The new ambitiousness could not have sprung full-blown into his consciousness like a fully shaped god from the head of Zeus; it must have been there all the time, undetected, waiting. What had triggered it had been the sudden awareness that Earle was shrinking — no longer the larger-than-life idol who had moved through the corporate world with demoniacal grace, pokerish imperterbability, uncanny judgment, athletic balance. Not until Earle had revealed unmistakably his own weakness had insidious thoughts wriggled past Oakley’s puritan conscience, changed wish to desire; and even then, he thought, it was unlikely he’d have done anything about it if Earle had lived. The options would have been unfavorable. Petty embezzlement? Even if he had been convinced he could get away with it, it was beneath him. A full-scale raid designed to wrest the empire from Earle? No: he lacked the calculated brutality for that, the rapier fineness, the stamina, the acrobatic agility. He was a good lawyer, sensitive to subtlety and nuance, alert to opportunity, keen to the openings that were to be found between the fine-print lines of financial documentation. He had discovered, investigated, discarded and recommended countless deals for Earle Conniston; he had protected the empire against incursion and insult; he had unerringly weeded out deadwood and dispassionately called for its amputation. But he had achieved these successes because he had been confident, and he had been confident because he was backed by Earle’s weight. Thinking it through relentlessly he had concluded that the lucky timing of Earle’s death had been the only event in the world which could possibly have given him both the opportunity and the resolve to make his grab.
He didn’t know whether to feel grateful or angry. Something Earle had said ten years ago remained in his head as if written in letters of fire: In anything you do, risk is determined not by what you stand to win but by what you stand to lose. Today, for the first time in his life, Oakley had committed himself fully: he stood to lose everything. Absolutely, literally everything. It frightened him.
In his way Oakley had always been a fatalist. Things were determined by chance as often as not. Luck: the very fact that he existed at all was only a matter of chance. How had his father happened to meet his mother? How had he, a bright but undistinguished young lawyer, chanced to meet Earle Conniston at precisely the opportune moment for them both? It had been, he recalled, at a poker game — the perfect setting. The shape of a man’s life was carved not only by his own decisions and reactions but, equally as much, by blind coincidence, sheer accident. Luck.
It was Earle’s bad luck, and perhaps Oakley’s good luck, that Earle had blundered into Louise’s bedroom at the wrong moment, blundered into Frankie Adams’ drop-kick, blundered against the bedpost. It amazed Oakley that his conscience remained untroubled. Not responsible for Earle’s death, he felt no guilt about the course he had pursued since then — unless guilt could be defined as the gnawing fear that his whole scheme would collapse, with him under it.
He inspected his watch irritably and shot his cuff. Ten past eleven. He had arrived before eight o’clock after making the ransom drop along the road as instructed. Presumably Orozco’s operatives in Nogales were monitoring the radio signal from the bugged suitcase which contained the money.
He sat it out another twenty minutes, at the end of which time he got out of the car and walked around the clearing, went into the woods and scoured the ground, not sure what he was looking for but half afraid he might stumble across Terry’s body. He found nothing at all to indicate the kidnapers had ever been there. He went back to the car and rolled out of the clearing with the air-conditioner roaring softly. The big car took the rutted roads fast, swaying on its springs, bottoming now and then with a sickening bang. By the time he reached Patagonia he had chewed his cigar to mangled shreds; he scraped the remains off his fingers in the dashboard ashtray and bumped across the railroad tracks and put the car onto the paved road to Sonoita, gunning it up to ninety across the rolling valley.
Shortly before one o’clock he turned in at the main gate and started up the last few miles to the house. The ranch sprawled toward the horizons — a thousand miles of fence, a hundred windmills, fifteen thousand cattle, five thousand acres of irrigated Pima cotton, two hundred cowboys and farmhands, six hundred horses and eighteen tractors, uncounted coyotes and coveys of quail. The Conniston ranch: a small corner of the empire. Carl Oakley surveyed it with a proprietary air while he tooled the car expertly toward the big house.
Orozco was waiting by the garage when he came out. Oakley said, “No sign of her. I waited three and a half hours.”
“I’m sorry, Carl.”
“You think she’s dead, then?”
“I guess she is. But we got to keep lookin’ anyway.”
They walked up to the house, Orozco talking on the way: “Your buddy at the Pentagon built a fire under the dispatcher at Davis Monthan. They let us have the flight plans of the planes they had in the air yesterday and we narrowed it down to five possibilities. I got men out checking all five areas now. One of them was right over downtown Tucson, which ain’t going to be much help. I told them we wanted to know where the planes were at twelve forty-four but the guy pointed out one of those jets covers maybe ten miles in one minute between twelve forty-three and a half, and twelve forty-four and a half. Not to mention if your watch was off by half a minute or two minutes.”
They went inside. Louise and Adams sat gloomily at a table in the front room playing gin rummy. Oakley said, “She didn’t turn up,” and headed for the corridor, ignoring their questions. Orozco trailed him into the office and shut the door. Oakley said, “What about the bug in the suitcase?”
“It went over the border at Lochiel and they lost the signal.”
“They what?” Oakley wheeled.
“Look, Carl, a little transmitter like that ain’t got a whole lot of range. Maybe we’ll pick it up again. I got men on every road south out of Lochiel.”
“They’d damned well better find it.”
“You get no guarantees in this business. We do our best.”
“You sound like a God damned used-car salesman on South Sixth in Tucson.”
Orozco grinned. “I used to be.” He pointed a pudgy finger and, following his glance, Oakley saw a map pinned up against the bookshelves; it hadn’t been there before. Orozco said, “’Scuse me for making the place into a war room but I’m tryin’ to run the whole operation by phone from here.” He went over to the map and beckoned. “Look here. I got men in Nogales and Magdalena. Ain’t all that many roads leading out of Lochiel — sooner or later the bleeper’s got to go through somewhere around there unless they get smart and ditch it or double back this side of the border, in which case I got a man posted at Lochiel. We’ll turn them up. Just a matter of time.”
“Unless they stop to divide up the money and leave the suitcase on a junk heap at Cananea.”
“I’ve got boys closing in. If it’s there they’ll find it.”
“Sure. Then what?”
Orozco shrugged. “You got to play this kind of thing by ear, Carl.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Sit here on my ass and diddle myself?”
Orozco brought up a straight chair from the back of the room and reversed it, sitting down cowboy-fashion, astraddle with his thick arms folded across the high back of the chair. “Time we had that little talk about the ranch, Carl. I told you I’d bring it up today.”
“This isn’t the time for it.”
“Hell it ain’t. What else you got to talk about right now?”
“I don’t want to talk at all.”