“You understand, we get him, what’s going to happen.”
Barron stared at McClatchy for a nanosecond; then his eyes shot past him, looking for Dan Ford. If he was there he didn’t see him. He looked back to Red, and he knew he had to forget about Ford.
“I understand,” he said, then suddenly turned and twisted gun-first into the jetway.
In the faint light he could see the passageway veer to the left twenty feet ahead. How many times had he walked down one of these with no thought at all? Just follow the other passengers and get on the plane with no thought that someone was there, just past the turn of the passageway, waiting to end your life as you came around it.
“This is McClatchy.” Red was still with him, talking hushed into his radio. “Patch me into Lufthansa security.”
Barron inched toward the turn point, his heart pounding, his finger full on the Beretta’s trigger. He was expecting Raymond to be right there as he came around the corner, and was prepared to fire the instant he saw him.
“McClatchy,” Red said again. “Is the suspect on the aircraft?”
Barron counted to three and turned the corner.
“No!” he yelled suddenly and dashed forward. “He’s outside!”
A door was open at the jetway’s far end. Barron charged toward it, stopped as he reached it, then took a breath and went through it. He hit the top of the stairway outside just as Raymond tugged open a service door on the ground level and ran into the terminal building.
Barron took the jetway steps on the run. Behind him he could see Red come out through the door, barking orders into his radio.
At the bottom he crossed the tarmac, then pulled up quickly as he reached the door Raymond had gone through. Another breath and he eased it open to see a hallway brightly lit by overhead fluorescents. He moved forward. Just ahead, a door to the left. Another breath. He opened it and froze. It was an employee cafeteria. Several tables were turned over. A half dozen employees were on the floor. Hands clamped over their heads.
“Police! Where is he?” Barron yelled.
Suddenly Raymond stood up from behind an overturned table just in front of a far door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The slain airport cop’s automatic danced in his hand.
Boom! Boom! Barron fired back and dove to the floor. Rolling over, he came back up, ready to fire again. The door was open, Raymond was gone.
An instant later Barron was through it, charging into another hallway on the full run. Suddenly a door at the far end flew open and Halliday came through it, Beretta in hand.
“He didn’t come this way!” Halliday yelled.
Barron saw a partially open door halfway down the corridor between them and ran toward it. He reached it first, pulled up hard, then went through it and into another hallway. Farther down he heard one gunshot, then a second.
“Christ!”
Now he was running full out. His lungs on fire, he slammed through a door at the far end. It was the baggage area. A baggage handler was dead on the floor in front of him; another was on his knees and bleeding ten feet away.
“There! He went up there!” The handler pointed toward the conveyor belt carrying luggage up into the terminal.
Shoving aside suitcases, bags, and boxes, Barron pulled himself onto the conveyor.
Boom! Ping!
Barron heard the shot and the ricochet. At the same time, he felt something whiz past his head. Then he was riding up. Twenty feet ahead he saw Raymond, crouched between baggage. By now he’d lost the L.A Dodgers cap, and Barron could see his head was shaved to the scalp.
Boom! Boom!
Barron fired. His first shot slammed off a large suitcase next to Raymond’s head. The second missed entirely. Then he saw Raymond rise up on one knee to fire. Barron hit the floor expecting to hear a thundering gunshot. Instead he heard a metallic Click! Then came another and another. Something was wrong with Raymond’s gun.
Barron moved up, twisting to the side, ready to fire. But it was too late. Raymond was gone. He could hear him scrambling up the conveyor, shoving aside luggage as he went.
The conveyor was narrow and made for luggage, not people, but if Raymond could ride it, Barron could. He shoved the Beretta in his belt, then ducked low and started up, pulling himself over two large golf bags. One second, two. He ducked again as the conveyor passed under some electrical conduit. Abruptly it took a sharp left and he had to grab on to the golf bag to keep his balance. Suddenly Raymond was right there, dropping like a huge rat from the conveyor support structure overhead. In an instant he had Barron by the collar and was swinging the jammed automatic like a hammer.
Barron ducked away, then slammed a fist hard against Raymond’s head. Barron heard him cry out, and he grabbed Raymond’s shirt with his other hand, jerking him toward him to hit him again. As he did, Raymond swung the automatic once more. The move was fast and short and very hard. The blow caught Barron just in front of his ear, and for the briefest second everything went black. Then the conveyor belt gave way beneath them and both men tumbled downward, one after the other, with baggage in between. A second later they were on the luggage carousel. Barron’s head cleared and he saw faces. People were screaming and yelling at him, but he didn’t understand why or what. Then he realized he was on his back. His hand went for the Beretta in his belt. It wasn’t there.
“Looking for this?”
Raymond stood above him, Barron’s gun in his hand, inches from his face.
“Dasvedanya.” Good-bye, he said in Russian. Barron tried to turn away, somehow shield himself from the shot.
“Raymond!”
Barron heard the bark of Red’s voice and saw Raymond whirl. There was the terrible roar of exchanged gunshots. Then Barron saw Raymond jump from the carousel and disappear from sight.
53
Dan Ford came through the door in lockstep with a black-suited Lufthansa security agent to see Raymond running right at him. For an instant their eyes met; then Raymond veered to the side, shoving an elderly man out of the way, and dashed through a sliding door. It took a moment for Ford to realize whom he had seen and what had happened. Then he became aware of screams and shouts coming from the baggage area behind him. He turned and ran toward it.
Red lay on the floor in a mass of blood. People milled around him in shock, too stunned and horrified to do anything but watch. Ford rushed forward just as Barron fought his way in from the opposite direction, pushing people aside, yelling for them to get back. Both men reached Red at the same time. Barron dropped beside him and tore open Red’s jacket, shoving both hands hard into the middle of Red’s chest, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Somebody call nine-one-one! Somebody call a fucking ambulance!” he screamed, then his eyes came up and he realized it was Dan Ford.
“Call a fucking ambulance!” he yelled at him. “Call a fucking ambulance!”
“He wouldn’t wear a vest,” Barron heard someone say, and he felt an arm try to pull him away. He wrenched free.
“John, forget it,” the same voice said quietly. Barron looked up to see Roosevelt Lee standing beside him.
“Fuck you!” Barron screamed at Lee.
Then he saw Dan Ford talking forcefully with Halliday and Polchak and Valparaiso, pointing the way Raymond had gone. Suddenly the three cops bolted in that direction. Barron’s eyes came back to Red, and he heard Lee’s voice, soft with tears.
“It’s too late, John.”
Puzzlement came over Barron’s face, and Lee took him by the arm, pulling him up, looking him in the face.
“It’s too late, do you understand? The commander is dead.”
The world floated. Sound did not exist. Everywhere faces stared. Barron saw Dan Ford come back and take off his blue blazer and cover Red’s face with it. He saw Halliday and Polchak and Valparaiso come back, too, breathing heavily, their jackets wet from the rain. He saw huge Roosevelt Lee shake his head at them, his tears, rivulets now, running unhurried down his cheeks.
/>
It was 9:47 P.M.
54
STILL WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13. 10:10 P.M.
It was Halliday who sent him home. They’d need someone fresh in the office in the morning, he’d said; besides, he and Valparaiso were enough manpower to coordinate the hunt for Raymond from the airport. Lee and Polchak were already gone, traveling the longest miles of their life to the city’s Mount Washington section and the plain, three-bedroom bungalow at 210 Ridgeview Lane to tell Gloria McClatchy her husband was dead.
“Drive.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Just keep moving.”
Dan Ford started the engine and drove John Barron’s Mustang out of LAX, turning north toward Santa Monica. Red’s blood was still on Barron’s shirt and on his hands. He didn’t seem to notice, just sat in the passenger seat of his own car and stared at nothing.
That a five-square-mile area around Los Angeles International Airport had been cordoned off within minutes after the incident and that literally hundreds of police, aided by helicopters and dogs, had begun combing the area for Raymond Oliver Thorne didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the fact that every outgoing flight had been delayed until each passenger was carefully checked to make certain Raymond hadn’t simply switched airlines in his attempt to escape.
What did matter was that Red McClatchy was dead. Maybe he could have simply shot Raymond on the luggage carousel without yelling his name. Or maybe people had been in the way and he couldn’t have shot without endangering them. Or maybe he was afraid that if he didn’t distract Raymond right then, in the next split second he would have killed Barron. But in the end, in those last horrible seconds there had been a brief, thundering exchange of gunfire, which meant Red had fired at Raymond. The trouble was, as good as Red was, Raymond had been better. Or faster or luckier, or all three. Whatever it had been, Red McClatchy was dead and John Barron wasn’t.
Whatever had happened, Red had saved John Barron’s life.
Red McClatchy, whom Barron respected, despised, and loved in the same breath. Who had made him his partner only minutes before the horror had taken place.
No matter what he had done, or what the 5-2 was about, it was impossible to think of him as mortal. He was a giant, a legend. Men like that didn’t die on the floor of a busy airport terminal with all the lights on and two hundred people milling around trying to collect their luggage. They didn’t die at all, they were enshrined. Maybe one day forty years into the future you’d hear he’d passed away after a long retirement. Even then, the obituaries written about him would be heroic and endless.
“He wore a flak jacket in the garage like the rest of us. But he never wore a vest. I didn’t realize it.” Barron continued to stare off, the rain lighter now, only fine mist in the headlights. “Maybe he believed his own myth. Maybe he thought nothing could kill him.”
“Knowing Red, it was more like he just didn’t like the damn things. They came from a period after his,” Dan Ford said quietly and just kept driving. “Maybe that was reason enough in itself.”
Barron didn’t reply, and the talking stopped. In an hour they were away from the city lights, driving north into the hills on the Golden State Freeway toward the Tehachapi Mountains. By then the rain had stopped and the stars were out.
55
Thirty-five minutes after he’d left the airport Raymond was in the parking lot of the Disneyland Hotel looking up at the overhead monorail that brought guests to and from the hotel to the fabled park. For a moment he grinned in amusement—not because he had escaped a police trap by the skin of his teeth, or because he had managed to get out the same way he’d come in, by simply boarding the nearest bus at hand and riding out on it toward Disneyland even as the first sirens raced past going toward the International Terminal, the beginning of what he knew would be an enormous confluence of police that would descend within moments. He grinned because he remembered that in 1959 the then premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, had asked to visit Disneyland and had been turned down by the U.S. government. It was a diplomatic faux pas that became an emotional and bitter international incident. What happened finally he didn’t remember. It was the bizarre absurdity of it, to imagine what could have happened in the dark and harried chambers of Washington and Moscow as the thumbs of the cold war superpowers were edged ever closer to all-out nuclear confrontation by Mickey Mouse.
As quickly, his musing ceased. The intensity of the hunt for him, he knew, was already spiraling upward. They knew how he was dressed and that his head was shaved nearly bald. He needed a place to go where he could safely rest and regroup and try again to reach Jacques Bertrand in Zurich. This time it would not be about his arrival in Frankfurt but once again about a plane and a passport and getting him out of California as quickly as possible.
The headlights of another airport bus crossed him, and then the bus stopped. The doors opened and a group of French-Canadian tourists disembarked. Immediately he joined them and walked into the hotel lobby. Then he went to the gift shop. Once again he used Josef Speer’s Euro/MasterCard, this time to buy a Disneyland hat and a Pirates of the Caribbean windbreaker.
His appearance changed, if only a little, he once again used public transportation. He took the next bus back toward the city, going first to John Wayne Airport, then transferring to another bus that would take him to the only place he was reasonably certain he could spend the rest of the night undisturbed, the Beverly Hills apartment of Alfred Neuss.
An hour later he was there and thinking about a way to get in. He expected a wealthy American jeweler, even one who kept a modest apartment like Neuss, to have an electronic security system, every door and window wired against a break-in. He’d been trained to disable a dozen widely varying security systems simply by isolating the control wire to the place he wanted to gain entry, then splicing a loop into it and back-feeding the power to the monitoring station before making the cut, thereby maintaining a closed circuit and making the surveillance system appear intact when in fact it had been broken. And he’d been prepared to deal with whatever system Neuss had, but it wasn’t necessary.
Alfred Neuss was not just excessively predictable, he was arrogant. The only thing protecting entry to his Linden Drive apartment was a front door lock that could easily have been picked by the most simpleminded burglar, and at twenty minutes past midnight Raymond did just that. By 12:45 he had showered, put on a clean pair of Alfred Neuss’s pajamas, made himself a pumpernickel and Swiss cheese sandwich, and washed it down with a glass of the ice-cold Russian vodka Neuss kept in the freezer portion of his refrigerator.
At 1:00 A.M.—choosing not to use Neuss’s telephone despite the complex way he switched numbers for fear that at some point the law enforcement experts could utilize a sophisticated trace-back—he was at Neuss’s home computer in a small study across from the front entryway with Barron’s Beretta on the table beside him. Within seconds he had pulled up the terminal emulator, dialed in the contact number in Buffalo, New York, and then, telnet-ing into its host, logged on and sent a coded message to an e-mail address in Rome that would be electronically forwarded to another e-mail address in Marseilles, then sent on to Jacques Bertrand’s e-mail address in Zurich. In it he told the Swiss attorney what had happened and asked for immediate assistance.
Afterward he poured himself a second glass of Russian vodka, and then, precisely at 1:27 in the morning, Thursday, March 14, while nearly every police officer in Los Angeles County searched for him, Raymond Oliver Thorne climbed into Alfred Neuss’s king-sized bed, pulled the covers around himself, and fell soundly asleep.
56
THURSDAY, MARCH 14. 4:15 A.M.
“Stemkowski. Jake, right?” John Barron leaned on the counter in the kitchen of his rented house in the Los Feliz section of the city, pencil in one hand, phone in the other.
“You have his home phone? I know it’s six-fifteen in the morning. It’s four-fifteen here,” Barron said forcefully. A moment later he scratched out a phone n
umber on a pad next to him. “Thank you,” he said and hung up.
Ten minutes earlier an exhausted Jimmy Halliday had called with three pieces of information that had just come in. The first had been about two 9 mm Berettas found in a custodian’s floor-washing bucket in a men’s restroom at the Lufthansa terminal. Whatever fingerprints there might have been had been dissolved by the detergent in the bucket. But there was no doubt where the Berettas had come from—they had belonged to the sheriff’s deputies Raymond had killed in the elevator at Criminal Courts.
The second piece of information concerned the ballistics test on the Sturm Ruger automatic found in Raymond’s bag on the Southwest Chief. Matching tests proved without doubt it was the weapon used in the torture and murder of the two men in the tailor shop on Pearson Street in Chicago.
The third was that reports had just come in from the inquiries sent yesterday afternoon to the police departments in San Francisco, Mexico City, and Dallas—cities the magnetic strip on Raymond’s passport had shown he had visited just before he went to Chicago, which was a period of little more than twenty-four hours from Friday, March 8, to Saturday, March 9. Unsurprisingly there had been murders in all three cities across that time frame. In both San Francisco and Mexico City, authorities reported finding the bodies of men who had been brutally tortured before they were slain. Afterward their faces had been wholly disfigured by point-blank gunshots. The victim in San Francisco had been dumped into San Francisco Bay, the one in Mexico City left at a vacant construction site. The motive behind the disfiguring and dispersal of the bodies appeared to be the delay of identification thereby giving the killer time to get away or time to pass before the bodies were discovered and their murders announced, or both. It was the same MO Raymond had used for Josef Speer. Halliday had ended the call by saying he was working with the San Francisco PD and Mexico City police to get more information on the murder victims there and asking Barron to do the same with Chicago.