silhouette of the train. Then the abrasive wordsbroke through the dissonance and he froze.
“Very well thought out, Herr Converse! Some win,some lose. You lost”
Joel spun around. The man yelling at him in themetal chamber was the passenger who had gotten onthe train at Dusseldorf, the apologetic commuterwho had sat next to him until the obese salesmanhad asked him to exchange seats. In his left hand wasa gun held far below his waist, in his right theever-respectable attache case.
“You’re a surprise,” said Converse.
“I would hope so. I barely made the train inDusseldorf. Ach, three cars I walked through like amadman but not the madman you are, ja?”
“What happens now? You fire that gun and savethe world from a madman?’
“Nothing so simplistic, pilot.”
“Pilot.”
“Names are immaterial, but I am a colonel in theWest German Luftwaffe. Pilots only kill one anotherin the air. It is embarrassing on the ground.”
“You’re comforting.”
“I also exaggerate. One disconcerting move onyour part and I shall be a hero of the Fatherland,having cornered a crazed assassin and killed himbefore he killed me.”
“"Fatherland’? You still call it that?”
“Natiirlich. Most of us do. From the father comesthe strength; the female is the vessel.”
“They’d love you in a Vassar biology class.”
“Is that meant to be amusing?”
“No, just disconcerting in a very minor way,nothing serious.” Joel had moved imperceptibly untilhis back was against the bulkhead, his whole mind,his entire thinking process, on pre-set. He had nochoice except to die, now or in a matter of hoursfrom now. “I suppose you have an itinerary for me,”he asked as he swung his left arm forward with thequestion.
“Quite definitely, pilot. We will get off the trainat Wesel, and you and I will share a telephone, mygun firmly against your chest. Within a short time acar will meet us and you will be taken “
Converse slammed his concealed right elbow into the
bulkhead, his left arm in plain sight. The Germanglanced at the door of the forward car. Alow!
Joel lunged for the gun, both hands surging forthe black barrel as he crashed his right knee with allthe force he could command into the man’stesticles. As the German fell back he grabbed hishair and smashed the man’s head down onto aprotruding hinge of the opposite door.
It was over. The German’s eyes were wide,alarmed, glassy. Another scout was dead, but thisman was no ignorant conscript from an impersonalgovernment, this was a soldier of Aquitaine.
A stout woman screamed in the window, hermouth opened wide with her screams, her facehysterical.
“Wesel. . . !”
The train had slowed down and other excitedfaces appeared at the window, the frenzied crowdnow blocking those who tried to open the door.
Converse lunged across the vibrating metalenclosure to the exit panel. He grasped the latchand pulled it open, crashing the door into thebulkhead. The steps were below, gravel and tarbeyond. He took a deep breath and plunged outsidecurling his body to lessen the impact of the hardground, and when he made contact he rolled over,and over, and over.
He careened off a rock and into a cluster ofbushes. Nettles and coarse tendrils enveloped him,scraping his face and hands. His body was a mass ofbruises, the wound in his left arm moist andstinging, but there was no time even to acknowledgepain. He had to get away; in minutes the whole areawould be swarming with men searching for him,hunting for the murderer of an officer in theFederal Republic’s air arm. It took no imaginationto foresee what would happen next. The passengerswould be questioned including the salesman andsuddenly a newspaper would be in someone’s hand,a photograph studied, the connection made. Acrazed killer last seen in a back street in Brusselswas not on his way
to Paris or London or Moscow. He was on a trainout of Bonn, passing through Cologne, Essen andDusseldorf and he killed again in a town calledWesel.
Suddenly he heard the high-pitched wail of ahorn. He looked up the small hill toward the tracks;a south-bound train was gathering speed out of thestation several thousand feet away. Then he saw hishat; it was on the hill, halfway down. Joel crept outof the tangling brush, staggered to his feet, and ranto it, refusing to listen to that part of his mind whichtold him he could barely walk. He grabbed the hatand began running to his right. The south-boundtrain passed; he raced up the hill and across thetracks, heading for an old building, apparentlydeserted. More of its windows were shattered thanintact. He might rest there for a few moments but nolonger; it was too obvious a hiding place. In ten orfifteen minutes it would be surrounded by men withguns aimed at every exit, every window.
He tried desperately to remember. How had hedone it before? How had he eluded the patrols in thejungles north of Phu Loc? . . . Vantage points! Getwhere you can see them but they can’t see you! Butthere were tall trees then and he was younger andstronger and could climb them, concealing himselfbehind green screens of full branches on firm limbs.There was nothing like that here on the outskirts ofa railroad yard . . . or maybe there wasl To the rightof the building was a landfill dump, tons of earth anddebris piled high in several pyramids; it was his onlychoice.
Gasping, his arms and legs aching, his woundinflamed, he ran toward the last of the pyramids. Hereached it, propelled his way around the mass, andstarted climbing the rear side, his feet slipping intosoft earth, and wood and cardboard and patches ofgarbage, where it had been layered. The sickeningsmells took his mind off the pain. He kept crawling,clawing with each slipping foot. If he had to, hecould burrow himself into the stinking mess. Therewere no rules for survival, and if sinking himself intothe putrid hill kept a spray of bullets from ending hislife, so be it.
He reached the top and lay prone below theridge, dirt and protruding debris all around him.Sweat rolled down his face, stinging the scrapes onhis face; his legs and arms were heavy with pain, andhis breathing was erratic from the trembling causednot only by unused muscles but by fear. He lookeddown at the outskirts of the railroad yard, then up
ahead at the station. The train had stopped, and theplatform was filled with people milling around,bewildered. Several uniformed men were shoutingorders, trying to separate passengers apparentlythose in the two cars flanking the scene of thekilling or anyone else who knew anything. In theparking lot surrounding the station ablue-and-whitestriped police car, its red roof lightspinning, the signal of emergency. There was a rapidclanging in the distance, and seconds later a longwhite ambulance streaked into the lot whipped intoa horseshoe turn and plunged back, stopping closeto the platform. As the rear doors opened, twoattendants jumped out carrying a stretcher; a policeofficer above them on the steps shouted at them,gesturing with his arm. They ran up the metalstaircase and followed him.
A second patrol car swerved into the lot, tiresscreeching as it stopped next to the ambulance. Twopolice officers got out and walked up the steps; theofficer who had directed the ambulance attendantsjoined them, with two civilians, a man and a woman,beside him. The five talked, and moments later thetwo patrolmen returned to their vehicle. The driverbacked up and spun to his left, gunning the engine,heading for the south end of the parking lot,directly toward Converse. Again they stopped andgot out, now with weapons drawn they raced acrossthe tracks and down the slope of gravel and tar intothe wild grass. They would be coming back in min-utes, thought Joel, absently clawing the raggedsurface by his shoulders. They would stop and checkout the deserted building, perhaps call forassistance, but sooner or later they would examinethe huge mounds of landfill.
Converse looked behind him; there was a dirtroad marked with the tracks of heavy trucks leadingto a tall link fence, the gate held in place with athick chain. A man running up that road andclimbing that fence would be seen, he had to staywhere he was, hidden in the putrid rubble.
Another sound interrupted his franticcalculations a sound like one he had heard onlymoments before. On his right, in the pa
rking lot. Athird patrol car came speeding in its claxon howling,but instead of heading for the ambulance and thefirst police vehicle by the platform, it veered to itsleft, racing over to jOill the striped car at the southend of the lot. The two policemen in the field hadradioed for assistance, and Joel felt a numbing senseof despair. He was looking at his own executioners.Executioner. The newly arrived patrol
car contained only the driver or did it? Did thepoliceman turn his head and speak? No, he wasdisengaging something, a seat belt probably.
A gray-haired uniformed man got out, lookedaround then started walking rapidly toward thetracks. He crossed them and stood on the top of theslope, shouting down at the police officers in thesun-drenched brown grass. Converse had no ideawhat the man was saying, but the scene appearedstrangely out of place.
The two policemen came racing into view, theirguns no longer in their hands but holstered. Therewas a brief heated conversation. The older officerwas pointing to a distant area south of the landfill;his words, to judge by their volume, were commands.Joel looked back at his patrol car; on the panel ofthe front door was an insignia that was absent on theother car. The man held a rank superior to those ofhis young associates; he was issuing orders.
The younger policemen ran back across the tracksto their vehicle, their superior following but notrunning. They swung back the doors, literally jumpedin and, in a burst of the engine’s roar, swerved to theright and sped out of the parking lot. The older manreached his patrol car, but he made no movement toopen the door or get inside. Instead, he spoke atleast his lips moved and five seconds later the reardoors opened and two men emerged. One manConverse knew well. His gun was in Joel’s pocket. Itwas LeifLelm’s chauffeur, a taped bandage across hisforehead, another on the ridge of his nose. He pulledout a gun and barked a command to the other man;in his voice was the vengeful fury of a soldierdishonored in combat.
Peter Stone left the hotel in Washington. He hadtold the young Navy lieutenant and the slightly olderArmy captain that he would contact them in themorning. Children, he thought. Idealistic amateurswere the worst, because their righteousness wasusually as valid as their actions were impractical.Their childish disdain for duplicity and deceit did notcountenance the fact that to rip out the maniacalbastards frequently required greater malevolence andfar more deception than they could imagine.
Stone got into a taxi leaving his car in thebasement parking area and gave the driver theaddress of an apartment building on NebraskaAvenue. It was a lovely apart
meet, but it did not belong to him; it was leased byan Albanian diplomat at the United Nations whowas rarely there naturally, because he was based inNew York. But the former intelligence officer hadworked hard and turned the Albanian several yearsago, not merely with ideological pleas to a finescholar s conscience but also with photographs ofthis same scholar in all manner of sexualindulgences with very strange women women intheir sixties and seventies, bag ladies off the streets,who after carnal abuse were subject to sheerphysical abuse. He was a winner, thescholar-diplomat. A psychiatrist in Langley had saidsomething about wish-fulfillment sexuallyrepressed matricide. Stone did not need thatnonsense; he had the photographs of a son-of-abitchsadist. But it was the children that occupied hismind now, not the excesses of a fool that permittedhim access to a luxury apartment far beyond hisconsultation fees.
The children. Jesus! They were so right, theirsensibilities so correctly on target, but they did notunderstand that when they took on the CeorgeMarcus Delavanes of today’s world it was war in allits worst forms of brutality, because that was theway these men fought. Righteousness had to joinwith a commitment to crawl in the gutter ifnecessary, no quarter sought, for none would begiven. This was the last fifth of the twentieth centuryand the generals were going for it all; the paranoiaof their disgust and frustrations had come to theend of endurance.
Stone had seen it coming for years, and therewere fumes when he had come close to applauding,throwing his hands up in frustration, willing to sellwhat was left of his soul. Strategies had beenaborted men lost because of the maddeningbureaucratic restraints that led back to laws and aconshtudon that were never written with anythinglike Moscow in mind. The Mad Marcuses of thisplanet this part of the planet had a number ofvery plausible points. There were those in theCompany years ago who were adamant and notsquirrelly about it. They said, “Bomb the nuclearplants in Tashkent and Tselinogradl Blow them thehell up in Chengdu and Shenyang! Don’t let thembegin! We are responsible and they are not!”
Who knew? Would the world have been better off?
Then Peter would wake up in the morning andthat part of his soul he had not sold would tell him,no, we cannot do that. There had to be anotherway, a way without confronta
tionand wholesale death. He still clung to thatalternative, but he could not dismiss the Delavanesas megabomb off-the-willers. Where were we headingnow?
He knew where he was heading had beenheading for years. It was why he had joined thechildren. Their righteousness was justified, theirindignation valid. He had seen it all before in toomany places, always at the extremes of the politicalspectrum. The Delavanes of the planet would turneveryone into robots. In many ways, death waspreferable.
Stone unlocked the door of the apartment, closedit, took off his jacket and made himself the onlydrink he would permit himself for the evening. Hewalked to the leather chair by the telephone and satdown, taking several swallows before putting theglass on the table beneath the floor lamp. He pickedup the phone and dialed seven digits, then threemore, and one more after that. A very faint dial tonereplaced the original, and he dialed again. Everythingwas in order. The call was being routed through aKGB diplomatic scrambler cable on an island in theCabot Strait southwest of Newfoundland. OnlyDzerzLinsky Square would be confused. Peter hadpaid six negatives for the service. Five rings precededthe sound of a male voice in Bern, Switzerland.
“Allo?”
“This is your old friend from Bahrain, also thevendor in Lisbon and a buyer in the Dardanelles. DoI have to sing "Dixie’?”
“Well, mah wahd, ” said the man in Bernstretching out the phrase in a dialect bred in theAmerican Deep South, the French pretence dropped.“You go back a long time, don’t you, sub?”
“I do, sir.”
"I hear you’re one of the bad guys now.”
“Unloved, mistrusted, but still appreciated,” saidStone. “That’s more accurate. The Company won’ttouch me, but it’s got its share of unfriendlies intown who throw me consultations pretty regularly. Iwasn’t as smart as you. No deposits from UncleNo-Name in Swiss accounts.”
“I was told you had a little juice problem.”
“A big one, but it’s over.”
“Never negotiate a release from people worsethan you if you can’t pass a Breathalyzer test. You’vegot to scare them, not make "em laugh.”
“I found that out. I hear you do some consultingyourself. “
“On a limited basis and only with clients whocould pass Uncle No-Name’s muster. That’s theagreement and I stick to it. Either I do or someBoom Boom Botticelli is flown over and Massa’s inde core, cole ground. "
“Where the threats don’t do you any good,” saidthe civil"an.
“That’s the stand-off, Pearlie May. It’s our littledetente. “
“Would I pass muster? I give you my word I’mworking with good people. They’re young andthey’re on to something and they haven’t got an evilthought in their heads, which under thecircumstances is no recommendation. But I can’ttell you anything substantive. For your sake as wellas mine and theirs. Is that good enough?”
"If the consultation doesn’t take place in outerspace, it’s more than enough, and you know it. Yousaved Johnny Reb’s ass three times, only y’awl gotthe sequence backwards. In the Dardanelles andLisbon you got me out before the guns came in.Over in Bahrain you rewrote a report about a littlematter of missing contingency funds that probablykept me from five years in a Leavenworthstockade.”
“You were too valuable
to lose over a minorindiscretion. Besides, you weren’t the only one, youmerely got caught or nearly did.”
“Regardless, Johrmy Reb owes. What is it?”
Stone reached for his glass and took a drink. Hespoke, choosing his words carefully. “One of ourcommanders is missing. It’s a Navy problem, SANDPAC-based, and the people I’m with want to keepit contained. No Washington input at this stage.”
“Which is part of what you can’t tell me,” saidthe Southerner. “Okay. SAND l’AC that’s SanDiego and points west and wet until the date line,right?”
“Yes, but it’s not relevant. He’s the chief legalout there maybe was, by now. If he’s not pasttense, if he’s alive he’s nearer you than me. Also ifI get on a plane, my passport ignites the computersand things can’t go that way.”
“Which is also part of what you can’t tell me.”
“Check.”
“What can you tell me?”
“You know the embassy in Bonn?”
“I know it’s in trouble. Just like the security unite inBrus
sets. psycho’s cutting one hell of a path. What aboutBonn?”
“It’s all related. Our commander was last seen there.”
“He’s got something to do with this Converse?”
Steve paused. “You can probably fill in morespaces than is good for any of us, but the bones ofthe scenario are as follows. Our commander was avery upset man. His brother-in-law who,incidentally, was his closest friend was killed inGeneva “
“Down the road from here,” interrupted theexpatriate in Bonn. “The American lawyer whosedemise was engineered by Converse, at least that’swhat I’ve read.”
"That’s what our commander believed. How orfrom whom he got the information no one knows,but apparently he found out that Converse washeading for Bonn. He went on leave to go after him.”
The Aquaintaine Progession Page 48