Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “Is that what I’m doing? Maybe I just want the two of us to reach some unpleasant conclusions together. And whatever happened to the Miranda rule? Aren’t Garth and I entitled to the services of a lawyer?”

  “We have a right to hold you for forty-eight hours; this is a special case. Do you want a lawyer?”

  “It’s a moot question. There’s no way Garth and I are going to be allowed to talk to a lawyer, and you know it.”

  “If you’re innocent, it’s in your interests to talk to me, Frederickson.”

  “Okay, let me ponder the problem by myself. First, let me assure you that Garth and I are perfectly happy to be sitting here in your lockup. We’re a hell of a lot safer here than we would be out on the streets. In fact, I’m surprised that we’re still here; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that you’re stepping on some very big toes right now, because you were under pressure to turn us over to the other interested party yesterday, right after you arrested us. Am I right?”

  Captain McGarvey said nothing, but the trooper’s face now revealed a great deal; he was a commanding officer who feared that his organization and men were being used, and didn’t like it.

  “Now I think we may be getting somewhere,” I continued quietly. “Captain, if you had turned us over, Garth and I would be dead right now. Up to this point, we probably owe you our lives. If I’m right, you were perfectly willing to cooperate fully with the people who called you—except for one thing. You didn’t believe the story they told you, and that stuck in your craw. There were too many unanswered questions, and you figured that the New York State Police have a right to know what’s going on in their own state—especially when it involves firebombing in the Catskills and seven dead men. That’s really what this interrogation is all about, isn’t it? It’s personal.”

  McGarvey stared at me for some time, then nodded slightly. “All right, Frederickson, I’ll give you that,” he said simply. “I am asking these questions for myself; I don’t like being jerked around. Even if you were to say something incriminating, it wouldn’t be admissible precisely because you don’t have a lawyer.”

  “In that case, I do believe I want to tell you what’s going on.”

  McGarvey reached over to turn on the tape recorder, which gave me a little time to think. I needed it; I knew where I wanted to go with the trooper, but wasn’t at all sure how I wanted to get there. I wasn’t about to lay out everything I knew or suspected just for McGarvey, and there was no way I was going to implicate Veil in the killings of the commandos or anyone else. At the same time, I had to present a good enough case so that McGarvey would continue to act as a buffer between Garth and me, and Madison’s men. I was going to have to do a lot of improvising and hope I didn’t get tripped up.

  “You say you’ve heard of me, so you know I hire out as a private investigator,” I continued. “A month ago I was given a rather large retainer by the Senate committee charged with investigating the president’s cabinet nominees.”

  “Why hire you, Frederickson? Why wouldn’t the committee use its own staff investigators?”

  “Because the specific matter the senators wanted investigated was extremely sensitive, and they were afraid of leaks if their own people did it. There were persistent rumors that the nominee for secretary of state—”

  “Orville Madison, the C.I.A. guy?” I’d gotten McGarvey’s undivided attention.

  “Right. The rumors were to the effect that Madison has, or had, a long-standing connection with people in organized crime, specifically with one of your local boys—Liu Sakh Po.”

  McGarvey frowned, leaned forward, and placed his forearms on his desk. “Po was murdered a few days ago. We’d been trying for the better part of a year to put together a case against the bastard that would stick.”

  “I’m aware of that, Captain, and so was the Senate. One of the rumors was to the effect that Madison had been receiving money for years from Po, in payment for Madison’s having helped him enter this country secretly—and probably illegally—after the war, and then helping him to get back into business. In other words, it looked like the nominee for secretary of state might have been getting a piece of the action from Po’s whorehouses and drug rings. On the other hand, the president had made clear that he was committed to Madison’s nomination unless and until any of the rumors were proved to be true. I think you can understand why the committee wanted to bring in an outsider with a reputation for both fair-mindedness and discretion. Anyway, I got the gig. At the time, I thought it was because I must have been living right; that is no longer my thought.”

  “That’s a very heavy tale, Frederickson.”

  “Yeah. Now I think it might be a good idea if you turned off the tape recorder.”

  He did. “Where does your brother come into it? He’s a cop, not a P.I.”

  “Soon after I got started on the case, two men tried to kill me. Obviously, they missed, but they did manage to burn down the apartment buliding where I live. Five people died in the fire, which made it a case of arson and murder. Garth was assigned to the case; since it was connected with my investigation, we decided to tag along together.”

  “Who do you think was trying to kill you?”

  “At first, I assumed it was Po overreacting to the fact that I wanted to investigate his business operations and political connections.”

  “Po’s dead,” McGarvey said curtly. “And those weren’t Albany mobsters we found dead up in the mountains—not with camouflage fatigues, night-vision goggles, and Uzi submachine guns. They were equipped like combat soldiers.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What were you and your brother doing up there in the first place?”

  “We’d received a tip that there was an emotionally disturbed veteran living by himself up there, a man by the name of Gary Worde. We were told that Worde might have invaluable information on the connection between Po and Madison.”

  “Who gave you the tip?”

  “It was an anonymous caller. Still, Garth and I figured it was worth our time to go looking for him.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “No; it was a wild goose chase. If there is somebody living up there, we sure as hell couldn’t find him; however, as you’ve noticed, somebody certainly managed to find us. The phone call had to be part of a trap; we were set up. We were wandering around up there, and the next thing we knew there was a plane dropping napalm and people shooting at us.”

  “I don’t believe the two of you killed all those men.”

  “You believe right.”

  “Who did kill them?”

  “I don’t know. We never saw six of the seven men you mentioned, except when they parachuted from the airplane, and the guy we took the Uzi off was dead when we found him.”

  “Who’s Veil Kendry?”

  “Never heard of him; the name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “What about the two Con Ed men you killed?”

  An unpleasant surprise, always a danger in improvisation. Some very nasty, fanged chickens were coming home to roost; Madison was pulling out all the stops. “It’s true that I killed two men who were inside a Consolidated Edison van, but they were assassins, not utility workers, and they were trying very hard to kill me. As far as I know, the matter’s under routine investigation. Naturally, I made a complete statement, and a report was filed.”

  “Strange; nobody seems able to find the report.”

  “It’ll turn up. You know how bogged down the police can get with paperwork; things get misplaced.”

  McGarvey grunted noncomittally. “You and your brother disappeared a few years ago, Frederickson, and you didn’t surface for better than a year. You want to tell me where you were?”

  A huge, ice-cold fist clenched around my heart and began to squeeze, making it difficult for me to breathe. “No, Captain,” I replied simply, “I do not.”

  That raised McGarvey’s eyebrows again. “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because where we were, and
what happened to us, has absolutely nothing to do with this matter. I can’t speak about it.”

  “You mean you won’t speak about it.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Were you in Russia?”

  “I love it!” I said, and laughed. Laughter was the next best thing to whistling through this particular potential graveyard. Garth and I were in a lot of trouble, and I knew it. Madison had been doing his homework, and he’d concocted quite a dossier on us. “That must be some report you got. The problem is that it’s fiction; with any kind of promotion, it should make the best-seller list.”

  “Answer the question,” McGarvey said in a considerably sharper tone of voice than he’d been using up to this point. He had the look of a man who thought he was about to close the books on a matter that was important to him. “Were you and your brother in Russia for that year?”

  “Not likely, Captain.”

  “I think you were, Frederickson. I think you were with Veil Kendry, and you were being trained as agents.”

  “To do what?”

  “You were trained to train others to become experts in urban guerrilla warfare.”

  I sighed, shook my head. Madison had carefully crafted a pastiche of facts and lies, sense and nonsense, that could keep Garth and me answering questions for a very long time—time we didn’t have. I had no idea what McGarvey had told Madison’s people to explain why he was refusing to turn us over to them, but the excuse wasn’t going to last much longer. The trooper was almost convinced that we were guilty of whatever we’d been charged with, which meant that I had to find a way of bringing the game with McGarvey to an end, and in the process somehow get us sprung. I really had nothing to play with, and so I decided to play one card that had already proved valueless once, and follow it with another that was only a joker. After that, there would be nothing left to do but sit quietly at the table and see what might happen.

  “Captain,” I said, uncrossing my legs and leaning forward in my chair, “let’s cut through this. I was hired by the Senate committee because of my reputation for discretion, but enough is enough. I’m going to give you a telephone number known by perhaps only a dozen people in the world. It’s a private, direct line to the office of a man by the name of Lippitt.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You’re not supposed to have heard of him, any more than you were supposed to have heard of Orville Madison before he was nominated as secretary of state. Lippitt is the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he’ll tell you that most of what you’ve read in that report you received is bullshit. You might also mention the trouble we’re in, and tell him we’d appreciate a personal visit from him as soon as possible.”

  “Will this Lippitt tell me where the two of you were for that year?”

  “I doubt it strongly.”

  “But he knows?”

  “He’ll assure you that we weren’t in Russia,” I replied, and gave him Lippitt’s number. “After you call him, place a call to Senator Kathleen Wyndham. She’s—”

  “I know who Senator Wyndham is, Frederickson.”

  “Good. She’s the head of the Senate committee investigating the nominees, which makes her my boss. You make sure you talk to her, not anybody else; tell her everything that’s happened here.”

  “You have a number for a direct line to her?” McGarvey sounded impressed.

  “I had it, but I lost the slip of paper somewhere up in the mountains. Make sure you tell her that I’ve been digging very deeply into Orville Madison’s background and have found some very disturbing things.” I paused, took a deep breath. “Tell her I said there’s an Archangel looking over her shoulder.”

  The trooper frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s just a code, so that she’ll know the message comes from me. Tell the senator that I’d like to see her personally just as soon as possible. Tell her there’s a great deal at stake, and that it’s a matter of life and death—literally. Would you like me to make the calls myself?”

  McGarvey shook his head, as I’d known he would. “Do you really believe that a United States senator is going to drop everything she’s doing in order to hop aboard a plane and fly here to see you?”

  “If you say everything I’ve asked you to say, and if you tell her there’s an Archangel looking over her shoulder, I certainly hope so.”

  “Who do you think sent those men after you up in those mountains, Frederickson?”

  “Captain, earlier I said that I wanted us to arrive at some unpleasant truths together. We’ve arrived. After everything I’ve just told you, you know damn well who tried to kill us up in the mountains; it’s the same man who tried to kill me earlier and ended up burning five people to death; it’s the same man who blew up an entire family in Seattle simply because they knew the truth about him. It also happens to be the same man who’s demanding that you turn Garth and me over to his people, so that they can kill us. We’re talking about Orville Madison himself.”

  “You’re full of shit, Frederickson,” McGarvey said; but the blood had drained from his face.

  “Am I? I’m sorry to put you between a rock and a hard place, Captain, but the decisions you make in the next few hours will determine whether Garth and I live or die. The request to pick us up and turn us over came from the C.I.A., didn’t it?”

  “Frederickson, I—”

  “Don’t bother denying it, McGarvey, because I know it’s true. Now, it’s the F.B.I. that’s responsible for counterintelligence, not the C.I.A., and the F.B.I, gets very touchy about incursions into its territory. You know that too. Orville Madison was head of the dirtiest department in the agency, and he’ll remain with the C.I.A. pending his confirmation. What he’s been doing isn’t exactly standard operating procedure, and so he’s had to use a string of operatives who are absolutely loyal to him personally. He’s running out of those kinds of operatives; if he weren’t, he never would have involved the New York State Police. He never counted on you having the guts to hold us and ask a few questions for yourself.”

  McGarvey, still very pale, was silent for a long time. “Do you realize what you’re saying?” he asked at last.

  “That President Shannon’s nominee for secretary of state is a coldblooded, psychotic killer who’ll do anything to cover up certain things in his past? Of course I realize what I’m saying.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this at the beginning?”

  “Would you have believed me, before I had a chance to point out certain things you could think over?”

  “What makes you think I believe you now?”

  “Madison is counting on you not believing Garth and me. I’m counting on you continuing to do the right thing; if you do, I think there’s a good chance we can nail this guy. Oh, and by the way: it was Madison who had Po killed. For that job, he used a kind of super-assassin he’d hired from outside the C.I.A.”

  “That’s crazy, Frederickson.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “What kind of hard evidence do you have to back up any of this?”

  “Let’s get Mr. Lippitt or Senator Wyndham here. Or you can set up a conference call where we can all talk and listen.”

  “You’re holding something back on me, Frederickson,” McGarvey said in a low, slightly menacing voice. “That isn’t a very good idea.”

  “Captain, why don’t you go make those calls?”

  19.

  Waiting; trying to remember all the lies I had told so that I could repeat them if I had to, hoping I’d done the right thing in offering up a decidedly bent version of the truth. Garth, whose cell I now shared, wasn’t so sure.

  “If you were going to talk to him at all, why didn’t you just tell him all of it, straight?”

  I winced at the loudness of Garth’s voice. Putting my finger to my lips, I walked around the cell, checking the walls, ceiling, and under the cots for anything that might be a listening device. I didn’t find any—which didn’t mean there
weren’t any there. I motioned him toward the sink, where I turned on the faucet. “Where would you have had me start?” I asked in a low voice. “With a newly elected president coming to town? A bullet hole in a window? A painting and ten thousand dollars in a hidden compartment? How about a white-eyed ninja who seems to be able to appear and disappear at will? Come on. If I’d started trying to explain how and why Veil is the center of gravity in this particular universe, I’d have had to talk about all the killing he’s done up to this point, and then get into the whole Archangel business.”

  Garth shrugged. “So?”

  “So the way I handled it seemed like a good idea at the time,” I replied, making no effort to hide my irritation and impatience. “My version played a whole hell of a lot better than the truth would have. Besides, Veil’s the only ally we have at the moment, and he doesn’t need a horde of state troopers and F.B.I. agents looking for him in addition to Henry Kitten and Madison’s people. Veil’s discredited, remember? Bringing him into it would only have made a bad situation worse.”

  “Ally? You’ve always had a weird way of looking at the world. He’s responsible for this shit.”

  “Funny, I thought Orville Madison was responsible.”

  “Kendry’s responsible for you being in the situation you’re in.”

  “What, are you visiting this cell as a tourist?”

  “I don’t give a shit about myself, and you know it. Besides, I ended up here working in an official capacity.”

  “We’ve been through this before, Garth, and there’s no sense in playing it all through again. I took his money, didn’t I?”

  “To put it in the bank for him. He sandbagged you. The trap he set may have been subtle, but it was still a trap.”

  “Asking a friend for help isn’t setting a trap.”

  “He knew what would happen.”

  “Drop it, Garth. What’s done is done.”

  “‘Dropped’ is what we’re going to be when Lippitt won’t talk to McGarvey, and your Senator Wyndham—if he can even get hold of her—tells him that your story about being hired by her committee is a fairy tale.”