“We sit around that apartment just waiting. I want to see Felicity. I mean it, Laidlaw.”
“Unfortunately you don’t sit around that apartment, Mr. Showers. You and your Mr. Joyce have been all over Ottawa, searching for Miss Stuart. I must ask you to stop. Her situation is difficult enough. You are only making it more dangerous for her.”
There was a distant, rolling percussion—the cannon of noon in Majors’ Hill Park again.
“Making what more dangerous for her?”
“Porique will be in Ottawa tomorrow. You may see her after you talk with him.”
“Talk with him where?”
“At the House of Commons. At the opening of the debate on the constitutional amendments.”
“Guy is a fugitive. You say he’ll be at the debate?”
“Yes. He means to interfere with it.”
“Interfere how?”
“That is one of the things I’m depending on you to find out.”
“You’re going to arrange for a meeting with him?”
“No. You’ll have to do that yourself.”
“How?”
“I wish I knew, Mr. Showers.”
The deputy dropped Thatcher off at a townhouse on J Street the Agency used as a base for domestic operations in Washington. With just three calls over an emergency line to Langley, he had an “A” team assembled and dispatched to the Watergate. Taking the George Washington Parkway and the Roosevelt Bridge across the Potomac, they reached the building in eighteen minutes. Sixteen minutes after that, they had three microphones in place along the corridor wall outside Arthur Jordine’s apartment and a recording van disguised as a telephone company truck parked outside on Virginia Avenue and operating. If Nixon had used professionals like these instead of that crew of antic bumblers in 1972 he might have had a more honorable place in the history books.
Four minutes after the Watergate team reported readiness, Thatcher received a coded radio message. The tail car he had ordered was in place and waiting on Belmont Road just up from the French Embassy. A backup car was positioned around the corner and across the Rock Creek bridge at Whitehaven and Massachusetts Avenue.
Thatcher puffed his cigar a moment, reexamining his plan for possible defects and inadequacies. He should have had a telephoto-camera set up on Roosevelt Island across the channel from the Jordine apartment, but that could wait. He had to deal with the moment.
He picked up his phone and had a call patched through the regular Langley switchboard.
“Allo. Ambassade de France.”
“Monsier Argent, please.”
“Un moment, s’il vous plait.”
Thatcher had to identify himself clearly before Argent’s secretary would put him on the line, but when he had done so Argent came on the line almost immediately, effusively amiable.
“William! How are you? I saw you lunching at Chez Camille the other day, but you and your secretary, Madeleine, is it? You were very much in, uh, conversation, so I did not wish to, uh, intrude. But, I said to myself, it’s been so long, months, since I have seen my friend William Thatcher, and I really must ring him and arrange lunch soon. And so, William, when are you free? Next week? There’s a wonderful new place in Alexandria.”
“I wasn’t calling about lunch, Louis.”
“Ah, business. Our Sovietski friends are being obnoxious again?”
“That’s not my line anymore, Louis.” As Argent knew very well.
“Oh? You have been promoted?”
“Transferred. I’m on a special project. Canada.”
As Argent knew very well.
“Ah yes. Serious times up there.”
“Louis, I’ve got to talk to you. Your name has come up in something we can’t figure out. Are you acquainted with a guy at the Russian Embassy named Bolshinin?”
There was a long silence. “We should talk about this in person, William. I can make lunch tomorrow. Can you?”
“We’ve got kind of a hurry-up on this, but I guess a day won’t matter.”
“Bien. The Jockey Club, twelve-thirty. D’accord?”
“Just fine.”
Seven minutes after Thatcher hung up, the tail car on Belmont Road reported a Citroen leaving the French Embassy compound at great speed.
Thatcher signed off and hurred down to the street, where another car he had ordered was waiting. “To the Watergate,” he said.
Trench lay naked on his bed in his grubby little room, inch by inch examining his wounds, the shade of the small lamp tilted to provide maximum light, a glass of straight gin on the table. He drank from it, then touched his penis, the site of his most superficial yet most painful wound.
He gave out a sharp yelp and lay back, gasping. Pain there was but no infection. Yet. Infection would kill him. Pain he could manage. Like always.
There was infection in the cut on his left arm. It had needed stitches, and he had provided them, using needle and thread sterilized in boiling water on his hotplate. He had put three stitches into his right arm as well, and doused every cut with as much disinfectant as he could manage without screaming. With the bandages wound tightly, there was less pain, but he changed them every six hours, adding more disinfectant each time, after a careful examination. Changing the bandages meant maximum pain.
The pain he must worry about was the pain that might immobilize him. If he could avoid that, if he could keep going and keep moving, then he could finish this job and get his money and go, and then quickly find a medicine man. He had calculated the blood he had lost, and decided it wasn’t as much as he had thought. He needed more food and sleep, and three more bandage changes. Then he could make his score, and go.
Trench looked to the opened garment box on the chair, and the folds of black cloth within it. This time he would make no stupid mistake. This time he would remember all his rules. Even if he were to have another chance at that big, beautiful girl, he’d follow his rules and let it pass. He’d carve her up some other time.
It was time to pour the disinfectant again. Then he’d wrap the bandages and drink himself to sleep. Upon waking, he’d drink more and then begin walking about the room, moving all his limbs. He reached for the gin.
Thatcher and his driver sat in their car, parked outside the Watergate, with both the main entrance and the recording van in view. They had tuned into the radio frequency monitoring the wall microphones, keeping the volume low. Thatcher leaned back against the seat, blowing cigar smoke out the open window. He spoke excellent Russian and Swedish, but his French was dismal. He could follow Argent’s and Marie-Claire Showers’ conversation enough only to know that they were both saying nasty things about Jordine.
A silence fell, and a few minutes later Argent’s Citroen pulled out of the building garage. Thatcher’s driver turned to look over his shoulder at him.
“We wait,” Thatcher said.
He waited much longer than he wished, through the long, hot, hazy afternoon and into the gray evening, so long that twice he had to go into the Howard Johnson’s opposite to use the men’s room. He went back a third time when he ran out of cigars. This was becoming itchy. He had expected Marie-Claire to bolt at once, but she was holding her ground, possibly all night. Many of the people he saw entering the building just after working hours were coming out again. One tall red-haired woman had come in and out twice, with two different men.
A light on the dashboard console flickered. The driver switched radio frequencies.
“Garage, garage,” said the voice over the receiver. “Arthur Jordine is here. Arrive, arrive.”
Jordine’s anger showed in the pulsating veins at his temples and his high color. But when he entered the living room and saw Marie-Claire sitting by the window, her purse and suitcase nearby, he spoke with the trained, cold restraint of a diplomat.
“Marie-Claire,” he said, sitting opposite her, “some people from the Central Intelligence Agency came to see me today.”
She said nothing. The last of the sunlight made a faint glit
ter on the curving sweep of the river.
He hesitated. She was drinking and he wanted a drink, but he dared not interrupt this. “They said that the Russian I found for you and Louis-Paul has hired someone to murder Dennis, that he was probably responsible for the bomb that killed Lila Merridew. What does this mean, Marie-Claire? What have you involved me in?”
“Is that all they said?”
“Yes.”
Marie-Claire reached for her purse and held it on her lap. “C’est tout? They said nothing else, Arthur?”
“No! But, damn it, there’s a lot more I’d like to know.”
She pulled out a pistol. “Jew,” she said, and fired three times. The first shot missed. The next caught Jordine in the shoulder and the third in the stomach. The chair he was in was knocked over backwards and one of his shoes flew off as his body slammed against the wall.
“Close, close,” said Thatcher, into his microphone. “Move!”
He and his driver ran for the lobby, flashing District of Columbia police IDs at the security man as they hurried by. Other men came running up the main corridor. Sending two of them to the firestairs, Thatcher and the others used the elevators. There was no sign of her in the apartment.
“Back to the street!” Thatcher said.
“Wait a minute,” said a man with a radio and earpiece receiver. He pressed it closer with a forefinger.
“She’s in the Kennedy Center,” he said. “She went through the garage.”
This was bad, very bad. Thatcher had not pulled a snatch since Iceland, two years before, and it was showing. The Kennedy Center had five or six levels of parking garages, plus the immense lobbies, the balconies, the terrace theater and restaurant, and a labyrinth of passageways connecting the backstage areas. The deputy would never forgive him.
He left a man at each of the huge building’s garage entrances and set the others on a methodical sweep of the interior. He himself ran up the escalator to the main level, moving quickly through the gathering crowds to the ticket offices. It would be just like the too wonderfully clever bitch to buy a ticket to the goddamn opera and sit there for three hours while they went off tearing the city apart.
It was a bad hunch.
He ran to the red-carpeted great hall, looking from one distant end to the other, glimpsing a dozen blond women who might be her, but none who was. He had another hunch, the terrace overlooking the river. Brushing rudely past and extremely elegant and indignant couple, he pushed through the glass doors. It was a good hunch, but too late. There she was, climbing into a taxicab stopped for the traffic light on Rock Creek Parkway.
Thatcher was good at quick decisions. Mendelsohn might sit mulling for days. Laidlaw would just disappear, reappearing only when a workable solution had presented itself in a form acceptable to his intellect. Thatcher moved with his instincts. He ran back through the lobby and out the other side, loping down the ramp. His driver wasn’t there, but it didn’t matter. The car had a hidden snap ignition switch. Alerting his team by radio, he spun the car roaring into Virginia Avenue. The cab had been in the southbound lanes of the parkway. Thatcher hit the parkway going north, driving as fast as the traffic allowed until he reached the long, climbing, turning exit lane that led to Massachusetts Avenue. He would have at least five minutes. He made the light on a yellow, swerved right, and then left, into Belmont Road. There were no available parking places where he wanted to stop, so he pulled up onto the grass.
Marie-Claire Showers was clever enough to have gone to the opera in the Kennedy Center; desperate enough to have tried for the first airplane to anywhere out of National, Dulles, or Baltimore-Washington; resourceful enough to have made her way to some Fort Belvoir rat G.I. bar and picked up a ride to Richmond or farther. But he guessed she was as self-centered as she was intelligent, and would go to the place of maximum safety as directly as possible, no matter whom she compromised.
He reached beneath the seat and pulled on the small lever, releasing the weapons drawer. He had the army-issue .45 automatic in hand, with silencer attached, in three seconds. Pausing at roadside to make certain there was no one about, he stepped over the guardrail and slid down the steep, wooded slope. Halting himself no more than halfway down, he moved laterally along the ravine until he was in sight of both the embassy and the stretch of parkway joined by Waterside Drive leading down from Massachusetts Avenue.
Thatcher was one smart son of a bitch. The taxicab pulled off at the small intersection and the right rear door opened, the brief illumination of the interior light showing that, indeed, Marie-Claire was the passenger. If she went to her right, to come around to the Belmont Road entrance of the embassy, he would have to move quickly to take her from the rear. If she took the easier slope to the left, she would come directly at him.
She did.
A rotten taste filled Thatcher’s mouth. He’d been twelve years in the air force and never once inflicted a casualty. His only mark in the service of the Agency had been a Lebanese terrorist, with several dead Israeli school children to his credit, whom Thatcher had blown to pieces with a grenade in Istanbul.
Now there was this beautiful woman, wife of a high-ranking and increasingly sympathetic American foreign service officer, climbing up the ridge toward him, just a few seconds away from his next decision.
She was an enemy of the United States. She was one of the architects of the destruction of Canada. She had taken out a contract on her own husband; arranged the death of her beautiful, innocent neighbor; and coldly murdered her own lover. She was a whore, an anti-Semite, a spy. The deputy had authorized extreme prejudice.
In the end, none of those became the reason he chose for killing her. He did it mostly to assure himself that he could do it.
He aimed without sighting, but aimed true. When Marie-Claire was not ten feet from him, his bullet hit her directly in the nose, imploding her face into a clownlike, cross-eyed, mashed expression, and hurling her body back down the slope.
His professional instinct was to remove her skirt and underclothing, leaving her as a possible sex-crime victim, leaving her, as he thought of it, much like the unfortunate Judy Sadinauskas.
But Thatcher was mad. He picked up the still-warm, supple and surprisingly light body, flung it over his shoulder, and staggered up the ridge. When he came to the fence, he moved along it until he came to a place where the top was in reach, then heaved Marie-Claire’s body up and over, listening as it fell with a thudding splat onto some sort of stonework on the other side. She had reached her destination.
22
Laidlaw sipped a martini in the bar of the Hotel Château Laurier. It was the best he had had in Canada. He was disposed toward one more, but Inspector Beckett was unfortunately punctual. Entering in dress uniform, he ordered a soft drink at the bar, drank it quickly, then departed. Laidlaw followed a few minutes later, catching up with the police officer in a shadowy, tree-lined lane of Majors’ Hill Park just outside the hotel. Across the canal from the park was Parliament Hill, its towers dark silhouettes against the hazy royal blue of the summer night sky. Beckett handed the American a thick envelope.
“It’s everything,” he said. “Everything that I gave the prime minister. Everything, to the best of my knowledge, that is going to happen.”
“We are extremely grateful to you. I wonder, I think some way might be found to compensate you for your troubles. I’ve a fair amount of money at my disposal just now. There’d be no record of any sort.”
Laidlaw always tried to give large amounts of money to everyone with whom he did such business. It invariably increased the sense of obligation, or compromise.
“I could not take a penny, though I appreciate your kindness.”
“Of course.”
They fell silent. A young couple was approaching from the north end of the park, their arms draped clumsily around each other. They were quietly talking in French, oblivious to everything else. Laidlaw let them pass far behind them before speaking again.
“I i
ntend to stop Guy Porique,” Laidlaw said, at length.
“That might be easy enough. I will be doing my part in this.”
“I mean to stop Porique in a way that will stop everything else.”
“If you could do that, Canada would be much in your debt. We should have to erect a statue to you.”
“That would hardly be appropriate.”
“At the front of the American Embassy.”
“Perhaps at the rear of the American Embassy.”
The trouble with the apartment in Hull was that the living room view of Ottawa and the river was so compelling that the room lost all function but that of an observation deck. With little else to do, Showers and Joyce had spent most of their time in the chairs by the window, sitting and watching, and drinking. With nightfall, Joyce couldn’t stand it anymore. He turned his chair away from the window, and went to the radio. There was nothing like Aretha Franklin, but he at last found a French station that was playing a sort of jazz, a cool and quiet jazz.
“Do you mind?”
“No,” said Showers, staring out the window. “That sounds very pleasant, Mr. Joyce.”
They were in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled back and ties loosened. Joyce had never seen Showers so informal before, or so tired. The man was starting on a second bottle of Scotch.
“Thinking about tomorrow?” Joyce said, snapping open a can of Molson.
“I’m thinking about after tomorrow.”
“It’s simple, my man. You hand him Porique and he turns over Felicity Stuart. Then we split.”
“You think that’s what Laidlaw wants me to do? Hand him Porique?”
“You’re the main chance, right? You’re the only one he thinks Porique will be willing to talk to. Is that not so, my man?”
“Mr. Laidlaw and his friends have infinite resources. They could have killed—‘eliminated’ is their euphemism—Guy Porique weeks ago.”
“They don’t want him dead. They want him alive and cooperating.”
“You think that, do you?”
Northern Exposure Page 31
