He had to make his move now. And he had to be careful. No telling what kind of shape Vanduyne might be in—physically or emotionally. A guy who showed up at that drugstore could be capable of anything. He might go off like a screaming bomb. And the last thing Snake wanted was a scene in a downtown Metro station.
He reached out toward Vanduyne. Careful… careful…
30
John almost cried out when he felt the fingers close on the back of his neck and the voice whisper from somewhere behind his left ear.
“Freeze, asshole. Don’t even think about turning around. You see my face, you’re dead. And so’s your brat.” John reached out a wildly trembling hand and slapped it palm open against the nearby wall for support. To passersby they probably looked like a pair of friends, one sick, the other comforting him. If they only knew.
Oh, Christ, he’d done it now. He’d screwed up everything! Poor Katie! They were going to kill her and it was all his fault! He tried to speak but his throat was locked. All he managed was a hoarse croak. He tried again.
“Please… listen—”
“No!” The hand squeezed the back of his neck, the whisper grew harsher. “You listen! You’re one fucking idiot, you know that? You want your kid dead? Is that what you want?”
“No! Oh, please, no!”
“Then why were you following my man?” The pressure on the back of his neck increased.
“Why?” my man…
This was Snake, not the guy in the jogging get up. This was the one he had to convince to take good care of Katie. John squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated everything on his words. He had to get through to this… this animal.
“Because she means so much to me. She’s all I have in this world that matters. She’s my child. Can you understand that? She’s my daughter and she’s little and she’s defenseless and I’m responsible for her. If anything happens to her, it’s my fault. And if anything… really bad happens to her… I don’t think I can go on living. Do you see? Does that make any sense to you?”
“Not a bit. Doc,” said Snake.
The utter flatness of the voice sent a blast of cold despair through John. The emotions he’d expressed were incomprehensible to this man. He might as well have been speaking Swahili.
“And you know what else doesn’t make sense to me?” Snake said. “You disobeying and spying on my man. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Panic surged through John. He didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
“I haven’t called anyone or told anyone!” He began babbling. “Not a soul! Just as you said! But I have to know, don’t you understand? Coming down here was a crazy thing to do, but that’s what not knowing if Katie’s alive or dead is doing to me! It’s making me crazy! You’ve got to believe that!” A long pause followed. John held his breath, waiting.
Finally Snake spoke.
“Well, we don’t want you going crazy, now, do we. We wouldn’t want that.” The hand released John’s neck. “You freeze there, Doc. You stay facing that wall and the only thing you look at is your watch. You wait here ten minutes before you so much as turn your head.”
“But Katie—” A sharp jab in his back cut him off.
“Not another fucking word, you hear?”
Miserable, John nodded. He felt so helpless. Christ, if only he had the guts to turn around and grab this guy and throttle Katie’s whereabouts out of him. But that might spell the end of Katie… if she wasn’t already— He heard footsteps moving away from him, heading back toward the escalator. He pushed back his jacket sleeve and looked at his watch: 4:11. He’d have to stand here until 4:21 while Snake and his accomplice got away.
And then he heard a voice shout two words from over by the escalator: “Maggie Simpson!” At first they didn’t register. Was that Snake or someone else looking for— Maggie Simpson! The little pacifier-sucking girl from Katie’s favorite TV show. Katie loved her! That could only mean… the only way they could have found out…
She’s alive! Katie’s alive! John clamped his hands over his eyes and wept with relief.
Snake listened to Vanduyne’s sobs, watched his shoulders quake as he leaned against the wall and bawled, then he stepped onto the escalator and rode it to street level.
Snake hadn’t wanted to tell him, had wanted to let him suffer for being such a jerk, but then he’d reconsidered. If not knowing about his kid was really making Vanduyne nuts, then it was good business to tell him. Otherwise, the guy was a loose cannon. Who knew what crazy thing he’d try next?
And this guy had a crazy streak a mile wide. Sure, he was back there crying like a baby now, but Snake had an uneasy feeling he’d be making a big mistake if he wrote off that guy as a wimp. He’d sensed something dangerous at the bus stop as Vanduyne had passed by on Paulie’s tail. Something in his eyes. Feral. Like some sort of predator. Hard to match that up with the sob sister downstairs, but the guy’s eyes hadn’t been lying.
Snake slammed his fist against the escalator’s rubber hand rail. That’s why you never snatch a kid. Adult to adult, it’s one thing… a snatch is the cost of doing a certain kind of business, a price they pay for not being careful. The packages lick their wounds and slink away, poorer but wiser.
But involve a kid and you’re on a whole other level. You tap into something primal. You wind up dealing from a different deck. Suddenly everybody’s taking it personally. And that’s when people became unpredictable… dangerous. Snake didn’t understand it but recognized it when he saw it. And he sure as hell had seen it in Vanduyne’s eyes.
So he’d told him about Maggie Simpson. To calm him down. Make him more predictable. He starts thinking his kid is dead, pretty soon he decides he’s got nothing to lose—a very bad situation all the way around.
Up on the sidewalk he checked his watch. He’d wasted too much time jerking around with Vanduyne. He’d left his car at the Mayflower, so he started jogging up Connecticut Avenue. He’d have to hustle if he was going to make the meeting with Salinas.
He thought about Vanduyne again. Before this was over, he was going to need a persuader.
31
As planned, Paulie stepped onto the Metro train and waited until the platform emptied; then he stepped off again. And watched. No one else got off. He watched the doors close and the train slide away into the dark gullet of the tunnel.
All right! Nobody following him.
He headed back up to street level. He’d been twitchy as a strung-out crackhead since he’d walked into that drugstore, half-expecting a gang of feds to jump him as soon as he asked for those pills.
He checked his pocket to make sure he had the drugstore bag. A lot of risk to get that little vial. But things had worked out okay. Better than okay. He’d hit Snake up for some cash to cover the jogging suit and the prescription, and a little extra to keep the home fires burning.
He checked his beeper in the other pocket. The readout said no calls. Which reconfirmed that he hadn’t been followed—Snake was to have beeped him if he’d spotted anyone on his tail. So everything was cool. He felt the tension ooze out of him.
He passed a guy leaning against a wall, looking for all the world like he was crying. Maybe he was sick. Or drunk.
Which gave Paulie an idea. Why not pick up a little bubbly as a gift for Poppy? She was all strung out babysitting the kid. She liked champagne and a bottle might get her to lighten up a little.
Yeah. Great idea. Buy her a goddamn magnum. Buy her two.
32
It took Snake a while, but he finally found a parking spot off M Street within half a block of Il Giardinello—he needed his car close by. He opened the glove compartment and started the tape recorder, then snapped his fingers in front of his chest. The mike in his shirt button picked up the sound and the needle on the receiver jumped. All right. All systems go—as long as he didn’t get too far away.
Snake walked around Georgetown a little before approaching the restaurant—just to be sure no one was tailing him.
What’s the big attraction in owning a restaurant? he wondered as he approached the kitchen door. Actors, comedians, jocks, TV geeks—they all seemed to want one. Why? Looked like a royal pain in the ass. He checked his jacket buttons and his lapel pin, then knocked.
One of Salinas’s guards, a beefy guy named Llosa with dark skin and thick, Indian features, let him in. Snake handed him his .45 but the guy patted him down anyway. Satisfied that Snake wasn’t going to murder his boss, he led him to the back office.
“Miguel!” Salinas said, from his recliner. His beige silk suit was wrinkled where it bunched around his rolls of fat, and his gold-toothed smile was humorless. “You’re late!” Mr. Fatso Drug Lord didn’t like to be kept waiting?
Tough. Snake wasn’t about to incite Salinas, but he wasn’t going to kiss his ass either.
“Had to arrange to get some medicine for the kid,” Snake said pointedly. “You know, the kid no one knew was sick? Took me longer than I’d anticipated.”
“But it is all taken care of, no?”
“Yeah. All taken care of.”
“Excellent!” Now his smile was genuine. “Alien, pour our friend a drink.
Scotch, right?“
“Right. A little soda.”
“Give him the good stuff.” Salinas’s financial butt boy hopped to the task.
“We’ve got some beautiful sixty-year-old MacCallan single malt here,” Alien Gold said. “Cost Carlos thirteen big ones at auction.”
Thirteen grand for a bottle of Scotch? Now that was conspicuous consumption. Snake glanced around. Just like the rest of this dive. Look at the furniture, all dark and heavy and intricately carved, with real Tiffany lamps and Persian rugs; the walls were worse, hung with heavy burgundy drapes and all shades of garish Colombian art.
And in among the paintings, a signed photo of Tricky Dick. Very weird.
Gold handed Snake his Scotch, neat. “I held off on the club soda,” he said. “You don’t want bubbles getting in the way of the taste of this stuff.” Snake bit back a sharp retort. No profit in being ungracious, but he wondered about a guy with an MBA acting as gofer.
“To the success of the project,” Salinas said, raising a glass of red wine.
They all drank. Snake smacked his lips around the sixty-year-old Scotch. Pretty good, but not worth five hundred bucks a pop.
“Alien,” Salinas said, wiping off his mustache, “give Miguel his next installment.” Gold bent and lifted a leather attachê case. He handed it to Snake.
“You want to count it?”
“Not now,” Snake said. “I’ll count it later.” He smiled to make it clear he was joking.
Salinas chuckled and his gut shook like the proverbial bowl full of jelly. A round man, Salinas—a round face with a round mouth on a round body. His smile was all white and gold except for the space between his upper front teeth—a gap big enough to shoot watermelon pits through.
Always polite, soft-spoken, almost formal. Yet Snake knew that behind that jolly exterior hid a diamond-hard, laser-sharp mind. An obsessively security-conscious mind. He’d realized that the first time they’d met here.
Snake had recorded the conversation—he admitted to his own security hang-up—with a standard transmitter mike, but when he’d checked the tape, all he heard was thirty minutes of hiss. Which meant Salinas had a bug jammer in his office. A good one—randomly varying frequency and amplitude. But there were ways around that…
Snake took another sip of Scotch and dropped into a chair. “All right. I’ve got the kid. I’ve got her daddy dangling on a string. What’s this service he’s supposed to do?” Salinas looked at Gold.
“Alien, will you please excuse us?”
Gold looked hurt. “You don’t think you can trust me with this?”
“I think you can be trusted with anything. Alien. But I do not think you want to be trusted with this. Comprende?”
Gold stared at him a moment, glanced at Snake, then shrugged. “Okay. If that’s the way you want it.” He started for the door.
“It is not a burden you wish. Alien,” Salinas said, smiling solicitously.
“Fine. I’ll be at the bar.”
As the door closed, Salinas said, “He is upset. He thinks he should know everything about my business. And perhaps he is right. But in this matter, I am not so sure.” Snake was beginning to get an uneasy feeling about “this matter.”
“I believe your question,” Salinas said, “was what service do I expect Dr. John Vanduyne to perform?” He took another sip of his wine. After he swallowed, his smile was gone. His voice was coldly matter of fact. “I expect Dr. John Vanduyne to remove his old friend Thomas Winston from the White House.” Snake felt the Scotch glass begin to slip from his fingers.
“The P-President?” He’d never stuttered before in his life. “The President of the United States?”
Salinas nodded.
Snake had a strange, floating sensation. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. All along he’d known that the stakes in this job would be high—nobody offered you that kind of money just to put the screws to a doctor bureaucrat in HHS. He’d tried to figure the angle but couldn’t come up with any reason why Vanduyne would be so valuable.
The stakes were high, all right. Too high.
He opened his eyes. “Winston’s legalization thing… that’s what this is all about, right?”
Salinas nodded again. “This coward wants to ruin our business. Fifty billion dollars a year—gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that! You can understand why we cannot allow such a thing.”
“Yeah, sure,” Snake said. Fifty billion a year justified just about anything. What had he got himself into? “But how’s this Vanduyne going to solve your problem?”
Salinas smiled. “Vanduyne is President Winston’s personal physician. We will instruct him to administer a dose of chloramphenicol to his old friend.”
“Chloram—what?‘’
Salinas gestured to the pad on the table to Snake’s right. “Write it down.”
Snake spelled it out phonetically as Salinas repeated it. Klor… aw… PHEN… uh… call, then got the proper spelling from Salinas.
“What’s that? A poison?”
“No. That is the beauty of it. Chloramphenicol is an antibiotic. An old one that is rarely used anymore.”
Snake stared at the word on the sheet of paper in his hand. “I don’t get it.”
“One of the reasons chloramphenicol is rarely used is its effect on the bone marrow of a small percentage of patients.”
“What’s that?” Snake said.
“Like the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: The bone marrow stops producing blood cells. The condition is called aplastic anemia. I have never heard of it, but then, what do I know about medicine? However, I have educated myself over the past few months… ever since a certain source informed me that Thomas Winston almost died from aplastic anemia at age three. The cause was chloramphenicol.”
“So?”
“So, if he gets another dose, the same thing will happen: His bone marrow will go on strike. He will sicken. He may well die.”
“May die? What if he doesn’t?”
Salinas shrugged. “He does not need to die. I would prefer that he did, but at the very least he will be gravely ill, much too sick to attend the drug summit in The Hague. And if he survives, he will have a long recovery. Too long to continue in office. He will have to resign.”
“Which puts Robert Baldwin in the White House. What if he decides to push legalization too?”
Salinas smiled and shook his head. “We know Vice President Baldwin. We have him…” He made an elaborate gesture of slipping his hand into his jacket pocket.
“So why not just plug Winston?” Snake said. “Be a helluva lot easier and more efficient than this’may die‘ crap. Then you know he’s out of office.”
“No-no,” Salinas said, for the first time leaning forward. He explained why la compania had discarded that idea.
Snake
nodded, only half listening. Already he could see problems.
“Okay. Whacking him wouldn’t work. But what happens when Vanduyne gets his kid back and tells the world he was forced to give Winston the chlor-whatever it’s-called? Same result: Winston’s a martyr and you’re out of business.” Salinas smiled. “But he will not get his child back. At least not for long. Immediately after their joyous reunion, they will have a terrible accident.”
Snake went cold. “That’s not my thing.”
“I know it is not. I will arrange for that.”
“All right. But won’t whoever’s treating Winston put two and two together and figure he’s been dosed with this stuff?”
“Not unless Vanduyne tells them. The chloramphenicol will be long out of his system, and his doctors will not know about his previous bout of aplastic anemia.”
“Why not?”
“Because he himself removed it from his medical records years ago. Thomas Winston wanted a spotless medical history when he presented himself to the American public.”
“Then how do you—?”
Salinas smiled. “My dear Miguel, should it surprise you that I have excellent sources?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Not at all.” Snake was just beginning to grasp Salinas’s reach. The President’s announcement was only last night, yet he and Salinas had been planning this snatch for two months. Salinas had known all along and had been ready to pounce as soon as Winston publicly committed himself.
And he even knew what Winston had wiped from his medical history years ago. This guy had a dedicated T-3 line into the government—he was connected.
Salinas leaned back again. “So you see? Everything is arranged. It’s a perfect plan.” The reassurances rolled off Snake like a used car salesman’s promises, and the cold within him grew as he took stock.