by Buck Sanders
There was a constant, background roar in the basement that gave each of Chalmers’ words a grating edge, as though his speech blended into the noise to produce a result that could cause physical pain to Slayton’s ears. The pauses between his sentences seemed like years.
“Damned thing is, we’re gonna turn you loose, man,” he said. “See? You’re gonna be outta here before you even know it. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Later.”
Slayton knew full well that could be another hope-and-denial tactic. He chose to ignore it. “Do you always say and do everything in terms of cliches?” he asked, giving up hope of getting any leads in passing from Chalmers’ speech.
Chalmers shook his head, almost ruefully. “Wise-ass,” he said. “Don’t get smart, prick.” He dug his thumb savagely into the bruise on Slayton’s forehead, the reaction apparently pleasing him. His eyes went a little crazy and unfocused. “I might blow your goddam head off right now.”
Slayton was ready for that one. “You can’t do anything,” he said. “Without orders. You’d squat on the floor and jerk off if Haman ordered you to. You’re nothing.”
It got the desired response, a stinging slap that rocked his head from side to side against the scorching surface of the pipe. “You’re incredibly dumb, man, for a guy who’s tied up. You haven’t got no brains. You’re gonna die if you’re not careful!”
Slayton decided to lubricate the man’s rage a bit more. He was fairly certain Chalmers was not empowered to kill him. He had to be sure. “I’m tied up and you still can’t kill me, you simple-minded dog turd.”
That was it. Chalmers drove a fist into Slayton’s stomach, and his breath rushed out. And as Chalmers was working on his mad, he failed to see what Slayton could perceive as soon as his eyes refocused. Someone else had entered the basement. A man clad in gray utility clothes, lugging janitorial gear through the door to the security stairway.
“Come on, big man,” said Slayton. “Let’s see what you’re made of besides shit.”
Chalmers’ eyes flared, and he whipped the gun from the shoulder holster, jacking the hammer back with his thumb. “You talk too much, man,” he said, placing the bore of the big gun so it encompassed the tip of Slayton’s nose. “You’re gonna wind up worm food because you talk too much. Better be nice.” He grinned his sickly grin again.
“Fuck you,” Slayton said, low and even, calculated for effect. The janitor had spotted them by now, and had moved quietly closer for a better look. He was a man in his mid-thirties, looking somewhat Italian, with a rich mop of curly black hair.
“Dumb,” Chalmers said simply. Then he pulled the trigger fast, three times, the barrel of the gun mashed into Slayton’s face. He felt the hard clank of the action snapping back, but remained with his eyes steely. To show a man like Chalmers fear was a mistake, even if you were going to die. But Slayton’s body tensed against his will, anticipating the bullet that would spread his head and brains all over the basement.
Three dry clicks on a empty chamber. Chalmers saw the fear fleet across Slayton’s face. It was a microsecond, but it was enough. He laughed hysterically, high and whooping. He leaned forward, mashing his face against Slayton’s, so it appeared as if he had one huge eye in the center of his forehead.
“Big man, big man!” he hooted into Slayton’s face. “You’re so scared of dying you’re making in your pants, big man!” He pulled the clip to the .45 out of his back pocket and waved it in front of Slayton, cackling like a five-year-old who wouldn’t share. “You’re scared of an empty gun!”
On the words empty gun, the janitor broke an industrial broom handle over Chalmers’ skull. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he went down in a pile of unconscious arms and legs, the pistol spinning away on the flat stone surface of the floor.
“Man, what in hell is going on down here?” the janitor asked, picking up the gun.
“Treasury agent,” Slayton croaked, as though introducing himself. He felt the absurd urge to continue; treasury agent, janitor; janitor, terrorist.
The janitor said, “Don’t go away,” and rushed off for a moment, returning with a pair of wire cutters he used to free Slayton from the pipe.
Agony flared brightly in his arms as they came free. He couldn’t help falling in a heap beside Chalmers on the floor when he finally left the pipe. The janitor helped him up. Slayton actually thought he might swoon as blood and fresh pain raced into his depleted extremities.
Slayton pulled himself to his knees. The sensation was at once exhilarating and almost nauseating.
“You have to help me with him,” he said, picking up the canteen from where Chalmers had placed it on the floor and drinking—carefully, but greedily. “I’m deputizing you, or employing you, or whatever you want. You’ll make a lot of money for a few hours work.”
“I hear that,” the man said. “This janitorial crap sucks for air. What do I do with this punk?”
“Tie his hands,” Slayton said, then adding, “You have a car?”
“Ho, just barely. That’s an expensive proposition, and this is the only job a guy like me can get. But yeah.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Slayton asked.
“You kidding?” said the man. “I came back from Nam to find the employment situation here somewhat—uh, compromised. Now, if I’d been grabbed as a hostage in Iran instead of fighting for Lyndon B. and old Milhous, I might be better off.” He snapped off a hank of wire and efficiently immobilized Chalmers, who was still out. “You really a Treasury agent?”
“I’ll show you my ID later. After I get some speed into me. What time is it?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“Day or night?” He realized it sounded stupid.
“It’s the fourteenth,” the man said. “It’ll be noon in an hour.”
The opening of the Seth-Olet exhibit was in two hours.
16
When Ben Slayton caught his first look at himself in a mirror, he thought he looked like a skid row derelict. And there was no time to get pretty.
The lump on his head was mostly under the hairline, but there was a noticeable bulge that made him look, from the side, like a mutant from a 1950s science fiction movie, and a livid violet crescent that radiated downward onto his forehead. His shirt, from contact with the pipes, had scorched brown along the arms and back. He had numerous cuts and markings from the free-for-all in the suite, and he smelled like the locker room of the Boston Celtics. If he burst in on the Seth-Olet conclave with the wrong timing, he might get himself shot.
He placed an emergency phone call to Winship, who had already gone in with the Secret Service contingent. It stood to reason that everyone else would be in solemn conclave at the exhibit hall. There were phones, but he lacked the numbers, and there was no time left.
Hurriedly, he gave directions to the janitor, his savior, whose name turned out to be Buck Fuller. “Henry, actually,” he yelled as they piled into his car, a dusty Camaro Rally Sport. “Buck’s from the Marines.”
“Move it,” yelled Slayton back, feeling the way the bones seemed to grind together as he himself moved. “Break laws!”
The Camaro lept off the pavement, leaving an inch of rubber on the street. They fish-tailed out across an intersection, slewing into the path of a tourist bus and a rank of commuters, but Buck speed-shifted and easily outdistanced them. Slayton braced himself against the padded dash.
“You’ve done this before,” he shouted, smiling. “Faster!”
A wide grin split across Buck’s face and he laid his pedal down, screaming through a red light and causing a supermarket tractor-trailer driver to lay on his air horn. The blast dopplered away behind them as they made smoke.
“Thought I was gonna have to take to the sidewalk there for a second!” Buck yelled, eyes nailed to the road, checking his gauges, his mirror, and the openings ahead of him in economical visual sweeps. His hand-eye coordination was un-canny, almost as good as Slayton’s.
“There’ll be cops on
you any second,” shouted Slayton. “Can you handle it?”
The grin stayed where it was. “Pie,” Buck said.
On cue, a pair of prowlers sprang into view behind them, like cheetahs making tracks behind a gazelle. One slewed in, tires smoking, from a side street, the other screamed into a speed turn, lights and siren bellowing an all-out Code Three. Buck glanced at the mirror, but did not react, saying simply, “They’re on us.”
“Don’t lose them, let ’em follow us in. But don’t let them catch up, either.”
“Right turn ahead?” Buck shouted.
“Right.”
“Watch this!”
With a piercing war whoop, Buck shot the Camaro into the turn, lagging behind on the arc that would slide them into the right-hand lane, and instead spinning the wheel against the line of northbound traffic that loomed in the windshield. With ballsy precision, he rotated the wheel full around in the opposite direction, stabilizing them by spinning the auto completely around in the middle of the street.
They would be simple to follow, thought Slayton: just trace the black lines all over the pavement and find out who was at the end of them.
It was the most exhibitionistic kind of show-off driving, but the cop in the lead chase car could not follow Buck’s act. He tried to slow down in order to take the turn Buck negotiated at top speed and spun around anyway, demolishing the front end of a parked Mercedes Benz, clipping his door handles off on a white Dempster Dumpster, and finally shrieking to a stop with a pair of front flats and a copious amount of gray smoke billowing from the wheel wells and under the hood. The second cruiser caught control of its fish-tailing, and blasted past its out-of-commission buddy just as the cop stepped from his wreck to check the damage, pinch himself, and wonder how rich the driver of the Mercedes he had tattooed might be.
“Sorry about that,” yelled Buck.
“Idiot’s own fault,” shouted Slayton back. “He took the driving course but never thought it was for real!”
Parked cars and buildings flashed by in a stroboscopic blur as Buck made time, ignoring the lights. Anyone who could see him coming got hastily out of his way.
“That’s it!” he yelled.
“Keep going,” Slayton said. “A block and a half there’s a turn-in to an alley. Take that. The alley dead-ends. Stop there!”
In the mirror Buck saw the second police car jounce onto the road in their wake, flashbar winking insistently. Then he caught the mouth of the alleyway and careened into it. Though the alley was much narrower than the urban street, Buck did not slow down until they were almost eating the phone poles and chain-link fence that terminated the passage.
“Now what?”
Slayton jacked the door open and stepped out. Behind them the cruiser roared down the alley. “Give yourself up,” he said. “Tell them what I told you. I’ll have the Secret Service keep them from shooting you. And wait for me!” He slammed the door and ran toward the exhibit hall breezeway.
The grille of the police car filled up the rearview mirror as Buck took his hands off the hot wheel, looked at them, and then folded them in his lap, striving to look as innocent and harmless as possible. “Righto,” he said to the mirror.
Two Secret Service men bracketed the entrance to the hall. Slayton ran up and they immediately became defensive.
“Slayton!” he shouted, and luckily one of the men recognized him. He stopped, breathless, and demanded, “Is the President here yet? And is Ham Winship in there?”
“President’s due any minute, sir. Winship’s inside.”
“Then get out of my way,” he said, pushing past, and leaving the men to resent their assigned superiors. No time for ginger treatment of egos, he thought.
Everyone was assembled in the main exhibit room amid the television setups and the artifacts of Seth-Olet’s mastăba. Several additional Secret Service men sprang to check Slayton as he burst into the room, but fortunately, he spotted Winship before they spotted him.
“Ham!” he shouted. Indecorous, but under the circumstances the best way to get Winship’s attention quickly, since he hated the nickname Slayton had come up with for him.
Two more Secret Service men caught up with him as he reached Winship. They started to grab the dishevelled, wild-looking man, but Winship pushed away their eagerness.
Everyone in the room watched the hurried and hushed conversation that followed, like a quick football huddle. To these onlookers, the actions taken in the next few seconds on behalf of the bedraggled man who had burst into the room—where any minute they would be addressed by the President of the United States himself—must have seemed quite odd.
First, the Secret Service men withdrew, with crisp, businesslike motions. Winship walked over to the lectern that had been positioned for the television cameras and requested that the room be immediately cleared. Most of the audience complied, thinking this request had something to do with the arrival of the Chief Executive.
But second, and stranger, a member of the elite contingent of archeologists was intercepted as she tried to make her way over to the bedraggled man. She was rather directly escorted out of the room by the pair of Secret Service agents seen talking to the man, led away with gentle but unmistakeable pressure from the men flanking her.
Most of the people in the room took the seeming evacuation in stride.
Shauna Ramsey had come to her feet the moment Slayton rushed in. But the crowd was milling around rather than stationed in their seats, and she had to elbow her way somewhat ungracefully through them. She did not hear Winship’s announcement. She could not see anything ahead of her except the mess that had recently been made of Benjamin Slayton. He was alive!
She was halfway to him when her path was obstructed by a pair of unsmiling Secret Service men. They were wearing gray-on-gray suits, just as Ben had joked during the ride down. They gently grasped her by the biceps and did not permit her to pass.
“Ben?” she said, now confused. “Ben!” She shouted at him, across the room, as the agents restrained her, with little show but great efficiency.
He saw her, was looking at her from across the artifact-choked chamber. He saw what was happening to her—and did nothing. He stood there, not taking his eyes off of her, as Shauna Ramsey was conducted away from the room under guard.
Shauna’s stomach felt as though it had taken a dive down an elevator shaft. She fought for words but none came.
Something had gone horribly wrong.
“Ben! Jesus Christ, Ben, what the hell is going on?” Slayton turned as Shauna was taken through the door and came face-to-bruise with Wilma Christian. As he turned, she saw the full picture formed by the bashes and cuts, and drew in a small breath of surprise. “Holy god, Slayton, what happened to you?” The diamond-chip blue eyes were irised wide with sudden concern.
“Wilma, you’ve got to leave,” he said, ignoring her, with his eyes past her. Most of the people were already out. Shauna was gone.
“Like hell you say,” she snapped instantly. “What are you—” She broke off as Slayton moved around her and began to scan the table areas, searching as rapidly and succinctly as he was capable. His fingers traced mouldings and borders, he weaved and bobbed and gave every object, every surface, every chunk of ancient Egyptian incunabula that came within his reach a thorough once-over. Two more Secret Service men bustled into the room and began doing the same.
She was following him, almost duplicating his movements, looking where he had looked, feeling where he had felt, trying to get a hint by association. None came or presented themselves. It did not take the reporter in her long to get exasperated.
“Ben, what is it? Please, goddamnit, tell me what’s going on!” He kept moving, searching frantically, upending ornate pots and sounding the Seth-Olet backdrops for clues or leads.
And as he searched, he finally spoke. It did not slow him down. “There’s a bomb in here, Wilma, an explosive device. It could be one of a million configurations. It could be any size, and it could b
e concealed almost anywhere. It could also go off any second now, so please get your ass out of here! Brlcklin!” he shouted at one of the agents. “See Ms. Christian out of here before she gets her ass blown off!”
Wilma went for her camera, like a gunslinger, before Bricklin reached her. Slayton whirled, and for the first time their eyes connected. His were full of desperate steel. “And no pictures, Wilma! Get out of here before I toss you through the goddam window! Out!” He went back to work.
She waved Bricklin’s anxious hands away. “I’m going. Hands off, Ace, unless you want to buck the Constitution.”
Wilma complied, and was out the door with the rest. Only Slayton and the two agents remained in the room.
“Goddamnit,” he hissed to himself. It was wrong, and he was practically panicking. There was no time to do the obvious, which was to slap the location of his objective out of Shauna Ramsey. Anybody could hold out for an hour. They did not even have that much time. The President would not be allowed near the place, but in all probability the roomful of near-priceless artifacts would go up in a brilliant display of fireworks, and Rashid Haman would have another propaganda victory to add to the dossiers.
Which was the real reason Slayton was hanging in the exhibit hall, risking his life on behalf of a tombful of dead antiquity. He had come this far, had been through so much on behalf of Rashid Haman, who up until now had been an incorporeal super-entity, like an omnipotent ghost. To have such an adversary turn out to be a woman who had completely bamboozled him was bad enough—but having her win, despite his realization, in any small way at all, which included the destruction of the exhibit, was a personal defeat that Slayton would rather die than countenance. Losing, at this extreme, would be as bad as death anyway. So Slayton stuck, and searched. The Secret Service men did the same because they were under his orders. It was 12:52 p.m.