parked there. The men eyed Gant with unfriendly stares. Did they have some way of listening in to his conversation? He thought not, but supposed it didn’t matter anyway. He could keep it brief and to the point with Vernon.
The phone rang three times. ‘Yessir,’ came the sunny voice. ‘I know it’s gonna be a wonderful day when I see this number calling.’
‘Vernon.’
‘That would be me.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m walking down the street. I just had my breakfast at the Charlotte Inn, and man, what a breakfast it was.’
Gant smiled. Vernon often took his meals at the best hotels and restaurants in Charleston – he had the money to spend, and he enjoyed the jarring contrast between himself and the alarmed gentry who ended up sitting at tables near him. Gant could picture Vernon strutting through the historic district like a peacock. Six feet, four inches tall in bare feet, the top of his white Stetson hat adding another four inches, the heels of his snakeskin cowboy boots adding another two. Tight jeans, a black T-shirt painted to his broad chest and shoulders, a riot of tattoos reaching from the razor wire tattooed around his neck, all the way down his shoulders and arms to his big rawboned hands. He was a piece of work, all right – toothpick in his mouth, huge jaw jutting out, daring just about any hard man to go ahead and try his luck. There probably wouldn’t be any takers today, or tomorrow, or any time this month.
‘You ready to work?’ Gant said.
‘I’m always ready to work.’
Gant glanced up and saw the stewardess, flight attendant, waitress, or whatever from the airplane. She clomped across the uneven paving in her high heels and skirt, waving to him. One passenger, one stewardess. Man, it was crazy.
‘Listen, I don’t have much time,’ he said. ‘I’m about to catch a plane here. That thing with the boat? The delivery? I need you to give the green light on that. It’s a go. So tell our supplier we’re ready and tell the boat it’s coming at them.’
‘Got it, boss.’
The woman came almost to within touching distance. ‘Mr Gant, we’re ready for you now. The plane is all set.’
‘Thank you. I’ll be just another minute.’
‘Of course.’ She turned and started clomping back. Without much interest, he watched her big behind move away toward the plane.
‘Also,’ he said to Vernon. ‘What’s the story in New York?’
He sensed a hesitation on the other end of the line. It was uncharacteristic for Vernon, to say the least.
‘Vernon?’
‘There ain’t no story in New York, I’m sorry to say.’
‘What?’
‘There’s no story. At least, none that anybody would want to hear.’
‘Vernon, I don’t have time to dance around. Out with it. The plane’s about to take off without me.’
‘All right,’ Vernon said, but his voice didn’t sound like it was all right. ‘Our man went to make the pickup late last night, and nobody was there. Our boy wasn’t home, even though he knew we’d be coming soon. Nobody was home, and there was no message left.’
Gant thought about it. He started walking toward the plane. ‘Maybe he went out last night to a bar and picked up a girl or something. Tell the guy to wait around a while.’
‘I already did. He’s waiting in the apartment. See, it wasn’t locked. In fact, the door wasn’t even closed.’
Gant felt his breathing become just a tiny bit shallower. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right. Keep on it. I’ll be home in a few hours.’
‘I’m on it.’
Gant rang off and trotted up the steps into the plane. He took his seat as the flight attendant pulled the door closed and locked it airtight. He cinched his seat belt as the woman took her fold out seat near the door of the cockpit. The engines roared into life, and without further ado, the plane taxied into position for takeoff. These guys were in a hurry to get out of here. Gant settled back, closed his eyes and relaxed himself as the plane accelerated down the bumpy runway and then left the ground. He took several deep breaths as they went into a steep ascent. Later, when they leveled off, he opened his eyes. Out the window he saw huge, white puffy clouds. Only then did he begin thinking again.
Jesus, that Foerster thing was bad news. This business was about knowing people. It was about relationships, and he was beginning to think the relationship with Foerster was not a good one to have. It wasn’t the first time he’d had these thoughts. In fact, he had it on good authority that his relationship with Foerster should have ended after just a brief fling.
Gant had once known a man named Monty. Monty was restless, a mover, and an adventurer. He had his fingers in a lot of different pies. He was the only man Gant had ever met who wore a handlebar mustache – it gave him the effect of being a man out of time, a museum piece catapulted from the 1800s into the present day. Gant half-expected Monty to pull up on a bicycle with an enormous front tire, instead of the vintage Corvette he normally drove.
Monty was gone now, turned up dead in the Amazon more than a year ago, in the nearly lawless border region where Colombia, Peru and Brazil all met. They found his body in an alley behind a bar in Leticia, Colombia. What he was doing there was never explained by anybody. In fact, the only reason Gant knew he was dead was because one morning when he slid behind the wheel of his car, a small newspaper clipping to that effect from The Toledo Blade was taped to his dashboard. It turned out Montgomery Blaine was born and raised just outside Toledo, and still had parents there. A small handwritten note was taped to the dash along with the clipping.
He would have wanted you to know.
It gave Gant the creeps sometimes, to think of the people who must be watching him. Whoever they were, they must approve of, or at least not care about, Gant’s more unsavory activities. Still, it wasn’t a good feeling to have those eyes following his moves.
In any case, Monty was the one who had given him Foerster. It was during the lead up to the anthrax job, more than two years ago now. Certain people were feeling Gant out about it. Could it be done, take out two Illinois state senators at the same time, in a government office building in Chicago? The key here was that the two good liberal senators, a man and a woman, both very powerful in state politics, shouldn’t look like they were specifically targeted. And whoever took them out either had to escape completely, or know nothing of the reason or the people behind the attack.
Taken as an intellectual exercise, Gant said yes, he thought maybe it could be done. There’d have to be collateral damage to cover up the purpose of the attack, and that meant innocent people would have to die. Also, a bomb wouldn’t work because you’d never get it past security and into the building. But an airborne biological agent in the ventilation system – highly concentrated, highly virulent anthrax, for instance – that might do the trick.
OK, his audience said, but could he, Gant, pull it off?
He wasn’t sure, even then, if the job was for real. Maybe it was just some people blowing off steam by fantasizing about something they wanted to see done, or might want to see done. Maybe it was a set-up, a sting, someone somewhere had been turned by the government, and the FBI was listening to every word. Gant didn’t know. In fact, even now, he still wasn’t sure. But at the time, despite the uncertainties, he decided to treat it as if it were real. If it were a sting, then he was looking at a lot of time, possibly the rest of his life, in prison. But he took the gamble anyway. Fortune favors the bold.
‘I need a microbiologist,’ he said to Monty one evening. They were walking, as they often did, among the Friday night crowds in downtown Charleston. They moved along streets lined with multimillion-dollar pre-Civil War homes into Battery Park, where the breeze off the harbor and the chatter from the gawkers would surely thwart any attempt to listen to their conversation.
‘A microbiologist?’ Monty said. ‘I didn’t suspect Tyler Gant even possessed a word that long in his vocabulary. That’s a six syllable word. What, pray tell, do you need one of those for?’
