The Informant

18

HE GOT OFF THE plane at George Bush Intercontinental Airport outside Houston and rented a dark blue Buick LaCrosse. He drove to the comfortable old hotel near the Astrodome where he'd made a reservation and checked in. Instead of sleeping on the plane, he had remained alert because his conversation with Agnoli had been disturbing. He could have killed him in the men's room where there were no cameras and probably could have gotten away with it. But his previous dealing with Agnoli had convinced him that Agnoli wouldn't invite trouble he didn't need. And he had the feeling that a man who wasn't one of the capos who had agreed to his death should be left alone right now. There was going to be enough killing soon.

Two hours later he had dinner in the fish restaurant beside his hotel. He sat in the dark wooden booth thinking about the rest of his life. If he were to stop right now and fly back to the UK, what would happen? He might be able to fit in a few months with Meg before another enterprising young soldier managed to find him. It was possible, if he was very careful about his movements, to make it last a bit longer. He had killed Tosca's first three scouts in Brighton, but dumped their bodies in London. It was difficult for him to know if anyone in the United States knew they'd even been in Brighton.

It had been bad luck that they found him. He and Meg seldom went to Brighton, partly because that was the city where one of the Talarese family had spotted him ten years ago. For him it had seemed an unnecessary risk, and for Meg Brighton had unpleasant associations. But there he had been again, down in Brighton for the races with Meg, and he had been spotted. He wished there could have been a way to get rid of the three or elude them without killing them. Then nothing more would have happened. Carl Bala could have died of old age after a few more years in prison, and Tosca could have succeeded him, with no personal interest in the Butcher's Boy.

He hadn't seen the three men coming, and so he hadn't had a chance to do something different—go to a more remote part of the United Kingdom to stay out of sight, or go to France. Even as these thoughts formed, he knew they were lies. If he had noticed the three men looking for him in England, he wouldn't have concocted some clever way to hide. He simply would have killed them sooner and more efficiently.

The whole issue would have gone away without the old men. It was typical of bosses to listen to Tosca's request and see some advantage in it for themselves that made them indifferent to the risks. Did those fat bastards forget who Tosca was talking about? Didn't they take a moment to reflect on why a man who commanded over three hundred soldiers wanted to share the credit for killing one solitary enemy? And now, even after he had found his way into their meeting to kill Tosca and walked out again, didn't even one of them remember who he was?

He looked at the window. It was dark out and getting to be evening, time to get busy. He finished his dinner and went out to his rental car to begin his search for the necessary weapons. In the old days he'd had connections in many cities who would sell him guns. Now he was alone, and he would have to scavenge.

He thought about how he was going to find a gun. At times he had bought guns at garage sales, or from street drug dealers, who he had found would sell just about anything. He'd once known a gunsmith who sometimes had people leave guns with him to be fixed or modified and then never come back for them. Once he'd bought a compact .32 Beretta from a gas station owner outside Las Vegas who had taken it from a busted gambler in exchange for a tank of gas to get home. He knew he would have to work a little harder this time. He would have to prepare.

He had passed a big thrift store on his way into town from the airport, and he drove back now and went inside. The sales floor looked like a hurricane had blown through and deposited the contents of twenty houses. There were various unmatched pieces of furniture, toys, books, vases, clothing of every sort and size, costume jewelry, old magazines, small appliances, recordings in every format since Edison. The other shoppers were as various as the merchandise. Some appeared to need a cheap way of staying warm, while others scrutinized and evaluated each item like antique collectors.

In the clothing section, he picked out four different baseball caps, a few T-shirts in dark colors, a couple of zip-up sweatshirts with hoods, an olive drab canvas messenger bag with a shoulder strap, and a navy blue work shirt with an embroidered patch over the left pocket that said BOBBY. At a counter he bought a pair of aviator sunglasses. He bought a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, an adjustable crescent wrench, a cold chisel and hammer, a lock-blade knife. When he got to the car, he put all of his purchases in the trunk.

His next stop was a huge Home Depot. He bought a short section of sheet metal heating duct, a pair of tin snips, and a roll of electrical tape. A few blocks from the store he parked and used the tin snips to cut a strip of sheet metal about eighteen inches long and two inches wide with a slight hook on the end. He wished he could show Eddie Mastrewski that he still remembered how to do this.





When Schaeffer had turned sixteen, Eddie had taken him to the Department of Motor Vehicles and signed the papers so he could get a learner's permit. Eddie had sat in silence with beads of sweat running down his forehead while the boy drove up and down the streets, narrowly missing parked cars and stopping so abruptly at each intersection that Eddie was nearly catapulted out of his seat. He endured the lessons for two months, until the boy's test date came along and he passed. The next day Eddie said, "Come on. I want you to meet somebody who knows a lot about cars."

The boy thought it would be a mechanic who was going to show him about car maintenance. Eddie was particular about his car because he sometimes used it to get away after he and the boy had done a job. It was unthinkable that it wouldn't start and run smoothly. Instead, the man was a thief. He was tall and rangy with blond hair like a clump of hay, and he had a southern accent. He taught the boy how to cut a piece of thin sheet metal into a slim-jim, a tool for opening locked car doors. He showed him how to use a screwdriver and hammer to pop out the ignition switch to hot-wire it.

On the way home Eddie said, "I can't buy you a car right now, kid. People would wonder where the money came from. Maybe in a couple of months, after we've mentioned to the right people that you're saving for one. But after today, if it's a matter of life and death, you know how to get one."

He took his messenger bag and one of the hats and one of the sweatshirts out of the trunk and set them on the car seat, then drove a little farther down the street and stopped near a Starbuck's coffee shop. He opened his laptop computer, found the Starbuck's Internet network, and typed in "Gentlemen's clubs, Houston, Texas." Several addresses appeared, and he began to drive. The place he wanted was easy to imagine. It had to be big, and it would have to have a parking lot that was vast enough so the cameras and patrols wouldn't easily see him. It had to be a loud, popular sort of place with men coming in constantly at this time of the evening and very few leaving yet.

He drove out of the city on the beltway that surrounded it and found the first club. He drove past and decided it wasn't the sort of place he wanted. There was a small, dark-looking parking lot behind a windowless box of a building. He drove to the second, and it was better. There was a warehouse-size building with a big sign on the roof with a picture of a mischievous-looking pony and the word MUSTANG, and beneath it, HUNDREDS OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. He assumed the beautiful women didn't all dance there on one night.

He stopped down the road, removed the bulb that illuminated his license plate, and put a few pieces of black electrical tape on the plates so I became T, P became B, 5 became 6, and 9 became 8. He put the messenger bag over his shoulder, a hooded sweatshirt over the bag, and a baseball cap on his head, then drove back to the lot.

The parking space he selected was as far from the sprawling building as possible. He got out of the car and walked two rows closer to the club. The row where he had parked was still filling up with new arrivals. The one where he stood was full, but the drivers probably hadn't been here very long. He touched the hood of the nearest car as he walked, and it was still hot.

He stopped and looked back as though he were waiting for a friend. He leaned against the nearest car, inserted the slim-jim he'd made into the door beside the passenger window, jerked it up, and unlocked the door. He took out his car keys, pretended to unlock the door, and opened it. He leaned in and performed a quick search. He felt under the driver's seat, under the dashboard to the right of the steering wheel for a hidden pistol holder, used his screwdriver to pop the glove compartment, relocked the car, and moved on.

After three cars he began to wonder if he had made a mistake. Maybe the practice of carrying guns was one more thing in America that had changed since he'd left. But the fourth car held what he needed. In the pocket at the front of the driver's seat was a compact Sig Sauer P238 with two full magazines. He put the gun and ammunition in the messenger bag, locked the car, and moved on. His next car was empty, but then he hit two in a row. One had a Glock 17, and the other an M92 Beretta. He kept moving from car to car. When fifteen minutes had passed, he sensed that the odds were getting too high that he would be noticed.

He turned and walked back toward his rental car. The lot was filling up now, and he had to walk close to several groups of men while he was trying to keep the stolen pistols invisible. He had seven pistols in his messenger bag, which was bulging and weighed at least fifteen pounds. He got into his car, set the messenger bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, started the car, and slowly made his way up the aisle toward the exit.

He had not been wrong. The last time he had thought about the gun laws in Texas had been quite a few years ago, but at that time it was legal to carry a loaded, concealed weapon if the gun owner was in his car. That was pretty much an invitation to keep a gun in the glove compartment, and he'd just verified that many people were in the habit. He drove out onto the highway and headed eastward toward central Houston and his hotel. Tonight he was grateful that some things were eternal.

The hotel was quiet and pleasant, and he felt glad to be back in his room. He opened the newspaper the staff had left outside his door and scanned the pages. There was a small article, no larger than four column inches, about a joint police and FBI raid on an Arizona resort, in which they'd arrested dozens of guests on parole violations, illegal drug and weapons charges. Orders from Washington must have been to keep from releasing too much. He hoped it was because the government was planning to do something more to disrupt the old men's attempts to reorganize themselves. Anything the government could do to frustrate those bastards and keep them off balance right now would help him.

He spread the newspaper on the desk and set the bag on the surface, then took out the seven stolen guns, one at a time. There was the Sig P238, the Glock 17, two Beretta M92s, a Browning Hi-Power .45, a Kimber .45, a Springfield Armory .40. All of them were fully loaded, and three had an extra loaded magazine or two.

It had been a good fifteen minutes' work. Now it was time to sleep and get ready for the next part of the trip. He showered and then soaked his body in the tub, as he had done in Arizona. He was going to do some difficult things in the next few days, and he couldn't afford to be slowed down by any aches or angry scratches or blisters once it began. When the water had cooled, he dried off and went to bed. As soon as he dozed off, he dreamed he was in England again. The strange part was that the dream wasn't strange at all. He did all the things he usually did—woke with Meg in the old manor house, went to the big dining room for breakfast, then went into the library for an hour to read the newspapers while Meg completed her letters and her e-mails. The library was his refuge because it had been hers, and her father's before her. When Schaeffer and Meg had begun to live here after her parents died, he had begun reading his way through the books in the shelves. He had read his way through in about five years and then began to buy books. In the dream-day he and Meg packed a bag and went into Bath, ate at a restaurant, went to a play, and met some friends for a drink afterward. As he looked around in the hotel bar where they had stopped, he noticed that all of the other tables and the stools at the bar were occupied by members of the Mafia he had seen at the ranch. They didn't recognize him, but he kept waiting for one to turn and look at him, then stand and point at him.

At eight in the morning he awoke, got up and dressed, then drove to an electronics store, bought a prepaid cell phone, and dialed Meg's number in London.

"Hello," she said.

"Hi. It's me."

"I've been wishing it would be you every time, but I always remind myself that you would never call in these circumstances. Do you have new circumstances?"

"They're a bit worse than before. I wanted to tell you that I'm doing my best to get through this, but you should be prepared for the probability that it won't work out."

"Oh, my God, Michael. Please. Is there any way to simply leave? If you and I met in a village in Paraguay or one of the thirty thousand islands of the Maldives, couldn't we live some kind of life together? Because I'd do that without hesitation."

"So would I. The problem is that the people I'm worrying about have branches and subsidiaries in a great many countries, and very close ties with a lot of other organizations everywhere. Right now, today, the word is being spread that finding me is worth a lot of money. The figure will be high enough so quite a few people in different places will begin to search."

"What are you going to do?"

"Make getting me seem like a hard way to make money."

"The only other time you went back there, you made up such a pretty story for me. Do you remember? You were with the CIA, and the two boys who had been killed when the Bulgarians came after you would be awarded posthumous medals by the queen?"

"I remember."

"I never bought a word of it. But I loved you for making it up. I've always loved you, from the time you took me to tea after that meeting in Bath, and we talked. I didn't know anything about you—what you had done before, who you knew, and so on. I could see everything about you without any facts to obstruct the view. You do your best to come back to me. If you make it, I'll be here waiting for you. If you don't make it back, then know that I don't regret anything. If I had it to do again, I'd give myself to you in a heartbeat."

"What's going on now reminds me that I have a few things to regret, but I've never felt anything but lucky I met you. I love you."

"I feel as though we didn't get to say that enough times."

"If I get back, I'll say it every morning before I do anything else."

"I'll remind you."

"I'm sorry, but I've got to keep moving, so I'd better go. Stay safe. Be alert. If anything around you seems odd, assume it's trouble. Visit friends in faraway places for a few weeks. One way or another, this will be over by then. If they find me, they'll stop looking."

"I'll be waiting for you."

He disconnected the call, took the phone apart, and dropped the pieces in trash cans as he walked along the street. When he reached the hotel, he checked out and began to drive northward out of Houston.