by Marc Olden
“Let me read you your hotel bill,” said Clarke. “Three hotels, two suites in each. Comes to two thousand dollars a day, and you been in Washington, lemme see …”
“Three days,” said Robert Sand.
“Jesus! That’s six thousand dollars!”
“Cheap at twice the price.”
“What’s cheap at twice the price?”
“My life,” said Sand, whose Samurai training had emphasized survival. Sand never checked into one hotel, he always had The Baron make reservations in two or three, two suites in each. Hundreds of years ago, the ancient Japanese warriors often had several homes, caves, or huts in the forest, never allowing an enemy to pinpoint their whereabouts.
Robert Sand, twentieth-century Samurai, refused his enemies the same knowledge.
Each suite was under a different name, all bills paid in cash by either Sand or someone working for The Baron. Cash plus different names meant fewer records and even fewer questions.
“I tell you one thing,” Clarke said. “I wish you was okayin’ the spendin’ back when I was sitting’ in the White House. I’d have had gold-plated toilet seats in Harlem, and maybe your people wouldn’t have thrown as many rocks through store windows as they did back in those days.”
“Maybe. Then again, maybe they would have thrown gold-plated toilet seats through the White House windows. You never can tell about my people.”
The Baron said, “Hmmm,” a thoughtful sound that could have meant anything and nothing at all. Then. “The girl—she tell you anything more than she did when you first met?”
“A little. Reiss was in a hurry for the photographs, just snatched them from her hand and left. She thinks he said something about having to see a man about a tin can. It all happened so fast, she’s not sure. She’s a nice person, close to being over her head, but …” He let the sentence end there.
The Baron paced slowly across the green carpet of his hotel suite, eyes narrowed. “Tin can, tin can. Might mean some more of that virus.”
“I thought about that. It’s as good a guess as any. Reiss probably had to do two things in a hurry. One is get copies of those photographs off to England, so they could put a bull’s-eye on my back. The other probably was to lean on Canning, make him come up with another sample.”
The Baron was standing in front of the window, looking down at the dark Washington street below him. “Something about this town,” he murmured. “Never get it out of your system.” Turning to Sand, he said, “It’s all coming together. Drewcolt, Reiss, and the White House. Oh, something I almost forgot. Take a look at this.”
Crossing the room, he picked up three newspaper clippings lying on the glass top of a small brown table. Handing them to Sand, he turned and walked back to the window and stood staring down at a city he had once held tightly in the palm of his hand.
“Had to happen,” said Sand. The clippings were small ones, each mentioning The Czars, hinting or asking whether Russian rebels were out to prevent the Russian government from getting friendly again with Red China.
One of the clippings was from a Washington, D.C., newspaper, another from New York, and the third from a Paris leftist paper.
“Tell you something,” said The Baron, his back still to Sand, “those clippings are perfect for Drewcolt’s purpose. They don’t say The Czars are real, they only ask if they are or hint that they might be. And lemme tell you, son, that’s all it takes. One tiny turd in the punch bowl makes it impossible to drink the stuff. And that’s what Print Drewcolt’s got. Just enough shit to start more people talkin’, and maybe start the Chinese to thinkin’. It’s just enough.”
Sand said, “Looks that way, but it’s not over yet. I’ve been doing some thinking on the way over here. It’s not enough for us to wait, then grab the virus a second time. I can’t be everywhere at once, so in the next six days Drewcolt can still pull hits against Red China and do some damage. There may be a way of stopping attacks on the Chinese, at least for a few days.”
“That’s why I’m letting you run up hotel bills like it was the national debt,” said Clarke. “So think, damnit. You think I’m spending all this money ’cause I want somebody to talk to? Hell, I can send you to camp for a whole lot less.”
Robert Sand grinned. “Something about this town gets you going, doesn’t it?”
The Baron breathed deeply, then exhaled. He nodded his head yes. Softly he said, “I didn’t do it all when I was here, and that’s why I need you now.”
“We need each other. Now, hear me out, then give me your opinion. First, Drewcolt’s going to learn very soon that someone else wants that gold. That’s right—his ambition now has competition. We’ve got to establish this quickly, and above all, make it look real. That’s where you come in. When he hears about his competitor, it should make him either stop this random killing of Chinese or at least slow down. Because now he’ll have another set of targets to zero in on, something he’s not prepared for. We must force him to make the move we want.”
Clarke’s eyes narrowed with interest. Walking across the room, he sat down in a huge yellow-and-brown overstuffed chair across from Sand. “Yeah? Go on.”
“I’m betting that a new competitor might even make him think of going with that virus sooner, assuming he’s got it. That could be used against him.”
“With what we know about Reiss and Canning being asshole buddies, you can bet that Drewcolt’s got them working on getting some more.”
Sand nodded his head. “The competitor is also my way of getting into the castle and getting the virus.”
“How you figure?”
“Lisa Warren. She figures.”
Clarke was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the Black Samurai, eagerly listening to his every word. “Lisa?”
“She’s the key. We need her. In a sense, my life will depend on how well she plays her part. She’s going to set up the second bidder for the gold, and if we’re lucky, Drewcolt’s going to buy it.”
Smiling and shaking his head, Clarke slapped his knee, then said, “Son, we are realty throwin’ the dice now! Another bunch of sticky fingers after that gold is gonna send Drewcolt up the wall. He thinks he’s the king bull; well, he ain’t—no, sir, he ain’t. Keep talking, I’m listening. You want a drink of bourbon? No? Okay, I’m fixin’ me one, but you keep on talking, you hear?”
Reiss’s fat hand gently touched her right shoulder, pushing her back into her apartment and out of the doorway. Without a word he came into the room, followed by two men. She recognized them from the customs building twenty-four hours ago. One of them had stared at her that night in a way that had made her cringe.
“Andrea, Andrea,” said Reiss, stopping in her plainly furnished living room and looking around. “How ever can you bear to live like this, my sweet darlin’? Oh, you know these two gentlemen from last night, I am sure. Simon and Dietrich, this here’s Miss Andrea Naiss. Dietrich’s been wantin’ to meet you, darlin’, so I thought tonight’s as a good a time as any.”
Her heart pounded, and her head felt light, as though she had been drinking too much. Clutching her gray cotton robe at the neck with both hands, she said, “Why, why the sudden visit, Reiss? The pictures no good or something?”
Reiss was looking around for a chair, finally deciding to sit on a threadbare black-and-tan couch. When he sat, the pillows rose up on either side of his fat thighs. Folding his hands across his huge stomach, he said, “No problem about the pictures, my sweet. No problem at all about what’s in them. It’s what’s not in them that I’m here to talk about.”
Her mouth was dry. She stood stiffly in the room, eyes on Reiss. The other two men looked at her, particularly Dietrich, who unbuttoned his topcoat, took it off, and tossed it onto a nearby wooden chair. Her heart jumped, and her hands flew to her mouth.
“Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow, Reiss? I mean, well, you know, you could have phoned and—”
“Andrea,” wheezed the fat man, “like I told you, Dietrich here
wanted to meet you. Besides, what we wanted to know couldn’t wait. You see, my little black-and-yellow darlin’, we want to know why you failed to get a nice, clear photograph of a certain black man, and just hours later, you are seen in the Lincoln Memorial park with a black man who just might—might, I say—be the gentleman in question.”
“Reiss, I—”
“Andrea,” he interrupted, “you know how thorough CCE is, and that’s why we’re here. Questions and answers and …”
She jerked her head to the left, in time to see Dietrich and Simon move toward her. Her eyes were misty with tears, and she murmured, “Please, oh, please don’t …”
Dietrich grinned, his hands swiftly moving to her breasts and squeezing them, the pain ripping across her chest. His nails dug into her flesh, and she could hear him breathing rapidly.
She pushed her hands against him, then raked her nails across his face, tearing the skin and drawing blood.
He stopped, his hand swiftly going to the pain he felt on his face; then he moved his hand away and stared at the blood. “Shit, bitch!” he said softly, and backhanded her across the mouth, driving her teeth sharply down on her tongue. “That’s gonna cost you just a little bit more,” he said.
The robe was torn from her, and the two men forced her to the floor.
Maynard Reiss licked his thick lips, moved his fat hands along his thighs, and smiled. Sighing deeply, he leaned back and watched.
Chapter XIII
WILLIAM BARON CLARKE AND Robert Sand sat in the back seat of the limousine parked at the end of the hospital parking lot. Neither spoke. A phone call from The Baron had awakened Sand, and now, twenty minutes later, they both waited in the cold, silent darkness.
The Black Samurai stared straight ahead, his eyes intent, as though trying to see through a wall. He was in a world of his own, and everything else had been shut out.
Wisely, with a lifetime of timing and awareness, The Baron remained silent. After making the phone call to Sand, he had awakened only one of his Secret Service men. That was Frank Pines, white, twenty-eight, slim, with blond hair and blue eyes. A former Iowa college basketball player who looked as though he’d just stepped from a milk ad.
Frank Pines had killed seven men in six years of law enforcement, two of them in his three years as a Secret Service man. He bossed the detail guarding The Baron, despite the fact that he was the second youngest of the almost two dozen agents assigned to the ex-President.
Pines had balls, brains, and he didn’t like to talk much, three virtues in demand around William Baron Clarke. The Baron quickly took a liking to him, and on the rare occasions when he preferred to move quickly with as little fuss as possible, it was Frank Pines who was beside him.
It was Frank Pines the two men were waiting for.
They spotted him jogging across the parking lot, a blond-haired figure moving gracefully between cars, his dark-blue topcoat turned up against the cold. Reaching the car, he slipped into the front seat, slammed the door, blew on his hands, and turned to face the two men. “Touch and go,” he said. “They don’t know if Andrea’s going to make it. Whoever worked her over was good at it. She’s bleeding internally, and that’s what the doctors can’t stop. Some of her face is left, but not much. She took a beating, busted ribs, broken wrist.”
Then, shifting his eyes to Sand, Pines said, “They used something on her.”
The Black Samurai leaned his head to the side, a silent command for Frank Pines to continue.
“A bottle,” he said. “Whoever it was played some rotten games with that woman. They broke it first, then shoved it …” Pines stopped, his eyes on Sand. He continued. “No one should have to take what she took. Christ!” He rubbed his hands, his eyes shifting back to The Baron.
Turning to Sand, The Baron said, “I’ve sent for Colonel Morse. He’s one of the best surgeons in the country, and—”
Sand interrupted him. “They were after me. That’s what they wanted. Those photos. Reiss must have felt she was not telling the truth. She was. This one time she was, and it cost her.”
“Preliminary police report shows no signs of forced entry into her apartment,” said Pines. “Means she let whoever it was in, so she knew the person or persons who did it. She must be a gutsy lady. It took a lot for her to crawl across the floor to that phone. More guts to crawl seven feet than most men have to use in a lifetime.”
Sand looked out the window at the dark sky. Courage. Strength. She had them, after all, if only for a little while.
“Cops asked me a few questions,” said Pines. “I told them my interest was a national thing, but if they needed, to check in. I left the car phone number, and—”
The flat sound of the phone buzzer interrupted him. He looked at The Baron, who nodded. Pines picked up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
He listened, then turned his eyes back toward the two men, silently mouthing the word “Cop.” “Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Thanks, George. Appreciate it.”
Reaching over the back seat, Pines hung up the phone, then looked at The Baron. No one spoke. Then Pines’s eyes shifted to Robert Sand. “She didn’t make it,” he said softly.
None of the men said anything. The Baron let out a deep breath, looking out his window at the lighted windows of the hospital.
In the darkness, Sand leaned his head back on the seat. “She just wanted to be strong, that’s all.” He spoke softly, as if thinking out loud. “Sad,” he said.
Sitting up, he looked at Frank Pines, then at The Baron. Without a word, he turned from them, opened the limousine door, and stepped outside. Closing the door behind him, he walked away from the car without looking back.
Pines turned to Clarke as if to ask where Sand was going. Clarke said quietly, “He’s got something to do. Let’s go, Frank. Back to the hotel. We’ve got things to do ourselves.”
Both turned to look out the window in the direction Sand had been walking.
The Black Samurai had disappeared.
In exclusive Washington suburbs, many homes are electronically wired against burglars—silent alarms, easily tripped off, alerting local or private police to move in, often before the burglar could climb in or out. Maynard Reiss’s eighty-thousand-dollar two-story brick house, where he lived alone, was wired.
His garage wasn’t.
That’s where the Black Samurai waited in darkness, since the empty garage had told him that the house was empty too. When he had left The Baron’s limousine, Sand had made one stop, picking up a special weapon. Now he gripped the small twenty-seven-inch sword in his left hand, his back flat against the cold cement wall of the garage, his ears picking up the sound of the limousine turning into the driveway.
It had been a forty-five-minute wait in chilled, damp darkness. When Sand thought of Andrea Naiss, the wait had been easy.
The limousine purred to a halt, and the huge metal garage door slid up and back, sliding across the ceiling, then stopping. The cold air rushed in, slapping his face. He flattened himself harder against the right forward wall, his back to the limousine, still unseen.
He heard a car door open, them slam shut, followed by sounds of a man walking toward the house. That would be Reiss.
The motor started up, and Sand smelled the exhaust and gasoline and saw lights from the headlights before the car moved slowly, easily into the garage, rolling by him, stopping in front of the far gray-brick wall. Bending over, Sand moved forward silently, hiding behind the car, crouching near the passenger side across from the driver’s seat.
The white driver, stocky, crew-cut, and hard-faced, cut the motor, turned off the lights, and got out. Walking back along the car toward the door, he began to hum a country-and-western tune. Reaching the door, he stretched his arm overhead to pull down the garage door.
Sudden pain zigzagged through the driver’s back as Sand drove a powerful elbow into his kidneys. Standing on tiptoe to ease the sudden agony, the driver’s hands clawed at the .38 Smith & Wesson in his belt. Sand’s right foot press
ed down hard behind the driver’s right knee, quickly bringing him down to a kneeling position on the concrete garage floor.
Quickly the Black Samurai drove his right fist down into the driver’s bicep, deadening the arm. The gun clattered on the oil-stained concrete floor. Quickly drawing his right hand back until it was almost touching his own left ear, Sand tensed the hand, then smashed the stiffened knife edge into the base of the guard’s hairline.
The stocky man fell forward, face-down, into a small pool of blue-black oil. Bending over him, Sand grabbed a handful of his coat and pulled him back into the garage, pulled the door down, and stepped clear of it before it touched the concrete.
The sword gripped tightly in his right hand, he moved quickly toward the house.
Reiss said, “Shit,” slammed the icebox door, and with the sound of the doorbell filling the house, moved toward the front door. Reaching it, he pulled it open and said, “How many goddamn keys do I have to give you …?”
He stopped.
Sand stood in the doorway, his soft brown eyes on the fat man, and in a move quicker than anything Reiss had ever seen in his life, the Black Samurai’s right hand moved toward the fat man’s face.
There was a quick glimpse of light reflecting on sword blade; then Reiss felt the pain on his left cheek. His hand touched it and came away feeling wet and warm. His eyes wide, Reiss looked at his fat, blood-covered hand, then at Sand.
“Move,” said the Black Samurai.
Reiss backed up. Dimly he heard the door slam, then saw the black man come closer. “Tonight,” said Sand, “you degraded a woman, then, you killed her.”
Reiss looked at his bloody hand, frowned, then roared, “Boy, you don’t know what you’re—”
He’d never seen a human being move that fast. In almost one motion, Sand drove a powerful thrust kick into the fat man’s right knee, causing him to cry aloud, turn, and stumble. His back was to the Black Samurai, who swiftly brought the small sword across it in two parallel strokes. Slowly, blood seeped from the two slashes.
Like a huge beast, Reiss stumbled into tables and chairs, knocking lamps and vases to the gold carpet. “Jesus, God …” he moaned, moving away from Sand, who watched without expression as the bleeding fat man bumped into a wall, pulling two small pictures down and to the floor.