Whirlwind (14 page)

What are the odds they’re headed for the Hilton? Five hotels. One in five? No, worse. He’s on Sam’s expense account, and that means he won’t stay in a Motel 6. Son. Of. A. Bitch!

Charlie leapt to his feet. He’d left his BMW sportsute on a dirt-surfaced maintenance road near the end of the runway a road that could only be reached from the airport. Not enough time to circle back to the terminal; his only hope of intercepting Schmidt was to drive cross-country and pray that he could cut the man off before he reached the motel strip.

Let’s see what this Beamer is made of.

Four-wheel drive, and precisely the kind of suspension you’d expect German engineers to put on an ofF-roader. The X5 handled well. Besides, the ground was hard pack He didn’t have to worry about sinking up to his hubcaps in sand. On the other hand, he did have to worry about hummocks and washes and boulders and

Ouch! Where the blazes did that come from?

Twenty miles an hour was the best he could manage. Anything faster jolted the steering wheel out of his hands.

Too slow, too slow.

The lights of five trucks in convoy sped away from the airport. Charlie was still a hundred yards from the road when they passed in front of him.

He gunned his accelerator. The X5 leapt forward. Luck was on his side. The ground was level, obstacles few, he could move faster here and…

Oh, hell!

His headlights picked out a drainage ditch separating open desert from asphalt. He slammed on his brakes. The BMW fishtailed. A cloud of gravel fountained into the air, rattling against the side panels. His front bumper tilted down. Charlie locked his fingers to the steering wheel, his stomach falling as he plunged down a thirty-degree slope.

Jerking his foot from the brake, he seized the gear lever and downshifted to first. The Beamer was sliding sideways, ready to roll. Charlie wrenched the wheel, steering into the slide, wrestling to regain control. A concrete sluice lined the ditch’s bottom. The BMWs bumper hit it hard. A rooster tail of sparks sprayed by the driver’s side window. Charlie gritted his teeth as the truck skidded left.

The X5 tipped sickeningly onto two wheels. Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Charlie unsnapped his safety belt, hurling his weight right. The BMW tottered. Charlie’s shoulder was on the passenger seat. He twitched the wheel left, then pulled straight again. The Beamer weaved, shifted balance, and thudded back onto four wheels.

Flooring the gas pedal, he pulled himself erect into the driver’s seat. The BMW’s ventilation system sucked the smoke of burning rubber into his face. Traction!

Grinning fiercely, he accelerated up the sluice. Thirty miles an hour. Thirty-five. Forty. High beams bright, he kept his eyes left looking for the right, for the perfect…

No rocks. Not an easy angle, but better than anywhere else. He aimed for it. The BMWs front wheels clawed dry earth. Charlie held steady, and held tight. The speedometer read a bit more than fifty miles an hour. Air bags or no, if anything went wrong, he was in trouble.

He fumbled for his seatbelt.

The world tilted sideways. The Beamer exploded up the slope. Its undercarriage shrieked across a rock as it reached the crest, bounced four wheels into the air, and thudded down hard.

He was on the road, and safe.

Which was more than could be said for the Kolodenkova girl. Schmidt’s convoy had already passed through the intersection. Charlie, cursing furiously, watched them turn, one by one, into the Hilton parking lot. She’d only be minutes ahead of them.

Murphy’s law being what it is, the traffic light at the intersection turned red just before he reached it. Murphy strikes again, a darkened police car sat directly across the street. Inside a patrolman unlimbered his radar gun, preparing to trap unwary speeders.

There’d be no running this particular red light. Charlie cursed louder.

The light winked from red to green. Keeping within the speed limit, Charlie turned left, cautiously signaling like a good citizen, and pulled into the Hilton’s driveway. Mitch Conroy’s stolen black Dodge pickup was the first thing he saw.

The second was Schmidt and his punks waltzing through the hotel’s front entrance.

No time to park, Charlie braked to a halt in the loading zone. Leaving his keys in the ignition, he ran for the entrance.

There they were. Aw, God, there they all were. Ten wolves loped laughing toward the reception desk. Not three yards away, Irina Kolodenkova stood frozen like a deer in the headlights. All Schmidt had to do was glance up to see her. He’d recognize her as soon as he spotted her. Dyed hair and inept makeup wouldn’t fool a pro like Schmidt, not for a second.

No choice, no plan, no time the only thing Charlie could do was improvise. “Hey, Schmidt! Yeah, you, you dumb Dutchman!”

Ten men turned. Nine of them were reaching gun hands beneath their jackets. Schmidt merely frowned. “Charles McKenzie,” he purred. “How un expected.” He flicked his hand, signaling his followers to leave their weapons out of sight.

The receptionist’s eyes went wide. She started to lift the phone. A bear-like paw one of Schmidt’s aides snatched it off the counter. “Cool it, lady.” She backed out of sight.

“Charles, I am astonished.” That creepy Boer voice, utterly devoid of emotion; Charlie wondered if he practiced it every night. “I heard you’d gone walkabout. Now I find you, Daniel in the lion’s den, greeting me at my own hotel. Tell me, Charles, how did you find me so swiftly? I can’t have been in this wretched city more than fifteen minutes.”

Charlie kept a large supply of smirks in inventory. He put on the most irritating one. It fit just fine.

Her face drained bloodless, Irina blinked.

Schmidt’s voice, hollow as the grave, was in and of itself a death threat. “Best tell me what you’ve been up to, Charles. Best tell me how you managed to track my spoor.”

Schmidt’s lips tightened as Charlie winked at him. “Trade secret. However, I will tell you I’m staying just up the road. At the Marriott. I like the breakfast at the Marriott. The Marriott knows how hungry a traveler can be in the morning.” He’d said it three times: Marriott, Marriott, Marriott. Had she understood? Charlie couldn’t tell. “You ought to try it, Johan. Hell, they’ll probably even have bananas for your pet monkeys.” Charlie flipped a disparaging hand at Schmidt’s followers. Good news: they glowered. Better they should look daggers at him rather than glance around the lobby. “Peel ‘em with their toes, I bet.” Faces changed color. “By the way, Johan, be sure to call Sam. I bet he’s been sweating bullets since I dumped his bloodhounds. If you tell him I’m in the Marriott, he might sleep a little better, although I hope not.”

Irina had gotten his message. She took a halting step backward. Baggy jeans, oversized shirt, hasty hair her garb didn’t draw eyes in her direction. That was a good thing, Charlie thought. Despite her motivation for dressing drably, at this present moment her clothing choices were a very good thing indeed.

“Samuel will want to know what you’ve been up to, and why you cut and ran.”

“None of his business. Yours either.”

“But it is, Charles, it is.” Schmidt began to turn. “Come over here, let’s sit in the lounge and chat.” In a moment he’d be facing her head-on. “My colleagues can see to checking me in.”

Charlie stopped him cold, body three-quarters toward Irina, pale face paler with anger. “Tour colleagues can see to whatever they want because they don’t wear dumb damn sunglasses all the time. I’ve always wondered what’s behind those shades. I bet you’ve got little pink rabbit eyes, my lad you know, darting left and right, worrying where the big bad wolf is.” Charlie broadened his smirk as if to add: and I am that wolf.

Schmidt’s lips twitched. “I conceal my eyes because men find my gaze… unsettling.”

Charlie chortled. He made the sound as exasperating as possible. “Look, )ohan, my car’s out front with the engine running.” Nodding her understanding, Irina edged backward. “Besides, it’s getting late and I need my beauty sleep. I trust I’ll see you in the morning. In my rearview mirror, no doubt.”

Schmidt’s voice was wind off a glacier. “You won’t even see that. I’m going to kill you one of these days. I presume you know that.”

Down to the end of the corridor and almost out of sight. Nobody noticed her. Now, if she had any sense, and Charlie knew she did, she’d hightail it out the back door, then wait for him near his BMW.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard you the last time you made that particular promise.”

“This is the last time.”

“Fine. Give it your best shot.” Charlie stretched his arms out, offering his chest. “Come on, Johan, now’s your chance.” Schmidt set his jaw. “Oh, sorry. I forgot. You can’t do it face-to-face, can you?” He spun on his feet. “Is this better? Come on, buddy boy, I’m trying to make things easy for you.”

Feeling gun-sight eyes on the back of his neck, Charlie began counting slowly to sixty. By the time he reached thirty, he was nauseous. At fifty, he wanted to dive for cover. But sixty was his target, and sixty it would be, and he would not shake or shiver, but instead would hold himself rock steady until he ticked off the last terrifying second of one full minute. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, thank you, God, sixty. “No sale, eh? Well, I always said you were pussy.”

Laughing, Charlie hobbled to the door, feigning a limp that he was sure Schmidt’s men would remember the next morning.

Only when he was outside did he wipe the sickening sweat from his forehead.

Let’s not try that trick again.

Schmidt wouldn’t be off balance for long. Give him a few minutes to collect his thoughts and he’d order a pack of watchdogs to stake out the Marriott. Charlie had a little prank to play before they left the lobby and ran for their trucks.

He lifted the X5’s back hatch, snapping open his war bag as he tugged it out. Pen in hand, he neatly printed “For road expenses ONLY.” on four ordinary envelopes. Into each he tucked five thousand dollars’ worth of the marked bills Sam had given him earlier in the day.

Shimming the locks of the four trucks flanking Schmidt’s bad-boy G-Wagen, he slid four envelopes under four passenger seats, making sure each seat was too far forward for comfort. In the morning, Schmidt’s no-brow apes would roll the seat backs, and, surprise, surprise…. Charlie almost laughed out loud.

As he was closing the door on the last truck, a shadow darted from beneath a tree. A frightened woman’s voice whispered, “How did you find me? How did they find me? In the lobby, they were laughing about me, they were saying they would “

“No questions,” Charlie barked. “They’ll be out here in seconds. Just get in my car. No, don’t worry about your Dodge or Whirlwind. They’re safe here. I’m the one they’ll be watching.”

“No. I cannot “

No time and no patience. “Just get the hell in my car, okay? If you don’t, I’ll clock you, and we won’t be able to argue about things until you wake up.”

Ijam slumped behind his spacious desk. His tuxedo jacket was crumpled on the floor, his bow tie flopped limp beneath the collar of an unbuttoned shirt. At this late hour, he was one of the few people at work in the Executive Office Building. Nobody else was around except the security guards, the communications people, and a handful of eager young Iagos, each of them as treacherously ambitious as he’d been at their age.

He hadn’t wanted to go to the party that night, but he’d had no choice. Above all else, Washington was a social town. Those who did not pay obeisance at ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raisers were vulnerable. More than one cabinet secretary had been exiled into the outer darkness because he’d failed to trade bon mots with the right people while sipping a glass of overpriced California wine.

Nine to five is when you shuffle paper. The real work begins at cocktail time.

Or, in Sam’s case, a little before midnight. The Whirlwind mess to say nothing of Charlie goddamn the man McKenzie had put him behind schedule. He had to get caught up. The president was making a major address the next day, and the speechwriters had turned in two thousand words of crap. Shoving aside a stack of phone messages … shit, three of them were from Dr. Sangin Wing, and he could stew until the morning … Sam began to read: “As Middle East negotiations evolve “

Evolve? Christ! You can’t use that word. The votes of twenty million fundamentalists depended on never, ever implying that anything evolves.

Grimacing, Sam laboriously pecked out the word “unfold” on his loathsome computer. He hated the thing, never learned how to type, looked with contempt on upstart yuppie white trash with their laptops and their Palm Pilots and their Web-browsing cellulars and…

The phone rang. Not the regular office phone, and not the president’s hot line. The other phone. That phone.

He snatched it up and heard the sound of music playing faintly in the background, something classical, a familiar tune: The Anvil Chorus from some wop opera. He gritted his teeth. There was only one man he knew who listened to nothing but opera….

“Good evening, Samuel. Johan Schmidt here.”

Even when he was politely saying hello, Schmidt managed to be menacing. “Johan. Thanks for calling. Any progress to report?”

Schmidt was so emotionless that you knew there was only murder in his heart. Presuming he had one. “Some. I have located Charles. He has taken a room in the Airport Marriott here. Two teams are on duty outside the hotel. You need not worry about him eluding observation again.”

Sam sighed with relief. “Any idea what he’s been up to?”

“He declined to say. However, whatever it was, it injured his leg. He’s walking with a pronounced limp.”

“Glad to hear it. You know him personally, don’t you?”

“He and I have a certain history.”

Sam could detect not the least hint of a change in Schmidt’s voice. Nonetheless, the words made the hair on the back of his neck rise. “Be careful. He’s dangerous.”

“We have that in common.”

Sam’s sinuses throbbed. “Any word on Kolodenkova?”

“Not yet, but it’s still early days.”

“We don’t have days.”

“I am aware of that, Samuel. It was only a manner of speaking.”