by Dean Ing
Wes shouted, “Kaiser, to the right,” as he hit the Blazer’s ignition, angry that Weatherby was not with him to secure a dreadfully wounded man for a two-minute scramble to the hospital. Carefully, because he could hear the thumps of O’Grady in his cargo section, Wes wheeled out and then urged the Blazer to Hesperian. He was only half-aware that the Ford was beginning to block traffic, its horn a constant complaint, or that the black stretch limo was just getting underway after tearing loose from the Ford’s front bumper. He did see Joey Weatherby booting his own limo down the macadam behind him, and wondered why Weatherby did not follow his right turn but, instead, thrummed his limo left after that battered stretch.
In less than two minutes Wes careened into the Kaiser’s tall shadow, horn blaring over the hammer of his engine. He shouted for help but did not get it from either of the two citizens standing by the emergency entrance, but one had the decency to swing a door open as Wes, carrying Grover O’Grady as a man crosses a threshold with his bride, swung inside bellowing for help.
* * * *
Ali Zahedi thought he was clear, once he had ripped free of the Ford’s fishhook bumper, and in his inside rearview saw the ferocious teeth-bared visage of Nurbashi as the mullah, terrified among the clatter of loose weapons at his feet, snatched for purchase at anything he could grasp. “Safety belt,” Ali shouted. He ran one red light, narrowly missing pedestrians, and then slowed to avoid any further display. He found the turn to Foothill, collected his wits, and then called, “I heard no explosion. It is my turn, now!”
“Get us out of here,” the mullah screamed, “that cursed black car will catch me!”
And then Ali saw the other car, much like his own, narrowing the gap behind them, and recognized it but could not believe the man he had shot was capable of driving. Ali floored the pedal, all four tires howling like djinn as he began the long turn onto Freeway 580. “Shoot the demon,” Ali cried, no longer caring about the bizarre roles a mullah would, or would not, choose.
But the car behind was curiously loath to approach closer than fifty yards as they sped eastward toward Interstate 5. Ali knew about this California autobahn because Zahra Aram had briefed them; forbidden to use radar, the state police often let traffic find its own pace. Well, Ali would set a hot one. In the slanting rays of a dying sun, Ali thought he could see massive shoulders hunched in the chase car. The man seemed content to lie back, and then Ali noticed the whip antenna on that chase limo, and realized what that meant, and without concern for Nurbashi he slammed his brake savagely, hoping the chase car would rear-end him.
Weatherby swerved to the shoulder, braking adeptly, and then Ali was well and truly onto it again, swerving around a big double-tandem Peterbilt, hoping he could hide in traffic. Another big rig ahead began an abrupt move into the fast lane, a third rig some distance ahead slowing so that Ali had to careen around those wheeled buildings. Ali saw the driver of the chase car with his window down, apparently shouting to someone in the cab of a big rig, and when that hefty arm swung out of the window, it pointed toward Ali. For some reason, on the two-mile stretch he could see ahead, most of the huge cargo rigs seemed to be hanging back, and those behind seemed to be gaining, a staggered wall that eliminated other passenger cars, discounting the immaculately restored Porsche roadster that snarled past them all on the outer shoulder like a scalded wolverine.
Ali, his suspicion growing, thought he would take the Dublin exit but an enormous triple-tandem rig was parked there, and its driver doffed his long-billed cap as Ali passed. Now Ali could not see the chase car, no other cars at all, but over the wails of the praying mullah he heard the buzz-saw whirr of huge tires ahead, and behind, and now beside him, and when honking did no good he decided that anything a Porsche Spyder could do, a stretch Caddie limousine could do as well. Ali’s understanding of machines was, after all, not perfect.
Ali did not actually elect to go for the shoulder until he had been nudged up to eighty miles an hour and the rig to his left made an abrupt lurch in his direction. Then Ali swerved, and the rig ahead braked just enough to close the hole, and then, only then, did Ali Zahedi spy his immediate future. It did not look much like paradise.
It looked exactly like a culvert flanked by a shallow sculptured fan of concrete. Ali’s reflexes were excellent, and he hit the brake instantly, so that the Caddie hit the foot-high lip of concrete at only sixty miles an hour, carrying away the entire front suspension and catapulting twenty-three feet of limo into a series of end-over-end flips shedding pieces of metal, glass, flesh, and twenty-dollar bills at each impact.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Joey Weatherby, puffing from his exertions to locate the waiting room outside Surgery, did not have the look of an NTC Board Chairman; here he was only a harried, overweight man in rumpled clothes hoping for some barest scintilla of good news in the kind of place that wholesaled bad news by necessity.
Vangie, who had arrived minutes before, saw the big man first and dropped the dog-eared copy of Sunset she’d been leafing through without seeing it, nudging Wes as she arose. “He’s still in surgery,” she said.
“They made optimistic noises,” Wes added as he stood up, “but between the lines it sounded like touch and go.” He raised one hand, fingers crossed.
Weatherby’s heavy shoulders slumped. “The guy in the Ford. Who the hell was he?”
“A federal agent named Kimmel. I saw him down in Emergency a half hour back, with a couple of his friends from the Department of Justice.” He waited to see that register on Weatherby’s face. ‘ ‘They say the man O’Grady shot was toting several pounds of plastique around his ribs, just like that weirdo at my party.”
Weatherby blinked, taking it in, saying only, “Imagine that. Now I owe them one. How is he?”
“Mad as hell. Broken nose, glass cuts, and a gunshot crease across his back. But he was on the scene because you told me about that Winthrop guy. Just think about it, Weatherby: Where would we be right now if you hadn’t?”
“Too goddamn many ‘ifs.’ ” Weatherby closed his eyes, rocking slightly, and let Wes’s hand guide him to a seat. Hugging himself with crossed arms, the big man rocked back, then forward, staring at his shoes. “Joey,” he said softly, and sighed, and then looked with dry and feverish eyes toward Wes. “He never called me that before. I think he knew he’d bought it, and for once I was helpless as a baby.”
“You could do what I’m doing. You can pray,” Wes replied, and lowered his head again.
They were still sitting with bowed heads when a woman in hospital greens approached from down the hall, mask hanging like a necklace, pinching the bridge of her nose. The trio stood for this ritual. “Are you Mr. O’Grady’s family?”
“My son-in-law,” Weatherby said softly. “My dau . . . his wife is in Pennsylvania.” He did not notice the effect of this revelation on Wes, but stood as if expecting a physical blow from the surgeon.
“He is not out of danger, but we think he’s going to make it. Helps to have a middleweight’s physique,” she said, and gave details only after a careful scrutiny of the three who stood before her. One slug had slit the peritoneum, laying open the abdominal cavity like a razor. Another had glanced off a hipbone, damaging a kidney and displacing several organs. “I suspect he had some rough handling on the way here,” she finished, shaking her head.
Wes, a little defensively, “What if we’d been a minute later?”
The surgeon donated a wry smile. “There would be no good news tonight. A lot of arterial bleeding, and - let’s just say we stabilized him at the last possible moment. We’ll know more in a few hours. Now if you’ll excuse me.” She accepted their handshakes and returned down the hall, scuffing in her paper sandals.
“So much for weekend plans,” Weatherby said, but looking like a man reprieved. “Thanks for. . . for Grover,” he added, with a rough hug for Wes. ‘ ‘I know you’ve got that Mex round-trip to make, and I’ll be okay here. Listen, don’t pass it around that Grover is family. First
he was the best damn’ soldier I’ve ever had. God! I saw his innards sagging out like that, and told myself he was a dead man.”
“Is that why you took off after that guy?”
A nod.
“What makes me suspect you caught him.” It was not a question.
Now a muscle twitched in Weatherby’s face, and Wes saw a glitter in the deep-set eyes. “No. But I did see the damnedest wreck east of here on Interstate Five-Eighty, a half-mile ahead of me, just about sundown.” A considered pause before, “I even stopped to render assistance, of sorts. Two guys, both in satisfactory condition.” He drew a finger across his throat.
Wes studied the big man’s face a moment. “Guy you were chasing?”
“Him and another one in that Caddie. I don’t know why their limo didn’t bum, it sure had some interesting hardware spread along the shoulder. Like a sawed-off Browning. Anyway, the guy tried to bluff a big rig; well, several of ’em, actually.” Now Weatherby’s teeth were showing faintly through a tight smile.
“You said you had a two-way in your limo,” said Wes. “Did you use it?”
“I might have. There’s a lot of CeeBee talk with codes your average driver doesn’t understand. You know, for emergencies, and like that,” Weatherby said, waving his hand vaguely.
“And you had an emergency,” Wes said in bogus innocence. “Did you get any help?”
“The other guy sure as hell didn’t get any,” Weatherby said. “I told you before; the freeways are still my turf.”
“I didn’t hear any of this,” Wes said. “But thanks. Is there any likelihood that . . . accident . . . will be studied?” “Doubtful. Nobody pranged anybody, and nobody told anybody what to do, exactly.”
“Not exactly,” Wes echoed, with his first smile in hours. He bent to retrieve his coat, motioning toward Vangie’s handbag, then stopped. “Just out of curiosity: How would someone with a lot of NTC clout make an, ah, inexact suggestion of that sort?”
“You got me,” said Weatherby. “I suppose he’d just point out the problem, and tell die kings of the road to do what they do best.”
* * * *
Delta One reached La Paz late on Saturday afternoon, with a spirited crew including Wolf Schultheis and both his children, because Alma and Rogan raised hell from both ends until Wes agreed to take Alma along. Something about long waits and Mexican civil law; and besides, Alma wanted her father to give her away in a romantic tropical setting, now that Rogan had popped the Question by long-distance cellular link. Jim Christopher kept referring to the trip as the Honeymoon Special.
Mexican weddings, as Boff Allington remarked while watching La Paz beach palms sway through the bubbles of a champagne glass, must be infectious. “It has to be pathological,” he said to Vangie, who beamed resplendent with a hibiscus in her dark hair and a simple gold band on her left ring-finger. ‘ ‘No woman in her right mind would have married Wes Peel,” he charged.
Vangie laid her cheek on the shoulder of her new husband.
“It seemed like the wrong thing to do at the time, so I did it,” she said, straight-faced.
“And I was afraid she might not ask me again,” said Wes slyly, earning a bite on his earlobe for his calumny.
Without taking his arm from Vangie’s waist, Wes used the other hand to toast the grown children who were gamboling on a beach backlit with the last ruby glow of a La Paz sunset. Alma Rogan’s formal dress bunched around her thighs as she rode the back of Glenn Rogan, arms hugging his neck, her squeals punctuating his progress through deep sand. Tom Schultheis and David Kaplan, like Rogan himself, frisked barefooted with trousers rolled to their knees, with shouts appropriate to men whose bellies were full of Margaritas and Coco Locos.
“Dey will be sorry tomorrow,” remarked Wolf Schultheis, his elbows resting on a tile balcony. “It is hard on de leg muscles. I would be with dem otherwise.” He smiled reflectively toward the beach.
“Let ’em play,” Wes replied, inhaling the spicy breeze. “They’ll be working their buns off soon enough, converting our plant lines for Highjump assembly.”
“It is what dey wanted,” the old man reminded him.
“I expect I’ll have to remind ’em now and then,” Wes said, and kissed his bride.
* * * *
Winthorp appeared on the Grayson campus on the first day of the Fall Semester, subdued as always, his emotional antennae quivering for any sign of surveillance. The fireplace of his bungalow was full of pulverized ash now, and his files were half empty. In any case he certainly would not need clippings to remember the news articles on Kosrow Nurbashi and his minions. Fingerprinting had crystallized the identities of Raz-mara and Zahedi, though Nurbashi’s illegal entry into the country had kept him an anonymous smear of meat on a California freeway. With luck, Winthorp himself would never be implicated.
And in six months or so, perhaps Winthorp could extrude fresh tendrils of interest into the undercurrents of Shiite diplomacy. If the media could be believed, John Wesley Peel must be stopped before he consolidated the cargo systems of Great Satan from highway to orbit.
Winthorp was a week into his fall schedule when an agent from the Cleveland FBI office paid him a visit. Winthorp had memorized the news releases of that Hayward fiasco, and knew that the NTC’s Joseph Alton Weatherby was with Peel at the time. Therefore, Winthorp admitted his interview with Antony Ciano. It was legitimate scholarly research, he insisted, externally calm, internally vibrating. Winthorp had only asked questions, he said.
And yes, he was the son of Sultana, his entire life was an open book; and no, he did not recall the names Razmara or Zahedi. Students, perhaps?
Winthorp met his classes that day because he knew that he must, though his guts continued to vibrate like a bowstring. Valium helped a little. Three more days of placid campus life helped a lot, especially after he disposed of those pulverized ashes.
Winthorp knew that he had dodged that FBI bullet and his heart pounded only for a moment when his door chime sounded one evening. It was one of his new students, a young woman whose eyes reminded him of his mother’s though her accent was more southern.
Zahra Aram had needed only an hour to decide her course of action after seeing Golam’s fate on television and in newspapers. She knew, of course, that the unidentified man had been Nurbashi. It had taken her a week to find a Midwest academic named Hassan Winthorp; two more days to move from (Hie university to another.
Now she simpered and stammered until the professor invited her in, and showed her class notes to him obsequiously, apologizing for the intrusion. Could he, perhaps, explain how a young Sunni Moslem woman might pursue a career in his exalted footsteps?
When he heard her Sunni claim, Winthorp relaxed further. He became somewhat more alert and cordial when the girl, intent on her notes, kicked off her shoes and showed him a flash of thigh.
Her hair reminded him of Sultana’s. He told her so. She pulled the ornate pins from the loose bun of hair and preened for him, and as they sat facing one another she asked if her figure also reminded him of anyone, and leaned so that he could see between her breasts, and Winthorp leaned forward too, dry-mouthed, knowing he must not touch this luscious creature but knowing also that he did not really need to.
Focusing on her cleavage, he did not see her hands sweep toward him as if to box his ears, but he felt an instant of agonizing pain, leaping forward, forcing her to scramble aside.
Zahra left soon after, polishing the door handle, leaving the place dimly lit and walking quickly to the campus. It was three days before they found Winthorp, as dead as Farda, lying in a pool of his own blood. The most careful search of the man’s effects, including those file cabinets and his library of tacky old movies, failed to turn up the faintest hint of an enemy, or of Farda. Police forensic specialists said he was done in by an ice pick of needle sharpness; maybe more than one. Sixty years previously they might have suspected hat pins, or those heavy-shafted, ornate carved hair pins of yore. But these days, who would su
spect the vengeance of an old-fashioned girl?