In the conference room at Peerage Brokers, I again sat at the big oblong table. Narrow-faced Vincent Worth of Special Sections, in another three-piece suit, played paterfamilias at its head. That gray little fed Art Rickerby again stood at the window, with his back to us, and Tony Wale sat opposite me with a wary expression, maybe afraid I’d drag his ass across the table again.
Not a word had yet been said, though I’d come in a good two minutes ago. It was like hot-rodding kids playing a game of chicken, and whoever went off the line first might drive off the cliff. But I was going to make them go first. I was curious to see just how stupid these feds could be.
Rickerby couldn’t look at me. He pretended to be studying what was left of the overcast afternoon, separating two slats of the blinds to do so. But I knew he couldn’t meet my gaze. My buddy Art. My pal Art. My betrayer Art.
The aftermath of the melee in my apartment might have taken the rest of the day sorting out, but it didn’t. That’s where it comes in handy having an NYPD Captain of Homicide for a best friend. Shortly after several of the federal watchdogs had come rushing belatedly to my defense, two uniformed beat officers were on their heels. Just for the entertainment value, I stood by listening to them argue jurisdiction for maybe five minutes, then told the older of the uniformed pair to call Pat Chambers.
Within an hour, Pat had worked things out with one of Rickerby’s people, and I had given a detailed statement. The crime scene and whatever follow-up was necessary would be handled jointly by the Homicide Bureau and the local F.B.I. office. Everybody was happy, except maybe the late Felipe Mandau.
And me.
“Mr. Hammer,” Worth said finally, “this incident changes everything. It will be almost impossible to keep this out of the press. And if it’s known we’re allowing you to traipse around the city getting into shoot-outs and creating general mayhem, we will be rightly accused of reckless endangerment of the public.”
I said nothing.
Worth’s frozen gray eyes remained fixed on me. “That leaves us with only two viable options. One, that you go into immediate protective custody at a military base, and I would suggest that Miss Sterling accompany you, to prevent her from being used as leverage against you. This, obviously, would be the most prudent option.”
I said nothing.
“Two,” Worth continued, “we step up our protective measures, even as we appear to back off—giving the impression that we have thrown our hands in the air and left you to your own devices. In reality, you would be virtually surrounded by our people.”
I said nothing.
Tony Wale, gingerly, said, “Mike, this is the option we encouraged you to accept at our last meeting. We use you as bait to attract the remaining Soviet agents. But then we are right there to swoop in.”
That was when I began to laugh. A good old-fashioned horse laugh that stopped just short of tears, though there was plenty to cry about.
“When your people ‘swooped in,’ today,” I said, “the party was so long over, the street-cleaners were sweeping up the confetti. No. No more shadowing me and Velda, no more agents watching us from across the street or from the lobby of my apartment building or down the hall from my office. Pull everybody off. Now. Right now.”
Worth tried out a small smile on that narrow, somber face; it didn’t play well. “All right, then. Option number one. We’ll get you and Miss Sterling cleared out this afternoon and on a plane to—”
“No protective custody, either,” I said. “I’m just a private citizen, going about his business.”
Worth was shaking his head. “Unacceptable, Hammer.”
“Mister” had gone the way of all flesh.
I said, “I’m not going into some kind of protective custody, like the witness in a damn mob trial... remember that Murder Inc. clown who got tossed out a window at Coney Island, in protective custody? And anyway, if I did allow that, how do I know my next stop isn’t the Soviet Union, thanks to some extradition deal that the politicians cook up?”
Worth didn’t deny it.
I said, “I need to find you fellas a real live K.G.B. agent that I can trade you for getting my life back. And the only way I can do that is on my own.”
Wale said, “Mike, you can’t stop us from putting men out in the field to protect you.”
“I am going to assume anybody tailing me is the enemy. I am going to assume anybody watching me is the enemy. You may have noticed how I handle enemies. I warned you people at the beginning of this damn thing.”
Rickerby still had his back to us, looking out that window at a dark gray sky full of rain that refused to come down.
Worth said, “Are you threatening to kill federal agents, Mr. Hammer?”
“No. I’m promising to defend myself. But before I put myself in that position, I’ll have a press conference. Just like the politicians. I’ll tell this city and this country and the whole wide world about how you are screwing up. How I was almost killed today under the watchful eye of dozens of federal agents.”
Worth glanced at Tony Wale, who shrugged. Then Worth looked to Rickerby, whose back remained to us.
“All right,” Worth sighed. “I believe the expression is... ‘it’s your funeral.’ Now get the hell out of here, Hammer.”
“No,” I said.
Worth’s cool evaporated and fire melted the frozen eyes. “What did you say?”
“Sorry. What I meant to say was hell, no. You and Tony take five. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, fellas. Art and me, we need a little talk between old friends.”
Worth’s slice of a face was reddening. He was on his feet, and leaning his hands on the table. “Goddamn you, Hammer, you do not—”
“Vince,” Rickerby said quietly, still looking out the window, “leave Mike and me alone. For just a few minutes. We... I... owe him that much.”
Worth seemed as confused as he was angry, while Wale—who knew me too well—was just fine with getting out of that room.
When the door slammed, thunder shook the sky like an overdone echo. Rain came down. Hard. Insistent. And right on cue.
I got up and walked over to Rickerby and watched the reflections on his face of water trails streaming down the window. His expression was emotionless, but the rain streaks cast onto it were like tears.
“I didn’t tell them, Art,” I said, “who the other assassin was. But I told your guy at the scene. He obviously told you.”
Rickerby’s nod was so slight it almost didn’t register.
“Comrade Gorlin,” I said. “The Dragon—the tooth part, anyway. Was Mandau the new nail? Or is that somebody else?”
Rickerby said nothing.
“He’s carrying around a hole in his hand that I gave him,” I said. “That’s one small solace. Fun to know that every time he washes his hands, he thinks of me. If the slob ever washes his hands.”
“Mike...”
“You lied to me, Art. Back in that barn, I spared Comrade Gorlin’s life for you, handed him to you on a platter, because you said a quick kill wasn’t good enough. You said he would rot in a cell waiting for the day when he would take the long walk to that oaken chair with the big switch.”
Thunder cracked the sky; lightning flashed on Rickerby’s solemn face.
“What about Richie Cole, Art? The agent who was like a son to you? You said you’d made promises over his body, the way I once made promises over the body of a guy who gave an arm for me in the Pacific. You said nothing would stop you from taking your revenge and you sought me out as the best man for the job of hunting down the son of a bitch you would see dead.”
“I didn’t lie to you, Mike.”
“Didn’t you?”
He turned to me and half of his face wore the reflected gray streaky raindrops. “I meant those things when I said them. But when I brought in the surviving half of the Dragon team, my superiors insisted he was just too important to waste on execution. It’s the same situation you’re in, Mike, right now—the need for you to bring us a living K.G.B. agent captured on American soil. A catch like that is worth something.”
“You traded Gorlin for agents of ours.”
“Yes. Five agents, Mike. Agents like my late colleague Richie Cole, who were languishing in the kind of prison that you managed to escape. I don’t have the luxury of your emotionalism, Mike. I am, for better or worse, a bureaucrat. A servant of the state. And I have to make decisions in the cold hard reality of a world on the brink of nuclear destruction.”
Some of the anger had bled out of me. Didn’t swapping a piece of garbage like Gorlin in order to free five of our boys make a hell of a trade?
Actually, no.
“Art, you gave Gorlin back to them, you let the Dragon out of his cage, and now another Richie Cole is dead—his name was Des Casey, Art, and he was a soldier, a decorated war hero and he died trying to save my life. He has a family here in New York and a girl back in D.C., and assuming they’ve gotten the word by now, they are in hell and will be there a long, long time. So I will tell you right now, Art, that if I can bring you back a Commie agent alive, I will— just call me Frank Buck, buddy. But it won’t be Comrade Gorlin.”
Rickerby nodded. He risked touching my sleeve, and I flinched a little, but then let him guide me to the table. He nodded for me to sit and I did. He sat next to me and he put his hand on my arm. I left it there.
“I know you think I let you down,” Rickerby said. “And maybe I did. In this kind of deadly work, you make judgment calls that cost lives. But I will do this much for you, Mike. I’m going to see to it you have your way. All the watchdogs will be called off.”
“I appreciate that, Art.”
“You may be thanking me for your own death, so I’ll pass on saying, ‘You’re welcome.’ As for Comrade Gorlin, I ask only one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Make it slow.”
“No problem.”
He reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a picture, a surveillance photo of a tall, thin man with sunken pockmarked cheeks, a sharp nose and hooded eyes behind black round-frame glasses. His hair was gray and cropped close to the skull. Actually, he looked like a damn skull.
“Colonel Toy,” Rickerby said. “We have confirmed that he is in the United States. Very likely right here in Manhattan, supervising the mission that Gorlin and Mandau botched today.”
I studied it and gave it back to him. As he tucked the photo away, I said, “And if I bag that bastard, it’ll free some of ours?”
“Yes. Do that, and I can all but guarantee you that you and Velda can return to your normal life.” He smiled a little. “Well, your kind of normal life.”
“There’s something I need to give you.”
“Oh?”
I got out my wallet and removed the I.D. with the fancy embossed seal, which I tossed on the table before him, like a sullen waiter delivering the check.
“If this goes wrong,” I said, “you won’t want my body turning up with that in my pocket.”
“Understood.”
“And, anyway, I don’t think we’re going to be doing any more jobs together. After today, I’m strictly an Old School private eye. In future, do me a favor? Spare me the cloak-and-dagger bullshit.”
“Understood. Mike...”
“Yeah?”
“I know we won’t be working together, and I know we’ll never be friends again, but... I’d like to shake your hand.”
What the hell.
We shook hands.
He was standing at the window when I left, crying his rain-reflected tears.
* * *
Late afternoon, I met Velda at the bar at PJ. Moriarty’s on Sixth and Fifty-second. The rain had let up, but you could feel in the air that more was coming.
Neither of us was hungry, but we shared a corned beef sandwich just for fuel. No beer. Coffee. Caffeine was my friend.
“I think we can wrap this up tonight,” I told her.
The sky was growling out there.
“Am I sticking with you?” she asked.
“No, I have an assignment for you. One last assignment on this job, and a damn important one.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. My life may depend it. And yours.”
“Oh. Okay.” She nibbled at the edge of her half of the sandwich. “The Dragon back? It’s crazy, Mike. Unreal.”
“Oh, it’s real all right.”
“Funny.” She shook her head. “To think, that Commie creep tracking me all the way back to the U.S., ready to kill me on sight... and yet I never ever saw the S.O.B. myself.”
“It’s often that way with the hunter and the hunted.”
“Good thing you saw him first, Mike.” She took another nibble, rolled those dark lovely eyes. “Hard to believe that Rickerby would let that monster go.”
“Art was trying to save lives.”
She touched my hand. “Mike. I’m sorry about Des. I know you really liked him. He was a good guy.”
“Just a damn kid.”
“No, he was older than that. He was a soldier. He went out the way he would have wanted.”
“No, Velda. No soldier really wants to die in combat. Like Patton said, it’s all about killing the other guy.”
“Good point.” She gave me a nasty, teasing smile as she prepared to take another nibble out of her half sandwich. “Gonna do some killing tonight, Mike?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Forty-five more?”
“Not that many.” I grinned at her. “I’m in a quality over quantity mood, doll. Pass that mustard, and I’ll fill you in on your assignment.”
* * *
I was in no mood to deal with the Wentworth Hotel’s arcane system of monitoring those calling on their guests. I went in the employee entrance off the alley, moving through the kitchen like I knew what I was doing, and bribed a waiter to let me use the service elevator. No matter how posh the hotel, the ass end of it smells like a garbage truck. The Wentworth was no exception.
When I knocked at Irene Carroll’s door, it took her a while to answer. Finally, I heard footsteps padding on the other side of the door, and I stepped to one side so she couldn’t check the peephole. I figured she’d assume it was a hotel staffer, since that was the regular drill. And she did, opening the door, and I stepped inside, shutting it behind me.
She looked good, but maybe a little more of her age was showing than last time. Her nice full figure was swathed in a light blue quilted housecoat, its belt hastily tied, and her legs and feet were bare. No make-up but for lipstick, and her white, chin-cut hair looked tousled.
Her eyes widened with surprise, almost alarm. “Mike! You weren’t announced.”
“I don’t like to stand on ceremony,” I said, brushing by, walking on into the pop-art-decorated living room. An ashtray on the glass coffee table had two cigarettes going in it and a couple of drink glasses. I smiled to myself.
As before, I sat on the red chair and she sat opposite me on the blue sofa.
I crossed my legs. Got comfortable.
“Yes?” she said impatiently, leaning forward, hands clasped. “Why are you here, Mr. Hammer?”
“What happened to ‘Mike’?”
“Why are you here, Mike?”
“Just wanted to ask you a question.”
“Just one?”
“Probably just one, or maybe two. That night, a few months ago—why were you late to Jasper’s party?”
She tried to sound off-hand. “I ran late. I don’t have any servants in the city, and—”
“Oh, no servants in the city. That must be a hardship for you.”
She reached for the black enamel box and got out a cigarette. She was about to light one of the dark gold-tipped numbers when I said, “You’ve already got one going, Irene. In fact, you’ve already got two going.”
She swallowed nervously, then went ahead and lit the fresh cigarette.
“Doesn’t take much of a detective,” she said, her voice brittle, “to figure out that I’m entertaining a guest. Let’s be frank. A male guest.”
“Yeah, since one cig has lipstick and the other doesn’t, that would have been my deduction.”
“So if you don’t mind, now that you can see that you’re intruding, would you please go? I’ll be glad to talk to you later. Perhaps tomorrow?”
Still just getting comfortable, I unbuttoned my suit coat, giving her a glimpse of the .45 in the sling under my left arm. “Answer my question, Irene, and I’ll just toddle along.”
She swallowed thickly. “As I say, I didn’t go to the party until later because I was running late.” She forced the trademark tinkly laugh. “I am notorious for arriving late, and—”
“You weren’t avoiding the shooting that you knew would take place?”
She practically dropped the smoke, her eyes wide, her mouth an attractive trapdoor that had sprung. “No! I had no idea...”
I folded my arms. “There was another Washington hostess, probably your chief rival a few years ago... remember her? The wife of a senator. Want to hear something wild? She was a Russian spy, perfectly positioned to know not only what her powerful husband knew, but, in her charming way, to meet and gain the confidence of all sorts of persons in critical positions in our government and foreign ones. Strangely, a number of those persons died—some of natural causes, others violently, including her own husband during a break-in at their mansion upstate. Get this—an attempted jewel robbery. Small world, huh?”
“I knew that woman,” Irene said. She had folded her arms, as well. “She was no spy. She died at her home in a terrible accident.”
“Yeah, I know. I arranged it. You see, she was half of an assassination team—she teed the victims up, and the other half hit a hole in one. Like you said, she’s gone. Dead. But the other half of that team is back. He tried to kill me today. Unsuccessfully, as you may have gathered. But he did manage to kill a nice young M.P. who was protecting me. So my question to you, Irene, is... are you the replacement for that other Washington hostess?”
“That’s enough!” a familiar male voice shouted from a hallway.
Senator Allen Jasper entered in a dark-colored robe of his own that indicated just how frequently he spent time at Irene Carroll’s pad.
Angry as hell, Jasper stood with the crying comic-book woman on the wall just behind him, as if she were the one he was defending as he said, “Irene a spy? Are you out of your mind, man? Mike, get out of here. Now! You’ve gone completely around the bend.”
I gestured easily, smiling like the old friend I was. “Sit down, Allen. I thought that might bring you out of your shell. By the way, you were casting a shadow where you were standing, eavesdropping. Cheating husbands need better skills than that.”
He was breathing hard. She reached up a hand to him, touched the elbow of his robe, and he gazed down at her, swallowed, nodded, and sat beside her.
“You don’t believe that nonsense you were spouting,” Jasper said, much more quietly. “Irene a Russian spy? You can’t mean that.”
“Well, it’s a workable theory. I’ve been considering it. And if Irene is in the employ of the K.G.B., it would explain a lot... and like that other hostess, she’s gotten close enough to you, Allen, to know exactly what you’re doing and thinking.”
He slipped an arm around her and she moved closer him, trembling. “This is nonsense, Mike,” he said. “All right, you’ve found out our secret. We’re having an affair, and we have been for some time. Satisfied?”
“Not really, but I’d imagine you are, frequently. Very convenient, living in the same building, you two. Irene, you were late that night because you were reluctant to be in the same room as Allen’s wife—you remember Allen’s wife, don’t you? Emily? You told me how wonderful she was.”
She was sniffling. “You’re... you’re cruel.”
“Well, maybe it’s because my ego got bruised, knowing that you coming on to me yesterday was just to make me think you were unattached. The way you use that Warren Bentley character as your beard.”
Jasper was frowning at me, as hurt as he was angry. “Why are you doing this, Mike?”
I ignored the question. “Now I know why Ralph Marley wanted to quit his easy, high-paying easy gig with you, Allen—he didn’t like being the guy who helped you sneak around on your wife. Marley was a straight shooter, a family man who loved his wife, and it rubbed him the wrong way.”
“What is the point of this, Mike?”
“You’ve been lucky, you crazy kids, keeping your secret. The press has looked the other way. Hell, maybe your wife looks the other way, too, but I doubt it. She’s probably like the rest of your constituents, who buy you as the upstanding guy you pretend to be.”
Now Jasper’s anger was gone and only the hurt remained. “Why are you doing this, Mike? What are you trying to prove?”
“Look, I’m no choir boy,” I said. “Generally the only bedroom activities that interest me are my own. But you have a secret that can be used against you, Allen. Times are changing. The press may not always keep the lid on. Does the name Christine Keeler mean anything to you?”
He was shaking his head and she was trying to disappear into him. “Mike,” he said desperately, “what are you after? What do you want?”
“The K.G.B. wanted me to take a trip to Russia. I think I know why, but even if the point was just to get revenge on me for past sins, I want to know how I came to be chosen as Ralph Marley’s replacement.”
He frowned in confusion. “Mike, I picked you. You were Marley’s friend, helping out the night he got shot. But you’d done work for me before. You know that.”
“You were the ideal blackmail target in this thing, Allen.”
“No one blackmailed me in taking you along, Mike! No one!”
“No one pressured you to use me?”
“No. It was my choice.”
That was not what I’d expected to hear.
“All right,” I said, and I sat forward. I tried to take all of the threat out of my voice. “Think, and think carefully. Did anyone even suggest, in the most casual way, that I’d make a good replacement for Marley? Maybe the very night of the shooting?”
He thought about it, but only briefly. “Yes, Mike, there was someone. But it was, like you say, casual. Just conversation. Cocktail party conversation, at that.”
“Who made this casual suggestion, Allen?”
And this time his response was exactly what I expected to hear.
* * *
The cab moved through the rain like a lumbering beast, but the sky was the greater beast, rumbling and roaring and flashing with incandescent fury, split by veins of electricity. It was coming down hard now, rain filling the gutters, machine-gunning umbrellas, sending even those New Yorkers made of the sternest stuff to seek shelter under marquees or to huddle in doorways or to cram inside bars that offered a more soothing kind of wet.
By the time I got dropped off, it had let up momentarily, as if God was grabbing a breath before His next expression of displeasure with the human race. The bottom floor of the townhouse, just off Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park, bled light from its windows. I had expected to find that floor dark. At almost seven, there was no reason for a high-society, exclusive practice like that of Dr. Harmon Giles to be doing any business at all.
I had figured to get buzzed in and go up to the second floor landing of the doctor’s apartment. I’d never been inside, but had passed it on my way up to visit Lisa Contreaux’s top-floor pad yesterday.
But now I found myself knocking at the front office door. It was locked, of course, though the reception room was brightly lighted, if empty of patients, with no nurse or receptionist behind the counter across the room. I had just about given up, and was ready to return to my initial plan, when the doctor—in a white smock over dark trousers—peeked out from the hallway next to the receptionist’s station. He squinted, trying to make me out through the rain-streaked glass.
“Mike Hammer, Doc!” I yelled. “Got a minute?”
He lifted his chin and smiled faintly in recognition and came across the room, unlocking the door. I stepped inside, only mildly damp. I’d spent most of the downpour in the cab.
“Glad I caught you, Doc,” I said, and grinned. “I didn’t figure you’d be open at this hour.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, pleasant but not friendly, mildly put upon as he closed and re-locked the door behind me, “but I ran late today with some walk-ins.”
I took the liberty of hanging up my wet trenchcoat and rain-sluiced hat on his metal rack.
He was saying, “I was just about to close up shop and go upstairs to my apartment. Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Hammer? I have appointment slots open for tomorrow. We can write something down.”
He was a somewhat bigger man than I remembered, but otherwise the same—in his mid-sixties with mustache, graying hair, wire-frame glasses, a distinguished variation on the old family doctor. He wasn’t smoking his pipe, but the smell of tobacco was on him.
“It’s this leg, Doc,” I said, rubbing my thigh. “It’s been giving me fits. Man, on a rainy day like this, it just screams at me.”
“Well, it certainly shouldn’t,” he said. “That was a very simple procedure. We got the bullet out, and it seemed to be in one piece.”
“Maybe you left behind a few fragments of shrapnel,” I suggested. “Could you do something about it—now?”
He mulled that, sighed, and shrugged. “I suppose I can take a quick look at it.”
“Would you mind, Doc?”
“Not at all.” His smile was completely friendly now. “A good mechanic has to stand behind his work, right?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t want to break down in the middle of the Thruway.”
He led me into and down the hallway and stopped at an open doorway, reached in, and switched the light on, illuminating a small, standard examining room. Nodding toward the elevated table with its crisp white tissue-paper covering, his back to me, he said, “Just remove your pants, Mr. Hammer, and have a seat. Be with you in a moment.”
“Not in the mood to drop my drawers, Doc,” I said, and he whirled and saw the .45 aimed his way. “Why don’t you just hop up on that little table.”
He did so, rather awkwardly. Now he knew how his patients felt. He was sitting there like a kid with his legs dangling and his expression was telling, because there was no confusion in it. Just fear.
“Tell me about Complex 90, Doc.”
This did seem to surprise him. “Complex 90... Where did you hear that term?”
“Well, I wasn’t there at the time, but those were the last words of a kid who used to assist you. Gawky, goofy-looking brain named Dennis Dorfman. Remember him?”
His face took on a sadness that was almost believable. “That was such a tragedy. Such a sad, premature end for so brilliant a young man.”
“And yet somehow I think you’re over it. Complex 90, Doc. Tell me about it.”
Finally, his genial features hardened into a mask of contempt, and his eyes became as cold and unblinking as a stone statue’s. “Why don’t you tell me what you think you know, Mr. Hammer?”
“Well, I believe it’s a formula, an organic formula I think was the phrase, to protect astronauts from space viruses, and from latent viruses they may have unknowingly brought with them into space.”
His smile wasn’t much of one. “Not bad for a layman, Mr. Hammer. But surely you know that Complex 90 is many years away from finalization. We are only in the initial stages.”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s why Dennis Dorfman had to die. I believe he knew you’d had a breakthrough, and were hiding it. He may also have discovered your connections to a foreign government. That you’d sold the formula to them.”
His mustache rode the sneer. “I didn’t ‘sell’ anything to anyone.”
“Oh. Then you’re a good party member.”
“I’m not a party member at all, Mr. Hammer. I’m a scientist in a very dangerous world, a world where the balance of weaponry and technology between two great superpowers must be maintained. Right now, America is in the lead in the space race.”
“But with Complex 90, you figured to give the Russians a boost.”
“Perhaps.”
“So, then, you were planning to sell it to both sides?”
His eyes and nostrils flared. “There is no sell about it!”
“Why didn’t you just defect, Doc? Or can you do more damage... I mean, ‘good’... where you’re currently placed? You can talk till you’re red in the face... get it? ...but you’ll never convince me you’re not a Soviet agent. That you’re just an idealist trying to maintain the balance of power.”
The contempt was back. “And why is that, Mr. Hammer?”
“Because somebody close to Senator Jasper, somebody on the inside, had to stage-manage this rather elaborate farce. Somebody who had learned that I frequently worked for and with the senator’s favorite bodyguard, Ralph Marley. Someone who knew that there were people in Moscow who would just love to get their hands on me, the guy behind the paint-factory massacre in ’52, the guy who dismantled their top assassination team.”
He was chuckling now. “You have an amazingly over-inflated opinion of your own value, Mr. Hammer.”
“Maybe, but I was the perfect choice nonetheless. I was a guy who could serve his function and then be used for propaganda value. I was ideal for embarrassing the senator and the United States itself, by pinning an espionage rap on me. Even if it did cost the life of a nice Russian girl.”
He was grinning now, eyes wide behind the wire-frames. “Are you listening to yourself, Mr. Hammer? Have you enough of a grip on reality to know how ridiculous this all sounds?”
“You were on the inside, Doc. You were a friend of Jasper’s, someone he respected because of your N.A.S.A. work. You were close enough to know... whether as a trusted friend or just an observant bystander. that the senator and Irene Carroll were having an affair. That would be the ideal blackmail vehicle for getting the senator to agree to hire me as his bodyguard on the Russia junket.”
“I did no such thing.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t have to. Things had been put so perfectly into motion that Allen, as if he’d been brainwashed to do so, selected me as his Russian-trip bodyguard. No major prompting needed. All you did was gently suggest to Allen, after the shooting on the night of the party, that he was lucky to have me at the ready to step in for poor Ralph Marley.”
He gestured with both hands. “I suggested you to him. And what of it?”
I gestured with the .45. “I know there are others in this with you. I doubt you could have reached out to Pietro Romanos for this job. Whoever thought to hire a sharp shooter to play jewel thief knows his stuff, that’s for sure. Romanos could have easily shot the senator, no matter who pushed him aside. All you need is a head shot, a cinch for a champion shooter like Romanos. No, Romanos had two jobs to do the night of the party—shoot and kill Ralph Marley. and shoot me in the leg.”
He was chuckling again. “Wounding you, I suppose, to make a hero of you, but not so badly as to keep you from taking Marley’s place on the Russian trip? Simply absurd, Mr. Hammer. Ludicrous. Below even a man of your doggedly average intelligence.”
“Nice try, Doc. No, that’s not why Marley was to wound me, and specifically in muscle tissue, where some residual ache might be expected. No, this was about Complex 90. About smuggling it into the Russia in the most unexpected and frankly amusing way. And this is why no one has tried to kill me—why I’m still the target of abduction. Maybe you hope to have my ass hauled back to Russia, or possibly just want to make sure I’m not dead till you’re through with me—so that there are no embarrassing discoveries during the autopsy.”
Now he was afraid that I knew. And I did know. “What are you saying, Mr. Hammer?”
“You patched me up that night, all right. You took out the bullet but you also inserted a capsule filled with microfilm into my leg and sewed me up, didn’t you, Doc? You Commies didn’t have to smuggle Complex 90 into Russia—I did it for you!”
He was smiling now, a nasty smile, and he started to applaud. The Russians like to applaud—especially for themselves.
I shook the .45 snout at him like a scolding finger. “That’s why I was taken to that remand prison, Butyrka, not to the K.G.B.’s main facility, the Lubyanka. That’s why the warden there was arranging for me to go take my ‘physical’—the capsule would have been cut out of me, with me none the wiser, and I’d have been turned over on espionage charges for a nice big show trial.”
Giles shrugged. “But you did not cooperate, Mr. Hammer. Instead you cut yourself a path of death and destruction that could never possibly justify one man’s desire for survival. How do you sleep at night, Mr. Hammer?”
“I sleep like a baby, pal. Like an innocent babe.”
He was shaking his head in disgust. “What now? I suppose you kill me. That’s what you do, isn’t it? I have given my life to preserving and saving lives, but you, Mr. Hammer, only take and destroy lives. You a monster who holds himself above all others, and the only moral code you follow is an eye for an eye. Vengeance. You are pathetic. Go ahead, Hammer. Kill me. Kill the doctor so instrumental in the achievements of the space program. Kill the scientist whose only goal is maintaining a balance of power in a potentially apocalyptic world. Oh, and be sure to entertain the jury with this amusing tale you’ve spun.”
“No, Doc,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m not going to kill you. A guy told me earlier today that there are certain evil sons of a bitches who are more valuable alive than dead, and I think you qualify. You have too much knowledge that Uncle Sam could use—about Russia and K.G.B. espionage, and even Complex 90. It’d be selfish to just bump you the hell off, much as I’d like to.”
He glowered at me. He looked a little silly, with his feet dangling like that.
“Okay, Doc,” I said. “Hop down off of there like a good boy.”
I marched him out into the hall and that was when I heard Lisa Contreaux say, “Thanks for dropping by, Mike,” right before she jammed the hypodermic needle in my neck.