by Paul Moomaw
“I don’t give a shit what he is, long as he has the money.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But the sooner he’s gone, the safer I’ll feel.”
Nick looked away and smiled. His hand brushed the pistol Hesse had given him. He took the last bottle and carried it to the waiting pilot.
“Now, I think you got something for us,” he said.
“Yes.” Rafael reached into the airplane and pulled out two packets wrapped in white butcher paper. He walked down the pier to the shore, and handed one packet to each of the men.
“Count it,” he said. “I do not wish complaints later.”
The two men opened their packets and began fingering and counting wilted hundred-dollar bills.
“Not very crisp stuff,” Leonard said.
“Old money is less conspicuous.”
Leonard shrugged and continued counting.
“Ten thousand,” Nick said.
Leonard finished counting, nodded. “Same here.”
“Good.” Rafael walked toward the pier, paused. “Stay here until I am out of sight.”
“What difference does it make?” Leonard asked.
“Just do as I say. You were not hired to ask questions.”
Leonard snorted and riffled the stack of currency. “Whatever, man.” He marched back to the van. Nick remained on the shore, watching as Rafael returned to the airplane. The pilot released the lines, grabbed the wing strut, and pulled himself into the pilot’s seat. The door swung shut, and the engine coughed to life, sputtered briefly, then smoothed into a low snarl as the craft turned its nose toward the center of the lake. Once there, it paused. Nick waved, but there was no response. The engine surged with a deep growl and the airplane moved forward, picking up speed. It was far down the lake when it lifted from the water and headed west.
Nick returned to the van and climbed in.
“That’s the end of that,” Leonard said.
“Almost,” Nick said, and slipped a hand into his jacket pocket, fingering the pistol.
“So start the engine and lets get the hell out of here,” Leonard said.
Nick nodded and reached for the ignition key. Then he cocked his head.
“Sounds like he’s coming back this way,” he said.
“Maybe he forgot to give us our bonus.”
The sound of the engine grew louder, and the seaplane appeared over the trees again. It flew directly toward the van, approaching in a shallow dive, passing very close overhead.
Leonard peered out the window at the retreating plane. “What the fuck do you suppose he’s up to?”
Nick shook his head. “Who knows?” The two men watched as the aircraft turned and banked and flew back in their direction again.
“Now what?” Nick said, as the plane passed low over head once more. He started to stick his head out the window to get a better look.
With a soft, whoofing sound, a yellow-orange blossom of flame enveloped the van. The vehicle rose on its wheels, then sagged back into the spreading flames. The passenger door opened and a burning body fell half-way out and then hung there, blackened arms stretching toward the ground.
The seaplane circled once more over the ruined van, then pointed its nose west and raced away, the rising sun glinting on its wings.
Chapter 6
Alain Delon laid the binoculars in his lap and rubbed his eyes.
The air always stinks here,” his companion said. “Gives me a headache.”
Delon grinned. “Too close to Germany, non?”
The other man, whose name was Jules Epinard, sniffed loudly. He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his trousers and blew his nose.
“Who can tell, any more?” he said. “We make enough of our own stink these days.” He waved vaguely at the land around and below them, the rolling Moselle Valley. The two men sat on the remains of a low, stone fence, perched on the side of what passed for a hill in this part of the Lorraine. Their car, a nondescript Peugot sedan whose gray paint needed washing badly, sat a few meters below them. The vehicle belonged to Epinard, and was as dirty on the inside as the outside. Delon rubbed at a grease spot on his tan sweater, and wished again that he had either driven his own car, or dressed for Epinard’s.
“You complain, always,” he said.
“But it’s true.” Epinard’s voice rose several notes in self defense. “If it isn’t the pollution from Metz, rolling down the river, it’s the stink from the steel plants. Who could smell a German in all that?”
“Delon raised the binoculars to his eyes again. A brown haze shimmered between him and the low, concrete dome of the newest nuclear power plant at Cattenom.
The building to the left of the containment structure. That’s where the main power generator is?” He handed the glasses to Epinard and pointed.
Epinard peered at the complex. “No. That’s the emergency generator. The main supply comes out of Plant Number One.” He pointed down the river. “You can see where the transmission lines come in, and the transformer towers.”
“Is everything ready?”
Epinard nodded. He handed the glasses back to Delon. “Those things give me a headache,” he said.
“Everything gives you a headache.”
Epinard shrugged. “I suppose so. At any rate, we have three men in there. Dulotte got a job in security. Ballestre is clerking in the main administrative complex, right where the telephone switchboard for the whole place is. And Beauville is on the night shift at the emergency generator.” He looked over at Delon and grinned. “Pretty neat, eh?”
“Not too bad, I suppose.”
Epinard barked a laugh. “Don’t kill me with praise.” He clapped Delon on the shoulder. “One thing. They are fueling the place a lot sooner than they announced. I think they want to get it up and running, catch the Germans off guard, you know? They are pretty upset, pulling away from nuclear power as they are, and then we put a big new reactor right on their border.”
“No matter.”
“Maybe we should inform the American.”
Delon shook his head. “No.”
“He may want us to change the schedule, do our little thing before the place is running. That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
“We don’t change the schedule.”
“But the Americans are paying, non?”
“Americans!” Delon spit. “Fuck them. We will use them while they are here to use, and kill them when we can. It is as Jean Thiriart says—two or three hundred American deaths should do the trick.”
“Thiriart is a crazy Belgian,” Epinard muttered. “Americans aren’t so bad.”
Delon stared at Epinard until the other man looked down. “We don’t change the schedule. We don’t change anything. Understand?”
“If that thing is filled with uranium, or whatever they fill it with, we could be making a big mess, Alain.”
Delon grabbed Epinard’s arm. “You let me worry about that. You just stick to your end of the business and do as you’re told.” He jammed the binoculars against his eyes again and gazed down the valley, not looking at the nuclear complex, but toward the German border which lay only a few kilometers away.
“No great loss, anyway,” he muttered.
“Comment?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh well,” Epinard said, sighing and shifting his bottom on the stone wall. “No one I know lives around here. How about you?”
“Me? I’m from Thionville. Right down the road.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that we could be poisoning your own home.”
Delon shook his head slowly, the glasses still glued to his eyes.
“It’s not my home. Not for a long time. I haven’t any family here. My parents died during the war, right after I was born.”
“Who raised you, then?”
“My sister. Or, better, she put up with me until I was sixteen, then tossed me out on my ear and ran off to Normandy. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“So you don’t know anybody th
ere, either, eh? Just like me.”
“Right.” Or close enough, he thought. Maybe he knew one person. She had lived in Trier, just across the border in Germany. Lise. A face flashed into his memory, the way he had seen her the last time, laughing at him. He had been poor, and stupid, caught up in the rapprochement between France and Germany, willing to believe that the Boche were wonderful people after all, willing to fall in love with a German girl. She had strung him along, had fun with him, enjoyed the way he mooned around after her, and then humiliated him in front of her German friends, called him a stupid peasant. He hoped she still lived in Trier. She would have a surprise coming. So would Epinard. Best to be sure Epinard was inside the plant, for that matter. He knew too damned much. Worse, he was soft. If !he understood that he was going to be helping turn a big corner of France and Germany—and Luxembourg with any luck—into a radioactive wasteland, he might feel a need to confess for the sake of his guilty conscience.
Delon stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. “Drop me at the train station in Metz.”
“You’ll be in touch?”
“Yes. But not for a while. I have a trip to take. To Austria.”
“Ahh, Linzertorte.”
Delon laughed. “Bad for the figure. I have business there.”
Chapter 7
Pray had always hated hospitals, and Swedish Hospital was no exception. As he walked through the main entrance he felt himself tense, felt his face go hard, and his eyes hood over, the way they might in some high stakes poker game. If anything, the cavernous, columned lobby and reception area made things worse. It was as if someone had tried to create the illusion of a grand hotel, and to Pray, it felt like walking onto the set of some dark, black comedy.
“Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician,” he muttered, louder than he realized, as he walked past the information kiosk; the middle-aged woman sitting there in her gray and white volunteer uniform gave him a questioning look.
“Prior,” he said to her. “Matthew Prior,” and fled toward the elevator before she could ask what floor he was on.
It didn’t help his mood that his head still hurt from being banged on so thoroughly the day before; nor that his pride had suffered even more severe damage. He didn’t do a lot of bragging about having earned, several years before, a black belt in Kenpo. But he was privately proud of the accomplishment, and worked out regularly to keep his chops up.
And I gave it away, he thought, wincing at the painful memory of his encounter with the chain-bearing thug.
But at least he was on his feet. Josef Ruhm was not. Pray’s last sight of the old jade dealer had been as ambulance attendants carried him, strapped to a stretcher and complaining weakly that he could walk, out of the Fourth and Pike Building.
Now, Ruhm lay, awake but looking ragged, in one bed of a double room on the third floor of the hospital. Someone had wrapped him up in generic pajamas a couple of sizes too large, and heavy bandages covered one eye.
In the other bed, separated by a partially drawn curtain, a fat man with a greasy bald head lay watching a television game show and eating little hard candies with crunching bites.
Pray took the older man’s hand. “How are you, Josef?” he asked.
“Could be worse. A few bruises, that’s all. Bruises never killed anybody. But they took the boat, Adam.”
“Ask him what’s wrong with his eye,” the man in the other bed said.
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Not that much.”
“Come on, Josef.”
“Just a small problem. I had cataract surgery last year. They stuck in one of those little plastic lenses, and it seems to have gotten knocked out of place.”
“They’re going to have to operate,” the fat man said, chewing as he spoke. “They got to re-do the lens, and probably a cornea transplant, too.”
“Wonderful hearing, that gentleman has,” Ruhm muttered. “He worries. Doesn’t even know me, and he worries. I swear to God he keeps count of the number of times I shit.”
“Is he right?”
“About how often I shit?”
“Josef!”
“I guess so. But it’s a minor operation.”
Pray pounded his fist softly against his palm. “Who did it, Josef?”
“Who knows?”
“You know, you old faker.”
“Just street criminals. It could have happened to anyone.”
“Come on Josef. Lie to the cops all you want, but not to me. Those guys were sent. They knew what they were after.”
“Forget it.”
“No!”
“Don’t yell. It hurts my ears.”
“Was it the man you mentioned before? The one who wanted to buy the boat?”
Ruhm stared silently at the ceiling.
“Come on, Josef. What’s his name?”
Ruhm turned and looked at Pray, grasped his arm with a wrinkled hand.
“Let it go, Adam. Sometimes nothing can be done. Sometimes trying only makes it worse. You’re too young to have learned that lesson yet, but it’s true. Believe me.”
“You sound like an old man.”
“I am an old man, maybe older than I ought to be. But some things I know, and this is one of those things. I’m only sorry about the boat.”
“I don’t give a damn about the boat.” Pray stopped, grinned, and shook his head. “No, that’s a lie. I want that boat so bad I can taste it. But I also want someone to pay for what he did to you. If you don’t want the police involved, leave them out. I’ll go after him. I’ll get him and the boat.”
“No, Adam.” Ruhm shook his head slowly, squeezed Pray’s arm. “No. You’re too used to getting what you want.” He smiled under the bandage. “You know your problem, Adam? You want to be a hero. There’s no room in the world for heroes anymore.”
Pray sighed. “You’re a stubborn old goat, Josef. But if you change your mind, let me know.” He stood up reluctantly. “When have they scheduled the surgery on your eye?”
“Tomorrow,” the fat man said. “He’s giving them a hard time about that, too. Says he wants to go home. Talk some sense to him, why don’t you.”
“Shut up, why don’t you?” Ruhm yelled. He turned back to Pray. “If it’s favors you want to do me, get me away from Mr. Nosy over there.”
Pray laughed, but as he walked down the hallway toward the elevators, and later still, as he made his way across the cavernous lobby of the hospital, Ruhm’s words echoed in his mind.
Maybe I am too used to getting my way, he thought.
The woman in the information kiosk smiled cautiously at his as he walked toward her.
“May I help you?” she asked.
Pray stopped, stared at her, then leaned his hands on the counter of the kiosk.
“What’s wrong with getting what you want?”
“I beg your pardon?” The smile quivered the slightest bit.
“Nothing. Sorry.” Pray wheeled and marched toward the exit doors.
Chapter 8
In the eastern reaches of the San Juans, off the coast of Washington State, the hunk of rock called Skipjack hardly deserves dignifying with the title island, which was one reason the ketch Roxene, her black sails reefed, lay at anchor there under the crescent of an early moon.
The Roxene’s master, whose name was Leo Draper, and who referred to himself when he was in his cups or stoned, or just in that kind of mood, as the dream-gone-sour of a prep school headmaster and a lady surgeon, lounged against the craft’s dog house and puffed thoughtfully on a skinny, Italian cigar. A stray breeze ruffled his blonde hair, and he ran his fingers over his scalp. He was getting thin on top.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said.
His dog, a brindle Boxer named Hades, who was the Roxene’s only other occupant, and who was also getting old, looked up at the voice, then rose with slow dignity and crossed the deck to Draper, where he settled down again with a soft moan of pleasure, his
dark massive head stretched across Draper’s thighs.
“Maybe it’s time we settled down with a good woman,” Draper said, scratching the dog’s ears. It was a thought he had voiced before. But what woman would agree to live on a houseboat on Seattle’s Hood Canal? Especially when the houseboat leaked, so that the bilge pump came on at all the wrong times, drowning out the stereo, wrecking the television picture with static lines, and destroying tender moments of romance.
For that matter, how many women would entrust their lives to a man of uncertain means, who made his living, as Draper did, by the occasional chartering of his ketch to lovesick tourists who wanted a moonlit trip through the San Juan Islands, and by the more frequent passage through those same islands with contraband cargo?
Draper laughed. It was a sad thing, he thought, that by society’s standards his most respectable source of income was the occasional fee he got for information he picked up and passed on to the Central Intelligence Agency.
He glanced uneasily over his shoulder at the hatch in the center of the deck, where tonight’s cargo lay. He had broken one of his rules—never to carry something if he didn’t know what it was. On the other hand, the big man with funny eyes, who looked like a Kraut, but talked like a Mexican, had paid him in advance—cash, lots of it, in small, used bills—to have his boat waiting in Lake Union when the seaplane, piloted by a man who both talked and looked like a Mexican, arrived. There also would be a kilo of top grade heroin waiting for him when he made the delivery. He didn’t usually work for promises, but the large cash advance had eased his doubts.
When the plane arrived, Draper had asked again what he was handling, and had been told again it was not his business to know—had been made, in fact, to wait on the dock while the pilot shifted the cargo, carried in large canvas bags the size of the body bags Draper had gotten his fill of in Vietnam, from seaplane to ketch. He had managed a glance, though. That accounted for his uneasiness now. One of the bags had opened, and a steel bottle had slid from it, a steel bottle with the symbol for radioactive substances prominently displayed on its side.