Hard Fall (40 page)

His second choice agreed to come right over to discuss the “shoot.” For the sake of pretense, Kort was a free-lance fashion photographer.

Cindy Axtell arrived twenty minutes later. The face was perfect, the bust a little flat, the hair too short, but that could be dealt with. At his request, they were shown to a conference room where they could discuss the job “in private.”

He closed the door. “Miss Axtell, I selected you in part because your resumé included a few minor acting credits. I'm short on time, so I'm going to be very direct. I am not a photographer. No fear,” he said, raising his hand. “I'm not what you're thinking. Nothing like that. What I have in mind will require some acting skills, and I'm prepared to pay for that. I can only hope there is a touch of romance in your heart, for without it, I doubt you will agree to what it is I have to propose.”

She crossed her arms
and
her legs, immediately suspicious. She looked like an insect fighting off the cold. “I'm listening, but not for long.”

“Nothing sexual
whatsoever
. Furthermore, you get to spend the entire afternoon driving a brand new BMW around town.”

Now he had her.

“Before going any further, I have to know
right now
whether or not you are seriously interested in the work. As I said, I have very little time. I can't waste it on you unless you're willing to go forward.”

“Interested in
what
?” she insisted.

“Acting. An afternoon of acting is all. Nothing sexual. Completely alone. Twice your going rate. Four hours minimum. Cash, up front.” That raised her eyebrows.

“Cash?” He nodded. “You'll double my rate?” He gave another nod. She studied him. “There's something in the car, isn't there? Drugs, something like that? No thanks. I don't think so.” She reached out for her tiny purse.

“Drugs?” He laughed. “You don't like the car, you leave it wherever, and whenever you want. You can keep the keys or throw them away. I don't care.” He could see he had her good and confused. He decided to push on. “There's a woman I'm very much in love with. She is also in love with me. Her husband is having her every move watched. He's very rich and he hasn't accepted their separation well at all. You may know the type.”

She squinted, but he saw sympathy behind the attempt. He exhaled and relaxed.

He had her in the palm of his hand.

Monique braced herself for another wave of panic.

It came as a burning, twisting contraction that nearly buckled her over. She understood the importance of maintaining an appearance of calm, of continuing with her day-to-day activities, of avoiding paranoia. At the same time she saw conspiracy over her shoulder at every turn: the garbage man; the randomly parked car; the repairman fixing the office copier. All suspects.

Three people had asked after her health, so she obviously wasn't hiding it very well.

Five minutes to five. She grabbed her purse and was on her way out when her assistant caught up to her.

“A fax just came in for you. It's marked urgent and private.” She handed it to her. Monique accepted it with an unsteady hand. It had no less importance than a stay of execution.

She drew herself into one of the reception room chairs. Hand written, the message was a single paragraph. The return address was Dallas, Texas. Her heart jumped. From
him
. It had been sent by an “Evelyn Macleod.” That provided her the two letters—
E
and
M
—which, when at the start of a word, marked where his coded message stopped. It required effort to break it on the fly. She searched the document for the letters
EM
and found them in employees,
employees
was in the second sentence. She mentally extracted the second letter of every word up to the word
employees
.

re: Employee problems.

Monique:

Ugly confrontations at loading attempts for night flights. We've attached only nonunion, away-base employees to the night work, and it's causing problems. Suggest a price increase to match unions before it becomes more organized. Please advise by morning.

Eve

She couldn't do it in her head. She stole a pencil from a Snoopy cup on the front desk and wrote it out:

g-o-t-o-t-o-i-l-e-t-n-o-w

She broke it out backward, and then she saw it:
go to toilet now
.

She crumpled up the message and was about to throw it out when she thought better of it. “Good night,” she said to the receptionist.

“See you tomorrow,” the receptionist said. This stopped her. She knew better. She took one last look around the office. She had built a pretty good life here, she thought. God willing, she would never see it again.

The walk to the bathroom dragged on. The clicking of her pumps was like the ticking of a clock. She felt her pulse at her temples.

She turned the handle and stepped inside.

A blond woman stood at the sink, her head down. She was wearing a short red leather skirt and a black leather jacket. Another bolt of panic slapped her. FBI? If he couldn't make contact with her …

“Take the center stall and lock the door,” the blond woman said once the hall door had shut. “We're alone.” When Monique hesitated, the woman added, “Hurry! Strip down to your underwear and pass your clothes to me in the end stall. There's a shopping bag there. Put that stuff on.” The model dried her hands and then entered and locked the toilet stall next to the wall, the one immediately adjacent to Monique. “If someone comes in, sit down. Make it look like you're on the john.”

Monique obeyed her. She shed her clothes in seconds and passed them through. In the shopping bag she found a duplicate red miniskirt, the same sheer blouse, and a black leather jacket. All her size. At the very bottom of the bag was a blond wig, a pair of oversized eyeglasses, and, beneath these, a pair of scissors. She stared at the scissors, but only briefly. She knew what had to be done. She clipped off great locks of her hair and dropped them into the toilet. For the wig to fit she had to have shorter hair.

He had thought of everything.

“Thank you so much,” she blurted out. She was crying again. She hated herself for it.

“You must love him very much,” came the voice from the stall.

Cutting off most of her hair was the final blow. Her life was over. She could feel it.

“Give me your keys, and tell me where you parked.”

That was when Monique understood Kort's plan.

“It's in the reserved spaces,” she said. There was too much to do. She was all thumbs.

The door to the hall opened.

Monique froze and dropped to the toilet. She saw the other woman's hands seize the discarded clothing, and then she, too, sat down on the toilet. The woman who had entered took the only remaining stall. She urinated, flushed the toilet, and washed her hands. She left.

A tube of lipstick and a compact slid under the panel. Monique picked it up. With two more snips, most of her hair was gone. It floated in large clumps on the surface of the water. She flushed it away, and with it, the last several years. The short-haired blond wig felt horrible. She checked the compact's mirror and seated the wig properly. The bright red lipstick was awful, but it changed her looks dramatically. The gray-tint glasses polished it off.

Another person. Cheap, sexy—easy.

The woman next to her passed a ball of clothes to her. She whispered, “Put them in the shopping bag.
You
will carry it. I carried it in.” She heard the other woman leave her stall then. Monique put the compact and the clothes in the empty shopping bag and opened the stall door.

She gasped. This woman, dressed in her clothes (the skirt pinned in the back, she noticed), wearing her makeup similarly, and a wig that imitated the hair that had just been flushed down the toilet, looked amazingly like her real self. “It'll work,” she said.

Cindy Axtell nodded and smiled. “Yes, I think it will. Give me two minutes.” As she spoke, she snatched Monique's purse and dumped its contents into the empty purse she had brought with her. They then switched purses. Monique handed her the keys to the BMW. Axtell said, “Take the
stairs
to the lobby—that way you won't run into someone from your office and have to explain yourself. Once downstairs, walk right out the front doors. Put some hip into your walk. Make it sexy. The idea—his idea—is that the more you stick out the less you'll be seen. Is that a man's way of thinking, or what? Once outside, turn left and keep walking. Go into the hotel bar in the next block. Sit alone and order a drink. Don't drink alcohol, and don't talk to
anyone
. He'll meet you there. But it may take him quite a while. Be patient. He said to make sure to tell you that.”

Monique checked herself once in the mirror.

Axtell said, “You two are real lucky to have each other. He seems like a great guy.”

Monique played along. “He is.” She meant every word.

“He told me to park the car anywhere and just leave it. I know you're eloping and all, but even so … can't I call you or something, tell you where it is?”

“Don't worry about it,” Monique said, trying to sound confident, not knowing what kind of story Kort had built, but now beginning to guess. “Whatever he said … You know how it is.”

The other woman shrugged.

Monique loved that car. She hated to be without it. Her world continued to come apart before her eyes.

Cindy Axtell dropped the keys into Monique's empty purse, opened the door and left.

Monique looked at her watch and started counting off the two minutes.

Kort thought of his ideas as flowers, germinating from seed, tenderly breaking through the stubborn surface to the life-giving light beyond, from which they absorbed energy, converted it, and continued to grow until bursting with color and scent that would set up the proper conditions to form the seeds so the process could begin again. No thought simply arrived, fully conceived and developed. There was a period of fertilization, germination, of adolescence and of maturity, each important to the construction of the next, the structure as important as the end point. So it was that by seeing the transit cop hassling the bums in the Metro station the night before, and feeling the unbearable weight of Daggett's knowledge of his operation and the likelihood of failure, his formidable imagination had given birth to a series of ideas that had ended in the purchase of a pair of gray canvas trousers with a stretch waist, a white golf shirt, a brown windbreaker, and a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes from a chain store that had a sister outlet not twenty blocks away in trendy Georgetown. He paid cash for it all, having stopped at a cash machine only minutes earlier. His major enemy now was not only Daggett, not only Lynn Greene and the FAA, not only all of the agents of the FAA, FBI, NTSB combined, but his own body. Fatigue drilled through him from his temples as if someone were screwing a vise shut on his head. It bulged his eyes, dried his throat, tortured his stomach, and caused a massive, unforgiving headache at the top of his spine. The muscles in his shoulders felt welded tight. Exhaustion had poured sand in his eyes.

And there remained much to do. The flowers of his fertile imagination were reaching harvest. Having seen the contents of Daggett's briefcase, in desperation he had reached a single, inescapable conclusion: He had to die. As long as he remained alive, the FBI would continue to pursue him.

He liberated the new clothes of their tags and stapled advertisements and regrouped them into a single bag.

The trick had been to locate a fire escape exit door from the Red Line tunnel somewhere between Dupont Circle and Farragut North, a task made easier by studying engineering plans available to the public at the Library of Congress, which Kort had entered promptly at one o'clock that afternoon, following his hiring of Cynthia Axtell at the modeling agency. It was one thing to identify the hieroglyphic markings on the library's microfilm, and another thing entirely to actually locate the door itself down a back alley off the spiderwebbed streets of this city. But every such plan had its logistical setbacks, and Kort would not be deterred. At long last, it was the very street person he sought who unknowingly led him to the anonymous steel door marked in five-inch stenciled white letters:

NO PARKING ANYTIME
DO NOT BLOCK DOORWAY
EMERGENCY EXIT

He followed the man through the door, which was blocked open appropriately enough with a crushed beer can, after waiting several minutes so he wouldn't frighten him.

Never frighten a man you intend to kill.

The steel door led down an impossibly long flight of steel steps, dimly lit by the glow of red exit signs and arrows pointing up, and suggested that the street people who used these subway tunnels as their shelter were among the most physically fit people in the city. He didn't count them, but he guessed them at about six hundred steps, perhaps two hundred vertical feet—twenty stories—of descent, and he wondered about his ability to climb them at a full run later that night. With each landing, the intensity of the heat grew markedly, forcing Kort to understand the desperation of those who elected to dwell here. It was stiflingly hot, suffocating air, reeking unnaturally of burning electricity, steel, and rubber, and did nothing to improve his already deteriorating condition.

The tunnel was black as night, as dark as hell itself, relieved only occasionally by a low-watt bulb in a steel safety cage, mounted high above the trunk lines and plumbing pipes that ran endlessly along the poured-cement walls. An unseen gravel complained underfoot and contributed no doubt to the dry, caustic dust that quickly lined his nostrils and flared a bitter taste at the back of his raspy throat. He stopped intermittently, listening for and identifying the dragging footsteps of the man who had preceded him. When at last he paused and heard nothing, he put himself on guard, for either a train was coming, and the stranger ahead knew well enough to take shelter from being seen in its single headlight, or he had taken roost in a spot where he intended to consume the better portion of the spirits he carried in the brown paper bag at his side. Either way, Kort knew enough to be on full alert, for his moment was at hand. His fingers stroked the cool shaft of the small penlight he had used the night before in Daggett's home, and he readied himself to use it.