Atropos (9 page)

Borzov sighed. It was ridiculous to let the GRU have such latitude. All it did was duplicate the KGB’s efforts, and frequently get in Borzov’s way.
That
was something to live for after the Atropos operation was done. He would (somehow) get around the Army’s objections and subsume the GRU into the KGB.

He laughed. It would only take another hundred years or so. The laugh turned into a cough. Borzov looked. Same color. He wondered how much phlegm he could produce for the doctor, should he live another hundred years. Enough to drown her in, he hoped.

In the meantime, he would try to puzzle out these killings. They didn’t have the earmarks of a professional operation. Neither did they seem to be the work of one of those quaint lunatic killers the capitalist system had a knack for turning out.

Someone was doing this for a reason, but what could the reason be? It couldn’t be to stop the men from taking or completing a given job. At least, that couldn’t be the reason for all of them, since some of the victims, including Gillick, one of the ones Borzov used to use, had been retired for some time.

Gillick, Borzov thought. He was, he supposed, just as glad to have Gillick dead, especially now, with Borzov’s masterpiece so near completion. Borzov might even have neutralized Gillick as a possible source of embarrassment himself, if it had occurred to him. So to one way of thinking, this killer had done Borzov a favor.

Borzov did not like to be grateful to unknowns for unasked favors. It bothered him. A spy master should know his allies as well as his enemies.

Borzov felt another cough coming on. He told himself he would suppress it for ten seconds. He began counting. At the count of seven, he cursed and reached madly for a handkerchief, bringing it to his mouth just in time.

S
EAN MURPHY WAS GLAD
he’d picked Regina Hudson’s office as the place to offer his suggestion. If he’d done it anywhere else, she would have walked out on him.

“Sean,” she said. “That’s disgusting. I thought you were supposed to be looking out for me.”

Sean pushed his wire-frame glasses up his nose. “Your mother,” he said, “asked me to
help
you. I assumed what she wanted me to help you do is become a first-rate journalist. I’m a reporter, not a baby-sitter. If you need looking out for, you should look somewhere else.”

“But Sean, I
slept
with the guy.” The tone of her voice and her body language made her seem too young to sleep with a teddy bear, let alone guys, but Murphy knew that could be deceptive.

“I know,” he said, and waited.

Regina opened her mouth to speak, then realized the turn the conversation had been taking and closed it again. She turned a firm pink, but she pressed on. “You know what I mean!”

“I know that you are supposed to be running the Hudson Group,” Murphy said. “And that the masthead of
Worldwatch
says you are the publisher of it. I also know that you are in a unique position to get information that the other newsmagazines can’t get. That
was
you I was sitting next to at the meeting the other day, wasn’t it? You did hear that everybody said this was the one interesting story of an otherwise boring campaign? So why are you being so fastidious?”

“It might not even work.”

“If it doesn’t work, we haven’t lost anything.”

“The last time I saw him, I told him to drop dead.”

He probably loved you for it. Those people don’t get told to drop dead too often.”

“I don’t even
like
him anymore.”

“I’m not telling you to like him, I’m telling you to call him on the phone and ask him a couple of questions.”

Regina made patterns with her finger on her desk blotter. Murphy had known her since she was a little girl. All she’d ever wanted to be was a good reporter, and whatever that Trotter character had done to her, he hadn’t been able to wipe that out completely. Right now, she had to be thinking how nice it would be to get the beat on this, how proud of her her mother would be.

“Sean,” she said. “This doesn’t feel right to me. I mean, it doesn’t strike me as completely ethical, getting a story from someone you used to have a relationship with.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Murphy said. “There’s no connection at all. You were finished with this guy when? Four years ago?”

Regina looked at the ceiling for a second, waved a few fingers. “Almost five,” she said.

“Okay, then. So it’s ethical to ask. I mean, it’s impossible that you slept with him just to get the story, right?”

“No,” Regina said. “Definitely not.”

Regina had slept with Mark Van Horn because she had been confused and lonely and horny and sad. It was late in her junior year of college. She had spent most of the year in love (she thought) with a classic poor-but-honest case who was at Whitten on a scholarship. He was witty and considerate, and an enthusiastic and tender lover, Regina’s first.

He was also, it turned out, a snob. Since Patty Hearst had disappeared, the children of the rich had been drilled in not broadcasting exactly who they were. Hudson was a common-enough name, so Regina didn’t need to use an alias the way some people she knew did.

When PBH found out she was of the Hudson Group Hudsons, he became a completely different person. He started
apologizing
all the time. For his clothes. For the fact that he didn’t have a car. Whenever he didn’t have enough money to pay for a movie or something. Before he’d found out who Regina was, he’d never given it a thought.

Regina tried to kid him out of it. She tried logic. She wound up throwing things and screaming. Nothing worked. PBH was never going to learn the basic concept of American democracy—the only way having money showed you were better than anybody else was that it showed you were better in getting or holding on to money.

After two months of this, Regina had called it off. PBH had taken it with a sigh. His bearing and attitude said, “I’ve been expecting this, rich girl like you, poor boy like me, just slumming, I should have known,” and Regina wanted to kill him.

Then Mark Van Horn, who had transferred to Whitten College at the beginning of the second term, asked her out.

“It will be fairly gruesome,” he’d said. “Some people up here have invited me to tea.”

“Party people?” Regina asked. She meant, of course, the Van Horns’ political party.

To Mark, to any Van Horn, there was no other sort of party. “Old friends of the family, though I’ve never met them. They said I could bring someone along, and I want to, in case one of them has a daughter with thin blood and buckteeth.”

Regina laughed. “So you asked me.”

Mark nodded. “You’re one of the few people I know here, and I know you can go to a tea without laughing at the idea. Also, you’re very pretty, and I like you. I didn’t know whether it was less insulting to ask you to do this as a favor or as a date, so I’m trying to make it a little of both. What do you say? I’d like your company, and I need the favor.”

Regina went. It had been absolutely as terrible as Mark had said it would be, and they’d laughed about it over dinner later. Three more dates, and they were lovers.

The relationship had a lot to be said for it, most of which was said by others. Regina’s roommate thought she and Mark looked dreamy together, and that it was fate that sent Mark there. Regina suspected that her roommate had a serious case of damp panties for Mark herself, but nothing was ever said out loud. Mark treated the roommate the way he treated practically everyone else—with the smooth manner and easy smile his father gave to the constituents.

The three parents involved thought it was simply marvelous. The Senator, no doubt, had visions of adding the weight of one of the nation’s largest communications companies to his already legendary clout. Besides, a lot of the Van Horn money came from pulp forests. The marriage could be an economic and political masterstroke. Mark’s mother, Ella, now divorced and drinking on the French Riviera on a more-or-less permanent basis, was hoping that Regina would marry her son to save him from some, quote, gold-digging tramp, unquote. The fact that she had married Senator Van Horn not too long out of her family’s bakery in Fort Wayne, Indiana, seemed to have been rinsed from her mind completely.

Petra Hudson had been all for it, too. She’d done everything but start publishing a magazine for brides and force Regina to proofread the whole thing. Regina had found her mother’s behavior very puzzling, considering her lifelong dedication to keeping the Hudson Group free of political entanglements. It was only recently that Regina had figured it out. Petra Hudson, renegade Soviet spy, had wanted her daughter married to the son of one of the most powerful politicians in America, in case her secret came out. She wanted a hold on the Senator, leverage on him.

That might have been enough to make Regina hate her mother, but she had already ordered her heart to issue the woman a blanket pardon by the time the explanation for the whole business occurred to her. There was also the fact that Mother, while she had been sad when Regina broke up with Mark, had not nagged her or pushed her in any way to take up with him again.

Regina was not so crazy about the relationship as all that. Mark could be fun, and he certainly understood as much as Regina did about money and power. But he was selfish and demanding (and I thought
I
was spoiled, Regina thought), and he could be very nasty when he didn’t get his way.

The only thing that kept them together for three months was the fact that Mark didn’t have all that many things he wanted his way about. He was totally indifferent to what he ate or drank, or to what he or Regina wore. He wouldn’t even bother to ask her opinion—he’d just wait for her to express a preference. Sometimes, Regina thought that if she waited long enough before saying anything, Mark would starve to death out of pure indifference.

But Mark had to pick the movies they saw, the records they listened to, the people they went out with. He simply refused to have anything to do with something he didn’t like. Or thought he might not like. “Wait till I’m not around,” he would say. “You’ll have a better time.”

Sex with Mark was scary. He had a beautiful body and knew what to do with it, but he was so cold and businesslike, Regina sometimes wondered if she wouldn’t be better off with a vibrator. Mark knew, it seemed, a million positions to do it in, and was determined to work his way through them one by one, as if he were accumulating points for a merit badge.

The only time there’d been any real passion in their relationship came during the Great Anal Sex Argument. Mark wanted to; Regina absolutely refused. The very idea disgusted her, and still did. She felt now that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, whatever else it was, was a mammoth vindication of her instincts.

Mark had been furious. He’d called her silly. He’d called her a coward. He said she was repressed and provincial and bourgeois.

Regina had said, “I don’t care,” and Mark had really gotten upset.

That had been the beginning of the end. Once Mark knew that there was at least one thing in which he was never going to get his way, he stopped treating her with any kind of respect at all, sniping at her in public and private with snotty remarks, showing up late or not at all, and all the rest of the things a person can do to get on someone else’s nerves.

Finally, he’d done one too many, and Regina had told him to drop dead and walked out. He transferred again at the end of the term (Mark didn’t seem to last long anywhere) and Regina hadn’t seen him since.

Now, she was supposed to call him up and ask him for a favor.

She took a deep breath. She was going to do it. She had promised Sean, and she kept her promises. She didn’t
want
to do it, but she would.

She wasted a little time analyzing why she didn’t want to do it. She decided that it was because she found it embarrassing to have gone to bed with someone basically because she knew her mother would approve of him. She wanted to forget all about Mark Van Horn, but here she was, dragging herself back to his attention. Asking, she knew, to be told to drop dead. Or worse, to have some of the famous Van Horn charm (Mark could show the full measure of that when he wanted to) poured over her.

All right, she told herself, all right. Get it over with. The first thing to do was find him. She had her secretary ring Senator Van Horn’s office. Regina picked up when the connection was made.

“Hello,” she said smoothly. This was her Corporate Voice. She often thought that if anything happened to the Hudson Group, she could use the Corporate Voice to get work as an announcer on a classical-music radio station. “This is Regina Hudson, of the Hudson Group. I’d like to get in touch with Mr. Mark Van Horn, the Senator’s son—” Regina winced.
They
knew he was the Senator’s son. The Corporate Voice, however, never missed a beat. “—and I was wondering if you might tell me how.”

“Just ...” The person on the other end hesitated for a second, as if listening to someone else. “Just a moment, Miss Hudson. Please hold.”

She wasn’t on hold long, just long enough to wonder what kind of luck would let Mark be in his father’s office at that particular second. Regina had been looking forward to another round of dithering once she found out where Mark was.

“Miss Hudson!” said a happy voice after the hold clicked off. Not Mark’s voice. “This is Ainley Masters.”

Ainley Masters, Regina thought. He was another one who’d thought Hudson-Van Horn nuptials would have been a marvelous idea. Maybe the worst of them. Rumor had it that he had been drawing up a pre-nuptial agreement the size of the Federal Budget when Regina pulled the plug.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Masters,” Regina said politely.

“I understand you want to talk to Mark.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Perhaps I can help you.”

“No, it’s personal.” Kind of, Regina added silently. If there were no personal element, this phone call wouldn’t be happening, that was for sure.

“Well, then,” Masters said. “You’re in luck. I don’t know where Mark is at the moment, but he’s due in town within the next couple of days. I’m sure he’ll want to call you immediately.”