The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  Maybe he had, and they were running up and down this blasted train like the Keystone Cops for no reason. Maybe Le Tour himself had planted the rumor of the train to Edinburgh. He may have even gone so far as to plant some of the plastique on a couple of unsuspecting tourists, just to throw the authorities off, to divert their attention. A shell game.

  The very idea brought on another wave of fatigue. Gorman wanted to give himself over to it, slip under and drown. They were running out of time. The announcement of their approach to the Edinburgh station had come.

  He brought his tonic water to his lips, sincerely wishing it contained a good big shot of Bombay gin.

  “Tired, luv?” Zuckerman asked, picture of the concerned girlfriend.

  “Just contemplating murder,” he said. “Charlie Roxbury had better be enjoying his vacation. It may be the last he takes.”

  “Think on the bright side, Neddie. When we catch this Le Tour bloke — and we will — you’ll be the one getting promoted while Charlie’s latest twit puts him through a wringer and turns him into steak tartare.”

  “She’s MI5,” Gorman pointed out.

  Zuckerman sniffed in affront. “I know Melanie, luv. The number refers to her median intelligence.”

  “Meow.”

  She leaned toward him with a hand on his thigh. “I believe a real man prefers a real woman.”

  The fatigue vaporized. His eyes locked on hers. “I prefer a real woman.”

  Zuckerman smiled like the Cheshire cat. “See there?”

  “And how are the lovebirds?” Franklin crowed, taking a seat across the small table.

  Zuckerman smiled brilliantly. “You’re such an ass, Thomas.”

  Gorman laughed. Under his breath he said, “Anything?”

  Franklin shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Got near enough Gaspara and his luggage. Nothing on the E-nine. It’s not him.”

  “Damn.”

  “Double damn. We’ll be in the station in ten minutes.”

  “Let’s sweep through again,” Zuckerman suggested. “People will be milling about, gathering their belongings. No one will even notice us this time.”

  Gorman nodded, slipped an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her close, laying his head over on hers. Her breast pressed into his side. Nice. “We’ll split up again. As the train’s pulling in, if any of us have a likely candidate, we stick with them into the station. Agreed?”

  The others nodded.

  “See you at dinner then,” Franklin said loudly, getting up from the table, then softly: “I’ll take the front end.”

  Zuckerman leaned up as if to tell Gorman a secret. “You take my rear. Ooops! I meant the rear of the train.” Drawing back, she gave him a playful wink. “For now, at least.”

  Gorman pulled in a deep breath as the adrenaline level rose again. He had to hitch a little at his trousers as he stood. His adrenaline wasn’t all that was rising. Maybe he’d end up thanking Charlie Roxbury yet. Provided Le Tour didn’t end up blowing half of Scotland — and most of the world’s leaders — to kingdom come.

  As Gorman made his way through car eight again, announcements rumbled over the train’s speaker system. How to exit the train, where to pick up checked luggage, where to make connections. As Zuckerman had predicted, the attentions of their fellow travelers were focused on their arrival in Edinburgh, gathering children and belongings, chattering about the next leg of their journeys to wherever.

  He checked the light on the E-9 every few minutes. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. A sense of panic began to rise inside him. If either Le Tour or the plastique was on this train, they were about to lose their chance at it.

  The train gave a bit of a lurch as it bent into a corner. He used it as an excuse to drop his carry-on next to a row of seats containing an athletic balding man in hiking gear and a tall, angular platinum blonde hugging a book bag and staring out the window.

  Gorman apologized, bending down to retrieve the bag. The hiker gave him a vicious look. The woman glanced up at him with a vacant smile and a nod. She wore yellow-tinted rectangular glasses with thick black frames and was attractive in spite of them.

  Discreetly, Gorman reached into the side pocket of the bag as the call came for all passengers to return to their seats. As he started to rise he was hit squarely from behind and knocked flat in the aisle. Before he could try to push up, the drunk who’d dropped him got tangled up in his feet and came down awkwardly on top of him. The breath went out of him in a whoosh. The E-9 went skittering under the seats.

  “Get off!” Gorman grunted, trying without success to get his legs under him.

  “’Xcuse me!” The breath the slurred words rode out on was heavy with the perfume of scotch. The drunk scrambled for purchase, digging his knee hard into Gorman’s back, knocking him in the back of the head with an elbow.

  “You’ll have to return to your seats!” the conductor insisted, as if they were wrestling on the floor for the sheer enjoyment of it.

  The drunk struggled up, staggering, stepping on Gorman’s butt. “Shorry! I’m shorry. I really don’t like trains,” he drawled.

  “Return to your seat, sir,” the conductor said without sympathy.

  Gorman remained on his hands and knees, staring beneath the seats. Where the hell had the E-9 landed?

  “Sir!” the conductor snapped.

  “Just a minute!” Gorman called. “I dropped something.”

  “You’ll have to return to your seat.”

  “Hey!” the drunk shouted, suddenly truculent. “My friend said he dropped something!”

  Heart pounding, Gorman spotted the business end of the sniffer. He dove for it, eliciting a shriek from a middle-aged woman in support hose and sensible shoes. She clocked him one over the head with a rolled-up magazine as he reached between her thick ankles to grab the thing.

  “Sorry, ma’am! I’m really sorry,” he said, scrambling backward. He pushed to his feet and slammed into the drunk.

  “Hey!”

  “Take a seat!” the conductor shouted.

  Gorman fell into an empty seat, his ears ringing, his head pounding. He’d put his knee into something wet and sticky on the floor. None of it mattered as he turned the E-9 around.

  The red light was glowing.

  Oh Jesus.

  They were coming into the station.

  He looked around frantically at the faces. The sensible-shoes woman. A man who resembled Mr. Potato Head. A curly-haired child who stuck out his tongue. A businessman in a dark suit and sunglasses. The hiker.

  Gorman’s heart went into overdrive. They were coming into the station. Which one did he stick with? When had the bloody light gone on exactly?

  The conductor was shoving the drunk toward the back of the car. Had the drunk seen the device and knocked him down because of it? Was the drunk a drunk at all?

  He hit the reset button as the train screeched to a stop. The doors hissed open and the rush began. Everyone stood at once. People moved in a crush toward the doors, toward the luggage bins. Gorman started back toward the group of people he’d fallen past, openly watching for the light on the back of the E-9.

  Mr. Potato Head: no.

  Sensible Shoes: no.

  He was jostled from behind and bumped into the hiker, who cursed him in French.

  The collective mass of humanity surged toward the door.

  French.

  Le Tour was Belgian. The language of Belgium was French.

  The blonde with the book bag and a couple of others had moved between him and the hiker.

  The crowd was spilling out of the train and into the station, where God knew how many people were rushing around.

  The light on the back of the E-9 was blazing like an evil eye.

  Gorman surged forward with the crowd, keeping his eyes on the hiker’s bald spot. “Excuse me! Sorry!” he said, pushing his way through. The hiker looked back over his shoulder, scowling, turned around, and hustled on.

  “Gotcha!” Gorman said unde
r his breath. He lunged past Book Bag Woman, knocking her sideways, and reached for the hiker, catching him by the collar of his jacket. “FBI. Please step aside with me, sir.”

  The hiker tried to turn around and spit in his face, spewing a stream of virulent French. He jerked back around, dropped one shoulder, and was out of the coat and lunging through the crowd, backpack clutched by the straps in one hand.

  Gorman swore and bolted after him, shouting, “FBI. Halt!”

  The crowd parted like the Red Sea, the hiker shoving left and right, Gorman hot on his heels. He didn’t even hear the shrieks and shouts. His focus was on Le Tour. Had to be Le Tour. He spoke French. He was running. The light had gone on.

  It had to be Le Tour or Gorman’s ass was grass with every superior from here to the Bureau chief.

  Anticipating the hiker’s move toward a side exit, Gorman cut the angle and dove for him, catching him tight around the hips. The hiker cried out and went down.

  “You’re under arrest!” Gorman shouted, tasting blood as he scrambled to get a knee in the man’s back. “It’s all over, Le Tour.”

  “What’s all that commotion?” asked the tall blond woman, staring back along the platform at the scene behind her.

  The dowdy woman who’d been waiting for her arrival made a face of ferocious disapproval. “A drug fiend, I’ve no doubt. A decent person isn’t safe to travel anywhere. Like as not, that train was full of drunkards and ruffians of all manner. The world is going to hell on a sled. Chaos all around.”

  “Oui,” the platinum blonde said in a sultry alto, shouldering her book bag. “And we must choose to be swept along by the storm, or to stand in the eye of it and control our destiny. No?”

  Dowdy blue eyes gazed up at her with a sort of reverence and something more. “Aye.”

  They went out of the station and walked side by side across a parking lot; near enough to touch, but not touching. The air between them was charged with electricity. The blonde was elegant, tall, very chic in a slim, long black skirt, black tights, flat shoes, and a loose, long-sleeved tunic the color of slate.

  “I’ve missed you,” the short woman said almost under her breath.

  “And I you, cherie.”

  They neared a white VW microbus. The short woman unlocked the back door and they climbed inside.

  They came together like a pair of thunderheads: violent, angry, hungry, wild. A tangle of tongues and lips and limbs, the clashing of teeth and passion. Clothes were pulled and torn and tossed. The layers of civilized facade came off one after another until they were naked — thigh to thigh, hips to hips, belly to belly, breast to chest.

  The short woman lay back on the pile of clothes, naked, eyes as hot as blue flame. “Make love to me.”

  François Le Tour stared down at her — the wig and yellow-tinted glasses gone, lipstick smudged — filled with a passion for her that nearly matched the one he held for his cause. “I shall make love to you, my darling Sheena. And then we shall make war.”

  Gorman pressed a blue gel ice pack to his lip and glared at the hiker. Station security had descended on them and hauled them both off to a room in the labyrinth of administrative offices to sort out the mess. The hiker sat at the table, his lips curling with the kind of belligerent sneer that only French-speaking people ever truly master.

  “I do not know what it is,” he said contemptuously. “I do not know where it came from. I know only that it is not mine.”

  They all — the hiker, Gorman, the two security guards, the police detective who had been called in — stared at the thing on the table. A matchbox from a restaurant in Brussels. But there were no matches inside. Plastique had been molded into the box. Enough to set off the E-9. They had torn apart the hiker’s backpack and found no more explosive. A Ziploc bag of marijuana, yes. Plastique, no.

  The cop started in again with the questions.

  Gorman got up and went out of the room. Franklin and Zuckerman stood in the hall, Zuckerman smoking a cigarette and looking inappropriately serene.

  “He claims not to know Le Tour,” Gorman said. “I don’t know. He could be telling the truth and just comes across like a lying asshole because he’s French. Le Tour might have slipped the stuff in his pack when he wasn’t looking. Or he may be a willing accomplice.”

  Zuckerman shrugged and blew out a stream of fine white smoke. “He looks the tree-hugging type. He’s certainly got the attitude for a terrorist. That’s more than I can say for mine.”

  Zuckerman’s sniffer had gone red at the knitting bag of an older woman who had turned out to be a nun.

  Franklin shrugged. He had zeroed in on a tourist with a golf bag and a twitchy look, but hadn’t gotten a reading at all on his E-9.

  Gorman swore and threw the ice pack against the wall, all of it overwhelming him at once: the jet lag, the frustration, the impatience. “We lost him.”

  “Well, there is an upside,” Zuckerman said.

  “We lost a man who’s carrying around enough plastic explosive to level a few square blocks of this city,” Gorman said angrily. “What could be the upside?”

  “We know where he’s going, ducky,” she said, putting out the cigarette in a glass ashtray she’d pinched from someone’s office. She set the ashtray on the floor, straightened, dusted her hands off, and smoothed her skirt. “Come along, Ned,” she said, starting down the hall. “It’s time for dinner, and I for one am famished.”

  “How can you eat that way, Ox?” Angus demanded. “We’re on the brink of greatness here.”

  Ox might have looked up from his shepherd’s pie, but his eyes were nearly invisible beneath his shaggy red brows. “Or the eve of disaster,” he said and took another bite.

  Angus went red. He leaned across the table, wild-eyed. “I’ll not have you talk that way, Ox Ferguson!” He glanced around the pub for eavesdroppers and lowered his voice. “The world will know the name of Angus MacLout. The world will hear the story of the treachery of the MacGregors. And Phillip Bates will pay to see that it’s done and that the wrongs are righted!”

  Ox grunted and forked up another mouthful. Soft bits of potato dotted his beard.

  Agitated, Angus sat back in his chair and drank half a glass of beer, his gaze constantly scanning the scene, as if he expected someone to leap up and point an accusatory finger at him. The pub was busy, full of smoke and noise and the smells of beer and food and sweat.

  He himself stank, he knew. He was covered in dried mud from digging half the day in a bloody trench to work on the golf course sprinkler system. Filthy job. And one that rankled mightily, having been assigned by Lorren Douglas, who was third cousin to the Mac-Gregors and knew full well the whole bitter tale.

  Well, Lorren Douglas and his bloody cousins wouldn’t be laughing after the end of this week.

  He checked his watch. It was time.

  He nodded to Ox and got up from the table. Ox stared down at the last few bites of his shepherd’s pie, finally abandoning it. They wove their way through the mob and stepped out into the night air. The western horizon was still orange and pink, but lights glowed in the windows of the village that had hardly changed since the seventeenth century: narrow brick streets, tidy white-washed shop fronts.

  They walked to the phone box on the corner, where a chunky girl with a cockscomb of dyed green hair was in the middle of an argument with someone on the other end of the line.

  “I said no, Seamus! You never listen to me! That’s half your problem . . . Not listening!” she shouted. “That’s the problem!”

  She looked out at Angus and rolled her eyes, then turned her back. “I know that’s what you did, because Sheila bloody told me . . . I don’t care she’s a tramp. I know what she said is true.”

  “Bloody hell,” Angus grumbled, checking his watch again. He stepped around to the other side of the phone box and glared at the girl. She gave him the finger and turned away again.

  “You’re a shit, that’s what . . . Don’t tell me to bugger off. You bugger o
ff.”

  Angus came back around to the door of the box and knocked on the glass.

  The girl stuck out her head. She had three nose rings and a silver bead below a lower lip painted black. “Bugger off!”

  “You bugger off, little girl! I’ve got business to conduct on this telephone.”

  She looked him up and down and curled her lip. “Calling the pig farm, are you?”

  “None of your bloody business!”

  “This phone box is occupied,” she said primly. “Use another.”

  “My associate is calling on this phone,” he said. “You use another.”

  “Your associate is it?” she said snidely. “Well, you can tell your associate from me to bugger off!” She pulled back inside the box, shut the door, and leaned up hard against it.

  Angus swore and pushed at it. Trying to move the little twit was like trying to budge a donkey. He banged at the door, kicked at it.

  Ox stood by, inscrutable as a totem.

  Angus turned to him at last, exasperated. “Will you bloody help me?”

  “She’s hung up.”

  The door opened and the girl came out and kicked him hard in the shin, square on the bruise Sheena had already left there. “You wasted all my time and me money ran out!” she cried, mascara running in dirty black streams down her pale cheeks. “You great stupid ass! You’ve ruined my life! I hope you’re happy!” She kicked him in the other shin and ran away.

  Angus howled, dancing from one sore leg to the other. He doubled over and grabbed at one shin, then the other. The phone rang and he banged his head trying to get in. He grabbed his head with one hand and clawed at the phone with the other, knocking the receiver off the hook. Out on the street, Ox just shook his head.

  “Angus? Angus, are you there?” Sheena asked, brow knitting as she listened to the crashing on the other end of the line. She sat in bed in Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel, swathed in rumpled sheets, her hair a mess.

  “Sheena?”

  “Aye. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Angus snapped. “Have you got what we need?”