Night's Landing. Carla Neggers
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street musician fired up his accordion and moved in, playing a cheerful tune. The tourists laughed, loving it.
Janssen paid for his coffee and walked down the street to a small Mercedes that awaited him. The back door opened, and he slid onto the cool leather seat next to Claude Rousseau, his most experienced bodyguard.
“She won’t say anything,” Nicholas said. “She hasn’t told anyone that we’ve met. She’s not going to now that her son’s been shot. It would only complicate the situation for everyone—her, her husband, her son. The president.”
“Is she afraid?”
“Terrified.”
He sighed, his pulse quickening. Yes, terrified. And yet all beautiful Betsy Quinlan Dunnemore knew was that her old acquaintance from college was a convicted tax evader.
“Did she believe you?” Rousseau asked.
“About her son? I don’t know.” That troubled him, because he’d told her the truth. He’d had nothing to do with the shooting. “Have you heard from our man in New York? Does he have any idea what the hell’s going on there?”
Rousseau shook his head. He was dark haired, angular, good-looking and lethal. Thrown out of the French army. A mercenary, plain and simple. “Nothing.”
“Be prepared. You might have to go to there.”
Claude smiled. “All of my passports are in order.”
Janssen knew not to ask how many passports, how many identities, Rousseau—if that was his real name—had at his disposal. Even if Claude would tell him, which he wouldn’t, there was always, for Nicholas, the question of plausible deniability. Some things he was better off not knowing. His people knew it and sometimes didn’t trouble him with details.
Could his man in New York have taken it upon himself to try to kill Rob Dunnemore?
If so, he should have finished the job—done it right and killed both marshals. Now it could look like a botched job, which, if his friends or enemies thought he was behind it, would only make Nicholas appear weak.
The Mercedes pulled out into Amsterdam’s tangle of impossibly narrow streets, many indistinguishable from the sidewalks and ubiquitous bike paths. Janssen settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, picturing himself bike riding in the hills of northern Virginia as a boy, picking wild strawberries on a warm spring day, driving north into Pennsylvania with his father and walking up Little Round Top as his father regaled him with details of the Battle of Gettysburg. It had all sounded so romantic. To Father, the soldiers on both sides exemplified duty, honor, integrity and courage. They were men who’d never given up.
Nicholas imagined the federal agents hunting him were much the same. He had no illusions they’d forgotten about him. “Failure to appear” was not a good thing. If convicted of the tax charges, he faced a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison—what would taking off to Switzerland before his trial tack onto his sentence?
Going to trial wasn’t an option.
Prison wasn’t an option.
But he could never go home.
That was what he hadn’t realized, on a soul-deep level, when he’d fled.
He did now.
He opened his eyes, saw a Dutch couple riding bicycles with their blond toddlers in little seats on the handlebars. Everything seemed so foreign to him. He felt the familiar lump in his throat. He was, he thought, so far from home.
Eight
Sarah passed bellmen and limousines on Central Park South and lingered a few seconds under the awning of the expensive hotel where the news conference touting the joint fugitive task force had been held.
She could almost see Nate Winter and her brother walking out onto the street in their dark suits, relieved to have that tedious ninety minutes behind them.
The weather was better today. Cool, partly cloudy.
And it was later in the day. Afternoon rush hour. Sarah made her way across the busy street. There had to be more cars and more pedestrians on Central Park South now than yesterday at midday.
For the first time all day, she was—at last—alone. She walked alongside the stone fence overlooking the south end of the park until she came to Fifth Avenue, which ran north along the huge park’s eastern side.
Her interview with Joe Collins had been short and to the point. Sarah had made it clear that President Poe had checked on her simply as a friend. It wasn’t that big a deal. She didn’t know whether Collins was convinced or not. She spent the afternoon with her brother for five or ten minutes at a time. He was still out of it from his surgery and medications, but when he was awake enough to talk, he told her to go back to Tennessee.
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