Time to Kill (3 page)

‘It must be awful to lose everybody and everything like that,' said David.

‘It is. And it's something you're never going to know,' guaranteed Slater, working to cut off the discussion.

‘I'm sorry!' apologized David, at once. ‘It's just that—'

‘I know,' interrupted Slater. ‘Let's not think or talk about it any more.'

That night, secure in their double sleeping bag, but again not having made love despite neither of them still being tired, Ann said, ‘It's not going to go away.'

‘I'll handle it.'

‘We're going to have to be very careful.'

‘Don't worry.'

‘I do worry.'

‘We'll be OK. We knew it was going to happen, sooner or later. He's accepted that you were an orphan, with no known family. It's obvious he'll keep on to me.'

Ann turned away from him, to fit herself comfortably against his bent legs. ‘I don't want the bubble to burst.'

‘I promise you it won't.'

‘Ordinary looking son of a bitch,' judged John Peebles, gazing down at the arrest file photographs of Jack Mason.

‘They usually are,' said Barry Bourne. Both CIA relocation clerks assigned to the Justice Department were comfortable in their cocoons, insulated against any disruption or stress, their only responsibility to monitor and keep up to date Cold War defection and witness protection cases.

‘You ever come across him before?'

‘How the hell could I! It's years ago, long dead history.'

Peebles, a bespectacled, angularly featured man, flicked through the file until he came upon Dimitri Sobell's picture. ‘Ordinary again, the guy next to you on the Metro.'

‘If they'd had horns and tails it would have made it easier to recognize them as bad guys,' said Bourne, a fan of late-night one-liner gangster movies.

‘You think guys who did what Mason did should get remission?'

‘Whatever damage they caused between them, it was a long time ago,' said Bourne, shrugging. ‘Damned glad I didn't work here then.'

‘Guess I'd better see what the penitentiary records say about Mason. And warn Sobell he's about to be released.'

‘Never understand why we bother,' said Bourne. ‘There's a
Dragnet
rerun on TV tonight. You gonna watch it?'

‘Hadn't thought about it.'

‘You should. It's a classic.'

Three

‘C
alifornia!'

‘Your idea for us setting up a business together was with computers, with my security input, right? California is where the computer industry is. So that's where I told the warden I was thinking of moving to.' Having identified the West Coast to the governor as his most likely resettlement area, Mason was observing the universal intelligence mantra of preventing the accidental disclosure of any lie. It wasn't likely that Chambers would talk about their going into business, but there was no way of predicting what the fat fuck would say when he underwent his release interview. Every base had to be covered.

‘I don't like California.'

‘I do.'

‘The computer industry isn't that centralized any more – that was years ago. It isn't like that now.'

‘How the fuck do you know! You've been inside for almost fifteen years!'

‘And kept in touch with the outside as much as you have.'

‘I'll check out California, until your release – see what I think about the potential.' This shouldn't really be coming to him as such a surprise: hadn't he known for years of the burden Chambers was going to be?

‘I was thinking of New Orleans, maybe. I like New Orleans.'

He hadn't thought this conversation through sufficiently, Mason accepted, self-critically. The admission unsettled him. Just as quickly, though, he saw the potential unconsidered benefit. Their penitentiary association would be thrown up on day one of any investigation into Chambers' killing, if there was the slightest doubt about the supposed accident Chambers' death would appear to be. And the last thing Mason intended to risk was having that association – his face and his name, even though he was shortly to discard the identity – emblazoned across every television screen in the country. Pleased with the quickness with which the complete recovery came to him, Mason said, ‘Let's slow this down a little, Peter. All I told Harrison was that California might be a good place for me to look at when I got out. I didn't say anything about you and I setting up together. And I don't think you should, either. What the fuck right has anyone got to know what we're going to do! You get asked, you say New Orleans. We don't tell them anything.'

‘You're right!' said the other man, with forced belligerence. ‘What the fuck right do they have to know what we're going to do! We paid already.'

The totally controlled Mason kept any reaction from his face but thought how predictably like a programmed bank official the other man was; if he hadn't known – and hacked into the prison records to confirm – the countrywide scam Chambers had so brilliantly conceived, Mason wouldn't have believed it possible for such an ineffectual man to have carried it off. The fact that the man had eventually been caught proved his limitations, Mason supposed. Unlike himself. He hadn't been arrested for any mistakes he made: he'd been served up on a plate when the motherfucker Sobell defected.

‘That's my boy! I stay with California, you stay with New Orleans, not a word to anyone about what we're planning. When we decide which or where we want to be, we make our own minds up. Fuck 'em.'

Chambers' bravado enthusiasm wavered. ‘We can't just buck parole.'

Jesus, this wasn't going to be easy, Mason thought. ‘Who said anything about bucking parole? We both chipped off five years by working the system their way. We don't dump it all down the toilet the moment we step outside the gate.'

‘Whatever you say.'

That's how it was always going to be until he got his hot hands on the three million dollars, thought Mason: whatever he said, whenever he said it, however he said it. ‘Which means there can't be any contact between us, once I get out. No letters, no phone calls, OK?'

‘OK,' said Chambers, doubtfully.

‘So I need to know where to find you.'

Chambers frowned. ‘I don't have a place. Why don't I come to you?'

‘Because I don't know where I'll be in six months' time, when you're released. And I just explained to you why we can't keep in touch while you're still inside.'

‘What we going to do?' asked the former bank official.

Mason suppressed the sigh. ‘You were living in New York when you got arrested, right?'

‘Right.'

‘So that's the parole board you'll have to report to, initially,' reminded Mason. ‘Pick a hotel, a big one – a convention place, maybe – where we'll disappear in the crowd. You're due out when, the 26th, 27th, somewhere around then?'

‘The 25th,' supplied Chambers.

‘I'll call you on the 28th, after you've had time to settle in and maybe sort your parole. We'll celebrate.'

‘That sounds good.'

‘All you've got to decide is the hotel.' Allowing himself the irritation, Mason added, ‘You got five weeks to think about it: after that, I'm gone.'

Another of Mason's self-taught disciplines was objectivity, and objectively he recognized that his irritation wasn't motivated by Chambers' vapid dependency but by there having been no CIA access to his records from which to discover Dimitri Sobell's new identity and whereabouts. With further discomforting realism Mason was increasingly coming to fear that the CIA warning system had changed and that he was not, after all, going to be able to follow the easy route to Sobell. Compounding that discomfort – discomfort wasn't sufficient: scourging, eye-tearing frustration – was his awareness that he hadn't evolved an alternative way to find the man upon whom he was going to impose every suffering.

Chambers totally missed the contempt. ‘It's going to be great, you and I.'

‘Great,' echoed Mason, hollowly, as an echo is a hollow sound.

Mason had not expected – nor been warned until the previous evening – that he would be taken from White Deer for his interview with the Washington DC parole board ahead of his release and was glad one of his most recent hacking expeditions had been to study the regulations governing the procedure. He became even more grateful when Frank Howitt announced that he was to be the escort for the tightly scheduled, one-day trip. It was not until Mason put on the suit in which he had been sentenced, and not worn since, that he realized how preposterously out of date he appeared: he so obviously looked like a long-term convict. The perpetual exercise, over all the years, had virtually changed his physical shape and maybe, apart from his face, his very appearance, so much so that the clothes were those of a smaller, different person. The jacket was strained across his expanded, muscled shoulders, which in turn shortened the sleeves way above his wrists, while the waistband of his trousers was too wide for his now taut waist, puddling the pant cuffs around his ankles.

The sniggering Howitt said, ‘You've no idea what a fucking mess you look!'

The chief prison guard was in plainclothes, too, encased in a suit Mason judged to be only marginally better than his, looking like a chrysalis about to burst, although not to release anything of beauty. Mason said, ‘I'll play Laurel to your Hardy.'

Howitt's face tightened. ‘You'll jump to whatever string I pull. I'm going to enjoy myself today.'

It was a set up, Mason decided. In all his near fifteen years in a penitentiary he had never heard or known of an about-to-be-released prisoner being escorted to such a parole board interview. He needed to be extremely careful, alert to everything.

As Mason pondered this, Howitt said, ‘Which arm do you want, left or right?'

‘Arm?' queried Mason.

‘To be cuffed. You don't think I'm going to trust you not to run, do you!'

‘Don't be a cunt.'

‘It's against regulations to swear at a prison officer,' seized Howitt, at once.

Mason hesitated before extending his left wrist, his face fixed against the intentional, painful tightness. Mason guessed his wrist would be chaffed raw by the time he'd gone to and from Washington DC.

‘That's better,' smirked Howitt.

Maybe better for me than for you, thought Mason. His suspicion grew within minutes when they left the penitentiary without any sign-out formalities. Gerry Garson, an acolyte guard who always stayed close enough to Howitt to have his dick up the chief's ass, was at the wheel of a battered ‘99 Ford, in street clothes, not uniform. Mason memorized the registration. There was a sharp stab of pain in his wrist as he got awkwardly into the rear. Mason timed his move as Howitt prepared to enter, seemingly to make room for the huge man. The effect was to topple the right-handedly restricted man almost full length across the rear seat. As Howitt floundered himself upright, Mason said, ‘You all right there, Frankie?'

‘You fuck with me, you're going to lose,' threatened Howitt.

‘Fuck with you how, Frankie? What have I done?' Mason saw Howitt twitch with the pain in his wrist, only just holding back. Garson's uncertainty was reflected in the rear-view mirror.

Howitt became aware of his colleague's reaction from the driver's seat. ‘You OK about the schedule, Gerry?'

Garson moved off before replying. Even then he just said, ‘Uh huh.'

‘Everything on time?'

‘Uh huh.'

‘You OK, Gerry? You don't sound so sure,' said Mason.

‘I told you to shut the fuck up!' demanded Howitt, who finally managed to cover his bruised and injured arm.

Mason looked away from the man and stared intensely at his first sight for fifteen years of the flat surrounding countryside – of anything – outside the penitentiary, having been refused compassionate release for his mother's funeral. The lifers fantasized of release being like arriving from another world, and to a degree that was how it seemed to Mason. He was instantly aware that he hadn't prepared himself by half, a quarter even, and that his minutely planned schedule needed possible readjustment. He abruptly felt a hollow emptiness like literally being an alien. He couldn't remember, couldn't think – which was fucking ridiculous – what he'd expected, apart from noise and bustle and people. Even accepting, as he did, that White Deer was isolated, there was none of that. None of anything. A few cars passed, quietly. There were cows in a distant field. Even further away, on a jagged skyline, a coalfield rig: a lot of smoke, certainly. Did smoke overhang a coalfield? Whatever it was, it was industrial. In the first one-street township – what the fuck was its name; surely he should be able to remember the nearest town! – the neon advertisements flashed and glittered their Las Vegas copy, too cluttered for any of it to be read or understood, but there still weren't the people there should have been, the noise and the activity he'd held for all these years in his mind and wanted to see, to be part of again.

Unnecessarily – disconcertingly – Howitt said, ‘This is the outside, asshole: the other, real world. I wanted you to see it, to know how inadequate you're going to be out here, among it, not knowing what the fuck to do.'

Mason remained staring away, unspeaking, sure which of them was the most inadequate. It was a hell of a temptation not to put Howitt back on his personal disposal list. But he wouldn't. It would all be too easily linked, if Chambers' death and that of Dimitri Sobell ever became suspected to be anything but accidental, which he didn't intend them to be but against which he had to protect himself.

‘Think about it!' demanded the man overflowing into Mason's part of the seat. ‘Think what it's going to be like out there. You know any more how many cents make a dollar? How much change to expect when you buy a beer from a ten? How to fuck a woman, after fucking Chambers for so long?'