contacts knew that to try and hold out on him for blackmail later would be a bad idea.
The second place was with the Turks, who certainly had kept a copy of the encrypted material that had begun this whole affair. There were poor file clerks in Turkey as well, and Natadze knew somebody who knew somebody who could pave a road to a clerk’s door with enough money to buy those files.
The third had been the Russian himself, and he wasn’t going to be telling anybody anything unless he believed in an afterlife, and that would be the Devil who processed him into Hell. Should be there by now. If such a place existed, no doubt the doctor would wish to discuss it with Natadze when he eventually arrived there.
He smiled. He did not believe in Hell, nor in Heaven. God, if He existed, should be too busy to concern Himself with what people did on this one little mudball of a planet.
The fourth, and most problematic, was the file at Net Force HQ in Quantico. Americans could be bribed, of course, but not all of them were corrupt — and if you chose the wrong one to try, the whistle would be blown, fast and loud. An organization such as Net Force would be full of patriots, and men who valued their country more than they did personal fortunes were very dangerous. As far as he knew, Net Force still did not understand the significance of the Turkish files, and Natadze did not wish to alert them to this.
So that would be the biggest challenge. He would have to figure out a way to get to the files and destroy them. Fortunately, the man he had put into the hospital was in no position to work on them, at least for a while. He could start the ball rolling on the GRU and Turks with a couple of calls. Money was no object to Mr. Cox — an amount that would make a man rich in Moscow or Ankara was pocket change to a man worth billions.
Natadze felt good about things, better than he had since the snafu with Gridley. He was on top of the situation, he had been very careful with the Russian, the death would look like an accident, and in any event, he’d left nothing behind to follow him. Mr. Cox would be pleased with him. Thinking of which, he picked up the throw- away cell phone and pressed in Cox’s number.
“You have good news?”
“Yes. It is done,” he said. “No problems.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes.”
Natadze discommed. He would destroy the phone at the first stop for petrol, and would scatter the pieces into several garbage cans at different locations. No more mistakes.
Jay asked the doctor point-blank: “If you were me, would you stay here?”
Dr. Grayson smiled. “If I were you, I’d probably be in a circus sideshow, me being a woman and all.”
“Funny,” he said, not answering her smile. “And not a bad sidestep of the question, either.”
She sighed. “You were in a deep coma, Mr. Gridley,” she said. “After having a bullet thwack you in the head. Another day or two in the hospital is a smart idea in the long run.”
“In the long run, Doc, we’re all dead. And you’re still dancing.”
She shook her head. “If I were you and I knew what I knew, I’d stay here for another day. People are both very tough and very fragile, and we don’t begin to know all there is to know about this kind of injury.”
“But I’m not in a coma now, my head wound is not serious, I’ve got a bandage on it and all, and I can lie around in my own bed a lot cheaper than I can this one.”
“Why don’t we wait for your wife to come back from lunch and discuss it?”
“Oh, no, then it would be two against one. I want to go home.”
“What’s so important there it can’t wait?”
“The guy who put me here is still out there. I can help track him down. Wouldn’t
“If I agreed to let you go home and you had a relapse, my malpractice insurance company would never forgive me.”
“I won’t sue you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Come on, Doctor. I need to be out of here.”
She nodded. “It’s not a prison, Mr. Gridley. You can check out AMA if you wish.”
“AMA?”
“Against Medical Advice. You sign a waiver, then if you drop dead on the way home, you can’t blame us — though the families usually do anyway.”
“Where do I sign?”
She smiled again, and shook her head. “That’s what your wife said you would say.”
“Saji talked to you?”
“On the way to lunch. She said you would tell me you were checking out of the hospital, and no matter what I said, you wouldn’t be swayed. She said she would keep a careful eye on you.”
Jay frowned. “How could she know this? I didn’t discuss this with her.”
“Apparently she knows you better than you think.”
He sighed. Yeah. Apparently so.
But that didn’t matter. He was going home.
25
Even though he knew it was theoretically possible, Thorn hadn’t really believed he’d be that lucky. Now and again, it happened, just often enough to keep him from discounting it.
The Super-Cray had come up with a match on Jay’s shooter and whoever killed the dead Russian.
Alone in his office, Thorn had his holoproj float the two images side-by-side. The picture on the left was from a bank ATM cam near the spy goods store — the man hadn’t been using the machine, but had been walking past it in the background, behind a woman withdrawing money from her account. Forty dollars, according to the ATM’s records. It was not the sharpest picture in the world, and only caught him from about the knees up, but it showed a dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five glancing in the camera’s direction. A scale running down the size of the image showed his height in centimeters, based on the known height of a NO PARKING sign on a post behind him. He was about six feet tall.
The woman, a young and attractive brunette who was visible only from the chest up and blocking most of the frame, wore a skimpy red halter top that had trouble keeping her rather voluptuous breasts in check, and if the rear view was as interesting as the front one, Thorn guessed that this was the reason the passing man was looking over his right shoulder her way. He was checking her out.
That would mean he was heterosexual.
Or maybe he was gay, she had on designer pants, and he was admiring those.
The second image was taken by a traffic cam covering an intersection in southern Connecticut, the town of Bridgeport, four miles away from where the Russian spy’s body had been found. A car was halfway through the intersection, making a clear right-hand turn on a red light, right next to a NO TURN ON RED sign. The traffic cam had snapped an image, showing the driver and the front of the car with its license plate, all neat for the local authorities to run the plate and mail the driver a ticket. The picture was date and time stamped.
The driver was an elderly woman, white-haired, and barely able to see over the top of the full-sized Cadillac’s steering wheel.
But: Behind that car, stopped behind the crosswalk, was a new Dodge, and seated at the wheel of that car was a dark-haired man whose head was surrounded by a pulsing red circle.
“Enlarge two hundred percent. Unsharp mask, selected field, on image two,” Thorn said. “Apply reasonable extrapolation generator.”
The computer obeyed, doubling the size of the image inside the circle, sharpening it, and augmenting the
