Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [125]
Carroll pushed himself to his feet, then he nearly fell back to the suddenly spinning cement “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Tip-top shape.”
Carroll’s eyes were watering badly. His body wasn’t his own. Using bricks in the wall for handholds, he started down the metal stairs winding away from the roof.
Somebody had taken Walter Trentkamp’s body away.
The cop called after him, “Hey, buddy, you ought to get yourself treated! Have somebody look at your head. There wasn’t any body up here.”
Carroll hardly heard the policeman’s last words.
Suddenly he had a different priority in mind: he wanted to go home. He needed to go home right away.
Carroll thought about his kids and about Caitlin.
He thought about Caitlin’s meeting with Anton Birnbaum and wondered what might have transpired there. He was worried about the people he loved…. There wasn’t any body up here on the roof…. Sure thing—this was all a dream, a horrible nightmare.
He had no clue how he managed the first wild minutes of the drive to Riverdale. Maybe it was practice—all those half-drunken nights of his recent past. Maybe God did look after babies and drunks. But there was a time coming when God might abdicate his responsibilities, all his watchfulness …
And what then?
Chapter 98
THE FAMILIAR LIGHTS of the old house in Riverdale were glittering brightly.
As he drove up his street, Carroll remembered a time when his father and mother would have been there, a time when everything had seemed so much saner … when Trentkamp was Uncle Walter.
Walter Trentkamp had been his father’s friend for all those years. Had his father begun to guess anything? We had all been so naive about foreign governments back then. About our own government as it was turning out Americans thought of democracy as the world’s one superior political system. We thought we understood the parameters of our government’s power.
Trentkamp and the KGB had been brilliant at fooling everyone. Walter Trentkamp had been so confident, he hadn’t hesitated at using Carroll. What better conduit for information? Walter’s hubris was startling, but his modus was consistent at least As Carroll thought back now, he remembered that Walter had spent time in Europe after World War II. He recalled “fact-finding” trips to South America, to Mexico, to Southeast Asia. It was no wonder they had never been able to identify Monserrat. They hadn’t been looking in the right places.
No one had thought to look right there in New York or Washington. No one had begun to suspect Trentkamp. And Trentkamp had obviously known that they wouldn’t. His confidence was galling. He had no fear or respect for American Intelligence, and he had been right not to. His ruse, the misdirection had been perfect—the life-work of a master spy, this decade’s Donald McLean or Kim Philby.
Suddenly, Carroll’s eyes were watering again—only now it was-because he was so glad to see his kids. They jumped up and ran to him as he stumbled inside the house. Then the Carroll family was hugging and kissing. They were squeezing their father as tightly as they could.
“We have to get out of here,” Carroll whispered to Mary Katherine as the two of them got to hold one another. “We have to move out of the house now…. Help me dress them. Try to explain as little as you can. I have to call Caitlin.”
Mary Katherine nodded. She didn’t even seem that surprised at the news. “You go call Caitlin now. I’ll outfit the troops.”
Two hours later, the Carrolls, the family of six plus Caitlin Dillon, quietly checked into the Durham Hotel on West 87th Street in Manhattan.
Carroll’s plan was to stay there for a night, maybe a few nights, until they could decide how to work with Anton Birnbaum, how to work with the New York police, whoever they could trust. Life was suddenly full of treacherous false bottoms. Carroll didn’t want another one to suddenly fall out.
Once they were together in the West Side hotel, Caitlin and Carroll fell into an embrace. They shared a long kiss which neither of them wanted to end. Caitlin pushed against Carroll with