Sam Goines—the man I had known—was well and truly dead.
Requiescat in pace.
Good-bye...
Maxey had spoken of Las Vegas as Sam’s killing ground. Recalling the phrase now, I found myself wondering.
“The game,” I said. “That first one, at the Scheherazade. It wasn’t just to get rid of Sam Goines. Those aces and eights...”
The bearded man’s mouth quirked in the half promise of a smirk.
“Stage dressing,” he said. “Pure stage dressing. You were out there on the balcony playing hero. I was inside staying alive. And I saw the last hand you showed Holy Joe, here, and remembered Francis Shaw’s love affair with Wild Bill Hickok. The thing there in the penthouse had gone wrong; I grabbed the cards and put them on DiMarco’s chest as a distraction...and the cops ate it up so well that I made sure they never went hungry again.”
I’d wondered if it might have happened that way, but there was more I wanted to know.
“That was the play, then? Everyone in that penthouse suite was supposed to die—except you?”
The colonel’s answer was immediate and indignant.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Of course not! Remember who the gunners were?”
I remembered.
And understood. And realized what I would have to live with for the rest of my life.
“Goddamn you, Goines!” I said. “Goddamn you—and God forgive you, too. Because I never will!”
The colonel seemed genuinely taken aback.
“Without admitting anything at all,” he said, “Martinez and the other one were only two out of several hundred men who could have been picked for the job. My contacts are more extensive than Sam Goines’s ever were.”
“But you picked Big Trouble and Little Trouble,” I said.
His face turned bland.
“Someone picked them,” he replied. “Someone who had your best interests at heart. Someone who went to the trouble of finding a couple of mercs who knew you personally. Who could be trusted to see that you survived.”
“But...why?”
The colonel shrugged. “You were there on a pass,” he said. “Francis Carrington Shaw had set the game up to get back the atom bomb that had been stolen from Goines. All the other people at the table belonged to him. Who knows? Maybe Sam Goines just thought he ought to have a friend of his own on the premises.”
But now I could see the whole outline, and it was no go.
“More bluff,” I said. “And more lies. I was there as a convincer, someone to tell people—like Corner Pocket—that the man who got killed was Sam Goines. No matter what Shaw thought, no one was ever going to give him the bomb he wanted. Not then. And not now.”
The colonel opened his mouth, ready to give back as good as he was getting. But I think he saw the answer in my face. And kept quiet.
“There never was a bomb,” I said.
Corner Pocket started to object. “Interpol—” he began.
“Interpol only knows what it’s told,” I said. “Television hype notwithstanding, it’s just a kind of information network. Doesn’t do its own investigations. So when the French government said it had lost an atomic weapon and offered the thief s suicide note as evidence, Interpol accepted the story at face value. They hadn’t played poker against Sam Goines.
“What were you going to do with the dud, Sam—set up in business as an independent nuclear power, or just go in for a little quiet terrorism?”
The colonel stirred. “I keep telling you,” he said, “Sam Goines is dead. Kaput. Finished.”
“And so’s his nuclear potential,” I said, letting it pass. “But how’d he wind up with an ersatz bomb in the first place?”
You could see him decide not to answer and then change his mind. What had happened still seemed to rankle. Nobody more righteous than the hustler who’s been hustled.
“The French,” he said, with an audible edge in his voice, “couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery. And that goes double for their army. It’s an open secret—in some circles, anyway—that half their so-called independent nuclear force is bullshit because they don’t have and can’t seem to make enough weapons-grade cores. For what it’s worth, the little bastard who stole the thing for me was as big a con man as anyone. The warhead he came up with was one of their phonies—all the electronics in place and in good working order, but a core made of pure industrial-quality lead.”
Corner Pocket looked incredulous, but I nodded, still looking at the bearded man.
“I can testify to that,” I agreed. “I took an ax to the electronic components before I left that neat little hangar-arsenal out there in the desert. Just for luck. But driving the old half–track around the boonies, maybe it was the night air finally got my brain working and I noticed I hadn’t seen any radiation dosimeters or other safety items around. And it got me to wondering...”
The colonel actually smiled again. “So you used the scintillometer from the half-track’s prospecting kit—”
“And it told me that the stuff in that little yellow box was slightly less radioactive than the desert sand. All that trouble. For nothing.”
The colonel shook his head. “Not for nothing,” he said.
But before he could go on he was interrupted by another voice; one that did not come from any source in the room.
“No, indeed,” it said, in a paper-dry husk I recognized. “Not for nothing. To the contrary, sir!”
This was Francis Carrington Shaw’s home turf. Naturally he would want to come to the party.
“The objective was power,” Shaw’s voice went on. “Power of a kind beyond even the dreams of most men.”
I did a visual area-search of the room and located the sound source without too much trouble. Furnishings in the room were Spartan but elegant. The Empire breakfront against the far wall had seemed solid at first glance, but now I could see that a part of its scrollwork was pierced in the pattern of a medium-sized speaker...and what had seemed to be a keyhole in the face of the third drawer was actually the opening for a television camera lens.
Nothing is private in Las Vegas.
“A dud bomb’s no power,” I said, turning to face the camera.
The dry voice snorted something that might have been a cynical laugh.
“If you believe that,” it said, “then I wonder that you are able to make a living at poker. In my day, the ability to bluff was as much a part of the poker player’s armament as his ability to estimate odds.”
“And it still is,” I agreed. “But like any powerful weapon, it is best used with discretion. And sparingly. That’s where Sam Goines always went wrong. He was basically a crapshooter; playing poker, he bluffed so often that no one would let him get away with it. That won’t work with an atom bomb.”
“Won’t it?”
“No. Because sooner or later someone will call your hand, and you’ll have to show openers or fold.”
Another desiccated laugh. “Nicely put, sir,” he said. “Nicely put. But inaccurate. Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“I read them.”
“Every major power on earth,” Shaw’s voice said, “now poses a nuclear threat of one kind or another. Even without a rocket delivery system, it is potent because components can be smuggled to a sensitive point—the center of New York City, for instance, or London or Paris or even Moscow—and reassembled there to hold the city and its people hostage.
“Yet in the more than four decades since the Nagasaki detonation, no atomic weapon has been exploded in anger. No one, as you say, has had to show openers.”
I thought it over and thought I saw the hole in his argument.
“Governments don’t use the weapons,” I said, “because they’re afraid of retaliation. Mutual devastation, a no-win situation. But a private operator, one with no territory to defend...”
And there I stopped short, appalled by the abyss that had opened beneath my feet.
Shaw let me look into it for a whil
e.
“As you perceive,” he continued when he was sure I’d seen enough, “the threat of retaliation keeps governments reasonable. But put such a weapon in private hands and the potential for nuclear blackmail is virtually unlimited.”
“And the risk of calling the private party’s bluff—”
“—would be totally unacceptable, especially if the demands made were reasonable and the threat credible.”
I nodded in the direction of the breakfront, as though talking to a visible presence. “Which it would be, because of the Interpol report. But that wouldn’t stand up for long: Interpol may not know that the bomb was a phony, but the French government certainly does. They’d be sure to blow the whistle.”
“Not in this world.” The voice was edged with contempt. “The British might and the Russians might and even the United States might. But not the French. Their politicians have the minds of children, their civil servants are arrogant incompetents, and the national capacity for hubris is absolutely beyond belief. No, sir. No! They would die, literally die, rather than confess the hollowness of their force de frappe.”
“And so, you—”
“He wanted the power, yes.” The colonel broke into the exchange. “Like anyone, he wanted the power and he thought Sam Goines would sell it to him.”
I turned to look at him.
The bearded man’s face was composed now, and he seemed to feel himself on solid ground, directing his words to no one in particular, but making sure everyone—especially the one not physically present—could hear.
“Most people think money and power are pretty much the same thing. Interchangeable. And to an extent that’s true. But Francis Carrington Shaw wanted more, and he thought an atom bomb, real or not, would give it to him. He was going to run the United States from behind the scenes.”
“And why not?” the dry voice demanded. “Why not? Who would be the loser? Could anything be worse, more muddled and incompetent, than the kind of government we’ve had for the past twenty years?”
No one said anything.
“This country was once the greatest and most powerful on earth,” Shaw’s voice went on. “And it could be again. All it lacks is determination. You doubt it? Think of what happened in Vietnam. In your own war—all of you.
“It could have been won at any time.
“Lyndon Johnson had committed the troops, and he had even sold himself on bombing Hanoi, because the air force told him they could promise results if the attack was heavy, sudden, and unrestrained. And they could have proved it. But they never got the chance, because Lyndon just wasn’t the hard-nose he liked to impersonate.
“The gutless, flannel-mouthed bastard hesitated! And temporized.
“After the Tet offensive, when the North Vietnamese and the Cong had shot their wad and had nothing left and we could have walked over them and taken the whole country, he backed off. When a determined and ruthless bombing effort could have succeeded, he moved slowly and let them build their shelters and bring in their Russian defensive missiles. He threw away his war and he threw away men like you—like you, Preacher. And you, Singleton, and you, Goines. You came home from your war to a nation that spit on you, not because of the stories the news media had been bleating out, but because you had done the one thing Americans will never stand for, will never accept: You had failed to win a war...and that damned all of you in the eyes of your countrymen.
“But you had not lost!
“Johnson had lost the war by not being tough enough, while the leaders of North Vietnam had not wavered, never lost sight for a moment of their determination to secure their basic aim, which was nothing short of the total domination of the entire country. At any cost.
“Never were they influenced in the smallest degree by casualties their people suffered...or inflicted. The bitterest irony of all was the accusation of genocide made against the Americans. Not one single charge offered at the so-called Stockholm War Crimes Tribunal of the late 1960s had even the smallest basis in fact. To the contrary, it was the American leaders’ squeamishness in using their full potential for destruction that led to their eventual defeat.
“Francis Carrington Shaw wants power?
“You’re damned right he wants it! He wants the power to stiffen his government’s backbone, to force it to take those actions that are needed if this nation is to survive into the next century. For that power I will take any risk, dare any contumacy. I want it. I need it. I will use it to save us all. Now...tell me that this is unworthy. Or that I am wrong.”
The voice from the loudspeaker had strengthened as the words went on, rising by degrees to the force and timbre it must have possessed in youth, and the final sentence left a thunder of silence.
I looked at Corner Pocket, whose eyes had gone empty, and he looked away. Some things are too painful for speech. This was a man he’d respected.
But the Voice of Heaven didn’t see it that way.
“God!” he said. “God has spoken!”
He fell to his knees beside the poker table and held out his arms toward the breakfront camera, real tears streaming from his eyes.
“This was the one who guided me,” he said. “The one whose guidance I have so sorely missed. He speaks now and I hear. Kneel, all of you! We are in the presence of the Almighty!”
Corner Pocket took a deep breath and finally managed to look at me.
“You feel that way, too?” he inquired.
“Not exactly,” I said. “But then, I’ve heard it all before. Or read it, anyway.”
His face said he didn’t understand.
“History,” I said. “It’s in there, almost word for word if you change a couple of dates and the names of a battle or two. These are the same arguments—the stab-in-the-back ploy—that Adolf Hitler used to take over Germany in 1932.”
A BENEDICTION
May Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, now and forevermore...
THIRTY-TWO
Francis Carrington Shaw was done with us. No more words came from the speaker.
But Holy Joe Gillespie couldn’t seem to take silence for an answer and remained on his knees beside the table, begging the god of his choice to bless him with divine guidance and promising to be a good and worthy servant—yea, even unto the gates of Sheol. It went on and on, and finally the Mormon youngster who had been dealing took charge, raising the Voice of Heaven to his feet and escorting him out the door to one of the waiting automobiles. He was still babbling when the car door closed.
In marked contrast, Colonel Connor—or Sam Goines, or whoever it was now—had nothing to say at all when two of the security guards who had been hovering outside the villa came inside and made an efficient business of cuffing his hands behind his back. He paused for a moment to look at me just before they went out the door, and I looked back but neither of us spoke and the look said nothing at all. We were strangers.
“Think you can zap him on any of this?” I asked when Corner Pocket and I were alone in the room.
He shook his head. “Not even going to try,” he said.
I didn’t understand.
“We could maybe make a case on Sam Goines,” he explained, “but if what he told us is true—and I suspect that it is—we’d play hell proving that he and Colonel Connor are the same man. No. There’s an easier way. I’d already given it some thought before we knew who we were really dealing with, and I think it still works. Colonel Connor is going to leave the country the same way he came. In Francis Carrington Shaw’s personal Boeing 767, with nothing on his passport to show that he was ever here.”
“But—”
“Sam Goines is wanted in lots of places,” Corner Pocket went on, paying no attention to my interruption. “Hotter than a pistol. That’s why he had to ‘die’ up at the penthouse and then switch into the role of a bearded mercenary named David Connor. But he didn’t think it all the way through. David Connor was a real live human being—died about a year ago training
troops in Chad—and he had a life of his own. Real friends. And real enemies. They still want him in Nigeria and in the United Arab Emirates and in Saudi Arabia and Libya. Take your pick. The 767 will make a fuel stop in one of those places, en route to somewhere else.”
I nodded. Slowly. “They’ll hang him?”
Corner Pocket shook his head. “No way,” he said. “All those governments abolished hanging when the colonial powers pulled out. Uncivilized. Gone back to good old-fashioned public decapitation.”
He needed a ride again, and I said it wouldn’t be out of my way to take him back to his office—which we both knew was a lie.
But we still had things to talk about.
“Shaw’s dying,” Corner Pocket said when we were back in my rented car and threading our way through the grounds of El Cholo Loco. “Goines must have known it and thought he could use the atom bomb scam to take over. Getting rid of the Man’s closest associates would have been the first step. It’s the only way the killings make sense...if they’re going to make sense at all.”
I shrugged.
Nothing to add.
“Jorge Martinez,” he said, moving to a new subject when I didn’t reply. “Turns out he had more of a local record than we knew about at first. Glitch in the police computer.”
I kept my eye facing front and concentrated on maneuvering the car through a left turn to the inbound lanes of the Strip.
“When they got the kink ironed out,” he went on, “the files told us Martinez had lost the security guard job here in town for some reason not stated—and a couple months later he and another guy were picked up for peddling toot.”
“Other guy name of de la Torre?” I inquired, still not looking at him.
“Uh-huh. Cross–check showed they were in ’Nam together. Along with someone else we know. So we thought we might ask their mutual friend if he thought it would be worth our while to go looking for de la Torre. For the penthouse shoot-up.”
I shook my head. “Forget it,” I said.
He didn’t reply, and we made the rest of the trip in silence. Thinking our own thoughts.
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