“Call your husband,” the man whispered.
She shook her head. He pushed the gun directly to her forehead. It hurt her, metal pressed on bone.
“Call him.”
“William,” she said very quietly. “William …”
Laforge heard her. He moved across the living-room, reached the bottom of the stairs, looked up. The smile he’d prepared for her disappeared from his face. He faltered. He caught the ornamental orb of the handrail, the ornate wooden globe in which some eighteenth-century craftsman had carved petals. He was very conscious of the texture of this work against his skin. For a moment he had a curiously complete awareness of the whole house, and its details flooded him all at once, ceiling beams, plaster cornices, the random-width pine floorboards, dark crannies, the little surprises that even now pleased him – the exquisite woodwork of a mantel, a design etched in a pane of glass. The house filled him. The sensation was dreamlike. Even the gun in the young man’s hand was more illusion than thing. I am not here, he thought. None of us are.
Then what rushed through him was the notion that this man’s entrance was some form of security test, nothing more, that he’d found a weakness in the system and exploited it, and pretty soon Arganbright would come through the door and everything, everything would be hunky-dory. Shipshape. We found a flaw, Mr Laforge, Arganbright would say. We like to check our own strengths, sir, we like to probe and probe –
But this was all so much wishful thinking, and Laforge knew it. So much fancy. He watched Carolyn come down the stairs, the young man moving just behind her. He was real. Yes, he’s real.
“William, I do not understand this,” Carolyn said.
She said it two or three times. Thinking he might halt her growing hysteria, Laforge made a comforting gesture with his hands.
“William, who is this man?”
“He knows who I am,” the young man said.
Laforge had a weird feeling, a sense of implosion, air escaping from his body, as if he might shrivel like a balloon, casting off all responsibilities, all the flaws of his history as he dwindled into nonexistence.
“William, what is he going to do?”
Nick had come to the foot of the stairs, drawn by the sound of the intruder’s voice. The appearance of the gun paralysed him.
Teng smelled the woman’s perfume. She stood one step beneath him, so close he could see the faint hairs on the back of her neck. Her yellow hair was long but she had it pinned up. A mole was visible on the right side of the otherwise unblemished neck. He couldn’t remember Marissa having any blemishes. But some panicky slippage was going on inside him now and he realised he couldn’t remember Marissa at all, neither face nor hair nor smell, the way she felt, nothing, everything had disintegrated so completely he experienced a solitude unlike anything in a life that had mainly been one of absences. It cut the way a surgeon’s knife did, straight into his heart. He thought how little was left to live for.
“I gave no orders,” Laforge said. “You understand that? I did not order Costain or Railsback –”
It was useless. Laforge knew it. Useless to protest.
“You can’t get away from here,” Laforge said.
Teng came down a step and shot William Laforge directly in the face. Laforge was thrown back against the wall, where he slid to the floor. Teng stood over him. He fired again into Laforge’s face, which was deformed, unrecognisable, something from a child’s dream of a thing that lurked in a cellar. It was done now.
The woman screamed. Teng, thinking of what had been done to Marissa, bringing it to mind with overpowering clarity, shot Laforge’s wife in the side of the head. And when the young man shouted aloud at him – Teng understood nothing, he was beyond language, he heard only clamour – he raised the gun and fired into the boy’s chest.
He stepped over the fallen woman, who lay at a strange angle on the stairs, thighs apart, knees uplifted, eyes shut. The young man had been knocked on his back, fetal in death, almost touching.
Teng remembered for some reason the young girl in Railsback’s house, the beautiful young face in the window, the expression of hope and pleasure, the innocence he’d ruined in a fraction of time. Then he walked out into the night, which seemed cold to him, as if vengeance had lowered the temperature and justice were a chill affair.
Charlie Galloway was running toward the house when he heard the first shot. His coordination was poorly wired and he weaved from side to side through the long grass, panting as he ran. The second shot appeared to explode inside his own brain. The pain in his skull clawed. His internal compass was dented, his gyroscope out of alignment. The house at times seemed to be straight ahead, at other times left or right. He kept running. Sweating, he heard another shot, then another.
The house became abruptly silent, although not tranquil; the light that burned in a downstairs window looked like a raw eye newly blinded in an act of violence. Twenty yards from the front door Galloway crouched among an unruly outgrowth of brittle shrubbery, his chest aching from the effort of movement. He saw Armando Teng, pistol in one hand, step through the front door.
Where were they? Charlie wondered. Where the guards? Where the cavalry? In that shocked space beyond time, beyond reckoning, he wasn’t sure how many moments had passed since the first shot – perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps less, he couldn’t say. Violence had a clock all its own. Where was the small army? Did it exist? Was it composed entirely of deaf men?
Teng took a couple of steps from the house. He appeared unhurried, slightly dazed, as if having accomplished what he set out to do he’d shed all sense of purpose. He stared toward the shrubbery where Charlie Galloway was half-hidden, but gave no sign of recognition. He turned his face to the left in the direction of the parked vehicles.
The van door opened. A rectangle of brilliant light flooded the dark.
Charlie took a step back, drawing himself down into the shrubbery. When six or seven rapid gunshots came from the direction of the van and Teng fell – first to his knees, then face down with the slack finality of death – Galloway immediately hunched, sliding into the long grass and moving back across the meadow to the trees. He climbed the slope quickly, looking back only once before scrambling with heartbreaking speed down the incline to the creek.
Breathless, he stepped on to the bridge, hearing a fish feebly disturb the surface upstream. Somebody else stood on the bridge.
“Been a long time, Charlie.”
Charlie Galloway looked at the outcropping of white eyebrows, all that was visible of Vanderwolf’s face.
“We had men out looking for you. I’ll say this. You’re slippery and persistent.”
“Is that meant to be a compliment?” Charlie asked. His voice had a tremor.
Vanderwolf came closer. The smell of his cologne was strong and citric. He peered disdainfully into the darkness and shuddered. “I hate the countryside. How can people live here?”
Depressed, Charlie Galloway said nothing. He thought: They live here, and they die. The night had gone all wrong, tilting on an axis he couldn’t understand.
Teng was dead. Charlie Galloway had failed. He thought of Karen. He would go in search of her and explain his failure. She’d understand. He’d make her see how hard he’d tried. She might be convinced by his effort. She might see fresh beginnings, new possibilities.
“What a tragedy,” Vanderwolf said. “Laforge had everything to five for. Along comes some fanatic and shoots him.” And he shook his head, as if saddened. “Kamikaze type. You can’t take protective measures against that kind of killer.”
“I didn’t notice protective measures,” Galloway said. “Teng apparently strolled straight inside the guy’s house and shot him and …”
He let the sentence hang. The obvious dawned on him: nothing had been done to protect Laforge from Armando Teng. Absolutely nothing. The game was fixed, the outcome bought and sold. And now Charlie realised why he himself hadn’t been apprehended on the estate, because such an event might h
ave been noisy, might have forewarned Teng, whose destiny, alas, had not been his own. Sad Teng. Poor sad Teng.
Crazed killer strikes in Bucks County. Tomorrow the world would read the story and then forget it immediately in the great amnesiac flux of things. Because life rolled on.
A very soft breeze came up through the reeds, dying before it had begun, stillborn. He had an image, plundered from God knows what source, of Karen standing on some breezy Californian cliff, a paisley scarf caught by bluster and tossed back from her slender neck. He loved that neck, the angle of her shoulders.
“Security can’t be everywhere, Charlie. You understand that. What we have here is a tragedy,” said Vanderwolf. “Psychotic killer on the loose. All too common, unfortunately. I guess an examination of the killer’s background will yield some useful clues about his motive. Who’s to say?”
Charlie heard the fish again. In the beeches an owl cried.
“Well. What plans do you have?” Vanderwolf asked. “What next in your illustrious career? You ought to lay off the booze for openers. Give yourself a break.”
“I think I’m going home,” Charlie replied quietly.
“All the way home?”
Charlie stepped toward the end of the bridge without answering.
Vanderwolf said, “What’s America got to offer a man like you anyway? You never struck me as a New World kind of guy.”
Charlie still made no response. He had the feeling he was going to be shot in the back. His neck turned cold. Then the sensation passed, because he understood there was really no need for Vanderwolf to have him killed. What danger did Charlie Galloway represent? He had a story of sorts to tell, but who’d listen? Who’d publicise it? As soon as he tried to open his mouth he’d be discredited by the Bureau, by the LAPD, by the testimony of paid experts. History of alcohol abuse, drunken incidents, car accidents, hospitalisation. You see how it is. Troubled.
And what would his story consist of even if anybody listened? All he could say was that a person or persons unknown, clearly in positions of some influence, wanted Laforge dead. Otherwise, why was the man’s official protection so ineffective? Charlie perceived complexities, questions to which he would never find answers because none were to be had. They would be buried in the heart of the capital, in quiet wood-lined offices, expensive houses, prestigious private clubs where powerful men made murderous decisions. Truth lost its gloss and faded into rumour. Rumour, in time, became apocrypha, beyond substantiation. Theories would arise, as they always did, and interested persons, some of them loonies, would pick at the fabric of these hypotheses, obscuring with paranoid conjecture what little remained of truth until finally veracity had vanished without leaving even a whisper behind. Speculation was a hall where meaningless echoes rolled back and back. Who was behind the murder of William Laforge? Was the standard-issue lone assassin theory going to suffice?
There was never any truth, never a core one could touch and say, Yes, this is it. America was obfuscation and shredding-machines and people in political office who had raised denial to the status of a masonic ritual.
The country filled him with despair. He wondered if he’d carry his gloom with him if he went back to his origins? Would despondency always turn out to be his luggage, permanently attached to him? He imagined himself strolling through Govan on a white Friday night in summer, feeling that other-dimensional nature of a Glasgow weekend, that gateway into labyrinths of possibility amidst the magic grey and ginger tenements – all this came into focus, drawing him back to his place of birth like a stranded sea-thing reclaimed by a tide. But would he feel a weight and look down and see the sinister black suitcase chained to his wrist anyway?
“Charlie,” Vanderwolf said. “One last thing.”
Charlie looked round. He had time to think I know too much although I really know nothing. The gun in Vanderwolf’s hand went off, a report in a minor key. Charlie felt the pain in his chest, but it was a bizarre sensation, his and not his, close and far away. He lost balance, slithered down the bank into the stream, disturbing the mallard ducks. Distressed, they squabbled around him, wings violently thrumming water. They clacked and pecked and harassed him. With one eye open, he watched them settle again. Recomposed they sailed, over water already turning blood-red, downstream.
Vanderwolf had gone. The bridge was empty.
Half-submerged, Charlie rolled on his back and looked up at the stars, which appeared to be rushing away from him, sucked out of the galaxy.
This is a hell of a way to go.
He raised one hand up out of the water, imagining he was reaching for his wife, for a shadow of love, but then his strength faded and the hand dropped back to his side and he thought Karen. Karen, let me explain myself. Let me tell you how it is. How it will be in the future. But she wasn’t listening. He closed the one functioning eye. The lid fluttered gently, a tiny spasm.
After that, Charlie Galloway no longer moved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the help of many people over a period of time: in England, David Singer, Adrian Bourne, Bob Cripps, Dennis ‘Frank Pagan’ Le Baigue, Anna Bence-Trower, Brian Levy, Charles Nettleton, Merric Davidson, sportsman and publicist. In the United States, Bonnie Campbell of Sedona Travel who makes the world manageable; Shelley McGehee of Arizona State University Music Library; Katie Smith, a wonderworker at HarperCollins. In Scotland, Robert Burns, Erl and Anne Wilkie, David Taylor, Jack Dennison, David Cuthbertson, Leonard Meikle and Ian Ferguson wherever on the planet they might be. And in the Philippines various people, living in bad circumstances, who would prefer anonymity.
Very special gratitude is due W E Wyatt, for lighting bright lamps on wintry Glasgow afternoons.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Lyrics from “Jamaica Farewell” are reprinted with permission of Cherry Lane Music.
“The Christmas Song” (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire) Lyric and Music by Mel Torme and Robert Wells. Copyright 1946 Edwin Morris & Company, a Division of MPL Communications, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights resewed.
Lines from Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiamid © Christopher Murray Grieve 1948, 1962 are reprinted with permission of the Macmillan Publishing Company, NY.
Lines from Endgame by Samuel Beckett are reprinted with permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Copyright © 1991 by Campbell Armstrong
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0409-1
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Agents of Darkness Page 42