After leaving the Bangor area behind, Shane and Tracie drove for a long time without seeing much beyond the occasional small town, appearing isolated and lonely in the distance. They passed Waterville and then the state capital of Augusta, eventually reaching Portland, where they stopped for gas, to use the restrooms, and to grab another bite to eat, then continued on.
Shane spent most of the drive in silent contemplation of the incredible turn his life had taken in less than a day. A fiery plane crash. A secret document. A beautiful CIA operative. KGB spies. Murder.
The whole scenario was outlandish. It was like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. Twenty-four hours ago, Shane would have dismissed it as a nonsensical nightmare. But that was before he had seen a room full of professional investigators gunned down in cold blood, had a silenced pistol shoved between his eyes, helped steal a car, and gone on the run.
He shook his head. He realized with a start he hadn’t given a single thought to the deadly diagnosis he had received yesterday, the one that had shaken him up so badly, since seeing the airplane burning in the forest.
Until now.
The miles continued to melt away under the tires of the Granada. Shane found himself struggling to keep his eyes open. He blinked a few times, stifling a yawn. They had spent the entire afternoon in the car, with just the short break in Portland at midday to gas up and stretch their legs, and it was now late-afternoon. The skies had cleared as they moved south and the sun blazed high in the sky, but Shane felt like he could drop into a deep sleep at any moment.
“Go ahead and relax,” Tracie told him, amused. “Once the adrenaline from the conflict melts away, that high is replaced with a feeling of lethargy. It’s your body’s way of coping. It’s not every day you have to fight off psycho gunmen. At least I assume it’s not.”
“You assume right,” Shane agreed. He chuckled, then sobered, thinking about the slaughter that had taken place back at the Bangor Airport. “You don’t think the cops believe we killed everyone back in Bangor, do you?”
Tracie was silent for a moment. “Right now, I doubt they know what to believe. Witnesses saw us leave the airport, undoubtedly followed immediately by the gorillas chasing us, but that doesn’t mean much one way or the other. Unless there is someone still alive who can describe exactly what happened—”
“—and I don’t think there is,” Shane interrupted. “As far as I know, the only people they didn’t kill were the controllers in the radar room working airplanes, and those guys wouldn’t have seen anything, because they were inside a dark room in a separate part of the building.”
“If that’s the case, then it would be in our best interest not to get picked up by the police. They would eventually have to release you, but it would take a long time to verify your story, and they wouldn’t be in a very forgiving mood, not with a half-dozen or more murdered people — one of them a cop — on their hands.”
Shane rubbed both hands over his face, still just as tired but now nervous as hell, too. He exhaled forcefully and looked across the front seat at Tracie. “So, what’s the plan?” he asked. “Where are we going? What do we do now?”
“Well,” she said, looking at her watch. “For the rest of today, we’ll have to maintain a holding pattern. I’ve got some cash and a few goodies stashed away inside a safe-deposit box in a bank just outside New York City. The first priority is to retrieve that, but since today is Sunday, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get at it. We’ll have to find an anonymous motel somewhere between here and New York and hole up for the night. I’ll call my boss and fill him in on what’s going on, and then tomorrow we get up bright and early, make a little bank withdrawal, and then continue toward D.C.”
Shane stared hard at Tracie, who gazed straight out the windshield, pretending not to notice him watching her. “A little bank withdrawal,” he said.
She glanced over, a Mona Lisa smile on her face. “That’s right,” she said.
“What could you possibly have stored in a safe deposit box that will help us out of this jam?”
“I told you, I have some cash.”
“You told me. You also said, and I quote, ‘a few goodies.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that.”
“You’re talking about weapons.”
“Well, maybe. You know, a girl has to be prepared for anything.”
She returned her attention to the highway and Shane watched the scenery roll by as the Granada continued churning south. What sort of girl just happens to keep a cache of weapons and money handy? What else might she have stored in that safe-deposit box?
He thought about the events of last night, about her insistence on avoiding the hospital despite being injured in a deadly plane crash. About her stoic toughness as he cleaned and dressed her deep thigh wound, dressed in his gym shorts and little else. About those long legs, slim and smooth and sexy. Then he started thinking about things that had nothing to do with secret communiques or spies or airplane crashes.
He daydreamed about sexy secret agents for a while, and eventually he fell asleep.
28
Winston Andrews was well into his third gin and tonic when he realized he was gulping rather than sipping. He pondered that realization for a moment and eventually concluded he didn’t care. His Georgetown condominium felt cold, empty and lonely since Emily had died — was it really almost three years ago? — and he could no longer come up with a single reason to sip rather than gulp.
The endgame was coming, Winston could sense it, and he was surprised to discover he didn’t mind all that much. He and Emily had never had children, so when she succumbed to lung cancer — the ultimate irony, Winston thought, given her status as a nonsmoker and lifelong health nut — the only thing left to occupy the long hours in the day was work.
And that was fine, as far as it went. Winston had always been nearly fanatical about his work. But now, push was coming to shove, and Winston was no longer particularly interested in dealing with the shove. Approaching seventy, he had devoted his life to United States intelligence services since playing a critical role in the U.S. — Soviet collaboration to defeat the Nazis in World War II.
Winston had spent virtually that entire war on the ground in Russia, making and cultivating contacts with the Soviets while they were suffering horrific losses of life, more than twenty million people dying before the defeat of Hitler had been accomplished. By 1945, when the Axis nations finally surrendered, Winston Andrews — genteel, Ivy League-educated Winston Andrews — had emerged as the most knowledgeable American alive regarding the affairs of the Soviet Union, both political and military.
Winston had served in the CIA for the next four decades, keeping his contacts inside Moscow active and even, to the utter astonishment of his superiors at the agency, developing new contacts as the older ones died, retired, disappeared, or faded away.
During the darkest days of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, Winston was considered a star, funneling to the highest levels of the United States government classified intel regarding Soviet military buildups, aggression in foreign countries, KGB activity, and the Russian space program. You name it, Winston Andrews knew about it. His information helped shape the foreign policy decisions of an unbroken string of eight presidents from Truman to Reagan. He wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican — although if pushed, Winston might reluctantly admit toward a liberal bias — he was simply an intelligence gatherer.