He felt dissipated, unclean, as if he had drunk too much, which he rarely did, or had been with a prostitute, which he never was.
In the living room of the suite, he saw the empty bottle that had held the one beer he’d drunk. The empty dinner plate. A full cup of cold coffee. He had dropped his napkin on the floor.
At the door to the hallway, he found the deadbolt as it should be. He wondered why he’d thought it might have been unlocked. The security chain hung loose; but he never engaged them because they were flimsy and easily defeated, supplied by hotels largely for psychological purposes, to assure guests that they were doubly safe.
He took a short bottle of Pepsi from the honor-bar fridge and twisted off the cap and washed the bitter taste from his mouth.
In the bathroom, standing at the toilet, he was surprised to see that his urine was unusually dark. He wondered what he might have eaten to have such an effect.
At the sink, washing his hands, he saw the small red bruise in the crook of his right arm. At the center of it was a darker spot, like a pin prick. Directly over the vein. As if a phlebotomist had recently drawn his blood, though none had. He supposed it might be an insect bite coincidentally on the vein. He examined himself for other bites, but there were none.
He always had aspirin in his kit of toiletries. With the Pepsi, he took two, and hoped this wasn’t a sinus headache, which aspirin never much relieved.
After a long, hot shower, he felt better, more himself.
Drying off, pulling on a fresh pair of boxers, he began to think about booking a flight back to Virginia.
The telephone rang. Each room had a phone, and the one in the bathroom was wall-mounted. “Hello?”
Booth Hendrickson said, “Good morning, Nathan. I wish you had reacted differently to what I told you in the Austin airport.”
“Booth? How did you know where I was staying?”
Booth Hendrickson made an unusual suggestion.
“Yes, all right,” Silverman replied, and he stood listening for a few minutes. He hung up.
He felt weak. Shaken by what he had been told, he sat on the bathroom floor, his back to the wall. Shock soon gave way to sorrow threaded through with dismay that Jane could have so profoundly betrayed his confidence in her. He was mortified that his assessment of her, both as an agent and as a person, had been so wrong.
Eventually he got to his feet. As he was combing his damp hair in front of the bathroom mirror, he saw the phone reflected from the opposite wall, beside the towel rack.
He turned to stare at it, puzzled. He had the strangest feeling that the phone was going to ring and that it would be Randolph Kohl, director of Homeland Security, calling again.
He waited, but of course it didn’t ring. He had never in his life had a premonition that came true; and neither did this one.
Kohl had called minutes earlier, as Silverman had been pulling on a fresh pair of boxer shorts and thinking about booking a flight back to Virginia. Considering the devastating news about Jane that the director of Homeland Security had delivered, there could surely be nothing more to add to her list of crimes.
Finished combing his hair, he switched on his electric razor and began to shave, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Gradually, his sorrow became twined with anger, with resentment that Jane had for seven years played him for a fool.
Although it was Sunday, Silverman had work that must not be postponed. He needed to do something about Jane Hawk. She had gone to the dark side. Hell, she had plunged into the dark side. A stain on the Bureau. He needed to stop her.
When he had dressed but before putting on his sport coat, he took his shoulder rig from the nightstand drawer and shrugged into it, adjusted it, and slipped the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson into the holster.
The drawer contained a second gun. He had not put it there. He had never seen it before. It was stowed in a Blackhawk reverse-carry holster with adjustable belt clips.
Mystified, he took the holster out of the drawer and the gun out of the holster. A .45 ACP Kimber Raptor II. Three-inch barrel. Eight-shot magazine. Hardly more than a pound and a half, it was made for easy concealed carry.
As strange as the existence of the gun might be, stranger still was the fact that he quickly accepted the necessity of it, fixed the holster to his belt, and inserted the pistol.
A thought kept circling through his mind: Randolph Kohl wants me to have the second weapon. Kohl wasn’t with the Bureau, had no authority over Silverman, and carrying a gun that wasn’t a properly registered duty piece violated FBI rules, but for some reason none of that mattered. Within a minute of finding the pistol, Silverman was fine with it and no longer either concerned or curious.
He put on his sport coat, looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door, and decided the weapon was all but undetectable.
1
* * *
HAVING FALLEN ASLEEP shortly before 2:00 A.M., Jane broke out of a nightmare, fully awake, at 6:10. She hadn’t gotten enough sleep to be refreshed for what lay ahead, but she wasn’t going to get a minute more just then.
She showered, dressed, and sat in an armchair with a pen and a notepad and William Overton’s smartphone. After leaving the attorney dead in his closet on Friday night, she’d been too emotionally and physically wrung out to deal fully with the phone when she got back to her motel in Tarzana, and since getting up Saturday morning, she’d been on the run. Now, using the password Overton had given her, she accessed his address book and scrolled through it, writing down names and phone numbers.
She recognized some of the names, power players in the legal system, as well as in politics, news media, finance, entertainment, the arts, sports, and fashion. Not all of them were likely to be members of Aspasia, but surely at least several were. David James Michael, the Silicon Valley billionaire, was among them, and Bertold Shenneck, of course. The collection of names and numbers was too small for a man whose life had been as complex as Overton’s, which probably meant that these were those he deemed most important and that he kept another digital Rolodex elsewhere.
Under the listing labeled SHENNECK’S PLAYPEN, in addition to the forty-four-character Web address that she had previously recovered, there were also four street addresses in Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The L.A. address was the one for the Aspasia that she had visited.
When she had completed transcribing the contents of his address book, she consulted the numbers she had for Bertold Shenneck. There were two listings for the scientist’s residence in Palo Alto: the main line and one labeled CLIVE CARSTAIRS, HOUSE MANAGER. She called the second.
The man who answered had a British accent. Informed by the caller-ID window on his phone, he said, “Good morning, Mr. Overton.”
“Mr. Carstairs?” she asked.
“Speaking.”
“Oh, Mr. Carstairs, this is Leslie Granger, Mr. Overton’s personal assistant. We haven’t spoken before.”
“Good morning, Ms. Granger. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I trust that nothing untoward has happened to Miss Nolan.”
At the top of Overton’s address book, programmed for speed dial, had been the name Connie Nolan.
“Oh, goodness, no. Connie’s just fine. I’m junior in the job, the assistant to the personal assistant. If Mr. Overton gets any busier, I’ll probably have an assistant of my own before too long. The thing is, Mr. Overton wants me to messenger a package to Dr. Shenneck. He thinks the doctor is there in Palo Alto, but he wanted me to confirm as much.”
“Good that you did,” Carstairs said. “Dr. and Mrs. Shenneck will be at the ranch in Napa Valley through Thursday.”
“Ah! Then I’ll see that it goes directly there.”
Overton might have lied. Confirmation of Shenneck’s whereabouts meant that she and Dougal would make a run at him later in the day.