Foxcatcher by William H Hallahan

Author:William H Hallahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

No one knew where Eric Rock was. Each day McCall checked his dailies, looking for some word on the man. But Rock was as elusive as a ghost.

After a week of waiting for someone to report on Rock’s whereabouts, McCall took matters into his own hands. He would locate Rock personally.

The only hard fact McCall had gleaned was a phone number in New York City—Rock’s message center. People reached Rock by speaking to a message unit at that number, then waiting for him to call back—which he sometimes never did.

But the man himself could be anywhere in the world. He got his messages by telephoning his recorder once or twice a day from wherever he was at the moment, and that could be Rome, New Delhi, Singapore, or San Francisco. He seemed to have no fixed home.

It was that message center that McCall focused on.

McCall arrived at the disused safe house later than he had planned. By the time he’d parked, sunset was less than an hour away. Quickly he lifted the two cases by their handles out of the trunk of his car and carried them across the sidewalk and up the concrete steps to the doorway.

He paused to check the pedestrians, then studied the parked cars, then the windows of the brick row houses that lined both sides of the street. Most of them were apartments with professional offices on the first floor. Windowpanes reflected the red ball of sun.

McCall took bare note of the flawless autumn weather before he unlocked the door and stepped into the inner hallway. The building was supposed to be empty, and he stood listening for sounds: footsteps, scraping chairs, shutting doors. But the interior was quiet—almost as though the building were listening to him.

It had been used variously over the years—as offices for a special Latin American disinformation program, as a duplication center until the new one was completed, and periodically as a safe house.

By the time he’d reached the third floor, his arms were shaking from the heavy cases and he was panting. He unlocked the door to the front room and pushed it open.

The phone was sitting in the middle of the bare floor. Beside it stood the folded mattress cot he’d ordered. McCall put down the two cases, then crouched and picked up the telephone receiver. He got a dial tone. Good.

He took a pad from his pocket and looked at the number on the telephone and compared it with the number written on the pad. They were identical. Then with a screwdriver he removed the base of the telephone.

Now he opened the larger case. This was a highly sophisticated computerized telephone-tap unit. The top face of the unit was covered with toggle switches, phone-jack receptacles, and digital-number squares. From the side of the unit he drew out a sixteen-inch cable and attached its two alligator leads to the contacts inside the base of the telephone. The other wire he plugged into an electric outlet. He worked several toggle switches and watched the computerized numbers dance on the display face.

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