"You lucked out. What's going on?"
"Long story, no time. I'm at Binkley, Hart, and Rove on Wall Street. We have guys with guns over here impersonating agents and hunting me."
"Are you clean?"
"No, but I think I'm onto a big one."
"As in terror?"
"Terror for profit."
"Okay, so maybe we aren't so concerned about you being dirty. But don't use the term government contractor. You kill anybody?"
"Not yet. I've got to get out of here, though."
"I'll get people there as fast as I can. But this is Man hattan and there's traffic."
"Hurry."
"Do you look like yourself?"
"What difference would that make?"
"Good point."
"At the moment I may go with the full beard. Not sure."
Sam hung up.
"Make a copy of these." Sam held out the Chaperone pa pers.
"These are documents from our law firm. Client documents."
"I have reason to believe the people who want these are on the verge of committing a massive atrocity that will make 9/11 look like child's play. It is a crime in the future, not in the past. The attorney/client privilege doesn't cover it, and if it does, then damn the privilege."
She looked at him with hardened green eyes.
"You want a lot of trust."
"I think I'm looking at someone who has the courage to be a hero."
"Or is a damn fool." She took the papers to a copy machine, copied them in about two minutes, and handed the originals back to Sam, who put them in his briefcase. She went to a file folder full of papers as thick as a couple of New York phone books and placed them in the stack.
"If you don't hear from me tomorrow, make sure these go to the man you just talked to. He's Ernie Dunkin, like Dunkin' Donuts. FBI. Call him and tell him to show them to Jill. He'll know."
"What if you don't call, how will I find you?"
"If I don't call, things are bad. I'll have to find you."
"How did you sign in?" Martha asked, obviously think ing.
"As Michael Bowden. But I had this beard. In a minute I won't."
"If I say you're Scott Davis, who is going to argue? There's probably not many partners around."
"If they know what I look like, they won't argue-they'll just shoot."
"With witnesses?"
"You die just as fast if people are watching. I gotta go."
"I'm coming with you. I can help get you out."
Sam thought of a lot of things he could say, and perhaps should say, but he had a feeling about Martha. She understood the danger and was determined to help, and standing around discussing it could be more dangerous than moving.
"Let's go up five or ten floors on the outside stairs."
"Isn't that the wrong direction?"
"We'll pull a fire alarm up there. Those guys who want my ass will have to wonder if it's real. The firefighters will come."
"I know someone up there. We'll need someone to open the door this time of night."
They slipped into an office near the exit to the stairway to use the phone. Sam pulled off the beard and got the makeup off as best he could.
"My friend always works late." Martha said. "Let's hope this isn't the only night she takes off this week."
Her friend was in and agreed without much explanation to open the stairway door. They went through the exit to the stairwell with their shoes off to keep the sound down and began climbing fast. After a couple of flights they heard someone running up from a few floors down. By the seventeenth floor Martha was breathing deeply and slowing a bit.
"One more," she said.
At the eighteenth floor a woman was holding the door open a crack. She was young like Martha, dark and Latin-looking.
"Go pull a fire alarm anywhere on this floor," said Sam, pointing at the door.
"But what about you?"
"I'll be fine. Please do it."
In his stocking feet Sam resumed running up the stairs, leaving a fretting Martha to disappear with her friend into the eighteenth-floor warren.
Sounds of foot strikes on the concrete floor began reverberating up the stairwell. People were coming down.
"You're going the wrong way, buddy," the first guy said. Others tried to be more forceful, even grabbing him by the arm.
"My family" was all he said. He put on his shoes because noise no longer mattered. When he got to the twentieth floor, he found what he was looking for-another fire alarm. He pulled the alarm and stepped behind the door, hoping there were still some late-night stragglers. There were. When the door opened, he ducked inside. No doubt men in the control room would instantly speculate that he might have pulled the alarm and thereby deduce his possible location. Once inside, he went diagonally across the building and found the stair way on the other side. The place was empty now. In his brief case he kept a lighter. He moved about a large office area full of cubicles and gathered wastebaskets which he clumped to gether under a smoke-and-heat sensor. Quickly he lit the contents of each on fire and ran to the stairs. The sprinklers began pouring water down from the ceiling. The fires would be out in seconds, but somebody was going to be pissed. He began descending the stairs. There were not many people now, a couple or so that he could hear above, and a few more within earshot below.
There would be men posted at the stairs probably looking for a bearded guy, but there might be those who would sus pect a disguise. If it was Gaudet, his men might have his pic ture from their surveillance of the LA office. There was no good explanation for how Gaudet's men might have tracked him here, and that was a serious concern. He suspected that Figgy had somehow figured it out and passed it on to the French. Suddenly he knew he had to have the office checked for microphones. The betrayal was a miserable feeling.
He heard sirens outside and knew that both the FBI and the fire department would be arriving. As he descended to the fifteenth floor, a man in a tailored blue suit with expensive shoes exited, obviously unconcerned.
"There's no significant fire. Wastebaskets on the twentieth. Some asshole practical joker getting his kicks."
"Yeah," Sam said. "Think I'll wait right here for the elevators to start again."
"Suit yourself," the man said, electing to walk down the stairs. Sam walked into a hallway to find locked doors to a computer-processing facility. On a lark he went and knocked on a door. Soon a curious-looking Asian woman opened it.
"Yes?"
"I'm just checking that this floor is cleared," he said as of ficially as possible. He stepped past her, gently pushing through when she tried to stop him by holding his arm.
Then, Sam had a minor epiphany. Gaudet and the French were in league-for the moment, at least, they were the same. The men on the street and in the tunnel were Gaudet men acting on French information.
Chapter 18
A man is distinguished by his strong spirit in a great storm.
It was a bone-chilling, misty November evening and it felt like snow. At the bottom of Central Park, just off Fifth Avenue, there was a duck pond, and at its northern corner Michael stood in the dark waiting. After he and Grady said their good-byes, he had finally collected all his journals and sneaked away to California, taking only a couple of days to find a piece of property that was to his liking. There he waited with Sam's men, hoping to lay his hands on Gaudet and anyone else who had the tenacity to chase him to his hideaway. He had returned to Manhattan just for this meet ing. It was 6:55 p.m. Time did not pass easily when the adren aline flowed. The place was mostly quiet, except for seekers of solitude and lovers walking hand in hand, or the occasional homeless person. Michael had learned to recognize these wretched souls who slept in bushes, and fled the foot police.