in shock at the contents. The rectangular metal container held something that he had not put there, which was an impossibility since only he knew about the box and possessed the only master key.

It should have contained five white envelopes, each filled with five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, and indeed that money appeared to be untouched. This was one of eleven emergency caches he kept in safe-deposit boxes all over the city. He had set out this morning to remove fifteen thousand dollars from each, a total of $165,000, which he intended to give away. He opened each of the five envelopes and counted the contents with trembling hands. Not a single bill was missing.

Jack was not even slightly relieved. Though his money was still there, the presence of the other object proved that his false identity had been penetrated, his privacy violated, and his freedom jeopardized. Someone knew who “Gregory Farnham” really was, and the item that had been left in the box was a bold notification that his elaborately constructed cover had been penetrated.

It was a postcard. There was no writing on the back, no message; the presence of the card itself was message enough. On the front was a photograph of the Tranquility Motel.

The summer before last, after he and Branch Pollard and a third man had burglarized the Avril McAllister estate in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and after Jack paid a profitable visit to Reno, he rented a car and drove east, stopping the first night at the Tranquility Motel along Interstate 80. He had not thought about the place since, but he recognized it the instant he saw the photograph.

Who could possibly know he had stayed at that motel? Not Branch Pollard. He’d never told Branch about Reno or about his decision to drive back to New York. And not the third man on the McAllister job, a guy named Sal Finrow from Los Angeles; Jack had never seen him again after they had split the take from that sour job.

Then Jack realized that at least
three
of his phony IDs had been penetrated. He rented this safe-deposit box as “Farnham” but he stayed at the Tranquility Motel as “Thornton Wainwright.” Both
noms de guerre
were now blown, and the only way anyone could have linked them
was by connecting Jack with his “Phillipe Delon” identity, under which he resided at his Fifth Avenue apartment, so that name was blown as well.

Jesus.

He sat in the bank cubicle, stunned but thinking furiously, trying to decide who his enemy might be. It could not be the police or the FBI or any other legitimate authority, for they would simply have arrested him once they had accumulated this much evidence; they would not play games. Nor could it be any of the men with whom he ever worked on a heist, for he took great care to keep his acquaintances in the criminal underworld well out of his life on Fifth Avenue. None of them knew where he really lived; in the event they scouted a job requiring his planning skills and special knowledge, they could reach him only through a series of mail drops or through a chain of pseudonymously listed phone numbers backed up by answering machines. He was confident of the effectiveness of those precautions. Besides, if some hoodlum had gotten into this box, he would not have left the twenty-five thousand bucks untouched; he would have taken every dollar of it.

So who’s on to me? Jack wondered.

He focused on the
fratellanza
warehouse robbery that he and Mort and Tommy Sung had pulled off December 3. Was the mafia after him? When they wanted to find someone, those boys had more contacts, sources, determination, and sheer perseverance than the FBI. And the
fratellanza
would most likely not have taken the twenty-five thousand, leaving it as an ominous notice that they wanted more than the money he had stolen from them. It was also in character for the
fratellanza
to leave a teaser like the postcard, because those guys enjoyed making a target sweat a lot before they finally pulled the trigger.

On the other hand, even if the mob tracked him down, then somehow searched back through his criminal career to see who else he had hit, they would not have gone to the trouble of acquiring cards from the Tranquility Motel just to put the fear of God in him. If they had wanted to leave an upsetting teaser in the safe-deposit box, they would have left a photo of the warehouse that he had robbed in New Jersey.

So it was not the mafia. Then who? Damn it, who?

The tiny cubicle began to seem even smaller than it was. Jack felt claustrophobic and vulnerable. As long as he was in the bank, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He stuffed the twenty-five thousand into his overcoat pockets, no longer intending to give away any of it; suddenly, it had become his escape money. He put the postcard in his wallet, closed the empty box, and rang the buzzer for the attendant.

Two minutes later, he was outside, drawing deep breaths of the freezing January air, studying the people on Fifth Avenue for one who might be tailing him. He saw no one suspicious.

For a moment he stood rocklike in the river of people that flowed around him. He wanted to get out of the city and the state as quickly as possible, flee to an unlikely destination, where they would not look for him. Whoever
they
were. Yet he was not entirely sure that flight was necessary. In Ranger training, he had been taught never to act until he understood why he was acting and until he knew what he hoped to achieve by his actions. Besides, fear of his faceless enemy was outweighed by curiosity; he needed to know who he was up against, how they had broken his various covers, and what they wanted from him.

Outside the Citibank Building, Jack hailed a cab and went to the corner of Wall Street and William Street, in the heart of the financial district, where he had six safe-deposit boxes in six banks. He went to five of them, from each of which he collected twenty-five thousand dollars and a postcard of the Tranquility Motel.

He decided to stop after the fifth, because his coat pockets were already bulging with $125,000, a sufficiently dangerous sum to be carrying, and because, by now, he knew beyond a doubt that his other six phony identities and clandestine safe-deposit boxes had been found out as well. He had enough money with which to travel, and he was not particularly worried about leaving the remaining $150,000 in the other six boxes. For one thing, Jack had four million in his Swiss accounts; and for another thing, the distributor of the postcards would already have taken the available money if that had been his intention.

By now, he’d had time to think about that motel out in Nevada, and he had begun to realize something was strange about the time that he had spent at the place. He had remained there for three days, relaxing, enjoying the quiet and the scenery. But now, for the first time, it seemed to him that he would have done no such thing. Not with so much cash in the trunk of his rental car. Not when he had already been away from New York (and Jenny) for two weeks. He would have driven straight home from Reno. Now that he was forced to contemplate it, the three-day stay at the Tranquility Motel did not make much sense.

Another taxi conveyed him to his Fifth Avenue apartment building, where he arrived shortly before eleven. He promptly telephoned Elite Flights, a company that chartered small jets, with whom he had dealt previously, and he was relieved to discover that, fortuitously, they had an unbooked Lear available for departure at his convenience.

He took the twenty-five thousand from the secret compartment in
the back of his bedroom closet. With the funds he had removed from the safe-deposit boxes, he now had $150,000 in immediate operating capital, enough to deal with virtually any contingency that might arise.

He hurriedly packed three suitcases, distributing a few clothes in each, but leaving most of the space for other items. He stowed away two handguns: a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum, chambered for the .357 Magnum cartridge but also capable of firing .38 Special cartridges with considerably less kick; and a .32 Beretta Model 70, its stubby barrel grooved to accept a screw-on, pipe-type silencer, of which Jack included two. He also took an Uzi submachine gun, which he’d illegally modified for full automatic fire, plus plenty of ammunition.

Jack’s newly acquired guilt had substantially transformed him during the past forty-eight hours, but it had not overwhelmed him to such an extent that he was incapable of dealing violently with those who might deal violently with him. His determination to be an honest and upstanding citizen did not interfere with his instinct for self-preservation. And considering his background, no one was better prepared to preserve himself than Jack Twist.

Besides, after eight years of alienation and loneliness, he had begun to rejoin society, had begun to hope for a normal life. He would not let anyone destroy what might be his last chance for happiness.

He also packed the portable SLICKS computer, which he had used to get through the armored transport’s sophisticated electronic lock the night before last in Connecticut. In addition, he decided he might need a Police Lock Release Gun, a tool that could instantly open any type of pin-tumbler lock—mushroom, spool, or regular—without damaging the mechanism, and which was sold only to law-enforcement agencies. And a Star Tron MK 202A, a compact, hand-held “night vision” device that could also be rifle-mounted. And a few other things.

Although he distributed the heaviest weapons and equipment equally among the three large suitcases, none of the bags was light when he finally closed and locked them. Anyone who helped him with his luggage might wonder about the contents, but no one would ask embarrassing questions or raise an alarm. That was the advantage of leasing a Lear jet for the journey: He would not be required to pass through airport security, and no one would inspect his baggage.

From his apartment, he taxied to La Guardia.

The waiting Lear would take him to Salt Lake City, Utah, the nearest major airport to Elko, a shade closer than Reno International, and a lot closer if you considered the necessity of overflying to Reno and then doubling back in a conventional-engine commuter plane to Elko. Elite Flights had told him that Reno was anticipating a major snowstorm that
might close them down later in the day, and the same was true of the two smaller fields in southern Idaho that were capable of handling Lear-size jets. But the weather forecast for Salt Lake City was good throughout the day. At Jack’s request, Elite was already arranging the lease of a conventional-engine plane from a Utah company to carry him from Salt Lake to the little county airport in Elko. Although it was in the easternmost fourth of Nevada, Elko was still within the Pacific time zone, so he would benefit from a gain of three hours, though he did not think he would arrive in Elko much before nightfall.

That was all right. He’d need darkness for what he was planning.

To Jack, the taunting postcards, retrieved from his safe-deposit boxes, implied there were people in Nevada who had learned everything worth knowing about his criminal life. The cards seemed to be saying that he could reach those people through the Tranquility Motel or perhaps find them in residence there. The postcard was an invitation. Or a summons. Either way, he could ignore it only at his peril.

He did not know if he was being followed to La Guardia; he did not bother looking for a tail. If his apartment phone was tapped, they knew he was coming the moment he called Elite Flights. He wanted them to see him approaching openly, for then they might be off-guard when, on arrival in Elko, he suddenly shook loose of them and went underground.

•

Monday morning, after breakfast, Dom and Ginger went into Elko, to the offices of the
Sentinel,
the county’s only newspaper. The biggest town in the county, Elko boasted a population of less than ten thousand, so its newspaper’s offices were not housed in a gleaming glass high-rise but in a humble one-story concrete-block building on a quiet street.

Like most papers, the
Sentinel
provided access to its back-issue files to anyone with legitimate research needs, though permission for the use of the files was granted judiciously.

In spite of the financial success of his first novel, Dom still had difficulty identifying himself as a writer. To his own ears, he sounded pretentious and phony, though he realized his uneasiness was a holdover from his days as an excessively self-effacing milquetoast.

The receptionist, Brenda Hennerling, did not recognize his name, but when he mentioned the title of his novel that Random House had just shipped to the stores, she said, “It’s the book-club selection this month! You wrote it? Really?” She had ordered it a month ago from the Literary Guild, and it had just arrived in the mail. She was (she said) an avid reader, two books a week, and it was truly a thrill to meet a genuine novelist. Her enthusiasm only added to Dom’s embarrassment. He was of a
mind with Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said, “The important thing is the tale, the well-told tale, not he who tells it.”

The
Sentinel
’s back-issue files were kept in a narrow, windowless chamber. There were two desks with typewriters, a microfilm reader, a file of microfilm spools, and six tall filing cabinets with oversize drawers containing those editions of the newspaper that had not yet been transferred to film. The exposed concrete-block walls were painted pale gray, and the acoustic-tile ceiling was gray, too, and the fluorescent lights shed a cold glare. Dom had the odd sensation that they were in a submarine, far beneath the surface of the sea.