Atropos

by William L. DeAndrea

  Well, Regina thought, I made his day. If Allan were around, she would have been delighted to give him the opportunity to make hers, so to speak.

  Where the hell was he, anyway?

  Chapter Eleven

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  IF STRIDING ALONG ON A pavement so cold it makes your feet ache, with your hands stuffed into inadequate pockets and your head pulled turtlelike into your jacket can be called strolling, Allan Trotter was strolling down the Nicholette Mall that Sunday afternoon.

  For all the company he had, he might as well have been on the moon. They apparently had some strict blue laws in Minnesota. Here it was, 1:30 P.M. Central Standard Time, and the bars weren’t even open yet.

  It had seemed like such a good idea when he’d thought of it yesterday. The computer had regurgitated Carl Gottfried, of CG Electronics, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as the most likely duck to be lined up in the bugger-hater’s shooting gallery.

  After eleven murders, of course, you’d think the computer could give you copies of the killer’s grade-school report cards. As they said, garbage in, garbage out. What the Agency had been able to glean from police reports from around the nation and its own files hadn’t exactly been garbage, but it hadn’t been a feast either.

  The victim profile it turned out was useless. The dead men were different in age, religion, marital status and financial well-being. What they had in common, nobody needed a computer to find: They were all white males, they were all electronics experts respected in their field, and they all had a reputation, earned or otherwise, for having done secret stuff There was no consensus on that, either. Some people had supposedly worked for the Russians, some for what Trotter laughingly thought of as Our Side, and some had big industrial-espionage reputations. And, of course, they had all been killed.

  And there was one other thing. While several of the men on the list had retired by the time they were hit, all of them had been active through the years 1973-1977. Trotter wondered how much that was worth. It would be like someone running around killing everyone who’d worked for McDonald’s in the summer of 1982. It would give you an interesting cross-section of victims, but what could you possibly have against all of them?

  Anyway, Rines had had the idea of feeding the computer all the information they had on electronic-surveillance people (which was quite a bit—there are certain people your government likes to keep track of) and having the computer cross-check it with the profile. “Maybe we can ask the next guy why somebody wants to kill him,” Rines said.

  The computer gave them Carl Gottfried of CG Electronics, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  The Congressman had looked at the huge sheet of printout with the one lonely name on it and said, “My Lord, he’s cleared the table, hasn’t he?”

  “One name,” Trotter said.

  “And even he don’t exactly fit,” the old man said. “He didn’t even start up in the business till spring of 1974.”

  “I’d like to talk to this Gottfried,” Trotter said.

  “That’s what I just said,” Rines told him.

  “I don’t mean question him, I mean talk to him now, this very minute. Did it give us his phone number on that thing?”

  It did. Two of them, in fact. Trotter got no answer at the office number, but found Gottfried at home. He told him he had some business for him, urgent business, and he’d like to see him as soon as possible.

  Gottfried was amenable. “Well, you’re more than five hundred miles away from Minneapolis; how soon can you get here?”

  “How did you know that?”

  The computer had come up with a picture of Gottfried along with the data. He was thin, balding, wore glasses. He looked like a high school nerd who had found a long-term and very satisfying revenge on the rest of the world.

  “I’m an electronics expert, Mr. Trotter.”

  Trotter could almost see the picture smirk. He could definitely hear it in Gottfried’s voice.

  “I’ll fly in tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “Okay. Your plane will probably be late. The weather is a mess. Call me at home when you get to the airport, and I’ll come into the office to meet you. You have my office address?”

  Trotter repeated it.

  “Third floor,” Gottfried reminded him. “On second thought ...”

  “Yes?”

  “No, nothing. Tell you what. Call me here, like I said, and if there’s no answer, call me at the office, all right?”

  “Fine with me,” Trotter had said. “Take, care of yourself.”

  Gottfried said, “Huh?” but Trotter was already hanging up.

  “Get me on a plane to Minneapolis,” he said.

  “Send a man,” his father replied. “I don’t want you flying into any blizzard.”

  “No time to brief him. Look, our friend, whoever he is, moves fast. In less than a year, he’s killed almost a dozen men. And they weren’t innocent bystanders, either. These were people who’d made it to the top in the suspicion business. The killer knew who these men were, and had the resources to find them, get close to them, and kill them.”

  Rines scratched his chin. “Yeah. And he did it in so many different ways that we only caught on to him a couple of weeks ago.”

  “All right,” the old man said. “You’ve convinced me. Not that you had to. You’re running the Agency, remember?”

  Trotter smiled. “I don’t want to throw my weight around unnecessarily. I just wish I didn’t have to wait till tomorrow to get there. How come you never taught me to fly a jet?”

  “It was on the agenda, son. You ran out on me before I could get around to it.”

  “Don’t expect me to apologize.” The meeting broke up.

  Trotter called Regina that evening and told her it would be another day or two before he got home. He was pleased to find himself thinking of it as home.

  Regina was disappointed—that also felt good—and told him about the call she’d made to Mark Van Horn. Trotter had heard the story of Mark Van Horn a long time ago. He wasn’t worried. He told Regina to go ahead and ask him her questions. “Interview him in person, if you have to. If you want to. It’s your magazine, and it’s your decision.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I never did.”

  “Then what do I have to worry about? Or you either. I’ll see you soon, Bash. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  Trotter called Gottfried from the airport. No answer at his home. Busy signal at the office. He tried a few more times. Same results. Finally, he said to hell with it, and went for a taxi. The line was busy; the odds were that someone was in the office.

  He told the driver to drop him off at a hotel about five blocks from Gottfried’s office. Not only was this a standard precaution, it was also good for his cover as somebody with a problem he needed a security consultant’s help with. It was all probably a waste of time, since it was all but certain no one was following him, but as his father had often said, if you make your precautions habits, you don’t have to waste time deciding whether you need them.

  That was true wisdom, and had stood him in good stead over the years, but Trotter wished that this time it had occurred to him to precaution himself about three blocks closer to his destination.

  He could feel the blood congealing in his legs by the time he reached the right door. He was glad he had gloves on when he grabbed the handle. He wondered what kind of brain would put brass handles on an outside door in the middle of the frost belt. What did the unfortunate bare-handed person do? Stand there until spring?

  Trotter went inside and stood there for a few seconds, warming up. Slowly, he let his head inch free from his coat.

  Then he realized he was stalling.

  It made him angry, because he didn’t know why. He took a few seconds to figure it out. When he did, he was angrier still.

  He was stalling because he
was afraid of what that busy signal might mean.

  Bad. Very bad. Fear was all right. Fear was good. It put an edge on you. But not if you refused to face it. Trotter took a deep breath, then exhaled, fogging up his glasses again. He waited until they cleared.

  Too long out of the field, he thought. Then headed for the stairs. Gottfried’s office was on the third floor.

  He was out of breath by the time he got there. All that damned working out, and he still wasn’t in shape. He caught his breath and made his way down the hall.

  The doors here were wood, top to bottom, with gold letters announcing who occupied what office. There was no glass to let Trotter have a look inside before he committed himself.

  There it was. CG Electronics. Trotter didn’t knock. He grabbed the knob firmly and twisted it slowly. It made no noise. The door was open. When he could feel the latch had cleared, he threw the door open and jumped aside.

  Nothing happened. Trotter shrugged. That would also be good for his cover, if his cover was posing as a paranoid nut.

  He went inside. The office had been trashed. A man lay on the floor to his right, out of immediate sight of the doorway. A telephone receiver dangled just above his hand. The man’s face was turned obligingly toward Trotter. Obligingly, because it enabled Trotter to see instantly that the dead man was Gottfried, and because it is considerably less unpleasant to see a small black hole in someone’s forehead than it is to see a big red mess where the back of someone’s head used to be.

  The gun was on the floor about fifteen feet from the body, a regulation police thirty-eight. Trotter was happy to see that the killer had saved everyone a lot of irritation by not trying to set this up like a suicide or an accident or something. The position of the wound, the lack of powder burns, would have told the truth no matter what the killer had tried to set up.

  Trotter went over and picked up the gun. “Always pick up the gun,” his father had taught him. “You come upon a dead body, and the gun is lying there, you pick it up. A dead body and a gun means a killer’s been around, boy, and for all you know he’s still there or just came back. Don’t worry about your fingerprints, you worry about your life first.”

  Trotter still had his gloves on, so he didn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints, just smudging the killer’s. In the unlikely event the killer had left any. He worried instead about what he was going to do for leads now. The combined genius of the Congressman, Rines, himself, and some very high-priced computers had come up with the name of this now rapidly cooling corpse. He could only hope the killer hadn’t retired.

  Trotter laughed at himself. Aren’t you the sweet one.

  But he didn’t take it back. Trotter was not equipped to go back over old cases and patiently follow clues. He had been trained to take charge, to grab hold of a situation and not to let go until he had twisted it into a shape he liked.

  Now, there might not be a situation. The situation might be (probably was) over. Might as well try to grab a handful of steam. The whole situation would bother him less if he had some inkling of what the hell was at stake.

  He decided to forget about it. He arrived at that sort of decision a lot more frequently than he was able to carry it out, but he always felt better just for telling himself he was allowed to put it aside. He’d go back to Kirkester, to Bash. Make wedding plans, if she still wanted to. If something was going to happen that would make some sense of this mess, Trotter would find out about it.

  The only thing to decide now was whether to let poor Mr. Gottfried wait till tomorrow for someone to find him, or to make an anonymous call to the police before he left town.

  Then he didn’t even have to decide that much, because the police were there, pointing guns at him, and yelling at him to drop his.

  Trotter did what they said. He put his hands on top of his head, though they hadn’t asked him to do that. And he worked hard at not smiling. He didn’t think they’d understand.

  Chapter Twelve

  Washington, D.C.

  HE LAY NAKED ON the bed, relaxed, happy. It had been a very hectic six months. Twelve of the bastards killed. Life would have been a lot simpler if he’d just been able to find out who the right one was, of course. Doing something unfamiliar once was a lot easier than doing it twelve times. He was glad it was over. He was beginning to get the feeling that someone suspected something was going on. That guy they busted in Minneapolis—they’d let him out of jail altogether too soon. That’s what his sources said anyway, and he had no reason to doubt his sources. That guy might have been released because he was cozy with the police. So what—whatever he was, he’d shown up just an hour after Gottfried’s death. That was cutting it a little too close.

  He rubbed his chest and told himself again how glad he was that it was over. He had to smile. They’d all been so surprised when he’d pulled his gun or grabbed their throats or whatever he’d decided to do to that particular one. It was an amazing feeling of power, watching them realize that though Nature or God or whatever they wanted to say had put them in this world, he had decided to take them out of it.

  It wouldn’t be the same, of course, if he’d had to kill somebody with a shred of decency. But these men were scum. They earned their bread by nosing into people’s dirty secrets. They deserved to get it. There must be a lot of people who deserved to get it.

  He had the heat in the apartment way down. He could feel cool air currents against his body. He liked it. He liked to go naked. He was more alive that way, more in touch, as though the world loved him.

  One more, he thought. One more to be rid of, but that could wait. That had to wait. In the meantime, he had nothing to do but live his life.

  There was a phone call he was supposed to make. To a woman. He felt something stronger than the wind down in his groin. He raised his head. His dick was twitching. He looked at it as though he’d never seen it before.

  “What is this?” he asked it. “Nostalgia?”

  He started to laugh. He rolled over and grabbed the phone and dialed. He was still smiling when the call went through.

  “Regina?” he said. “Hi. This is Mark Van Horn. I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”

  Part Two

  Lachesis

  She who measures the thread of life ...

  Chapter One

  The Year Before

  MARK WAS DOING A FAVOR for his mother. That was the rationale. The real reason was that he had always wanted to poke around inside his father’s safe. Mark Van Horn had been forbidden very little in life, but he had been forbidden to look into that safe.

  What was even more amazing was that this order came not from the housekeeper, or from Ainley Masters, but directly from the Senator himself. Mark was forbidden to mess with the safe and, more amazing still, further forbidden from telling anyone his father had mentioned it.

  It was silly, in a way. At the time the safe had been put off limits, Mark had been a twelve-year-old kid with a fixation on caper movies and a toy stethoscope, with which he used to listen to all the locks in the house, and through which it was impossible even to hear his own heartbeat. If he wanted to cat-burgle any place (as he frequently did), he had to steal a key or sneak in through the window. He had about as much chance of getting into a combination lock as he had of growing up to be a member of the Other Party. All the Senator had succeeded in doing was filling his son’s mind with curiosity about that safe, and making him carry on his burglar fixation long past the time it would have died a natural death. Mark had very nearly (but not quite) been thrown out of two private schools for testing his continually developing skills on safes in headmasters’ offices.

  The Van Horn name and Van Horn money smoothed over those situations, and by the time he started college, Mark had more or less lost his mania for getting into places. Or rather, the nature of the places he wanted to get into had changed. Regina Hudson had been one of the nicer places he had gotten into.

  The only lock he still wanted to ope
n was on his father’s safe. One day, on a visit to Switzerland to see his mother, he decided to break the second part of the law.

  “Ella?” he said. His mother liked him to call her Ella. She said being called “Mother” made her feel too old. “Ella, what does the Senator keep in the wall safe in the bedroom?”

  “What bedroom, dear?”

  “The master bedroom in the Georgetown house.”

  “There is no wall safe there.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  Ella sniffed. She had a fine, thin nose. Delicate nostrils. Very good for sniffing. “If there is, he put it in after I left him.”

  “I suppose so.” Mark’s parents had split up when he was twelve, and he was thirteen before he found out the safe existed, so it was possible. He had just assumed it had always been there, since he hadn’t been aware of its installation. On the other hand, he was away at school so much, they could have installed lead lining and turned the place into a fallout shelter without Mark’s necessarily having been aware of it.

  “In any case,” Ella went on, “it can’t be anything very important. Ainley Masters takes all the important things and puts them in a vault somewhere underground. I tried to tell your father that someday, Ainley will sell that stuff back to the Van Horn family for a billion dollars, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” She sniffed again. “He never listened to me. I think Ainley poisoned his mind. Would you care for a drink, dear? I’m going to ring down for one.”

  Mark had checked his watch. Eleven thirty-five A.M. One of Ella’s better days.

  “I don’t know how important it is,” Mark said, “but he told me never to go near it or he’d whip me.”

  Ella’s blue eyes widened. “Your father said that?”

  “He did. He also told me never to mention it to anyone. Including Ainley.”

  Ella’s eyes lit up. She half-sat, half-collapsed into a chair. She spread the fingers of a bone-china hand across her chest and sat there blinking.