Courier (6 page)

He turned toward the beat-up wooden counter on the left and heard barking. Behind the counter was a motley stack of metal crates with an assortment of dogs and a couple of cats, all very excited by the two young women in front of the crates who were kneeling down and opening cans of food.

He asked the beefy man in the REA uniform shirt with "Ace" embroidered on the pocket, "What's with all the dogs?"

"Lost in transit." The man turned and looked disinterestedly at the animals. "Lucky for them, those SPCA volunteers come down to feed them because I sure ain't about to. I can't tell you how sick I am of their damn barking." He turned back. "What can I do you for?"

"Pickup for ABN."

"Yeah? I'll go look."

Rick leaned on the counter. Watching the animals, he wondered where they had come from and how a family could lose a supposedly beloved pet on an airplane flight. Ace returned with the inevitable blue-stenciled ABN mesh bag.

"Here you go. Sign for it right here."

Rick signed and left. He stuck the bag in his canvas sack, reset the bungee cords, started the engine, and headed back toward the terminal. He'd only gone a hundred feet when he heard a rising roar behind him – a car engine accelerating hard. In his side mirrors, he saw headlights flaring as the car bounced on the rough asphalt. He moved to the right to let it go by; he didn't feel like racing with all the junk he was carrying. What if I dropped the Korean food,
?
he thought..
Now, that would be a real tragedy.

He saw in his mirrors that the oncoming car was also moving to the right – still heading for him – so he pulled up and over the high concrete curb, across the sidewalk and stopped next to the chain link fence that encircled the runways. The car kept coming, but when it hit the curb, the angle between car and the curb was too shallow and the entire front end was thrown to the left with a shriek of tires.

Rick recognized the black Impala as the same car that had gone through the light at 18th and L. He could see the driver wrestling with the steering wheel but couldn't get a good look at his face.

Rick remembered an incident in college when – as he was just cruising around behind campus enjoying the warm spring weather – this jerk had cut him off on a turn. Rick wasn't angry, but had flipped him the bird just to make the point. The idiot had then tried to run him off the road three times in total fury.

When Rick had finally parked his bike with some dumb movie-born expectation of a fistfight, the driver – a stocky guy with a black shirt and patterned black tie – had gotten out of the big Lincoln with the Jersey plates, stomped over, pulled a nasty little pistol from a belt clip, and stuck it in Rick's stomach.

As it happened, Rick only had to endure fifteen minutes of inebriated but relatively innovative cursing, but it left him convinced that stopping to take on a crazed driver in a fair fight was a lousy idea. After all, a motorcycle could lose just about any car on anything but a long straight – it seemed wrong not to take full advantage.

He kicked the shifter all the way down into first gear, twisted the handlebars sharply left, and gunned it, shooting up a rooster-tail of grass and dirt until he caught traction on the sidewalk and shot off the curb and into the road. The black car stopped and slammed into reverse, but Rick was already past his rear bumper and swerving back onto the road – now in front again. The Impala screeched to a halt and spun its rear wheels for a second before it gained traction and leapt forward.

The Impala had better acceleration in the low end than the dignified – if not downright stodgy – BMW and quickly caught up, passed, and once again cut viciously in front of the courier. Rick slammed on the brakes – feeling as though he were tipping up on his front wheel like a trials rider – and swerved right, passing behind the Impala again.

Rick had left the bike in first gear and both cylinders were screaming. When he popped the clutch, the rear wheel spun and smoked, but now he had the torque he needed as he kicked it up through the gears. He looked back and saw that the black car was still fishtailing on the road behind him with no chance of catching up.

Blue and red flashing lights exploded from a side road hidden between two airplane hangars. Ah, my old friends, the airport police, Rick thought.

Given a choice between a ticket and whatever this maniac behind him had in mind, Rick would take the ticket. He braked hard, pulled well over to the right, and waited for the police cruiser to pull up – shielding him from another assault.

The Impala slid past as slowly as any other law-abiding citizen, and Rick watched the car's taillights dwindle and then turn left onto the highway back to the city. When the car and its still-unknown driver had disappeared, he turned and put an apologetic look on his face for the benefit of the airport cop still struggling out of his cruiser.

Rick thought that there were probably fifty police forces in the capital area, and, clearly, the airport police were scraping the bottom of the applicant pool. This policeman was so fat that his shirt was bulging open between the buttons, and by the time he got out of his car and straightened his gun, his nightstick, his hat, and his flashlight, his face was bright red with the effort.

Things should go pretty well according to the usual script – a demand for his license followed by ten minutes of stern warnings, vague threats, and a hefty fine – so he reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the slim wallet he only used for traffic stops. When the cop had finished chewing him out, Rick drove off with a fifty-dollar ticket that he crumpled and tossed into a Dumpster as soon as he was out of sight. After all, what was another fifty bucks compared to the several thousand dollars he already owed?

Once again, he thanked the incompetent staff at Columbia Women's Hospital. When he was born, his birth certificate had read "James Richard Putnam". His mother, who certainly didn't intend to have her husband's father's name ahead of her own father's name, sent his dad back two days later, and he'd returned with another birth certificate – this time correctly emblazoned with the name "Richard James Putnam".

Even as a teenager, it had been clear to Rick that there were many advantages to having a second identity, so he'd applied for a Social Security card when he started both his first and second jobs and taken his driving test at two locations. "Jack" Putnam had already run up so many points that there were bench warrants out for his arrest, but Vietnam veteran "Rick" Putnam was an upstanding citizen without a single black mark on his record.

Deciding that being a bit late getting back was preferable to running into that jerk in the black Chevy, he took the back exit from the airport and danced his way back to the bureau through dark Pentagon parking lots, past the brightly lit Iwo Jima Monument, and over Key Bridge.

He rode with his usual caution and concentration regarding other drivers, but with most of his mind turning over the same question.

Why would anyone be out to get him
?

CHAPTER 8

 

Still warmed by the peppery combination of
kimchee
and Korean beef, Rick barely felt the chill as he drove up North Carolina Avenue onto Capitol Hill. As usual, he was struck by how nice a place Washington was to live in – almost a guilty secret, considering that many of the amenities, the parks, the museums, the open public spaces came from the lavish use of other people's taxes.

On Capitol Hill, the tidy row houses were divided evenly between brick that had been left in its original colors and brick that had been painted in blues, whites, and some surprising yellows and pinks. Tall trees lined the road and provided shade that was a blessed relief in the hot and humid summer months. It was a quiet neighborhood – much like a small town even though it was only three blocks from the Capitol; Rick could almost imagine the government clerks of post–Civil War Washington in their Homburgs and spats as they walked with their wives, holding parasols, and admired their new homes.

Of course, there were some pretty awful housing projects just a few blocks to the south. He could feel the smoldering resentment every time he crossed the invisible line that separated white from black. Even so, projects were unusual in DC – an error made by well-meaning liberals in the sixties. Most of the poorest areas were still quiet streets of small houses – far different from the cramped industrial ghettos of northern cities like Philadelphia and New York.

He pulled up to a brick house on the corner of North Carolina and 3rd Street SE. It was a surprisingly roomy two-story place, which had been home for at least three sets of housemates that Rick knew of, and there may have been more. What he did know was that whoever had actually signed the lease to the Foreign Service couple who owned it now was long gone. Apparently, so long as the cashier's checks were deposited in the house bank account and no one burned the place down, the owners weren't about to change things.

He jumped off the BMW, leaving it in first gear. Feathering the clutch, he ran alongside as the engine ran the heavy machine over the curb and up the board placed on the side of the three steps up to the backyard. He jockeyed the bike over to the back of the small rear courtyard – just a concrete patio, really – put the front wheel up against a solid metal drainpipe, and secured it with the chunky padlock on a heavy chain looped around the pipe. Yanking on the chain to be certain it was secure, he took off his helmet and went up the wooden steps to the kitchen.

Corey Gravelin – one of his housemates – sat at the kitchen table, eating Special K and reading
The Wall Street Journal
. He was tall and slim with chiseled features, hair just this side of too long, with a neatly trimmed mustache. Corey wore his usual after-work outfit, which in his case simply meant that he had removed the jacket from his blue three-piece suit, carefully folded back his French cuffs, and fractionally loosened his tie. He was one of those men whose good looks made other men wonder if he was gay.

Rick would have been entirely sure Corey was gay if not for the fact that he worked for an extremely conservative Republican congressman and was always accompanied by a stunning woman when he attended events like a Kennedy Center gala or a charity dinner. In either case, Corey's sexual orientation didn't concern Rick. There had been a few guys in the Seventh Cavalry who Rick had been fairly sure swung that way, but they could be counted on in a firefight, and that was all that mattered.

Corey looked up. "How's it going, Rick?"

"Not bad. Anything new in the world?"

"Well, the last guys to walk on the moon are heading home; the President has stopped being Mr Nice Guy to the North Vietnamese. He's got B-52s going all the way to downtown Hanoi this time and…" He paused to look at the paper. "Yeah, the White House is going to take away the
Post
's TV stations if they don't cut out their bullshit crusade over Watergate." He sat back in his chair. "That whole thing is just overblown, don't you think?"

Rick smiled, and then stuck his head in the refrigerator to see what was there. "Man, you know I don't do politics."

"Yeah, but you were in Vietnam. You must see how the left wing is making it easier for the communists with all this crap?"

Rick grabbed an apple and turned around, leaning back against the counter. He took a bite and chewed for a moment.

"I'll tell you, the main thing Vietnam taught me was ignorance. I went in thinking I knew what I was doing, and that the President and the Pentagon knew what they were doing, and I came out pretty sure that no one had a clue."

Corey turned back to the paper. "Well, I'm glad my boss is on Banking, and I won't have to deal with the circus they're setting up in the Senate. Sam Ervin is a grandstanding fool – ‘simple country lawyer', my ass."

"Hey, a nice scandal will mean longer hours and more dough for me, so I guess" – Rick's voice took on a stentorian tone like a politician on the stump – "they should follow the trail wherever it leads."

His voice back to normal, he said, "Let's go from the sublime to the ridiculous. What are the Three Musketeers up to?"

The Three Musketeers were the other housemates, computer programmers who kept the mainframes running at places like General Electric, Westinghouse, and Riggs Bank. At least that's what they claimed. Rick was pretty sure from their conversations that they spent most of their time playing
Spacewar!
on the powerful machines.

"Who knows? I haven't seen them, and I can't figure out what they're doing when I can see them."

Still eating his apple, Rick wandered out into the living room. It was empty, but he could hear excited voices coming from the half-finished basement downstairs.

The three computer techs were sitting around a wobbly folding table, fiddling with what looked like a typewriter in a small suitcase. Steve Lord, a slow-speaking South Carolinian with a full beard, was wearing a T-shirt from a Sly Stone concert, cut-off jeans, and sandals. Rick knew that this was what he usually wore to work and had once asked if that was the way most people at GE dressed.

Steve said that his bosses hated his clothes but knew their computers would go down in a week if he wasn't there.

Neither of the other men had Steve's self-confidence, or much of any self-confidence at all. Zeke Pickell was a short, hyperactive kid from Oregon with bushy red hair and a tendency to wear patterned sweaters. He was known as "Eps", which Rick gathered had something to do with "Epsilon" being computer-guy code for something small.

The last of the trio, Scott Shaw, had been commanded to "Beam me up!" so often that he'd good-naturedly taken the Star Trek engineer's nickname as his own and would occasionally refer to "dilithium crystals" in a thick Scottish burr. With his buzz-cut hair, short-sleeved white shirts, and pocket protector, he looked older and perhaps a bit more deliberate than his friends. Rick knew Scotty was probably the brightest of them all – he'd graduated from MIT in only three years at the age of eighteen.