The Consignment Read Online Free Page A

see.
    Two squad cars and an ambulance were making their way through the parking lot. Word was already spreading out from the Fettners guys, Dimitri’s name was suddenly in the air. People were saying he was shot, badly wounded.
    After a minute I left Trevanian with Micky Baker and went back into the hangar and sat down at the Haplon stand. There was nothing I could do then but wait. And so I waited. The next quarter hour, people wandered in and out of the hangar, the day unexpectedly cut loose from its moorings, suddenly drifting. The police gathered the Fettners team together and interviewed them all. The likes of Micky Baker started spreading the word that maybe Dimitri was more than just badly wounded. Around two P.M., there was an announcement over the loudspeakers: The fair was closing early, anyone who wanted to could leave just so long as they checked their security tags at the main gate. Then four names were read out, none I recognized, three men and one woman who’d neglected to report to the rangemaster.
    I delegated Gillian Streiss to pack up our stand, then I gathered my papers together and told Rossiter I was leaving.
    At the main gate I checked my security tag, the guard consulted his clipboard and waved me on through. I drove out to the turnpike, put ten miles behind me, then turned off at a giant Wal-Mart sign and made my way over some speed bumps into the parking lot of a mall. I parked and reached into the glove compartment and took out my “scramble-and-squirt” device, a box of electronics the size of a book of matches. Then I reached farther back and took out a rubber cup and fixed it to the device. I put the whole thing in my jacket pocket and got out and crossed to a pay phone, where I picked up the receiver and fixed the rubber cup to the mouthpiece. Then I inserted two quarters and dialed. After two rings a machine at the far end came on and I got three long beeps, the signal that the machine was ready to receive.
    I hung my head. I gathered myself, then spoke. “Blue Hawk is dead.” I repeated it once, then I dropped my finger onto the phone bar, breaking the line.

CHAPTER 2
    Colonel Alex Channon sat silently through my recital of the sequence of events out at Springfield. His elbows rested on his desk, from time to time he raised a hand and tapped his knuckles against his mouth. When I was done his gaze slid on by me, and for several moments he contemplated the bare wall. Then he reached over and switched off the digital recorder. He looked like I guess I must have looked when I lost four men from my unit in the Gulf War. Diminished. At least partially broken.
    “You called from outside the fair?”
    A pay phone, I told him. Ten miles from Springfield.
    He didn’t acknowledge my reply, just sat awhile staring at the recorder beneath his hand. In the twenty-something years since he’d walked to the rostrum in the West Point lecture theater and delivered the first lesson in Intelligence to me, Dimitri, and our fellow cadets, Alex Channon had climbed steadily into the upper branches of the Pentagon tree. He’d once been a military adviser to the National Security Council, one of the uniforms you sometimes glimpse ducking out of picture as the Secretary of Defense announces some policy shift to the media, and now he was the Pentagon’s place man in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA. But the years of his ascent had worn him. He remained lean, but his hair had thinned and grayed, and the lines of his face had deepened. He had large responsibilities and he carried them gravely. He was the kind of guy most people would be relieved to know still had influence down in Washington, but at fifty-four years of age he hadn’t made General, and his time was probably running out. Though he gave a few guest lectures at West Point each year, the small office there where we always met was really just his reward for climbing so far up the slippery slope at the Pentagon. Retaining close links with guys