Watchers (52 page)

But
what
a dog.

And what a wondrous new world we live in, he thought.

Genetic technology might have to be rechristened “genetic art,” for every work of art was an act of creation, and no act of creation was finer or more beautiful than the creation of an intelligent mind.

Getting his second wind, he heaved entirely out of the water, onto the sloped north flank of the northern breakwater. That barrier rose between him and the harbor, and he moved inland, along the rocks, while the sea surged at his left side. He’d brought a waterproof penlight, clipped to his trunks, and now he used it to proceed, barefoot, with the greatest caution, afraid of slipping on the wet stones and breaking a leg or an ankle.

He could see the city lights a few hundred yards ahead, and the vague silvery line of the beach.

He was cold but not as cold as he had been in the water. His heart was beating fast but not as fast as before.

He was going to make it.

Lem Johnson drove down from the temporary HQ in the courthouse, and Cliff met him at the empty boat slip where the
Amazing Grace
had been tied up. A wind had risen. Hundreds of craft along the docks were wallowing slightly in their berths; they creaked, and slack sail lines clicked and clinked against their masts. Dock lamps and neighboring boat lanterns cast shimmering patterns of light on the dark, oily-looking water where Dilworth’s forty-two-footer had been moored.

“Harbor Patrol?” Lem asked worriedly.

“They followed him out to open sea. Seemed as if he was going to turn north, swung close by the point, but then he went south instead.”

“Did Dilworth see them?”

“He had to. As you see—no fog, lots of stars, clear as a bell.”

“Good. I want him to be aware. Coast Guard?”

“I’ve talked to the cutter,” Cliff assured him. “They’re on the spot, flanking the
Amazing Grace
at a hundred yards, heading south along the coast.”

Shivering in the rapidly cooling air, Lem said, “They know he might try putting ashore in a rubber boat or whatever?”

“They know,” Cliff said. “He can’t do it under their noses.”

“Is the Guard sure he sees them?”

“They’re lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“Good. I want him to know it’s hopeless. If we can just keep him from warning the Cornells, then they’ll call him sooner or later—and we’ll have them. Even if they call him from a pay phone, we’ll know their general location.”

In addition to taps on Dilworth’s home and office phones, the NSA had installed tracing equipment that would lock open a line the moment a connection was made, and keep it open even after both parties hung up, until the caller’s number and street address were ascertained and verified. Even if Dilworth shouted a warning and hung up the instant he recognized one of the Cornells’ voices, it would be too late. The only way he could try to foil the NSA was by not answering his phone at all. But even that would do him no good because, after the sixth ring, every incoming call was being automatically “answered” by the NSA’s equipment, which opened the line and began tracing procedures.

“The only thing could screw us now,” Lem said, “is if Dilworth gets to a phone we don’t have monitored and warns the Cornells not to call him.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Cliff said. “We’re on him tight.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” Lem worried. As the wind got hold of it, a metal clip on a loose line clanged loudly off a spar, and the sound made Lem jump. “My dad always said the worst happens when you least expect it.”

Cliff shook his head. “With all due respect, sir, the more I hear you quote your father, the more I think he must’ve been just about the gloomiest man who ever lived.”

Looking around at the wallowing boats and wind-chopped water, feeling as if
he
was moving instead of standing still in a moving world, a little queasy, Lem said, “Yeah . . . my dad was a great guy in his way, but he was also . . . impossible.”

Hank Gorner shouted, “Hey!” He was running along the dock from the Cheoy Lee where he and Cliff had been stationed all day. “I’ve just been on with the Guard cutter. They’re playing their searchlight over the
Amazing Grace,
intimidating a little, and they tell me they don’t see Dilworth. Just the woman.”

Lem said, “But, Christ, he’s running the boat!”

“No,” Gorner said. “There’s no lights in the
Amazing Grace,
but the Guard’s searchlight brightens up the whole thing, and they say the woman’s at the wheel.”

“It’s all right. He’s just below deck,” Cliff said.

“No,” Lem said as his heart started to pound. “He wouldn’t be below deck at a time like this. He’d be studying the cutter, deciding whether to keep going or turn back. He’s not on the
Amazing Grace
.”

“But he has to be! He didn’t get off before she pulled out of the dock.”

Lem stared out across the crystalline-clear harbor, toward the light near the end of the northern breakwater. “You said the damn boat swung out close to the north point, and it looked as if he was going north, but then he suddenly swung south.”

“Shit,” Cliff said.

“That’s where he dropped off,” Lem said. “Out by the point of the northern breakwater. Without a rubber boat. Swimming, by God.”

“He’s too old for that crap,” Cliff protested.

“Evidently not. He went around the other side, and he’s headed for a phone on one of the northern public beaches. We’ve got to stop him, and fast.”

Cliff cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted the first names of the four agents who were positioned on other boats along the docks. His voice carried, echoing flatly off the water, in spite of the wind. Men came running, and even as Cliff’s shouts faded away across the harbor, Lem was sprinting for his car in the parking lot.

As Travis was rinsing dinner dishes, Nora said, “Look at this.”

He turned and saw that she was standing by Einstein’s food and water dishes. The water was gone, but half his dinner remained.

She said, “When have you known him to leave a single scrap?”

“Never.” Frowning, Travis wiped his hands on the kitchen towel. “The last few days . . . I’ve thought maybe he’s coming down with a cold or something, but he says he feels fine. And today he hasn’t been sneezing or coughing like he was.”

They went into the living room, where the retriever was reading
Black Beauty
with the help of his page-turning machine.

They knelt beside him, and he looked up, and Nora said, “Are you sick, Einstein?”

The retriever barked once, softly:
No
.

“Are you sure?”

A quick wag of the tail:
Yes.

“You didn’t finish your dinner,” Travis said.

The dog yawned elaborately.

Nora said, “Are you telling us you’re a little tired?”

“If you were feeling ill,” Travis said, “you’d let us know right away, wouldn’t you, fur face?”

Nora insisted on examining Einstein’s eyes, mouth, and ears for obvious signs of infection, but at last she said, “Nothing. He seems okay. I guess even Superdog has a right to be tired once in a while.”

The wind had come up fast. It was chilly, and under its lash the waves rose higher than they had been all day.

A mass of gooseflesh, Garrison reached the landward end of the north flank of the harbor’s northern breakwater. He was relieved to depart the hard and sometimes jagged stones of that rampart for the sandy beach. He was sure he had scraped and cut both feet; they felt hot, and his left foot stung with each step, forcing him to limp.

He stayed close to the surf, away from the tree-lined park that lay behind the beach. Over there, where park lamps lit the walkways and where spotlights dramatically highlighted the palms, he would be more easily seen from the street. He did not think anyone would be looking for him; he was sure his trick had worked. However, if anyone
was
looking for him, he did not want to call attention to himself.

The gusting wind tore foam off the incoming breakers and flung it in Garrison’s face, so he felt as if he was continuously running through spiders’ webs. The stuff stung his eyes, which had finally stopped tearing from his dunk in the sea, and at last he was forced to move away from the surf line, farther up the beach, where the softer sand met the lawn but where he was still out of the lights.

Young people were on the darkish beach, dressed for the chill of the night: couples on blankets, cuddling; small groups smoking dope, listening to music. Eight or ten teenage boys were gathered around two all-terrain vehicles with balloon tires, which were not allowed on the beach during the day and most likely weren’t allowed at night. They were drinking beer beside a pit they’d dug in the sand to bury their bottles if they saw a cop approaching; they were talking loudly about girls, and indulging in horseplay. No one gave Garrison more than a glance as he hurried by. In California, health-food-and-exercise fanatics were as common as street muggers in New York, and if an old man wanted to take a cold swim and then run on the beach in the dark, he was no more remarkable or noteworthy than a priest in a church.

As he headed north, Garrison scanned the park to his right in search of pay phones. They would probably be in pairs, prominently illuminated, on islands of concrete beside one of the walkways or perhaps near one of the public comfort stations.

He was beginning to despair, certain that he must have passed at least one group of telephones, that his old eyes were failing him, but then he saw what he was looking for. Two pay phones with winglike sound shields. Brightly lighted. They were about a hundred feet in from the beach, midway between the sand and the street that flanked the other side of the park.

Turning his back to the churning sea, he slowed to catch his breath and walked across the grass, under the wind-shaken fronds of a cluster of three stately royal palms. He was still forty feet from the phones when he saw a car, traveling at high speed, suddenly break and pull to the curb with a squeal of tires, parking in a direct line from the phones. Garrison didn’t know who they were, but he decided not to take any chances. He sidled into the cover provided by a huge old double-boled date palm that was, fortunately, not one of those fitted with decorative spotlights. From the notch between the trunks, he had a view of the phones and of the walkway leading out to the curb where the car had parked.

Two men got out of the sedan. One sprinted north along the park perimeter, looking inward, searching for something.

The other man rushed straight into the park along the walkway. When he reached the lighted area around the phones, his identity was clear—and shocking.

Lemuel Johnson.

Behind the trunks of the Siamese date palms, Garrison drew his arms and legs closer to his body, sure that the joined bases of the trees provided him with plenty of cover but trying to make himself smaller nevertheless.

Johnson went to the first phone, lifted the handset—and tried to tear it out of the coinbox. It had one of those flexible metal cords, and he yanked on it hard, repeatedly, with little effect. Finally, cursing the instrument’s toughness, he ripped the handset loose and threw it across the park. Then he destroyed the second phone.

For a moment, as Johnson turned away from the phones and walked straight toward Garrison, the attorney thought that he had been seen. But Johnson stopped after only a few steps and scanned the seaward end of the park and the beach beyond. His gaze did not appear to rest even momentarily on the date palms behind which Garrison hid.

“You damn crazy old bastard,” Johnson said, then hurried back toward his car.

Crouched in shadows behind the palms, Garrison grinned because he knew whom the NSA man was talking about. Suddenly, the attorney did not mind the chill wind sweeping off the night sea behind him.

Damn crazy old bastard or geriatric James Bond—take your pick. Either way, he was still a man to be reckoned with.

In the basement switching room of the telephone company, Agents Rick Olbier and Denny Jones were tending the NSA’s electronic tapping and tracing equipment, monitoring Garrison Dilworth’s office and home lines. It was dull duty, and they played cards to make the time pass: two-hand pinochle and five-hundred rummy, neither of which was a good game, but the very idea of two-hand poker repelled them.

When a call came through to Dilworth’s home number at fourteen minutes past eight o’clock, Olbier and Jones reacted with far more excitement than the situation warranted because they were desperate for action. Olbier dropped his cards on the floor, and Jones threw his on the table, and they reached for the two headsets as if this was World War II and they were expecting to overhear a top-secret conversation between Hitler and Göring.

Their equipment was set to open the line and lock in a tracer pulse if Dilworth did not answer by the sixth ring. Because he knew the attorney was not at home and that the phone would not be answered, Olbier overrode the program and opened the line after the second ring.

On the computer screen, green letters announced: NOW TRACING.

And on the open line, a man said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” Jones said into the mike on his headset.

The caller’s number and his local Santa Barbara address appeared on the screen. This system worked much like the 911 police emergency computer, providing instant identification of the caller. But now, above the address on the screen, a company’s rather than an individual’s name appeared: TELEPHONE SOLICITATIONS, INC.

On the line, responding to Denny Jones, the caller said, “Sir, I’m pleased to tell you that you have been selected to receive a free eight-by-ten photograph and ten free pocket prints of any—”

Jones said, “Who is this?”