The Informant (17 page)

He found that he remembered the ground he was crossing. He knew the spots where he could risk breaking into a full run, and where he would have to trot, watching for half-buried rocks and raised roots that could injure him in the dark. Tonight a broken ankle would be fatal.

The sound of the helicopters changed again. This time the sound was coming from the north, along the spine of the mountain. He dashed to a sparse stand of pines nearby and then searched for a better place to hide. He found a deep depression on the edge of the grove. It looked as though sometime in the past a big tree had fallen, and the roots had left a hole. He sat in the depression, spread his poncho around him, pulled armloads of pine needles and twigs over on top of it, and lay down on his back.

A helicopter passed over him, bright spotlights shone down from its belly, and then it began to descend. It hovered and set down on the open meadow that lay between him and the downslope. The engine remained loud and the rotors still turned, the false wind kicking up dust and bits of bark.

The door on the side opened and two men in olive jumpsuits ran a few feet, dropped to their bellies, and lay there sighting M-16 rifles on theoretical foes lurking in the forest. Then the rest of the team jumped out, spread, and ran for cover. A second helicopter landed farther up in the meadow, and its crew performed the same landing drill.

The two helicopters churned up even more dust and debris as they rose unsteadily to a height of about a hundred feet and then swung away along the spine of the mountain. The men on their bellies got up and ran to join their comrades, who were already setting off along the path that led to the ranch complex.

He lay still and waited. He was fairly certain that the outer edge of the sweep had been established, and this was it. The men coming along the path passed within fifty feet of him, the butts of their assault rifles resting atop their shoulders instead of against them, turning their heads one way and the other to spot a target. None of them discerned anything human about him in the hole under the poncho and the pine needles and scraps.

Moving slowly, he fed the tube from his backpack canteen up through the neck of the poncho and drank. He rested and regained his strength while he waited for the contingent of federal officers to move far enough off. After a few more minutes he didn't hear them anymore so he got up and began to walk.

Before long he reached the beginning of the downslope. It was a gradual, steady descent, but now there were no paths. Probably few, if any, of the resort's guests had ever hiked down the mountain. In the daytime, the level land at the foot was a hot, harsh, demanding place.

As he descended out of the zone of pine trees and into the levels with patches of cactus and yucca, he could feel the rocky ground radiating stored heat into the cooler night air, like a memory of scorching sunlight. He came downward at a walk. When he reached the level ground and could see ahead far enough to spot the variations that were rocks and desert plants, he worked his way up to a trot. He could just catch the faint sound of helicopters on the moving air now and then from the far side of the mountain.

By now they were probably ferrying passengers to some police facility in the area. A lot of the men at the conference would draw some charges. Nearly every cabin would have a gun or two in it. A lot of the men were violating their paroles just by being in the same place as a hundred other convicted felons. There would undoubtedly be lots of other minor charges he couldn't anticipate—possession of this or that drug, carrying false identification, and so on. If the police found Frank Tosca, his body alone was adequate justification for holding all of the men for questioning.

Now that he was off the mountain there was little cover. He was tired, but he forced himself to stretch and take longer strides. His fast walk turned into a trot, and his trot accelerated into a jog. He kept up the pace for a mile or more before he slowed to a walk. When he caught his breath again, he worked up to a jog. He felt his age more than before. It wasn't that he couldn't perform quick, strong movements. It was his stamina that was diminished. He felt tired, used up now, and keeping up the pace was difficult.

The desert was black and silent and empty, but he knew that was an illusion. He was probably running past lots of desert creatures. He hoped he wasn't coming close to any rattlesnakes. They tended to slither into holes and crevices at night, but if he stepped in the wrong place, he was likely to draw a bite.

The only sounds now were his breathing, his footsteps, and the quiet rush of air past his ears. He kept on until he wondered if it was possible that he had missed the road in the dark and was going into an endless stretch of desert. But then he saw the dim, pale line of gravel a shade lighter than the surrounding desert. He stepped onto it, turned, and followed it. After a few minutes more he spotted the tall rocks with the tarp stretched between them where he had left his rental car. His navigation had been a bit off, but he must have diverged from his trail only a degree or two. He felt relieved. He had made it all the way into the mountain resort on foot, done what he had planned to do, and made it all the way back.

He took off his poncho and his hat and rolled them into a compact bundle, then drank the last of his water. When he reached his car, he put the bundle into the trunk with his small suitcase. He opened the suitcase and took out a set of street clothes and changed into them. He stuck the small pistol he had taken off the sentry in the back of his waistband and covered it with his shirt.

He remembered a 1950s-era hotel in Scottsdale that he used to like so he drove there and found that it didn't look as though it had changed much. He asked if they had a vacant room at this hour, checked in, and went to his room for a shower. After standing under the heavy stream of hot water for a few minutes getting the dust off and soothing his aching muscles, he ran a bath and soaked for a long time. He lay there with the water to his chin, and then his head jerked in a reflex and he realized he'd dozed off. The water had already begun to cool. He stood, dried off, went to the door to be sure he'd put out the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign, and locked everything that would lock. He propped a chair under the knob to buy himself a few extra seconds if someone battered in the door. Then he made sure the nine-millimeter pistol was fully loaded and ready. He put it under the spare pillow on the side of the bed nearest the door, got under the covers on the other side, and let himself fall into a deep sleep.

SHE RECOGNIZED SPECIAL
Agent Holman's voice on the phone instantly. It was before dawn, and she had been waiting for most of the night for his call. But what he said was unexpected. "Frank Tosca is dead."

"So he found the meeting," she said.

"I thought the theory was that he was the one who asked for it."

"Not Tosca," she said. "The other one. The Butcher's Boy. He certainly wasn't invited, but he found out where it was and went there to kill Tosca."

"It's a little early to be sure of that," Holman said. "I remember that was your interpretation of the break-in and killings at Tosca's house. But anytime one of these guys is on the edge of getting really powerful, his enemies get anxious. There were sure to be others who thought they should be the head of the Balacontano family, a few with the name Balacontano. There's also the fact that calling a meeting of the old men is an inherently dangerous thing to do. They're touchy, and a couple are borderline psychotic."

"You're right, of course," she said. "How was Tosca killed?"

"He was found by the raiding party in his cabin, lying on the floor with his throat cut."

It was exactly as she would have expected—the kind of silent attack a solitary killer with all the skills would choose. "I'll wait until the preliminary investigation is over before I say anything more. What's going on out there now?"

"We're moving into the mop-up stages, I think. There are more than two hundred of them in custody right now. We're trying to process them in small groups by airlifting some of them to the Phoenix Police Department. We're also bringing in buses. I expect before the night is over, we'll be farming them out to local lockups all over the area. It's the biggest thing since Apalachin—much bigger, if you just count the number of men we picked up."

"I wish I were there."

"So do I. We could use your help keeping the names straight and how they relate to each other."

"Well, I'd better let you get back to that."

"As soon as we've got more on the Tosca thing, or anything else, I'll get back to you."

"Thanks."

"The thanks go to you. I'm not forgetting that you were the one who figured this out and turned it over to us."

"We're on the same side. It may not seem that way sometimes, but we are."

"I'll talk to you later."

She sat in her dimly lighted office staring at the telephone. She shouldn't have blurted it out that way. She hated working with people who immediately accepted the first interpretation that came to mind and then stuck to it because it was theirs. And now she had probably given Holman the impression she was one of those people. She was sure the Butcher's Boy had done it, but she shouldn't have said it until she'd given the FBI a chance to work their way to the same conclusion.

He had told her that was what he wanted to do, and as far as she knew, he had never failed to accomplish his goal when all it entailed was killing someone. He had managed to get past two hundred men, all of whom had, at some point, made their bones. He had gotten past them and killed Frank Tosca. The big question in her mind now was, Had he also gotten out?

If he had been scooped up in the sweep, he would be photographed and fingerprinted like everyone else. But if he was then placed in a holding cell with a big group of Mafiosi, one of them would recognize him, and they would immediately gang up and kill him. That was what they did best. But if Elizabeth Waring arrived and took him out of that danger, wouldn't he be grateful? Wouldn't he be happy to be her informant? Getting as many of the men who knew him as possible into prison would be his best way of making himself safe. And he had already begun to tell her things. He didn't have any reluctance about that. As he'd said, he hadn't taken an oath of omertà. He wasn't in the Mafia.

She had to take steps to exert control of his fate before he was lost to her forever. First, she would have to be in Phoenix. She would have to get permission from Hunsecker, but her chances of receiving it were nil.

The situation was infuriating. She was the head of a section. If, in the course of any other organized crime case, she'd needed to send a Justice Department investigator to identify and divert a prisoner in the hope of turning him into an informant, she could have done it without permission from anybody. But this man, the professional hit man who had just killed the most potent and dangerous mob boss since Carl Bala himself, evidently wasn't acceptable to the department.

And even if, as probably would happen, the deputy assistant was forced by the avalanche of publicity on his superiors to take an interest, it would be a distant, tepid interest in what the FBI was up to. And the one person who must not be directly involved was Elizabeth Waring. Not only did she have a distinctly supervisory post that precluded her going out into the field, but she was tainted. She had spoken with the killer alone before the three murders at Tosca's house. If Hunsecker knew that she had spoken with the killer a second time, she would be fired.

Elizabeth was in an impossible position, and she had no method for handling it. She had been through twenty years of bureaucratic civil wars, and she had never needed more than one strategy—look at every detail and tell the truth about it. In her first big case she had relinquished forever the chance to endear herself to the upper echelon of the hierarchy by dissenting from their view of the chaos that got Carlo Balacontano convicted of murder. And by being the lone dissenter, she had denied herself the chance to be popular with her equals. When she had been asked for an opinion, she had told the truth. Each time someone who had embraced an opposing view questioned her assessment, she would supply the evidence—as much of it as was necessary to overwhelm him and make him move on to score his points on some other issue.

The strategy of telling the truth would not work this time. She had broken rules, argued with her boss, deceived him, and done things he had forbidden. The truth would destroy her. She had crossed a line and didn't see a way back. She had already begun to console herself the way lunatics and fanatics did—by telling herself that some day everyone would see she was right. She thought about her husband, Jim. He would have told her to concentrate her efforts on persuading the rest of her section. "Bring the team along," he would have said. "If you get too far out there ahead of everybody, the main thing you are is alone."

She woke up her computer and surfed the websites of the various packagers, searching for the best flight from Reagan International in Washington to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. She was about to select a flight when she remembered the rest of the ritual—her itinerary would be sent to her computer and printed. The computer would tell anyone who wanted to look exactly what she'd done and when.

She looked at her watch. It was five-thirty already. The sun was rising on the other side of the building, and the facades across the street were bathed in a red-orange glow. She picked up the telephone on her desk and started to dial, then hung up. She had no proof that her phone calls weren't being recorded. Maybe they weren't, but the numbers anyone dialed would appear on the bill. She used her cell phone and called Delta Airlines. She got a ticket for the flight at ten
A.M.
Then she wrote a memo to her second-tier people, saying she was taking a personal day or two. She thought about the kids. Amanda and Jim were exceptionally mature and self-reliant, and they had each other. But she would have to do some thinking before she went through with this.