Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

  Instead, when he’d finished with Jimmy (and he thought he’d done the boy some good—Jimmy had the will to holiness, but he had not yet learned to subjugate his emotions to that will), he ostentatiously spurned the invitation to be interviewed and allowed Special Agent Swinton to drive him to the gate.

  Roger felt terrible about Special Agent Swinton. Granted, it was the Will of the Lord that he die, but he seemed a man of such quality. It seemed almost wasteful for his part of the Plan to have been simply an obstacle for Roger to clear before confronting his destiny. That, of course, and as the source of a gun.

  But that was how it worked out. As Swinton drove his car through the woods that hid Hudson Group Headquarters from the highway, Roger told him there was an insect on his collar.

  “Odd for October,” Swinton had said, and tried to brush it off.

  “No,” Roger said, “you keep missing it. Let me get it.” Once Roger’s hands were that close to a man’s undefended throat, even a trained man’s undefended throat, the outcome was almost a certainty. Roger rendered Swinton unconscious, gained control of the automobile, pulled off to the side of the road, trickled a few drops of water from a vial in his pocket on Swinton’s forehead, and finished him.

  Then he removed his clerical garb and replaced them with Swinton’s shirt and jacket, taking as well his revolver and identification. He had no intention of using either—the identification would have done him little good in any case, since he looked only superficially like Swinton—but the Lord was guiding his actions.

  Roger turned the car around and drove back to the building’s rear parking lot. He found a use for the gun almost immediately, shooting the lock from a loading-dock door and going in that way. Again, the Lord was with him. No one heard the shot, and no one saw him as he made his way through the busy pressroom and upstairs to the editorial offices. He had spotted Mel Famey’s office when he was there before. It was down at one end of the corridor, the other end of which held the executive offices and the entrance to the Hudson family suite.

  He opened the door and walked in. Famey jumped.

  “We were to meet,” Roger told him.

  Famey’s beard twitched. “Yes,” he said. Roger was wondering what the man was so nervous about when Famey’s hand came up from under his desk with a gun in it.

  Roger dropped to the floor. While he was falling, he heard the spitting sound of a silenced revolver. He took Swinton’s gun from his pocket and fired once. Famey fell backward from his chair. His head thumped heavily on the floor.

  Roger turned and faced the door, his brain working madly. The shot, the crash of the body—an army of FBI men should be here any second. He couldn’t shoot it out with all of them, and he couldn’t think of a way to explain the gunplay, either on his part or Famey’s.

  No one came.

  A masterpiece of modern architecture. Roger’s memory supplied him with the phrase from some old magazine article he’d read while preparing for his stay in Kirkester. No expense spared. All offices soundproofed for maximum working efficiency.

  Roger offered a short prayer of thanksgiving. Barring a telephone call, he would have a few minutes to sort this all out.

  He went and looked at the body. There was no obvious wound, but there was a dark pool of blood around Famey’s head. Roger tilted the body with a toe to see underneath. He saw a ragged exit wound in the back of Famey’s neck. He’d shot the man through his open mouth. Roger had once heard an emergency-room intern describe that phenomenon as a “hole in one.” It had seemed completely tasteless at the time, but now it struck him as rather amusing, and he began to giggle.

  As soon as he recognized it as a nervous reaction, he made himself stop and think the situation over.

  Now he had done that, and accepted the new life God had in store for him. The first thing to do was to get out of this building—he had nothing more to do here; nothing more to do in Kirkester, now that he knew the Russians had turned their treachery on him.

  He could not count on getting out of here as easily as he’d gotten in—he only knew one way off the grounds, and that was through the heavily guarded, all-vehicles-searched front gate. He needed some kind of safe conduct, and the answer to that was at the other end of the hallway, where the Hudsons were.

  There was just one thing here he still had to do. The dead man at his feet may have been a would-be murderer and a traitor to his country and to God, but he was still a human being with a soul. Roger couldn’t just leave him and still be true to his ministry.

  But there was a problem. He had used all the water he’d brought with him on poor Swinton, and there was no source of water in the office.

  No source of pure water, at any rate. There was a coffee machine and a pot of black coffee. It was hot, but Famey wouldn’t feel it, and in the eyes of God, it would all be the same.

  Chapter Two

  ROGER FELT STRANGE AS he made his way down the corridor, exposed. Before now, back to Biblical times, the Angel of Death was known to man only by the results of his works. That was only fitting. “The Lord works in a mysterious way his wonders to perform” meant simply that He kept His own counsel and revealed His instruments only rarely.

  This, it seemed, was to be one of the times. It was an honor. Roger had to remember that. The Lord was good to him far beyond his desserts. There was no need to be nervous simply because he had grown unused to face-to-face confrontations since Vietnam. The Lord would make plain to him what to do.

  And he did. As soon as Roger presented himself at the locked, soundproofed door of the Hudsons’ family suite, he knew what to do.

  “I know it’s all for my own protection!” Regina told Rines. “And don’t, please, remind me that I came to you for help. I remember, and I appreciate it.”

  “What’s the problem, then?” Rines wished Trotter would show up. They’d phoned from the gate that he’d entered the grounds already, how big was this goddam place? Granted, with security checks and everything, it would take a little longer, but he should have been here by now. He was needed. Rines wasn’t fond of the fiction of Trotter’s not being the one in charge, but he was willing to play along. Knowing what he knew about the Congressman’s son, Rines figured it was just Trotter telling himself, for the sake of his sanity, the kind of lie nobody but the teller has to believe.

  It was more or less working; everybody who counted knew Trotter was in charge, but they almost automatically pretended to defer to Rines. Except Regina Hudson wouldn’t play. Anytime Rines told her to do something, she wanted reasons. Rines, to his own surprise, had enough pride to have become sick of giving her the one reason that always worked: “Trotter said so.”

  So they were having an argument. “You were brought here from the office for your own safety, Miss Hudson,” he told her.

  “I have work to do.”

  “There’s a telephone; there’s a computer terminal. What else do you need?”

  “An explanation.” She had been standing to argue; now she flopped down in a chair. “That’s all,” she said wearily. She looked miserable and scared and very young, and Rines realized she had been using the anger to keep the rest of it from showing.

  “We think—” What the hell. “Trotter thinks we know who the Russians’ hit man is, and we have reason to believe—”

  “Who?” she demanded. “Who is it?”

  A buzzer went off just as Rines opened his mouth. He held up a hand, asking Regina to wait, and went to the intercom. “Yes?”

  A voice croaked, “Swinton, I ...” There was a click as a finger slid off the talk button.

  “How the hell did he get up here?” Rines asked the room at large. Nobody had any specific answers, but since Rines and the man with him both knew he’d never gotten off the grounds, Swinton had to be around somewhere. Rines drew his gun and stood to the side of the door. “Wish they had a TV camera here or something.”

  Regina said they never thought they’d need one in this part of the building.

&
nbsp; Rines smiled at her. “No need to sound so apologetic. I wouldn’t have, either. You stand there, so you’ll be behind the door when it opens, okay? Not that I expect anything to go wrong, but why take chances?”

  Regina nodded dumbly and took her place at the door. She’d been doing everything dumbly lately. Rines and the man who’d brought her upstairs weren’t saying anything, but it was obvious that they suspected the man on the intercom might be the killer. The person Allan thought was the killer. Which was good enough for her.

  A small part of her wanted to see the face of someone who could kill children merely to give someone negotiating leverage. That was probably the last of her “news instinct,” shocked by so many personal scoops that it had shrunk to something considerably smaller than everyday curiosity. The rest of her wanted to run away somewhere and forget any of it ever happened.

  Regina pushed herself back against the wall as Rines told his man to open the door.

  Regina had noticed over the last day or so that except for Rines (who was older) and Albright (who was black), it was impossible for her to tell the FBI men apart. The one with his hand on the knob was a Xerox copy of the ones in the main corridors who were duplicates of the ones at the entrance. It wasn’t that their features were identical, though they did all seem to be handsome without being striking. It was more an attitude, as though the Bureau had somehow cornered the market on all the Boy Scouts who’d grown up taking the oath seriously.

  Rines’s man undid the lock and turned the knob. Then things got confusing.

  As soon as it was unlatched, the door lurched open. Rines’s man instinctively pushed back against it. Regina, behind the door, could see nothing, but the man said, “It’s Swinton,” and let the door open the rest of the way. Regina gasped as a limp body spilled out across the floor. Rines’s man lowered his gun and bent to help, and the body on the floor rolled over, raised a gun and fired twice.

  Regina screamed and tried to claw her way backward through the wall. There was no third shot. She was still in one piece. He hadn’t shot her.

  She was still trying to grasp the concept when she noticed that the barrel of the gun was pointing directly at the middle of her chest. Above the gun was the face of her pastor. She thought absurdly, Jimmy is going to be so disappointed, and began to giggle.

  “Please be quiet, Miss Hudson. I don’t mean to harm you.”

  It was the voice from the church steps, the quiet sound of concern and reassurance that had made him so popular. Regina stopped giggling. In the presence of that voice, in these circumstances, nothing was funny.

  He got to his feet, keeping the gun trained on Regina all the time. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you kill me and get it over with?” How odd, she thought. What she’d intended to say was don’t shoot please don’t shoot.

  “If everyone behaves intelligently, there’ll be no question of anyone else getting killed. I need you alive.” He gave her a small encouraging smile. She’d seen him smile that way at Sunday school students. “I didn’t even kill this gentleman. Mr. Rines, I think. Control said Rines. I didn’t kill you, did I, Mr. Rines?”

  A voice came from the other side of the door. “Go to hell.” Regina continued to surprise herself; in spite of the spot she was in, she had room for relief at knowing Rines wasn’t dead. And she could take her eyes away from the gun long enough to notice the look of pain that flashed over Mr. Nelson’s face when Rines damned him.

  He shook it off. “Well,” he said, with an air of decision. “I was hoping to find your mother, but I think you’ll have to do. Come with me, please.” He gestured with the gun. Regina found it very compelling.

  She took two steps out from behind the door, then stopped. The man who had opened the door was writhing on the floor in agony. One hand was trying unsuccessfully to stop the redness pulsing from his belly. The other hand clutched tightly at one of Rines’s hands, the one on the end of the arm with the big red stain surrounding a small black hole.

  The young man was whispering. She hadn’t been able to hear him behind the soundproof door. “The jacket and the hair,” he said. “Swinton’s. Just like ... Swinton’s, sorry chief, jacket ... hair ...” Then he made a rasping noise and both hands fell limp.

  Regina said, “Oh, Jesus,” and started to cry.

  Nelson’s voice was soothing. “It’s all right. I promise. Remember, ‘My Kingdom is not of this Earth, but my Father’s, which is in Heaven.’”

  Nelson bent and picked up the guns the FBI men had dropped. He stashed them safely in various pockets. Then he went to the small desk in the room and poured some water from the pitcher into a Dixie cup. Still keeping the gun trained on Regina, he knelt beside the dead man (who, Regina knew now, had not been a cookie-cutter creation but a human being, unique and irreplaceable). Nelson turned the body faceup, closed its eyes, and trickled water on its head.

  “I baptize you,” he said, “in the name of the Lord, and humbly beseech him to forgive you your sins, and to take you to be eternally happy with him in Paradise.”

  “Oh, my God,” Rines groaned. “All the wet hair ...”

  Nelson stood up, beaming. “You see, Miss Hudson—may I call you Regina? You see, Regina, it’s all part of the Plan.”

  Regina stared. Nelson seemed quite pleased with himself. “I don’t expect you to understand all at once. These are profound theological issues. It took me a long time to figure them out. But at least you’ve stopped crying.”

  Regina didn’t dare tell him why she’d stopped crying. It was because if she tried to make any sound at all, what would come out would be a scream that wouldn’t stop until she’d screamed herself insane.

  Chapter Three

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN better.

  Trotter made his way through the building with Petra Hudson’s words echoing through his head. Her son had been wild, accusatory, kept from violence only by his inability to decide exactly whom he should be violent to. Rines told the story while a doctor patched up his arm, and ambulance attendants bundled off the dead man. Jimmy Hudson wasn’t having any. Not Mr. Nelson. Impossible. They were all plotting against him. Trotter said sure, then ignored him. Irrational people were easy to shrug off.

  But Petra Hudson wasn’t even angry; she had no blame for anyone, not even herself. I should have known better. Than to get into the game in the first place, Trotter supposed. Than to try to change sides and get away with it. Than to have let Trotter talk her into hoping.

  When Trotter had worked out some probabilities, and told her it wasn’t over yet, she’d just smiled sadly at him. Thanks, but no thanks.

  All right, to hell with her. He had work to do. Reports coming back from Rines’s men indicated that Nelson was making his way to the back of the building, keeping to open areas as much as possible to avoid having someone jump out from behind a closed door and coldcock him before he could do anything to his hostage. So far, with the FBI and security guards carefully kept away, they’d been through the bullpen of Hudson Features—a thousand desks but no cubicles, and the second-floor cafeteria. The route was identical to the one Regina had taken him through for his Grand Tour of the place when he’d first arrived. That made sense—Regina was undoubtedly the tour guide for this little jaunt, too.

  Next, they’d go downstairs to the main entrance hall, then across the catwalk through the pressroom, down again, and out the back. Trotter hoped.

  The key thing was the pressroom. Nelson ought to love it; visibility all around and nowhere for a sniper to shoot from except the tops of the printing presses. If printing presses were easy to climb, there’d be no need for the catwalk.

  To do any good, Trotter had to get there first. Nelson had a head start, but Trotter wasn’t dragging a hostage, and he could run through corridors on a more direct route.

  There was no one around the catwalk door when he made it there. He opened it just to make sure they hadn’t gone ahead of him, but all he could see was the pressroom with
everything in readiness for the special issue of Worldwatch. Far across the room, he could see the glassed-in control area. The man inside raised his arm and waved and gave him a sign to indicate everything was ready.

  The idiot. What if Trotter had come in with Nelson and Regina right behind him? It was gratifying to know that Rines had gotten the doctor off him long enough to make the necessary phone call and that the press operator understood the instructions, but Trotter had to go through with this no matter what, and there was no sense taking the risk of the subject’s finding out.

  The asshole was still waving. Trotter waved back, which seemed to make him happy, then went back through the door. He leaned against it and waited.

  And thought. Could he have saved a few lives, kept Regina out of this spot, if he’d been a little less cautious? If he’d jumped up out of his pew the minute the first drops of water hit Elizabeth June Piluski’s cute little head, grabbed Nelson by the collar, and hauled him off to be locked in chains while they tossed the parson’s house, who would be alive? Who would be safe? A lot more people than were now.

  Because Regina or no Regina, Nelson could not be allowed to get away. He hadn’t had time to discuss that with Rines, but it was almost as if the Congressman’s voice had sounded simultaneously in both their brains. Azrael was not to be allowed to flap his angel’s wings and fly away. It wasn’t that he’d go back to the Russians, it was that he was simply too goddam sick (and too goddam successful) to be allowed to stay loose. So there was no question about bringing him down; the question was: Could you make him fall without his bringing somebody with him.

  Trotter doubted it. This angel would not fall alone. The only thing left in doubt was who with. There was a big FBI ambush waiting at the other end of the building. Trotter had sworn that whatever happened, Regina Hudson would not be part of it. Trotter had gotten her into this; he’d get her out.