Watchers (65 page)
“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.
The worst happens when you least expect it.
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.
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
.
No
.
“Are you sure?”
A quick wag of the tail:
Yes.
Yes.
“You didn’t finish your dinner,” Travis said.
The dog yawned elaborately.
Nora said, “Are you telling us you’re a little tired?”
Yes.
“If you were feeling ill,” Travis said, “you’d let us know right away, wouldn’t you, fur face?”
Yes.
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.
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?”
The computer was now searching data banks of Santa Barbara street addresses to cross-check the ID of the caller.
The voice on the phone said, “Well, I’m calling in behalf of Olin Mills, sir, the photography studio, where the finest quality—”
“Wait a sec,” Jones said.
The computer verified the identity of the telephone subscriber who placed the call: Dilworth was getting a sales pitch, nothing more.
“I don’t want any!” Jones said sharply, and disconnected.
“Shit,” Olbier said.
“Pinochle?” Jones said.
In addition to the six men who had been at the harbor, Lem called in four more from the temporary HQ at the courthouse.
He stationed five along the perimeter of the oceanside park, a few hundred yards apart. Their job was to watch the wide avenue that separated the park from a business district, where there were a lot of motels but also restaurants, yogurt shops, gift shops, and other retail enterprises. All of the businesses had phones, of course, and even some of the motels would have pay phones in their front offices; using any of them, the attorney could alert Travis and Nora Cornell. At this hour on a Saturday evening, some stores were closed, but some of them—and all of the restaurants—were open. Dilworth must not be permitted to cross the street.
The sea wind was stiffening and growing chillier. The men stood with their hands in their jackets, heads tucked down, shivering.
Palm fronds were rattled by sudden gusts. Tree-roosting birds shrilled in alarm, then resettled.
Lem sent another agent to the southwest corner of the park, out by the base of the breakwater that separated the public beach from the harbor on the other side. His job was to prevent Dilworth from returning to the breakwater, climbing it, and sneaking back across the harbor to phones in another part of the city.
A seventh man was dispatched to the northwest corner of the park, down by the waterline, to be sure Dilworth did not proceed north onto private beaches and into residential areas where he might persuade someone to allow him to use an unmonitored phone.
Just Lem, Cliff, and Hank were left to comb through the park and adjoining beach in search of the attorney. He knew he had too few men for the job, but these ten—plus Olbier and Jones at the telephone company—were the only people he had in town. He could see no point ordering in more agents from the Los Angeles office; by the time they arrived, Dilworth would either have been found and stopped—or would have succeeded in calling the Cornells.
The roofless all-terrain vehicle was equipped with a roll bar. It had two bucket seats, behind which was a four-foot-long cargo area that could accommodate additional passengers or a considerable amount of gear.
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