“Anyway, we both had a lot on our minds during the flight down, there was a kind of awkwardness between us. By then Robin had read me, he had a good idea of who and what I was, he knew the names of men I’d killed. Even so he loved me. It was my love he was afraid of losing, because he felt like a goddamn monster.”
“Poor Robin.”
“We chartered a boat, fished for jack and pompano, did some diving. Our usual routine. When he finally got all the emotional knots untangled and confessed—”
“You couldn’t believe a tenth of what he told you.”
“No. So he flipped a Kennedy half dollar fifty times. Forty-seven times it came down heads. Robin said he could keep it up all afternoon, but it was boring. Then he unsheathed his diver’s knife and asked me to stand behind him. He wasn’t wearing anything but swim trunks and burn cream on his shoulders and nose. He stood in the sun on the stern deck with his right arm outstretched, palm up. He put the knife in his palm and concentrated on it for a couple of minutes. His hand was steady. The knife suddenly flew and stuck with tremendous force in the mast twelve feet away. Robin retrieved the knife and held it up, and I remember how the sun flashed on the blade. He passed his other hand over the blade and it wilted like an unwatered flower. Then he straightened the blade, not quite as good as new: it was about an eighth of an inch out of plumb.”
“Good Lord. What did you do?”
“I smiled; asked him how he did it. He said, By wanting to, that’s all I know. Robin looked tired. I went below to get him some lemonade and fix myself a drink. I poured a hell of a lot of gin over ice and drank it before it was cold. The sight of a tempered steel knife blade curling over at the tip wasn’t easily dismissed from the mind.”
“No indeed.”
“When I tried to apply reason to what I’d seen, my mind just—balked. Nothing looked quite right to me, but I didn’t blame that on the gin. I couldn’t tell if I was looking at water or artfully contrived, blue concrete. I had the eerie notion I could walk on it, all the way to Buenos Aires. I wondered if the multiplication tables still worked. I wondered if the sun was going to set as usual, or if it would hang in that particular spot in the sky forever—”
“In other words, you freaked.”
“I finally realized what was affecting me: simple terror. I’d dealt with terror before. You have to get yourself moving. Do something, anything, but don’t just stand there paralyzed. So I took Robin his lemonade. He was anxious and uncomfortable. I don’t know how I looked to him. I imagine my smile was badly hung. But when I gave him the glass and touched his hand I found that I could breathe again. After that I was okay. Different, but okay.”
“When did you decide to quit MORG?”
“On the spot. It was obvious that Robin was going to need me, badly. I had an obligation, a moral obligation to complete an assignment I’d been working on for a year. Then I could come home to stay. Ellis Tidrow had been wanting to return to missionary work for some time. Borneo, New Guinea, one of those Godforsaken places. I told Robin I was ready to be a full-time father. At first he was afraid I’d made the decision because I thought he needed a keeper. When I convinced him otherwise, he was—overjoyed. God, we had a beautiful time the rest of that week, making up for some long-gone years.”
“Smoke getting in your eyes?” Hester asked.
“No, I’m crying:”
“Oh,” she said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t go apeshit on you.”
“It isn’t apeshit to cry when you love someone.”
Peter moved her, but tenderly, got up to walk off his emotion. He added another log to the fire. He came back to her. He was angry now, though not at himself. Hester closed her eyes and touched him blindly, erotic because of the tears she had seen.
“I think Childermass planned to take Robin from me the night I introduced them,” Peter said. “Robin had prepared a couple of reasonably difficult demonstrations. Ball bearings on a Formica table top. He kept several of them in constant motion without rolling any off the table, a feat which I couldn’t duplicate using both hands. Childermass wrote down a long series of numbers, sealed the original in a metal box, kept a check list. Robin held the box in his hands. From eight feet away Robin ran the numbers off on a digital calculator, almost faster than the eye could follow. It was obvious, even then, that Robin’s talents … had no practical limitations.”
“I don’t understand why you had to tell Childermass that Robin’ was a psychic.”
“Do you remember what MORG stands for?”
“Multiphasic, Operations, and umm, Research something-or-other.”
“Research Group.”
“MORG. That’s … really grotesque, when you think about it.”
“Just a bastard little agency that never made it at DOD. Except for Childermass it would have been dismantled along about the beginning of the Korean War. But Childermass is one of the great bureaucrats and demagogues, the equal of Hoover himself. He took an agency nobody knew much about and created a sphere of influence in the Cold War climate of the fifties. All he needed to become really powerful was a few hundred million dollars. He got the swag by scaring people. He tricked and lied and blackmailed. He conned large numbers of otherwise sensible men into believing that the CIA and the FBI weren’t enough. We needed MORG. And did we ever get it.”
“I don’t think you answered my question about Robin and—”
“I was so tired of the gangster work, the neighborhood protection rackets. Which is all it ever amounted to despite the rhetoric and the chauvinism. We were protecting our no-doubt vital interests in neighborhoods like Cambodia, Peru, and the Trucial Oman States. And the old ways always worked best: a payoff here, a killing there. I was damned tired and just a little careless long before I recognized the symptoms. I ought to have quit cold, but Childermass argued me out of it. I accepted double salary and a title in an area where my training and judgment might be valuable. A sensitive post. Too sensitive, because Robin had access to everything inside my head. Sooner or later that would have caused trouble. So I told Childermass. Hell, I all but invited him to steal my son.”
“You didn’t know Childermass was interested in psychic phenomena.”
“No. The Russians and the Czechs had been diddling with it for years, reason enough for Childermass to sink a few million into Paragon Institute. Nothing much had come of his investments. But it was all there, just waiting, for Robin.”
Peter got up to open a bottle of Irish beer and poke up the fire. Hester curled deep in the tub chair, looking out at him like a dreamy animal in a winter den.
“That’s one reason why I don’t believe my son is dead,” Peter said quietly. “Dr. Irving Roth is a liar. His computer also tells lies, and four `witnesses’ will lie to their graves because they’ve been handsomely bought. Childermass leaves nothing to chance. Robin was too valuable to be let out of Paragon by himself, particularly at two in the morning.”
“What if he … broke out for some reason?”
“And jumped in the river with four people watching? It’s a little too neat, Hester.”
“I guess so.”
“Childermass found himself in possession of a unique natural resource. The Russians don’t have one. The Chinese don’t have one. He wanted Robin locked up—the euphemism is ‘involuntary sequestration’—where his researchers could devote full time to him. He didn’t want any questions asked about the boy, ever. Robin’s ‘death’ was easy to fake, but there was a bigger problem.”
“You?”
Peter nodded. “Childermass knew that as long as I was alive there was no chance he could get away with any of it. Robin was scheduled for five days of tests at Paragon Institute. In the meantime Childermass had an urgent request. One of our Russians had died in Vladimir prison after eight long years. As soon as he was in the ground the Ukrainian NTS got his wife out; she had refused to leave Russia as long as Sergei was alive. There was a chance she had some information, one of many pieces
of a puzzle we’d been working on for a long time, and because I’d known them both it seemed likely Katya would be willing to cooperate with me. She was old and sick and we were working against time, so I flew to Finland immediately. But I was a few hours late; Katya had lapsed into a coma and was failing so rapidly there was no chance she would recover. I saw her briefly. Maybe it was Katya. Or maybe it was some other old woman they’d drugged for the occasion.”
“Who do you mean, they?”
“Our Baltic group. The Principal is, or was, a man named McGourty. I think I killed him, but to this day I don’t know for sure. Good old McGourty. He sprung for dinner at Kalastasaturppa and got me to the Helsinki airport in plenty of time to catch the 7:30 P.M. Finnair flight to Copenhagen. From there I was connecting direct to New York on SAS. I said goodbye to McGourty at the gate. The plane was a DC-9, I think, and the flight was lightly booked, maybe twenty-five passengers in all.
“We were boarding in a light rain, walking across a stretch of wet tarmac, when the bomb went off prematurely, almost blowing the tail section off the plane. The explosion dismembered a couple of cargo busters and a ramp rat. Most of the boarding passengers were injured; fortunately there was a big catering truck between us and the blast. I don’t know what caused the bomb to go off at the airport instead of over the Gulf of Finland. Maybe one of the cargo busters pried open the wrong suitcase. I came to in the back of an ambulance parked on the ramp. I remembered vaguely having dinner with McGourty, and there he was again, bending over me on the litter, talking, to me, looking very concerned. I couldn’t hear a word he said. He had rolled up my sleeve. I saw the needle in his hand. I couldn’t tell you why I reacted like I did. I might have seen something, just for an instant, in his eyes. I think now that McGourty heard the explosion as he was driving away from the airport, turned around and came back in case it was necessary to finish off a bad job. And that’s a bad pun, but I got both hands around his throat before he could jab me, and if he wasn’t dead when I left him on the litter and drove off in the ambulance, it’s only because I wasn’t at full strength at the time.”
“All those people dead because—”
“Childermass wanted to be sure I didn’t come back from Finland. He could have put me up for bids, I can think of half a dozen professionals who would’ve considered the money worth the risks. Childermass has always been a free spender when it comes to his pie-in-the-sky projects, but my life wasn’t worth two hundred and fifty thousand bucks when five thousand would do the trick, and to hell with the rest of the people on that plane. By the time he assigned a reliable assassin, I had my wits about me. It took me six weeks to get home. I had it figured—why he’d done it; what he wanted. I got in touch. He said he knew he’d made a hell of a big mistake, and he wanted to talk. Just the two of us.”
“Did you trust him?”
“We worked it out so there was no possibility I was walking into something. But he was so eager to get rid of me he was willing to do the job himself. Childermass isn’t a coward, but he’s never carried a weapon and as far as I know he’s never killed a man. It can be hard to do that first time. He was counting on me to be a little lax. Hardware fixed him up with a High Standard Model 10 riot gun, which is an automatic shotgun a little more than two feet long, with a pistol grip, loaded with Sabot cartridges that generate twenty-two-hundred foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. It’s one of the most evil weapons ever devised. He had the gun under his rain slicker. We met after midnight, in the middle of a parking lot at RFK stadium. His car, a VW, and the stolen car I was driving. I circled until I was satisfied he was alone in the bug. I parked eight feet away, and parallel. He got out. It was raining. He had his right hand through the side slot in the coat. I still didn’t expect anything. But the engine was running: I had one foot heavy on the brake, the other on the accelerator.
“He should have brought that shotgun up firing through the glass of the off-side window—hell, he could have blown the side right out of the car. But he couldn’t see well because of the rain, and maybe he didn’t trust his fire-power. If he’d done it right, there wouldn’t have been anything left of me above the belt buckle. But he wasn’t a pro, he wanted the door open. I’d rigged a little something, just to set him back on his heels, make him nervous. A fifty-thousand-candle-power torch that went on as soon as the door was opened, hitting him full in the face, blinding him. He lost his cool and tried to drag that shotgun out from under the slicker. He was back on his heels, still holding onto the door with the other hand. I hit the gas and took off. Childermass lost his balance and fell down hard on his butt with his left arm still extended, and the shotgun was hung up at a bad angle. The jolt triggered it and that big, heavy Sabot slug blew his arm away at the elbow.”
“Oh, God, that’s terrible! What did you do?”
“Drove fifty feet; stopped. Looked back. Put it in reverse. I figured by the time I ran over him, back and forth three or four times, he wouldn’t miss the arm at all.”
Hester’s face was totally drained of color. “I don’t believe … you would have done that.”
Peter reacted with a fierceness that startled Hester: he took her face in his hands. The pressure of his fingertips made heavy indentations along her cheekbones. She sucked air painfully through clenched teeth. Hester tried to look away, and couldn’t.
“Hester,” he said softly, “what are we talking about here? I never owned a white horse. I was never in a fair fight in my life. I never gave the other guy a chance to draw first. It is a very ugly thing to die by shotgun. It’s probably worse than being blown up by a bomb ten thousand feet over deep blue water. I would have run over him, Hester. I would have mangled him. But they were monitoring or observing visually from somewhere, and they filled the area with cars in a hell of a hurry. I got out alive because I had clouted some kid’s Roadrunner with a big mag mill in it, and because I had less to lose than the man driving the chase car; speed and desperation gave me the necessary edge.”
Hester’s stomach was churning. Her right cheek stung where one of his fingernails had gouged her.
“Please …”
Peter released her. He turned his head away as if he felt contempt for her, for unpardonable weakness. His contempt hurt worse than a beating.
She had said: “It could be—the one reason why he won’t give up, why he’s still after you.”
And Peter had said: “Revenge isn’t that dear to Childermass. No, he’s hunting me out of fear. He’s afraid I’ll take Robin away from him. And Robin has become more important to him than MORG itself.”
Hester watched Peter scrape the underside of his jaw with the old-fashioned straight razor which he’d stropped to a delicate edge. He had good steady hands today. He’d slept soundly two nights in a row, so he wasn’t sick to his stomach half the time from sheer nervous fatigue. He could hold on to his meals and he’d put on four or five pounds since she’d been cooking for him, he didn’t look quite so gaunt any more. In another week … Hester’s eyes stung with sudden tears. She wished now she had lied about the girl poor Raymond Dunwoodie had mentioned, the psychic. “I checked all the hospitals, Peter. I couldn’t find a trace of the girl. Maybe she wasn’t treated—you know, she might have been feeling okay and they just sent her home.” But it wasn’t so easy to lie to him. Not when he sat very close and still, his eyes motionless like a chilly kind of waking death, with those metal-hazy glints that made you mindful of the savage potential of the smaller jungle cats, the ones even the best of the cat keepers and trainers don’t try to work into the act.
So she’d told him all she had learned about Gillian Bellaver. Those Bellavers. He praised her detective work. There was a tremor of excitement in him, a renewed sense of purpose. Hester couldn’t shake the feeling that she had made a disastrous mistake.
Peter finished his shave and rinsed. Hester got up and went back to the ironing board and pressed the priestly suit of clothes he had stolen the day before, along with a clerical collar and a pl
ain black homburg and a black satchel like the satchel doctors carried in that remote era when doctors made house calls. No one looked too closely at a priest in a hospital, no matter what time of the day or night he was seen there. No one asked for credentials.
When Peter had it all together Hester studied him critically from across the room.
“If I’d walked in the door just now I wouldn’t have known you,” she admitted.
“I feel about as authentic as a two-dollar hairpiece,” he grumbled. “I was never big on disguises.”
“You’ll be great, Father, um—”
“Van Bergen.”
“But the timing?”
“Couldn’t be better. New Year’s Eve, the hospital’s half empty. Reduced staff, and by ten o’clock tonight there’ll be at least one discreet but swinging party for those nurses stuck with floor duty. I’ll have plenty of time to talk to the Bellaver girl. And if she’s all Raymond claimed she was—”
“Then somebody else could be interested,” Hester said. “The ones Raymond talked to before you met him in the park. He had to be talking to MORG, Peter. There was no call from Raymond Dunwoodie logged at the Institute on that day. I checked.”
Peter studied her. “Maybe you’re taking too many chances lately.”
“Oh, Peter, anybody can get a look at the telephone log!”
“That place is heavily miked, Hester! And I tried to explain to you how the Psychological Stress Evaluator works: they’ll have random print-outs on every employee. It’s a long-distance device that evaluates physiological tremors under stress, you don’t have to be hooked up to it to give yourself—”
“Okay, okay.”
“So you spent a few minutes bashing with their computer and got away with it, but maybe you’ve done something else that strikes Paragon security as a little odd, and they don’t need much to make them suspicious. One slip and you’ll be another in a fairly long line of people who have passed through Paragon Institute on their way to a cloudy corner of limbo.”
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