“Without the slightest doubt.” Hawthorne grinned, not so much in humor but in remembrance, his eyes again on the ceiling. “Aggressiveness aside, Henry Stevens is very bright, very analytical, but the main reason he was taken out of the field and shoved upstairs is that he’s a totally inept liar. To begin with, you think he’s about to sweat, whether you see him or merely hear his voice. It’s why I’m convinced he knows more about my wife’s death—her murder—than he’s telling me.… You know what I asked him, so you can assume the implication. His answer was so flat and unequivocal, his reaction so quick, instantaneous, I knew it was the truth. He said he’d met Ingrid only once, at the small wedding reception the embassy gave us—when he accompanied his wife.”
“So much for the lie,” said Cathy.
“I never had a doubt. Neither would you if you’d known Ingrid.”
“I wish I had.”
“She would have liked you.” Tyrell moved his head slowly, again looking at the major, no hostility in his eyes. “You’re about the same age she was, and with that same sense of independence, even authority, but you assert it more—she never had to.”
“Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Commander.”
“Hey, come on, you’re a military officer; you have to. She was a quadrilingual translator; it wasn’t called for. I wasn’t insulting you.”
“By God, she bought it!” shouted Poole, bursting through the door of Neilsen’s room.
“Bought what?” asked Hawthorne.
“The fact that I volunteered for an underwater gravity-free bathysphere that sprung an oxygen leak in my lungs! Hot damn!”
“Let’s eat,” Cathy said.
Room service arrived forty-five minutes later, the interim spent with Hawthorne studying the gatehouse entry log, Poole reading the newspapers he had purchased at the stand in the lobby, and Catherine taking a warm bath, hoping to “wash away a dozen or so anxiety attacks.” They kept the television set on, the volume low but sufficient to hear any sudden news bulletins that might concern Van Nostrand. Thankfully, there were none. Their meals finished, Tyrell phoned Henry Stevens at the office.
“Can you plug up any intercepts with a scrambler?”
“You still think we’ve got leaks here?”
“I’m damn sure of it.”
“Well, if you have some new evidence, let me know, because you and I have been on reverse scrambler for the last three days. Which would mean the leaks are on your end.”
“Absolutely impossible.”
“Christ, I’m sick of your know-it-all attitude.”
“Not know-it-all, Henry, just generally knowing more than you.”
“I’m sick of that too.”
“Then it’s simple. Fire me.”
“We didn’t hire you!”
“If you cut off the funds we need, it’s the same thing. Do you want to do that?”
“Oh, shut up.… What have you got? Any word on Little Girl Blood?”
“No more than you have,” answered Tyrell. “She’s here, within a few miles of her strike, and no one knows where.”
“There’ll be no strike. The President’s as good as locked in a vault. Time’s on our side.”
“I love your confidence, but he can’t keep that up too long. An invisible President is no President at all.”
“I don’t love your attitude. What else? You said you were going to give me some names.”
“Here they are, and put every one of them under the sharpest micros you’ve got.” Hawthorne read off the names he had selected from the gatehouse log, having eliminated the usual estate personnel—a plumber, a veterinarian for the horses, and a quartet of Spanish dancers who had been hired for an outside barbecue, Argentine style.
“You’re talking about some of the biggest guns in the administration!” Stevens exploded. “You are now certifiable!”
“Every one of them was there during the last eighteen days. And since Little Girl Blood is indelibly linked with Van Nostrand, it’s entirely possible that one, or more than one, is part of that bastard’s agenda—knowingly or unknowingly.”
“Do you realize what you’re asking me to do? The secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, that crazy chief of clandestine G-2, the goddamned secretary of state? You’re nuts!”
“They were there, Henry. So was Bajaratt.”
“Do you have proof? For God’s sake, I could be fried by every one of the President’s men!”
“I’m holding the proof in my hand, Captain. The only people on this list who would fry you are working with Bajaratt, again knowingly or unknowingly. Now, damn you, go to work!… Incidentally, within the next twenty minutes or so, I’m going to give you a traceable asset that could make you an admiral if you’re not killed first.”
“That’s nice. What the hell is it, and where will the trace take us?”
“To the person behind Van Nostrand’s getting out of the country.”
“Van Nostrand’s dead!”
“They don’t know that at his point of departure. I repeat, go to work, Henry.” Tyrell hung up the phone and alternately looked at Neilsen and Poole, who stared at him, mouths agape. “Is something bothering you?” he asked.
“You sure play hardball, Commander,” said the lieutenant.
“There’s no other way to play it, Jackson.”
“Suppose you’re wrong?” said Cathy. “Suppose no one on that list has anything to do with Bajaratt?”
“I won’t accept that. And if Stevens can’t come up with anything, I’ll see that this list goes public with the larger story and so many innuendos, lies, and half-truths that the power structure will have mass cardiac arrests coming up with explanations. There won’t be any safety nets even for the real saints in Washington.”
“That’s cynical to the point of complete irresponsibility,” Neilsen said curtly.
“It certainly is, Major, because to find Little Girl Blood, the core of her support group has to panic. We know they’re out there, and we know they’ve penetrated our closed circles here and in London and Paris. Just one mistake, one person trying to cover his ass, and the experts go to work with their magic serums.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Basically, it’s not that complicated. We start with the gatehouse list, men known to have been in close contact with Van Nostrand, then the list expands with the individual microscopes. Who are their friends, their associates; who works in their offices with access to classified materials? Who among them have life-styles seemingly beyond their means? Are there weaknesses that could make them marks for extortion? Everything progresses at top speed, fear and panic the ammunition.” The telephone rang and Tyrell pounced on it. “Stevens?” Hawthorne frowned; he covered the mouthpiece and gestured to Poole. “It’s for you.”
The lieutenant picked up the phone on the desk. “Did it happen, Mac?… Ten minutes ago? Okay, thanks.… How the hell do I know? Sell the damn thing! If they had any brains, they’d have flown it to Cuba.” Poole hung up and looked at Tye. “Van Nostrand’s jet landed and apparently there was a lot of confusion. The Washington escort had a blowup with the Jones boys, who left the plane at General Aviation, saying they’d been dismissed by the owner and then got outta there.”
“It’s time for St. Thomas,” said Tyrell, reaching for the phone and dialing the Caribbean. His face creased with anticipation, he waited, then pressed the two-digit ICM code and listened to his messages.… My darling, it’s Dominique! I’m calling from a boring cruise off the coast of Portofino.… Hawthorne blanched, his eyes wide, the muscles of his face taut. It was false, as everything about Dominique was false, the mendacity of a killer whose whole life was a lie. And Pauline in Paris was part of that lie, a fragment that could bring them one step closer to Bajaratt.
“What is it?” said Cathy, reading the anxiety on his face.
“Nothing,” replied Tyrell quietly. “I just heard from someone who made a mistake.” Another message followed; his tension retur
ned.
Suddenly, from outside the hotel window, there was an ear-shattering scream. It continued, growing louder, then hysterical. Neilsen and Poole ran to the window. “Down in the parking lot!” cried the lieutenant. “Look!”
Below, where the huge black surface of the parking area was illuminated by bordering floodlights, stood a blond woman and a middle-aged man. The woman was shrieking in horror, clutching her companion as he tried desperately to quiet her and pull her away. Poole opened the window; the gray-haired man’s pleas were now audible.
“Shut up! We’ve got to get out of here. Will you be quiet, you idiot, people will hear you!”
“He’s dead, Myron! Jesus, look at his head—it’s half blown away! Holy Christ!”
“Shut up, you goddamned tramp!”
Several white-jacketed waiters came running from a rear door, one of them holding a flashlight, its beam wavering back and forth, finally settling on the figure of a man, his body angled out of the open door of a Porsche convertible, half on the seat, half on the pavement. The dark area around the man’s head glistened under the flashlight’s beam; the skull was shattered, bleeding.
“Tye, come over here!” cried Neilsen, the shouts below covering the urgency of her voice.
“Shhh!” Hawthorne held the palm of his left hand over his ear, concentrating on the words he was hearing on the line from St. Thomas.
“Someone was just killed down there!” Cathy continued. “A man in a sports car. They’re sending for the police!”
“Be quiet, Major, I’ve got to get this right.” Tyrell wrote on the room-service menu.
Outside the room, in the Shenandoah Lodge’s corridor, Amaya Bajaratt hurried past Hawthorne’s door, removing a pair of surgical gloves.
21
“Good God, it’s the secretary of state,” said Tyrell quietly to himself. Stunned, he slowly replaced the telephone as the sound of sirens filled the parking lot below. “I don’t want to believe it!” he whispered, albeit loud enough to be heard.
“Believe what?” asked Cathy, turning away from the window. “It’s a mess down there.”
“It’s a mess up here too.”
“Someone was killed, Tye.”
“I understand that, but it has nothing to do with us. We are, however, very involved with something else that’d give the country mass cardiac arrest.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Van Nostrand’s military escort at the airport in Charlotte was by direct order of the secretary of state.”
“Oh, m’gawd,” said Poole softly, his gaze on Hawthorne, his hands closing the window. “And I thought you were hangin’ ten on a skateboard when you talked about people like that.”
“There’s got to be an explanation,” Neilsen interrupted, “because you’re right, there can’t be a connection between him and Bajaratt.”
“He had a pretty solid connection with Van Nostrand, strong enough to get him out of the country under damned strange circumstances, and Van Nostrand—Mr. Neptune—had Little Girl Blood hidden in a guest house a few hundred yards away from that library. To go back to the alphabet, if A equals B, and B equals C, then there’s a specific relationship between A and C.”
“But you said you saw two men gettin’ into that limo, Tye. One with a hat—”
“Which is standard for covering a bald head,” broke in Hawthorne. “I said that too, Jackson, and I was wrong on one count and too limited with the other. They weren’t two men; one was a woman, and a hat doesn’t cover just a bald head; it also hides a woman’s hair.”
“It really was Bajaratt,” Cathy whispered. “We were so close!”
“So close,” agreed Tyrell quietly, frowning intensely. “We don’t have a choice—I don’t have a choice—and there’s no time to waste.” He reached down for the telephone while there was a knocking at the door. “See who it is, will you, Poole?”
Standing in the hallway were two uniformed police officers. “Are these the rooms of a Major Neilsen, a Lieutenant Poole, and a relative, an uncle, from Florida?” asked the man on the right, reading from a clipboard.
“Yes, sir,” answered the lieutenant.
“Your registration is incomplete, sir,” said the second policeman, peering inside the room. “The laws of Virginia require additional information.”
“Sorry, fellas,” said Poole. “I wrote that out myself and we were in an awful hurry.”
“May we see your identification?” The man with the clipboard pushed past the lieutenant into the room, his colleague following several steps behind, blocking the door. “And please account for your whereabouts during the past two hours.”
“We haven’t left these rooms since we arrived well over two hours ago,” said Hawthorne, replacing the phone. “And as we’re consenting adults, you’ve no right to interfere with our pursuits no matter how offensive they might appear to you.”
“What?” Major Neilsen blanched, muffling her throated protest.
“Maybe you don’t understand, sir,” said the clipboard holder. “A man was shot down there, murdered. We’re questioning everyone on the premises, and, if you want it straight, especially anyone with a fishy registration, which yours seems to fit. There’s no name for Uncle Joe here and no address in Florida except a town, and no credit card number.”
“Ah told you, we were in a hurry and we paid cash.”
“At these prices, you must carry a lot of cash, then. Maybe more than a lot.”
“That’s none of your business,” said Tyrell sharply.
“Listen, mister, the victim down in that parking lot was set up,” said the clipboard. “He brought a box of fancy chocolates for whomever he was going to meet. The card read, ‘To my generous friend.’ ”
“Oh, that’s terrific!” exclaimed Hawthorne. “We shot him, stayed around for the parade, and didn’t even take the chocolates!”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Definitely,” agreed the officer at the door, reaching under his tunic and pulling out a police radio as he unsnapped the flap of his holster. “Sergeant, we’ve got three weirdos up here, all possibles, rooms five-oh-five and five-oh-six. Send a detail as fast as you can.… Guess what I just spotted? Hurry up!”
Following the gaze of the patrolman, four heads whipped around to the other side of the room. On the top of the bureau were Poole’s Walther P.K. automatic and Hawthorne’s .38-caliber revolver.
Bajaratt looked out the window at the crowds below. She was not interested in the mayhem or the proceedings, she knew both only too well—the morbidly jostling onlookers beside themselves to catch a glimpse of a bloodied corpse, and the police trying to maintain a semblance of order until higher authority arrived to tell them what to do. Until then, the mutilated body had to stay in place; it was meat for the frenzied bystanders, a bloody sheet covering the corpse in no way diminishing their appetites.
The Baj was not concerned with the infantile activities of the useless; she was desperately trying to find Nicolo, whom she had sent downstairs the instant she returned to the suite, his instructions explicit. Something terrible happened and we must leave. Find a car even if you have to subdue the owner! Take the suitcases and use the fire stairs! There he was! In the shadows of a pole supporting a floodlight, raising his right hand, holding something in it, and nodding his head. He had done it!
Bajaratt checked the mirror, adjusting the wig of thin white hair. The liquid adhesive on her face held the accentuated lines together; the pale powder, the dark gray half-moons under her lidded eyes, and the thin, white-drawn lips produced the countenance of an old woman, an eccentric old woman who wore a man’s brown hat over her head.
Bajaratt opened the corridor door, instantly astonished by the noise and the stream of running police who were converging on a room down the hall, their guns drawn. She proceeded toward the elevator, skirting the uniforms, a bent-over figure fighting the advancing years.
“You sons of bitches, let go of me!”
&n
bsp; “Don’t get near me, you hogs, or yer all gonna be a lot fuckin’ sorrier than me!”
“Don’t you dare touch me!”
The Baj was suddenly paralyzed, her every muscle, tendon, and joint inoperative. You sons of bitches, let go of me. Only one voice, only one man. Hawthorne! Instinctively, she spun her bent-over body to the right, the chaos inside commanding her attention.
Between the bodies and the outstretched arms pinning Tyrell against the wall, their eyes met, hers narrowed in shock, his wide, bewildered, disbelief joining panic.
* * *
Howard Davenport, acknowledged powerbroker and giant of industry, yet withal a frustrated, defeated head of the insatiable Department of Defense, poured himself a second Courvoisier from the brass dry bar in his study and walked slowly back to his desk. He was a relieved man, the relief having come roughly two hours before when the D.O.D. security car had radioed the night watch, confirming that Van Nostrand’s limousine had left the estate with a passenger or passengers in the back seat.
If Hawthorne is driven away by my limousine, you’ll know my information was wrong, and you must never mention that I brought it up.
Davenport had no intention of ever doing so. There was more than enough muted hysteria over the hunt for Little Girl Blood. To burden the hunters further with blatantly false rumors would only add to the panic—some intelligence zealot would factor them into an esoteric computer, thus spreading more confusion as some other zealot picked them up. Van Nostrand understood that only too well; it was the reason he gave his final instructions should it turn out that former Lieutenant Commander Hawthorne was not a member of the infamous Alpha market.… Good God, what kind of Defense secretary was he? considered Davenport. He had never heard of the Alpha, whatever it was!
No, the time had come, he thought. He wished his wife were home rather than in Colorado, visiting their daughter, who had just delivered her third child, but there was no separating mothers and daughters and emerging grandchildren; it was a given. He really did want her with him, because he had finally typed out his resignation on the old Remington his parents had given him a lifetime ago. The newspapers frequently made a point of the old typewriter; the scion of Short Hills wealth pecking away, making notes at the antique machine when he could have the finest computerized equipment, to say nothing of an army of secretaries. But the “old Rem” was an old friend, a friend he could think with, so Davenport saw no reason to change.
The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel Page 36