by James Grady
Atwood knew Maronick had insisted on meeting him at his home in order to commit him even further. Maronick would make it a point to be seen by someone in the neighborhood whom the police might later question should things go wrong. In this way Maronick sought to further ensure Atwood’s loyalty. Atwood smiled. There were ways around that one. Perhaps the girl might prove a useful lever there. If …
“I’m going now, dear.” Atwood turned toward the speaker, a stocky gray-haired woman in an expensively cut suit. He rose and walked with his wife to the door. When he was close to his wife, his eyes invariably traveled to the tiny scars on her neck and the edge of her hairline where the plastic surgeon had stretched and lifted years from her skin. He smiled, wondering if the surgery and all her hours at an exclusive figure salon made her lover’s task any more agreeable.
Elaine Atwood was fifty, five years younger than her husband and twenty-four years older than her lover. She knew the man who had driven her wild and brought back her youth as Adrian Queens, a British graduate student at American University. Her husband knew all about her lover, but he knew that Adrian Queens was really Alexy Ivan Podgovich, an aspiring KGB agent who hoped to milk the wife of a prominent American intelligence officer for information necessary to advance his career. The “affair” between Podgovich and his wife amused him and served his purposes very well. It kept Elaine busy and distracted and provided him with an opportunity to make an intelligence coup of his own. Such things never hurt a man’s career, if he knows how to take advantage of opportunity.
“I may just stay over at Jane’s after the concert, darling. Do you want me to call?”
“No, dear, I’ll just assume you are with her if you aren’t home by midnight. Don’t worry about me. Give Jane my love.”
The couple emerged from the house. Atwood delivered a perfunctory kiss to his wife’s powdered cheek. Before she reached the car in the driveway (a sporty American car, not the Mercedes) her mind was on her lover and the long night ahead. Before Atwood closed the front door his mind was back on Maronick.
Malcolm saw the scene in the doorway, although he couldn’t discern features at that distance. The wife’s departure made his confidence surge. He would wait thirty minutes.
Fifteen of that thirty minutes had elapsed when Malcolm realized there were two men walking up the driveway toward the house. Their figures barely stood out from the shadows. If it hadn’t been for their motion, Malcolm would never have seen them. The only thing he could distinguish from his distant perch was the tall leanness of one of the men. Something about the tall man triggered Malcolm’s subconscious, but he couldn’t pull it to the surface. The men, after ringing the bell, vanished inside the house.
With binoculars, Malcolm might have seen the men’s car. They had parked it just off the road inside the gate and walked the rest of the way. Although he wanted to leave traces of his visit to Atwood’s house, Maronick saw no point in letting Atwood get a look at their car.
Malcolm counted to fifty, then began to pick his way toward the house. Three hundred yards. In the darkness it was hard to see tree limbs and creepers reaching to trip him and bring him noisily down. He moved slowly, ignoring the scratches from thornbushes. Halfway to the house, Malcolm stumbled over a stump, tearing his pants and wrenching his knee, but somehow he kept from crying out. One hundred yards. A quick, limping dash through brush stubble and long grass before he crouched behind the stone wall. Malcolm eased the heavy magnum into his hand while he fought to regain his breath. His knee throbbed, but he tried not to think about it. Over the stone wall lay the house yard. In the yard to the right was the crumbling tool shed. A few scattered evergreens stood between him and the house. To his left was blackness.
Malcolm looked at the sky. The moon hadn’t risen yet. There were few clouds and the stars shone brightly. He waited, catching his breath and assuring himself his ears heard nothing unusual in the darkness. He vaulted the low wall and ran to the nearest evergreen. Fifty yards.
A shadow quietly detached itself from the tool shed to swiftly merge with an evergreen. Malcolm should have noticed. He didn’t.
Another short dash brought Malcolm to within twenty-five yards of the house. Glow from inside the building lit up all but a thin strip of grass separating him and the next evergreen. The windows were low. Malcolm didn’t want to chance a fleeting glance to the outside catching him running across the lawn. He sprawled to his belly and squirmed across the thin shadowed strip. Ten yards. Through open windows he could hear voices. He convinced himself different noises were his imagination playing on Mother Nature.
Malcolm took a deep breath and made a dash for the bush beneath the open window. As he was taking his second step, he heard a huffing, rushing noise. The back of his neck exploded into reverberating fire.
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
—Traditional oath
ONSCIOUSNESS returned abruptly to Malcolm. He felt a dim awareness around his eyes, then suddenly his body telegraphed a desperate message to his brain: he had to vomit. He lurched forward, up, and had his head thrust into a thoughtfully provided bucket. When he stopped retching, he opened his aching eyes to take in his plight.
Malcolm blinked to clear his contacts. He was sitting on the floor of a very plush living room. In the opposite wall was a small fireplace. Two men sat in easy chairs between him and that wall. The man who shot Wendy and his companion. Malcolm blinked again. He saw the outline of a man on his right. The man was very tall and thin. As he turned to take a closer look, the man behind him jerked Malcolm’s head so he again faced the two seated men. Malcolm tried to move his hands, but they were tied behind his back with a silk tie that would leave no marks.
The older of the two men smiled, obviously very pleased with himself. “Well, Condor,” he said, “welcome to my nest.”
The other man was almost impassive, but Malcolm thought he saw curious amusement in the cold eyes.
The older man continued. “It has taken us a long time to find you, dear Malcolm, but now that you are here, I’m really rather glad our friend Maronick didn’t shoot you too. I have some questions to ask you. Some questions I already know the answers to, some I don’t. This is the perfect time to get those answers. Don’t you agree?”
Malcolm’s mouth was dry. The thin man held a glass of water to his lips. When Malcolm finished, he looked at the two men and rasped, “I have some questions too. I’ll trade you answers.”
The older man smiled as he spoke. “My dear boy. You don’t understand. I’m not interested in your questions. We won’t even waste our time with them. Why should I tell you anything? It would be so futile. No, you shall talk to us. Is he ready yet, Cutler, or did you swing that rifle a little too hard?”
The man holding Malcolm had a deep voice. “His head should be clear by now.” With a quick flick of his powerful wrists the man pulled Malcolm down to the floor. The thin man pinned Malcolm’s feet, and Maronick pulled down Malcolm’s pants. He inserted a hypodermic needle into Malcolm’s tensed thigh, sending the clear liquid into the main artery. It would work quicker that way, and the odds that a coroner would notice a small injection on the inside of a thigh are slim.
Malcolm knew what was happening. He tried to resist the inevitable. He forced his mind to picture a brick wall, to feel a brick wall, smell a brick wall, become a brick wall. He lost all sense of time, but the bricks stood out. He heard the voices questioning him, but he turned their sounds to bricks for his wall.
Then slowly, piece by piece, the truth serum chiseled away at the wall. His interrogators carefully swung their hammers. Who are you? How old are you? What is your mother’s name? Small, fundamental pieces of mortar chipped away. Then bigger hunks. Where do you work? What do you do? One by one, bricks pried loose. What happened last Thursday? How much do you know? What have you done about it? Why have you done it?
Little by little, piece by piece, Malcolm felt his wall crumble. While he felt regret, he could
n’t will the wreckage to stop. Finally his tired brain began to wander. The questions stopped and he drifted into a void. He felt a slight prick on his thigh and the void filled with numbness.
Maronick made a slight miscalculation. The mistake was understandable, as he was dealing with milligrams of drugs to obtain results from an unknown variable, but he should have erred on the side of caution. When he secretly squirted out half the dosage in the syringe Atwood gave him, Maronick thought he had still used enough to produce unconsciousness. He was a little short. The drug combined with the sodium pentothal as predicted, but it was only strong enough to cause stupor, not unconsciousness.
Malcolm was in a dream. His eyelids hung low over his contacts, but they wouldn’t shut. Sounds came to him through a stereo echo box. His mind couldn’t connect, but it could record.
—Shall we kill him now? (The deep voice.)
—No, on the scene.
—Who?
—I’ll let Charles do it, he likes blood. Give him your knife.
—Here, you give it to him. I’ll check this again.
Receding footsteps. A door opens, closes. Hands running over his body. Something brushes his face.
—Damn.
A pink slip of paper on the floor by his shoulder. The tears fogging his contacts, but on the paper, “#27, TWA, National, 6 A.M.”
The door opens, closes. Footsteps approaching.
—Where are Atwood and Charles?
—Checking the grounds in case he dropped anything.
—Oh. By the way, here’s that reservation I made for you. James Cooper.
Paper rustles.
—Fine, let’s go.
Malcolm felt his body lift off the floor. Through rooms. Outside to the cooling night air. Sweet smells, lilacs blooming. A car, into the back seat. His mind began to record more details, close gaps. His body was still lost, lying on the floor with a pair of heavy shoes pressed in his back. A long, bumpy ride. Stop. Engine dies and car doors open.
—Charles, can you carry him into the woods, up that way, maybe fifty yards. I’ll bring the shovel in a few minutes. Wait until I get there. I want it done a certain way.
A low laugh. —No trouble.
Up into the air, jammed onto a tall, bony shoulder, bouncing over a rough trail, pain jarring life back into the body.
By the time the tall man dropped Malcolm on the ground, consciousness had returned. His body was still numb, but his mind was working and his eyes were bright. He could see the tall man smile in the dimly lit night. His eyes found the source of the series of clicks and snaps cutting through the humid air. The man was opening and closing the switchblade in eager anticipation.
Twigs snapped and dead leaves crunched under a light foot. The striking man appeared at the edge of the small clearing. His left hand held a flashlight. The beam fell on Malcolm as he tried to rise. The man’s right hand hung close to his side. His clear voice froze Malcolm’s actions. “Is our Condor all right?”
The tall man broke in impatiently. “He’s fine, Maronick, as if it mattered. He sure came out of that drug quickly.” The thin man paused to lick his lips. “Are you ready now?”
The flashlight beam moved to the tall man’s eager face. Maronick’s voice came softly through the night air. “Yes, I am.” He raised his right arm and with a soft plop! from the silencer shot the tall man through the solar plexus.
The bullet buried itself in Charles’s spine. The concussion knocked him back on his heels, but he slumped forward to his knees, then to his face. Maronick walked over to the long, limp form. To be very sure, he fired one bullet through the head.
Malcolm’s mind reeled. He knew what he saw, but he didn’t believe it. The man called Maronick walked slowly toward him. He bent over and checked the bonds that held Malcolm’s feet and hands. Satisfied, he sat on a handily placed log, turned off the flashlight, and said, “Shall we talk?
“You stumbled into something and you blundered your way through it. I must say I’ve developed a sort of professional admiration for you during the last five days. However, that has nothing to do with my decision to give you a chance to come out of this alive—indeed, a hero.
“In 1968, as part of their aid to a beleaguered, anticommunist government, the CIA assisted certain Meo tribes in Laos with the main commercial activity of that area, narcotics production. Mixed among all the fighting going on in that area there was a war between competing commercial factions. Our people assisted one faction by using transport planes to move the unprocessed opiate product along its commercial route. The whole thing was very orthodox from a CIA point of view, though I imagine there are many who frown on the U.S. government pushing dope.
“As you know, such enterprises are immensely profitable. A group of us, most of whom you have met, decided that the opportunity for individual economic advancement was not to be overlooked. We diverted a sizable quantity of unprocessed, high-quality morphine bricks from the official market and channeled them into another source. We were well rewarded for our labor.
“I disagreed with Atwood’s handling of the matter from the start. Instead of unloading the stuff in Thailand to local processing labs and taking a reasonable profit, he insisted on exporting the morphine bricks directly to the States and selling them to a U.S. group who wanted to avoid as many middlemen as possible. To do that, we needed to use the Agency more than was wise.
“We used your section for two purposes. We compromised a bursar—not your old accountant—to juggle and later rejuggle the books and get us seed money. We then shipped the morphine Stateside in classified book cases. They fitted quite nicely into those boxes, and since they were shipped as classified materials, we didn’t have to worry about customs inspection. Our agent in Seattle intercepted the shipment and delivered it to the buyers. But this background has little to do with your being here.
“Your friend Heidegger started it all. He had to get curious. In order to eliminate the possibility that someone might find something fishy, we had to eliminate Heidegger. To cover his death and just in case he told someone else, we had to hit the whole section. But you botched our operation through blind luck.”
Malcolm cleared his throat. “Why are you letting me live?”
Maronick smiled. “Because I know Atwood. He won’t feel safe until my associates and I are dead. We’re the only ones who can link him to the whole mess. Except you. Consequently, we have to die. He is probably thinking of a way to get rid of us. We are supposed to pick up those envelopes at the bank tomorrow. I’m quite sure we would be shot in a holdup attempt, killed in a car wreck, or just ‘disappear.’ Atwood plays dumb, but he’s not.”
Malcolm looked at the dark shape on the ground. “I still don’t understand. Why did you kill that man Charles?”
“I like to cover my tracks too. He was dangerous dead weight. It will make no difference to me who reads the letters. The powers-that-be already know I’m involved. I shall quietly disappear to the Middle East, where a man of my talents can always find suitable employment.
“But I don’t want to turn a corner someday and find American agents waiting for me, so I’m giving the country a little present in hopes it will regard me as a sheep gone astray but not worth chasing. My farewell present—Robert Atwood. I’m letting you live for somewhat the same reason. You also have the chance to deliver Mr. Atwood. He has caused you a lot of grief. After all, it was he who necessitated all those deaths. I am merely a technician like yourself. Sorry about the girl, but I had no option. C’est la guerre.”
Malcolm sat for a long time. Finally he said, “What’s the immediate plan?”
Maronick stood. He threw the switchblade at Malcolm’s feet. Then he gave him still another injection. His voice was impassive. “This is an extremely strong stimulant. It would put a dead man on his feet for half a day. It should give you enough oomph to handle Atwood. He’s old, but he’s still very dangerous. When you cut yourself free, get back to the clearing where we parked the car. In case you d
idn’t notice, it’s the same one you used. There are one or two things that might help you in the back seat. I would park just outside his gate, then work my way to the rear of the house. Climb the tree and go in through the window on the second floor. It somehow got unlocked. Do what you like with him. If he kills you, there are still the letters and several corpses for him to explain.”
Maronick looked down at the figure by his feet. “Goodbye, Condor. One last word of advice. Stick to research. You’ve used up all your luck. When it comes right down to it, you’re not very good.” He vanished in the woods.
After a few minutes of silence, Malcolm heard a car start and drive away. He wormed his way toward the knife.
It took him half an hour. Twice he cut his wrists, but each time it was only minor and the bleeding stopped as soon as he quit using his hands.
He found the car. There was a note taped to the window. The body of the man called Cutler sprawled by the door. He had been shot in the back. The note had been written while the tall man carried Malcolm into the woods. It was short, to the point: “Your gun jammed with mud. Rifle in back has 10 rds. Hope you can use automatic.”
The rifle in back was an ordinary .22 varmint rifle. Cutler had used it for target practice. Maronick left it for Malcolm, as he figured any amateur could handle so light a weapon. He left the automatic pistol with silencer just in case. Malcolm ripped the note off and drove away.
By the time he coasted the car to a stop outside Atwood’s gate, Malcolm felt the drug taking effect. The pounding in the back of his neck and head, the little pains in his body, all had vanished. In their place was a surging, confident energy. He knew he would have to fight the overestimation and overconfidence the drug brought.