Atropos (26 page)

Trotter groaned. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Seven o’clock,” Regina said.

“Eight o’clock,” said the voice on the phone. “Seven, where you are.”

“What’s up?” Trotter asked. “You want me to move to another phone and call you back?”

“Don’t bother, the line is secure.”

Trotter wanted to ask if he was sure, but he had faith in the Agency’s communications department. “Besides,” he said aloud, “all the people who were good enough to tap us are dead, now.”

“Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?” Rines demanded.

“I don’t see how you could. I don’t.”

“No word from Albright.”

“That’s bad. Maybe we ought to get some people looking for him.”

“Did that two hours ago,” Rines said. “I didn’t bother telling you because you’re not supposed to have any contact with them anyway. I made up a client and sent some of my best young private ops. Happened to have them in Chicago, just winding up a legitimate, money-paying case, so I sent them on to where you are.”

“Yeah.” Trotter was rubbing the back of his head. “Let me know if they find anything.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Already? I’m impressed. What did they turn up?”

“Albright’s rental car. Out in the middle of a wheat field or something. Wide open, trunk up.”

“Accident?”

“Not so my people could tell. Battery was dead from the dome light’s being on because the door wasn’t latched right. Donut tire on the right front, flat in the trunk. And, Trotter?”

“Yeah?”

“My people say the tire was deliberately spiked.”

“So Joe found something interesting on the road and wanted an excuse to stop and watch it.”

“That’s the way I read it.”

“And somebody objected.”

“No signs of a scuffle. Maybe he ran off.”

“You believe that?”

Rines’s voice was tight. “No more than you do. The question is, what did they do to him?”

“The question is,” Trotter said, “if they took Joe away, whatever shape he was in, why did they leave a car directly traceable to him right out on the open highway?”

“It was open highway, all right. Took my people less than three hours to get onto it. Crop duster spotted it, radioed it in; my boys picked it up on the police radio and got there first. They might as well have tied a red helium balloon to the thing.”

“Stupid,” Trotter said. “This doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t seem like Borzov or any of his myrmidons. Just talking about him, I use words like ‘myrmidons.’ I mean the KGB makes mistakes, but this is amateur night. Just like the killings of the electronics guys.”

“You keep coming back to that,” Rines said, impatiently.

“Yeah, I do, don’t I? I wish to hell I knew why. Listen, Rines, I’m going to hit the bricks and try to see what’s going on around here.”

“Check in. Frequently.”

Trotter promised he would, and hung up.

He turned to Regina. “How much of that did you understand?”

“Enough,” she said. “Joe Albright’s in trouble, isn’t he?” She looked worried. She had gotten to know Albright well over the past year, and she liked him.

“The probability is high. Where’s the best place to find Murphy right now?”

“You have to ask? At the paper, Hudson Group’s headquarters for the primary.”

“Get dressed. That’s where we’re going.”

“Don’t I get to eat? I’m starving.”

“I’ve got to talk to Murphy first. Then you can eat.” Trotter already had his shorts on, he was reaching for his pants. Regina sighed and got out of bed.

“It was so nice for a while.”

Trotter looked at her while she stretched. She was as lithe and unselfconscious as a seal.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to Murphy.”

That was a lie. He did not have to talk to Murphy. He had yet, in fact, to decide what he was going to say to Murphy when he caught up with him. What Trotter had to do was to get Regina into the middle of a group of people, especially a group of alert, active, and suspicious people. Like newspaper reporters, for instance. He wanted a lot of eyes open when Regina was around, because he might have to leave to take care of something (you never knew in this business), and someone had already taken Joe Albright, a trained agent.

After that, anything might happen.

A
T FIRST, JOE ALBRIGHT
thought the buzzing was in his head. The
pain
was certainly in his head, now a dull throb, now bright bolts of lightning that threatened to hard-boil his eyeballs from the inside.

Joe coughed. He felt as if he wanted to blow his nose, but he didn’t think his skull retained enough structural integrity to stand the strain. Every time he took a deep breath, his lungs filled with some kind of airborne crud that made him want to cough some more. He contented himself with shallow breaths.

The buzzing was loud, and consistent. It seemed to be the one thing about his current situation that didn’t strengthen or fade each time he moved or thought. The noise was a combination of a whoosh, a whine, and a hum, and the part of Joe’s brain that was conscious enough to be aware of it was convinced that, given time, the noise alone would be enough to give him one hell of a headache.

Joe groaned and came a notch closer to full consciousness. “Positively no smoking,” he mumbled.
Why the hell did I say that?

Senator Van Horn’s kid had cold-cocked him with the tire iron. That was the last thing he remembered for sure. The Senator and Mark coming out of the silo farm, their pickup truck tiny in the middle of the armada of trucks hauling grain away.
Can we help you fix that tire?
Sure. Wham!

After that it got a little hazy. No. First it got wiped out completely. Then it got a little hazy. He remembered (in a dreamy sort of way) being lowered from the cab of the pickup and being half-carried, half frog-marched somewhere. That must have been when he’d seen those emphatic, red-and-white
NO SMOKING
warnings. “Danger of explosion or fire,” Joe said.

Suddenly, he was wide awake. “Sure!” he said triumphantly, and sat up.

Big mistake. Sitting up hurt his head. Shouting had caused him to take in too much of the dirty air, which made him cough and hurt his head all the more. Joe spent the next five minutes rolling around on the hard floor, holding his head together with his hands, alternately coughing and whining and saying “shit” over and over again.

Finally, the pain diminished. It didn’t vanish. It didn’t come close to vanishing. It didn’t even get back down to where it had been before. But it stopped filling Joe’s whole mind with agony; it left him enough brain cells to sustain a coherent train of thought.

Okay, Joe told himself, okay. Take it easy. Don’t move around.

A voice inside him sneered.
As if you had a choice. Man, your head been whupped and fucked up good. You better see a doctor.

Joe told the voice to shut up. Unless there was a doctor’s office inside this silo, it was going to be a while before he saw one, and that’s all there was to it.

That’s where he was, of course. Inside one of those recently emptied silos. The droning he heard was the exhaust system, venting the inevitable particles of chaff and wheat dust that the unloading of one of these things leaves behind. That explained the
NO SMOKING
signs, too. Fine flammable particles suspended in air in a confined space made a powerful explosive. Every year, a couple of these things went up around the country, sometimes one of the little round deals you saw next to a quaint red barn, less often one of the huge, empty skyscraper-like things that were visible for miles in the middle of the prairie. Joe was sure of all this, but he wondered how he knew it. He decided he’d seen it on “Mr. Wizard” when he was a kid. Sure. Mr. Wizard blew up a tin can with cake flour, and talked about the silo problem. He wasn’t sure how big this one was—about medium, he guessed. About the size of a three-story tenement.

All right. So much for where he was. Now, why was he here? Okay, he was here because nobody would think of looking for him in such an insanely dangerous place, but why was anybody
hiding
him?

He had a terrible time with that one until he remembered what brought him to the middle of these amber waves of grain in the first place. He’d been tailing Gus Pickett. He’d followed Gus Pickett, and found Senator Henry Van Horn. And his son. The Van Horns had seen him and, despite his fondest hopes, recognized him from the party they’d thrown.

The Van Horns hadn’t wanted it known that they were meeting with Gus Pickett on the eve of what looked to be the decisive primary. Why? Senator Van Horn was known to be a friend of Pickett’s. What did they have to hide?

The very fact that they were meeting on the eve of the primary. This close to the Big Endorsement, a meeting with the famed billionaire might lead to questions. Of course, the Senator had sloughed off bigger questions than “Why were you playing farmhand?” and gotten away with it.

So it could be that the reason behind it all was very big; so big they didn’t want to risk
any
questions being asked.

What could be that big?

Borzov in the country, right, fool? Man, you in worse shape than I thought.

Right, right, Albright said. God, his head hurt. He wondered who that voice was. He decided it was himself from his blacker-than-thou period as a teenager, the time when he was going to be so tough and smart and cool that the world would just roll over and play dead for him. Joe wished the little snot would go away.

Still, he had a point. Borzov was in the country. Gus Pickett had for years been suspected of fronting for Moscow. And now here was Senator Van Horn sneaking away in a half-assed disguise to meet with Pickett.

Maybe the Senator was selling his endorsement, and therefore, a good shot at the White House.

Joe felt a chill that wasn’t caused by the state of his skull. Trotter had said the KGB man was pulling some kind of stunt with the election.

But the Van Horns? The family of millionaires and war heroes and astronauts? What could the Senator be selling out for? The Van Horns had more money than God, and they had more power than anybody sane could possibly want. Senator Hank had very likely gotten away with
murder,
for God’s sake, what more could Russians give him?

They could refrain from playing a tape one of the dead audio men had made. Just as Trotter had speculated.

So much for that for a while. Try another question.

Like what?
the snot wanted to know.

Like why am I still alive? Joe responded silently.

All right, they didn’t want me talking about their meeting to whomever I might work for, or to the press. Fine. They went upside my head to keep that from happening. They damn near killed me as it was; one more shot would have done it. Why didn’t that blow fall?

Because, fool, they want to find out what you and your friends know already. And they aimin’ to find out.

Joe didn’t like the snot he had once been, but he had to admit the kid was shrewd. It looked as if there was a lot more unpleasantness ahead.

A big shaft of daylight spilled into the haze of the flour dust as a door slid open about ten feet from Joe. The space was filled by two big men who might have been twins. Both were blond. Both squinted against the dust. Neither smiled.

In a surprisingly gentle voice, one of them said, “Stupid sons of bitches.”

The other said, “Come on, now, Ed, what did they know?”

“They might never have known anything, the jerks,” Ed said. “Look at him. They threw him in here with hard shoes on, with his belt with a metal buckle. All it takes is one damn spark.”

Joe wished he could scramble to his feet and dash past the two men to freedom. He wished he could at least show some kind of fight before they got to him. He couldn’t. There was only one thing he could do. He rolled over on his belly and started rubbing his belt buckle against the hard, cold floor.

It might have only taken one spark, but the spark didn’t come. Four strong hands lifted Joe from the floor as though he were a toy.

T
HE SENATOR’S PRESS CONFERENCE
was set For nine o’clock Central time, early enough for the West Coast feeds of the networks’ news, but more importantly, in plenty of time to be the front page of all of tomorrow’s morning papers. Saturday was usually a slow news day. And the Senator would be available to fly back to Washington in time to do at least one of the Sunday public affairs shows.

Ainley Masters had taken the lead in setting this all up, something Senator Van Horn’s press secretary didn’t appreciate. But while the press secretary, an aging True Believer who’d been a small-town editor back in the home state, wasn’t too bright, he was clever enough to have caught on long ago to the fact that when it came to Van Horn interests, there was no territory forbidden to Ainley Masters.

That, at least, was the way it used to be. Ainley wasn’t so sure it still applied. He had the feeling he was being frozen out, not just by the Senator now, but by Mark. Ainley hadn’t planned on coming on this rustic jaunt at all until Mark announced his determination to follow his father. Since the kidnapping, Ainley had been loath to let the boy out of his sight. So he came.

He might just as well have stayed in Washington. Since their plane had landed, Ainley had not gotten so much as a hello from either his present or future employer. The only reason he had busied himself at all with the arrangements for Hank’s press conference was to have a report to bring them, to have some excuse to lay eyes on them.

A couple of security men lounged casually outside the door of the Van Horn suite. Ainley had arranged for that, too. He wanted to have the Senator and his son (especially his son) attended by full-time bodyguards, but they were having none of it. Reports Ainley had been getting, telling of long, secret trips by the two Van Horns, did nothing to add to his feeling of security.

It was as if being kidnapped, and seeing a young woman murdered in front of his eyes, had had no effect on Mark whatever. Perhaps, God forbid, Mark was more his father’s son than Ainley had imagined.