The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(31)

Maybe that was exactly what Foster wanted me to do.

Disappear.

I left the house and drove Foster’s Toyota fifteen miles south to Pahokee, a moderately sized town of stuccoed buildings bleached from the sun, where I found some jeans and a green pullover shirt at a secondhand store. I picked up a few toiletries and ordered four take-out pizzas at an eatery I spotted. The trip also allowed me to make a call, which I did, collect, from a gas station pay phone.

To Stephanie Nelle.

I narrated the day’s events, leaving nothing out, with an even tone and a military completeness.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” she said. “I had no idea about Jansen. I was referred to him. Which raises more issues that I have to deal with, here, internally.”

“You have some kind of revolt going on?”

“You could say that. It goes back to COINTELPRO.”

There was that acronym again.

“It took fifteen presidents, fifty years, and an act of God to end Hoover’s reign and finally dismantle his godforsaken FBI,” she said. “Over a thousand agents once worked COINTELPRO. Many of them remained with the bureau long after 1972, when Hoover died. And those men didn’t change. They just became better at what they did. I was told, though, that Jansen was not one of them.”

“Somebody lied to you.”

“I see that. But thanks to you, we came away with the files and the coin. Are they safe?”

The waterproof case remained in the Toyota’s trunk, within my sight a few feet away. The coin in my pocket.

“They’re fine.”

“I prefer you not read those files,” she said. “They’re classified.”

“How’s that possible? They came from Cuba.”

“Just return them to me, please.”

“So you knew all along there were files waiting in that wreck?”

“I did. But there was no need for you to know that.”

“Except, in the past few hours, people have been trying to kill me over them.”

“Just bring them to me.”

Looking back, that was the first of countless orders Stephanie Nelle would give me in the field. That one came in the same authoritative voice I ultimately learned to both detest and respect. She would say that I ignored her more times than I obeyed, and she might be right. One thing I knew then, though, was that before I handed anything over I planned to read every damn word in those files. My curiosity meter had tilted off the charts. Too much had happened over the past twelve hours for me to just blindly hand things over. That impetuousness would ultimately serve me well during my time as an intelligence operative, but I can’t say that it didn’t occasionally lead to trouble.

“Cotton, our job is to keep this under control. Understand?”

“There’s a whole bunch you’re not saying.”

“Welcome to my world.”

I chuckled. “Okay. I get it. Shut up and do the job.”

“You do learn fast. There’s no need to stay there. Foster and his daughter are no longer part of this. Leave now and bring the files and the coin back to Mayport. I’d send some help, but I didn’t do so good with choosing that the first time. I’ll leave it to you this time.”

Fair enough.

I hung up the phone and made a second call to Pam, to let her know I was okay. She knew nothing of my new assignment, the first of innumerable times I would keep her in the dark about my professional life. National security and all that other bullshit. The trust between us was gone, and sadly time would only make things worse. I hurt her. Bad. And each day I felt anew the force of her emotions. Was she vindictive? Probably. But I’d given her good reason. She’d been hurt and she was hurting me back. I accepted her anger because I thought it was all part of making amends. What I wouldn’t learn until many years later was how calculatedly she ultimately exacted her revenge, planting and tending my pain as carefully as one would work a garden.

I stood outside the gas station, biding my time while the pizzas were being made. The town loomed quiet, except for a steady breeze tickling the treetops. The sun was dissolving to orange in the western sky, far out over Lake Okeechobee, the dusky air still oven-warm. Shadows had begun blurring into one another like a growing stain on the concrete.

My watch read nearly 6:00 p.m.

Time for me to head north to Jacksonville.

About a four-hour drive.

The Fosters would have to find their own dinner. They were no longer important to this mission. The Toyota could be returned to Foster tomorrow. More of that rules-don’t-apply-to-me mentality I was beginning to appreciate.

I hopped into the car and drove farther south to where US 441 veered east toward the Atlantic Ocean. I turned and a sign informed me that I-95 lay thirty-five miles away. Everything Foster had told me about the 1928 hurricane still stuck in my brain. Incredible that such atrocities actually happened right here. What had Martin Luther King Jr. said? The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Amen.

A car approached from behind.

Fast.

A few hundred yards ahead the highway became four-lane in both directions. But here there were only two. The car sped past in the opposite lane, then cut back in front and lit its brake lights. I slammed my right foot onto the brake pedal and slid to a stop. In my rearview mirror I saw a second car behind me.