Probably there’d be roadblocks leading to the airport pretty quick.
Think, Platt, think!
All right. He had an emergency passport and about twenty thousand dollars of Hughes’s money–a thousand in cash, and the rest in a cash-card account– plus he had a hundred grand of his own fuck-you money stashed in another cash-card account under a name nobody knew.
What he needed was a ride, and he needed it from somewhere close.
Ahead was a section of the airport where the express package and cargo service planes were parked.
He grinned as the idea hit him.
“Good morning sir,” the manager of the freight office said.
“How can I help you?” He was a kid of maybe twenty-four, twenty-five, wearing a white shirt and a blue tie.
Platt smiled.
“Well, sir, I have me a little problem. My name is Herbert George Wells, I’ve got this big ole shipment of farm machinery sitting on a loading dock in London, England, and no way to git it home.” He put a lot more grits in his accent than usual. Stupider he sounded, the better.
“That’s what we’re here for, sir.” “Thing is, the original airline I hired?
Well, they crapped out on me, blew an engine or some thing, and in order to get my tax break, I needed to have spent the money for the plane by December 31/ of last year.” The manager raised an eyebrow.
” “See, it saves me about ten thousand dollars if I can show I paid the money about three weeks ago, you understand what I’m sayin” here?” “I think so.” “I’d like to hire one of your planes to fly over there and pick up my machinery–nothin’ illegal here, sir, I got proper papers on everything–but if I don’t use my first charter, I’m gonna lose ten thousand dollars. On the other hand, I really need those parts, it’s cos tin’ me bid ness every day they’re sit tin’ in England and not in Mobile –that’s where I need to get it, you see. Mobile, Alabama.” “It does appear to be a problem, sir.” “Well, yes. And since there’s nothing illegal about my stuff over there, let’s just say, just, you know, for instance, if you had taken this order from me, oh, say, around Christmastime, how much of a problem would that be?” The manager looked around. Then he looked at Platt. What he thought he saw was a big, musclebound mechanic with his butt in a crack.
“Well, sir, if I had taken the order and somehow forgotten to enter it into the computer, that would be my mistake. I could, ah, correct that when I filled out the paperwork, pre-date it so it matched the actual date I took the order.” Platt smiled, one man of the world to another.
“Well, sir, if you was to do that, I would be mighty grateful, mighty grateful. And Mr.
Franklin and a baseball team of his twin brothers would also be mighty pleased.” Platt reached into his shirt pocket, looked around, then removed ten hundred-dollar bills, folded in the middle. He put the bills on the desk and slid them toward the kid.
The kid covered the bills with his hand, opened his desk drawer, raked the money off the desk, then shut the drawer.
He smiled at Platt.
“All right then, Mr. Wells, what kind of equipment did you have in mind?” Platt grinned. He had his ride, and any feds looking for him wouldn’t find it–since it had been booked two weeks earlier and under another name.
Once he got to England, getting a flight to Africa would be easy.
Then he and Mr. Thomas Hughes would have some words.
Yes, sir, they surely would.
Chapter 37 Sunday, January 16th, noon Quantico, Virginia
Michaels ate takeout Chinese food at his desk, using throwaway chopsticks to fish the stuff directly from the containers, not even bothering with the paper plate that came in the lunch bag. He’d ordered hot and spicy chicken with noodles, and sweet and sour tofu, but it all seemed kind of bland, and he ate for fuel, not taste. He had other things on his mind.
Toni came into his office. He looked up.
Her face, while not grim, was certainly serious.
“More good news?” he asked.
“Maybe we can’t wait on White’s chartered jet to deliver Mr. Thomas Hughes to us after all.” Michaels put the food box down.
“Never rains but it pours.
What?” ” “It seems that about an hour ago, FBI field agents who went to Chicago’s O’Hare airport to set up a surveillance on the gate where Platt was supposed to catch a plane to England goofed up.” “Goofed up. There’s a nice phrase. What does ‘goofed up” mean? And how did they know where he would be?” “Once we knew who we were looking for, we found a couple of hidden accounts that Hughes had set up, small stuff, less than twenty or thirty thousand in each. Hughes tried to hide his connection to them, but not very hard. Platt used money from one of the accounts to book his ticket–and under a phony name.” “How do you know it was Platt?” “Who else would be tapping into a slush account to buy a plane ticket overseas right now? We tipped off the field guys.
The agents got there several hours ahead of the scheduled departure time, but Platt was already there.
He spotted them.” “And he got away, didn’t he?” “The field agents aren’t willing to concede that yet. But he did escape from the terminal building by assaulting a ticket agent and a freight handler.
Stole a freight truck and disappeared.
The FBI is looking, but it’s a big airport.” “Yeah, that might be called a goof-up. Best-and worst-case scenarios?” Toni leaned against the wall.
“Best case, they find him hiding behind a shipment of lawn furniture five minutes from now and take him into custody, whereupon he spills his guts and gives the federal prosecutors enough useful data to overload and sink an aircraft carrier. Hughes comes home, we grab him, he gets fifty years, and dies in jail when he’s a hundred.” Michaels smiled at her.
“I like that one.” “Worst-case scenario, Platt gets away, calls–or manages to get to–Africa, where he informs Hughes the game is over and we’re on to him. Hughes hunkers down behind his money and lives happily ever after in the guest room at the Presidential Palace, then dies at a hundred from eating too much caviar.” “I don’t much like that story. Why is it I think it is more likely?” “They could still catch him.” Michaels shook his head.
“Somehow, my faith in the FBI’S field ops is not as strong as it once was.” He paused, staring at the congealing noodles and tofu.
“Where is Colonel Howard?” “In the air, on an Air Force jet. He should be here within the next couple of hours. What are we going to do?” “Right now, if Platt wants to pick up a phone and call Hughes, can we stop him?” “Jay says we can. If the virgil number Platt called before is the only one Hughes is using, we can jam it so it won’t accept incoming calls.
But there are other phones in Bissau, some of which probably even work.
We can’t block them all.” “Did you lay out what’s going on for the colonel?” “Not yet.” “Call him, tell him. Tell him to lay out his incursion scenarios.
Find out what our chances are of going in and grabbing Hughes.” “Are we ready to take that road yet, Alex?” “This guy terrorized the country, caused people to die, nearly gave a big chunk of a nuclear bomb to a bunch of nuts, and stole a shit load of money. I want to see him behind bars.
If we do it right, we’re in and out before anybody figures out what’s going on, and Mr. Thomas Hughes belongs to us. I’m ready.” “I’ll call the colonel.” The intercom buzzed.
“Yes?” “Sir, your wife’s lawyer is on the phone.” Great.
“Get his number. Then have my lawyer call him.” Toni looked at him.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it when we get caught up.” Sunday, January 16th, 5 p.m. Bissau, Cuinea Bissau Hughes stood on the terraced balcony outside his room, looking over the pink buildings of the compound at the surrounding grounds. It wasn’t so bad here, when you had this kind of accommodation. You could build yourself a decent house in this country for twenty thousand dollars, a mansion for less than a hundred thousand. And he had forty million.
He’d manage.
He leaned against the balcony railing, watching a shirtless native gardener with a hoe dig weeds from a flower bed. You could hire a guy like that for twenty bucks a month.
Yes. He’d do all right here.
The deal with Domingos had gone as smoothly as it could have gone. A hundred million dollars had gone into El Presidente’s private Swiss account, and the mineral rights for the country of Guinea-Bissau now belonged almost entirely to Thomas Hughes. All the mineral rights were his, for the next ninety-nine years. The oil, bauxite, and phosphates alone were potentially worth billions–at least that was what Hughes’s geologists and petroleum engineers had told him.