Howard looked across at Clutesi and slipped the manila envelope into his jacket pocket. “I’ve a phone call to make. We’ll talk again later.” The two FBI agents left the room, and a minute or so later the uniformed cop returned, carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee.
Matthew Bailey kept his left hand on the control wheel as he set his radio transmitter to the Bay Bridge Unicom frequency, 123.0 MHz. He called the airfield up as he levelled the Centurion off at two thousand feet over the Chesapeake Bay and asked them for a runway advisory. Through his headset he heard a young woman tell him that runway 29 was in use and that the winds were coming from the west at about six knots. There was no other traffic in the pattern and he took the plane down to one thousand feet, flew parallel to the runway and then made two gentle left turns before touching down.
The airfield was slightly larger than the one where Farrell Aviation was based, and it had a hard runway which was at right angles to the water. Bailey taxied over to two petrol pumps by the side of a white-painted wooden hut where a teenager in blue overalls topped off his wing tanks. “Can I tie down over there?” Bailey asked.
“How long are you staying?” said the teenager, hanging up the fuel hose.
“Should be leaving tomorrow,” said Bailey. “Maybe tonight.” He was wearing dark glasses and his Orioles baseball cap hid his red hair.
The teenager pointed to a group of small planes. “Over there’ll be just fine,” he said.
“Great, thanks,” said Bailey. He went over to the hut and paid a girl for his fuel and for the tie-down fee, then started up the Centurion and taxied it over to the parking area. After he’d secured the plane he used a public phone to call for a taxi. He wanted to get back to the motel as quickly as possible. He’d always known that Mary felt the same about him as he did about her. The previous night had been fantastic, the best sex he’d ever had. She had a terrific body, and he’d loved the way she’d gasped and moaned as he mounted her. God, there was so much he wanted to do with her. He wanted to make love to her in every possible way, to do things with her that he’d only read about before. Once the hit was over and done with, he’d ask Mary to go away with him. She was older than him, sure, but that wasn’t a problem. She was everything he’d ever wanted in a woman, and more. And he’d prove to her how good he was, in bed and out of it. They’d be a great team. The best. He found himself growing hard and he paced up and down impatiently.
Cole Howard stood in the corridor outside Joker’s room in the Shock-trauma unit, tapping the antenna of his mobile phone against his cheek. “You liaise with the anti-terrorist people in the UK, what do you make of him, Don?” asked Howard. A nurse pushed open the door behind them and wheeled a television set inside.
Clutesi shrugged. “He looks like shit, doesn’t he? Not what you’d expect an SAS soldier to look like. But he sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about. I think he’s on the up and up. What do you plan to do with him?”
“I’m not sure,” replied Howard. “The forensic guys are doing a comparison on the bullets at the moment, but he admits killing the MI5 agent and the girl.”
Clutesi frowned. “We’re not going to charge him with the killings, surely?”
Howard shook his head. “No, it looks like self-defence. But it’s going to be harder to explain away the two bodies in his hotel room in New York, isn’t it?”
“Not if he’s right and the gun the MI5 man had on him was used to kill the men in New York. But that’s going to take time, and you know as well as I do that more often than not the bullets are so knocked about that the forensic boys never get a match.” Clutesi looked at his watch. “You hungry?”
“Sure,” Howard replied. He hadn’t eaten breakfast. He’d spent most of the night with the lab techs going over the scene of the fire, and had caught a few hours’ sleep on a cot in the bureau’s Baltimore office. Food had been the last thing on his mind.
“We can spare half an hour, right?” asked Clutesi.
“What have you got in mind?”
“Maryland crab cakes,” said Clutesi. “You’ve never eaten anything like it. The best place is just down the road.” He saw Howard’s frown and grinned. “I spent two years in the Baltimore office before I moved to the Counter-Terrorism Division. How about it?”
Howard agreed and the two men caught the elevator down to the ground floor. “It’ll do O’Brien good to sweat it out for a while,” said Howard as they stepped out into the street.
“I dunno about that,” said Clutesi, “he doesn’t seem like the type who’d sweat easily.”
Clutesi headed confidently down the street and Howard matched his stride. Several nurses were standing in a group, smoking and talking in the hot sun. Howard guessed that the hospital had a no-smoking policy. It was a bright, sunny day, with barely a cloud in the sky, and the sidewalks were shimmering in the heat. It was humid, too, and most of the people out on the streets were casually dressed in loose shirts and shorts. Most of the passers-by were black, and clearly poor. Their surroundings were also down-at-heel, ranks of row-houses with peeling paint and rotting window frames. Some of the houses had been converted into offices but many had ‘For Rent’ signs in their windows. The shops were also showing signs of wear and tear, with lacklustre window displays and apparently few customers. There were plenty of cars on the roads but most were old and in need of repair. Clutesi took Howard towards a large multilevel building with a sign saying ‘Lexington Market’ on the side. There were groups of blacks standing in groups around public telephones, mainly young men in hundred dollar Reeboks, Malcolm X baseball caps and heavy gold chains around their necks and wrists. They glared at the two FBI agents with hostile eyes.
“Drug dealers,” said Clutesi. A tall, thin black man, the front of his blue jeans stained around the groin, was waving a fist in the air and screaming at no-one in particular, his eyes vacant.
“Why don’t they clean this place up?” asked Howard, who was finding it difficult to imagine why Clutesi had taken him there to eat.
“Hey, this isn’t so bad,” said Clutesi. “There are areas in the city that are a hundred times worse than this, places where two FBI agents couldn’t walk without a full SWAT team in attendance. There’s a drive-by killing somewhere in the city pretty much every day, usually innocent bystanders getting shot in the process, and most of it is drug-related. The middle classes have all moved out to the suburbs. There are no jobs for those left, and with the economy in the state it is there’s not much chance of things changing.
“The government never really got to grips with the city’s problems,” continued Clutesi. “They’ve made big investments, like the new stadium, the shopping malls at the Inner Harbour and the National Aquarium, and this development, Lexington Market, but they haven’t done anything about the quality of the life for the people here. It’s not tourist attractions they need, it’s jobs.”
“Did you enjoy your two years here?” asked Howard.
Clutesi pulled a face. “For an FBI agent, it’s an okay posting. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be a homicide detective here. It’s mainly blacks killing blacks, with crimes investigated by white detectives answerable to a black commissioner of police. You’re caught between a rock and a hard place. At least as an FBI agent you know you’re not here forever, and when I was here they were a good bunch of guys. But it’s not New York, that’s for sure.”
He pushed open a glass door and ushered Howard inside. “Welcome to Faidley’s,” he said.
Howard was standing at one end of a large room with high ceilings around which reverberated animated conversation and the sound of eating and drinking. The smell of fish and crabs was almost overpowering. Around the edge of the room were a number of stands selling a variety of seafood. There were tanks containing large, mournful fish and lobsters with their claws bound with elastic bands, fresh fish lying on beds of crushed ice while behind them black men in bloody aprons chopped off heads and removed guts. In the far corner Clutesi saw a stall selling shrimps and thick salmon steaks, and in the centre of the room was a raw bar where customers stood and ate oysters on the shell and drank beer. In the centre of the bar section women were wielding sharp knifes, opening oysters and clams with professional flicks of their wrists.
Over on Howard’s right was a counter section with a queue of people, black and white, waiting to be served. The place was packed, with most of the diners standing by chest-high tables and eating with their hands. Howard peered curiously at the counter. “These are the best crab cakes in Baltimore,” said Clutesi, “probably in Maryland.”
They reached the front of the queue and Clutesi ordered two crab-cake platters. A few seconds later two plastic trays were slammed down in front of them. Howard picked up his and looked at it. The crab cake was about the size of a baseball and looked as if it had been formed by being squashed between two hands. He lifted the tray to his nose and smelled, a warm blend of crab and spices. The meal came with bread and a salad, and Howard’s
