“Mary, there’s no need.”
“Maybe I have a need. And I want a gun.” She paused, took a deep, shuddering breath, then smiled wryly. “My experiences of the past few hours have convinced me that pacifism is not a philosophy that’s workable in all situations.” She paused, and her smile faded. “I’ve had friends killed too.”
“The three of you are fools,” Acton said in disgust. “You’re going to get us all killed. You’re going up against a professional killer, maybe more than one.”
Jay Acton had already amply demonstrated his courage, and he didn’t seem afraid now, only thoroughly exasperated. Suddenly I realized that I believed his story. It meant that I was about to use his cellular telephone to dial us up an assassin from the KGB. Talk about home delivery.
“I want a gun, Garth,” Mary said in the same firm voice. “There are plenty back up in Jay’s cave.”
“You’ve never fired a gun.”
“I can certainly point one in the right direction and pull a trigger. You just load it for me and show me where to aim. Please. It’s important to me.”
To my utter astonishment, Garth nodded his assent, then turned to me. “Mongo, I suggest you go check on the idiot back there, call to pay our respects to Mr. Hendricks, and bring back guns for yourself and Mary. I’ll have a talk with our KGB friend here about the best place to set up an ambush.”
Chapter Ten
It had been impossible to tell from Edward J. Hendricks’s tone of voice on the telephone just what he was thinking; but then, considering the fact that I’d had to call him at his Washington office and go through his secretary, he’d had time to get his thoughts together. He had sounded in control, almost subdued, when he came on the line, almost as if he’d been expecting to hear from me, which wouldn’t be surprising; a panicked Elysius Culhane would almost certainly have contacted the FBI counterintelligence chief concerning my escape from police custody, and perhaps even about the massacre inside the Community’s mansion. Hendricks had listened without interruption while I described the sequence of events that had occurred since I last spoke to him on Sunday afternoon. I told him about Jay Acton’s assertion that ultraconservative organizations around the country were riddled with KGB plants, and ventured the opinion that the FBI, with the vast resources of men, data, and equipment at its command, should have little difficulty rooting out these fake Americans now that their existence was known.
Hendricks had chided me gently about my disobedience of his previous order, as he would be expected to do, but then went on to congratulate me on my good fortune, thank me for my display of good citizenship, and tell me that he was sending a heavily armed team of FBI agents from the Bureau’s New York City office to take us out of the stone quarry and whisk us off to Washington, where we would be housed in a comfortable and secure facility and provided with protection while the KGB network of provocateurs was being dismantled, and until the danger had passed. The FBI would take custody of Gregory Trex, and Hendricks would personally see to it that a federal warrant was issued immediately for Elysius Culhane’s arrest on a variety of charges, including one to conceal acts of espionage. I told him we were concerned about being spotted on the mountainside by someone with binoculars, and so wished to stay out of sight in the cave with the electronics gear until our FBI escort arrived to spirit us away. Then I told him exactly how to get to the cave. Hendricks expressed considerable enthusiasm for this idea. The FBI head of counterintelligence assured me that he would have men to us within an hour, and that I shouldn’t worry.
Right.
I’d neglected to mention that we had a veritable arsenal at our disposal, but then, what Edward J. Hendricks didn’t know couldn’t hurt us.
I’d purposely called on the cellular telephone from a position just outside the mouth of the cave, in the stone channel, where I could watch the bound Gregory Trex, and where he could watch and listen to me while I talked. I’d wanted to see his reaction—which I’d assumed would be humiliation and anger—when it was driven home to him that he’d been thoroughly duped and humiliated by the very enemies he hated so much. But Gregory Trex, already thoroughly humiliated when he lost control of his bowels during the firefight in the ballroom of the Community mansion, had hardly displayed any reaction at all; he hadn’t even seemed to be listening to me, hadn’t seemed to comprehend what had happened. There was dried spittle on his lips and chin, a blank look in his eyes. I suspected Gregory Trex would be serving no time for the murders he helped commit, but would be returned to some kind of institution, where he would spend the rest of his life. He showed no interest in the food or water I’d offered him when I finished my conversation with Hendricks. I’d retrieved two automatic pistols from the foot locker in the cave, checked to make certain that the magazines were full, then gone back to join Garth, Jay Acton, and Mary.
Now we were waiting in ambush; Acton had chosen the site, and it seemed a good one. Here, the rutted main access road had been cut right through the trap rock that comprised most of the mountain, and the machine-scarred rock on both sides of the road formed a deep, narrow channel. In addition, a rockslide about a hundred feet down the mountain blocked the road, preventing further advance by vehicle. It was the route that would certainly be used by any FBI agents, who would be identifiable from the government plates on their cars. There were other roads, like the one leading to the grassy plateau and picnic area, but there was no reason for anyone coming to rescue us to take them. An assassin on his way up would assume that we were all holed up in the cave, as I’d said we’d be, waiting to be shot like fish in a barrel, and so could be expected to come up by this, the route of least resistance. And if an assassin, or team of assassins, tried to come at us from another direction, we felt we had that covered too.
The site was about midway between the hidden cave near the top of the mountain and the base, where Pave Avenue ended at the fork in the access road leading both up to the quarry and down to the river. Acton was with me, on an outcropping of rock on a ledge perhaps seventy or eighty feet above the roadbed. Garth and Mary were on a ledge across the way, closer to the road, screened from view on the grounds—but not from us—by a pile of rubble. I could see down to the river, in the unlikely event an attacker came from that direction, and Garth had a clear view of the top of the mountain, if someone came that way. We could both see sections of Pave Avenue and would thus see any vehicles approaching the access road. The down side was all the high ground above us, sculpted ledges left by the machines that had cut the rock, but we’d agreed that it would take a local resident with an intimate knowledge of the mountain and quarry to get into position above us—and then only if the potential sniper knew where we were, which was not possible. We considered it a more than acceptable risk for the position we held.
It was late afternoon, and I estimated that we had about three hours of daylight left—more than enough time for Hendricks’s mission of mercy or murder to arrive. But we had to wait considerably less time than that. Less than fifteen minutes after we had come down from the cave and taken up our positions, a late-model gray Cadillac appeared below us on Pave Avenue. It slowed down as it neared the mountain, then disappeared from sight as it made a sharp left turn onto the access road.
“My God,” Acton said tightly. “That’s Culhane’s car.”
I glanced at the other man, who looked thoroughly shaken. He looked at me, bewilderment clearly visible in his dark eyes and on his sharp features.
“Surprise, surprise,” I said softly, clicking off the safety catch on my machine pistol. “What tangled webs these KGB creatures weave.”
“Frederickson,” Acton said in the same tight voice, “I don’t understand this at all.”
“Be quiet. Maybe your former boss is just coming up here for a nice view of the river and a little meditation.”
“Frederickson—”
I cut off the KGB operative with a curt wave of my hand as Elysius Culhane’s Cadillac came around a bend in the road bel
ow us, then braked to a stop on the other side of the rockslide. The right-wing columnist, commentator, and activist had definitely not come to the quarry for the view, and the only subject on which he was meditating was murder.
The engine of the car was turned off, the driver’s door opened, and Culhane got out. He was wearing heavy tweed slacks, high-top hiking boots, and a white, quilted hunter’s vest festooned with shotgun shells. He tilted his head back and squinted, looking up the side of the mountain in the direction of the cave, then bent over and reached back into the car. What he brought out were a shotgun and an ammunition belt on which hung two hand grenades. He slung the belt over his shoulder, carefully picked his way over the rock rubble blocking the way, then began moving up the road, walking with stiff, nervous strides. I could see the sweat streaming down his face, soaking his shirt and the quilted vest.
I glanced across the way, saw Garth whisper something in Mary’s ear. She nodded, then held the gun straight in front of her with both hands, bracing herself with her elbows on the ledge. Garth sidled backward, then disappeared from view around an outcropping of stone. I had a pretty good idea where he was going—down to the road to personally greet Mr. Elysius Culhane, undoubtedly with a fist to the face.
I glanced sideways at Acton. He seemed somehow different. His brow was knitted, and he appeared to be in deep thought as he stared down at the figure moving on the road below us. I wondered what he was thinking.
Culhane was perhaps ten yards from the spot where I expected Garth to step out and rudely greet him when I suddenly heard the sound of running footsteps coming down the road from the opposite direction. Culhane heard them too and stopped dead in his tracks. He crouched slightly, brought the shotgun up to waist-high firing position, and waited.
A few moments later a terrified, haunted-looking Gregory Trex came staggering around a bend in the road. He had obviously found a way to free himself from his bonds, but he had paid a price: both his wrists were bleeding profusely, the flesh shredded by the sharp rocks he must have sawed against to cut through the nylon rope. He’d obviously had nothing on his ruined mind but escape, for he hadn’t even thought to take a weapon from the foot locker just inside the cave.
He saw Culhane and abruptly stopped; suddenly his face was wreathed in a childlike smile of elation and relief at the sight of his friend and mentor, the creator and master of the Cairn death squad. He certainly didn’t appear to understand the situation, and definitely didn’t understand that he, as the only surviving member of the death squad, was not someone Elysius Culhane wanted to remain alive. Then Trex’s smile vanished as a thought seemed to occur to him.
“You have to go back, Mr. Culhane!” Trex shouted as he waved his arms in the air and again started down the road. “Something’s wrong! I think they’ve set a trap for you! Go back! Take me with you!”
Culhane hunched his shoulders slightly, glanced quickly, furtively, around him. Then he looked back at the man approaching him, leveled the barrel of the shotgun on Gregory Trex’s belly, and pulled the trigger. The slugs from both barrels caught Trex in the pit of the stomach, blew him off his feet and backward even as they doubled him over. The corpse hit the ground, twitched for a few moments, then was still, arms and legs flayed out to either side, blood oozing from the fist-size hole in his stomach and the basketball-size hole in his back.
Culhane again looked around nervously, then broke the smoking barrel of the shotgun and reached for a fresh shell in a pocket of his vest. I moved around to the other side of the boulder where I’d been crouched at the same time as Garth stepped out from behind a column of rock and into the road.
Culhane saw Garth, stiffened, then stutter-stepped backward a yard or so as he fumbled with his shotgun and a shell. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted in a whining, high-pitched voice.
“That’s my big brother, Culhane!” I shouted at the only slightly blurred figure on the road below me. “He’s a very nasty man, with a quick trigger finger! We want you alive to answer questions, but dead will do! Drop the shotgun right now!”
He did. Then he stepped back, bowed his head, and wrapped his arms around his chest, as if he were suddenly cold. Garth walked forward and bent down to pick up the shotgun. As he did so, Culhane was suddenly seized with a spasm of mindless rage and frustration. He threw his head back and screamed, at the same time reaching for one of the grenades dangling from the ammunition belt slung over his chest.
“Don’t do it, Culhane!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, knowing that I was too far away to fire on Culhane without risk of killing my brother. “Garth, look—!”
It was Mary, directly above Culhane, who opened fire on the man. She was able to let loose one quick burst before the shock of the unfamiliar recoil and shattering noise made her drop the machine pistol. But it was enough, because her aim had been true. Bullets tore into Culhane’s head and chest, spinning him around like a top. His involuntary jerking pulled the pin from the grenade he was holding, and it dropped to the ground an instant before he fell on top of it. Garth ran three steps, then dove headlong over a sharp ridge of loose stones a moment before the grenade exploded, painting the flesh, bone, and blood of Elysius Culhane across the sheer stone wall below me.
The echo in the rock cathedral from the chatter of Mary’s machine pistol was now joined by the booming echo of the exploding grenade. When the echoes died away, I could hear an approaching siren, very close.
“That’s it,” I said, half to myself, as I stared down at the carnage below me. Across the way, Garth had climbed back up to the ledge. He helped a very shaken Mary Tree rise to her feet, then gripped her firmly by the elbow as he guided her toward the path leading down to the road.
A police car, lights flashing and siren wailing, appeared below on Pave Avenue, then disappeared from sight as it made a sharp turn onto the access road.
I turned toward Acton, who was staring down at the corpses of Gregory Trex and Elysius Culhane, confusion and concern clearly etched on his features. “Let’s go,” I said, pointing with the barrel of my machine pistol toward the cleft in the stone wall behind us that was the entrance to the narrow, rubble-strewn rock chute that led down to the road. “It’s over.”
Acton looked at me, but he didn’t move. “Nothing’s changed, Frederickson,” he said in a low voice. “Mosely can’t give us the protection we need.”
I stepped back a few paces and raised the machine pistol slightly—just enough to give the KGB operative pause in the event he was thinking about making any sudden moves. “What’s the matter, Acton? Aren’t you relieved that we’ve eliminated your dreaded KGB assassin? I don’t understand your problem.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“You’re damn right there’s something wrong. What’s wrong is that you’re full of shit. Culhane was no KGB assassin. I saw his face when he found out you were KGB, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Unless they teach you people to throw up on command, his reaction was no act. It would have made no sense for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti to have two of their agents working the same territory, blind to each other, constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Nobody has ever confused the KGB with the Keystone Kops. Culhane showed up here because his old buddy Edward J. Hendricks gave him a little courtesy call to warn him that the shit had already hit the fan and that there was no way he could keep the whole story of Culhane’s manipulation by the KGB from becoming public. Culhane flipped out. He must have figured that he had one last chance to wipe out all the people who could implicate him in this nightmare and then get away clean, counting on his right-wing buddies to cover up for him. There was never any KGB assassin after us, and there’s no massive KGB network inside the ultra-conservative movement—as much as I find the notion enormously entertaining. As Garth and I suspected, there’s just you—one very clever, valuable, and enterprising KGB officer looking to make lemonade out of lemons. So let’s get out of here. We can all sit down at the Cairn police station a
nd wait for the FBI to arrive.”
Jay Acton still didn’t move. “Frederickson, we’re all dead if we end up in police custody. Somehow, in some way, the KGB will find a way to kill us.”
On the road below, Dan Mosely was out of his car, talking to Garth and Mary, apparently getting an explanation of what had happened. At the base of the mountain, three patrol cars were parked across Pave Avenue, blocking off access to the quarry. Mosely looked up, saw me, and waved. I waved back.
“You don’t quit, do you?” I said, looking back at Acton. I raised the machine pistol higher, leveled it on his chest. “Get your ass down there. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t even think of trying to run, because there’s no place for you to go.”
Acton walked stiffly across the ledge, paused at the fissure, and looked back to me. “You’ve killed us,” he said tersely, then bent down and slipped through the crack in the stone.
“Hey, Mongo!” Garth shouted up to me. “You all right? Can you get down?”
“Yeah!” I shouted back. “Acton’s already on his way! It’s going to take me a little longer!”
I slipped through the fissure, started picking my way down through the sharp rubble in the narrow chute. The adrenaline that had kept me going was now fast draining out of my system, and I suddenly felt as exhausted as I had been in the canoe. My headache was returning, along with more pronounced double vision. I almost tripped on a rock and decided it was time for a breather. I sat down on a pile of crushed rock, took a series of deep breaths while I reflected on how nice it was going to feel to soak in a hot tub and then take to my bed for as long as it took for my body to completely heal.
Jay Acton had certainly been earnest, I thought, a great performer, like his father, but in his own case an actor determined to try to write his own ending to his own play right to the finish. Instead of escaping earlier, as I was certain he could have done, he had opted to save our lives as a necessary first step in trying to lend credibility to a cock-and-bull story that he’d hoped would enable him to burrow his way into the highest echelons of the American counterintelligence apparatus—or, at the very least, to sow a great deal of discord and suspicion.
The Language of Cannibals Page 20
