“Yes, that’s right.”
Dex swallowed, paused. “Is his name Erich? Erich Bruckner?”
“Yes sir, it is…”
“My God, how can that be? I mean — he’s still alive?”
“Oh yeah. Very much so. My grandfather’s in his nineties — but you’d never guess it.”
“Amazing. And he wants to talk to me…”
“Yes, sir. He says it’s very important.”
“Okay, can you put him on?” Dex exhaled, rubbed his eyes. How weird was this going to get?
“Well, Mr. McCauley. He says he’d like to talk to you in person. He says it’s important, and he rather not say anything about it on the phone.”
“Where’re you calling from?”
“Lancaster. Pennsylvania. He says it’s not that far from you. You live in Maryland, right?”
Dex hesitated, but then felt silly. Of course Bruckner would know that if they looked up his number. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“So, can you come see him?”
“You mean now?”
“As soon as you can.”
“All right, I’ll tell you what — tell him I’d very much like to meet him. Get me some directions, and I can be on the road within the hour.”
Jason waited for Dex to get paper and pencil, then gave him what he needed. He could back it up with an internet map site if he had to.
“Okay, Jason… one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“When you tried to contact me — did you call anybody else?”
“Uh, yeah, I called the fireman, the guy with the Italian name.”
“Chipiarelli.” Dex exhaled sharply as he digested the bad news.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“You leave him a message?”
“Yeah, on his machine, why?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
After getting a chopper to a private airfield east of Gaithersburg, Maryland, Sinclair and Entwhistle crossed the tarmac to a waiting Lexus hybrid SUV. As dusk leached color from the landscape, they drove north on Route 97, a pleasant drive through soft hills and farmland, to intersect with I-70 toward Baltimore.
“Winter and Wilson are still in Virginia and Jersey. Neither will be available tonight, maybe not even tomorrow.” Entwhistle closed his laptop where he’d been decrypting the latest messages.
“Anything new from Spruill?” Sinclair was driving for two reasons: one, he liked it, and two, he couldn’t stand the way Brits drove in the States — very shaky.
“Since he started the stake-out? Nothing.”
“Next time he checks in, tell him I want half-hour updates — even if it’s about his fingernail clippings.”
Entwhistle re-opened the laptop, started encrypting a terse transmission. They drove in silence as the vehicle’s headlights played over the trees and meadows lining the winding road. As Sinclair glided around a gradual bend, a deer stood poised to spring across the road, then flinched back under the beam of the light. Just what they needed right now was a collision — that would be just about enough delay to jeopardize the operation.
Sinclair rubbed his chin with the back of his hand, an unconscious gesture he’d displayed most of his life. So how did he feel about this assignment? Did he really care if it went south? His superiors had evidently cast it into the “maybe file,” the status for anything not worth getting top-tier hands dirty.
The Guild had survived by applying basic rules of economics to other aspects of human conduct in the geopolitical and military arenas. From what Sinclair had managed to glean from his ability to read between the lines, the Guild ascribed quotients of risk-to-benefit, and based most strategic decisions on a series of formulae tested through centuries of hands-on application. They had mastered the manipulation of global conflicts, investing in both sides of every war, and profiting beyond imagination.
While he found a certain level of interest in this kind of planning and execution, he didn’t care enough to push himself up through the ranks to learn it well. Sinclair, when being honest with himself, was a man who had given up not only his idealism, but his need to excel at anything ever again. He was just doing a job — that was it.
As he drove along in silence, he let his mind wander, replaying old scenes and incidents from his life. Flash-cuts of video memory: days at college, basic training, his first apartment, the birth of his first child. All of it seemed so long ago, so foreign to him. Like watching a docu-bio of someone only vaguely familiar. It had been so long since anyone had used his first name, he barely remembered it himself. Symbolic, really, how everything he’d ever felt important in his life had begun an inevitable slide into meaninglessness — including his position within the endless labyrinths of the Guild. Did he truly care about anything now?
Sinclair grinned softly, as he tried to imagine what his superiors would think if they ever divined his innermost thought. It made him smile — because they may already be doing it. Maybe that’s why he spent most of his time holed up in an abandoned base on a forgotten island…
“Interstate 70 coming up,” said Entwhistle.
“I see the ramp.”
Entwhistle glanced at his watch. “Spruill missed his check-in.”
“Did he acknowledge your last message?”
“He did indeed.”
Sinclair knew how easy it was to wander off schedule. “Give him fifteen minutes before we get concerned.”
Entwhistle nodded. “I figure we have at least 40 minutes to his rendezvous point. More than enough time to put himself in a jolly jackpot.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Whaddya mean, you’ll ‘cover me’?” Tommy’s voice was low and controlled, but tinged with equal parts anxiety and indignation.
Dex was checking his Sig-Sauer as they stood in Augie’s kitchen. The overhead ceiling fixture was off, and he could see Tommy’s angular handsome face dimly highlighted by a small night-light plugged into a socket over the old counter-tops. “I just told you — we need to get that tape off your answering machine.”
“Suppose they’ve already been there? Suppose they already got it?”
Dex looked at him with a neutral expression. “Then at least we’ll know what we’re up against, and that we’ll be having some extra guests up in Lancaster.”
Tommy exhaled, drew in a long, calming breath. “Okay, okay. I’m cool with it.”
Dex nodded, opened the back door which led into Augie’s unkempt backyard, little more than an oblong of weeds and knee-high grass enclosed by eight-foot high cinder block walls. He looked at Tommy. “Just like we rehearsed it, right?”
“You got it, Chief.” Tommy swallowed hard and followed him out into the night.
The only problem was — they hadn’t really rehearsed it very well. What Dex had done was run down a very quick series of “what-ifs” and tried to reach a consensus on how to deal with each of them. The consensus he had in mind was him and Tommy, but Augie kept spouting off with slightly askew remarks that suggested he wasn’t always tuned-in to the same station as everybody else.
Now, as he stood in the backyard, looking up at the sparkling burn of stars, he thought for an instant on the strange place to which his life had come. Despite his frequent statements he’d never been happier since retiring from the Navy, he knew now that was a lie. Most of the time, he was half-bored out of his ass, and never realized how much he’d needed some sort of tension in his life. And right about now, as he coolly regarded Tommy, he felt every fiber of his being thrumming like a cable full of high amp current. He felt alive and ready for whatever was waiting for him.