Color of Blood(63)

As soon as the door closed, Dennis raced to the elevator and watched the long hand inch its way around the dial. It finally stopped at the fourth floor. The motor in the old elevator shaft whined loudly as it returned to the first floor.

Without waiting for the languorous elevator car to return, he took off up the stairwell, feeling his ankle for the pistol strapped there. He had more bravado than energy, and he soon found himself struggling as his thighs burned with lactic acid.

He knew he was in a gray area of engagement that Massey had given him. He was to find Garder and call in an extraction team; the team of professionals would do the rest. Dennis was to intervene and hold Garder only if he was in open flight.

Dennis’s problem was that he still had to confirm that this was Garder, and he could do that by sitting in the lobby and looking for the small scar on his chin when he exited. But that would mean he’d need to keep following him and maintain a running commentary with the extraction team. That was messy and prone to error.

Or Dennis could confront the man, perhaps in his room, and after confirming he had the right guy, he could keep him at gunpoint until the extraction team arrived. If he had the wrong person, then he’d fabricate a dumb tourist story and bolt. The worst thing he could do was call in a team to extract a watch dealer from Norway.

He opened the fourth-floor stairwell door and peered down the hallway. A maid’s cart was stationed about forty feet away, overflowing with dirty towels and sheets. He heard a man’s voice from that direction. Stepping into the hall, he let the door close behind him quietly and tiptoed past the open hotel room door. He heard a man’s voice say in English: “No: all set. I don’t need any bottled water. Please go.”

Dennis made a split-second decision that the man he had followed was Garder; he spoke with an American accent and sounded agitated, and he wanted the maid out of the room ASAP. That fit with an agent on the lam.

Dennis walked slowly past the man’s door, keeping his back to the maid, who came out and pushed the cart down the hall in the opposite direction. He raced back several steps and stuck out his shoe to prevent the room door from closing.

He stood there, his heart jumping wildly as the door stopped a quarter inch from the end of its run, and the maid continued away from him. Dennis wondered if the man inside had noticed that the door lock hadn’t set. Reaching down, he pulled out one of the Agency’s new wonder weapons.

It was a black, plastic-composite .32-caliber pistol with a small silencer that could be transported in several parts inside a specially made roll-on suitcase. The six rounds were packed individually inside the roll-on handle of the suitcase during transit, and Dennis had painstakingly loaded the clip before strapping it to his leg. Dennis had convinced Massey to issue one of the airport security–proof weapons, and now he glowed with self-congratulation at his foresight.

If he was right, he had just scored really, really big.





Chapter 25


He pushed the door with the toe of his shoe, and it opened enough so that he could see into the room. A small hallway led into an L-shaped room to the right. A clothes dresser with a flat-screen TV on top was placed against the wall to the left of the bedroom, about ten feet down the hallway; on the right he could see the bottom end of a double bed.

A bank of draperied windows faced Dennis at the end of the room, with a small round table and two chairs in front of the windows.

He guessed there was a bathroom to the right, behind the bed. He stepped into the hallway and waited. Sure enough, a toilet flushed, and he let the door close behind him, the sound of the door closing masked by the flush.

Dennis had not spent his career arresting wayward agents at the point of a gun. Nearly all of his arrests had been done with backup, and in only one case had there been violence—a distraught Athens field agent was so despondent with the arrest that he tried to shoot himself before Dennis’s sidekick could wrestle the gun out of his hand.

Still, as Dennis inched down the small hallway, he was confident he could handle Garder. A gun is a powerful motivational tool to encourage compliant behavior.

At the end of the hallway he hugged the wall to the right side and waited, pistol raised to his chin. The gun felt foolishly light, and he wished he would have taken it to the Agency range for a practice run, but he did not think he would have to use it. He heard soft footsteps on the room’s carpet and flattened himself against the wall in the hallway.

The man seemed to be talking to himself, and walked from the bathroom into the bedroom, moving alongside the bed toward the dresser on the left side of the room, diagonally across from Dennis.

“Hold it there,” Dennis said, stepping out and pointing the pistol at the man’s chest.

“Jesus!” the man said, jumping. “What the hell are you doing in my hotel room?” The man peered at the pistol and then back at Dennis’s face. They stared at each other for several seconds.

“Take my wallet,” the man said, reaching into his back pocket. “No problem. Take it all.”

“Hold it!” Dennis yelled. “Put your hands on top of your head. Now!”

The man dropped his wallet onto the floor and put both palms on top of his head.

“Take anything you want,” the man said, his voice shaking. “It’s all yours.”

Dennis laughed. “You got the million dollars you stole from the Agency lying around here somewhere? We could use that back.”