‘The Hoths set a deadline. Almost certainly midnight. Susan didn’t show, the Hoths went to work. They made a threat, and they carried it out. And they proved it. They phoned through a cell phone picture. Maybe a live video clip. Peter on the slab, that long first cut. Susan’s life changed, effectively, on the stroke of midnight. She was helpless in a traffic jam. The phone in her hand was suddenly appalling and repugnant. She threw it out the window. Followed it with the memory stick, which was the symbol of all her troubles. They’re both still there, in the trash on the side of I-95. No other explanation.’
Nobody spoke.
I said, ‘The median, probably. Subconsciously Susan would have put herself in the overtaking lane, because she was in a hurry. We could have triangulated the cell phone, but I think it’s too late now. The battery will be dead.’
Silence in the room. A whole minute. Just the hum and beep of medical equipment.
Sansom said, ‘That’s insane. The Hoths must have known they were losing control of the stick as soon as they phoned the picture through. They were giving up their leverage. Susan could have driven straight to the police.’
‘Two answers,’ I said. ‘The Hoths were insane, in a way. They were fundamentalists. They could act the part in public, but underneath it was all black and white for them. No nuance. A threat was a threat. Midnight was midnight. But anyway, their risk was minimal. They had a guy tailing Susan all the way. He could have stopped her going off message.’
‘Who?’
‘The twentieth guy. I don’t think going to Washington was a mistake. It wasn’t a missed connection in Istanbul. It was a last-minute change of plan. They suddenly realized that for a thing like this they needed someone on the ground in D.C. Or across the river, more likely, in one of the Pentagon dormitories. So the twentieth guy went straight there. Then he followed Susan all the way up. Five or ten cars back, like you do. Which was fine, until the traffic jammed up. Five or ten cars back in a traffic jam is as bad as a mile. All boxed in, maybe a big SUV in front of you, blocking the view. He didn’t see what happened. But he stayed with her. He was on the train, wearing an NBA shirt. I thought he looked familiar, when I saw him again. But I couldn’t confirm it, because I shot him in the face a split second later. He got all messed up.’
More silence. Then Sansom asked, ‘So where was Susan at midnight?’
I said, ‘You figure it out. Time, distance, average speed. Get a map and a ruler and paper and pencil.’
Jacob Mark was from Jersey. He started talking about Troopers he knew. About how the Troopers could help. They patrolled I-95 night and day. They knew it like the backs of their hands. They had traffic cameras. Their recorded pictures could calibrate the paper calculations. The highway department would cooperate. Everyone got into a big conversation. They paid me no more attention. I lay back on my pillow and they all started edging out of the room. Last out was Springfield. He paused in the doorway and looked back and asked, ‘How do you feel about Lila Hoth?’
I said, ‘I feel fine.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t. You nearly got taken down by two girls. It was sloppy work. Things like that, you do them properly or not at all.’
‘I didn’t have much ammunition.
‘You had thirty rounds. You should have used single shots. Those triple taps were all about anger. You let emotion get in the way. I warned you about that.’
He looked at me for a long second with nothing in his face. Then he stepped out to the corridor and I never saw him again.
Theresa Lee came back two hours later. She had a shopping bag with her. She told me the hospital wanted its bed, so the NYPD was putting me in a hotel. She had bought clothes for me. She showed me. Shoes, socks, jeans, boxers, and a shirt, all sized the same as the items the ER staff had burned. The shoes and the socks and the jeans and the boxers were fine. The shirt was weird. It was made of soft, worn white cotton. It was almost furry, down at a microscopic level. It was long-sleeved and tight. It had three buttons at the neck. It was like an old-fashioned undershirt. I was going to look like my grandfather. Or like a gold miner in California, way back in 1849.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She told me the others were working on the math problem. She told me they were arguing about the route Susan would have used from the Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Locals used shortcuts through surface streets that looked wrong according to the road signs.
I said, ‘Susan wasn’t a local.’
She agreed. She felt that Susan would have used the obvious signposted route.
Then she said, ‘They won’t find the picture, you know.’
I said, ‘You think?’
‘Oh, they’ll find the stick, for sure. But they’ll say it was unreadable, or run over and damaged or broken, or there was nothing sinister on it after all.’
I didn’t answer.
‘Count on it,’ she said. ‘I know politicians, and I know the government.’
Then she asked, ‘How do you feel about Lila Hoth?’
I said, ‘All in all I’m regretting the approach on the train. With Susan. I wish I had given her a couple more stops.’
‘I was wrong. She couldn’t possibly have gotten over it.’
‘The opposite,’ I said. ‘Was there a sock in her car?’
Lee thought back to the FBI inventory. Nodded.
‘Clean?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘So think about Susan setting out. She’s living a nightmare. But she’s not sure exactly how bad it is. She can’t bring herself to believe it’s as bad as she suspects. Maybe it’s all a sick joke or an empty threat. Or a bluff. But she’s not sure. She’s dressed in what she wore for work. Black pants, white blouse. She’s heading for an unknown situation in the big bad city. She’s a woman on her own, she lives in Virginia, she’s been around the military for years. So she takes her gun. It’s probably still wrapped in a sock, like she stores it in her drawer. She puts it in her bag. She leaves. She gets stuck in the jam. She calls ahead. Maybe the Hoths call her. They won’t listen. They’re fanatics and they’re foreign. They don’t understand. They think a traffic jam is a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.’
‘Then she gets the midnight message.’
‘And she changes. The point is, she has
‘What about the list?’
‘She was a normal person. Maybe working around to killing someone else produces the same feelings as working around to killing yourself. That’s what she was doing. She was climbing upon the plateau. But she wasn’t quite there yet. I disturbed her too early. So she quit. She took the other way out. Maybe by 59th Street she would have been ready.’
‘Better that she was spared that fight.’
‘Maybe she would have won. Lila would have been expecting her to take something out of her pocket or her bag. There would have been an element of surprise.’
‘She had a six-shooter. There were twenty-two of them.’
I nodded. ‘She’d have died, for sure. But maybe she would have died satisfied.’
A day later in the hotel Theresa Lee came back to visit. She told me that Sansom had scoped out a likely target area about half a mile long and the Jersey highway people had closed it off with orange barrels. Three hours
