Brian Freemantle - Two Women

Jane hurried back inside, but at once cut left for the next exit, guessing the reinforcements were to close the store: search it, certainly. She emerged directly out on to the street, without being stopped, without seeing a policeman even, although she could hear a far-away siren. Jane kept walking, using the crossing further to distance herself from the car park before turning to go back towards the junction where she’d first seen the policemen, who had obviously seen her – or rather the Volkswagen and its plate number – after all. The Marriott could only be 50 yards after she took a right at the junction.

The dark-suited man seemed to come out of the rear of the Mercedes with the same movement of the door opening, completely blocking her path. The blow, low in her stomach, was not hard but professionally expert, winding her, preventing any protesting shout and doubling her up at the same time, so that she was easily thrust into the car with the man tight behind, virtually lifting her. The Mercedes was at the lights before Jane could straighten.

Tony Caputo, the Cavalcante consigliere, looked back from the front seat and said: ‘If you try to scream now you’ve got your breath back we’ll cut off your tongue, Mrs Carver. Not completely, just about half an inch from its tip. You’ll still be able to speak but you’ll sound like a retard. You’re not going to scream, are you, Mrs Carver?’

‘No,’ said Jane.

‘He won’t show,’ declared Barbara Donnelly. ‘We all know he won’t show. He shows, he’s pussy-face of this or any other year. And I didn’t think we were dealing with pussies.’

Hanlan hadn’t heard pussy-face before. He liked it. He said: ‘We gotta go with it, everything as planned. It’s all we’ve got.’

They were in the CCTV viewing room of the Northcote building, the FBI installations doubling the number of cameras and monitors. The lobby reception staff were doubled too, the additions all police. The elevators were staffed, which they weren’t normally, both with FBI agents. There were FBI and police in every office on the floor on which the nervously waiting Geoffrey Davis had his office.

With philosophical acceptance, Hanlan said: ‘OK, what’s our recovery going to be?’

‘What makes you think there’s going to be one?’

‘Thanks for that great encouragement!’

‘Tell lies, spread lies,’ suggested the woman. ‘Lure them out of their dark places.’

‘My people will never go with it,’ rejected Hanlan. ‘Their escape is entrapment.’

‘My people will,’ insisted Barbara, who’d lit a cigarette without protest. ‘The prosecution’s yours, federal. NYPD isn’t federal. You don’t entrap anyone. You even say you don’t. Your spokesperson says you’ve no idea what the claim is all about.’

‘That puts us not co-operating.’

‘We don’t, most times. Everyone knows that.’

‘So what’s your entrapment?’

‘Defection, from a major New York Family. That’s using the Daily News invention. The investigation’s concentrated on certain specified companies. Which it is. They won’t know who the defector is but mentioning companies will convince them there is one. We don’t get some playback whispers, life ain’t fair.’

‘It was your leak, to the Daily News,’ accused Hanlan.

‘I could be offended by a question like that.’

‘Are you?’

‘It could rattle the cages.’

‘We got two women out there, one miscalculation and they’re dead.’

‘Big-time advantage of the idea,’ argued Barbara. ‘Our Family – or Families – think there’s an internal source, it deflects the attention from Jane and Alice. Diffuses it, too. Maybe even redirects resources, although I think that’s being optimistic.’

‘You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?’ It was better than anything that had occurred to him since the two women had run.

‘Talking as the ideas come to me,’ insisted Barbara Donnelly, straight-faced.

They both turned, as the door burst open. Davis said: ‘I’ve just spoken to Jane: I know where she is!’

Before anyone could speak the telephone rang and the lawyer said: ‘That’ll be her, with the address of her hotel!’

But it wasn’t.

When Hanlan took the call from Federal Plaza, Ginette Smallwood said: ‘Alice Belling’s just walked in. Says she’s got things for us.’

Charlie Petrie’s first call to the Algonquin was just after nine, directly after hearing from Caputo that their Highway Patrol source had come good with the location of the Volkswagen and that they’d picked up Jane Carver and were on their way into Manhattan. There was no way that Stanley Burcher would have already left for his meeting with the Northcote lawyer that early. Petrie kept calling, every five minutes, right up to ten o’clock, finally slamming the receiver down and saying aloud: ‘Where the fuck are you, Stanley?’

At that precise moment, in fact, Stanley Burcher was getting off the early New York shuttle to Washington’s Reagan airport, hurrying directly for a cab for Dulles airport and his already booked flight to Geneva. He believed it to have been an elementary precaution to make his escape with such a dog’s-leg detour, just in case Petrie suspected he was running and rushed people out to New York’s Kennedy terminals to intercept him. It was, of course, unlikely because another precaution had been to leave the Algonquin without paying his bill, so that callers would be told he was still a resident there.

Burcher had always been a man to take elementary precautions, which was why his recent and direct involvement in the Northcote business had been so unsettling. It had been an elementary precaution years before to obtain a legitimate Caymanian passport in the anonymous name of William Smith, the identity he was now adopting and in which his flight to Switzerland was booked. Another had been, even earlier, to open a numbered bank account in Geneva and regularly transfer his Mafia fees into it, from his equally untraceable Grand Cayman account.

Burcher was sure he was going to enjoy his Swiss retirement. The Swiss understood the attraction – and the benefits – of anonymity.

‘Where is she, Alice? Where’s Jane?’ demanded Hanlan.

‘I don’t know!’

‘Alice, you’re in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, working from kidnapping down,’ took up Barbara Donnelly. She’d come back to Federal Plaza with Hanlan, leaving their squads in place, after waiting forty-five minutes beyond the given time for Geoffrey Davis’s unappearing mystery visitor and for Jane Carver’s promised second call, which never came. Throughout that time Hanlan had remained constantly on the telephone from the Northcote building, confirming the finding of the Volkswagen – but not of Jane – at Morristown and moving McKinnon’s squad there from West Milford. He sent with them the FBI forensics team, which had completed their examination of the cabin. Despite its trashing, they’d found nothing.

‘I told you, we split up this morning at the motel. She said she wasn’t seeing the FBI without her lawyers with her and drove off the way we’d come.’ Alice was confused by their combined aggression, which started with Hanlan pedantically advising her of her Miranda rights against self-incrimination.

Hanlan acknowledged that fitted with what he’d been told by both Davis and Burt Elliott, to whom he’d also spoken from the Northcote building. The way you came from West Milford doesn’t go through Morristown, which was where your car was found.’

Alice shook her head. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I want to tell you what I do know.’

‘Finding Jane Carver’s the priority,’ said Barbara.