05.Under Siege v5 Read online

  He had also catalogued the lawyer’s face and would recognize him again if he saw him anywhere. This was a skill Charon worked diligently to perfect. He was a hunter of men, and faces were his stock in trade.

  He hadn’t always been in this line of work, of course, and as he automatically scanned the faces around him and committed them to memory, in one corner of his mind he mused on that fact.

  He had grown up on a hard-scrabble ranch in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. His mother had died when he was three and his father had died when he was twenty-four. The only child, Charon inherited the family place. Weeks would pass without his seeing another person. He did the minimum of work on the ranch, tended the cattle when he had to, and hunted all the rest of the time, in season and out.

  Since he was twelve years old Henry Charon had hunted all year long. He had never been caught by conservation officers although he had been suspected and they had tried.

  Sagging cattle prices in the late ’70s and a thrown rod in the engine of his old pickup changed his life. A banker in Santa Fe laid reality on the table. Unless he devised a way to earn additional income Charon was eventually going to lose the ranch. That fall Henry Charon became a hunting guide. He advertised in the Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and had so many responses he turned people away.

  In spite of his taciturn manner and introspective personality, Henry Charon enjoyed immediate success at his new venture. His gentlemen nimrods always saw trophy animals, sometimes several of them. When one of the corporate captains with his shiny, expensive new rifle needed a little help bringing down his deer or elk, the crack of Charon’s .30-30 was usually unnoticed amid the magnum blasts. Stories of successful hunts spread quickly through the boardrooms and country clubs of Texas and Southern California. Charon jacked his rates from merely high to outrageous and was still booked for years in advance.

  The event that changed his life came in 1984, on the evening before the last day of elk season, as he drank coffee around the campfire with his client, who this year had come alone and paid without quibble the entire fee for a party of four. That was the client’s third season.

  The client was looking for someone to kill a man. He didn’t state it baldly but that was the drift of the conversation. He didn’t ask Charon to undertake the chore, yet somehow in the oblique conversation it became unmistakable that the demise of a certain board member at the client’s savings and loan would be worth fifty thousand dollars cash, no questions asked.

  The client got his elk the next morning and Charon had him on the plane in Santa Fe by six p.m.

  Intrigued, Henry Charon thought about it for a week. Really, when one thought about it objectively, it was hunting and hunting was the one thing that he was extraordinarily good at. Finally he packed a canvas bag and headed for Texas.

  The whole thing was ridiculously easy. Three days of observation established that the quarry always took the same route to work in his black BMW sedan. Charon went home. From a closet he selected a rifle that one of his clients from the year before had brought along for a backup gun and had left behind.

  Three mornings later in Arlington, Texas, the quarry died instantly from a bullet in the head as he drove to work. The police investigation established that the shot must have been fired from a salvage yard almost a hundred and fifty yards away as the victim’s car waited at a traffic light. There were no witnesses. A careful search of the salvage yard turned up no clues. Asked to assist, the FBI identified several dozen ex-military snipers as possible suspects. These men were all discreetly questioned and their alibis checked, to no avail. The crime remained unsolved.

  Two weeks later the money arrived at the ranch in the Sangre de Cristo in a cardboard box, mailed first class without a return address.

  The savings and loan man came to the ranch on two more occasions. He was stout, in his late fifties, and wore custom-made alligator-hide cowboy boots. He sat on the porch in the old rocker and looked at the mountains against the blue sky and talked about how tough times were in Texas since the oil business cratered. On each visit he mentioned the names of men connected with the savings and loan industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The first man subsequently drowned on a fishing trip in Honduras and the other apparently shot himself with a Luger pistol, a family heirloom his father had brought back from World War II, one evening when he was home alone.

  The last time Henry Charon saw the original client he brought another man with him, introduced him, then got back into his Mercedes and drove off down the dirt road, dust swirling. The new man’s name was Tassone. From Vegas, the savings-and-loan man said.

  Tassone was as lean as his chauffeur was fat. He looked over the house and grounds with a deadpan expression and made himself comfortable on the porch. “Awful quiet out here,” he observed.

  Charon nodded to be sociable. He scanned the hillsides slowly, carefully.

  “I hear you got a talent.”

  Charon again examined the draw where the ranch road went down to the paved road. He shrugged. Tassone had his feet on the rail.

  “A man with talent can make a good living,” Tassone said. When Charon made no reply, he added, “If he stays alive.”

  Charon seated himself on the porch rail, one leg up, his hands on his leg. He turned his gaze to Tassone.

  “If he’s smart enough,” the man in the chair said.

  Charon stared at the visitor for a moment, as if he were sizing him up. Then he said, “Why don’t you take the pistol out of that holster under your jacket and put it on the floor.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Charon uncoiled explosively. He drew the hunting knife from his boot with his right hand and launched himself at the man in the chair, all in the same motion. Before Tassone could move, the knife was at his throat and Charon’s face was inches from his.

  “If you don’t, I’ll bury you out here.”

  “What about Sweet?” Sweet was the Texas savings-and-loan man. “He knows I’m here.”

  “Sweet will go in the same hole. He’ll be easy to find. He just drove about a mile down the road and stopped. He’s sitting down there now, waiting for you.”

  “Reach under my coat and help yourself to the gun.”

  Charon did so, then moved back to the rail. The pistol was a small automatic, a Walther, in .380 caliber. He thumbed the cartridges from the clip, jacked the shell from the chamber, then tossed the weapon back to Tassone.

  With his eyes on Charon, Tassone holstered the gun. “How’d you know Sweet didn’t leave?”

  “The road goes down that draw over there.” Charon jerked his head a half inch. “I was watching for dust. There wasn’t any. There’s a wide place under a cottonwood where the creek still has water in it this time of year. He’s sitting there in the shade waiting for you.”

  “Maybe he’s circling around on foot to get a shot at you. Maybe he thinks you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

  “Sweet isn’t stupid. I took him hunting. He knows he wouldn’t have a chance in a hundred to kill me at my game, on my own ground. Now you may have dropped off someone on your way up here, someone who’s a lot better than Sweet. So I’ve been looking. Those cattle out there on that hillside in front of the house are three-quarters wild, and they’re not edgy. Behind the house—that’s a possibility, but there’s a flock of pheasants up there. Saw ’em fly in before you drove up.”

  Tassone looked carefully around him, perhaps really seeing the setting for the first time. In a moment he said, “Cities aren’t like this. Ain’t no spooky cows or cowshit or pheasants. Think you can handle that?”

  “The principles are the same.”

  The visitor crossed his legs and settled back into his chair. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Got a little business proposition for you.” An hour later he walked down the road toward the car where Sweet was waiting.

  That was the last time Charon saw Sweet, the savings-and-loan man. Three years had passed
since then, busy years.

  This afternoon, when the plane landed, Henry Charon joined the throng in the aisle and eased his one soft bag from the overhead bin. As usual, the stewardess at the door of the plane gave him her mindless thank-you while her eyes automatically shifted to the person behind him. Anonymous as always, Henry Charon followed the striding lawyer into the National Airport concourse.

  Taking his time, his eyes in constant motion, Charon moved with the crowd, not too fast, not too slow. He avoided the cab stand in front of the terminal and started for the buses, only to change his mind when he glimpsed the train at the Metro station a hundred yards away.

  He studied a posted map of the system, then bought one at a kiosk. Soon he was in a window seat on the yellow train.

  The second hotel he tried had a vacant single room. Charon registered under a false name and paid cash for a four-day stay. He didn’t even have to show his false driver’s license or credit card.

  With his bag in his room and the room key in his pocket, Henry Charon set forth upon the streets. He wandered along looking at everything, reading street signs and occasionally referring to a map. After an hour of strolling he found himself in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.

  Comfortable in spite of the sixty-degree temperature, he sat on a bench and watched the squirrels. One paused a few feet away and stared at him. “Sorry,” he muttered with genuine regret. “Don’t have a thing for you today.”

  After a few moments he strolled toward the south edge of the block-sized park.

  Four portable billboards stood on the wide sidewalk facing the White House. ANTINUCLEAR PEACE VIGIL the signs proclaimed. Two aging hippies in sandals, one male, one female, attended the billboards.

  Across the eight-lane boulevard, surrounded by lush grass and a ten-foot-high, black wrought-iron fence, stood the White House, like something from a set for Gone With the Wind. The incongruity was jarring amid the stone-and-steel office buildings that stretched away in all directions.

  Along the sidewalk curb were bullet-shaped concrete barricades linked together at the top by a heavy chain. Henry Charon correctly assumed they had been erected to impede truck-bomb terrorists. Similar barricades were erected around the White House gates, to his left and right, down toward the corners.

  Tourists crowded the sidewalk. They pointed cameras through the black fence and photographed each other with the White House in the background. Many of the tourists, at least half, appeared to be Japanese.

  On the sidewalk, parked back-in against the fence, sat a security guard on his motorcycle, a Kawasaki CSR 350, doing paperwork. Charon walked closer and examined his uniform; black trousers with a blue stripe up each leg, white shirt, the ubiquitous portable radio transceiver, nightstick, and pistol. The shoulder patch on his shirt said U.S. PARK POLICE.

  Another man standing beside Charon spoke to the guard: “Whatever happened to the Harleys?”

  “We got them too,” the guard responded, and didn’t raise his eyes from his report.

  Charon walked on, proceeding east, then turned at the corner by the Treasury building and walked south along the fence. Looking in at the mansion grounds he could see the guards standing at their little kiosks, the trees and flowers, the driveway that curved up the entrance. A black limo stood in the shade under the roof overhang, waiting for someone.

  He strolled westward toward the vast expanse of grass that formed the Ellipse. Tourists hurried by him without so much as a glance. Never a smile or a head nod. The little man who wasn’t there found a spot to sit and watch the people.

  Inside the White House the attorney general was passing a few minutes with the President’s chief of staff, William C. Dorfman, whom he detested.

  Dorfman was a superb political operator, arrogant, condescending, sure of himself. An extraordinarily intelligent man, he had no patience for those with lesser gifts. The former governor of a Midwestern state, Dorfman had been a successful entrepreneur and college professor. He seemed to have a sixth sense about what argument would carry the most weight with his listeners. What Dorfman lacked, the attorney general firmly believed, was any sense of right and wrong. The political expedient of the moment always struck Dorfman as proper.

  The real flaw in Dorfman’s psyche, the attorney general mused, was the way he regarded people as merely members of groups, groups to be manipulated for his own purposes. Over at Justice the attorney general referred to Dorfman as “the Weathervane.” He had some other, less complimentary epithets for the chief of staff, but these he used only in the presence of his wife, for the attorney general was an old-fashioned gentleman.

  Others in Washington were less kind. Dorfman had racked up an impressive list of enemies in his two years in the White House. One of the more memorable remarks currently going around the cocktail-party circuit was one made by a senator who felt he had been double-crossed by the chief of staff: “Dorfman is a genius by birth, a liar by inclination, and a politician by choice.”

  Just now as he listened to Will Dorfman, the senator’s remark crossed the attorney general’s mind.

  “What happens if this guy gets acquitted?” Dorfman asked, for the second time.

  “He won’t,” the attorney general, Gideon Cohen, said curtly. He always found himself speaking curtly to Dorfman.

  “There’ll be a dozen retired crocks and out-of-work cleaning women on that jury, people who are such little warts they’ve never heard of Chano Aldana or the Medellín cartel, people who don’t read the papers or watch TV. The defense lawyers won’t let anyone on that jury who even knows where Colombia is. When the jurors finally figure out what the hell is going on, they’re going to be scared pissless.”

  “The jury system has been around for centuries. They’ll do their duty.”

  Dorfman snorted and repositioned his calendar on the desk in front of him. He glanced at the vase of fresh-cut flowers that were placed on his desk every morning, one of the White House perks, and helped himself to a handful of M&Ms in a vase within his reach. He didn’t offer any to his visitor. “You really believe that crap?”

  Cohen did believe in the jury system. He knew that the quiet dignity of the courtroom, the bearing of the judge, the seriousness of the proceedings, the possible consequences to the defendant—all that had an effect on the members of the jury, most of whom, it was true, were from modest walks of life. Yet the honest citizen who felt the weight of his responsibilities was the backbone of the system. And tencent sophisticates like Dorfman would never understand. Cohen looked pointedly at his watch.

  Dorfman sneered and hid it behind his hand. Gideon Cohen was one of those born-to-money Harvard grads who had spent his adult life waltzing to the top of a big New York law firm, a guy who gave up eight or nine hundred thou a year to suffer nobly through a tour in the cabinet. He liked to stand around at parties and cluck about the financial sacrifices with his social equals. Cohen was a royal pain in a conservative’s ass. Even worse, he was a snob. His whole attitude made it crystal clear that Dorfman couldn’t have gotten a job polishing doorknobs at Cohen’s New York firm.

  When Cohen looked at his watch the third time, Dorfman rose and stepped toward the door to check with the secretary. As he passed Cohen, he farted.

  Alone in the chief of staff’s plush, spacious office, Gideon Cohen let his eyes glide across the three original Winslow Homer paintings on the wall and come to rest on the Frederick Remington bronze of a bronc rider about to become airborne, also an original. More perks, gaudy ones, just in case you failed to appreciate the exalted station of the man who parked his padded rump in the padded leather chair. The art belonged to the U.S. government, Cohen knew, and the top dozen or so White House staffers were allowed to choose what they wanted to gaze upon during their tour at the master’s feet. Unfortunately the art had to go back to the museums when the voters or the President sent the apostles back to private life.

  Ah, power, Cohen mused disgustedly, what a whore you are!

&
nbsp; Behind him, he heard Dorfman call his name.

  Three minutes later in the Oval Office Dorfman settled into one of the leather chairs as Cohen shook hands with the President. George Bush had on his Kennebunkport outfit this afternoon. He was leaving for Maine just as soon as he finished this meeting, which Cohen had pleaded for.

  “The dope king again?” the President muttered as he dropped into a chair beside Cohen.

  “Yessir. The drug cartels in Colombia are issuing death threats, as usual, and the Florida senators are in a panic.”

  “I just got off the phone with the governor down there. He doesn’t want that trial in Florida, anywhere in Florida.”

  “You seen this morning’s paper?”

  George Bush winced. “Mergenthaler’s on his high horse again.”

  Ottmar Mergenthaler’s column this morning argued that since the drug crisis was a national crisis, the trial of Chano Aldana should be moved to Washington. He also implied, snidely, that the Bush administration was secretly less than enthusiastic about the war on drugs. “I detect the golden lips of Bob Cherry,” Bush said. Cherry was the senior senator from Florida. No doubt he had been whispering his case to the columnist.

  “I think we should bring Aldana here, to Washington,” Cohen said. “We can blanket the trial with FBI personnel, convict this guy, and do it without anyone getting hurt.”

  Bush looked at his chief of staff. “Will?”

  “Politically, it’ll look good if we do it right here in Washington in front of God and everybody. It’ll send a message to Peoria that we’re really serious about this, regardless of Mergenthaler’s columns. Stiffen some backbones in Colombia. If— and this is a damn big if—we get convictions.”

  “What about that, Gid?” the President asked, his gaze shifting to the attorney general. “If this guy beats the rap, it sure as hell better happen down in Florida.”