emergency. We need to meet right away. Now. I don’t mean to frighten you, and you’re certainly not in any danger.”
“Danger?”
“At least not right now,” the mysterious Mr. Fox went on. “And neither are little Nicky and Joshua. In fact, they’re still tucked away in their classrooms at Stephen Foster Elementary School. When they walk home at three- ten, I’m equally confident that they’ll still be just fine.”
A sense of horror drenched Nick like a bucket of ice water. This asshole was threatening his children! “Listen here,” he said, raising his voice. “I don’t know who-”
“If you raise your voice to me, Mr. Thomas, I will hang up the telephone, and then you’ll never know what I wanted to talk about.” The stranger paused for effect. “Am I making my point?”
As his fear peaked, Nick’s will to fight drained right out of him; as if someone had pulled a plug. This guy knew his children’s names. He knew their school…
“Mr. Thomas, are you still there?
The voice startled him. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Good,” said Mr. Fox, a smile suddenly materializing in his voice. “Really, I assure you that you’re in no danger. But I need to meet with you. Right now. Look for a white Lincoln out in front of your building-on the 13th Street side. I’ll wait exactly five minutes.” The line went dead.
Shit! Nick stared at the handset for a long moment, wasting a good half minute of valuable time. He considered calling Security but instantly dismissed the notion. Whoever this guy was, he’d done his research. And whatever he was up to, he’d have planned a countermove if Nick did the obvious.
Besides, there was no time. That thought shot him out of his seat. Time. He said five minutes! God, if the elevator was cranky, it’d take him that long to get down to the lobby.
The handset bounced off the cradle as he tossed it down and headed for the door. His boss saw him tear out of his bull pen, and made a move to block his path, but then shrank away from whatever he saw. Even opened the door for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Irene placed the call from her car, on her way to catch the plane that would take her to West Virginia. She’d been dreading the deed all day, and once Frankel picked up on his end, she realized she hadn’t been dreading it quite enough. As she took her drubbing, Paul Boersky sat quietly in the shotgun seat, pretending to be interested in the passing scenery.
“I’ve got to tell you, Irene, just how disappointed I am in your handling of this case.”
Like you did it so much better in ’83, she shot back silently. This was a call of atonement, not one of conflict-well, at least from her point of view. From the other side of the line, every call was an excuse for conflict.
“You have him and then you lose him, and then you have him again. Jesus, I need a scorecard just to keep up. What have our redneck friends been able to turn up?”
Irene checked over her shoulder and changed lanes, following the signs to Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. “Not much, I’m afraid. Nobody seems to remember seeing them, but a waitress remembers a kid spending a long time on the telephone. Didn’t hear any of the conversation, though.”
“Damn,” Frankel spat. “So have the troopers given up?”
What a ridiculous question. “No, sir, not that I know of. In fact, the last time I talked to the guy in charge down there, he said he had every available trooper on the case. I called Les Janier in the Charlestown office, and he said he’d get some agents down there to help out. I’m on my way there myself, in fact.”
“What about the surveillance we put on old man Sinclair out in Chicago?” Frankel asked, changing subjects. “Last report I got, they were following him out of the state.”
Irene took a deep breath. He’s going to go ballistic. “Well, there’s a problem there, too, sir,” she said. “Seems he was onto us somehow. He sent one of his associates on a ride, wearing a look-alike costume. Then, while we were distracted, he sneaked out another entrance to his compound and disappeared.” There, she’d said it. At least the primary heat from this one would be focused on someone else. Ted Greenberg, probably-her Chicago counterpart.
Frankel remained quiet for a long time. She’d met the man only twice, but she knew he tended to turn crimson red when he was upset. In her mind, he was purple now. When he finally spoke, he seemed beyond anger, tipping the scale more toward fury. Hatred maybe. But he maintained perfect control of his voice.
“You realize, don’t you, Irene, that we are the FBI? The most advanced investigative organization in the world. And these Donovans and their relatives are making you look like a complete idiot. A laughingstock for the entire world! Christ, I’ve seen Barney Fife turn out better police work than you!”
Why, thank you for the inspiration, Peter, Irene didn’t say.
“You’ve got two days, Irene,” Frankel concluded. “Two more days, and then I yank you off the case and bust you down to border guard. Are you understanding me here?”
“Yes, sir,” Irene said. Translation: I’ve got my confirmation hearings in six weeks, and you better not screw them up. “Perfectly, sir.”
“Now, go out and act like an FBI agent!”
Nick saw the line at the elevators and said to hell with it. He flew down the stairs-six floors, twelve flights- passing two cliques of smokers huddled in the stairwell like high school students, sneaking their forbidden puffs where no supervisors were likely to catch them. Both groups looked startled at first, until they saw he was no one, then went on about their gossiping.
As he crashed out of the stairwell into the lobby, a security guard looked even more startled than the smokers, and he instinctively moved his hand toward his side arm. For the briefest moment, Nick considered blurting out the story-that some madman had been threatening his children-but he pushed the thought out of the way. In response to the inquisitive look, he flashed the ID badge dangling from his neck.
“Late for an appointment,” he said hurriedly. He didn’t wait for a reply.
As promised, a white Lincoln was parked illegally, immediately outside the 13th Street entrance. He hurried toward the vehicle, then slowed his approach. How was he supposed to know if it was the white Lincoln?
As if to answer his question, the driver’s door popped open, and a bull-headed man with white hair beckoned him over. “Mr. Thomas?” the man called.
Nick’s breath caught in his throat. The voice was the same, minus the electronic distortion. He slowed even more. “Yes.”
“Please climb in,” the man offered with a smile. “Truly, you are in no danger.”
No, just my children, Nick thought. He approached haltingly, like a dog obeying an order to come and be beaten for eating a sock. The man gestured to the passenger side, and the instant Nick’s butt was in the seat, the vehicle started to move, even before the door was completely closed.
“Hello,” the driver said, extending his hand across the seat hump. “I’m afraid we started off on the wrong foot. My name is not Fox. It’s Sinclair. Harry Sinclair. Harry to my friends. May I call you Nick?”
Nick didn’t bother to smile as he hesitantly shook the old man’s hand. At first, the name didn’t mean anything. Looking at his face, though, it came back to him. This was the man he’d seen on the cover of Business Week, with a headline like “Mr. Connection.” In the photo, the tycoon was awash in money, with cartoon politicians bulging out of his pockets.
“You can call me whatever you want,” Nick said, still tight as a bowstring. “Where are my children?”
Harry scoffed and waved off Nick’s concerns. “They are as I said to you on the phone. Perfectly safe at their school. I mean it, Nick, they’re in no jeopardy. I’m afraid that in my zeal to meet with you, I may have led you to believe otherwise. I apologize.”
The hell you do. Nick didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, concentrating his energies on an effort to keep his body from trembling as Harry piloted the Lincoln toward the Virginia suburbs. For the first time in a very long while, he felt real fear.
“You’re on edge,” Harry said. He flashed a smile that seemed to hold a genuine kindness. “I’ll get right to the
