"No, my friend," Swan murmured between clenched teeth, "I worry beforehand, and shoot only when I know my target. . ."
The body tumbled from the chute, groaning. For a shadow of a moment Swan was tempted, his finger beginning to tighten on the trigger of the Colt Woodsman pistol. But he stopped in time. The body on the floor twitched a few times. The eyes were open. There was a bit of blood speckling one earlobe. The technician, thought Swan. I was right.
Before he had time to congratulate himself for foresight and restraint, he heard the faint whine of the elevator descending. So he's coming down that way, in style. He can assume now that I'm dead.
No, Swan decided. I'm not giving him enough credit, and that's a mistake that could be fatal. He knows whom he's up against - he'll use a fail-safe device. The second technician will be in the elevator. If this second time there's no reaction from me, he'll be coming down the chute to gloat over the body. Smart, thought Swan. Yes, he's certainly smart. At least, not stupid.
The whine of the elevator ceased. The steel doors parted in the center. Again, Swan almost fired as a man seemed to step into the room, arms waving awkwardly. But he was not stepping, he was falling. The second technician had been propped cleverly at a forward angle against the inside doors. As the man struck the carpet Swan wondered how Mancuso had done it. Probably an electronic oscillator in the diaphragm of the microphone. Hardly lethal, but enough to put even a horse out of action for an hour. Clever boy.
Swan settled in a crouch, his back to the elevator now, slightly to one side of the chute so that he would not be immediately seen by the descending man and yet would have a clear line of fire. This time, when the body hurtled down, he knew who it would be. A grand entrance, like a children's play or a game. Surprise! He only wished there would be time for him to see the expression of shock on Mancuso's face.
Behind him, Eddie silently slid open the thin oiled metal panel in the ceiling of the elevator and dropped from darkness to the floor, body weight nicely cushioned by the thick soles of his New Balance running shoes. Eighty- five bucks they'd cost, he remembered, and worth every nickel.
He saw Edwin Swan. Well, I'll be damned ... the son of a bitch is still alive! How about that?
In his youth - his childhood, really, for it seemed to Eddie that he had somehow skipped the time that most people call youth - he had hated everything about so-called amusement parks. He had been dragged against his will by his parents and his friends to Coney Island, Rye Beach, and Palisades Park. He was nauseated for at least an hour after every stomach-bending ride on the roller coaster. In the bump-'em cars he was slammed from side to side until his eyeballs ached. In the Fun House he recoiled from skeletons that popped from dark corners and banshee howls, and he dreaded the sudden opening of floors that dumped his thin boy's body on poorly stuffed mattresses. Once, at the age of nine, hurtling down the slide, he had caromed off a railing, overshot the padded landing, and sprained his wrist so badly that he couldn't play stickball in the street with the other kids for two weeks. As a boy he had borne with all that lest he suffer the tag of "Chicken!" But now he was a man. In theory he didn't have to do anything he didn't damn well want to do.
And damned if I'll slide down one of those mothers even now, he had decided. Call me chicken - I don't care. A quick inspection of the little elevator had given him his surreptitious method of entry . . . just in case there was some kind of booby trap that he hadn't thought of. And there was Swan - alive. Surprise!
He hated to shoot a man in the back, even a man like
Edwin Swan, who had been ready to kill Ginger and Rusty along with James Emerson. "Swan," he whispered.
As the DD5 turned, Eddie fired twice into the look of total shock that whitened the man's features. Two blue- black holes appeared in the wrinkled forehead just above the left eye. Swan sprang backward as if he had been jerked by the noose of a rope. But when he struck the floor he stayed there, without life, without even a residual twitch.
Smart guy. Smarter than me, but his luck ran out. Any day of the week, Eddie thought, I'd rather be lucky than good.
He made his way up the stairs, past the helpless technicians and the man sleeping peacefully with cotton candy all over his face. Outside the Fun House, the midway was packed with people searching for something new or exciting to do or to see. Sousa marches spurred them onward. Eddie wiped sweat from his forehead, then looked up just in time to see the cars of the roller coaster flash by in a tight, screeching, sickening turn.
"Not for me," he said aloud, and headed for the car that would take him to the airport.
They straggled into Mexico City on different flights, arriving at the Hotel Princesa within hours of each other; Eddie first, then Ginger, Vasily, and finally Emerson with his hand freshly bandaged and lines of both weariness and pain etched deeply into his face. They told each other what had happened and then, with Emerson's arrival, they read the letter from Rusty to her husband, instructing him what to do.
In the living room of Emerson's suite they stared at one another. Swan, Wolfe, Andriakis, and Krause were dead, but Rusty's letter made it all meaningless.
Eddie went to the bar and found the vodka. He sloshed some over ice and stared down at the swirling liquid in the glass. "Double zero," he said bitterly. "Those guys were rotten and they deserved what we did to them, but we forgot that someone else was in the game." He raised his glass to Emerson in a mock salute. "Bon voyage. Colonel Volanov. Give my regards to Moscow."
"He's right," said Vasily, stretching his legs wearily. "It's the only move you have left."
There was no reaction from Emerson. He stared straight ahead and his lips were slightly puckered, as if he were whistling a tune they could not hear.
Eddie raised his voice slightly. "Do you understand what he's saying? There's nothing more we can do for you. We tried. We were lucky, but not lucky enough. We failed."
He was about to say something else, but Ginger gave him a warning look. She got up and went over to her father. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he looked up.
"You're tired," she said. "Why don't you lie down for a while?"
In a thin voice, he said, "Do you think I can relax when they've got Rusty?"
Vasily looked at him narrowly, leaned forward, and said, "They may have her, but they won't hurt her. You don't have to worry about that part of it. They want you sweet once they get you. They want you happy."
Again, Emerson seemed not to have heard him. He picked up Rusty's letter and read it through again. "She says that they'll call at seven," he said. "Another hour to wait."
"You could wait lying down," said Ginger. "Come on. Daddy, please."
Eddie said, "They'll call and set up a treff, and you'll be back with Rusty before you know it."
"And then homeward bound," Emerson said bitterly.
Ginger rubbed the back of her father's neck. "Daddy, you should rest."
Emerson gave her a faint smile. "I don't see how putting my feet up will help the situation, but if it makes you happy..."
He rose, and with his arm around her shoulders they walked to the bedroom door. Eddie started to follow them, but again Ginger gave him a warning look, and he stopped.
"I'll just turn down the bed for you," she said, and the door closed behind them.
Eddie went to the bar, added a splash of vodka to his glass, and built a Scotch on the rocks for Vasily. "What do you think?" he asked, handing the drink to the Russian.
Vasily shrugged. "End of the game. Check and mate."
"I meant Jimbo. That thousand-yard stare."
"Yes, I saw it. I don't like that, either."
"I saw it a couple of times in my outfit, down in Williamsburg. That's the way they look when they can't handle it anymore, when they're about to go kill-crazy. It's showing in his eyes."
"Take it easy," Vasily said. "It's almost over."
Ginger was in the bedroom with her father for fifteen minutes. When she came out, quietly closing the door beh
ind her, Eddie said, "What the hell was that all about? Since when do you have to turn down the bed for him?"
"Make me one of those, would you?" She pointed at his glass. "I wanted to be alone with him for a while. Eddie, he scares me. He's like a different person."
Eddie looked at Vasily swiftly but said nothing. Ginger took the glass from his hand, sipped, and then leaned against him, the top of her head against his cheek. "He's lying in there," she said, "staring at the ceiling and talking. Not really talking, sort of mumbling. I couldn't understand half of what he was saying." She pulled away to look at him. "Has he told you what happened when he went after Andriakis?"
"Only that he took him out. He wouldn't say any more than that."
"From what he's saying now, it was a lot more than that. Someone else seems to have been killed, too. It doesn't sound very pretty."
Eddie's lips tightened; he could think of nothing to say. From across the room, Vasily said, "Ginger, let's concentrate on one problem at a time. Right now the job is to make sure that your mother is safe. After that, we can worry about your father."
"But he's acting so strangely."
"He'll come out of it. He did what he had to do and now he's feeling it, that's all. It won't last long."
He did not sound at all convincing, and Ginger looked to Eddie for confirmation. Eddie nodded. "He's right - it's a natural reaction, that's all." He did not try to explain why the same reaction had not hit any of them.
They settled down to wait then, and they waited for almost an hour, Eddie and Vasily drinking steadily and Ginger just sipping. It was three minutes after seven when the telephone rang. Eddie made a move for it, but Ginger stopped him. "Let him take it in the bedroom," she said.
The ringing stopped as Emerson picked up the phone. They waited again, and a few minutes later he came out of the bedroom, the lines around his lips deeper than before. Ginger jumped up as he came in.
"First of all, your mother is all right," he said to her. His voice was fuller than before, and he seemed more in control of himself. "I couldn't speak to her, but this man Sasha says that she hasn't been harmed and that she won't be harmed ... as long as I do as I'm told."
Ginger sank back in her seat and nodded gratefully.
"Did he give you instructions?" Eddie asked.
Emerson was about to answer when Vasily held up his hand. "If he gave you instructions he probably told you not to repeat them to anybody. Isn't that correct?"
"Yes — "
"In that case, I don't wish to hear them."
"What the hell's eating you?" Eddie asked sharply.
"I no longer care to be involved," said Vasily, "in anything that isn't my business and over which I no longer have any control."
Eddie looked at him with anger. "If you don't want to listen, stick your goddamn fingers in your ears. Go ahead, Jimbo."
Vasily frowned, said nothing more; but he turned his back.
"They're in Point Balboa, California," Emerson said. His eyes once again seemed glazed, unseeing. "He gave me directions to the Reynolds house on Scotsman's Bay. I'm to be there by tomorrow night. Alone."
"This Sasha," Eddie said, "has a flair for the dramatic. What the hell's behind it?"
"I don't know. He said that he thought it would be the perfect place for me to end my American odyssey. Those were the words he used. He may be right. I once had that idea myself. . . but under different circumstances."
A wave of weariness swept over him. Suddenly too tired to talk straight or think straight, he closed his eyes and in a flick of time went tumbling back to the barn in Albania with that tickle of straw beneath his neck and the honest smell of horses, horse piss on straw, and the mustiness of moldering leather in his nose. And then knew that the smells were right but the barn was wrong; it was a German barn so long ago in the last days of the war when he sat behind a wooden stall and listened to the thrashing sounds of love on straw, and in the aftermath of passion heard the reedy voice of an eighteen-year-old reciting the brief, pathetic, and soon-to- cease story of his life. The story that had formed the core of the American odyssey of James Emerson, the story that he knew so well and which now unrolled itself across his mind like Bible verses well recalled.
... all kinds of things we used to do together, Chub and me. There's always good fishing in Scotsman's Bay, and crabbing, too, if you know how to look for them. Sometimes we'd get a couple of dozen out of the bay, take home half, and sell the rest for a nickel a crab. Old Mr. Reynolds always used to take a dozen from us, has that little old house on top of the cliff up over the bay, so Chub and me would stow those crabs in gunnysacks and go climbing up to the Reynolds house, right up that cliff. Could have taken the stairs, of course, but it wasn't any fun that way. There's this crazy zigzag staircase Mr. Reynolds built right down the side of the cliff. It's the only way to get down to the beach from his house unless you 're good at climbing cliffs, which is what we used to do. Wasn 't much of a climb 'cause it wasn 't much of a cliff, just a real sharp slope with plenty of bushes and vines to grab hold of, and halfway up there's a sort of a cave where we could rest. Yep, that was our secret cave. We used to climb halfway up and sit there for a while where no one could see us, just looking out over the water. . .
He opened his eyes and realized that the others were staring at him, concerned. He smiled faintly to reassure them. "Just memories. The old Reynolds house on Scotsman's Bay. I've never seen it, but I know that house. Smack on the water, a secluded bay no bigger than a cove. Does that suggest anything to either of you?"
Eddie cocked an eyebrow at Vasily. "Submarine?"
Vasily looked away.
"That's my thought, too," said Emerson. "They can't take me out through any public transport, so maybe the choice of Point Balboa is more than just dramatics. A sub would make sense."
Vasily was shaking his head unhappily again. "I don't want to hear any more of this. When are you leaving?"
"Tonight. As soon as I can."
"Alone?" Eddie asked the question, then threw back his drink and went to the bar to make another. He turned and looked at Emerson over the rim of his glass, and repeated, "Alone?"
"That depends on you people. I have a course of action to propose."
"That's what I thought," Vasily said. He put down his glass and stood in front of Emerson. "I don't know what you have in mind, but it has to be something unintelligent. Your options have run out, don't you understand that? For God's sake, man, do as they say! Get your wife - go back to Mother Russia - live the Soviet equivalent of happily-ever-after. There's nothing else you can do . . . unless you want to abandon the woman whom you obviously care for more than anyone else in this world. I'm not a sentimental man. But you are. Now, my dear fellow, you have to pay the price."
"I think there is something else I can do," Emerson said quietly.
With a touch of impatience, Vasily turned on Eddie. "Are you really going to get involved in this?"
"I'm going to listen to what the man has to say."
"Then you're as insane as he is. We just took on the CIA and barely got away with it. Are you going to start throwing rocks at the KGB, too?"
"It won't be the first time."
"Quite so, but this time you'll be doing it without me. This is turning into a family affair, and it's not my family." He turned and walked out the door. Eddie ran after him and caught him in the corridor near the elevators.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he said angrily. "Saving my valuable skin. I suggest you do the same with yours. I don't know what happened to that man back in Albania, but he's turned into a suicidal fire-eater. I won't work with people like that. The risk is hardly worth the satisfaction."
"He wants his wife back. You said so yourself - he loves her."
"He can have her back and live in peace for the rest of his life. All he has to do is go home and be a hero. But no, he'd rather go up there, wherever it is, and snatch her away from the KGB. That's self-destructive, and I won't have
any part of it."
The elevator door opened, and Vasily stepped in. Eddie said, "Where are you going?"
"Remember Benny Zahn in Bogota? He'll know where I am. If you get out of this idiocy alive, look me up." The elevator doors closed.
Eddie went back to the Emersons' suite where Jimbo and Ginger were sitting just as he had left them. He sighed, sat down, and said, "All right, let's hear it."
* * *
The house was ten miles north of Point Balboa, overlooking the sea, an old house that had lasted past its time. It had a brick foundation, but the rest of it was made of clapboard weathered by sun, wind, and salt. Small and without pretense, it was furnished with the kind of wickerwork and spare rugs, outsize vases and improbable tapestries that most people save either for garage sales or summer homes. Everything was old about the place, the only new item being the transceiver that Sasha had set up in the living room. There were bedrooms on the second floor for Sasha and the two embassy men, and on the first floor a cramped but secluded room for Rusty. What saved the house from total tackiness was its cliff-hanging perch above Scotsman's Bay and a sweeping view of the ocean. A rickety wooden staircase zigzagged down the face of the cliff for over a hundred feet, leading to the crescent-shaped beach that rimmed the bay below.
Rusty stood at the edge of the cliff near the top of the wooden staircase, staring out to sea and into the setting sun. The air was warm, but she shivered in the slight breeze blowing in off the bay. Somewhere out in that sea an E-class Soviet nuclear submarine was running submerged on a course set dead for Scotsman's Bay, and tomorrow night a launch from the sub would creep into the bay in the secret hours after midnight, pick up two passengers, and return. After that would come the trans-Pacific haul to Vladivostok, and then the supersonic flight to Moscow. The arrival of the launch would mark the successful end of her mission. She was very much aware that it could also mark the end of her marriage. She shivered again at the thought.
Sasha's voice behind her said, "They tell me that sometimes you can see the whales offshore. Frankly, I don't see the attraction, but people come for miles. I've just spoken to your husband."
The Sleeping Spy Page 31