by Ahern, Jerry
His old OSS friend years ago had related to him once how two pairs of pliers were often used in conjunction with a gutter downspout to climb to the roof of a building. John Rourke didn’t even have one set of pliers, but he climbed the downspout anyway.
The double Alessi rig across his bare shoulders, only three rounds in one gun, six in the other, his spare magazines on the bedroom floor, fallen there when he ripped out his belt, his knife still on the chair by the dresser, he had one option and one only. Get on the roof and as quickly as possible, kill the three men by the car. It was that or die, and more than his own life— he realized he feared for Emma Shaw’s life. Did that mean that he loved her?
It was a thought at once comforting and terrifying.
His hands worked along the downspout, his feet
locked around it, helping to shove him upward along its length. He was halfway to the roof. Below him, Emma Shaw fired a really nice, clean-sounding short burst.
From his position, he could not see the three men, or for that matter the car.
His right hand reached the gutter—it was integral to the structure, not an add-on as gutters had been six centuries ago. Rourke hoped it was not only integral but sturdy, because the gutter was the only handhold for him on the roof line. He hauled his body weight up against it, rolled over it onto his back, the shingle material rough against his bare skin.
Almost literally, he’d been caught with his pants down.
Including the men both inside the bedroom and outside, not discounting these three, there were eleven. That was an odd number for an assault, but none of the men seemed wonderfully professional, just violent. There was a decided difference between the two qualities.
John Rourke, flat against the roof surface now, started climbing toward the peak. Once there, it would have to be quick, not a sniping situation. That would be too slow. Just stand up, kill them and hope there weren’t any more of them to kill him back.
Another admirably controlled burst from Emma Shaw below.
She loved him, she said. John Rourke was not prepared to tell any woman he loved her. There had been only two women he’d loved that way, Sarah and Natalia.
Sarah was dead. “Jesus,” Rourke hissed through gritted teeth. The thought alone tightened his throat, his chest, made him want to stop all this, regardless of the men there on the ground by his borrowed car, just stop it all and sit down where he was and let the tears come. His temples throbbed. His mind and body ached.
And there had been Natalia. He had loved Natalia, perhaps still did. Sensibly, she had let herself fall in love with Michael and now she was Michael’s, as much as a woman of Natalia’s strength and courage and independence could be any man’s woman.
And Emma Shaw?
He’d come here to her, lonely and full of greater sadness than he had ever known, knowing what would happen, afraid to let it happen, wanting it to happen, still deep inside himself feeling he was somehow cheating on Sarah, albeit she was dead. He almost felt as if to these armed men who had come here to kill, he owed a thank you rather than death. They had kept him from doing something that he would have regretted, something that someday might have stood between him and Emma Shaw.
To have come here now was wrong.
One didn’t mourn a lost wife by having intercourse.
Throughout his life, he had never believed in the inevitable, yet he had come here wanting the inevitable to cancel out his thinking, to take away his pain.
Marriage, he had always believed, despite the arguments he and Sarah had, despite the difficulties that their marriage at most times seemed unable to endure, was for life.
Did that mean that since, for the moment at least, his life went on, that their marriage still was, still continued to endure?
He was at the peak of the roof.
He could see the three men clearly, and as yet they clearly did not see him.
There were three rounds remaining in one of his twin stainless Detonics .45s, six in the other. Although functionally perfectly ambidexterous all his life, the right was his master hand. He shifted the pistol with three rounds to his left hand, the one with six in his right.
Straddling the peak of the roof, Rourke rose up to his knees, both pistols cocked and locked. He drew his feet under him, so he could stand quickly, testing his balance, too, lest he lose it and fall.
His left thumb swept behind the tang, wiped down the safety, then swept back. More easily, he thumbed down the safety of the pistol in his right hand.
John Rourke stood.
“Up here!”
The three men wheeled their weapons toward him and John Rourke opened fire. A single bullet from the gun in his left hand to the head of the man in the center of the three behind the car. A double tap from the gun in his right hand to the chest and thorax of the man to the already dead man’s left. A double tap from the gun in his left hand, emptying it, chest and thorax again.
The slide of the pistol in John Rourke’s left hand was locked open, empty.
Four rounds remained in the pistol he held in his right hand.
The three men were down without firing a shot in return.
“Stay where you’re at, Emma, in case there are any more of them!” Rourke ordered. He was already moving along the roof line and lowering his body profile, just in case.
Ten
Tim Shaw’s eyes were on his daughter’s clothing. He would have expected grass stains or something on her skirt, but there were none.
And he looked at John Rourke, and wondered.
In all, there were eleven dead men here, and like Nikita Kamasov who was one of them, they were all in the drug trade, most of them documented killers, all of them armed with submachineguns. And John Rourke had killed them all, the majority of them inside Tim Shaw’s daughter’s bedroom.
Doctor Rourke was reloading magazines for his .45s when Tim Shaw walked over to him. Rourke looked up from his guns. “Doctor Rourke, these guys just—”
“Yes?”
“One father to another, huh?” “Yes?”
But Tim Shaw didn’t know what to say. After all, Emma was a grown woman, and even though John Rourke had a daughter close to her age, it wasn’t as if John Rourke was anywhere near old enough to be her
father. Rourke had to be about forty. Rourke’s children were as old as they were because Rourke had played games with the cryogenic sleep process, intentionally aging them into adulthood. Everybody grew up reading the story in history books. “Just wanted to say I’m sorry about the death of your wife, real sorry. Lost mine when Emma was just a tyke.”
John Rourke nodded. “Thank you.” Rourke’s every gesture, right down to his breathing, seemed to suggest exhaustion.
“These guys just popped in on you.”
John Rourke looked Tim Shaw square in the eye. “Your daughter and I were in the bedroom, as you’ve obviously deduced. And judging from the condition of her clothing—no blood stains, no grass stains, no mud—you’ve probably guessed at a few other things. Gentlemen don’t discuss personal relationships with women, as we both know. Under the circumstances, however, suffice it to say that I was feeling terrible. I still do. Your daughter, a friend, was very kind to me; she’s as fine a woman as I’ve ever had the good fortune to know.”
“Know?”
John Rourke loaded one pistol after the other in turn. “Whatever might have happened was never allowed to happen, by the circumstances attendant to what you see here.” And Rourke gestured toward two of the morgue men who were carrying a body in a black rubber bag on a stretcher between them.
“Okay, John,” Tim Shaw said. “Who you think these guys were after?”
“I wasn’t followed up here, and the F.O.U.O. car was randomly selected, so I doubt there was any electronic trace. I’d say the Nazis hired these men to go after your daughter as part of a revenge plot against you. Get her out of here. Back on base would be safest.”
“In one of her damn airplanes,” Shaw nodded. “The ba
stards. Can’t come after me, gotta go after my daughter.”
“For the operation you pulled off at that condo, when you nailed six of the ones who did the massa’cre at Sebastian’s Reef Country Day School. You got six of their people and you got a lot of their equipment. If there were twelve, as we suspect, you cut their commando group by fifty per cent. Easy to see why they want back at you.”
Tim Shaw, looked toward the house’s little front porch. Emma sat on the railing, her skirt sagging down between her knees, her hands kind of buried inside it. And she looked sadder than he’d ever seen her look since her mother died.
He looked at John Rourke again. “None of my business, but do you love her?”
John Rourke stared at him blankly for a split second, then, his eyes hardening, said, “I don’t know.” Rourke lit a little cigar, holding his lighter while Tim Shaw took out a cigarette. Then Rourke lit it for him. “I get the impression with all the things they’ve put in history books about me—and that’s stupid, because I didn’t do anything special—but that people think I’m supposed to be some guy out of a novel or a movie.”
John Rourke hadn’t done anything special? If that were true, then George Washington was just a soldier with bad teeth. “You mean people expect you to be more than human, and that means less than human,”
Shaw opined.
“I lost my. wife. I just killed a son. My head isn’t on straight. I don’t really know what I know, except Emma’s a marvelous person. That make any sense, Tim?” Rourke exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
“Yeah, probably, John, if anything does these days,” Shaw answered, nodding, his eyes focusing on the glowing tip of his cigarette.
Emma Shaw watched the two men she loved. She loved her brother, of course, but that was different. And it was a different sort of love, too, of course, that she had for her dad, Tim Shaw the cop—different from the way she loved John Rourke.
And now it was over before it was begun.
She just sat there on the porch railing, hands clasped in each other between her knees. When she swung her feet forward, she could see them beneath the hem of her skirt. When she swung them back, it was as if they weren’t there. She was perched, waiting, waiting for her father to say something, maybe even for John to say something.
But she’d said it all to herself already. This was too soon for John, too soon after the death of Sarah Rourke. And maybe she’d messed up any chance they might have had in the future. And her father was too good a detective not to have figured out why all the carnage within the house was confined to the bedroom.
“Shit,” Emma Shaw murmured under her breath.
As she watched her father and John still talking, one of the Shore Patrol investigators began walking hurriedly from his car, toward them.
Emma Shaw swung her legs around and slipped off the railing, started walking across the porch, then started running, down the low steps, across the yard where evidence technicians still worked and only a little while ago there had been three dead men.
She quickened her pace now, seeing the Shore Patrol investigator—Lieutenant Ned Barringer—approaching her father and John.
He gave the usual salute military people give to important civilians. And, after all, John was technically a general.
John nodded to him.
She slowed her pace, stopped a few feet away from John and her father and Lieutenant Barringer. She could hear what he was saying. “… received word from Deitrich Zimmer, sir. The communique states that despite the damage done to the cryogenic repository in New Germany, both Mrs. Rourke and Generaloberst Mann are alive, in cryogenic sleep, and will be traded for Martin Zimmer. But if there is no trade, they will be killed. We’re working on getting independent confirmation now, but the message source appears to be genuine, sir. Not one body has yet been found in the wreckage of the cryogenic repository. The fires caused by the explosions are still burning, but the German government says it will send in a team in fire-resistant gear to check. That may take several hours.”
Men didn’t faint, and certainly not men like John Rourke. But he leaned back against the hood of the F.O.U.O. car, his face suddenly white as a sheet, his eyes closing.
And, when he opened his eyes, he looked at her.
She felt tears and there were a million contradictory reasons why she should, but she couldn’t let them show.
Her father said, “You mean to say they never fuckin’ checked!” “I, uhh—”
John didn’t say anything.
Eleven
The pale blue gas swirled away for just an instant. She had a lovely face, just as he remembered it from that brief moment one hundred and twenty-five years ago when there had been the shared communion of death between them, he the giver, she the receiver. Her hair, almost too meticulously brushed it seemed, almost funereally perfect, was a rich, dark auburn, the arrangement softening with time. The hair grew, of course.
Generaloberst Wolfgang Mann’s hair was well past military length, and a healthy growth of beard adorned Mann’s traitorous countenance.
Deitrich Zimmer’s thoughts returned to Sarah Rourke. With her eyelids down, of course, it was impossible to see her eyes. But he remembered them as they had been in that instant more than a century ago when they had flashed up at him, defiantly, proudly. She was, of course, a remarkable woman, full of courage and strength and determination and not at all unattractive. She was the mother of his son.
Several courses of action lay open to him now, possessed of her body as he was. With her, he would assuredly be able to trade for the return of Martin. With her, he could control John Rourke, and hence at least to some degree control the Trans-Global Alliance’s attempts to interdict his actions.
Zimmer looked past the cryogenic chamber in which she lay, toward the wall which was covered by a mural-sized video screen, a map displayed on it, showing the constantly updated positions of forces of the Reich and of Eden, all but one in the same. The attack on Pearl Harbor would be critical, of course. And, with the good Herr Doctor Rourke out of the way, there would be a decided advantage.
He—Zimmer—would arrange the trade for young Martin in such a manner that John Rourke would have to accomplish the trade himself. And he—Zimmer— would not only have Martin back, but have John Rourke as his prisoner, or dead. But he hoped for the former, the latter—an eventuality—coming to pass all in due time.
And if the good Herr Doctor Rourke had any compunction about personally involving himself in the trade, that would fade away instantly.
In the event that he was unable to carry out his plan of preference, he had made arrangements to accomplish his intended scheme by other means. A video crew and specialists in laser holography would be his “ace in the hole,” as the Americanism went.
This promised not only to be challenging, but amusing as well.
The one problem with his ice-bound redoubt was that there were no windows, and he felt just slightly claustrophobic. The feelings passed with activity, of course, and there would be an adequate supply of that.
There was a secret, and he must know it, possess that secret himself. And the secret was the greatest prize, even greater than the death, final and complete and ultimate, of Doctor John Thomas Rourke. And only John Rourke could unlock that secret, retrieve this knowledge.
This ultimate knowledge posed the ultimate risk of course, but what knowledge was, after all, without risk to the knower?
Deitrich Zimmer licked his lips.
He could taste it.
Twelve
“It’s very simple to give you artificial fingerprints, Mr. Rourke, but that’s the least of your worries.” Natalia watched Michael’s eyes as they squinted slightly, the doctor from the police department forensics unit lighting a cigarette as he continued. “You can get anyone to alter your fingerprints, either temporarily or permanently. Corneal imprint is what’s most reliable. But, you have to remember that Deitrich Zimmer, when he isn’t being a Nazi dictator, is one of the
finest medical minds ever. What’s known of Zimmer’s techniques—and that’s precious little—is studied in medical schools from New Germany to Lydveldid Island to the Chinese First City to Mid-Wake—hell, you name it. He’s going to be able to spot fingerprint changes unless they’re done perfectly, and he might even spot them then. And what will you do about cranial measurements? Dental records? No, you could pull off a deception that would last until he examined you. That’s it, Mr. Rourke.”
“I have to try,” Michael said in reply.
Natalia sat on a stool at the far end of the morgue, her legs crossed, a cigarette in her hand. She flicked ashes from it to the floor—Dr. Robinson had said she could, that the floors were swept every night—and a few specks of ash settled on her stocking. She brushed them away, rearranging herself on the stool, straightening her dress. Michael, the moment he heard about Deitrich Zimmer’s communique, was determined to go through with the charade he had planned before the— thank God—totally erroneous information concerning his mother’s death.
When Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna thought of Sarah Rourke, she thought of Mark Twain’s famous line, about reports of his death being premature.
All the toughness and courage and ability which Michael and Annie had in abundance weren’t solely inherited from their father. For the first time since the night one hundred and twenty-five years ago when Sarah was shot in the brain by Deitrich Zimmer, Natalia saw real hope of Sarah’s return to the living.
Dr. Robinson was saying, “Think of it this way. Dr. Zimmer may be evil incarnate—I don’t know—but I do know he’s not a fool. He knows you exist, and he knows you’ve impersonated Martin—successfully— once before. He will anticipate it, Mr. Rourke. I read somewhere that you once entertained plans for following in your father’s footsteps in medicine.”
“I still do, maybe.”
Dr. Robinson’s teeth looked like ivory against his chocolate brown skin as his face beamed with a broad grin. “Well, then put yourself in Zimmer’s place, for goodness’ sake! He’ll be expecting to be deceived. If Martin Zimmer were still alive and your father actually brought Martin Zimmer in trade for your mother’s life, Deitrich Zimmer would check Martin Zimmer just as carefully! From what you’ve told me this evening and from the scuttlebutt I’ve picked up, it seems clear that Deitrich Zimmer essentially built Martin Zimmer! He started with the raw clay of your brother, added surgically the genetic material from a descendant of Adolf Hitler, made Martin. Don’t you think he’d know every measurement it was possible to know, every minute scar, every blemish! You don’t even know if Martin Zimmer was circumcised. Were you?”