Everybody changes in eight years, but not that much. The waitress in Maine wouldn’t have been so bowled over by the von Niehauser of 1936—not that the younger version hadn’t been handsome enough, but lacking the sexual fascination that comes only with a fall from grace. “Like ice,” she had said. One of life’s aristocrats.
The man Havens knew had been through the fire, all right. Nothing would ever surprise him again. For Joachim von Niehauser, life had lost its power to appall. He had already learned all the secrets about himself. That, apparently, was what the war had done for him.
And those were the years Havens had spent sitting behind a desk in Washington. You kept your innocence in Washington; there were no brushes with tragedy, and you could live there forever and stay just the same. Like a fly in amber.
No wonder von Niehauser had been able to walk around the whole FBI, just as if they hadn’t been there.
Havens discovered that he had a headache. It wasn’t a real deluxe number yet, but it was getting there. His eyes hurt. He focused on the tiny, distant fleck of light, faintly resentful that it should be there, that he should have anything to trouble him from horizon to horizon.
But it was going too. The darkness was winning out; you could watch the thing beginning to fade. For five minutes, Havens hardly blinked. And slowly, in stages that were so gradual that it was impossible really to notice them, that point of yellow light became fainter and fainter.
And then, abruptly, it was gone.
What the hell did that mean? Havens looked at his watch, which had one of those illuminated dials, and saw that it was after four-thirty in the morning. In another hour, it would be sunrise.
Who keeps a light on until four-thirty in the morning—and in a place like this? Possibly someone might live around here, but that didn’t really go very far toward explaining the light; at fourthirty in the morning, most people were sound asleep. And that light hadn’t been switched off—it had seemed to go out by itself.
Why does anybody leave a light to go out by itself? Clearly not for their own use, or they would get up and tend to it. Then for someone else.
Suddenly the obviousness of it struck him. He couldn’t understand how he could have been so stupid as not to have seen it from the first. The proverbial light in the window—the thing was a signal.
And who up here would have a reason to be signaling anyone? Who else?
All at once Havens could feel his heart pounding and the sweat beginning to break out under his armpits. All at once he couldn’t wait for the first gray traces of dawn, because he knew now that whatever it was he had come for was out there waiting for him.
29
The wind and the sun rose together. The night just seemed to fade away, leaving the soft outlines of things in the white air. Little pieces of ice went stinging by him as Havens climbed out of his sleeping bag and crouched underneath the shelter of the rocks. It was so cold that he didn’t like to take a deep breath.
He dug his field glasses out of the saddlebag and tried to find the source of the light he had seen last night, but it was useless. Things half a mile away were merely dim shapes, and in a few hours, probably, you wouldn’t be able to see to the end of your arm. The storm was going to be everything the Mexicans had claimed for it. It would leave no room for anyone; the only thing left to do was try to get in out of it. So all Havens could hope for was that, wherever that light had been coming from, whether von Niehauser was there or not, it was someplace that had a door you could close.
He unhobbled the horse, slipped the bridle over her ears, and climbed on. He didn’t try to direct her—he didn’t have to. That animal wanted to get down from the mountain just as bad as he did.
After about half an hour they hit the flatlands again. The mountain just stopped; you could have traced its edge in the dirt. For a while they were a little shielded from the wind, but that didn’t last.
The horse walked with her nose tucked down by her chest, and Havens turned up the collar of his sheepskin coat and buried his gloved hands in the pockets. Through eyes narrowed down to slits, he tried to home in on objects that lay straight ahead, guiding the horse with his knees if she started to wander. He didn’t want to end up going round and round in huge circles out here, until he fell out of the saddle and froze to death. That sort of thing seemed perfectly possible.
But he tried not to think about that. He tried to think about von Niehauser, about how he would play it if by some miracle there really was a cabin or something up ahead, and if von Niehauser should be waiting inside. He supposed he should have something in mind.
Pleased to meet you, Herr Baron. And now, in the name of the people of the United States, I’d like to place you under arrest.
Maybe he would try that, as soon as he had thawed out enough to be able to make intelligible sounds again. But by then, of course, von Niehauser almost certainly would have killed him. Why the hell should he do anything else?
Havens tried to think of everything he had working for him, but it didn’t amount to much. There was, of course, no particular reason for von Niehauser to imagine that he had been tracked as far as the New Mexico desert. And, of course, Havens had the advantage that von Niehauser had never seen him—not to remember, at least. It wasn’t possible that he could remember him from New York, so when he stumbled through the door he could be anybody. He had taken the precaution of leaving his badge and identity card behind him in El Paso, so even if the Herr Baron decided to pat him down he wouldn’t find anything except twenty dollars and a driver’s license.
Of course, none of that might make any difference. Von Niehauser might be the type who was just inhospitable on principle. He might blow Havens away as nothing more than ordinary professional prudence.
Not that it would do him any good. And somehow Havens really couldn’t see him stooping to that. Nothing he had ever found out about the man led him to imagine that von Niehauser was wanton in his homicides—the man killed to stay alive.
And the net was tight around him now. Gomá was dead, so his Mexican contact was canceled—there wasn’t anywhere for him to run to anymore. And tomorrow, when the storm lifted, every inch of these mountains would be crawling with federal officers. Where was von Niehauser going to go?
It was with a tiny flash of surprise, like being startled by someone hiding behind a door, that Havens realized, and for the first time, what it was he was actually doing out here. He could have waited back at the hacienda—if von Niehauser tried to break out, where else would he come?—but what had driven him over the mountains and into this howling storm was the pressure of the manhunt he himself had set in motion.
Those guys from the El Paso office, with their jeeps and their high-powered rifles and their search planes, all they wanted was a body they could carry back in an ambulance, so the morgue photographs could be in the mail to Seat of Government and they could stop worrying about their performance reports for a while. They had their orders—nobody was prepared to take any chances on the subject breaking loose. All of them would shoot to kill, the first time. “I expect you’ll run him to ground and that that’ll be the end of it.” That was what General Groves had said.
Well to hell with Groves. Havens had made up his mind to try to take von Niehauser alive. And if von Niehauser didn’t feel cooperative, that was going to be his tough luck.
But in the meantime, God it was cold! At least the wind was coming from behind him; otherwise he couldn’t imagine how he would have been able to open his eyes, there was so much ice in the air. The horse didn’t like it either—she kept making strange little snorting sounds, like a man blowing his nose into a handkerchief.
It was astonishing the way everything seemed to have been bleached out, like a photograph taken with the lens too wide open. It hadn’t begun to snow yet, exactly. It was just so cold and the wind itself seemed to have frozen up into hard little crystals that stung like pieces of sand. Havens wished he had something to pull down over his ears If von Nieh
auser killed him, he wasn’t sure he would be able to tell the difference.
He forced himself to look around, to try to get some sense of how far he had come and where he was. According to his watch, it had been about twenty minutes since he had left the mountain; he looked back over his shoulder—it was just about impossible to keep from closing his eyes—and he could no longer see it behind him. The ground had seemed to be falling gradually, and then to have leveled off, and now it appeared to be rising ever so slightly. He didn’t have any idea what that meant. He didn’t know if these flatlands would just go on forever or what. He didn’t have a clue about what was a thousand yards in front of him.
The hat that Romero’s soldier had loaned him was a kind of Mexican version of the Stetson, a little flatter in the brim and with the crown not creased quite so deeply, and he was wearing it jammed down as tight as it would go, so that the sweatband was almost covering his eyebrows. But there was no strap, nothing to keep it on except its own tenacity, and finally the wind was too much for it.
Havens moved—or thought perhaps that he had moved—and the thing went skimming off and was almost out of sight before his hand was halfway up to catch it. That was when the cold really began to get mean. Within only fifteen or twenty seconds it felt like somebody had grabbed hold of the back of his head with a pair of ice tongs. After a while, the pain was virtually the only thing he could think about.
And then, in an instant during which he was able to pry his eyes open to see where he was going, he saw the outline—really nothing more at first—of a small building.
How far away? A quarter of a mile? Less? There was a door and a single square window—as he got closer he could see the thin little cross of latticework that held in the four panes of glass. And there was a car parked by the side. It was something to head for. He didn’t care if Jack the Ripper was hanging by his clawed feet from the rafters—all he wanted was to get under that roof and in out of the storm.
“Not far now, pal,” he murmured, patting the horse on her neck—the poor brute was just plodding ahead with her nose down, exactly like a machine. “Maybe they’ve got a stable. And if they don’t, you can come inside and drink tea with the gentry.”
As he straightened up, he thought he heard something zing by his head. It sounded like an insect, but of course that was impossible. Probably it was just the wind, which by then was whining like a buzz saw. Probably his ears were beginning to play him tricks.
And then, the next instant, it was as if the whole world had suddenly turned a brilliant, electric white. There was nothing anymore, not another object in the universe. He was hardly there himself.
He wasn’t sure he ever felt the impact. He thought, but it wasn’t something about which he could be sure, he thought he could feel himself sinking; but that too had thinned out almost to nothing. It was like falling backward into a huge feather pillow that became a cloud, that became nothing, that dissolved you into nothing. And the question just had time to flicker across his brain, Am I dying?
And then the blinding white turned to red. And then to darkness. And then to nothing.
. . . . .
When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was von Niehauser. Havens was lying there—at first he didn’t know any more than that, and then he heard the wind and felt the cold and knew he was still outside—and von Niehauser was looking down at him. He was wearing a heavy, double-breasted greatcoat and a British officer’s cap, and he was kneeling. His right hand was clutching the barrel of a rifle, the butt resting against the ground so it supported him like a staff, and the reins of Havens’ horse were twisted through the fingers of his gloved hand.
The horse was looking down at him too, her head just above von Niehauser’s shoulder. Von Niehauser, unlike the horse, was smiling.
“Good—you are alive then.” It seemed to afford him some real measure of satisfaction, as if he had won a bet. “I had intended to kill you, of course, but I am not at all displeased with this outcome.”
Havens tried to turn his head a few degrees, but the effort was so exquisitely painful that he felt as if his skull must certainly be lying around on the sand in big pieces.
When the sensation had passed off a little, he tried moving his fingers and was happy to discover that they still worked. And then his feet, first one and then the other.
That was when he noticed that his left hip seemed to be twisted out of its socket. Anyway, that was what it felt like. It hurt like a bugger, but it was a different pain from the pain in his head. It was an impersonal sort of pain, as if it really belonged to somebody else and was only out to him on loan. At any rate, he supposed he would find out all about it soon enough.
He wished von Niehauser would stop smiling at him. Havens tried to say something, but his throat was like leather and the words just wouldn’t come out. And then, without warning, he was racked by a great spasm of coughing that seemed to tear him apart inside and made his head feel as if it might burst. He turned over on his side, and a thick gob of blood and phlegm ran out of the corner of his mouth and onto the sand. After that he felt better.
“You shot me, you son of a bitch,” he said finally, his voice a shaky whisper but at least audible.
Von Niehauser merely nodded. “Yes. I needed the horse. And, besides, I recognized you—you’re the policeman from New York.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t sound so surprised, my friend. You should know that a hunted man can always tell when someone has recognized him.”
“Jesus Christ.”
For a long time neither of them moved. They seemed to be studying one another, as if each was satisfying an intense curiosity, as if each was confirming the accuracy of his conjectures. And then Havens swallowed, and tried to raise his head, and spoke again.
“Gomá is dead.”
“Yes—I knew that the minute I saw you. Did you kill him?”
“Yes.”
It was then that Havens noticed for the first time the way von Niehauser held his left arm stiff against his body, and how drawn his face seemed. He really was leaning against the barrel of his rifle, giving the impression that without it he might have had trouble keeping his balance. Everything about him suggested an almost overpowering weariness. Havens had almost made up his mind to ask what had happened, but then he remembered that this wasn’t precisely a class reunion and thought better of it.
Instead, he brought a hand up to his head and started feeling tentatively around for damage. His right temple was badly swollen, and he could actually put a finger into the deep cut, like the lips of a repulsive, bloated mouth, that seemed to run the whole length of his skull. There wasn’t very much blood; the cold seemed to have congealed it almost at once.
“I was aiming for your head,” von Niehauser said matter of factly. “You see, I couldn’t take the risk of hitting the horse. And in this wind. . .” He shrugged rather stiffly. He seemed to feel it was necessary to explain to Havens why he hadn’t killed him outright.
“Don’t think a thing of it.” Havens smiled rather sourly. “What’s the matter with my leg?”
“Oh—that. I think you must have torn something when you fell. Does it bother you terribly much?”
“I’ve felt better.” Havens tried moving his foot again, and shooting pains ran straight up into his groin. “It doesn’t seem to work.”
It occurred to him that the conversation was beginning to sound ridiculous.
Because, after all, they were warriors separated by a deeper antagonism than possibly any two people on the planet. It had nothing to do with pride or personal hatred or the honor of their countries. They were struggling over the shape of history, and Havens kept hearing, over and over again, something that Groves had said. If they can’t have the world, they might be willing to watch it go up in flames.
“You got what you came for, didn’t you.”
“Yes.” Von Niehauser nodded, almost imperceptibly. There was nothing like triumph in his voice. “Yes
, I got what I came for.”
“And do you think now that you’ll be able to build your god damned bomb?”
“Yes.”
Havens could feel a strange throbbing inside his chest. It was anger, he realized suddenly—and fear. It was von Niehauser, after all, who had the gun and the horse and the secret of fire. It seemed that the combined forces of American security, collectively and in the individual person of Special Agent George Havens, were a poor match for this solitary man with no resources beyond his own will and courage. The end didn’t matter; on a purely personal level, von Niehauser had already won his victory.
But there was nothing of the victor to be seen now. The dignified, composed figure that knelt beside Havens in the howling wind seemed impervious to everything. If he felt his success, or the cold, he didn’t show it. And whatever was wrong with him, whatever had etched into his face that look of resigned weariness, his suffering gave the impression of being more an attitude of mind than anything like the corruption of injury. Von Niehauser seemed immune from accident; he was merely tired of it all.
In one of those flashes of insight that sometimes come to people at the cutting edges of their experience, Havens realized that the man looking down at him through those dead eyes cared nothing about the war or the survival of the races of man or his own life. He was indifferent the way the dead are, and whatever drove him forward, whatever had brought him down into this pitiless cold and whatever would send him where he was going, it had nothing to do with fear or patriotism or the soldier’s pride or the ambitions of common humanity. He was past that.
And then von Niehauser smiled again.
“I am sorry about taking your horse,” he said, exactly as if he meant every word of it. “But the battery in my car is dead. I have no other way of getting out of here.”
“Give it up.”
Havens had managed to raise himself up to lean on one elbow—it seemed so undignified to talk about these things while you were flat on your back, and he saw clearly enough that, behind the faint playfulness, von Niehauser was very far from intending a joke.
Chain Reaction Page 31