Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Richardson came in behind her, but she didn’t look up. “How’s it going?”

“I’ve got it down to four,” she said.

“How the hell did you do that? What are the criteria?”

“It would take an hour to show you. We don’t have an hour.”

“Give me the four.”

She handed him the three passenger lists with four names left untouched. “I don’t know how to get it down to one.”

He glanced at the lists. “Dallas … Chicago … Los Angeles … another Chicago. What do you want to do?”

“If there’s any way in the world to hold all four of them, do it,” Elizabeth said. “He’s running. Though he doesn’t exactly run; he just sort of fades out. He won’t stay put. He’ll get on another flight under another name. He’ll pay cash.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s no time. Look at those ETAs.”

“I’ll get the FBI on the phone.”

* * *

Elizabeth watched Richardson through the open door of his office. It was the third time he had been on the telephone with the FBI agent. He held his ballpoint pen over a yellow legal pad, at first poised to write something down, then just gripping it like a knife, clicking the button on the end of it nervously, retracting and extending the tip over and over as he listened.

She waited at her old desk and tried to avoid the bad luck by watching the first group of ambitious GS-7’s and −9’s coming in to work early, each expecting to be the first, seeing her and looking puzzled, then seeing Richardson’s door open and looking disappointed. She had been like them once, and it mortified her now, but at the time it hadn’t been ambition. She just hadn’t known enough history. They had still called it the Organized Crime Task Force in those days, behaving as though they had been brought together to cope with an emergency that would go away if they worked harder than the Mafia. That was before she had learned enough to realize that criminal conspiracy was the natural state of affairs in all civilized countries. People who worked for the Justice Department had to be in it for the long haul.

But then Richardson was on his feet and out of his office, and the expression on his face was enough. “No hits,” he said. “Dallas is seventy-one years old, and both Chicagos are military personnel. L.A. is already on the ground and the FBI doesn’t even have its team there yet. I’m sorry.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s not too late. He’s got to be in the L.A. airport, or near it, trying to get out. He doesn’t have another reservation. Don’t we even have a birdwatcher in a major airport like that?”

“We don’t have a picture or a description or anything else. Nobody’s ever seen him. What are they supposed to do?”

“He’ll be getting on another flight. Try the name. It might not be any good now; next time he can call himself Rufus T. Firefly if he feels like it. But there’s got to be a way to stop him before he gets on another plane. It will be a one-way ticket bought for cash in the airport since his plane landed.”

“I don’t know,” said Richardson. “This is getting thinner and thinner.”

“Please,” said Elizabeth. “This is closer than we ever got ten years ago.”

Jack Hamp was sitting in the coffee shop overlooking Runway 23 with four engine mechanics from United when the crew chief happened to notice that the light on his beeper was blinking. It didn’t blink often, so he didn’t look at it often. He wasn’t under the illusion that if there was an emergency they would think to warn him, so a month after he had gotten this assignment he had opened it up and cut the wire from the relay to the little speaker.

Jack Hamp had managed to retire from the Los Angeles Police Department after twenty years and gotten a job as what he had thought was a Justice Department field investigator. At the moment the job didn’t involve much investigating. He was supposed to loiter in the L.A. airport and watch the huge amorphous, anonymous crush of people getting on and off airplanes to see if he could spot any of the fifty or so men and women that the Justice Department was giving special attention to at any given moment. Most of the time, when somebody like that was coming through, Hamp would have the reservation in advance, and all he would have to do was to pass by the gate to see him step aboard, then report what he had seen: “Subject Vincent Toscanzio. At 13:53 subject boarded TWA flight 921 for Chicago, ETA 7:53 P.M. Was accompanied by two male Caucasians listed as Harold Carver, positive I.D. Joseph Vortici, and Paul Smith, probable I.D. Frederick Moltare.” It all went into the hopper for some analyst to sort out in Washington.

The rest of the time he fished the crowds for Special Surprise Guests nobody had known were out and about. He had no vanity, and he was good at looking like something other than a federal cop. He was six feet three and lanky, with pale blue eyes, long blond hair and a mustache. He looked like the aging cowboy he probably would have been if he hadn’t been optimistic enough to join the marines twenty-five years ago and accidentally seen a few big cities. He usually went to a gate when a crowded flight from a major departure point was unloading. He would stand a little back from the gauntlet of moms and pops scrutinizing the file of passengers to see Junior a second earlier. He would carry an object—maybe a magazine, maybe only sunglasses or a set of car keys—but never a cup of coffee, because that was what people drank when they were on duty. And like the moms and pops, Jack Hamp would stare at each face for a moment right in the eyes, because he too was hoping to recognize someone.

He managed to pick out a few interesting faces each month, and this probably made his reports worth sending, but he didn’t much like the assignment. He suspected he had gotten it because the Department wanted him on the payroll, but didn’t have a clear idea what to do with him on a day-to-day basis. He was young to be a retired cop—forty-six—but he was too old and uneducated to be on the Upward Trail with the rest of the Boy Scouts.

The Justice Department had put him through a refresher course in investigative techniques of the sort he had given to ten or twelve litters of rookie cops over the years, an orientation for federal employees that he had used to compile a list of whose calls he could ignore, and a little practice in shooting holes in cardboard cutouts that looked like the villains in a comic book. Then they had sent him back to L.A.

Hamp walked with a barely perceptible limp as he got up and made his way to the pay telephone at the other end of the concourse. The man who had put the hole in his left thigh eight years ago had taken a little of the femur with it, and he sometimes felt the stainless-steel pin. He dialed the number quickly. “This is Hamp,” he said.

The man on the other end was somebody he had never talked to before, but Hamp knew Richardson’s name. It was one of the ones he couldn’t ignore.

Ackerman walked to the Hong Kong Airlines desk. The man behind the counter was Chinese, but he had an engraved name-plate on his jacket that read MR. SULLIVAN. His English accent made Ackerman homesick for Schaeffer’s life. “May I help you, sir?”

“You have a flight to Hong Kong in twenty minutes,” he said. “Do you have any seats left?”

Mr. Sullivan clicked some keys on his computer. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s fully booked. We have another at four-seventeen.”

Ackerman hesitated. Hong Kong was okay, because he could go back through British customs after a week without raising any eyebrows. If he flew back through New York, there would be watchers in the airport, and he might never make it out. He decided that waiting was the smaller risk. “I’ll take it.”