“No,” she said, and tried to get away, but she was too weak, and he had her throat in a strong left hand. She was on the floor with her back against the bed, and when she forced her eyes open she could see Sir Lewis standing over her and she could see the biro in his hand. There was a look of genuine sadness on his face.
“I am sorry,” the old man said, and tightened his grip so she couldn’t scream.
She remembered DI Stingley saying, the eyes, there’s something about the eyes, what does it feel like, what does it feel like...
Felicity learned. Fortunately, she would never remember.
9
BELLMAN GOT TIRED OF looking out the window at the storm; he decided to peek in on Felicity and apologize to her if she was awake. Not, he thought, that he had endangered the State of the Alliance—if you wanted people to refrain from holding things back, you shouldn’t deal with spies. He was more worried about what he’d done to his working relationship with Felicity Grace.
Bellman’s problem was (and always had been, if you asked the Congressman) that he had an ornery streak of idealism, or optimism, or some kind of positive expectation of life that no amount of experience had been able to expunge. He was also just too damned emotional to be a spy. He’d been trained to hide it, but he didn’t like to hide it. He, in fact, hated it, hated the whole life.
Which was why, he reminded himself as some strange sense of propriety made him pull on a pair of pants, you got the hell out. There was no one to blame for putting him back in but himself and Leo Calvin.
He knocked on the connecting door and said Felicity’s name. No answer. He turned the knob and opened the door. He stood well clear of the opening. Felicity might be a nervous sleeper—he already knew she was a good shot. It would not be funny if he opened the door to apologize and got a bullet in the forehead for his trouble.
She wasn’t there.
Bellman stepped into Felicity’s room with the idea that maybe the Alliance was shakier than he’d thought. She wasn’t in the toilet. Had she run out on him? If so, why?
Another look showed him the question was academic. She hadn’t taken anything with her. Maybe her robe.
It didn’t make sense. She was a pro, she had a gun, she knew he was next door, how could anyone have gotten her out of there without her cooperation? Bellman decided he could figure it out later. He stepped out into the hall, he wasn’t sure why. To check for muddy footprints from Polish-made shoes, smell a Russian cigarette, something.
He heard a commotion a short way down the hall. Thumps. Grunts. Moans. A man’s voice and a woman’s. There weren’t enough people in the hotel for the woman to be anybody but Felicity. He ran to the door and tried the knob, cursing himself for wasting time as he did it. Of course it was locked.
A bare shoulder isn’t the best way to tackle a locked door, but it beats a bare foot. Bellman threw himself against the white-painted wood four times before it gave way, and he found himself staggering across the room. The stagger kept his body low enough for the bullet to miss him. The man who had fired the shot followed up by clipping Bellman along the side of the head with the gun, then running for it.
Bellman blinked a red curtain from his vision and went to the door. The man was out of sight, in a lift or down the stairs by now. Bellman went back to the room.
Felicity was on the floor, sitting very still. Her head was thrown back on the bed. He felt weak when he looked at her face, at the obscenity of the blue plastic pen sticking out from her eye. His shoulder began to throb and then his head, and he looked around for a sink to be sick in.
Then she moaned. And moved her head.
Bellman leaped across the room and clamped her head in his hands. He didn’t know what he could do to help her, but he was sure moving her head around with that thing in her could only make things worse.
She moaned again.
“It’s all right, honey,” he told her. “It’s all right.”
God, he couldn’t stand to look at her. He wanted to grab the pen and pull it out. Whatever damage had been done, it couldn’t be worse than this...this violation. And if he pulled it out, he would probably kill her.
What he needed was to get someone here who knew what the hell to do. He looked around for the telephone. He might just be able to reach it.
Carefully, trying not to alter the position of Felicity’s head, he stood up. He pressed his left knee against the back of his left hand, then gently eased the hand free, leaving Felicity’s head clamped between his right hand and the inside of his left knee. He stood with his right leg well back—he didn’t want to hit the pen accidentally and drive it the rest of the way into her brain. His interruption had probably stopped the Cyclops from doing it—he had no intention of finishing the job for him.
Bellman reached across his body with his left hand, stretching as far as he could without jostling Felicity. He cursed English phones for having no handle under the breaker buttons the way American phones did. Finally, he pressed his fingers against the bottom and his thumb against the dial, and got the phone down from the bedside table to the mattress, where he was able to get a new hold and bring the phone to where he could use it.
He clamped the receiver between left shoulder and ear and, still holding the woman steady, dialed 999.
Nothing happened. Random phone static, perhaps the hint of a distant conversation.
Bellman fought panic. Goddammit! If the phones are defective, if they cost her her life, I’ll tear this goddam place down brick by brick, starting with the hotel management, I’ll—
Hotel.
This was a hotel phone. He needed an outside line before he could do anything. He dialed another line. There was a click, and the quick double whirrs that told him the phone was ringing.
Two minutes later, an ambulance was on the way.
FOURTH
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow,
“If only you’d spoken before!
It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
“We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe
If you never were met with again—
But surely, my man, when the voyage began,
You might have suggested it then?”
—The Hunting of the Snark
Fit the Fourth
1
BELLMAN WINCED AS HE LOWERED himself into the black leather chair in Tipton’s office.
“Are you all right?” the Acting Section Chief asked.
“A bruise,” Bellman told him. “It’s nothing. About the third day the numbness wears off.”
A two-day wait, Bellman reflected, had probably been good for Tipton’s health, too. Because as Bellman waited the other night to hear what would happen to Felicity Grace, his brain came back from vacation, he put the pieces together, and figured out just what the hell had been going on around here. And he was angry.
He was still angry (too much emotion, he’d never be able to kick that), but he did not now intend to strangle Robert Tipton with his bare hands as he would have the other night if he’d been given the opportunity.
Instead, he’d taken the weekend to go back to what he knew best. He’d dug up some old contacts, found some specialists, and gotten things in place to work on his own. He preferred it that way. The one thing wrong with the Establishment was that it was established. Your enemy could find you if he looked hard enough. He could learn what you were up to. A pickup team could hit, run, and dissolve, and they couldn’t be caught by trolling the usual channels.
They were also answerable to Bellman alone. You could not ask for the heartfelt loyalty of someone who did this kind of work free-lance for money, but you could pay them enough to make it unlikely they’d want to wander. And for insurance, there was fear. Cross me and die. It wasn’t infallible, but it worked well enough. The Russians’ whole system was based on it.
Not that he’d be cutting ties to Tipton and
his Section. They could still be useful to him. That was why he was here. The idea was to react naturally without letting Tipton know that the game had been switched at halftime.
“You’ve seen Felicity?” Tipton asked.
“Every day,” Bellman replied. She’d been moved to a hospital in Chelsea on Saturday afternoon.
“How is she?”
“Her eye didn’t grow back. There’s still a hole in her head.”
Tipton made an expression of distaste. “I meant, how is she taking it?”
“Oh,” Bellman said. He crossed his legs. “That’s interesting, the way she’s taking it. She’s depressed, which you’d expect, and she’s angry at herself. She says she was stupid to let the Cyclops take her. She thinks she’s let you down.”
Tipton’s face showed concern, but it wasn’t all necessarily about Felicity. “Mmmm,” he said. “Could she tell you anything about this Cyclops?”
“Could she?” Bellman shrugged. “She didn’t. Says she didn’t remember anything about him.”
“You sound as if you doubt her.” Tipton was tapping a pencil on the desk, point, eraser, point.
Bellman let it go on for a long time before he spoke. “I think you ought to go visit her, Mr. Tipton.”
“I intend to. I was waiting to be absolutely sure she was out of danger. And, of course, though we’ve tried to keep it to a minimum, there has inevitably been some publicity about the case. It wouldn’t do for me to be seen in a newspaper photo.”
“She’ll recover. They’ll start fitting her for a glass eye as soon as the swelling goes down. They might have a tough time matching the color, but they’ll get there. But I do think you ought to go. Have Natalie whip up a disguise for you. Get out to the hospital. Reassure her.”
“We take care of our people,” Tipton said. “There’s no need for me to reassure her.”
“I don’t mean medically or financially, I mean professionally. Tell her she shouldn’t feel stupid.”
“Mr. Bellman, I hardly think—”
“Tell her,” Bellman went on, “that she has no reason to feel concerned about her stupidity compared to the stupidity of the asshole who put the fate of the entire Anglo-American Intelligence communications network in the hands of a fucking homicidal maniac.”
“So you know,” Tipton said.
Bellman wanted to laugh. Tell Tipton, no, it was an inspired guess. Instead, he said, “I know. I should have known days ago. It wasn’t going to take forever, Tipton. I’m only allowed so many stupid days a year, and I’ve used them all up through June on this.”
“Did Felicity tell you?”
“She told me nothing. That is a brave and loyal woman. She’s lying on a gurney being wheeled into an operating room with a pen sticking out of her head, and she’s worried about the honor of the Section.”
“How did you know?”
“You mean, will Stingley or any of the police down there be able to figure it out? Relax, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Stingley is a good man,” Tipton said.
“Sure he is, but you’ve got him stifled. That fingerprint business, for instance. That’s your doing, isn’t it?”
“It’s down to me. As is everything else in this fiasco. I’d still like to know how you learned Sir Lewis was doing these murders.”
“The shoulder was what clinched it. After I beat the thing to a pulp trying to get the door open, it seized right up. Couldn’t even brush my hair with it. It’s still pretty sore.
“But it got me thinking about Sir Lewis, and his war wound, the scar tissue along his back and shoulder that kept him—how did the file have it—‘from having full range of motion.’
“Then I thought of the Cyclops’s style of attack, like the power portion of a snooker stroke. Just about the only way a man who can’t raise his right arm can generate any power at all.”
“I see,” Tipton said. He was leaning back in his chair, holding a finger across his lower lip. The perfect picture, Bellman thought, of an executive being patient with an underling who’s telling him where he’s screwed up.
Bellman decided to oblige him. “Of course, that was just the clincher. The rest of it—Leo Calvin, the kidnapping, the Russians, the attempts on my life before and after I spoke to them, the timing of Sir Lewis’s removal from that chair—the only way any of it made sense was if Sir Lewis was the Cyclops.” Bellman raised his eyebrows. “A fact,” he added, “that no one thought fit to tell us.”
Tipton planted both fists on his desk blotter and shoved himself to his feet. “What would you have us do, damn you?”
Bellman looked at him. “Are you serious? I would have you not give one of your most delicate problems to a man who goes around poking people’s eyes out, that’s what I would have you do.”
“Very droll, Mr. Bellman.” Tipton’s face was red with controlled anger; his lips were so tight, his voice seemed to be escaping through the pores in his skin. “We had no sooner seen that fingerprint when we—it’s no use explaining. Go back to Washington and tell them we’re hopeless. That’s obviously what you intend to do. We’ll muddle through.”
“That’s the spirit,” Bellman told him. “Pecker up. Stiff upper lip.”
For the first time since Bellman had met him, Tipton looked dangerous. “You go to hell, Mr. Bellman,” he said.
“That’s two places you’ve tried to send me. I’ll go to both of them, no doubt, but not right away.”
“Whyever not?” Tipton said venomously.
“Because, Mr. Tipton, there is still a goddam job to be done. It’s more important than ever, don’t you think, that Sir Lewis Alfot be found before some bobby catches him and talks to the Mirror? Take a few moments and think about what the Russians could do with this.”
“I have thought about it.”
“I’ll bet you have. That was rhetorical. While I’m at it, I’ll tell you why you sent Sir Lewis off to do that report.”
“We sent him because your bloody Congressman wouldn’t take no for an answer!” Tipton sat down again. He played a rhythm track behind his words on the desk with his fist. “The labor trouble had to cease! Sir Lewis’s cover was unbroken! Sir Lewis had the people in his pocket! Sir Lewis was, God help us, ‘trustable.’ Sir Lewis would be chafing at his retirement! It was foolish of him to have retired! Sir Lewis would prepare and deliver the report! Or else the United States would have to rethink their entire Intelligence posture, and the U.K., to use the Congressman’s quaint, charming phrase, would be included out!”
“Yeah,” Bellman said. “That sounds like him. But I don’t think, somehow, the Congressman would have insisted if you’d just let him know why Sir Lewis retired.”
“Simple to say, Mr. Bellman. I was not shocked by Philby or Blount or the rest, but when that fingerprint came through here, I was shocked. This man had built the Section. Recruited me, damn near all of us personally. He represented values, Bellman. Don’t smirk, damn you.”
Bellman was injured innocence. “I always look like this. I read the file, and I read the report. I know what Sir Lewis meant to you here.”
“You couldn’t,” Tipton said flatly. “The Congressman talked about how the people love Sir Lewis, and they do. It’s a return of his love for them. But they don’t know the half of it. He has been, Bellman,” Tipton sat straight and solid in his chair, as if bracing himself for a gust of laughter, “a great man. A true Englishman.”
Bellman nodded soberly. He laughed at no one’s patriotism.
“If he’s gone mad, it’s because he’s taken too much on himself—felt like a father to a rebellious family that he feels has let him down. God knows, I feel that way myself sometimes, and I haven’t a tenth the justification Sir Lewis has.
“And I was not, Mr. Bellman, going to destroy what was left of the greatness of Sir Lewis Alfot. I cleared my actions at the highest levels. It was agreed to ease him out without letting him know we were aware of what he’d done. He was to be kept under guar
d so that he’d never do it again. His food was medicated, his contacts, and environment kept strictly regulated under the supervision of the Section psychiatric officer to make sure he never did these things again.
“He was, in short, under control.
“When the Congressman called, with his plan, his ultimatum, I was not going to tell him that Sir Lewis Alfot was no longer ‘trustable’ because he had decided for some dark reason to kill people at random. I would not do it!”
“No doubt this was backed up at the highest levels, too,” Bellman said.
Tipton raised his chin. “I take full responsibility.”
“Bully for you,” Bellman said. “Now I am smirking. Not at your sentiment, or even your action. But don’t underestimate the Congressman. I’ve regretted it every time I’ve done it. He’s not my favorite person in the world, but when his interest runs with yours, he can be the most trustable man on earth. I’ve seen him swear the President of the United States to secrecy—never mind which one—and I can tell you right now, when he finds out about Sir Lewis—”
“Which he will, if he hasn’t already,” Tipton said. “Don’t underestimate me, either, Bellman.”
“Which he will,” Bellman echoed. “I wanted to talk to you before I reported. You could always shoot me before I leave the room.”
Tipton ignored him; Bellman went on. “When he finds out, no power on earth will be able to get the secret from him. He’s got a lot invested in Sir Lewis, too.”
Tipton folded his hands in front of his face and took several deep breaths. “Well,” he said at last. “You haven’t taken me over all these jumps for nothing. What is it you want?”
“I want you to tell Felicity to talk to me, to tell me everything. It might just help.”
“Do you have an idea?” Bellman replied with a pointed silence. Tipton said, “I’ll write her a note. She’ll know it’s from me. I’ll tell her not to feel stupid, either.”
“That’s more like it,” Bellman said.
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