“I mean, it was so fucking obvious you would have had to be an idiot not to catch on,” Firbank had explained, throwing an elbow over the top of his dresser as he leaned against it for moral and dramatic support. “In the last ten weeks, three key figures in the Oconee Project have quit their jobs, sold their homes, and simply dropped out of sight. No explanations—at least none that anybody could possibly take seriously—no nothing. And all three, surprise surprise, were in the direct line of command over our friend. Then along comes Duelle with his photograph and his sob story, oozing loyalty to the old school tie and begging us to protect his nearest and dearest—but not begging hard enough so that there’s any question of pulling him out. No, he was very careful about that. He just wanted to serve, you see.”
His eyes dropped to the carpet, which was of the same green and yellow pattern as the one covering the floor in Guinness’s room, and for a moment he seemed to have lost himself in contemplation of Holman Duelle’s spiritual ugliness.
And he was right, of course. Kathleen’s new protector really was a bag of shit.
“Do you know how he got himself into this mess?” Firbank asked suddenly, as if their minds were in such perfect tune that Guinness’s thought had been his own, to which he now wished to add the corroborating example. “Do you know how he painted himself into this corner? It’s an instructive story.
“When he was at North Carolina, somebody talked out of turn and suggested that our boy had been buying research data from his own graduate students and passing it off as his—that was part of the reason, apparently, that they canned him. Nobody could prove anything, so there wasn’t anything like an open scandal; he just quietly packed his bag and moved down here.
“Well, Flycatcher proved it. He got to somebody, and he has the whole thing in writing—lab notes, signed statements, the whole number. For that sort of thing, there’s nobody in the business who can touch him. The carrot and the stick; it was beautiful. If he’s a good boy and does what he’s told, Duelle gets to be a big man; if he strays by a millimeter, he’s ruined.
“A little bit at a time—it’s a lesson in patience to us all—he sucked the poor bastard in one inch at a time. All he wanted was some one tiny little piece of information, something Duelle could lift right out of his file cabinet, and then one thing more, and then a copy of some innocuous blueprint to be procured from Atlanta with a signed order, and then a little more, and a little more—until that slimy little greaseball was in so deep that Flycatcher might as well have owned his soul.
“And do you know what will happen once this whole unfortunate business blows over? Duelle will end up as one of the three or four most strategically significant engineers in the whole project; he’ll have access to everything, literally everything. Imagine what it would be worth to, say, the Chinese to have a handle on him then.” Firbank looked up and winked, and raised his glass again, as if to toast the diabolical cleverness of that archfiend, the CIA’s very own director of operations.
“Imagine what it’ll be worth to us to have them believing they have a pipeline into an installation of that significance. We’ll feed them so much bullshit they’ll be trying to dig out from under for the next fifteen years.”
Guinness shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Handles and pipelines—why was it that a certain kind of moral blindness always seemed to manifest itself in a passion for mixed metaphors? It was one of those moments in his life when he was thankful to be just a simple assassin; he wasn’t built for these intricate games of bluff and counterbluff, involving the safety of millions of people and perhaps the fate of the human enterprise itself. The complexities of taking one fragile little individual’s life were about all he could see his way to handling, at least at one time. Although, he had his doubts that guys like Arnold had any real sense of the significance of the risks they were taking for all the rest of us. Arnold didn’t really strike him as the imaginative type.
“Tell me,” he said slowly, being careful not to look too directly into Firbank’s face, “Just what the hell are those guys up to over there?”
Firbank shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know, at least not for sure.” He smiled. “I have a theory, if you’re interested; I think this project, which we keep being assured doesn’t exist, has something to do with the neutron bomb that everybody says we’re not building. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; the rumor mills have been buzzing for over a year now.”
He shrugged again, giving the impression that his curiosity about the matter was something he could probably live with.
“I guess I’ll never know, though. I’ve been given direct orders to the effect that it isn’t any of my business, that Duelle shouldn’t even be approached on the subject. You know as well as I do, the Pentagon makes such a big secret of everything, they might only be designing a new letterhead for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And anyway, what difference does it make?”
Guinness frowned and flapped his hand in front of his face once or twice, as if to wave the question away like a bad smell. Firbank was right again; it didn’t make any difference, not to them. They were just a pair of technicians. Worrying about what finally came of their highly specialized and generally not very pleasant performances just wasn’t their end of things. In a way, that was something for which they could be grateful.
“How long have you had your hooks into him?”
“Since this morning.” He was as bland as milk about it, but you could tell he had enjoyed himself. Well, Guinness wasn’t casting any stones—he had rather enjoyed pushing poor little Duelle around himself. “I just went over to that office of his and spelled it out for him. We had him cold; there wasn’t a thing he could do. Jesus, I thought maybe he was going to have a stroke or something. When I finally offered him the deal he almost kissed my hand he was so grateful for a way to stay out of jail. It isn’t every day you see somebody quite that eager to roll over on his fellow conspirators; he’s quite the confessional type is the professor.”
Firbank’s mouth puckered slightly in disgust. But whether the distaste was directed at Duelle or himself wasn’t entirely clear. It is difficult to play on human weakness in such a manner without feeling some of the dirt might have rubbed off. You always wondered, after all, how you might react yourself the day they had you by the balls. Entrapment had never been the road to a highly developed sense of the worth and dignity of human nature. Firbank would have had to be incredibly virtuous—or, assuming the distinction is worth making, incredibly thickheaded—not to have come away from the encounter with a disturbing sense of his own vulnerability.
There was one of those awkward silences one experiences sometimes in the presence of an unpalatable truth; Firbank looked as if he thought perhaps he ought to say something more but wasn’t sure what it could be.
He really was astonishingly tall, a fact made all the more obvious by the way he had to bend slightly at the waist in order for his elbow to make it down to the top of the dresser. Guinness wondered whether he might not have played basketball in college; it seemed likely, since intelligence outfits all over the world always liked to recruit athletes, on the assumption that they adapted better to the rather uncomplicated view of life the work demanded. Assassins were a special case—the character of their task tended to favor solitaries and other unsportsmanlike types—but spies nearly always carried with them a strong aroma of the locker room.
Perhaps Firbank was only just beginning to learn that the version of hard, cold reality he had chosen for himself simply wasn’t a noncontact sport. Perhaps that was his trouble.
One saw a lot of them, coming out of colleges and law schools and graduate programs in everything from classical languages to business administration, hungry for anything that didn’t smell of theory, anything that could be advertised to them as authentic. And, needless to say, the nastier the better—the serious and the distasteful tending, at that age, to seem like Siamese twins. Even these days, after all the muck dragged across
the nightly news about the bad little boys at the CIA, Uncle Sam still didn’t have any trouble recruiting spies.
They want it to be a game, though. The young ones like Firbank, they want it to be real but they still want it to have rules and symmetry, like touch football. The defining characteristic of games, however, is that they aren’t played for keeps, that the consequences of losing can’t be too alarming; and, oh, how all those fresh young faces crinkle in dismay when they finally see that they aren’t playing just for points anymore. The losers, poor schlubs like Duelle, don’t ever get a rematch.
Not that Guinness was feeling particularly superior. If Firbank found he didn’t much fancy acting like a thug, more power to him. Maybe someday he’d get sick of it and find himself some other way to make the car payments. That would be the smart thing, the thing Guinness would have liked to have done himself, except that he’d gotten in too deep too early. He had tried it once and it hadn’t worked. Once you become a man who kills other men, once that becomes the means by which you do your work, then it’s a little late in the day to decide you’ve had enough. That was a thing Firbank would have learned the hard way if he had succeeded in leaving Guinness out there in the piney woods, for the delicate feasting of birds and of dogs. But as it was, lucky boy, he had himself a second chance if he decided to take it. If he knew it was there to take. If it had filtered through to him yet that he might want it.
But that was his business. Guinness experienced no stirrings of evangelical fervor, not the slightest impulse to save this or any other soul. Not Firbank, not from himself. He was a nice enough kid but, what the hell, he’d made his own choices, presumably with his eyes open, and if not, then that was just too damned bad. Guinness didn’t owe him a thing.
“So you burned him,” Guinness muttered, willing enough to change the subject that neither of them had brought up but which had still managed somehow to intrude itself into the silence. “You think he’ll stay burned?”
Firbank lifted his eyebrows, a gesture that fit itself somewhere in the narrow space between surprise and incomprehension. No, Guinness thought to himself, that possibility hadn’t occurred to him yet, had it.
“I mean, he isn’t the steadiest mark in the world. He might take it into his head to do a flit. He might, through sheer failure of nerve, betray himself so that our friends on the other side decide to cut their losses.”
They would do that anyway, eventually. How long, he wondered, would it be before they tumbled onto what was going on, and Duelle ended up by the side of the road somewhere with a hole in his ear. Guinness frowned slightly; he didn’t really care, of course—what should it matter to him what became of Holman Duelle?—still, somehow it did manage to come a little close to home. After all, something almost amounting to kinship. . .
He glanced up, and Firbank didn’t appear to have noticed the pause, so he forced himself to smile.
“Who knows,” he continued, “he might even decide to confess to them too. It happens, you know; I can see him pleading with them to get his ass out of the country. ‘I was loyal, master,’ just like in the movies—the whole sorry scene. I wouldn’t put it past him. What if he compromises himself and they snuff him?”
The expression on Firbank’s face was one of the wickedest things Guinness had ever seen in his life. No, this was not someone who had perceived the irony behind the life he had chosen for himself.
“So what if they do?” he asked simply. “Nothing lasts forever.”
. . . . .
Nothing lasts forever, the man had said. Well, he was right, nothing does. Guinness looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, alternately sipping on his can of Sprite and pressing its cool, smooth surface against his cheekbone. He could still see out of his right eye, at least. And the swelling, which tomorrow would be an ugly purplish color, would begin to go down fairly soon. He was a fast healer, as he knew from experience. And nothing lasts forever.
It really wasn’t all that comforting a reflection. Either one of them, for that matter. At three thirty in the morning, when your face hurts and you’re hungry and you don’t have a very clear idea anymore of what you should be doing, your mortality is a little too close at hand. It isn’t the time to think about how nothing lasts. God, Guinness thought, I look like hell.
He felt like hell too. Firbank, for all that his stomach muscles might have the consistency of mayonnaise, was probably sleeping like a baby. He wondered how Duelle was sleeping—or if he was sleeping or just waiting in the dark for some unspecified retribution, the blanket drawn up until it covered everything but his eyes.
Here’s to happy dreams all round. Guinness ran some warm water into the basin and soaked a washcloth against the careful work of cleaning himself off.
A shower would have been better, but he shrank from the idea. He felt as if he must have cobwebs in his armpits, as if the vein of dirt must run so deep that anything more than a little cosmetic rinsing around the edges and he might fall apart completely.
It was ticklish work getting the dried blood off without sending throbs of pain through his whole face. Finally he gave it up and went back into the bedroom. Maybe in the morning he would have better control over the details of his life, but at the moment he simply couldn’t spare the attention.
There was no getting away from it, he had bungled it pretty good this time. He sat down on the edge of the bed further from the window, eating aspirin from a tiny green plastic bottle and washing them down with Sprite, as he thought about what a stupid ass he had been to think that all he had to do was bait the hook to have Flycatcher land right in his lap. Well, that wasn’t quite fair; he didn’t suppose he had ever really been guilty of thinking anything of the kind. Of course it wouldn’t have worked, he had seen that. When was it ever that easy? When had it ever happened that he hadn’t had to do absolutely everything the hard way? It simply wasn’t his karma to get lucky in these matters.
Somehow the effect of the aspirin seemed to be merely to clarify the pain in his head, to define it into something like an edge of cold, hard light thrown over every little shaded recess of suffering ganglia. There would be no point in even trying to sleep.
For a long time after he had finished the can of Sprite—or what seemed like a long time; probably it wasn’t more than ten or twelve minutes—he remained almost motionless on the edge of the bed, waiting vainly to begin feeling a little better. When he realized, finally, that that wasn’t going to happen, he got up, took the five shot .38 from where it was resting on top of the television set and stuck it back into the waistband of his trousers, and went outside. He would take a walk; maybe that would help. Maybe it was all just nerves.
He was halfway to the university before he figured out what he really wanted. Across the street was a little QuikWay food store, long since closed for the night, and mysteriously dark except for the neon lights in the dairy case. Next door was a dry cleaners, sealed like a tomb. All doors were closed against him, it seemed. The world was nicely tucked in, and all the ladies and gentlemen of Clemson, South Carolina, were safe in their beds.
He thought perhaps he would just see about that. He kept on down College Avenue toward what he supposed the residents thought of as the center of town, trying to recollect how all that network of little streets connected up between there and Strawberry Lane. Professor Duelle was going to have a late night visitor.
“The little son of a bitch,” Guinness mumbled to himself. The little son of a bitch had, after all, set him up. The little son of a bitch in all probability thought Peter McAffee was dead and buried and out of his life. Well, the little son of a bitch should be disabused of that notion just as quickly as ever possible.
He must have been walking pretty fast, because it wasn’t more than about forty minutes before he found himself within a block or so of the house that Kathleen’s old man’s money had built. It wasn’t quite five in the morning yet, still black as newsprint out and not a streetlamp in sight. He slowed his pace a bit, thinki
ng how he would play it.
What the hell. Duelle would think he was Lazarus; it would scare the bejesus out of him. The greasy poltroon would have to assume that if Guinness was still alive then Firbank was dead, and that would give him pause. Probably he didn’t know much—after all, who would be fool enough to trust Holman Duelle with a secret worth the keeping?—but whatever he knew, Guinness would squeeze it out of him like juice out of an orange.
And who cared anyway? It didn’t really matter if the little bastard didn’t know his own telephone number; it would simply be a pleasure to spend the time bouncing him off the living room wall.
It wasn’t unimaginable, Guinness knew, that even as soon as tomorrow morning he would regret what he was bent on doing, but he didn’t really care. Tomorrow was tomorrow, and now was now. Later, when he had gotten it out of his system, he could afford to indulge in the luxury of feeling like a heel—it wouldn’t be the first time. Right at that moment, however, the whole thing seemed like a perfectly marvelous idea.
The house, of course, was dark. The whole street was dark, everybody was sensibly asleep at that ungodly hour. But Duelle was demonstrably at home; just beyond the further edge of the house, hidden in the still deeper gloom of a carport, was the dark mass of what one assumed must be the family car.
Having never been inside, Guinness could only suppose that the bedrooms were on the upper story, but in any case the entrance was shielded from view on either side by narrow trelliswork, loaded with ivy, coming down on either side from the lintel. If he wanted to know who his visitor was, then Duelle would just have to come to the front door. And if he didn’t, then Guinness would just have to kick it right off its hinges.
And, of course, he would simply walk up to the front door and ring the bell. There was no point in starting to get cute about it; after all, he was the unkillable Peter McAffee, against whom not even the CIA would hope to prevail.
Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2) Page 19