The Death List by Marc Olden

Author:Marc Olden [Olden, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-6071-5
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

FOUR DESPERATE PHONE CALLS to stewardesses and friends brought Betsy Kerwin $155 in quick loans, more than enough to get her to Newark Airport by taxi. There she placed the list in a brown manila envelope addressed to herself at the main American Express office in Paris, and mailed it on her way to a 9:35 A.M. shuttle flight to Washington, D.C. On the forty-five minute flight, she kept to herself.

At Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C, she bought herself a pair of $15 yellow slacks and a white turtleneck sweater to go with white sneakers she had bought at Newark Airport. Purchasing a cake of soap and a blue washcloth, she went into the ladies room and cleaned up as best she could. Running a comb through her dyed blond hair, she touched it at the back with her left hand, then put on red lipstick, smoothing it even with her little finger.

Leaving the ladies room, she phoned Nathaniel Arledge from a small piece of paper with several numbers written on it in black eyebrow pencil. She got him at the second number.

“Yes?” he said evenly, his voice almost cheerful.

“It’s me,” said Betsy. “The flight and the money.”

“Taken care of,” said Arledge, laughing lightly as if to impress someone else in the room with just how efficient and calm he was. “You’re on it, as a friend of the family. Your company was glad to cooperate and the package is with me. How do we work it, now?”

“You get on, have the package on your lap. One of the girls will come down and take it from you. It won’t be me, Mr. Arledge, so don’t bother your government head about that. Somebody will take it and give it to me. I’ll get on here and get off in Paris. You won’t even see me either time and, believe me, I don’t want to see you.”

“Uh,” said Mr. Arledge, not quite sure how to ask the next question, “do you have the, uh …”

“The list,” said Betsy. “It’s in a safe place, and in case you’re thinking of getting cute, it’s not on me. It’s in a safe place, so don’t bother running up and down the aisle of the plane screaming my name. Just have the twenty thousand or you are in some kind of trouble, man.”

“Everything will be taken care of,” said Mr. Arledge, and Betsy could almost hear him grinning, trying to keep it together and stay cool.

“It had fucking better be, old man,” she said and hung up.

At 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, John Bolt turned in his seat and said, “Then what?”

“Well,” said Mara, “Oh, John, you have some cuts on your face. Shaving?”

Laughing, Bolt said, “Not intentionally. Somebody else tried to shave me, without asking me first.”

Smiling, she leaned her head sideways and said, “Same old John. Where angels fear to tread.”

“Yeah. So tell me,” he said.

“I did nothing for six months, except think about things. You among them, my family, and what kind of a new life I wanted.

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