by Dean Ing
A truly dead weight seems to multiply, and they worked hard to lift the body up, then swung it into the Pinto's luggage space where Romana dropped her end - the head and trunk - heavily. Andy folded the legs in, smoothing the plastic drop cloth, prodding the body into a position of fetal flexure, then helped Romana arrange a waiting blanket over it. They did not use the same blanket because, knowing how police forensics could create a chain of evidence from microscopic strands of the same blanket in two vehicles, they were careful to minimize their risks. Later she would cleanse the Plymouth thoroughly of evidence, but before that, Andy would do the same with the Pinto. Not even a vagrant hair would escape that kind of attention.
Andy dropped the trunk lid and then they were changing roles, Romana wiping away the bright lipstick, roughening her eyebrows with her thumbs, removing her wig, slipping out of the low-heeled pumps and into men's bulky athletic shoes, shucking the frilly sweater and padded brassiere, all of her discarded role going into an opaque garbage bag. She slipped into a man's dark pullover of rough weave and followed it with a nylon windbreaker. The old slacks already had cuffs, and her wallet was already in a hip pocket. The battered hat over her own short, straight black hair completed the transformation; Romana Dravo was no longer a tall, moderately attractive woman in early middle age, but Roman Dravo, a fiftyish man of barely medium height and sharply chiseled, almost Asiatic cheekbones. The ID in her wallet was also that of Roman Dravo, male Caucasian, eyes brown, age fifty-three.
Andy's transformation to his standard identity, Andrew Soriano, took a few seconds longer, and Romana loosed a faint smile when he had to rip the bra off, failing to operate its hooks properly. She saw no point in remarking on that; she had been unhooking her brassieres for forty years, since her handlers had first decreed that she must wear them, and for the first year she had been as clumsy as the boy was tonight.
No longer a boy, she corrected herself, not for years now, watching Andy thrust clothing into the plastic bag. He was not thickset nor wide of shoulder, and his height was an inch less than her own - had not risen a millimeter, in fact, since he went away for his education in the mid-eighties. In the hard shadow of flashlights, the cords at his shoulders traced hollowed lines of strength to throat and to biceps, triceps, and those forearms were so powerfully sinewed that he could never pull off a female role in short sleeves, no matter how practiced his falsetto.
While he continued his lightning role change she moved forward and started the Pinto's engine. Its rasp steadied, still muffled because of the flexible metal hose that ran from the tip of its exhaust pipe to coupled sections of two-inch galvanized pipe. The pipe doubled back to run beneath the Pinto, finally to protrude out the front of the detached garage, so that the little car could idle for as long as necessary without poisoning their air. Andy had argued for this idea while still in his teens: if she had taught him that aircraft engines required a full warmup before performing with maximum reliability, why should they do less for their cars?
It had been one of his earliest additions to her craft, a special source of pride to him.
In a day or so, Romana would return to the rental house and dismantle the pipe alone, erasing every shred of evidence of the two of them, a chore she actually enjoyed because each time she cleaned up after a "commission" - self-commissioned to be sure - she deliberately pitted herself against the minds of the forensics specialists who might come one day, seeking evidence. But the highest marks in her profession came when no one knew to seek evidence, nor where to begin that search. Far better than a cold trail was no trail at all.
Moments later, Romana backed the Pinto out in darkness while Andy closed the overhead door. The backseat was full of legitimate fishing equipment, canned food, cheap bedrolls, a two-man tent; everything they might want if they were starting out very late to stream-fish the tributaries that fed Millerton Lake in the Sierra foothills near Fresno. Andy had, in fact, already mentioned such an outing to colleagues in the lab.
They had scarcely passed the Merced city limit headed south on Highway 99 when Romana glanced over to see what Andy had in his lap. "My God, what are you doing with that in here?" she said angrily.
"Spoils of war," he replied, unchastened. He held up a bundle of banknotes. "Hundreds - and there's more. Must be close to ten thousand in cash."
"You are an idiot, Andrew. It may be marked and if we should be stopped now, for whatever reason - "
"I'm carrying my lab ID, and this is my car. Nobody will notice the bag, and if they do, this will be something I spotted along the highway. And if they go digging into the trunk, it won't matter a damn anyhow, so what's the big complaint?"
We had agreed to leave the proceeds in the garage for now, but you changed a detail without asking, she thought, yet this was not a time to argue it. "Ten thousand? Hardly worth the trouble unless there is another treasure we can use."
"A change of clothes - not much else."
She knew what he was thinking; this was not one-tenth the value of most exfiltration kits they had taken. If they had waited and followed him, the spy might have led them to a much greater cache of goods.
"It's always a judgment call," she said. "He had the bag with him, and I doubt we could have kept within range of that little car of his. Oh - you got the tracer from his car?"
"Of course. Switched off, in the Plymouth's glove compartment. Weren't you watching?"
"By now, I should not have to watch you every second," she said dully.
"But you do anyhow," he replied, mumbling it because the little flashlight was again clamped between his teeth as he counted money in gloved hands. He zipped the bag up and grunted in disappointment. "Only sixty-seven hundred to the penny, pretty much a waste of time. We could have given him more time.
Wait - I have his wallet here."
She cursed under her breath; another unnecessary risk! Andy held too much stock in the identification badge he carried. One day he might run into a cop who remained unimpressed. The California Fish & Game Forensics Laboratory badge was convincing enough; for that matter, it was genuine. Though Andy Soriano did most of his work in the lab, sparse state funding meant that he was sometimes required to go into the field, and for that they gave him a warden's badge. Basically, a game warden was a peace officer, capable of arrests and authorized to carry a sidearm. But the time might come when the cop who checked that ID had once been harassed for a few undersized trout, and then . . . "Must I ask, Andrew?"
"Oh, sorry. Charles Alvin Lane, DMV license, Visa card and a MasterCard. Thirty or so in cash; don't worry, I'll stuff it back in with his change. Couple of snapshots of glamourpussy, Costco card, Triple-A membership, Social Security, a rubber in foil. No secret compartments I can find. We can do a better check back at The Place."
She did not respond, thinking instead how easily he dismissed the charms of young women.
"Glamourpussy"; not a word she had ever used, but it implied the disdain she had worked so hard to ingrain in him. After all the training she had lavished on her foster son, an infatuation with some brainless beauty would mean utter disaster. If not for him, certainly for Romana.
"We may find something yet," she said. "I once deciphered a Luxembourg account number from a nonsense word printed on a postage stamp. The letters were - "
"Coded to a telephone dial, and you netted a quarter-million from it. You told me," he said quickly.
Am I some garrulous old fool, then, boring him with repetitious stories? That would happen one day, no doubt. She was almost - what was it? - sixty-one years old according to the calendar, nearer her late forties by the accounting of any mirror, with a slight resemblance to that tennis pro, Navratilova. Her thighs and buttocks were still firm. She could still chin herself, sometimes twice, and her weight had not fluctuated more than a few pounds in all her adult life. All that testosterone might have something to do with her muscle tone, with what she had come to regard as her unique good fortune.
Early in life, living as a
boy simply because, even with no penis, she had been born with a vestigial scrotal sac and testes that never descended, she had been taught by her parents to keep her difference secret. Later, Soviet physicians had shown great kindness and greater curiosity, explaining that she had a structurally variant Y chromosome - a very rare phenotype - and that she must make the best of it as others had.
There were words for creatures with such genetic problems, most of them scornful: freak, hermaphrodite, freemartin. The Soviets were quite good at rearranging one's views. They explained that, as a female, she would have certain advantages: she would never have to bear children and would not enjoy the sex act enough to let it trouble her, though she could indulge in it. After the minor operation to remove that tiny scrotal sac while leaving the testes intact, she was taught to regard herself as specially gifted. With her inherent male strength and aggressiveness she might have been trained as an athlete; another Stella Walsh, perhaps, an XY female Olympic sprinter.
But the KGB handlers had a different life in mind for Skander Masaryk, and completed his/her education in operating in any sexual role that might arise.
Skander never forgot the kind advice of the doctors, however, and adopted femaleness by simple preference. Skander was so cautious about this secret that, even after the rape of her country by the USSR
and her defection to the Americans, she used delaying tactics against a thorough physical exam. A good thing, too: to this day she had no doubt that the men who had tried to garrote her on a Virginia campus were CIA. (Her physical strength and glandular responses had taken them by surprise.) It was really no great task to dispose of one body in a culvert and to leave the other in her place in a burning car.
That was when young Masaryk chose a life of vengeance, to prey on the predators, and no one was better equipped to identify an agent in the field; a client, as it were, from whom she took her deadly commissions. As she had expected, Soviet-bloc people rarely had much worth the taking; before her
"death," she had avenged herself by giving up some of their operations to the Americans.
In a way, she felt, both sides had killed Skander Masaryk. But over the years, Masaryk's ghost had continued to extract a terrible price from the West. To her knowledge, no intelligence professional had ever grown wealthy by preying on veteran professionals in this way.
Now, enriched by the hoarded treasures of over a score of victims, she could retire at any time, while Andrew could carry on this unique pursuit by himself. Even after she died, this was a revenge she could keep on taking.
Long ago, Romana had realized that, in some respects, she fitted the definition of a serial killer.
Because she kept herself current on such shared information ploys as VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, Romana carefully studied all aspects of this FBI program wherever they appeared in open literature. She studiously avoided tactics that became too routine, though there were only so many ways you could do these things. Her clients had been garroted, bludgeoned, bled, burned, shot, poisoned slowly - a mistake she had not repeated - and quickly; and in the case of a particularly irksome Iranian, left trussed with wire, gagged and weighted in marsh grass at low tide in a mud flat near San Francisco Bay.
Tidal action erases footprints, but takes hours. That drowning had been a slow process.
So serial killers tended to be male loners, alienated from close family ties? Very well, she had obtained the best possible camouflage by posing as a health-services nurse and stealing a two-year-old from a bracero camp nursery. With that act she became a single mother with a toddler. She did not use the same method of client disposal twice until years had elapsed and made an avocation of studying new ways to perform her lethal commissions.
It was Andrew who had discovered a humane injection used on rogue animals, called the Thomas Concoction. Essentially, it was an analog of curare injected with potassium chloride. In the briefest time, it stopped first the voluntary muscles, then the heart. It had worked so well tonight that she resolved to use it again in a year or so.
Without doubt, she decided, she had kept herself conditioned in part through her constant, long-term surveilling of potential clients and the deadly intellectual gaming it entailed. I have kept this body in good repair, she thought. But all the sun protection and creams and lotions in the world could not prevent those damned wrinkles from appearing at her eyes and throat, almost imperceptibly at first, then so clearly that she had already paid for two sessions of cosmetic surgery in Mexico. Well, she could afford it.
Presently she turned off at Madera, then took the winding blacktop past Millerton Lake and the hamlet of Auberry, headlights spearing through the stands of scrub oak and, along creek sides, sturdy sycamore.
Gray masses of granite shouldered from the soil here, with an occasional glitter of quartz reflected from the Pinto's lights. The road contained sudden twists and dips that took all of her concentration until, a few miles beyond Auberry, she slowed for the final turnoff.
The gate was little more than rusted barbed wire and posts secured by baling wire. The metal sign, targeted long ago by some idiot with a shotgun, proclaimed "POSTED, NO TRESPASSING." It had hung there for many years, a vain hope of protection for the miner's shack that squatted decaying not far from the road. She had not used this disposal site for years, but had checked recently to make certain that it had never been discovered. During her hike to the site a week before, she had seen no evidence of recent activity on the claim, but Romana's small satisfactions lay in disposing of every tiny risk. And now she saw that no fresh tire tracks had preceded hers.
She switched off her lights and let Andy handle the gate, grinding forward in low gear, waiting for Andy to take his seat on the right front fender, a dangerous perch with the Pinto's front end bobbing through the underbrush. After careful consideration, she had left her night-vision goggles at The Place, vowing to buy a more compact unit. The one she owned was an ungainly device, and a flashlight beam could blind it temporarily. Andy's flashlight played along the path for her, though it was none too steady, and she found no unpleasant surprises on the way to the shaft.
For over a century, men had sought their big strikes in this region, some mining copper ore, a few following veins of gold into the earth, some with competent mine shoring, some innocent of the most basic safety measures. The shaft Andy had found here, long ago, had not been worked for generations. The original miner had cleverly elected not to run wagon tracks nearer than twenty yards from the shaft, allowing scrub oaks to remain as a final camouflage.
She helped Andy drag the client from the Pinto and took the ankles while he held the shoulders, flashlight again in his teeth, stumbling along toward the shaft. She realized that the grunts he vented were chuckles at his own clumsiness. "Break an ankle and you'll see how funny this is," she warned.
They stopped at the mouth of the shaft; not a truly vertical hole, but slanting down at a steep angle to follow an ancient vein. Some giant might insert a telephone booth down the hole, but nothing much wider.
Once, in daylight, she had seen how the shaft leveled out some thirty feet down, and that water was standing at that level. Andy let his end go at the edge of the shaft. "Just a minute, let me replace those bills,"
he panted, clumsy with his gloves, forcing the small wad of money from the wallet into the client's pocket.
If ever this one was found, even with the wallet missing, an accident would seem more likely than robbery.
"To the right, not in the middle," she cautioned, because the client might be caught on wooden debris toward the left side. Then she let go and let the weight tumble it down and down into darkness. The last sound was a sodden splash, far down the shaft.
"Thought I'd forget?" Andy shone his light on the client's handgun, displaying it like a trophy, then tossed it into the shaft and listened to its clatter and thump.
"You did wipe it clean of your prints," she said softly, more question than declaration.
"
Oh, Jesus!" He gasped and clapped his hands against the sides of his head, turning to gaze into the shaft. She swore and took one step forward, and then, flicking her light toward his face, she saw the gleam of his teeth as his frame shook in silent mirth. "Naturally, I did," he said then.
"Stupid ass!" she burst out. "You do play the most deadly games!"
She turned on her heel and was halfway back to the Pinto before she heard his reply, good-natured as usual: "The acorn never falls far from the tree, mother mine. . ."
7
MAY 1994
Andy's good humor was prompted by necessity; he had learned that relentless pursuit of a better mood could usually make it real. During the drive back toward Millerton Lake, he managed to infect his mom with it, aping the expression he had noted on the face of Charles Lane as the man felt Romana's weapon pressing beneath his chin, asking Romana to recount other commissions when a spy first realized he was to be, in her special jargon, a client. He had heard most of it before, knew her stories the way a Bosnian Serb schoolboy knows ethnic history. He also knew that the best way to improve her mood was to play student to her favorite role of teacher. So, when she launched into a memory fifteen years old, Andy's thoughts were diverted to his own boyhood.
He could not remember when she had found him, she'd said, a toddler abandoned by migrant workers in Southern California. She had always been severe with him, but had also taught him strict self-control. As a mother figure, she was not the sort to smother him with affection. His earliest memory was the terror he'd felt when she warned him of others who might take him away from her, despite the expensively forged adoption papers. After all, Romana was the only security he knew.