Time to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Good enough to be an Indian scout?’

  About to turn fourteen, David was engrossed in the exploration history of the western United States and Slater had encouraged the interest by comparing David’s backwoodsman prowess against that of the earlier settler heroes whose images adorned the boy’s bedroom walls, although greatly outnumbered by past and present basketball stars. David was close to being unnaturally tall for his age and was the star in his own right of both his school and youth club basketball teams.

  ‘Almost,’ said Slater.

  As David hurried off to collect kindling twigs and firewood, Ann said, ‘You’re too hard on him.’

  ‘I’m not,’ denied Slater, at once. ‘I praise him when it’s due.’

  ‘Not enough. You’re trying to bring him up too quickly in your own image,’ said Ann. She was a blonde, exercise-trim woman who believed her second life was as perfect as Slater believed his to be, although she’d never told him outright. To have done so would have inevitably taken them back to the times she wanted to exorcise: the cheating, the physical violence of times with Jack as well as his whoring and neglect and her attempted escape into the bottom of too many gin bottles.

  ‘Would that be so bad?’ There was no irritation in his voice.

  ‘He shouldn’t miss out on being a young kid.’

  ‘He’s not missing out on anything. And never will.’

  They were only aware of David’s return at the very last moment, so silently, despite his height, did the boy instinctively move through the wooded undergrowth. ‘I’ve stacked up a lot of stuff lying around,’ he said. ‘Enough to take us through tomorrow. Big stuff from some felling over the brow.’

  ‘About time I helped,’ offered Slater.

  ‘I can manage.’

  ‘Together we can do it twice as quickly.’

  ‘I should set the fire first. There’s not a lot of sun left.’

  ‘Well done!’ praised Slater, looking pointedly at his wife. It had been a test. By the time they would have made another wood collection, even though it had all been assembled, there would not have been sufficient heat in the sun to start the fire through the glass scrap upon which Slater insisted. To have used ordinary, reserve-only matches represented a failure. Slater’s return, laden with branches, was another test, although this one for himself. So many were supported on his outstretched arms that Slater could not see to pick his way soundlessly over the twigs and bark and branch-fallen forest floor. So he moved cautiously, feeling and assessing each step before imposing the slightest weight.

  ‘Got you!’ shouted the boy when Slater judged himself still too far away from the camp to be detected. He hadn’t heard the give-away twig snap, either.

  ‘Identify,’ demanded Slater, going into their rehearsed routine.

  ‘You’re next to a birch sapling between two conifers,’ complied the boy, coming into view. ‘And you were scuffing.’

  David was far better than he had been at his son’s age, conceded Slater. He consoled himself with the thought that it was easier to move soundlessly over the permanently frozen tundra around Irkursk than the tinder-dry undergrowth of an early summer Maryland. These outings had an underlying reason, far beyond David becoming expert in outdoor existence and survival. They were just one of several ways Slater intended making his son as totally self-sufficient and confident as possible.

  ‘Don’t try to carry as many logs as me,’ he admitted, sweating as his outstretched arms ached under the weight.

  The fire was well alight and Ann had moved their equipment into their tent by the time Slater got back, letting the logs drop and supporting himself half bent, panting, with his hands against his knees.

  ‘Why’d you try to carry so much, macho-man?’ she demanded.

  ‘I didn’t realize how heavy they were,’ admitted Slater. ‘I’m out of shape.’

  ‘Maybe David should start teaching you.’

  ‘Maybe he should,’ agreed Slater, as the boy re-entered the clearing, carrying without apparent effort what appeared to Slater to be practically as big a load as he had.

  It took each of them two more journeys to complete their log pile, stacked as an additional wind break, Slater carrying less each time. David constructed the wood spit over the fire to grill their steaks, which he did perfectly without burning the meat or allowing the wood to catch alight from the dripping fat.

  As they ate the boy announced, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to try to catch some fish. I’m sure there are some, trout maybe, in the rock pool just over the rise.’

  Slater considered it an unlikely location but didn’t challenge the boy. ‘If you’re right I could teach you how to bake them in clay.’

  They burned the meat debris on the fire, to prevent its lingering scent attracting forest predators, and built up the fire as a further deterrent and to warm the stream water to wash. Slater and Ann shared a double sleeping bag, both naked because their relationship was still very physical although that night neither moved to make love, contentedly tired from the climb and from their contribution to setting up the camp.

  There were fish in the river pool and David caught two, not with a line but by lying trapper fashion with his hands in the icy water to snatch them out when they swam over his caressing fingers. He caught a rabbit, too, in a snare he set before he began to fish, and he skinned and gutted it for their evening meal. For most of the remaining morning and early afternoon they wandered the forest, with Slater further challenging the boy on which berries and fungi and plants were edible, against those that were not.

  ‘Did you really do things like this with your father?’

  ‘A lot,’ said Slater, cautiously.

  ‘How long did it take you to learn it all?’ asked the tall boy, striding slightly ahead of his parents as they descended towards their camp.

  ‘Quite a while.’

  ‘I’d have liked to know what your father looked like – seen a photograph.’

  Slater was conscious of Ann’s sharp sideways look, to which he didn’t respond in case David unexpectedly turned back. It had, not surprisingly, taken the untrained Ann longer than Slater to completely adopt their new CIA-guided personas. Very soon after Ann had become pregnant, they had begun devising their own legend – using the ingrained KGB credo of keeping small falsehoods and outright lies to a minimum, to avoid being caught out – to satisfy the inevitable curiosity of their then unborn child. Over the months and years they’d been confident they had prepared as effectively as possible, even to the extent of believing everything about their new, now secure identities. But increasingly there had been questions and curiosity from David they had not anticipated.

  ‘I wish I had one to show you,’ said Slater. ‘But I’ve told you the house fire in which my mother and father died destroyed everything.’

  ‘Wasn’t there any other family, apart from you?’ persisted the boy.

  ‘You know all my mother and father’s relations died in Poland in the last years of the war in Europe.’ Sometimes Slater regretted the Polish invention, which had been an unnecessary CIA insistence to account for his Russian accent in an immigrant America in which foreign accents aroused little interest anyway; over the subsequent fifteen years the accent had flattened out to be virtually undetectable although there was still the Slavic flaxen hair and high cheekbones of his genuine ancestry.

  ‘It must be awful to lose everybody and everything like that,’ said David.

  ‘It is. And it’s something you’re never going to know,’ guaranteed Slater, working to cut off the discussion.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ apologized David, at once. ‘It’s just that—’

  ‘I know,’ interrupted Slater. ‘Let’s not think or talk about it any more.’

  That night, secure in their double sleeping bag, but again not having made love despite neither of them still being tired, Ann said, ‘It’s not going to go away.’

  ‘I’ll handle it.’

  ‘We’re going to have to be very
careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I do worry.’

  ‘We’ll be OK. We knew it was going to happen, sooner or later. He’s accepted that you were an orphan, with no known family. It’s obvious he’ll keep on to me.’

  Ann turned away from him, to fit herself comfortably against his bent legs. ‘I don’t want the bubble to burst.’

  ‘I promise you it won’t.’

  ‘Ordinary looking son of a bitch,’ judged John Peebles, gazing down at the arrest file photographs of Jack Mason.

  ‘They usually are,’ said Barry Bourne. Both CIA relocation clerks assigned to the Justice Department were comfortable in their cocoons, insulated against any disruption or stress, their only responsibility to monitor and keep up to date Cold War defection and witness protection cases.

  ‘You ever come across him before?’

  ‘How the hell could I! It’s years ago, long dead history.’

  Peebles, a bespectacled, angularly featured man, flicked through the file until he came upon Dimitri Sobell’s picture. ‘Ordinary again, the guy next to you on the Metro.’

  ‘If they’d had horns and tails it would have made it easier to recognize them as bad guys,’ said Bourne, a fan of late-night one-liner gangster movies.

  ‘You think guys who did what Mason did should get remission?’

  ‘Whatever damage they caused between them, it was a long time ago,’ said Bourne, shrugging. ‘Damned glad I didn’t work here then.’

  ‘Guess I’d better see what the penitentiary records say about Mason. And warn Sobell he’s about to be released.’

  ‘Never understand why we bother,’ said Bourne. ‘There’s a Dragnet rerun on TV tonight. You gonna watch it?’

  ‘Hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘You should. It’s a classic.’

  Three

  ‘California!’

  ‘Your idea for us setting up a business together was with computers, with my security input, right? California is where the computer industry is. So that’s where I told the warden I was thinking of moving to.’ Having identified the West Coast to the governor as his most likely resettlement area, Mason was observing the universal intelligence mantra of preventing the accidental disclosure of any lie. It wasn’t likely that Chambers would talk about their going into business, but there was no way of predicting what the fat fuck would say when he underwent his release interview. Every base had to be covered.

  ‘I don’t like California.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘The computer industry isn’t that centralized any more – that was years ago. It isn’t like that now.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know! You’ve been inside for almost fifteen years!’

  ‘And kept in touch with the outside as much as you have.’

  ‘I’ll check out California, until your release – see what I think about the potential.’ This shouldn’t really be coming to him as such a surprise: hadn’t he known for years of the burden Chambers was going to be?

  ‘I was thinking of New Orleans, maybe. I like New Orleans.’

  He hadn’t thought this conversation through sufficiently, Mason accepted, self-critically. The admission unsettled him. Just as quickly, though, he saw the potential unconsidered benefit. Their penitentiary association would be thrown up on day one of any investigation into Chambers’ killing, if there was the slightest doubt about the supposed accident Chambers’ death would appear to be. And the last thing Mason intended to risk was having that association – his face and his name, even though he was shortly to discard the identity – emblazoned across every television screen in the country. Pleased with the quickness with which the complete recovery came to him, Mason said, ‘Let’s slow this down a little, Peter. All I told Harrison was that California might be a good place for me to look at when I got out. I didn’t say anything about you and I setting up together. And I don’t think you should, either. What the fuck right has anyone got to know what we’re going to do! You get asked, you say New Orleans. We don’t tell them anything.’

  ‘You’re right!’ said the other man, with forced belligerence. ‘What the fuck right do they have to know what we’re going to do! We paid already.’

  The totally controlled Mason kept any reaction from his face but thought how predictably like a programmed bank official the other man was; if he hadn’t known – and hacked into the prison records to confirm – the countrywide scam Chambers had so brilliantly conceived, Mason wouldn’t have believed it possible for such an ineffectual man to have carried it off. The fact that the man had eventually been caught proved his limitations, Mason supposed. Unlike himself. He hadn’t been arrested for any mistakes he made: he’d been served up on a plate when the motherfucker Sobell defected.

  ‘That’s my boy! I stay with California, you stay with New Orleans, not a word to anyone about what we’re planning. When we decide which or where we want to be, we make our own minds up. Fuck ’em.’

  Chambers’ bravado enthusiasm wavered. ‘We can’t just buck parole.’

  Jesus, this wasn’t going to be easy, Mason thought. ‘Who said anything about bucking parole? We both chipped off five years by working the system their way. We don’t dump it all down the toilet the moment we step outside the gate.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  That’s how it was always going to be until he got his hot hands on the three million dollars, thought Mason: whatever he said, whenever he said it, however he said it. ‘Which means there can’t be any contact between us, once I get out. No letters, no phone calls, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Chambers, doubtfully.

  ‘So I need to know where to find you.’

  Chambers frowned. ‘I don’t have a place. Why don’t I come to you?’

  ‘Because I don’t know where I’ll be in six months’ time, when you’re released. And I just explained to you why we can’t keep in touch while you’re still inside.’

  ‘What we going to do?’ asked the former bank official.

  Mason suppressed the sigh. ‘You were living in New York when you got arrested, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So that’s the parole board you’ll have to report to, initially,’ reminded Mason. ‘Pick a hotel, a big one – a convention place, maybe – where we’ll disappear in the crowd. You’re due out when, the 26th, 27th, somewhere around then?’

  ‘The 25th,’ supplied Chambers.

  ‘I’ll call you on the 28th, after you’ve had time to settle in and maybe sort your parole. We’ll celebrate.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  ‘All you’ve got to decide is the hotel.’ Allowing himself the irritation, Mason added, ‘You got five weeks to think about it: after that, I’m gone.’

  Another of Mason’s self-taught disciplines was objectivity, and objectively he recognized that his irritation wasn’t motivated by Chambers’ vapid dependency but by there having been no CIA access to his records from which to discover Dimitri Sobell’s new identity and whereabouts. With further discomforting realism Mason was increasingly coming to fear that the CIA warning system had changed and that he was not, after all, going to be able to follow the easy route to Sobell. Compounding that discomfort – discomfort wasn’t sufficient: scourging, eye-tearing frustration – was his awareness that he hadn’t evolved an alternative way to find the man upon whom he was going to impose every suffering.

  Chambers totally missed the contempt. ‘It’s going to be great, you and I.’

  ‘Great,’ echoed Mason, hollowly, as an echo is a hollow sound.

  Mason had not expected – nor been warned until the previous evening – that he would be taken from White Deer for his interview with the Washington DC parole board ahead of his release and was glad one of his most recent hacking expeditions had been to study the regulations governing the procedure. He became even more grateful when Frank Howitt announced that he was to be the escort for the tightly scheduled, one-day trip. It was not until Mason put on
the suit in which he had been sentenced, and not worn since, that he realized how preposterously out of date he appeared: he so obviously looked like a long-term convict. The perpetual exercise, over all the years, had virtually changed his physical shape and maybe, apart from his face, his very appearance, so much so that the clothes were those of a smaller, different person. The jacket was strained across his expanded, muscled shoulders, which in turn shortened the sleeves way above his wrists, while the waistband of his trousers was too wide for his now taut waist, puddling the pant cuffs around his ankles.

  The sniggering Howitt said, ‘You’ve no idea what a fucking mess you look!’

  The chief prison guard was in plainclothes, too, encased in a suit Mason judged to be only marginally better than his, looking like a chrysalis about to burst, although not to release anything of beauty. Mason said, ‘I’ll play Laurel to your Hardy.’

  Howitt’s face tightened. ‘You’ll jump to whatever string I pull. I’m going to enjoy myself today.’

  It was a set up, Mason decided. In all his near fifteen years in a penitentiary he had never heard or known of an about-to-be-released prisoner being escorted to such a parole board interview. He needed to be extremely careful, alert to everything.