Turn Loose the Dragons

by George C. Chesbro

  Peters placed his right hand in the small of Alexandra’s back, bracing her, then thrust his hips forward so that she could feel his desire.

  “Oh, I’ll help you, sweetheart. You keep blowing on that ear and we’ll have to look for a phone booth.”

  “No, Rick!” Alexandra whispered harshly. She did not make any abrupt move away from him, but instead dug a tapered fingernail into the soft flesh behind his right ear and held it there. “You’ll help me by remembering that we’re professionals working together on a tough job. That’s all there is between us. We’ll never see each other again when this week is over. Help me by respecting the fact that I’m a wife and mother. Act, Rick, but don’t feel anything toward me, and know that I’m not feeling anything for you. That’s how you can help me.”

  Peters pushed Alexandra away gently but firmly. The pain behind his ear ceased. Alexandra was half a head taller than he was, and he stared hard up into the woman’s dark brown eyes. He wanted to reach out and touch the star-shaped scars beneath those eyes, but he was not sure that she would tolerate such a gesture, even under the scrutiny of the dozens of pairs of eyes that were on her at any given moment, appreciating her sensuality and beauty.

  “You may need more than that from me before we’re done,” he said in the same low voice. “We have seven days and some death ahead of us. It could be a very long time.”

  Alexandra shook her head. Her smile was still fastened firmly in place, but her eyes had again grown distant and cold. “No, Rick; it could never be that long.”

  “I don’t believe you don’t feel anything for me. You’re wired.”

  “Believe it, Rick. Any electricity you feel is coming from you.”

  Peters shrugged. “What excuse did you give John for taking off for a week?”

  “What difference does it make? Let’s talk business. How long have you been here?”

  “About an hour,” he lied. “I wanted to get an early look at some of our fellow passengers.”

  Alexandra gave a brief nod of her head. “I meant to be here earlier. I got tied up in traffic after the bridge.”

  “If you’d been here earlier we’d have both wasted our time. Too many people waiting for too many different flights. Also, this place is too open. Whoever took this contract has to be a top pro; he knows as much as we do, and he’s not going to give himself away in some airline terminal.”

  “What’s that for?” Alexandra asked, nodding in the direction of the large portable radio Peters carried in his left hand. Once again she pressed close to him and whispered in his ear. “Knowing you, Rick, it’s probably a bomb.”

  Peters laughed easily, noting Alexandra’s effort to suppress her hostility. They would, after all, be spending a lot of time together. At the same time he was sure he recognized ambiguity in her voice, and that pleased him. “You got it,” he said softly, smiling at the same time as his gaze darted around them to make certain there was no one within earshot. “If we don’t make the target by Friday night, we’ll just arrange to blow up everyone.” He paused, continued seriously, “A little extra precaution. Any Commie hotel, if it’s not bugged, probably has walls made of toilet paper. We’ll play this whenever we have to talk business.”

  “Always the pro,” Alexandra said appreciatively. “God, do I ever feel rusty.”

  “You’d never know to watch you.” Peters glanced at the large display board below them in the main rotunda, to their right. “We’re boarding,” he continued, taking Alexandra’s arm and turning toward the secured corridor leading to the boarding area.

  Peters felt Alexandra stiffen. “Rick,” she said tightly, “we’ve got enough trouble without there being any unnecessary tension between us. You’ll remember what I said?”

  Peters smiled reassuringly. “I’ll remember, Mrs. Finway. You can’t blame a guy for a little wishful thinking. Come on, let’s go to work.”

  John

  The pamphlet had told him all he needed to know.

  Obtaining a visa had not been a problem. John had the necessary contacts and more I.O.U.s from various leftist organizations than he could use in a lifetime. He had gone to the Sierran Mission to the United Nations in New York City armed with letters of reference, but they hadn’t been needed; the Sierrans at the Mission were familiar with his reputation and had been happy to accommodate him. The slip of paper that would have taken an average American a minimum of four weeks to obtain had been in John’s possession within a half hour. After a call to his sister in the Bronx, John’s surprise for Alexandra had been made ready.

  It had been so easy, he thought. Surprise. All he had done was rip the bottom out of his life.

  That wasn’t true, he thought, rage elevating his blood pressure to a point where tiny explosions of light formed rainbow amoebas that quivered, vanished, and then reappeared in his field of vision. It was Alexandra who had done the tearing: all during the time she had affected hurt at his relationship with another woman, she had to have been thinking of her own deceit with a man John had come to loathe after meeting him fifteen years before. Rick Peters was a man he hated.

  In retrospect, John realized that he’d viewed his suffering over a woman as being vaguely noble, his guilt and pain a kind of moral alchemist’s gold glinting in the dark murk of the lie he had lived for a year. He had indeed been a fool, he thought, but not in the sense that he had described himself to Alexandra. His ego had made him appear as a kind of tortured prince in his own eyes, while in fact he had been court jester and cuckold all along. For how long? he wondered. Months? Years? It occurred to him that his wife and Peters might never have ceased being lovers.

  It was some time before he realized that the roses he’d bought had slipped from his fingers and lay strewn across the floor behind the large Seiko display case where he was standing. As he bent over to pick up the flowers, his hat, which he always wore in public when he wanted to protect his privacy and not be recognized, slipped off his head. He quickly put it back on, then pressed his wrap-around sunglasses snug to the bridge of his nose. John hesitated, straightened up. He absently gathered the flowers into a pile with the toe of his shoe, then slowly and deliberately crushed them under his feet as he went back to staring through the plate glass of the display case.

  Twenty-five yards away, framed in John’s vision by cameras, watches, and calculators, Alexandra stood at the top of the rotunda steps, pressing against Rick Peters’ body as she kissed his mouth. She was dressed in tight brown leather slacks and jacket, and her hair was drawn back from her face, held in place by a huge ivory barrette. John experienced a piercing sense of déjà vu. He had seen the hair style, the barrette, before, but not in fifteen years, not since the days just before they were married.

  Alexandra was wearing the hair style and leather outfit to please Peters, John thought, feeling sick with humiliation, rage, and desire. Alexandra had never looked more beautiful and desirable to him than at that moment, cradled easily in the arms of another man.

  John badly wanted to hit Peters. He started to step out from behind the display case, but then stopped and ducked back. He couldn’t do that, John thought. He was simply too well known; any emotional outburst or cathartic violence he indulged in here would be paid for by Michael and his daughters in the soiled currency of public humiliation. The story of John Finway confronting his adulterous wife and her lover at JFK Airport would be reported in every newspaper in the country.

  He dropped his boarding pass on top of the crushed flowers, turned, and started to walk toward the nearest exit. Then the rage and need to hit returned, mixing volatilely with his humiliation and desire to paralyze his muscles. Vaguely, as if in an ether dream, he heard a woman’s amplified, metallic voice announce that the flight to San Sierra was boarding. When John turned back, he saw that Alexandra and Peters were gone.

  The prospect of returning home and waiting while Peters and Alexandra were off for a week in San Sierra walking arm-in-arm, laughing, making love, burned the lining of his mind
with a corrosive, acid heat.

  He had been a fighter all his life, John thought, and a winner for most of it. What Alexandra had done and was doing was despicable, but what he had done was also despicable. His lust for and relationship with another man’s wife had stripped him of his moral armor, and he had no right to judge Alexandra’s sin as greater than his own. In the clouded land where he and Alexandra now lived, there were no innocent bystanders. Self-pity and outrage were wasted emotions; winning his wife back for himself and their children was all that mattered. He wanted to fight now, but he was immobilized by indecision, by not knowing where to fight, or how. However, no matter what he was going to do, he knew he could not wait a week to do it. If he did, he would not be the same man when Alexandra and Peters returned. Being forced to wait would gut him, and he could not let that happen.

  He desperately needed time to think, but he knew he simply did not have it. Once the plane was gone, there would be nothing to do but wait and burn while his soul evaporated within him.

  Still without knowing exactly what he was going to do, John spun around, picked up his boarding pass from the smear of ruined flowers and ran up the marble steps toward the security checkpoint at the neck of the corridor leading to the boarding gates. He carried no hand luggage, and in a few seconds he was through the metal detector and sprinting down the corridor.

  A few moments later he became aware of someone running beside him.

  Harry

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Harry murmured softly to himself when he saw the man’s hat fall off to reveal a head of iron-gray hair marked by a distinctive silver streak. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  Harry had arrived at the airport two hours ahead of time on the off chance that Peters, if he had an accomplice, might arrive early to meet with him. Harry had used his Asshole character to cover his early arrival, first complaining loudly to airport officials about misinformation concerning the time of departure for his flight, and then attempting to regale anyone who would listen with pictures of the snakes, turtles, and various other reptiles he claimed to keep in his apartment.

  Despite Harry’s frenetic activity, no one carrying a dun-colored boarding pass from the Sierra tour desk had escaped his attention. Manuel Salva was an immensely important and difficult target, and Harry knew there were dozens of ways in which a man or woman, under pressure, nervous and unaware of surveillance, could blow a cover. However, as members of the San Sierra tour group filed through the terminal, Harry had noticed nothing unusual to arouse his suspicion. With half an hour left before the scheduled time of departure, he had assumed a passive role, hiding behind a newspaper near one of the entrances to the terminal, watching and waiting.

  Peters had arrived barely five minutes before Alexandra Finway, and Harry had been about to precede them to the boarding gate when a solidly built man with a dun-colored boarding pass, wearing a gray hat and wrap-around sunglasses and carrying a bunch of roses, walked past him. The man glanced around the rotunda, then stopped dead in his tracks.

  Harry had frowned as he’d watched the man abruptly turn to his left and dart behind a large display case. Harry knew that even the most inept assassin would never behave in such an obviously suspicious manner, yet he had been intrigued because he was certain that the man’s reaction had been triggered by the sight of Rick Peters and Alexandra Finway performing their own bit of business at the top of the steps at the far end of the rotunda.

  Then the man’s hat had slipped off as he’d reached down to retrieve the flowers that had fallen from his hand, and Harry had immediately begun trying to plot the complex new permutations in the situation brought on by the unexpected appearance of Alexandra Finway’s husband in the TWA terminal. It was obvious to Harry that Peters and the woman were unaware of Finway’s presence, and Finway appeared totally oblivious to everything but the fact that his wife was about to fly off to San Sierra for a week with another man.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Harry whispered wryly, and he grunted with annoyance.

  The CIA agent glanced up at the display board overhead as the light beside his flight number began to flash, signaling boarding. He stayed where he was, watching the lawyer, then smiled grimly and nodded with approval as Finway turned and headed for an exit.

  Harry’s smile disappeared when the man stopped in the middle of the floor, apparently undecided as to what to do. “Go home, Finway,” Harry mumbled, peering intently over the top of his newspaper. “Do us all a favor and go home.”

  He saw Peters and Alexandra Finway turn and disappear from sight as they moved with other members of the tour group toward the boarding gate. But John Finway remained motionless in the center of the rotunda, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the others had moved away to board a plane that was only minutes from takeoff.

  Harry was painfully aware of the passing time. Yet, without knowing exactly why, he stayed where he was. His superior had made it very clear to him that protecting Alexandra Finway was low on his list of priorities. John Finway was not on the list at all, and Harry could not help but speculate wryly on what Administration post the Director of Operations would bestow on him if he reported back that, sorry, he wouldn’t be able to prevent Manuel Salva’s assassination after all because he’d missed the plane to San Sierra. Paper Clip Inspector. Horseshit Analyst in the Bio-Warfare labs.

  Still Harry waited, his gaze fixed on the tense, still figure a few yards away from him.

  Harry knew that a man like Rick Peters could kill quickly and silently, in a number of ways. He thought it possible that Peters, if he spotted Alexandra Finway’s husband before she did, would kill Finway somewhere in the terminal, given even a slight opportunity such as Finway deciding to visit a men’s room. The appearance of Finway in the tour group would, Harry thought, almost certainly unravel Peters’ plans, whatever they might be. Having read Peters’ dossier, it was even conceivable to Harry that an enraged Peters wouldn’t even bother with subtleties; seeing his operation blown, he might perfunctorily kill Finway out of spite and run.

  Harry cursed under his breath as Finway suddenly turned back, picked up his boarding pass, and ran toward the security checkpoint. Deciding that he had nothing to lose and wanting to prevent a needless killing if he could, Harry discarded a large chunk of his Asshole character along with his reptile pictures and ran after the lawyer.

  Harry went through the metal-detecting device a few seconds behind Finway, then easily caught up with and trotted beside him. By then, Harry had slipped into the role of Giggler.

  “I don’t know why I can never get to airports on time,” Harry panted, feigning breathlessness. “Running after things is the story of my life.”

  John Finway glanced at him blankly, then looked away without speaking. As they emerged from the tunnel into a large, open space by the boarding gate, Harry could see that they had run for nothing; the bulk of the group was bunched together, waiting to be funneled into the plane past a single official who was inspecting boarding passes. The black and silver crown of Alexandra Finway’s hair could be seen near the narrow entrance to the boarding ramp on the far side of the crowd of thirty-five or forty people who were pressing forward in an attempt to get their choice of the charter flight’s unreserved seats.

  Finway abruptly stopped running and turned his back to the group. Harry ran on a few more paces, then stopped, turned, and casually walked back toward the other man.

  “Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait,” Harry said, shaking his tow head in disgust. “That’s the story of my life.”

  Harry noted without surprise that Finway now seemed glad to have him nearby. Harry subtly drew himself up to his full height and folded his arms across his chest as the other man moved a few steps closer, using Harry’s body to shield himself from the sightlines of the other passengers.

  Harry stood still as the other man furtively glanced over Harry’s shoulder, then pulled his hat low over his forehead and bowed his head slightly.

  “Uh, you fly
a lot?” Finway asked tentatively.

  “Every chance I get,” Harry replied, pitching his voice considerably higher than normal. “I like to travel.” His laugh was high-pitched, almost a giggle, as he settled firmly into his slightly altered psychic suit. “I’m a travel agent, so I get to take a lot of busman’s holidays. You meet a lot of nice, interesting people when you travel.” Harry laughed again as he stuck out his hand. “My name’s David Swarzwalder.”

  “John Finway,” the lawyer replied, absently shaking Harry’s hand and glancing furtively over Harry’s shoulder as the last of the passengers boarded. His smile was decidedly forced. “Enjoy your trip, David.”

  Harry moved aside as Finway, obviously anxious to avoid a fey, clinging giggler, stepped around him and walked quickly toward the brown-jacketed official who was waiting impatiently at the head of the boarding ramp. By now Harry had made a firm decision to try to attach himself to the radical lawyer for two reasons, only one of which he knew would be looked upon with favor by his superior.

  His first reason was practical: Harry reasoned that, regardless of what happened between Finway, his wife, and Peters, a relationship with Finway could afford him closer physical proximity to the two principal targets of his surveillance. He was well aware that there were many variations of the confrontation which was certain to come that might not suit his purposes, but he felt that the potential edge he might gain was worth the risk. But he had to move at once; while attaching himself to John Finway was an option that could always be discarded later, it had to be pursued immediately.

  He knew that Harley Shue would certainly consider his second motive irrelevant and potentially distracting, and thus an unnecessary risk. Harry didn’t care. No stranger to violent death and an expert killer himself, Harry simply did not like to see innocent people get caught in the line of fire, and there was no doubt in his mind that Peters would feel it necessary to kill Finway once the boyish, blond-haired assassin became aware of the lawyer’s presence. At the least, Harry intended to make that task as difficult as possible. Consequently, Harry was close behind John Finway as the other man walked through the caterpillar tunnel to the plane’s entrance.