The Patriots Club (19 page)

31

Guy de Valmont walked down the corridor in the rolling gait that was his calling card. A casual stride, one hand in the pocket, the other ready to wave a hello, fire off one of his charming salutes, or brush the pesky forelock out of his eyes. He was a tall man, and thin, in his skivvies all bones and right angles. But the miracle of Braithwaite and Pendel of Saville Row, combined with his naturally broad (but bony) shoulders, gave him the haphazard and elegant carriage of an English gentleman. To de Valmont, there was no higher calling.

It was his fifty-third birthday, and to celebrate, he’d allowed himself an early glass of bubbly. The zest of it was still fresh in his mouth, the mark of a good vintage. His birthday, along with the gala dinner that evening, and perhaps, too, the champagne, had put him in a rare, contemplative mood. He was not concerned with his age, so much as with the realization that he had spent twenty-five of those fifty-three years at Jefferson. Day in, day out, with four weeks of vacation a year . . . well, more like eight weeks lately. Still, twenty-five years doing the same damn thing. Lines of worry appeared on de Valmont’s pale forehead. Where had they gone?

It seemed like yesterday that he and J. J. had founded the place. Jacklin, then in his forties, with his tenure as secretary of defense freshly behind him, and he, Guy de Valmont, the Wall Street wunderkind, who’d thought up the harebrained scheme. Buy troubled companies with other people’s money, turn them around, wring every last cent of cash out of them, then get rid of them, either via an IPO or, preferably, an outright sale. On paper it looked easy, but twice in those first years they’d almost gone bust, buying the wrong companies, using too much cash or too much leverage, and never enough common sense. That was before Jacklin got the inspiration that would make Jefferson great. The revolving door, he called it. The currency-thin barrier between Wall Street and Washington, D.C. Oh, it had always been there, right back to Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet.” But until now, it had been something whispered about, something not quite kosher. Jefferson came along and practically institutionalized the thing.

De Valmont whistled softly, taking up “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” The occupants of the offices to his left and right read like a Rolodex of the high and mighty. Billy Baxter, budget director for Bush I. Loy Crandall, air force chief of staff. Arlene Watkins, chief of the General Services Administration, the office that okayed all contracts between civilian corporations and the government. The list went on. Counsel to the President. Senate majority leader. President of the Urban League. Director of the International Red Cross. The only one missing was the head of the Boy Scouts of America.

They were all at Jefferson, making up for years of government penury, feathering their nests for retirement, or for their children’s retirement, or their children’s children’s. Pay at Jefferson was generous. (He, himself, had become a billionaire long ago. In fact, he’d passed the five-billion marker somewhere around his fiftieth birthday.) And all Jacklin asked was that they make a few calls, pull a few strings, cash in a few favors. Swing a vote to increase funding for this or that project. Soften regulations to allow export of a new military technology. Amend a piece of legislation to include another state. If companies in Jefferson’s portfolio benefited, all the better.

“J. J.?” he called, sauntering into Jacklin’s palatial lair. Jacklin had insisted it be at least ten square feet larger than his office at the Pentagon. De Valmont spotted him poring over some documents at his desk. He walked closer, realizing that Jacklin had turned his hearing aid down. All those artillery rounds in ‘Nam had left him deafer than a bat. De Valmont stopped a foot behind his back.

“Bang!”

Jacklin jumped out of his socks. “Damn it, Guy,” he said, his cheeks flushing red. “You scared the crap out of me.”

De Valmont ignored the outburst. “You’ll never guess who I just spoke with. Tom Bolden from HW.”

Jacklin’s face froze. “The kid who shot Sol Weiss?”

“One and the same.”

“Whatever for?”

“He called. Asked me if I knew anything about Scanlon.”

“Scanlon! God, there’s a name from the past.”

“And not one we’d particularly care to remember. He sounded upset.”

“I’d imagine so. What’d you tell him?”

“That I was busy and that I’d look into it and call him back.” De Valmont shrugged and studied his nails. He needed a manicure. He couldn’t go to the dinner this evening looking like a Goth. “What do you think he’s found?”

“Sir!”

“Yes, Hoover. Still here.”

Hoover shook his head, startled. “I thought you’d gone somewhere.”

“Standing right by your side.” Guilfoyle lowered himself to a knee. “What do you have?”

“A restaurant at Sixteenth Street and Union Square West called the Coffee Shop. Bolden called the place twice the same day that Miss Dance visited the pharmacy. He used an ATM right around the corner at twelve-sixteen
P.M
. Oh, and they don’t take credit cards.”

“The Coffee Shop,” said Guilfoyle. “Good work.” He hurried to his desk overlooking the operations center and picked up his cellular phone. Unlike standard-issue models, this phone carried a sophisticated scrambling device rendering his transmissions a collage of squawks and beeps and indecipherable white noise to surveillance devices. The phone he called was equipped with a similar device, capable of unscrambling the transmission in real time.

“Sir,” answered a deep, unsatisfied voice.

“I have some good news.”

“I’ll believe it when I hear it,” said Wolf.

“We’ve pinpointed where Bolden will be at noon. The Coffee Shop at Union Square.”

“You’re sure?”

Guilfoyle peered over his desk at the lines of technicians busy at their consoles. Heads bowed, hands racing furiously over keyboards, they brought to mind the galley slaves of ancient Greece. Men enslaved by machines. “Cerberus is,” he answered. “I want you to take in a full field team.”

“How many men do we have in the vicinity?”

“Eight, not including you and Irish. They can form up on your location in twelve minutes.”

“Any shooters?”

Guilfoyle ran a mouse over the red pinlights indicating his men’s locations on the wall-mounted map. In turn, the name of the operative and his field grade appeared in a box beneath it. “Jensen,” he said. Malcolm Jensen. A former marine sniper. “I want you to act as his spotter.”

“His spotter . . . but sir—”

“Jensen will need someone who knows what Bolden looks like. We can count on him being in some kind of disguise. You’ll have to keep a sharp eye.” Wolf began to hesitate, but Guilfoyle cut him off. “I can’t have you in the middle of things. Bolden knows your face by now. We can’t risk spooking him. That’s final.”

“Yes sir.”

“I think Mr. Bolden’s given us enough of a run for our money. Don’t you?”

32

T
he Blackberry,
thought Bolden.

By law, every cell phone possessed a GPS chip—a chip that broadcast the phone’s location to within a hundred feet. His pager number was published in HW’s directory. That number, in turn, could be traced to a service provider—in his case, Verizon Wireless. But to pinpoint the signal—to actually get a read of the GPS coordinates, so many minutes and seconds longitude and latitude—required getting inside the phone company. Being able to tap into their transmission networks and track down a specific number.

Bolden clutched the device in his palm, pedestrians passing to either side of him, as if he were a stone in a stream. The phone was a homing beacon. He’d made it so easy for them. Hurrying to the nearest corner, he tossed the BlackBerry into a trash bin. The signal turned green. People flooded the crosswalk. Bolden stepped off the curb, hesitated, then returned to the trash bin.

“Taxi!” he called, raising a hand in the air.

A moment later, a cab pulled over.

Bolden opened the door and stuck his head and shoulders inside. “How much to Boston?”

“To Boston? No, no . . .” The Sikh cabbie thought about it for a second. “Five hundred dollars plus gas. Cash. No credit card.”

“Five hundred? You’re sure?” As Bolden pretended to consider the offer, he slipped the BlackBerry into the pouch behind the passenger seat.

The Sikh nodded vigorously. “Ten hours driving. Yes, I am sure.”

“Sorry, too steep. Thanks anyway.” Stepping back to the curb, Bolden watched the cab disappear into traffic.

At Lexington and Fifty-first, he ran down the stairs of the subway, then hugged the wall and watched dozens of men and women file in after him. Five minutes passed. Satisfied he was no longer being followed, he jumped the turnstiles and descended the stairs to the south platform.

He was safe. No GPS signal to hone in on, no office to stake out. While he had no doubt that Guilfoyle had been monitoring his home phone, he hadn’t mentioned the name of the restaurant where he intended to meet Jenny. It was their inadvertent secret.

He boarded the local train, and ten minutes later, got out at Sixteenth Street.

Jenny slid into the booth, huddling against the wall. Keeping her eyes in front of her, she unwrapped the scarf from her neck and loosened the buttons on her overcoat. She’d tucked her hair into a black beret, and that she kept on.

They were here
. Bobby Stillman had promised her that. Bobby didn’t say how many of them there might be, if they were men or women, or how they could have known. Just that they were here. It was a fact you had to count on, Bobby had said. A tenet of faith. And if they weren’t, you’d better pretend they were, because they sure as hell would be there the next time. Amen.

The Coffee Shop was boisterous and bustling. Every table was taken, the aisles cluttered with waiters and waitresses shuttling back and forth between the dining room and kitchen, refilling coffee cups, ferrying trays piled high with meat loaf and burgers and grilled-cheese sandwiches. It was the kind of place that served lunch on thick porcelain plates and coffee in chipped enamel mugs, and where the staff hollered to one another across the room.

They’re here.

Just like in
Poltergeist
. They’re here but you can’t see ’em. Jenny pushed her mug out for some coffee. After it was poured, she added two packets of sugar and warmed her hands on the mug. Turning her wrist, she saw that it was already 12:05. Tom was five minutes late. She started to look over her shoulder, then caught herself.
It’s only five minutes. He’ll be here any second. He got caught in the office.
There were always delays at the bank, last-minute corrections, meetings that went long. Except that Thomas was never late. For Thomas, “on time” meant ten minutes early. He was a disaster as a boyfriend. He never learned that dates should arrive five minutes late, and that parties didn’t really get going until an hour after they began. All of which meant he’d be a wonderful father.

She took a sip of coffee, letting her eyes flit around the restaurant. She looked at the two guys inhaling their hamburgers while insisting on talking at the same time. The older man engrossed in his crossword puzzle. The table of executives sipping iced tea and pretending to be enthralled by what the big boss had to say. And why not women? Shouldn’t she be suspicious of them, too? Maybe it was the two blondes picking at their salads. Or the gaggle of college students strewn across the booth like pieces of clothing. Or . . . Jenny dropped her eyes to the pool of black liquid. It could be any of them. Why not all of them? She stopped herself. It was infectious. Bobby Stillman’s paranoia had gotten to her, too.

Where was Thomas?

Guilfoyle stared intently as the blue pinlight made a stop-and-go circuit around the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was moving much too fast for someone on foot. The pinlight circled a block, then stopped for a few minutes. It zoomed ten blocks uptown and then ten blocks back. Presently, it was making a beeline across the Triborough Bridge.
An airport fare,
Guilfoyle said to himself. It was the cabby’s lucky day.

“Hoover,” he called.

“Yessir.”

“Cancel tracking Bolden’s BlackBerry signal.”

The pale, washed-out face turned to him in concern. “Did we get him?”

“Other way around, I’m afraid. Bolden’s on to us.”

Guilfoyle allowed himself a private laugh as he watched the blue pinlight negotiate the wilds of Queens and finally disappear off the map. To his eye, it was all the more proof that Bolden was headed in the opposite direction. Downtown. To Union Square.

The threat of snow and rapidly falling temperatures did nothing to discourage the lunchtime crowd, Bolden decided as he made a circuit of Union Square. The sidewalk was knotted with men and women, their parkas, mufflers, and berets a rainbow against the woolen sky. He kept close to the buildings, hugging the walls. Occasionally, he cut into a doorway and lingered there a moment or two. He kept his eyes down, his chin and mouth buried in the folds of his jacket. But all the while he was looking.

A raft of students blocked the area immediately in front of an NYU dorm, petitioning for signatures against the newly reinstated draft. Across the street in the park, a horn quartet serenaded a gaggle of listeners with a Bach fugue. Farther along, a smaller ensemble had gathered in front of a boom box pounding out a reggae beat. Bolden could see nothing out of place. Everything was moving at its usual frenetic pace.

Leaving Union Square, he headed west two blocks, then turned south and circled back. He slowed by the entrance to the alley that led to the rear of the Coffee Shop, the restaurant where he’d planned to meet Jenny for lunch. His eyes traveled up and down the street, but again, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

The back door was open. The low, steady rumble of conversation reached him, along with a pulse of warm air. He stepped inside. The heat wrapped itself around him like a blanket. The rest rooms were on the right, and past them, a coffee station. On the left, swinging doors led to the kitchen. He advanced a few steps and gazed across the dining room. Jenny was seated alone in a booth next to the window, huddled over a cup of coffee. She was dressed in jeans, an ivory Irish fisherman’s sweater, and a camel-hair overcoat.

Bolden studied the noontime crowd, his eyes sliding from face to face. There was no one staring at Jenny.

No one except him.

It was safe.

She spotted him.

The dark-haired man seated alone at the table, next aisle over. This was the second time Jenny had glanced in his direction and found him staring back. He was one of them. Had to be. He was young. He looked strong, athletic. She observed that he was dressed in slacks and a blazer, like the two who had come after her last night. Bobby Stillman had been right.
They were here.
Jenny didn’t know how it was possible, just that it was. He was proof. Sitting there fifteen feet away pretending not to look at her, but looking at her, all the same. She looked up again only to meet his eyes. He was handsome, she’d give him that much. They’d chosen their operatives well.
Operatives.
It was Bobby Stillman’s word. Except this time, he didn’t look away. He smiled. He was flirting. Oh, Lord, he even raised an eyebrow.

Jenny’s gaze dropped to the table like a lead weight. She could cross him off the list of potential bad guys. With a microbiologist’s zeal, she examined the rim of her coffee cup. She wasn’t any good at this. Not the lying. The acting. The pretending. The simplest fib left her trembling with shame. She felt as if she were on stage, every set of eyes in the restaurant secretly examining her.

“How’s your arm?”

Jenny started, not knowing whether she should look up and answer or just ignore Thomas altogether. She didn’t recognize him in jeans and a dark work jacket. “Ten stitches,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Long story.”

“Don’t tell me. We have to get out of here.” She slid a leg out of the booth, then froze. Her hand reached out to his cheek. “My God,” she whispered.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Actually, it’s gunpowder. The good news is that the guy missed.” Bolden narrowed his eyes, confused. “What’s wrong? Why are you so worried about me?”

“They came to get me,” said Jenny. “They told me you were in trouble, and that I might be in danger, too. They took me to this apartment in Brooklyn so I’d be safe. But then these other guys—”

“Who came for you? Who told you I was in trouble?”

“Bobby Stillman. She said you’d know who she was.”

“She?”

Jenny nodded. “She’s waiting for us. They’re here. The ones who are after you. We have to go now. We have to get out of here.”

“Slow down, Jen.”

“No!” she whispered, her teeth on edge. She wished that for once he would just do as she asked without arguing. “We have to go.”

But Thomas didn’t move. “It’s all right,” he said, looking around the restaurant. “I promise you. They don’t know we’re here. No one does. I don’t know what anyone told you, but no one followed me here. It’s impossible, okay? This is our place. No one else knows about it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. For once, I’m sure.”

Jenny could sense his worry beneath the confidence. His eyes looked tired. She leaned across the table and reached for his hand. “What in the world is going on?”

Thomas spent a few minutes going over what he had been through during the past twelve hours. When he was finished, he said, “I didn’t know what to think when I stopped by school and you weren’t there. At first I thought it was just because you were feeling lousy, but then . . .” He smiled, and she could feel his affection, his love. “Tell me about her. Who is this Bobby Stillman?”

“So you don’t know who she is?”

“Contrary to popular opinion, no.”

“She’s scary. She has too much locked up inside of her. She’s like a hydrogen bomb, all this dark energy and fear, just ready to go off. She said it’s ‘a club’ that’s after you. Or a ‘committee.’ I’m not exactly sure. They think you know something about them. They’re scared. That’s all I know, other than the fact that she’s on the run, too.”

“You said she came for you at school?”

“Not her, but a friend of hers did. They said that if I ever wanted to see you again, I had to come with them. At first, I didn’t believe them, but then there were those cars coming after them, and now, here you are with gunpowder on your cheek.” Jenny found a napkin and wiped her eyes. “They’re going to help you get out of this mess . . . they’re going to help
us.
Please come with me now. We can’t stay. She said they might figure out we’re here. It’s all so crazy. Mind readers and Big Brother and the All-Seeing Eye.”

“Did she say anything about Scanlon? Or about a group calling themselves Minutemen?”

“No. Who are they?”

Bolden explained about the tattoo he’d seen on Wolf, and how he’d found a similar drawing related to the Scanlon Corporation, a “civilian contractor” that had once built military bases for the army. How Scanlon had branched off into private security work that included providing military trainers for other nations’ armed forces. “The connection seemed too perfect to be a coincidence.”

“And who are the ‘Minutemen’?”

“Some group of right-wing crazies back in the sixties. All I know is that they’re from Houston, too, where Scanlon started up, and that they used the same Kentucky flintlock rifle as a logo for their group.”

“I’ve never heard of them . . . outside the regular Minutemen. Paul Revere. Lexington and Concord. One if by land, and two if by sea. The Old North Church.”

Bolden looked away, and she could see the disappointment in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” said Jenny.

“It’s all a wild-goose chase.” He wrung his hands.

“Where did you say they took you?”

“Harlem. Hamilton Tower. Near Convent Avenue.”

“I know where it is. It’s one block from Alexander Hamilton’s old home. The Grange.”

“And so?”

“And so, I don’t know . . . you’re the one talking about Minutemen and flintlock rifles. Bobby Stillman said the club had been around forever. Actually, she said, ‘since the beginning.’ Maybe it’s been around since Hamilton was secretary of the Treasury.”

“That’s over two hundred years ago.”

“There are lots of clubs older than that. The Order of the Garter. The Society of the Cincinnati.” Jenny looked at her watch. “Come on. We’ve been here too long. You can ask her yourself. She’s waiting.”

She stood and led the way past the cashier, through the pack waiting to be seated. Thomas tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, Jen,” he said. “You never got to tell me what you wanted to talk about.”

“You sure you want to know? It’s not the best time.”

“Of course I want to know.”

“All right then.” Turning, she took his hand. “I’m—” Jenny felt her mouth go dry. Around the room, several men were standing from their tables and hurrying toward the cashier’s desk. They were all of a kind: near her age, fit, neatly dressed. The Romeo who’d been giving her the eye was on his feet, too. She counted five men in all.
They’re here.