The Five Year Plan (1998)

'When we saw what it was, we thought we'd better have it put in here,' Carol explained nervously. 'Gina's in the Ladies' room with Smithy. It was Smithy who unpacked it. I think she had a bit of a shock.'

'It was Smithy who screamed?'

'She's sort of a nervous individual, Mister Figaro. Nervous, but loyal. Smithy cares about you. We all do. That's why an incident like this is so upsetting. I suppose, with our client list, it's understandable. But this -- this is like something out of the movies.'

'Now I really am intrigued,' said Figaro and followed her into the boardroom.

Smithy was now lying on the sofa beneath the window, and Gina was fanning her pale-looking face with a copy of the New Yorker.

Figaro recognized the cover. It was the issue that included the profile of himself. He glanced around the room, his dark, quick eyes serving a usefully photographic memory, taking in the probable chain of causation. The New Yorker piece. The dismantled packing case. The pubic clumps of straw. The delivery item itself.

Free standing, about five feet high, and looking like something that had met the stony gaze of a Gorgon, was a topcoat made of stone.

'What kind of sick person?' Carol bleated. 'No, wait just a minute. I know what kind of person. There's a name on the delivery note.'

She handed him a sheet of pink paper and placed a tentative hand on her boss's shoulder. It was the first time in three years of working for Figaro that she had ever touched him and she was surprised to find hard muscle underneath the jacket of his expensive Armani suit. He was a tall, attractive man, in good shape for someone who spent most of his time in the office and the rest of it in court. Kind of like Roy Scheider, she thought. The same long nose. The same high forehead. The same glasses. Only paler. Almost as pale as the woman lying on the couch.

'Do you feel all right, Mister Figaro? You look a little pale.'

Figaro, who was rarely in the sun, looked away from the stone topcoat and met her eye. For a moment he said nothing. Then he laughed.

'I'm fine, Carol,' he replied, and started to laugh again, only this time it really took hold of him until he had taken off his glasses and was leaning with both hands on the boardroom table, tears streaming down both cheeks.

Chapter TWO

Two things happened on the morning of Dave Delano's release from the Miami Correctional Center at Homestead.

One was that Benford Halls, recently transferred from Homestead to the State Penitentiary at Stark, was executed. Although Stark was many hundreds of miles upstate, the circumstances of Halls's final hours -- meticulously reported on almost all of Florida's TV and radio stations -- caused a lot of anger and resentment among the cons at Homestead. Not only had Halls been kept waiting for several hours after his scheduled 11 p.m. execution because of a problem with the ancient electric chair, but it had also been reported that movie actor Calgary Stanford had been allowed to attend the execution in order to research a death-row role he was soon to play.

Dave Delano had good reason to remember Benford Halls. They had both been sentenced in the same Miami courthouse on the same day, exactly five years before. That Dave should have served the full term -- since 1987, parole for federal prisoners had been more or less eliminated -- didn't seem so bad when he compared it with waiting around for five years to be put to death in front of some movie actor. If that didn't rank as cruel and unusual, then Torquemada must have been one of the world's great humanitarians.

The second thing that happened was that Dave received an airmail letter. It was from Russia and written in the unmistakably clear hand and cryptic style of Einstein Gergiev. Gergiev had been released from Homestead some six months before Dave, after serving eight years on a racketeering charge. Released and then deported as an undesirable alien.