Shadowfires

a voice which brooked no debate-probably the
tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of
inferior rank-he said,
“You'll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won't
have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from
us. We'll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I'll thoroughly search
the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that
points us toward Eric,
I'll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we'll go after him
together. If I don't get a lead on him, we'll meet up and hide out
together, until we can decide what to do next.”
    She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might
still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be
killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it,
he was right.
    Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will
you get out of here?”
    He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the
time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out.
“You'll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That's got to be
ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it.
You'll take this Mercedes, and I'll take the Ford just far enough to
swap it for something else.”
    “They'll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”
    “Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this
particular license number, driven by a man fitting
Eric's description. You'll be driving, not Eric, and we'll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”
    “I'm not so sure.”
    “I am.”
    Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a
day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”
    “ Las Vegas,” he said.
    The answer startled her. “Why there?”
    “ Southern California 's too hot for us. I'm not confident we can
hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”
    “What place?”
    “I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”
    “You're a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”
    “My real-estate development
company's been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I'm
hardly a wheeler-dealer.
It's small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it's an older
motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And
it's not in the best repair. In 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 up-”
    “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