Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  “Unsuccessfully.” Cohen rotated the arm. “And everyone will be looking unsuccessfully for you.” Clay slumped; Cohen shook him awake. “Where'd you get the weapons?”

  “Military sources. Captured AK's, that's all they were. There's a place in Istanbul, two places in Switzerland, others. Everybody knows.”

  “Where'd you get the bomb?”

  “What? Wait, wait – it was just a surveillance station –”

  “Who on who?”

  “Us against them. What's wrong with that?”

  “Where'd you get it?”

  “It got passed down.”

  Cohen wrenched the arm. “Clay, you've got a choice: cooperate or die. I've talked with all your friends. They keep naming you.”

  “They're trying to wriggle out.” Clay sat back weakly against a tussock, drew up one knee. “But I've got something on you.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Your girlfriend's about to die. Want to stop it?”

  “My girlfriend died on Sainte-Victoire. Your people killed her.”

  “The Hell. We got her Sunday night in Paris. She's in D.C. now. I saw her this morning.”

  “You can have her.”

  “I might, under other circumstances. Right now my circumstances are rather constrained, aren't they? I've killed your buddy, Stinson, albeit in self-defense. You've gotten the idea I'm responsible for your recent inconveniences, although I'm not. I've got only one piece of information valuable to you.”

  “Only thing worth anything to me is the names who run you.”

  “There I can't help you. Jesus, oh, stop it.” Clay sagged into the mud. “Please – I'm a terrible coward…can't stand pain.”

  “Imagine what your friends have endured.” Cohen stretched the arm. “No one will save you here. You can talk and hope I keep my word. Or you can clam up and die very painfully for a bunch of people who wouldn't hesitate to murder you the moment you're not needed.”

  “There's another side you wouldn't understand. If I give in and die anyway, I've gained nothing. If I don't give in, even though I die I keep my pride. You wouldn't understand pride, Cohen. It's not in your makeup.”

  “I have one reason for leaving you alive. That's your daughter.”

  Clay tried to stand. “What'd you do to her?”

  “Nothing. Although you're shit, she needs a father. While I was at the boat house she came down from the house. How old is she?”

  “Nine in September.”

  “How did you ever spawn such a pretty child?”

  A bullfrog croaked officiously in the marsh behind them. A powerboat was crossing eastward, its motor laboring in the swell. “If I twist your arm any more, I'll break the nerve. Then the arm will be useless the rest of your life. In a minute I'm gonna start on the other arm. Then you'll have neither.” He wrenched Clay's other arm. “Goddamn it – who pulls your strings?”

  Clay was gone and Cohen slapped him back. “Unfortunately, no one,” Clay groaned. “I'm what you call a self-motivated man.”

  “Then why do this? Why the bomb in Tibet?”

  “It was a nuclear-powered surveillance station.”

  “A surveillance station's worth this killing? And pursuing me to Hell and back?”

  “Security.” Clay shivered. “Can't we move to drier ..? To make money.”

  “Who pays?”

  “I get a commission, and favors in the Senate and House; it's just politics.”

  “Is this all you do, this stuff?”

  “I'm a consultant; I've got contacts. It's how I make the money I need.”

  “Need for what?”

  “Upkeep. My position. Campaign donations, parties, State Department receptions, boats, cars. You think it's easy, being in society – being part of the government?”

  “Do you think most Americans would approve of what you do?”

  “Why not? They don't give a shit anyway.”

  Cohen twisted harder. “Names.”

  “Can't. Help. Don't have them.” Clay tried to pull back. “Trade me for the girl.”

  “Fuck the girl!” Cohen bit his lip.

  “It's happening this minute. She's getting it from every guy in the team…an electric probe stuck right up her…”

  “Give me the names.”

  “It's a voice in the night. I never know who calls.”

  “Who pays?”

  “It's dollars in a pickup packet, or a draft to my bank.”

  “From where?”

  “Banks in Argentina or Uruguay.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Not allowed to keep records. Don't remember. You won't believe it, but the print won't xerox and the paper disintegrates.”

  “Sure.”

  “Everything they've sent me, which isn't much. It powders. Disappears.”

  “Who started you out?”

  “I was divorced. Had money troubles. Was with a Senate committee. Got a call from a man who said I was recommended to him by a Senator.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn't say and I didn't ask. You don't know how business is done on the Hill.” Clay coughed. “He said he represented associates who wanted to help me out, and would I do them a favor. I said sure, what is it. He sent me five thousand. At first I didn't want to spend it but finally had to. After a couple weeks he called again and asked me to interview a man in New York for an import-export job, and to serve as their representative to that firm. So I flew up to the city and met Chester.”

  “What about Stihl and Mort?”

  “Later they asked me to find a man with a military background to represent the company in the Far East. That was Stihl. Mort was hired for Europe. Same criteria.”

  “Do you want to live? I need names.”

  “Can't help you.”

  “Then I'll go through your address book and kill every person in it.”

  “Waste of time, and a waste of innocent people.”

  Cohen took Clay's knife and slipped it into his good arm, above the elbow. Clay gasped, tried to scream. Cohen punched him. “I'll twist this arm right off unless you shut up and give me names. I'll cut this nerve too.”

  “You're dirt. Not even human. I can't stand it. Please, if I knew, I'd tell you, please! Please?”

  “I'll count from ten. At one I do it.” Cohen shifted to better his position. “Nine, eight, seven, six, five…”

  “I'll tell you where she is!”

  “Four, three, two…”

  “Don't you care about Ruby? Why won't you make a deal?”

  “She works for you. Now and always.”

  “She went over to you in Neuenweg. She helped you with that cop in Paris. She bought you clothes and kept you from the law. She killed our man in Neuenweg. The Hell she works for us.”

  “If she doesn't, how do you know all this?”

  “Mort found you two in Paris. He watched your room from across the street. He'd planted a bug in your coat in Neuenweg, as a precaution.”

  “But he was still in Neuenweg when we got away.”

  “You're an amateur. They found your car in the woods, Cohen. They were going to take it, then decided to wire it, hoping Stinson might show.”

  “Why didn't Mort kill us in Paris?”

  “There were some heavy transatlantic calls about it. Mort wanted to kill you both and I said no, in hopes you'd meet Stinson. We lost you briefly after you evaded the CRS. What was that about, anyway?”

  “Keep going.”

  Clay paused to swallow. “They picked up your transmission again by driving around Paris till they got an echo and vectored it. Then you shook them on the train, and they couldn't find you in Strasbourg. I swear to God it's true – I swear on my daughter's life.”

  “Where's Ruby now?”

  “It's a meat packing plant, D'Angelo Services, off New Jersey and Third.”

  “Stay quiet and you might live.” Cohen threw him into the kayak. “I should make you paddle.”

  “Oh God, I need a doctor
. I'm gonna die of pain…”

  THE WIND had shifted east, pushing them fast across the river. Cohen retied and gagged Clay and left him bound to the kayak in sedges by the west shore, walked to the Impala, dressed, and drove back to him. With Clay in the trunk he retrieved the .357 from under the seat and drove downtown.

  TOO MANY PEOPLE I've deserted, drawn them to their deaths, can't chance Mort has you, Claire, killing you. Paul was right: Fuck vengeance, go live peacefully, save the people you love. Do I love you? I always have but you've tricked me – have you? Maybe what tricked me was my lack of trust – and now you're paying for it. Why do others always pay for my sins? God's most brutal penance – just like He did to us with Christ.

  If you didn't put the signal in my coat and Mort did, then I've failed you, Claire; I haven't loved, for love is trust. They've hunted me so hard I don't trust anyone – even losing faith in Paul because he didn't hate. And he was right, he was right.

  IN AN ALLEY off Third Street cars leaned curbward on wheelless hubs, soggy newspapers and broken bottles in the gutter, pink eyes of rats ducking from his headlights into sewer drains. The D'Angelo packing plant had six stories, a false concrete loggia mortared to its face, and a stepped-up facade at the roof.

  No lights were on and the doors were locked. Two truck trailers were parked along one side; they smelled of sawdust, oil, and rotten meat. The loading doors were locked; like those in front they had thin wires taped inside their small glass panes.

  He tossed the extra rope from the Impala's trunk over the lowest rung of the fire escape and climbed to the roof, lashed the rope to a flue, and dropped over the side. The parapet was overhung; he had to swing back and forth until the rope carried him to a window. It was not wired. As he leaned forward to break it, the rope's arc carried him out again, the Impala spinning way below in miniature circles. He pulled himself to the roof, tied the rope in a sling round his chest, and swung over the parapet again. On the third try he smashed the window inward and grabbed the casement. The Magnum slipped from his belt and fell endlessly, cracked loud against the sidewalk.

  He wriggled through the window into an airless office stinking of pipe tobacco and coffee residue. In the corridor he bumped a water cooler that hummed back malevolently.

  There was no movement on any of the floors. The front door could not be unlocked without tripping an alarm. He considered returning to the roof and back down the fire escape for the gun, but checked first for the cellar stairs.

  They were hidden behind a fire door with an OSHA poster. Lights were on below.

  The stairs creaked as he descended. They gave on a narrow corridor, at its far end a lighted room and the voices of two men discussing batting averages while they bent over a battered, dark-haired form lashed to a chair. One shifted position and Cohen saw a bloody, swollen face as a toilet flushed behind him, lavatory door clanging. He spun round; Mort filled the corridor, grabbed his waist, yelling. He slugged Mort as a crack of pain shot across his skull. He started to run, awareness receding down a wave into frothy vagueness.

  24

  HE SANK through ultracool light, a silent sea peopled by the dead. Horrible pain centered on his neck, inside the spine. A red mass floated before him, a raw flesh aroma. Rib blades gleamed in its fractured chest. A ghost approached, shook him. His eyes would not focus.

  “He's awake.” It was a harsh, squeaky voice.

  Mort entered, eyes black, nose bandaged. Cohen remembered; he turned to the corpse next to him. It was a side of meat.

  “Now you really have something to beef about,” Mort chuckled. “With no one to take your side.” He punched Cohen's ribs. “Side – get it?” He settled his great bulk on a stool and leaned toward Cohen confidentially. “You know, Sam, my work's often very frustrating. I can spend months, months, on a task that comes to nothing. How satisfying it is to have you hanging here with the corpses in the aging room. How'd you find us? Or shall I wait for Paul to tell us?”

  Cohen's tried to govern his swollen tongue. “You'll never get us both. I've promised you, he'll piss on your grave.”

  “Time will tell. In the meantime, we have some entertainment for you.” Mort held up the heart-shaped diamond necklace. “Remember this?”

  The one with the squeaky voice and two others with beards cut Cohen down and tied him to a chair bolted to the floor. The squeaky one stuck a needle in his arm.

  What returned was beyond formulation. It was not color, sound, or heat. It was experienced individually by each cell, he realized, because the structure of his psyche was shattering. It occurred to him distantly that he had become like a nation whose laws were abandoned, and whose citizens, his cells, had reverted to fending for themselves. Beneath this chaos grew a foreknowledge of death, and despair over something irretrievably lost. Intensely he fought back, nurtured a private understanding against the random thoughts unraveling his mind. It was the hardest thing, he realized, he had ever done, and it threatened to slip away the second he gave it less than full awareness.

  He heard Mort's voice, and fought the urge to smile, act familiar. “You have been through a mental anguish in the last half hour,” Mort said, “that few ever have to endure. However, because you believe you are strong, you have been able to overcome it. Very commendable, but it's only a stage of the drug. In a few minutes the horror will be back, this time for real.”

  Cohen kept his mind on the purpose growing inside him like a pregnant orange spider swollen and inverted in its web. He called the fortune teller; it was an old French telephone, very crackly, the voice at the other end veiled by a mysterious, inhuman hoarseness. “She is not here,” the voice said, “but she left you a message.”

  “What is it?”

  “She said you would not listen.”

  “I will – I promise!”

  “No, no. That was the message.”

  “What?”

  “She said you would not listen.” The connection died; the receiver idled like a motorboat in his ear. Then he saw it was not a telephone but an electric drill in Mort's hand. “Where's Paul?” Mort grinned. “We need answers. Or Paul won't be safe.”

  “He's safe now.”

  “Not enough.” Mort stuck the whirring drill up Cohen's nose. It tore his nostrils and roared against his brain. Mort drew it out, turned it off. The silence and blood were nauseating. Mort smiled. “A taste of the future.”

  Pain swept him into unconsciousness. Mort shook him awake. “Where's Paul?” Cohen did not answer. “Bring her in!” Mort called.

  The two bearded men dragged her into the room and tied her to a chair opposite Cohen. It took him a moment to recognize her, for her face was puffy, bruised and blue, her lips split and blackened with dried blood, her eyes half-shut. Her short hair, still dark as she had dyed it in Paris, was frowsy and matted with blood.

  “Wake her,” Mort whispered.

  The squeaky-voiced one threw a pan of water in her face. It ran down her half-unbuttoned blouse and onto her jeans. Her head wobbled listlessly; she coughed and moaned. “Hey!” Mort yelled and slapped her face.

  Cohen lunged but the chair held him tight. Claire raised her head and saw him. “Hello,” she rasped. “You okay?”

  “What have they done?”

  She tried to smile. “Not too much.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “You've got nothing to be sorry about.”

  “But I am.” Beyond the bruised face, the black short hair that had replaced the amber tresses she had once coiled so sensuously about him, beneath the turquoise eyes so clearly regarding him through darkened lids, he saw the person who had tried, as she had promised, to sacrifice her life for his. “I could've trusted you, in Paris. I thought…”

  “Come, come,” said Mort. “It's been a learning experience for us all. But let's get this meeting on the road. Here,” he pointed to Cohen, “we have someone with information we need, who will not share it. And here,” he poked Claire, “we have someone who has nothing we need, bu
t whose condition may interest the other. In essence,” he chuckled, “it's a variable of our original plan.” He bent down to Claire. “We will still use you, my dear, to extract information from him.”

  Claire looked at Cohen. “I've told them nothing.”

  “Let's be quick,” Cohen said. “You let her go, and as soon as I'm sure she's free, I'll tell you whatever you want.”

  “No, no, no, Sam. I've too much respect for you to ever do that. Once she were free you'd clam up. We've found it difficult to break you; now we'll see if you're cruel enough to sit there and watch her suffer.”

  “Don't talk, Sam. They can't hurt me more than they have. Keep Paul safe.”

  “I don't even know where he is.”

  “The fallback, Sam?” Mort said. “The one you talked about in Neuenweg.”

  “That was bullshit.”

  Mort stood, clasped his hands. “Let's not be meretricious.” He motioned to the one with the squeaky voice, bowing to Cohen. “Let the Bell Telephone Hour begin.”

  The squeaky-voiced one brought in the electrodes. He pinned two to Claire's fingers, popped her blouse apart and attached two to her nipples. She watched Cohen with unflinching eyes, shook her head. Mort took the console. “How high shall we go, Sam?” He spun the dial.

  She arched her back, gasping, writhing, her fingernails tearing at the chair arms.

  “Stop it,” Cohen yelled, trying to kick but his legs were tied fast.

  Mort clicked the dial higher. Claire howled; Mort smiled at Cohen. “Where's Paul?”

  “Stop. I'll tell you.”

  Mort nudged up the rheostat. “Tell me and I'll stop.”

  “No!” she screamed, writhing. “No! No!” Her head lolled forward. Mort turned off the rheostat.

  IT WAS A CHILL, sunny November Saturday. Alex came into the huddle, mud-stained, winded, bloody. “Let's satisfy their expectations,” he panted, tightening his helmet strap. “They expect pass, so we will. But not how they think.”

  The moment of elation faded. The lovely odors of bruised grass and sweat, the dry-throated taste of blood and exhaustion, were replaced by a sterile fluorescence, a pervasive stench of carcass and sawdust. “I'll tell you where the fallback is if you let her go.”