Sleeping Dogs (14 page)

“He was killed too? Where?”

“England.”

She jumped up. “My God, we’re wasting time. Get me the flight lists from London to New York. Every flight since the nephew died. And every flight out of New York since he killed Tony T.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions. We don’t even know what happened to the nephew. It might have been AIDS.”

“Then find out. But later. First the airline flight lists.”

Elizabeth worked alone. In the old days it used to take hours of negotiations to get anything from the airlines. Now any question from the Justice Department—at least the Washington office-induced a special kind of panic. Too many planes had been dropping out of the sky. The fax machine kept buzzing, and Richardson’s secretary had to keep walking back into the little cubicle to change the paper.

Elizabeth crossed off all the names of women, then all the names of travelers with Frequent Flyer credits, then all the reservations made more than a week ago, then all the passengers with names he couldn’t be expected to use—Yamaguchi, Babatundi, Gupta, Hernandez and Nguyen—then looked through the sheets again. What else? What was it that made him special? Nothing. That had to be it. There would be nothing special at all: no special seat, special meals, special luggage arrangements. He didn’t give a damn if he rode naked in the baggage compartment; all he wanted was to get out fast and disappear again. She checked the notations on the printouts once more, crossing off any passenger who had a special request.

That left an encouragingly short list. There wasn’t time to count the names, but there were still too many. She thought about what he had done. He had walked into a kitchen, shot Tony T in front of a lot of people and walked out. It was the middle of the night. Of course he had known Tony T was dangerous. What he would have wanted to do was to sneak into Talarese’s bedroom while he was asleep and empty the pistol into his head. It would have been between three and five in the morning, the time the police always picked for a raid, when he would be deep asleep, and the plane reservation would be based on what he had wanted to do, not what he’d had to do. He would expect to be finished and on the street by five-thirty at the latest, at the airport again by six-thirty and on a plane by seven-thirty or eight. That was the absolute outside limit.

Elizabeth pushed aside half of the flights. Would he sit around in an airport until 10:55 waiting for a way out, when anybody could walk in and see him? Not a chance. He would be long gone by then. He’d be up in the air about thirty thousand feet on his way to … where? Not someplace where there would be two flights a day, eight hours apart. If he missed the first one, there had to be another one warming its engines on the runway. Someplace big and busy. She went through the pile of flights again, pulling out the small cities, losing hundreds of names as she did it, and feeling warmer now, closer to him. Once, years ago, she had gone through the airline lists, knowing that he was one of the names, and never gotten this close. He had already landed somewhere before she even knew he had taken a plane. But this time was different; these flights were still in the air. Maybe this time.

He was running, and he wasn’t going to cross his own path. No return reservation. She obliterated all the round-trip tickets, now finding reasons for eliminating names faster than her hand could move to strike them out. Almost all the remaining names had booked return flights.

Form of payment. He would certainly have credit cards, probably in a lot of different names. But if he did, he wasn’t going to let them be used to trace him away from the crime scene, and he wasn’t going to throw one away for an airline ticket. He would use them for hotels after he had come to earth someplace safe. He would pay cash for the ticket.

There were only five names remaining on three flight lists now, and she laid them all out on the table and stared at them. One of them looked wrong: Hagedorn, David. She was sure she had crossed that one off already. She looked quickly from sheet to sheet. Hagedorn, Mary, traveling with Hagedorn, Marissa. Parents. At one time she wouldn’t have understood, but now she did. It was that awful, depressing anxiety that one of the planes was going to fall out of the sky, and some sort of magic would keep Marissa from being an orphan. She crossed off Hagedorn, David.

There was nothing to distinguish any of the other four. They had all bought tickets with cash on the day of the flight. All had chosen to leave New York on morning flights. All were males traveling alone, taking any seat they could get. Somebody undoubtedly had heard a relative was sick, another had been called for a job interview, another had a girlfriend who wanted him to join her after all. The fourth had just fired a pistol into the head of a New York caporegima, and was understandably impatient to get out.

Richardson came in behind her, but she didn’t look up. “How’s it going?”

“I’ve got it down to four,” she said.

“How the hell did you do that? What are the criteria?”

“It would take an hour to show you. We don’t have an hour.”

“Give me the four.”

She handed him the three passenger lists with four names left untouched. “I don’t know how to get it down to one.”

He glanced at the lists. “Dallas … Chicago … Los Angeles … another Chicago. What do you want to do?”

“If there’s any way in the world to hold all four of them, do it,” Elizabeth said. “He’s running. Though he doesn’t exactly run; he just sort of fades out. He won’t stay put. He’ll get on another flight under another name. He’ll pay cash.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s no time. Look at those ETAs.”

“I’ll get the FBI on the phone.”

* * *

Elizabeth watched Richardson through the open door of his office. It was the third time he had been on the telephone with the FBI agent. He held his ballpoint pen over a yellow legal pad, at first poised to write something down, then just gripping it like a knife, clicking the button on the end of it nervously, retracting and extending the tip over and over as he listened.

She waited at her old desk and tried to avoid the bad luck by watching the first group of ambitious GS-7’s and −9’s coming in to work early, each expecting to be the first, seeing her and looking puzzled, then seeing Richardson’s door open and looking disappointed. She had been like them once, and it mortified her now, but at the time it hadn’t been ambition. She just hadn’t known enough history. They had still called it the Organized Crime Task Force in those days, behaving as though they had been brought together to cope with an emergency that would go away if they worked harder than the Mafia. That was before she had learned enough to realize that criminal conspiracy was the natural state of affairs in all civilized countries. People who worked for the Justice Department had to be in it for the long haul.

But then Richardson was on his feet and out of his office, and the expression on his face was enough. “No hits,” he said. “Dallas is seventy-one years old, and both Chicagos are military personnel. L.A. is already on the ground and the FBI doesn’t even have its team there yet. I’m sorry.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s not too late. He’s got to be in the L.A. airport, or near it, trying to get out. He doesn’t have another reservation. Don’t we even have a birdwatcher in a major airport like that?”

“We don’t have a picture or a description or anything else. Nobody’s ever seen him. What are they supposed to do?”

“He’ll be getting on another flight. Try the name. It might not be any good now; next time he can call himself Rufus T. Firefly if he feels like it. But there’s got to be a way to stop him before he gets on another plane. It will be a one-way ticket bought for cash in the airport since his plane landed.”

“I don’t know,” said Richardson. “This is getting thinner and thinner.”

“Please,” said Elizabeth. “This is closer than we ever got ten years ago.”

Jack Hamp was sitting in the coffee shop overlooking Runway 23 with four engine mechanics from United when the crew chief happened to notice that the light on his beeper was blinking. It didn’t blink often, so he didn’t look at it often. He wasn’t under the illusion that if there was an emergency they would think to warn him, so a month after he had gotten this assignment he had opened it up and cut the wire from the relay to the little speaker.

Jack Hamp had managed to retire from the Los Angeles Police Department after twenty years and gotten a job as what he had thought was a Justice Department field investigator. At the moment the job didn’t involve much investigating. He was supposed to loiter in the L.A. airport and watch the huge amorphous, anonymous crush of people getting on and off airplanes to see if he could spot any of the fifty or so men and women that the Justice Department was giving special attention to at any given moment. Most of the time, when somebody like that was coming through, Hamp would have the reservation in advance, and all he would have to do was to pass by the gate to see him step aboard, then report what he had seen: “Subject Vincent Toscanzio. At 13:53 subject boarded TWA flight 921 for Chicago, ETA 7:53
P.M.
Was accompanied by two male Caucasians listed as Harold Carver, positive I.D. Joseph Vortici, and Paul Smith, probable I.D. Frederick Moltare.” It all went into the hopper for some analyst to sort out in Washington.

The rest of the time he fished the crowds for Special Surprise Guests nobody had known were out and about. He had no vanity, and he was good at looking like something other than a federal cop. He was six feet three and lanky, with pale blue eyes, long blond hair and a mustache. He looked like the aging cowboy he probably would have been if he hadn’t been optimistic enough to join the marines twenty-five years ago and accidentally seen a few big cities. He usually went to a gate when a crowded flight from a major departure point was unloading. He would stand a little back from the gauntlet of moms and pops scrutinizing the file of passengers to see Junior a second earlier. He would carry an object—maybe a magazine, maybe only sunglasses or a set of car keys—but never a cup of coffee, because that was what people drank when they were on duty. And like the moms and pops, Jack Hamp would stare at each face for a moment right in the eyes, because he too was hoping to recognize someone.

He managed to pick out a few interesting faces each month, and this probably made his reports worth sending, but he didn’t much like the assignment. He suspected he had gotten it because the Department wanted him on the payroll, but didn’t have a clear idea what to do with him on a day-to-day basis. He was young to be a retired cop—forty-six—but he was too old and uneducated to be on the Upward Trail with the rest of the Boy Scouts.

The Justice Department had put him through a refresher course in investigative techniques of the sort he had given to ten or twelve litters of rookie cops over the years, an orientation for federal employees that he had used to compile a list of whose calls he could ignore, and a little practice in shooting holes in cardboard cutouts that looked like the villains in a comic book. Then they had sent him back to L.A.

Hamp walked with a barely perceptible limp as he got up and made his way to the pay telephone at the other end of the concourse. The man who had put the hole in his left thigh eight years ago had taken a little of the femur with it, and he sometimes felt the stainless-steel pin. He dialed the number quickly. “This is Hamp,” he said.

The man on the other end was somebody he had never talked to before, but Hamp knew Richardson’s name. It was one of the ones he couldn’t ignore.

Ackerman walked to the Hong Kong Airlines desk. The man behind the counter was Chinese, but he had an engraved name-plate on his jacket that read M
R.
S
ULLIVAN.
His English accent made Ackerman homesick for Schaeffer’s life. “May I help you, sir?”

“You have a flight to Hong Kong in twenty minutes,” he said. “Do you have any seats left?”

Mr. Sullivan clicked some keys on his computer. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s fully booked. We have another at four-seventeen.”

Ackerman hesitated. Hong Kong was okay, because he could go back through British customs after a week without raising any eyebrows. If he flew back through New York, there would be watchers in the airport, and he might never make it out. He decided that waiting was the smaller risk. “I’ll take it.”

“May I have your passport, please?”

Ackerman plucked it from his coat pocket and handed it to Mr. Sullivan, who glanced at it and set it aside for a moment.

“How will you be paying for that, sir?”

“Cash.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Sullivan. “Let me just confirm that it’s still available.” He pressed three numbers on his telephone and began to speak in Chinese. Ackerman glanced around at the people lining up behind him and setting their luggage down. As he turned back, his eyes caught something peculiar. At the far end of the counter there was another man speaking into a telephone in Chinese. It was the cadence that caught his attention. When Mr. Sullivan talked, the other man stopped, and then Mr. Sullivan said something and the other man glanced in his direction. Ackerman watched the man until the two hung up almost simultaneously. He stood at the counter while Mr. Sullivan made out the ticket, copying his name from his passport, and then he walked away.

He knew it was possible that Mr. Sullivan was only calling his supervisor to check on that reservation. It might even be that two conversations followed approximately the same course, ended at the same time, and had nothing to do with each other. But it might also be that two men who worked for Hong Kong Airlines had just made a year’s salary. He had been away a long time. Ten years ago the Balacontano family could steal the cargoes off wide-body planes in the middle of JFK and truck them out. It wasn’t hard to believe that by now they could search passenger lists for the right alias.

He walked to Gate 28, where he was to board the flight for Hong Kong, then walked along the concourse until he found the right place to sit. It was two gates away, at Gate 26. The seat he wanted was occupied, but a lot of flights were going to leave before he needed it. He used the time to buy a ticket for the four-thirty plane to Albuquerque, and then sat in a coffee shop where he could watch people coming through the metal detectors that guarded the concourse, until he realized that watching was pointless. They didn’t have to send faces he knew; somehow they had found out what name he was using. And they wouldn’t be clumsy enough to get stopped by a metal detector. The gun would be concealed inside another steel object or, more likely, was already here.