The Disposable Man (30 page)

“You can go fuck yourself,” was Willy’s response.

Padzhev’s pleasure merely increased. “Excellent. I will share with you a little of my predicament, so you can see for yourselves what I need.”

He resumed his restless pacing. “I am, as they say, a stranger in a strange land—land that Edvard Kyrov chose well before my arrival. I am hoping that advantage has also made him overconfident.”

He paused to look at me directly. “He has been whittling away at my forces from the moment I arrived, and I think he may be about to launch a final assault, which he will no doubt do as soon as he learns of my precise whereabouts. What I hope to do is to use that momentum to his disadvantage—to select a site, attract him into it, and eliminate him using means he won’t suspect I have.”

“And which you’re hoping we’ll supply,” I suggested.

He bowed in appreciation. “Exactly. What I’m looking for is the type of device your police forces use to track your opponents, along with the expertise to operate it.”

Willy burst out laughing. “A bug? You want us to bug the guys who’re after you? You been watching too many movies.”

“Actually,” I quickly added, and I hoped diplomatically, “what you’re referring to is usually only available to larger departments. We’ve never had anything like that.”

Padzhev gave us a long appraising look, obviously reassessing our usefulness.

I tried to buy us a little time. “What did you have in mind, anyway? How were you thinking of planting them on Kyrov’s people?”

He frowned and waved his hand idly. “Oh, we have a fairly good idea where a couple of them are, from time to time. Our numbers aren’t great enough to turn that to any tactical advantage, but if we could get close enough to attach such a device to even one of their vehicles, then we might use it to find the others until, eventually, they all could be either tagged or eliminated.”

He was rubbing his chin with one of his knuckles, lost in his own thoughts. The unlikeliness of his scheme suggested the limitation of his options—a point belied by his calm manner—and it occurred to me that if, in fact, we did turn out to be useless to him, our lives were basically forfeit. He was struggling to stay alive—not to win some abstract advantage over his enemy—which, as ironies had it, meant it was up to us to supply him with hope.

Luckily, Sammie did just that. “I have an idea,” she said, the nervousness in her voice showing she’d reached the same conclusion I had.

Padzhev looked up at her. “Yes?”

“There is a way to track people using satellites. It’s called the Global Positioning System, or GPS—”

Padzhev scowled. “We are fully aware of what it is, Miss. It is not my interest to know where
I
am on a map. I wish to know where
they
are.”

“I know, I know,” Sammie protested. “Let me finish. It’s not hard to turn that around—to plant a GPS transmitter on someone, and then receive that signal off a satellite to find out where he is. Biologists do it to track migration patterns.”

Padzhev’s expression cleared. “The collars they put on animals. Of course. And you have access to that equipment?”

Again, Willy laughed, but Sammie protested loudly. “Yes, we do. It’s not connected to our department, but I know where to get it.”

I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. She had recently been involved in helping the Brattleboro selectmen establish new “no-fire zones” within the town borders, to limit the possibility of firearms accidents in and out of hunting season, but that had involved mapmaking, not GPS.

“How do you plan to do this?” Padzhev asked her.

She shook her head. “I tell you, you won’t need us anymore.”

His eyes narrowed. “I told you I needed your expertise as well.”

“And I don’t trust you farther than I could spit.”

He pursed his lips. When he spoke again, the tension in him was easier to see. “I don’t have time to negotiate. If you wish to die right now, fine. If you wish to live a little longer, then go get what you need. It is your choice to believe me or not, but I will tell you that if I make it out of your country alive, you will be set free. What I’m asking you to do will be in the best interests of all of us. Edvard Kyrov and his people will not be so inclined. It is your choice.”

“I want the Lieutenant with me,” Sammie said.

Padzhev didn’t hesitate. “Fine, but I keep all the others, and I give you an escort.” He leaned forward and cocked his head toward the TV set. “And keep this in mind: there are no guarantees. Kyrov is no longer the only person looking for us. Everything depends on your speediness. The more time you take, the more imperiled we all become, and I will not hesitate to eliminate your friends if I feel either Kyrov or the police are too close.”

I saw Sammie’s jaw harden as she stared back at him. “We’re wasting time.”

· · ·

We drove back to Brattleboro in one of Padzhev’s cars, with Sammie and me in front and one of the Russian gunmen in the back. He didn’t say a word the entire trip, but neither of us assumed he couldn’t speak English. Not that we cared anyway. Our course had been chosen for us.

Which naturally made me think of how other people were faring.

“Does anyone in the department know you went up to Middlebury?” I asked.

I watched her in the dim glow of the dashboard. It wasn’t quite dawn, and we’d all been through the wringer. She was strained with fatigue and tension, and I wondered how much longer she could function on nerves alone.

“Ron was supposed to be faking things for us,” she said. “He refused not to play some part, and we thought we’d be back before he got into trouble. Considering the shootout, though, I think we can kiss that idea good-bye. Plus, not only did Willy abandon his vehicle when he smacked that other car’s rear end, but he identified himself when he called for backup. The chief may’ve been playing silent partner to our little escapade, but he’s going to have a tough time covering for this one.”

“I am sorry,” I murmured.

Sammie’s voice took on a false heartiness. “Nothing to apologize for. You’ve been shafted from the start. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still doing my job.”

“That might not hold up in court.”

“Yeah, well… ” She turned toward me suddenly. “You’re going to have to keep a low profile when we hit town. Coffin made sure your picture’s plastered all over the place, like a regular Jesse James.”

“What’s the plan, by the way?” I asked. “Or does present company make that a bad question?”

For the first time in too long, she smiled broadly. “Hell, no. In fact, the more the merrier.” She looked up into the rearview mirror and said loudly, “Hey, Vladimir. You speak English? ’Cause you better be a part of this if you want your boss’s plan to work.”

The man’s response was slow and heavily accented. “My name is Anatoly.”

“Good. Pay attention. We’re going to hit up an outfit called Cartographic Technologies for what we need. They’re civilians—high-tech mapmakers. Came in on the wave of the computer revolution. They use mapping to piggyback other data—demographics, vegetation distribution, political affiliations, watersheds, even 911 addresses. They work in the same building we do, upstairs, and they got computers and printers and fancy Internet connections up the wazoo. What I’m thinking is, we approach them like this whole thing is a super secret, high-security undercover job—that all this publicity about Joe has been a smoke screen to get the drop on some bad guys. We can make ’em Russian and pretend you’re an adviser from the feds. You understand?”

Anatoly merely nodded.

“What makes you think they’ll have what we need?” I asked.

“They were the ones who documented the no-fire zones. We got friendly, since I like all that gadgetry, and they showed me a lot of the other stuff they do. That’s when I saw one of those transmitters.”

I was doubtful, but I kept it to myself. Whether she believed in her own plan or not, Sammie had bought us time, and right now that was good enough. If Padzhev was heading for the kind of fight he described, anything was possible, including our being able to get Gail and the others out of harm’s way.

It was still dark when we reached Brattleboro, and drizzling slightly—that predawn hour when, from my days as a young patrolman, I’d always envisioned the buildings and empty avenues as parts of an abandoned, life-size train set—an image enhanced by the traffic lights endlessly, quietly blinking, cautioning no one—blurry washes of red or yellow flashing dully on the scarred shiny surface of the streets.

Sammie headed toward Grove Street—and the entrance to the Municipal Building’s parking lot—but passed it by, pulling onto Williston just beyond—a rarely traveled, narrow, one-way street, which, after she’d killed our lights, turned as black as any urban back alley.

We moved silently on foot across the front of the intervening State Office Building to the edge of our parking lot, pausing in the gloom of the bordering trees to watch for any activity. Given the police department’s location on the ground floor, it seemed to me an enormous risk to use the rear entrance, even assuming the usual skeleton crew was hunkered down over coffee or filling out reports.

But that wasn’t Sammie’s intention. She led us not to the rear but to the side of the building and a broad metal fire escape leading up to a locked steel door on the second floor. There she paused, extracted a set of keys from her pocket, fitted one to the lock, and let us in.

She smiled at me as she quietly pulled the door to, explaining the unauthorized key. “Thought it might come in handy someday.”

The second floor was dimly lighted and as still as a tomb. The three of us walked halfway down its length before ducking into a dead-end alcove, stoppered by a glass-paned door marked “Cartographic Technologies.”

Sammie tried the knob, found it locked, and dug a wallet out of her back pocket. From it, she extracted a thin piece of rigid steel wire with a hook on the end. I wondered if she and Willy weren’t spending too much time together.

Instead of picking the lock, however—a movie stunt I’d never seen work in real life—she slipped the wire between the door and the jamb, searching for the lock’s button release mounted along the edge. There was a distinct snap; Sammie straightened, turned the knob, and ushered us across the threshold. Anatoly remained silent throughout, but I caught him giving Sammie an admiring glance.

We entered a single, large, high-ceilinged room, ghostly pale from the streetlights below filtering through a long wall of tall windows. The room’s center was occupied by a large table, strewn with dimly perceived papers, and all around the periphery, squatting like toadstools on every available flat surface, was a tight row of softly contoured, mismatched computers, monitors, printers, scanners, fax machines, and other things I couldn’t identify, all dark and silent except for a scattering of green and amber operational pilot lights that took us in like the eyes of patient beasts. There was a quiet, steady hum in the room and the faint odor of warm plastic.

“Now what?” I asked, still looking around.

“We wait till they show up,” Sammie answered. “There’s an old vault in the far corner there—they use it for storage—but it’d be a good place to stash ourselves, just in case someone else walks in.”

We carefully followed the direction she’d indicated, found the room-sized vault, and borrowed three office chairs to make ourselves comfortable, surrounded by piles of boxed documents and rank upon rank of rolled-up maps.

· · ·

Three hours later, only Anatoly was left sitting in a chair. Sam and I had made beds of the boxes and were fast asleep when our silent companion shook us awake, his finger to his lips. We could hear outside the vault, now tainted with the pallor of early morning light, people entering the outer room, laughing, talking, and moving things around.

Sammie sat up, rubbed her eyes, and moved her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Christ,” she whispered. “Wish I could brush my teeth.”

Yawning, she stood up, stretched, and added, “Let me go in first. Might cut down on the heart attacks.”

With her departure, Anatoly exhibited the first signs of nervousness I’d witnessed so far. He sidled up to the doorway, his face tense and his right hand under the flap of his jacket, resting, I was sure, on the butt of a gun.

After a small outburst of surprised chatter and a few laughs, Sammie stuck her head back into sight and invited us out.

Standing in the middle of the room were two very tall, slim women, both with bright red hair and freckles. I’d seen them before in the corridor—God knows they were hard to miss—but never realized they worked here.

Sammie made the introductions: “This is Abby and Judy Coven—the sister act of Cartographic Technologies. My boss, Joe Gunther, and our colleague Anatoly, who’s playing a little coy with his real identity.”

Abby, the one with the most hair—a flaming bush that almost engulfed her head—raised her eyebrows. “Ooh, that sounds interesting.”

Judy, a little shorter, and with straight hair in a pageboy, looked at me and added, “Especially in the company of the most wanted man in Windham County.” Her expression was considerably less appreciative than her sister’s.

Sammie scratched her cheek. “Yeah, well, that’s what we’d like to talk to you about. You expecting anybody this early? Any meetings or anything?”

Judy shook her head. “No, why?”

Sammie walked over to the front door, which was shielded from view by a freestanding room panel. “I was wondering if it would be all right to lock the door, just while we’re talking.”

Judy didn’t answer, but Abby was obviously intrigued. “Sure. We have a clean slate till eleven.”

We heard the lock snap shut, and Sammie reappeared, wearing her most affable smile. “Why don’t we all sit down?”

We ended up in a circle, parked on a variety of desk chairs, including the three we rescued from the vault. The arrangement reminded me of a therapy session.

Sammie cleared her throat. “The reason for all the cloak-and-dagger is that we’re working undercover—probably the biggest case any of us has ever been on. That’s why all the cock-and-bull about Joe. We had to make it look like he was on the run.”