fact, it’s closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks
ago, and we’re going to tear it down next month, put up a new place,
sixty units, a restaurant. There’s still electrical service. The
manager’s suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom,
furniture, telephone-so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans.
Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a
sensation that the feds can’t put a lid on. Anyway, if we can’t get a
lead on him, hiding out is all we can do.”
“I’m to drive to Vegas?” she asked.
That’d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us-and considering
what’s at stake, I think they want us real bad-they’ll probably have men
at the major airports.
You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up
Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I’ll follow in a couple
of hours.”
“But if the cops show u “Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip
away from them.”
“You think they’re going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.
“No. I just know I’m more competent.”
“Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a
half decades ago.
He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”
And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that.
What was it he’d said-that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the
world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?
“Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.
She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future
together, was for her to do what he wanted.
“All right,” she said. “All right. We’ll split. But it scares me,
Benny. I guess I don’t have the guts for this kind of thing, the right
stuff. I’m sorry, but it really scares me.
He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn’t anything to be ashamed
of. Only madmen have no fear.”
A Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one
o’clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood
outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the
wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking
harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a
sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.
He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue
shirt, and a greenandornngestriped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it
had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as ajoke gift. Even by a
generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain.
He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose
that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine
on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind
his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the
scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding
chin.
In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted
on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his
arms, therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped
to pick up.
Solberg’ 5 office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every
shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners,
were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file
folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in
apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two
chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.
“Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping
at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time
what lay beyond the walls of his office.
The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many
trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a
large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg’s
second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past