Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  “If I go back to Seattle,” she began slowly, the expression of her voice the most tentative thing imaginable, “I wouldn’t be very hard to find. You could come there whenever you wanted, just to stay a few days. I wouldn’t want more than that—I don’t think you would either—but it would be something, at least, and I don’t think we would have to. . .”

  The words died away as Guinness held up his hand for silence, but he had stopped listening anyway. He didn’t have any attention for anything except the car that was stopped outside after making a slow circuit around the loop of the street’s dead end.

  It was a dark blue Ford, the kind of anonymous vehicle favored by hoods of no imagination, and it had been lingering out there, with its motor running, for seven or eight seconds.

  Just the driver inside, and the windows were rolled up; nobody was planning anything nasty. Whoever he was—and Guinness had a fair idea at least which team he would be on—he quite obviously didn’t have anything in mind except eyeballing the premises a little.

  He hadn’t seen Guinness, who was standing near the edge of the window and was concealed by the shades, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t looking.

  “Kathleen, I want you to get up, slowly, and go over to the window above the sink.” Guinness was quiet and businesslike; he hadn’t even turned his head. “There’s a car outside, but I don’t want you to look at it. Just show yourself at the window and pull down the shade.”

  She did as she was told. Her eyes were large and frightened and she moved across the room as if her joints were stiff, but she did as she was told. When the shade came down, the car outside jumped forward a little bit as it went into first gear, and then drove slowly away. It was out of sight almost at once.

  “What does it mean, Ray? What was he doing out there?”

  Kathleen’s hands were palm down on the countertop next to the sink; she gave the impression that she might otherwise have collapsed to the floor. Guinness only smiled.

  “He was making sure you were home, and I’ve no doubt he’ll tell us why in short order. Where’s the phone? There’s somebody I want to get in touch with.”

  The phone was in Duelle’s study, just off the living room. Guinness placed a call to the Holiday Inn, and when he had finished talking he put the receiver back in its cradle, went back to the kitchen to fetch Kathleen, and the two of them waited, Kathleen seated behind her husband’s desk and Guinness standing a little distance away, for the phone to ring.

  That happened at 2:15, on the tick.

  20

  “Let it ring a couple of times. . . two. . . three. . . No point in letting them know they haven’t caught us completely unprepared. Five. . . Okay, remember what I told you—pick it up.”

  “Hello?” She was very well rehearsed. A shudder ran through her, like a stab of pain, as she listened to what the voice at the other end of the line was saying, but her own voice had been steady enough. At least he didn’t have to worry that she would fold up on him. She would remember her lines.

  “But he isn’t here!—Oh, dear God, my husband isn’t here! You’ve got to let me find him; I don’t know where—”

  She pulled the receiver away from her ear sharply, as if the buzzing sound of the broken connection had been the loudest noise she had ever heard. And then, reluctantly, seeming not to wish to give up even the illusion of contact, she placed it back in its cradle. Her face was drawn, and she looked suddenly much older. It was astonishing how a person could age that way in a few seconds.

  “They’ve got her, Ray! They’ll kill her if he doesn’t—”

  “I don’t care what they want him to do—how long have they given us to find him?”

  She struggled, ever so briefly, with her rising hysteria, and then was calm again. Well, perhaps not calm. Merely in control.

  “An hour. They’ll phone back in an hour. They said not to call the police or they’ll—”

  “Are you sure he’s at his office?” It was a pointless question, but he had to keep her mind on business. This wasn’t the moment for allowing oneself the luxury of considering the consequences of failure. They were entirely too horrible.

  “Yes. Do you want me to phone?”

  “No. I’ll go and fetch him. He’s not reliable enough that I care to give him any options. I want to be right there behind him—I want him to believe me when I tell him that I’ll kill him if he doesn’t come.”

  Driving to campus, he made something of a point of not hurrying. He didn’t want to make any mistakes and run over any undergraduates. He had made enough mistakes already.

  How could he have possibly been so dumb as not to have seen this one coming? It was such an obvious move! He must have been mad to have let Rocky go off to school like that; he shouldn’t have let the kid out of his sight; what the hell difference would a missed day have made when by tomorrow she and Kathleen would have been on their way to Seattle? He must have been out of his mind.

  And what burned him was that he had pushed them into it himself. Hadn’t that been the whole idea, to fret Duelle’s little friends until they made some kind of move? And then, somehow, when it had turned out that Firbank actually wasn’t one of Flycatcher’s people, through his own immense stupidity he had allowed himself to believe that perhaps, after all, nothing more would happen.

  No, actually, he couldn’t even credit himself with that much in the way of brains; because, truth to tell, he hadn’t really thought about Flycatcher and his little band of helpers at all. He had let himself get tangled up in his own private problems and had forgotten to do any thinking about anything else. He had been a proper fathead had Raymond M. Guinness, the holy terror of modern espionage.

  And now, instead of taking their best shot at him, they had grabbed Rocky. And there wasn’t a chance in the world they wouldn’t kill her the moment she outlived her immediate usefulness.

  It wasn’t the sort of thing a man liked to think about, but Guinness forced himself. He had to work out the logic of the thing; he had to know precisely what they expected to have happen, or he could do nothing.

  Of course, they had decided to go for broke. They would validate Duelle’s credibility with the bureaucrats in Washington in the most graphic way imaginable, by proving that the threat against his family had been real. And the easiest way to do that was to kill Rocky. The kidnapping had been only so much public relations, the merest pretext; they hadn’t any intention of letting her go, no matter what anybody did. The supposed “conditions” were so totally irrelevant that Guinness hadn’t even bothered to ask himself what they might be.

  So, there it was. If they found out that Duelle was compromised, they would kill Rocky immediately. And when Duelle failed to do what they asked of him (and, whatever it was, he would never be able to do it, not with Peter McAffee, boy government agent, in on every move. Hell, unless they were idiots they would have known he had been in the house when they phoned—they would have seen his car, by now grown quite familiar, parked in the driveway), when Duelle didn’t come through, as they had no intention that he should, then Rocky’s life wouldn’t be worth a thin dime.

  And it was his own fault, his own damn fault. His own stupidity and vast carelessness.

  If it was even that. With a sudden thrill of horror, he found himself wondering if on some level he hadn’t planned it this way. After all, it was precisely the sort of thing he would have done in a minute if it had been somebody else’s kid, somebody else’s irrelevant little brat who might just be useful for baiting the appropriate hook. After all, things were working out very much according to the outline of his original plan; he had, in fact, managed to spook Flycatcher’s army of rent-a-thug subordinates into doing something stupid and self betraying. Everything was going along perfectly marvelously from that point of view.

  Guinness didn’t like it, but it was difficult to ignore the possibility that all those marvelous unconscious instincts that made him of such value to certain offices in charge of the uglier aspects of Ameri
can foreign policy, that all the more or less automatic cunning that had kept him alive, when by all odds he should have died years ago, hadn’t found a means to put his daughter to good use; and right directly in the way of these men so obviously willing to sacrifice little girls to the larger ends of this mindless game they were all playing. Maybe all along, without even being aware of it, he had been playing against himself. Maybe it really had reached that point at which he himself—not just the danger he attracted to himself like iron filings to a magnet, but himself, in his own person—was the greatest hazard to the people he loved; maybe now he could no longer trust even his instincts.

  Maybe Kathleen was right. Maybe he really did belong in a cage.

  But whatever it was, whether what he had done had been evil or merely inept, it came to the same thing. If they killed her, these goons who even now didn’t have the faintest notion that their precious plan was in ruins, no matter what they did, if they killed her then it would be he, her own father, who would be her murderer, just as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself.

  He drove the idea from his mind; he refused to think of it. He could not allow himself to consider even the possibility of failure. Never in his life had he so much needed to be the cool, analytical technician, as above doubt and weakness as any machine. To be perfectly inhuman—that much, at the very least, he owed to this child of his, whose life he had so carelessly put in peril. To be as perfectly heartless as he could manage.

  The thing to remember, the thing to cling to, was the fact that they would at least have to make it look like a righteous snatch. The whole exercise would be meaningless, they would gain nothing, unless they acted at least as if they meant to make a trade. That was their weakness—and Guinness’s only chance.

  Time was the great thing. To use their weakness, their need to appear ready to deal, to buy himself, and Rocky, some time. He wasn’t asking for the world, just a few hours. Time enough to find out where they were hiding her and to get her back—any way he had to.

  Time. The only thing that only Holman Duelle, stepfather and traitor, could buy for him. The only reason Guinness could think of, at that moment, for keeping the little shit alive.

  He parked behind the library and sat for a moment with both hands braced against the steering wheel, feeling pretty ragged. One glance in the rearview mirror indicated that he looked just as bad as he felt; his right cheek was badly swollen and an unhealthy reddish color that would darken to nearly black within a day or two, and he hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t had the nerve—the thought of drawing a razor over all that side of his face was absolutely appalling. He smiled at his reflection and pushed open the car door. Outside, the air was heavy and warm, and he hadn’t gotten twenty steps before he could feel the little drops of perspiration forming down his spinal column.

  Well, it wasn’t so bad. He could still see out of his right eye, which was something of a surprise, and probably, looking the way he did, he would scare the bejesus out of good old Duelle.

  Duelle would think he had come back from the dead in any case. No doubt it would give him a turn, having the late lamented Peter McAffee walk into his office in the middle of the day. Guinness was rather looking forward to that; it would be kind of fun watching the color drain out of the little son of a bitch’s face. He could only hope it would also make him easier to handle—he needed Duelle submissive and frightened, more frightened of him than of anything or anybody on earth.

  There was an open staircase leading up to the main promenade that went in front of the library and then up seven or eight steps to lead to a series of buildings, most of them laboratories and classrooms devoted to the physical sciences, of which the engineering building was the first. Guinness took it slow, making his way against a current of student humanity, not wishing even to get out of breath. He had had no sleep to speak of in thirty-six hours, he had been beaten up and threatened and damn near killed, and his nerves were in tatters from the emotional wear and tear of a day that had started early and had been just filled with alarming little turns of events. What with everything, there simply wasn’t all that much left inside, and he wanted to be careful not to waste what little there was. It would have to last out the rest of the afternoon, and maybe even longer. He was taking it slow.

  He stepped inside the library for a moment and treated himself to a couple of sips from the stainless steel drinking fountain that was next to the alcove in which the Xerox machines were humming like a swarm of drowsy bees. Taking a little water in his hand, he patted it delicately over his face, much to the obvious scandal of the fortyish, matronly peroxide blonde who was sitting behind the reception counter, stamping dates on the back covers of a pile of books for a heavyset professorial type with a gray moustache. The gray moustache turned his head slightly, probably wondering what the atrocity was, and then went back to a close study of his fingernails.

  The water had been wonderfully cold, and it made Guinness feel like a new man. When he went outside again, the foot traffic had fallen off quite a bit, so he supposed that the passing period between classes was over. The only sounds were the gurgling of the fountains in the reflecting pool immediately below him and the whirr from countless rooftop air conditioning units. He reached back over his kidney to adjust the position of the five shot .38 in his trousers’ waistband—and, perhaps, to confirm for himself that it was still there.

  Onward and upward, no point in loitering around listening to the fans churn. Nothing was going to get any easier, and an hour wasn’t really a very long time.

  The dragon lady was still holding everyone at bay in the lobby, and she didn’t look at all glad to see Guinness.

  “Is Professah Duelle expectin’ you?” You could have scraped off her tongue and used the saliva to etch glass.

  Guinness smiled—all that hostility in only five words made him feel wonderful, like life was not entirely bereft of meaning and purpose.

  “No, I’m sorry, cutie pie. And he won’t be very delighted that I’m here, either; but that’s not your problem.” He fished around in his pocket and brought out his shiny gold FBI badge, holding the little leather case open for her so she could read the identity card and see his picture up in the left hand corner.

  Her hand went down on the receiver of the telephone console in front of her, but Guinness shook his head—still smiling.

  “That’s a no-no, sweetheart. Why don’t we just let it be a surprise?”

  He walked past her to the elevators. Having pushed the button, he stood where he could see back to where she was sitting. He didn’t trust her an inch; probably the second the elevator door closed behind him she’d be on the horn to the cherubic Duelle, just for spite.

  Not that it would make any difference.

  The door slid open, and Guinness stepped inside and pushed the button for the fifth floor. It was sort of fun, like a race. He tried to calculate how long she would take nerving herself up to it—after all there was the little gold badge to consider—how long it took to dial four digits, how long Duelle would let his phone ring. . .

  As soon as the elevator made the fifth floor, Guinness turned smartly around the corridor to Duelle’s office. He could hear a phone being answered in mid ring, and by the time he stopped in the office doorway, Duelle was holding the receiver up to his ear. Probably in that instant he was getting the bad news from two directions at once.

  It was comic, really—the way Duelle started to hang up but, when the full impact hit him, simply opened his fingers and let the receiver drop to the surface of his wood finish desk with a crash. Scrooge staring through the bed curtains at Marley’s ghost couldn’t have looked more startled.

  “How goes it, pal? Glad to see me?”

  There was a kid, probably in his early twenties, skinny and sporting a lank blond moustache, sitting in the chair to one side of the professor’s desk; he looked almost as surprised as Duelle.

  “You a graduate student, pal?” Guinness asked him, smiling and looking interest
ed. The kid only nodded. “Then go design a new kind of bomb or something. Your mentor and I have things to discuss.”

  The kid looked over toward Duelle, who wouldn’t have noticed him if his hair had suddenly turned green, and whose mouth was opening and closing convulsively, as if of its own accord, and then the boy got up from his chair and slipped out of the room without a sound. Obviously, he was a smart lad and would go far in the world.

  Finally, Duelle seemed to notice the telephone receiver lying on his desktop—even from across the room you could hear the medley of clicks and hysterical little squeaking sounds, as the dragon lady downstairs tried to reestablish contact. He picked it up, holding it with the very tips of his fingers, the way you would some faintly repulsive object, and laid it back down in its cradle. That done, he seemed no longer to know what to do with his hands; he showed signs of wanting to put them out of sight in his lap, of contemplating God only knew what desperate and stupid move. It was no time to encourage such panicky foolishness, so Guinness took the .38 from where it had been resting against his pelvic girdle and pointed it at a spot just under the inside corner of Duelle’s right eye. The furtive, nervous movement suddenly stopped.

  “That’a boy,” he said calmly. “Just keep it in mind, Duelle; at the moment you’re not one of my favorite people. I’m not really prepared to be patient—one wrong move and the wall behind you is going to need a new paint job. Understand? I asked you, did you understand?”