"There's no such thing anymore."
"Okay. I'll call a rent-a-cop."
"You can't do that."
"Where in the Constitution does it deny me my right of free association and free speech?"
"All right, all right. It's not off the record, I just didn't hear it."
"I need you to call the St. Regis Hotel, the housekeeping department, and tell them I'm a government contractor and whatever else you have to tell them to get their full and silent cooperation."
"Just tell me one thing and, of course, I never heard it."
"And how's that different than off the record?"
"Quit being a wiseass. What room?"
"2004."
"Is that a joke?"
"Coincidence."
"Damn," Ernie said, and hung up.
Jill still looked pissed.
"Grogg thought of dropping the transmitter."
"Don't blame Grogg, you dirty rat bastard," Jill said. "I knew there was a reason I never married you."
"There was. It was my stupidity."
"So, tell me what happened!"
"We knew she went behind some small shops. They took her out of Grand Central in a crate. Once we knew about where she was… Well… how many huge crates come out of small shops in Grand Central? The crate was one of several suspicious activities that we checked on. We followed it to the hotel and used off-duty cops to check it out. They nar rowed it down to a particular floor from staff who saw a crate, and then we got a match for Benoit with a description of a woman in one of the rooms from one of the maids."
"And that's it? Why were we trying to trace the e-mail?"
"Confirmation never hurts."
"He could be torturing her, Sam. Millions could die. Why confirmation? Why not storm the place and see what she knows?"
"Because she doesn't want to come out until she knows enough about Cordyceps to stop it. She signed up to be a hero. You take her out too soon and we may lose the whole war."
Chapter 20
A departed lover is worse than a rotting tooth.
The gray mist hung in the trees and lay over the water, just fitting in the channel as if cotton placed by loving hands. The mountains were steep and sprinkled with oak and mixed conifers. Michael had read about them but had not seen them since childhood, and his fascination was keen.
Although it had been only three days since the meeting in Central Park he was disappointed that he had heard nothing about any capture of Gaudet.
Frederick, a mule on loan from a local hunting outfitter, seemed bored with the mountain and clearly wanted the oats that were his due every time he made the bottom or the top. It was a bit of mule psychology that Michael had learned from the owner.
Yodo was in a good mood this morning and had actually made a little conversation on the way down.
"A very good place," he had said, followed by a few com parisons with the Hokkaido Forest in Japan. It was a speech for Yodo. Yodo's succinct approach to communication suited Michael fine. The best thing about Yodo was not what he said but the way he occasionally smiled. It carried a hint of irony that Michael found appealing.
This morning it helped in only a small way with the melancholy inside him. The disappointment of losing Grady would linger and he was still affected by Marita's death and the loss of Eden, his wife. Things could come together in the mind like ocean waves that mount one upon the other.
He had seen the desert in summer and it seemed a very tired place and he thought of it now. When his father had taken him, it was parched and had become like an old face, the deep lines in the clay running out everywhere and nowhere, for good reasons, but not according to any predetermination that a man could explain; the moisture of it was blown away, leaving only grit and subtle shadings of warm colors that blended easily with no line between the brown, the tan, and the gold. His soul had become like the desert, and Grady had become the white cloud forming against the incessant blue-she made him see promise of an end and a beginning; new rain that turned the soil alive and the air sweet, the restoring of the arid terrain.
Now she was gone.
They were down in a deep canyon on the Wintoon River in northern California. One thousand feet above them ran a two-lane asphalt road and at their feet, two hundred yards below, the river frothed in a deep rock canyon. Michael pon dered the cable stretched across the river, a good one hun dred feet off the water at its lowest point. On the far side there was a bluff and a flat two-acre area with two log houses, one with several rooms and one a cabin.
The bluff was bordered on two sides by the intersection of two rivers at right angles, the Wintoon and Salmon rivers. There was no feasible way to access Michael's new home ex cept a white-water trip in a kayak or a long, torturous hike down the mountain and then a boat ride across the river or a hand-pull on a cable-suspended cart. Unless one crossed the gorge suspended from the cable, any other access across the river entailed scaling a cliff to Michael's plateau. To Michael, this meant protection, but Sam had been concerned about the sheer number of hiding places and the difficulties of security in any forest environment. Still, it was much better than New York, and since Michael was a free man, he decided that this would be his home. For now. It was a primitive place. Michael could feel the wildness here that he loved so well. California, even some of the remote parts, could get a bit crowded, but this area was not well traveled once you moved more man one hun dred yards off the highway. Michael's home's location elimi nated all but the most determined. Tourists wouldn't make it down the trail, much less across the river, unless they wanted to try their hands at white-water swimming in a cold river.
This place was called an inholding. It was surrounded by national forest and the government had wanted to buy it. Their only problem was that the white-haired gentleman who had owned the place cared only a little for money, loved his land, and hated the government. It was a formula that brought Michael his new home. Old and tired, the owner had been hauled off by his only child, a daughter, more or less against his will-even if his shackles were the bonds of love. Now, a few days after first laying eyes on the place, Michael was moving in.
The cable car was actually a flatbed with no sides. Michael and Yodo loaded his stuff and Michael tried to summon his old enthusiasm. The donkey had carried his two hundred pounds and Yodo, about 125. Michael's wounds were still healing so he carried only his camera and notepad. They hobbled Frederick, gave him oats and hay, and Michael climbed aboard the flatbed of the cable car to pull his way across the two hundred feet. It was easy to see why the realtor refused even to consider making the trip and had listed the property without ever setting foot on it.
Once on the other side Michael sent the cart back for Yodo and began hauling the two hundred pounds of stuff into his new home. He would make twenty or thirty such trips to move in, but he didn't mind. Solitude was worth a great deal. He realized that he had become a bit of a recluse. In the Amazon, in recent times, silent visits from Marita had been plenty, so long as he had his weekly trips to Angamos to play his Quena flute with the Red Howler band. Around these parts a car went by every five or ten minutes, but they were a thou sand feet above him. On his side of the Salmon River one had to ascend over five thousand feet and travel a good dis tance back to get to the nearest wilderness area trail-all perfectly satisfactory.
For a while Sam's men would be keeping him company. The revelations concerning the law firm had brought disturbing news about the lengths to which some would go to have the secret of the Chaperone. He had delivered the phony journal as promised, mainly to help Georges and Benoit, of whom he'd quickly grown fond. He had invited Raval to come and stay here once his spy days were over. Evidently, Raval's spy days were short-lived, because he had already arrived. Michael looked forward to the day when the technology en tered the public domain and they would no longer have to wear Kevlar.