‘Hmph?’
“They killed her friend and made her watch … the things they did to her … To them she was just a thing.’ … ?ill? and Rick,’ Sandy said aloud, not quite realizing it.
‘Burt and Henry,’ Sarah corrected. ‘I don’t think the other two will be hurting anybody anymore.’ The two women shared a look, their eyes meeting across the breakfast table, their thoughts identical, though both were distantly shocked at the very idea of holding them, much less understanding them.
‘Good.’
* * *
‘Well, we’ve shaken down every bum west of Charles Street,’ Douglas told his lieutenant. ‘We’ve had one cop cut – not seriously, but the wino is in for a long drying-out period at Jessup. A bunch have been puked on,’ he added with a smirk, ‘but we still don’t know crap. He’s not out there, Em. Nothing new in a week.’
And it was true. The word had gotten out to the street, surprisingly slow but inevitable. Street pushers were being careful to the point of paranoia. That might or might not explain the fact that not a single one had lost his life in over a week.
‘He’s still out there, Tom.’
‘Maybe so, but he’s not doing anything.’
‘In which case everything he did was to get Farmer and Grayson.’ Ryan noted with a look at the sergeant.
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘No, I don’t, and don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why.’
‘Well, it would help if Charon could tell us something. He’s been pretty good taking people down. Remember that bust he did with the Coast Guard?’
Ryan nodded. ‘That was a good one, but he’s slowed down lately.’
‘So have we, Em,’ Sergeant Douglas pointed out. ‘The only thing we really know about this guy is that he’s strong, he wears new sneaks, and he’s white. We don’t know age, weight, size, motive, what kind of car he drives.’
‘Motive. We know he’s pissed about something. We know he’s very good at killing. We know he’s ruthless enough to kill people just to cover his own activities … and he’s patient.’ Ryan leaned back. ‘Patient enough to take time off?’
Tom Douglas had a more troubling idea. ‘Smart enough to change tactics.’
That was a disturbing thought. Ryan considered it. What if he’d seen the shakedowns? What if he’d decided that you could only do one thing so long, and then you had to do something else? What if he’d developed information from William Grayson, and that information was now taking him in other directions – out of town, even? What if they’d never know, never close these cases? That would be a professional insult to Ryan, who hated leaving cases open, but he had to consider it. Despite dozens of field interviews, they had not turned up so much as a single witness except for Virginia Charles, and she’d been sufficiently traumatized that her information was scarcely believable – and contradicted the one really useful piece of forensic evidence they had. The suspect had to be taller than she had said, had to be younger, and sure as hell was as strong as an NFL linebacker. He wasn’t a wino, but had chosen to camouflage himself as one. You just didn’t see people like that. How did you describe a stray dog?
‘The Invisible Man,’ Ryan said quietly, finally giving the case a name. ‘He should have killed Mrs Charles. You know what we’ve got here?’
Douglas snorted. ‘Somebody I don’t want to meet alone.’
‘Three groups to take Moscow out?’
‘Sure, why not?’ Zacharias replied. ‘It’s your political leadership, isn’t it? It’s a huge communications center, and even if you get the Politburo out, they’ll still get most of your military and political command and control -‘
‘We have ways to get our important people out,’ Grishanov objected out of professional and national pride.
‘Sure.’ Robin almost laughed, Grishanov saw. Part of him was insulted, but on reflection he was pleased with himself that the American colonel felt that much at ease now. ‘Kolya, we have things like that, too. We have a real ritzy shelter set up in West Virginia for Congress and all that. The 1st Helicopter Squadron is at Andrews, and their mission is to get VIPs the heck out of Dodge – but guess what? The durned helicopters can’t hop all the way to the shelter and back without refueling on the return leg. Nobody thought about that when they selected the shelter, because that was a political decision. Guess what else? We’ve never tested the evacuation system. Have you tested yours?’
Grishanov sat down next to Zacharias, on the floor, his back against the dirty concrete wall. Nikolay Yevgeniyevich just looked down and shook his head, having learned yet more from the American. ‘You see? You see why I say we’ll never fight a war? We’re alike! No, Robin, we’ve never tested it, we’ve never tried to evacuate Moscow since I was a child in the snow. Our big shelter is at Zhiguli. It’s a big stone – not a mountain, like a big – bubble? I don’t know the word, a huge circle of stone from the center of the earth.’
‘Monolith? like Stone Mountain in Georgia?’
Grishanov nodded. There was no harm in giving secrets to this man, was there? ‘The geologists say it is immensely strong, and we tunneled into it back in the late 1950s. I’ve been there twice. I helped supervise the air-defense office when they were building it. We expect – this is the truth, Robin – we expect to get our people there by train.’
‘It won’t matter. We know about it. If you know where it is, you can take it out, just a matter of how many bombs you put there.’ The American had a hundred grams of vodka in him. ‘Probably the Chinese do, too. But they’ll go for Moscow anyway, especially if it’s a surprise attack.’
‘Three groups?’
‘That’s how I’d do it.’ Robin’s feet straddled an air-navigation chart of the southeastern Soviet Union. ‘Three vectors, from these three bases, three aircraft each, two to carry the bombs, one a protective jammer. Jammer takes the lead. Bring in all three groups on line, like, spaced wide like this.’ He traced likely courses on the map. ‘Start your penetration descent here, take ’em right into these valleys, and by the time they hit the plains -‘
‘Steppes,’ Kolya corrected.
‘They’re through your first line of defense, okay? They’re smoking in low, tike three hundred feet. Maybe they don’t even jam at first. Maybe you have one special group, even. The guys you really train.’
‘What do you mean, Robin?’
‘You have night flights into Moscow, airliners, I mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, what say you take a Badger, and you leave the strobes on, okay, and maybe you have little glow lights down the fuselage that you can turn on and off – you know, like windows? Hey, I’m an airliner.’
‘You mean?’
‘It’s something we looked at once. There’s a squadron with the light kits still at … Pease, I think. That used to be the job – the B-47s based in England. If we ever decided like you guys were going to go after us, from intelligence or something, okay? You gotta have a plan for everything. That was one of ours. We called it Jumpshot. Probably in the dead files now, that was one of LeMay’s specials. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev – and Zhiguli. Three birds targeted there, two weapons each. Decap your whole political and military command structure. Hey, look, I’m an airliner!’
It would work, Grishanov thought with an eerie chill. The right time of year, the right time of day … the bomber comes in on a regularly scheduled airliner route. Even in a crisis, the very illusion of something normal would be like a touchstone while people looked for the unusual. Maybe an air-defense squadron would put an aircraft up, a young pilot standing night alert while the senior men slept. He’d close to a thousand meters or so, but at night … at night your mind saw what the brain told it to see. Lights on the fuselage, well, of course it’s an airliner. What bomber would be lit up? That was one op-plan the KGB had never tumbled to. How many more gifts would Zacharias give him?
‘Anyway, if I was John Chinaman, that’s one option. If they don’t have much imagination, and go with a straight attack, over this terrain, yeah, they can do that. Probably one group is diversionary. They have a real target, too, but short of Moscow. They fly in high, off vector. About this far out’ – he swept a hand across the map – ‘they make a radical turn and hit something, you can decide what’s important, lots of good targets there. Chances are your fighters keep after them, right?’
‘Da.’ They’d think the inbound bombers were turning away for a secondary target.