The Tin Man (10 page)

“Where are we going?”
he demanded, tired of the games.

“Intercourse
.”

He choked.
Intercourse? Seriously? Was the universe trying to fuck with his head?

“How
much farther?”

She
consulted the map before saying, “About ten more miles.”

“Keep an eye out,” he told her, “for the cops and that Mustang. And feel free to fill me in on that plan of yours anytime you’re ready.”

“I think we should lose the car.”

He
nearly choked. “And do what?”

“Walk
, of course.”

H
is knuckles whitened on the wheel. Walk? Ten miles? Was she mad? Just as he opened his mouth to say something disparaging, he saw what looked like lights on the horizon. Flashing lights. His heart jolted. Less than a mile ahead, a line of police cruisers was blocking the road.

“Holy
crap,” she cried, echoing his sentiments.

There was a thicket of trees on the right. Tapping the brake, he
flipped off the headlamps and veered toward it, praying they hadn’t been spotted. He drove blindly into the trees, holding fast to the wheel as he bounced hard in his seat. Brittle branches clawed the doors. He brought the car to a stop and shut off the engine.

“
We’re buggered,” he said, turning to her with a woeful expression. “Six ways to Sunday.”

“
Tell me something I don’t know.”

He shook his head,
then looked hard at her. “Go back to New York, Thea. Before you get hurt.”

“Nice try,” she said. “But you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Please,” he said. “There’s too much blood on my hands already.”

She
narrowed her eyes. “Surely you don’t blame yourself for what happened to your staff.”

He hung his head. How could he not? The truth was
, guilt was twisting in his gut like a red-hot corkscrew. And he’d feel even worse if something equally bad were to happen to her.

She pushed open the door
and hopped out. As she snatched up her briefcase and purse, she said, “I didn’t get into journalism to play it safe.”

She set off
across an open field. Not knowing what else to do, he climbed out, slammed the door and, holding tight to his Glock, hobbled after her.

* * * *

It was well past nine o’clock in the evening and, as ever, Milo Osbourne was still at his desk, perched in front of his computer screen, scanning the day’s news—his way of keeping up with the competition. Not that there was all that much left, thanks to his growing empire.

T
ypically, he spent his days flying from city to city in his private jet, patrolling the newsrooms of his vast media empire, mixing it up with all of his editors and producers. Brought up in a journalistic home (his father and grandfather both started out as reporters and editors), he’d been a news junkie for as long as he could remember and still got a charge out of being in the thick of things.

One more news site and he would be heading home to his Eastside penthouse, where his wife would greet him in the foyer with a glass of Camus Cognac Cuvee 3.128
—his nightcap of choice. As much as he hated the French in general, he couldn’t deny that they excelled at making cognac. And Cuvee 3.128 was the
crème de la crème
. Blended from three different
eau de vie
, it cost upwards of $2,500 a bottle.

The night his wife wasn’t there to greet him
—for whatever reason—was the night he started shopping for her replacement—a game plan he’d made abundantly clear to her from the outset of their relationship. He had made it equally clear to his first six wives. Was it his fault they all turned out to be hard of hearing? It was a damn good thing he’d made all of them sign pre-nuptial agreements. Well, all of them except the first one. But he’d learned his lesson from that financial flaying, hadn’t he?

It wasn’t that he didn’t love his current
spouse and the son she’d borne him; he did. It was just that he didn’t want to sit around at home with them day in and day out. He took them on safaris and things like that a couple of weeks every year, which he thoroughly enjoyed, but it wasn’t what fulfilled him. Not really. Work was the thing that gave meaning and purpose to his life. And he planned to keep at it as long as he still had all his faculties.

He took a breath and let it out.
It had been a long day of back-to-back meetings and he was exhausted. No one would know it, though, to look at him—sitting up straight at his desk, still donning his coat and tie. He always wore a suit while working, and owned more than a hundred of them—all custom made for him on London’s Saville Row—the “golden mile” of tailoring, where the term “bespoke” originated.

He
liked things just so. And why not? He had the money and not the least desire to live a miserly existence. Some people called him fastidious—as an insult. As far as he was concerned, they could all go to hell. He might be richer than God, but he was first and foremost a newspaperman. He was supposed to be fastidious, wasn’t he? Or would his critics prefer he played fast and loose with the facts?

And th
ose who called him a knee-jerk conservative (Alex Buchanan, for one) could go to the devil, too. He believed passionately in free markets and smaller government. And if his network happened to mirror his views, so what? Last time he checked, freedom of speech was still in force in his adopted country. (Although, some of the other first-amendment freedoms were clearly flagging.)

He scrolled down his list of bookmarks, moving from
The Capital Post,
which he had recently acquired,
to the formidable Gray Knight—the nickname given
The News
because of its type-heavy pages.

The Gray Knight would be his White Knight, he thought with a
wry grin. The smile faded the moment he saw the usual top story attacking the new president. He shook his head disapprovingly. It was almost as if the editors went out of their way to print stories to embarrass the new administration. Despite his promise to keep his hands out of editorial policy, he planned to put an end to that kind of reckless reporting the minute the merger was in place.

Osbourne
jolted when his Droid started rattling on the desk like a Tommy gun. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was Quinn Davidson. Speak of the devil, he thought, snatching it up.

“P
lease tell me you’re not calling to postpone our meeting.”

There was a pause before a man on the other end said,
“Milo Osbourne?”

Osbourne
shuddered. The man had an English accent not unlike his own. It was definitely not Quinn Davidson’s voice.

“Who’s this?”
he demanded.

“Black Knight takes White Knight,” the caller whispered.
“And calls check.”

* * * *

“You never did tell me how you got that limp,” Thea said as they tromped through yet another damp, muddy field. For the past hour, they had been cutting through pastures and cornfields, doing their best to stay out of sight of the roads and farmhouses.

“If you must know,” he replied rather curtly, “I
injured my knee jumping out of a helicopter in Iraq.” He did not wish to dwell upon it. The last thing he needed right now was another bloody flashback.

“Did you fight in the war?”

“Nay,” he said. “I was a correspondent. For the
Edinburgh Times
.”

He had worked his way up from copy boy
—an entry-level position his father had secured for him. The job entailed running carbon copies of stories from one part of the newsroom to another. The dawn of the computer age had rendered the job obsolete.

“Is that where you grew up?
In Edinburgh?”

“
Aye,” he replied, saying as little as possible as he limped along, trying to avoid stepping in anything fecal. “In a suburb called Stockbridge.”

Having chivalrously loaned her his sports
coat, he was shivering from the cold and trembling from nervous exhaustion. His shoes were caked with mud, his trousers wet to the knees with dew, and his stomach a seething cauldron—an unpleasant reminder that he’d put nothing in it all day but coffee, scotch, and a stale Krispy Kreme he pilfered from a box in the break room. He prayed that, at the very least, when they got to the farm, they’d find her grandfather’s cottage equipped with a teakettle and fireplace.

“What was it like?”

He shrugged. “Like anywhere else, I suppose.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“I had a twin brother, but he was killed last year in Iraq.”

“I’m sorry,” she said
, her voice softening. “I know what it’s like to lose a brother. My own brother—Robby was his name—died of an overdose when I was still in high school.”

“Mine was Kenny,” he said, though he couldn’t say what compelled him to tell her.

“Were you and he close?”

“Aye
,” he replied, feeling another stab of grief. “Growing up, we were inseparable.”

“
Was he killed in combat?”

“Na
y. In prison. Abu Ghraib, actually.”

She rounded on him
, eyes as wide as an owl’s. “Abu Ghraib! What in the name of God was he doing there?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied
, dropping his gaze. “The last I heard, he was arrested by the U.S. military on the flimsy charge of being a threat.”

He could see her incredulous scowl, even in the dark.

“A threat? How so?”

“He was working for Newswire
,” he started to explain. “Looking into something to do with crooked reconstruction contractors. The week before he was arrested, he wrote that he was close to landing a big fish.”

“And you suspect
that big fish was somehow involved?”

He met her
gaze. “Wouldn’t you?”

She held his
stare. “Did you look into it?”

“
Of course I did.” He could feel his deep frustration agitating even now. “But everywhere I turned, I ran into brick walls.” Pulling his gaze away, he heaved a sigh. “Let me tell you something, Thea: When it comes to covering their arses, the lads in the Pentagon don’t just circle wagons, they circle great bloody armored tanks. The experience gave me a whole new respect for Woodward and Bernstein. Not that they haven’t always been among my heroes.”

Lumbering after Thea, shivering with cold and fatigue, Buchanan found himself thinking about his father, who’d worked all his life as a press operator for the
Edinburgh Times
, Scotland’s newspaper of record—until Milo Osbourne busted the printers’ union.

After that,
his da, too proud to go on the dole, went to work in the mines—something Donald Buchanan swore he’d never do. Every night, he’d come home, face black with coal dust, and drink himself into a stupor.

“Go to university,
lads,” he would tell his sons, slurring his words. “Or you’ll end up like your miserable auld da with nowhere to go but down the tubes.”

Those were hard years.
There was little money and little to eat. They had to give up their nice flat in Stockbridge and move to a dreary council house in West Pilton—one meager step above slum dwelling. Alex could remember lying in bed at night, eyes open in the dark, wondering if that was how it was to be down in the mines.

“This must be the place,”
Thea said, drawing him back.

They were standing at the end of a gravel driveway
. The hand-painted sign on top of the mailbox read: Schuler.

He looked at her, surprised.
“Your grandfather’s staying here?”

“
Sometimes the Amish rent rooms to tourists,” she explained with a nod, “but they don’t advertise the fact. You have to know someone.”

Looking up the drive,
he could see an old but well-kept white farmhouse. A covered porch stretched the length of the front. The downstairs windows were aglow with soft golden light. Candlelight, judging by the flickering.

“
Seems a wee bit rustic,” he observed. “Why here of all places?”

She shrugged.
“To avoid distractions, I guess.”

They walked up the path, which curved
past a split-rail corral that held a couple of dozen brown cows. They were Devonshires, he was almost certain. Rare in the States, but dead common back in Britain.

He stepped up to the fence and held out his hand. One of the cows came over.
As he stroked her velvet muzzle, he said, just because, “How now, brown cow.”