“Look, I’m no choir boy,” I said. “Generally the only bedroom activities that interest me are my own. But you have a secret that can be used against you, Allen. Times are changing. The press may not always keep the lid on. Does the name Christine Keeler mean anything to you?”
He was shaking his head and she was trying to disappear into him. “Mike,” he said desperately, “what are you after? What do you want?”
“The K.G.B. wanted me to take a trip to Russia. I think I know why, but even if the point was just to get revenge on me for past sins, I want to know how I came to be chosen as Ralph Marley’s replacement.”
He frowned in confusion. “Mike, I picked you. You were Marley’s friend, helping out the night he got shot. But you’d done work for me before. You know that.”
“You were the ideal blackmail target in this thing, Allen.”
“No one blackmailed me in taking you along, Mike! No one!”
“No one pressured you to use me?”
“No. It was my choice.”
That was not what I’d expected to hear.
“All right,” I said, and I sat forward. I tried to take all of the threat out of my voice. “Think, and think carefully. Did anyone even suggest, in the most casual way, that I’d make a good replacement for Marley? Maybe the very night of the shooting?”
He thought about it, but only briefly. “Yes, Mike, there was someone. But it was, like you say, casual. Just conversation. Cocktail party conversation, at that.”
“Who made this casual suggestion, Allen?”
And this time his response was exactly what I expected to hear.
* * *
The cab moved through the rain like a lumbering beast, but the sky was the greater beast, rumbling and roaring and flashing with incandescent fury, split by veins of electricity. It was coming down hard now, rain filling the gutters, machine-gunning umbrellas, sending even those New Yorkers made of the sternest stuff to seek shelter under marquees or to huddle in doorways or to cram inside bars that offered a more soothing kind of wet.
By the time I got dropped off, it had let up momentarily, as if God was grabbing a breath before His next expression of displeasure with the human race. The bottom floor of the townhouse, just off Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park, bled light from its windows. I had expected to find that floor dark. At almost seven, there was no reason for a high-society, exclusive practice like that of Dr. Harmon Giles to be doing any business at all.
I had figured to get buzzed in and go up to the second floor landing of the doctor’s apartment. I’d never been inside, but had passed it on my way up to visit Lisa Contreaux’s top-floor pad yesterday.
But now I found myself knocking at the front office door. It was locked, of course, though the reception room was brightly lighted, if empty of patients, with no nurse or receptionist behind the counter across the room. I had just about given up, and was ready to return to my initial plan, when the doctor—in a white smock over dark trousers—peeked out from the hallway next to the receptionist’s station. He squinted, trying to make me out through the rain-streaked glass.
“Mike Hammer, Doc!” I yelled. “Got a minute?”
He lifted his chin and smiled faintly in recognition and came across the room, unlocking the door. I stepped inside, only mildly damp. I’d spent most of the downpour in the cab.
“Glad I caught you, Doc,” I said, and grinned. “I didn’t figure you’d be open at this hour.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, pleasant but not friendly, mildly put upon as he closed and re-locked the door behind me, “but I ran late today with some walk-ins.”
I took the liberty of hanging up my wet trenchcoat and rain-sluiced hat on his metal rack.
He was saying, “I was just about to close up shop and go upstairs to my apartment. Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Hammer? I have appointment slots open for tomorrow. We can write something down.”
He was a somewhat bigger man than I remembered, but otherwise the same—in his mid-sixties with mustache, graying hair, wire-frame glasses, a distinguished variation on the old family doctor. He wasn’t smoking his pipe, but the smell of tobacco was on him.
“It’s this leg, Doc,” I said, rubbing my thigh. “It’s been giving me fits. Man, on a rainy day like this, it just screams at me.”
“Well, it certainly shouldn’t,” he said. “That was a very simple procedure. We got the bullet out, and it seemed to be in one piece.”
“Maybe you left behind a few fragments of shrapnel,” I suggested. “Could you do something about it—now?”
He mulled that, sighed, and shrugged. “I suppose I can take a quick look at it.”
“Would you mind, Doc?”
“Not at all.” His smile was completely friendly now. “A good mechanic has to stand behind his work, right?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t want to break down in the middle of the Thruway.”
He led me into and down the hallway and stopped at an open doorway, reached in, and switched the light on, illuminating a small, standard examining room. Nodding toward the elevated table with its crisp white tissue-paper covering, his back to me, he said, “Just remove your pants, Mr. Hammer, and have a seat. Be with you in a moment.”
“Not in the mood to drop my drawers, Doc,” I said, and he whirled and saw the .45 aimed his way. “Why don’t you just hop up on that little table.”
He did so, rather awkwardly. Now he knew how his patients felt. He was sitting there like a kid with his legs dangling and his expression was telling, because there was no confusion in it. Just fear.
“Tell me about Complex 90, Doc.”
This did seem to surprise him. “Complex 90... Where did you hear that term?”
“Well, I wasn’t there at the time, but those were the last words of a kid who used to assist you. Gawky, goofy-looking brain named Dennis Dorfman. Remember him?”
His face took on a sadness that was almost believable. “That was such a tragedy. Such a sad, premature end for so brilliant a young man.”
“And yet somehow I think you’re over it. Complex 90, Doc. Tell me about it.”
Finally, his genial features hardened into a mask of contempt, and his eyes became as cold and unblinking as a stone statue’s. “Why don’t you tell me what you think you know, Mr. Hammer?”
“Well, I believe it’s a formula, an organic formula I think was the phrase, to protect astronauts from space viruses, and from latent viruses they may have unknowingly brought with them into space.”
His smile wasn’t much of one. “Not bad for a layman, Mr. Hammer. But surely you know that Complex 90 is many years away from finalization. We are only in the initial stages.”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s why Dennis Dorfman had to die. I believe he knew you’d had a breakthrough, and were hiding it. He may also have discovered your connections to a foreign government. That you’d sold the formula to them.”
His mustache rode the sneer. “I didn’t ‘sell’ anything to anyone.”
“Oh. Then you’re a good party member.”
“I’m not a party member at all, Mr. Hammer. I’m a scientist in a very dangerous world, a world where the balance of weaponry and technology between two great superpowers must be maintained. Right now, America is in the lead in the space race.”
“But with Complex 90, you figured to give the Russians a boost.”
“Perhaps.”
“So, then, you were planning to sell it to both sides?”
His eyes and nostrils flared. “There is no sell about it!”
“Why didn’t you just defect, Doc? Or can you do more damage... I mean, ‘good’... where you’re currently placed? You can talk till you’re red in the face... get it? ...but you’ll never convince me you’re not a Soviet agent. That you’re just an idealist trying to maintain the balance of power.”
The contempt was back. “And why is that, Mr. Hammer?”
“Because somebody close to Senator Jasper, so
mebody on the inside, had to stage-manage this rather elaborate farce. Somebody who had learned that I frequently worked for and with the senator’s favorite bodyguard, Ralph Marley. Someone who knew that there were people in Moscow who would just love to get their hands on me, the guy behind the paint-factory massacre in ’52, the guy who dismantled their top assassination team.”
He was chuckling now. “You have an amazingly over-inflated opinion of your own value, Mr. Hammer.”
“Maybe, but I was the perfect choice nonetheless. I was a guy who could serve his function and then be used for propaganda value. I was ideal for embarrassing the senator and the United States itself, by pinning an espionage rap on me. Even if it did cost the life of a nice Russian girl.”
He was grinning now, eyes wide behind the wire-frames. “Are you listening to yourself, Mr. Hammer? Have you enough of a grip on reality to know how ridiculous this all sounds?”
“You were on the inside, Doc. You were a friend of Jasper’s, someone he respected because of your N.A.S.A. work. You were close enough to know... whether as a trusted friend or just an observant bystander. that the senator and Irene Carroll were having an affair. That would be the ideal blackmail vehicle for getting the senator to agree to hire me as his bodyguard on the Russia junket.”
“I did no such thing.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t have to. Things had been put so perfectly into motion that Allen, as if he’d been brainwashed to do so, selected me as his Russian-trip bodyguard. No major prompting needed. All you did was gently suggest to Allen, after the shooting on the night of the party, that he was lucky to have me at the ready to step in for poor Ralph Marley.”
He gestured with both hands. “I suggested you to him. And what of it?”
I gestured with the .45. “I know there are others in this with you. I doubt you could have reached out to Pietro Romanos for this job. Whoever thought to hire a sharp shooter to play jewel thief knows his stuff, that’s for sure. Romanos could have easily shot the senator, no matter who pushed him aside. All you need is a head shot, a cinch for a champion shooter like Romanos. No, Romanos had two jobs to do the night of the party—shoot and kill Ralph Marley. and shoot me in the leg.”
He was chuckling again. “Wounding you, I suppose, to make a hero of you, but not so badly as to keep you from taking Marley’s place on the Russian trip? Simply absurd, Mr. Hammer. Ludicrous. Below even a man of your doggedly average intelligence.”
“Nice try, Doc. No, that’s not why Marley was to wound me, and specifically in muscle tissue, where some residual ache might be expected. No, this was about Complex 90. About smuggling it into the Russia in the most unexpected and frankly amusing way. And this is why no one has tried to kill me—why I’m still the target of abduction. Maybe you hope to have my ass hauled back to Russia, or possibly just want to make sure I’m not dead till you’re through with me—so that there are no embarrassing discoveries during the autopsy.”
Now he was afraid that I knew. And I did know. “What are you saying, Mr. Hammer?”
“You patched me up that night, all right. You took out the bullet but you also inserted a capsule filled with microfilm into my leg and sewed me up, didn’t you, Doc? You Commies didn’t have to smuggle Complex 90 into Russia—I did it for you!”
He was smiling now, a nasty smile, and he started to applaud. The Russians like to applaud—especially for themselves.
I shook the .45 snout at him like a scolding finger. “That’s why I was taken to that remand prison, Butyrka, not to the K.G.B.’s main facility, the Lubyanka. That’s why the warden there was arranging for me to go take my ‘physical’—the capsule would have been cut out of me, with me none the wiser, and I’d have been turned over on espionage charges for a nice big show trial.”
Giles shrugged. “But you did not cooperate, Mr. Hammer. Instead you cut yourself a path of death and destruction that could never possibly justify one man’s desire for survival. How do you sleep at night, Mr. Hammer?”
“I sleep like a baby, pal. Like an innocent babe.”
He was shaking his head in disgust. “What now? I suppose you kill me. That’s what you do, isn’t it? I have given my life to preserving and saving lives, but you, Mr. Hammer, only take and destroy lives. You a monster who holds himself above all others, and the only moral code you follow is an eye for an eye. Vengeance. You are pathetic. Go ahead, Hammer. Kill me. Kill the doctor so instrumental in the achievements of the space program. Kill the scientist whose only goal is maintaining a balance of power in a potentially apocalyptic world. Oh, and be sure to entertain the jury with this amusing tale you’ve spun.”
“No, Doc,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m not going to kill you. A guy told me earlier today that there are certain evil sons of a bitches who are more valuable alive than dead, and I think you qualify. You have too much knowledge that Uncle Sam could use—about Russia and K.G.B. espionage, and even Complex 90. It’d be selfish to just bump you the hell off, much as I’d like to.”
He glowered at me. He looked a little silly, with his feet dangling like that.
“Okay, Doc,” I said. “Hop down off of there like a good boy.”
I marched him out into the hall and that was when I heard Lisa Contreaux say, “Thanks for dropping by, Mike,” right before she jammed the hypodermic needle in my neck.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I was back in the jungle, huddled in my foxhole, and I could hear the metallic tattoo of machine-gun fire from the Jap nest in the trees. It was cold, dank, but I was sweating, a malaria flare-up maybe. My M-1 was empty and all I had was my .45, and all around me were sprawled the dead and wounded from the last banzai attack, and I was the last whole man and I had to do something. Maybe I’d have a chance if I crawled on my belly through the snarl of brush and around through the trees to come up behind them and empty the .45 into that grinning machine-gunner, but I couldn’t make my legs work, and my hand felt rubbery around the Colt’s grip, my fingers like sodden sausages, but that goddamn machine-gunning just kept up, as if it were on top of me, and then I wasn’t in the foxhole, I was in a tin-roofed, grass-walled hut and the guy from the nest was up there on the roof now, firing down at me, firing right down, and I stared up at the roof watching the bullets dimple the metal, wondering why those slugs didn’t tear through that cheap sheet of tin and into me and through me and...
...my eyes opened, and I wasn’t in a foxhole or a tin hut.
I was in the backseat of a car with my hands bound behind me, forcing me forward. Felt like tape, adhesive tape. I couldn’t see much, and only the bump of the wheels and the groans of the undercarriage on rough road told me I was in a car, a big car, possibly a luxury sedan. I could sense more than see the two big men I was sandwiched between. My head hung and my wits were about me enough to leave it that way, so as not to indicate I was awake, even if a little man inside my brain was beating his bass drum to provide music for the blazing pain behind my eyes.
The rain on the car roof, that machine-gun fire in my fever-dream, was unrelenting. The smell of rain was in the air and on the clothes of those I rode with—a man was at the wheel, a woman next to him, a tall man on my left, a big damn brute on my right. The sky was adding to the bass drum pounding in my brain with its own fireworks show accompanying a banshee orchestra working discordant variations on the climactic passages of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
Giant cymbals crashed, and the world turned white, and I saw the members of my escort party in a strobe flash.
Dr. Giles was hunkered at the wheel, in a yellow raincoat and floppy matching hat, like a school crossing guard. Eyes straining behind wire-rimmed glasses, he was trying to guide the vehicle through the driving rain, the foggy windshield no help. Lisa Contreaux was in the passenger seat, her Carmen black hair dampened and stringy, her raincoat transparent plastic.
“We’ll be fine,” the doctor was saying, sounding more confident than he looked. “This road is as straight as it is bumpy.
I could drive it in my sleep.”
“It feels like that’s what you’re doing,” she said, concerned.
Showing no concern at all were my bookends—a tall skinny cadaver of a man, his cheeks sunken and pockmarked, his eyes hooded and dead behind round black-rimmed glasses. His raincoat was black with water-repellent coating; drops pearled on it. His woolen hat was black and damp, a shorter version of a Cossack cap.
On the other side of me was the bulk of my old friend Comrade Gorlin, a dragon in a tan raincoat. His bald head was egg-shaped, its smoothness disrupted by the Apache cheekbones, his blunt nose with its thick, flaring nostrils, and that bristly brush of a mustache. Droplets of moisture were all over him, as if he were sweating. Maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to dry himself off. He had something more important to do.
Being in charge of me.
Where were we? I quickly sensed we were near water, and even over engine thrum and vehicle jostle, I could hear rough, choppy stuff on either side. Harbor sounds found their way through the angry night, like lost children crying for their mothers.
To my left, a beam of light was cutting through the storm, highlighting the driving rain. A boat’s beacon? No. Somebody searching for me? No such luck. There was a regularity to the sweep of the beam, though, and a fixed position. What could it be?
Then I knew. That was a prison searchlight, nearby but with water between us. Riker’s Island? If so, I was beginning to figure out where I was.
“Harmon, don’t hit it!” Lisa yelped. “It’s right in front of us.”
Brakes went on, tossing us forward, and it would have been a good time for me to make a move, if my hands weren’t bound and my head wasn’t exploding.
“Sorry,” the doctor said, giving his attractive passenger a sick little smile.
He got a key out of somewhere, and opened the car door, letting the storm come in to momentarily roar at us, as if we were standing too close to a caged beast. Then the man in yellow slicker and droopy matching hat seemed to get swallowed up in all that dark weather until lightning momentarily made the world white again and there he was, not ten feet away, opening a wire gate in a six-foot wire fence topped with barbed wire. Like Butyrka Prison.
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