The Brea File (35 page)

Macimer had once attended a law enforcement conference at the hotel. Quickly reviewing his memory of the layout, he headed away from the main entrance toward a separate large building off to the left, housing a private tennis club, open to hotel guests and members only.

Inside the entrance Macimer was stopped by a deeply tanned fugitive from a seaside lifeguard station. He stopped flexing his muscles when he stared at Macimer’s credentials.

“Nothing to worry about,” Macimer said. “I’m meeting someone here. If anyone asks for me, I’ll be in the locker room.”

“Yes, sir,” the disconcerted young man said.

Macimer walked quickly through the locker room, emerged at the far side of the courts area and immediately spotted what he was looking for: a fire exit with panic hardware, opening only from the inside.

He glanced back across the huge open floor, past the busy courts with their scurrying, white-clad figures in shorts, toward the entrance. No one in street clothes was visible. The attendant was out of sight.

Macimer stepped outside and moved immediately into the cover of a grove of trees behind the building.

Five minutes later, certain that he had not been spotted, he walked past the pool area behind the Pook’s Hill Lodge and used a back entrance to reach the lobby. Through the front windows he could see the upper floors of the Linden Hill Hotel, only a quarter mile away.

The Pook’s Hill Lodge was large, expensive, more an apartment hotel than an overnight stop, catering to those with large expense accounts. As Macimer crossed the lobby toward the elevators he could feel the sweat on his face and body drying from the air-conditioned chill. He wondered if he would have been sweating anyway, even without his brief run through the woods, on his way to an unexpected meeting with a beautiful woman.

“Paul! Thank God!” Erika had cried when he telephoned the number she had left on answer-phone’s tape. “I was afraid I’d missed you—or you wouldn’t call back.”

“I just got home. What is it, Erika?”

“I have to see you.”

To his dismay there had been a small leap of excitement. “This isn’t a very good time, Erika—”

“Paul, I
must
talk to you!” The anxiety in her voice reached him clearly. This was no casual phone call. He remembered that she had been in the lounge at Hogate’s the night he waited for the man who called himself Antonelli. Coincidence, surely. Or perhaps he didn’t want to believe otherwise.

“What’s it about, Erika?”

“You know… you must know. Paul, it has to be tonight.”

There was something definitely wrong with her voice. Anxiety, yes. Or had she simply been drinking the evening away? He was unsure of her and of himself, suspicious of his own swift marshaling of arguments for responding to her plea. Because he did want to.

“Where are you, Erika? This isn’t your home number.”

“In Bethesda. It’s called the Pook’s Hill Lodge. Just over the hill from the Linden Hill Hotel. You can come right up, Paul, number 1115. I’ll be waiting…”

You must know
.

What did he know?

The elevator enveloped his overheated body in cold, as if he had stepped into a refrigerator. The day had been one of the hottest of the year but he had hardly noticed the heat most of the time; he was conscious of it now by contrast. The elevator hummed upward in soft cool silence, stopping gently at the eleventh floor. The doors opened with a barely audible hiss.

Wide, softly illuminated corridor, carpeting about two inches deep, Van Luit papers on the walls, a hush like that of an old church. He found 1115 and knocked. There was a tiny peephole in the door at eye level. He sensed rather than saw an eye peering out at him, then heard a bolt shoot back. The door flew open.

“Paul!” It was an exclamation, as if she had not quite believed he would come. “Come in, come in…”

The living room was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end opening onto a private balcony and a view of city lights. The thick white carpeting, casement draperies, modern furnishings were all quietly but insistently expensive, chosen by a decorator for effect rather than because someone liked them.

“One of the perks of living at the top,” Erika Halbig said, following the direction of his gaze toward the long windows. She answered a question in his eyes before he spoke. “It belongs to a friend of mine. She’s in the country for the summer—everyone who is
anyone
leaves this city for the summer. She asked me to look in once in a while.” Erika laughed lightly, nervously. “So you see, we’re quite alone.”

Macimer looked full at her, catching the nervousness in her eyes as well as her voice. Why was
she
nervous?

“What is it, Erika? You said it was important.”

She laughed again, and the tip of her tongue flicked over her lips, moistening them. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? You’re really not making it easy, Paul. Would you like a drink?” The question might have been a sudden inspiration. “I’m one or two ahead of you. What is it—Bourbon on ice?”

“That’ll be fine.”

She was more than one or two ahead. The smell of gin mingled with a tantalizing fragrance as she brushed past him toward a wet bar. Watching her splash whiskey over ice cubes, then spill Beefeater’s gin over the ice in her own empty glass without measuring, he asked himself if she was acting like someone bringing him an important message, someone putting a friendly, civilized face on an ugly secret.

Quite suddenly he knew that she was not. Her manner was almost coquettish. Her dress—a plum-colored chemise with a miniskirt, the soft, flowing, silklike fabric clinging to her body as if charged with static electricity—was calculatingly provocative.

Carrying her drink over to a white sofa, she curled her legs under her as she sat in a corner. “Don’t look so surprised, Paul, you must have known. And for heaven’s sake, sit down!”

He smiled as he dropped into a chair facing her, a chrome-and-glass cocktail table between them. “What must I have known, Erika?”

“Why I asked you here, of course.” The nervousness was still evident, but there was vulnerability as well, nervousness become anxiety. He found it astonishing in so flawlessly perfect a creature that she could feel vulnerable, unsure of herself. “How long has it been, Paul?”

“How long?”

“Since you first knew you wanted me.”

He stared at her, startled but at the same time oddly relieved that they would not have to play any complicated games. And he didn’t have to worry tonight about the Brea file.

“If the truth be known,” he murmured.

“Yes, the truth,” she said brightly. “By all means, the truth.”

“It must be the same for every man you meet,” he said.

“I’m not asking every man. I’m asking you.”

“You’re a very desirable woman, Erika, and I’m not made of stone. But…” He glanced away from her, taking a deep breath, letting the new tension which had replaced his own earlier nervousness have its way. Then he thought with sudden force of Jan.

He scooped his drink from the table in front of him and took a deep swallow, ice clicking against his teeth.

“What’s wrong?”

“The usual.” His smile was rueful, almost apologetic. “We both have… other obligations.”

“Oh, Paul. Dear, dear Paul.” She placed her glass on the table and stood very carefully, as if she weren’t quite certain how steady she was. Then she walked slowly over to him. “No one believes in that one man-one woman thing anymore. Surely you don’t think Jan does!”

“If she doesn’t, she puts on a good act.” Macimer smiled. “I suppose it sounds as if we came here from another planet.”

“I think it’s kind of nice… but not very practical. I mean… nothing lasts. Not like that.” Her fingers toyed with the deep scoop of her neckline, drawing his gaze. The silken fabric defined the precise shape of her nipples. “Do you wonder why the lady keeps herself slightly sozzled with dependable old Beefeater’s?”

“Last time we met, I got the idea that Russ leaves you alone too much.”

“He leaves me alone even when he’s with me. I’m not important enough for him even to find out who I am or what I think. I’m not an empty-headed porcelain doll, Paul, something you put on a shelf and dust off when company’s coming. And I’m not proper old Elaine, either, the charming hostess who always said the proper thing and evidently never sweated.” Erika’s hip was pressing against Macimer’s shoulder. Her hand came to rest lightly at the base of his neck. “You’re sweating, Paul. I like that.”

Staring up at her, feeling the heavy beat of his pulse, the small burning spot where her hip leaned against him, the feathery tips of her fingers teasing the back of his neck, he thought how lame and even ridiculous his protest about marital obligations had sounded. What Erika said was true. Fidelity was now a subject of humor, seriously discussed by a public television panel as a naïve twentieth-century American invention, like the motorcar.

“You’re here, Paul—and I’m here. Jan isn’t. This has nothing to do with her. She’ll never even know.”

“I will.” He wondered how she knew that Jan was away. Russ Halbig did. Agents had been following him wherever he went.

“Is that so terrible?” Erika laughed, and he heard again the nervousness beneath the throaty promise of her laugh. “This could be a night to remember.”

“Erika, that’s a line from a bad play.”

Suddenly she sank to her knees before him. “Paul,
look at me!
Am I so easy to reject? Forget about Jan, forget about Russ! Forget about being that damned gentlemanly, soft-spoken, shoes-shined FBI man for once.” She reached behind her back and did something to the chemise. It slipped from her shoulders and drifted downward slowly, as if reluctant to release the flawless breasts. When it was around her waist Erika lifted her face toward his. He was startled to see tears in her eyes. “What do I have to do, Paul? Beg? I will, you know, if that’s what you want.”

The impulse came from a tangle of desire and embarrassment and the need to comfort her, to reassure her that she was indeed beautiful and important. He reached for her as he stumbled awkwardly to his feet, pulling her up with him. Her dress collapsed around her feet. He was not surprised to find that she wore nothing else. As his arms embraced her she pressed feverishly against him, warm delicious curves and parted lips and sleek skin of youth, as eager as a girl in an adolescent’s fantasy, breathlessly murmuring in his ear, “Say it, Paul! You want me, too. I know you do. I’ve always known.”

Too eager, he thought. Too sudden. Too timely.

He pushed her away in a spasm of self-disgust. How predictable he had been! How eager to come running when Erika beckoned!

His words were harsh. For a moment he had wanted to strike her. “Did Russ put you up to this? Was I supposed to talk to you afterward or what? How much did he tell you about the file?”

He saw the answer in the leap of fear in her eyes. Panic had no reason to be there unless his guess was accurate. “What… what are you talking about, Paul?” she faltered. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”

“I think that’s obvious.” He reached down for the dress on the floor. It weighed about as much as a sigh. “Here, it’s cold in this place. You’d better put this back on. Tell him you did your best.”

At the door, feeling like a man who has just reached the far side of a minefield, he said, “You don’t have to tell him this, but your best is damned good. You didn’t make it easy for me either.” He smiled grimly. “There’ll be times when I’ll probably kick myself, but I’ll survive. I guess we both will.”

Her stricken, naked image pursued him along the silent corridor.

Linda was released from the hospital at eleven o’clock Friday morning, less than two hours before the scheduled departure of United flight 27 for Phoenix by way of Dallas. Macimer drove directly from the hospital to Dulles International. “I’ve packed everything on your list,” he told his daughter on the way. “And anything else I could think of that you might need.”

She nodded indifferently.

“If I’ve forgotten anything, you’ll just have to go shopping in Phoenix,” he said lightly.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Instead of responding she gazed out the car window. He was disturbed by the lack of response, the dull eyes, the absence of normal excitement over a cross-country flight.

In spite of its size the Dulles terminal was crowded and noisy. When they got through the baggage check and reached the waiting area, they were a half hour early. Macimer sat with his daughter and tried to talk to her. Her responses continued to be limited to monosyllables and shrugs.

In desperation Macimer said, “I know it makes everything seem senseless, what happened to Carole. I don’t think there’s anything that’s harder to accept than the idea that none of us really counts for anything, you or Carole or anyone else. So there are a couple things I want you to think about. Maybe they won’t help, but think about them. One is that you do matter—to me, to your mother, to Kevin and Chip, to your friends, your grandparents, a great many other people. Especially to us, your own family. The other thing is that what happened with that truck wasn’t a senseless, meaningless accident. The driver of that truck deliberately forced you off the road.”

“I know!” Linda whispered fiercely. To his relief the veil fell away from her eyes. Her face was angry, but alive.
Stay angry
, he thought. “Why did he do it? That’s what I don’t understand!”

“I think I know,” Macimer said quietly. “I can’t go into details, but it’s very probable that the driver of that truck was someone involved in an FBI investigation—someone Carole had seen.”

Linda’s eyes grew round. “That’s weird!” She took a moment to digest this revelation before asking, “What’s it all about? Is he some kind of terrorist the FBI is after?”

“Yes.” It was a good word for Brea, Macimer thought. “I wish I could tell you more, Linda. I can’t, not right now. But what I want you to try to understand is that what happened wasn’t blind chance.”

“Carole is still dead.” The girl winced at the word. “Nothing changes that.”