Chaos Theory (17 page)

‘What’s to explain? Just tell me who the medallion belonged to. All I really need is a name.’

‘Rick, this is the only safe way we can do this, OK?’

Rick took the phone away from his ear and frowned at it. He had never heard Bill Pringle sound so shrill before. Bill was normally a quiet, steady, wry kind of guy, but now he sounded almost as if he were begging.

‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘I’ll catch the redeye, see you for breakfast in the morning.’

Bill hung up without saying anything else.

‘Is everything all right?’ asked Adeola.

‘I’m not sure. Bill says that his friend has found another medallion, but he wants me to go to DC tonight so that he can tell me about it face to face. He says it’s too much of a risk, telling me over the phone.’

‘You need to be very careful about this, Rick,’ said Adeola.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Steve, ‘I’ll come along, too, if that’s OK. Watch your back for you.’

‘Me, too,’ said Noah. ‘If there’s going to be any trouble, I don’t want to be here, sitting on my hands, considering I started this whole mess, by bringing up that medallion in the first place. Should have left it where it was.’

‘No, Noah,’ said Adeola. ‘If there is one thing that I have learned from all of my work in politics, it is that you have to face up to the worst that can happen before you can hope for the best.’

 

T
hey caught the 9.15 p.m. America West flight from Burbank and arrived at Ronald Reagan airport in Washington at 7.30 the next morning.

After they had made their connection at Phoenix, Noah had managed to sleep for over two hours, and if he dreamed he didn’t remember any of his dreams when he woke up. But as they taxied up to the finger, Rick said, ‘You sure like to talk in your sleep, don’t you? Quite some conversation you were having with somebody. Kept talking about KOs.’

KOs? thought Noah. Or had it been
chaos
?

It was a grey, humid day, with clouds hanging low all across the capital, like filthy sheets. They rented a metallic red Chevy Lumina and drove south on Route 1 to Groveton. A fine rain began to prickle the windshield.

Steve, sitting in the back seat, leaned forward and said, ‘Let’s do a straight run up the street, see if there’s anything that don’t look quite right.’

They reached the corner of Alexandria Street, where Bill Pringle lived. It was a quiet, unassuming street of two-storey houses, most of them painted white or grey or pale blue, with creepers on their front porches, and children’s bicycles lying on their front driveways. The paper boy had already delivered: outside almost every house a copy of the
Washington Post
was flapping damply on the grass.

Bill’s house was number 1103. There were two cars parked outside the garage, a Dodge Intrepid and a five-year-old Honda Civic. The drapes were open but as they drove past they saw nobody in the front living room, nor the bedrooms upstairs.

There was a dark green Ford Explorer with tinted windows, parked by the curb about a hundred yards away from Bill’s house.

‘What do you think about that?’ Steve asked Rick. ‘If that’s a resident, how come he hasn’t parked in his own driveway?’

‘The licence-plate is local,’ Rick observed. ‘And there’s a “baby on board” sticker in the back. I can’t see any self-respecting terrorist driving around with
that
in his window.’

They turned into Bill Pringle’s front yard and climbed out of the car. Rick went first, with Noah and Steve staying well behind him. Steve kept glancing up and down the street, and giving nervous little sniffs and shrugs.

Rick rang the doorbell and they heard it chime inside the house. He was just about to ring again when the door opened and Bill Pringle appeared.

‘
Rick
,’ he said, almost as if he hadn’t been expecting him. ‘And you brought some friends, too.’

Noah glanced at Rick to judge his reaction to Bill Pringle’s appearance. Bill was in his early sixties, as skinny as a scarecrow, with wild white hair and heavy-rimmed spectacles. He hadn’t shaved that morning, because his deeply-cleft chin was sparkling with white stubble. He was wearing a grubby plaid shirt and baggy jeans, and carpet slippers.

‘You – ah – want to come in?’ he asked them.

Rick hesitated. ‘Everything OK, Bill?’

‘Sure. Sure. Come on in.’

‘You’re sure that everything’s OK, Bill? Looks to me like you haven’t slept.’

Bill didn’t answer, but stepped back into the hallway, and made a beckoning gesture with his finger.

Rick went in after him, followed by Noah and Steve. The hallway was cramped, with a barometer hanging on the wall, and an old-fashioned hallstand, with pegs for hats and coats. There was a stale, warm smell in the house, as if the air conditioning had been switched off and the windows kept shut.

As soon as Bill led them through to the parlour at the back of the house they understood what was wrong. Bill’s wife, Kathleen, was sitting at one end of the beige leather couch, wearing only a dark maroon bathrobe, her grey hair in curlers. Her face was a picture of misery and exhaustion. On the other end of the couch sat a young woman of about thirty-two or thirty-three, who from her looks, Noah immediately took to be Bill and Kathleen’s daughter. She was wearing a summer dress with tiny red-and-yellow flowers on it, but the red ribbon around the neckline was torn, and there was an angry crimson bruise on her left cheekbone, so that her eye was almost completely closed.

Between the two of them, in what was almost a parody of domestic contentment, slept a large tortoiseshell cat. But immediately behind the couch stood two men in light grey suits. One looked like a boxer, with a shaved head and a broken nose. The other could have been a hairdresser, with a greasy, chestnut-collared pompadour and a narrow, rat-like face. The hairdresser had his arms folded, but in his left hand he was holding a dull grey Beretta automatic.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said the hairdresser, in a tensile North Virginia accent. ‘We’ve been waiting on you for quite some hours now.’

‘Oh, Bill,’ said Rick.

Bill Pringle lowered his head and said nothing. But the hairdresser came around the couch and said, ‘Poor Bill, he didn’t have too much choice now, did he? So don’t you go being too censorious, sir. If you were married to such a lovely woman, and you had such a lovely daughter, what would
you
do if somebody were to threaten to blow their brains all over your rug?’

Rick said. ‘What’s the deal?’

‘Deal? Who said anything about any deal?’

‘Then what do you want? Because whatever it is, you’re welcome to it.’

The hairdresser came closer. He had a large wart at the side of his nose, and his teeth were brown and crooked. He smelled strongly of lavender oil.

‘All I want, sir, is silence. Nothing more. Nothing
less
, though, neither.’

‘You can have it,’ said Noah. ‘You want us to promise never to say anything to anybody about those medallions? OK, we promise. We’ll back off, and forget we ever saw them. We’ll never mention them again, as long as we live.’

‘Then you know why we’re here?’ said the hairdresser.

‘Like I said – whatever it is those medallions mean – whatever it is they represent – we’re prepared to forget about them. I swear to God that you’ll never hear from us again.’

Bill said, ‘Please. My wife isn’t well. Whatever this is all about, there’s no profit in it for us. This gentleman here says that we’ll forget it. I give you my word of honour, we’ll both forget it. So long as he remembers the number I gave him.’

The hairdresser looked from Bill to Rick to Noah to Steve, and he didn’t blink once. Then he walked back around the couch, taking a silencer out of his pocket as he did so. He screwed the silencer on to the muzzle of his Beretta, then cocked the gun with his thumb, and pointed it directly at the back of Kathleen Pringle’s head. The Pringles’ daughter let out a high-pitched breath, and Bill pleaded, ‘No, please!
Please!
’

‘What did you expect?’ asked the hairdresser. ‘You didn’t think that your word of honour was going to cut it? Did you seriously expect me to go back to the people who sent me here, and tell them that your mum-ness is one hundred percentile guaranteed, because you
promised
? What do you think they would say to me, if I did that?’

‘I think they’d be genuinely upset,’ remarked the boxer. He had the childish lisp of a man with no front teeth.

‘Well, me too. So I’m sorry about this, but you don’t leave me any alternative. Henry, let’s get this over with.’

The boxer reached into his belt and produced a long, triangular-bladed knife.

Noah said, ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ But the boxer stepped up behind Kathleen Pringle and took hold of a bunch of her hair curlers in his left hand, pulling her head back and exposing her throat.

‘
No!
’ shouted Bill Pringle. He made a jerky rush forward, like a marionette whose strings have become entangled, and tried to stumble around the side of the couch. But with complete calmness, the hairdresser lifted his automatic, levelled it, and shot Bill at point-blank range in the face. There was a sharp, compressed whistle, and the back of Bill’s head was sprayed all over the wallpaper behind him, and halfway over a family photograph.

Kathleen Pringle screamed, and tried to stand up. The boxer pulled her back down again. Her daughter reached across for her, catching at her sleeve. ‘
You can’t! You can’t do this!
’ The tortoiseshell cat opened its eyes and looked up, plainly annoyed at being woken up.

The hairdresser moved across, trying to push the daughter away. But the instant he was blind-sided behind the boxer, Noah lunged forward and seized hold of the cat. The cat screeched in fury, its legs scrabbling, but Noah took hold of the end of its tail and swung it around in the air – once, twice – and then he threw it straight into the hairdresser’s face.

The hairdresser yelled out, ‘
Shit!
’ and toppled backwards, with the cat clawing wildly at his cheeks. He fell awkwardly into the green velveteen drapes behind him, just as Noah bounded over the couch and dropped his full two-hundred-pound weight on top of him. He caught hold of the hairdresser’s left wrist and wrenched it backwards, so that he could hear all of his tendons snapping, like elastic bands. The hairdresser lost his grip on his Beretta, and Rick bent over and picked it up, pointing it between his eyes. The cat rushed out of the room as if all the demons in hell were chasing it.

The boxer backed into the corner by the window, holding up his knife. Rick said, ‘You want some advice, buddy? Drop it, before I drop you.’

But the boxer shifted the knife from one hand to the other. ‘You think you have the balls?’ He pronounced it ‘ballth’, which somehow made it sound more threatening.

Steve said, ‘Come on, feller. Put it down.’ He carefully stepped over Bill Pringle’s body and moved around the couch. Kathleen Pringle was whimpering in shock, and her daughter was holding on to her tightly.

‘What you going to do, man? Shoot me in cold blood? You’re not going to shoot me in cold blood.’

‘Try me,’ said Rick, aiming the Beretta at him.

Steve picked up a green brocade cushion from the couch, and held it up in front of him. The boxer stabbed at it, and changed hands with his knife again.

Noah approached him from the other side.

‘I’m going to gut one of you,’ said the boxer. ‘Come on, ladies, which one of you is it going to be?’

Steve dodged towards him, and then to his right. The boxer slashed at his cushion, and a blizzard of feathers blew out. He lurched around to face Noah, but Noah was much too quick for him. He side-stepped behind him, seizing his left wrist and twisting it up between his shoulder blades. Then he grabbed his right wrist, and jammed it upward.

The point of the boxer’s own knife went vertically straight into his lower jaw, just behind his chin, penetrating his tongue and crunching into his palate. His eyes widened, and blood spurted out from between his lips. He said, ‘
Mmmmfff
,
mmmmfff
,
mmmmfff
,’ and spun around, trying to tug it out. He fell against the wall, and then knocked over a side table with a lamp on it.

Rick went straight up to him and shot him in the ear. Blood splashed over the wall like a huge crimson chrysanthemum. Then he went back to the hairdresser, who was still lying on the floor behind the couch.

Noah said, ‘Jesus, Rick. You’re not going to shoot both of them?’

‘I thought we decided it was kill or be killed. We’re a hit squad, remember?’

‘Jesus. Yes, but Christ!’

Rick hunkered down beside the hairdresser and pointed the Beretta at his nose. The hairdresser flinched, and lifted one hand as if to shield himself.

‘You’re going to tell us who you are, and who sent you?’ Rick asked him.

‘Are you serious?’ said the hairdresser.

‘Oh, for sure. I’m serious.’

‘And if I tell you? What – you’ll off me anyhow?’

‘I’ll think about giving you a head start.’

The hairdresser lowered his hand. It had been a futile gesture, in any case. He gave Rick and Noah a tilted, rueful smile.

‘I’m sure glad my mom can’t see me now. She always wanted me to be a veterinarian.’

‘She still alive?’

‘Uh-hunh. Died of ovarian cancer, when I was eleven.’

Noah said, ‘Why don’t you tell us who sent you? What do you have to lose?’

The hairdresser dabbed the cat scratches on his cheeks with his fingertips. ‘It won’t do you any good, even if I tell you. You’re better off changing your names and going to live someplace where nobody knows you.’

‘Those medallions,’ said Noah.

‘Sure, they’re part of it, like the swastika was part of the Third Reich. But, like I say, you’re better off not knowing. They’ll find you, no matter what you do, and then—’ He made a throat-cutting gesture.