by Tom Clancy
“Where did all the rust come from?” he asked her, giving the keys back.
“She went to school in Chicago, at Northwestern, all that terrible snow and salt.”
“That’s a good school. Let’s get you back inside.” Kelly took her arm and directed her back to the house. It smelled like an old person’s house, the air heavy with dust that she was too tired to wipe, and stale food, for the meals she still fixed were for two, not one.
“Are you thirsty?”
“Yes, Ma’am, thank you. Water will be just fine.” Kelly looked around while she went to the kitchen. There was a photo on the wall, a man in a high-necked uniform and Sam Browne belt, holding the arm of a young woman in a very tight, almost cylindrical, white wedding dress. Other photos cataloged the married life of Kenneth and Gloria Boyd. Two daughters and a son, a trip to the ocean, an old car, grandchildren, all the things earned in a full and useful life.
“Here you go.” She handed over a glass.
“Thank you. What did your husband do?”
“He worked for the Commerce Department for forty-two years. We were going to move to Florida, but then he got sick so now I’m going alone. My sister lives in Fort Pierce, she’s a widow too, her husband was a policeman. . . ” Her voice trailed off as the cat came in to examine the new visitor. That seemed to invigorate Mrs. Boyd. “I’m moving down there next week. The house is already sold, have to get out next Thursday. I sold it to a nice young doctor.”
“I hope you like it down there, Ma’am. How much do you want for the car?”
“I can’t drive anymore because of my eyes, cataracts. People have to drive me everywhere I go. My grandson says it’s worth one thousand five hundred dollars.”
Your grandson must be a lawyer to be that greedy, Kelly thought. “How about twelve hundred? I can pay cash.”
“Cash?” Her eyes became fey again.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Then you can have the car.” She held out her hand and Kelly took it carefully.
“Do you have the paperwork?” It made Kelly feel guilty that she had to get up again, this time heading upstairs, slowly, holding on to the banister while Kelly took out his wallet and counted off twelve crisp bills.
It should have taken only another ten minutes, but instead it was thirty. Kelly had already checked up on how to do the mechanics of a title transfer, and besides, he wasn’t going to do all of that. The auto-insurance policy was tucked into the same cardboard envelope as the title, in the name of Kenneth W. Boyd. Kelly promised to take care of that for her, and the tags, too, of course. But it turned out that all the cash made Mrs. Boyd nervous, and so Kelly helped her fill out a deposit ticket, and then drove her to her bank, where she could drop it into the night depository. Then he stopped off at the supermarket for milk and cat food before bringing her home and walking her to the door again.
“Thank you for the car, Mrs. Boyd,” he said in parting.
“What are you going to use it for?”
“Business.” Kelly smiled and left.
At quarter of nine that night, two cars pulled into the service area on Interstate 95. The one in front was a Dodge Dart and the one behind it a red Plymouth Roadrunner. Roughly fifty feet apart, they picked a half-full area north of Maryland House, a rest stop set in the median of the John F. Kennedy Highway, offering full restaurant services along with gas and oil—good coffee, but, understandably, no alcoholic beverages. The Dart took a few meandering turns in the parking lot, finally stopping three spaces from a white Oldsmobile with Pennsylvania tags and a brown vinyl top. The Roadrunner took a space in the next row. A woman got out and walked towards the brick restaurant, a path that took her past the Olds.
“Hey, baby,” a man said. The woman stopped and took a few steps towards the vinyl-topped automobile. The man was Caucasian, with long but neatly combed black hair and an open-necked white shirt.
“Henry sent me,” she said.
“I know.” He reached out to stroke her face, a gesture which she did not resist. He looked around a little before moving his hand downwards. “You have what I want, baby?”
“Yes.” She smiled. It was a forced, uneasy smile, frightened but not embarrassed. Doris was months beyond embarrassment.
“Nice tits,” the man said with no emotional content at all in his voice. “Get the stuff.”
Doris walked back to her car, as though she’d forgotten something. She returned with a large purse, almost a small duffel, really. As she walked past the Olds, the man’s hand reached out and took it. Doris proceeded into the building, returning a minute later holding a can of soda, her eyes on the Roadrunner, hoping that she’d done everything right. The Olds had its motor running, and the driver blew her a kiss, to which she responded with a wan smile.
“That was easy enough,” Henry Tucker said, fifty yards away, at the outdoor eating area on the other side of the building.
“Good stuff?” another man asked Tony Piaggi. The three of them sat at the same table, “enjoying” the sultry evening while the majority of the patrons were inside with the air conditioning.
“The best. Same as the sample we gave you two weeks ago. Same shipment and everything,” Piaggi assured him.
“And if the mule gets burned?” the man from Philadelphia asked.
“She won’t talk,” Tucker assured him. “They’ve all seen what happens to bad girls.” As they watched, a man got out of the Roadrunner and got into the Dart’s driver’s seat.
“Very good,” Rick told Doris.
“Can we go now?” she asked him, shaking now that the job was over, sipping nervously at her soda.
“Sure, baby, I know what you want.” Rick smiled and started the car. “Be nice, now. Show me something.”
“There’s people around,” Doris said.
“So?”
Without another word, Doris unbuttoned her shirt—it was a man’s shirt—leaving it tucked into her faded shorts. Rick reached in and smiled, turning the wheel with his left hand. It could have been worse, Doris told herself, closing her eyes, pretending that she was someone else in some other place, wondering how long before her life would end too, hoping it wouldn’t be long.
“The money?” Piaggi asked.
“I need a cup of coffee.” The other man got up and walked inside, leaving his briefcase, which Piaggi took in his hand. He and Tucker walked off to his car, a blue Cadillac, without waiting for the other man to come back.
“Not going to count it?” Tucker asked halfway across the parking lot.
“If he stiffs us, he knows what happens. This is business, Henry.”
“That’s right,” Tucker agreed.
“Bill Murphy,” Kelly said. “I understand you have some vacant apartments.” He held up the Sunday paper.
“What are you looking for?”
“A one-bedroom would be fine. I really just need a place to hang my clothes,” Kelly told the man. “I travel a lot.”
“Salesman?” the manager asked.
“That’s right. Machine tools. I’m new here—new territory, I mean.”
It was an old garden-apartment complex, built soon after the Second World War for returning veterans, composed exclusively of three-story brick structures. The trees looked about right for that time period. They’d been planted then and grown well, tall enough now to support a good population of squirrels, wide enough to give shade to the parking areas. Kelly looked around approvingly as the manager took him to a first-floor furnished unit.
“This is just fine,” Kelly announced. He looked around, testing the kitchen sink and other plumbing fixtures. The furniture was obviously used, but in decent shape. There were even air conditioners in the windows of every room.
“I have other ones—”
“This is just what I need. How much?”
“One seventy-five a month, one month security deposit.”
“Utilities?”
“You can pay them yourself or we can bill it. Some of our renters
prefer that. They’ll average about forty-five dollars a month.”
“Easier to pay one bill than two or three. Let’s see. One seventy-five, plus forty-five. . .”
“Two-twenty,” the manager said helpfully.
“Four-forty,” Kelly corrected. “Two months, right? I can pay you with a check, but it’s an out-of-town bank. I don’t have a local account yet. Is cash okay?”
“Cash is always okay with me,” the manager assured him.
“Fine.” Kelly took out his wallet, handing over the bills. He stopped. “No, six-sixty, we’ll make it three months, if that’s okay. And I need a receipt.” The helpful manager pulled a pad from his pocket and wrote one up on the spot. “How about a phone?” Kelly asked.
“I can have that done by Tuesday if you want. There’s another deposit for that.”
“Please take care of that, if you would.” Kelly handed over some more money. “My stuff won’t be here for a while. Where can I get sheets and stuff?”
“Nothing much open today. Tomorrow, lots of ’em.”
Kelly looked through the bedroom door at the bare mattress. He could see the lumps from this distance. He shrugged. “Well, I’ve slept on worse.”
“Veteran?”
“Marine,” Kelly said.
“So was I once,” the manager replied, surprising Kelly. “You don’t do anything wild, do you?” He didn’t expect so, but the owner insisted that he ask, even ex-Marines. The answer was a sheepish, reassuring grin.
“I snore pretty bad, they tell me.”
Twenty minutes later Kelly was in a cab heading downtown. He got out at Penn Station and caught the next train to D.C., where another taxi delivered him to his boat. By nightfall, Springer was headed down the Potomac. It would have been so much easier, Kelly told himself, if there were just one person to help him. So much of his time was tied up with useless commuting. But was it really useless? Maybe not. He was getting a lot of thinking done, and that was as important as his physical preparations. Kelly arrived at his home just before midnight after six continuous hours of thinking and planning.
Despite a weekend of almost nonstop motion, there was no time to dawdle. Kelly packed clothing, most of it purchased in the suburbs of Washington. Linens he would buy in Baltimore. Food the same. His .45 automatic, plus the .22-.45 conversion kit, was packed in with old clothing, along with two boxes of ammunition. He shouldn’t need more than that, Kelly thought, and ammo was heavy. While he fabricated one more silencer, this one for the Woodsman, he thought through his preparations. His physical condition was excellent, nearly as good as it had been in 3rd SOG, and he’d been shooting every day. His aim was probably better than it had ever been, he told himself, going through what were now almost mindless mechanical operations on the machine tools. By three in the morning the new suppressor was fitted to the Woodsman and tested. Thirty minutes after that he was back aboard Springer, headed north, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep once he got past Annapolis.
It was a lonely night, with scattered clouds, and his mind drifted somewhat before he commanded himself to concentrate. He was not a lazy civilian anymore, but Kelly allowed himself his first beer in weeks while his mind churned over variables. What had he forgotten? The reassuring answer was that he could think of nothing. The less-than-satisfactory thought was that he still knew little. Billy with his red Plymouth muscle car. A black guy named Henry. He knew their area of operation. And that was all.
But.
But he’d fought armed and trained enemies with less knowledge than that, and though he would force himself to be just as careful now as he had been there, deep down he knew that he would accomplish this mission. Partly it was because he was more formidable than they, and far more highly motivated. The other part, Kelly realized with surprise, was because he didn’t care about the consequences, only the results. He remembered something from his Catholic prep school, a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that had defined his mission almost two thousand years before: Una salus victus nullam sperare salutem. The one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety. The very grimness of the thought made him smile as he sailed under the stars, light dispatched from distances so vast that it had begun its journey long before Kelly, or even Virgil, had been born.
The pills helped shut out reality, but not all the way. Doris didn’t so much think the thought as listen to it, sense it, like recognizing something that she didn’t wish to face but refused to go away. She was too dependent on the barbiturates now. Sleep came hard to her, and in the emptiness of the room she was unable to avoid herself. She would have taken more pills if she could, but they didn’t allow her what she wanted, not that she wanted much. Just brief oblivion, a short-term liberation from her fear, that was all—and that was something they had no interest in granting her. She could see more than they knew or would have expected, she could peer into the future, but that was little consolation. Sooner or later she would be caught by the police. She’d been arrested before, but not for something of this magnitude, and she’d go away for a long time for this. The police would try to get her to talk, promise her protection. She knew better. Twice now she’d seen friends die. Friends? As close to that as was possible, someone to talk to, someone who shared her life, such as it was, and even in this captivity there were little jokes, small victories against the forces that ruled her existence, like distant lights in a gloomy sky. Someone to cry with. But two of them were dead, and she’d watched them die, sitting there, drugged but unable to sleep and blot it out, the horror so vast that it became numbing, watching their eyes, seeing and feeling the pain, knowing that she could do nothing, knowing even that they knew it as well. A nightmare was bad enough, but one of those couldn’t reach out and touch you. You could wake up and flee from one of those. Not this. She could watch herself from outside, as though she were a robot outside her own command but not that of others. Her body would not move unless others commanded it, and she even had to conceal her thoughts, was even afraid to voice them within her own mind lest they hear them or see them on her face, but now. try as she might, she could not force them away.
Rick lay next to her, breathing slowly in the darkness. Part of her liked Rick. He was the gentlest of them, and sometimes she allowed herself to think that he liked her, maybe a little, because he didn’t beat her badly. She had to stay in line, of course, because his anger was every bit as bad as Billy‘s, and so around Rick she tried very hard to be good. Part of her knew that it was foolish, but her reality was defined by other people now. And she’d seen the results of real resistance. After one especially bad night Pam had held her, and whispered her desires to escape. Later, Doris had prayed that she had gotten away, that there might be hope after all, only to see her dragged in and to watch her die, sitting helplessly fifteen feet away while they did everything to her that they could imagine. Watching her life end, her body convulsing from lack of oxygen with the man’s face staring at her, laughing at her from an inch away. Her only act of resistance, thankfully unnoticed by the men, had been to brush out her friend’s hair, crying all the while, hoping somehow that Pam would know there was someone who cared, even in death. But the gesture had seemed empty even as she’d done it, making her tears all the more bitter.
What had she done wrong? Doris wondered, how badly had she offended God that her life should be this way? How could anyone possibly deserve such a bleak and hopeless existence?
“I’m impressed, John,” Rosen said, staring at his patient. Kelly sat on the examining table, his shirt off. “What have you been doing?”
“Five-mile swim for the shoulders. Better than weights, but a little of that, too, in the evening. A little running. About what I used to do back in the old days.”
“I wish I had your blood pressure,” the surgeon observed, removing the cuff. He’d done a major procedure that morning, but he made time for his friend.
“Exercise, Sam,” Kelly advised.
“I don’t have the time, John,” the surgeon said—
rather weakly, both thought.
“A doc should know better.”
“True,” Rosen conceded. “How are you otherwise?”
The reply was just a look, neither a smile nor a grimace, just a neutral expression that told Rosen all he needed to know. One more try: “There’s an old saying: Before setting out on revenge, dig two graves.”
“Only two?” Kelly asked lightly.
Rosen nodded. “I read the post report, too. I can’t talk you out of it?”
“How’s Sarah?”
Rosen accepted the deflection with good grace. “Deep into her project. She’s excited enough that she’s telling me about it. It’s pretty interesting stuff.”
Just then Sandy O’Toole came in. Kelly startled both of them by lifting his T-shirt and covering his chest. “Please!”
The nurse was so startled that she laughed, and so did Sam until he realized that Kelly was indeed ready for whatever he was planning. The conditioning, the looseness, the steady, serious eyes that changed to mirth when he wanted them to. Like a surgeon, Rosen thought, and what a strange thought that was, but the more he looked at this man, the more intelligence he saw.
“You’re looking healthy for a guy who got shot a few weeks ago,” O’Toole said with a friendly look.
“Clean living, Ma’am. Only one beer in thirty-some days.”
“Mrs. Lott is conscious now, Doctor Rosen,” the nurse reported. “Nothing unusual, she appears to be doing fine. Her husband’s been in to see her. I think he’ll be okay, too. I had my doubts.”
“Thanks, Sandy.”
“Well, John, you’re healthy, too. Put your shirt on before Sandy starts blushing,” Rosen added with a chuckle.
