the Second Horseman (2006) (9 page)

She finally fell silent, moving behind a chair, as though she could hide there, unable to meet Scanlon's eye.

"You weren't there as an enforcer, Catherine. I'm sure you did more than anyone else could have to win him over. I'm not holding you responsible for this."

She stared down at her hands. Whether he held her responsible or not, she was responsible. She'd been put in charge. He'd been in her car. And now he was gone. There was too much at stake for these kinds of stupid mistakes.

"What happened to the chase car?"

"It wasn't their fault. There was a lot of traffic and I wasn't careful enough to make sure they were behind us. Daniel's feet hit the ground probably before Brandon's did. But he was too far back."

"Does Brandon still have the phone w
e g
ave him?"

"He had it when he ran."

"Is it working?"

"In theory it's water and impact proof."

"It has a built-in GPS, yes? One that transmits even when the phone's turned off?"

She nodded submissively. "No signal. Either it's not as tough as the specs say or he pulled the battery out."

Scanlon walked behind his desk and dropped into his chair. "Clever boy."

"Richard?"

He looked up at her.

"I . . . I'm so sorry. I know that --"

He waved a hand dismissively. "Relax, Catherine. And sit down. There was no sure way to play this. If I'd assigned an entire SEAL team to watch him and he wanted to walk away, he would have figured something out. That's why we want him, right?"

"But I should have --"

Another wave of the hand. "Maybe we can make this work for us. Use it as a chance to prove a point. Or maybe not. I don't know. The bottom line is that this was never going to be an easy courtship."

He turned his chair to fully face her as she finally sat down. "I assume he knows basically nothing. That he changed th
e s
ubject every time you tried to tell him why we broke him out of jail."

"How did you know? Did you bug the --"

He shook his head. "The less he knows, the less motivated he thinks we'll be to find him. How much money does he have?"

"None. I mean, we didn't give him any."

"IDs?"

She shook her head. "He didn't give us time to make any."

"Do we have a photo of him with the short hair and new glasses?"

"No, but we can Photoshop the one we've got."

Scanlon drummed his fingers on his desk. "I assume his prison escape hasn't gotten much press in Nevada."

"None at all, really. It's more of a local story up north."

"Okay. We're going to have to risk it. Quietly fax a photo of him to our friends in casino security. Tell them he's a suspected cheat and to contact me if they see him."

"What about his accounts?"

Scanlon leaned a little farther back in his chair and let out a long, slow breath. They'd done a great deal of research into Brandon Vale and found a number of his bank accounts spread out across the country under various aliases. The problem was that ther
e w
as no way to know if they'd found them all. Worse, they'd never turned up any documents relating to those aliases, making it likely that he had IDs stashed in places they couldn't track. Probably just buried in the woods along with a stack of hundreds. Someone like Brandon could be counted on to be well diversified in that area.

"Drain them," he said finally. "Let's not make this easy for him."

Edwin Hamdi watched the flashing light indicating that he had a call on the secure private line he'd had installed. It had been a precaution, really. Nothing more. Nothing he'd expected to ever use.

"Hello, Richard," he said, when he finally picked up. Scanlon was the only person with the number and had been given instructions to use it only in the event of a dire emergency.

"He's gone, Edwin. He jumped out of a moving car on the Strip."

Hamdi's breath caught in his chest for a moment and he glanced up to confirm that his door was shut, despite already knowing that it was. "How could this happen? He's one man, wanted by the police! How could he get away from your people?"

"It was quite a production, actually. You'
d h
ave been impressed."

Hamdi's jaw clenched at the lack of gravity in Scanlon's tone.

In the beginning, the only significant weakness in his plan was the overreliance and irreplaceability of Jamal Yusef in the Middle East -- a situation that couldn't be remedied and therefore had to be endured. Then Congress had suspended all new Homeland Security funding, leaving them without the resources to go forward. And now this.

"What does he know?"

"Nothing."

"Don't you --," Hamdi shouted, but then caught himself and lowered his voice. "That seems very unlikely to me."

"Relax, Edwin. I handpicked everyone involved in this and none of them know anything about you -- no one but me does. And Brandon's completely in the dark. All he knows is that someone broke him out of prison, and the only face he has is Catherine's."

"But he was told what we wanted from him. He can use that --"

"She never got the chance. He kept changing the subject. Figured we wouldn't put as much effort into finding him if he didn't have any information."

Hamdi tightened his grip on the handset but didn't speak, just breathing into the phone. It was becoming harder and harder not to look back fondly on the cold war. In retrospect, it had been nothing but a game. Two opponents, playing for insignificant pieces, neither daring to make a meaningful advance. Errors -- even serious ones -- rarely cost more than brief embarrassment or the loss of secrets with no long-term significance. But now the world had changed. The U
. S
. government, still accustomed to the glacially paced, low-stakes competition with the Soviet Union, was struggling to adapt to a completely new enemy. An enemy that could appear from nowhere and kill thousands -- perhaps millions -- for no rational reason at all. It was a difficult transition and one that wasn't moving fast enough to avert disaster.

"Are you going to be able to find him?"

"I think so. I hope so."

"You hope so?" Hamdi said. "You hope so?"

"I'm not going to make promises about something I can't control, Edwin."

Hamdi didn't immediately respond. He was becoming increasingly concerned about Scanlon's attitude toward this little thief. He didn't seem to be treating him as th
e n
ecessary -- and ultimately temporary -- evil he was.

"And if you do find him?"

"I don't understand the question, Edwin."

"I think you understand it quite well."

"What do you want me to say? That I'll take him out back and shoot him? Unless you've come up with an alternative you haven't told me about, we're stuck with him."

Hamdi nodded silently. "Then perhaps it's time for you to be a little more forceful in the way you convince him what is and isn't in his best interest."

Chapter
ELEVEN

The maid shook her head disapprovingly as Brandon stood there in a towel, dripping all over the carpet and telling his sad story about going to the pool and forgetting his key. Or maybe she was shaking her head at his atrocious Spanish. It was hard to be sure. After a little begging and a few of his best embarrassed grins, she finally used her passkey to let him into a room he'd chosen based solely on the fact that no one had answered his knock.

"Gracias!" he said, ducking into the room and pushing the door closed before the maid could peek inside.

He latched the chain and pressed his back against the wall after confirming that no one was in the bathroom or asleep in the unmade bed. Maybe his luck was changing.

He powered up the laptop sitting on the desk and then began rifling through the open suitcase next to it, hoping the roo
m w
asn't occupied by a couple of five-foot
-
tall, middle-aged women.

It turned out it was a somewhat taller middle-aged man. Brandon slipped on a very roomy pair of plaid shorts and a golf shirt that would be perfectly complemented by the collection of black socks and brown dress shoes that were his only choices. On the bright side, the loafers were actually the right size.

He heard someone talking outside and froze, but they just passed by. If there was one thing in life that drove him nuts, it was relying on luck instead of planning. But how the hell could he plan for getting thrown out of prison by Betty Crocker's much hotter sister? Sometimes you just had no choice but to improvise.

The overall effect of the clothes wasn't as bad as he expected. Except the socks. He took them off and slid the loafers back on. With a little luck, people would think he was going for a baggy, neo-preppy thing. Luck. There it was again.

After another nervous glance at the door, he sat down in front of the laptop. There was no password and he made a quick inventory of its contents. All business stuff -- no credit card numbers or anything else he could use. But it was connected throug
h t
he hotel's WiFi, so he pulled up Explorer and started tapping in addresses.

"Shit," he muttered after a few minutes of effort. Mostly he was pissed off, but he also had to admit to being a little bit impressed. He'd checked four bank accounts and all four had come up closed. That was almost a hundred grand of emergency funds up in smoke. No wonder Catherine had gone for the filet. He'd paid for it.

Another ten minutes confirmed that these assholes were really irritatingly efficient. His net worth had sunk to sixteen thousand dollars -- Canadian, no less -- in an account in Banff. What was even more annoying was that he didn't have any way of accessing that money personally. He could use his still
-
operational Internet bill-paying service to send him a check, but he had no ID to cash it, and Vegas was a notoriously suspicious town. He could, however, send checks to other people. Real people with identities and lives and houses and families.

Ironically, he hadn't stashed a single ID or bag of cash in Vegas. The idea was that it was the first place anyone would look for him, so he'd have every reason to avoid it. Yet another mistake in what was becoming a long list of mistakes. His closest stash was in Salt Lake City. And, of course, there was no guarantee that instead of fake driver's licenses and cash, he wouldn't find a herd of well-armed goons or a booby trap. But what choice did he have?

Brandon removed his glasses and squinted against the bright sun. He could see well enough not to bump into anyone and skipping the glasses would make him slightly less recognizable. Of course, crossing the road was going to be fairly death defying. What was it the bumper sticker said? Live on the edge: There's a better view.

After only a few minutes of walking along the Strip, the heat had plastered his new shirt to his back and his hand was sweating profusely around the sixty dollars in his pocket. He'd found it in a pair of slacks hanging in the closet of his unknown benefactor and was reluctant to release it since it was all he had to live on for the foreseeable future.

His best -- only -- option was to make it to Salt Lake and take his chances getting his IDs. Then buy a reliable old truck and head to Central America for a few years. If he could track down some local talent, he might even be able to pull a small job or two and live a fairly comfortable little lifestyle. A quiet hut by the beach had neve
r r
eally been his vision of paradise, but it beat the hell out of a prison cell or a coffin.

But first, a little information. This Catherine woman knowing everything about him while he knew nothing about her and her playmates had to go. It was time to balance the scales a bit.

He wandered over to a pay phone and thumbed through the yellow pages until he found the section for private investigators. He found a national outfit that he'd never used and dialed the number. Admittedly kind of dull, but the truth was that Pis were a great way to gather information without introducing the often unpredictable criminal element.

"Hi. I'd like to hire an investigator, please."

"You've got one," came the pleasantly motivated voice on the other end of the line. She sounded cute, too . . .

He punched himself in the forehead "Focus!"

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. Sorry."

"What can I do for you?"

"I need information on a private plane and a house."

"What kind of information?"

"I dunno. Whatever you can get."

"Yo! Could I get some more peanuts over here?"

The bartender frowned and dipped the bowl behind the counter, returning it filled with what was to be Brandon Vale's dinner.

He'd managed to get a room at a dive hotel about six blocks away by wiring double the price of the room into the front desk guy's personal bank account.

Thank God for dishonesty. Without it, the world would just plain cease to function. It could be a bit of a two-edged sword, though. The clerk had drawn the line at kicking Brandon back any cash. He obviously was only confident enough to play if it was the hotel and not him that was at risk.