"A Maiden's Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deaver Jeffery)

9:10 A.M.

He'd never forgotten an anniversary in twenty-three years.

Here's a husband for you.

Arthur Potter folded back the paper surrounding the roses – effervescent flowers, orange and yellow – mostly open, the petals perfect, floppy, billowing. He smelled them. Marian's favorite. Vibrant colors. Never white or red.

The stoplight changed. He set the bouquet carefully on the seat beside him and accelerated through the intersection. His hand strayed to his belly, which pressed hard against his waistband. He screwed up his face. His belt was a barometer; it was hooked through the second-to-the-last hole in the worn leather. Diet on Monday, he told himself cheerfully. He'd be back in D.C. then, his cousin's fine cooking long digested, and could concentrate on counting grams of fat once more.

It was Linden 's fault. Let's see… last night she'd made corned beef, buttered potatoes, buttered cabbage, soda bread (butter optional, and he'd opted), lima beans, grilled tomatoes, chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. Linden was Marian's cousin, in the lineage of the McGillis forebear Sean, whose two sons, Eamon and Hardy, came over in steerage, married within the same year and whose wives gave birth to daughters, ten and eleven months, respectively, after the vows.

Arthur Potter, an only child orphaned at thirteen, son of only children, had enthusiastically adopted his wife's family and had spent years plotting the genealogy of the McGillises. Through elaborate correspondence (handwritten on fine stationery; he did not own a word processor) Potter kept up religiously, almost superstitiously, with the meanderings of the clan.

Congress Expressway west. Then south. Hands at ten to two, hunched forward, glasses perched on his pale fleshy nose, Potter cruised through working-class Chicago, the tenements and flats and two-family row houses lit by the midwestern summer light, pale in the overcast.

The quality of light in different cities, he thought. Arthur Potter had been around the world many times and had a huge stockpile of ideas for travel articles he would never write. Genealogy notes and memos for his job, from which he was soon to retire, would probably be the only Potter literary legacy.

Turn here, turn there. He drove automatically and somewhat carelessly. He was by nature impatient but had long ago overcome that vice, if a vice it was, and he never strayed above the posted limit.

Turning the rented Ford onto Austin Avenue, he glanced in his rear-view mirror and noticed the car.

The men were in a blue-gray sedan, as nondescript as could be. Two clean-shaven, clean-living, clean-conscienced young men, and they were tailing him.

They had Federal Agent printed on their foreheads.

Potter's heart thudded. "Damn," he muttered in his low baritone. Furious, he tugged at a jowl and then wrapped the green paper tighter around the flowers as if anticipating a high-speed chase. When he found the street he sought, however, and made the turn, he was doing seven cautious miles per hour. His wife's bouquet rolled against his ample thigh.

No, he didn't speed. His strategy was to decide that he was mistaken, that the car contained two businessmen on their way to sell computers or printing services and that it would turn off on its own route soon.

And leave me in peace.

But the car didn't do any such thing. The men maintained an innocuous distance, traveling at the identical, irritatingly slow speed of Potter's Ford.

He pulled into the familiar driveway and continued a lengthy distance, then rolled to a stop. Potter climbed out of his car quickly, cradling the flowers to his chest and waddling up the walk – defiantly, he hoped, daring the agents to stop him here.

How had they found him?

He'd been so clever. Parking the car three blocks from Linden 's apartment. Asking her not to answer the phone and to leave her machine off. The fifty-one-year-old woman, who'd be a Gypsy if she could have rearranged her genes (so different from Marian, despite their common blood), excitedly accepted his instructions. She was used to the inexplicable ways of her cousin-in-law. She believed his manner was somewhat dangerous, if not sinister, and he could hardly dissuade her of that, for so it was.

The agents parked their car behind Potter's and climbed out. He heard their footsteps on the gravel behind him.

They didn't hurry; they could find him anywhere, and they knew it. He could never get away.

I'm yours, you self-confident sons of bitches.

"Mr. Potter."

No, no, go away! Not today. Today is special. It's my wedding anniversary. Twenty-three years. When you're as old as I am you'll understand.

Leave. Me. Alone.

"Mr. Potter?"

The young men were interchangeable. He ignored one and thus he ignored both.

He walked over the lawn toward his wife. Marian, he thought, I'm sorry for this. I've brought trouble with me. I am sorry.

"Leave me alone," he whispered. And suddenly, as if they'd heard, both men stopped, these two somber men, in dark suits, with pale complexions. Potter knelt and laid the flowers on the grave. He began to peel back the green paper but he could still see the young men in the corner of his eye and he paused, squeezing his eyes closed and pressing his hands to his face.

He wasn't praying. Arthur Potter never prayed. He used to. Occasionally. Although his livelihood entitled him to some secret, personal superstitions he'd stopped praying thirteen years ago, the day Marian the living became Marian the dead, passing away in front of his joined fingertips as he happened to be in the middle of an elaborate negotiation with the God he had, all his life, more or less believed existed. The address he'd been sending his offers to turned out to be empty as a rusted can. He was neither surprised nor disillusioned. Still, he gave up praying.

Now, eyes closed, he lifted those same fingertips and gave a backhanded wave, warding off the indistinguishable men.

And federal agents, yes, but God-fearing agents perhaps (many of them were), they kept their distance.

No prayers, but he spoke some words to his bride, lying in the same place where she had lain for these long years. His lips moved. He received responses only because he knew her mind as well as his own. But the presence of the men in the matching suits kept intruding. Finally he rose slowly and looked at the marble flower etched into the granite above her tombstone. He'd ordered a rose but the flower looked like a chrysanthemum. Perhaps the stonecarver had been Japanese.

There was no point in delaying any longer.

"Mr. Potter?"

He sighed and turned away from the grave.

"I'm Special Agent McGovern. This is Special Agent Crowley."

"Yes."

"Sorry to trouble you, sir. Mind if we have a word?"

McGovern added, "Maybe we could step to the car."

"What do you want?"

"The car? Please." No one says "please" quite the way an FBI agent does.

Potter walked with them – he was flanked – to their vehicle. He realized only when he was standing beside it that the wind was steady and ridiculously cold for July. He glanced at the grave and saw the green paper of the flowers roll in the steady breeze.

"All right." He stopped abruptly, deciding to walk no further.

"We're sorry to interrupt your vacation, sir. We tried to call the number where you're staying. There was no answer."

"Did you send somebody over there?" Potter was worried that Linden would be upset if agents came calling.

"Yessir, but when we found you we radioed them."

Potter nodded. He looked at his watch. They were going to have shepherd's pie tonight. Green salad. He was supposed to pick up something to drink. Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale for him, oatmeal stout for them. Then, after dinner, cards with the Holbergs next door. Hearts or spades.

"How bad is it?" Potter asked.

"A situation in Kansas," McGovern said.

"It's bad, sir. He's asked you to put together a threat management team. There's a DomTran jet waiting for you at Glenview. Particulars are in here."

Potter took the sealed envelope from the young man, looking down, seeing to his surprise a dot of blood on his own thumb – from, he supposed, a latent thorn somewhere on the stem of a rose with petals like a woman's floppy-brimmed summer hat.

He opened the envelope and read through the fax. It bore the speedy signature of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"How long since he went barricade?"

"First report was around eight forty-five."

"Any communication from him?"

"None yet."

"Contained?"

"Completely. Kansas state troopers and a half-dozen agents from our Wichita office. They're not getting out."

Potter buttoned then unbuttoned his sports coat. He realized that the agents were looking at him with too much reverence and it set his teeth on edge. "I'll want Henry LeBow as my intelligence officer and Tobe Geller for communications. Spelled with an e but you pronounce it Toby."

"Yessir. If they're unavailable -"

"Only them. Find them. Wherever they are. I want them at the barricade in a half-hour. And see if Angie Scapello is available. She'd be at headquarters or Quantico. Behavioral Science. Jet her out too."

"Yessir."

"What's the status of HRT?"

The Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, consisting of forty-eight agents, was the largest tactical barricade force in the country.

Crowley let McGovern deliver the unfortunate news.

"That's a problem, sir. One team's deployed to Miami. A DEA raid. Twenty-two agents there. And the second's in Seattle. A bank robbery that went barricade last night. Nineteen there. We can scramble a third team but we'll have to pull some agents off the other two. It'll be a while before they're assembled on site."

"Call Quantico, put it together. I'll call Frank from the plane. Where is he?"

"The Seattle incident," the agent told him. "If you want us to meet you at the apartment so you can pack a bag, sir…"

"No, I'll go right to Glenview. Do you have a siren and light?"

"Yessir. But your cousin's apartment's only fifteen minutes from here -"

"Say, if one of you could take the paper off those flowers, there on that grave, I'd appreciate it. Maybe arrange them a little, make sure the wind doesn't blow them away."

"Yessir, I'll do that," Crowley said quickly. So there was a difference between them; McGovern, Potter realized, was not a flower arranger.

"Thank you so much."

Potter started down the path again, following McGovern. The one thing he'd have to stop for was chewing gum. Those military jets climbed so fast his ears filled up like pressure cookers if he didn't chew a whole pack of Wrigley's as soon as the wheels left the asphalt. How he hated to fly.

Oh, I'm tired, he thought. So damn tired.

"I'll be back, Marian," he whispered, not looking toward the grave. "I'll be back."