“They make everybody talk,” the other agent smirked. “You know, like the car dealer, everybody talks.”
“And nobody walks,” his partner finished for him with a matching smile.
“Especially about bombs, like that one that took down the Washington Monument, and the atom bomb, the one you don’t know anything about. You’ll puke your guts out once the military guys work on you.”
Shapiro was suddenly silent. Atom bomb? He remembered what Sarah Goldberg said about what lay at the deep end of her swimming pool. Oh my God, Shapiro thought. Oh my God. I do know something. They’ll get me to tell them, too. He had no pretensions about what the government would do to him to discover information about a terrorist bomb plot.
I have to get away, he thought.
One man still gripped Shapiro’s arm. The other agent stood in the doorway leading to the front hall. Shapiro thought rapidly.
“Okay. I understand. I’ll be glad to help,” he said. “I don’t know much about anything, but I’ll tell everything I know.”
“Fine, wonderful, now let’s go,” the man holding his arm said, not relaxing his grip.
“Look, can I change my clothes first, real quick?” Shapiro asked. “I’ve been wearing this for two days now. Hey, let me get on some clean underwear and socks and I’ll talk my head off.” He smiled. “My bedroom’s upstairs. Just give me thirty seconds.”
The men looked at one another. The man by the door spoke.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll check it out first, though.”
The three men went up the stairs to Shapiro’s bedroom.
“Any chance of a bit of privacy?” he asked.
Before answering, the two agents glanced around the room. One man went to the bedroom window, lifted it and looked around outside, seeing that the room was on the second floor and that no trees were within reach. It was a twenty-five-foot drop to the gravel pathway below the window. The other man threw drawers open and searched quickly.
“Okay, we’ll be right outside the door,” he said to Shapiro, gesturing to his partner. The men walked out the bedroom door, leaving it ajar.
Shapiro dropped the clean clothes on the floor and quickly stepped to the window, which the agent had left open. Shapiro lifted the hinged lid on the upholstered chest in front of the window and removed a white plastic box with bright-red words: Fire Friend. From inside the box he pulled a length of yellow rope with white plastic steps at intervals. Two shiny steel hooks were attached to the ends of the two parallel lengths of rope. Shapiro shoved the chest away from the wall and snapped the steel hooks onto two steel eyebolts sunk into the wall, near the floor. He threw the yellow rope out the window.
All this took no more than five seconds. He’d practiced doing just that, years before. Before Adam was born.
“Thank you, Sally,” he muttered. Thank you for being so afraid of fire, so afraid of being trapped in our second-floor bedroom by a fire on the stairs.
Shapiro climbed out the window and made his way down the swaying ladder. Just before he reached the ground a head appeared in the window.
“Shit,” the FBI agent shouted. The head retracted. Shapiro heard a shout through the open window. “Get downstairs. Now. He’s bogeying.”
Shapiro dropped to the ground, thinking quickly. He glanced at the driveway and saw a black sedan parked directly behind his Mercedes, blocking it from backing out the driveway. He looked around frantically, then spotted the wooden walkway leading to the dock on the salt marsh.
The full moon showed the flood tide just ebbing, draining the water out to the nearby ocean.
Shapiro sprinted down the walkway to the end of the dock. Resting upside down in a crooked frame he’d constructed from graying two-by-fours was Shapiro’s red fiberglass kayak, eighteen sleek feet long. A double-bladed paddle was jammed inside the boat.
Shapiro hefted the forty-five-pound boat off the storage rack and dropped it in the water at the end of the dock. He sat on the edge of the dock and held the boat in place with his right foot. He heard shouts coming from the house.
“He’s by the fucking water,” a voice shouted. “This way. Hustle!”
Shapiro lowered himself from the dock into the kayak’s cockpit, holding the long paddle in his left hand while he held onto the dock to steady himself with his right hand. He heard footsteps pounding down the wooden walkway as he shoved off from the dock and began paddling furiously away from the house, out into the marsh, toward the ocean a half mile away.
When fifty feet of water—which Shapiro knew to be only inches deep as the flood tide covered the top of the grass that made up the salt marsh—separated him from the shore, he glanced back and saw the two FBI agents standing on the end of the dock. Both held handguns.
“Come back here or we’ll shoot, asshole,” one man shouted.
The other agent shoved the man’s arm aside. “Can’t interrogate a corpse, dummy,” he said. “Get back to the car and get on the radio. Call, I don’t know, the Coast Guard or somebody.”
There was a marina at the mouth of the river that the marsh fed into. The marina would be closed, but there was a telephone booth there.
He paddled quickly. One step at a time, he thought, ignoring the breathtaking beauty of gliding over the shallow water with the reflection of the full moon breaking into kaleidoscopic sparkles from the ripples on the surface. Sally had talked about that magic night on the water so many times. He choked. Adam. Adam. Why would they kill you?
The telephone booth next to the gas pump at the marina was brightly lit. Who do I call, Shapiro wondered. Not my law partners. They wouldn’t let me run from the FBI.
He reached into his pocket. It was still there, the yellow post-it note on which Judy Katz had written her home telephone number before getting out of Shapiro’s car earlier that night.
It took three tries before Shapiro managed to punch in the correct set of numbers to charge the call to his credit card. A sleepy voice answered on the sixth ring.
“Judy, it’s Ben,” he whispered. “I need you to come get me right now. I’ll explain when you get here.”
He gave her directions to Pavilion Beach, a rocky stretch a half mile from the marina.
“Judy,” Shapiro said before hanging up, “you’d better bring Sarah with you. I don’t think we’ll be going back to your place—not for a while.”
CHAPTER 59
The eight-foot-tall solid oak door to the Lincoln bedroom flew open with such force that its door handle dented the horsehair plaster wall. Catherine Quaid was so startled she dropped the towel she had just wrapped around her dripping body after stepping from the bathtub.
Lawrence Quaid stomped into the bedroom and stared at his now-naked wife. He hesitated. It was some time since he’d seen Catherine naked.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” he screamed. She stepped back. “Catherine, don’t you realize that I am in the crisis that will define my presidency? There is an atom bomb loose somewhere in the country. It’s in the hands of madmen. They’ve shown us they’re willing to do anything to intimidate us, to intimidate me. I’m trying to galvanize the country and protect it, and there you are on the podium at an anarchist rally.”
He walked toward the door but turned before leaving the room. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
Catherine Quaid reached for a bathrobe, drew in a deep breath, collecting her thoughts, trying to control the angry words that were fighting to fly from her. She spoke softly.