Hubert Tocsin laid a hand on Captain Madoowbe’s shoulder. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised what friends you can make, in the arms business. Once I had breakfast with Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, and dinner with the Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, the Primate of Ireland, both on the same day.’
‘I’ve dropped one of these pendants,’ said Adeola. ‘You can’t see it anywhere, can you? It’s a reproduction, but I’d hate to lose it.’
Hubert Tocsin and Captain Madoowbe looked around the carpet. Suddenly, Captain Madoowbe bent down and picked up the missing pendant from underneath one of the buffet tables. ‘Here, Ms Davis. I have always had a keen eye.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Adeola.
There was another moment of high tension, although Adeola didn’t know what it was that was causing the stress between herself, Hubert Tocsin and Captain Madoowbe. It was almost like standing next to an electricity substation, the atmosphere so charged Adeola felt as if sparks might crackle between them.
Hubert Tocsin looked at her as though he were expecting her to say something else. She was deeply curious to know what he and Captain Madoowbe were talking about, but it was obvious that they were waiting for her to leave before they resumed their conversation. She walked out of the hotel and Hong Gildong opened the Landcruiser’s door for her.
‘You’ve found your leopard, Ms Davis?’
‘Oh, please, call me Adeola. And what’s
your
real name?’
Hong Gildong smiled. ‘You know Korean, then.’
‘I know that “Hong Gildong” is just an anonymous name, like “John Doe”.’
‘Hong Gildong will do. I am an anonymous sort of man.’
They pulled away from the front of the hotel. As they did so, Adeola’s cellphone rang and it was Rick.
Nineteen
R
ick tapped on the bedroom door. Linda Pringle said, ‘Come in.’
Inside, the flowery green drapes were drawn to keep out the late-afternoon sun. Kathleen Pringle was lying in bed asleep, the back of her hand half-covering her face. Her daughter was sitting beside her in an armchair, her eyes swollen, but looking much more composed now.
‘She went off all right, then?’ asked Rick.
‘I think she’s too shocked to cry. I think I am, too.’
‘I’m so sorry for what happened. You should never have gotten involved in any of this.’
He looked around the bedroom. It was small and stuffy, with green speckly wallpaper and a framed print of Jesus above the bed.
‘You’ll be safe here, anyhow,’ he told her. ‘Phil and Grace, they’re good people. They’ll take care of you.’
‘What about Dad? What about those men?’
‘Steve will take care of them. That’s one of Steve’s specialties: making problems disappear.’
‘But that’s my dad. I don’t want him just to disappear.’
‘I know. And if I know Steve, he’ll have fixed something, so you can say goodbye properly, when this is all over. Listen – why don’t you come downstairs and have a drink? We can leave the door open in case your mom needs you.’
Tiredly, Linda stood up and leaned over to kiss her mother’s hand. Then she followed Rick downstairs to the living room. Steve wasn’t back yet, but Noah was sitting with Phil and Grace Bukowski.
Phil was in his mid-sixties, bald, with prominent false teeth, while Grace was much larger than he was, a big woman with dyed-brown curly hair that was much too abundant for her age, and badly-drawn eyebrows, and a long face like a placid horse.
As skinny as he was, Phil had once been in charge of the close-protection team that looked after President Jimmy Carter, and completely unknown to the media or the public, he had stopped a .22 bullet that had been fired at the president from long range on the golf course at Pine Hills, Georgia. He was tough, and he was wiry, and he was unfailingly loyal, which was why he had agreed to take care of Kathleen and Linda Pringle until it was safe for them to go home again.
Rick sat down in one of the cream leatherette armchairs, and Grace brought him a cold bottle of Miller. On the table next to him there was a cluster of framed photographs of grandchildren, some of them with Phil’s imp-like looks, and others resembling horses.
‘Cute kids,’ said Rick.
‘Nine of them we got now,’ Phil told him. ‘And a tenth due in September.’
‘Jesus. The whole damn world’s going to be overrun with Bukowskis.’
‘Your mom OK now?’ Grace asked Linda.
‘She’s sleeping, thank God.’
Rick said, ‘Your dad . . . did he ever tell you the name of this friend of his, from the Secret Service Archive? The one he met at The Watergate?’
‘Sure,’ said Linda. ‘Wallace Rudge. Dad had known him for years. They used to go fishing together. Wallace was writing a book about the Secret Service.’
‘I know Wallace,’ said Phil. ‘Good, steady guy. You want his phone number?’
Wallace Rudge lived in Falls Church, only seven miles away. Rick called him but the line was busy. Ten minutes later he called again but the line was still busy. After forty-five minutes, he said to Noah, ‘Either this guy’s wife is on the phone, or there’s something wrong. Why don’t we drive over there?’
Noah swigged the last of his Miller and said, ‘Why not?’
It was almost 7.45 p.m. by the time they turned off the Dulles Toll toward Tyson’s Corner, and the sun was shining directly into their eyes, so that they had to lower their sun visors.
Wallace Rudge lived in a 1950s brown-brick apartment block on George C. Marshall Drive, mostly hidden from the road by oak trees. Rick parked in the visitors’ area at the back of the block, but before he went to the front doors, he walked over to the residents’ parking section. The space marked 5C was occupied by a faded red Honda Accord.
‘Well, somebody’s home, even if it isn’t him.’
They went up to the main entrance and Rick pressed the bell for apartment 5C. They waited, but there was no reply. Rick pressed the bell again. Still no response.
‘This isn’t right,’ said Rick. ‘His car’s still here, his phone’s off the hook.’
He jabbed every single bell. After a while, a man’s voice came over the intercom. ‘
Deirdre? That you?
’
Without waiting for a reply, the man pressed the door-release buzzer, and Rick pushed the door open.
They took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The apartment block was hushed except for the muffled sound of
Friends
on somebody’s television, with intermittent bursts of laughter. They walked along the dull green carpet until they reached apartment 5C at the very end, next to a hammered-glass window with dead flies on the sill.
Rick knocked. Then he pressed his ear against the door and listened.
‘I can hear something. Sounds like a faucet running.’
He knocked again, and called out, ‘Mr Rudge! Mr Wallace Rudge! Friends of Bill Pringle’s here!’
Still no reply. He pushed the door and it swung open, silently. The lock was broken and the security chains had been cut, so that they were dangling loose.
Rick drew back his windbreaker and tugged out an M9 semi-automatic pistol.
‘Where the hell did you get that?’ asked Noah.
‘Phil lent it to me. Precautionary measure.’
Rick dodged into the hallway, with Noah crouching well behind him. The Rudges’ apartment was cramped and old-fashioned, with red sculptured carpets and tapestry-covered armchairs and couches. On the walls hung amateur oil paintings of rivers and forests and local churches, all of them signed
Nora Rudge
.
Noah walked across the living room and picked up the fallen telephone receiver. He held it up to show Rick, but he didn’t have to say anything.
‘Mr Rudge!’ Rick shouted again. They could hear a faucet running, maybe in the bathroom, but nobody answered.
Noah said, ‘They killed my friends in their bathroom, Mo Speller and his wife. Maybe you’d better take a look.’
Rick scuttled crabwise across the corridor. He nudged open the bathroom door with the muzzle of his M9, and then pushed the door wider and looked inside.
‘Well?’ asked Noah.
Rick stiffly stood up, leaning against the door frame for support. ‘Looks like the same thing’s happened here, man. It’s wall-to-wall blood.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
Rick took a quick look in the bedroom, and the kitchen, but there was nobody there. Whoever had murdered Wallace and Nora Rudge, they were long gone. He pushed his M9 back into his belt and came back into the hallway.
‘Time to call in the cops?’ asked Noah.
‘Uh-hunh, Not yet, man. These guys seem to know what we’re going to do even before we do. So don’t let’s rule out some tip-offs from the CIA, or the FBI, or the local law enforcement agencies.’
Noah nodded his head towards the bathroom door. ‘Were they—?’ he asked Rick, and made a throat-cutting gesture with his finger.
Rick nodded.
‘Shit, that’s terrible. That’s terrible.’
‘How do you think
I
feel? If I hadn’t called Bill Pringle, and asked him to look into it—’
‘He must have found out something important,’ said Noah. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have—Shit.’
‘Come on,’ said Rick, gripping his arm. ‘We need to get out of here, quick. We’ve probably left a shit load of forensic as it is.’
‘But don’t you think we ought to, like, search the place? Look for any notes that this Rudge guy might have left?’
‘You think the guys in grey suits wouldn’t have done that already? They’re trying their damndest to keep a secret here, Noah. Besides, I think that Bill left me a clue already – even before he went to see Wallace Rudge at The Watergate.’
‘So, what clue?’ asked Noah, as they walked back into the living room at Phil and Grace’s house.
‘Don’t you remember? Bill was promising those guys that he was going to keep quiet about the medallion, only a few seconds before they shot him. He said, “
This gentleman here says he’ll forget it . . . so long as he doesn’t forget the other number I gave him
.”’
‘I don’t get it. What other number?’
‘He must have meant the number he gave me last night, the Auburn number.’
‘Maybe you should try calling it,’ said Phil, and handed him the phone.
‘I did. But as far as I can work out, it isn’t a telephone number at all. The code for Auburn is 315, not 102, and it’s not a cellphone number, either.’
‘He didn’t give you any other hints, apart from that number, and the name Auburn?’
‘That was it. And he was very specific that it was Auburn, New York.’
‘Maybe we should call Leon,’ Noah suggested. ‘He could check it out on the Internet for us.’
‘Leon?’
‘He found that Prchal character for us, didn’t he?’
‘Well, OK . . . maybe it’s worth a try.’
Rick called Leon at the Bel Air, on the conference phone.
‘Leon? It’s Rick. You online?’
‘Sure. I’ve been trying to find out who that guy is with Professor Halflight. I think I’ve identified the location. It’s the Manchester Grand Hyatt, on Market Place, in downtown San Diego. But I haven’t been able to identify the guy yet.’
‘Who’s there with you?’
‘Adeola, and Silja, and Adeola’s new bodyguard.’
‘She has a new bodyguard?’
‘Erm—’
Adeola broke in. ‘Rick, don’t worry about that for now. Alvin Metzler assigned me some extra protection, because of the Peace Convention.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure I’m sure. I’ll talk to you about it when you get back.’
‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘I need to talk to Leon. Leon, that Professor Halflight stuff . . . can you drop that for now, and see what you can find re Auburn New York . . . related to the number – here it is – 1029190.’
There was a pause, and then Leon said, ‘Not too much. All I have here is like New York stock market numbers.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Rick. ‘Bill said 1029190 – extension 1. Try an extra 1 on the end.’
Leon typed in the extra 1, but it produced nothing more than a grave-marker number in St Mary’s Cemetery, Auburn.
‘St Mary’s Cemetery?’ said Noah. ‘Maybe we should find out who’s buried there. Maybe
that’s
the connection.’
Leon tried to access the cemetery’s grave-marker listings, but 10291901 could only give him the family name Robbins.
‘Looks like we’ll have to fly to Auburn and dig ’em up,’ said Noah.
‘Hmm – sounds like a pretty obscure clue to me, even for Bill,’ said Phil.
‘Bill? I wouldn’t put it past him,’ said Rick. ‘He
was
a cryptologist, as well as being a security analyst. He used to work for the code-breaking section.’
Over the phone, Adeola said, ‘You mentioned a famous prison in Auburn, didn’t you, Rick? Maybe that number he gave you was the identity number of one of the inmates.’
Leon typed in
Auburn Prison
but there was no Internet record of prisoners’ identity numbers.
‘In fact, it says here that the governors of Auburn Prison did everything possible to take away their inmates’ individuality. They weren’t allowed to speak, and they all had to dress in identical black-and-white striped uniforms, like those prisoners in the old silent movies.’
‘Hmm,’ said Rick. ‘Could be it’s an account number, at one of the Auburn banks.’
More keyboard-rattling. Then, ‘Tompkins Trust Company, HSBC – that’s just about it. And neither of their account numbers starts with 102.’
‘Wait up a second,’ said Noah. ‘My bank registration number, the one I use for online banking, it’s the same as my birthdate, right, that’s how I remember it. Oh-nine-oh-nine nineteen-seventy. Look at this number. This could be a date, too. October twenty-ninth, nineteen-oh-one.’
Leon typed ‘
Auburn, October 29 1901
’. Almost immediately, he said, ‘This could be it. “October 29 1901. The execution at Auburn Prison of Leon Czolgosz, for the assassination of the president, William McKinley.”’