Hugo laughed again and fired at Josh's head, which Josh at the last instant had tucked into the back of Mr. Nimrin's neck, like a chicken burrowing into a hen. The bullet too traversed the hall, ending its journey somewhere back in that dormitory.
Josh tried to brace himself against the side wall, but Mr. Nimrin kept moving, vaguely but insistently, as though to dodge between all the bullets that would ever be fired anywhere, from here to eternity. Meanwhile, Hugo was moving forward, no longer laughing, saying one more terse sentence before firing deliberately into Mr. Nimrin's torso, so that Mr. Nimrin sagged backward against Josh.
Much better. With Mr. Nimrin not squirming around like a baby during a diaper change, Josh could brace them both against the side wall, bring that left arm up across Mr. Nim-rin's now-bleeding chest, bring his right hand over Mr. Nim-rin's shoulder, clutch his right wrist with his left hand to brace himself, and this time aim carefully at that damn smudge. And shoot. Dust puffed from the smudge.
Surprised, Hugo looked down at his shirtfront, then glowered at Josh. Taking another flatfooted step forward, he fired his own gun again and Josh felt the heavy impact when it punched into Mr. Nimrin's body. If the man got much closer, one of those bullets would go all the way through Mr. Nimrin and into Josh.
“This is unfair,” Josh muttered, because he'd already hit the man. But, all right.
He fired again, and by God hit the same spot, and Hugo thudded to a halt. He looked confused, but he was closer. The gun in his hand weaved like a snake as he tried to find Josh behind Mr. Nimrin.
Bullets stop people, dammit. Who did Hugo think he was, Rasputin? Josh fired a fourth time, and for the third time he saw the bullet hit home. That smudge was now red, and growing.
Hugo had stopped his advance. He took a two-handed stance, aimed very carefully, looking for some chink in the armor of Mr. Nimrin, and Josh fired a fifth time, and then a sixth. Hugo weaved. His gun had apparently become very heavy; the angle of its aim drooped ever downward.
How many bullets were in this little Beretta? Josh stepped away from Mr. Nimrin, who crumpled to the ground. Hugo, seeing his target in full at last, tried with both hands to lift his gun, but Josh stepped forward, stepping over Mr. Nimrin, then one more step, and shot Hugo in the nose.
As Hugo toppled backward, his gun clattering to the floor, Josh leaned forward, aiming now at that exposed Adam's apple, wanting the coup de grace, but this time the Beretta merely said click. A seven-shot magazine; who would have guessed?
But just enough.
55
NO TIME, NO TIME. All that shooting would have been heard all over the house. Dropping the empty Beretta, Josh ran forward to the closed door next to where Hugo had been seated, and of course it was locked, with no key in the keyhole.
Was this what life had become reduced to, searching unconscious and dead bodies? Josh pawed at Hugo's trouser pockets, felt a key—Yale, here in the main house, not the simple skeleton key of the garage—and as he reached into the pocket a hand snapped closed on his wrist.
He shrieked, biting it off after only a second, his feet scrabbling on the floor as he tried to get away. The hand gripped him, unchanging. He stared at it, and then at last stared along the arm and up to Hugo's face, which was sweating like a tankard of ale, the skin pale, metallic, the eyes unfocused around that punched-in nose, the lips parted, teeth clenched. No part of him moved, but the hand kept its grip.
Josh peeled the cold fingers back one at a time. They offered no more resistance than a flip-top ring, and stayed where he pushed them. Four fingers, then push down, the thumb bumped over the wristbone, and then he could reach into the trouser pocket to grasp the key.
At first he couldn't see them, in this storage room full of mattresses and Christmas tree lights. He stood in the doorway, peering in at semi-darkness, and was about to say Eve's name when a far voice called, “What was that?”
Mrs. Rheingold. Josh turned away from the room, stood in the doorway, saw her there at the foot of the stairs, peering up, acting as though she might come up. From there, she wouldn't be able to see the two bodies on the floor.
“Just the plumbers, Mrs. Rheingold,” he called. “Blowing out the pipes.”
“The pipes?”
“Just getting them all unclogged, you won't have a problem anymore, be done here in just a few minutes, thank you, Mrs. Rheingold.”
“A problem?”
She'd said that as though to say “I didn't know I had a problem,” but Josh chose to hear it another way: “Not much longer,” he called. “Everything'll be fine in just a few minutes.”
“Josh?” Eve's voice whispered from somewhere inside the room.
“Everything's okay,” Josh called to Mrs. Rheingold, and waved, and at last she nodded and departed, and he could turn to Eve, who thrust herself into his arms, folding in there, pulling him close as though to hide inside his ribcage. “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God.”
No time. “Where's Jeremy?”
“He's—” Still clutching to him, she half-turned, peering back into the room. “He's frightened.”
“No time.” Josh pushed her away, frantic, feeling Levrin pound his way up the stairs from two flights below.
She had Jeremy's hand now, out from behind a painted balsa manger. Josh pulled Mr. Nimrin's revolver from his left pocket, switched it to his right hand, and stooped to gather Jeremy up, ignoring the child's cry of fear at the sight of the gun. He turned, Jeremy in his left arm, the revolver in his right hand, and raced back down the corridor to the dormitory, trusting Eve to follow.
In the dormitory, just in sight coming up the stairs, was a bulky man Josh had never seen before, who never saw Josh at all, because he ran to the railing, fired directly into the side of that head, and heard an echoing shot behind him. He looked back, saw Eve staring at him in horror, but it was Levrin and another stranger—how many of them were there?—who were running this way down the corridor.
“Fast!” he yelled, and raced down the stairs two at a time, jumping over the body crumpled at the bottom, turning left because that's where the stairs were to the ground level and the front door. “Run, Eve, run, Eve, run, Eve!” afraid she was too far back, Levrin would reach her, a bullet from Levrin would reach her.
Down the main stairs, afraid to look back, and he hurtled out the front door and stopped dead, Eve running into his back. The two who'd driven the Marathon earlier were there, no more than ten feet away, standing beside the Marathon now parked in the drive, pointing guns directly at Josh.
And now Jeremy screamed and kicked out and punched his arms around and jerked his head from side to side so that Josh couldn't aim or hold his balance or think. He stood there, the screaming child in his arm, Eve clinging to his back, until Levrin arrived to pluck the useless revolver out of his hand.
Josh looked at him, and Levrin was smiling. As ever, smiling. “Well, Josh,” he said, “you have been quite bad, have you not? But all is well that comes to an end well. Another idiom.”
Losing his smile, he barked something at the two in the driveway, who put their guns away. No longer needed.
Jeremy, feeling the strangeness in the air, became quiet, staring at Levrin, who looked again at Josh, his manner almost sympathetic. “Come inside, Josh,” he said. “Bring your family.”
“Say, chaps.”
They all turned, and around the corner of the house had come two of the Christian Capitalist golf carts, each carrying two suited and necktied and white-shirted and orange-capped Capitalists, one of whom had raised a hand for their attention. “Say chaps,” he called again. “Are we by any chance off the reservation?”
56
HOW HAD THESE RETREATERS stumbled onto this property? Josh watched them, the orange baseball caps, the simple smiles, and tried to find some advantage for himself in their intrusion. If he'd been on his own, he'd have used this distraction to run back into the house, hoping to find something in there to help him; but with a wriggling two-year-old
hanging from his arm, and Eve clinging to his back, there was nothing to be done.
Meanwhile, Levrin, his genial pose under severe strain, was saying, “What are you people doing here? You belong next door.”
“Oh, I am sorry,” said the spokesman, the heaviest of the four, while the other three climbed out of the carts to stretch their legs, bend the kinks out of their backs, gawk around at the house and grounds. There were four golf bags standing up in the racks provided at the back of the carts, each containing only one club, under a protective leather headcover numbered 1. “We were just tootling along,” the spokesman went on, waving vaguely toward Long Island Sound, “saw the open door in the wall, tootled on in.”
“That door is kept closed,” Levrin told him, being more severe than usual.
“Not today,” the spokesman said, as the other three reached for their golf clubs.
“And locked,” Levrin insisted.
“Not today,” the spokesman said, and the other three lifted out the golf clubs, which weren't golf clubs at all. “Take out the transportation,” the spokesman said over his shoulder, as Josh finally recognized him as Tom, the one who'd played Major Petkoff, Raina's father.
Levrin said, “Take out the what?” but Josh had already understood that last sentence, and had folded both arms around Jeremy, hands over the boy's ears as Harry (Bluntschli) turned with the golf club that was actually an AK-47 and laid a line of fire along the length of the Marathon. The rattle of the automatic rifle was amazingly loud, even out here in the open, but that was as nothing compared to the sound the Marathon made when its gas tank blew up. Everybody ducked and recoiled, Jeremy twisted around like a greased pig trying to see, and Marathon parts made a brief hot-metal sprinkle in the general area.
Into the stunned silence that came next, Mitch Robbie smiled over at Josh and said, “Wasn't that nice? Harry was a Ranger before he found his true calling.” He smiled at the remains of the Marathon, the bottom of a twisted frame on four sagging tires. “And here we have a barbecue pit with wheels.”
Levrin, flabbergasted, said, “How can you have those weapons? The team is at that apartment!”
“Not anymore,” Robbie told him. “I called them,” he said, and took a stance, as though about to say, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” instead of which he said, “This is Levrin,” sounding exactly like Levrin. “Because of people here,” he went on, in the same style, “I must speak in English. The Pausto woman has defected and informed on you. Leave at once, go to the bandshell in Central Park, I will meet you there.” He smiled, and spoke in his own voice: “You should have seen them run.”
Levrin, spitting mad, said, “That does not sound at all like me.”
Robbie smiled. “They thought it did.”
Tom had now taken out and unmasked his own AK-47, the last of the faux golf clubs, which meant there was an awful lot of weaponry out here in the driveway; everybody but Josh and his family. The cast of Arms and the Man were very well armed. The two men who'd been here when Josh and Eve and Jeremy had come out had pocketed their pistols, and so had the man who'd come out of the house with Levrin, but Levrin still had a pistol in his hand, and now he stepped closer to Josh, the trio of the family shielding him from the AK-47s as he grabbed Josh by the elbow and said to the others, “Put down those arms, or I will shoot this entire family.”
Seeming to ignore him, Robbie looked around and said, “We need more noise. We need to give somebody in the neighborhood a reason to call the cops.”
Pointing, Josh said, “Behind that basement window, there's a whole lot of weapons and ammunition.”
“Oh, good,” Robbie said, and swung the AK-47 around. “I've decided,” he said, “to get over my fear of guns. To increase my range, you know. I never fired one of these things before.”
“Stop!” Levrin shrieked, and when Josh looked at him—he was way too close—Levrin was clearly a man in terror.
Robbie paused. “Stop? Did somebody say stop?”
“That is a munitions dump!” Levrin yelled.
“Don't yell,” Josh told him.
“You'll blow up the house! You'll blow up the entire neighborhood!” He was still yelling. Jeremy kicked at him, but Levrin was just a bit too far away.
“Blow it up! Blow it up!”
They all looked up, and Mrs. Rheingold was up there, half out a second story window, waving her arms, a huge manic smile all over her face. “Shoot it! Blow it up!”
“Never refuse a lady,” Robbie said, and squeezed the trigger.
As Levrin shrieked and cowered, and his three companions dropped to the ground with their arms over their heads, only the first bullet went through the basement window. Not prepared for the rifle's recoil, Robbie had been unable to stop firing until half a dozen shots went through the study window on the ground floor. “Damn,” he said. “Try again.”
“Hold it,” Josh said, and Robbie cocked an eyebrow in his direction, poised to go on. Josh said to Levrin, “Give Eve your pistol.”
Levrin was still squinting against the expected explosion. Through the squint, he peered at Josh. “To her? Why to her?”
“She might not shoot you.”
Eve came around Josh to pluck the gun from Levrin's hand. “On the other hand,” she told him, “I might.”
“Yaaaahh!” The front door burst open and a six foot three inch naked woman with her hair half-burned away and a pair of handcuffs dangling from her right wrist next to the pistol she brandished came hurtling out, stopped, took a stance, and shot Levrin twice. He dropped like a piano out a window, and only then did she speak: “Nobody move!”
Nobody moved.
Tina came warily down the steps, circling them all, and said to Robbie, “You. Put down that weapon.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“You will drive.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Generally to the rest of them she said, “You will not follow.”
Robbie got behind the wheel of one of the golf carts, Tina beside him. “Go,” she said.
As the cart puttered away around the corner of the house, Dick (Nicola) said, “There's something the Christian Capitalists don't see every day.”
57
SHE WON'T GET FAR,” Agent Schwamm said. “Naked, and on a golf cart.”
“You just mean on a golf cart,” Agent Zimmer told him. “Naked, she actually might get pretty far.”
“I know what I meant,” Agent Schwamm told him.
Josh knew what they both meant, that they were furious they couldn't arrest Josh Redmont, cuff him, and lock him up and put him on ice forever. Furious. Seething. Melting their shirt buttons. Causing the ends of their neckties to curl up.
They'd been on phones; Mrs. Rheingold's and their own cellphones. They'd opened laptops and sent E-mails. There'd been dark discussions about calling something called sog to get a ruling at the very highest level, and they still entertained hope that one of their questions to higher authority would be answered their way. Because somewhere, somewhere in all this chazeray, these explosions, these illegally imported assault rifles, these payments to a mole—a mole, for God's sake!—these foreign agents with their plots and plans, their machinations and manipulations, somewhere in this unholy un-American mess, there had to be some sort of Federal crime, please God, that they could pin on Josh Redmont, just so they could feel a little better, a little less like biting somebody's head off.
After all, look what he'd done, this Redmont. Knew about a planned criminal act—and a doozy of a criminal act, at that—and never reported it. (Of course, the criminal act had not actually occurred and now would not occur, in no small part because said Josh Redmont with others had foiled it, but still.)
All right, he had housed illegal aliens and illegal imported weapons. (Very well, his family had been kidnapped and he had feared for their safety, and at the first opportunity he had turned the illegal weapons, slightly used, over to the Nassau County police, who had turned them over to FBI ag
ents Zimmer and Schwamm, but still.)
Yes, but he had actually been a part of the planned criminal enterprise (yes, yes, noted above) for at least two weeks and should be considered one of the conspirators. (Yes, yes, the fake suicide note had been found in the dead Hugo's pocket, and its purpose, and its significance to the entire Redmont family, had been explained at length and at volume by Josh Redmont, but still.)
Speaking of the dead Hugo, the same Josh Redmont freely admitted to having shot the man six times, thus causing him to become dead. (Yes, at that moment the decedent Hugo had been firing his own gun at Josh Redmont and had been holding the Redmont family captive in a locked room, but still.)
He had taken payment to be an undercover agent of a foreign and presumably hostile power for seven years, at last culminating in the previously mentioned planned criminal enterprise. (That he was the inadvertent recipient of a monthly stipend because the scam artist Ellois Nimrin's payroll-hiking scheme had fallen through, which the wounded but not dying Nimrin had weakly admitted to on his stretcher while being carried out to the ambulance, and that accepting money even when you don't know what you are getting it for is not a crime—not even a Federal crime—were both apparently incontrovertible, but still.)
Redmont's Toyota Land Cruiser was at this moment parked in the spies’ safe house's garage. (The dead Hugo had driven it there, as fingerprinting would soon show.)
Oh, damn it to hell! Agents Zimmer and Schwamm were not happy. They sat with Josh in the shot-up study in the long afternoon light, they never expressed anger or any other emotion, they never by word or deed put a single crease in the image of a professional FBI man on duty, but nevertheless they made it clear, in a thousand other ways, that they were not happy.
Others were happy. Josh, for instance, at last having no guns pointed at him or threats pointed at his family, and finally coming to believe he wasn't in terrible trouble with the law after all, was provisionally very happy, though it didn't seem like a good idea to express that thought too much in the presence of Agents Zimmer and Schwamm. Eve and Jeremy, both happy, or at least relieved, were elsewhere in the house, Eve chatting up Mrs. Rheingold to help her get over the disappointment of not having her house blown up, Jeremy breaking some eighty-year-old toys. And Tom and Dick and Harry were presumably happy in a frantic sort of way, having been interrogated briefly by lesser FBI agents and then permitted to hurry back to the city, where they would do their best to find a new Sergius for tonight, since Mitchell Robbie and Tina Pausto had both disappeared completely, leaving nothing behind but a golf cart awash in the rocky water just outside Mrs. Rheingold's back gate.
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