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
dilominous 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,
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.
&n
bsp; 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 unhooked
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 lockmushroom, 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. Any one 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 safedeposit 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 news paper. 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 backissue 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.
After Brenda Hennerling explained the filing system to them and left
them alone to do their work, Ginger said, "I'm so caught up in our
problems that I keep forgetting you're a famous author."
"So do I," Dom said, reading the labels on the filing cabinets that held
issues of past Sentinels. "But of course, I'm not famous."
"Soon will be. It's a shame: With all that's happening to us, you're
getti
ng no chance to savour the publication of your first novel."
He shrugged. "This isn't a picnic for any of us. You've had to put an
entire medical career on hold."
"Yes, but now I know I'll be able to go back to medicine once we've dug
to the bottom of this," Ginger said, as if there was no doubt they would
triumph over their enemies. By now, Dom knew that conviction and
determination were as much a part of her as the blueness of her eyes.
"But this is your first book."
Dom had not yet recovered from his embarrassment at being treated like a
celebrity by the receptionist. Now Ginger's kind comments kept a blush
on his cheeks. However, this was not the mark of embarrassment; it was
an indication of the intense pleasure he took in being the object of her
concern. No woman had ever affected him as this one did.
Together, they went through the file drawers and removed the pertinent
back issues of the Sentinel. They would not need to use the microfilm
reader, for the newspaper was running two years behind in the
transferral to film. They withdrew a full week's editions, beginning
with Saturday, July 7, of the summer before last, and took them to one
of the desks, where they both pulled up chairs.
Although the unremembered event that they had witnessed, and the
possible contamination, and the closure of I80 had happened on Friday
night, July 6, the Saturday paper carried no report of the toxic spill.
The Sentinel was primarily a source of local and state news and, though
it included some national and international material, was not interested
in fastbreaking stories. Its halls would never ring with that dramatic
cry, "Stop press!" There would be no last-minute recomposition of the