Metzgers dog, p.24
Metzger's Dog, page 24
“Check your bags, sir.” It wasn’t a question.
“Fine,” said Porterfield, and accepted the two baggage stubs.
“Gate 78,” said the man. “You’d better hurry.”
Porterfield walked quickly across the lobby toward the bank of escalators that led to the metal-detectors and then beyond to the airplanes, not looking back.
PORTERFIELD SPENT THE TIME on the airplane reading magazines. There seemed to be nothing on this flight except the journals for money fanciers—magazines that contained excruciatingly detailed accounts of the economic exploits of men who were photographed with their coats off but their shirts unwrinkled and their ties clasped beneath stiff, immaculate collars. These men were all referred to as “CEOs” who had moved from one company to another because of their love of a challenge. There were other magazines that seemed to be all advertisements for objects that cost thousands of dollars and were handmade by European craftsmen. They were all special, some in limited edition, some numbered and signed, some just called rare. There were also beautiful advertisements for hotels in cities where he’d spent time—most of them tropical cities on the ocean, where large, futuristic buildings along the beach were crowded from behind by filthy shacks made of sheet metal and discarded plywood anchored in the rainsoaked mud. He slept for the last hour of the flight and awoke feeling calm and rested. As the airplane descended, he gazed out the window at the array of lights in the Los Angeles basin, fluttering and blinking in the distance. He reached into his pocket and glanced at his ticket again. He’d have only a few minutes to catch the airplane to San Diego. He would have liked to telephone Alice, but this was their home ground and they’d be watching him for that. Besides, Mrs. Goode would have reached Alice hours ago.
The crowd of people leaned and wobbled and bumped each other as they made their way down the aisle toward the door. Porterfield waited for an opening and joined them. He knew Los Angeles International Airport, and his baggage was checked through to San Diego, so he felt calm and resigned. The flight to San Diego was only forty-five minutes, and then this would be over. They’d have some way of throwing off any trap he might have set for them, but the exact nature of it didn’t pique his curiosity. He only hoped it didn’t demand that they kill him.
He yawned as he stepped across the threshold into the carpeted corridor and walked toward the terminal. He walked to the television screen mounted on the pillar in the center of the room and looked for his flight, then went to Gate 19, picked a bench away from the crowds, and sat down. It would only be a few minutes.
He heard the voice on the public-address system, and it sounded exactly like the one he’d heard in Washington. “Mr. Porterfield, please pick up a white courtesy phone. Mr. Porterfield.”
Porterfield walked down the hall and picked up the telephone. To his surprise, there was a voice on the other end. “Mr. Porterfield?”
“Yes.”
“Please come to the American Airlines desk at Gate 72.”
Porterfield said, “I’ll be right there.” He smiled. It was simple enough. There would be another ticket waiting for him, and another flight to another city. It was the trick, the way they’d planned to break up the trap. It wasn’t bad. They’d have redirected his baggage with the change in reservations. They were watching him now, he was sure. There was no way he could let anyone know where he was going.
At the end of the corridor he entered another large waiting area, the mirror image of the one he’d passed through moments ago. As he made his way toward the desk at Gate 72 something seemed to be wrong. There was no young man in a blue blazer to meet him, only another passenger waiting there. He noticed that the passenger was a girl with long brown hair and a rather good figure, then she turned toward him and he noticed that she had large, clear green eyes. He moved up beside her to wait for the attendant to return.
Suddenly the girl turned and threw her arms around him, smiling. “Daddy!”
PORTERFIELD STOOD STILL while the young woman embraced him hard, her hands moving to his back. He said, “You don’t really have to frisk me. You saw me get off an airplane.”
“That’s true, but you probably have a little card on you that says you can even shoot people on airplanes when you’re in the mood, and electronic underpants that jam the metal detectors.”
“Interesting idea,” he said, returning the woman’s embrace so she could finish her search.
She reached into his breast pocket and extracted the envelope with his ticket in it, then appeared to study it. “Okay, time to move on.” She walked across the lobby and Porterfield followed. They walked to the line of people waiting to board the flight to San Diego.
As they waited in the line, Porterfield said, “We seem to have made the flight. Are you going with me?”
She stared at him. “I’ll be with you. Other people too.”
As they neared the portal at the narrow corridor leading to the airplane, people huddled closer, and Porterfield felt himself bumped twice. He decided not to speak. She didn’t seem to care if he asked questions, but in the press of the crowd he knew she wouldn’t answer. As they reached the doorway she grasped Porterfield’s hand and pulled him to the side.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No problem. Come on.” Then he noticed that she no longer held his ticket. She must have handed it off to someone in the crowd, he thought, but he resisted the temptation to look down the corridor to see which one it might be. He followed her across the lobby again, and they sat down together.
She lit a cigarette and said, “I noticed you’re not wearing a bulletproof vest.”
“Should I be?” He smiled. His sportcoat had panels of Dupont Kevlar sewn into it, so it would stop any bullet smaller than a .45 caliber.
The young woman shrugged. ‘It’s your wardrobe, but I would have thought something like that would be required if you want to dress for success in your line of work.”
“Or yours.”
“I’m flat enough as it is. But the point is this. You’re not some kind of kamikaze, are you? Eager to die for the cause?”
“I’d prefer not to. What’s the cause?”
“We thought you might be a little cranky about what’s happened.”
“If the money is all you want, I don’t think we have much to worry about. I didn’t set any traps. I didn’t know I was going on a flight. If I had, I wouldn’t have known where. Most people would have assumed it would be any place but Los Angeles.”
The young woman looked away from him through the large plate-glass windows. The airplane was slowly moving toward the runway. She blew smoke in the air, then pushed her cigarette into the ashtray. “I hope you’re telling the truth, but we’ll know in a minute when we try to get out of here.”
They stood up and walked to the escalator, then rode it down to the ground floor and stepped onto the moving walkway. In front a family wearing Hawaiian shirts blocked them from passing, but the young woman didn’t seem to care. They stood on the long conveyor and drifted sedately toward the main foyer. In a moment, Porterfield knew, they’d be past the bank of metal detectors. From here on there would be danger. Armed men could reach this part of the airport from the parking lots without even passing security guards. He said quietly, “Did you have the courtesy to make a return reservation for me?”
She said, “Here. You might as well have this.” She reached into her purse and produced another airline ticket.
Porterfield accepted the ticket and studied it, then said, “This plane leaves in forty-five minutes. Am I going to make it?”
“As your travel agent, I sincerely hope so. You will unless you managed to get word of your itinerary to someone.”
“How could I do that?”
“The airplane has a radio, and I’m sure you also have a little card that says you can use everybody’s radio.”
“No, my electronic underpants cause static.”
The couple in front of them wearing Hawaiian shirts whispered together. The husband shook his head, but the wife said loudly, “He said ‘electronic underpants.’ I heard him.”
When they reached the end of the conveyor the young woman walked across the main foyer and through the exit to the sidewalk. Hundreds of people were moving into and out of the airline terminal, taxis stopped and started, pudgy little buses deposited streams of passengers. Porterfield said, “What now? We drive to a desert shack and hold me hostage for another”—he glanced at his watch—“thirty-eight minutes?”
“Some other time. Our desert shack is being remodeled, so the paint’s still tacky in the guest room. You’ll have to drop in and see us later. We’re expecting to be able to entertain more lavishly soon.”
“Thank you. I’d enjoy that. What do we do while we’re waiting?” He stepped back to allow a cabdriver to swing a suitcase onto the curb.
“Nothing,” she said, and put her arm in Porterfield’s, walking him to the bench beside the wall. “Sit here, relax. Some nice men in cars out there in the darkness have rifles trained on you right now. Some others are in the airport waiting for you to make a move, so you won’t be lonely. Right now I have to leave you, but I’ll be back.” She turned and walked down the sidewalk and into the terminal again.
Porterfield looked out at the thousands of cars in the lot, then scanned the five-story parking ramp across the drive. He could see nothing for certain—there were silhouettes of heads in many of the cars, and people stood on some of the tiers of the parking ramps, some fumbling with baggage, others just loitering, apparently without another way to pass the time before they expected an airplane to arrive or leave. Probably she hadn’t lied, and at least one of them was there to blow his head off if something went wrong. There was no reason to doubt it, and he knew he wouldn’t do anything different if there were no one watching.
The plan wasn’t bad, he thought. Even if he’d managed to shake the woman and get to a telephone, there was no way he could have done anything. He could tell the San Diego field office that a person arriving on the seven-thirty flight would pick up two brown suitcases that he had baggage claims to match. It would have taken longer than the three-quarter-hour flight even to organize a team, and then they’d see fifty or sixty people arrive and pick up two brown suitcases each. They had no way to arrest anyone or even examine the suitcases. Meanwhile, Porterfield would be here with guns trained on him. It wasn’t bad. He smiled as he glanced at his watch again. It was after seven-thirty already, and the baggage would now be rolling down the ramp in the San Diego airport. He waited.
The young woman appeared again far down the sidewalk. He watched as she walked toward him. She had one hand in her purse, fumbling around for something. His jaw tightened, then the hand emerged and it held a cigarette and a lighter. He leaned back on the bench and sighed.
She stopped in front of the bench and lit the cigarette. “Stretch your legs, Daddy. You’ve got a long flight ahead of you.”
“That’s a relief.” Porterfield stood up. “My wife will be pleased. I left word I might be gone for a couple of days.”
“You people have wives?” She seemed startled.
“Sure. Wives, kids. Of course, my kids are grown up and married. We even had a dog, but he died a few years ago.”
They walked on in silence between the metal detectors, along the moving walkway, and up the escalator to the boarding area. Finally she stopped him. “Wait. Here’s the locker key. Inside the locker is the original set of papers. You’ve got a minute or two. Don’t bother to be careful about the briefcase or the papers. There aren’t any fingerprints on anything.”
He stared at her. “That’s not necessary. We have copies.”
“But we wanted you to know, and we thought that if you had them back—”
“Know what?”
“That it’s over. As of this minute, we’re out of this business. There’s no reason now to hunt for us.”
Porterfield handed the key back to her. “Do me a favor. Just take it with you and burn it. Burn the other copies you have. Forget you ever saw it.” He turned and walked to the boarding gate.
36 Goldschmidt sat in the massive leather armchair in front of Porterfield’s desk. Far behind him on the wall above the door the portrait of Theophilus Seyell’s father stared into the room like a malevolent voyeur at a window. Goldschmidt said, “If we devote sufficient time and energy to it, the problem can be settled.”
Porterfield leaned back and studied Theophilus Seyell’s father. It was an impossible face, the features a child’s imagination would create to complete the specter that seemed to materialize at night among the clothes in his darkened closet. “There isn’t any problem unless we invent one. Everyone who might have been vulnerable has been rotated. Most of the people responsible for the papers are dead.”
“But there are still interests that need to be insured.”
Porterfield nodded. “Of course.”
“I’ll start organizing a field team as quietly as possible. My own people may be the only ones I can afford to use right now, but—”
“Don’t bother.”
“Given the time and the resources, anyone can be hunted down. And these people have too much money to remain invisible for long.”
“No. I’ll handle it.”
“Ben, be reasonable. The first time we heard of these people it was because they attacked a college campus with an automatic cannon. For all we know they’re brigade strength and spending the five million on military weapons.”
Porterfield shifted his gaze from the portrait to Goldschmidt. His tired eyes narrowed. “For all you know they’re from another galaxy and live on whipped cream.” He looked back at the portrait. “We can’t open this thing up again on a grand scale or the word will go out to the operational people. The rest of this is going to take me about a week. After that there won’t be any terrorists and the papers will never see the light.”
“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”
“You don’t need the extra headache.”
“Then I’ll talk to you in a week.” Goldschmidt stood up and walked across the broad Oriental carpet to the door. He stopped and pointed up at the portrait. “Fascinating, really, isn’t it? That a man with Seyell’s money and power would choose to have a thing like that on his wall?” Without waiting for an answer, he went out and closed the door.
Porterfield took a scrap of paper and wrote on it, “Enjoyed the pictures you showed me the other day. I’d appreciate it if you could order me a set from last Thursday in Los Angeles. I’d especially like shots of my daughter and me. I’d do it myself, but once you get on the mailing list you never get off.”
He sealed the paper in an envelope and dialed the intercom. He said, “Karl, I’m afraid I have to send you on an errand in Miami today. Come on in and I’ll explain it.”
IN THE GARDEN OF THE BILTMORE HOTEL the only sound came from the rhythmic advance of the tide over the sand of Butterfly Beach. The sun had stopped at the horizon line and seemed to have flattened on the glassy surface of the ocean like the yolk of an egg, and now the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees glowed whitish in the sky.
“This is it,” whispered Chinese Gordon. “Zero minus sixty seconds and counting. We can still call Mission Control if you don’t want to marry an inert and unpromising object like me.”
Margaret held up her bouquet of ranunculus and poppies like a microphone and intoned into it, “This is Houston. We have ignition. I repeat, we have ignition.”
Margaret’s father, a tall man with wavy gray hair at his temples and a bald pate that caught the weak glow of the sun, walked up to them, lifting his feet three inches off the ground at each step in unconscious guilt at crushing the soft carpet of grass. “It’s just about time for me to do my only official act in this. I hope I give her away without making any mistakes. She’s the only daughter I’ve got, so I’d better not make a mess of it.”
“Daddy, you’re walking like a chicken. How much champagne did you have?”
“Mr. Kepler and Mr. Immelmann have made sure we were supplied. Liberally. Magnificently.”
Chinese Gordon said, “I’ll be good to her, Doctor Crisp.”
“Don’t call me that. I’ve been a proctologist for over thirty years now, and every time somebody calls me Doctor I think the worst is yet to come. Call me Baird.”
“Baird. Stop that,” said Mrs. Crisp as she came around the corner of the bungalow with Immelmann. Behind them the judge, a short, fat man, was putting on his black robe. Kepler straightened the judge’s collar and patted him heavily on the back. “There you go, sport. Want me to dust off home plate for you?”
The judge beamed. “I think I’ll manage. I’ve done over two thousand weddings, you know—career total.”
“Ever figure your won-lost record?”
The judge stepped onto the grass, smiling and holding his arms out in their flowing sleeves to herd everyone into position. High in a eucalyptus across the lawn with scarlet bougainvillea vines woven into its dark green leaves an invisible bird began to sing.
“How beautiful this is,” Mrs. Crisp said to her husband. “And look, far out there on the ocean. The lights on that ship are gorgeous, red and green and blue. It looks like a sailing ship. Magical.”
Kepler said to Immelmann, “She’s got a great eye. Never seen an oil rig before.”
Immelmann glared at him and said to Mrs. Crisp, “You’re right. We’re very lucky. Must be anchored out there waiting for the right wind to take it out to sea—maybe to Hawaii or even Tahiti.”
Kepler whispered, “Anchored nine miles out with fifteen hundred feet of pipe. The good ship Standard Oil.”
“Dearly beloved,” the judge’s melodious voice rolled in the still air of the evening, “we are gathered here this evening to witness the joining together in matrimony of Margaret Anne Crisp and Leroy Charles Gordon. It is a solemn occasion and yet a happy one….”
Mrs. Crisp whispered to no one in particular, “I’ve never seen a civil ceremony before. He’s very good.”
