The Doomsayer

by Jerry Ahern

  “All right— but you could get the horses on her.”

  “But I’m not taking the Ave Maria, Harmon. That’s final.” She stepped into her track shoes, bending to tie them, saying, “Michael—carefully— get me that boning knife from the other duffel bag.” She let her hair down as she stepped from behind the blanket. The hell with not washing it, she thought— it’d be wet soon enough.

  “Momma, why are you wearing shorts? It’s cold outside. You wouldn’t—“

  She cut the boy off. “I don’t feel like going for a swim in my blue jeans, Michael.”

  “A swim, Mrs. Rourke?” Harmon Kleinschmidt asked.

  “I asked myself, Harmon, what would my husband do in a situation like this. Well, my husband is very good at things like this— always was. I guess it isn’t a secret anymore that he was in the C.I.A., he was a survival expert, and a doctor too. He’s alive somewhere. That’s what the children and I are doing— looking for him. I tell myself he’s looking for us. I know he is,” she automatically corrected herself. “If John were doing this— that’s my husband— well, he’d go back to the pier at night, go into the water, swim up alongside one of the boats and steal it. He’d take a knife,” she said and raised the boning knife to show Kleinschmidt as Michael handed it to her. “And, I guess he’d use it if he had to,” she added.

  “I can’t let you do that, Mrs. Rourke.”

  “I feel old enough these days, Harmon. Just call me Sarah,” she smiled.

  Chapter 18

  “Shit,” Paul Rubenstein muttered. He hunched his collar up against the wind, asking half under his breath, “Why is it cold in St. Petersburg?” He looked around him, down at the Harley between his legs, at the Schmeisser slung under his right arm. He decided nothing in view could or would answer him. He stared down at the road, watching the troops moving along it. “Cubans,” he muttered to himself.

  Pushing his wire-framed glasses up from the bridge of his nose, Rubenstein let out the Harley’s stand, dismounted, and moved into the trees to get further off the road below and to avoid the wind. He dropped to the ground, squatting there. He wished he’d started smoking again.

  He could still see the road through the trees, and he watched to make certain none of the troops moving along below him made any sudden moves toward the side of the road, indicating they’d somehow detected his presence. He wished he spoke Spanish. Then perhaps if he got closer to them he could learn something.

  “Everybody can’t be John Rourke,” he said half-aloud, smiling. He wondered for an instant what Rourke was doing. Had he found Sarah and the children yet? If he hadn’t, how long would he keep on looking?

  Rubenstein studied the road, drawing casually in the dirt between his legs with the point of the Gerber MkII knife Rourke had given him for the journey. He began mentally to tick off the situation’s pertinent details, to help himself to form a plan. He had been in the St. Petersburg area for nearly three days. The city itself was partially destroyed; there were internment— concentration— camps all over. He studied the faces inside, behind the wire fences. He’d convinced himself most of the people inside were old and that most of them seemed to be Jewish like himself. It was just a feeling, he knew. Maybe they weren’t Jewish; perhaps it was the armed guards and the barbed wire that made him think so— and he had seen films of the camps during World War II. That was enough. He decided some of them were Jewish at least.

  He had left his bike and slipped quietly through the streets at night past the Communist Cuban patrols. The house his parents had lived in was gone. There was a house if a roof and three standing walls counted, but there had been a fire and obvious looting. They were not there. He had checked throughout the neighborhood, trying to remember which houses had belonged to friends of his parents from the few times he had visited them there. He hadn’t been certain of any of it, but none of the houses in the neighborhood looked to be inhabited anymore, nor habitable.

  “Gotta,” he muttered, staring away from the road, looking at the meaningless lines he’d drawn in the dirt with the long-bladed knife. There was one large camp, larger than many of the others combined. Somewhere inside, he told himself, there would be someone who knew his parents, perhaps knew what had happened to them. If they were dead, he wanted to know. For certain.

  Concentration camps, he told himself, were made to keep people in, not out. The young man smiled. Perhaps after he penetrated the main camp and learned what he could, he could free some of the prisoners. Rourke would, he decided.

  Chapter 19

  Rourke rolled the Harley Davidson to a stop in the sand. He could appreciate more realistically how thinly spread the Russians must have been. The beach area had been fenced with barbed wire— he’d cut that. But there were no guards in sight. “Stupid,” he muttered.

  “What did you say?” Sissy asked, sitting behind him on the bike, her grip around his midsection relaxed now that they had stopped.

  “I said the Russians are stupid to leave the coast unguarded like this— good thing for us, though.” Rourke decided, and without much of a valid reason, he didn’t like the girl.

  “Oh,” she said, noncommittally, almost inaudibly.

  “Oh,” he echoed, staring down at the surf. He could see a light, blinking from offshore in the twilight. Rourke reached into the belt under his jacket where he’d temporarily stashed the Kel-Lite. He glanced up and down the beach. Then Rourke moved the switch one position forward, pushing the button, releasing it, then pushing it again. He made a series of dots and dashes and, after a moment, the light from offshore, already seeming closer, signaled back in a predetermined pattern he’d worked out with Reed by radio. He moved the switch on the flashlight back into the off position, then handed Sissy the light. “Put that in the side pocket over there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the pack, Sissy— in the pack.”

  “All right,” she said. “Was that the airplane?”

  “The amphibious plane, right.”

  “Are you going to leave your motorcycle behind?” she asked, her voice sounding strained to him. Watching the approaching plane across the water, he decided she was probably wrestling with getting the Kel-Lite back into the Lowe pack.

  “No, I’m bringing the bike. They can get close enough I can get it up a ramp and into the plane. Shouldn’t get the bike too wet. I can clean off the salt water as soon as we’re airborne.”

  “Can’t you just get another motorcycle?” she asked.

  “Why should I? There’s nothing wrong with this.”

  “But isn’t it a lot of bother— I mean, cleaning it off, hauling it aboard? Why not just—“

  “Did you like disposable things— when there were disposable things? Pens, cigarette lighters, things like that?”

  “Yes, I suppose I did,” she answered, her tone defensive Rourke thought.

  “Good for you. I didn’t.” Rourke said nothing else. Already, the amphibious, twin-engine aircraft was closing on the surf. He gunned the Harley down the sandy embankment to meet it.

  Chapter 20

  “Miami Beach was the home of so many capitalists— it is appropriate that I have taken the finest home along the beach and made it headquarters for the People’s Army.”

  Natalia smiled, studying Diego Santiago’s fleshy, slightly sweating face. She remembered the file. Diego was correct, but Santiago was an assumed last name, ever since his rise to prominence in the Cuban Communist hierarchy.

  “General Santiago?” she asked.

  “Si, Major Tiemerovna,” he responded.

  She smiled at him again, then looked out over the veranda and across the sand toward the inky blackness ridged with white foam, the breakers. “All of this— doesn’t it distract you? It would me, I confess,” she said and laughed a little.

  “You would distract me, Senorita. I use this house because it is centrally located; it fills my needs. I swim. It is the only exercise my demanding schedule allows me. Perhaps, while you and Colonel Mikl
ov are here with us, you too can go for a swim. It is relaxing. I find it so at least.” He smiled again, then, looking at her glass, asked, “More wine?”

  She smiled. “A little, I suppose— but only a little, Comrade General.”

  “You are too formal, Senorita. There is no need for a beautiful woman ever to be formal. Call me Diego. I insist. Take it as an order, if you like, from a superior officer in an allied army.”

  She smiled, taking his outstretched right hand, feeling it to be slightly clammy. She watched his eyes watching her cleavage.

  She leaned back in her chair, her hand slipping from Diego Santiago’s hand, then resting on the white tablecloth. She studied the hand, knowing, feeling Santiago’s eyes studying her. She had arrived with Miklov, expecting nothing to do with Santiago until morning, feeling emotionally drained after her uncle’s revelation. She had felt tired, confused when Santiago’s aide met them at the airport, announcing there was a formal late supper being served in two hours. She glanced to her Rolex watch. It was nearly eleven.

  With Miklov, the aide had had them driven to Santiago’s house along the beach— another surprise. She had brought formal attire— she always did on an assignment such as this. While Miklov had changed, she had showered, washed her hair, dried it, then dressed. Looking at herself in the full length mirror before coming down to dinner she had done two things— slipped an ultra light, thin boot knife into a garter holster on the inside of her left thigh, then checked her appearance. She wore a black evening gown, not too much jewelry, black shoes and a small black bag— her COP derringer pistol was in the bag. She didn’t worry that it would be discovered. If Santiago had reason to suspect her as KGB, he’d suspect her all the more without a weapon. And an obvious weapon was always a good thing— it sometimes ended a search quickly enough that a hidden weapon, like the knife on her thigh, would not be found.

  Now she moved uncomfortably in the chair, straightening her skirt, moving her eyes from her hand to her shoes, then up her ankle to the hem of her dress. Santiago was talking to Miklov and she was trying to appear disinterested.

  “I think, Colonel Miklov, that there is no cause for alarm for your superiors. It is only natural to assume that two dynamic nations such as ours operating in such close proximity as we do should, from time to time, become abrasive with one another. Yet it is this very dynamism and this very strength which makes us allies. How is the expression in English— the fortunes of war, no?”

  Natalia looked up from the hem of her dress, seeing Diego Santiago’s eyes watching her. “But, Comrade General— Diego,” she asked, her voice low, soft— and she intended it to sound that way. “If we are both such worthy allies, then why cannot we learn to function like well-oiled cogs in the Communist machine— together?” She looked into the Cuban’s eyes, smiling.

  “My dear young woman— you are exquisitely beautiful and you are also very intelligent. You have brought us exactly back to square one, have you not. Senorita, I am overwhelmed,” and Santiago bowed toward her.

  The skin on her shoulders, her throat— all the parts of her that were naked to Santiago’s eyes— crawled under his gaze, but she leaned forward, knowing he could look down her dress more easily. “Comrade General,” she almost whispered. “I do not understand. This beautiful house, this dinner— I was very fatigued when we arrived.”

  “Perhaps then a swim, as I suggested.” Then Santiago, as if he had forgotten Miklov existed, suddenly remembered he did. “You are welcome to join us, Colonel.”

  Miklov, gray, with tight jowls and dark eyes, smiled. “The young lady is correct. I too am tired, and I’m afraid age precludes a midnight swim. I should be in bed. It has been a long day and I eagerly anticipate our renewed discussions tomorrow.”

  “Comrade Colonel,” Santiago said, “tomorrow, I shall show you both the cream of the armed forces of the People’s Democratic Republic of Cuba.” Then, turning to Natalia, Santiago said, “But tonight, Senorita, I will show you the ocean. In my humble role as leader of the People’s Army, as I have indicated to you, the water is my one form of solace, of rest, of renewal. Perhaps, since these waters touch my homeland of Cuba— perhaps I feel from them the renewal to go on, despite all obstacles. They touch my home, my heart. You can understand this, Senorita?”

  “Yes,” Natalia answered, watching his eyes.

  “You will join me then for a swim?”

  “Si,” she answered, smiling, watching his eyes smiling. “That is the right word, yes?”

  “Very right, Senorita,” Santiago answered.

  “Gentlemen,” she began, standing. Both Miklov and Santiago stood then as well. “Comrade General, I shall meet you—“

  “On the beach in fifteen minutes— just beyond the veranda. That gives you sufficient time?”

  “Yes,” she smiled. Miklov moved her chair back as she walked past the table, saying to her, “Good night, Comrade Major.”

  She turned, her eyes focused on his. “Yes, Comrade Colonel.” And then, as she passed Santiago, his hand was out, as if to help her. She touched her left hand to it and dipped her eyes slightly. He was shorter than she was, and she didn’t wish him to become too aware of it.

  “I shall be with you, then,” she said, softly, noncommittally. It was a game she had played before, and sincerely wished she would not have to play to the ending.

  She walked away from the table, through the dining room and to the double oak doors. She stopped, turning around, noticing Santiago’s eyes on her— and Miklov’s as well. She did nothing, standing there a moment, as if hesitant, then turned and walked through the open door and toward the circular staircase. Santiago could perhaps still see her, she thought. She stopped at the base of the stairs, her left hand catching up the ankle-length skirt of her black dress just above the knee, raising it to help her walk the stairs, her right hand touching lightly at the railing of the banister. She ascended the stairs, hoping Santiago were watching; she wanted him to have a good show.

  She looked down behind her a moment, then continued her ascent to the upper landing, dropping her skirt as she walked toward her room.

  There was no need for a key, and none had been provided for her. She turned the knob on the door and entered the room. She had determined earlier it was not video-monitored and assumed nothing had been added to it since her absence. She closed the door behind her and leaned hard against it, staring down at the blue carpet beneath her black shoes, sighing, breathing hard. “Pig,” she muttered, but so that only she could hear it, in case there were indeed microphones hidden in the room which she had not detected.

  Natalia closed the deadbolt from the inside and walked across the room, tossing her black purse with the COP derringer on the bed.

  She stopped in front of the full length mirror. “A midnight swim,” she muttered.

  She stood in front of the mirror. Behind it, she thought, there might be a camera, so she began to undress as if for some unseen audience. She raised her hands to her hair, pulling the pins that bound it up at the nape of her neck, letting it fall, then shaking it to her shoulders and past that. She hunched her shoulders forward, her arms behind her as she fumbled for the zipper at the back of the black dress, getting the hook and eye closure open.

  She pulled the zipper all the way past her waist, then hunched her shoulders again as she slipped the strap that had held the dress up around her neck over her head, letting the front of the dress drop forward, dropping the dress to the floor. She wore no bra, and as the dress fell, she moved her hands up, cupping her breasts in them, then shifting her body to let the dress fall around her ankles. She pushed the slit, lace-trimmed black slip down from her waist, past her hips, and down her thighs to around her ankles. She stared at herself in the mirror. She wore black, lace-trimmed bikini panties, and these she pushed down with her thumbs, after removing the knife on the garter. She bent over, her thumbs hooked on each side of the stocking on her right leg.

  She pushed the left stocking down to her
ankle, then the right, then stepped out of the dress, the slip, and the panties and pulled her left leg up, rolling the dark nylon from her feet. She stood in front of the mirror, as if surveying herself, turning, looking at her legs, cupping her hands under her breasts.

  Natalia decided enough was enough. She turned abruptly away from the mirror, then walked into the bathroom. She assumed that if anything were fixed to provide a picture— short of fiber optics, evidence of which she had seen none— it was the mirror. She sat on the toilet, feeling relatively safe.

  Finished, she did what she normally would, then stood, walking back into the bedroom, to her suitcase. There were two bathing suits there— both one-piece. She picked the black one rather than the tan, flesh-colored one. She walked back toward the mirror, holding the suit up in front of her. She turned, flashing her rear end toward the mirror, then walked back toward the bed, sitting on its edge. She put the suit on ducking her head under the strap which would support the front of the suit from her neck.

  She walked back to the mirror, adjusting the suit, intentionally cupping her hands under her breasts as she fitted the suit to her body. She did a full turn in the mirror, then walked away from it, again feeling enough was enough.

  She took a white, hip-length beach jacket from her suitcase— she hadn’t had the time to unpack. Slipping it on, she belted it too tightly about her waist. There was a pair of black, high-heeled sandals in the other suitcase; and, barefoot, she walked across the carpet, found the shoes and put them on.

  She walked back to the mirror again. She pulled the earrings off, unclasped the necklace, then looked at the gold Rolex on her wrist. Her timing was perfect— five minutes late.

  As she started across the room, she stopped, pausing beside the dresser, taking up a bottle of Chanel No. 9. She used it on her neck and behind her left ear, then picked up the black bag she had tossed on the bed. She opened the bag, took the COP pistol and broke it open, checking the four, 125-grain jacketed hollow points there, then closed the pistol. She replaced it in the bag, then clutched the bag to herself as she started toward the doorway. She sighed. It promised to be a long night, she thought.