“Right, right, deal,” she said.
Eventually the two engines were throbbing, rattling his teeth, then whirring smoothly and they were moving, half bouncing across the water. The instrument panel had lights of green, red, and white and the glow cast an unreal set of shadows across Kendrick’s craggy, stolid face. He could have been chiseled from stone, ageless. Then they were free of the water and out ahead of them the black night sky yawned …
Arden Sanger was stealing an evening away from Company business, engaging in an activity that, were it known, would quite probably lead to his early demise. He was writing his autobiography and, though he had only completed the section dealing with his football exploits, he was fully aware that the mere existence of such a document required the darkest secrecy. Consequently he followed no pattern in the time spent writing, altered his normal evening procedures as little as possible, and so far as his staff was concerned he was working in his locked study, just as he habitually did. But he was reliving the great Illinois game in his senior year, when Iowa City was his toy and a pair of pert little cheerleaders his post-game playmates. Jack Carson, indeed!
He had been sitting motionless at his desk for ten minutes, remembering the textures and scents of that remarkable evening, when the gentle buzzer on his desk hummed, unobtrusive but insistent, pulling him back across more than forty years.
“Yes, Dennis,” he said, having capped his fountain pen and depressed a lever on the plastic box.
“Sorry to bother you, boss, but I’ve got Liam on the scrambler and he’s very insistent on speaking directly to you …”
“Dennis, this is not remotely a priority matter. You realize that, don’t you? I am busy, you realize that, I trust?”
“Yes, sir. But Liam suggested that you and he were friends while I was nestled at my mammy’s breast … and he went on to imply that if I failed to put this call through to you he would personally rip my nuts off and hang them on my widow’s Christmas tree—”
“Nothing to worry about, then. You’re not married.”
“Shall I put him through, sir?”
“For your sake, Dennis, yes, you may put him through.” He stood up, picked up a pair of spring-loaded handgrips, and began squeezing them as he walked toward the French windows. Outside the spring night rested lightly on his patio, garden, pool, and tennis courts. Two men stood on the lawn, arms folded, looking up at the roof. The range of the television cameras was being given the monthly check.
“Arden, you there?” The voice came through the room speakers, having made its way into and out of the scramblers.
“Liam, this had better be good—” he began.
“You sound like you’re at the bottom of a well, which is funny, as you’ll soon understand—”
“Don’t worry how I sound, Liam, Just get on with it. I’m terribly busy. And, Liam, before I forget it, don’t frighten Herman that way.”
“Herman? Who the hell is Herman? Herman who?”
“Dennis Herman, the young fellow you just spoke to. What is it that you want, Liam?”
Liam McGonigle’s voice grew considerably less gruff as he groped along the slippery skeleton of his story, feeling for figurative chinks into which he could anchor the unlikely narrative, keep it from dropping away into unsalvageable absurdity.
“So, the first point is,” Liam broke the lancetip of his story, “we cannot actually find CRUSTACEAN … that is, Bert. He just snaffled, he’s gone.”
“I know his name, Liam. And what makes you think he’s actually gone …”
“Because there’s funny stuff going on. We’re at his place in Maine right now, I’m standing in his study … we’ve been here all afternoon and, well, some pretty weird shit went on here last night—”
“How weird?” Sanger waved to the two men who had strolled over to another section of the lawn and were standing, quietly chatting. They returned his gesture. “Liam, how weird?”
“Well, the window here in the study is broken, glass all over, no effort made to clean it up. The slug that broke the window came from outside—Andrew found it, dug it out of the spine of a volume of Montaigne’s essays. There are three sets of car tracks outside, the Rolls and a small car, a Dodge or a little Ford, I don’t really know. Whatever it was, it burned up last night … I mean, there was one hell of an explosion and fire in the driveway last night and it was a car, no doubt about that, the smell won’t go away.” Liam took a deep breath; Sanger waited. “There’s another set of tracks, too. Big tow truck, came and carried the wreckage away. Oh, the third set belongs to a red Pinto in the garage …”
“Hmmm.” Sanger felt sure there was more to the story but couldn’t imagine what it might be. Prosser was simply too old: he’d thought so for several years, but they shared a generation and he hadn’t wanted to simply cut the old man off. As usual, sentiment was an unlucky master. Still, this operation had hardly seemed significant at the start. Simple observation, information gathering, and then it had begun to go wrong. The college kid had been killed and from then on, from Sanger’s point of view, none of it had made any sense. “Go on,” he said smoothly, changing his tone, not wishing to inhibit poor old Liam who, while many years Prosser’s junior, was certainly not much of a fieldman, never had been, not even in his highly questionable prime. Liam belonged at a desk but Prosser had requested him, as well as Fennerty, and it had all seemed so harmless.
“Well,” Liam hesitated, “then we found one of the opposition, that is, the remaining member of the opposition team, the little one—”
“Ah, the one with the porkpie hat …”
“You really amaze me, remembering that,” Liam said admiringly. Sanger smiled at himself in a round, gilt-framed mirror over a bowl of yellowish flowers. “Well, we found him down the well … that’s what I meant when I said you sounded like you were—”
“Down a well? Whatever prompted you to look down a well?”
“Just looking around—blood speckled on the side. Anyway, we took a peek down and there he was, not so deep, and most of his head was missing … in fact, we found a good bit of his head on the rim, once we looked a little closer.”
“And what did you do about the body?”
“Left it. It’s nothing to us, one of Moscow’s boys, just a—”
“Moscow,” Sanger said sharply. “Why Moscow?”
“I don’t know, a guess … whoever he was working for, we can always find him if we need him.”
“You think Bert killed him?”
“Well, who else?”
“Chandler. I assume you haven’t found Chandler yet …”
“No, we haven’t. You think …”
“Why not? They were chasing Chandler, they want Chandler, maybe they were unlucky enough to catch him. Let’s say, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Chandler and Brennan,” Liam mused. “What a thought.”
“Am I right in saying that as of this moment you don’t know where anyone is?”
“You could say that …”
“And we still don’t know what everybody’s after? That’s right, isn’t it? Tell me, Liam, do you know anything about Stronghold? Does the word mean anything to you?”
“No, means nothing to me.”
“My God, this whole thing is the damnedest mess, no definition to it, sloppy … You know what it smacks of, Liam? Real life, that’s what. All fouled up, unpredictable, sloppy, no order to it. I hate things like this, to be frank. Hate them … and this thing has been sloppy from the start …”
“Look, Arden, we’re not that crazy about being out here … there’s nobody left to die but us, you see what I mean? We want to come in out of the cold. Heh, heh.”
“Don’t talk like that. You can fly back here whenever you want. This whole blasted thing was busywork, you know that. Come in out of the cold! Nonsense!”
“Well, what do you want us to do? We’re still hired hands. Andrew says to tell you it’s a matter of—what, Andrew? Ah, self-respect, Arden. A matter of self-
respect …”
“I see. Well, Liam, if I tell you about Stronghold, you’ll have some exercise ahead of you. Are you two up to that?”
“We’re not senile, for Christ’s sake. You just tell us what to do …”
“All right. First thing, you’ll need flares, red flares …”
Liam groaned. Arden Sanger smiled to himself. He was going to straighten this out quick. Damn quick. The autobiography would just have to wait …
Bert Prosser was exhausted. He knew what he looked like, there was no need to look in the Rolls-Royce mirror: face gray, eyes bloodshot, mouth terribly dry, hands shaking if he removed them from the steering wheel. He only weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and he felt as if there was no flesh on the bones: he felt like something hung in a doorway on Halloween to scare children. The fear of his own death hung about him, like the odor of old meat. Soon, he was going to die soon: everything had gone wrong, it had all blown up in his face.
Killing the drunken man—his employee, for Christ’s sweet sake, a man who wisely or not had depended on him—had set him off. He’d thought, jerking awake in the middle of the night, hallucinating, that he was already dead, that he was locked in his coffin and water was seeping in at the bottom. When he woke, he’d still been able to see the man in the coffin with the water licking at him … but it was the man he’d killed and it wasn’t a coffin, it was the damp, stinking well …
Then there’d been the mess of getting rid of the burned-out car, bribing a man with a tow truck, throwing his own slight weight around, making up a story. God, it was so tiring and he couldn’t depend on the man to keep quiet. Too many loose ends. He had no idea where Andrew and Liam were, assumed they were befuddled, somewhere out there, and would finally work their way back to Boston and get in touch with him. Yes, it was sloppy, terribly sloppy, but he was only human. Very old, very human. He would never have let things dribble off like that, not in the old days. But in the old days he didn’t get the silly operations, the crazy ones: jokes, fieldmen called them. And this had been one of the worst jokes, no planning, utterly reactive, and made no sense either from Petrov’s side or Sanger’s. Petrov never should have gotten involved and Prosser wondered how he had, knowing that he would never know. And Sanger had responded, taking Bert’s own estimate of the situation.
Shit! He’d handled it all so badly. Indecisive. Old … He reached Cambridge a little after nine o’clock, put the Rolls in the garage, and went in by the outdoor entry which led to his private quarters. A light burned in the kitchen and he ignored it, sought no conversation with Ogden or Mrs. Grasse. He would call Sanger on Tuesday. For tonight, he would take some sleeping pills and blot out the worries. Chandler was safe, the woman was safe, he couldn’t do anything about Brennan, and he was eventually going to have to show up at his office. What he needed was time to restore himself, his vigor, however much remained.
It was rather more than forty-eight hours since Krasnovski had visited the dacha and Maxim Petrov had more or less forgotten the messy result of the joke on his opposite number. In fact, once Krasnovski had departed the country house, Petrov had contemplated just how the whole ugly business might be blamed on the younger man who needed a severe lesson in humility if anyone ever had. But the means eluded him. So he’d turned his attention to somewhat more meaningful problems in Helsinki and Zurich where two of his employees had muffed the ball rather badly. As a result of trying to scour the floor after those two while keeping his own fingers clean, he had worked so late that a midnight snowstorm had caught him, made sleeping in the Kremlin preferable to going home.
Consequently he was at his desk at an altogether ungodly hour the next morning, appropriate he supposed glumly for a godless state, when Krasnovski appeared bright-eyed, pink of cheek, full of helpful suggestions. Petrov hated helpful suggestions.
“Don’t speak,” Petrov said. The Sporting News, which Krasnovski had been told was the peculiarly obscure key to a code regarding the United States which only Petrov knew, was spread flat on the desk. The Yankees had beaten Cincinnati in Florida and Petrov thought they just might possibly meet in the World Series.
“I regret to say that I must,” Krasnovski said, smiling.
Petrov marked his perusal of the box score with a forefinger and stared balefully up at Krasnovski: “All right then. Speak.”
“You recall the situation in Boston that we discussed Sunday morning?”
“If I must.”
“Well, we seem to have stopped killing their people …”
“We weren’t killing their people. We were killing plain, ordinary, innocent citizens.”
“As you wish—”
“No, no, as it is. Or was. But, in any case, you say we’ve stopped?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s good news.”
“Not altogether, sir.”
“And why not, you irritating fellow?”
“Because now they have killed our people.”
“Oh.”
“Two of them. The freelances.”
“Who killed them?”
“A Harvard professor, who may die from the attempt, killed one. We’re not altogether sure who killed the other.”
“Source?”
“CANTAB.”
“He probably killed them himself,” Petrov said, laughing bleakly.
“Is that humorous, sir?” Krasnovski’s innocence deserved a grenade.
“It was a test, Krasnovski, and I regret to inform you that you failed. We will have no discourse whatsoever regarding my sense of humor.” He returned to The Sporting News, moving his finger. “By the way,” he said casually without looking up, “before our fellows were killed, did they happen to get what they were going after?”
“No. We are informed that the item is now out of our reach.”
“Out of our reach?” Though he no longer saw the box scores, he kept his head down. His focus had shifted: he was thinking and trying to keep from screaming aloud. “Out of our reach?”
“So said CANTAB.”
“From where did he contact us?”
“Via New York. From a roadside telephone in Maine.”
“Our people are dead and the point of our efforts is out of our reach.” He finally got up, went to watch the fresh snow cover, the pale light of morning, hardly light at all. It looked as if the world had been plunged back into winter. “What about the Chandler fellow? And wasn’t there something about a woman who went with him?”
“Source informs us that they are missing. He cannot find them.”
“Either he has rather badly lost his touch or … well, he may not be absolutely candid with us.” Petrov impatiently folded The Sporting News.
“Might we not just abort the whole thing?”
“No, Krasnovski, we might not. Now go on about your business while I attend to this. Go on …”
Krasnovski departed reluctantly, pouting, eyes downcast.
Out of reach.
Petrov finally allowed himself a smile. Out of reach. That was a phrase he’d heard before from CANTAB. It had a meaning and the meaning came down to a single word: Stronghold.
He leaned back, regarded the graying sky, the snow which whitened everything he saw from his window. The question in his mind was hardly anything new: who was CANTAB actually working for? Petrov had always assumed that the old man was a mercenary, an expert who was called upon only at times when no one else would do. Did he perform the same sort of function for Sanger? But, then, why not? So long as jobs of work did not conflict: and surely this business had had nothing to do with Sanger. It was only a scrap of paper, nothing Sanger could possibly have known about … No, it was a matter of bad luck. Bad luck that Sanger’s people had gotten into it … if they were in it, if they had killed the two thugs working in Boston. He squeezed his temples between his fingertips: his days were never really less than complex, but ill-defined, long-distance problems such as this one, which found details growing more ornate rather than less so, were
the things he hated most. Unimportant by themselves, acquiring importance only because they were strangely executed.
Strangely executed, indeed.
He contemplated calling Sanger on the direct line and finding out what the hell was going on. But what if Sanger wasn’t in on any of it? Then his curiosity would become a wild-eyed demon, thrashing about, stirring up trouble where there had been only confusion.
He tried with considerable determination to think logically.
Did he care about the dead fieldmen?
No, not really. Bunglers, CANTAB had wanted to terminate them for the bungling alone.
Did he care about what games CANTAB might be playing?
No, not really. He was an old man who’d gotten into this business only because it seemed so simple and harmless. CANTAB would never be trusted with anything major … He would surely blow too easily and, anyway, his greed might long ago have made him a double agent. He just wasn’t important to Petrov.
What was important, then?
The document. And the people who had it. And CANTAB had said out of reach … Stronghold. It had to be Stronghold.
He called Krasnovski back into the office.
“Get me the Montreal section man, please.”
Not yet midnight.
Fennerty and McGonigle, awake and blinking with the aid of pills, a trunkful of red flares, headed northward on the best road. They would switch places every couple of hours to ensure the pace.
In the Atlantic a submarine floated like a dead fish, gleaming darkly beneath the moon. The officer in charge had spent an hour decoding the oddest communication he’d ever received: there was no alternative but to request a confirmation. So far as he could tell, the highly secret maneuvers which were to have been carried out against a small, uninhabited island used for practice by the Navy were now supposed to become operational—that is, real, for Christ’s sake. So far as he could tell, there was only one possible conclusion, inescapable, but it was a tough pill to swallow … Behind all the bullshit and razzmatazz, it looked like the United States had gone to war!
Against Canada …
In Montreal a fat man’s late evening dinner was ruined: his chief aide found him in a warm, fragrant, second-story Italian restaurant, tucking into pasta with dark sauce, a chilled bottle of Soave Bolla uncorked and waiting. Struggling into his overcoat, he hurried back to his office. He quickly had to validate an order, select the individuals to carry it out, and get word to them. It was, after all, no easy thing to carry out an offensive mission, mounted on the spur of the moment, within a sovereign nation so far from home. The instructions were long and detailed and required something akin to a miracle from the man in Montreal. He was however given considerable incentive: his career, and quite possibly his life, depended on his success. “Crazy,” he thought to himself as he began preparations, “it gets crazier all the time.” The telephone number in Halifax did not answer for nearly an hour … In the meantime he threw up twice.
The Glendower Legacy Page 24