At midnight Henry Charon locked the door to the Hampshire Avenue apartment and went down the stairs to the street. He walked the block to his car, unlocked it, maneuvered it carefully from his parking place, and drove away.
The evening was chilly and humid. Much colder and it might snow. He was dressed for the weather. Long underwear, hiking boots, a sweater and warm coat. Under his thin leather gloves he wore a set of latex surgical gloves, just in case.
Scrupulously obeying the traffic laws, Henry Charon drove to National Airport and parked in the long-term lot. He put the entry ticket in his shirt pocket and sat behind the wheel scanning the lot. It took him about three minutes to decide on the vehicle he wanted. Just as he was about to get out of his car, another car drove in. He waited until the driver had exited the lot, then got out and carefully locked his door and put the keys in his trouser pocket.
The car he had selected was a Toyota. Getting in took about half a minute. Charon slid a thin, flat metal shim down between the driver’s window glass and the felt seal and fished carefully until he got the notch in the shim in the right place. Then he pulled. The door lock button rose with a click.
Inside the car he felt under the mat. No luck. Not that he really needed a key, of course. He could hot wire the car with about five minutes of work, but a key would be nice. He looked in the ashtray and the glove box and the little compartment for cassette tapes. A spare key was wedged in there under a Grateful Dead tape.
The car started on the first crank. Half a tank of gas.
Charon gave the attendant the ticket from his shirt pocket and a dollar on the way out. The attendant had a portable radio going, a news-talk station. As the attendant glanced at the ticket and rang it up, Charon heard a voice on the radio mention Dan Quayle. As the wooden arm in front of the car rose, Charon fed gas. The attendant hadn’t even looked at him.
It took an hour to find the house he was looking for in Silver Spring, set back among tall, stately maples and some really large pines. No cars on the street. He drove down to the corner and out to the main avenue, memorizing the turns, then turned around and came back.
As he eased the car down the driveway he examined the house for lights. One was on behind drapes in a downstairs room — he could just make out the glow.
Charon left the engine running and slipped the transmission into park. He pulled off the leather gloves and laid them on the seat beside him.
The automatic was in one coat pocket and the silencer in another. It took about six twists to screw the silencer into place. He didn’t check the magazine or chamber — he knew they were ready.
He opened the car door and stepped out, then pushed the door closed until the interior light went out.
A brick stoop, a little button for the doorbell. He could hear the tinkle somewhere in the house.
The breeze was chilly and the wind in the pines made a gentle moan. It was a sound he had always liked. Now he shut that sound out and listened for others, car doors or engines or voices.
Nothing.
The door opened. A man about sixty, thick at the waist, in his shirtsleeves. He looked just like his photo last week in Newsweek magazine.
Well, Charon thought, this was luck indeed.
“Yes?” the man said, cocking his head quizzically.
Henry Charon shot him dead center in the chest. The gun made a popping noise, not loud, a metallic thwock. As he fell Charon shot him again. With the man lying in the foyer on his side, his legs twisted, Charon stepped over and fired a slug into his skull.
Then he pulled the door closed and walked for the car.
He heard voices now. “Dad! Dad!” A woman calling.
Seated behind the wheel, Charon saw lights in the second story come on.
He pulled the shift lever one notch rearward, into reverse, then looked over his shoulder and backed down the driveway toward the circle of warmth from the streetlight. No cars coming.
Henry Charon backed into the street, put the car in drive, and drove at twenty-five miles per hour toward the avenue. He glanced at his watch. Two-nineteen a.m.
At three-oh-five he took a ticket from the automatic device guarding the parking lot entrance at National Airport and wheeled the car back into exactly the same stall he had taken it from. He replaced the key in the cassette tray, locked the car, then walked toward the terminal to get a cup of coffee.
He would let about an hour pass before he drove his own car past the attendant and handed him the ticket he had just acquired driving in. No use giving the man two short-time tickets in the same night. The second time he might look at the driver. Not that he would remember me, Charon thought, wryly amused. Nobody ever does.
During the night Harrison Ronald awoke with a start. He found himself fully alert, lying rigid in bed, listening to the silence.
And God, it was quiet. Nothing! He strained his ears to pick up the slightest noise.
Fully awake and taut as a violin string, he eased the automatic from under his pillow and slipped from the bed. He listened at the door. Nothing. He put his ear to the door and stood that way for several seconds, listening to the sounds of his breathing but nothing else.
The fear was palpable, tangible, right there beside him in the darkness. He could smell the monster’s fetid breath.
Frustrated, listening to his heart thud, he glided noiselessly to the window.
He pulled the blinds back ever so slightly. The light on the pole between the trees cast weird shadows on the grass, which looked from this angle like the green felt on a pool table.
Too quiet. No wind. The tree limbs were absolutely still.
What had awakened him?
He held his wristwatch so that the dim glow coming through the gap in the blinds fell upon it. Three-fourteen a.m.
Not even a hum from the heating system. That was probably it. It was off.
In a moment the system kicked back on.
He felt the tension ebbing and walked back to the bed. He sat gingerly upon it and tossed the heavy pistol onto the blanket beside him. Rubbing his face, then lying full-length on the bed, Harrison Ronald tried to relax.
What was Freeman doing right now? Did he know?
Of course he knew. Or suspected. Freeman would be curious, with that alley dog asshole-sniffing curiosity that had to be satisfied, so he would take steps to learn the truth. He would talk to people and use money and sooner or later he would know. What then?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tuesday the world came unglued. Those were the words a senator used later to describe the day, and those words stuck in tens of millions of minds as the perfect description.
It started whenever you awoke and turned on your television to check on the President’s condition at Bethesda and found yourself staring at a stark image of a suburban two-story Cape Cod house surrounded by tall pines and lit by floodlights. In the gray dawn half light, the surreal image looked ominous.
The troubling thing about the picture was not the ambulances, the flashing blue-and-white beacons, the uniformed policemen and the clean-cut FBI types in Sears suits, nor was it the sobbing grown daughter and her two children home to visit Dad for Christmas. No. The troubling thing about the image was that the house looked like something from the set of an old “Leave It to Beaver” show. As you stared at it you could see that it looked exactly like the one in the ads for house paint for great American homes “just like yours”—the perfect distillation of the American two-story dream house in Hometown, U.S.A. And the owner had been assassinated, murdered, when he opened his door to a stranger.
The owner, of course, was Somebody, Congressman Doyle Hopkins of Minnesota, majority leader of the House of Representatives. He had been shot three times at point-blank range.