Time to Kill (35 page)

‘Maybe,' conceded Potter. ‘It's evidence we're short of, not reasons. We'll all go,' decided Potter.

‘What about the gun licence application?' said Slater.

‘Something else that's out of my jurisdiction,' said Potter. ‘That's something for the local PD.'

They hadn't laughed or ridiculed him, Slater realized. He hadn't felt they despised him as a defector, either. There was, in fact, a lot about the encounter that he hadn't expected. Some, indeed, that he hadn't fully or properly understood.

‘Sorry I was irritable when we last talked,' said Mason. ‘That's why I'm calling so soon, to say sorry.'

‘You said you weren't mad,' reminded Beverley.

‘I'd had a bad day.'

‘How come?'

‘Now I've decided to settle out there I'm transferring banks,' said Mason, the lie one of several he'd rehearsed during the interceding and unsettling nineteen hours.

‘You didn't tell me you were doing that.'

‘I hadn't thought about it until I got here, which was stupid.'

‘What's the problem?'

The problem is that you haven't already told me what you and Glynis Needham are talking about, thought Mason. ‘I imagined it was going to be easy but it isn't. I've got to go back tomorrow and sign some more forms.'

‘How's it going with the lawyer?'

He had to switch this fucking conversation! ‘Slower than I expected there, as well. I miss you.'

‘I miss you, too. What—'

‘I don't want to talk about me,' Mason cut across her. ‘I want to talk about you. What are you doing?' Mason felt hot, stifled, and wished he could open the door of the booth at the Annapolis main post office.

‘Working, what else?'

‘Busy?' Why was she holding out on him?

‘I heard from Glynis.'

At last! ‘She planning to come out again?'

‘About you.'

‘What about me?' Mason hadn't intended the question to be so sharp and bit angrily at his own lip.

‘Wanted to know if you'd got fixed up with a job yet.'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘That your interviews were going well. That's what you told me, wasn't it?'

That wouldn't take two telephone calls. ‘Why's she so interested? I thought you were my case officer now.'

‘She also wanted to know about the compensation claim. She was glad you weren't going to go ahead with it.'

‘That all?'”

‘What else could there be?'

‘I don't know,' said Mason, in rare honesty. The damned dyke
had
kept on about the penitentiary case, he reminded himself.

‘She did talk about coming out again,' conceded Beverley.

Getting there! Mason said, ‘What did you tell her?'

‘She didn't talk dates. I told her to call me again when she was more definite.'

‘You think asking about me was just an excuse to make plans to come out and hit on you again?'

‘That's exactly what I think.'

‘Is that why you're sounding so down?' There wasn't a problem, Mason determined: no cause for him to re-plan or reschedule anything. Just one thing, he corrected himself. He didn't think he'd bother to go back to San Francisco, convenient – and pleasurable – though it was to have his very own sex slave.

‘I've got my period. It's a bad one.'

‘We'll think of something to put Glynis off.'

‘You going to give me your number?'

‘That's another pain in the ass,' said Mason, coming to another rehearsal. ‘I checked out this morning from where I've been for the last couple of days: you could have thrown a saddle on the cockroaches and ridden in the Kentucky Derby. I'm going to try a Marriott, downtown. I'll give you a call later, with the number. You going to be in the office all day?'

‘All day,' she said.

‘I hope the period gets better.'

‘So do I. When do you think you'll get back?'

‘It's difficult to say. Not much longer.'

‘You promise?'

‘I promise.'

‘I love you.'

‘I love you back.'

‘Goodbye, darling.'

‘Goodbye Beverley,' said Mason, meaning it.

‘What do you think?' asked Denver.

‘It's definitely Dimitri Sobell,' said Burt Hodges, the original CIA debriefer, whose retirement home was at Harper's Ferry, and who'd recognized the Russian's assumed name from the
Frederick News-Post
and watched the entire interview on video link to an upstairs room. Hodges was a trim, upright man, the only hint of him passing seventy years his almost total baldness.

‘We'd confirmed that from the voiceprint,' reminded Potter.

‘You think your guys will be able to pick up anything from those flower stems?' asked Hodges.

‘If it's scientifically possible they'll get it,' insisted Potter. The coffee had been replaced at the Tennessee Avenue safe house with a bottle of Wild Turkey, the video turned off. All three men were drinking.

‘It would be a hell of a confirmation,' said Denver. ‘What did you think of Slater?'

‘Pretty good,' judged Hodges, who'd spent virtually every day for three months with the man during his defection debriefing. ‘Not as rusty as I'd expected. His story sounds genuine by its very weakness. If they were fantasizing they'd have made it a hell of a lot better than that.'

‘I'm not happy about the handguns,' cautioned Potter. ‘If some innocent gets shot it'll be my tit in the wringer.'

Denver smiled at the thought of the physical impossibility of that being inflicted on a man of Potter's size. ‘It'll work out. There's not a lot of options.'

‘There never is,' said Potter. ‘So far I've been lucky. I keep worrying it can't go on without breaking.'

Twenty-Six

S
later hoped that Ann's conviction would be allayed by knowing that both the CIA and FBI were jointly involved, but it wasn't. Since the discovery of the bouquet on David's grave, she'd become more adamant than ever that Mason was stalking them and it remained the only all-consuming subject of every conversation between them, not discussed as a possibility but as an indisputable fact. She even argued that the intelligence organizations' interest was confirmation of their having been found by her ex-husband, continuing to refuse to leave the house except for their mourning vigil at the cemetery, where the nervousness shivered through her. Her only slight recovery had been to re-open the gallery, although at a distance, liaising by telephone several times a day with Jean, whom she officially appointed manager, with a salary increase. The day of Slater's safe house encounter she agreed to her former PA employing a recently graduated art student who applied for a work-experience position and had Slater drop off some pre-signed cheques for Jean to keep the finances up to date. She also had him reiterate her refusal to stage any further exhibitions. Among the accumulated mail had been two enquiries, one at the international level for Andre Worlack. There was no one resembling Jack Mason on the CCTV footage Slater examined and reset, as he had done in yet another effort to reassure Ann since her self-imposed imprisonment.

Slater kept to the arrangement he'd agreed with David Potter after the flower retrieval, despite Ann's demands that he call the FBI supervisor earlier, using the intervening time to fully catch up with everything outstanding at his own office. He, too, declined two overdue enquiries, although he could have fitted them into his existing schedule. In reply to a letter from the San Jose company, he promised to let them know as soon as possible when he would be able to return to New Mexico to discuss the further, promised work. He enclosed with that letter the provisional plans for the first two already agreed contracts. On his way home to collect Ann for that evening's cemetery visit, he enrolled them both in the gun club with which he'd so far only had telephone conversations, despite not having received their handgun permits. The senior instructor warned that it was extremely unlikely either of them would be granted a gun carrying licence.

Slater hadn't told Ann of the discussion with Potter about the guns, knowing it would increase the tension that seemed to be permanent between them and which quickly surfaced when he refused to make the scheduled telephone call to the FBI man before noon.

‘You told me he fixed today!' she flared.

‘Because today he might hear something but it won't be yet, not nine o'clock in the morning. People have to get to work, look at and assess whatever experiments they've carried out before they can tell him.'

‘So now you're a scientist! Know how it's done!'

‘Stop it, Ann. It's wrecking us,' said Slater, a familiar plea.

‘We're already wrecked!'

‘We could stop it happening if we tried.' He was coming more and more to believe that she was right.

‘If I tried, you mean!'

‘I mean we're not going to achieve anything if we go on fighting … making things worse than they already are. We could today get the results of the Bureau tests that prove Mason didn't put the flowers there.'

‘He did!' insisted Ann, irrationally.

‘What if they find fingerprints that aren't Jack's? Are you going to believe the findings of the best scientific criminal investigation facilities in the world? Or yourself?'

‘Call them!' Ann insisted, refusing the logic as she customarily did.

‘Not before noon,' refuted Slater, just as insistently. ‘I'll come back from the office, do it from here. You'll know the moment I do.'

Would they know, one way or another? Slater asked himself, on the first of his journeys that day into the town, the routine automatic now to stop at the gallery to go through the overnight CCTV film as he had at the house before leaving. Abruptly, unable to stop it, Slater sniggered, immediately conscious of the curious look from a commuter next to him in the momentary traffic jam, hurriedly and visibly putting his hand out to the radio, which he wasn't playing, as if turning a programme up. It was surreal, absurd, to realize so much depending upon a dollar's worth of flowers! Except that it wasn't funny. Neither Denver nor Potter had laughed, thought it ridiculous. This was how things were in real, serious life: situations being resolved or exacerbated by the unreal, the unexpected. He was as uncertain and worried as Ann, just better able to control it – conceal it – because of his ingrained professional training. Perhaps not as easily able to control it, though. There was a tinge, maybe more than a tinge, of hysteria in that giggling outburst. He'd been so quickly aware of the curious frown from the guy in the next car because he was constantly alert to everything around him, relieved that the traffic was moving again, as anxious as Ann to pick up their handguns and undergo the lessons.

Would they get a carrying licence if it were proved Mason had handled the flowers? But this wouldn't be enough, even if it were granted ahead of their becoming competent gun handlers. They'd have to be given protection, as they had when he'd defected. Then, he remembered, it had been virtually protective custody, he and Ann separated, able only to talk on the phone which would inevitably have been bugged. Then the CIA and FBI had needed him, to learn everything he could tell them – and maybe things he might try to conceal – for his evidence against Mason at the trial. Would the need to keep the Witness Programme intact, as Potter had insisted, be sufficient this time? Running ahead of himself, Slater mentally cautioned. He shouldn't speculate ahead of learning the scientific results. He could, in one respect though, perhaps the most important: he was quite sure Ann wouldn't accept that her ex-husband wasn't hunting them even if the FBI produced irrefutable evidence to the contrary; no more than he would, not completely.

There was nothing on the gallery CCTV and it only took ten minutes to reset but Ann had already called the office once before he got there.

‘They might have called you ahead of you calling them,' she said.

‘They haven't.'

‘You are coming back?'

‘I promised, didn't I?'

‘If they've found anything … that it's him, I mean, I don't want you to go back to work. I want you to stay here, with me.'

‘All right,' agreed Slater. Could Hillary Nelson be wrong? Too many questions, too much uncertainty, he thought, one nagging at him more persistently than all the others. He shouldn't make monsters out of shadows, as Ann was doing, he warned himself.

‘It can only mean that they've confirmed it's him!' insisted Ann, hunched in the seat beside him as he drove towards Washington and the safe house on Tennessee Avenue.

‘It doesn't mean that at all,' refuted Slater.

‘What did this guy … Potter … say?'

‘You were close enough to hear when I called him from the house. Just that he thought it would be best if we met personally rather than talked on the telephone and why didn't we both drive in to where I met them before.' Slater was as bewildered as Ann by the suggestion. David Potter and Peter Denver would both be cover names but neither the CIA nor the FBI casually surrendered the location of safe houses without good reason. Slater had been surprised at Tennessee Avenue being identified to him for his first encounter, despite his long absence from Russian intelligence. He'd never before heard of it being done with anyone so peripherally involved as they would consider Ann to be. Perhaps they didn't consider her to be peripheral. Or maybe they intended abandoning Tennessee Avenue. Safe houses weren't maintained indefinitely.

‘They know it's him,' Ann continued to insist, slumping lower in the passenger seat but at the same time looking anxiously around her, as he had been doing since they'd left Frederick, although not so obviously and despite knowing that locating a following car on a traffic-thronged interstate was virtually impossible.