Стивен Хантер - G-Man

He started again, drove a few blocks and wound his way back to the main drag — Wisconsin — and turned left, aiming to head down to Georgetown, take the Key Bridge to Virginia, then the parkway to the Beltway to Nick’s big house near McLean. He drove, checking mirrors for headlights that didn’t waver in their pace or distance from him, and saw nothing. At a busy intersection, he looked around, committing to memory the cars behind him, and then pulled into a street parking space to let them slide by. He waited, he waited, he waited, and then resumed his journey. At the next stoplight, he made the same quick check to see if any of the cars were from the first batch. Nope, nothing.

He drove on back to McLean, again monitoring for pace and distance behind him, saw nothing. He finally arrived at the road off of which Nick’s cul-de-sac was sited and, a street before, turned off, parked, went dark. No car followed along the road for some time, much less pulled into his street. He felt secure now, so he completed the journey to Nick’s, waiting in the driveway for any action. There was none.

He went in the house with his key, found no one awake, reset the alarm code, and went straight to the guest room to go to bed. But first, he called his wife and had a nice old-marriage chat, and then said, “Look, this is silly, but you haven’t seen anybody around, have you?”

“Around? What could that possibly mean?”

“You know, lurking, following, peeking.”

“Lord, Bob, you promised on this one, no adventures.”

“I can’t see that this is an adventure. It’s only my sordid old past. It shouldn’t be of interest to anybody, it makes no sense, but I just had a feeling I was being followed.” He edited Nikki out of the sequence to keep it simple.

“Maybe it’s just paranoia. You have many reasons to be paranoid, and I don’t know why you never are.”

The answer: his enemies tended to be dead, not in the shadows.

“Okay,” he said, “maybe it’s just that,” and signed off.

The next morning — he lingered in bed to avoid Nick’s wife, Sally, who had never been a big Bob Lee fan — he put the question to Nick over coffee.

“No,” said Nick. “Nothing.”

“No strange parked cars, no weird sensations of being observed through glass, no odd coincidence like the stranger turning up over and over again.”

“I haven’t been paying attention. But I’d like to think I’d notice.”

Bob told him of last night’s oddness.

“She wouldn’t feel something or see something if something weren’t there.”

“I’ll bump my head up to Condition Yellow for a few days,” said Nick.

“Appreciate that. See, what bothers me is not the possibility that she’s wrong but that she’s right. Because if she is, these guys were really good and when she picked them up they disengaged. How would they know their cover was blown?”

“Isn’t that an interesting question.”

“They’re so good, in fact, either a. they don’t exist or b. they’re high-skill operators and that kind of talent doesn’t come cheap, so whoever — again, if he exists — is behind this is investing big money in the op.”

“So it would seem,” said Nick.

“Now, let me ask you: you know everything I know about my grandfather, you know everything I’ve learned, maybe you know more because you’ve read the files a lot more carefully than I have, can you see any reason in any of it for anybody else to be interested?”

“Anybody else? Do you have an idea?”

“I have nothing. But, after all, I’m known to the Agency, I’m known to your folks, I’m known to various alphabet agencies that don’t exist, and it’s not impossible that one of them has opened a new file on me.”

“Maybe it’s the IRS. Have you paid your taxes?”

“Always over-generously.”

“No alimony, no back payments, no debts, no angry husbands, croupiers, environmental impact agencies, nothing from your big land deal?”

“I don’t think so. Nothing I can see.”

“Well, maybe the Agency or Homeland Security have you tabbed as an antiterror consultant, subject sniping, and they’re discreetly checking you out before they make an offer, because if you’re up to something nasty, they don’t want to go down with you.”

“I suppose. But I’ve done nothing for months but sit on the porch like a lump and, all of a sudden, I go off on this little crusade to learn about a man who’s been dead since 1942 and suddenly, somewhere, there seems to be a stirring.”

“Any organized crime irons in the fire?”

“Nothing I’ve turned up. Maybe the old bastard’s downfall at the Bureau involved organized crime somehow, but, really, that was over eighty years ago. Who would care now?”

“Well,” said Nick, “if you’re still thinking conspiracy, it’s my experience that, more often than not, if any kind of conspiracy, even potential conspiracy, exists, it’d for one reason: not intelligence, not revenge, not justice, not anger, it’s dough, it’s bucks.”

“That’s a very good point, and I agree that the profit motive is the motive in just about everything.”

“So… where’s the lost fortune? Under the X in that Boy Scout map Granddad drew? Where’s the treasure? Are you likely to turn up the lost John Dillinger millions? Did Baby Face steal an Old Master? Did any of the boys steal diamonds, stock certificates that later became Xerox, land deeds, gold-mine maps?”

This was the stumper.

“That thousand uncirculated I found in the strongbox. Maybe they think there’s more, but I can’t believe there was, as the sums those days were so much smaller. Dillinger stole about a hundred fifty thousand over all his robberies, and Baby Face was way behind him. So even if there’s a hundred fifty grand under the X in that map, that’s not so much by today’s standards.”

“No, it’s not.”

“And even if there were, uncirculated money from 1934 would be damned hard to reintegrate for profit without lots of attention.”

“That’s true,” said Nick. “So thinking about units of wealth disproportionate to their small size that could be hidden in that final X-marks-the-spot, diamonds would seem to be one of the possibles, because you could get a couple of millions’ worth of stones into a briefcase. Big uncut stones, unregistered. That might be worth mounting some kind of operation.”

“I don’t see anything about diamonds in this. All those other things, nothing either. These farm boys were strictly in a cash-and-carry business — as in, they carried a lot of cash out the door. I just don’t see any kind of hidden wealth in play here.”

“Many questions, no answers.”

“Maybe it’s just my imagination, but then there’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t have no imagination.”

LINCOLN AVENUE

CHICAGO

July 22, 1934

There was hubbub everywhere on the nineteenth floor. Young agents couldn’t settle down to work, though it was Saturday, and drifted about, forming and reforming knots, full of ball-game excitement and not a little apprehension. Everybody smoked, and the heavy overheads pushed the fog out the open windows into the superheated Chicago air. It would break 100 again today, not that the young men were in any state to notice it. The bathroom was overused, nobody ate a thing, nobody could sit still. Some guys went all chattery, some went all solemn, some just wandered, dreamy looks on their faces.

Only in one room could serenity be found. That was the arms room. Since the apprehension was slated to take place in a public area, the Marbro Theatre, an ornate palace of exhibition, and it was certain to be crowded on a hot night where its air-conditioning offered some surcease from the hammer of the heat and the anvil of the humidity, Sam had declared no long guns. The Thompsons, the Browning rifles, the Model 11 riot guns sat in their rack in the vault, the vault door sealed, no chits out, no guns unaccounted for by Ed Hollis’s careful reckoning.