Authors: Jon Land
It didn’t make any sense, Blaine thought. Burning the car indicated they hadn’t found what Easton had hidden. That meant it was still in the Porsche somewhere, unless the fire had claimed it. But Easton’s hiding place would be a spot impervious to flames.
McCracken climbed back through the door and settled himself where the front seat used to be. The hiding place would be convenient, within arm’s reach, so as not to attract attention when Easton used it. It would not have to be big but would be reinforced, protected with padding perhaps.
His fingers wrapped around the shift knob, which was leaning off to the side. With nothing better to do, he stripped it off even though it had already obviously been checked by both Easton’s killers and the CIA. He unscrewed the lower portion, squeezing with all his strength. It came off, exposing the knob’s hollow interior, a perfect hiding place for something small. He stuck his index finger through the opening and felt around the inside. Nothing but dust. He rolled the knob around in his hand, then wedged his finger back inside and held it up to the light as if it were a mystical crystal ball that might show him the answer.
The knob remained black and charred. No magic today. …
Blaine was about to discard it when something occurred to him. The knob was an inch in height but only three-quarters of an inch of his finger was inside. That left another quarter-inch within the knob unaccounted for. Another compartment. There had to be another compartment.
Blaine removed his finger and wiped the black grime from the top of the knob. Shifting instructions for the famed Porsche five-speed appeared. Neutral was in the middle, represented by a red
N
. Blaine pushed the
N
.
The charred top of the shift knob popped up.
Unseen by his escort, McCracken lowered the knob to his lap and peered inside.
There was a section of microfiche, thin and blackened around the edges. He lifted it carefully out and eased it between layers of his clean white handkerchief.
“I give up,” Blaine said, tossing the shift knob aside.
“About time,” responded his escort gratefully.
McCracken met Andrew Stimson thirty minutes later on a park bench on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“We’ll let the computers have a go at this,” Stimson said, fitting the microfiche into a clear plastic envelope. “Fiche is composed almost totally of a plastic, highly flammable material. There’s probably enough information on this one to fill a dozen magazine pages, but I don’t know how much even the computers will be able to salvage after the heat it’s been exposed to.”
“A name, a location, anything,” Blaine said.
“We’ll do the best we can. If we get lucky, there’ll be repetition of certain words and phrases the computer can lock on to.”
“Could take a while.”
“Probably.”
“Then I think I’ll catch the shuttle to New York and pay Madame Rosa a visit.” The taxi slid down East Eighty-sixth Street, taking the ice ruts as they came.
“Early snow’s a bad sign for the winter,” the cabbie told Blaine. “A bad sign.”
They passed a corner where a Santa Claus was surrounded by singing carolers, their breath misting in perfect rhythm in the bright air. Blaine hadn’t been in the States for Christmas since his banishment five years before. Lots of mistletoe and roasted chestnuts had come and gone. Christmas in America was like Christmas nowhere else, but he found himself strangely unmoved by the joyous atmosphere of people rushing around and not seeming to mind it much.
Truth was, he disliked the holiday season because it left him empty. Holidays were for sharing, but Blaine had nothing to share and no one to share it with. He was an only child of parents dead for several years, with a splattering of aunts and uncles across the country whose names he could barely remember. There had been many women in his life, but the affairs had never lasted long enough to be labeled relationships.
This rarely bothered Blaine, but Christmas was an exception. His work had been his life and that work allowed no attachments. Enemies could get to you through people who were close, and anyone who thought that to be a violation of the rules of the game didn’t really know the game. You flew alone, ate alone, lived alone, and mostly slept alone. Some operatives chanced marriage but seldom children because children were the most vulnerable of all, too easy to make disappear.
Worst of all, Blaine reckoned, was that the fear of attachments came not only out of regard for the opposition but for your own people as well. Your superiors liked leverage. They always treated family men better because if they misbehaved there were always those buttons that could be pushed.
“This it?” the cabbie asked him.
They had come to a halt in front of a brownstone with a doorman blowing breath onto his gloves before the entrance.
“Yeah, this is it,” Blaine told the driver, flipping him a twenty with instructions to keep the change.
Blaine stepped out of the cab and approached the entrance to Madame Rosa’s to find his path blocked by the rather burly doorman.
“Do you have an appointment, sir?”
Blaine fingered his beard. “A trim will do for today. I’ll take the manicure next week.”
The doorman was not amused. “This is a private club, sir.”
“Club? Is that what they’re calling these places today? My, my, leave the country for a few years and the whole damn dictionary changes.”
The doorman’s eyes swept around him, obviously unsure. Avoiding a scene was foremost on his mind. Making one was foremost on McCracken’s.
“Tell Madame Rosa a friend of Tom Easton’s is here to see her.”
“I know no woman by that name, sir.”
Blaine moved a little closer, leery of the bigger man’s feet and hands. “Let me spell it out for you. Either I go by you or through you. Your choice.”
The doorman moved toward a phone suspended in a box to the right of the windowless entrance. “Who should I say is here?” he asked McCracken.
“Rudolph R. Reindeer …”
Blaine knew the name didn’t matter because the doorman was already going for his gun. The man’s bulky jacket precluded a quick draw, which allowed McCracken the instant he needed to close the gap between them and to lock his hand on the doorman’s drawing wrist. Blaine pounded his face once with a fist and then slammed his groin with a knee rocketed from the pavement in a blur of motion. The doorman gasped, eyes dimming, and started to slump. McCracken grabbed him, providing support, and pounded rapidly on the door.
“Hey, you inside! Help! Open the door! This guy’s sick!”
McCracken could feel himself and the doorman being observed through the peephole.
“Come on!” he urged, striking the door harder.
It finally opened and a short, slender Oriental man stepped out.
“I don’t know what happened,” Blaine explained, as he helped drag the doorman in. “He just collapsed.”
The door closed behind them.
“Excellent performance,” came the voice of a woman through thin raps of solitary applause. And then Blaine saw the gun in the Oriental’s hand. “Now, if you would be good enough to put your hands in the air …”
T.J. Brown met his air force contact for lunch five hours after depositing the computer disk on his desk. The captain’s name was Alan Coglan and T.J. had become friendly with him during research for a story he had done a few months back on the new breed of test pilots.
Coglan arrived at the restaurant late and approached the table nervously, face as stiff as his air force uniform.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, holding the disk in his hand and making no move to sit down.
“Does it matter?”
“I’ll say it does.” Now Coglan seated himself but kept his legs outside the table. He had left his overcoat on. T.J. watched him smother the disk with a napkin and slide it across the table. “I’m giving this back to you because I want nothing to do with it. You never met me, understand? And if you won’t tell me how you got this disk, go to the FBI and tell them—right now before it’s too late.”
T.J.’s eyes showed fear. “Al, you’re scaring the shit out of me. That ain’t no way to treat a friend. All this over a goddamn flight plan?”
“A goddamn flight plan,” Coglan parodied. “Sure, the goddamn orbital flight plan of the space shuttle
Adventurer
.”
McCracken raised his hands and let the small Oriental push him against the wall in order to search him. The man found his Browning but kept right on jostling him up and down until he was satisfied that was all Blaine had been carrying.
He turned slowly and faced an elegant woman dressed in a blue sequined gown.
“Your errand boy here didn’t take my wallet, Madame Rosa,” Blaine told her.
The woman smiled comfortably. “I thought I’d give you the pleasure of telling me who you are and what you’re doing here yourself.” Her eyes moved to the Oriental. “Chen, show him to my study.”
The Oriental led Blaine down a lavishly appointed hallway lined with original artwork and antique sculptures displayed on pedestals. They stopped at the last door down, and Chen waited inside with him until Madame Rosa made her appearance.
“Stay by the door,” she instructed him.
Chen bowed slightly and took his leave.
Madame Rosa closed the door behind him.
McCracken glanced around the room. It contained a strange mix of colonial furniture and modern technology. A row of video screens was built into the wall above a rolltop desk. A board with either red or green lights flashing for each of the brownstone’s rooms rested on an ancient cherry carpenter’s table.
“So that’s why my ruse didn’t work,” Blaine said, eyes back on the monitors, specifically one that showed the brownstone’s front. Five others provided different views of the building’s exterior.
“It was quite a performance,” said Madame Rosa.
“I aim to please.”
“Just so long as you’re not contemplating any encores in here. Chen is quite adept at dealing with intruders. He would be most pleased if I turned you over to him.”
“Can he buy his clothes in men’s sizes yet?”
Madame Rosa cracked a smile which held no trace of amusement. “All others who underestimated him were buried soon after. I brought Chen over from China. His reputation preceded him.”
McCracken walked about the room, inspecting it. “In which case he must fit in perfectly at this glorified whorehouse. Tell me, did you ever consider putting a red light over the front door?”
Madame Rosa’s face grew taut with impatience. “You mentioned Mr. Easton to the doorman outside.”
“Yes, I suppose I did.”
“If you’re here to threaten closing me down, forget it. I’m protected … all the way to Washington.”
Blaine’s dark eyes dug deep into the madam’s. “Lady, you piss me off and I won’t close you down, I’ll blow you up.”
“You worked with Easton?”
“Let’s say we fished in the same stream and I’m taking over his boat. We have a code in our business that lives on after death. I’m here to find out who killed him.”
Madame Rosa’s sequined gown seemed to blink. “I told everything I know to the others.”
“I like hearing things firsthand.”
“And just who are you?”
“The name’s Blaine McCracken if it matters.”
“It doesn’t.”
“We were talking about Easton. A regular customer, I presume.”
The woman nodded. “Twice a month when he could fit it into his schedule.”
“Same days?”
She shook her head. “Never. His work and security factors made that impossible. Sometimes he would book his appointments only hours in advance, sometimes days. Monday was different.”
“How so?”
“We had filled a … special order for him. He had been waiting for some time.”
The twins, McCracken realized. What kind of world had he entered here?
“That distresses you, Mr. McCracken?”
“Treating people like they were something out of a Sears catalogue has never rubbed me the right way.”
“Then consider yourself in a minority. People need relief, refuge, a place where their wildest dreams can be made a reality. A house like mine releases people’s pent-up inhibitions in a way that hurts no one.”
“Tell that to Easton … and his twins.”
Madame Rosa hesitated. “That was an entirely different situation.”
“And quite puzzling, if you ask me.” Blaine walked over to the bank of six video monitors. “I assume there’s another of these at your security station.”
“Of course.”
Blaine nodded. “So two men were able to bypass all this surveillance to get in and out of the building and murder three people in between. Something smells.”
“They were professionals.”
“So am I.”
“Maybe the killers were just better.”
“More likely they had inside help.”
Madame Rosa’s features flared. “I will not stand here and—”
“I’m not finished yet. Not only did they get in and out without being seen, they also knew exactly what room Easton would be found in. No need for trial and error, right?”
“He used the same room all the time,” she replied defensively.
“But someone would have had to tell the killers that, wouldn’t they? And maybe this same person, or persons, looked the other way, perhaps pulled the plug on your million-dollar surveillance for five minutes or so Monday afternoon.” Blaine paused. “You’re still standing there, madame.”
“Your conclusions are unfounded. Discretion has always been a primary concern here. My people go through more security checks than the President’s staff.”
“What about beyond your people?” he challenged her. “Someone might have known something. Enough.”
“No,” the woman replied after a pause long enough to convince Blaine she was holding something back.
“Madame Rosa,” he began more compassionately, forming a lie, “I’m here on no one else’s authority but my own. This is purely personal. The killers of Tom Easton cannot be allowed to go unpunished. Otherwise, none of our kind are safe.”
“There is nothing I know that can help, I assure you.” Her eyes softened and she seemed to feel less threatened. “But if there’s anything else I can do …”
Blaine nodded. “I’m retracing all of Easton’s steps up to the time he died. I’d like to see the room where he was killed.”