Code of Blood

by George C. Chesbro

  Tank Olsen and Montsero had been butchered by someone very strong, like Hammerhead, wielding something heavy and razor-sharp, perhaps a machete. Bloody chunks of both men were strewn about the room, and their severed heads had been placed alongside each other on top of the electrical discharge apparatus; Montsero’s aviator glasses had been neatly set in place on the bridge of his nose.

  Chant imagined he could almost hear the echo of Hammerhead’s loud, mad laughter ringing in the room.

  The straps on the torture chair had been unbuckled, but Chant did not immediately rise. He sat still, scanning the small lecture hall with his eyes as he tried to make sense of what had happened, and why he was still alive. Hammerhead, he thought, had undoubtedly killed Montsero because of what Hammerhead considered the psychologist’s lax security measures. In addition, probably without Montsero’s knowing it, Hammerhead must have rigged the discharge apparatus so that Olsen would die, but Chant would only be stunned into unconsciousness.

  Why? Some kind of macabre joke?

  Chant continued to mull it over in his mind, until the answer came to him with a stunning impact that left a burning taste in the back of his mouth that had nothing to do with the electricity that had coursed through his body.

  His watch had been taken from him before he’d been strapped into the chair, but a clock on the wall read seven-thirty; he’d been unconscious close to three hours.

  He hoped he was not too late.

  Chant rose from the chair, walked quickly down into the well of the lecture room, up onto the platform to the door of the office where he had met with Hammerhead. The door was locked, but Chant kicked it open. In three quick strides he was across the office and behind the desk. There was a telephone and a Manhattan directory in one of the drawers, and Chant quickly dialed Martha Greenblatt’s number. There was no answer After fifteen rings Chant hung up, found Jan Rawlings’s home number in the Manhattan directory, called that. Again, there was no answer.

  Although he was out of disguise and the jumpsuit he was wearing was splattered with blood, Chant knew there was no time to do anything about it. If Martha Greenblatt and Jan Rawlings were still alive, Chant thought, it would only be because Hammerhead had underestimated how long he would be unconscious. Minutes could count.

  He hurried from the building and across the campus He broke into the first car he found, crossed the wires, and within moments was on his way into Manhattan. Traffic was light, and in less than half an hour he had pulled up to the curb in front of Martha Greenblatt’s East Side brownstone. Chant leaped out of the car, bounded up the steps to the entrance.

  Lights were on inside the brownstone, but there was no answer to his knock. When the knob didn’t turn, Chant kicked the door open and stepped into the richly decorated vestibule. His first reaction was relief, for there was no blood; then the smell came to him.

  Searching through tears, Chant found the mutilated bodies of Martha and Harry Greenblatt in the blood-drenched master bedroom Martha’s severed head had been placed on top of her typewriter, which in turn was set in the middle of a small writing desk placed in a corner of the bedroom Her silver hair was stained crimson, and her pale eyes stared unseeing through the lenses of her reading glasses.

  “I’m so sorry, Martha,” Chant said aloud, wiping away tears. He found two silk scarves in the dresser drawer, covered the heads, sighed deeply. “You turned out to be too good a lawyer for both of us; I never should have listened to you. But you won’t be forgotten, and the men who did this won’t be forgiven. I promise you they’ll pay.”

  With that, Chant took the grief in his heart and gently pushed it aside to where it could be treated another day, but would not now dull his senses or interfere with what he had to do.

  There was a blood-stained piece of paper lying on the floor near the writing stand, and Chant picked it up. It was a carbon copy of a letter, apparently left on the floor as “evidence.”

  Dear Sirs,

  It has recently come to my attention that a man taking part in experiments at Blake College under the name of Neil Alter is actually the criminal, John Sinclair.

  Chant skimmed the rest of the letter, which went on to reveal everything R. Edgar Blake knew—but, fortunately, not everything Martha Greenblatt knew—about him, apparently in order to establish the credibility of the writer. The signature at the bottom was a fairly good forgery of the woman’s handwriting.

  Chant crumpled up the letter and tossed it aside He assumed copies had been hand-delivered by messenger to the New York offices of the FBI, NYPD, CIA, and possibly Interpol. Very soon, if it were not happening already, New York City would be swarming with people from many different agencies and countries, all looking for him Also very soon, someone would come upon the carnage in the lecture hall at Blake College; the police would connect the murders with the letter, and might even now be on the way to the brownstone …

  Chant picked up the telephone on the writing desk and once again dialed Jan Rawlings’s number. This time he let the phone ring twenty times before hanging up. He had not expected the phone to be answered, for he knew that the social worker was almost certainly dead by now. Hammerhead had done his homework before serving up his surprise in the lecture hall, Chant thought, and had gotten Jan Rawlings’s name from his application, Martha’s from a referral form Montsero had apparently requested. Now Tommy Wing was killing anyone he suspected might have suspicions about the experimental program.

  At the very least, Chant thought, Hammerhead was using the murders, and Chant himself, to make certain the waters would be muddied for some time to come; there would be plenty of time for Blake to help Hammerhead disappear—and, perhaps, eclipse forever the real purpose of the experiments.

  There was a Rolodex file on Martha’s writing desk, and on impulse Chant spun it to the Rs, flipped through the cards. There was a card for Jan Rawlings, listing both her home phone and a private office line Chant again picked up the telephone, dialed the office number.

  The line was busy; despite the lateness of the hour, someone was still in the large, communal office—and speaking on Jan Rawlings’s private line.

  In the distance he heard sirens, approaching and converging on the area from three different directions.

  He would certainly not be safe on the streets in a stolen car, Chant thought. On foot, in the New York City night, it would be easy to elude capture by melting into the darkness—but that would not be the fastest way to get to Jan Rawlings’s office building, which was where he had to go. As long as there was a chance she was still alive, he had to make every effort to make certain she stayed that way; since he could not reach her on the telephone, he would have to go to her.

  The car he had come in could well have been reported stolen by now, Chant thought, which meant he needed other transportation. Martha’s purse was on her dresser, and Chant quickly searched through it until he found the keys to her Mercedes. He went downstairs, through the kitchen and into the attached garage where the silver Mercedes was parked. Chant slid behind the wheel, started the engine, pushed the garage door opener, and pulled out onto the street.

  Heading downtown, Chant stopped the car at the curb beside the first phone booth he came to. He dropped a quarter in the slot and again dialed Jan Rawlings’s office number The line was still busy. He got back in the Mercedes and started up.

  He knew he was risking a great deal in what could turn out to be a futile gesture; by now the police would be searching hard for him, they would have his description, and there was a better than even chance they knew he was driving Martha’s car. Someone else—a cleaning lady—could be using the social worker’s phone, Chant thought, or she might simply have left it off the hook by accident before leaving the office. Still, he considered his course of action to be clear—and the car was the fastest way to get to the office building that loomed in the shadows of the great twin towers of the World Trade Center.

  He turned south on the West Side Highway bypass, accelerated past
the piers of the shipping lines that jutted into the Hudson River. As he stopped behind a car that had braked for a red light, two police cars with flashing lights pulled up on either side of him. The driver of the car to his left was talking excitedly into his radio, while his partner had drawn a gun and was shining a powerful flashlight into Chant’s face; before the light blinded him, Chant had seen in the policeman’s eyes a shock of recognition.

  Chant jammed the gears into reverse, slammed the accelerator to the floorboards and popped the clutch The engine and tires screamed as the car catapulted backward and caromed off the police car to Chant’s right. The officer with the drawn gun leaned out the window and squeezed off a shot that shattered the Mercedes’s windshield and whistled past Chant’s ear.

  Chant knew exactly where he wanted to go. He half turned in his seat and feathered the steering wheel slightly to his right. The rear of the car fishtailed, then veered sharply right. He lined up on his target, straightened the wheel and gripped it tightly to keep it in place. He crashed through a metal barrier and knocked over a fire hydrant before hitting the curb with a jolt that blew out both rear tires. Still he kept the accelerator to the floor as the car shot across the sidewalk and out a narrow loading dock toward the black, icy water of the Hudson.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jan sat in stunned disbelief, listening in amazement to the special news bulletin that had interrupted the Schubert symphony she’d been listening to. When the report was finished, Jan reached out with a trembling hand and shut off the small portable radio. Still numb with shock, she piled the client folders she had been updating into a neat, foot-high stack on the corner of her desk and replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. Then she rose and went to the windows where she could see out over the Hudson River and the West Side of Manhattan. From her position on the seventeenth floor of the office building, she could clearly see the revolving, flashing red and white lights of at least half a dozen police cars parked at various angles around the pier where the man Martha Greenblatt had introduced to her as Neil Alter, driving Martha’s stolen car, had reportedly plunged to his death in the ice-clogged river.

  Jan understood none of it. Over the years she had read a number of articles about the infamous John Sinclair, renegade American Army deserter and globe-trotting vigilante-mercenary-terrorist, but she could not understand how Martha Greenblatt—Jan was now certain that she had known Neil Alter’s real identity—could have become involved with him.

  Nor could Jan connect the gentle-eyed, gentle-voiced man who had twice met with her in this very office to an international criminal who had done all the terrible things reported in the media. In fact, for weeks Jan had been thinking a great deal about Neil Alter—who turned out to be John Sinclair, object of a twenty-year-long international manhunt.

  Jan shuddered and wrapped her arms around her chest as she stared at the flashing lights. She remembered the feelings the man had stirred in her, recalled the night she had dreamed of him and awoke touching herself, straining against her cupped hand and probing fingers. Ah yes, Jan thought with a thin, wry smile. What a charmingly innocent, Bible Belt Baptist she was; the only man whose fantasy-form had driven her to masturbation and caused her to experience her first orgasm turned out to be a cunning criminal who had killed a countless number of people.

  She started when she heard a noise behind her, wheeled around and saw a man standing in the doorway across the large room. The man appeared to be in his mid-fifties, with long, greasy gray hair that fell in pasty bands across his broad shoulders. His eyes were glassy, and the muscles in his face were slack, causing his jaw to droop slightly. His right hand was hidden inside the folds of a bulky wool overcoat.

  Jan swallowed hard as she struggled to resist the panic that threatened to paralyze her. She drew herself up to her full height, cleared her throat, and forced herself to speak in a clear, strong voice “I’m sorry, sir, but the office is closed now. There’s no one here to help you. The security guard downstairs should have told you that.”

  The man gave no indication that he had heard her—or, if he had, cared. He abruptly began walking across the room toward Jan. Jan snatched up the telephone and, without taking her eyes off the man, started to dial the emergency police number.

  The man’s hand came out of the overcoat; he was holding a machete with a black bone handle and a long, curved blade that shone dully in the fluorescent light. The blade described an arc, and Jan pulled her hand away just in time to avoid having it cut off. The blade severed the telephone cord and buried itself in the wood. The man wriggled the blade back and forth to free it from the desktop while Jan trembled with terror. Her initial fear had been that the man with the vacant, glassy eyes and long, greasy hair meant to rape her; now she had the horrible realization that he had not come to rape or rob, only to kill.

  The man’s attack had come so quickly that Jan had not even had time to scream—and now she knew she was not going to. Screaming, she thought, was useless, since there was no one to hear her. Her only hope for survival lay in stealth and cunning.

  She gripped her purse by its long, leather strap and swung it at the man’s head. The blade flashed, and Jan was left holding on to a length of strap while the heavy leather bag flew through the air across the room, bounced off one of the other desks, and landed on the floor. Jan grabbed a wooden-handled letter opener from her desktop and brandished it, then realized how futile such a weapon was against a man wielding a machete.

  She had to find a place to hide, Jan thought. The man was between her and the door, and she knew she could not hope to outrun him; with the lights on, it was only a matter of time before he trapped her and began chopping. There was only one place she could hide, and that was in the large, darkened conference room up the narrow stairs just behind and to her left.

  The man was climbing up over the desk now, swinging the blade like a deadly metronome back and forth in front of her face. Jan kicked off her shoes, turned and ran up the stairs into the darkness above. She heard the man stumble, then start to come after her, his tread heavy on the stairs. Jan hurled herself under a long, heavy conference table, crawled to the other side and cringed behind one of the wide table legs.

  After a few moments Jan screwed up her courage, rose to her knees, and peered over the top of the table. She could see the man’s figure silhouetted in the doorway against the light from the office below; he was searching for the light switch He found it, and a second later the lights came on.

  Jan ducked, spun around and jammed the point of the letter opener into the wall socket behind her Sparks and blue flame danced across the metal blade of the opener, but the wood handle protected Jan and the room went dark.

  The man hesitated just a moment, then began walking around the table. He was dragging the machete blade across the wood surface, and the odd, silky sound of steel sliding across the polished tabletop sent chills through Jan. The man bumped into a chair and, still without speaking a word, began mechanically hacking at it. Jan used the sound to cover her movements; she crawled on her hands and knees back under the table, made her way to the far corner of the room, and huddled in a corner.

  Having demolished the chair, the man continued his circuit around the table. He paused twenty feet away from Jan, man and poised machete outlined by the moonlight streaming in through the windows at the far end of the room.

  Suddenly there was a soft but distinct popping sound, like the snapping of someone’s fingers. The sound came from somewhere in the darkness along the wall to Jan’s left, just inside the doorway. The man with the machete tensed, cocked his head in that direction. The sound was repeated, this time slightly louder. The man in the moonlight raised his blade, lurched in the direction of the sound, and disappeared into the darkness amid the sound of crashing chairs. Jan cringed at the thwack-thwack of steel striking wood.

  To Jan’s astonishment, another, different silhouette suddenly glided into the wide pool of moonlight, moving silent as a shadow. It was the
silhouette of a tall man, well over six feet, and his shirt hung in shreds about his chest and shoulders. There was something familiar about the movements and shape of the silhouetted figure, and Jan had to jam her knuckles into her mouth to keep from crying out in shock—and joy.

  The tall man raised his right arm and snapped his fingers, once.

  Suddenly the man with the machete came hurtling out of the darkness, machete held high with both hands over his head. He brought the blade slicing down toward the top of the other figure’s head, but by then the tall man was no longer there. Moving with the speed and grace of a ballet dancer, Chant moved easily to one side as the blade sliced down through the empty space where he had been standing only a moment before. A knee shot up into the killer’s stomach, and for the first time a sound issued from the man’s throat as he doubled over and gasped for air. The machete clattered to the floor as Chant’s hand came down on the back of the killer’s neck. There was a cracking sound, and the killer collapsed to the floor.

  Somehow, Jan knew her attacker had died almost instantly It seemed to her that everything had happened in the space of a single breath.

  “Holy shit,” Jan heard herself say.

  “Are you all right, Miss Rawlings?” Chant asked as he turned the killer over in a pool of moonlight and began to search through his pockets.

  Jan’s response was to giggle. She felt weightless, turned inside out, floating somewhere inside the shell of her own body. “I am certainly not all right!” she managed to blurt between bursts of hysterical laughter. “As any one of my clients might put it, I’m scared out of my fucking gourd!”

  Chant stopped what he was doing and looked in her direction. “Are you hurt?”

  Jan brought her hysteria under control. She clenched her fists, took a deep breath, got to her feet, and walked into the moonlight. “No,” she said evenly. “Thanks to you, I’m not hurt.”