Atropos (33 page)

No. Mark had to die.

And all Trotter had to do was kill him. It was so simple. Flick an emery wheel against a flint, and the curtain comes down for both of us.

So why don’t you do it?
he asked himself.

Shh,
he told himself cunningly. I’m giving Bash more time to get to safety. Besides, I might think of something by the time the cops get here. The cops, he reminded himself, who by now were undoubtedly looking for him as the murderer of Senator Van Horn.

Trotter sighed inwardly.

So let Mark do it, he thought. He’s been responsible for so many deaths, let him be responsible for his own. And mine, I suppose. Though I don’t know if I’m going to make it in any case.

So he taunted Mark. Tried to make him forget the situation and fire the gun.

“Made it what?” he said again. “All you’ve managed to do is make it stink.”

And that did it. Mark growled something that sounded like “You bastard,” and the gun came up.

And Ed had to be a hero. “No!” the thug screamed, and threw himself on Mark’s arm. Mark had taken the silencer off long ago, but the blast was considerably muzzled.

Ed fell, blood spurting from his chest. He’d be dead in seconds.

The silo was still standing.

“‘Walking around inside a bomb,’” Mark sneered.

“The only reason it didn’t go up,” Trotter said reasonably, “was that Ed’s body covered all the muzzle-flash.”

The whole thing was just beginning to dawn on Jeff. He walked to Mark and looked at his friend’s body with eyes and mouth wide open.

“Don’t bullshit me, Trotter. Now I know that lighter doesn’t mean anything. Good-bye and good riddance.”

He started to raise the gun again. This time Jeff jumped him.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” he yelled, and hit Mark in the mouth. Mark went down and dropped the gun.

Logic still told Trotter that Mark had to die tonight, but self-preservation told him there was no reason Trotter had to go up with him. All he had to do was stand up and get out the door right next to him.

His legs were asleep. His blood pressure had dropped to the point where the muscles in his extremities weren’t getting enough oxygen. Sitting in one position on a hard floor had only made matters worse. Trotter cursed and watched Jeff and Mark rolling on the floor. Jeff was bigger, but Mark was dirtier. It looked like anybody’s fight, but it didn’t look as if it would last too long.

Trotter dropped the lighter, making a promise to get Murphy a new one, if he insisted, buy him the whole Zippo factory, if he could get out of here alive. He licked his left hand, then smacked the palm of it hard against the wall behind him. He pushed straight down and willed his legs to move. The pain came back. It had no locality—his whole body was a throbbing wound.

Trotter managed to get his right leg bent, his right foot flat on the floor. That, and some patience, was all it took. If they could just keep fighting long enough ...

But no. Mark had Jeff by the throat and wasn’t letting go. It would be over in seconds.

With one last effort, Trotter fought to his feet. He had his hand on the doorknob when Mark threw Jeff away and picked up his gun.

The light came like a sudden dawn behind them just as the Acura was clearing the front gate. Murphy had wondered what he was going to do about the guard. It turned out he didn’t have to do anything. He, like everyone for miles around, was looking at the fireball.

The noise came just behind the light, a sharp crack, then a low rumble like thunder. Joe Albright stirred. “What was that?” he asked.

“Shh,” Regina said. “Just a storm, Joe. Try to stay awake. We’re getting help for you.”

Murphy said, “Regina ...”

“I’m all right, Sean. Keep moving.”

“Let’s talk later, Sean, okay?”

He left her alone. Regina Hudson’s tears rolled fat down her cheeks. They fell unheeded from her face, and mixed with a pool of Allan Trotter’s blood on the floor of the Legend.

She who spins the thread of life
...

A
SIDE FROM THE TOILET,
this was the first place the Congressman had gone by himself since his stroke. It wasn’t his idea. He’d been asked for.

Borzov had asked for him. As soon as he had heard what had happened out there on the Great Plains, the Congressman had begun making plans—foolish, desperate plans—to keep Borzov in the United States, so that he could get his hands on the bastard.

The plans hadn’t been necessary. Borzov’s illness had taken care of that. There was an infirmary in the Soviet Embassy, but that wasn’t good enough for the General. Knowing the state of Soviet medical care, the Congressman was not surprised.

Instead, the Ambassador had engaged an entire floor of a small but superior private hospital in Maryland, just outside the D.C. line. The word was (and the Congressman had always made it a point to get the best available word) that “General Dudakov” might die at any minute.

Then the Congressman had received a personal telephone call from the Soviet Ambassador. It was the General’s strong wish—the Ambassador did not say “last wish,” though he might as well have—to see his old comrade-in-arms for the last time.

The Congressman had played it cagey, delaying a decision by pleading his own ill health. It was all too possible that this was some kind of scam to finger him as the head of the Agency, to reveal that the Agency existed. Borzov could be trying to put his thumb in the Congressman’s eye one last time before he went.

The Congressman grieved for his son. His loss left him empty, an emptiness made all the more barren by the knowledge that “Allan Trotter” would not be simply ignored by history, but would go down as the brutal assassin of Senator Henry Van Horn and his son.

The Congressman’s head, however, had not emptied. This was still his game; he was still the master of all the moves. He wanted to see Borzov, but he didn’t want anybody putting anything over on him.

The first thing he did was to get the State Department to sign off on his visit to the General.

“Go, by all means,” they had said. “It will be good for international relations.”

Fine. As good a cover as any. He went.

The Congressman was frisked twice, once by a Soviet guard, and once by an American. He didn’t know what the American was guarding, unless it was the Soviet guard. They didn’t let him keep his walking stick. The Soviet guard ushered him into Borzov’s room. And stayed there.

Borzov was a white lump on a hospital bed. Tubes emerged from unlikely places, flowing with liquids of various unappetizing colors. The face above the sheet was as gray as the implausibly tidy hair on Borzov’s head. Someone, the Congressman thought, must have come in every twenty minutes to comb it.

Borzov said something that was muffled by the oxygen tube across his upper lip. The Congressman got closer to the bed. The guard’s face said he didn’t like that, but he made no move to stop him.

“He speaks English,” Borzov said. His voice was a whisper, barely audible above the beeping of the heart monitor.

“Who does?”

Borzov rolled his eyes in the direction of the guard.
“Français, alors, bien?”

The Congressman smiled and switched to French. “It is a very Imperial habit, for a Russian to be speaking French. You may be in trouble.”

“I am already in trouble. I am kept alive only so that they may bring me back to Moscow for trial. You have killed me at last, my friend.”

“You climbed the horse’s back yourself. Don’t complain because he threw you.”

“Very good. Besides, I shall win after all. I shall die in this hospital, then I will be celebrated a hero.”

“You will forgive me if I harbor doubt about your disgrace.”

“I failed. Under a previous regime, that would have been enough. But going ahead with my plan without proper clearance was a crime against
glasnost,
of the new spirit of cooperation. It seems, my friend, that the Chairman truly means it.”

“From your mouth to God’s ears,” the Congressman said.

“Even words addressed to God’s ears are tolerated these days. Do you believe in Fate, my friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“I believe in Fate. You and I have been fated to contest a war the world would not have been able to survive if it had been fought with armies and missiles. We have killed and lied and cheated and perverted the workings of our own and foreign governments. We—it was our fate that we do so. Perhaps if we had been less evenly matched, one of our countries would have found it necessary to trigger the end.”

“This whole conversation is probably being recorded,” the Congressman said. “Whether the guard speaks French or not. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“For the record, of course.” The General took a deep pull of oxygen from the tube in his nostrils, coughed once, and went on. “For the record, you are humoring the vaporings of a dying man, all right?”

“Talk.”

“Perhaps Fate has decided that we old men now move aside. Perhaps it is indeed time for the long, half-secret war between our nations to be over.”

There were many sad things about war, the Congressman thought, but this was the saddest—as a matter of survival, you
must
descend to the level of the enemy. Not constantly, and not in every way, but in some way at least some of the time. In fighting Borzov and the men like him, the Congressman had in fact
become
like him. He preferred to think he had done it—sacrificed his humanity, if you wanted to put it that way—for a noble cause. But he would have preferred much more to have lived in a world where careers such as his would not have been necessary.

“Perhaps,” the Congressman said. “But perhaps not. That is why men like you and I—humoring you, as you say—men like you and I will always be required.”

“A sad thought.”

“A sad thought indeed. I hate to leave you with one, but—”

The Van Horns are
all
dead?”

The Congressman wanted to laugh. He was tempted to let Borzov die thinking he had Mark Van Horn tied up somewhere, spilling his guts about Borzov’s little project to steal the White House.

He decided against it. The Congressman never lied for fun, only for advantage. “Yes, all. They found the son’s—Mark Van Horn’s—head in a field about a quarter of a mile away. It was badly burned, but the identification through dental records is positive. At least two others, probably three, died in the blast.”

“And the assassin, this Trotter, is he dead, too?”

“According to the witnesses, there was no way he could have gotten out.”

“He was at the party Senator Van Horn threw for me. You must have met him.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Miss Hudson—she must be taking this badly.”

“She’s in seclusion.”

“And Ainley Masters, the hero of the affair?”

“He’s joined my staff.” The Congressman grinned as he recalled his little talk with Ainley Masters. It would take years to unravel the mess the Van Horns had helped make of American politics; with Ainley Masters’s knowledge, it might take fewer of them. Ainley was given to understand that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. He signed on—what the hell, he’d been out of a job, anyway.

“A wise decision on your part. I suppose now Babington will be President.”

“It’s a safe assumption. He’s acquired the holiness of the Van Horns by osmosis. And Abweg’s suicide seemed to remove any doubt.”

“It seems unusual for an American politician to take a loss so hard.”

Or so messily, the Congressman thought, jumping off the roof of his hotel like that the day after the fateful endorsement. The Congressman wondered if Borzov thought he was fooling anyone. Still, one of the pleasures of the Congressman’s job would be to tell the new President exactly how he got to
be
President. Another would be dealing with Gus Pickett. The Congressman had big plans for Gus Pickett.

“Time is up now,” the guard said. He must have gotten tired of pretending he understood French, the Congressman thought.

“Help me up,” the Congressman said. “Or give me back my cane.”

But Borzov had one more question. He beckoned the Congressman closer. “He was your son, wasn’t he? I am so sorry, my friend.”

The Congressman stared at him for a few seconds. Then he swallowed, said, “Good-bye, General,” and gave his arm to the guard.

They had just stepped into the hallway when the Congressman heard the intermittent beeps of the hospital monitor become a sustained note. Doctors and nurses bustled down the hall, nearly knocking him over. The Soviet guard handed him off to an American guard, who gave him his cane back and pointed him to the door.

The Congressman didn’t leave. He waited some hours, until a doctor came and told him General Dudakov was dead. He waited more hours before they finally let him see with his own eyes the body of his comrade in the war against Hitler, his enemy ever since.

Only then did he call his driver and have himself taken to the offices of Fenton Rines Investigations, the secret headquarters of the Agency.

It was the only place he had that felt like home.

T
HE NURSE WAS ALL
bustle. She never smiled, and she gave orders like a printing-shop foreman, but she always made Regina feel better.

Right now, she bustled into the room with a glass contraption, thrust it at Regina, and said, “You must express now the milk. Your little one drink and drink while you sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” Regina said.

“Sh-sh-sh,” the nurse told her. “It is not to be sorry. You had the difficult labor and the cesarean section, eh? That is major surgery. You must sleep. But little Alain must eat, no? So, you must express now the milk.”

“Allan,” Regina said.

“Alain, as I have said. The young nurses fight over who is to feed him. You will have to watch that one, Madame Hardin. Ring the bell when you are done.”

The nurse bustled out. Regina smiled at her back as she went. They were very good here. They knew their business, and they asked no questions.