Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Duelle nodded stiffly, and Guinness put the gun in his jacket pocket, leaving his hand in there with it.

  “Fine. Then let’s move along and—who knows?—you might even live long enough to make it to the parking lot.”

  Guinness stepped back out of the doorway, motioned to Duelle with his free hand, and then followed him down the corridor to the elevators. By the time they were halfway there, Duelle was walking a little less like a mechanical man, and they got down to the lobby and out the door into the sunshine without making an exhibition of themselves.

  The dragon lady seemed to be hiding in the broom closet—at least, she wasn’t at her accustomed post. Just as well, since it saved a certain amount of amateur theatrics.

  “Where are you taking me?” Duelle asked as they walked down the steps into the parking lot where Guinness had left his car; it was the first articulate sound he had made so far.

  “We’re going home.” Guinness kept hold of his elbow as they made their way between the rows of cars. “We’re going to visit your little wife and see what we can do about getting her kid back for her. Your pals have ripped her off, did you know that?—no, you didn’t, did you. They threaten to perpetrate all kinds of terrible deeds upon her tender young flesh if you don’t do just what they say.”

  Oddly enough, Duelle did seem genuinely surprised.

  Perhaps he still thought they wouldn’t do anything really drastic without first telling him about it. Perhaps it simply hadn’t occurred to him yet that these people with whom he had allied himself would actually kidnap a nine year old girl. It was always the same—little men who get in over their heads, thinking that they’re so smart, thinking that they can keep things from getting out of hand, that they’ll only allow them to go so far and no further, and then it’s always such a shock when not everybody plays by the rules. Guys like Duelle, they didn’t even know what the rules were.

  “They wouldn’t—You don’t think they’d—”

  “Kill her?” Guinness put in brightly, laughing like it was a big joke. “Carve her up like a Christmas turkey and send the pieces home in the mail? Of course they would, you schmuck. What in hell choice are they going to have? And you know what? If she dies, you die.”

  He opened the car door on the passenger side and, taking Duelle by the shoulder, thrust him viciously inside.

  “It’s something to keep in mind, pal,” he said, after he had settled himself behind the wheel. “If I don’t get her back, safe and sound, if it works out that they’ve so much as mussed her hair, then tomorrow morning somebody’s going to find a grease spot named Holman Duelle decorating the asphalt out on 123. They’ll have to pick you up with a blotter.”

  All the way back to Strawberry Lane, the two men exchanged not a word. As they got out of the car, Kathleen was standing in the doorway, waiting. It was impossible to tell from her face what she might have been thinking; perhaps that was just as well.

  They all assembled, like a council of war, in Duelle’s study. Duelle sat behind his desk, the telephone within easy reach, and Guinness stood to one side. He was tired and edgy, but he couldn’t have sat down in that room, in this man’s presence, not the way things were, not if his life had depended on it. So he stood, leaning slightly from the waist, the palm of one hand pressing against the desktop.

  Kathleen stood just slightly behind him, almost at his elbow. It was the sort of detail even Duelle would notice, and you could tell he was wondering what sort of relationship existed between his wife and this—this whatever, or whoever, he was.

  “When they phone back, in—” Guinness looked at his watch, “shall we say, twelve minutes, they’ll ask you to do something. It’ll be something gaudy—murdering the president of Clemson University, or blowing up half the downtown, something on that order. Whatever it is, you tell them you’ll do it. Tell them you’ll do it, but that you need time to set it up. Try to get four hours. Say you want proof, at that time, that your daughter is still alive. Say you want to talk to her over the telephone—that you’ll ask her a question then, and that if you don’t like the answer, the deal’s off.”

  Duelle had pushed himself back into his chair, seemingly trying to disappear into the brown naugahyde padding. He gave the impression of being confronted with more than he could quite absorb all at once, as if several dangerous and inescapable facts had suddenly been set before him on the desk in front of him, his eyes skipping from one to the next as he tried to decide which posed the greatest threat.

  “Do you understand all that, Duelle?” He looked up into Guinness’s face and nodded, several times. “Then repeat it to me; tell me exactly what you’re going to tell them.”

  Duelle repeated it, the way a child will repeat the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance, as if the words were utterly without individual meaning. It made you nervous that so much should depend on such a man.

  When he was finished, he turned his eyes to his wife. There was no accusation in them, only a terrible need to comprehend.

  “Who is he, Kitty?” he asked finally, his voice barely a whisper. Kathleen, in answer, came forward the necessary half step and put her hand on Guinness’s arm, where it was pressing against the desktop.

  The gesture merely annoyed Guinness. This was not the moment for small thrills of sexual triumph, or to indulge Kathleen’s human, but not very admirable, longing for revenge. He shook her off, with brutal impatience, exactly as if she had been a particle of lint sticking tenaciously to his sleeve. He didn’t even bother to look to see how she took it. He didn’t care.

  “Just keep your mind on the one thing, Duelle. If the kid dies, you die. If you screw up, or try in any way to warn them, so help me you’ll never come up out of that chair alive.”

  “Believe him.”

  It was Kathleen, still almost directly behind him, her voice seeming to come through clenched teeth.

  “Believe him, Holman. I’ve known him for a long time, and he means what he says.”

  It was one of those moments—there didn’t seem to be very many in life—when suddenly things are made shockingly clear, things which had puzzled you for years. Guinness almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  His little Kathleen, the original Miss Wholesome Abhorrence of Violence, the girl who had left him all those years ago in London because she just couldn’t face the idea of living with a murderer; here she was, threatening her husband, the nice, safe gentleman she had chosen to take his place, with immediate and absolutely certain death—and she was loving every minute of it.

  Apparently it made all the difference if you had someone else to do the killing for you.

  Maybe, too, it was such a moment for Duelle. He seemed to firm up slightly, as if aware, finally, that he was trapped, that there was nothing he could do except to play the role that had been assigned to him. He passed his hand over his forehead, up into the thatch he had so carefully combed forward, revealing, perhaps without even being conscious of it and certainly without caring, how far back his hairline had actually receded; it was as if the appearances of things no longer mattered, as if suddenly he had somehow been freed.

  His answer, when it came, was surprisingly calm. He bent forward a little from the waist, planting his elbows on the desktop and lacing his fingers together, almost as if he wanted to pray.

  “You needn’t worry, Kitty. I’m just as afraid of him as you could want me to be—I just want to know the one thing.”

  He turned his head slightly, looking up at Guinness, almost accusingly. In that moment, at least, he was very much the wronged husband.

  “All I want to know is who you are.”

  It was a very simple request—Holman Duelle simply wanted to know through what mechanism all this trouble had been brought down on him. He was finished and he knew it. He could face that well enough, but he wanted to understand the means. It didn’t seem like too much to ask.

  He looked from Guinness to Kathleen and back again, waiting. He only wanted the truth,
and, perhaps by this means, to announce that he was a man like other men, that he hadn’t meant any great harm when he had cut his deal with Flycatcher—or whomever it had been that the spook had sent; Guinness just couldn’t see his fair haired Flycatcher sticking that fine, slender, aristocratic neck out far enough to approach the good doctor himself—that he had never meant to put anyone’s life in jeopardy. Not his own, not anyone’s. In that moment the two of them were only men, and perhaps the moral differences were not all on Guinness’s side. Holman Duelle deserved his answer. The great problem, of course, was simply finding the means of giving it.

  “My name is Raymond Guinness. I work for the government, but none of that matters. I’m not here on their behalf, not anymore. What matters to you is that I was your wife’s first husband. Rocky is my daughter.”

  At that precise instant, the telephone rang.

  21

  Duelle did as well as anyone had a right to expect. He sounded convincingly unconvincing, like a man who had something to hide and was chiefly worried about covering his ass. Guinness was listening in on the bedroom extension, as doubtless his adversaries were assuming he would, and they sounded like they bought the deal. When the line went dead, Guinness put the receiver back and went downstairs. Kathleen and Duelle were still in the study, both standing in such a way as not to have to look at the other.

  “I have until six,” Duelle said, quite unnecessarily. “They want me to set fire to the project.”

  “Is that feasible?”

  Duelle shook his head.

  “No. I wouldn’t know how to circumvent the sprinkler systems, and anyway, the place is always crawling with security people. The best I could hope for would be something in my own office, and even that wouldn’t do any good; there are only the files, and all of those are duplicate copies. I don’t even know where they keep the originals.”

  It hadn’t been anything more than a question; Guinness hadn’t really even thought about the matter from that side—hell, the last thing Flycatcher and his people wanted was Holman Duelle arrested for arson. What they had in mind was a nice dead body, some sweet little girl martyred to the cause of preserving the Oconee Project. They hadn’t the faintest interest in having their demands met.

  It was odd how Duelle’s answer carried something of the tone of an apology, but of course he probably didn’t understand that nothing he could do would make any difference.

  Guinness checked his watch. It was 3:20, allowing only a little more than two and a half hours. They would phone back at six—the theater of the thing demanded as much—and Rocky would be allowed to say a few sentences; but after that she probably wouldn’t last another quarter of an hour, no longer than it would take them to find a secluded spot in which they could quietly cut her throat. Two and a half hours. Not much time—not much time at all.

  Kathleen seemed to divine what he was thinking. She folded her arms together and looked down at the carpet, which was an odd greenish color; she might have been thinking, for the thousandth time in the six years of her life in this house, how much she hated it.

  “Can you get her back?”

  “I can try.”

  A glance passed between them, an unspoken understanding about what it might mean if he failed, about what they had ever meant to each other, or ever might mean. They each saw perfectly that their two little lives, whether together or apart, would never be worth anything again if, by six o’clock that evening, he hadn’t managed this one piece of business.

  “I’m going to assume,” he said, as much as anything just to have something to say, “that nobody is going to do anything dumb.” They both looked at him now, as if he had uttered the sentence in a foreign language, and Duelle slumped slightly against his desk, half sitting on the edge. Obviously, he hadn’t made himself entirely clear.

  “I don’t want either of you to leave the house, or to answer the phone, until I come back. Above everything else, don’t answer the phone; they may try to rush things. If they can’t reach you—well, perhaps we can hope it’ll take them a while to nerve themselves up to killing a nine year old girl.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply—what reply was possible? He simply turned on his heel and left the room. He left the house, in fact, and didn’t stop moving until he reached his car, and then only long enough to open the door and get in behind the wheel. There was no time to be wasted on the social amenities.

  It was 3:30 by the time he made the small parking lot next to the Rexall drugstore. For some reason the lot was slightly below street level; Guinness parked next to the retaining wall, in order to be shielded as much as possible from view, and opened up the trunk. The time was fast approaching when he would need what he had been carrying around in the tire well ever since arriving.

  The Colt .45 automatic was still in his Eastern Airlines flight bag, wrapped in a cloth. It hadn’t been tampered with, but he went through the ritual of checking it anyway, and then put the flight bag, with his little five shot revolver inside, back into the tire well and closed the trunk lid, locking it with his key. He couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which he would need them both, and one gun stuck in your waistband was uncomfortable enough. There was an extra clip of cartridges for the .45, and he dropped them into his jacket pocket; he wasn’t going up against an army and probably wouldn’t need the extra six rounds, but it made him feel better to have them.

  Standing there, in the shade of the retaining wall, holding the huge automatic in his hand, Guinness wondered if there really was any chance at all of getting Rocky back. Certain things were inevitable: that before the day was over several human beings who, at this moment, were enjoying the best of health, who perhaps were hunting through their pockets for a roll of Lifesavers, or wondering how they were ever going to make the next payment on their house mortgage, were going to be dead. Perhaps he would be one of them, it really didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who had to die, so long as his daughter didn’t have to be one of them. He wasn’t a philanthropist, and people who went around kidnapping little girls had to take their chances.

  To hell with it. He put the ugly thing away, a little further back than usual, where so large an object would have less chance of bulging under his coat, and he fished around in his pocket for some change. It was time to make a phone call.

  . . . . .

  It must be nice to work for an organization with money; the CIA seemed to have safe houses everywhere, even in the wilds of South Carolina. Guinness didn’t have the faintest idea where the place was and didn’t much care. It was simply a rule in this business that once an operation was started you didn’t go back to your own room—you never knew who might be waiting there for you. And with the little package that friend Firbank was carting around, it wouldn’t do for him to go back to the Holiday Inn.

  He checked his watch again—it had been better than an hour and a half, so the pride of Langley would have had plenty of time for everything—and dropped a dime in the pay phone next to the drugstore’s magazine rack, which seemed to contain nothing but True Confessions and Family Circle. Firbank answered on the first ring. In the background was the sound of a television set.

  “Did you manage it?”

  Firbank only laughed, cocky punt. “Yeah, sure. It was easy. I just walked in and flashed my card. The lady I talked to in the principal’s office wasn’t even surprised; it seems they’ve had a lot of trouble with both the kid and his family. ‘Known criminal types,’ I think she said. The CIA was a new wrinkle, apparently, but they gave him up without a murmur. I pulled him right out of English class.”

  Guinness smiled tightly at the woman behind the counter and decided he would buy something on his way out. She didn’t look as if she thought he had any business there if he was just going to use the phone, and he didn’t want to make any new enemies, not for the next few hours. It was a kind of superstition with him, a willingness to make small appeasing gestures to a malevolent universe and its immediate representatives—in this case
, the woman behind the counter at the Clemson Rexall.

  “Is he giving you any trouble?” He might have wished that Firbank had thought to use some less direct, less hazard ridden method to pick up the child, but you couldn’t ask for the moon. Probably he was just being overly nice; nobody was going to press any charges for kidnapping, and if they did, that would be Firbank’s problem.

  “Not a peep.” Firbank seemed to cup his hand over the mouthpiece; in any case, his tone became more confidential. “I told him we’re playing a joke on his old man, and he laughed his ass off—besides, it seems he doesn’t much like English. He’s a fat kid, and I think a little simple. I bought him a quart of chocolate ice cream and put him down in front of the boob tube. He’s happy, don’t worry about him.”

  Guinness wasn’t in the least worried.

  “Then you know what to do,” he said, repeating the lesson so there would be no mistakes. “You bring him here—in exactly fifteen minutes, no more and no less—and you park across the street—”

  “Right. And when I see you in the window, the kid and I come out of the car and show ourselves for about ten seconds, so our client can have a good hard look but not have time enough for anything cute. Then we get back into the car and we drive away. Did I get it right, teacher?”

  “You got it right. And remember, when you’re finished, you take that kid and you get lost somewhere. I don’t want either one of you turning up for a good long time. You’re sure Healy’s in his office?”

  “I’m sure. Relax, McAffee, he’s there. He’s been there all afternoon.”

  “Good enough. Fifteen minutes from right now.”

  Guinness hung up the phone and looked at his watch again: 3:40. He should give himself at least five or six minutes before he even thought about going up to see Healy, and the movie house was right next door. Timing was everything.