Yuri took the black mouthpiece from the velvet-paneled wall. "Driver," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"I want you to stop at a place that sells weapons, guns. You know such a place? Not far out of the way for us?"
"Yes, sir, South Rampart Street."
"That will be fine."
"Why are you doing this?" asked Stolov, pale bushy eyebrows knitted, face almost sad.
"It's the gypsy in me," said Yuri. "Don't worry."
The man on South Rampart Street had an arsenal beneath the glass and on the wall behind him. "You need a Louisiana driver's license," he said.
Stolov was watching. This infuriated Yuri, that Stolov stood there, watching, as if he were entitled.
"This is an emergency," said Yuri. "I need a gun with a long barrel, there, that's fine. Three fifty-seven Magnum. A box of cartridges. Here." He took the money out of his pocket, hundred-dollar bills, ten of them, then twenty, slowly counted out. "Do not worry," he said. "I am not a crook. But I need the gun. You understand?"
He loaded it there, in the shadowy little store with Stolov watching. He put the rest of the bullets into his pockets, divided up in little handfuls, heavy, loose.
As they stepped into the sunlight, Stolov said: "You think it's a simple matter of shooting this thing?"
"No. You are going to stop it, remember? We are going home, Aaron and I. But we are in danger. You said so. Terrible danger. And now I have my gun." He gestured to the car. "After you."
"You must not do anything stupid or foolish," said the other man. It wasn't anger this time, just apprehension. He laid his hand on Yuri's hand. Yuri looked down. He thought how pale was the skin of this Norwegian, and how dark was his own.
"Like what?"
"Like try to shoot it, that's what." The man was exasperated. "The Order has a right," he said, "to finer devotion than this."
"Hmmm. I understand. Don't worry about it. As we say all over the world where English is spoken, no problem! OK?"
He flashed a smile at Stolov and opened the door of the car for him and waited for him to get in. Now it was Stolov who was suspicious, uneasy, even a little frightened.
And I barely know how to pull the trigger, Yuri thought.
Twenty-six
MONA HAD NEVER thought her first days at Mayfair and Mayfair would be like this. She was at the big desk in Pierce's spacious dark-paneled office, typing furiously on a 386 SX IBM-compatible computer, just a tad slower than the monster she had at home.
Rowan Mayfair was still alive now eighteen hours after surgery, and twelve hours after they'd taken her off the machines. Any minute she might stop breathing. Or she might live for weeks. Nobody really knew.
The investigation was forging ahead. Nothing to do right now but stay with the others, and think, and wait, and write.
She banged away on the white keyboard, faintly annoyed by the noisy click. "Confidential to File from Mona Mayfair" was her title. It was protected. No one could access this material except Mona herself. When she got home, she'd transfer via modem. But for now, she couldn't leave here. This is where she belonged. She had been here since last night. She was writing down everything she had seen, heard, felt, thought.
Meantime every room in the vast complex of offices was occupied, busy soft voices speaking steadily and in conflict with each other, into different phones, behind partially open doors. Couriers came and went.
It was quiet, without panic. Ryan was behind his desk in the large office, as they called it, with Randall, and Anne Marie. Lauren was down the hall. Sam Mayfair and two of the Grady Mayfairs from New York were in the conference rooms using all three phones. Somewhere, Liz Mayfair and Cecilia Mayfair made their calls. The family secretaries, Connie, Josephine and Louise Mayfair, were working in another conference room. Faxes kept rolling in on every machine in the place.
Pierce was here with Mona, letting her have the big machine, on his mammoth mahogany desk, and looking rather defenseless at his secretary's smaller, more humble computer, in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat on the back of the chair. He was not doing much of anything, however. He was simply too sleepy, and too grief-stricken, as Mona herself ought to have been, but was not.
The investigation was entirely private, and it could not have been handled any better by anyone else.
They had begun last night in earnest an hour after Rowan had been found. Several times Pierce and Mona had returned to the hospital. They had been there again at sunrise. And then gone back to work. Ryan, Pierce, Mona and Lauren were the nucleus of the investigation. Randall and several of the others came and went. It was now some eighteen hours since they had commenced their phone calls, their faxes, their communications. It was getting on dusk, and Mona was lightheaded and hungry, but much too excited to think about either thing.
Someone would bring some supper in a little while, wouldn't they? Or maybe they would go uptown. Mona didn't want to leave the office. She figured the next piece of information would be from a Houston emergency room, where the mysterious man, six and a half feet tall, had had to seek some sort of medical help.
The Houston truck driver had been the most important link.
This was the man who had picked up Rowan yesterday afternoon. He had stopped in St. Martinville last night to tell the local police about the thin, crazed woman who had struck off on her own into the swamps. On account of him, they had found Rowan. He had been called, questioned further. He had described the place in Houston where she'd run up to his truck. He told all the things she said, how she was desperate to get to New Orleans. He confirmed that as of yesterday evening when he last saw her, Rowan had been right in the head. Crazed perhaps, but talking, walking, thinking. Then she had gone off alone into the swamps.
"That woman was in pain," he'd told Mona on the phone this morning, recapitulating the entire tale. "She was hugging herself, you know, like a woman having cramps."
Gerald Mayfair, still stunned and sick over the fact that Dr. Samuel Larkin had slipped away from his care and vanished, had gone with Shelby, Pierce's big sister, and Patrick, Mona's father, off to the swamp near St. Martinville to search the spot where Rowan had been found.
Rowan had been hemorrhaging, just like the others, though she was not dead. At twelve last night they had performed an emergency hysterectomy on the unconscious woman, with only Michael there--in tears--to consent. It was either that or she'd never make it till morning. Incomplete miscarriage. Other complications. "Look, we're lucky she's still breathing."
And breathing she was.
Who knew what they might discover up there in the grass in that St. Martinville swamp park? It was Mona who had suggested this and was all for going herself. Patrick, her dad, was all sober
ed up now and determined to be of help. Ryan had wanted Mona to remain here with him. Mona couldn't quite figure that one. Was Ryan worried about her?
But then when Ryan started to buzz her over the intercom every few minutes to ask her some minor question, or make some minor suggestion, she knew that he simply wanted her support. OK by her. She was there to give it. In between calls, she typed, she wrote, she recorded, she described.
The Houston office building had been discovered before noon.
It was only walking distance from where Rowan had appeared on the highway. Unoccupied except for the fifteenth floor, which had been leased to a man and a woman. The fifteenth floor was a grim scene. Rowan had been a prisoner. For long periods Rowan had been tied to a bed. The mattress was filthy with urine and feces, yet it had been laid with fresh sheets, and surrounded by flowers, some of which were still fresh. There was fresh food.
It was ghastly, all of it. There had been plenty of blood--not Rowan's--in the bathroom. The man had been hurt there, obviously, maybe even knocked unconscious. Photographs of the bathroom had already come in. But the bloody footprints leading to the elevator, and out the front doors of the building, clearly indicated he had left on his own.
"Looks to me from this like he fell again in the elevator. See that. That's blood all over the carpet. He's weak, he's hurt."
Well, he had been then, but was he still hurt now?
They were canvassing every emergency room in the entire city. Every hospital, clinic, doctor's office. They would check the suburbs, and then move in concentric circles, checking, until they found where the bleeding man had gone. Within the direct vicinity of the building they were checking door to door. They were checking alleyways, and rooftops, restaurants, buildings that were boarded up. If the man was anywhere nearby, wounded, they would find him.
As it was, the bloody foot tracks had vanished under the wheels of the passing traffic. Whether the man had climbed into a vehicle or simply crossed to the other side could never be known.
The entire investigation was private, the best that money could buy.
One agency after another had been enlisted. Tasks were constantly being assigned, information collated. Private doctors had gathered the blood samples in the Houston bathroom and taken them to private laboratories, the names of which were known only to Lauren and Ryan. The grim prison rooms had been fingerprinted. Every article of clothing, and there had been many, had been packed, labeled and shipped to Mayfair and Mayfair. Things had already started to arrive.