John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

“So big!”

“Well, that’s Jack. He never does anything halfway. But that’s why I’m calling. I wanted to give them a present, you know, and I was wondering where I should send it.”

Olga hesitated. “But you can take it to the wedding,” she told him. “Is soon, I think. Tomorrow or next day.”

“Ri-iighht,” Burke replied, “but… where is it, anyway?”

There was a long silence, and then: “You don’t be… invited ?”

“Oh, yeah, of course I was, but… I’m on the road, and I left the invitation at home, so-”

“I’m sorry,” Olga told him, “I am not permitted to provide this… information. Only Madame Puletskaya can give this. And like you, she’s traveling. But I know she calls Wednesday.” She paused. “You’re in U.S.?”

“Yes.”

“What is your time zone?” she asked crisply.

“Rocky Mountain.”

“Oh yes? Then I arrange she calls you – Rocky Mountain, eight to noon. Yes?”

“Yeah, sure, but-”

“Please? Your number? I am giving it to her on Wednesday.”

Burke recited the telephone number of the motel, and said, “The problem is… that’s a week! And-”

“Sorry. Is best I can do!” Then she thanked him. And hung up.

Seated at his desk, Ray Kovalenko shook his head and swore quietly to himself, then threw his hands in the air and half growled, half shouted, “Shit!”

He’d turned his office upside down, and checked the clothes he’d been wearing. To no avail. The index card was nowhere to be found.

As for Burke, he was MIA. It wasn’t just that he didn’t answer his phone. The Garda was looking for him, and no one had seen the man for days.

The father-in-law, Aherne, was about as much help as a dose of the clap. Feck off!

Kovalenko had gone to the trouble of locating and contacting Burke’s family in Virginia, but they seemed genuinely surprised to learn that their son wasn’t in Dublin. (And that the FBI was looking for him.)

So he had racked his brain, trying to remember what Burke had said about d’Anconia – and who he was. He’d been to Belgrade. He’d been in Allenwood. He’d gone to UCLA. Or USC. One of those places. None of it was any help without a name, a real name, and Kovalenko didn’t have a clue. Sounds like… It was on the tip of his tongue, and then it was gone. Williams…

Meanwhile, Andrea Cabot called twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. He was dodging her.

In the end, it took a trip to Dublin and a large serving of crow before Tommy Aherne would even agree to see him. And then it was only to negotiate. He wanted the indictment dropped, the sanctions lifted, and a new passport for Burke.

“Done!” Kovalenko agreed.

“And there’s the issue of compensation-”

“Compensation? Compensation for what?”

“Business lost,” Aherne told him.

“I can’t-”

“Then I’ll suppose you’ll be on your way,” Aherne told him, taking the FBI agent by the elbow, and turning him toward the door.

Kovalenko froze. After a moment, he said, “I can give you a letter.”

“And what would I do with a letter?” Aherne asked.

“As Legat, I’ll acknowledge that a mistake was made. And that it was our fault.”

“You mean, your fault,” Aherne told him.

“Exactly. It was my fault. You can do what you want with the letter. I’m sure your solicitors will think of something.”

Aherne grunted his grudging assent, and went for pen and paper.

When the letter was written, and the ink blown dry, Aherne said, “Michael’s in the States, isn’t he?”

“Where?”

“Nevada,” the old man told him.

“Where in Nevada? It’s a big state!”

Aherne shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “If he calls, I’ll tell ’im you want a word.”

At first, Kovalenko thought the old man had tricked him, and that he was lying. But, eventually, he accepted the depressing truth. The old fart didn’t know where his son-in-law was. And no, Burke hadn’t said anything to him about d’Anconia’s real identity.

“But didn’t he tell you all about it?” Aherne asked. “He said he went to London. Were you not in, man?”

It took only a day to confirm that Michael Burke had entered the United States from Ireland two days earlier, passing through immigration control at JFK. Credit card information revealed that Burke flew to Reno from New York, and rented a car from Alamo. A green Hyundai with California plates.

But that was it. Kovalenko contacted the FBI office in Las Vegas, and asked them to put out a BOL for Burke’s rental car.

Then, seventy-six hours and seven phone calls after Andrea Cabot’s initial call, Kovalenko persuaded his contacts in the Garda to visit Burke’s apartment. “We’re getting information from a confidential, but very reliable source that Mr. Burke is a victim of foul play. If you could visit the apartment discreetly, just to see if he’s dead on the floor, we’d be very grateful. Oh! and while you’re there, hopefully this morning, maybe you could make a copy of the hard drive on his computer and shoot it over to me…”

Eighteen hours later, he had the name of “the American” Andrea was screaming about.

Wilson. Jack Wilson.

Wilson was impatient – and worried that Irina had run into some kind of trouble at Immigration. Where was she? Her flight had landed half an hour ago. He stood with his double bouquet of red roses, looking for her in the parade of humanity streaming through Security.

He felt sorry for them. They were thrilled to be in Vegas – you could see it on their faces – but if they were here on June 22, they were going to be in for a rough time. The city was as artificial as that place in the Middle East, where they had the “underwater restaurant.” A metropolis in the middle of nowhere, Vegas boasted nineteen out of twenty of the largest hotels in the world. And it was almost entirely dependent on the kindness of technology. The hotels would be uninhabitable in the absence of air-conditioning. (This June, temperatures were around a hundred degrees most days.) And what would they drink? The water supply depended on pumps that run on electricity, and even the dams allocating water around the state relied on state-of-the-art electrical systems using digital technologies. The water would be gone in a tick of the clock.

Forty miles away, Lake Mead would become a mecca once everyone realized that the grid wouldn’t be coming back “up.” Not soon. Not ever. Maybe a few of them would think of Culpeper, and realize what was happening. But what they wouldn’t know, and couldn’t guess, was that this time they couldn’t just walk to the next town. This time there was nowhere to go. This time the whole country was going down and, with it, the world.

Just getting to Lake Mead would be difficult for most of them. It was forty miles through high desert, so it wasn’t as if they’d be able to carry much in the way of food and water. Eventually, the ones who survived would defend their access to water, build defensive perimeters, and retribalize. How long would that take? A month? Two, at the most.

Vulnerable people passed him. A woman in a wheelchair, a mother with an infant in a sling, a very obese man. They wouldn’t have a chance. And neither, of course, would Mandy. He’d been tempted to bring her to the B-Lazy-B. But he’d resisted, hardening his heart to his purpose. Mandy was the past, and the past was something he could not risk revisiting.