“Pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, and sixty-eight. When you’ve seen it, call me. Looks as if we might be standing hip-deep in gasoline, and someone just struck a match.”
New York disconnected before Oslett could respond.
“We’re going to California,” he told Clocker.
“Why?”
“We probably will,” Clocker replied, as if what Oslett had said made perfect sense to him.
As they drove through the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Oslett was relieved to find himself surrounded by signs of civilization—though he would have blown his brains out rather than live there. Even at its busiest hour, Oklahoma City didn’t assault all five senses the way Manhattan did. He didn’t merely thrive on sensory overload; he found it almost as essential to life as food and water, and more important than sex.
Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn’t measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city, too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the people seemed so inexplicably
He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o’clock yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen minutes late, and Alfie wasn’t on it.
In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to, traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor. Until yesterday.
They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu—perhaps a traffic accident—had delayed Alfie on his way to the airport, causing him to miss his flight.
Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a “cellar command,” implanted in his deep subconscious, should have been activated, compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command: sometimes it was so deeply buried in the subject’s mind that the trigger didn’t work and it
While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out. The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning and training, much the way that information could be lost when a computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.
But he hadn’t been at the motel.
He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.
Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on Sunday night, Alfie’s abandoned rental car had been found in a residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands. Alfie was renegade.
Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade. Catatonic, yes. AWOL, no. Everyone intimately involved with the program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of the
Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight and one o’clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on schedule.
Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to assume that he’d snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M. Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would have been renegade for two full days.
They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.
Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours, assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn’t slept. Alfie could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single-minded as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.
Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward assassin.
Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with which they had supplied him—and by which he could be tracked—and because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o’clock Sunday morning; the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm pistol.
The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store: multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.
And at that point they had lost him for too long.
From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Anywhere.
Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.
But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.
Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.
Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe. By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he
In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of
Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said I’VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA—NOW I CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth
Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.
The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds. Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.
The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha
