The Shadow Man (14 page)

Robert Arlen walked along Fifth Avenue to West Forty-second Street, down West Forty-second toward Broadway. He strolled casually through the cold, neon-glazed night as if he had no destination, seemingly preoccupied and unaware. But he was aware of everything going on around him.

Dressed in Andrews’ dark slacks, black turtleneck sweater and tan jacket, the outfit he and Graham had decided was most distinctly Andrews’ during his New York misadventures, Arlen stayed merely on the fringes of the areas that had been frequented by Andrews. From a distance, and not a very great distance, he would certainly be mistaken for Andrews. The same clothes, same mannerisms, same walk, same haunts.

Behind Arlen was another CIA agent, unobtrusive and watching. Ahead of Arlen was the trailing agent’s counterpart. Both men were experts in the art of being invisible. So shadowed, Arlen felt as safe as possible under the circumstances. He was himself thoroughly trained in the martial arts, and he carried tucked in a leather holster in the small of his back a snubnosed Smith and Wesson .38 revolver that was an effective killer at close quarters. He had used it before and was confident of its deadliness.

Arlen had been walking for more than two hours now, and nothing suspicious had occurred. The bait remained untouched.

He was startled for a moment by a blast of sound, but it turned out to be only a slim black youth lugging one of those oversized tape players. The youth walked on at a purposeful fast clip, white vinyl boots flashing. The raucous music was soon lost in the mingled night sounds of Times Square.

After another hour on sidewalks now packed with tourists and theatergoers, Arlen decided that the night had been wasted. Stepping out of the way of a wizened gray-haired woman attentively being escorted by a swarthy young professional in a blue tuxedo, he headed back toward the Hayes Hotel.

He nodded to the old bellhop near the brass revolving door at the hotel entrance and crossed the carpeted lobby to the elevators. There was one other passenger in the elevator, a man carrying a salesman’s sample case, a raincoat draped over his free arm. Arlen leaned against the steel wall of the elevator and nonchalantly moved his right hand around nearer his gun.

But the salesman, in the manner of elevator passengers, studiously avoided Arlen and surveyed the ceiling. At the third floor he got out and disappeared down the hall, walking as if he had sore feet, fishing in his pocket for his room key.

When he reached Andrews’ room, Arlen flashed his ultra-violet penlight at the doorknob and saw that the chemical that glowed only under the flashlight beam was undisturbed. He unlocked the door and entered.

The room was silent, still lighted softly by the fixture in the alcove by the bathroom. Arlen took off his jacket and tossed it over a chair. Then he decided to remove the sweater. He hated turtlenecks. They were too confining. He didn’t even like to wear a necktie.

As he crossed his arms and was pulling the sweater over his head, he heard the closet door open.

He managed to work one arm free before something was clamped firmly about his neck, cutting off his wind. Arlen didn’t panic; he remembered that the room had been wired for sound and tried desperately to yell. But the pressure on his windpipe increased brutally, choking off sound. His free arm was pinned tightly behind him, up between his shoulder blades. Frantically, he thrashed out with his legs, trying to upset something to make enough noise to attract help. But the only sound was that of his feet thumping softly on the carpet.

The light behind his eyelids became red, deepened to a black that was dotted by bursting pinpoints of brightness. Then he was unfeeling, drifting . . .

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Underwood said.

Graham stood behind him, staring down at Arlen. “I don’t understand how it could have.”

Arlen was sitting on the sofa, rubbing his bruised and reddened neck. He said nothing; it hurt him almost unbearably to speak. When he had regained consciousness, he’d crawled slowly across the carpet in agony and deliberately knocked over a lamp, and within seconds the help that should have arrived an hour before burst in.

Graham was there almost immediately, and, shortly thereafter, Underwood. Underwood wore the annoyed, impatient look of a man who’d been bested at some highly competitive game because he’d allowed himself to become distracted.

With great pain and effort, Arlen explained to them what had happened.

Graham paced to the window. It was unlocked. “He might have lowered himself from one of the floors above,” he said. “But dammit, Keeler across the street should have seen him!”

“Yet it
is
possible that he got in that way,” Underwood said thoughtfully.

“It’s the only way he could have got in, and he had to be lucky to get in that way.”

“Or skillful,” Underwood remarked. “Incredibly skillful.”

“The rest was easy enough,” Graham said. “Once he gained entry, he hid in the closet and waited for Andrews’ —or Arlen’s return. Then he chose his opportunity.”

“And during the struggle, the sweater never was removed from around Arlen’s head ... ”

Graham nodded. That was the one break they’d had, apparently. Aside from the fact that Arlen still was alive. “So even if our man would know the difference between the two men close up,” Graham said, “he still thinks he killed Andrews.”

Underwood walked to the window and looked outside. “But he didn’t kill him. That’s what worries me.” He turned back toward Graham. “He was good enough to get in here without being seen, then he bungled the job. He didn’t kill him.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t think he scored,” Graham said. “Maybe he was scared off.” He was watching Underwood carefully.

“It doesn’t take long to garrote a man,” Underwood said sharply. He sounded almost as if he were disappointed in the intruder for not completing his work. Graham, who knew Underwood as well as anyone did, realized that he was reacting to being puzzled. It disturbed Underwood to be puzzled.

Several people walked by outside in the hall, happily chattering about nothing consequential. A woman giggled. Theirs was a different world, with problems unlike those confronting the three men insulated in the room.

“We have to find a way now to let him know he failed in his attempt to kill Andrews,” Graham said.

Underwood smiled, as if experiencing a sudden, subtle revelation. “Do we?” he said.

They liked to ski in the early-morning light, when the snow had a brittle white freshness about it and the pines and rocky crags cast distorting shadows that were dangerous. Andrews and Pat were both good skiers, though Andrews had taken up skiing only two years ago. Pat had skied since her college days in upper New York state.

For over an hour they tested their abilities on the angled slopes, sideslipping and doing difficult stem turns, building speed and feeling the freedom that skiing provides. As they swept across white spaces, Andrews admired the superior ability of the graceful figure in red jacket and stretch pants skiing ahead of him.

It was just cool enough to see faint wisps of vapor from their breathing as Andrews and Pat crouched low and traced a lazy, zigzag course back toward the cabin.

One of Andrews’ boots came loose from its binding, and he flexed his knees and swiveled his hips, turning to brake with the edge of one long, sideways-flung ski. A spray of snow described a graceful pure arc as he stopped midway down the slope.

He watched Pat plant a ski pole, crouch lower and snake around a dark outcropping of rock as if it were a slalom pylon, as she continued toward the cabin.

Andrews knelt and carefully refastened the boot in its binding. In the silence of the mountain he could hear the soft rasping of his breathing, and cold began seeping along his flesh where his gloves didn’t quite meet his jacket sleeves and the back of his shirt had stretched and risen above his belt.

By the time he’d straightened and was ready to continue down the slope, Pat had disappeared beyond the stand of pines near the cabin. Andrews reflected that she probably was already leaning her skis against the wall by the door, or possibly was already inside, sitting on the sofa removing her ski boots and heavy wool socks. He leaned forward, planted his ski poles and pushed off down the mountain.

He hadn’t gone far when he saw a dark rise of rock slightly to the left of his projected path.

Alarms jangled in the back of his mind. Andrews had skied for two seasons on the mountain, and he didn’t remember that angle of rock emerging above snow this deep. He began to snowplow to slow his speed as he approached the dark protruberance.

From a hundred feet away, he saw that it was not a rock; its contour was too smooth and strangely symmetrical.

From fifty feet away, he saw that what he’d mistaken for a rock was a body, lying facedown, partly on its side and half concealed by the light snow that had fallen last night. A sudden breeze momentarily covered the dark form with a powdery white shroud.

Andrews spun to the side, digging in his poles, and stood staring down at the body.

It was the corpse of a man, hatless, dressed in a twisted blue overcoat pulled halfway up over the back of his head. The face wasn’t visible.

Andrews felt his numbness wear off to be replaced by confusion, an enraged sort of pity for the man at his feet and then fear. He made himself kneel and clutch the stiff material of the coat. Then he forced himself to shift the body so he could see the face.

He stood up with a hollow, inward breath of shock.

The dead man was Underwood. He’d been strangled by a thin wire with such force that his throat had been cut to create beneath his chin a gaping, lipless red grin.

“Fall down, slowpoke?” Pat asked Andrews from where she sat curled in a corner of the sofa. The fire Andrews had laid before they left the cabin was now crackling and blazing, shadowing Pat’s face in subtle mobile tones and brightening her eyes.

Andrews locked the cabin door behind him. He’d left his skis on the porch.

Gravity seemed to increase and overcome the contented expression on Pat Colombo’s face. “What’s wrong?” she asked, in a voice also slowed by ponderous weight.

“I found a body up the slope.”

Pat didn’t understand what he meant.

“A dead body,” Andrews said. “It’s Samuel Underwood.”

For several seconds Pat stared at him. “The same Underwood ...?” She knew her question was unnecessary and let her voice trail off.

“The same,” Andrews said. He was unexpectedly calm, yet his heart was racing. The sudden heat of the cabin was beginning to make him perspire.

“What does it mean?” Pat asked. “What was he doing here?”

Andrews crossed the room, removed his down ski jacket and tried to think of the answers to Pat’s questions. He could think of nothing but the horror-struck, puzzled expression on Underwood’s face, and the unnatural gaping grin beneath his chin.
What did it mean?
he repeated Pat’s question to himself.
Could any of it be explained?

The telephone rang.

Andrews’ body jerked as if the sound had penetrated his flesh.

No one could know they were here. And the telephone had ceased to exist to Andrews; it had never rung. Never.

It rang two more times while he stood frozen. It was the only sound in the world.

He walked to the phone, and on the fifth ring he lifted the receiver and raised it to his ear.

“Senator Andrews,” a deep, level voice said, “this is Paul Liggett.”

Nels Graham’s car was in the lead as the three identical late-model gray Pontiacs threaded their way up the narrow highway toward the isolated town of Perith. They were now the only cars on that remote section of highway, traveling above the posted cautionary speed limit, maintaining equal distances from each other, conveying a sense of perfectly controlled haste.

Graham sat next to his driver, Tom Mathison, peering through the windshield at the increasingly steep and rocky country around them. To his left and higher, he could see vast fields of white through slowly dissipating mist, and here and there off the sides of the highway were isolated, irregular patches of snow preserved in low spots. Graham turned his head slightly sideways and forward to squint up at the sky. There was plenty of blue showing, but a bank of low gray clouds appeared to be moving in, devouring the blue in a measured and unstoppable advance.

He was watching a spidery, windblown pattern of light snow cross the highway when the car suddenly braked to a halt, sharply enough to pitch him forward so that he had to support himself with a hand on the padded dashboard.

“Jesus!” he said, glancing at Mathison.

Mathison merely nodded, a single forward pecking motion, indicating that Graham should look in the direction they had been driving.

On the crest of a slight rise in the highway, where the mountain sloped down on the left and there was a steep drop to the right, a rockslide had blocked the road.

“Isn’t that just fine!” Graham said with acid irony.

He and Mathison got out of the warm car and walked forward to examine the rockslide more closely. Two men from the other cars joined them. They all stood for a few seconds without speaking, soberly confronting the unexpected obstacle.

The rockslide was over five feet high and extended the width of the road. Some of the smaller rocks had gone over the edge of the highway to scatter on the slope beyond. There was no way to clear a path for the cars. no way to go around the blockage.

“How far is Perith?” Graham asked Mathison. He was shivering. It was cold at this altitude.

“About five miles.”

Graham stared thoughtfully out over the sweep of angled, pine-covered mountainside. A hawk, or possibly a small vulture, circled effortlessly with fixed wings against a blue patch of morning sky, as if flaunting its freedom.

“Let’s look at the map,” Graham said, “and see if there’s a way around this mess.”

He returned with Mathison to the car and they spread the road map out on the hood. The turned-off engine began to tick rapidly. Metal cooling.

“This way looks best,” Mathison suggested after a few minutes. He traced a squarish forefinger along the crinkled map.

Graham followed the course of the fingertip with his eyes. The heat rising from the car’s hood felt good in the brisk air. “That means going all the way back to the main highway,” he said, when Mathison was finished.

“But it looks like the surest way, sir.”

Graham bent closer to study the map. “This way would be shorter.” His own forefinger traced a course.

“That doesn’t look like much of a road,” Mathison said, pointing to the faint blue line that cut from highway to highway. “And it might be closed off just like this one.”

“It’s worth the chance,” Graham said. “It saves miles.” He glanced quickly about. “Can we turn the cars around here?” he asked, with sudden doubt that wasn’t revealed in his voice.

“Sure,” Mathison said, “but it’ll be touchy.”

Graham nodded. “Let’s tell the others what’s going on.”

“Yes, sir.” Mathison reached through the rolled-down window and tapped the horn.

“Not that way!” Graham snapped, shooting an upward glance at the looming mountain that had produced the rockslide. “You’ll kill us all.”