Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cargo plane coming in low over the treetops, on a direct line with me. Another black canister dropped from its belly; if I wasn’t ventilated by bullets, I was soon likely to get roasted.
“Mongo!”
“I see it!”
Worde’s corpse was on its belly. I rolled it over, then put my hand inside his coat and groped through the gore I found there. My fingers closed around the packet. I pulled it out, jumped to my feet, and started back toward the trees just as the canister landed behind me. I leaped and rolled, clawing my way through the ice and snow as a great whoosh rolled over me in a tidal wave of sound. The odor of gasoline stung my nostrils as thick, billowing clouds of suffocating black smoke swirled over and around me. Flames slapped at my face—and then I was out of it, and into Garth’s grasp.
“Jesus!” Garth shouted as he lifted me up, then slammed me back down into the snow. He rolled me back and forth a few times to smother my burning clothing, rubbed snow through my hair, over my face and neck. Finally, apparently satisfied with the fruits of his labors, he sighed and sat down hard in the snow.
“How am I?” I asked loudly in order to be heard over the roar of the fire in the meadow and the forest beyond.
Garth frowned and shook his head in disgust, even as tears welled in his eyes. “Only slightly singed.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” I held up the packet. “Look what I’ve got.”
Garth, a strange expression on his face, didn’t even glance at the packet. “Why did you do a dumb-ass thing like that?”
“Huh?”
“Why did you run out and risk your life like that? Trying to save somebody’s life is one thing, but Worde was already dead. That package wasn’t that important, Mongo. None of this shit is.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Who gives a shit if Orville Madison becomes secretary of state or not?”
“I thought you were beginning to.”
“Wrong. I’d break the man’s spine if I could get my hands on him, but I don’t give a shit if he becomes secretary of state. I give a shit about trying to keep you in one piece. Then you go and do a damn fool thing like that and almost get yourself killed for a lousy package which could contain dirty laundry, for all you know. What do you think would happen to me, Mongo, if you died?”
I had no answer for a question I’d never expected to hear. I was trying to think of something to say when I suddenly realized that the shooting from the ridge had stopped. Startled, I glanced toward the ridge; the silhouette of the commando was gone.
“I think I got the son-of-a-bitch,” Garth continued quietly.
“Then what the hell are we doing sitting here?!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “Let’s go!”
A dead commando meant a hole in the ever-tightening cordon, and so we began climbing the ridge directly toward the spot where the gunman had been standing. However, we had to take into account the possibility that the man was just playing possum and hoping we would do exactly what we were doing, and so we proceeded with a good deal of caution. Halfway up the ridge we split up, with Garth going to the left and me to the right. With my Beretta out, I darted from tree to tree, listening for any sound from the top of the ridge, looking for any movement. I’d made it all the way to the crest of the ridge when I heard Garth’s voice.
“Here, Mongo,” my brother called softly. “I’ve got him.”
Moving in the direction of Garth’s voice, I found him standing over a large man dressed in a camouflage uniform of brown and white. The man had night-vision goggles draped around his neck, a large pack strapped to his back, and his lifeless hands held an Uzi submachine gun. He made a formidable-looking corpse, but it hadn’t been Garth who’d killed him; the commando’s throat had been deeply slashed from ear to ear, and the thumb on his right hand had been amputated.
“Goddamn,” I said when I’d recovered from my initial shock. Gary Worde had been right on target when he’d called out Veil’s name.
“Yeah,” Garth murmured as he reached down and picked up the Uzi. He took two ammunition clips from the man’s belt, dropped them into his pocket. “If Kendry had really wanted to make me feel good, he’d have hung around just a few minutes longer. Which way is the truck?”
Taking out my compass, I held it in the palm of my hand and squinted at the needle in the moonlight. “That way,” I said, pointing to my left. “But we can’t cut over that way until we’re sure we’re outside the ring. For now, I think we should keep on going straight.”
“Right,” Garth said curtly, and we started down the opposite side of the rise at a trot.
Our thoughts with the man who had died of the disease called Orville Madison which we’d brought with us into his place of solitude, we walked due north in silence for better than three hours, until the sun began to rise over the horizon to signal a cold, white dawn. We’d paused often to listen and watch, but we had detected no sounds of pursuit. Now we stopped at the top of a mountain and scanned the surrounding landscape through our binoculars, saw absolutely nothing except distant plumes of smoke rising from the forest fires started by the canisters of napalm.
There was no cargo plane, no sign of the five surviving commandos. There was also no sign of Veil, although we knew he had to be out there someplace.
Puzzled but relieved at the absence of any kind of pursuit, we checked our compasses, then started off to the east. With a little luck, I thought, the Jeep would be where we’d left it, and it would start.
A half hour later two New York State Police helicopters appeared in the distance, heading toward the fires.
“Do we want to be rescued?” Garth asked as we stood inside a shadowy copse of fir trees and watched as a third helicopter passed almost directly overhead.
After some consideration, I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“It could save us a long hike, and a very cold night in the mountains; we can’t risk a fire.”
“We need time to think about what we’re going to do next and who we’re going to see. I think we’re better off if we keep our options open. If the State Police get hold of us, they’ll have an awful lot of questions I’m not sure we want to answer yet—at least not to them.”
“You’re right. Why don’t you open the packet and see what the hell’s in there?”
“I was thinking it might be better to open it in the presence of at least one official witness. It’s sealed pretty good, and as long as we leave it that way there are tests that can establish the fact that it’s been sealed and underground for a few years. That could be important.”
Garth nodded his agreement. “You sure the Jeep is in this direction?”
“Ask me in a day or two,” I said, and started down the side of the mountain.
We’d headed in the right direction, and the Jeep was where we’d left it; unfortunately, we never got a chance to see if it would start. New York State troopers were waiting for us—in force—when we emerged from the forest on a ridge just above the place on the highway where we had parked the Jeep almost a week before. Suddenly, grim-faced men in blue and gray uniforms seemed to be popping up or out all over the place, surrounding us with their guns drawn.
“Freeze!” a tall, burly state trooper standing fifteen yards ahead of us shouted as he leveled a shotgun between Garth and me.
We froze, slowly raised our arms in the air.
“Where’s the other one?!”
“What other one?” I asked. “Look, Officer, we were just out for a little hiking.”
“With a submachine gun?”
He had a point. Almost as an afterthought, Garth relaxed his fingers and the Uzi clattered to the frozen ground. One of the troopers quickly stepped forward and snatched it up. Then we were grabbed, hustled down to the road, slammed up against a car, and roughly frisked.
“You’re making a mistake, Trooper,” Garth said in his most reasonable tone of voice. “Look in my wallet; you’ll find
a detective’s gold shield. My name’s Lieutenant Garth Frederickson, and I’m on special assignment for the NYPD. This is my brother, the criminologist Dr. Robert Frederickson.”
“We know who you are, Frederickson,” a big, black trooper growled from somewhere behind and above my right ear. The man found my Beretta and Seecamp, relieved me of both. “But you’re no longer on assignment for anyone, and it’s likely that both you and your brother are going to be learning a lot more about criminology from the inside of a prison. Both of you are under arrest for violation of the Federal Espionage Act. Now, where’s your buddy?”
“We don’t know who you’re talking about,” Garth replied in a low, rasping snarl that no longer sounded quite so reasonable.
“Veil Kendry. When and where did you split up?”
Garth and I both started to turn around, stopped when a rifle barrel knifed down between us and smashed against the hood of the car.
“Who’s Veil Kendry?” I asked, and heard Garth softly grunt his approval. These were definitely not the right people to talk to or show anything.
“Shut up, you little bastard,” the trooper behind me said as he prodded me hard between the shoulder blades with his rifle butt. “He’s the man you and your brother have been selling our country’s secrets to for the past five years, and he works for the Goddamn Russians. Don’t bother trying to deny it, because the government people have you cold. All three of you are fucking spies.”
It seemed the rope I thought Orville Madison was supposed to be hanging himself with still had a few kinks left in it.
18.
Garth and I were handcuffed, bundled separately into the backs of two State Police cars, and given a speedy ride—complete with wailing sirens—to a headquarters building just off the Thruway, near Albany. We were strip-searched and all our possessions taken away. We were placed in separate cells in a small lockup facility at the rear of the building, given a meal, and allowed to sleep under the supervision of a trooper sitting in a chair in the corridor just outside our cells.
In the morning we were served a breakfast that was surprisingly good for jail food. A few minutes after the dishes were taken away, I heard the cell door on the opposite side of a tile partition open and close, and then two sets of footsteps walking away down the corridor, toward the front of the building.
Garth was brought back about an hour later, and a young, attractive female trooper came through a door to my right, opened my cell, and motioned for me to come out. I was led down the corridor to a pale green door which the woman opened for, and then closed behind, me.
The small interrogation room was bare except for a metal desk and chair set back against the far wall, and a second folding metal chair placed in the middle of the room. A heavyset trooper in a uniform with a captain’s insignia sat very erect behind the desk. To his right was a tape recorder, which he turned on as I entered the room, and on the desk top in front of him was a yellow legal pad and felt-tipped pen. The man had close-cropped brown hair, and dark, expressive eyes. I went to the chair and sat down, crossed my legs and smiled at the trooper. He didn’t smile back. We sat and stared at each other for close to five minutes, while the recorder kept running.
“I know,” I ventured at last. “I just don’t look like a spy. That’s why I’m so good at it; people don’t take me seriously. Garth is the one who looks like a spy, and that’s always been a problem. I insisted that the Russians hire him, too, as kind of a package deal. He needed the money.”
“You think this is a joke?” the trooper asked in a low voice that was surprisingly lilting. His nameplate said McGarvey. Irish.
“I think the idea of Garth and me being spies is a joke.”
“I take you very seriously, Frederickson. I won’t bullshit you if you don’t bullshit me.”
“Somebody’s already bullshitting you, Captain, and it isn’t me.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Didn’t my brother tell you?” I asked with more than passing interest.
“You tell me. What happened up in those mountains? We found seven corpses up there; one was really just a pile of burned bones. Six of those men were dressed in uniforms and armed to the teeth; they’d all had their throats slashed and their right thumbs severed. It also looks like somebody was dropping firebombs from a plane; I’ve seen burn patterns like that before, in Viet Nam. It looked like a Goddamn war zone up there.”
It appeared that Garth hadn’t told the man anything, which didn’t surprise me. “That’s because there was a war, Captain.”
“Will you tell me what’s going on, Frederickson?”
“I’m the one who should ask you that. Your men said that Garth and I are wanted on espionage charges. Somebody’s pulling your chain, not to mention a lot of strings. I think you know that, or at least suspect it strongly.”
“Nobody pulls my chain, Frederickson,” McGarvey said evenly. “Maybe that’s why I’m sitting here asking you to tell me what’s going on.”
“I think I hear what you’re saying. But I notice that you didn’t say anything about strings. If you’d done even an itty-bitty check on Garth and me before your men jumped our asses, you’d have known that the charges were ridiculous—maybe something dreamed up on the spur of the moment by somebody in a panic and very desperate to get us locked up where he can get at us. The New York State Police are being used as baby-sitters, and that’s what this is all about. In fact, I might even venture a wild guess that you were pointedly requested not to interrogate us. How am I doing, Captain? Do I win a prize?”
McGarvey’s heavy eyebrows raised slightly. “Like I said, Frederickson, nobody pulls my chain. But now you’re trying to; you still haven’t told me anything.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work harder.”
“What person or government agency asked you to pick us up? F.B.I.? I mean, the charges against us would fall into their jurisdiction, right?”
“I’ll ask the questions, Frederickson,” McGarvey replied dryly. “You may be the smaller of the Frederickson brothers, but you’ve certainly got the biggest mouth and smoothest tongue.”
“Garth gets disgusted easily, Captain. When he gets disgusted, he either takes a swing at you or gives you the silent treatment. I’m more patient.”
The captain’s response was both unexpected and disturbing. “Your brother’s a dangerous man, Frederickson,” he said in an odd tone of voice.
“Indeed,” I replied, feeling uneasy. The expression on the other man’s face was one of genuine concern, and I wasn’t sure I liked that.
“I don’t think you understand what I mean. He’s not living on the edge; he’s hanging over it by his fingertips. I’ve seen men in that condition before. He’s going to explode one of these days, maybe when you least expect it.”
“Is this knock-the-brother business some new kind of interrogation technique?”
“No. It’s an observation. He has a drug pallor, you know. Is he on anything?”
“Garth doesn’t even do aspirin.”
“Well, my suggestion is that you two get this business behind you as quickly as you can. In my opinion, he needs professional help—and quickly.”
“What did he say to you?” I asked, feeling genuinely alarmed, yet not certain that I wasn’t being manipulated. Captain McGarvey knew his business; he could play both good guy and bad guy at the same time.
“It’s not what he said; it’s the way he looks.”
“Garth’s just cranky this morning,” I said, trying to get my mind off Garth and back to the business at hand. “Being shot at and having napalm dropped on your head does that to some people; it puts them off their feed.”
“He’s very protective of you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m his brother and he doesn’t like it when people shoot at me and drop napalm on my head, either.”
“Who shot at you and dropped the napalm?”
“Just maybe the same people who called you and asked tha
t we be picked up. I’m sure it’s occurred to you that there just might be a very direct connection. What about it, Captain? Does that give you pause?”
The answer was clearly yes. McGarvey was silent for some time, and then he abruptly reached over and turned off the tape recorder. A few things might be bothering Garth, but something was also bothering this New York State trooper a great deal. He obviously smelled a whole barrelful of dead fish—but then, it wouldn’t take a genius to do that. What McGarvey also smelled was tremendous power, power to, at the least, destroy his career; despite his confident, almost defiant, demeanor, the smell of that power had to frighten him. He had pride in his person and his job, but—exactly like Garth and me—he had to be wondering what kinds of wheels were furiously turning in Washington and how he was going to avoid being crushed under them.
“I’d heard of you a long time before this, Frederickson,” McGarvey said at last. “And I’ve done my own checking on the report I got.”
“What report?”
“I told you I’ll ask the questions.”
“We’re not very likely spies, are we?”
“You still haven’t told me what happened up in the mountains.”
“I’m not sure you want to know,” I said carefully.
“Why not?”
“Because then the same people who want Garth and me dead might want to kill you. Remember that you didn’t get a request to pick us up until after the bullets and napalm had missed.”
McGarvey rewarded me with a brief nod of his head. “An interesting observation, Frederickson, and it’s noted,” he said in a flat voice. “But you let me worry about my safety.”
“Captain, let us ponder this problem together. Why don’t you tell me what government agency told you that we’re wanted on espionage charges?”
“Frederickson, why do you want to play games with me?”
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