Jericho's Fall, page 23
She shook her head. “I don’t have all night, Mr. Clark. Before you tell me your story, maybe you should tell me why you want to.”
He was trying to look in every direction at once. He had shaved his beard. He had ditched the gaudy red Explorer and was driving some sort of rent-a-wreck. She did not understand why he was still in town.
“They’re after me,” he finally said. “I need your help.”
“My help?”
A tight nod, Adam’s apple bobbing. “You can’t be touched, but I can. I’m in serious trouble, Beck. But I think, if you’ll just talk to Jericho, he can call off the dogs.”
“Jericho!”
“He’s the one who hired me in the first place. Now people are trying to kill me.”
Beck opened her mouth to dismiss his words as melodrama, then shut it with a snap: she was in no fit state to accuse someone else of seeing monsters under the bed. And so she listened. The tale was part whine, part complaint, part cri de coeur. And it was quickly told. After he lost the lawsuit over his Kennedy book, Clark had found himself suddenly without a publisher. Nobody would touch him. Then Jericho came along. Not personally. An intermediary. With an offer. He was to dig up all the dirt he could about Scondell Bloom. Every fact, but also every rumor. Beat the bushes. Use whatever tools came to hand. Hire people if he needed them: there was a budget, said Clark, and not a modest one. His fee, too, would be handsome. He had to sign various undertakings not to disclose anything to anyone but the intermediary, but he had no trouble with that. When his research was done, when it was all turned over to the client, he was free to write his book, subject only to the client’s editing.
He had no trouble with that, either.
What he did have trouble with was his sense that somebody was dogging his steps. Somebody was keeping up with his interviews, not merely tracking him, but talking to people after he did, and sometimes before. There were searches of his apartment, too, and bugs—“In my business, you get used to those things”—but none of this discouraged him. On the contrary. He took the rough tactics as evidence that he was making progress.
“And then something went wrong,” she prompted.
The writer nodded. He was ordered to Stone Heights. At this point, he and Jericho had not met. But the intermediary told him to visit the house to pick up some notes. He had promptly done as requested, and of course had been tossed out on his ear. So he hung around town, waiting for a call from the intermediary, picking up whatever additional information he could.
“And where did Pesky come in?”
Well, that was the point, really. He had hired Pesky as part of the budgeted staff. But, very soon, Pesky began taking orders directly from Jericho.
Through the intermediary.
So the two men worked partly together, and partly at cross-purposes. “For instance, I didn’t know he was sneaking around Stone Heights taking pictures until he told me. I asked him why he took a risk like that, and what he hoped to get out of it. He told me to mind my own business. And then he had that fall, and Jericho went after him with the gun—”
Clark stopped and looked around again, as if awaiting the appearance of the same mad specter, only this time torturing him instead of Pesky.
“If you didn’t know Pesky was at Stone Heights,” she asked coldly, “then why did I see your car the morning he shot the dog?”
“He borrowed it.” Offered promptly, as if Clark had anticipated the question. “Sometimes he drove my rental instead of his. For security’s sake, he said.”
“Who’s idea was shooting the dog in the first place?”
“Pesky’s. I didn’t know about it until after.”
Beck found the writer’s lies unimpressive. On Monday morning, when she found the dead dog, the red Explorer had passed her twice, first traveling uphill, away from Stone Heights, then heading down again, both times before the gunshot. Lewiston Clark had dropped Pesky off, then returned to pick him up, knowing precisely when the poor dog would be killed. Or maybe she was being too hard. A third person might have been behind the wheel. As Pete Mundy kept reminding her, Bethel was full of strangers these days.
“So why are you on the run? Who’s after you?”
Well, he did not know exactly. But somebody was. He knew the signs. Hotel rooms ransacked. Credit cards mysteriously canceled. Cars trying to run him off the curving mountain roads.
“Sounds more like harassment,” said Beck, but if she intended her words to reassure, she failed.
“Exactly. First they harass you to flush you out, and then they take you when you’re on the run.” A crash at a nearby table caused the writer to half rise, fists inexpertly balled. Then he sank into his seat again. Only a dropped tray. People were laughing. Clark shook his head. He had yet to touch his burger. Beck had limited herself to a small Diet Coke. “I have no place to stay,” he said, resuming his lament. “That’s when they get you.”
She was already shaking her head. “If this is some roundabout way to wangle an invitation to Stone Heights—”
“No. No. I wouldn’t go there.” A theatrical hesitation, as if his next line had just now popped into his head. “On the other hand, given what’s been going on, Stone Heights might be the safest place.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of who’s after me. It has to be Jack Notting’s people.”
“If it is, what makes you think Jericho can call them off?”
“Because they were in it together. That’s what my sources tell me. Thick as thieves, so to speak.”
“Tuesday you thought Jericho was blackmailing Jack Notting.”
“Today I’m hoping he isn’t.”
She drummed her fingers on the table, mildly astonished that the writer had been so easily taken in. She did not know who had hired him. She was sure it was not Jericho Ainsley And so she asked the obvious question.
“Who was the intermediary? Why did you trust him?”
But even before he pulled out the signed contract, she had guessed. Lewiston Clark might play the clumsy oaf, but he was a dogged investigator. He would not have been taken in easily. The only person who could have persuaded him that he was really working for Jericho Ainsley was—well, someone very close.
She didn’t even need to turn the letter around to see that it was signed, with a great flourish, by Sean Ainsley.
CHAPTER 27
The BreakIn
(i)
In her car once more, having promised to talk to Jericho and sent Lewiston Clark off into the darkness of his own making, Beck did her sums. Either Sean was working with his father, or Sean was working against him. Given the intensity of Jericho’s reaction upon discovering who—whom!—Pesky was working for, she would bet on the latter.
Beck continued to dismiss the writer’s claim that his life was at risk. Someone was trying to scare him off, the way Pete Mundy and his partner had, except that this time the tactic was working. Indeed, she was not sure how much of Clark’s story to trust. The entire encounter with the writer might have been nothing more than another contrivance of whoever was trying to spook her.
“Take it down a notch,” she muttered—another Jerichoism.
Driving slowly through town, Rebecca thought it over. Sean Ainsley had hired a marginally successful writer and a marginally competent investigator to dig up dirt on Scondell Bloom. And why would he need the dirt? She was not sure he did. After all, had he really had it in for his father, he could surely have hired someone—well, better. The obvious answer was that the writer had not been dealing with Sean at all, that Jericho’s son continued to sit in his New York office, dispensing largesse for environmentally friendly manufacturing projects around the world, as ignorant of the latest manipulations as he was of everything else about his father. In short, the writer might have been duped by someone else, using Sean’s name. Another possibility, she supposed, was that Sean was working on behalf of someone else: a Third World government, say, to whom he made grants, and who could not afford the best investigators.
But she was teasing herself with the likeliest answer. Sean might not have been close to his father, but he worshiped the woman he and his sisters called Aunt Maggie. Margaret Ainsley, worried about her political future if another scandal exploded around her cousin, had been in regular communication with Sheriff Garvey Other than that, she could hardly let her own hand be seen, other than in a couple of carefully scripted conversations on phone lines she knew perfectly well were bugged. On the other hand, a quiet word to Sean could have set off a whole chain of events.
And not only because Sean loved his aunt. He would also be acting out of simple malice. Rebecca remembered his unearthly glee one night when, after years of trying, he nearly got her into bed; and how the only thing that had saved her from an act of absurdist tragedy was what she saw at the last moment as she gazed into the handsome, triumphant face. In that instant, she understood that Sean’s true desire was for victory not over her weak and lonely flesh but over his own domineering father.
(ii)
Wait.
Police cruiser in front of the library, flashers on. Ambulance beside it.
Beck practically flew out of the car. She was leaving for Chicago in the morning anyway, but if something had happened to Miss Kelly, whom she genuinely liked, then she was leaving tonight.
And something had.
Miss Kelly was inside, sitting on a desk, talking to Deputy Frias. She was holding a compress on her forehead, and looked woozy. She had not yet noticed Rebecca. Miss Kelly’s head was down, and she was explaining to the deputy what had happened. Beck caught just the tail end, but the tail end was enough. She had been working late because they were revamping the catalogue. A couple of men—the strangers, Miss Kelly called them, just as everybody else in town did—a couple of the strangers had knocked. There was little violent crime in Bethel, and Miss Kelly had thought nothing of opening the door. The strangers had bulled past her, shoving her to the floor, where she had bumped her head on a table. In one minute, out the next. They knew what they were looking for.
What was that? the deputy asked.
The computers. That’s all. The library computers that connect to the Internet.
The paramedics wanted to take the librarian to the regional hospital, but she refused. They made her sign a form, and Beck, who by now had been noticed, read over her shoulder, but the first name was illegible.
After everyone else had left, the two of them sat there, drinking unreasonably weak coffee from the convenience store around the corner.
“Did they say anything?”
The librarian grimaced. “I believe their main contribution to the conversation consisted of telling me to get out of the way.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“The police asked me. I thought I might have seen one of them in the supermarket last week, but I’m not that good with faces.” A moment’s embarrassment as she checked the compress. “I have a cut, don’t I? I’m afraid to look.”
“It’ll heal. You won’t have a scar.”
The black woman sounded doubtful. “I hope you’re right.” She grinned. “I know I must sound vain.”
“Not at all. But it’s going to be fine.”
She offered Miss Kelly a ride, but the librarian’s apartment was right across the street. Beck asked if she was sure she wanted to skip the hospital, and Miss Kelly asked if Beck was sure there would be no permanent scar. Then Rebecca asked the question she cared about most:
Did Miss Kelly know what Jericho had been looking at on the Internet?
Beck steeled herself for another assertion of librarian’s privilege. Instead, Miss Kelly plunged right in. Perhaps the bump on the head had changed her ethical views. “Mainly, the financial news. I think he checked his own portfolio, too, even though we have signs warning people not to do that on these machines. Oh, and he visited home-improvement sites.”
“To buy appliances?” Beck asked.
“I don’t think so,” said the librarian. “I think he was mainly interested in how things work. How to nail on a shingle or tape up drywall. Things like that.”
Driving away, Rebecca was kicking herself for missing what the strangers had obviously figured out. Brian Navarro had told her that Jericho used the Internet at the library. She had not paused to wonder why a man with a perfectly good computer and modem at home would go to the trouble of driving forty-five minutes to the library when he wanted something off the Internet. The only reason she could think of was that he thought his home computer, like his home phone, was tapped. Whatever he was searching for, he wanted to hide it. The strangers had the computers, and would no doubt try to track down what sites had been visited. But Beck knew that her onetime paramour was a paper-and-ink man. He would not have relied on the screen alone. What he needed, he would have printed.
The printouts had to be somewhere in the house.
CHAPTER 28
The Hero
(i)
Rebecca noticed the headlights when she was halfway up the peak. Something big, she decided from the height and angle of the beams— bigger than her rental, anyway, and clinging to her tail a couple of hundred feet back. Probably nothing to worry about, but after seeing Miss Kelly with her forehead gashed open, she was prepared to worry about whatever might come along, thank you very much.
She looked around. The road narrowed here, and the forest closed in on both sides, obscuring the view up the looming, shadowy mountain and, for minutes at a time, even the night sky. Jericho had told her one misty night that the forest was haunted by the ghosts of warriors who had perished when the warring tribes met in the surrounding fields, and then, when he had her shivering with fear, insisted on pulling over and scurrying into the trees for some unscheduled fun.
There was no mist tonight. The storm had moved off, and the air was crisp and clear.
The headlights were closer.
Her cell phone lay on the passenger seat, but with the curves coming up, she needed both hands to steer. Besides, the only person Beck could think of to call for help would be Pete Mundy, and she was starting to worry that she was spending too much time around him. The deputy, in his sweetly protective earnestness, set her competing sides to war with each other, and the tension generated by the battle was more than she needed just now.
Closer.
This was not like the drive up from Denver. This was not an over-reaction to the stress of the reunion. This was real. Whoever was behind was gaining as she sped along the narrow mountain road. The headlamps filled her car. She was heading uphill, so acceleration was out of the question. The truck was on her tail now—
And a Suburban pulled out in front of her, blocking the road.
She slammed on the brakes and skidded. With a nasty screech, her bumper slid against the fender of the Suburban, which was parked crosswise. A second pulled up close behind. There was nowhere to go. Rebecca fumbled for the door-locking button and grabbed for her cell, but men were already pulling her out of the car.
Lights and badges.
“Miss DeForde? Federal Bureau of Investigation. Would you mind coming with us?”
Into the back of one of the Suburbans. No cuffs, but an agent beside her. Somebody had her keys and drove her car. They made a little caravan. Not up the hill. Not down. Off along a side road, into the darkness of the mountain forest, leaving civilization far behind.
(ii)
They parked the Suburban in the middle of a field. She could see stars and the moon and the headlights of two other vehicles, one of them hers. She could see no houses, not even a distant flicker of light. The driver got out. So did the man beside her, instructing Rebecca to wait. She asked if she was under arrest. The man said no. She asked if she was free to leave. The man said no.
The wait was not long.
A fourth car drove into the field, moving very fast.
Two men got out, one about her age, one closer to Jericho’s. They climbed in, the older man beside her, the younger one in the front, and she guessed at once that the younger man was guarding the older.
The younger man flashed a different badge. “I’m Deputy Krukoff, United States Marshals Service. I am informing you officially that you are about to meet a protected witness. You may not repeat to any unauthorized person any information that you acquire as a result of this meeting. Do you understand?”
She sized up Krukoff in an instant: a lover of authority, but over women especially. Jericho without the dash and wit.
“I understand.”
“You are here because certain of your activities may place the protected witness at risk. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“The witness has chosen to talk to you alone. This is against my advice.” Having laid out his bureaucratic position, the marshal slipped from the car, lingering near enough to save his protectee should Beck pull a knife from her slacks.
The older man spoke for the first time. “Rebecca. What a pleasure to meet you at last.” He put out a hand. “Jack Notting.”
(iii)
“You’re very persistent,” said Jack Notting, and she knew at once that he was the sort of man who was interested in no one’s views but his own. He was a small man, almost boyishly slender, but he emanated the stony confidence of a successful manipulator of destinies. He spoke in the clipped, overly simple phrases of the morale officer. “You and Jericho both. How is the old bastard anyway? Cancer won’t beat him. Not the type. You watch. Back on his feet in no time. He’ll be back to blowing up the world or making his fortune or whatever turns him on this week. You’re leaving tomorrow?”
The question caught her off guard. “Yes.”
“Probably best. Jericho was a fine man in his day, but he’s wandered off the reservation. So have you.”
“I didn’t notice any boundaries.”
Jack Notting might not have heard. “I’m worth a couple of billion dollars. Did you know that, Rebecca? Two billion dollars, and I’m in witness protection. Want to know why? Because I decided to be a hero. To tell the truth. My partners lied their asses off in front of the grand jury, and I told the truth. Got it?” He did not wait to hear whether she had it or not. “Now, look. You’ve been asking lots of questions about Scondell Bloom. Time to stop. Keep it up and there won’t be a trial. Know why? Because there won’t be a witness. I don’t care how many marshals they put around me. I don’t care if they stash me in Saskatchewan. Keep this up and I’ll be dead.”
