Truth or Die (14 page)

I was expecting him to give me a look that said
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Instead he just said no.

“No?”

“That’s right,” he said. “No.”

But it was the way he said it. Cocksure. As if he’d suddenly regained all the leverage.
Really?

I knew exactly what he was thinking. Forget the shoelaces, if I couldn’t kill him, the only things about to be tied were my hands.

“Fine,” I said.

But it was the way I said it. And had he been paying a bit more attention, he would’ve stopped smiling well before I lowered my aim and fired one shot into his right foot.

“Motherfucker!”
he screamed as the dime-sized hole in his black wing tip gurgled blood like a garden hose.

He grabbed his foot and I grabbed the side of the Dumpster, climbing out with my duffel. I walked straight out the basement door to the back of my building, through the alley, and onto the sidewalk. As soon as I turned the corner, I hailed a cab.

Only after telling the driver the address did I lean back in the seat and think about what I’d done, or more to the point, how I hadn’t thought twice about doing it.

Most people will live their entire lives believing they know exactly who they are and what they’re capable of. But that’s only because most people will never have to find out for real.

I ran my tongue over my split lip, tasting the warmth and slight saltiness of my own blood.

This was for real, all right. As real as it gets.

“JESUS CHRIST, what happened?”
asked Owen as he opened the door.

“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I just beat up a fist with my face, that’s all.”

He leaned toward me for a closer look. The closer he got, the more he winced. “I’ll go get some ice.”

He backtracked to grab the ice bucket near the television and headed off down the hallway while I put down my duffel and made a quick turn into the bathroom. I opened one eye slowly to the mirror. The other eye was already swollen shut.
Cut me, Mick….

I washed off all the blood and gave the hand towels a proper burial in the garbage pail below the sink. Housekeeping could put them on our tab, because there wasn’t enough bleach in the world to bring those puppies back to white.

That got me wondering as Owen returned with a full ice bucket. I just wanted to make sure.

“You didn’t check in under Winston Smith again, did you?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Care to guess, though?”

I wasn’t really in the mood. Then again, I was the one who’d brought it up. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take Fake Names for five hundred.”

Turns out, the kid did a pretty decent impression of Alex Trebek. “Eric Arthur Blair,” he said.

I stared at him blankly with my one good eye. I had no clue.

“What is George Orwell’s real name?” he answered.

Of course. The kid was as consistent as he was clever. That might have explained why he’d chosen to hide out in another hotel, this time in two adjoining rooms at the Stonington down in Chelsea. Frankly, though, I didn’t know which genius to believe.

On the one hand was Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

On the other hand was Owen channeling the Fodor’s travel guide to Manhattan. “There are over two hundred fifty hotels in this city, totaling over seventy thousand rooms,” he informed me. “As long as you weren’t followed here, I think we’re good.”

He looked at me, cocking an eyebrow. That was my cue to assure him that no, I hadn’t been followed to the hotel.

“Besides,” he added, “we’re both in desperate need of some sleep, as well as showers.” He sniffed the air around me. “And one of us is a little more desperate for that shower than the other, if you don’t mind me saying.
Where the hell were you?
”

After fashioning an ice pack from the liner bag in the ice bucket, I filled Owen in on where I’d been. The Times Building. The luggage store and the bank. (Hence the duffel and its contents.) Then my apartment and … oh, yeah, did I mention the Dumpster?

I would’ve preferred to leave out the part about Claire being pregnant, but that would’ve left unanswered the only question Owen could’ve had for me when I was done explaining. Particularly about the trip to my apartment.
Are you freakin’ nuts?

Maybe I was. But at least he now knew why.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He was staring at the carpet, a fresh wave of guilt over Claire’s death crashing down on him. “I just feel so—”

“I know you do,” I said. “But don’t. I told you, this will never be your fault.”

“It’s not fair, though,” he said.
“It’s not fair.”

I looked at him, with his shaggy hair and baggy jeans, forgetting for a second the incredible intellect he possessed. He truly was just a kid, wasn’t he? Never more so than in that moment.

For everything he knew about the world, Owen was still learning the greatest lesson of them all. Life.

“Your turn,” I said. “Any luck at the Apple store?”

Owen’s update was a lot shorter, as he’d had no luck identifying the two guys who wanted us dead. The fact that I’d learned the first name of one of them didn’t really change anything. But I had an idea what could.

“I need to get ahold of Detective Lamont again,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“Hopefully still at home. His precinct patched me in last time.” I took a step toward the hotel phone before stopping. Thoughts of my home line being tapped had jumped squarely in the way. “Is there any chance they would’ve bugged Lamont’s phone, too?”

Owen didn’t answer. He was suddenly glued to the television. I hadn’t even realized it was on; the sound was down.

“What’s up?” I asked, pulling up alongside him. I literally had to nudge him to respond. “What are you watching?”

“Something pretty strange,” he said.

NEXT TO the CNN logo were the two favorite words of any news network.
BREAKING NEWS
.

Above those words was Wolf Blitzer, presumably elaborating on the other two words filling the screen next to him.
BASS OUT
.

Owen quickly grabbed the clicker, turning up the volume. No sooner could we actually hear the Blitzmeister, as Claire got such a kick out of calling him, did the scene cut to the East Room of the White House.

The name Bass didn’t register with me at first, but as soon as I saw him standing at the podium, I put it together. Lawrence Bass was supposed to be the next director of the CIA. Now here he was—flanked by the president on one side, his family on the other—announcing that he was withdrawing his name from consideration.

“Wasn’t his confirmation hearing coming up pretty soon?” I asked.

“That depends,” said Owen.

“On what?”

“If you think this morning qualifies as pretty soon.”

Owen had pegged it, all right. That was pretty strange. On the flip side, Bass’s rationale couldn’t have been more common. Not only was he turning down the CIA director’s post, he said he was leaving his current position as director of intelligence programs with the National Security Council. Why?

To spend more time with his family.

“Turn it up more,” I said.

Owen ramped the volume on the remote as we both sat down on the edge of the bed to watch.

“Some decisions are easy, others are hard,” Bass explained, his hands tightly gripping the podium. “And then there are the ones that are both.”

He turned to glance at his wife, who was corralling their young twin daughters, an arm draped over each of their shoulders. The girls, who looked to be around seven or eight, were smiling, almost preening for the host of photographers before them. As for the wife, she was wiping away a tear.

“As honored as I was to be chosen by President Morris to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, I couldn’t ignore the sacrifice it would require of my family,” Bass continued. “All my life, I’ve known only one way to approach a job—and that’s with everything I have. That’s what I would’ve brought to my job as CIA director, just as I did at the NSC. But in the end, there’s an even more important job for me, and I already have it. That’s to be the very best father and husband I can be. So as much as this was a hard decision for me, in some ways—three very beautiful ways, to be exact—it was an easy one.”

With that, he let go of the podium, stepped back, and hugged his wife and daughters—one, two, three. The sound of cameras clicking away was nearly deafening, even through the television.

“Very touching,” said Owen as the screen switched back to Wolf Blitzer. He was introducing some pundit for comment.

“Yes, it was,” I said.

Owen turned to me. Each of us knew what the other was thinking. “For a minute there, I almost believed him.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said.

A HOT shower and some sleep used to do wonders for me. I’d wake up with that can-do attitude straight out of a breakfast cereal commercial trumpeting all those essential vitamins and nutrients.

Now I was just wondering if I’d live to see another breakfast.

Not to say there weren’t any saving graces.

For instance, watching Owen hack one of those disgusting websites selling personal information about people was the best irony I’d seen in a long time. It looked simple, too. That is, until I asked Owen what he was actually doing.

“It’s called a Structured Query Language injection,” he explained. “SQL for short. I trick the website into incorrectly filtering for string literal escape characters.”

String literal escape characters? Structured Query Language injection?

Carry on, I told him.

The upshot was that we weren’t taking any chances in communicating with Detective Lamont. That resulted in the second-best irony I’d seen in a long time. We were evading the prospect of the highest of high-tech surveillance by going seriously old school.

“How did you know I had a fax machine at home?” asked Lamont the moment we stepped into the backseat of his car that night outside what used to be the Juliet SupperClub near Twenty-First Street and Tenth Avenue. Given how many people had been either stabbed or shot at coming out of the place, I figured he’d know it well.

“I’ll let Owen tell you,” I said, making the introduction. Nothing in my fax had mentioned I was bringing someone along, and certainly not someone so young.

“How old are you?” asked Lamont. He was squinting. Partly because there was barely any light in the car, but mostly due to disbelief.

“Nineteen,” answered Owen.

Lamont turned to me. “My car’s older than him.”

I glanced around the interior of his Buick LeSabre, my eyes moving from the crank handles for the windows to the ashtray below the radio.
An ashtray.

“Your car’s older than everybody,” I said.

With that, the headlights of an oncoming car lit my banged-up face. We were still parked along the curb.

“Shit,” said Lamont. “How did that happen?”

I told him the story. It also gave me a chance to thank him for tipping me off about my phone line.

“Call it a hunch,” said Lamont. “The two guys who paid me a visit were CIA.”

Owen chimed in. “Special Activities Division, right?”

“How did you know?” asked Lamont.

“Let’s just say we share the same company health plan.”

Lamont shot me another look.
He’s nineteen
and
he works for the CIA?
“What other surprises do you have?” he asked.

Lamont had helped me up until this point based on little more than his gut. The time had come to prove his instincts right. I asked Owen to take out his phone and show Lamont some highlights from the hallway of the Lucinda Hotel.

“How’s that for a special activity?” I said as we watched the body of Claire’s killer being removed from the room.

Then came the main attraction. The big picture, if you will.

Owen showed Lamont the two recordings he’d played for me at the Oak Tavern. Even having seen them already, I got the same anxious, uneasy, pit-in-my-stomach feeling I’d had the first time. All of it was so painful to watch. And yet that was all I could do. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

As for Lamont, he remained completely silent. In fact, he barely even moved. I tried to imagine all the things he’d seen as a New York City detective. Much of that, I was sure, was far more unsettling from a blood and guts standpoint.

But this was different. This had
implications.
The likes of which he most definitely hadn’t seen before.

“We need a favor,” I said as soon as the second recording was finished.

I half expected Lamont to shoot back, “No, what you need is a federal grand jury.” This was the guy, after all, who had warned me about trying to do other people’s jobs.

But that seemed like a very long time ago. A lot had changed. Including Lamont.

“Let me guess,” he offered, nodding at Owen’s phone. “You have faces but no names.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Lamont looked at me and nodded again. Sometimes a man’s character reveals itself slowly. Over months, maybe even years. Other times, all it takes is a New York minute.

“Yeah, I can help you,” he said.

As he threw the car into drive and pulled away from the curb, he began to whistle. It was the first few bars of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Buy me some peanuts and what?

LAMONT REACHED for his cell, tapping a speed dial number as we stopped at a red light at the corner of Tenth Avenue. He waited a few seconds while the line rang. We all waited.

After a couple more rings, someone picked up. It was a guy’s voice. I could just make it out. “Hey,” the guy said. “Where are you?”

“You’re about to get an e-mail from someone you don’t know,” Lamont said into the phone. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Go ahead.”

Hearing the voice for the second time, I recognized it. Lamont was talking to his partner, Detective McGeary.