6

Wanamaker missed the beginning of the call because of a burst of static. “Say again,” he demanded once the line had cleared.

Huxstep, who had shoehorned his bulky body into a public telephone booth in Concord, said, “You-know-who told me to call you.”

“Why doesn’t you-know-who call me himself?” Wanamaker demanded.

Huxstep had the good sense to ignore the question. “You want I should give you the good news or the bad news first?”

Wanamaker groaned something about having enough static in his life already. “Start with the good,” he said.

“The good news is we traced the Hertz car to the long-term parking lot at Logan Airport. The airport cops spotted it there about five hours ago.”

To Wanamaker that sounded like bad news. “We’ve got ten days left before the Ides of March and you’re telling me he took a plane somewhere?”

“He took a taxi somewhere,” Huxstep said. “The somewhere was an Avis office in Boston. He thought he was muddying the water. But it was amateur hour, you see what I mean?”

“So you got a fix on the car he’s driving,” Wanamaker said, trying to coax Huxstep through the narrative.

Huxstep would not be hurried. “He made a big point of asking directions to Cape Cod, so we knew right off he wasn’t going there.”

“Did you, or did you not, locate him?” Wanamaker wanted to know.

“Since this part of the story comes under the heading of good news, you ought to be able to figure out the answer.”

Wanamaker was tempted to remind Huxstep that he was a utility infielder talking to the man who managed the team, but he decided this would only divert the conversation unnecessarily. So he waited for Huxstep to continue.

Huxstep cleared his throat with so much enthusiasm that Wanamaker thought he was being disconnected. Huxstep went on. “You-know-who, meanwhile, remembered something from our visit to the subject’s loft in New York. The subject was looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which said pot of gold was supposed to be in Concord, Massachusetts.”

“What pot of gold?” Wanamaker asked, thoroughly confused. If this was the good news he hated to hear the bad.

“So we staked out the three roads into Concord,” continued Huxstep, determined to tell the story in his own way, “me on one, your man Friday on another, you-know-who on the third. And guess what your man Friday saw one hour into the stakeout?”

“The Avis rental car,” Wanamaker said tiredly.

“The Avis rental car,” Huxstep agreed. “So after that all we had to do was some elementary road work and we knew where he was sleeping and who he was visiting.”

“You mind if I ask you a question?” Wanamaker said, his voice oozing irony.

“It’s your nickel.”

“When is you-know-who going to terminate the operation?”

“Your question brings me to the bad news part.”

“I was hoping you might have forgotten.”

“The bad news part is the subject has been in contact with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you-know-who is worried that he might have told her the story of his life.”

“That is definitely bad news,” Wanamaker agreed.

“So unless you object, you-know-who is thinking of”—here Huxstep read off, word for word, what the Admiral had printed out for him on the back of an envelope—”killing two birds with one stone. But to do that he has to wait until the birds of a feather flock together.”

Wanamaker exploded. “Unless I object! You tell you-know-who that I’m sitting here in Washington and he’s out there in the goddamn catbird seat and it’s up to him to figure out what to do, and not me, and once he figures out what to do, he should go and do it. You tell him that rank has its privileges, and one of them is operating independently without trying to lay off the blame on someone else if things go wrong by getting that someone else to authorize something at a distance. You tell him—” Wanamaker ran out of steam. “You tell him,” he said in a tight voice, “to plug the leak. How he does it is his business.”

“I will pass on your instructions,” Huxstep said with unaccustomed dignity. “Plug the leak. How he does it is his business.”