“Right in front of the building on E.”
“Come on, Freddy. Let’s go get this over with.”
“At least let’s pull the car into the basement and let the lab guys photograph the body.”
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Harrison roared. “The only reason, the only reason, I’m still alive after ten months of this shit is that nobody knew I was undercover. Now you’re going to let the lab people see the car and the body and me? Do I look suicidal?”
“Forget it, Freddy,” Hooper said. “We’ll just be creative on our reports. Won’t be the first time. Not for me, anyway.”
In the car they talked about it. They drove down toward Fort McNair. On the east side of the army post was a huge, empty parking lot. Weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. Beer cans and trash strewn about.
The parking lot was bounded on the west and north by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Across the wall were huge old houses, quarters for senior army officers stationed in Washington. To the east, sixty yards or so away, were small private houses, but brush and trees obscured the view. A power relay station surrounded by a chain-link fence formed the southern boundary of the two-acre parking area.
They didn’t waste time looking the place over. Ford backed up toward the brick wall and popped the button in the glove box to release the trunk lid. He left the engine running. All three men got out and went around back.
Freddy took one look and heaved.
“For the love of—”
“Look at his hands! They burned his fingers off!”
“Come on, you shitheads,” Ford growled. “Grab hold.”
They laid the corpse on the ground and got back in the car. Ford jerked the shift lever into drive and fed gas. Freddy retched some more.
“What I can’t figure,” Harrison mused, “is why Ike? Why’d he think Ike was the stoolie?”
“Remember Senator Cherry?”
“The mouth.”
“Yeah. We told him Ike was our man inside.”
Harrison Ronald braked the car to a stop and slowly turned to face Hooper, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. “You mean Ike was a cop?”
“Naw. He was just a hood. But we figured that since Cherry was talking out of school and there was little chance we could shut him up, we’d better do something to cover your ass. So we gave him a name — Ike Randolph.”
Harrison faced forward. He flexed his fingers around the wheel.
“And Freeman killed him. That’ll put him in prison for life. Too bad about Ike, but—”
“Freeman didn’t kill Ike.” Harrison Ronald said it so softly Freddy in the backseat leaned forward.
“What say?”
“Freeman didn’t kill Ike. I did. Oh, Freeman tortured him, mutilated him, but he wanted to spread the fun around. He’s that kind of guy. I killed him.”
“You?” Freddy said, stunned.
“It was Ike or me, man. If I hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d be a hundred and eighty pounds of burned dead meat this very minute. Just like Ike.”
“Drive. Goddammit, drive!” Hooper commanded. “We can’t sit here like three fucking tourists in the middle of the street. Everybody in town will get our license number.”
Harrison put the car into motion.
“You killed him,” Freddy said, still wrestling with it.
“What in hell did you think was gonna happen?” Harrison roared, sick of these two men and sick of himself. “Fuckhead! You white fuckhead! You knew if Cherry talked Ike Randolph was a corpse looking for a grave to fall into. And now he’s dead! Well and truly dead, dead as I would be if anybody had whispered my name.”
“Why didn’t you dump the body before you came to us?” Freddy asked.
“I wanted you to see it. Ike was a pathological asshole, but he didn’t deserve that. I wanted you coat-and-tie FBI paperpushers to see it and smell it and get it smeared all over your clean white hands. So sue me.”
The ceiling was at least five thousand feet Henry Charon estimated as he drove up the interstate toward Frederick, Maryland. Hazy, five or six miles visibility. Not like out west where you can see for fifty miles on the bad days.
He knew where he was going, a little park along the Potomac. There should be no one there in December, a week before Christmas. The place had been deserted last week when he found it after consulting an aviation sectional map and a highway map. He had drawn some lines and done some calculating.
Just before he got to Frederick he exited the four-lane and turned south on a county road. The two-lane blacktop wound southward through fertile farming country of the Monocacy River valley. Neat homes and barns stood near the road and cattle grazed in the fields.
Henry Charon turned right onto a dirt road just past an abandoned gas station and proceeded west for 4.2 miles. The road he wanted was sheltered by a grove of trees. There!
No fresh tracks in the mud. And not too much mud. That was good.
He parked the car and pulled on his parka and gloves. Before he put his feet on the ground, he pulled a pair of galoshes over his hunting boots and buckled them.
It took him half an hour to check the area. No hunters or fishermen on the river, no one in the fields to the north.
The only house visible from the parking lot was a half mile or so away on the other side of the Potomac River, in Virginia. He checked the house with binoculars. No one about.
Occasionally a light plane flew over. Charon didn’t look up. He was only sixteen nautical miles north of Dulles International and seven or eight miles north of Leesburg. Harper’s Ferry was about fifteen miles to the west. So there were going to be planes.
He got the radios from the trunk of the car and went over to the pile of gravel near the bank, where he sat down. From this gravel pile he had an unobstructed view straight up and to the south and southeast from the zenith down to the treetops on the other side of the river, about ten degrees above the horizon. That was enough. More than enough.
He turned on each radio and checked the batteries. He had installed a fresh set in each unit this morning and he had others in the car, just in case. The needles rose into the green.
He selected the VHF frequency band on the first radio and dialed in the frequency for the northern sector of Dulles Approach, 126.1. With the antenna up and tweaked to the right just a little, reception was acceptable. On the other radio he selected UHF, and dialed in frequency 384.9. He was fairly confident they would be using VHF, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Both radios began spewing out the usual chatter between controllers and pilots. Charon arranged one radio on each side of the rock pile and adjusted the volume knob. They didn’t need to be loud — he had excellent hearing in spite of the thousands of rifle shots he had listened to over the years without ear protection.
He got out the sandwich and coffee he had purchased at a fast-food emporium’s drive-through lane this morning. He ate slowly, savoring each bite. The coffee cooled too quickly, but he drank it anyway. It was going to be a long afternoon.
Perhaps. Who knew?
All the preparation, all the planning was over. He was as ready as he would ever get. He thought about the past three weeks, about the plans he had made and contingencies he had provided for.
One chance in four. He had a twenty-five percent chance today, he concluded. As usual, the quarry had the advantage, which was just the way Henry Charon liked it.
Charon grinned. He finished the coffee and sandwich and carefully placed the paper and cup on the backseat of the car, where it couldn’t blow out, yet where he could dispose of it the first chance he got.
Then he sat down again on the gravel and began listening intently to the radios.