Lee said, 'So the Hoths are covering their asses too.'
'Wrong tense,' I said. 'They already covered them. They're hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.'
***
The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, 'If Homeland Security can't even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can't tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.'
'Yes,' I said. 'It could have been.'
The doors closed. The train moved on.
Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, 'What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.'
I said, 'Thanks for pointing that out.'
You tipped her over the edge.
Your fault, specifically.
The train rattled into the 28th Street station.
We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark's case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross street towards Madison. I was feeling pretty good by then. I had spent sixteen hours out of seventeen fast asleep, and I was full of food and fluids. But Lee and Jake looked beat. They had nowhere to go and weren't used to it. Obviously they couldn't go home. They couldn't go to friends, either. We had to assume all their known haunts were being watched.
Lee said, 'We need a plan.'
I liked the look of the block we were on. New York has hundreds of separate micro-neighbourhoods. Flavour and nuance vary street by street, sometimes building by building. Park and Madison in the high 20s are slightly seedy. The cross streets are a little down at heel. Maybe once they were high end, and maybe one day they will be again, but right then they were comfortable. We hid out under sidewalk scaffolding for a spell and watched drunks staggering home from bars, and people from nearby apartment houses walking their dogs before bed. We saw a guy with a Great Dane the size of a pony, and a girl with a rat terrier the size of the Great Dane's head. Overall I preferred the rat terrier. Small dog, big personality. That little guy thought he was boss of the world. We waited until the clock passed midnight and then we snaked back and forth west and east until we found the right kind of hotel. It was a narrow place with an out-of-date illuminated sign backed with low-wattage bulbs. It looked a little run down and grimy. Smaller than I would have liked. Bigger places work much better. Greater chance of empty rooms, more anonymity, less supervision. But all in all the place we were looking at was feasible.
It was a decent target for the fifty dollar trick. Or maybe we could even get away with forty.
In the end we had to bid our way up to seventy-five, probably because the night porter suspected we had some kind of a sexual threesome in mind. Maybe because of the way Theresa Lee was looking at me. There was something going on in her eyes. I wasn't sure what. But clearly the night porter saw an opportunity to raise his rate. The room he gave us was small. It was at the back of the building and had twin beds and a narrow window on an air shaft. It was never going to show up in a tourist brochure, but it felt secure and clandestine and I could tell that Lee and Jake felt good about spending the night in it. But equally I could tell that neither one of them felt good about spending two nights in it, or five, or ten.
'We need help,' Lee said. 'We can't live like this indefinitely.'
'We can if we want to,' I said. 'I've lived like this for ten years.'
'OK, a normal person can't live like this indefinitely. We need help. This problem isn't going to go away.'
'It could,' Jake said. 'From how you were figuring it before. If three thousand people k new, it wouldn't be a problem any more. So all we have to do is tell three thousand people.'
'One at a time?'
'No, we should call the newspapers.'
'Would they believe us?'
'If we were convincing.'
'Would they print the story?'
'Why wouldn't they?'
'Who knows what goes on with newspapers now? Maybe they would check with the government about a thing like this. Maybe the government would tell them to sit on it.'
'What about freedom of the press?'
Lee said, 'Yes, I remember that.'
'So who the hell will help us?'
'Sansom,' I said. 'Sansom will help us. He's got the biggest investment here.'
'Sansom is the government. He had his own guy trailing Susan.'
'Because he has a lot to lose. We can use that.' I took Leonid's phone out of my pocket and dropped it on the bed next to Theresa Lee. 'Text Docherty in the morning. Get the number or the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. Call Sansom's office and demand to speak with him personally. Tell him you're a police officer in New York and that you're with me. Tell him we know his guy was on the train. Then tell him we know the DSM wasn't for the VAL rifle. Tell him we know there's more.'
FORTY-NINE
THERESA LEE PICKED UP THE PHONE AND HELD IT FOR A moment like it was a rare and precious jewel. Then she put it on the night stand and asked, 'What makes you think there's more?'
I said, 'Overall there has to be more. Sansom won four medals, not just one. He was a regular go-to guy. He must have done all kinds of things.'
'Like what?'
'Whatever needed doing. For whoever needed it done. Not just the army. Delta guys were loaned out, from time to time. To the CIA, on occasion.'
'To do what?'
'Covert interventions. Coups. Assassinations.'
'Marshal Tito died in 1980. In Yugoslavia. You think Sansom did that?'
'No, I think Tito got sick. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was a back-up plan, in case he stayed healthy.'
'Brezhnev died in 1982. In Russia. The Andropov, pretty soon after that. Then Chernenko, real quick. It was like an epidemic.'
'What are you? A historian?'
'Amateur. But whatever, all that led to Gorbachev, and progress. You think that was us? You think that was Sansom?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'I don't know.'
'But whatever, none of that kind of stuff relates to March of 1983 in Afghanistan.'
'But think about it. Stumbling into a Soviet sniper team in the dark was a totally random chance. Would they have sent a go-to ace like Sansom walking around in the hills, hoping for the best? A hundred times out of a hundred and one he would have come up empty. That's a massive risk for very little reward. That's no kind of mission planning. A mission needs an achievable objective.'
'A lot of them fail.'
'Of course they do. But they all start out with a realistic target. More realistic than blundering around in a thousand square miles of empty mountains hoping for a random face to face encounter. So there must have been something else going on.'
'That's pretty vague.'
'There's more,' I said. 'And it's not so vague. People have been talking to me for days. And I've been listening. Some of what I heard doesn't make much sense. Those federal guys snarled me up at the Watergate in D.C. I asked them what was going on. Their reaction was weird. It was like the sky was about to fall. It was way out of proportion for some technical trespass twenty-five years ago.'
'Geopolitics isn't simple.'
'I agree. And I'm the first to admit I'm no kind of an expert. But even so it seemed way over the top.'
'That's still vague.'
'I spoke to Sansom in D.C. At his office. He seemed sour about the whole thing. Gloomy, and kind of troubled.'
'It's election season.'
'But grabbing up the rifle was kind of cool, wasn't it? Nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about what the army used to call dash and daring. So his reaction was wrong.'