Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  Then he was down under the dashboard as they opened up with everything they had, and they had a lot. By sound and impact alone, Peter was able to pick out two submachine guns, a high-powered rifle, and an automatic pistol. They were in the brush at the left side of the road. All four of them. He thanked Jesus, Cortlandt, and the Company for the car’s heavy steel plating, standard equipment lately on his assignments. Without it, he’d now be Swiss cheese. He might yet be. But he still had a few things to do.

  That’s some fucking Homaidi.

  Who’d have expected this?

  No wonder he’d lasted so long.

  There was a break in the firing as they stopped to reload, and Peter went to work.

  Staying down, he groped for the gas mask above him on the seat, found it, and put it on.

  Then he picked up and tossed his two remaining fragmentation grenades, carefully counting to twelve this time because his targets were no more than twenty feet away, and he didn’t want the damn things getting thrown back at him.

  He tossed blindly through the driver’s window, head down behind the armor plating. He heard the crackling roar of the two blasts going off, then the metallic rattle of shrapnel against the car and the whine of steel flying over his head. He thought he heard a cry, but he couldn’t be sure. Homaidi and his people were flat out among brush and trees, so there had to be a measure of protection in simply that.

  Peter let go with his tear gas.

  He lobbed all three, everything he had, and he still didn’t raise his head above window level to see where they landed.

  Scrunched together in the well of the car, covered with a thousand bits of glass, he waited and listened. He heard only silence. Not a bird. Not a whisper of leaves. Dead air.

  The tear gas drifted into the car. It settled on the eyepieces of his mask. Staring through it, everything was gray.

  Peter breathed heavily through his mask. All he wanted to do was huddle there and not move. Mostly, he didn’t want to get out and deal with what was waiting for him.

  Finally, he did.

  Automatic in hand, he slid out of the passenger’s door and crawled around to the other side of the car. Layers of gas hung like fog. The air was cool but he was sweating under the mask. Through the gray, he saw torn brush and scorched and shredded pieces of bark.

  Not straight in. You don’t know what’s waiting. Circle around and come at them from the rear.

  Peter Walters crawled all the way. He did it slowly, tortuously, pausing every few moments to listen. There was still no sound. Not a bird, not an insect.

  I’ve killed everything.

  And with that thought, dread entered him and the image of his own death passed by like a breeze. Or was it some other hired gun being blown away somewhere else at this instant, in some other wood, or back alley, or city street? The images in his mind were blurred.

  Then the images passed and he wanted nothing more than to escape from that voodoo that let him know of unseen killings in one direction and his own death in another. He wanted to be free of wizardry, free of the gas mask on his face and the automatic in his hand, free of any further violence. He wanted to turn away from whatever was waiting for him a few yards ahead in the brush, and just keep going without looking back and turning to a pillar of salt.

  But of course he didn’t.

  And moments later, he was among them.

  The grenades had done well. The carnage was complete. Pockets of gas still hung in the low places, partially obscuring the bodies, but he saw enough.

  The force of the explosions had torn them apart. In spots, the greenery was pulverized. The grass seemed to ooze out of the soil.

  Over it all, the drizzle made the air coolly humid, blurred the eyepieces of Peter’s mask. He groped for a handkerchief and wiped them clear.

  More broken stick figures.

  A quick glance gave him all four.

  Then he took them one at a time.

  In something like this, you had to be absolutely sure.

  He came to Abu Homaidi first. He was still able to recognize the slight, almost concave body. The staring eyes carried a glint of ice… the open mouth, a silent scream. The overall mood was nothing but fear and funk and stink of the grave.

  The next two were as anonymous to Walters in death as they had been in life. One of them seemed to grin with a clown’s deep gloom. The other had too little face left to show any expression at all.

  Then he saw the pale blond hair spread beneath the fourth one’s head. It was long, shoulder length, and evidently had come tumbling out from under the baseball cap that had concealed it.

  He saw, too, the plain gold band on her finger.

  Peter rocked gently on his knees on the wet ground.

  Was he going crazy?

  There was getting to be plenty of evidence.

  But if he was, he wasn’t going alone.

  This is my last.

  26

  THE FBI DIRECTOR had originally described the press reaction as a media feeding frenzy, and it was beginning to look pretty much the same way to Henry Durning.

  My God, look what I’ve caused.

  The attorney general’s thought held a curious mixture of wonder, excitement, and wry amusement, all heightened by a fine edging of fear. Or was the fear merely part of the excitement?

  Either way, people certainly were frightened in the area where the three FBI agents’ bodies had been dug up.

  They also were wealthy, politically influential, and totally unaccustomed to having a bunch of murdered feds turning up in their midst. That sort of thing was strictly inner-city garbage. What was the point of living in Greenwich, Connecticut, if the same things were beginning to happen there?

  So they wanted reasons. And at this point they hadn’t heard any that satisfied them. Nor had any of their local political representatives, many of whom were coming up for re election and saw the unexplained murders as a possible attention-getting issue.

  From his office late that evening, the attorney general watched a news conference, televised live. The FBI director was a fox at bay, surrounded by yapping hounds in the guise of reporters. Wayne was generally good at this sort of thing, and he appeared no different today as he fielded the steady barrage of questions, calmly explaining that the Bureau’s investigation into the three agents’ deaths had top priority, and the media would be kept informed of developments.

  But Durning knew Brian Wayne well, and he didn’t like the way he looked and sounded in front of the cameras. There was too much sweat on his forehead and upper lip. He was blinking and shifting his eyes too often. His voice was husky and he kept clearing his throat. He was responding to questions too slowly, and several times he had to grope for a word.

  Brian was definitely shaken. Worse than that, he was frightened.

  Durning had lunched with Wayne less than five hours ago and he had seemed fine. He wasn’t fine now. What had happened in between?

  The attorney general picked up the phone and dialed the FBI director’s office.

  “When the news conference is over,” he told the assistant who answered, “please ask the director to call me.”

  Wayne called Durning fifteen minutes later. They spoke briefly and Wayne walked into the attorney general’s Justice Department office exactly twenty minutes after that.

  Durning’s immediate staff was gone for the night and the two men were alone.

  “What’s wrong?” said Wayne.

  Durning gave him a chance to sit down. Then he poured him some bourbon to match his own. “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  They sat staring at each other.

  “I guess you saw the news conference,” said the FBI chief.

  Durning nodded.

  “And it was that obvious?”

  “Only to me.”

  Durning looked at the drink in his friend’s hand. It was shaking enough to make the ice clink against the glass.

  “I had a couple of visitors,” said Wayne. �
��They came just before I was due at the conference, or I’d have called you.” He paused for some bourbon. “Ever hear of a Washington lawyer named Hinkey? John Hinkey?”

  “Sounds familiar but I don’t know from where.”

  “Real hotshot type. Always pushing for cameras and sound bites. Started off as an agent for the Bureau, then he went private and cashed us in for a lot of big, high-profile cases and big bucks.”

  Durning nodded. “I remember now. The shyster almost knocked me over once getting to a camcorder.”

  “He came to see me with a new client. A woman. Her husband’s Jim Beekman.”

  “Who’s Jim Beekman?”

  “He’s one of our two still-missing agents. The ones no kids or dogs have come up with yet.”

  The attorney general looked at the FBI director, not moving.

  “It seems Mrs. Beekman’s very worried. She wants to know why her husband hasn’t been home all this time and not called her. She’s a little hysterical over the three bodies. She’s been asking questions and getting only one answer:‘He’s off on a case.’ ”

  “Who’s she been asking?”

  “His section chief. Agents he’s worked with. Anyone who’ll talk to her. Finally she went to Hinkey because he’d been in the Bureau himself and she and her husband knew him from way back.”

  “What’s Hinkey’s attitude?”

  “Tough. No nonsense. Believes in going straight to the top. Refuses to take any more of what he calls that classified top-secret shit.” Brian Wayne sighed. “Then the sonofabitch actually gave me an ultimatum.”

  Durning sat listening to his friend’s ice rattle.

  “He said he’ll give me just three days to either tell Mrs. Beekman where her husband is, or let her speak to him on the phone.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “He’ll do his own asking and looking around. He’ll find out if any other agents have disappeared and not been heard from for more than a week. Then he’ll go to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility and see if they can find out what the fuck is going on. And if they try to cover up, too, he’ll call his own goddamn news conference and bust the whole thing wide open.”

  Durning sat four feet away from the FBI Director, studying his face. Watching what was happening there. He saw there was nothing for Brian anywhere in the world but this moment, this thing. It was consuming him.

  “I’ve never asked you,” said Durning. “These five agents you used to help me with this. How was it arranged inside the Bureau?”

  “They were given special duty assignments to the Office of the Director. I thought I was being careful. I took them from five different cities.”

  “What were their immediate superiors told?”

  “Nothing. The assignments were classified. But that won’t hold up forever once Hinkey starts digging.”

  “But you’re still the only one who knows of any connection to me?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the term cover-up, “ said Durning. “Those were John Hinkey’s exact words?”

  Wayne nodded glumly. He suddenly seemed to have lost interest in the whole discussion. He sank within himself and a deep shadow crossed his face, as if something had passed between him and the light.

  Except that this shadow didn’t pass. All it did was hold on and deepen further.

  Henry Durning awoke in the night and remembered the carriers of Brian Wayne’s syndrome, or fear, or whatever, in Vietnam.

  These things were always different, of course, but small parts remained the same. Finally Durning had gotten to know the darkly fear-haunted ones, the real suicides, pretty well. They usually stared off with their hundred-mile stares and carried their pain like a skin disease on the surface, sensitive to the slightest touch, and scratched and tore at it until at last there was nothing left. Only the final, self-inflicted bullet in the brain was left.

  Brian Wayne had been one of them.

  But he had lacked enough of that final touch of lunacy to blow his brains out himself and had walked straight at a bunch of waiting VC to see if they could do it for him. And they’d have done it if I hadn’t been there to stop them.

  It was strange how these things worked. If you thought about them enough you could end up screaming in a rubber room. So most of the time you tried not to think about them. But every once in a while, if you woke up in the middle of the night and weren’t smart enough to goddamn get out of bed and start doing something, they could still grab you.

  As they were doing now. While making him a hero all over again.

  Although he had his own theories about heroes. It was all circumstances, reflex, and luck. No one ever knew in advance how they’d react. But in his particular case, it also was desperation.

  The thing was, as his squad’s brand-new, first-time-out patrol leader, he’d gotten them caught right smack in the middle of a goddamn clearing, with grenades floating out of the surrounding jungle like black baseballs, and very little of anything left by the time the earth stopped exploding.

  He himself was lifted, breathed cordite, and came down with a crash. Somehow, he was still gripping his submachine gun. He lay flat in the tall grass, oozing blood from seventeen separate shrapnel wounds. Brian lay somewhere off to his right. The remains of his patrol littered the clearing.

  Everything was still.

  Then he saw them coming out of the jungle. There were only seven of them, all dressed in their baggy black pajamas. They held burp guns and pistols and carried satchels of grenades. They came slowly, carefully, ready to finish off any survivors. They had smooth, egg-shaped faces, one third of which was forehead. Guns ready, moving in a loose line, they watched the high grass.

  Just in case any life remained, they fired into everybody they came upon.

  Durning sighted along the blued steel of his gun, feeling the barrel slippery with blood. He had to get all seven with a single burst, or he and any other survivors were dead. They’d probably be dead soon anyway, but why make it easier.

  It was then that he caught sight of Brian Wayne rising up out of the grass and starting to walk toward the VC. He had dropped his gun, and blood was running from his face and head. A walking herald of death, making his own mad statement: Here I am guys. Finish me off clean ’cause I can ’t do it for myself.

  It took the boys in the black pajamas several beats to react. By that time, Durning had his front sight squarely on the chest of the first VC on the left and was squeezing the trigger. He felt the quick, spastic lurching of the gun against his cheek and saw the young soldier’s body pop like a large black balloon. Still squeezing the trigger, he eased his sight to the right across the six others. They seemed to go up, then down, in puffs of brown smoke.

  Then he passed out.

  He lay in the grass with the sun on his back, slipping in and out of consciousness. How easy it was to kill. You just had to point a gun and squeeze the trigger. Anyone could be taught to do it. But they should have taught him sooner. At the age of six he should have been put in the army instead of school. By now he might have learned enough about killing to have been able to keep his men alive.

  Another patrol from his company found them less than an hour later. Durning, Brian Wayne, and a headquarters captain who’d been along as an observer were the only ones alive.

  Durning was out of his head for a week. But Wayne and the captain were able to give lucid detailed accounts of what had happened. On the basis of these, Durning was hailed as a hero and received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Thinking of it now, almost twenty years later, he still felt he should have been court-martialed instead.

  So, Brian.

  Under that surface crust dwelt pure mush. How long could he hold together once Hinkey’s sharp jackal’s teeth began ripping at him?

  Something would have to be done about the lawyer. And his client.

  Such were the nocturnal considerations of Attorney General Henry Durning.

 
; None of which calmed him enough to let him go back to sleep. For that, he tried drifting into an appealing erotic fantasy of the beautiful Mary Chan Yung.

  It began with her body pictured in the position of ascendancy, with her face and breasts close above him. He placed his hands on the dip of her waist and studied the result for a moment. Then changing his mind, he slipped his hands beneath her breasts, cupping them lightly, his palms barely making contact, and all of it shining out of a velvet midnight dark.

  There were soft purple shadows about her eyes and under her cheeks and chin.

  He saw the play of light across her forehead and smooth, shining hair.

  Her lower lip, he decided, was extraordinary, with the kind of sensuous fullness that could probably break some unsuspecting man’s heart.

  He pictured her breasts as surprisingly full for so slender a woman, with brownish-pink nipples and flesh that gave off a pale, porcelain glow.

  She bent to him and they kissed and held one another.

  Then he was in her.

  He closed his eyes.

  In his little mental charade he envisioned it being several weeks since they were last together, and they both responded to it. Separation. Still the most powerful aphrodisiac available. It made the upstairs bedroom seem much too far away. In the less than five minutes since she had entered his house, they were naked on the living room rug.

  It had been a long, tiring, tension-filled day, but he could feel her pumping new life into him. For these few moments, in this warm dark, he had no brain, no plan, no wit, no care, no desire, other than the sexual. It was as if everything that had happened until now was just so much dead skin, waiting to be peeled away.

  For now, they belonged solely to each other. He had some distinct notion that there might well be a world beyond the immediate reach of his body, but it held no interest for him.

  Then, inevitably, at the very moment his desire seemed most insatiable, it was sated.