the Third Twin (1996)

Murray Claud was another unusual name, and they tracked him down quickly. It was Jeannie who made the call. Murray Claud Sr. told her, in a voice full of bitterness and bewilderment, that his son had been jailed in Athens three years ago, after a knife fight in a taverna, and would not be released until January at the earliest. “That boy could have been anything,” he said. “Astronaut. Nobel Prize winner. Movie star. President of the United States. He has brains, charm, and good looks. And he threw it away. Just threw it all away.”

She understood the father’s pain. He thought he was responsible. She was sorely tempted to tell him the truth, but she was unprepared, and anyway there was no time. She promised herself she would call him again, one day, and give him what consolation she could. Then she hung up.

They left Harvey Jones until last because they knew he would be the hardest.

Jeannie was daunted to find there were almost a million Joneses in America, and H. was a common initial. His middle name was John. He had been born at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., so Jeannie and Lisa began by calling every Harvey Jones, every H. J. Jones, and every H. Jones in the Washington phone book. They did not find one who had been born approximately twenty-two years ago at Walter Reed; but, worse, they accumulated a long list of maybes: people who did not answer their phones.

Once again Jeannie began to doubt whether this would work. They had three unresolved George Dassaults and now twenty or thirty H. Joneses. Her approach was theoretically sound, but if people did not answer their phones she could not question them. Her eyes were getting bleary and she was feeling jumpy from too much coffee and no sleep.

At four A.M.. she and Lisa began on the Philadelphia Joneses.

At four-thirty Jeannie found him.

She thought it was going to be another maybe. The phone rang four times, then there was the characteristic pause and click of an answering machine. But the voice on the machine was eerily familiar. “You’ve reached Harvey Jones’s place,” the message said, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. It was like listening to Steve: the pitch of the voice, the diction, and the phrasing were all Steve’s. “I can’t come to the phone right now, so please leave a message after the long tone.”

Jeannie hung up and checked the address. It was an apartment on Spruce Street, in University City, not far from the Aventine Clinic. She noticed her hands were shaking. It was because she wanted to get him by the throat.

“I’ve found him,” she said to Lisa.

“Oh, my God.”

“It’s a machine, but it’s his voice, and he lives in Philadelphia, near where I was attacked.”

“Let me listen.” Lisa called the number. As she heard the message her pink cheeks turned white. “It’s him,” she said. She hung up. “I can hear him now. ‘Take off those pretty panties,’ he said. Oh, God.”

Jeannie picked up the phone and called police headquarters.

53

BERRINGTON JONES DID NOT SLEEP ON SATURDAY NIGHT.

He remained in the Pentagon parking lot, watching Colonel Logan’s black Lincoln Mark VIII, until midnight, when he called Proust and learned that Logan had been arrested but Steve had escaped, presumably by subway or bus as he had not taken his father’s car.

“What were they doing in the Pentagon?” he asked Jim.

“They were in the Command Data Center. I’m in the process of finding out exactly what they were up to. See if you can track down the boy, or the Ferrami girl.”

Berrington no longer objected to doing surveillance. The situation was desperate. This was no time to stand on his dignity; if he failed to stop Jeannie, he would have no dignity left anyway.

When he returned to the Logan house it was dark and deserted, and Jeannie’s red Mercedes was gone. He waited there for an hour, but no one arrived. Assuming she had returned home, he drove back to Baltimore and cruised up and down her street, but the car was not there either.

It was getting light when at last he pulled up outside his house in Roland Park. He went inside and called Jim, but there was no reply from his home or his office. Berrington lay on the bed in his clothes, with his eyes shut, but although he was exhausted he stayed awake, worrying.

At seven o’clock he got up and called again, but he still could not reach Jim. He took a shower, shaved, and dressed in black cotton chinos and a striped polo shirt. He squeezed a big glass of orange juice and drank it standing in the kitchen. He looked at the Sunday edition of the Baltimore Sun, but the headlines meant nothing to him; it was as if they were written in Finnish.

Proust called at eight.

Jim had spent half the night at the Pentagon with a friend who was a general, questioning the data center personnel under the pretext of investigating a security breach. The general, a buddy from Jim’s CIA days, knew only that Logan was trying to expose an undercover operation from the seventies and Jim wanted to prevent him.