Baldauf, highly agitated, suddenly stopped and lit a cigar. He chewed on the end for a few moments, bit through it, then heaved the cigar out over the lawn. “The fucker!” he shouted. He sucked in a deep breath, then continued through clenched jaws: “Some motherfucker broke my boy’s back and arms, then filled him up with shit that smothered him and broke his face apart. Then he was left hanging naked, shit oozing out of him, from a tree up at the logging camp for all those gooks to gawk at. When I get hold of the bastard that did that, I’ll make him curse his mother for not having an abortion.”
“I believe there was a paper necklace draped around your son’s neck,” Chant said quietly.
Baldauf turned to face Chant, studied him through narrowed eyelids “Nobody who wasn’t up in the logging camp that day knows about the necklace,” the squat man said in a hoarse voice laced with menace “How the hell do you know?”
“Being able to find out things is what makes me a good intelligence officer, Mr. Baldauf. The point is that the paper necklace is a Hmong symbol of hope. Somebody was sending a message to the Hmong in Mordan County. The Hmong will see the person who killed your son as an avenger, a man to rally around.”
Baldauf’s thick fingers wrapped themselves like talons in the lapels of Chant’s topcoat. “You know who did this thing?”
“I believe so. It’s why I was sent to Mordan County, and it’s why I’m talking to you.”
“Tell me!”
Chant placed his cane over his right wrist, then gently but firmly removed Baldauf’s fingers from his coat. “Before I do, Mr. Baldauf, I have to touch on some unpleasant business.”
Baldauf’s pale green eyes flashed. “What the fuck are you talking about, Fox?! You said you know who killed my son! Now, I’m warning you—!”
“I said I believed I knew. May I be frank with you, sir?”
Baldauf flushed and ground his teeth with impatience. “Say what you have to say,” he answered in a low voice that hummed with tension. “Then give me the name of the man who tortured and murdered my son.”
“I happen to know that you won’t be calling in any law-enforcement agencies from outside Mordan County. So far, you’ve been successful in keeping news about the crime to a minimum, and you’ll continue to do so.”
Baldauf frowned. “That’s right. So what? I—the people of this county don’t need the help of outsiders. We’ve got enough men right here—deputy sheriffs, local cops, and volunteers—to do the job. Everybody around here loved my son.”
“I’m sure. Be that as it may, the real reason you don’t want the state police or FBI poking around the county is because you have too many things to hide.”
“Look, you—!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baldauf,” Chant said firmly, “but this discussion is necessary, and it’s best to get it out of the way now. There are very serious irregularities in the way your family does business, and with the way you handle the people who work for you. In fact, you’ve committed dozens of state and federal crimes.”
Wilbur Baldauf slowly and deliberately patted down the strands of dyed hair over the top of his head. When he spoke, his tone was low, threatening. “You’d best mind your own business, Fox. I mean for you to take that as a threat.”
“Oh, but I intend to mind my own business—which, in this case, is the army’s business. I’m telling you that the U.S Army has no interest in your activities, illegal, immoral, or otherwise. My only concern is catching this man. For reasons that I’ll come to, the army also prefers that the matter be kept quiet. Since you effectively control all the law and news-gathering in the county, you can take steps to see that this is done Our interests coincide.”
Baldauf studied Chant’s face for some time before he finally spoke. “You’ve got balls, Colonel—coming to a man’s home on the day of his son’s funeral and talking to him like this.”
“I thought you might be more interested in catching your son’s murderer than in my manners.”
“Yeah,” the fat man grunted. “You’re right.”
“My only interest in your personal business is how knowledge of it can help me to predict where this man may strike next.”
Baldauf’s face darkened. “Strike next?”
Chant, leaning heavily on his cane, abruptly resumed walking up the path. He waited until Baldauf was beside him, then said. “We have good reason to believe that the person who killed your son is a man by the name of John Sinclair.”
Baldauf’s face went from red to purple, and his voice shook with murderous rage. “What the hell does this Sinclair want with me?! And why did he kill Lester?!”
“Please be patient, Mr. Baldauf,” Chant said, lightly tapping his cane for emphasis. “If you listen to what I have to say, I’m sure most of your questions will eventually be answered.”
“Go ahead,” the other man replied, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Let’s hear it.”
“For security reasons, I can’t tell you exactly what John Sinclair did in the war, or describe the incident that led to his desertion.”
“This guy’s a deserter?”
“Yes—a traitor to his country, if you will. He literally walked away from the war, after telling his superior he was going to do it. Six assassins were sent after him, and he killed every one of them. Later he was presumed dead, killed by the enemy and buried in an unmarked grave. In fact, he somehow made it out of Southeast Asia and back to this country.”
“I don’t give a shit about his war record,” Baldauf said, slapping his thighs in frustration. “What does this fucker look like?”
“Now? Nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows what he looks like?! How the hell—?!”
“Sinclair is a master of disguise, forgery—all the ‘black arts,’ as we call them.” Chant paused, smiled wryly. “He’s also one mean son of a bitch and a coldblooded killer—traits anyone dealing with him should always bear in mind. However, when he can get away with it, he prefers to accomplish his ends by trickery. I’ve been tracking him around the world for the past seven years, and I’ve never heard him described the same way twice. Once, in Switzerland, he even passed himself off as an Army Intelligence officer with a limp; that, of course, was to make sport of me.”
Baldauf glanced quickly at Chant, laughed nervously. “You still haven’t told me—”
“I’m coming to it, Mr. Baldauf. For some years now, Sinclair has been enaged in the business of robbing people who are … uh, shall we say ‘vulnerable’?”
“Vulnerable? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I was trying to be diplomatic, Mr. Baldauf,” Chant said, affecting a sigh. “What I mean is that John Sinclair robs people who rob people. Since thieves and murderers can’t very well ask for help from law enforcement agencies without risk of going to prison themselves, they’re vulnerable to a man like Sinclair. Now do you catch my drift?”
“Watch your mouth, Fox.”
“Sorry to be indelicate, Mr. Baldauf, but now I think we understand each other. And you understand why you’re what Sinclair would consider a perfect pigeon, if you’ll pardon the unflattering term. You have only your private resources to pit against his, and he’s often protected by his victim’s victims. Unfortunately, he’s become a kind of legend; people who’ve been wronged and whom he’s helped look on him as a kind of no-nonsense Robin Hood. Needless to say, this is not the view of the world’s law-enforcement agencies, nor of the U.S. Army. We are not amused. The fact of the matter is that we find him a considerable embarrassment. Both Interpol and the FBI have thick files on him.”
“The army wants to prosecute him as a deserter?”
“No, Mr. Baldauf,” Chant answered dryly. “The army wants him dead.”
“How’s that?”
“Right now he’s primarily an annoyance to law-enforcement agencies. If he were caught, he might very well cause serious difficulties for the government of the United States. Believe it or not, Mr. Baldauf, there are still secrets abo
ut our conduct of the war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—and Sinclair knows a lot of them. We don’t want him sitting safely in some prison while he writes his memoirs.”
“What secrets?”
“They wouldn’t be secrets if I told them to you, would they? To keep things simple, let’s just say that it wouldn’t set a good example for America’s youth to find out that a man who’d been twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor turned out to be a traitor and a criminal.”
“How the hell do you think he even heard of me?” Baldauf asked in a slightly petulant tone.
“Actually, he probably heard about your Hmong workers first. He didn’t like what he heard, and so he made some inquiries. Sinclair, for a time, fought with the Hmong tribes in Laos against the Pathet Lao, so he probably takes what you’ve done to them personally. As a matter of fact, I’d expected him to come here eventually. I’d taken the precaution of planting my own agents among the Hmong, and that’s how I came to be informed of the unfortunate incident regarding your son. That kind of mindless brutality has Sinclair’s fingerprints all over it. This time I’m here fairly early in the game, and I can try to anticipate his moves. This is the closest I’ve ever been to the bastard, and I think I have a very good chance of finally nailing him.”
“What do you plan to do with him when you get him?” Baldauf asked carefully.
“I’m not sure you’ve been listening, Mr. Baldauf. I plan to kill him, and then see him buried at the bottom of some very deep well. Then he’ll no longer be a problem to you, to us, or to anyone else.”
They had reached a stone wall at the far end of the garden. They stopped walking, and Chant turned to look at Baldauf, whose thin lips had curled back into a sneer. His green eyes gleamed.
“That’s the best news I’ve heard from you yet.”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“How will you do it?”
“Oh, I won’t do it personally. I’ll be supervising a team of specialists I’ll be calling in. As a matter of fact, I was about to ask if I could use your telephone. I’ll be discreet.”
“You’re going to what?!”
“I’m part of a team, Baldauf. I’m the point man—I do the tracking, but I hope you don’t think I’m going to go up against that madman alone? I need help; at the least, I need three or four sharpshooters.”
“Do these other men know about … me?”
“No, not yet. But they’ll have to be briefed. You and your operations are the key to this thing, and we’re counting on your cooperation. Don’t worry about it; the members of the team I’ll bring in don’t give any more of a shit about the fact that you and your family are crooks than I do. We’re soldiers, Baldauf, not moralists, and we have a narrowly defined mission.”
“Can you absolutely guarantee me that one of those men won’t leave here after looking over my operation and make an anonymous phone call to some outside newspaper?”
“Hell, I can’t guarantee it, but—”
“Right. I’ve got a lot of men on my payroll, Fox—officially and unofficially. A bullet’s a bullet; they can kill Sinclair just as easily as your men. I don’t want anybody else in on this.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I need professionals.”
Baldauf’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why do I even need you, much less this team of yours, if I now know who it is I’m after?”
Chant shook his head, clucked his tongue. “Mr. Baldauf, I’m still afraid that you’re not really listening to me. Would you and I be out here having this conversation and freezing our asses off if John Sinclair were a common criminal? An ordinary criminal? We would not. Sinclair has matched wits—and sometimes firepower—with some of the best organizations, legal and illegal, in the world. Meaning no disrespect to you and all the people you control, but Sinclair eats Mafia dons for breakfast. As difficult as it may be for you to believe, you can’t hope to outfight him. The man is a murderous shadow, and you can’t gun down a shadow. You have to outthink him, Baldauf—trap him in the light. That’s what I’m here for; think of me as a source of light.”
“I’m beginning to think of you as being full of shit. You talk too goddam fancy to suit me. All I want to do is cut off the guy’s balls.”
“He’ll cut off your balls unless you listen to me, Baldauf. You somehow managed to become czar of Mordan County, so I have to assume you’re not as stupid as you sound.”
“Fox, you son of a bitch!” Baldauf shouted, raising his fist and stepping even closer to Chant. “I’ll kill you!”
“No, you won’t,” Chant said evenly, pushing Baldauf away from him, “so you can put that stupid idea out of your mind. If you do, you’ll certainly get some visitors. Sinclair will be warned away, and you’ll get a lot more than just media attention.”
Baldauf lowered his fist and looked away. “Somebody knows you’re here?”
“Of course; my boss in the Pentagon. I may be constantly on the move chasing after Sinclair, but I’m not exactly on vacation. I have to check in.”
Baldauf’s voice was almost inaudible. “How many people in Washington know about me?”
“About your illegal activities? Nobody. I told you that we don’t care about that; the only important thing is that Sinclair wants to destroy you, and he’s here.” Chant paused, sighed. “For two men who have common interests, we’re wasting a lot of time and emotional energy. We work together. I know how the man’s mind works; you don’t. It will be my job, through information you’ll give me, to anticipate his moves. I’ll try to set up a trap, and my team will spring it. Simple. We’ll get rid of Sinclair, and then you’ll be rid of us.”
Baldauf studied the ground. “Like you said, you know his mind. I’ve got plenty of men, and you can use them any way you see fit. I’ll cooperate, tell you anything you want to know—or need to know. Don’t bring in anybody else.”
“No. I told you I need professionals If I’m with you, then I become a target as well—and I’m not about to put my ass on the line alone with a bunch of strangers because of your goddam paraonia. You want me to get rid of Sinclair for you, then you do things my way.”
Baldauf, still staring at the ground, slowly shook his head. “You don’t understand If people found out where my money comes from, if it all came out in newspapers around the country and we started going to prison … I can’t take the chance.” Now he looked up. His jaw was set in a firm line, and his green eyes glittered. “If you bring in anyone else, if you tell anyone else what goes on in this county, I won’t cooperate. Not only won’t I cooperate, but I’ll make you all very uncomfortable while you’re in the county.”
“In which case, Sinclair will manage to kill you and get away to boot.”
“So be it. You can be in charge, Fox, but we use my men. No outsiders, and not a word about my operation to anyone else. We do things my way, or we go our separate ways and I take my chances. I’m not bluffing, Fox.”
Chant cocked his head, pretended to intently study the other man. “Yes,” he said at last “I can see that.”
“I don’t bluff. Never.”
“I still have to call Washington, Baldauf. I can’t go ahead on my own without authorization. I don’t have to tell them why you insist on my working alone, but they do have to give me permission. Catching Sinclair and killing him is too important for me to wing it without approval. I think I’ll get it if I make the recommendation.”
“Will you make the recommendation?”
Chant sighed, then scratched his head. “You don’t give me much choice, do you? After all, my job is to kill Sinclair.”
“Good,” Baldauf said, his lips curling back in a grim smile of triumph. “What about you? What if he recognizes you?”
Chant, affecting continued distraction and discomfort, shook his head. “He won’t. He knows that an Army Intelligence officer with a limp has been following him around the world, but I’m certain that he’s never seen my face. My presence here will be ex
plained by … let’s say I’m working for you. Introduce me as the new chief executive officer of Baldauf Industries. Baldauf, I’m already starting to have seconds thoughts about this.”
“Don’t. You limp.”
“Lots of men limp. You now have a CEO who limps.”
“Right.”
“I need to see your records and books, no matter what they reveal. I’ll also need the floor plans of all the buildings you own, as well as detailed contour maps of your land holdings. I need to know every detail of every operation in which the Baldaufs, any Baldauf, has ever sunk a penny.”
“Fuck you!”
“Well spoken,” Chant replied calmly, “except that I’m not the one with my pants down and my ass up in the air. I didn’t bury a son today.”
“Damn you! If you weren’t a fucking cripple, I’d kill you for that remark!”
“Sorry, Baldauf, but we’re wasting time. You have to understand that I’m an excellent intelligence operative and manhunter, but I’m not a magician. I know Sinclair very well, but I can’t read his mind. In order to anticipate and trap him, I have to know what he knows. We’ve been over this, and I thought we had an agree—”
“He fucking well hasn’t seen my records and books!”
“Don’t count on it. He may not have seen the actual records, but the odds are good that he knows most of what’s in them. The prick’s uncanny in the way he’s able to obtain information, and he’s a meticulous planner. He approaches these scams as if they were military operations. He’s had as many months as he’s needed to prepare, which means that you and I are operating right now on borrowed time.”
“I’ll tell you what you need to know,” Baldauf mumbled.
“Not good enough,” Chant said firmly. “He’s not going to do what you expect him to do, so you have no way of knowing what I need. In order for me to see the Baldauf family and Baldauf Industries through his eyes, I need all your records.”
“No records, Fox. There’s no way I’m going to let you look at them. Floor plans, contour maps, and a complete listing of holdings with their approximate value—yes. That’s it.”
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