Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  The room had two double beds and a green and yellow carpet to go with the wallpaper. He checked the bathroom to make sure there weren’t any giant cobwebs in the shower stall and then hoisted his suitcase and his Eastern Airlines flight bag up onto the bed closest to the door, the one he didn’t plan to sleep in. He hung up his extra suit and closed the curtain over the big picture window through which he could have seen the lake if it hadn’t been for a solid wall of trucks with campers in the payload, and what have come to be called RVs. Then, after testing the doorknob to make sure it was locked, he unzipped the flight bag and took out the two handguns and their boxes of ammunition that had been nestled in with his shaving kit and a folded towel he had put there to keep things from rattling.

  The first was an ugly little Smith & Wesson five shot .38 revolver, not very accurate with its two inch barrel, not at more than half a dozen yards, not if your target happened to be moving, and not very damaging if you didn’t hit something vital. But it was small and had a hammer shroud to keep it from getting caught on your jacket all the time; it would do for something just to carry around.

  The other, of course, was a different matter entirely. The good old reliable Colt .45 automatic, with low muzzle velocity and lots of shocking power. You could hit a man in the thumb with a .45 and still knock him over like a bowling pin, and Guinness had never cared much for the idea of having to be right on target to keep the other guy from shooting back.

  The man at the gun shop in Greenville had tried to talk him into a .357, claiming he had once killed a bear with one, but you could kill a bear with a .22 if you got lucky enough, and bears generally don’t carry guns themselves. There was a story about an agent who hit a razor wielding Mexican four times with a .357, and when the Mexican reached him he still had enough juice left to cut the stupid bastard’s throat. The Mexican, supposedly, had died an hour later, but that wasn’t thought to be much of a consolation.

  Guinness had test fired both weapons at the pistol range the gun store owner had fixed up in his supply room, and the .45 pulled a little to the left. It would do, however.

  It was way too big to carry, if you didn’t want the whole world noticing the bulges under your coat, so he would squirrel it away somewhere, probably in the tire well of his car, until he needed it. Things might never come to that—his man might be a thousand miles in the other direction; he might never have heard of Clemson, South Carolina—but in the meantime there would be a hand cannon no further away than the trunk of his shiny new Ford with its squeaky clean ashtrays, and Guinness would derive some comfort from that knowledge alone.

  He loaded all five chambers of the .38 and wedged it in under his belt, just over the left kidney, and then he methodically pressed six cartridges into the magazine of the Colt before sliding it into the handle. The whole thing was like a little ritual, a reminder that he wasn’t down here for a rest cure. Back in Washington, they expected him to work for his semimonthly government check, and the work he did really wasn’t very nice.

  The guns were still greasy with newness, so after he had put the .45 back inside the flight bag—he could worry about where to hide it later on—Guinness went into the bathroom to wash his hands, trying, as he always did, not to catch sight of himself in the mirror.

  When they had first come out, back in the golden days when he thought he had made his escape from a line of work that required one to hide guns in the tire well of one’s car, he had bought himself all four volumes, in hard cover no less, of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, a boyhood idol about whom, in his mature years, he had once written a paper for what were laughingly called the “learned journals.” Good old Orwell, he had known what it was all about; the very last sentence in his notebook had been, “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.”

  With still a decade of grace in front of him, Guinness wasn’t fifty, but then he had a lot more to answer for than friend George. Perhaps the process which lines your face started earlier if you did black deeds, the memories of which were hoarded up in some forgotten corner of what you had left of a conscience; perhaps it would have started earlier for George if he had stayed in Burma to spend a few more years whacking his bamboo cane against the soles of native felons’ feet; perhaps. . . So you tried to avoid mirrors, tried not to speculate about whether the evidence was accumulating there in the lines around your eyes.

  Still, it wasn’t too bad a face, not noticeably evil. The eyes with perhaps a little too much gray, making the blue look pale and a little cold. The mouth perhaps a little too small, a little too narrow through the lips. But for the rest, it was a good, farm boy face, with reddish brown hair and a few almost invisible freckles here and there over the bridge of the nose. Not a bad face—a face lots of people would be fool enough to trust. A good face for a man in his line of work. A mask.

  It was early yet, he had plenty of time. So Guinness went back outside and walked around to the lobby, thinking that he would buy himself a Mounds bar—he had seen a box of them next to the dining room cash register—and then go out to the little dock that the motel maintained for the benefit of guests who trailered a boat, and watch the water for a while. It would be nice just to stand there and listen to the waves slapping against the aluminum sides of other people’s outboards.

  The cashier was off somewhere, so Guinness stood in front of her counter, staring through the glass at the neat little double row of cigar boxes. He didn’t smoke himself, hadn’t had a cigarette in close to eight years, but he knew enough to tell that none of these would have been worth the hazards of falling back into bad habits.

  He had had a friend once, a great chubby, pleasure loving friend, who had been his boss back in the days when he had worked as a shooter for the British, back when he had still been in his twenties and had thought he was immortal. And that friend had always said that the Americans were an uncivilized race, the proof of which was that they could allow a trifle like Castro’s relationship with Moscow to irritate them into placing an embargo on Cuban cigars.

  Doubtless he had been right.

  A car drove up and parked in front of the motel’s entrance—you could see it quite clearly through the plate glass double doors—and a man climbed out from behind the wheel and came in to the front desk. Guinness let his eyes sweep past him, as if he were looking over toward the ladies’ room to see if his cashier might materialize from that direction; he was careful not to show any interest, at least no more than a man might show who was getting bored and restless, a man whose heels were going to sleep while he waited for someone to come and let him pay for his Mounds bar. No more than anyone might show at the arrival of a new body in his line of vision, a body it was pretty safe to assume wouldn’t help him with his problem. Nevertheless, he got a very good look.

  A man in his middle thirties, very tall, very thin. Wearing chocolate colored slacks and a tan sport coat over a white turtleneck shirt. His watch, which had a black leather strap, was on his left wrist, so he was presumably right handed, like most of the race. His hair was cut a little shorter than was usual at his age, but it was long enough to take a part, on the right side of his head. And his hair was almost blond enough to be called bone white.

  Well defined features in a tanned face. No signs of any weapons, but then there wouldn’t be. All in all, rather an elegant figure, the kind who looked like he read Gentleman’s Quarterly and had never done a stroke of work in his life.

  While Fashion Plate was busy with the clerk, a middle aged lady with a beehive hairdo came out from the restaurant, and Guinness paid his quarter and began unwrapping one end of the little paper package as he ambled off in the direction of the main exit, without even so much as a glance at the man who was counting out twenty dollar bills to settle his reckoning.

  Outside, he noted the make and license number of the car—a pale blue Buick, Georgia plates CLS 291. It was a rented car, just like his; the keys had been left in the ignition and they were attached to a chain l
ooped through a plastic identity tag with the word Hertz printed on a slip of paper inside. Additionally, the rental agreement was lying face down on the dash.

  He would have liked a look at that agreement, but it wasn’t really practical with the guy almost ready to come back out again and drive away. He would have liked to have known where the car had been rented—although that would be reasonably easy to trace—and where it was to be returned. Guinness supposed it was even possible they could dig that out of the computer banks for him, maybe even in time for the information to do him some good.

  Anything to make life a little easier.

  He would also have liked to know the guy’s name, but that was purely out of idle curiosity; it was almost certain to be a phony.

  Guinness was reasonably sure that he had just had a good, long look at the bull’s eye. He would have bet this job’s per diem that the man in the lobby of the Clemson Holiday Inn, calmly adding up the figures on his bill, was Flycatcher.

  2

  After a few minutes, the pale blue Buick drove away, but Guinness wasn’t there to see it leave. It would drive back toward town, such as there was, and then it would either continue up 123 to Greenville, or it would branch off at U.S. 76 and keep going until it could connect up with Interstate 85 and then head south to Atlanta. Those were the choices, because Flycatcher had apparently finished his end of things and was leaving. He was never one to hang around once an operation had been well set in motion, preferring to entrust the details to lieutenants while he went on to the next triumph; it was his strength and his weakness.

  And in either case, north or south, Guinness hadn’t the least intention of tagging along to find out.

  If our friend wasn’t Flycatcher—and that, after all, was at least a theoretical possibility; there might be a few tall towheads around who weren’t secret agents—then chasing after him in hot pursuit would be so much wasted motion.

  And if he was, then it would be suicide. You just didn’t tail agents of a certain category for long distances down public highways, not all by yourself and in broad daylight, not if you liked breathing. He would be sure to spot you, and once he did the advantages would all revert to him. He could lead you around by the nose, over no end of narrow, twisted little roads, until he found the perfect spot for just the right kind of ambush. And then it would be lights out.

  No, effective surveillance was something that had to be done by an organized team, and Guinness would leave that sort of thing to the snatch and grab boys back in D.C. His particular talents lay in other directions.

  So just to give himself something to do while a decent interval passed, Guinness actually did walk down to the motel dock to listen to the waves and watch the water twinkle. The Mounds bar was finished by the time he had covered half the distance—doubtless simply a question of nerves—and after a few seconds of communing with nature, he discovered he had lost interest.

  The game had started; it was pointless to try pretending that he could think about anything else when he had just been within sniffing distance of his quarry. Finer feelings would have to wait.

  “Y’mean Dr. Burquette?”

  The desk clerk pronounced it “Berkit,” coming down very hard on the “r.” He was a good-looking boy of about twenty-one or two, just finishing up a major in something called “Forest Management”—one had the impression that they relied pretty heavily on the college kids for cheap labor in Clemson—and he didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about Guinness’s question. One of the nice things about kids that age, they took you at your word. If you said you thought you might have known the man from college and were just curious, they believed you.

  “He’s a p’rfessor down at George Tech, been comin’ up here two, three times a month f’r quite a time now—almost as long as I’ve been workin’ here, and that’s near five months. He’ll stay a day or two and then go on back to Atlanta. Till he checked in yesterday mornin’ I thought we’d seen the last of ’m. It’d been close t’ six weeks. But I guess not. I guess he’s got business over ’t th’ university; we get a lota people fr’m other schools come t’ consult.” The last sentence was spoken with a distinct flavor of local pride. “He y’r man?”

  Guinness shook his head—no, the man he had known had been named Hodges—and the desk clerk looked disappointed. Guinness thanked him and started back to his room, pausing for a moment to pick up a folder on local points of historical interest from a little display table near the door, just so everyone could see how obviously he didn’t have any pressing business. After all, what did he care about anyone named Burquette?

  Within a minute and fifteen seconds he was in his car, and within three he had found the pay phone in front of the Winn-Dixie supermarket and had gotten the operator for a collect call from a Mr. Peter McAffee to anyone answering at a certain number with a District of Columbia area code. The voice at the other end was middle aged and warmly feminine as she accepted the charges and, after the operator had left the line, put Guinness through the current security song and dance.

  “Go ahead, Soldier,” she said at last, using his code name, with precise adherence to policy, only after she had established his squeaky clean clearance. “I’ll connect you with operations.”

  The supermarket door pushed open, the glass becoming opaque with glare for a moment, and a little girl, aged about ten, dressed in cutoff jeans and a pale yellow T-shirt that was many days away from the wash, strolled out as if she owned the place. In her two hands, shrouded with a crumpled piece of waxed paper, she held something that looked like a brown banana but was manifestly some mutant of the genus doughnut, its rough surface spangled here and there with large white drops of clotted glaze. A repellent object, the sort of thing you were astonished even a child could be brought to eat.

  Guinness frowned, thinking how much nicer things had been in the old days, when he had been chief headhunter for the British and had done his work in European cities, where the population gave the impression of being exclusively adult and there didn’t seem to be any little girls in dirty T-shirts who might, at any moment, come wandering into the line of fire.

  Little girls should be kept at home, where they were safe and invisible, where they did not serve to remind sinister types like himself, suddenly on the dark side of forty and without human ties in this world, that all around him another kind of life was being lived. That life was different enough from his own to seem like that of another species, upon which he was constantly in danger of intruding himself. He might watch, if he cared to, from the outside, but he must be careful to keep his distance. Such a life was not for him. He had tried it once or twice, often enough to know that it was not one of his options.

  “What’s the matter, Guinness? You stub your toe already?” The voice was not, as he had expected, Tuttle’s. It belonged to Tuttle’s boss, theoretically Guinness’s boss, Head of Section, George Prescott, the company’s number two man and grand strategist of operations. Guinness’s idea, and almost everyone else’s, of a perfect prick.

  “I want someone checked out and tailed,” Guinness answered blandly; it would be beneath his dignity to be insulted. He gave the particulars—a physical description of car and driver, along with the putative identity and the other bits and pieces provided by his friend, the major in forest management. “Find out if Georgia Tech has a Burquette on the faculty, and whether he’s blond and skinny. And see if you can catch up with our friend. My guess is he’s headed toward Atlanta, but in either case he can’t have more than a five minute jump on you. Use some of those wonderful police contacts you’re always crowing about; they’re good at spotting cars. I want to know where he comes down, and where he goes from there. You get a fix on him and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Guinness hung up the receiver and fished his dime out of the coin return slot, wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t simply have nailed the guy while he had had the chance. After all, he had had his little five shot .38 right there with him; it made
him feel a little odd just to have let Flycatcher walk away like that—and he hadn’t a doubt in the world that it really was Flycatcher. In the business you get so you know these things, the way some people can feel the next day’s weather in their bones.

  He didn’t have much faith that Prescott and his armies of foot soldiers would be able to keep a string on their boy, not if he was Flycatcher. If he were that easy he would have been dead a long time ago.

  Still, you can’t just blow a man away in the middle of a motel lobby for no better reason than because you happen to have a feeling about him. You have to check, to be sure. Nothing would ever make it right again if you happened to be mistaken.

  And Guinness didn’t like to take potluck. He liked to set up a hit, to have everything planned out so that it would come off without even the suggestion of a hitch. And he liked to leave himself plenty of ways out; burning Flycatcher right there in front of the desk clerk and the restaurant cashier, unless he were prepared to include them in the massacre, would have been a trifle sticky. In the real world, after all, these little matters were still lumped in with simple murders.

  No, he had been right to let him go. Prescott had understood that, hadn’t even suggested that anything else, anything like hot pursuit with pistols blazing, was even possible. Prescott knew his work; he wasn’t such a bloody fool as even to suggest such a thing.

  It made everything very hard, though. It would be so lovely if Prescott could simply point him in the right direction and he could go off somewhere and finish Flycatcher in his own good time, but it wouldn’t happen that way. Flycatcher would get past Prescott, and we would all have to go back to square one.

  At the moment square one was Clemson, South Carolina.

  He had been sent down here to dig around, and that was really about all he could do for the moment. Maybe he could find out something that would be of use in running the guy down.