Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Everything fit together now; everything made terrible sense. Harrison Sinclair — the surprise witness — was the one scheduled to be assassinated. A terrible irony occurred to me: Sinclair, whom we thought we’d buried, was all of a sudden discovered to be alive, and now he would be killed in a matter of hours.

Molly (who must have been struck with this same thought) clasped her hands, held them to her mouth. She bit the knuckle of her index finger, as if to keep from screaming. She began pacing around the study in tight, frantic circles.

“My God,” she whispered. “My God. What can we do?”

I found myself pacing as well. The last thing I wanted to do now was to further terrify Molly. We both needed to remain calm, think clearly.

“Who can we call?” she said.

I kept pacing.

“Washington,” she said. “Someone on the Senate committee.”

I shook my head. “Too dangerous. We don’t know who we can trust.”

“Someone in the Agency—”

“That’s preposterous!”

She resumed chewing on her knuckle. “Someone else, then. A friend. Someone who can show up at the hearing—”

“And do what? Go up against a trained assassin? No; we have to catch up with him.”

“But where ?”

I began to think aloud. “There’s no way he’s taking the helicopter to Washington.”

“Why?”

“Too far. Much too far. The helicopter’s way too slow.”

“Montreal.”

“Likely. Not definitely, but I’d calculate that there’s a high probability the helicopter is taking him to Montreal, where he’s either stopping for a while—”

“Or getting onto a plane for Washington. If we check all scheduled flights from Montreal to Washington—”

“Sure,” I said impatiently, “ if he’s taking a commercial flight. More likely, he’s chartered a plane.”

“Why? Wouldn’t a commercial flight be safer?”

“Yes, but a private plane is much more flexible and anonymous in its own way. I’d charter a plane. All right. Let’s assume the chopper’s taking him to Montreal.” I looked at my watch. “Probably he’s there by now.”

“But where ? Which airport?”

“Montreal’s got Dorval and Mirabel. That’s two airstrips, not to mention any number of small unnamed airstrips between here and Montreal.”

“But there must be a limited number of airplane charter companies listed in Montreal,” Molly said. She pulled a telephone book from the floor, near the couch. “If we call each one—”

“No!” I exclaimed too loudly. “Most of them won’t be answering the phone at this time of night. And who’s to say your father made arrangements with a Canadian charter company? It might have been any of thousands of U.S. companies!”

Molly sank to the couch, her hands flat against her face. “Oh, God, Ben. What can we do?”

I looked at my watch again. “We don’t have a choice,” I said. “We have to get to Washington and stop him there.”

“But we don’t know where he’s going to be in Washington!”

“Sure we do. The Hart Senate Office Building, Room 216, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings.”

“But before that! We have no idea where he’s going to be before that!”

She was right, of course. The most we could hope to do was to show up at the hearing room and—

And what?

How in the world could we stop her father, protect him?

The solution, I suddenly realized, was in my head. My heart began to pound with excitement and fear.

A few moments before he was so gruesomely killed, Johannes Hesse, alias “Max,” had thought that another assassin would take his place.

I couldn’t stop Harrison Sinclair, but I could stop his assassin.

If anyone could, I could.

“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ve got it figured out.”

It was just after four-thirty in the morning.

Three hours later — at almost seven-thirty on the morning of the last day — our small plane touched down in a small airport in rural Massachusetts. Less than twelve hours remained, and although it was an unbroken stretch of time, I feared (with good reason) that it wouldn’t be enough.

From Lac Tremblant, Molly had contacted a small private airplane charter company called Compagnie Aéronautique Lanier, based in Montreal, which had advertised the availability of twenty-four-hour emergency call service. Her call had been routed to the firm’s on-call pilot and had awakened him. Molly explained that she was a physician who needed to be flown to Montreal’s Dorval Airport on an emergency basis. She furnished the exact map coordinates of her father’s helipad, and a little over an hour later we were picked up in a Bell 206 Jet Ranger.

At Dorval, we had made arrangements with another charter firm to fly us from Montreal to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. Given a choice of planes — a Seneca II, a Commander, a King Air prop jet, or a Citation 501 — we chose the Citation, which was by far the fastest, capable of flying at 350 miles per hour. At Dorval, we easily cleared customs: our false American passports (we used Mr. and Mrs. John Brewer, which still left one virgin set if ever we needed to become the Mr. and Mrs. Alan Crowells) were barely inspected, and in any case, once Molly explained that it was a medical emergency, we were rushed through.

At Hanscom we rented a car and I drove the thirty miles or so as quickly as I dared, at precisely the speed limit. Once I had fully explained my plan to Molly, we sat in grim silence. She was terrified, but probably saw no logic in quarreling with me, since she was unable to devise any less risky plan to save her father’s life. I needed to clear my mind as much as possible, to consider every possibility of failure. I knew that Molly would have appreciated some reassurance now, but I had none to offer, and besides, it was all I could do to think my plan through to its end.

I knew, too, that it would be a disaster to be stopped for speeding. I’d rented the car with a false New York State driver’s license and counterfeit Visa credit card. We’d gotten by the car rental agency, but we would not survive the routine license check by a Massachusetts state trooper that inevitably accompanies a speeding ticket. There would be no record in their interstate computer data bank of my license, and the entire game would be over.

So I drove carefully through the morning rush-hour traffic to the town of Shrewsbury. At a little before eight-thirty we drove up to the small yellow ranch-style suburban house that belonged to a man named Donald Seeger.

Seeger was, to be honest, a calculated risk. He was a firearms dealer, the owner of two retail gun shops on the outskirts of Boston. He provided firearms for the state police and, as necessary, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (whenever the FBI needed to procure particular weapons quickly without going through cumbersome bureaucratic channels).

Seeger occupied a peculiar gray area of the legal firearms market, somewhere between the gun manufacturers and retail customers, who for one reason or another require such great discretion that they cannot deal directly either with distributors or the traditional retail outlets.

More important, though, I knew him just well enough to trust him. A law school classmate of mine had grown up in Shrewsbury and knew Seeger as a family friend. Seeger, who rarely dealt with lawyers, and (like virtually everybody, it seems) despised the lot of them, needed some quick (and free) legal advice on dealing with a disgruntled small-arms manufacturer, my law school friend told me. It certainly wasn’t my area of expertise, but I had an associate dig up the answer for him. Seeger was duly grateful, and took me out to a thank-you dinner at a good steak house in Boston. “If I can ever do anything for you,” he told me over filet mignon, hoisting his mug of Bass ale, “you just give me a call.” At the time, I figured I’d never see the guy again. Now, however, it was time to collect.