The Third Coincidence Read Online Free PDF Page B

his cravings.
    During the flight he reflected on the last few days. Events were
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    escalating just as he had expected. Years ago, as a young member of the FBI’s electronic surveillance unit, he had been a face in the crowd at a large joint CIA-FBI meeting headed by Jack McCall. When he had heard on CNN that the president would meet with McCall, he had watched the White House entrance often used for quiet meetings. He had recognized McCall when he pulled up to the security gate, and waited to follow him home. That night he had staked out McCall’s residence and saw a woman arrive. With his lap- top and her license plate, he learned her identity and address. While she had been with McCall, he went to her apartment and had not gotten out by the time she returned home.
    He had fought down his desire to take her when he had seen her body in the bathroom mirror, but he could not resist the playful act of stealing her underwear. Had he killed her and McCall, the gov- ernment would have been more careful about protecting the iden- tities of their replacements. They didn’t know him, but he knew them and where they lived.

    After landing in San Francisco, he took a cab to the downtown Mar- riott Hotel, paid cash and checked in as John Powell, a different alias than he had used to buy his plane ticket. In the unlikely event Mc- Call somehow picked up his trail, the ticket name could not be tracked to the hotel where they might find his fingerprints or DNA. From his room, he called an escort service and spoke with the manager, telling her he wanted a woman with medium-length black
    hair and large breasts, but not the streetwalker look.
    Momma had never looked cheap.
    After the manager’s assurance that she would send one of her best girls, the man flopped into the overstuffed chair that accepted him as a catcher’s mitt accepted a fastball. After plopping his feet onto the cushy ottoman, he took out his laptop that held more than two years of information on the habits and movements of all the cur- rent U.S. Supreme Court justices and Fed governors, and their fam- ilies. He had also started putting together data on some of the
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    leading candidates being floated in the press to replace the now de- parted justices. Also files on the rumored nominees to fill the va- cancy he had created on the Federal Reserve Board.
    And there will be more. I promise.
    He had bestowed the honor of being the next sacrifice for Amer- ica upon Supreme Court Justice Donald Quincy Breen. At first, bachelor Justice Breen had ranked poorly because his movements had been too unpredictable. All that had changed when Justice Breen and a Baltimore attorney, Ms. Judith Ashcroft, unexpectedly announced their wedding plans.
    It had not been difficult to get information on Judith Ashcroft, a thirty-six-year-old ex-beauty queen, who had grown up spoiled by her old-money family. She believed in the government’s responsibility to care for those not capable or willing to provide for themselves. An- other family of rich pigs longing to practice largess using money taken from hardworking Americans. If she really felt that way, she’d use her own money. The media colored it a solid marital merger with the more liberal wife expected to take the edge off Breen’s rep- utation for being right of the political center.
    The killing of a U.S. Supreme Court justice and his bride on their honeymoon would guarantee coast-to-coast headlines. After using his toes to leverage off his loafers, letting them drop silently to the plushly carpeted floor, he hacked into the e-mail of Mrs. Cor- delia Ashcroft, Breen’s new mother-in-law. Several days ago, in her inbox, had been an e-mail wherein Judith told her mother that she and her new husband would not, as reported by the media, honey- moon in Maui. Instead they would quietly slip away to spend June seventh, eighth, and ninth in the honeymoon cottage of a resort near Depoe Bay on the coast