Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

  So Roger worked for the Russians, through college, the seminary, and all during his open ministry as substitute pastor for churches all over the country. They paid well, better than the criminals did, and every time Will wrote out a check for his tithe, it amused him to think the Communists were underwriting so much of God’s work in America.

  It was a good life, and a fill-in pastor had a lot of free time to enjoy it. It gave him more time, too, to do his hidden work.

  This particular assignment had posed certain problems. It would involve his being on the scene for several months, perhaps longer. Control had told him it could be as much as a year. How could he arrange to get Mr. Nethercott out of the way that long? Will didn’t think it was in the Plan for him to be killed. If it was, it hadn’t been revealed yet to the Reverend Will Nelson. Will had used some of his extra time to examine the whole situation, Mr. Nethercott and his family. He found out that Mr. Nethercott’s son had been selling cocaine at a ski resort. It occurred to him to tip off the local police and get the boy arrested, but that was chancy. Would Mr. Nethercott take a leave of absence to see the boy through the trial? Would he disown him? Or something in between? Will did something he rarely did and discussed the situation with Control, which (he presumed) had led to the boy’s horrible skiing accident, which had lured Mr. Nethercott away for months to stay at his bedside.

  Lord, they were ruthless. It was that kind of ruthlessness that relieved Will’s conscience about using them, fooling them into helping God with the Plan.

  This had been, he decided, his best mission ever. Usually, to the extent someone honored by being allowed to go about the Lord’s business could, he felt sad. He was always sending to judgment filthy, corrupted souls who had no chance to repent and make amends for their wrongs. He did what he could for them, but the Lord was a stern judge.

  But in Kirkester, the joy of serving the Lord was magnified by the knowledge that Azrael had been summoning souls destined directly for Heaven (the two children; Hannah Stein in the first grace of her Conversion). Even the young man under the car was the most venial of sinners. The only soul he was sure he’d consigned to hell was that of Smolinski, who was a spy, a traitor, and a murderer.

  Personally, then, he was pleased with his work. Control seemed anxious over the larger operation (it had something to do with Jimmy’s mother, but Will didn’t know exactly what), but that concerned him not at all. If the plotters of the Kremlin were finding themselves in difficulties, it could only be because they were being thwarted by a Plotter greater than they could ever be.

  “Is that all?” he asked the transmitter.

  “You confirm your mission accomplished? Without complication?”

  “Any complications were added later. You insult my competence.”

  “My apologies.”

  Will smiled. He would have thought the roughly accented voice that spoke to him at times like this would have choked over an apology, but the man had gotten the words out almost as if he meant them.

  “Your apologies are accepted.”

  “Thank you. Hold yourself in readiness.”

  “I am always ready.” Will said it proudly. He was doing the Lord’s work. He had to be ready.

  “Again, my apologies.” He was getting positively good at it, Will thought. “I may contact you again as soon as this evening, your time.”

  “I’ll make it a point to be here.”

  “The mother has at last promised to cooperate.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know more than you show.” It sounded, amazingly, as though Control were talking through a smile. “The mother,” he said again, “has promised to cooperate. If she reneges, the son will pay.”

  “I will be ready,” Will assured him. They broke transmission. Carefully (he did everything carefully) he put the radio back in its hiding place.

  He went downstairs to the church itself. He knelt at the altar and said a prayer of thanksgiving. Jimmy was such a good young man, caring and God-fearing. The Lord would surely forgive the anger and hate he felt after the loss of the girl he loved. When Azrael called on him, he would do it with more joy than ever. Not only would he be sending another good soul to its reward in Heaven, he would be reuniting Jimmy with his lost love.

  The knowledge that he was the instrument the Lord had chosen to bring this about filled him like a cloud of light, and he bowed his head and was humble before the Lord.

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon when Allan came to get her. If she’d known he was coming, she wouldn’t have bothered choking down another god-awful hospital lunch.

  It was miserable to be in the hospital, especially when you weren’t very sick. It was even worse when you were hiding out at the behest of the FBI (or whatever) and you couldn’t have any visitors or phone calls.

  The minute she saw Allan, she sprang out of bed and went to the closet where she kept her things. She paused with her hand on the handle and looked at him, but he just raised his eyebrows as if he were wondering what the problem was.

  She told him. “You are really springing me, right? You didn’t bring flowers, so I figured it isn’t just a visit. Unless you’re not the type to bring flowers.”

  “I’m the type. Too many women I know wind up in hospitals.”

  Regina realized that that didn’t really answer her question, but she decided to pretend it did. She slid back the door and got her things.

  “The nurses are just going to let you sit here and watch me dress?”

  “They don’t know you’re leaving. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You could always draw the curtain.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” she said, and pulled her hospital gown up over her head. She felt ridiculously happy, even happier when she saw that someone had seen to it that her clothes got washed. She smelled her dress, like an actress in a fabric softener commercial, then threw it on the bed. The other night, he’d screwed her brains out, then told her it was good to be alive. Fear was misery, but having it relieved was an incredible high. Incredible. She’d never felt like this.

  “Have we ever done it in the daytime?” she asked him.

  He smiled at her, a knowing smile that said he’d seen this kind of reaction before, not that Regina cared. For her it was brand-new, and she was going to enjoy it.

  “No,” Allan said. “Usually we’re working in the daytime.”

  She looked pointedly at the bed and wiggled her eyebrows. It was the kind of impulse that is succeeded almost before it’s over by the suspicion that you have just made an incredible ass of yourself. Regina had thought she’d trained herself out of them.

  Fortunately, Allan took it the right way, laughing and shaking his head regretfully. “We’re working this afternoon, too,” he said.

  “I thought the coast was clear.”

  “It’s not that the coast is clear; it’s that we’ve finally got as many ships in the water as they do.”

  Regina found her bra and shrugged into it. “Fasten me up?” she asked brightly. She came over to where he sat, and he did it. “You’ve had practice,” she said.

  “How do women do this when they’re by themselves? Are you all double-joined, or what?”

  “Not me. I put it on backward, then twist it around.”

  “That must be fun to watch.” He kissed her back softly, then put his hands on her hips and turned her around.

  “This is going to be a tough afternoon, Bash. Are you okay?”

  She was thinking that Allan was the only person besides her father who could call her by that silly nickname without her resenting it, but she said, “My shoulder still hurts, Mr. Macho. Can’t you see the bruise?”

  “I’m sorry about that, but that’s not what I meant. Can you face something unpleasant this afternoon?”

  “How unpleasant?”

  “Rotten.”

  “Allan,” she said. “Darling
. After our little impromptu submarine ride, I think I’m ready. We’re not going back in the river, are we?” That last wasn’t banter. It came to her that he was perfectly capable of it.

  “No,” he said. “This could be worse than going back in the river.”

  “Not if you’re claustrophobic,” she said with feeling.

  “Well, your claustrophobia is safe, I can say that much.” He kissed her belly, stroked her bottom. “Come on, get dressed before I like this too much.”

  There was a beige Ford van pulled up at the main entrance of the hospital as they left. “That’s for us,” Allan aid. The side door slid open, and Allan helped her inside, assisted by a black man.

  “I know you,” she said. “You’re the fellow we did the article about. Mr. Albright.”

  “Call me Joe,” he told her.

  “Or Special Agent Albright,” said a voice from the front seat. Fenton Rines.

  Allan climbed in and closed the door behind him. Regina looked at him and said, “I see what you mean about having a lot of ships in the water.”

  Allan smiled at her, got her seated in one of the swivel chairs, took one himself, then asked Special Agent Albright if he had everything. Albright wiggled a pen in front of his face like Groucho Marx and said, “I’ve never had any complaints so far.”

  Rines made a noise. “This country is in a lot of trouble.”

  “I guess this is the payoff,” Regina murmured. Allan had his head down in a folder, looking at documents with TOP SECRET all over them, and didn’t hear her.

  She nudged him. “Is it?”

  “What? Oh, no. Rines is just a tight ass.”

  “I’m not talking about jokes! I asked if this is the payoff.”

  “Sorry. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “This is where we talk to your mother about what’s been troubling her—”

  “You found out?”

  Allan went on as if she hadn’t said anything. “—and what we think she ought to do about it.”

  “Are you telling me you can fix it?”

  “We can make it stop,” Allan said. He spun his chair around and took her hand. “Look, Ba—Regina, I mean—I told you this was going to be tough. You’re going to find out some things about your mother you would prefer not to know.”

  “Why are you building up the suspense? I’m a newsperson, remember? Inverted pyramid. Give me the biggest news first.”

  “No,” Allan said.

  “No? Why not? You can’t make hints like that and then not tell me.

  “If you hear it from me, you won’t believe it.”

  “Who am I going to hear it from, then?”

  “Your mother.” He gave her hand a squeeze, turned the chair around, and spoke to Rines. “You have any trouble getting these things out of the old man’s files?”

  “Hell, no,” Rines said. “I keep telling you, I’m the Lord’s anointed.”

  “Wait a minute!” Regina demanded. “What is my mother going to tell me?”

  “You’ll hear it,” Allan assured her. He went on before she could give him her opinion of him. “If I tell you, you’ll call me a liar. If I could have arranged things so that you never found out, I would have. But it’s rare when you can do what you want to in my business. Now leave it alone.”

  Regina had principles about taking orders from men, but Allan Trotter had been kicking dents in them since she first met him. She resented it, but when he had that burning-dead look in his eyes, she didn’t think there was anybody, woman or man, who would defy him without thinking it over very carefully.

  Still, she wasn’t going to let him shut her up completely. “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “As I said, it’s rare when you can do what you want to do. I wanted to get the Russians off your mother’s back—”

  “It is the Russians, then.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you doubted it, didn’t you? Yeah, it’s the Russians. We can get her clear of them. But I haven’t been able to find Azrael.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly. The Angel of Death. The assassin. The slick bastard who killed Keith Smith and Lou Symczyk and Clara Bloyd and Hannah Stein and Wes Charles. That man, or woman, or team, has been just a little too good for us.”

  All trace of humor was gone from Joe Albright, now. “We don’t even have a goddam corpus delecti, let alone a killer. Even if we knew who it was, he’d probably walk. Or she. Or they.”

  “You’re thinking like a law officer, Joe.”

  “That’s what I am.”

  “Not anymore. You’re a soldier. A counterinsurgent. International power games leave no time for niceties.”

  “I’m not sure I like this,” Albright said. “Nobody asked me if I wanted in on something like this.”

  “We were all drafted, Joe,” Allan said.

  Rines said, “You’re talking in front of a reporter, you know.” He sounded like someone remarking on the weather.

  “I—I made a promise,” Regina said. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Allan said. Regina was not reassured. No matter what they felt for each other (and it was definitely something, though Regina knew by now it would take a lengthy essay to characterize exactly what), she knew that if the promise she had made to Rines somehow did slip her mind one day, she could very easily become one of the “niceties” there was no time for.

  The van’s dome light went on. Joe Albright said excuse me, reached across her, slid back a panel, and took out a telephone receiver. Looking at him, Regina thought that he made much more sense as a “Special Agent” than as a junk man. He seemed to be hating this as much as she was, but he grunted it down and did his job.

  “Uh-huh,” he told the phone. Rines probably would have said “Roger,” or “Ten-four,” or something equally official-sounding. She had given up trying to predict what Allan would do in any situation whatsoever.

  “Uh-huh,” Albright said again. “Where is she? Okay. Got the place watched?”

  Allan made a spiraling motion with his finger. Albright nodded. “Get the helicopter up, too,” he told the phone. “We’ll be there in less than ten minutes.”

  He put the phone back and slid the panel shut. “She left the office and went home.”

  “It figures,” Allan said. “Now that she’s capitulated, the pressure’s off.”

  “She thinks,” Rines says. “Does this change anything?”

  “Makes it better for us. Oh, psychologically, it would probably be better inside the edifice she built with her own efforts. Remind her of what the Russians are trying to take away from her. But I don’t think it’ll make that much difference. She knows what she’s accomplished. Besides, we’ll get her away from the KGB mole in her organization.”

  “There’s a KGB mole in the Hudson Group?”

  “Of course there is,” Allan said.

  “Who? I know all those people! Who is it?”

  “That’s something else that’s missing from the payoff.”

  “If you don’t know who it is, how do you know there is one?”

  “Because the Russians are vicious but not stupid. Look, you may take my personal word for it that there are CIA moles in Pravda, TASS, Izvestia, even Krokodil, and they have a lot less influence there than the major outlets do here. Do you seriously think the Russians are going to let the American press make plans unmonitored? Do you think they’re going to let themselves be surprised by the American media?”

  “Why doesn’t somebody find them, expose them?”

  “If the government exposes them, it’s a witch-hunt,” Rines said. “Anybody else is a crackpot.”

  “But if they get to be influential ...”

  Rines said, “Ha!”

  “Don’t listen to him, he’s bitter. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Freedoms are not free, and a certain amount of having our own shoelaces tied together is the price we pay for Freedom of the Press. It’s worth it.”
r />   “The old man would wash your mouth out with soap,” Rines said.

  “I was practically quoting him,” Allan retorted. “Besides, that’s the reason we fight for this country. Where there’s freedom, there’s hope. Maybe someday, a reporter with enough brains, balls, guts, and perseverance will come along, find the bastards, and get it into the newspapers. I didn’t say they all worked for the KGB, you know.”

  Regina asked him who the old man was, but he just smiled and said maybe he’d tell her someday, and went back to his papers.

  Regina fell silent, half wishing she understood what the hell everybody was talking about, half fearing that the understanding would come all too soon.

  Chapter Three

  TROTTER’S EMOTIONS WERE ALWAYS mixed by the time they got to this part of an operation. There was something liberating about having the masks off and the credentials flying. Rines hit the guard at the gate with the weight of the Federal government, left Albright with him to make sure he didn’t phone the house, and the van sailed onto the grounds. It was signal for the gun lap of a race—strategy had (or had not) put you in the position you wanted to be in, but strategy was over. Now it was who was the fastest and the strongest. Now it was who wanted it most. Trotter liked that. It could be brutal, but in its way it was honest.

  What he didn’t like was the knowledge that even if everything worked out right, if he had been smarter and quicker and tougher, he still was a loser. Because no matter what, Allan Trotter could not be allowed to survive this mission. Too many people knew who and what Allan Trotter was for the Congressman’s son to be able to afford to keep him around anymore. Already he felt the identity beginning to dry on him and crack like a snake’s skin. The Congressman’s son was ready to shed Allan Trotter, and with him, another year of his life. He was tired of it. A man reaching thirty should have some kind of past he was willing to claim. A childhood to look back on. An achievement he could tell people about.

  Not him. If he lived through the next few days, he would soon be wearing another name, carrying a made-up past, facing an indifferent future.