“Jesus,” Parve said. “A Limey with a Liverpool accent. Where the hell am I?”
“Does it matter, after where you’ve been?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Sir James Roderick.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Almost a week now. Your sleep has been drug-induced, and, naturally, you’ve been fed intravenously. Your body and mind needed the rest.”
“What are you, the Salvation Army?”
“Hardly. Perhaps you would like some solid food now.”
“No, Sir James Roderick, I don’t want any solid food. As a matter of fact I want a drink.”
“Perhaps later,” Sir James said easily. “After we talk.”
“You won’t get me a drink, I’ll go someplace else.” Parve sat up. He felt surprisingly strong; he couldn’t remember a time in recent years when it hadn’t been difficult to move. “Where are my clothes?”
He’d expected some kind of resistance. Roderick simply pointed to a wardrobe set back against a wall. Parve got up and walked toward it. Roderick’s voice followed him.
“A few days ago you displayed a short but remarkable burst of energy when you tried to maim me. Why didn’t you use some of that energy on the rat that was eating your face?”
“I only get mad at human rats,” Parve said without turning. “The furry kind doesn’t know any better.” He opened the wardrobe; it was filled with expensive clothes. He turned back to Sir James. “These aren’t mine.”
“They’re yours.”
Parve didn’t argue. He turned back to the open wardrobe and dressed. The clothes fit perfectly, and were obviously hand-tailored. They made him feel strange, like a whole man again. It wasn’t a feeling he desired because it was ephemeral. However much Sir James Roderick built him up, Parve knew it would take only a short time for the acid of his memories to wear him down again.
The door to the room was open. Parve had every intention of dressing and walking out of the room, perhaps killing anyone who tried to stop him. Now his legs wouldn’t move. “You son-of-a-bitch,” Parve said quietly. “You know I won’t leave here until I find out what this is all about.”
“I’d hoped that would be your attitude,” Sir James said evenly. He didn’t smile. “Why don’t you sit down while I satisfy your curiosity?”
Parve sat. “I’d still like a drink.”
His host almost smiled. “Not yet,” Sir James said. “When I have said what I have to say, you may have anything you like.”
Parve wasn’t used to having people tell him what he could or couldn’t do. Still, he sat, watching the other man closely. He knew there was more substance to Sir James Roderick than the cane and bowler hat; there was steel in the man, and the honed, razor edge of it could be heard in the man’s voice.
“So, talk,” Parve said after a few moments.
“I will tell you about myself, John Parve, but first we will talk about you. Then we will both be on equal footing all the way.”
“How do you know who I am?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What is relevant is that you are an ex-C.I.A. agent. Six years ago your assignment took you to Zobatu, an emerging African country. The government at that time was threatened by an imminent military coup. The generals who were planning the coup were being counseled by a rather unique, international Jack-of-all-trades who had taken the code name given him by the Allied intelligence services—Hannibal. Your job was to investigate him, not to determine his attitudes toward the Zobatu people, but to determine whether he and his people were sufficiently anti-communist to satisfy your State Department.”
Parve didn’t want to listen any more. He would have done anything to stop the voice, but once again he felt paralyzed, trapped and motionless on a hard concrete sidewalk of the mind. Around him were pieces of flying, bloody flesh, chunks of metal, the smell of burning hair, a stifled scream, a child’s charred, rubber ball rolling past him…
“Hannibal didn’t take kindly to your interference,” Sir James continued, “so he blew up your family. In broad daylight.”
He’d just gotten off the airplane. Elizabeth and their two children had been waiting for him in the car parked in the airport parking lot. It had all been over in two minutes. They’d shot him full of a paralyzing drug, and then laid him down on the pavement twenty yards from the car.
The doors of the car had been sealed with jamming devices before Elizabeth and the children had had time to react. His son had been looking at him, beating at the car window with his tiny fist, screaming for his father to get up and help them. The boy had still been screaming when the car went up. A few seconds later, amid the screams of police and ambulance sirens, a black rubber ball had fallen from the sky, bounced twice, then rolled up to Parve’s paralyzed face.
“Naturally, you went quite out your mind from grief,” Sir James continued. “But you were also a highly disciplined man. The answer to your grief, naturally, was to return to the assignment and kill Hannibal in the most horrible manner you could devise. Unfortunately, the coup had been accomplished by this time, and the attitude of your government had changed. The generals were in power, and Hannibal installed as one of their chief advisers.
“The State Department of your country had decided to compete with the Russians and Chinese for influence in Zobatu, and this meant the shipment of money and armaments. There wasn’t much you could do about this turn of events, except blow your brains out. That, of course, was too obvious for a man like you. You are subtle—so you chose an appropriately subtle way to kill yourself through alcohol.”
John Parve practiced the words in his mind until he was sure he could say them in a voice that didn’t quake. “I should kill you.”
Sir James ignored the threat. “I represent an organization which calls itself The Club of Venice,” he said. “COVE, if you like. Simply put, COVE is a highly secret organization of international figures dedicated to—doing good.”
Parve felt sickness bubbling up in his throat. He threw back his head and released it as peals of manic laughter. Sir James waited until the sound had trailed off into a series of tortured gasps.
“My employers are known only to each other,” Sir James continued, ignoring Parve’s outburst. “Their instructions are carried out by operatives like myself, on the basis of written instructions delivered at various postal drops throughout the world. They are all men of virtually unlimited financial resources. In effect, what they have done is to organize a private espionage network that is action-oriented.
“Quite frankly, many of the members are motivated by bad consciences. I’m quite positive that a number of COVE members are ex-Nazis and fascists who fashioned their fortunes from the blood and twisted lives of other men. However, I offer that opinion solely for your own information; it is irrelevant to the existence of COVE. The members’ design now is to do what they can to eradicate injustice, whenever and wherever possible.
“COVE’s constituency is that which the governments of the world largely ignore, the people of the world. However, COVE does not attempt to overthrow existing governments; its members are experienced enough in international politics to know that such activity, over the long run, is largely an exercise in futility. COVE does not subvert governments; it circumvents them.”
“How long has this COVE been in existence?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet about a week. That’s how long a bunch of bleeding hearts would last out there in that jungle.”
Sir James made a clucking noise in his throat. “You don’t seem to understand. The members of COVE work for humanitarian reasons. The people they hire to work for them do not. They work for money. They are certainly not humanitarians, and the great majority could not even be described as liberal; such people tend, on the whole, to be inefficient. Most of COVE’s agents are professional killers—as you once were.”
“You expect me to work for you?�
�
“No, Mr. Parve. I will not insult you by trying to flatter you. You are, as you well know, finished—‘over the hill’ is the expression your own people might use. No, I’m afraid you would be of no use as a COVE agent.”
“Then what do you want with me?”
Sir James placed his cane across his lap and stared at Parve. “We are prepared to offer you an honorable way to die.”
Parve watched the other man’s eyes, but said nothing. The eyes remained clear and depthless, like the eyes in a very poor—or very great—painting.
“You are a dead man, John Parve,” Sir James continued. “You are merely going through the motions. Your life is worth nothing to yourself or to others, which is why you’re drinking yourself to death. On the other hand, you do possess something which is of value to us, your knowledge of Zobatu and the ways of its people.”
“I also speak Bantu. What does Zobatu have to do with all this?”
“The military government of Zobatu has recently decided to eliminate its most persistent critics, which means just about every intellectual, teacher and academician in the country. If this execution is allowed to take place, the intellectual soul of the country will be destroyed, as well as any hope of a better life for the Zobatu people. At this moment the Zobatu government is holding ninety five people in a compound in a solitary military outpost on their southern coast.”
“Mandringo?”
“Yes.”
“I know the place. It’s surrounded on three sides by jungle, and the sharks in that water are so thick you can just about walk on their backs.”
“Yes, it is a rather remote and well protected region. Which is why COVE plans to use three military transport helicopters to airlift the prisoners out. They are scheduled to be executed in three days.”
“You’ve got military transport helicopters?”
“COVE has unlimited financial resources. When I say unlimited, I mean unlimited.” He spread his hands meaningfully.
“Well, you might as well try to use kites. They have a radar station at Mandringo.”
“Yes. If the radar station is operating when we go in, we will be confronted by an unusual assortment of American Phantom jets and Russian MIG 21’s. That’s where you come in. It will be your job to knock out the radar station at exactly 1:21 A.M., our time, next Wednesday night. That is five and a half hours before the prisoners are scheduled to be shot.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I think I indicated it was a suicide mission.”
“I mean you’re crazy to think I’d agree to do something like that. I’ll choose my own way to check out.”
“Alcohol and rats?”
“You’re goddamn right! Why should I play cannon fodder for a bunch of rich bastards who are playing games with other peoples’ lives?”
“At 3:00 Tuesday afternoon the military adviser to the Zobatu government will make an inspection of the Mandringo radar station. Arrangements have been made for him to spend the night, which means he’ll be there when you make your raid. The man’s name is Hannibal.”
Parve jerked his head to one side; the sudden movement caused a ringing in his ears. He focused on a vase of flowers in a corner of the room. They were roses, and they looked like they’d been dipped in blood.
“Now, Parve, would you care for a drink or some food?”
“What?”
“I asked if you’d like a drink or some food.”
Parve’s voice came at him, as if shouted from a great distance. “I like my steak rare. Bloody.”
John Parve dove into the blackness. At 2,000 feet, the air over the African jungle was cold. He waited a few seconds, and then pulled the ripcord on his parachute. There was a whooshing sound, then a wrench as the straps tore into his armpits and groin. It was the only wav Parve could tell the chute had opened. Above him, the dyed silk was virtually invisible against the dark slate of the moonless night.
He drank in the night air, imagined he could feel it swirling in his lungs. The air was intoxicating, and Parve wished to enjoy this reprieve to the fullest, before he blew himself up with the radar station. That was assuming he didn’t break apart in the jungle below him.
Then things started to go wrong.
There was a soft, pinging sound under his left armpit, and then something heavy slipped down his side, bounced off his foot and was gone.
That would be the sack containing his satchel charges. Parve groped until he found the leather strap that had bound the charges to his side. He followed the strap to its end. His fingers came away moist and burning.
Acid.
Parve quickly wiped his fingers on his jump suit. In a few moments the stinging sensation went away. His rage didn’t The pilot of the plane that had run the drop had been anonymous; Parve had never even seen his face. It didn’t really make any difference, because it could just as easily have been the people, whomever they were, who had packed his chute. It could be any one of thousands of faceless men he had never seen, someone who didn’t want the mission to succeed. COVE had a traitor.
But then why not just kill him? It would have been just as easy to pour acid on one of the straps binding him to his parachute and then he’d be plummeting down along with the satchel charges. It seemed a hell of a way to abort a mission.
The charges hadn’t been designed to survive the impact of a thirty-two feet per second acceleration. They hit and exploded in the jungle below him, sending up a single, brilliant burst of light, like the blink of a Cyclops’s eye. The sound came to him a few seconds later, muffled by the surrounding jungle but still loud enough to attract some unwelcome attention from the radar station a mile or two away.
Parve cursed loudly; as if he didn’t have enough problems already, there were going to be a few dozen Zobatu soldiers strolling through the night jungle soon after he landed.
He got lucky, hitting the edge of a small clearing. He absorbed the force of the landing shock with flexed legs and rolled, taking care to keep clear of the harness. Something growled a few feet away in the jungle, and then crashed off through the underbrush.
Parve dragged in his chute, quickly dug a hole in the ground with his knife and buried the silk and harness. Then he sat down to catch his breath. He glanced at the illuminated dial of the calibrated watch-compass he wore on his wrist. The radar station would be almost due east, about forty-five minutes of hard walking away. He had four hours.
Parve tensed at a sound in the jungle, behind him and to his left. Lights moved through the trees, the interposing brush lending them a strobe effect. That would be the soldiers come to investigate the explosion, Parve thought.
Parve considered it for a few moments, then decided that the explosion had not been that loud; the soldiers would poke around for a half hour or so, then decide that the noise had been thunder and go away. In the meantime, they offered him the opportunity to re-arm himself.
Parve went into a crouch and slipped off into the jungle. Twenty-two minutes later he clapped his arm around the man’s neck, slipped his elbow under the chin, positioned his hip in the small of the man’s back and yanked. The soldier died without a sound. Parve quickly covered the man’s body with some brush, and then scooped up the man’s flashlight and automatic rifle. Then he melted back into the jungle to wait.
A half hour later the soldiers began to regroup. It didn’t take them long to discover that one of their members was missing. They searched for a few more minutes, and then disappeared back down a trail in a babble of excited voices.
That made one more strike against him, Parve thought; their missing comrade would make the soldiers at the station that much more uneasy. Of course, there was always the chance they would write him off as a leopard dinner, but that wasn’t something he could count on. And then there was the blast; finally, if the missing soldier and blast didn’t tip off the soldiers to his presence, the person who had treated his harness with acid would. Hannibal would be on his toes; Hannibal was a great many things, b
ut he wasn’t stupid.
The thought of Hannibal made Parve physically ill; he doubled over as his stomach knotted with hate. Hannibal, the man who had blown up his family was about to blow away close to a hundred more lives, and it was up to him to stop him.
But the hate had its positive effects also; it stiffened Parve’s muscles and kept him from trembling; it temporarily cancelled out the ravages of the six years of suicidal neglect Parve had subjected his body to. Finally, the hate gave Parve a steely resolve. That was what Roderick had been counting on, Parve thought, and he’d been right. He would get through this night feeding on his hate.
With the satchel charges gone, knocking out the radar station was going to be a little more difficult than he’d first imagined. Of course, the automatic rifle would help some, and with it he’d make sure he got one shot at Hannibal, even if he was carrying a pound of lead in his belly when he did it. But he would need more than an automatic rifle to get into the radar station. He needed an edge.
He checked his watch. He had three hours left. The existence of the trail the soldiers had used would cut down his traveling time considerably. It hadn’t taken the soldiers more than fifteen minutes to reach his position. It would be risky to use the trail, but it would give him valuable time, time that he needed. He would give himself an hour to reach the station and get in. That left him two hours to look for his edge. He decided he would spend the time hunting.
He’d spent a great deal of time in the jungle during his C.I.A. assignment in Zobatu, and he’d seen what the natives could do with two candles and a knife. Two hours wasn’t very much time to find what he wanted, but if he could get it he would have the edge he needed. In any case, it was worth a try.
Parve made his way back to the clearing and dug up his parachute. He cut out a large square, then used his knife to jab small holes along the perimeter of the nylon through which he threaded a length of harness cord. When he had finished he had a usable sack with a drawstring. Next he fashioned a small masque for the flashlight and cut two small holes in its face. He put the materials under his arm and headed back into the jungle.
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