He could leave, he knew. Just walk out of those patio doors and onto the fairway, slip across the greens and out of the golf course, return to the house and drive away and get back to Brazil. There were ways, and he knew them. A certain ship that left from Galveston, a certain plane that left from beside a Louisiana sugarcane field. There were toll road highways in the air, and you could rent space from a pilot or a gang to use them. Black travel was as systemized as buying a ticket online. It was harder to know where to go to do it, but once you knew, getting out of this country was as easy as getting in. You sit on a bundle of contraband. No security check. Just go.
Tom moved toward the patio door. But he stopped. He looked back and eyed Rush. What was the man doing?
Rush had gone up to a man, and was talking urgently to him. He’d not spoken to that man before. What was he saying? Tom had seen the second man outside on the patio earlier, smoking a cigarette. Rush was arguing with the man. Rush snatched something from the man’s hand. The man called angrily after Rush as he moved off.
What are you up to? You saw me. I know it. Why are you leaving?
Tom felt a surge of hatred. If it had not been for Rush, the lab in Brazil would have kept producing vectors. The FBI would never have identified Tom.
But then he felt something almost worse, and it was blame. He never could have found me if I’d picked random targets, like I told Cardozo I was going to do.
Rush pushed out of the room as if casually going to the bathroom. He did not look back.
And suddenly with a chill Tom realized what Rush was doing. He began pushing through the crowd toward the door through which Rush had disappeared. “Rude!” a voice protested. “Hey!” But Tom knew that Rush had recognized him, all right. They had recognized each other. It had been chemical. Like vectors following carbon dioxide. If Tom didn’t stop Rush, Rush would save a lot of people now.
Tom pushed through the door also. The hallway was empty. Tom listened for footsteps or voices. All he heard was the whoosh of air-conditioning. Tom reached for his Sig Sauer.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Christine and Alan Mahin looked up in shock as I rushed toward them in the hallway. They had not moved location since I’d left them, and I was grateful for that, at least. I called out that she needed to phone 911. She needed to get the police here immediately. I said Tom Fargo was in the ballroom, now, and an attack was beginning.
Alan, stupefied, did not take it in. “Don’t you have a phone, Colonel?”
“Where’s the fire alarm box?”
“Call the police?” Alan asked.
“Blond wig, cut curly and short. Dark-framed glasses. Dark jacket and gray slacks. He’ll be armed.”
As I hurried past, she was pulling a cell phone from her bag. But the couple was also walking the wrong way, back toward the ballroom, not out to the parking lot.
I stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Someone has to warn the others.”
“I did that,” I lied. “Get out! And don’t stand around outside! Go home!”
They turned and went in the right direction, as Christine punched in numbers on her phone, and I hurried up, searching… but not seeing what I needed. Down a flight of carpeted stairs to the lower level. The pro shop. The locker rooms… Where is it? Where the hell is…?
And then I saw the sprinkler on the ceiling. It was too high up.
I needed a goddamn chair to reach the ceiling. There had to be a chair in this million-dollar place. Inside the glassed-in pro shop I saw golf clubs for sale. And more trophies, this time for winners in junior league play.
In my pocket was the lighter that I’d snatched from the smoker’s hand in the ballroom. If I could get the fire alarm and sprinklers going, guests upstairs would flee. Soaked, they’d head for their cars and homes, for dry clothes. They wouldn’t, I hoped, stand around and gape.
There was no chair here.
The trophy case looked as if it would shatter from the weight of a man standing on it. But maybe the metal frame would support me. I lifted myself and managed to wobble on the inch-wide metal strip of the case. It bent but held. Teetering, I heard pounding footsteps from the stairwell, coming in my direction. But then moving away.
I heard two quick snapping sounds upstairs, muted but unmistakable. Gunshots. Tom Fargo was up there. Christine and Alan should have left by now, but I feared they hadn’t.
Swaying, I reached for the sprinkler. The lighter made a clicking sound. It didn’t light. It might as well have been a piece of flint wielded by a caveman. But then it did light. I held it up to the sprinkler, praying that the system would work, as I tried to keep my balance on the case, one hand steadying me against the wall.
RINGGGGGGGGG!
The spigot above began spraying water over me as the alarm began to bray.
Upstairs, I hoped, guests were shrieking as water poured down on them, driving them from the ballroom in a sopping rush. Hopefully any insects up there would be pinned by the flood of water.
And then, climbing down from the case, I saw a man through the spray, standing at the far end of the hallway. His arms extended toward me in a V shape.
As he fired I threw myself sideways and down, falling through a spray of shards. My shoulder hit the ground. The shots kept coming, muffled by the clanging fire alarm.
Snap… snap…
The clanging was steady as I rose and zigzagged off at a crouch, through a swinging door into a stainless steel kitchen. The appliances and counters heightened the echoing alarm. I had no gun. He’d be coming after me. I had no idea whether Christine Mahin had reached 911, whether Tom Fargo had shot her, Alan, and their unborn child.
I threw open a freezer door and left it open as I passed, pulled open a walk-in closet door and kept going. The open doors might make him think I was inside, or might block shots. There was a fire door ahead. I shoved through and into another hallway, pummeled by water.
Hide.
There was a storage room here, locked, and a boiler room, locked, and supply closet and unmarked door, locked. I looked back and the swinging door was opening. A foot began to come through. Ahead, another fire door, an exit. I reached the bar and pushed. Something hit the steel… shots… but I was through, out of the building. The water stopped pummeling me. I stayed flat against the clubhouse wall, moving behind a row of bushes. If I ran out onto the fairway, I’d be visible when he appeared.
Sure enough, he came crashing out.
Sirens now. Coming closer. Lots of them.
Fire department? Police? Did Christine get through?
Tom Fargo’s silhouette stood frozen outside the building. I saw the outline of his pistol. His head was up, swiveling slowly. He heard the sirens but wanted me.
But then Fargo began loping away, onto the golf course, out into the dark. In a minute he’d be absorbed by it.
He was getting away.
Fargo diminished into shadow, and the shadow headed off toward the seventeenth green, and the fence. The shadow disappeared and reappeared. He must have run in and out of a sand trap. The shadow was now seventy or eighty yards away, moving fast.
I followed.
He had a gun and I had nothing. He was in good shape, younger than me by too many years. Politicians call terrorists cowards, but they are rarely that. They are brave. I despise them. But they’re not cowards. If you don’t understand your enemy, you make mistakes. Tom Fargo was running because he was smart.