He fixed a can of hot stew on a Sterno burner, taking care that the light of the small flame was not visible from the slope below. When he had finished eating and had cleaned up, he got the radio down from the crack where he had cached it and inserted the earpiece. Then he pulled out the antenna and settled down cross-legged in the dry, sheltered area at the rear of the cave to listen.
First the television audio. Since they were covering the crisis on a continuous basis, the networks had a habit of summarizing the news every half hour. He didn’t have long to wait.
The chaos on New Hampshire Avenue exceeded his expectations. No fingerprints, no evidence for the police to sift from the apartment. Henry Charon smiled. He didn’t smile often and never for someone else’s benefit. His smiles were strictly for himself.
The military curfew was news to him and he listened carefully, thoughtfully, trying to calculate what it all meant.
Obviously the troops were looking primarily for terrorists, armed Colombians. If they discovered him it would be solely by accident.
When he had schemed and laid his plans he had never considered the possibility of troops. But he knew there would be unexpected complications so he was not unduly worried. As he sat there in the darkness thinking about it, it seemed to him that the thing to do was to stay holed up until the troops found the terrorists and life on the streets returned to normal. Then once again he could melt into the crowds.
The fact that his picture had been widely disseminated didn’t concern him. He had spent too many years as an anonymous face. He had dealt at the same gas station in New Mexico for five years before the owner began to recognize and greet him. And in a city the size of Washington the inhabitants studiously ignore the faces they see, avoiding eye contact. This was no small town. Human nature would protect him.
He tuned the radio to another frequency band, the police band, and experimented until he heard the dispatcher. He would listen for an hour. That would give him a feel for what was happening in the city.
Of course, he could walk out of the District tonight and steal a car in the suburbs and be on his way back to New Mexico when the sun rose, but no. There were two names left on that list Tassone had given him — General Hayden Land and William C. Dorfman. Which should he try first?
Or should he forget about those two and make another try at Bush? About the only way to get Bush now would be to blow up the whole hospital. That would be a project! Impractical to hope one man could successfully accomplish such a project on short notice of course, but interesting to think about. This was getting to be fun.
And once again Henry Charon, the assassin, smiled to himself.
“All calls to nine-one-one are recorded,” Special Agent Hooper explained. “I thought someone from the military might want to listen to this, just for the record, since you guys are sort of in charge right now.”
“I like your delicate phrasing—‘sort of in charge.’ ”
“Anyway, I called over to the Pentagon and they suggested you. The people at Guard headquarters said you would be wherever something was happening.”
Jake let that one go by.
“Anyway, we’ll have this tape analyzed by a computer for background noise, voice prints, all of it. We’ll eventually get everything there is to get. But I thought you might like to give it a listen.”
“Where?”
“Up here.” Hooper led the way up a set of stairs. Toad, Rita, and Yocke trailed along behind Jake.
“There’s a woman being murdered in an apartment house on New Hampshire Avenue. I can hear the screams. Nineteen-fourteen New Hampshire. Better hurry.”
Hooper played the tape three times.
“He’s talking too fast.”
“He doesn’t want to stay on the line very long.”
“He’s from the Midwest.”
“He’s white.”
“He sure as hell isn’t Colombian.”
“Captain,” said Tom Hooper, looking at Grafton. He had sat silently while Toad and Yocke hashed it over.
Jake Grafton shrugged. “He could have edited that down if he had wanted. Even talking fast, he stayed on the line longer than necessary.”
“What do you mean?”
“He could have said as little as this: ‘Nineteen-fourteen New Hampshire. I can hear the screams.’ ”
“So?”
“So. You asked what I think. That’s what I think.”
“Maybe he’s smart,” Jack Yocke said. “Would the dispatcher have sent two officers over Code Red if all she had had was an address and reported screams?”
Hooper thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ll ask. Maybe not.”
“So it’s hurried and wordy and breathless. Unrehearsed, if you will. And it gets immediate action.”
“It did,” Hooper acknowledged. “Officers were there in three minutes. The bomb exploded thirty seconds later.”
“Lot of fire,” Rita Moravia commented. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Probably gasoline,” Hooper told her.
Jake Grafton checked his watch. He needed to get back to the National Guard Armory and talk to General Greer. And call General Land.
“You going to be in your office in the morning?” he asked Hooper.
“Yes.”
“Could you give me a rundown on what you have on the assassin at that time?”
“Sure. But it isn’t much.”
“About ten.”
“Ten it is,” Jake Grafton said and turned his gaze to his entourage. “Well, children, the night is young. Let’s get busy.”
Henry Charon’s sedan exploded right on schedule, just as Jake Grafton was leaving police headquarters. The glass in the huge windows of the nearby grocery store disintegrated and rained down on the unusually large crowd, people there to stock up on food for the next few days. Six people were injured, three critically. Miraculously, no one was near the sedan when it blew, but four parked cars were destroyed by the blast and the intense heat. The fire in the parking lot was burning so fiercely by the time the fire department arrived that the asphalt was also ablaze.
The assassin heard the calls on the police radio frequency. Satisfied, he turned the radio off and replaced it in the dry niche in the rock above his head, then slipped from the cave for another scout around. All he could hear were the sounds of vehicles passing below, and they were becoming infrequent.
The wind was cold, the rain still coming down.
As he undressed and crawled into his sleeping bag he reviewed the events of the last few days. Lying there in the darkness pleasantly tired, feeling the warmth of the bag, Henry Charon sighed contentedly and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Jake Grafton arrived at the National Guard Armory, over a dozen young men and three women were being led into the building in handcuffs. The troops escorting them pushed them roughly along with their rifle butts. One woman who refused to walk was being carried.
“Uh-oh,” Jake muttered as Jack Yocke pulled into a parking place in the lot reserved for government vehicles. As he got out of the car he could hear them cursing, loudly and vehemently. One woman was screaming at the top of her lungs.
The screams followed him down the hall as he headed for General Greer’s office.
The soldiers searching the Jefferson projects had run into problems, the general said. People refused to open doors, some had illegal drugs in plain sight, and some verbally and physically attacked the soldiers. The officer in charge, Captain Joe White-Feather, had arrested sixteen of the most vociferous and truculent. He also had, the general said, another eight men on a truck coming in. Some residents of the projects had sworn that these men were drug dealers, and indeed, several pounds of drugs and a quantity of weapons had been recovered by the soldiers.