Unacceptable Risk (37 page)

"You're sure you haven't seen any strangers, no bearded guy?"

"No. Only a new lawyer by the name of Scott Davis. That's it"

"Where is he now?"

Sam quickly stepped into the first open office before hearing the answer. He closed the door, locked it, and stepped behind the door. There was a window to the hall with blinds and he saw their legs move by in a blur.

After waiting a minute, he opened the door and went quickly to Martha's office.

When he walked in, she jumped and looked frightened.

"It's me again."

"What in the hell? The beard?"

"Be calm. I'll explain."

"The FBI is here. They said to leave."

"Obviously I'm not Scott. I'm Sam. Those men are impersonating the FBI and I am a government contractor of sorts."

"Oh, my god. Why are they pretending to be the FBI?"

"Here's what I want you to do. Get the number of the New York FBI, Manhattan office."

"Okay."

She grabbed the phone and dialed, still looking frightened.

"Please don't be frightened. In seconds you'll have real FBI agents on the phone and on the way."

"I'm beginning to hope so."

"You got them?"

"Yes. Tell them you want to be put through to the Washington field office. Tell them you are placing the call for Agent Silverwind."

"She says just a minute. She says she doesn't know what you're talking about. She says she's new."

"Tell her that she should have a list of FBI agents on her computer. Tell her to look up Agent Silverwind."

"She says, 'What now?'"

"Ask her what it says by the asterisk."

"She says that it says to put through all calls and gives a number."

"Ask her to do it."

"Please put the call through."

"She says, 'Why didn't you say so?' "

"It may take awhile. It's running through relays to the cell of whoever is on call."

"Hello. I'm standing here with a guy named Sam who says he knows you."

"Tell him I need to prove I'm a government contractor." Sam said.

"He says he needs to prove he's a government contractor." Pause.

"You have a locket?" She looked genuinely perturbed.

They waited and she reached out for the locket, which was still outside his shirt. "Let me see." She studied it.

"I see the locket. It's gold and has a picture of an old Indian gentleman. He says to take off your right shoe. There is a red birthmark on your instep."

Sam quickly took off his maroon dress shoe. It had gum soles in keeping with tradition.

"I see the birthmark. He says now to ask you how the earth smiles."

"In flowers," Sam answered.

"He says you're a good guy, but not an employee of the government. He says though that he would trust you with his own mother."

Sam took the phone. "Who have I got?"

"Ernie."

"Thank God it wasn't your hard-ass partner."

"You lucked out. What's going on?"

"Long story, no time. I'm at Binkley, Hart, and Rove on Wall Street. We have guys with guns over here impersonating agents and hunting me."

"Are you clean?"

"No, but I think I'm onto a big one."

"As in terror?"

"Terror for profit."

"Okay, so maybe we aren't so concerned about you being dirty. But don't use the term government contractor. You kill anybody?"

"Not yet. I've got to get out of here, though."

"I'll get people there as fast as I can. But this is Manhattan and there's traffic."

"Hurry."

"Do you look like yourself?"

"What difference would that make?"

"Good point."

"At the moment I may go with the full beard. Not sure."

Sam hung up.

"Make a copy of these." Sam held out the Chaperone papers.

"These are documents from our law firm. Client documents."

"I have reason to believe the people who want these are on the verge of committing a massive atrocity that will make 9/11 look like child's play. It is a crime in the future, not in the past. The attorney/client privilege doesn't cover it, and if it does, then damn the privilege."

She looked at him with hardened green eyes.

"You want a lot of trust."

"I think I'm looking at someone who has the courage to be a hero."

"Or is a damn fool." She took the papers to a copy machine, copied them in about two minutes, and handed the originals back to Sam, who put them in his briefcase. She went to a file folder full of papers as thick as a couple of New York phone books and placed them in the stack.

"If you don't hear from me tomorrow, make sure these go to the man you just talked to. He's Ernie Dunkin, like Dunkin' Donuts. FBI. Call him and tell him to show them to Jill. He'll know."

"What if you don't call, how will I find you?"

"If I don't call, things are bad. I'll have to find you."

"How did you sign in?" Martha asked, obviously thinking.

"As Michael Bowden. But I had this beard. In a minute I won't."

"If I say you're Scott Davis, who is going to argue? There's probably not many partners around."

"If they know what I look like, they won't argue—they'll just shoot."

"With witnesses?"

"You die just as fast if people are watching. I gotta go."

"I'm coming with you. I can help get you out."

Sam thought of a lot of things he could say, and perhaps should say, but he had a feeling about Martha. She understood the danger and was determined to help, and standing around discussing it could be more dangerous than moving.

"Let's go up five or ten floors on the outside stairs."

"Isn't that the wrong direction?"

"We'll pull a fire alarm up there. Those guys who want my ass will have to wonder if it's real. The firefighters will come."

"I know someone up there. We'll need someone to open the door this time of night."

They slipped into an office near the exit to the stairway to use the phone. Sam pulled off the beard and got the makeup off as best he could.

"My friend always works late." Martha said. "Let's hope this isn't the only night she takes off this week."

Her friend was in and agreed without much explanation to open the stairway door. They went through the exit to the stairwell with their shoes off to keep the sound down and began climbing fast. After a couple of flights they heard someone running up from a few floors down. By the seventeenth floor Martha was breathing deeply and slowing a bit.

"One more," she said.

At the eighteenth floor a woman was holding the door open a crack. She was young like Martha, dark and Latin-looking.

"Go pull a fire alarm anywhere on this floor," said Sam, pointing at the door.

"But what about you?"

"I'll be fine. Please do it."

In his stocking feet Sam resumed running up the stairs, leaving a fretting Martha to disappear with her friend into the eighteenth-floor warren.

Sounds of foot strikes on the concrete floor began reverberating up the stairwell. People were coming down.

"You're going the wrong way, buddy," the first guy said. Others tried to be more forceful, even grabbing him by the

arm.

"My family" was all he said. He put on his shoes because noise no longer mattered. When he got to the twentieth floor, he found what he was looking for—another fire alarm. He pulled the alarm and stepped behind the door, hoping there were still some late-night stragglers. There were. When the door opened, he ducked inside. No doubt men in the control room would instantly speculate that he might have pulled the alarm and thereby deduce his possible location. Once inside, he went diagonally across the building and found the stairway on the other side. The place was empty now. In his briefcase he kept a lighter. He moved about a large office area full of cubicles and gathered wastebaskets which he clumped together under a smoke-and-heat sensor. Quickly he lit the contents of each on fire and ran to the stairs. The sprinklers began pouring water down from the ceiling. The fires would be out in seconds, but somebody was going to be pissed. He began descending the stairs. There were not many people now, a couple or so that he could hear above, and a few more within earshot below.

There would be men posted at the stairs probably looking for a bearded guy, but there might be those who would suspect a disguise. If it was Gaudet, his men might have his picture from their surveillance of the LA office. There was no good explanation for how Gaudet's men might have tracked him here, and that was a serious concern. He suspected that Figgy had somehow figured it out and passed it on to the French. Suddenly he knew he had to have the office checked for microphones. The betrayal was a miserable feeling.

He heard sirens outside and knew that both the FBI and the fire department would be arriving. As he descended to the fifteenth floor, a man in a tailored blue suit with expensive shoes exited, obviously unconcerned.

"There's no significant fire. Wastebaskets on the twentieth. Some asshole practical joker getting his kicks."

"Yeah," Sam said. "Think I'll wait right here for the elevators to start again."

"Suit yourself," the man said, electing to walk down the stairs. Sam walked into a hallway to find locked doors to a computer-processing facility. On a lark he went and knocked on a door. Soon a curious-looking Asian woman opened it.

"Yes?"

"I'm just checking that this floor is cleared," he said as officially as possible. He stepped past her, gently pushing through when she tried to stop him by holding his arm.

Then, Sam had a minor epiphany. Gaudet and the French were in league—for the moment, at least, they were the same. The men on the street and in the tunnel were Gaudet men acting on French information.

A man is distinguished by his strong spirit in a great storm.

—Tilok proverb

It was a bone-chilling, misty November evening and it felt like snow. At the bottom of Central Park, just off Fifth Avenue, there was a duck pond, and at its northern corner Michael stood in the dark waiting. After he and Grady said their good-byes, he had finally collected all his journals and sneaked away to California, taking only a couple of days to find a piece of property that was to his liking. There he waited with Sam's men, hoping to lay his hands on Gaudet and anyone else who had the tenacity to chase him to his hideaway. He had returned to Manhattan just for this meeting. It was 6:55 p.m. Time did not pass easily when the adrenaline flowed. The place was mostly quiet, except for seekers of solitude and lovers walking hand in hand, or the occasional homeless person. Michael had learned to recognize these wretched souls who slept in bushes, and fled the foot police.

His nerves kept him alert, but he wished for a stash of coca leaves to chew, here in the urban equivalent of the jungle.

From quite a distance he saw a man and a woman coming from the Fifth Avenue side of the park. The man wore a beret and had on a long coat. According to his verbal description, that would be Georges Raval and the woman on his arm was as mentioned in the e-mail.

As the couple approached, he looked warily about, determined that if he saw others he would flee, but he saw no one this time. The man wore a bulky coat and he wondered if he too was wrapped in body armor. The woman wore a hat that looked to be of fur, or a look-alike material, and a heavy, stylish, long dress coat.

"Georges?" he said quietly as the man drew close. This was the man he had met briefly in the apartment building.

"Hello, good to see you again."

The man's features were hard to make out in the dark; he still had the mustache and was a little under six feet, give or take. Even in the low light the woman seemed beautiful.

"Shall we walk?" Michael said.

"Yes. As you can see, I brought a friend, but you can trust her. Let me introduce you to Benoit, the love of my life."

"I am very pleased to meet you both."

"Benoit knows everything I am about to tell you."

"Are you married?"

"No. She is a prisoner in France, let out to find me. How's that for a shocker?"

"That's a shocker."

"We should do this quickly. You know about the work of Grace Technologies, yes? Altering brain cells to achieve personality changes."

"Yes, I know generally."

"You have heard of Chaperone?"

"Yes. You created this miracle?"

"I believe I'm the only person alive who understands it. Although the knowledge is incomplete. The molecule has not yet been fully mapped and therefore it isn't ready to be synthesized, although it can be used if a supply could be obtained."

They were walking in the park and Michael led them into a darkened area and into some heavy brush and out the other side to an old bench in a small clearing on another path. "Let's sit here."

"Are you sure it's safe?" Raval asked.

"I'm sure," Benoit said, taking a very large pistol from her handbag.

"God," Raval said, "I hate guns."

"Let's continue," Benoit said.

"My only regret," Raval said, "is that I don't know you

better."

Michael interpreted that as a need to trust him before divulging more. "I understand." He had a book bag, from which he removed three sandwiches. "Would you like something to eat? When you've been in the jungle as long as I have, it's hard not to carry food around with you."

"I don't need much." Georges broke his sandwich in two and gave half to Benoit. He thanked Michael, then spoke of science generally. He seemed interested in the Amazon and all that it spawned. In moments they were eating and laughing like friends, and they hadn't mentioned Grace Technologies again or vectors or the like.

When the food was gone, Michael turned the conversation serious once more. "You've been through hell. Perhaps afraid for your life. As for your friend, she seems to have an iron constitution. Perhaps she fears nothing."

"All of the above," he said.

"I fear French jails," the woman said.

"Why don't you come with me. I've moved to the mountains of California, where it is lonely and beautiful. I have bodyguards you can trust."

"Bodyguards?" Georges said.

"You saw them in the Village, when we were attacked on the street. They are good men, and I'll be able to work there."