Glory Boys (54 page)

Willard shook his head. He was dizzy and lucid at the same time. No wonder his father was always down here in Washington. ‘Mr Lambert’ of Powell Lambert was every bit as busy as his Wall Street partner. Powell’s job was to keep the supply lines ticking like clockwork. Willard’s father’s job was to make absolutely sure that the Firm had paid off everyone who mattered.

‘The Firm, Father, how far does it reach?’

‘It?’

‘Yes, how far?’

‘It, Willard, it? That’s no way to speak of a family concern.’

‘Huh? … Oh, right,
we.
How far do we reach? The United States Senate, obviously.’

Junius nodded.

‘Congress?’

Another nod.

‘Law enforcement? I guess the federal enforcement agencies…?’

‘Know us and love us. We do things properly, in a businesslike way. They like that.’

‘Customs?’

The older man shrugged. ‘We’ve spoken to them. They pitch their demands a little high. It’s a business we run, not a federal hand-out program. So, no. The answer to your question is no.’

‘And what else?’

‘For instance?’ His father was impassive.

‘What else, Father? The Department of Justice? The Attorney General? The White House?’

Junius Thornton smiled. He took a small leather notebook from his pocket and tore out a sheet. He wrote some names down on the sheet of paper using a slim pencil in a silver case. He showed the paper to Willard, who read the names.

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Amongst others, I should say. Amongst others.’

Willard read the list again. ‘Jesus Christ.’

His father turned away. A cardboard packet of matches lay in a silver tray on the bartop. Junius Thornton struck a match, lit the paper, and let it burn. He stopped watching even before the last spark of flame had vanished into ash. A barman with a white cloth wordlessly swept the ash out of sight. Aside from the lingering smoke, it was as though the sheet of paper with its handful of names had never existed.

Down by his right hand, Willard found the glass of water that he’d ordered what seemed like half a century ago. He stared at it dully, then raised it to his mouth. The water tasted flat, cold and insipid. It was a stupid drink for stupid people. He put it down. He found his father watching him, but not in a hostile way, in a kind way, a loving way even.

‘Jesus, Father, I hadn’t even imagined!’

‘Not your fault, my boy. It’s not something we shout about.’

Willard gestured down at his glass of water. He smiled. His father smiled back.

‘Say, Pa, you know anywhere I can get a drink around here?’

115

On the edge of the field there was a movement in the sharp salt spines of dune grass. A girl, mid-twenties, conservatively dressed, but spattered with dust and dotted with blood, shifted position as she followed the plane’s flight away to the south. She’d seen the cars, seen and heard the bursts of gunfire, known Abe had done the only thing he could do.

Pen watched Abe go in a storm of feeling. She felt intense and furious joy at his escape. At the same time, she saw the cars begin to creep around the field’s perimeter, looking for her. And it wasn’t just Marion’s men in the cars, it was whoever else Powell Lambert could provide – that, plus the entire city police force which seemed to have been purchased lock, stock and barrel. She was horribly afraid.

First things first: her feet. Her slim leather-soled office shoes had already chafed her feet bare. Blood was bubbling up between her toes. The pain she didn’t mind, but any time she tried to move fast her shoes flew off. On sand and grass that didn’t matter. On gravel, rock, or the stony unmade roads of the area, bare feet would be cut to ribbons. She pulled off her shoes and stockings, then put the shoes back on and tied them to her feet with the thin silk. She pulled the knot tight and already felt more comfortable.

Then: think.
Abe
. What would he do next? He wouldn’t just abandon her, she was certain. There was no chance of him simply giving up. But what would he do? He couldn’t come back to Samana Field. The risk of capture was far too high. But he’d do something.
What?

Meantime, she needed to hurry. One of the cars continued to tour the field, but the other one had stopped and had discharged its men. Six men, three of them cops, all six of them armed. For a second, she watched them come. Then, in a single golden moment, she realised she knew what Abe would do. She knew where to go and what to do.

She slid quietly down a sand dune, keeping out of sight. Forty yards away, a scatter of low bushes hunkered down against the fierce light and impending storm. She held her ledgers tightly against her chest. She was filthy now, no longer the neat bank girl who’d come into work that morning. But she didn’t care about any of that. Right now, all she needed was shelter.

She caught her breath, gathered her strength, then ran, bending double, staying low.

116

Roeder lifted the phone. A man on the other end spoke for half a minute. Roeder asked one or two questions and listened in silence to the answers. Then, ‘Keep going,’ he said and hung up. The room was silent for a few seconds, but not empty. There was a concentrated fury in Roeder’s pale face. His hands opened and closed, as though ready to mangle something.

But Roeder hadn’t got where he’d got by failing to think. His anger wasn’t vengeful, it was thoughtful. And suddenly, after a few seconds, it disappeared, or seemed to. He pushed back his leather-sprung chair and went to the hat stand. His hat was pearl-grey, soft felt, comfortable. From the drawer of his desk he took a gun. The gun was a .38 calibre Colt Army Special, dull black, cold metal, lethal.

Down in Jacksonville, his men and the city cops would either catch Rockwell and Hamilton or they would not. If the worst came to the worst, the last hand of this game would be played out somewhere else altogether and Roeder was a man who hated to miss a finale. He put his hat on his head, his gun in his pocket. He stepped out of his office and told his secretary he was taking a trip.

‘Yes, sir. Should I tell people where they can reach you?’

He nodded. Smiled and nodded.

‘Washington. I’m going to Washington.’

117

The storm wall was close now, less than a mile distant.

It was vast. The size of it was beyond words, beyond description. Storm clouds reached up thirty thousand feet. The length of the weather front was easily forty miles, and probably more. Abe had seen bad storms, but never one worse than this. He’d certainly never flown in anything like it, didn’t know if a plane could even stay aloft in those conditions.

Down on the beach, the long dangerous rollers from the Atlantic were changing their tune. The rollers were still there, still bigger if anything, but they’d begun to break up. Waves curled in long lines of white up and down the coast. The white had a nasty edge to it. This was no pleasant, frothy, ice-cream white. This was the savage green-white of a violent ocean, growing more violent with every wave.

And down below: Tin Can Field.

There was no reason to go there, except for one. Abe and Pen had no back-up plan. Or rather: Samana Field had been their back-up plan. So where should Abe go? He should go wherever he’d be most likely to find Pen. She’d go wherever she’d be most likely to find him. They hadn’t spoken about it, hadn’t thought about it. But there was only one choice. The site of their best and longest love-making. The place where they hadn’t come together as war hero and rich girl, just as man and woman. Their nights alone on Tin Can Field had been like something dropped from heaven, like nights snipped from the rest of their lives. It was here, if anywhere, he’d find Pen.

Abe hugged the ground. He was flying so low that nobody on the ground would be able to locate his direction unless he passed more or less directly overhead. But it was hellishly dangerous. The wind was getting stronger and gustier. Twice a sudden bolt and drop of air thrust him downwards. Only lightning reactions saved him from smashing up. The second time, he actually felt the thwack of a tree-top against his undercarriage, the plane’s sudden hesitation in flight.

He came to Tin Can Field. On a still day, he’d have come down on the beach. The sand slanted a little down to the sea, but it was hard and even, and there was plenty of space.

But today was no still day. Landing in a strong and gusting crosswind was an all but certain route to destruction. An imbalance in wind pressure between one pair of wings and the other would tilt the aircraft. In the air, that meant nothing. Close to the ground, if one wingtip snatched the ground on landing, then a tilted aircraft was probably a wrecked one.

Abe surveyed the approach. He would have to land in the path of the wind. That gave him a maximum distance of two hundred feet, far less than he usually needed. On the other hand, the wind, blowing directly in his face, would help slow the aircraft. He flew over the landing field checking for obstructions. Infuriatingly there was a drainage ditch running clean across the field, two thirds of the way down his proposed landing strip. The ditch cut his landing distance to just a hundred and forty feet, an all but impossible distance.

He was in a quandary.

He’d be of no help to Pen if he smashed up his plane and himself with it. On the other hand, he was of no help to her in the air either. He hesitated for a second, then knew he had to attempt the landing. He brought the plane around and lined her up with the little strip of sand and earth. Ahead, the sky was a mountain of black. Below, the sea was whipping itself into a frenzy. Abe watched a squall come spitting across the water towards him: a scurry of rain, white foam lashing off the tops of waves. In a flash, Abe realised that squall was his chance. The greater the windspeed in his face, the shorter his stopping distance. But the squall was a small one. He could already see past it to a lull in the water beyond. He moved as quickly as he could.

He dropped the plane faster than he wanted, spent a second or two racing full throttle towards the squall. A burst of rain crashed into him. Light vanished. His goggles streamed with sudden water. It was hard to make out anything below. But Abe couldn’t postpone movement. His hands and feet raced ahead of his eyesight. He throttled back, lost height, felt the plane snag on the buffeting wind. Desperately trying to judge his position in the swelling chaos, Abe caught a glimpse of his landing site. He moved the stick down, kept the rudder steady, throttled back to nothing. A lurch of wind slammed him down hard on the earth. The aircraft rocked once – whether from wind or something under his wheels was hard to tell – then corrected itself before Abe could react. He already had his elevator up. He felt the ground racing too fast beneath him. He could see the edge of the landing strip horribly close.

He was slowing. The violence of the squall did what he needed. He was losing speed fast. He thought he’d done it.

Then the squall lifted. The rain stopped. There was a second of bright sunshine and absolute calm. Slowly, at no more than five miles an hour, but unstoppably all the same, the DH-4 rolled forwards another couple of dozen yards and sighed a little as the wheels eased gently into the drainage ditch. The plane stopped, angled gently down, stuck fast.

118

Pen was losing the race.

To begin with, she’d done well. She made her escape from Samana Field without being noticed and, her bloody feet thankful for the newly secured shoes, she’d made good progress south. But, passing town, she’d been forced to compromise every rule of safety. It was broad daylight still – if that was the right term when half the sky was as black as a five-day bruise. She would need either to walk through town or try to sidle past it, down the waterfront. Either way was bad, but town was worse. As Sarah Torrance, Pen had been inconspicuous. She’d been the sort of person you could sit opposite in a bar for half an hour, then be hard pushed to remember one solitary detail about her afterwards. But that had been this morning. She was Sarah Torrance no longer, just Pen Hamilton the fugitive. Blood continued to leak from her shoes. Her silk stockings were ragged. Her skirt was torn. Her blouse was damp and filthy. Her hair had made the short but familiar step from well-combed and demure, to unkempt and ragged.

She chose the waterfront, trusting not to subtlety, but to speed.

She almost made it.

With the weather turning so foul, sightseers and tourists had abandoned the beach. Hoteliers were closing shutters, bringing tables inside, bringing down awnings, securing whatever could be secured. At the top end of the beach, Pen had seen a pair of uniformed cops lurking in the shade of a hotel veranda. Beyond them, there was a parked sedan car with a man inside, watching the beach and doing nothing. Pen cut inland, crossed a patch of rough ground to a hotel service road, then made her way behind the cops and the parked car. Then, pushing her way through the lush beach-side garden attached to a white-pillared casino, she cut back to the beach, sticking to the broken ground and spiky dune grasses.

Isolated and obvious, her best refuge was speed. She tore her shoes off, and ran. The four bank ledgers were heavy and had made a damp rectangular print against her belly. But she made good progress. Every hundred yards left in her wake was a hundred yards closer to Tin Can Field.

But, on reaching a small headland that marked the edge of the built-up area, Pen almost ran slap into a Marion goon, lying face down in the low grass. Pen came running within a dozen yards of him. The first she knew of his presence was when a shot cracked into the sand ahead of her.

She was so surprised she almost stopped running. When she turned, she saw the man – a fat guy, thank God, two hundred and twenty pounds at least – belting down the beach after her. She heard another couple of shots, but didn’t spot the fall of the bullets. Lungs and limbs burning with pain, Pen stretched the distance between them to thirty yards, forty, fifty, sixty. The fat man gave up, clutching his gasping side. Pen stopped for a second, gasping herself, and the two of them grimaced, before the fat man turned lumbering back to a nearby restaurant. From there he’d make a call for help. If the organisation was smart – and it was – it would have enough information to join the dots. Pen was on the run. Abe was there to get her out. They’d abandoned one pick-up point. They were going hell-for-leather to the next. A city plan would be enough for them to guess the rest.