One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  I brought in my equipment and made my preparations. I was very absorbed in my work. Time seemed to fly.

  44

  I almost ate the dinner.

  I’d planned to go through with part of the meal, behaving exactly as I had the first two times, so they’d be at their most relaxed when I made my move, and I was actually reaching for one of the cups when it occurred to me why I shouldn’t.

  Hours and hours had gone by according to my stomach, but these were the same two silent waiters who brought me my meal. There was no twangy music to be heard this time when the door was open, but another guard was still visible outside before the door was shut. I hoped he’d turn out to be alone, or at least not with a crowd, when the time came.

  The meal this time was in three cups, containing pea soup, and milk, and very weak-looking coffee, plus the usual pear, and I was actually reaching for the pea soup when the word drug came into my mind.

  Why wouldn’t they? If it were up to me to keep somebody quiet and imprisoned for a day or two, I would be very likely to put a lot of sleeping pills or some such into his evening meal, and hold off the evening meal until late, so he’d scoff it down. I’d give him milk, to relax his stomach, and the weakest coffee I could get away with. I’d give him thick liquids in which he’d be unaware of the extra ingredient. Then, knowing that he was safely asleep, I could take some time off as well.

  “What is this?” I asked, changing my movement from a reach for the cup to a pointing at it.

  “Eat,” the talkative one said.

  I hadn’t known the performance would start this early. You have to psych yourself up to perform, and I’d thought I would have a few minutes to get used to the stage and the other players while I ate, but now the red light was on before I was ready, and my question had been simply a stall, a chance to reorganize my mind, to get ready for my entrance.

  “I don’t like pea soup,” I said, gesturing with my left hand while my right hand went under the sofa cushion. Improvisation; the scariest part of acting.

  The talker took a step forward, glowering at me. Good; take another step. “You eat,” he said, padding his line.

  I picked up the cup of soup with my left hand, as though to smell it, leaning forward over the coffee table, my right hand dragging behind me under the cushion, holding on. Shaking my head, I looked up at the talker and flung the soup and then the cup into his face. At the same time, just as I had been rehearsing it over and over for the last few hours, I pushed up with the back of my closed right hand, shoving the sofa cushion out of the way, so that when I stood, right hand swinging forward, the spear came with it. The spear: two long triangles of broken glass that had been part of the pane mounted in the dismantled poster’s frame, their wide ends wrapped in a couple of Ross’s old checks and attached by four red rubber bands to the end of one of the long lengths of metal poster frame.

  The second guy was still reacting with shock, staring as his friend pawed at the soup on his face. That one was occupied for the next few minutes, so it was the silent one I lunged at, spear out, gashing a great ragged tear along the left side of his neck. There’s an advantage to being six foot six, to having the kind of reach I possess.

  But I hadn’t thought about the blood. It spurted out like somebody finding oil, as though under terrific pressure. I jumped to the side, turning toward the other one, and the spray of blood splashed onto the wall and the sofa as the dying man made a bubbling noise, arms up like a doctor drying his hands, already falling backward.

  The talker was reaching for the automatic tucked into his belt. I slashed at him, and he threw his arms up, and the pieces of glass drew a pair of red lines on his right forearm. I drew back the spear and cut at him again, but he was backing quickly away, making a guttural shout.

  Would the guard or guards hear that outside? I had not been able to hear the music when the door was shut, not even when I pressed my ear to the crack beside the jamb, so it should be safe. But not too many shouts, please, not too many. I lunged again, this time slicing sharp glass across the backs of his fingers as they closed on his gunbutt.

  He tripped over his fallen friend, and as he toppled backward I jumped forward and landed with both socked feet on his chest. His mouth opened, his eyes looked agonized, and before I could tell myself not to, I swung my spear like a golf club across the exposed target of his throat.

  God, it’s different. On PACKARD I’d done most of my own fights, being pretty good at pulling the punches and doing the falls, and the difference was like the difference on that videotape of Ross’s, between Delia West “dying” and Delia West dead. Already this small room was filling with terrible cloying smells. The things on the floor were too horrible to look at, and I had done it. I had been angry, and I had been afraid, and that’s a dangerous combination; it can make you do atrocious things.

  But now both those emotions had suddenly simply vanished from my mind, burned up in the adrenaline surge. My condition was almost as desperate as it had been, my being here in the first place was still just as random and unfair, and yet neither fear nor fury was in me anymore. What I felt now was mostly sick.

  I didn’t want to look at the people I’d killed, but I needed their weapons. My eyes kept squinting and I swallowed bile as I went down on one knee in the open space of the V their bodies made. First one gun, then the other, and I could concentrate now on the tools rather than the human beings.

  These were both standard .45 caliber Colt automatics, not precisely like my issue back in the army, but close enough. Ours had been black, these were a foggy brushed chrome. Nor, now that I looked at them, did the word Colt appear anywhere on them; they merely each had a set of numbers and letters stamped into the left side below the safety. Third World ripoffs of the Colt design, probably a little less precise, possibly a much cheaper grade of metal that would stretch and warp from the heat after not much use at all. But enough, I hoped, to get me out of here.

  Out of here. The look of them, the smell of them. If I stayed in here much longer, I’d be sick. Worse, I’d lose my strength, my resolve; I’d merely collapse in here until they came to get me.

  I put one of the automatics in under my belt, butt to the left for my left hand. The other was in my right hand as I reached out to open the door.

  45

  The guard outside, like the two I’d just killed, was dressed in worn boots, dark trousers, and a dark cotton workshirt. His complexion was olive, his hair black and curly, and he wore a thick moustache as though it were a badge of rank, or a requirement for the job. His gun was tucked in under his belt, so when he glanced in a bored way at the door when it opened, and then saw me, with the gun in my hand pointing at him, he at first looked startled, then made as though to reach for his own weapon, then realized that was hopeless and froze.

  Were there others, out of my sight? I put my left forefinger to my lips, to shush him, then patted the air downward to tell him to look more relaxed, then crooked my finger at him to say he should come join me in the room.

  He didn’t want to. He stood there blinking at me, quite naturally afraid of the unknown, so the second time I made the invitation I gestured as well with the automatic, and made myself look very stem, and that had the effect. In he came, walking reluctantly, and he would have put his hands up in the air if I hadn’t repeated that down-patting motion.

  I didn’t want him to see the bodies too early, and panic, so the instant he was across the threshold I took his arm and turned him to face the wall just beside the door. Even if he looked to his left now, across the doorway, the open door would block his view. With my own gun in his back I reached around and relieved him of his, then very cautiously leaned my head out through the doorway to look in both directions at what proved to be an empty hall.

  All right. I searched my man—I couldn’t bring myself to search the dead ones—and came up with Marlboro cigarettes, you-can-complete-high-school-at-home matches, some change, a four-inch switchblade knife, some sort of st
ringed prayer beads or worry beads, a plastic card all in Arabic, and a thick wallet. I left everything else, took the knife, and relieved him of his belt, to replace my own.

  The Yale-type key was in the lock on the outside of the door. Making the shush gesture again, not speaking, I stepped outside and locked him—them—in.

  I was in the downstairs hall now, and as I remembered the house from my occasional visits, the dining room and kitchen were down to the right, with the front door beyond. Living room, library, and perhaps other rooms were the opposite way. The door diagonally across the hall from the safe room was the downstairs powder room, and just beyond it, toward the rear, were the main stairs up to the second floor.

  I must have looked just then like a close business associate of Pancho Villa’s. I had an automatic pistol in my hand, no shoes, and two more guns tucked into a black leather belt going one and a half times around my waist. Still, I doubted I’d impress the Barq crowd by my appearance alone, so the thing to do was get out of there. I moved silently—in socks—down the hall, listening, moving with extreme caution.

  There was no more twangy music. In fact, there was no sound at all. The house couldn’t possibly be empty, yet that was the way it felt. I checked before crossing the open kitchen and dining room doorways, and both rooms were empty, though well lit. Could it be this easy?

  No.

  At the front door I saw what my problem was going to be. The exterior lights were on, or at least some of them, not enough to attract a lot of attention from the neighbors, but sufficient to bathe the house itself in illumination. From the front door, looking out through the curtain and the glass, I could see two Barq people, one on the lawn in front and one around to the side on the slate walk between house and garage. Both were seated on folding chairs, facing the house. There would surely be two more of them as well, in the rear and on the other side, so that the whole house was under surveillance, and the fact that they were out there mostly because of Ross and Doreen rather than me didn’t help that much.

  How much time did I have? The food deliverers would be missed eventually. Before that, someone might stroll down the hallway and wonder why the guard wasn’t on duty in front of the safe-room door. But there wasn’t any way I was going to get out of this house and across the well-lit grounds and over the wall, not without being seen, and my height and hair color made it unlikely I could disguise myself as just another passing conspirator.

  Well, if I couldn’t get out, maybe I could bring reinforcements in. The phone here was monitored, I knew that, but a quick call from one of the extensions— maybe upstairs—should do the job. With one last look at the patient sentries on their folding chairs, I turned away and hurried back down the hallway, past my former prison, and on up the wide doubling-back stairs.

  I’d never been up here before. As with downstairs, a broad carpeted hallway ran the width of the house, but up here there were more doors, a few open, most closed. For no particular reason I chose to turn right—toward the front door, that would be, downstairs—and passed one shut door before coming to an opening on my right which, when I peered cautiously in, turned out to be Ross’s office.

  Why not? I went in, closing the door behind me. As with the other rooms I’d seen, this one was well-lit, from a fluorescent lamp on the desk and a glass-shaded floor lamp over by the black leather reading chair and a pair of ceiling spots aimed at a giant six-foot-square acrylic painting of tumbled gray boulders.

  Crossing the room, I went around behind the desk and, before seating myself, glanced out the window.

  There was the rear of the house, the dirt-filled pool very obvious now with the exterior lights on. There was the expected guard, seated at a white wrought-iron chair on the patio, his ugly little machine pistol on the white round table beside him, looking like some obscure tool in the plumbing trade.

  The pool-company van was gone.

  From this angle I could see the right rear corner of the garage, and the space behind it where the van had been. That area was mostly in shadow now, but out a ways it seemed to me I could see faint indentations of tire tracks in the shaggy lawn, out beyond the pool, angling out away from the house.

  I knew, from previous visits here, that the stone wall at the front and sides of this property gave way to a high chain link fence at the back, topped with a spiral of razor wire, the whole thing artfully overgrown with vines and shrubbery. To make a new entrance in a stone wall would be time-consuming and difficult, but to make a new entrance through vines and a chain link fence required only wire cutters. And out there somewhere was Al-Gazel.

  I turned to the desk, which was a more elaborate version of Ross’s complex miniature habitat out in Malibu. There was the phone. There was the digital clock, reading 11:04, switching to 11:05 as I looked at it. There were the keyboard, the monitor screen, the printer, and there was the drawer of floppy discs. There was more neatness in this office than in Malibu, the vast scumble of research materials having been forced back to the outer suburbs of the desk, leaving only one pale blue manila folder centered in the main work area, just to the left of the word processor’s keyboard.

  I sat down. The phone, tan in color, was part of a minor switchboard operation, with several incoming lines and an in-house intercom; all in all, a more elaborate setup than mine at home. The push buttons were in the receiver, between the ear and mouthpieces, but when I picked the phone up and put it to my ear—a green light showed on the panel—there was no dial tone.

  They’ve turned it off? Just at night, that would have to be. By day they would need the phone working so Ross could continue to create the appearance of normality here, but at night they could switch it off, protecting themselves, just in case Ross or Doreen had a change of heart or, more remotely, in case I broke out of my prison.

  How much longer would they need Ross and, by extension, Doreen and me? They would be setting up tonight, and I had no doubt they’d figured out a way to neutralize those microwave barriers, so after their preparations were complete they would still be undetected. In the morning there would probably be very heavy security throughout this entire area, with the police possibly doing telephone checks and even random checks in person of the houses all around here. Then there would be the explosion.

  They’d want to still be here for that, wouldn’t they? Partly to see the results of their labors, but mostly because remote-control gizmos can fail, and they would want to be sure, after all their work. So they would be here at the time of the explosion, this army of people— how many? a dozen? two dozen?—and for some time after all the dynamite blew it would not be possible for them to leave here and try driving away from this part of town. The police presence after the explosion would be intense, and Ross would still have the job of front man, sounding chipper and normal on the phone, being friendly but firmly aware of his householder’s rights if any lawmen actually came to his gate.

  (Would Deputy Ken be back at Ross’s gate, seeing the connection, more insistent than last time? It would be too late for Al-Gazel by then, and all the people in it, even if he did come back, and Ross, the plausible middle-class householder in this affluent neighborhood, would probably still be able to stall and stall and hold off police interference until he’d managed to get us all killed.)

  So it would go on until tomorrow night, probably, when under cover of darkness the Barq group could leave, either openly through the front gate or, if the police were showing too much interest outside, surreptitiously through neighboring yards and houses. Just twenty-four hours from now, maybe a little more, and Ross’s partnership with Barq would be over, closed out with bullets in three heads. A great relief to those boys, no doubt, not to have to play the game anymore, not to have to go along with Ross’s stupid demands, not to have to accommodate his girlfriend and his actor pal. And then, a few hours later, away the whole company would go, free and clear.

  I need my own army, I thought. But how? I couldn’t get out of the house, and the phone would stay dead unt
il it no longer mattered.

  Looking around, I noticed again the blue folder centered on the desk. It was pale blue, and a white label had been pasted to it, with a title:

  FIRE OVER BEVERLY HILLS

  Ross’s file. Ross’s file on this. I reached out and opened the folder.

  46

  It was dedicated—I still find this hard to believe—it was dedicated to Doreen and me. This is what was typed on the first sheet of paper I came to inside the folder:

  For Doreen Kaufman and Sam Holt,

  who put up with a lot—

  I hope they think it was worth it.

  Insane. The man was completely involved in the fantasy.

  But still a professional, I saw, as I turned beyond the dedication page. The material in the folder consisted of three sorts of things: First, variant outlines of the book, with notes for treatment and viewpoint and why thus-and-so should go before this-and-that. Second, rough first draft segments, none more than a few pages long, of specific moments in the story, such as the first time he saw the Delia West tape and the first time he met with the Barq people. Third, extensive notes on the conspiracy itself.

  Barq, it turned out, was actually who they were. Their organization’s precise name was Barq Cyrenica, which Ross translated as “Cyrenician lightning,” explaining that Cyrenica—or, more usually, Cyrenaica— was an ancient coastal North African region around the once-important port city of Cyrene, variously a part of the Egyptian and Roman empires, and now, with Tripolitania and Fezzanya, one of the three segments of Libya. Barq Cyrenica was a rogue fundamentalist Islamic sect, at times pledging itself to the Iranian ayatollahs or to Libya’s Colonel Qadhafi. It had been held responsible for several murders of Arab emigres in Europe, but this was apparently its first operation in the United States.