passed, he sensed that the odds were getting too high that he would be noticed.
He turned and walked back toward his rental car. The lot was filling up now, and he had to walk close to several groups of men while he was trying to keep the stolen pistols invisible. He had seven pistols in his messenger bag, which was bulging and weighed at least fifteen pounds. He got into his car, set the messenger bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, started the car, and slowly made his way up the aisle toward the exit.
He had not been wrong. The last time he had thought about the gun laws in Texas had been quite a few years ago, but at that time it was legal to carry a loaded, concealed weapon if the gun owner was in his car. That was pretty much an invitation to keep a gun in the glove compartment, and he'd just verified that many people were in the habit. He drove out onto the highway and headed eastward toward central Houston and his hotel. Tonight he was grateful that some things were eternal.
The hotel was quiet and pleasant, and he felt glad to be back in his room. He opened the newspaper the staff had left outside his door and scanned the pages. There was a small article, no larger than four column inches, about a joint police and FBI raid on an Arizona resort, in which they'd arrested dozens of guests on parole violations, illegal drug and weapons charges. Orders from Washington must have been to keep from releasing too much. He hoped it was because the government was planning to do something more to disrupt the old men's attempts to reorganize themselves. Anything the government could do to frustrate those bastards and keep them off balance right now would help him.
He spread the newspaper on the desk and set the bag on the surface, then took out the seven stolen guns, one at a time. There was the Sig P238, the Glock 17, two Beretta M92s, a Browning Hi-Power. 45, a Kimber. 45, a Springfield Armory. 40. All of them were fully loaded, and three had an extra loaded magazine or two.
It had been a good fifteen minutes' work. Now it was time to sleep and get ready for the next part of the trip. He showered and then soaked his body in the tub, as he had done in Arizona. He was going to do some difficult things in the next few days, and he couldn't afford to be slowed down by any aches or angry scratches or blisters once it began. When the water had cooled, he dried off and went to bed. As soon as he dozed off, he dreamed he was in England again. The strange part was that the dream wasn't strange at all. He did all the things he usually did-woke with Meg in the old manor house, went to the big dining room for breakfast, then went into the library for an hour to read the newspapers while Meg completed her letters and her e-mails. The library was his refuge because it had been hers, and her father's before her. When Schaeffer and Meg had begun to live here after her parents died, he had begun reading his way through the books in the shelves. He had read his way through in about five years and then began to buy books. In the dream-day he and Meg packed a bag and went into Bath, ate at a restaurant, went to a play, and met some friends for a drink afterward. As he looked around in the hotel bar where they had stopped, he noticed that all of the other tables and the stools at the bar were occupied by members of the Mafia he had seen at the ranch. They didn't recognize him, but he kept waiting for one to turn and look at him, then stand and point at him.
At eight in the morning he awoke, got up and dressed, then drove to an electronics store, bought a prepaid cell phone, and dialed Meg's number in London.
'Hello,' she said.
'Hi. It's me.'
'I've been wishing it would be you every time, but I always remind myself that you would never call in these circumstances. Do you have new circumstances?'
'They're a bit worse than before. I wanted to tell you that I'm doing my best to get through this, but you should be prepared for the probability that it won't work out.'
'Oh, my God, Michael. Please. Is there any way to simply leave? If you and I met in a village in Paraguay or one of the thirty thousand islands of the Maldives, couldn't we live some kind of life together? Because I'd do that without hesitation.'
'So would I. The problem is that the people I'm worrying about have branches and subsidiaries in a great many countries, and very close ties with a lot of other organizations everywhere. Right now, today, the word is being spread that finding me is worth a lot of money. The figure will be high enough so quite a few people in different places will begin to search.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Make getting me seem like a hard way to make money.'
'The only other time you went back there, you made up such a pretty story for me. Do you remember? You were with the CIA, and the two boys who had been killed when the Bulgarians came after you would be awarded posthumous medals by the queen?'
'I remember.'
'I never bought a word of it. But I loved you for making it up. I've always loved you, from the time you took me to tea after that meeting in Bath, and we talked. I didn't know anything about you-what you had done before, who you knew, and so on. I could see everything about you without any facts to obstruct the view. You do your best to come back to me. If you make it, I'll be here waiting for you. If you don't make it back, then know that I don't regret anything. If I had it to do again, I'd give myself to you in a heartbeat.'
'What's going on now reminds me that I have a few things to regret, but I've never felt anything but lucky I met you. I love you.'
'I feel as though we didn't get to say that enough times.'
'If I get back, I'll say it every morning before I do anything else.'
'I'll remind you.'
'I'm sorry, but I've got to keep moving, so I'd better go. Stay safe. Be alert. If anything around you seems odd, assume it's trouble. Visit friends in faraway places for a few weeks. One way or another, this will be over by then. If they find me, they'll stop looking.'
'I'll be waiting for you.'
He disconnected the call, took the phone apart, and dropped the pieces in trash cans as he walked along the street. When he reached the hotel, he checked out and began to drive northward out of Houston.
19
Elizabeth had a strange, disconnected feeling as she looked down at Washington from the air. She wasn't feeling the way she usually did when she flew into Reagan International-a mixture of comfortable familiarity and pride at how beautiful the place was. She was somewhere else in her mind, and she realized that she was feeling what the Butcher's Boy must be feeling.
He had killed Frank Tosca in the midst of the biggest conference of bosses in fifty years. He must be wondering, as she was, what kind of reaction the old men were having. Most of them were probably busy dealing with the problem of being detained in Arizona. Even if nothing else was lost, each of the old men would be aware that he had been made to look ridiculous-not only careless, but gullible. He must be feeling very alone right now.
Looking foolish was a very serious matter if you were trying to keep a couple of hundred soldiers cowed and respectful. Looking weak had probably been the foremost cause of death in their families for the past five generations. Who would they be blaming today for what had happened in Arizona? The one who had insisted on the meeting was Frank Tosca. But it must be terribly unsatisfying to be angry at a dead man.
Most of them would have no choice but to settle on the Butcher's Boy. He was safe to hate. He was an outsider. None of them would have to deal with retaliation from his cousins and in-laws. When he had killed Tosca, he had robbed the meeting of its purpose. He had contributed to the number and gravity of their potential legal troubles. He had also contributed to the spectacle they presented as a group of impotent, half-senile old men trying to reconstruct a past that could never return. It had been one against two hundred, and once again, the two hundred looked like idiots. That alone would make them want him dead.
She knew, and the Butcher's Boy must know too, that the death of a man like Frank Tosca wasn't entirely bad news to the other bosses. They were the veterans of a great many vendettas and coups. The older ones had lived through a couple of disputes that in some countries would have seemed like civil wars. They knew that a strong man like Tosca might revitalize an organization that had been stagnating for years. But the more success
