GRECO LEANED AGAINST THE wall and wondered if he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.
Palisades overseeing CIA, Psycho Branch, and Mafia drug interests, presumably an enterprise so enormous that neither the Mafia nor the Feds could handle it themselves. It was all so superbly logical, yet immensely daring because of the risk of discovery. Somehow they’d all gotten into bed together, with Palisades fronting the operation, coordinating all their efforts, which had to include dealing with Washington as well as all the individual Latin American countries. It was logical, sure, but the complexity must have been incredible … and worth it. And that was what Celia, the cough-syrup fairy, had wandered into. He realized even in that instant that they would probably never know what kind of difficulty she posed for Palisades, because it was all mixed up with the husband/wife mess, the book exposing the whole thing, the attempt by the Director to blackmail everybody…
If he’d heard what he thought he heard, he wanted to burst out with the biggest, longest, loudest laugh of his life. It was priceless! Bassinetti wasn’t talking about a few agents free-lancing in the drug business with the Mob: that had been going on for years, it was part of the culture, almost a CIA perk when it came to dicking around in scary southern climes. No, this thing was policy, with Palisades as a huge, essentially legitimate front. This was a mainline organization. This came with approval from the top. It was the way around begging Congress for money to work the presidential will south of the border. It took heavy foreign entanglements out of the advise-and-consent category. What it did, in fact, was create a second, secret government within the one you saw on the TV news every night … and the second government was funded by getting into the drug business with the Mob.
It was the story of a lifetime. Teddy Birney would have killed for such a story. And then there was poor Celia! All she’d wanted to do was keep Zoe from knocking off her poor crippled husband.
If Greco lived a thousand years, which seemed increasingly unlikely at the rate his head was being bashed open and generally maltreated, he doubted if he’d ever get it figured out.
The General! That had to be General Cates, once Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now officially retired and overseeing most of the intelligence and security services, a kind of czar, reporting to God only knew whom. And the manuscript—well, now he knew what they were talking about.
The thought of trying to explain it all to anyone, even Celia, left him weak. The problem was, he really was feeling weak and crummy and lightheaded.
Then the tickling began deep in his nasal passages, like an army of killer ants setting out, tramp-tramp-tramping, marching toward his sinuses. He fought back a sneeze, but they kept coming on like gang-busters, raping and pillaging and burning. He grabbed for his handkerchief to clap over his nose but it was too little, too late.
He sneezed so hard his head smashed forward into the wall, making a sound that sounded like an explosion in an echo chamber, racketing on and on.
“God bless you,” a voice said.
Greco tried to focus through the tears running from his eye. His head whiplashed again with a second brain-rattling sneeze and a fit of sputtering and coughing. He wiped his nose.
“You must be Mr. Greco,” the voice said.
“If you say so,” Greco sniffed. He looked down into the black eye of a snub-nosed .38, held in the pink, pulpy fist of a very fat man in a wheelchair. Greco shook the cobwebs out of his head, but could only glimpse spiders. He wished he could do a Bogart impression to get things off on the right foot.
“My name is Emilio Bassinetti. Please, do come in.” He wheeled backward, keeping the gun trained on Greco. “You look terrible too. Why is it that everyone I see around here tonight looks as if they’d come directly from a mugging by Hulk Hogan?”
“Do you want an answer, or is that a rhetorical question?”
“Rhetorical, I suppose. Come in, come, come. Have a drink … take a load off your feet.” The broad beefy face, slightly flushed, wore a grin that made it look very friendly. “To be honest with you, I heard you bumbling around in the hallway some time ago, but I didn’t want to interrupt my final seduction of Mr. Cunningham—you are familiar with our Mr. Cunningham?”
“By reputation only.”
“Yes. Well, you have been very swift on the uptake, you and Miss Blandings—”
“Mason tells you this stuff, right?”
“I have a variety of sources. In any case, I’m afraid Mr. Cunningham’s concentration is rather fragile at the moment—intrigue is not a field in which he naturally shines, of course—and he really needed time to pull himself together. Please forgive this gun, Mr. Greco, it’s nothing personal, but I always feel at a disadvantage with my … my infirmity.”
“You seem to do pretty well,” Greco muttered, edging into the study, feeling cold, tired, and a lot like the man in the nasal spray commercial who seems to have drawn his last breath through a clogged nose.
“Over here by the fire,” Bassinetti said. “Goodness, you’re soaking wet. Sounds to me as if the flu’s got you in its grip.”
Greco went to warm himself at the fire, felt it attacking the clammy chill that had worked its way deep into his bones. “Hey!” He looked around the room. “Where is Cunningham anyway? I heard the two of you talking…” His head was hot and his eyes burning. He had a fever, and his hair was matted with blood where the gun butt had split his scalp.
“He left through that door over there.” Bassinetti pointed to one of the French doors in the long bank of windows. “He’s gone to pay a call on my wife. There’s an outside staircase to her rooms in the west wing—”
“Oh, shit! He’s gonna kill her!” The conversation he’d overheard was filtering back through his feverish memory and he tried to get out of the chair but was moving slowly at the center of a tilted, spinning room.
“Now, now,” the Director said soothingly. “Make it easy on yourself. Just let nature take its course. Sooner or later one man or another was bound to kill the woman. It’s her fate, I’m convinced. She’s so immensely killable, but you don’t know her like we do. Ah, your eye patch, your sneezing fit blew it off to one side. …”
Greco straightened the patch. He felt the flu bugs invading him, calling up reinforcements, out for the kill. His throat was suddenly raw and tender.
“Well, you got quite an earful, I’m afraid. Sorry to burden you with it, but let me give you a word of advice. If I were you, I wouldn’t let anyone know you heard a word. If certain people found out,” he purred, shrugging his massive shoulders, “you wouldn’t want to be you. See my point? You’re a man who’s survived a great deal in your time. You know how the world works. Now, take this drug business. You couldn’t stop it if you were willing even to forfeit your life to do so. You can see that. So don’t be a silly dead jerk who thought for a minute he could be a hero. This world, this tail end of the century, it’s no place for heroes. Their time has passed.” He sighed at the way the world had gone downhill. “Now,” he brightened, “how about a drink? A brandy?”
“Yeah, sure, a brandy.”
“Go ahead. Get it for yourself. Just don’t do anything ill-advised.”
He went to the drinks table. “A, I’m not a hero, Mr. Bassinetti. And B, I’m too damn tired to make a break for it. And C, what would I do if I did?” He poured brandy into a snifter. “What I need is an antibiotic.”
“Indeed you do. These colds can turn nasty. Well, this’ll all be over soon enough. Very soon now Mr. Cunningham will have a brief but decisive chat with my wife. Don’t be frightened if you hear a shot.”
“I’ll try to control myself.”
“Good man! Then Mr. Cunningham will come down to see me and collect a great deal of money.”
Greco wondered where Celia was, but he was so tired and felt so wretched that he doubted he was thinking straight. She was out there in the fog with that gigantic horse. She must be wet as hell. The bad guys would never find her in the fog. The brandy was burning his throat but he drank some more and figured the hell with it, at least he couldn’t feel any worse. Dan Rather was long gone. The Director had flicked him out of existence, and the screen was gray as the fog. Somebody was playing violins or cellos on the stereo. “What’s that?”
“Beethoven’s late quartets. Suits my mood.”
They heard a very loud bang.
“What was that?”
“That was Mr. Cunningham killing my wife.”
Charlie Cunningham stood at the top of the stairway, feeling the rain plastering his hair to his head and running in thick rivulets down his face. Through the window in the door he saw the white room in which Zoe worked. A creamy white with beige trim. She sat at the desk. She wore a heavy blue sweater, and he knew beneath the desktop were her tight white jeans. He thought about never going to bed with her again. Then he thought about half a million dollars, tax free. He hadn’t planned on having to kill her, but the half million was a great persuader. The Director was right, there was no other way to be rid of her. And if the Director got any clever ideas about what to do with Charlie Cunningham, all Charlie had to do was point out that he’d made himself a copy of the manuscript.
He opened the door and came in out of the cold and rain.
Zoe looked up, her sultry face pinched with frustration and impatience.
“Where have you been? It’s seven-forty. What have you been doing?” The questions came like machine-gun fire.
Charlie stared at her, couldn’t think of what to say. He was still holding the gun in his right hand. The bandage was heavy and wet, rubbing at his torn ear.
“Well? Is he dead?” Her voice had that familiar scraping, tearing edge. Like salt in a wound. “You idiot! Say something! Is it done? Did you kill him? Or did you chicken out?” Slowly her expression of anger turned to one of disgust. “Oh … you did, you screwed it up!” She spat the words at him, stood up, glaring. “You poor fool!” Her eyes, so soft and liquid in the heat of passion, flashed like laser weaponry, and he thought about how he could dull them forever, put out her lights for good.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said tonelessly.
“Idiot!” She came toward him like a fourth-rate Lady Macbeth, checked herself, went back to the desk. “All right, now you must go back down there and do it, Charlie.” She took a tiny gun from beside her typewriter. He wondered why she had a gun so close at hand. Then it began to dawn on him. He was supposed to have already killed Bassinetti when, as the prowler, he came to her room…
“Everybody’s got a gun,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many guns—”
“Stop babbling, Charlie! Now get out of here. I want you to use that gun. There’s still time to go ahead with the plan.” She bored twin holes in his skull with those eyes.
He went back to the doorway and the rain. He looked out into the night, felt the rain blowing in on his face.
“Look at the mess you’ve tracked in here! Charlie, can’t you do anything right? Use your head, think! Don’t be so hopeless, so stupid, such a loser! Are you listening to me, Charlie? Now use that gun!”
“All right,” he said. He drew a mental picture of the Vuitton bag, saw that it was all he’d ever hoped for, and turned back to Zoe. She was so beautiful. He raised the gun.
“Now what do you think you’re doing?”
“Using the gun, Zoe.”
She realized what was happening at the last second and pulled her own gun up.
They both pulled their triggers at the same instant.
It made a hell of a noise.
Celia heard the crack of the shot, which was carried on the wind blowing rain and fog from the direction of the house, directly into her face. Her ankle was swelling and felt like it had been crushed in a vise. Damn! It was always some damn thing—but the shot roused her from the contemplation of her pain.
Roger’s ears perked up.
She saw the lights of the study far away. The fog was either blowing away at last or she’d found a hole in it.
The sound of the shot echoed like a crack of thunder.
There were the glowing lights—
No! They couldn’t have failed, not after all this…
No! It just couldn’t have come to nothing, not now—
“Come on, Roger!”
She was so cold, so wet, so far over her own precipice of fear and frustration…
Oh, God, what if someone had shot Peter!
And Roger was running again…