“Died in an unfortunate car accident near his native Coventry, England.”
Dyson gave one of his enigmatic smiles and reached for a Macanudo, whose end he snipped as meticulously as a surgeon. He lighted it with a gold lighter and turned toward the window. Martin Lomax stood in silence, knowing better than to interrupt one of his boss’s reveries, which were more and more frequent of late.
Dyson found himself recalling the incident once again, for what seemed the millionth time. It had not made any of the newspapers, which indicated to Dyson that the U.S. government and its allies had pulled in a lot of chits. It had been a botch, all round, and the less known publicly the better.
Dyson had always feared the bounty hunters, but he had not counted on a bounty hunter working on contract for the U.S. government, a higher level of bounty hunter with the best intelligence.
Washington had obviously given up. All legal channels had been exhausted. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs had passed on to State its request to extradite. State had sent it to the Swiss embassy. No dice. The Alien Fugitive Division of Interpol’s U.S. National Central Bureau had been enlisted, to no effect.
Then someone at Justice, clearly frustrated beyond rational thinking, had come up with the idea: Screw the federal marshals. Send a contract employee to Monaco, where Dyson and his wife went twice a month. Grab the fucker. Just go in there and grab him and bring him back to the States, back to justice and Justice. Sort out the niceties later.
The attempted grab happened on a dark pathway near the casino. Two armed bounty hunters, actually. Taking on two of Dyson’s personal bodyguards.
A full moon, a bright crystalline night sky. The twenty-sixth of June. Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson had just come from a night of baccarat, accompanied by their thirty-one-year-old daughter, Pandora, a delicately beautiful woman, their only child, visiting from Paris.
The ringing of Pandora’s delighted laughter, the clove notes of Alexandra’s perfume.
A scuff on the pavement, a rustling.
Dimly glimpsed out of the corner of an eye: a silhouette, a darting figure.
Dyson, always watching, always suspicious, felt his stomach constrict before his mind knew anything.
The sudden intrusion of a raspy male voice: “Freeze.”
Bertrand, Dyson’s senior bodyguard, drew his pistol first, and the bounty hunters swiftly returned fire.
A sudden explosion, a series of rapid pops, the flashes of orange fire, the acrid smell of cordite. A woman’s scream, which was really the terrified scream of two women. The flash of moonlight reflected in Pandora’s earrings, a cough.
Bertrand saved Dyson’s life, though not his legs, and died in the process. Both Dyson’s wife and daughter were killed instantly. Dyson, paralyzed from the waist down, squirmed over to his dying wife and child and threw his arms around them both, half protecting, half embracing.
Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson’s marriage had long cooled, but she had given birth to Pandora, and Pandora was Malcolm Dyson’s whole world, the center of his life. He loved his daughter as much as any father had ever loved a daughter. He was obsessed with his Pandora; he could not talk about her without lighting up, without a smile or a glow.
Malcolm Dyson was a paraplegic now who carried his anger around in his motorized chair. Once he had lived for fortune; now he lived for revenge. I’ll never walk again, he had once thundered at Lomax, but with Pandora gone, why in the world would I ever want to?
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Early Monday morning, Sarah arrived at headquarters, walking stiffly from the previous day’s attack. She had placed Band-Aids over the cuts on her neck and the side of her face. There was a large bruise on her right cheek that had turned blue, another one on her forearm, and a particularly nasty one under her rib cage.
“What the hell happened to you?” Pappas asked.
She recounted the incident, assured Pappas that Jared was fine.
“Eight-year-old boys,” Pappas said, “are a unique species. They’re easily frightened and just as easily soothed. Plus, their wounds somehow seem to heal almost overnight-it’s one of their chief physical properties.”
Christine Vigiani approached, waited for Pappas to finish talking. In one hand was a curling sheet of slick fax paper; in the other was a cigarette, pluming smoke.
She said: “We got a photo.”
Sarah whirled around. “Thank God. How?”
“I’ve been putting out intelligence feelers to all friendly contacts, as you asked me to do. I was sort of dubious, I’ll admit it. But then all of a sudden, Mossad finally came through.” The Mossad is world-renowned for its extensive photographic archives, some of which are stored on CD-ROM.
Sarah took the fax. “What is this?” she asked.
“An enlargement of a video image taken from a moving car in Johannesburg-a group of BOSS officers exiting a restaurant.”
“This came over the high-res fax?” Sarah asked, plainly crestfallen. “This is it?”
“It’s all they had, and since it comes from a single video frame-”
“Is this supposed to be a face? It looks more like a smudged thumbprint!” It was totally useless.
Vigiani took a drag from her cigarette, narrowed her eyes in silence.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” Sarah said. “Nice try anyway, but this isn’t going to do us any good.”
When the group had assembled for the morning meeting, Sarah announced: “A few hundred copies of a South African computer Identi-Kit drawing of our good Prince are available up front, along with a spec sheet. Flash them around, or leave a copy if you think there’s a chance he might come into an establishment. We’ve got to check as many hotels as we can, which means we’ll have to call in some reinforcements from the PD and the Bureau. Remember, we’re looking for a fugitive implicated in a murder. That’s the public line.”
“That’s what he is,” mumbled one of the cops.
“Do you know how many hotels there are in the city?” asked another one of the cops, a tall, thin, sandy-haired fellow named Ranahan.
“No,” said Roth, holding a commuter’s mug of coffee. He turned around to stare directly at him. “Exactly how many hotels are there in the city? I’d be interested to learn the number.”
Ranahan coughed nervously. “How the hell do I know? A shitload.”
Roth nodded meaningfully. “‘A shitload.’ I see. Is that privileged information, or can I leak that to the press?”
“Baumann is known to travel first-class,” Sarah interrupted, “and to prefer first-class accommodations, so we should make sure to check all the top hotels, but also the bottom rung, the flophouses and boardinghouses. Those are the best places to ensure anonymity, better than the middle-level ones.”
“I’ll do the Plaza and the Carlyle,” Ranahan volunteered. “George, there’s a bunch of crack hotels in Harlem got your name on them.”
“Keep the search to Manhattan proper,” Sarah instructed. “White male, forties. Blue eyes, black hair, medium build, no known identifying marks. Bearded, but may be clean-shaven or have a mustache. Probably has a South African accent.”
“What the hell does that sound like?” asked Special Agent Walter Latimer from the New York office.
“No one knows what a South African accent sounds like,” said Ullman. “They might think it’s an English accent, or Australian or Dutch or even German.”
“Right,” Sarah said. “Now, let’s bear in mind that he can’t exist in a vacuum, in isolation. What does he have to do in order to live in the city and make his preparations?”
“Does he have any known accomplices?” asked Vigiani. “Any major act requires some assistants or contacts. He’s not going to just fly in, plant a bomb, and fly out. It doesn’t work that way.”