The Last Family (11 page)

“No, T.C. He would do it. Fact is I don’t need his help for this. You are going to do what I’m asking.”

“Why do you imagine that? You need to have the rocks in your head changed. Why would I?”

“It’s the only thing you can do.”

T.C.’s face grew red as his anger built. “You wouldn’t have him drop weight on me? I have my friends, too, Paul.”

Paul leaned in toward T.C.’s chair. “Normally I wouldn’t see him or speak to him for any favor, and neither would I ask him to use his power against anyone on my behalf. But don’t forget that we’re talking about my family’s safety. This is one hundred percent personal. If anything, and I do mean anything, happens to my family, you won’t have to worry about what Jack McMillan does. There won’t be enough of you left to do anything to.”

T.C. stood, his face ablaze in vein-popping fury. “You’re threatening me? You fuckin’ asshole. Don’t you dare threaten me, you one-eyed, hobbling son of a bitch!”

“You’re right. Don’t give it to me because Jack can have you sweeping the Capitol steps with a toothbrush. Do it because you owe me this much as an ex-agent. Do it because you owe your agents loyalty and retribution for this loss. And do it because you can’t let any man hold your agency hostage. Think up your own reason—you’re creative. But you will do it.”

T.C. exhaled slowly and cracked his knuckles thoughtfully. “I’m sorry, Paul, but I can’t. I will promise you that I’ll deal with Martin—with assistance from the Bureau.” T.C. smoothed his jacket and turned toward the
door. “Enjoy your visit, Paul. See some monuments. Get yourself laid.” T.C. winked at Paul. “Must have quite a load built up after living on that mountain all this time.”

“Just a second, T.C.,” Paul said as he crossed over to the door to the second bedroom and opened it wider. A distinguished-looking man in his seventies entered the living room and took a seat on the couch. T.C. Robertson’s face went as white as his teeth. “I’m sure you know Senator Stanton.”

“Well, this is a surprise.” T.C. was fighting to recover, but the realization that the man had been listening to the conversation was devastating.

“I bet,” Senator Abe Stanton said as he lit a cigar the size of a small log and exhaled a plume of smoke that covered the well-known face from T.C.’s view. “Now, we’re here to discuss what Paul wants,” the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee said. “And if it’s all the same to you, Thackery, we’ll just keep this between the three of us. It’s my opinion that mentioning this to Mr. McMillan, or anyone else, would be completely unnecessary and might have unpleasant consequences for one of us. Sit,” the senator commanded.

T.C. sat and smiled nervously, his face hardly darker than a sheet of typing paper.

“Interesting conversation you were having,” Senator Stanton said. “I for one am thrilled you’ve agreed to help Paul.”

“Paul makes a lot of sense, as usual,” T.C. said, nervously wiping at his brow with a napkin he lifted from the coffee table.

The senator blew a spinning smoke ring toward the television set and fixed his eaglelike eyes on T.C. “Have one of mine. It’s Cuban. What Castro smoked before his bout of throat cancer, I understand.” He reached into his pocket and removed a case, opened it, and held it out to T.C. T.C. took a cigar, sniffed it, and chewed the tip off, picked it from his tongue and placed it into the ashtray beside him. He lit the cigar using a lighter that was beside Paul’s cigarettes and inhaled the first puff.

“God, that’s excellent!” he said grandly. “I love a good cigar.” He was beginning to recover.

“I like to imagine I’m putting the torch to Castro’s crops.” Senator Stanton laughed and winked at T.C. “I bet I could get ten years for lighting this outside the room here.”

T.C. puffed on the cigar and listened to the inevitable.

8

P
AUL HAD SPENT THE FOLLOWING DAY MEETING WITH MEMBERS OF
the DEA and poring over the files of agents whom T.C.’s personnel manager had deemed fit for the team and available. He had finally narrowed it to ten possibles. That evening he had dined at La Côte d’Or again, this time with the owner of the restaurant. They had sat and sampled wines for several hours, and a taxi had delivered a rubber-legged Paul to the Willard at one
A.M.
Paul staggered to the elevator, maneuvering among the ghosts of U. S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abe Lincoln, and George Armstrong Custer, all of whom had walked through this same lobby. Paul opened his door and dropped his clothes, like a trail of bread crumbs, as he meandered to the bedroom and fell headlong toward the mattress, asleep almost before he hit the bed.

Paul awoke certain that he was not alone in the suite’s master bedroom. There was the faint scent of cologne
in the air, a difference in the patterns of air flow. Just enough that a man who had slept alone, and in the absence of commercial fragrances, for several years would pick it up. Just enough for an alarm as he fought toward consciousness. He didn’t move but lay still and let his eye take in the fact that the door was open and he had closed it before he went to sleep. Then he heard the breathing of someone beside the bed, and he was trying to decide how to move when the presence sat down in the armchair by the window.

“You’re awake,” the unfamiliar voice said. “If I planned to harm you, you’d surely be in the hereafter by now.”

The man in the chair twisted the knob on the floor lamp and was illuminated against the dark walls.

Paul rolled over and felt on the table for his eye patch. He located it and put it over the right socket as he sat up. “Who the hell are you?”

The man seated in the chair was tiny, no larger than a ten-year-old child with fifty extra pounds, and skin the pallor of the recently deceased. He had a round, bald head, and his features were remarkable only for their blandness. The eyebrows were light hints of hair above the washed-out blue eyes. He wore heavy framed glasses with lenses that seemed to suggest the body was being piloted by a far smaller being. The face, except where the glasses compressed, was almost perfectly round, and the mouth was a thin line between pink, fleshy lips. He was dressed in a green V-neck sweater and bright-blue pants. He wore twin golf gloves over remarkably small, round hands. There was a battered and old-fashioned briefcase beside him on the floor. The shoes were canvas Converse high-tops that were in no danger of touching the floor.

“Who are you?” Paul demanded. “How did you get in here?”

“My name is Tod Peoples. I picked the lock on the outside door.”

“You picked the electronic lock?”

“Well, no, actually I had a pass key. But I can pick locks.”

“Are you armed?”

“No, but I certainly could be if I chose,” he countered. He locked his small hands to the arms of the chair. “My man outside is.”

Paul couldn’t tell if the dwarf was kidding or not.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Peoples?” Paul asked.

“I’m here to help you.”

“Not to help me sleep.”

“No, you were sleeping fine on your own. Call me Tod.” He crossed his ankles and let his legs swing a few times.

Paul lit a cigarette. “Was I snoring?”

“Cigarettes,” Tod said, like a disapproving teacher.

“They’ll stunt my growth?”

“They’ll kill you. Ever heard of free radicals?”

“Stop, you’ll scare me. Doesn’t anyone worry about themselves anymore?” Paul inhaled and expelled a plume of smoke. Then he crushed out the cigarette. “Lighten up, Tod Peoples, it’s my room, remember? You’re one sight to wake up to.”

Tod frowned. “I’m not sensitive about my height or my appearance. I am aware of what I look like.”

“That’s good. I figure my appearance, much like my breath, is other people’s problem.”

The little man smiled for the first time. “Yes, we share something there. That’s true, isn’t it? I mean, we look fine to ourselves. Amazing how often people are shocked that a man with my power isn’t a ringer for Clark Cable or Cary Grant.”

“So what is it you plan to do for me?”

“I am a friend of friends of yours.”

“What kind of friend are you, Tod?”

“The best kind of all. The kind with information and other friends who possess talents you will need. I was made to understand that you are having trouble finding the right personnel for the job.”

“I can get help just fine. Information on whom?”

“Oh, on everyone. But I think you are interested in one man in particular.”

“And that would be?”

“Martin Fletcher.”

“CIA, right?”

“Me? Goodness no. Let’s say my role is multilateral data collection and interpretation, and dissemination of information. My little group coordinates that information with those who need or deserve it. I might take information to the very top, or I might give a tidbit to some sheriff in a county. Depends. But I have access to information that rarely makes the computers.”

“Pentagon?”

“Let’s not dwell on where I’m from. You can reach me through the DEA switchboard. Just ask for Special Agent Peoples.”

“DEA?”

“I am not DEA, never even been inside the offices, never been inside FBI’s headquarters, either. I meet very few people, Paul, and fewer still meet me.”

“I stand in awe.”

“Your calls will be patched to my office. Give your name to the person who answers and a number where you can be reached and for how long. If you can’t stay by the telephone, tell them it’s an emergency and they’ll find me. But don’t do that if you can help it, because they’ll call my mobile, and that is an unnecessary expense that the taxpayers will have to pick up.”

“You’re shitting me! They don’t make you pay for your mobile phone calls, do they?” Paul laughed.

Tod Peoples frowned. “Unnecessary records of the call. Just follow the instructions,” Tod said.

“That’s fine.” He was enjoying Tod Peoples. If the man meant any harm, he’d have already killed Paul or drugged him, and he figured Martin Fletcher was their mutual target.

Tod lifted the briefcase to his lap and opened the top. He took out a file several inches thick and held it out to Paul. Paul opened it and removed a stack of pictures. The first was of a child smiling into the camera. The front teeth were missing from his cocky grin.

“That’s my earliest picture of your Martin Fletcher. I
will furnish you copies of whatever you require for your purposes.”

“I could use a set of slides for team briefing.”

“The pictures won’t actually do you much good. Martin’s had extensive surgery on his face, possibly even his body. He stayed at a plastic surgeon’s clinic in Madrid for five months, five years ago.”

“The surgeon has no after pictures?”

“The surgeon and his nurses are after pictures themselves. They were killed in an unfortunate accident involving a large amount of plastic explosive. Fuse was—”

“Remote radio trigger?”

Tod smiled. “A hands-on sort of guy. I understand that specific, and unnamed, elements of an organization want Martin turned into axle grease worse than you do. The three-letter wonder agencies of this country who might have any interest in Martin Fletcher will stay out of your way unless asked for help. If you need help, the FBI would be my personal choice.”

“You have access to CIA files?”

Tod giggled. “We control the influx of certain information. My people see everything that comes in. We decide who else gets access. Very complicated affair. Also totally nonpolitical. I’d rather confine this discussion to Mr. Fletcher. You only knew Martin a short time, while I have known him, or of him, for two decades. I know his strengths, his favorite foods, the beverages he drinks, his sexual tastes, and most important, what you don’t know—his only weakness.”

“Do you know why he’s killing the families?” Paul said as he flipped through the file.

“Yes, possibly.”

Paul looked up into Peoples’s smug face.

“Well? Are you going to tell me, or do you want me to guess?”

“His only weakness is his mother. He has seen her every year of his life, on or near his birthday, with one exception six years ago.”

“Not that. Why he’s killing the families.”

“You don’t know already? On some level it’s all
about the unfortunate attraction of opposites, coupled with the sociopath’s inability to accept any blame for his own misfortune. Don’t you think it interesting that the perpetrator of a horror never forgives his victims? On another level he blames you directly for his troubles. You are his overall scapegoat.”

“Who broke him out of prison?” Paul wanted to see what this critter would allow. He might know more than Paul did.

There was no hesitation. “Two men in suits entered the prison using forged credentials. They were CIA-hired freelance, one brought in from Houston and the other from Seattle. Martin was far too valuable to be allowed to fall into a position where he might trade information for his freedom. The information he has might be classified as embarrassing and destructive to some powerful entities. They flew him south with a promise of life in paradise. Then they tried to kill him.”

“They planned to kill him?”

“They did, indeed. Oh, that’s right, you were in a coma when all of that happened. And it wasn’t a story that received wide circulation through channels you would have had access to, anyway. You haven’t kept up at all, have you?”

“You’ll tell me, though. Tell me what I missed.”

“Certainly. You
should
know, since it’s surely the main reason he’s back. Well, three young and brutally minded men met him and his wife and child at a small strip in the jungle of Guatemala. They should have sent ten times that many or killed him on the spot while he was unarmed. They struck at night and Martin dispatched them as you would expect. In the hoopla Martin’s wife, technically his girlfriend, Angela something …” He snapped his tiny fingers twice.

“Lopez.” Paul remembered Angela Lopez. She was the kind of woman you noticed and didn’t forget.

“Yes. Miss Lopez and their small child were killed. He blames you, and to some lesser degree your team members.”

“That’s crazy. I had nothing at all to do with it. I was in a coma, doesn’t he know that?”