Now what? Pittman thought.
He shrugged. With eight days to live, what difference did it make? In an odd way, he felt liberated. After all, what did he have to lose? Knowing when he was going to die gave him a feeling of immunity.
He stepped from the fir tree and concentrated to maintain his balance on wet, slippery grass as he crept down a dark slope toward the mansion. Moving cautiously toward the lights of the mansion, taking advantage of shrubs, a fountain, a gazebo to give him cover, he came closer to the illuminated windows. The drenched grass had soaked his shoes and socks, chilling his feet, but he was too involved in studying the windows to care. Curtains had been drawn, forcing him to cross the driveway where it ran parallel to the front of the mansion. He felt exposed by the drizzle-shrouded glare of arc lights as he darted toward bushes beneath the front windows.
Moisture dripped from the branches onto his overcoat. Again in shadows, he crouched tensely, moved through an opening in the bushes on the left side of the front doors, then warily straightened, able to see through a gap in the curtains at one window. He saw a portion of a luxuriously appointed oak-paneled living room. The room didn’t seem occupied. Quietly he shifted toward the next window, moving closer to the front door.
The next window’s curtains were open. He showed as little of his head as possible while he peered in. Immediately he realized that this window was part of the same living room that he’d just seen through the other window. But why would curtains in one window be closed, while the other curtains were not? He eased down out of sight, remembered the ambulance behind him in front of the mansion, and suspected that someone must have been waiting anxiously for the ambulance to arrive. When it had, that person had hurried from the room, too preoccupied to bother closing the curtains.
But where had that person gone? A detail that Pittman had seen in the room now acquired significance. On a carved mahogany table in front of a fireplace, there had been several teacups and coffee mugs. Okay, not one person. Several. But where…?
Pittman glanced to his right toward the mansion’s front steps. They were wide, made of stone. A light blazed above impressive double doors and revealed a closed-circuit camera aimed toward the steps and the area in front of the entrance. If there were other closed-circuit cameras, Pittman hadn’t seen them, but he had no intention of revealing himself to this one.
The best way to proceed, he decided, was to double back, to go left instead of right, and circle the mansion in the reverse direction from the one in which he’d intended to go. The method would eventually lead him to the windows on the right side of the entrance, but without forcing him to cross the front steps.
He turned, stayed low, close to the mansion’s wall, and shifted past the moisture-beaded shrubs, ignoring the two windows that he’d already checked. He came to a third window, the drapes on this one completely closed. After listening intently and hearing no sounds, he concluded that the room was empty and moved farther along, rounding a corner of the mansion.
Arc lights caused the drizzle to glisten. The lights were mounted on the side of the mansion and beneath the eaves of the sundeck that topped the multistall garage. Hugging the wall, Pittman crept ten feet along the side of the mansion, then reached the large garage, where it formed a continuation of the building. There weren’t any windows, so Pittman didn’t linger. Coming to the corner of the garage, he checked around it and saw that all five garage stalls were closed.
Past the garage, he faced the back of the house. There, fewer arc lights illuminated the grounds. But they were bright enough for Pittman to see a large, covered, drizzle-misted swimming pool, a changing room, fallow flower gardens, more shrubs and trees, and, immediately to his right, stairs that went up to the sundeck on top of the garage.
There had been lights beyond the French doors that led from the sundeck into an upper-story room, he remembered. Deciding that he’d better inspect this area now rather than come back after checking the windows on the ground floor, he started up the wooden steps.
19
The sundeck was disturbingly unilluminated. Pittman didn’t understand. Crouching in the darkness on top, he wondered why the other parts of the building had outside lights, while the sundeck did not.
The room beyond the two sets of French doors was well lit, however. Past substantial ornate metal furniture upon which cocktails and lunches would be served when the weather got warm, Pittman saw bright lamps in a wide room that had a cocktail bar along the left wall in addition to a big-screen television built into the middle of the right wall.
At the moment, though, the room was being used for something quite different from entertainment. Leather furniture had been shifted toward the television, leaving the center of the room available for a bed with safety railings on each side. A long table beyond it supported electronic instruments that Pittman recognized vividly from the week when Jeremy had been in intensive care: monitors that analyzed heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration rate, and blood-oxygen content. Two pumps controlled the speed with which liquid flowed from bottles on an IV stand into the right and left arm of a frail old man who lay covered with sheets on the bed. The two male attendants whom Pittman had seen at the hospital were making adjustments to the monitors. The female nurse was taking care that there weren’t any kinks in the oxygen tube that led to prongs inserted in the old man’s nostrils.
The oxygen mask that had obscured the old man’s face when he was taken from the hospital now lay on top of a monitor on the table beyond the bed. Pittman couldn’t be totally sure from outside in the darkness, but what he had suspected at the hospital insisted more strongly: The old man bore a resemblance to Jonathan Millgate.
The intense young man who had been in charge of getting the old man out of the hospital had a stethoscope around his neck and was listening to the old man’s chest. The somber men who had acted as bodyguards were standing in the far-left corner.
But other people were in the large room, as well. Pittman hadn’t seen them at the hospital, although he definitely had seen them before-in old photographs and in television documentaries about the politics of the Vietnam War. Four men. Distinguished-looking. Dressed in conservative custom-made dark three-piece suits. Old but bearing a resemblance to images of their younger selves.
Three wore spectacles. One had a white mustache. Two were bald, while the other two had wispy white hair. All had stern, pinched, wrinkled faces and drooping skin on their necks. Their expressions severe, they stood in a row, as if they were on a dais or part of a diplomatic receiving line. Their combined former titles included ambassador to the USSR, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to Great Britain, ambassador to Saudi Arabia, ambassador to West Germany, ambassador to NATO, secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser. Indeed, several of these positions had been held by all of these men at various times, just as they had all at various times belonged to the National Security Council. They had never been elected to public office, and yet in their appointed roles they had exerted more influence than any but the most highly placed politicians. Their names were Eustace Gable, Anthony Lloyd, Victor Standish, and Winston Sloane. They were the legendary diplomats upon whom Presidents from Truman to Clinton, Republican and Democrat, had frequently relied for advice, their shrewdness having earned them the nickname “the grand counselors.” Four of them. Which suggested that the old man in the bed was, in fact, the fifth grand counselor: Jonathan Millgate.