Christopher Reich - The First Billion

“The number belongs to another one of our Daisy taps. A Ms. Catherine Elizabeth Magnus. Ring a bell?”

“I confess I hear a wee tinkling,” said Dodson, as a deadly voice inside intoned, Enter the third murderer.

“Anyway, that number’s connected to a pretty decent phone,” Chupik continued. “Kind of a hot rod. It’s a WAP device—a wireless assisted protocol. Third-generation equipment. It can send and receive E-mail, as well as download pages from the web. I had the NSA send over the latest Daisy downloads attributed to that phone number. Usually, they sift it for the keywords we give them before sending it over, but I got it raw. This is what I found. At two thirty-two Eastern Standard Time, the number logged onto a cash transfer site on the Net. Quickpay.com. At two thirty-five, the user ordered sixty-five thousand dollars transferred from an account at the Bank of America in San Francisco to an account at Florida Commerce Bank. The beneficiary was Coastal Aviation.”

“And the sender?”

“Drumroll, please… Mr. John J. Gavallan.”

Dodson’s stomach tumbled. “Bless your soul, Mr. Chupik. I’ll mention your name to St. Peter tonight in my prayers.”

“Actually, I’d prefer if you’d mention it to my supervisor. I’m kind of sick of being a GS-15. Time I moved up a notch. You wouldn’t want to lose me to the private sector.”

“Rather to Satan himself.”

It took another hour for Dodson to put the rest of the pieces together.

While his assistants confirmed that Catherine Magnus had indeed arrived in West Palm Beach that morning—via an American Airlines red-eye, making stops in Las Vegas and Chicago—Dodson contacted Coastal Aviation. They were quick to report that they had, in fact, set up a private charter that afternoon, but neither the names Gavallan nor Magnus appeared on their manifest. The plane in question, a Gulfstream III, was chartered by an elderly man and his nurse. The flight plan called for a leg to Teterboro, New Jersey, then a transcontinental leg to Los Angeles.

“I’m sorry if my knowledge of business jets isn’t as up to date as it should be,” Dodson had said politely to the desk man at Coastal Aviation. “What is the range of a Gulfstream III?”

“About four thousand miles. But this one’s got an extra fuel tank. It can go six thousand easy.”

“Pray tell, did the elderly gentleman in question—”

“His name’s Dodson, just like you.”

Dodson bit back an expletive. He did not abide smart alecks. “Did Mr. Dodson request that the plane be fully fueled?”

“Sure did. Said he was picking up his son in Jersey and didn’t want to hang around very long. Funny thing is, he’s already half an hour overdue.”

“He is?”

“Plane took off at three-fifteen sharp, should have landed at seven latest. This Dodson fella’s not a relative of yours, is he?”

“No,” said the real Mr. Dodson. “You can rest assured he is not.”

The map was ancient, circa 1989, a moth-riven relic five feet wide and four feet tall dug up from a closet in the research library on the third floor. Politically, it was obsolete. Myanmar was called Burma. Germany was still two countries. And the Soviet Union was a single rose-colored mass spanning eleven time zones. But Howell Dodson couldn’t care less about what belonged to whom, whether Ingushetia was shown as independent or if the Panama Canal was denoted as American territory. All that mattered to his fevered brain was that the map be geographically accurate, and it was.

Leaning over the map, Dodson spread a yardstick in a line from Fort Lauderdale, seeing just how far his six thousand miles would take him. He fanned the yardstick from north to south and east to west, from Alaska to South Africa. Six thousand miles was a long distance, he discovered, and gave a man plenty of places in which to hide.

“By God, he’s gone AWOL on us,” Dodson whispered to the team of stern, clean-cut agents who had been assigned his acolytes. “Mr. Gavallan’s taken a flier on the FBI. I understand if he didn’t want to meet me at his hotel. I can see how he wouldn’t want to come into our offices right away. I’m not an unreasonable man. But damn it, when a United States citizen flees the country while being sought for questioning in connection with a multiple homicide, that’s just wrong. Get me Pierre Dupuis at Interpol. Then get me Yuri Baranov in Russia.” Something inside Dodson cracked, and he felt a flash of anger, as white and hot as lightning. “Oh, fuck, get me Crawford at Langley, as well. I suppose they should know about it too.” He looked at the eager faces staring at him. “It’s time we run along and see the judge upstairs about issuing that arrest warrant.”

Howell Dodson would teach Mr. John J. Gavallan not to toy with the United States government.

Florida had disappeared hours ago, a tobacco brown smudge swallowed by an azure sea. Distance, darkness, and the pleasant hum of a pressurized cabin relegated Gavallan’s worries to another world. Ray Luca wasn’t dead. Boris and his blond girlfriend were figments of his imagination. And Howell Dodson and baying hounds were no longer nipping at his heels. Not for the moment, anyway. Flying north by northeast at a speed of 500 knots and an altitude of 42,000 feet, Gavallan’s greatest threat lay five feet away, tucked beneath the sheets of a foldout bed.

Why are you here? he asked Cate’s sleeping countenance. Why did you follow me to Florida when you could have phoned just as easily? What else is there you’re not telling me about your other life? And finally: Who are you really?

Rising, he stepped across the cabin and adjusted the powder blue blanket so that it covered her shoulders. Cate stirred, turning onto her side and bringing her knees closer to her chest. A comma of blue black hair fell across a cheek. Her pale, generous lips parted. The cabin lights were dimmed, the door to the cockpit shut. They were in the otherworld of flight, and the sandpaper silence granted her an immunity he was not willing to extend himself.

God, how he wanted to draw back the sheets and crawl into bed next to her, to run his hands up the hard ridges of her back, to slide them around and cup her breast, to kiss that neck, that wonderfully warm and silk-soft neck, to feel her nipple harden beneath his thumb.

But she doesn’t love you anymore. Maybe she never did.

After years of his not feeling a thing, she’d awoken the dead part of him. She’d made his nerves tingle and his heart dance. She’d made him smile at odd moments. Mostly, she’d given him hope.

And then she’d taken it all away. Like that. In the snap of a finger.

They’d met three years earlier at an I-bankers’ conference one of the big firms had sponsored at the Four Seasons on Maui, this one to chart the Internet’s boundless future. It was a lavish shindig. Suites for the big shots, ocean views for everyone else. Unlimited cocktails at the hotel’s numerous bars. Breakfast buffets, whale-watching sails, excursions to the neighboring isles of Molokai and Lanai. Thrown in for respectability’s sake were a few lectures by industry specialists on topics of burning import, all to be concluded by 11 A.M. sharp lest someone miss his or her tee time at Kapalua or the jitney into Lahaina.

The conference wasn’t his style: all the glad-handling, everyone so buddy-buddy, patting each other on the back when the day before they’d been vowing to rip out the other guy’s guts. It was an exercise in ass-kissing, all expenses paid. Like it or not, though, it was a great way to build the name, to fly the firm’s banner where all the big shots could see it.