The Eldridge Roster

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Come on, Jimbo,” said a familiar voice. “This is no time for a break.”

  He looked up. Angie stood there, gun in hand, a quizzical look on her face. “You okay?”

  “My God!” he managed, straightening up. “Did you do that?”

  “Did you want to die?” she countered. The wail of police sirens drew near.

  “Did you do that?” he repeated, pointing with shaking hand at what hung on the fence.

  “It’s nothing I have any control over,” she said, looking without expression at the corpse. “It’s subconscious. He killed Paul Laval—I saw it in his mind. Killed him and wallowed in it. What a sicko.”

  “It’s your id,” he said. “Your id did that. Someone murdered your friend, threatened your mate and you skewered him like a capon.”

  “Paul was your friend, too. He died because of you.”

  “Yes. And I’m so sorry he’s dead. But he wouldn’t have wanted you to do that!”

  “I can’t control it, don’t you understand?!” she said, her voice breaking. “It just happens!”

  “You better have a real serious talk with your id,” said Jim, holstering his useless pistol. “For all our sakes.”

  The sirens were very close now. Across the street people were peering out their windows. Two houses down a feckless soul stepped out onto her porch.

  “We can talk Freud later,” said Angie urgently, pocketing her own weapon. “Tooky’s hit.”

  “How bad?” asked Jim, suddenly sorry he’d brought them all into this—Angie, with her slumbering demons, Tooky, nicely retired and now maybe dying because of Jim Beauchamp’s stupid conceit.

  “Bad enough,” said Angie as they jogged toward the back of the house. “He’s in his car on the next block.”

  They took off running behind the house as three Boston police cars skidded around the corner.

  It’d all been over in about ten seconds, the area blessedly empty of noncombatants.

  Angie had run into the street on the block behind O’Malley’s house. Tooky was standing beside his car, O’Malley in the back seat. As Angie ran up the street toward Tooky, a guy in telephone company work clothes appeared from behind a house, pistol in hand. Shouting a warning, Tooky fired at the same instant as gunman. Tooky fell to his knees, clasping his shoulder as Angie spun and pumped three rounds into the gunman’s chest.

  “We’re getting you to a hospital,” said Jim, slipping behind the wheel of the SAAB and pulling away from the curb. Police sirens sounded from everywhere. “Phil must have dropped an extra man off before he pulled up to the house,” said Jim.

  “No hospital,” said Tooky. He sat in back between Angie and O’Malley, a stack of gauze pads from the car’s first aid kit pressed against his right shoulder. “We’re going to Chelsea. One of our more industrial suburbs.” He grunted with pain as they went over a pothole. “There’s a Nicaraguan doc there who’ll patch me up. She owes me and I pay cash. Turn right here, Jimbo,” he said as they reached the end of the street. His face was drawn with pain. “Stop at an ATM,” he added as they slipped into the traffic along the two-lane Jamaicaway, Jamaica Pond to their left.

  “Our treat,” said Jim. “We’ve got lots of cash with us.” He pulled over to let five police cars roar past in the opposite direction. As he drove, Jim kept hearing and seeing Iceman’s death agonies, a continuously looping bit of hell. Angie sat silently in the back seat, keeping pressure on Tooky’s wound, her face paler than his.

  In the twenty-five minutes it took to wind through the traffic to Chelsea and the doctor’s dilapidated three-family house, only Tooky spoke, and then only to give directions.

  “Martin failed again,” said Whitsun, hanging up the phone as Schmidla came into the room. . “Spectacularly. All his men are dead. Munroe and Milano have the Potential, O’Malley. The only good news is that O’Malley wasn’t killed.”

  “Such good news,” said Schmidla. “So what’s the plan now, Terry?”

  “Philip has failed us on several occasions, Richard,” said Whitsun with a slight shrug. “He is being permanently replaced. His replacement is awaiting my call. Colonel Lokransky comes highly recommended.”

  “Sounds familiar. Not Russian is he?”

  “He is.”

  “You brought in Russians?” said Schmidla, incredulous.

  “Specifically, I brought in the Russian Mafia, Richard. Lokransky comes with a money back guarantee and an elite group of men he’s trained and led. They’re all ex-Spesnatsky—special operations commandos. They’ll be headquartered here for the duration.”

  “Here?! You’re bringing Russians commandos here? Are you mad?” Schmidla’s face flushed with anger. “They could compromise everything we’ve worked for!”

  “You served in Russia, didn’t you?” asked Whitsun. Rarely did Schmidla lose his aloofness. When he did Whitsun was quick to push all the buttons.

  “Terry, if you bring those subhuman Slavic scum here...”

  Whitsun burst into laughter. “Oh, Richard, Richard! Such a cultured, educated man, yet at your core you’re just another little Nazi street thug, driven by your prejudices. Probably even remember all the stanzas to the Horst Wesel, for god sake.”

  “They come, I’m gone!” snapped Schmidla, furious.

  “We have no other options. We need the Eldridge descendants—now. How long do you think Budd is going to hang out here? And we need security. There are just the two of us here. Lokransky can provide us with security and Potentials. He’s worth a hundred Philip Martins. He’s hired.”

  Schmidla opened his mouth.

  “No!” snapped Whitsun with a chop of his hand. “Enough. Recall our earlier conversation about who’s running this show. I am. Lokransky’s in Washington. He’ll be here first thing in the morning. You will cooperate. You will be civil.”

  “Is that an order, Admiral?” said Schmidla, his composure regained.

  “Yes, Standartenführer, that is an order,” said Whitsun. “For your own sake, Richard, for the sake of our shared goals, I hope that you still remember how to take an order.”

  Schmidla turned and left the room. Soon, he thought. Soon.

  Still much shaken, Phil Martin exited his plane at Washington’s Reagan Airport wanting only to grab a cab, get home to his Georgetown apartment, take a long shower and have a very large scotch. His conversation with Whitsun hadn’t gone well. Time to put out some feelers for fresh work, but that could wait until tomorrow.

  “Mr. Philip Martin, please come to the United Airlines customer service counter,” came the page, echoing through the terminal.

  Wonderful, he thought, heading for the main concourse. Probably shredded my luggage. Or worse, Whitsun sent someone over from GRD to pick him up and debrief him. He didn’t need any of that tonight.

  Martin stood in line at the counter for a few minutes only to be told it been a courtesy page for someone who’d been there but was apparently now gone.

  Stupid, he thought, entering the men’s room and stepping up to a urinal. Must have been someone from GRD. At least he had the lavatory to himself.

  “Mr. Martin?”

  Martin turned his head, startled. A blond-haired man with a scarred face stood in front of the adjacent urinal.

  “Yes?” said Martin, wishing that what he held in his hands was a pistol.

  “They asked me to tell you that you’re fired,” said the man, firing two rounds from a silenced .22 pistol into Martin’s head. The Frenchman’s body fell to the tiled floor.

  Pocketing his pistol, Lokransky left the men’s room, stepping around the yellow “Out of Service” sign.

  Chapter 18

  “An inn?” exclaimed Angie as Jim gunned the SAAB up the broad sweeping driveway. “It’s the House of Usher!”

  “Surely not as foreboding,” murmured Jim, parking beneath the portico of the white clapboard manse. Green wicker rocking chairs lined the blue veranda.

  “The Windermere,” said O’Malley from the back seat. “I
stayed here once. This is your safehouse?”

  “Well,” said Jim, getting out to meet the man coming down the steps toward them, “certainly we’ll have a nice room.”

  “Jimbo!” cried their host, shaking Jim’s hand. “Welcome! Mi casa es Su casa.” He was in his late forties, thin-faced, with a receding hairline and wide green eyes. Jim introduced Angie and O’Malley. “This is my friend Henry Watts,” he said. “We’ve known each other a long time.”

  Two teenagers appeared and took their bags, following their boss into the Windermere.

  Like much of the inn the lobby was a magnificent Gilded Age jewel. Furniture, carpets, tables, lamps, crystal chandeliers, all could have been plucked from a London club of two centuries ago. A baronial fireplace large enough to roast a stag dominated one side of the great room. The mural above it depicted a medieval hunt, a ferocious wounded boar charging an unhorsed hunter and his dogs. There was an air of eternal unresolved suspense to it—it wasn’t clear whether the monstrous wild-eyed boar or the tight-lipped bearded hunter would survive—if either. It was brilliantly done and Angie said so.

  “Unsigned, but rumored to have been painted by Winslow Homer,” said Henry, handing their keys to the bellboy. “Might even be true—has the atmosphere of “Watson and the Shark.”

  “So, here we are,” said Angie, after she and Jim had been taken to a suite seemingly only half the size of the lobby, the aptly named William Howard Taft Suite. “What now, Jimbo?” she asked, sinking down on the big canopied bed.

  The two-hour ride from Boston had been spent with Angie and Tim chatting like long-lost siblings—what was it like growing up with the dawning realization that you were Different? What did you first do that was really Weird? Were you as scared as I was? Did you ever tell your parents? (No, never, but they figured it out. And never once was it mentioned or discussed.) How much control do you have over It? (None.) And, lastly, synchronicity. Will it grow even more pronounced if there are more of us?

  “Now,” said Jim, joining Angie on the bed, “we keep going down the list, getting to folks before Whitsun. We’re not just here for the view. There’s a Potential here in New Hampshire.”

  “First tell me about this intimate little hotel and your buddy Henry.”

  Jim shrugged. “Henry worked for me up here as a sort of stringer. The Agency had an underground emergency command center nearby, one of several, just in case? Henry ran a failing B&B—too big a mortgage, too few rooms—and kept an eye out for visitors who might display an unusual interest in the area around the command center. So I funneled some money to him to ensure that he’d stay around.”

  “You bought him the Windermere with my tax dollars.”

  “No. I’m not Henry’s fairy godmother. Just helped find him a buyer for his B&B, provided a down payment and the name of a sympathetic mortgage officer. Besides, the Windermere was a grand old rotting hulk when he bought it—very much the House of Usher. Henry was able to get a government grant to restore the old place, given its historic significance. Taft did stay here, and Teddy Roosevelt, not to mention Charlie Chaplin, young Winston Churchill...”

  “So you didn’t do much for the guy and here we are in this immodest suite, gratis, and I bet not a vacancy in the place.”

  “Henry would have lost his shirt if the New England economy hadn’t taken off just after he remodeled.

  “You and Tim really hit it off, after a rocky start,” he added. “Sounded like long-lost twins.”

  “You’re jealous!” she laughed.

  “No, I’m very happy for you both. Besides, there’s not a jealous bone in my body.”

  “Right.” Reaching over, she pulled him down beside him.

  “Ah, we’re supposed to meet Tim in the dining room in twenty minutes,” he said.

  “Better get started,” she said, deftly unfastening his belt and zipper. Slipping her fingers into his shorts, she stroked him, feeling him stiffen. Leaning toward her, Jim kissed her, deeply, his free hand rubbing her breasts through her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra and he felt first one, then the other nipple swell with need.

  “Think President Taft did this here?” asked Angie ten minutes later as she straddled Jim, working him slowly, her hips moving in a slow ellipse as she rose up and down, Jim’s hands caressing her breasts.

  “Ever seen a picture of Taft?” he managed, watching her as she bit her lower lip, her face tense. Their rhythm increased, Jim’s hands slipping to her ass, squeezing, plowing into her, hard and deep. Her hand slid down, caressing Jim’s rock-hard testicles, even as her abdominal muscles tightened and released, tightened and released, the pleasure driving Jim to the edge. A deep flush spread across Angie’s face and chest.

  Throwing back her head, riding him hard, she let out a joyous sound of release, half sigh, half dirty chuckle.

  Jim came deep within her, his hands pinioning her taut buttocks to him. Angie collapsed on top of him, keeping him inside her. “I think we went a bit over on our time,” she said.

  There was a knock on the door. “You folks coming?” called O’Malley.

  “I’ve found O’Malley,” said Lokransky. “We’ll have him here by tomorrow morning.”

  Whitsun was startled. “That was fast! You’ve only been here a few hours, Colonel, yet you’ve already located one Potential and retired Mr. Martin? Well done!”

  “And where is Mr. O’Malley?” asked Schmidla. The three of them were in his parlor. It was night, with a fire in the hearth and red-chimneyed kerosene lamps burning high—lamps that always reminded Schmidla of his boyhood.

  “Dorset, New Hampshire. The Windermere Inn. We’ll be there in less than an hour.” From outside came the sound of a helicopter revving up-a large one from the sound of its engines.

  “How did you find him?” asked Whitsun.

  “One of those involved in Mallory’s escape—a man named Azarian—was wounded during the firefight. Someone imprudently made a phone call from the Windermere to his home.”

  “So?” said Schmidla. “Anyone could have...”

  “Please wait until I’ve finished, Doctor,” said Lokransky.

  “Of course,” said Schmidla with a curt nod. Arrogant ass, he thought, desperately wanting to shoot the Russian.

  “The ex-CIA officer who aided in O’Malley’s escape endorsed his agency’s purchase and renovation of the Windermere Inn and Hotel—part of their Cold War domestic counterintelligence effort.”

  “I’m sure that Phil Martin would have puzzled that out in about ten years, Colonel,” Whitsun said. He’d arranged for Rourke’s staff to fax a list of Jim’s projects to Lokransky.

  “What a generous program,” said Schmidla. “I’m doing some renovations to the fort—pity the Cold War’s over.”

  The roar of a helicopter engine filled the room, rattling the windows. One of Lokransky’s men came in, said something to his colonel in Russian and left. “We’re leaving now,” said Lokransky. “I anticipate returning with O’Malley by dawn. We also have one other stop to make, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for another Potential from your partial list, but we’ll take O’Malley first. Do you want O’Malley’s rescuers alive?”

  “Yes,” said the Admiral. “Unless they’re so imprudent as to have the Eldridge roster with them.”

  “Colonel,” said Schmidla. Lokransky looked at him expressionlessly.

  “If O’Malley should be killed rather than captured...”

  “He won’t be,” said the Russian.

  “Come, Colonel, we’ve both seen combat. You know as well as I you can’t predict who’ll catch a bullet and who won’t.”

  “So?”

  “So if O’Malley’s killed, please bring me his head.”

  “His head?” It was the first time Lokransky had ever shown surprise. Or a glimmer of humor. “Are you a collector, Doctor?”

  “I am a scientist, Colonel. If I can’t study the live organism, I study the remains. These people—people like O’Malley—are different from us
and that difference is their physiology. There’s no magic, there are only things that we do not yet understand.”

  “As you wish.” Lokransky gave a stiff little nod and was gone.

  “He’s got a whole squad in that helicopter,” said Whitsun, watching through the window. “All armed to the teeth. I hope he doesn’t start World War Three.” He turned to Schmidla. “You should commend me, Richard. I think we’ve got ourselves a winner there.”

  “A word of advice, Terry?” said Schmidla as the Sikorsky lifted off. “I speak from some experience. Never trust a Russian.”

  They watched at the window as the Sikorsky rose. It circled over Hull House then turned north and was gone.

  Lokransky and his unit had arrived at dawn. In fifteen minutes they’d occupied the island and secured the bridge to the mainland. Visitors weren’t allowed on the island, but some had in the past had come over in boats or across the unguarded bridge. No longer. The Russians were brisk, competent and efficient, clearly a highly-trained unit.

  Over Johnny Kim’s protests Schmidla had stopped the construction work begun only that day. What few private patients remained had been transferred to a mainland facility, a move paid for by Schmidla.

  She was almost out of fish yet the greedy pups kept on barking. “You guys are pigs!” shouted Maria, throwing the last of the mackerel down to the seals.

  Gone since the mid-nineteenth century, the gray harbor seals had returned to the Inner Harbor as the waters had grown cleaner. Cleaner waters brought back the fish, the fish brought back the seals and the pelicans. Hawks and the occasional osprey now nested on the islands.

  Watching two young males contend for the last of her offering, she didn’t notice Johnny Kim until he was almost next to her. “So, you catch the fish, huh?” he asked.

  “Right,” she said, carefully gauging the distance as she pitched the last of the mackerel, trying to place it near one of the less aggressive seals. A sudden sharp gust blew it mid-point between her target and a larger seal. The bigger animal dived, shouldering aside the smaller one and swimming triumphantly back to its perch, prize dangling from its mouth. “I keep a freezer full of mackerel for these ungrateful swine,” she said, turning to him. “We have them delivered every few weeks. So how’s your work going?” She wiped her hands on the towel tied to the handle of the plastic cooler. “Aren’t you supposed to be starting this week?”