“Yes, sir, certainly. If you’ll have your purchasing department call us with a purchase-order number, we’ll invoice your accounting department.”
“Thank you,” he said, and hung up.
He called again ten minutes later. Pressed the number one again. Got a different woman who said, “Gem Inorganics, how may I help you?”
“I’d like to place an order, please,” he said.
“May I have your account number?” she said.
“We don’t have one yet. This is the first time we’ve placed an order with you.”
“All right,” she said cheerfully, “I’ll have to get some references from you later on. Meanwhile, do you have the catalogue number on the item you want?”
“Yes, it’s 37468. In the ten-gram size.”
“One moment, please,” she said.
He waited.
“37468,” she said, “dimethylsulfoxide difluoride, the ten-gram size, and it’s in stock. May I have your name please, sir?”
“Hamilton Pierce,” he said.
“And the name of your corporation?”
“SeaCoast Limited,” he said.
“The address and zip, please?”
He gave her SeaCoast’s address on Seventy-second and Columbus.
“And your phone number?”
He gave her the phone number.
“The purchase order number on this?”
“127 dash 024,” he said.
“127 dash 024, yes, sir. That’ll come to seven hundred and four dollars plus tax.”
“Can you FedEx the order to me?”
“Yes, sir, but it’ll be expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“Well, it’ll be a hazard shipment, so that’s ten dollars right on top. Did you want this a one or a two?”
“A one or a...?”
“Delivery, sir. One day or two?”
“One-day, please.”
“I’d say the delivery charge’ll come to something like forty dollars, more or less.”
“Fine. When can you send it?”
“It’ll go out today.”
“Before you get our references?”
“I’ll trust you on those till you send them. Do you have a fax?”
“I do.”
“Just send me three business references and one bank reference. You can address those personally to me, my name is Anne Burroughs.”
“I’ll get that out right away,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pierce.”
He hung up, dialed Arthur at SeaCoast, filled him in on the conversation he’d just had, and asked him to fax the requested information to Miss Burroughs. Arthur said he would have it taken care of at once.
“While I have you,” he said, “the Statue of Liberty is in the First Precinct and the Plaza is in the Eighteenth.”
“Thank you,” Sonny said.
“What’s dimethylsulfoxide difluoride?”
“An insecticide,” Sonny said, and hung up.
He’d used a wire garrote the first time he’d killed anyone.
By the time he was seventeen, he had killed three men. By the time he was twenty — and an undergraduate at Princeton — he had killed yet another person, a girl this time. Since then, he’d been asleep. Waiting. And now, at last, the opportunity. There would be no personal glory here, none except the secret glory in his heart. Complete anonymity, Arthur had told him. Retribution without recognition. No credit claimed this time. Do the job and disappear. Take satisfaction in the knowledge that the debt had been paid, the score settled.
And although he was willing to give his life to achieve the goal entrusted to him, the No-Fail designation did not make such a sacrifice mandatory. Do the job and do it well, covering all tracks before and after, leave the victim or victims unmistakably dead, and then move on. He had been trained to kill and to escape intact. He would do both exceptionally well when the time came.
The first man he’d killed was an Egyptian spy posing as a rug merchant in Tripoli. In an operation of small consequence except as a training exercise, Sonny had gained entry as a seller of figs, snapping the wire loop out of his basket and around the Egyptian’s neck in a cobra-like strike that left him dead within seconds. His escape route was through the Old City, white walls and minarets, the smell of eucalyptus leaves, past the Mosque of the She-Camel, and down Jama ad-Duruj, and past the Osman Pasha Mosque, losing himself in dark and narrow alleys twisting downward to the sea, until at last the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean surprised him.
That had been the first time. There were two other men after that — one in Egypt, the other in Chad — and then the girl. Here in America. The only one he’d ever regretted. Sixteen years old. A sophomore at McCorristin High in Trenton, some fifteen miles from Princeton, where he’d been studying at the time. Francine Dumar, whose father was Alex Dumar, a GID agent whose cover was working as an insurance claims adjustor for the Prudential. Francine had been observed in conversation with a man from Langley, and it was assumed that Washington was taking a serious run at her in an attempt to nail her father as a spy. That she’d been receptive seemed undeniable. GID figured it would merely be a matter of time before they turned her completely.
The assignment was top priority in that one of their own was in imminent danger and remedial action was imperative. This may not have been a true mayday situation, where exposure and arrest — or even termination — of an agent was imminent; the job fell just short of an emergency Code Red designation. But it was serious enough, and Sonny’s orders were unmistakable. In the trade, “measles” was the international nomenclature for any killing engineered so that death would seem to have occurred either accidentally or through natural causes. Francine Dumar had to be eliminated, but discreetly. Francine Dumar had to contract a deadly case of measles.
He arranged her suicide. Overdose of the sleeping pill Seconal — which he’d forced down her throat one cold November night while her parents were attending a concert at the War Memorial on West Lafayette. Suicide note in her own handwriting — duplicated by their cobbler in New York. Sonny’s initial research had indicated that she was very popular at school, and also sexually promiscuous. The note explained in adolescent prose, which he himself had composed, that her period was three weeks overdue and she thought she was pregnant. Entirely plausible, given her reputation. He still considered it a brilliant touch, considering how inexperienced he’d been at the time.
Francine Dumar. A beautiful girl with long dark hair and brown eyes. He remembered that she’d been wearing nothing but a nightgown when he came into the small development house through a back door he’d picked with a nail file, the way he’d been taught at Kufra. She’d pleaded for her life. He’d pulled her head back by the long dark hair, forced the pills into her mouth, clamped his hand over her nose and mouth until she was compelled to swallow. Thirty-five of them, ten more than the lethal dose. She was comatose on the bedroom floor before he left the house. He knew she would be dead before her parents got home from the concert.
Saddest assignment he’d ever had.
Her father later defected, possibly suspecting that his only daughter had been murdered by his own people. His name appeared regularly on GID hit lists, but Langley had given him a new identity and so far he hadn’t surfaced anywhere.
Sonny looked at his watch.
He planned to revisit the Plaza early tomorrow morning, this time without the informative Miss Lubenthal as a mentor and guide. With her eager assistance today, he had learned the location of the pantry servicing the Baroque Room...
“May I take a peek into the kitchen, please?”
“Well... why would you...?”
“I just want to make sure it’s clean.”
“Clean? Well, I can assure you it meets the highest sanitary standards. In any event, that isn’t the kitchen. It’s the pantry. The kitchen is downstairs.”