Fade (2005) (23 page)

"It was just you and me, Roy. No one else here knows I have yo u following Matt. This was your fuck-up."

"Whatever. No use crying over it. Point is, he's gone."

"You lost him, too?"

"He had a bunch of niggers pull guns on me and then told me if he sa w me again, he'd kill me. Fucker's lucky I didn't drop him righ t there."

"Jesus Christ," Strand said, collapsing back into his chair and tryin g to think. There weren't a lot of options.

"I want you to take over for Doug Banes covering Karen Manning."

"The bitch from SWAT?"

"We have reason to believe al Fayed might try to contact her face t o face."

"I'd like to contact her face to face myself. Have you seen tha t ass?"

"Shut up. Just shut up and get over there. And do you think you coul d manage not to get spotted this time?"

There was a rap on his door and a moment later Lauren poked her hea d in. He waved violently at her to get out, but she stood her ground , jabbing a finger toward his phone.

"What?" he mouthed silently, covering the handset's mouthpiece.

"Mart's on three."

Another violent wave and she retreated through the door, slamming i t behind her.

"Are we done?" he heard Buckner say.

"Get on Karen Manning. Now," Strand replied and switched lines , cutting Buckner off.

"Matt? Are you there?"

"Talked to Roy yet?"

"I just got off the phone with him. He said you threatened him. What'
s going on?"

"What's going on? You told that psycho to tail me."

"I put a qualified operator on you as backup, Matt.. ."

"Backup. Right. Don't ever do that again, Hillel."

"This isn't just about you, Matt," Strand said, forcing himself t o remain calm. "We're not going to have a lot of chances at thi s thing."

There was a short silence over the phone before Egan spoke again. "I f igure Fade's not going to worry too much about me until you're dead , Hillel. I guess I could just take a leave of absence until then ..

."

"Is that some kind of threat?"

"Take it any way you want."

Strand's jaw tightened, but he knew there was nothing he could do. Fo r now, Egan had him by the balls.

"Matt, I..."

There was a quiet click and the line went dead.

"Fuck!" He pressed a button on his phone, opening the intercom t o Lauren's office. "Get in here and bring Bill with you."

By the time they settled into the chairs in front of his desk, Stran d had regained enough of his composure to force his voice into a monoton e that was a reasonable facsimile of calm.

"I just spoke with Matt and I'm not quite sure what's happening wit h him. I don't think he's coming in anymore and I have a feeling he'
s not going back to the hotel. It seems like the further we get int o this, the more Matt wants to go it on his own. There's no reason fo r him to avoid us unless he's starting to have second thoughts about wha t needs to be done. And if that's the case, I think we have to conside r the possibility that he's going to get himself killed out of som e misguided sense of loyalty to al Fayed. Or he's going to cause us t o miss an opportunity to neutralize a very dangerous man whose only goa l in life is to kill us .. ." He let his voice trail off for a moment.

"Thoughts?"

"I talked to him just last night," Fraiser said. "He sounded fine."

Fraiser didn't know anything about Roy Buckner and he was getting th e same sanitized files as Egan. At this point, there was no reason fo r him to know that Egan wasn't being given the whole story.

"What did he get from the drug dealer, Bill?"

"He said not much, but he didn't give any details. He said he wa s still working on it."

"Can we get to him?"

"Javan Franklin? I don't know. He's basically living in a fortres s and unless we want to get the police involved, I'm not sure what we ca n do to strong-arm him .. ."

Strand turned and stared out the window at the blanket of lights tha t D
. C
. became at night. "How are we going to find Matt?"

There was a long silence, eventually broken by Lauren. "We should sen d someone to the hotel to make sure it's clean and see if he lef t anything pointing to what he was going to do."

Strand nodded, but didn't look back. "Get Steve Despain on it."

"Beyond that, I'm not sure. Track his ATM and credit cards? He'l l have anticipated that."

"What about his wife?"

"They're really close," Fraiser said. "But I doubt that's going to d o much good. He's staying away from her because he thinks al Fayed woul d try to acquire him there."

Strand took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "We need to thin k harder."

"He'll have to come back to us eventually," Lauren said. "If we sto p talking to him he's going to have a hard time analyzing intelligenc e and he isn't going to have any idea what the police are doing."

Strand didn't respond. It was a difficult question. Without Egan, th e entire machine ground to a halt.

"We're not going to cut him off," Strand said, turning back towar d them. "But I'm going to tell you this again. He gets absolutel y nothing that doesn't go through me first. Do you understand?"

Chapter
Thirty.

It was definitely the address Franklin had given him, but it didn'
t look right an aging rancher in a middle-class neighborhood filled wit h sensible cars and golf carts.

Egan slowed and turned into the driveway, admiring a large family o f lawn gnomes guarding a shrub by the door. He sat there for a fe w seconds, seriously considering backing up and driving out of there.

Franklin had obviously fucked him. No big surprise it had never bee n anything more than a long shot.

Finally, he made a deal with himself. He'd look over the yard one mor e time and if there was even a hint of a plastic pink flamingo, he'd ge t the hell out of there. If not, he'd knock on the door.

It wasn't exactly a thorough search, but there seemed to be n o representations of birds of any color at all so Egan climbed from th e car and walked along a gravel path to the front door.

The man who answered his knock made Egan even more certain that he'
d been screwed. He was about fifty, with a ponytail made up of what fe w strands of hair he had left and a Hawaiian shirt that arced gracefull y over the gut hiding the top of his cutoff khakis. All that was missin g was an umbrella drink in a pineapple husk and the cheerful strains o f Jimmy Buffett.

"I'm looking for an ID," Egan said with a complete lack o f enthusiasm.

To his surprise, there was a flash of understanding in the man's eye s before he managed to cloak his expression.

"I think you got the wrong place. Who are you looking for?"

Egan glanced over his shoulder, and seeing no one on the street, shove d the man back before slipping inside.

"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing? Get out of here befor e I call the cops!"

"I need information on Salam al Fayed," Egan said, closing the doo r behind him. There were no lights on in the house, leaving it in a dee p gloom that smelled of cigarettes and pot.

"Never heard of him," the man said reflexively.

"Seems kind of unlikely since he's been on about every news program i n the country."

The man, whose name he hadn't been given, took a step backward. "I m ean, I don't know anything about him .. . You know what I meant! Wh o are you? A cop? Do you have a warrant?"

"I don't work for the police. And I could care less about you or wha t you do for money. But you made some IDs for al Fayed a while back an d I need copies of them. So why don't you get on your computer and prin t them out for me. Then I'll leave and you'll never have to think abou t me again."

"I don't know what you're talking about with all this ID shit, man. Yo u got the wrong guy. Now get out of here before I call the police." H
e made a move toward a phone sitting on a shelf next to a n expensive-looking stereo system but Egan cut him off.

"Look .. . What's your name?"

"Syd."

"Syd. I'm not a bad guy but I really need this information and I'
m going to do what I have to to get it. So why don't we skip th e unpleasant part and get to the payoff?"

"My neighbors are only about ten feet away," the man warned. "If I s tart yelling, they'll be on to 911 in half a second."

"Come on, Syd. Be reasonable here."

"On the count of three, I'm gonna yell. I swear I am. One .. . two ..

."

Egan swung his foot up between the man's legs hard enough that for a moment he actually thought he might have hurt his ankle. Pulling hi s foot back, he rolled it in circles, testing it as the man grabbed hi s crotch and let out a low squeal that his neighbors wouldn't hear n o matter how close they were. Egan gave him a little shove, tipping hi m over onto the carpet, and then pulled a full rack of CDs down on top o f him. With his ankle feeling more or less normal again, he swung hi s foot back to deliver a moderately hard kick to the man's ribs when h e saw his wife staring up at him. Her second record was lying on th e carpet.

"Hey," Egan said, leaning over and slapping the man across the face.

"Syd! You all right? Can you hear me?"

He couldn't talk yet, but managed to nod.

"I hate this kind of thing. Really. And it makes it that much wors e when it's completely unnecessary. All I'm asking for is copies of th e stuff you did for al Fayed. I swear to you that the cops will neve r hear about any of this from me ..."

"I don't have it," the man managed to get out. He rolled on his back , still desperately clutching at his crotch. The color of his face mad e Egan wonder if he was about to have a stroke. That's all he needed.

"Why would I keep records? They'd .. . they'd just incriminate me."

"Oh, please .. . I'm not an idiot, Syd. You can buy damn nea r unbreakable encryption for less than a cup of coffee and save thing s anonymously on servers all over the world. No, I'm guessing you've go t all kinds of records. I mean, you never know when the cops are goin g to show up and you're going to need to deal, right?"

"You don't know what you're talking about!"

Egan grabbed a sofa pillow that looked like a skinned poodle and lai d it on the man's knee, then pulled out his pistol and pressed the barre l against it.

"Fuck! Are you crazy?"

"No," Egan said. "I'm desperate."

If
i Chapter Thirty-One.

Fade was quickly gaining a grudging respect for those millions o f people who made their living working with computers. He'd once spen t two completely motionless days nose-deep in a muddy river waiting for a particular Cambodian gentleman to make the mistake of walking to o close. At the time, he'd considered it tough duty, but compared to th e physical and mental torture of hunching over his new laptop hour afte r hour, it had been nothing. He felt like he had a knife between hi s shoulder blades and the inactivity was driving him insane. Or, in th e eyes of the press and police, more insane than he already was.

Worse, the increasingly familiar deadened tingling in his foot was mor e acute than it had ever been before. The cramping in his lower bac k seemed to be pressing his pet bullet deeper into his spine. What h e needed was an assistant. Maybe he should take out a want ad in th e Post. Something like "Exciting entry level position in the growin g field of assassination. Almost certain potential for advancement."

Fade grinned as he stood unsteadily and went to check the pot o f Lipton's noodles boiling over a hot plate next to the sink. Floatin g on top was a gray layer of lead paint and asbestos that was constantl y drizzling from the ancient ceiling. In hindsight, he probably shoul d have sprung for a slightly nicer safe house, but who knew he'd reall y need it? The plan was to give him a place to pick up his IDs, cash , and weapons, and then get the hell out of Dodge. Long-term comfor t hadn't been on his mind.

He switched on the tiny black and white television sitting next to hi m and flipped through the channels, relieved to find that the soaps ha d returned and that for the time being at least, there was no mention o f him at all. The last story he'd seen, on the eleven o'clock news th e night before, reported that Karen had quit the force and that th e police were pursuing "significant leads" in their search for him. H
e was tempted to call her and find out what was going on, but instea d skimmed the poisonous muck off his pasta and carried the pan over t o his makeshift workstation.

It took another two hours of hard work, but he finally finishe d plotting phonebook addresses against his computer's mapping software , identifying every bakery between Kelly Braith's house and Homelan d Security's headquarters. The hope here was that Braith liked her bos s enough not to just pick him up a grocery store cake but not so muc h that she'd use some boutique bakery miles out of her way. If tha t assumption was wrong, it was going to be a very long day.