Stephen Leather - The Long shot

“What about back-up while I’m there?”

“You’ll be alone,” said the Colonel. “The last thing you want is a team following you around. This is completely solo, Joker. It has to be if it’s going to work.”

Joker put the money back in the envelope and slid in the photographs and typed sheets.

“What about a weapon?”

“That you’ll have to get while you’re there. The sort of company you’ll be in, you won’t have any trouble getting tooled up.”

Joker rubbed his chin with both hands. He could feel the stubble from several days’ growth scratch the skin of his palms. “And then? You still haven’t told me exactly how you want me to take them out.”

The Colonel smiled thinly. “That’s up to you,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

Joker nodded. He understood why it was a solo mission and why there would be no contact with the Americans. “Colonel, it’ll be a pleasure,” he said. Joker wished that he felt as confident as he sounded. His last encounter with Mary Hennessy had left him shattered — physically and emotionally — and his enthusiasm for the Colonel’s mission was tinged with an emotion he hadn’t felt for some time. Fear.

Cole Howard drove back to his office after dropping Andy Kim off at the airport. The mathematician had spent the previous day in the desert with several men from the Sheriffs Department and a laser measuring device which Howard had managed to borrow from the County Highways Department. Kim had been keen to get back to Washington and begin running his numbers through the university’s mainframe computer. He’d been like an excited child during the ride to the airport, bobbing his head backwards and forwards as he talked. Howard wished he could have got the same enthusiasm from the young FBI agent who’d been assigned to help track down the vehicles used in the desert rehearsal. She was a twenty-five-year-old college graduate straight out of the Academy, a pushy woman with too much hair who’d seen Silence of the Lambs fifteen times and clearly decided to model herself on Hannibal Lecter rather than on Jodie Foster’s character. She was tall, had backswept blonde hair and a sharp profile, with pale green eyes that always seemed to regard Howard with contempt. It was a look he was used to seeing in his father-in-law’s eyes. Her name was Kelly Armstrong and she seemed to blame Howard for giving her the mundane job to do, even though the assignment had come direct from Jake Sheldon. Howard had wanted someone more experienced but Sheldon had insisted that he use the new girl, because tracking down rental cars didn’t require anything more than a room temperature IQ. She hadn’t smiled at him once, and her icy politeness annoyed the hell out of him.

She was waiting for him in his office. She looked pointedly at her wristwatch, an expensive gold Cartier, and pursed her glossy pink lips. Howard wanted to tell her that he was late because of Andy Kim, but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of having to explain himself.

“Good morning, Kelly,” he said, coldly.

“Cole,” she acknowledged. “I’ve found twelve rental companies within fifty miles of Phoenix who rent or lease vehicles of the make and colour in the Mitchell video. In all there were eighty-three out on the day of the shooting.” She looked at her notebook and flipped over a page with the sound of tearing cloth. “Seventy-nine have been returned, four are still out. All four are still within their rental agreements.”

Howard nodded and sat behind his desk. He waved Kelly to sit down but she ignored him. “All eighty-three were paid for by credit card, and all went through without incident. No fake cards, no stolen cards. I’ve run checks on all the driving licences and other than a few dozen unpaid tickets and a guy who owes several thousand dollars in child support, there’s nothing untoward.” Howard opened his mouth to speak but Kelly continued. “I asked all the rental companies if they had rented out a blue and a white car at the same time, and none had. A total of eight had been involved in an accident of some form, but all were collision damage and all had the names and insurance details of the other drivers involved.”

“Good work, Kelly,” he said. “You’ve done a good job.” She nodded and turned to go. “But. .” he began and she tensed. When she turned back she was looking down her sharp nose at him like an angry bird preparing to peck out his eyes. She raised her left eyebrow archly.

“Those cars must have come from somewhere,” he continued.

“Without licence plates it’s going to be difficult to track them down,” she said slowly.

“Difficult, but not impossible,” said Howard.

“We’re not even sure they’re rental cars,” she said.

“True, but it’s unlikely they’d risk using their own vehicles.”

“They could be stolen.”

“That’s also true. In fact, that’s a good line of inquiry. You should check if any stolen cars match the description. But first you should start checking all the licences which were used to obtain the rentals we know about.”

Her smile tightened. “I already told you that I’d done that.”

Howard shook his head. “No, you said the licences were in order. Which they would be if they’d been stolen and not reported. Or if the licences were genuine but based on fake IDs. All you need for a licence is to pass the test and show a birth certificate. And birth certificates are easy to forge or you can get one for a dead child. What we’ve got to do is to contact the owner of each licence and check that they did rent the car. And ask them where they went.”

“Cole, that could take weeks.”

“If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes,” said Howard. “And if that draws a blank you’ll have to widen the area of investigation. Go to a one-hundred-mile radius from Phoenix. And keep extending it, to Tucson and beyond if it’s necessary. This is important, Kelly.” The girl glared at him as if she was going to say something, but instead she just nodded and turned on her heels. Her expensive wool skirt swung from side to side like a filly’s tail as she stormed out of Howard’s office.

Mary Hennessy stood in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her reflection. She’d always wanted to be a blonde when she was a little girl. She’d driven her mother to distraction: each time a birthday came round she’d always ask for the same thing — blonde curls — and she’d sent innumerable letters up the chimney to Santa Claus until she’d reached the age where she realised that hair colour was genetic and not something that a parent could change. By the time she discovered that chemicals could alter her natural brown colour she no longer wanted to be blonde. Now here she was, just about to turn fifty, with hair the colour of a mid-summer wheatfield. She turned her head from side to side, then bent forward to check the roots. The dye job was good for another week or so, she decided. She raised her head and smoothed the skin around her neck with her fingertips. It was, she acknowledged with a twinge of regret, beginning to lose some of its elasticity. She shuddered, remembering the turkey necks of old aunts who’d visited her house when she was a child and given her minty-tasting kisses and pressed sixpences into her palm. Soon it would be her turn to face the ravages of time, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. Perversely, her hair looked better than ever: the blonde locks suited her and the light perm made it much fuller. It also completely altered her appearance, though it matched the photograph in the American passport on her dressing table.

She adjusted the neck of her polo-neck pullover and then took a houndstooth jacket out of the closet and slipped it on. With the black jeans the outfit was casual but businesslike, she decided. Just right. She collected her car from the hotel car park and drove to the airport.