Austen and Timmler were sitting in a car about a block and a half away, and Timmler’s men were fanned out all over the area. No one was going to go sneaking out through any back doors.
“We’ve checked out everyone in the complex,” Timmler said blandly. “None of them are hostiles, so he won’t have any help available. But just in case, we’ve got snipers covering both ends of the walkway.”
“What about the neighbors? The last thing we need is to start a gunfight in the middle of a crowd.”
Timmler could only laugh. “Come on, Frank. What kind of show do you think we’re running here? It’ll never come to that. Besides, it’s Sunday afternoon; the place is practically deserted.”
There was a slight pause, and then Timmler took a sheet of paper from his inside overcoat pocket. “By the way, we’ve got the results on that list of Storey’s. Four of the eight are dead, but everything we’ve dug up about them is consistent with the assumption that they were Soroka’s plants. They were all born in the same year, they all attended the right universities, and their parents all died before Christmas of 1938.”
“And four of them are dead?”
“Yes.” Timmler unfolded the sheet of paper and held it up to the light, squinting. “ Anson and Van Ghent were both killed in World War Two, Gardner died in a boating accident in 1957, and—but, of course, you know about Tilson.”
“Right.” Austen nodded, his face an expressionless mask. “I know all about Tilson.”
“What do you want to do about the survivors?” Timmler asked, pretending not to notice. “Do we pick them up?”
“We pick them up. What else can we do with them?”
“Storey too?”
“Storey too. Come on, George—let’s get this over with.”
They got out of the car and walked up to the apartment complex’s parking lot, where a man in a pair of white painter’s coveralls was already propping his ladder up against the side of Yates’s building. He carried a small gas canister in his hand and, coiled like a length of garden hose, about twenty feet of rubber tubing. As soon as he saw Timmler, he scaled the ladder up to the roof and started making his way toward the rear, climbing awkwardly from one unit to the next, since each rose three or four feet above the other like a giant staircase up the hill.
Timmler pointed after him and smiled, his expression exhibiting all the quiet professional pride of a master craftsman. “That canister is full of thiopental. He’ll run the tube down the vent from Yates’s kitchen fan; in about ten minutes our friend should be fast asleep, but we can’t let him alone too long or he’ll stop breathing altogether. You did say you wanted him alive, didn’t you?”
“I thought it would be nice, yes.”
When the man in the coveralls appeared again, Timmler touched Austen on the elbow and they started up the walkway. They took their time and stopped in front of the stairwell to Yates’s apartment.
“This is the part I like the least,” Timmler said, reaching into his overcoat pocket. “Here, you’d better take this.”
In the palm of his hand he held what looked like the same small, nickel-plated automatic he had had in New York. The barrel, however, had been extended about an inch by the addition of a silencer. This time Austen took it; it was the first time he had carried a weapon since Vietnam.
At the top of the stairwell Timmler felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll go first, George.” Austen smiled rather thinly. “If he’s still awake in there, I wouldn’t want you getting killed doing something you didn’t approve of.”
If he had any brains at all, Yates would have his door dead-bolted. So you didn’t bother with keys or lockpicks; you just kicked the thing down. Fortunately the stairwell was very narrow; Austen braced himself against the side wall and let go. The heel of his shoe landed just beside the doorknob, and the door opened as easily as blowing the head off a glass of beer.
He went in low and rolled for cover behind the kitchen table, all in the prescribed fashion, the gun in his hand, but no one shot at him. He waited for a few minutes, just listening, but there wasn’t a sound except for the soft tinkling of a radio in the kitchen, so he got up.
“I feel like an idiot,” he said.
They found Yates stretched out over the foot of his bed, face down. Apparently he had just had time to find himself somewhere soft to fall.
The first thing Timmler did was throw open all the windows, all through the apartment, and in a few minutes the sickly smell of the gas was almost gone. It was about half an hour before Yates came around. They left him to do that for himself; nobody rushed him.
Yates’s first conscious act was to roll over on his side and throw up, spilling the contents of his stomach, which looked like tomato soup and smelled like hell, all over the floor. Timmler, considerate soul, went into the bathroom and brought him out a glass of water, and within thirty or forty seconds Yates was awake enough to take it, and to appreciate that he was no longer alone in the room.
“Just to put your mind at rest,” Timmler began, clamping his hands over his left knee as he sat on the dresser, “we’ve got this place blanketed. There’s no way you’re leaving here alive unless Mr. Austen and I take you out on the end of a leash. If you feel lucky, however, you’re welcome to try something; I’m sure Mr. Austen would feel obliged for the opportunity to blow your brains out all over the wallpaper.”
Yates looked down at the mess he had made on the floor, perhaps considering how much messier the place would get if he acquired a couple of drainage holes through the back of his skull, and brought his hands up to rest inoffensively in his lap. He sat there, staring at Austen, his narrow eyes glittering with recognition and hatred.
Austen merely smiled. “That fat newspaperman you chopped was a friend of mine, sport,” he said quietly, the muzzle of the automatic lined up on Yates’s larynx. “I suppose it’s childish, but I tend to resent things like that. Diederich should have known better.”
The allusion did not pass unnoticed. Yates reached up to touch the end of his moustache with his little finger, and then his face seemed to split open. It was the most unpleasant grin Austen had ever seen. “So you figured that out—good for you.”
Until the last second he hadn’t known he would do anything of the kind—God knows, he hadn’t planned it—but suddenly Austen was on his feet, the automatic still firmly clenched in his right hand, and in less time than it takes to draw a breath he had seized Yates by the throat with his left hand, dragged him off the bed and into a pool of his own vomit, and beat his head against the floor as hard as he could.
“You bastard,” he heard himself shouting. “You fucking maniac, I’ll break your face for you! You goddam slit-eyed cold-blooded shit!”
It wasn’t a very smart thing to do, and if Yates hadn’t still been pretty groggy Austen would probably never have gotten away with it alive. But such considerations were the furthest thing from his mind. In that one instant, all he wanted to do with the rest of the day was pound the son-of-a-bitch into strawberry jam.
But it didn’t last long. He stopped as soon as he realized that Yates wasn’t fighting back anymore—there wasn’t any fun in killing a man who wasn’t fighting back. It had been one of the absolutely necessary actions of his life; he had felt for a moment as if something inside his chest were beginning to tear apart under the strain.
When he felt the pressure of Timmler’s grip on his shoulder, he allowed himself to be pulled away.
“He’s okay; he’s just out cold again,” Timmler said finally from where he was crouched over Yates’s body, checking the pulse in his carotid artery.
Austen allowed himself a few minutes to calm down before he spoke. “I want a full confession.” Timmler had turned around to look at him the way someone might look at a particularly terrible traffic accident, but Austen no longer worried about what Timmler or anyone else thought. He was beyond that. “I don’t care how you get it, but get it. I want the tapes, and I want a signed transcrip
t. And then you plug a hole with this guy—he just disappears. We can’t afford to leave him alive.”
“You don’t want to do it yourself?” There was nothing in Timmler’s eyes; it had been just a question. Austen shook his head.
“You’re the boss.”
“That’s right—I’m the boss.”
And in that sullen mood they waited for Yates to come around again.
After a while Yates brought his hands up to the sides of his head and, when he perceived that it wasn’t likely to come rolling off any time soon, managed to drag himself up into a sitting position.
“I hope they kill you, Austen,” he said, looking like he meant it. “I hope Diederich wastes everyone of you pinko pricks.”
Austen and Timmler looked at each other in perfect astonishment. This wasn’t a development they had expected.
“What was that? You want to run that past us one more time, Yates?”
“You planning to plead ignorance, Austen?” Yates sat resting his elbows on his knees, showing his teeth like a devil. “You want to tell me you were just an unwitting tool? You guys are all alike.”
They let him talk. It was an odd, contradictory monologue, implying that perhaps Yates hadn’t spent much time thinking out the reasons for what he was doing, but the thrust of it was clear enough. They were all in it together, in some vast conspiracy of the left that seemed to include everyone who had ever stood in Simon Faircliff’s way. One grasped, as one listened, the really wonderful skill with which Howard Diederich had chosen his angel of destruction.
“And so that was your job—to stop them?”
“Yes.” Yates nodded. He didn’t regret anything; it was his proudest boast.
“And Clayton Burgess—was he part of it?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And Ted Boothe? You killed them both?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, boy.”
Austen got up and went over to the chest of drawers, hunting around until he found a clean shirt. While he got it out, he saw that Timmler was already preparing an injection of the tranquilizer that was going to render Yates about as ferocious as a week-old puppy.
“Here,” he said, throwing the shirt to its owner. “We want you to be presentable. And maybe, when you get to where you’re going, Mr. Timmler here will be kind enough to explain to you just how badly you’ve been suckered.”
V
“You can cut the head off a snake, but the folk wisdom is that it’ll keep on wriggling until sundown. It’d probably be a mistake to assume that just because we’ve got Yates his boys will all run for cover, so watch yourself.”
Those had been Mr. Austen’s instructions, and Michael Starkman wasn’t anyone to disobey instructions—not on a deal like this.
Starkman was from Providence, Rhode Island; he had never been to California before. Since joining the Company he had traveled a good bit; he had worked in Europe for eight years, in Africa for a while, and for two years in the Near East, based in Lebanon, before being posted to Langley, where he had spent the past five years. But for some reason he had never been west of the Mississippi and, like a lot of Easterners, had formed the vague impression that California was all palm trees and sandy beaches and traffic jams. Oroville wasn’t like anything he had expected.
This wasn’t any great roaring metropolis. Nobody wore one-way sunglasses and white shoes, and the music played over the public address systems in the department stores and diners was more likely to be country-western than hot acid rock. This was like a lot of other places he had seen, places too big to be called towns and too small to be cities, places that were scattered over New England like salt on a pretzel. This was like home.
And the home town was going half-screwy over the home town boy who had made good, because tomorrow their very own Simon Faircliff would be re-elected to the Presidency of the United States, and he wasn’t going to do it by halves either. No, the good citizens of Oroville were expecting their one-time compatriot, whom almost none of them had ever seen except on the evening news, to come down on his Republican rival like a brick wall.
So the home town boy who had never come home was a presence you felt everywhere. He was the local nature god, he was the prophet with honor, he was Big Brother all rolled into one. His face was everywhere—there were probably five or six thousand campaign posters in the downtown area alone—his name was on everybody’s lips and all over the front page of every newspaper, his words and deeds were treasured up like the legends of the heroes of Troy. And tomorrow night, after the election returns were in, it would probably surprise nobody if the local GOP chairman were dragged through the city streets in chains.
Starkman had been on the Company payroll long enough to realize that it was best just to stick to what your superiors told you and never, never ask unnecessary questions. But it didn’t take a Nobel laureate to figure out that Mr. Austen had decided there was something very wrong about his father-in-law, employer, and President, and that he was getting ready to do something drastic by way of a remedy.
“I don’t have to draw you a picture of what will happen to you if you ever breathe a word of this to a living soul, now do I?” Austen had asked.
Starkman had glanced at Mr. Timmler, who half-raised one eyebrow and half-smiled as if to say, Don’t kid yourself, Mike—he means every word of it, and that had been enough. He had shaken his head and answered up like a good boy, “No, sir, you don’t have to.”
“Good.” The Director’s face hardly seemed to grow less rigidly mistrustful, but under the circumstances one supposed he could be forgiven. “You’ll have to be told more than I feel right about telling anyone, but you need to know what you’re looking for and have some idea of the stakes. Believe me, it sounds like such a small thing, but nothing you’ll ever do again in your life will be as important as this.”
Austen had shown him a piece of notepaper with a short handwritten letter scrawled across it, signed “Pete.” Starkman read it, handed it back, and waited. There had to be more.
“Pete Freestone was a friend of mine. He was murdered five days ago. The implications of what he says are pretty obvious. What I want from you is something that will prove, one way or the other, whether the man who uses that name today is really Simon Faircliff.”
So that was that. Starkman had been flown up to a private airfield just outside Chico and then had rented a car to take him the twentysome-odd miles to Oroville, where he was absolutely on his own. He had been provided with a fake driver’s license and credit cards to rent the car, but the license and the rental agreement were both burned, according to instructions, as soon as he could find a private place to do it, and the credit cards were cut into pieces and scattered over about five miles of roadway. He had five hundred dollars in cash and no identity whatsoever. No one was taking any chances.
He spent most of Monday morning just touring the sidewalks, making sure that his presence in town was of interest to not a living soul—after all, wouldn’t it be uncomfortable to think he had been expected—and it was after lunchtime before he got around to visiting the Faircliff “museum.”
Naturally, the day before the election, there were plenty of people around. Nothing would have been more impossible than hiding his activities, so he decided he wouldn’t try.
“Would anybody mind if I took some pictures?” he asked one of the elderly ladies who sat behind a table covered with green felt and collected admission and sold little printed guides. He picked up three copies and laid a ten-dollar bill beside the rest. “I’ve come all the way from Spokane to be here for the big day tomorrow, and I want to be able to remember everything.”
He smiled his best boyish smile, but the old bag just blinked at him as if somebody were shining a light in her eyes. Then she looked down at the ten dollars and seemed to catch on.
“No flashbulbs,” she said, counting out his change. “We don’t allow any flashbulbs.” It sounded like something intended to be chiseled into stone.
His camera was a Minox-C with certain custom modifications, and he pulled it out of his pocket and took a group portrait. He couldn’t have made himself any more popular if he had brought cookies and Jack Daniels.
There were thirty-six exposures on his film roll, so he allowed himself plenty of opportunities to look like a tourist, taking pictures of the potted palms and the doors and the “No Smoking” signs and only getting to the contents of the glass cases when everyone had grown sufficiently used to his presence to have forgotten all about him.
He didn’t need a flash; the film was ultra light sensitive, intended precisely for photographing documents. He took at least two exposures of everything that looked interesting, including all three pages of the celebrated essay, and then left, waving goodbye to the moneychangers in the temple.
“Pete” had been right. The handwriting was different.
Now all he had to do was get the film back to Langley and he was home free.
He was walking in the general direction of his motel, where he thought he might just get in his car and drive away, when he spotted a familiar face from one of the less comfortable periods of his life—the seven months he had been stationed in Zaire, keeping track of the civil war there.
The guy’s name had been Krebs or Krall, something like that. He would turn up every once in a while in Kinshasa, where he had hired out as a mercenary, and there were some gaudy stories in circulation about how he treated the problem of defections from his native army.
The President's Man Page 33