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loitering, wasting his precious time. He was a big star now. He was important.
He was somebody Happy, happy. Joy, joy.
"You believe that," he said to nobody in particular, just the generic voices
crackling inside his head, "then you must be crazier than I am. I aren't happy
There aren't no joy"
As he turned the corner, he saw a police car coming up the street toward the
school. It was time to get the hell out of there, but he would be back.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I gathered up my files and all my notes on Jack and
Jill. I headed to Langley, Virginia, again.
No music in the car that morning. Just the steady whhrrr of my tires on the
roadway Jeanne Sterling had asked to see what I had come up with so far. She'd
called halfa dozen times. She promised to reciprocate this time. You show me
yours, I'll show you mine.
Okay? Why not? It made a lot of sense.
An Agency assistant sporting a military-style crew cut, a woman in her
twenties, escorted me into a conference room on the seventh floor. The room
was filled with bright light and was a far cry from my cube in the White House
basement. I felt like a mouse out of its hole. Speaking of the White House, I
hadn't heard from the Secret Service about any plan to investigate possible
enemies of the President in high places. I would stir that pot again when I
got back to D.C.
"On a clear day you used to be able to see the Washington Monument," Jeanne
Sterling said as she came striding in behind me. "Not anymore. The air quality
in Fairfax County is abysmal.
What's your reaction to the files on our killer elite, so far? Shock?
Surprise? Boredom? What do you think, Alex?"
I was starting to get used to Jeanne's rapid-fire style of speaking.
I could definitely see her as a law school professor. "My first reaction is
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that we need weeks to analyze the possibility that one of these people might
be a psychotic killer. Or that one of them might be Jack," I told her.
"I agree with you on that," she nodded. "But just suppose we had to compress
our search into about twenty-four fun-filled hours, which is about what we
have to work with. Now then, are there any prime suspects in your mind? You
have something, Alex. What is it?"
I held up three fingers. I had three somethings so far.
She smiled broadly Both of us did. You had to learn to laugh at the madness or
it could bring you so far down, you'd never make it back up again.
"Okay All right. That's what I like to hear. Let me guess," she said, and went
ahead. "Jeffrey Daly, Howard Kamens, Kevin Hawkins."
"Well, that's interesting," I said. "That might tell us something at least.
Maybe we better start with the one name that's on both of our shortlists. Tell
me about Kevin Hawkins."
JEANNE STERLING spent about twenty minutes briefing me on Kevin Hawkins.
"You'll be gratified to hear that we have Hawkins under surveillance already,"
she said as we rode a swift, smooth elevator down to the basement garage,
where our cars were parked.
"See, you don't need my help, after all," I said. I was buoyed by the prospect
of any kind of progress on the case. I was actually feeling positive for the
first time in several days.
"Oh, but we do, Alex. We haven't brought him in for an interview, because we
don't have anything concrete on him. Just nasty, nasty suspicions. That and a
need to catch somebody. Let's not forget about that. Now you're suspicious,
too."
"That's all I have at this point," I reminded her. "Suspicions."
"Sometimes that's enough, and you know it. Sometimes it has to be."
We arrived at the small private garage underneath the CIA complex at Langley.
The space was filled mostly with family vehicles like Taurus station wagons,
but there were a few high-testosterone sports cars as well. Mustangs, Bimmers,
Vipers.
The cars matched up fairly well with the personnel I had seen upstairs.
"i guess we should take both our cars,"Jeanne suggested, and it made sense to
me. "I'll drive back here when we're through.
You can go on into D.C. Hawkins is staying with his sister in Silver Spring.
He's at the house now. It's about half an hour on the beltway, if that."
"You're going to take him in now?" I asked her. It sounded like it to me.
"I think we should, don't you? Just to have a little chat, you know."
I went to my car. She walked to her station wagon. "This man we're going to
see, he's a professional killer," I called to her across the garage floor.
She called back, her voice echoing against concrete and steel.
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"From what I gather, he's one of our very best. Isn't that a fun thought?"
"Does he have an alibi for any of the Jack and Jill murder dates?"
"Not that we know of. We'll have to ask him more about it -- in detail."
We got into our respective cars and started up the engines.
I was beginning to notice that the CIA inspector general wasn't a bureaucrat;
she certainly wasn't afraid to get her hands dirT Mine, either. We were going
to meet another "ghost."
Was he Jack? Could it be that easy? Stranger things had happened.
It took the full thirty minutes to get over to Hawkins's sister's house in
Silver Spring, Maryland. The houses there were somewhat overpriced, but it was
still considered a middle-class area.
Not my middle class. Somebody else's.
Jeanne pulled her Volvo wagon up alongside a black Lincoln parked
three-quarters of a block from the sister's house. She powered down the
passenger-side window and talked to two agents inside the parked car. One of
her surveillance teams, I guessed.
Either that or she was asking directions to the assassin's hideout, which
struck me as humorous. One of the few laughs I'd had recently.
Suddenly, I saw a man come out of the sister's Cape Cod-style house.
I recognized Kevin Hawkins from his file pictures. No doubt about it.
He threw a quick glance down the street, and he must have seen us. He started
to run. Then he hopped on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked in the driveway.
I shouted, "Jeanne," out my open window and gunned my engine at the same time.
I began to chase... Jack?
THE FIRST THING Kevin Hawkins did on the motorcycle was to cut sharply
sideways over the sliver of frost-covered lawn separating two split-level
ranch houses. He raced past a few more houses, one of them with an aboveground
pool covered by a baby-blue tarp for the winter.
I aimed my old Porsche along the same inland route that Hawkins was taking.
Fortunately, the past few days had been cold, and the ground was mostly solid.
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