Desperate Measures (6 page)

“I promise it won’t.”

“Well, if it does, I’m gonna come to your apartment and break both your legs.”

“Just make sure you cash it before a week from Saturday.”

“What’s so special about a week from Saturday?”

“I won’t be around.” Pittman got out of the car, thankful that the rain had lessened to a mist, and watched the taxi pull
away in the darkness. A distance down the road, the driver switched his headlights on.

In the silence, Pittman suddenly felt isolated. Shoving his hands in his overcoat pockets for warmth, he walked along the
side of the road. The shoulder was gravel, its sandy bed sufficiently softened by the rain that his shoes made only a slight
scraping sound. There weren’t any streetlights. Pittman strained his eyes, but he could barely see the wall that loomed on
his left. He came to a different shade of darkness and realized that he’d reached the barred gate.

Without touching it, he peered through. Far along a driveway, past trees and shrubs, lights glowed in what seemed to be a
mansion.

What now? he thought. It’s two o’clock in the morning. It’s drizzling. I’m cold. I’m God knows where. I shouldn’t have gone
to the hospital. I shouldn’t have followed the ambulance. I shouldn’t have…

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he studied the top of the gate, then shook his head. He was fairly certain that he could
climb over it, but he was even more certain that there’d be some kind of intrusion sensor up there. Before Jeremy’s death
and Pittman’s nervous breakdown, he had worked for a time on the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. One of his articles had been
about a man whom Pittman had nicknamed “the Bugmaster.” The man was an expert in intrusion detectors and other types of security
equipment—for example, eavesdropping devices, otherwise known as bugs, ergo the Bugmaster. Enjoying Pittman’s enthusiasm about
information, the Bugmaster had explained his profession in detail, and Pittman’s prodigious memory for facts had retained
it all.

A place this size, Pittman knew, was bound to have a security system, and as the Bugmaster had pointed out, you never go over
a wall or a gate without first scouting the barriers to make sure you’re not activating a sensor. But at this hour, in the
dark, Pittman didn’t see how he could scout anything.

So what the hell are you going to do? You should have gone back to Manhattan with the taxi driver. What did you think you’d
accomplish by hanging around out here in the rain?

Through the bars of the gate, a light attracted Pittman’s attention.

Two of them. Headlights. Approaching along the driveway from the mansion. Pittman watched them grow larger, thought about
hurrying along the road and hiding past the corner of the wall, then made a different decision and pressed himself against
the wall right next to the gate.

He heard a smooth, well-tuned, powerful engine. He heard tires on wet concrete. He heard a buzz and then a whir. The gate’s
motor had been activated by remote control. The gate was swinging open toward the inside of the estate, its sturdy wheels
scraping on concrete.

The engine sounded louder. The headlights flashed through the open gate. Sooner than Pittman expected, the dark Oldsmobile
that had escorted the ambulance surged through the opening, turned to the left in the direction the taxi had taken to go back
to the city, and sped into the night.

Pittman was tempted to remain motionless until the car’s lights disappeared down the road. But he had something more immediate
to occupy him, for abruptly he heard another buzz, another whir. The gate was closing—faster than he expected—and he sprinted
to get through the opening before it was blocked.

The sturdy gate brushed past his coat. The lock snapped into place. The night became silent again.

Pittman found that he was holding his breath. Despite the expansive grounds ahead of him, he felt a spasm of claustrophobia.
The darkness seemed to smother him. At once the cold drizzle sharpened his senses, bracing him. He inhaled and glanced around,
reassured that no threat emerged from the shadows.

You expected guards?

No, but…

Dogs maybe?

Right.

Wouldn’t they have followed the car? Wouldn’t you have seen them by now?

Maybe. Maybe not. They might be trained not to follow cars.

So what’s the worst that can happen? If there
are
dogs, they’ll find you and corner you and bark until somebody comes. You’ll be charged with trespassing. That’s no big deal
for a guy who’s planning to kill himself eight days from now.

But what if the dogs are trained to attack?

This isn’t a top secret military installation. It’s a Scarsdale estate. Relax. And anyway, so what if the dogs are trained
to attack? Do you think being killed by a couple of Dobermans would be any worse than shooting yourself with a .45?

Yes.

What standards you have.

Chilled by the rain, Pittman moved forward. At first he was tempted to approach the mansion through the cover of the trees.
But then he decided there wasn’t any need—the night and the gloomy weather provided him with sufficient cover. Following the
murky driveway, he came around a shadowy curve and discovered that he was closer to the mansion than he expected.

Next to a sheltering fir tree, he studied his destination. The building was high, wide, made of brick, with numerous gables
and chimneys. There were several lights in windows on the ground floor, less on the second story. From this angle, he could
see a five-stall garage on the left. The garage had a sundeck on top, with two sets of French doors leading off the deck into
a second-story room that was lit, although Pittman couldn’t see what was in there. Mostly what attracted his attention was
the private ambulance, parked, its lights off, apparently empty, in front of the stone steps that led up to the mansion’s
large front door.

Now what? Pittman thought.

He shrugged. With eight days to live, what difference did it make? In an odd way, he felt liberated. After all, what did he
have to lose? Knowing when he was going to die gave him a feeling of immunity.

He stepped from the fir tree and concentrated to maintain his balance on wet, slippery grass as he crept down a dark slope
toward the mansion. Moving cautiously toward the lights of the mansion, taking advantage of shrubs, a fountain, a gazebo to
give him cover, he came closer to the illuminated windows. The drenched grass had soaked his shoes and socks, chilling his
feet, but he was too involved in studying the windows to care. Curtains had been drawn, forcing him to cross the driveway
where it ran parallel to the front of the mansion. He felt exposed by the drizzle-shrouded glare of arc lights as he darted
toward bushes beneath the front windows.

Moisture dripped from the branches onto his overcoat. Again in shadows, he crouched tensely, moved through an opening in the
bushes on the left side of the front doors, then warily straightened, able to see through a gap in the curtains at one window.
He saw a portion of a luxuriously appointed oak-paneled living room. The room didn’t seem occupied. Quietly he shifted toward
the next window, moving closer to the front door.

The next window’s curtains were open. He showed as little of his head as possible while he peered in. Immediately he realized
that this window was part of the same living room that he’d just seen through the other window. But why would curtains in
one window be closed, while the other curtains were not? He eased down out of sight, remembered the ambulance behind him in
front of the mansion, and suspected that someone must have been waiting anxiously for the ambulance to arrive. When it had,
that person had hurried from the room, too preoccupied to bother closing the curtains.

But where had that person gone? A detail that Pittman had seen in the room now acquired significance. On a carved mahogany
table in front of a fireplace, there had been several teacups and coffee mugs. Okay, not one person. Several. But where…?

Pittman glanced to his right toward the mansion’s front steps. They were wide, made of stone. A light blazed above impressive
double doors and revealed a closed-circuit camera aimed toward the steps and the area in front of the entrance. If there were
other closed-circuit cameras, Pittman hadn’t seen them, but he had no intention of revealing himself to this one.

The best way to proceed, he decided, was to double back, to go left instead of right, and circle the mansion in the reverse
direction from the one in which he’d intended to go. The method would eventually lead him to the windows on the right side
of the entrance, but without forcing him to cross the front steps.

He turned, stayed low, close to the mansion’s wall, and shifted past the moisture-beaded shrubs, ignoring the two windows
that he’d already checked. He came to a third window, the drapes on this one completely closed. After listening intently and
hearing no sounds, he concluded that the room was empty and moved farther along, rounding a corner of the mansion.

Arc lights caused the drizzle to glisten. The lights were mounted on the side of the mansion and beneath the eaves of the
sundeck that topped the multistall garage. Hugging the wall, Pittman crept ten feet along the side of the mansion, then reached
the large garage, where it formed a continuation of the building. There weren’t any windows, so Pittman didn’t linger. Coming
to the corner of the garage, he checked around it and saw that all five garage stalls were closed.

Past the garage, he faced the back of the house. There, fewer arc lights illuminated the grounds. But they were bright enough
for Pittman to see a large, covered, drizzle-misted swimming pool, a changing room, fallow flower gardens, more shrubs and
trees, and, immediately to his right, stairs that went up to the sundeck on top of the garage.

There had been lights beyond the French doors that led from the sundeck into an upper-story room, he remembered. Deciding
that he’d better inspect this area now rather than come back after checking the windows on the ground floor, he started up
the wooden steps.

The sundeck was disturbingly unilluminated. Pittman didn’t understand. Crouching in the darkness on top, he wondered why the
other parts of the building had outside lights, while the sundeck did not.

The room beyond the two sets of French doors was well lit, however. Past substantial ornate metal furniture upon which cocktails
and lunches would be served when the weather got warm, Pittman saw bright lamps in a wide room that had a cocktail bar along
the left wall in addition to a big-screen television built into the middle of the right wall.

At the moment, though, the room was being used for something quite different from entertainment. Leather furniture had been
shifted toward the television, leaving the center of the room available for a bed with safety railings on each side. A long
table beyond it supported electronic instruments that Pittman recognized vividly from the week when Jeremy had been in intensive
care: monitors that analyzed heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration rate, and blood-oxygen content. Two pumps controlled the
speed with which liquid flowed from bottles on an IV stand into the right and left arm of a frail old man who lay covered
with sheets on the bed. The two male attendants whom Pittman had seen at the hospital were making adjustments to the monitors.
The female nurse was taking care that there weren’t any kinks in the oxygen tube that led to prongs inserted in the old man’s
nostrils.

The oxygen mask that had obscured the old man’s face when he was taken from the hospital now lay on top of a monitor on the
table beyond the bed. Pittman couldn’t be totally sure from outside in the darkness, but what he had suspected at the hospital
insisted more strongly: The old man bore a resemblance to Jonathan Millgate.

The intense young man who had been in charge of getting the old man out of the hospital had a stethoscope around his neck
and was listening to the old man’s chest. The somber men who had acted as bodyguards were standing in the far-left corner.

But other people were in the large room, as well. Pittman hadn’t seen them at the hospital, although he definitely had seen
them before—in old photographs and in television documentaries about the politics of the Vietnam War. Four men. Distinguished-looking.
Dressed in conservative custom-made dark three-piece suits. Old but bearing a resemblance to images of their younger selves.

Three wore spectacles. One had a white mustache. Two were bald, while the other two had wispy white hair. All had stern, pinched,
wrinkled faces and drooping skin on their necks. Their expressions severe, they stood in a row, as if they were on a dais
or part of a diplomatic receiving line. Their combined former titles included ambassador to the USSR, ambassador to the United
Nations, ambassador to Great Britain, ambassador to Saudi Arabia, ambassador to West Germany, ambassador to NATO, secretary
of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser. Indeed, several of these positions had been held by all of these
men at various times, just as they had all at various times belonged to the National Security Council. They had never been
elected to public office, and yet in their appointed roles they had exerted more influence than any but the most highly placed
politicians. Their names were Eustace Gable, Anthony Lloyd, Victor Standish, and Winston Sloane. They were the legendary diplomats
upon whom Presidents from Truman to Clinton, Republican and Democrat, had frequently relied for advice, their shrewdness having
earned them the nickname “the grand counselors.” Four of them. Which suggested that the old man in the bed was, in fact, the
fifth grand counselor: Jonathan Millgate.

The intense young man with the stethoscope said something that Pittman couldn’t hear. The nurse said something in response.
Then the two male attendants spoke. Again Pittman was too far away to make out what they were saying. The man with the stethoscope
turned toward the grand counselors and seemed to explain something. One of the elderly diplomats, a gaunt-cheeked man with
a white mustache, Winston Sloane, nodded wearily. Another, his narrow face pinched with wrinkles, Eustace Gable, asked a question.
The man with the stethoscope answered. A third elderly diplomat, Anthony Lloyd, tapped his cane on the floor in a gesture
of frustration. Although their faces were pale, their ancient eyes were fiery. With a final comment, Eustace Gable left the
room. His associates solemnly followed.