“I don’t give a damn about your merit badges but I am going to kill you unless you start talking.” Cory extended the pistol until it pointed directly at Norm’s forehead. He braced his right wrist with his left. “Now!”
“Can I have a drink?”
“Ruth.”
“Right.” She scurried to the bar cart and mixed a drink with trembling hands.
“Did you stay in college long enough to ever have a history course, old buddy?”
“Don’t smart-ass me, Norm.”
“It’s a serious question. What I’m about to say won’t make much sense unless you have a vague idea concerning the historical currents in the world, both past and present.”
“I’m listening.”
“My father was exposed to the Committee in the late thirties. He had interests in several South American countries. He not only learned of the Committee but became active within its structure. In certain countries there is change but no change. Regimes come and regimes go. Presidents and prime ministers change, but all is the same. Bureaucracies, the land, wealth, institutions, all continue undisturbed. This pattern becomes quite evident if you study certain countries carefully.”
“Are you trying to tell me that some secret group controls this?”
“Yes and no. Nothing is quite so simplistic, old buddy. The group, as you call it, only wishes for certain things to remain sacrosanct: positions, wealth, a certain continuing hierarchy. The hierarchy that ultimately controls the destiny of all countries.”
“Composed of the wealthy.”
“Not only those with the most to protect, but the armed forces, the police authorities, and the bureaucracy. The Committee took its leaf from the enemy. Do you know how many Communists were with Mao in 1921?”
“A handful.”
“Less than a dozen. Do you realize how few initially went with Castro into the mountains?”
“I see your point.”
“Exactly. It proves what a few hard-core men who are highly disciplined can achieve. We have refined the process one step further, since we are hardly revolutionaries. We maintain three-man cells. The three are known only to one another.”
“There has to be control somewhere.”
“Control yes, exposure no. I know the men in my cell; the only other contact I have is with the man with the code name, Rook. This type of organization makes the Committee invulnerable. You might know me but no one else.”
“James and Pierce.”
Norm looked startled for a moment but quickly regained his composure. “Two minor police officers and a commodities broker. Now you see the dead end, Cory. That is why we are invincible.”
“You must know others.”
“Only where they are. They’re in the police forces, the FBI, CIA, the State Department, the army, and they are men of wealth and power who want to protect this country. They are a thousand strong, welded into three-man rings capable of enforcing their will on any aspect of this country. They are capable of using force in order to protect this country.”
“Formed by your father?”
“Yes. He returned to the States to spend the rest of his life, money, and energy forging the Committee. He did it well.”
“I’m beginning to see where I fit into this. Your group decided to eliminate the President, and I was to take the fall for the assassination. I was the dissatisfied ex-army officer, bitter over his father’s disgrace, who would protect the real killer and the real reason for the killing.”
“It seemed a good plan at the time, and a scenario we’ve used before. It would have worked well except for your inadvertent sighting of our man across the street. What in hell were you doing with a live round in the weapon, Cory?”
Cory ignored the question. “Why assassination?”
“He must be removed. Détente was bad enough, but Crescatt wants to crawl in bed with the bastards. He must be, will be, removed.”
“And the Vice-President?”
“He’s controlled by one of ours.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Of course.”
“Who is Rook?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
Norm smiled. “Hell, Cory, you can put pins under my fingernails. I can’t tell you something I don’t know. There is one possible way out for you.”
“Such as?”
“Remember the old adage, if you can’t beat them …”
“I’m wanted by every law-enforcement agency in this country.”
“Something could be arranged. I’m sure that Rook would find a spot for a man of your talents.”
The storm passed directly over the house. The day dimmed to murky light as rain pelted the roof.
“He’d probably want me to finish the job I aborted for you.”
“You’re already wanted for the attempt. Why not go all the way? You would have our guarantee that we’d take care of you afterwards.”
“Passport, money, a flight to South America?”
“Something like that.”
Cory leaned back in the chair, with the gun across his lap. Ruth walked toward him with a glass filled with ice in one hand and a whisky decanter in the other. “You know something, Norm? I don’t believe you.”
“It might be the best shot you’ve got. If you’ll pardon the pun.” Norm seemed more relaxed, as if certain he had reached Cory.
Cory had a single flashing thought. It suddenly seemed incongruous that Ruth would walk toward him with the whisky decanter. He turned toward her, but it was too late.
The blow from the heavy cut-glass decanter caught him across the side of the head. The force was sufficient to knock him across the side of the chair. He sprawled on the floor.
An underwater ballet moved in fluid slow motion. Quick flashing rings converged across his vision. Ruth still stood by the chair, holding the decanter neck with both hands as it swung back over her shoulder.
Norm catapulted from his chair. His mouth was a grim line as he moved across the room toward Cory.
He didn’t lose consciousness, although the black rings twisted into tighter and tighter concentric circles. He fired the revolver. The bullet passed harmlessly into the ceiling as a crack of thunder boomed over the house.
Norm changed direction and ran for the door. Ruth rushed after him and pulled the heavy paneled door shut after she left.
The rings turned red and obstructed his view. The pistol slipped from his fingers. He had to move. He had to stand. He pulled up his knees and pushed with both hands until he was on all fours. He fumbled for the gun. Reaching for a chair arm, he pulled himself up. He swayed erect.
The room rocked. The windows tilted to an obscene angle. Staggering across the floor to the desk, he fell across its surface as his hand tilted the phone receiver from its cradle.
He heard the click of dialing numbers from an extension in another part of the house. The clicking continued and then stopped when the dialer on the extension realized that a connection could not be made.
Cory’s head began to clear. Strength returned to his legs. The rings preambling probable unconsciousness began to fade.
Cory staggered across the room and reached for the door handle.
A shot boomed across the hall. Wood splintered near his waist as the projectile passed through the door into the far wall. He stepped aside and braced his back against the wall. Two more shots followed in quick sucession and blew wood splinters across the room.
He waited, counted to ten, and then threw the door open and flung himself onto the hall floor and rolled over twice in quick turns.
Norm was down the hall with his back to him, fumbling at the front door. Cory snapped two shots in his general direction and knew he had missed as Norm spun into the room to the right.
The darkness of the storm had turned the interior of the house into deep shadows. The rain had increased to a crescendo as lightning bolts cast intermittent flashes of illumination across the hall.<
br />
For a moment he wondered how Norm had obtained the heavy revolver he was using, and then remembered the gun room with its armory of weapons.
Cory lay on the floor with the pistol extended, ready to fire should Norm come back into the hall. He tried to remember the layout of the house. It was so many years ago, back to junior-high-school days, when they had tramped these halls with the busy dedication of small boys. He must remember.
The downstairs house layout flashed across his mind like a computer printout. When he fired at Norm near the front door, the other man had whirled into the room at his right. The dining room. A long pantry ran from the dining room back to the kitchen. In the kitchen there was another exit back to the hall directly behind Cory.
He was flanked. Without further conscious decision, Cory rolled over and through the door to the gun room. A quick burst of shots plowed across the carpeting in the hallway where he had lain only seconds before. Cory scrambled to his feet and pressed against the wall. He held the pistol tilted up, ready to fire or swing in any direction.
Across the room a series of windows looked out on an enclosed rear porch. Ruth Lewis, a tiny .25 caliber Beretta Jetfire clenched in her hand, walked slowly past the windows. Cory raised his pistol, steadied it, and let the normal motion of his arm swing with her as she tiptoed across the porch.
She stopped and turned until she faced him. They were less than twenty feet apart. Her eyes widened as she stared at his gun. She took a step backward and then another.
His finger tightened as the trigger squeeze began.
He lowered the gun until its menacing barrel pointed at the floor.
Their eyes met and held for a moment before she turned and ran from the porch.
A series of shots were fired through the door. Cory recognized the small pop-pop of a Beretta and the loud report of a heavy weapon, probably a .357 Magnum. A guncase along a rear wall shattered as several bullets pierced the glass.
The Magnum’s cylinders were undoubtedly empty by this time. There might be a chance for him to rush them. He took a step toward the door. Norm could have a reloader with him. If that were the case, he could insert new cartridges in a matter of seconds. Cory hesitated and let his hand fall away from the door handle.
It was time. It had to be now.
He jerked the door back against the wall and ran across the hall, into the living room, where they had talked earlier. Norm was dialing the phone. The Magnum dangled by his side.
Cory crouched and aimed. “Put the phone down. Don’t turn!”
Norm slowly lowered the phone. Ruth stood in the center of the room with the small automatic hanging uselessly from her fingers.
“Shoot him, Ruth,” Norm commanded his wife in a low voice.
She gave an unintelligible answer from the depths of her throat.
“Go ahead,” Norm insisted.
“Drop your weapon,” Cory said quietly.
“It’s a stand off, old buddy. You shoot me, and she shoots you.”
“That pop gun she’s holding is empty.”
“Mine isn’t.”
“You try and turn toward me and you’re dead.”
“What you say is true.” Norm’s fingers tightened on his weapon as it angled slowly up to point directly at his wife. “I can hit her without turning, Cory. Unless you want her dead, drop your gun.”
Both men’s guns erupted simultaneously. Both shots were accurate, as metal-jacketed projectiles tore into Ruth and Norm Lewis.
Cory stood over them as they died on the floor before him. Their eyes were glazed and unseeing before he could cross the few steps to stand over them. His pistol slipped from his fingers and thudded to the carpet.
He slowly turned and walked from the house.
CHAPTER 16
He made it to the outskirts of West Deerford before he had to pull the car off to the side of the road. He staggered across the shoulder, bent over knee-high grass, and was sick for a very long time. The thunderstorm was beginning to move onward, and clouds raced rapidly overhead. The vestiges of a light rain fell as he bent over with his hands on his knees.
Cory looked up at the sky and felt rain pelt against his face. “Oh, God!” The cry was torn from him and uttered in a voice he hardly recognized. He must get back to Ginny. Only she could give him surcease from these events which seemed to increase with such horrifying velocity.
He stumbled to the car and threw it in gear. The tires skidded on slick, rain-covered grass. The rear wheels spun for a moment before the vehicle fishtailed out onto the highway.
He had driven ten miles toward Lantern City before he realized that he was crying.
In a warm and secret part of her she awaited his return. She spent most of the day in a lazy state, letting the hours tick slowly by.
She stood and brushed sand off her legs. In one sweeping motion she gathered the large beach towel and flapped it in the air. She tucked the towel under her arm and began to walk back to the cottage.
She was nearly to the patio when she saw them. Two men came around opposite sides of the house. The one on the right was a large man with bulky shoulders. The second was thinner and wore tweedy clothes. They each held guns.
She turned and ran for the water and heard them pounding after her. She reached the water’s edge, where small wavelets lapped at her ankles and then at her knees as she pushed onward. She heard a man’s heavy breathing as he splashed behind her. If she could only reach deep water, she could swim and outdistance them. She plunged ahead.
The tide was out! It was another seventy-five yards to deep water. She glanced over her shoulder. The larger of the two was nearly upon her. She turned back toward the sea and ran.
The man’s shoulder caught her in the small of the back and knocked her, face down, in the water. She floundered in the shallows. Her arms flailed as she fought to regain her footing. He put his hand around her waist and lifted her up and walked back toward shore.
The second man stood above the waterline. His gun had disappeared, and he lit a pipe with studied nonchalance. “Take her inside,” was his quiet command.
Her hands were bound with double lengths of clothesline, and she was forced into a straight-backed chair.
“Where is he?” was the first question.
“I don’t know.”
Her head snapped to the side from the force of the stinging slap across her cheek. She shook her head to clear the black specks that converged across her vision. Her head snapped to the opposite side as he backhanded her across the other cheek.
She felt a thin trickle of blood seep from her nose and drip down over her bare stomach and thighs.
“Where?” the voice asked in a dispassionate tone.
“Don’t know.”
“You’ve got ten minutes,” the man with the pipe said as he walked from the kitchen.
Ginny’s eyes widened as the large man flipped on a gas burner under a front eye of the stove. He carefully selected a long fork with a wooden handle from the utensil drawer and placed the prongs over the jutting blue flame. He turned to face her with arms akimbo. “Well?”
She shook her head in violent denial.
Wilton James sucked on his pipe and looked across the wetlands by the side of the house. A seagull swooped down and dipped its head quickly into the shallows and then flew upward in graceful flight. The bird carried something aloft in its beak. He watched, with interest, as the gull rose to the height of fifty feet and then let the object fall to the ground.
The clamshell hit a large rock and shattered. The gull dove earthward and hopped over to the broken shell. Its beak pecked again and again into the shattered clam. James wondered how many thousands of generations of gulls it had taken to develop that instinctual corollary for survival.
Sergeant Pierce cleared his throat. James turned to face his subordinate. “Well?”
“He’s gone to Deerford to talk to Atkins, of the FBI.”
“That’s already taken care of.”
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p; “Then out to the Hunt Club to see what he can find there.”
James glanced at his watch. “What time did he leave?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“Damn!”
“She’s sure he’s coming back, but I don’t know.”
“If he has half a grain of sense he’ll keep going until he hits the Pacific Ocean.”
“He could be there already.”
“But she thinks he’s coming back,” James mused. “I assume they’re sleeping together?”
“I didn’t ask her.” Sergeant Pierce turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll ask her. She’s very cooperative now.”
“Forget it. I know they are.” He glanced at his watch again. “We’ll stay here tonight in case he returns. There’s always that chance.”
Cory seemed to awaken from a fugue state as the car approached Lantern City He was not conscious of having driven the last twenty-five miles. He shook his head as if to orient himself. His thoughts were still a jumbled mass of emotions and visual images that clicked by in a confused montage.
Over and over again he fired at Norm. The man’s dying reflex action pulled the trigger of the pistol—it fired, and Ruth died. Over and over again husband and wife, old friend and lover, died.
He wanted the sanctuary of the cottage. He wanted to throw off his clothes and walk to the shower to wash the stink of death from his body. Ginny would have a drink waiting. They would go to bed and would lie with hands and bodies entwined. Then the violent pictures would disappear.
He needed her.
He turned down the secluded lane that led toward the wetlands and the small house on the beach.
She lay bound on the kitchen floor and quietly cried. The burns on her legs and thighs hurt, but there was a deeper pain. She had told them everything she knew. She had revealed Cory to them, and now they would lay in wait with their guns, to shoot him when he parked the car and walked toward the cottage.
The pain, hurt, and deceptions of a lifetime surged through her. Memories of an almost-forgotten husband rose and faded in rapid sequence. The hurts by other men in other places and other times were now culminated in the physical abuse by the men waiting in the living room.
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