The Exile
Allan Folsom
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For Karen and for Riley,
and in memory of my father and my mother
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
PROLOGUE
PART 1 - LOS ANGELES
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PART 2 - EUROPE
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PART 3 - RUSSIA
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EPILOGUE
BOOKS BY ALLAN FOLSOM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
PARIS, FRANCE.
Two men sat alone in the private study of an elegant home on the Avenue Victor Hugo. They were old friends and successful businessmen of nearly the same age, somewhere in their early forties. One was Alfred Neuss, a Russian-born American citizen. The other, a Swiss-born British citizen, Peter Kitner. Both were tense and ill at ease.
“Get on with it,” Kitner said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Neuss hesitated.
“Go on.”
“Alright.” Reluctantly Neuss flipped the switch on an 8 mm movie projector on a table beside him. There was a flicker of light and the portable movie screen in front of them came to life.
What they saw was a silent, Super 8 mm home movie. The scene was the fashionable Parc Monceau on the Rive Droite, the city’s Right Bank. A children’s birthday party was under way. It was fun, silly, colorful. Twenty or more boys and girls pushed balloons and threw pieces of cake or shot spoons full of ice cream at one another while nannies and the occasional parent looked on, more or less keeping the fledgling riot under control.
A moment more and the camera panned away to another ten or so partygoers engaged in an impromptu soccer game. These were all boys and, like the others, ten or eleven years old. Soccer was their game, and they played it rough-and-tumble and with abandon. A miscued kick sent the ball beneath an overhang of trees toward a grouping of bushes. One of the boys chased after it, and the camera followed.
The boy was ten years old, and his name was Paul. The camera pulled back a little and stopped to follow him as he went toward the bushes to retrieve the ball. Suddenly another youth emerged from the foliage. He was older, taller, stronger. Maybe twelve or thirteen. Paul stopped and said something to him, pointing to where the ball had gone. And then, from nowhere, something appeared in the older boy’s hand. He pressed a button and a huge knife blade snapped out. In the next instant he stepped forward and shoved it full force into Paul’s chest. Suddenly the camera charged forward, bouncing as it went. The older boy looked up in surprise, staring directly into the onrushing camera. Then he turned and tried to run, but the person with the camera grabbed his hand and spun him around. He struggled wildly to get away but couldn’t. Suddenly he let go of the knife and pushed away. The camera fell backward and dropped to the ground to com
e full on Paul, his eyes wide, lying motionless, dying.
“Stop it! Shut it off!” Kitner suddenly shouted.
Abruptly Alfred Neuss turned off the projector.
Peter Kitner closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Alfred. I’m sorry.”
Kitner took another moment to compose himself and then looked at Neuss. “The police are not aware of the film’s existence?”
“No.”
“Or the knife?”
“No.”
“This is the only copy of the film?”
“Yes.”
“And you have the knife?”
“Yes. Do you want to see it?”
“No, never.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Kitner looked off, his face ashen, his stare vacant. Finally he turned back. “Take the film and the knife and lock them away in such a manner that only you or I may retrieve them. Use whoever you need, include the family if you have to, pay whatever the cost. But whatever that price is, make certain that in the event I meet an untimely death the Paris police, in concert with the attorneys representing my estate, have direct and immediate access to both the knife and the film. How that is done, I will leave up to you.”
“What about the—?”
“Murder of my son?”
“Yes.”
“I will take care of it.”
PART 1
LOS ANGELES
1
TWENTY YEARS LATER.
Amtrak Station, the desert community of Barstow, California. Tuesday, March 12, 4:20 A.M.
John Barron crossed toward the train alone in the cool of the desert night. He stopped at car number 39002 of the Amtrak Superliner Southwest Chief, waiting as a mustachioed conductor helped an elderly man with bottle-thick glasses up the steps. Then he boarded the train himself.
Inside, in the dim light, the conductor wished him good morning and punched his ticket, pointing him past sleeping passengers toward his seat two-thirds of the way down the car. Twenty seconds later he put his small carry-on bag into the overhead rack and sat down in the aisle seat beside an attractive young woman in sweatshirt and tight jeans curled up against the window, asleep.
Barron glanced at her, then settled back, his eyes more or less on the car door through which he had entered. A half minute later he saw Marty Valparaiso come on board, give the conductor his ticket, and take a seat just inside the front door. Several moments passed, and he heard a blast of train whistle. The conductor closed the door, and the Chief began to move. In no time the lights of the desert city gave way to the pitch-black of open land. Barron heard the whine of diesel engines as the train picked up speed. He tried to picture what it might look like from above, the kind of aerial shot you might see in a movie—of a giant, half-mile-long, twenty-seven-car snake, gliding west through the predawn desert darkness toward Los Angeles.
2
Raymond had been dozing when the passengers came on. At first he’d thought there were only two—an older man with thick glasses and an uneasy step, and a dark-haired young man in jeans and windbreaker who carried a small athletic bag. The older man had taken a window seat down and across the aisle from him; the younger man had walked past him to put his bag into the overhead rack a dozen rows behind. It was then the last passenger had come on board. He was slim and wiry, probably in his late thirties or early forties, and dressed in a sport coat and slacks. He’d given the conductor a ticket, had it punched, and then taken a seat just inside the door.
Under ordinary circumstances Raymond wouldn’t have given it further thought, but these were not ordinary circumstances. Little more than thirty-six hours earlier he had shot two people to death in the back room of a tailor shop on Pearson Street in Chicago and very shortly afterward boarded the Chief for Los Angeles.
It was a train trip that had been unplanned, but a surprise ice storm had closed Chicago’s airports and forced him to take the train instead of flying directly to Los Angeles. The delay was unfortunate but he’d had no choice, and ever since things had gone without incident, that was until they stopped in Barstow and the two men had come on board.
Of course, there was the chance they were nothing more than everyday early morning commuters on their way to jobs in Los Angeles, but it didn’t feel likely. It was their physical manner, the way they moved and held themselves, the way they had taken up positions on either side of him, one in the aisle seat by the front door, the other in the dark behind. In effect they had boxed him in, making it impossible for him to go one way or the other without encountering one of them.
Raymond took a breath and glanced at the big, ruddy-faced man in the rumpled jacket dozing in the window seat next to him. He was Frank Miller, a fortyish, somewhat overweight, divorced paper-products salesman from L.A. who wore an obvious hairpiece and hated to fly. Across the narrow table, Bill and Vivian Woods from Madison, Wisconsin, a fifty-something couple on their way to a California vacation, slept in seats facing him. They were strangers who had become friends and traveling companions almost from the moment the train left Chicago and Miller approached him as he stood alone in the lounge car drinking a cup of coffee, saying he was looking for a fourth for poker and asked if he’d like to join them. For Raymond it was perfect, and he’d agreed at once, seeing it as a way to blend in with the other passengers in the unlikely event someone had seen him leave the tailor shop and the police had put out a bulletin for someone of his description traveling alone.
From somewhere in the distance came two long wails of train whistle. A third came seconds later. Raymond looked toward the front of the car. The wiry man in the aisle seat sat motionless, his head back, as if he, like most everyone else, were dozing.
The ice storm and resulting train trip were troublesome enough by themselves, another kink in a series of meticulously planned events gone wrong. In the past four days he had been in San Francisco, Mexico City, then Chicago, arriving there via Dallas. In both San Francisco and Mexico City he had gone after vital information, failed to find it, killed the person or persons involved, and immediately moved on. The same maddening thing had played out in Chicago. Where he should have been able to extract information there had been none. So he’d had to move on to his last planned stop in the Americas, which was Los Angeles, or rather Beverly Hills. There, he was certain he would have no trouble whatsoever in garnering the information he needed before killing the man who had it. The trouble was time. Today was Tuesday, March 12. Because of the ice storm he was already more than a day late on what had originally been a precision schedule and one that, even now, needed to see him arrive in London no later than noon tomorrow. Still, while that was frustrating, he realized things had only been delayed and nonetheless remained workable. All he needed was for the next few hours to go off without a hitch. But now he wasn’t so sure that was going to happen.
Cautiously, Raymond leaned back and glanced to his valise in the luggage rack above him. Inside was his U.S. passport, a first class British Airways ticket for London, the .40 caliber Sturm Ruger automatic he’d used in the Chicago murders, and two extra eleven-round clips of ammunition. He’d been bold enough to carry them past the sharp-eyed antiterrorist security detachments patrolling the station and take them onto the train in Chicago, but now he wondered if he should have brought them at all. The guns he’d used in the San Francisco and Mexico City murders he’d had sent in plain wrapped packages for pickup at Mailboxes Inc. stores where he’d earlier had accounts opened and where he had a numbered box with a key. In San Francisco he’d collected the gun, used it, then dropped it into San Francisco Bay, along with the body of the man he had killed. In Mexico City there had been a problem finding the package and he’d had to wait nearly an hour until the manager was called and the package found. He had another gun at a Mailboxes Inc. in Beverly Hills, but with his schedule already stretched to breaking because of the need to take the train and with the problem in Mexico City fresh in his mind, he’d decided to take the chance and keep the Ruger with him an
d not risk another foul-up that could further delay his getting to London.
Another distant blast of train whistle, and once again Raymond glanced toward the man dozing near the front door. He watched him for a moment and then looked up at the valise on the rack above him and decided to take the chance. Simply get up, take the bag down, and open it as if he were looking for something inside. Then, in the dim light, carefully slide the Ruger under his sweater and put the bag back. He was about to do just that when he saw Vivian Woods watching him. She smiled when he looked at her. It was a smile not of politeness or the acknowledgment of a fellow traveler awake as she was in the early morning, but of sexual longing, and it was hardly unfamiliar. At thirty-three, Raymond was hard-body slim and rock-star handsome, with blond hair and large blue-green eyes accentuating a face that was delicate, even aristocratic. Moreover, he was soft-spoken and extremely well mannered. To women of nearly any age the combination was deadly. They looked at him carefully and often and with the same kind of yearning Vivian Woods showed now, as if in an instant they would run away with him to anywhere he wanted. And once there, do anything he asked.
Raymond smiled gently in response and closed his eyes as if to sleep, but knowing she would continue to study him. It was flattering, but a vigilance that, at the moment, was most unwelcome, because it made it impossible for him to stand up and take possession of the gun.
3
AMTRAK STATION, SAN BERNARDINO, CALIFORNIA. 6:25 A.M.
John Barron watched the string of early commuters come onto the train. Some clutched briefcases or laptop computers; others, paper coffee cups. Here and there someone talked on a cell phone. Most looked as if they were still half asleep.
Several minutes more and the conductor closed the door. Another moment and the train whistle sounded, the car gave a slight jerk, and the Chief began to move. As it did, the young woman in the seat beside Barron stirred and then went back to sleep.
Barron glanced at her and then down the aisle toward the line of passengers still waiting to find seats. He was impatient. Since first light he’d wanted to get up and walk past where the cardplayers were sitting and try to get a glimpse of their man. If he was their man. But it wasn’t the tactic, so he stayed where he was and instead watched a four- or five-year-old clutching a teddy bear toddle by. A handsome blond woman followed, and Barron assumed she was his mother. As they passed he glimpsed Marty Valparaiso in his seat by the door. He was dozing, or pretending to. Barron felt sweat on his upper lip and realized his palms were wet as well. He was nervous and didn’t like it. Of all the things to be, nervous was not one of them.
