London Bridges: A Novel (23 page)

“I'll be back real soon,” I said. “Soon as I can. Don't get too big when I'm not looking.”

And Alex whispered, “Please don't go away, Daddy. Please don't go.”

He kept repeating it over and over until I was inside my rental car and driving away, waving back to my son, who kept getting smaller and smaller, until he disappeared as I turned the corner of his street. I could still feel Alex's little body pressing against mine. I can still feel it now.

A little before eight that night I sat alone at the dimly lit bar inside the Kingfish Café on Nineteenth and Mercer in Seattle. I was lost in thoughts about my youngest son—all of my children, really—when Jamilla rolled into the restaurant.

She had on a long black leather car coat, with a dark blouse and black skirt, and she smiled brilliantly when she saw me sitting there at the bar, maybe looking as good to her as she did to me. Maybe. The thing about Jamilla is that she's pretty but doesn't seem to know it, at least to believe it. I had mentioned I was coming to Seattle, and Jam said she'd fly up to have dinner with me.

At first I hadn't been sure it was a good idea, but that was wrong, all wrong. I was incredibly happy to see her, especially after leaving Alex.

“You look good, Sugar,” she whispered against my cheek. “But you do seem a little beat-up, darling. You're working too hard. Burning the candle down.”

“I feel a lot better right now,” I told her. “You look good enough for both of us.”

“I do? Well, thank you for saying that. Believe me, I needed to hear it.”

The Kingfish, as it turned out, was a totally democratic restaurant: no reservations, but we were seated quickly at a nice table along the wall. We ordered drinks and food, but mostly we were there to hold hands and talk about everything that was going on in our lives.

“This thing with Little Alex,” I told Jamilla about midway through dinner, “it's the worst torture for me. Goes against who I am, everything I learned from Nana. I can't stand to leave him here.”

Jamilla frowned and seemed angry. “Doesn't she treat him well?”

“Oh no, no, Christine is a good mother. It's the separation that kills me. I love that little boy, and I miss him so much every day I'm away from him. I miss the way he talks, walks, thinks, tells bad jokes, listens to mine. We're pals, Jam.”

“And so,” Jamilla said, holding my eyes with hers, “you escape into your work.”

“And so”—I nodded—“I do. But that's a whole 'nother story. Hey, let's get out of here.”

“What do you have in mind, Agent Cross?”

“Nothing illegal, Inspector Hughes.”

“Hmmm. Really? Well, that's a shame.”

You've heard the saying get a room? Well, I already had one at the Fairmont Olympic on University across from Ranier Square, and I couldn't wait to get there. Neither of us could. Jamilla whistled under her breath as we walked into the impressive lobby. She stared up at the engraved ceiling, which must have been forty feet high. There was an actual hush inside the large, overdecorated room at a little past ten when we arrived.

“Italian Renaissance decor, big ol' antique chandeliers, five stars, five diamonds. I'm wonderfully impressed,” Jam said, grinning. As always, her enthusiasm was exhilarating.

“Every once in a while you just have to build in a treat, you know.”

“This is definitely a treat, Alex,” Jamilla said, and gave me a quick kiss in the lobby. “I'm really happy you're here. And that I'm here, too. I like us a lot.”

It kept getting better from there. Our room was on the tenth floor and it was everything it needed to be—bright, airy, plush, with a king-size bed. We even had a view of Elliott Bay with Bainbridge Island in the distance, and a ferry just leaving the waterfront in the foreground. The sights and scenes couldn't have been any better if I'd planned them out in elaborate detail, which maybe, just maybe, I had.

About that king-size bed at the Fairmont Olympic. It was covered with a gold-and-green-striped comforter—a duvet?—I'm always slightly confused about what distinguishes the two. We didn't bother to remove the comforter/duvet. We just fell onto it, laughing and talking, happy to be there together, realizing how much we'd missed each other.

“Let me make you a little more comfortable, Alex,” Jam whispered as she pulled my shirt out of my pants. “How's that? Better?”

“And I'll do the same for you. Only fair,” I said to her. “Tit for tat.”

“Well, yes, I do like that tat of yours.”

I began to unbutton Jamilla's blouse and she continued unbuttoning my shirt. Neither of us was in a hurry. We knew better than to rush any of this. The whole idea was to make it last, to pay attention to each detail, each button, the feel of the fabric, the tiny bumps of anticipation on Jamilla's skin, and on mine, the difficulty catching our breath, the tingle in our bodies, the electricity, sparks, whatever goodness came our way that night.

“You've been practicing,” she whispered, and she was already a little short of breath. I liked that.

I laughed. “Uh-uh. Actually, I've been practicing the art of anticipation.”

“Like this next button?” she asked.

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

“And the one after that?”

“I don't know how much more of this I can take, Jamilla. I'm not kidding.”

“We'll have to see. We'll just have to see. I'm not kidding, either.”

When Jamilla's blouse and my shirt were undone, we slowly pulled them off. Meanwhile, we kept kissing, tickling, scratching, nuzzling, ever so slowly. She was wearing perfume and I recognized it as Calèche Eau Delicate. She knew I liked the scent. Jamilla loved a light scratch all over her body so that's what I did next. First the shoulders and back, then her arms, her beautiful face, the long legs, her feet, then back up her legs again.

“You're getting warm . . . warmer,” she sighed, and laughed very deep in her throat.

Then we slid back off the bed and stood together, swaying and touching. Finally I took off her bra and held her breasts in my hands. “Like I said, I don't know how much more of this I can take.”

I didn't, either. I was hard, so hard that it hurt. I slid down and knelt on the Oriental rug. I kissed Jamilla down there. She was strong and confident, and maybe that's why I liked kneeling before her like this. In awe? Out of respect? Something like that.

Finally I pushed myself up again. “Okay?” I whispered.

“Okay. Whatever you say. I'm your slave. Your master? A little of each?”

I went inside Jamilla while we were still standing, dancing in place, but then we tilted down and dropped onto the bed. I was lost in the moment, lost in Jamilla Hughes, and that was exactly where I needed to be. She was making these tiny sighs and gasps that I loved.

“I missed being with you,” I whispered. “I missed your smile, the sound of your voice, everything.”

“Ditto,” she said, and laughed. “But especially that tat of yours.”

Moments later, five, maybe ten minutes, the phone on the nightstand began to ring.

For once, I did the right thing—I knocked the damn thing onto the floor, then covered it with a pillow. If it was the Wolf, he could call back in the morning.

The next morning I headed back to the Idaho Rockies. Jamilla and I shared a cab out to the airport, then took separate planes going in different directions. “Big mistake. Dumb move,” she told me before we parted. “You should just fly to San Francisco with me. You need some extended R and R.” I already knew that.

But it wasn't going to be. Corky Hancock was the biggest lead we had, and the surveillance on him had been tightening. There was nowhere Hancock could go in the state of Idaho and not be watched, or at least listened to. There was surveillance on his house, the surrounding acreage, even the stand-alone barn. We had four mobile teams on him, with four more in the wings if needed. Since I'd left, aerial surveillance had been added to the mix.

In Idaho, I attended a meeting of more than two dozen agents assigned to the detail. The meeting was held in a small movie house in Sun Valley. The movie 21 Grams with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts was playing there in the evenings, but not during the day.

Senior Agent William Koch stood in front of us. Tall and gangly, impressive in his way, he wore a chambray shirt, jeans, scuffed black cowboy boots. He played the local guy to a T, but he was nobody's fool and he wanted us to know it. The same was true for his CIA counterpart, Bridget Rooney, a confident, dark-haired woman who was smarter than a whip.

“I'll make this pretty simple for everybody. Either Hancock knows we're here or he's just unbelievably careful by nature,” said Koch. “He hasn't talked to anybody since we got here. He's been online—eBay for fishing rods, a couple of porn sites, a fantasy baseball league. He has a girlfriend named Coral Lee, who lives nearby in Ketchum. Asian American girl. Coral is definitely a good looker. Corky isn't. We figured he probably spends lots of money on her, and it turns out, he does. Slightly less than two hundred thousand so far this year. Trips, jewelry, one of those cute little Lexus convertibles the gals like.”

Koch paused and looked around the room. “That's about it. Except we know that Hancock is connected to the Wolf and that he's been paid a lot of money for his services. So at twelve hundred hours, we're going in to take a look for ourselves inside the house. So tired,” Agent Koch said in a singsong. “Tired of waiting.”

There were smiles around the room, even from those who didn't get the reference to the Kinks song. Somebody patted me on the shoulder, as though I had something to do with the decision that must have come down from Washington.

“Not me.” I turned and shrugged at the agent congratulating me. “I'm just a soldier here.”

The team going inside Hancock's place was mostly FBI, but there was a handful of CIA agents, too, led by Rooney. The CIA was in Idaho as a courtesy, partly because of the new working relationship that existed between the two agencies, but mostly because Hancock was directly involved in the murder of Thomas Weir, one of theirs. But I doubted they wanted to take Hancock down any more than I did. I wanted the Wolf, and somehow, somewhere, I was going to get him. At least, that was what I needed to think.

Koch and Rooney were in charge, and they finally gave us the go. At the appointed hour, we swarmed all over the Hancock house. FBI-emblazoned shirts and windbreakers were everywhere. Probably scared off a few deer and jackrabbits, even though not a single shot was fired.

Hancock was in bed with his girlfriend. He was sixty-four years old; Coral was supposed to be twenty-six. Lustrous black hair, good figure, lots and lots of rings and things, slept in the nude, on her back. Hancock at least had the decency to wear a Utah Jazz sweatshirt and sleep in a fetal position.

He began to shout at us, which was actually kind of ironic and funny. “What the hell is this shit? Get out of my damn house!”

But he forgot to look surprised, or he just wasn't a good actor. Either way, I got the feeling that he knew we were coming. How? Because he'd spotted us over the past few days? Or had Hancock been warned by someone in one of the cooperating agencies? Did the Wolf know we were onto Hancock?

During the first couple of hours of interviews, we tried Dr. O'Connell's truth serum on Hancock. It didn't work as well on him as it had with Joe Cahill. He got happy and high, but he just sat back and went with it. Didn't tell us much, wouldn't even confirm things that Cahill had already confessed.

Meanwhile, a search of the house, barn, and sixty acres of grounds was going on. Hancock owned an Aston Martin convertible—and the Wolf loved fast cars—but nothing else even vaguely suspicious turned up. Not for three whole days, during which nearly a hundred agents combed every square inch of the ranch. During that time, half a dozen computer experts—including loaners from Intel and IBM—tried to break into Hancock's two computers. They finally concluded that he'd had experts put up extra security to protect whatever was inside.

There was nothing to do but wait around some more. I read every magazine and newspaper in Hancock's house, including several back issues of the Idaho Mountain Express. I went for long walks and tried to figure out a direction for my life that made some sense to me. I didn't do real well, but the fresh mountain air was a nice treat for my lungs.

When a computer breakthrough finally came, there wasn't much to go on. No direct link to the Wolf or to anyone else who seemed suspicious to us, at least not at first.

The next day, though, a hacker from our offices in Austin, Texas, found a file inside an encrypted file. It contained regular communication with a bank in Zurich. Actually, with a couple of banks in Switzerland.

And suddenly we didn't just suspect, we knew that Hancock had a lot of money. Over six million. At least that much. Which was the best news we'd had in a long while.

So off to Zurich we went, at least for a day or two. I didn't expect to find the Wolf there. But you never know. And I'd never been to Switzerland. Jannie begged me to bring back chocolate, a suitcase full of the stuff, and I promised I would. A whole suitcase full of Swiss chocolate, sweetheart. Least I can do for missing most of your ninth year.

If I were the Wolf, this would be a good place to live. Zurich is a beautiful, amazingly clean city on the lake—the Zürichsee—with lovely fragrant shade trees and wide, winding sidewalks along the water, and fresh mountain air meant to be breathed in deeply. When I arrived, a storm was imminent and the air smelled like brass. The exterior of a majority of the buildings were in light shades, sand and white, and several were adorned with Swiss flags twisting in the blustery wind off the lake.

As I drove into the city I noticed trolley tracks everywhere with heavy-looking wires hanging overhead. The power of the old. Also several life-size fiberglass cows painted with Alpine scenes, which reminded me of Little Alex's favorite toy, Moo. What was I going to do about Alex? What could I do?