Ikon

by Graham Masterton

  ‘But why not? You have a charm about you, did you know that? A real sexual grace. And yet you don’t have the confidence that ought to go with it.’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s partly because Candii walked out on me. She was kind of my dream girl. That was before I changed my type, I hasten to add.’

  Kathy laughed. ‘You don’t have to change your type, just for me.’

  The way you raped me just then, I think it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘I raped you? I didn’t notice you protesting.’

  ‘I was afraid you might hurt me if I did.’

  Kathy held herself close to him, her breasts pressed against his chest, her hand proprietorially cupping his soft penis. She said, very quietly, ‘I can hear your heart beating. That frightens me, sometimes, to hear somebody’s heart beating. I keep thinking that it’s going to stop.’

  Daniel said nothing, but stroked her hair. In spite of Kathy’s company, in spite of her closeness, he felt peculiarly lonesome. Perhaps it was the cold knowledge that America was no longer free, and that the future was no longer certain. How long before the Soviets would openly reveal their ownership of the United States, and begin to suppress free speech? How long before nobody would be allowed to say or write anything against the State and even the everyday grumbles at the Downhome Diner would be censored by fear? How long before the late-night television news would report nothing more than official party information, and all the silliness and eccentricity and childish greed of American television was lost forever? He thought of the Joni Mitchell song which had warned ‘you don’t miss what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone,’ and already, in Kathy’s arms, he began to miss America.

  Kathy said, ‘I don’t know what to think about Kennedy any more. I used to adore him. He was my hero, when I was fourteen years old. And Jackie!’

  It probably wasn’t his fault,’ said Daniel. ‘God Almighty - what would you have done, if somebody had told you that fifty 10-megaton missiles were aimed at New York, and St Louis, and Chicago, and Denver, and that they were so close that you had no possible chance of stopping them? Do you know how long it would take a

  missile to get from Cuba to Houston? Well, I don’t know either, but it can’t be more than a couple of minutes. Willy would have known.’

  Kathy didn’t answer. She was completely at a loss to judge what Kennedy had done; how right or wrong it might have been that he had sold America short to the Soviet Union. She didn’t know what threats he had faced, or what military and historical pressures had weighed against him. What was more, everything she had learned about the United States in the past twenty years had been part of an elaborate worldwide confidence trick, a global sham; and so every single political point-of-view which she had formed over the past twenty years - every single opinion on which she might have been able to base an assessment of Kennedy - was distorted, simply a conditioned reaction to a bogus situation. She felt duped and confused and stateless, and that was part of the reason she had made her way into Daniel’s bedroom and made love to him. Daniel at least was Daniel. He had a daughter and a diner and a place to go. He was a Jew, too, and that meant he had Israel, as well^as America. He had some roots, some sureness, something to tell him what he was and what opinions he ought to hold. She felt herself as if someone had suddenly told her that she was an orphan, and that the people she had thought were her parents had been only actors, paid to convince her that she was a normal child.

  I`ll have that drink now, she told Daniel, gently. ‘A vodka, if there’s any left. I guess I might as well get used to drinking the stuff.’

  Daniel climbed over her, and out of bed. He bent over and kissed her, and said, ‘You don’t want a midnight hamburger, do you? I’m beginning to feel like cooking again. There’s plenty of ground beef in the icebox, and onions.’

  ‘What are you trying to do, turn me into a San Francisco sideshow? The Fattest Female Reporter in the Westr

  I’m beginning to miss cooking, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, don’t start taking your culinary obsessions out on me.’

  Daniel raised both of his hands in surrender. ‘Okay, I promise I won’t cook you a hamburger. But don’t start complaining when you see mine.’

  ‘Daniel, she said, as he put his hand on the doorhandle.

  He looked at her, his smile only just beginning to fade. Sitting up in bed, she looked pretty and short-sighted, vulnerable and almost childish. One breast was bare, soft and curved and pink-nippled.

  ‘What we did tonight, don’t read any special meanings into it, she said. ‘It was just that I was tired, and frightened, and I wanted you. But don’t expect anything out of it tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ asked Daniel. ‘I never look that far ahead. Tell me about tomorrow when it’s tomorrow.’

  He opened the door, and there was Skellett. Not only Skellett, but Walsh, and both of them were armed.

  ‘Back into the room, said Skellett. Daniel hesitated, and Skellett shrieked at him, ‘Back into the room, dummy1.’

  Daniel backed away, holding up his hands. Both Skellett and Walsh were carrying .45 automatics, powerful enough to blow off the average human head and leave nothing but red string. Daniel stepped back as far as the bedroom wall, and stood there stock still, his hands still held high, saying nothing.

  Skellett said, tartly, ‘Mr Walsh and the Los Angeles Police Department wish to thank you for your consideration in leaving your car parked right outside the house where you happen to be staying, and for checking in with the house-rental agency under your real, undisguised names. You couldn’t have made it easier for them to locate you if you’d fired signal rockets off from the roof.’

  ‘How did you get away?’ Kathy asked Skellett. ‘I thought you were tied up naked in the bathroom.’

  ‘I was, lady, I was, and believe me I won’t forget it. But Mr Walsh here has an incomparable way with locked doors, don’t you, Mr Walsh? He tears them off their

  hinges. And damned lucky for you that you didn’t throw away my clothes, that sharkskin suit cost $450, and that was without the vest.’

  ‘Where’s Rick?’ asked Daniel. ‘Rick Terroni, the other guy who was here?’

  ‘Oh, Rick Terroni. That’s it! Rick Terroni, Pratfaller Extraordinaire. Well, he’s comfortably tied up in his room right now, courtesy of Mr Walsh, and there isn’t much chance that he’s going to be able to get away. The simple reason is, we’ve nailed his hands to the floor.’

  ‘God, you’re a savage bastard, said Kathy.

  Skellett stalked across to the bed, raised his hand, and slapped Kathy right across the cheek, a cracking slap that broke the skin, and left the clear imprint of a man’s hand on her face.

  ‘You got away from me once, lady. You should have kept away.’

  Daniel lowered his hands, his blood thundering through his veins like boiling mercury; but Skellett did nothing more than swing his .45 around to point directly at Daniel’s face. ‘As for you, schmuck, you should have stayed out of it, too. You and your nosy Air Force friend.’

  ‘You hit her again - ‘ warned Daniel.

  Skellett stalked up to him, and pointed the automatic right between his eyes. ‘Yes?’ he demanded. I hit her again, and what?, What are you going to do about it?’

  Daniel lowered his head. ‘Just do what you’ve got to do,he said, in a humiliated mutter. ‘Just do it, all right?’

  Skellett stared at Daniel with eyes like pebbles. ‘If it was up to me, friend, I’d kill you here and now. Four of our people, dead, because of what you did yesterday morning, at the Wilcox Street parking-lot. Four trained agents, three of them spent years infiltrating the California Hell’s Angels. You know what you threw away yesterday, with those stunts of yours? Years of patient work. Years.’

  Daniel said, ‘Don’t touch Ms Forbes again, you hear?’

  I`ll do what I’m going to do, and I’ll do what I have to do.’

  ‘Skellett - ‘

  ‘Don’t annoy me, do you understa
nd? Just don’t annoy me. I’m taking all of you to Washington. I don’t want to, I’d rather blow your fucking heads off, personally. Right here, kill the whole damn lot of you, Susie included. But it seems like you know much more than you ought to, and the boyars in Washington want to know exactly how much. They want to put you through the mill, you get me?’

  Skellett said to Kathy, ‘Get dressed. We have a plane leaving from Burbank at three o’clock.’

  Kathy hesitantly held the sheets up against her naked body.

  ‘Get dressed!’ snapped Skellett. ‘We’ve seen it all before!’

  But both he and Walsh watched her pruriently as she wrapped the sheet around herself and trailed through the door to her own bedroom.

  ‘Keep an eye on her, Walsh,’ said Skellett. ‘Korvitz -you get dressed, too. Come on, let’s get going. I’ve had it up to hefe with this dump of a house.’

  Daniel quickly pulled on his jeans and his Arizona sweatshirt, and then went into Susie’s room to get her dressed, too. When she saw Skellett standing in the doorway, her face went rigid with fright, but Daniel sat down beside her and said, ‘It’s okay. You understand? We’re all together this time. Nothing’s going to happen.’

  Skellett cleared his throat loudly and nastily, but didn’t make any comments.

  They came across Rick in the hallway, stretched out on his stomach like a man crucified, with a dishcloth forced into his mouth. He was very white, and he was trembling with unstoppable quakes like an epileptic. His hands had been pierced by kitchen knives, the points of which had been stuck deeply into the polished wooden floor. Skellett stood over him for a while, watching him with distant satisfaction, and then said, ‘All right, Walsh. Release him. He’s coming with us.’

  Walsh plucked out the knives, one after the other, and tossed them across the hallway. Rick stayed where he

  was, shaking, white as death. Walsh kicked him in the ribs; and then turned him over with his foot.

  ‘Get up, okay?’ he demanded. ‘You want me to jump on your guts?’

  Shivering, wild-eyed, Rick managed to sit up. Walsh cuffed him, hard enough to send him sprawling, and then kicked him again. ‘I told you to get up, didn’t I? What’s the matter with you? Get up!’

  Rick at last managed to pull himself up on to his feet. He stared at Daniel as if he didn’t recognize him. Daniel said nothing, but kept his arm around Susie, and prayed again and again that Skellett wasn’t going to kill them. Not now, oh Lord. Please not now.

  Thirty-Five

  Ikon was still asleep at ten o’clock the following morning; even though two important parties were arriving almost simultaneously at the large grey-stone building on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the front entrance, with its six semi-circular steps, and its uniformed doorman, a long dark-grey Cadillac Fleetwood containing Titus and Nadine Alexander was drawing up.

  At the back entrance, in a plain brown panel-van, Skel-fctt was arriving with Daniel, Kathy, Rick, and Susie. They had been flown in a Gulfstream III from Burbank to College Park Airport, just north-east of Washington, and then been driven into the city along Highway 1. Skellett had ordered them not to speak to each other, and so for hours they had remained in anxious silence. Susie had only just recovered from her first kidnap by Skellett and Walsh; now she was being abducted again, and her face

  was as drawn and tense as the face of an old woman. Daniel kept his arm tightly around her, but that was all he could do.

  ‘Okay, out,’ said Skellett, as the doors of the panel-van were opened up. ‘And don’t try anything stupid. There’s nothing that you can possibly do here that’s worth dying for. You understand me? Just do what you’re told, keep quiet, and you may survive.’

  ‘You’re a gem,’ said Kathy, as she stepped out of the van, and followed Rick towards the building’s back entrance.

  ‘Well, so I’m told,’ grinned Skellett. They were ushered quickly along a peeling green-painted corridor until they reached a service elevator. Skellett pushed the call-button, and while they waited, he stood there smiling at them as if they were schoolchildren, and he was taking them to see the head teacher. There was that particularly wolfish look on his face all the time: You wait until you see what we’ve got in store for you.

  The service elevator rose with a jarring shudder to the 10th floor, and then Skellett drew back the gates and said, ‘Out. Walk straight ahead of you. Keep on going until you reach the end of the corridor. Then make a left.’

  They walked along the fluorescent-lit corridor in silence. The only sound was the squeak and clatter of their shoes. At the end of the corridor, they were met by two men who looked like security guards, dressed in grey uniforms with badges on their shoulders that Daniel had never seen before, but whose meaning he immediately grasped. They showed an eagle, perched on a sickle. The motif of the Autonomous Capitalist Oblast of America. Kathy glanced across at Daniel for the first time since they had been herded into the building, and he knew what she was thinking. There wouldn’t be guards with special badges if Ikon wasn’t true; if everything that Rick had said about a Soviet takeover of the United States hadn’t been a reality. Skellett said, ‘This way. You can wait in here.’ Then he

  said something in Russian to the two security guards, who briskly answered him back, and saluted.

  The four of them were pushed into a plain, green-painted room with a morning-misted view of the Internal Revenue Service building. There was no furniture, no drapes, no carpet. The door was slammed shut behind them and locked.

  They went to the window and looked down the ten dizzying storeys at Pennsylvania Avenue. Rick tentatively tried the window-catch, and said, ‘It’s not locked. We could all just about squeeze out of here.’ The window was hinged at the top, so that when it was open they could peer straight down at Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Three hundred feet in the air?’ said Daniel. ‘You have to be joking.’

  Rick opened the window wider. ‘There’s a ledge below us, as a matter of fact. We could climb out on to the ledge.’

  ‘Forget it, Rick. We’re not stuntmen, like you. We’re just ordinary people who don’t feel like climbing all over high-rise buildings. Besides if we got out on that ledge, where could we possibly go?’

  Kathy said seriously, ‘Do you think they’re going to -well, do you think they’re going to torture us? I’m not sure I could take any more of what Skellett did to me in Phoenix.’

  Daniel reached out and held her arm, but there was nothing he could do to reassure her. The chances were high that they would all be tortured, all of them except Susie, who didn’t know anything at all; and she would be tortured enough by the pain that her father would have to bear. Susie would be tortured beyond endurance if Daniel were to die.

  Rick said, ‘Listen, will you listen? We could climb out on to the ledge, and then we could climb upwards.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Daniel demanded. ‘We’re ten storeys up in the air. We’re supposed to climb out of a window and then climb higher?’

  ‘We can do it, God damn it,’ said Rick. The ledges only start on the ninth floor, but then there’s all this decorative moulding that goes right up to the roof. If we climb out on to the ledge below this window, and make our way along to the corner of the building, there’s a whole lot of concrete acanthus leaves; and we could climb up on those to the roof.’

  ‘Rick, I’ve got a seven-year-old girl here.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? A seven-year-old girl could climb up there easy. Better than you can, probably.’

  ‘But Jesus, Rick, it’s three hundred feet to the ground.’

  Rick stood up straight, and spread his arms. ‘Daniel, we’re not going to the ground. We’re going to the roof.’

  Daniel stared at Rick with an expression that could have bored holes in solid concrete; but when Rick refused to flinch, he knew that Rick was sure that they could make it; or at least that their chances of surviving outside on the ledge were higher than their chances of surviving at the
hands of Skellett and Walsh, and whatever other torturers Ikon could call upon. He turned away, and looked at Kathy, and Susie, and all he could feel was fear. Fear for them, because he knew that they were weaker, and that if anybody was going to fall from the ledge, it was going to be one of them. Fear for himself, too: for what he was going to have to do, and for the responsibility of looking after all these beloved lives.

  There was a sharp rapping at the door. A voice said, Ten minutes, then you see Ikon! Make smart!’

  ‘You hear that?’ asked Rick. ‘We’ve got ten minutes to make our minds up. Less than that. We’ve got two minutes to make up our minds, and eight minutes to climb out of that Goddamned window.’

  Daniel closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘You praying again?’ asked Rick.

  Daniel opened his eyes again.

  ‘I was just trying to work out what I would say to God on the way down to the sidewalk. “Forgive me, Lord, for I lost my footing?” Did you ever see that girl who threw herself off the Empire State Building in the 1930s? Perfectly intact, except that she’d dented the roof of a car two feet deep. Good thing it wasn’t a ragtop.’

  Kathy took Daniel’s arm. ‘Come on, Daniel. Calm down. We don’t have to do it, any of us, if we really don’t want to.’

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  ‘I’m going to try.’

  ‘Are you wearing any underwear?’

  ‘What the hell does that have to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jealousy? You’re going to be ten storeys up in the air, three hundred feet, out on a ledge with no panties?’

  ‘There are worse ways of getting attention.’

  Rick opened the window as far as it would go. Although it was such a still, misty morning, the wind blew in through the foot-wide aperture with a sound like howling demons. T think I’d better go first, then I can show you the best way to climb. The rule is, don’t hurry, don’t make a step unless you’re sure where your foot’s going to land, and stay confident. We’re all going to make it. Nobody’s going to fall; and that’s all there is to it.’