The Fool's Run

another street somewhere, find a phone, and call Chicago. They’ll know if she left early. If she didn’t, they should know her flight number, and we can catch her at the airport.”
    I drove another two miles and spotted a phone booth outside a convenience store. I pulled around to the side of the store where the car couldn’t be seen from the street, and called Chicago, collect.
    Maggie had not left early. She’d taken a three o’clock flight out of O’Hare, just as she had planned, and was still in the air. Dillon was stunned by the shooting. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “This is far out of bounds from anything I’ve ever heard of.”
    “Who would they be? Whitemark? They can’t just be some fuckin’ private eyes like you guys said,” I said.
    “That’s what we got from people in Washington—good people. That they’re just private detectives. I don’t know, it doesn’t add up.” There was another long silence and finally he said, “I can’t imagine it would be Whitemark. Big corporations can be ruthless, but we don’t have gunmen hanging around. I’m afraid it might be the federal people. When we checked on these private detectives, we heard they’d had some trouble with the government in the past. Remember?”
    “Yeah, I remember something like that.”
    “So maybe somebody’s got them on a string. It would be a way of . . . killing somebody without official involvement.”
    “But why would they come after us?”
    There was another moment of silence, and he said, in a cooler voice, “It’s very hard to think. Very hard. But suppose they figured out what happened at Whitemark and talked to each other, and said, ‘If we arrest these people, the publicity could set off a whole rash of these things. Like a rash of jet hijackings.’ If there is some kind of murder squad in the CIA or the NSA, they might have decided that this was the most expedient way to solve the problem.”
    “Jesus,” I said. I thought about the people I’d known in the Strategic Operations Group. A few were killers, plain and simple. They were career military men, Special Forces, and some held rank, but at heart, they were gunmen. If an intelligence agency needed a couple of shooters, they’d know where to find them. And private investigation was just the kind of job that attracted former company cowboys.
    “Where are you?” Dillon asked. I looked around, but there were no street signs. “I don’t know. Standing at a 7-Eleven on a street corner. We have to stay out of sight for a while and then head out to the airport in time to find Maggie.”
    “No. Don’t do that. They may very well be looking for you at the airport. I’ll call Maggie in the air. We have a business code we use for open phones, when we’re negotiating deals, and I can warn her off. She’ll call me from National, and I’ll tell her what happened and turn her right back around. There won’t be anything you can do for her. I’ll arrange for extra security and talk to Mr. Anshiser about what to do next.”
    “So what about us?”
    “If we can get a line on who it is, we might be able to work some kind of a deal. Can you call back here later?”
    “Yeah. We’ll get out of town. Find someplace we can hide out for a couple of days until we figure out what’s happened.”
    “What about your friend? The one who was shot?”
    “There’s nothing we can do about that,” I said. “There’s no way he could still be alive.”
    “All right, we can leave that for now. Had you finished wiping the apartment?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. And you still have your car?”
    “Yes.”
    “If they’re federal or have federal sponsors they may put out a watch for your car. They won’t have done it yet, though, if they thought they would catch you at the apartment. And if they’re an assassination team, they’re illegal; it might take them a while to get everything set. Can you hold on there just a minute?”
    “Yes.”
    His phone receiver hit the desktop, and I scanned the street for the red Buick with the dark windows. Nothing. Cars coming and going, some of them red, but nothing that looked like the Buick.
    “Okay, are you still there?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m looking at a road atlas. I would recommend that you take Highway Fifty east through Annapolis, cross the bay, then head north through Wilmington and into New Jersey. I’m not up-to-speed on police procedure, but as I understand it, watch bulletins usually go out