by Dean Koontz
Rice licked his lips. His throat was dry. He was so excited he could barely speak. "No. I didn't look. I never looked."
"And if you still doubt me," West said smugly, "one more thing. Lee Harvey Oswald's Marine records, and testimony of friends he made in the Marines, show that he was an abysmal marksman barely able to pass his requirements. Yet the commission wants us to believe that he fired at a moving target, aiming through an opening in a tree's foliage, a situation that allowed him eight-tenths of a second to aim and fire. And he was using a mail-order rifle." He laughed. "The commission asked three Master riflemen to re-create the assassination, just to show that it could be done as the commission said it had been done. The Masters used the Mannlicher-Cardano rifle Oswald had used, but only after the telescopic sight was remounted."
Rice blinked. "Remounted?"
The sight wasn't aligned with the barrel and, therefore, whatever one saw through the telescope was not what the barrel was pointing at. We made a mistake planting the Mannlicher-Carcano. We should have made certain the gun at least could have been used for the job even if it wasn't. But it worked out well enough."
"The Master riflemen," Rice reminded him.
"Oh, yes. After the telescopic sight had been remounted, the three Masters tried their hands at a recreation. They were placed on a platform half as high as the sixth-floor window from which Lee Oswald supposedly fired the shot. Their target was not moving, while Oswald's target had been moving. They were allowed all the time they wanted to line up a shot— not eight-tenths of a second, as Oswald supposedly had. Their target was more than twice as large as the President's head had been. You know what? None of them could kill the target—or even come close to killing it." He sighed and leaned back in his chair, picked up his cigar. "There was no need to make a perfect job of it. The files of evidence—which the public has been told again and again contain nothing that hasn't already been told—were sealed in the National Archives and will not be made public until the year 2039. This is for reasons of national security, we're told. And even then, even when they're told that worthless evidence must be kept secret for seventy-five years, the sheep suspect nothing."
Rice finished his brandy in one swallow.
"Do you believe me now?" West asked.
"Yes."
West let smoke out through his nostrils. "I have convinced my associates that we must not waste the contacts and the expertise that we developed while planning and executing the Kennedy assassination. We must organize, establish an underground apparatus —what I like to call The Committee. We must solidify our gains and protect them. And we must look for a new, profitable—operation. Operations. We must use The Committee as if it were a stock-investment plan."
"Other assassinations?" Rice said weakly.
"If it comes to that, yes. But there are other tools. If we can gain even partial control of the FBI and CIA, we ought to be able to engineer events that will keep the Communist sympathizers out of office in the first place. We can use federal officers to harass them. We can put federal taps on their telephones. We can shadow them every minute of the day. If a candidate has a mistress—or some other dark secret—we'll find it and use it to make him drop out of the race even before the primary elections are over."
"And where do I come in?"
Finishing his brandy, West said, "We need someone to run the day-to-day affairs of The Committee. Someone who is dedicated to this country, someone who hates, as we do, the Communist conspiracy. We need a man who is intelligent, as brilliant a man as we can find. He must be willing to take big risks. He must be ruthless. And he must be a man who has no public identity, because we want to build him an identity as one of the foremost liberal thinkers of his day."
"Liberal?" Rice said, perplexed.
"Camouflage," West said. "He'll be a double agent, so to speak."
"But I've written this book—"
"As yet unpublished."
"You mean—destroy it?"
"Do you mind?"
"I guess not. But the articles in Scott's magazines—"
"For all practical purposes, no one reads them. And certainly, no one remembers who wrote them. Scott will burn all unsold issues that contain your articles. Most people who subscribe to the magazines probably throw their copies away. And even if someone runs across one of the essays after you've been established as a liberal theorist, you can blush and say it was the work of a younger and less sensible Andy Rice. Easy."
"May I have more brandy?"
"Help yourself."
They were silent for a few minutes.
Then Rice said, "I'm interested."
"I knew you would be."
"But you risked so much! You told me all of this without being sure I'd want to get involved. You told me you set up Kennedy's assassination and—"
"No risk," West said. "If you'd been appalled, if you hadn't wanted to be a part of The Committee, we'd have killed you."
Rice shivered. "I see."
West poured himself another brandy. "Well! Shall we get down to specifics?"
His heart hammering, Andrew Rice nodded, sipped his brandy, and listened to A.W. West reshape his life
.
"Mr. Rice?"
Startled, Rice bit his fingers as they were shoving a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie into his mouth. He grunted with pain. He looked up, but there was no one else in his office.
"Mr. Rice?"
Miss Priestly.
The intercom.
He pushed the button. "What is it?"
"The list just arrived, sir."
"List?"
"The list of federal marshals you asked me to get from the Justice Department, Mr. Rice."
"Oh, yes. Bring it in, please."
She brought it in, and after she had gone he picked up the white telephone and dialed Miss Rockwalt in the CIA file room out in Virginia. He said, "This is the Spokesman."
"Yes, sir."
"I've got a list of names for you. Pencil handy?"
"Go ahead."
"They're all federal marshals assigned to the Washington area." He read off eighty names. "I want an address for each man. I want to know if he lives alone or with someone. I want his age, physical description, everything that you can get. You can call me at the usual number. I'll be here until seven o'clock this evening."
"It may take longer than that, sir," Miss Rockwalt said.
"Then I'll wait here until you've called."
"No later than nine."
"Every minute counts, Miss Rockwalt."
He hung up.
He ate another cookie.
He looked at his watch.
Was David Canning dead by now?
SEVEN
Washington to Honolulu
After McAlister had gone, David Canning spread drop-cloths around the schefflera, mixed up a quart of Malathion solution, protected his eyes with ski goggles, and sprayed the tree to prevent a recurrence of the mealybugs. One pint of solution remained, and he poured that into the potting soil to kill any insect eggs that might be there.
While the insecticide dripped slowly from the sharp tips of the schefflera leaves, Canning sat at the kitchen table and wrote a note to the cleaning woman who came in twice a week. If he had to be gone more than seven or eight days, she would have to know how to mist and water the plant. He didn't want to come home and find it yellowed, spotted, and wilted.
In a strange way he felt responsible for the tree. His was more than the sense of responsibility that a man should have for any living thing. This was specific. It was personal. Indeed, there was something almost paternal about it; Mike had observed as much when he had come to visit his father two weeks after Canning had moved into the apartment.
"You act as if it's a child," Mike had said, amused.
"There's more to plants than most people realize. I swear that sometimes the damned tree seems— aware, conscious. In its own way."
"You've been reading books. Talk to your plants. Play
some classical music for them. That kind of thing."
"I know it sounds crazy—"
"I'm not criticizing. I'm just surprised. I didn't know they taught you reverence for life in the CIA."
"Please, Mike."
"Sorry. I'll keep my opinions to myself."
"I never had to accept the prevailing philosophy of the agency in order to work there."
"Sure."
"I mean it.'
"Sure. Okay. Can we talk about something else?"
The way Canning saw it, he had bought the tree and brought it here, and he was the one trying to make it flourish inside of four walls and under a roof where, it had never been meant to grow. He had a duty to make every effort to keep it in good health, in return for the beauty that it added to his world and the peace of mind it gave him. He had an unspoken covenant with the tree, and his promise was his self-respect.
Or was he kidding himself? Was his caring for the tree merely an attempt, unconsciously motivated, to atone in some small way for having been a failure as a husband and father? Was he trying to make up for having destroyed his marriage and for having ruined his own children? Was he desperately trying to convince himself that he was not a cold, burnt-out, emotionless son of a bitch?
Don't be so hard on yourself, he thought.
Was it your fault, he asked himself, that Irene became a frigid, nagging bitch? To make her want him again, he paid her every imaginable form of tribute: praise, respect, love, romance, patience, tenderness, gifts and gifts and more gifts. He was a good lover; his own satisfaction mattered less to him than did hers. But because they did not enjoy a natural and mutual lust, because he always had to finesse her into bed with carefully thought-out game plans, his love soon became cynical, his respect feigned, and his praise as hollow as the chambers of the heart.
But to pretend that sex was their only failure was not fair to Irene. They had drifted apart both in and out of the bedroom—and they had become strangers to their children, as, well. Yet, as his father had taught him, and as he had learned from the examples provided by his father's friends, he had given his family all of the important things: a good home in a fine neighborhood, a swimming pool in the backyard, a nice school for the kids, allowances for the kids and money for their clarinet lessons and ballet school and baseball camp, the security of a substantial bank account, new cars, membership in a country club, an expensive vacation every year . . . If he had provided all of this and yet the four of them were strangers who merely boarded under one roof, then he had not fully understood his father and had gone wrong somewhere, somehow.
But what was the answer? Could it be explained by the usual pop sociology and pop psychology? Had he provided all the material comforts and then failed to give them love? Had he not managed to communicate to Irene and the children the things he felt in his heart? Had he and Irene been trapped by conventional man-woman roles that stifled their relationship? Had he been a male chauvinist pig without wanting to be, without knowing that he was? Had he walked along the generation gap, his kids on one side and he on the other, without understanding that it was a vast canyon and not just a gully? Running missions for the agency, he had been away from home for one and two months at a tune, six months out of twelve. Mike and Terri were adults by the time he received the White House assignment. Should he have been with them more time than he had been when they were young, to serve as an example and as a source of authority? Should he have been home every night to comfort Irene, to share the triumphs and defeats and irritations of daily life? Had his prolonged absences —and perhaps even the sometimes ugly nature of his job—been the cause of the alienation within his family? And if that were true, then wasn't he responsible, after all, for the withering of Irene's desire?
He felt very much alone.
He was adrift. Moving aimlessly toward an unknown future. He had no one. No one. And nothing. Nothing at all.
Except Dragonfly.
He finished the note to the cleaning woman, left it in the center of the kitchen table, switched off the fluorescent lights, and went into the living room. He took up the dropcloths, folded them, and put them away. He called a taxi service and asked to have a cab waiting out front at three-fifteen. Then he went into the bedroom and packed two suitcases.
After he had changed out of his jeans into a pale-brown suit, yellow shut, brown tie, and leather shoulder holster, he took his gun out of the top drawer of his bureau. It was a nickel-finished Colt Government Model .45 Automatic with an eight-and-a-half-inch overall length and a five-inch barrel. Weighing only thirty-nine ounces, it was perfect for use with a shoulder holster. The sights were fixed, of square Partridge design, and glareproof. Slanted ramp-style, the forward sight caught the light and yet allowed for an easy draw. Canning's holster, which snapped open from sideways pressure and "sprung" the pistol into his hand, thus accommodating a barrel lengthened by a silencer, made the draw even easier. The Colt's magazine held seven standard .45 Auto cartridges, not the most powerful ammunition made, but sufficient. More men in the counterintelligence services of all nations had been killed with this handgun than with any other weapon. Canning had killed nine of them himself: two Russians, two Poles, two Chinese, and three East Germans.
He often wondered why he was able to kill with such complete professional detachment, but he had never found the answer. And in his darkest moments, he thought that a murderer who suffered no remorse should expect to raise a family as alienated as his own.
Struggling to avoid that sort of despair, he took the precision-machined silencer from the bureau drawer and screwed it onto the Colt's barrel. The silencer was five inches long and filled with a new, resilient wadding material that made it one hundred percent effective for at least thirty rounds.
He looked at his watch: three o'clock.
Time to get moving.
He pressed the pistol into his holster and distributed three spare magazines, all fully loaded, in his pockets. He reached for the gun, touched the stock, and smiled as the weapon popped into his right hand. He brought it out, flicked off the safety, studied it for a few seconds, and returned it to the holster.
Once again, he was a field op.
He felt considerably younger than he had when he'd gotten up this morning.
He turned out the lamp and carried his suitcases into the living room, where he suddenly remembered that he hadn't locked the kitchen door. His apartment had two entrances: one off the third-floor landing that was common to two other apartments, and a private entrance from the courtyard by way of a set of switchback stairs. He had used the private entrance this morning when he'd gone out for a quart of milk, before the rain had begun. He put the suitcases down and went to lock up.
Turning the knob on the kitchen door, intending to open it and latch the outer storm door, Canning saw two men enter the courtyard through the archway in the alley wall. The kitchen door was centered with four panes of glass; therefore, he could look through the stoop railing and straight down into the courtyard. He let go of the knob. He knew these men—not who they were but what they did. They were both tall, solidly built, dressed in dark suits and raincoats and matching rumpled rainhats. They paused inside the arch and looked around the courtyard to see if they were being observed.
Twisting the lock shut, Canning stepped quickly away from the door before they could look up and see him.
Lightning shredded the purple-black sky, and a frenetic luminescence pulsed throughout the dark kitchen. The ensuing thunder was like a shotgun blast in the face.
Canning hurried to the living-room windows and cautiously parted the heavy rust-colored velvet drapes that had come with the apartment. Sheets of rain washed the street, made the pavement glisten, boiled and foamed in the gutters, and drummed on the roofs of parked cars. Across the street a blue Ford LTD was at the curb, its parking lights glowing, the windshield wipers beating steadily. From this distance, veiled by the rain, the driver was only a black and nearly formless mass behind the wheel. He w
as looking out of his side window, looking directly at the apartment house: his face was a pale blur between his dark raincoat and his rainhat. Canning looked up and down the street, but he saw no one else.
By now the two men in the courtyard would have started up the steps toward the kitchen entrance.
He left the windows and went to the front door. He took the Colt .45 from its holster, carefully opened the door, and stepped onto the landing. It smelled faintly of the lemon-oil polish that the superintendent used on the oak banisters. Leaning against the railing, Canning looked down to the bottom of the stairwell and saw that it was deserted. He had expected that much, for they wouldn't want to make a hit in a public corridor if there was a chance they could take him in the privacy of his own apartment.
Listening to an inner clock that was ticking like the timer on a bomb, he went back into the living room, closed the door and locked it. He reached for the wall switch and turned out the overhead light—and now the entire apartment was cast in darkness.
He listened.
Nothing.
Yet.
He holstered the pistol and picked up the suitcases. He carried them into the bedroom and shoved them into a closet. Leaving the closet open, he walked back to the doorway and stood half in the bedroom and half in the living room. He drew the Colt once more and stood very still, listening.
