Forty-five
John returned to the truck stop at dusk.
“Phone me a number to fax some material,” Garko
said. “Peruse, evaluate, let me know how you intend to proceed.”
The group abandoned the house, the town, and took up
residence in another motel fifty random miles away. Francis dispatched
the girls to the far corners of the rural town in search of a public fax
facility. Emily and Sally were first to stumble across a Kinkos. By
noon, the group gathered around the desk in Frances’ room. John dumped a
cluster of eight by ten photographs onto the table surface, images of two
men, one young, the other old, obviously related.
Jennifer stared at the image of the older man in
horror.
“What?” John said gently.
Jennifer turned and fled the room, returning
clutching her precious childhood photograph. She held it at arm’s length
with a shaking hand to compare the younger man standing next to the woman
to the older figure in the photograph.
John took notice. The resemblance was unmistakable.
“I’ll be damned.”
His choice of words haunted him. For one long silent
moment he fought off panic and the foulest sensation of cold dread he had
ever experienced. Never had he been so badly deceived and thrown off
track. The background in each of the faxed photographs hinted at an
opulent lifestyle. In several, John saw severe looking figures in dark
suits.
Body guards.
Francis’ hand fluttered nervously about her face.
“Oh, child, no!”
Silently, John thumbed Garko’s familiar number using
Jennifer’s cell phone.
“Garko here.”
“Who is he?” John said.
“Basil Bartow, recently dead. Bertrand, his son,
inherited Gulf oil, lots of it. You’ll have no way to do legitimate
business with the man, and I have no way of pinning down his whereabouts.
My advice is to nail him through his attorneys. He’s got a hoard of them
on retainer. The busiest of the lot is fishing in Minnesota on privately
owned land, Carmel Lake, a nice place on the northern shore. He doesn’t
have his wife with him. The woman in his company is much prettier.
“Let me know each move you make as you make it,
John. Provide me with the information you gather. We’ll try to keep you
one step ahead of the wolf packs. There’ll be two, one federal when
Bartow involves the FBI. That’ll happen when you shake down his
attorney. And Bartow will have his private forces. He’ll know who you
are and why you’re after him. John, it’s my opinion that you’re not
personally equipped to manage this situation.”
“I have friends,” John said.
“Highly efficacious friends?”
John laughed at the phrase. “Yeah, some of those.
We’ll check things out and get back to you.”
John thumbed off the cell phone and absently set it
aside. Jennifer was trembling. John slipped an arm about her and held
her firmly against him.
The look on Francis’ face indicated the extent of her
suspicions. Jennifer and the deceased Basil Bartow were somehow related
to one another. If Jennifer had been Basil’s target all along, or the
target of the deceased Basil’s son, the attempt on Evelyn’s life had been
a cover. Using Dimitri to kill Evelyn was the equivalent of using a
shotgun to take out a dummy target so close to the real target, Jennifer,
that the real target was certain to cease to exist as well. Bartow,
whichever one, had wanted Jennifer dead without the world knowing who she
was, or why she had died.
But if Jennifer had been
Rosie's target, why did she still live? Why the toxin to guarantee
the death of Evelyn Haxx?
Bertha and Gabby were clueless for the moment. Emily
and Sally looked on glumly, aware only that they were in over their
heads. Evelyn studied Jennifer with a look of perplexity, and Craig’s
eyes were on John for some idea of their next move.
“My God,” Francis murmured, but without any
inclination to spell out her gruesome suspicions in detail. “What’s
happening?”
“Pieces of the puzzle aren't
fitting at all," John said. "I can't make sense of any of it.
But like I said, one thing usually leads to another. We maintain our
momentum and pay this Bertrand Bartow a visit."
Jennifer accosted him in a
secure moment among the group chatting up a storm. “They don’t have to know about
the poison, do they?"
John shook his head and called
out to Craig. “Can you fly something with pontoons? We’re going fishing
in a lake in Minnesota."
Craig gestured his confused willingness to comply.
“Yeah, sure.”
Emily drew self-defensively to her full height when
John eyed her. “This may not be about you, but I’d like you to tag
along."
Evelyn bristled with indignation. “I’d not be left
behind.”
John glanced at each of the
balance of the group, Francis, Emily, Sally, Bertha, and Gabby. “No questions just yet. I
don’t have enough answers. I’ll take Jennifer, Emily, and Craig. The
rest of you stay put and keep a low profile.”
John turned and left the room
dragging Jennifer along behind him. Sensing a looming conclusion to
their crisis, for better or for worse, nobody bothered protesting John’s
autocracy.
“Something terrible is happening,” Francis murmured
fearfully when the two were gone. “Do what that man tells you. All of
you. Without hesitation.”
Later in the warm, sleepy summer afternoon, John
followed Jennifer along the trails of a nearby park, hand in hand. They
walked, worked off nervous tension, and had nothing to say to one
another. By the time they got back, Craig had leased another plane and
was ready to go. “I was about broke,” he confessed. “I just found out that
Francis put a damned fortune in my account to finance us. We owe the lady
big time.”
Jennifer drove a new rental. John sat at her side,
and Emily and Craig sat against opposing back doors without speaking,
stealing curious glances at one another, tempted to pry
John for more background information on their mission, but unwilling to
risk his ire considering the mounting tension that had turned his face
into a pale mask of chiseled stone. Craig finalized
arrangements at the same airport they had used previously, but they drove
to a lake thirty miles away to pick up the Piper Cub equipped with the
pontoons they needed for access to Lake Caramel.
John stared at the dock protruding into the water
with dismay and was last to board the plane. He didn’t speak
until they were airborne. “I don’t like the strategy we’re going to have
to use to get what we want," he muttered to no one in particular. "We need information. It’ll mean the end of a
man’s career if it’s provided, and it won’t be provided voluntarily.”
Craig found the lake without difficulty, folding the
map and stuffing it in a door pouch, then circling the lake before diving
for the water front in front of a sprawling quarter million dollar log
cabin. A lanky, curvaceous woman sunbathed on the dock, wearing a beige
bikini that matched her skin tone and made her look nude from a distance.
She and a lanky man working in a boat ran for the house as the plane approached.
John scrambled from the plane and caught the man on
the sprawling porch of the cabin. The woman in the bikini swung away and
ran screaming down the beach. Craig moored the plane and Emily went after
their escapee. Jennifer stayed put in the cockpit, unsettled by the
violence.
John held a gun to the head of his captive, and if
anyone had accused John of being an evil man in that moment, she would not
have faulted them their accusation, except that the faces of good and evil
had blurred in her short lifespan, and she could no longer tell them
apart. John called out for her and others to join him at the house.
Jennifer was the last to respond, but she finally threw her door and trudged
up the beach in the cool afternoon air.
Bartow’s lawyer was John’s size, but frail, his face
a mask of panic and mounting hysteria. John forced him face down on the
purple rug inside the lush cabin and bound his wrists behind his back with
a nylon tie. A number of ties protruding from John's back pocket, evidence
of a level of planning Jennifer hadn’t noticed. She curled up on a couch
in a distant corner of the cabin when Emily returned with the screaming,
struggling girl, her body scuffed and dirty, and cuts bleeding on her
hands and bare feet. The string to her bikini top had broken, and the
fragment of cloth fell to the floor when John brutally spun the girl
around and jammed one, and then the other wrist against the small of her
back. Once bound, he spun her about again and stopped her piercing shriek
with a massive hand clamped to her throat.
“Save your energy. You’re going to need it.”
Emily backed away, pale, but stoic, her arms crossed
self-defensively below her breasts. It made her look dangerous, which was
the effect John needed. Unless the attorney knew in his heart that he and
his companion would be tortured and killed, he would never betray his
client. Jennifer saw that John had been right in that regard. His entire
life was at stake working for a man like Bartow, and he couldn’t be
thought of as innocent. Jennifer brushed tears from her eyes, hoping the
man was at least as terrified as he looked, at least as terrified as
herself. Terrified, he would surrender and more quickly be released
unharmed.
John turned his full attention to the man curled in a panicky fetal
position on the floor. “I need to knew where to find your boss. Now.
Tomorrow. On any given day, at any hour. Day or night. I need to know
the extent and nature of his security. Everything you know, and if it’s
not enough, it’s going to cost us our lives, and I’m going to take you and
the girl down with us. We’re not here because we’re attacking Bartow. He
attacked us and we’re defending ourselves as best we can.”
The man shook his head frantically. “I don’t know
anything!”
John sighed heavily. “Sad thing is, I believe you.”
The girl shrieked when John
glanced her way. John’s expression was stone cold, determined and uncaring.
"Give it some more thought."
“God, no!” the man cried out. “You monster! She’s
just a child!”
John glanced at Jennifer, and if she had ever feared
him, it evaporated in light of the utter and total helplessness she saw in
his expression. In his eyes, she, too, was a child, and he sincerely did
not know if he could save her.
“I’ll tell you what I know!” the man cried.
“Please! For the love of God, let’s talk about this!”
John pulled the man off the floor and set him in a
chair. “I’ll go first. Disciples of Chaos. Know of them?”
The man grimaced and shook his head.
“Senator Caliph Hacks.”
John got a puzzled look. ‘Yeah, so?”
“Do they know one another, Bartow and Hacks?”
“No. They’ve never done business together.”
“You’re sure.”
‘”I’m certain of it.”
“Campaign contributions?”
The man sighed. “Yeah.”
“On the order of hundreds of millions?”
“Yeah.”
John extracted a copy of a folded photograph from his
back pocket and handed it to the man. “You tell me what this is all
about. Follow the implications down the line and let me know what they
are.”
The man studied the photograph. He had studied the
faces of his captors. He glanced at Jennifer. He looked up at John in
shock. “Who is she? God forbid, she’s related to the Bartows!”
“I take it anyone related to Bertrand Bartow would
have been a contender for a rather hefty inheritance, like maybe an oil
industry.”
“Oh, shit!”
The man looked to his girlfriend with eyes wide with
shock. “Oh, shit!”
“Her name is Jennifer. She thinks it’s Wessner, but
she doesn’t even know how old she is. Someone’s destroyed her records,
erased her identity, and she’s been poisoned.”
Emily gasped. Craig knocked a lamp from the table
standing suddenly erect.
“She’ll be dead within days. Either we stop
that from happening, or I begin taking Bartow’s organization apart
individual by individual, employee by employee, until I reach him and make
him wish he had never been fucking born.”
“He’s in Houston,” the man said. “He owns a night
club.”
“A toy,” John said. “A place to indulge himself.”
“Yeah.”
Lost in thought, John’s next move was to unsheathe
his knife. The man cried out and tried to roll aside, the perfect
position John needed to cut his bonds. He then walked over and freed the
girl who made a headlong dive for the top of her bikini fallen at her
feet.
John turned back to the man. “I take it Bartow is
something of an asshole.”
The man wet his lips. “He pays well.”
“Barring complications of this magnitude?”
“Yeah, I never knew about this. I don’t think anyone
does. If what you’re saying is true, I wouldn’t have Bertrand as a
client.” He eyed Jennifer a second time. “I’d have a few
service offers to make
to the girl. Maybe considerable compensation, considering.”
“I can give you a name and a number, a man called
Garko. He’ll fill in the details of what’s been happening, the
corroboration you need to our story. Assuming he has all you need and
that you trust him once you know who he is, would I be right to assume
that your association with Bartow will become a sudden and rather deadly
liability?”
The man thought it over. “You could probably say
that.”
“Do you have friends to forewarn of trouble?”
The man looked dubious. “I’d sure as hell like to.
Are you telling me to keep quiet about this?”
“That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”
The man shook his head after another moment’s
thought. “I steer my associates away from this mess and Bartow is pretty
badly undermined. He won’t know until it’s too late. Nobody’s going to
forewarn him, that’s for certain. If you’re trying to take him down, then
I guess we work in your favor.”
“Sounds like our guesses are panning out. I was
hoping I wouldn’t have to get nasty with you.”
The man sent his jowl flapping shaking his head
violently. “No, hardly necessary at all.”
“Give us as much detailed information on our
acquaintance of mutual interest and we’ll be out of your hair with
apologies and maybe a bit of gratitude, depending.”
The man nodded to a nearby computer. John gave him the
go-ahead with a nod, and for the next half hour, the accountant’s fingers
rattled across the keyboard gathering material that he burned onto a disk
without asking, handing it to John in silence. Sweat had broken out on
his forehead. He looked ill. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re going
to get close enough to Mr. Bartow to do yourselves any good. Nobody’s
going to give him a heads up, but I think he knows he’d never get one
should a problem arise.”
“A problem has arisen," John
said. "We’ll see what we can do
about putting it into his face where it belongs.”
