Atropos

by William L. DeAndrea

  Hank rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. Ainley wished he knew who the hell Hank had been listening to. Ainley had really only noticed it recently, but once he did, it became apparent that Hank had been taking advice elsewhere since shortly after the fire.

  “Have you been talking to some reporter?” Ainley demanded.

  Hank jumped.

  “It would be like you,” Ainley said. “Having some hack work on your memoirs for years at a time, strung along with tips and leaks. And it wouldn’t be long before you let him tell you how to behave so the book would come out the best read.”

  “Ainley, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s hard sometimes, considering the kinds of things I have to deal with.”

  “Ainley, I promise you, I’m not talking to any reporters. I’m not talking to anyone but you.”

  Ainley looked at him. He used to be able to tell when Hank was lying, but that was getting harder all the time.

  Hank smiled. Even Ainley, who knew infinitely better, could feel the charm of that smile. “How’s Mark doing?” Hank asked.

  That was another thing. Hank loved his son, so he said, but it was Ainley to whom Mark wrote his letters. Hank didn’t seem to mind. Since he’d divorced Ella, Hank had no interest in anything but the perks of Senatorial power and rucking. He acted as if his beloved son were a pleasant acquaintance and nothing more.

  “He’s coming to town in a few days.”

  “Oh,” Hank said. “School over?”

  Mark, after a few years of living on the family trust, was now attending Whitten College Law School. Both things were family traditions. He was also not attending Whitten College Law School, when his spirit moved him to be someplace else. This was also a family tradition. When Van Horns needed to pass the bar exam, the bar exam was passed. Attendance at classes was a necessity only for lesser mortals.

  “He just wants to visit,” Ainley said.

  “Oh.” Hank said. “How nice. I’ll have my secretary tell Mrs. Rodriguez to prepare his room.”

  “He’ll stay here with me, Senator,” Ainley said.

  Hank nodded, as though pondering a question of monumental importance. “That’s probably best,” he announced. “Lot of committee work coming up, and all the press fallout from Iowa, too.”

  “Yes, Senator,” Ainley said. He forbore to point out that as head man of the Senator’s staff, he’d be busy too. Part of the idea of the visit was for Mark to get some hands-on experience of the maneuvering at the fringes of a Presidential election.

  “I don’t know how much I’ll be home, anyway.”

  “Yes, Senator.”

  “But I want to get together with him.” Hank frowned, then brightened.

  “I’ll have Nancy check the calendar, and any lunch or dinner that isn’t spoken for belongs to Mark.”

  “That’s first-class, Senator,” Ainley assured him. He showed Hank out. After he was gone, Ainley looked at the door for a few seconds, slowly shaking his head.

  Chapter Six

  New York, New York

  SOMEONE KNOCKED ON THE door. Arnie ignored it, he was too busy on the phone. Sometimes he wished he had never stopped free-lancing, had never opened Power Dish Communications in the basement of his apartment building in the East Eighties. He was just too damned busy.

  Arnie had no idea where they came from. He had deliberately picked a place in a residential neighborhood to keep the clientele down to pros and people he knew. And he didn’t put on the dog. The store looked just like his workshop had when he was doing security stuff. Maybe it was the sign Sally had given him as a gag, the black-and-red-and-white painting of a chick in a bikini holding a handful of lightning bolts. She was the “Power Dish.”

  Arnie shook his head. Maybe he ought to replace it with one that said “A. Gillick, by appointment only,” like those diamond places.

  He’d done a security check for a place like that in Amsterdam, once. Found a bug, too. Had to be an inside job, because the mini recorder was right there next to it. There must have been the combinations to a lot of loaded safes on that tape, if the relieved look the Dutchman in charge of security gave him meant anything. Of course, Arnie never knew for sure, because it was a point of honor with him never to listen to stuff he collected. He was doing this for clients, after all, not for himself. He didn’t need to go stuffing up his brain with other people’s secrets. It was just here’s the tape, gimme my check, thank you very much, and off somewhere else.

  That was all before Sally, of course. Sally was a small brunette he’d seen at a party about two years ago. He decided to do her a favor, since there weren’t any worthwhile blondes in the place. What Arnie didn’t know was that Sally was a witch, and six months later he would be happily hypnotized into becoming Sally’s husband, and stepfather to eleven-year-old Pete.

  So the security business, at least on the footing it had been on, was over. All that globe-trotting meant too much time away from Sally.

  He had learned, on the other hand, that he didn’t want to be under her feet all day, either. Arnie had never been a big spender; he’d done high-risk, high-paying jobs for the challenge, and banked most of the money. But he needed to give Sally a break from his face. So he’d opened the store. He’d noodle around for a while, order out from the deli, close for lunch, noodle around a few more hours, and rejoin his wife about the same time Pete came home from school.

  If it weren’t for the damn customers, life would be a dream.

  They were pounding on the door now.

  Arnie put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Go away! Can’t you read, for God’s sake?” He would go look to make sure he’d put the CLOSED FOR LUNCH, BACK AT 1:30 sign on the door, but then the asshole out there pounding would see him and make things worse.

  Arnie turned back to the receiver. “No, I wasn’t talking to you. I know you can read, you work for the Encyclopedia Victoria.”

  A few weeks ago, Arnie had conceived the notion of buying Pete an encyclopedia. Pete was a good kid, and smart. School-smart, which Arnie had never been. Besides, he’d seen the ads on TV about the kid walking through what looked like a goddam monsoon to get to the library. Pete spent a lot of time at the library, and in New York, even in a good neighborhood like this one, there were elements your kid might be exposed to coming home late that should worry you a lot more than the weather.

  So when Arnie had seen a coupon in TV Guide to request more information, he filled it out and sent it in. What he got back was worthless; an expanded version of the magazine ad. So he’d said to hell with it.

  Then today, they’d called him on the phone. A guy with a slight Spanish accent asked him if he was Mr. Arnold Gillick, and when Arnie admitted it, told him he was a Customer Representative for the Encyclopedia Victoria, and that Arnie had sent for their information packet.

  “Yeah. The information packet didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.”

  “What might that be, Mr. Gillick?”

  “How much does it cost?”

  And the guy wouldn’t tell him! He launched into a spiel that was word for word exactly what was in the brochure!

  “Look,” Arnie said, ignoring the first knock at the door, “I know it’s the best. I want to know what it costs.”

  “New members of the Victoria family find Victoria surprisingly affordable.” He sounded like Ricardo Montalban on that old car commercial.

  “I don’t want to be surprised I can afford it, I want to know.”

  That was when Arnie had turned away to deal with the door pounder.

  “Yeah, yeah. You can read,” he told the phone. “Read me the price.”

  “The Victoria family offers payment plans from as low as five dollars a week.”

  “How many weeks?”

  “The flexibility of Victoria Family payment plans is such that payments can be made at the new member’s convenience. In addition—”

  “Stop it.”

  “—when you acquire Victoria—”


  “Stop it.”

  “—or simply preview it in your home, you will receive—”

  “Shut up, goddammit!”

  The Customer Representative seemed shocked. Apparently, the members of the Victoria family had better manners. “Mr. Gillick?”

  “If the next word out of your mouth,” Arnie said, “is not a number followed by the word ‘dollars,’ I’m gonna hang up. Hard.”

  “But the Victoria Family—”

  “Good-bye, asshole!” Arnie yelled, and banged the receiver down. Jerks. He wouldn’t buy their damned encyclopedia if they put his picture on the cover, now. What the hell kind of way was that to run a business? Afraid to let the customer know the price of the goods until you had him hooked? Especially a supposedly classy business like the Encyclopedia Victoria.

  Outside, someone was pounding on the door again.

  “Goddammit!” Arnie said again. It was probably somebody from the encyclopedia company, he thought, sent to drag him by the ear into the Victoria Family. Arnie chuckled to himself, and felt a little bit better.

  When he got to the door, he saw he was wrong. It wasn’t a kidnapper, it was a private eye. Somebody not especially tall, but sturdy, wearing a trench coat with the collar turned up, and a felt hat pulled down low.

  “What do you want?” It occurred to Arnie that this was ridiculous. Here he was, a big electronics expert, yelling through a door. He ought to hook up an intercom or something.

  “Mr. Arnold Gillick?”

  “Are you from the encyclopedia?”

  The guy in the trench coat tilted his head to the side, puzzled. Arnie still couldn’t see his face. “No. No. What?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Look, it’s my lunchtime, can’t you come back?”

  “This will only take a second. You are Mr. Arnold Gillick, a security consultant?”

  “I’m retired from that. I can’t help you.”

  “But you were in the field in, say, 1971?”

  “Oh, yeah, I did that kind of stuff from ’69 to about eighteen months ago.”

  “Continuously?”

  “Yep. Hardly even took a vacation. Of course, there was a lot of trav—”

  The man in the trench coat took his hand out of his pocket and the glass shattered. That was how it seemed to Arnie. He’d never get a chance to correct the impression, because the .357 magnum slug that shattered the window shattered Arnie’s head just a split second later.

  Chapter Seven

  Washington, D.C.

  “SO THAT’S WHY I HAD to drop everything and come down here. To meet a President who’s going to be out of office a year from now.”

  The old man stopped walking and turned to his son. That meant he was going to say something. The Congressman had made excellent progress in recovering from his stroke, but he still hadn’t reached the point where he could ply his walker, breathe and talk all at the same time.

  “He wanted to see you. He’s still the Commander in Chief, you know.” The Congressman faced forward again, plunked the walker a foot or so in front of where it had been, then inched up to it.

  He stopped again. “Besides, I think he was beginning to doubt you existed.”

  “I can’t wait until you’re well enough to take the Agency back,” Trotter said. The Congressman muttered something about hoping he lived that long, and plunked on.

  This walk was supposed to be part of the old man’s rehabilitation. The doctor (the President had lent the Congressman his own personal physician) had prescribed all the walking the Congressman felt like doing. Trotter reflected that his father had certainly picked a good place for it.

  The Capitol Mall will take all the walking you can do, and then some. Trotter was beginning to get a little tired himself, but he was damned if he was going to complain about it to a man who’d had a stroke. He just wished he had a walker of his own to lean on.

  The trouble was, the Capitol was so damn big, down there at the end of the road, and the Mall was so damn straight, everything looked closer than it was, easier to get to. The looming museums of the Smithsonian, lining either side, added to the illusion. Trotter reflected that this might be symbolic of what was wrong with Washington—lots of majesty, but lack of perspective.

  Trotter walked alongside his father, taking care not to go too fast and leave the old man behind. He was a little peeved that the emergency summons was an audience with a temporary officeholder and a spell as a physical therapist, but what the hell. The government was paying the plane fare. He could be back in Kirkester tonight.

  The walker stopped again, in front of the Air and Space Museum. Trotter waited for the Congressman to speak, but nothing happened. Tourists, sparse in the January cold, paid much more attention to the old man who seemingly slipped into suspended animation than they ever had when he was discussing top-secret projects in a public street. Trotter’s father had taught him that that would be the case. You can talk about anything in public if you keep your voice normal, don’t be too specific, and don’t act too interested.

  But if you stop, stand in one spot, and stare straight ahead, you’re going to attract attention.

  Trotter figured one of them ought to say something. “What is it? Do you want to go inside and touch a moon rock?”

  His father came out of his trance and looked at him. He always spoke out of the corner of his mouth these days, but this time, it seemed especially appropriate. He gave his son a one-eyed scowl and said, “You mockin’ the afflicted, boy?”

  Then he did a very unusual thing. He laughed. Real, genuine laughter, as though he had actually perceived something as funny. Trotter found it a revelation.

  “No, son. I was thinkin’ something over. Let’s get out of the doorway, and I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

  The Congressman stopped again about twenty yards farther down the Mall. “All right,” he said. “There was another reason for calling you down here.” The Congressman’s Southern accent had dwindled to practically nothing, a sure sign that he was getting down to business.

  “Thank you. As somebody said recently, I’m supposed to be the boss.”

  “You are, son, you are. People keep secrets from the boss all the time.”

  “I’m glad you’re going to tell me. I’d hate to have to fire you.” That raised another chuckle.

  “Well, it’s a personal thing, too. I got a call from Jake Feder. He wants to talk to me. I told him you were running the show these days, and he said he knew that, but he wanted to talk to me.”

  “You said okay.”

  “I said okay. He worked for me for a long time, and he was my friend before he worked for me.”

  “I have never noticed,” Trotter said, “that friendship ever cut a whole lot of ice with you.”

  “I could never afford it to. And anyway, you know Jake. Doesn’t give a fat hairy damn for anything in the world but circuits and his grandchildren.”

  Trotter nodded. He’d gotten a full load of Jake Feder’s grandchildren when Jake had come up to Kirkester to install Trotter’s electronics.

  The Congressman continued. “Well, he gives a damn about this.”

  “So talk to him.”

  “I want you there.”

  “He asked for you. This might not even be Agency business.”

  “Right,” the old man said. In the old days, he might have spat, but his control over his lips wasn’t what it had been. “What are the odds of that?”

  “Slim,” Trotter admitted.

  “So I want you there. People like Jake have to know you’re the boss now.”

  “I’m the boss for now. There’s a difference.”

  The old man gave him that half smile. “Whatever you say. Boss.”

  For the first forty-plus years of its existence, the Agency had operated like a guerrilla army, disappearing before anyone even started to look. The Congressman had had things arranged so that his headquarters (a couple of secure rooms for privacy, a John, and a linkup with the people who were actually do
ing the work) could be moved overnight. Things could still be done that way. The Congressman, as Director Emeritus, or on leave of absence, or however he chose to think of it, still had a hideaway in a basement somewhere. It wouldn’t do for him to be seen too much at the new, more permanent headquarters.

  Today was an exception. Fenton Rines’s secretary buzzed him to let him know the Congressman and a Mr. Trotter were here. Rines said, “Send them in,” and sat looking at the door, waiting for them.

  This door showed him nothing but woodgrain. The one that opened to the eighth-floor corridor outside read simply, FENTON RINES INVESTIGATIONS. The door didn’t lie, as far as it went. It just didn’t go very far. The Agency was behind that door, and it was a whole lot more than Fenton Rines. And there was a whole lot more going on than investigation, too. Disinformation, espionage, assassination, and things they didn’t have names for. Rines reflected that he had come a long way from the crew-cut ex-Marine who’d joined the FBI so many years ago.

  It had been a Fenton Rines investigation that had gotten him into all this. Rines had been a staunch and loyal Bureau man. Some said that he might have been in line to be Director someday, if Watergate hadn’t happened. Rines didn’t know about that, didn’t care that much. He liked doing what he was doing.

  But he chafed under the post-Watergate reforms. It bothered him that the Bureau should be hampered in its work because of some overzealousness in the past. Overzealousness, it should be added, in which Rines took no part. Still, it was annoying. And it was even worse because Rines’s practiced eye could see that somebody was doing something. Strange operations that looked like nothing a criminal in his right mind would want to do, but too well planned to be the work of a maniac.

  When he brought his findings to the Congressional Committee that was supposed to oversee such things, he was patted on the head and sent away. That was when he decided somebody in the government was according somebody privileges that were denied the Bureau.

  It all came to a head with the Liz Fane kidnapping. The Congressman had sent Trotter, who was then known as Clifford Driscoll, to straighten things out. Which he proceeded to do in an effective, if unorthodox, fashion. In the process, Rines had learned about the Agency, about the Congressman’s role in it, and the fact that Driscoll—now Trotter—was the old man’s son. The President didn’t know that. Jake Feder, who was also supposed to be coming this afternoon, had worked with the Congressman since the War, and he didn’t know it.