The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  “A golf tournament,” the driver answered.

  “A what?”

  “Our informant promises us that Le Tour will be heading to Edinburgh by rail today. The first afternoon train.”

  “Reliable?”

  “We would like to think so.” He added, “But of course we have no idea what he might look like. Only that twenty kilos won’t make for light packing.”

  “A golf tournament? What’s that got to do with the embassy adjunct?”

  “It’s one of yours, I’m afraid. Not ours.”

  “A U.S. golf tournament in Scotland? You’ve lost me.”

  “Phillip Bates,” the driver said, delivering the car into a grave silence.

  “The Phillip Bates?”

  “You’re not a golfer.”

  “Tree climber.” When the driver looked over at him indifferently, Gorman added, “It’s a long story.”

  “Phillip Bates purchased a very old Scottish castle and its grounds. Huge controversy,” he said, pronouncing it with the emphasis on the second syllable so that Gorman was still trying to piece the word together as the man continued. “An enormous estate. Converted the countryside into an eighteen-hole course that may give St. Andrews a run for its money, if I hear right. He’s throwing a bit of a do to inaugurate the thing. I’m amazed you haven’t heard about it, quite frankly. He’s launching the next generation of his operating system simultaneously. It’s a weeklong affair. International television coverage. Quite a stage, frankly. We’re involved because of the dignitaries, many of whom are traveling through London, one direction or the other.”

  “Dignitaries?”

  “Bates has kept it close to his vest. If our intelligence is right, he’s invited every damn political leader in the world to this tournament.” He added, “And most appear to have accepted.”

  “And you make Bates and his tournament the target?”

  “Our people do, yes.”

  “This is what I’ve inherited on my first day in London?” He moaned. “Charlie . . .”

  “Bates cut down well over four hundred acres of Scottish old-growth forest, installed six new lakes, and seeded the entire course with genetically altered grasses. How’s that for an environmental target?”

  “Oh . . . my . . . God,” Gorman uttered, his feet and fingers ice cold.

  “Yes. Our sentiments exactly.”

  The car left the motorway traffic, taking a left-hand exit rather than following the stream of rubber and steel toward London proper. “Isn’t the city that way?” Gorman inquired.

  “City?” the driver replied. “Didn’t I tell you? You’re being choppered up the rail line to Oxford. The train leaves from there traveling directly to Edinburgh in” — he checked his watch — “thirty-six minutes. You’ll be on that train, along with two of our own operatives.”

  “I will?”

  “Oh yes, you most certainly will. And if we are lucky, Le Tour will be on that train as well.”

  Alfonzo Zamora showed his substantial girth dressed in the Upper Class gray sweats that served as pajamas for the flight. He hovered over Rita’s aisle seat, apparently in need of a drool bucket.

  “The Bates thing?”

  “Yeah. Both of us,” Rita answered, pointing to Sprague, who introduced himself and reached out a hand.

  Zamora ignored Sprague and the man’s extended hand, his interest solely in Rita’s bustline. “Been reading stories about you, sweetheart.”

  “Down, Alfonzo,” she said, helping Billy’s extended arm away from her chest and then reaching for the drink, her own hand trembling slightly.

  “Maybe we draw the same foursome. Play best ball. I heard firsthand the fucking president of Mexico is going to play. Maybe Fidel, even. Did you know he’s a fucking four handicap?”

  “So’s Michael,” Rita said. “M.J.,” she supplied. “And that’s firsthand knowledge too, Alfonzo.”

  “If the pope was ten years younger, he’d be shanking ’em with the rest of the in-crowd,” Zamora roared, a little too loudly for the cabin. Zamora had been sampling the free champagne a little too liberally. “Fucking pope loves the politicians.”

  “Politicians?” Sprague asked, thinking back to the ominous words of his dead mentor. “As in world leaders?”

  “Fidel, as in what, Schwartz? Is he your caddy or what?” Zamora asked her.

  “If I were traveling with my caddy, Alfonzo, he wouldn’t be sitting in Upper Class with me, now would he? Billy here took the Olympic gold medal in Atlanta.”

  “Bet that looks terrific on your mother’s mantel,” Zamora cracked sarcastically.

  “Why do you travel with Hector so close by your side anyway?” She covered her mouth to conceal a contrived smile. “Don’t tell me the stories about you two are true? Seriously, Alfonzo?”

  “What stories?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What stories?” Zamora persisted.

  “Castro?” Sprague finally managed to articulate. “Fidel Castro is going to be at this event?”

  “You gotta be a caddy.”

  “And the president of Mexico,” Sprague connected. The third beer had bent him sideways.

  “For real?” Rita asked the man standing to her side.

  “On good authority,” Zamora claimed. “Just like I heard you been through more clinics than back nines lately.”

  “I’m still driving two-fifty straight as your pecker.”

  “You ought to know,” he said, his nose lifting as he sensed the arrival of dinner. He crossed the cabin without a goodbye, which meant to Rita Shaughnessy that he would be back.

  “Known him for long?” Sprague asked her.

  “I knew Alfonzo a little too well for a very short amount of time,” she confessed. “An IBM thing in Scottsdale. Ever since, he thinks he has first right of refusal or something. Ownership. You know the way the fucking Hispanics are with women.” She reconsidered. “Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.”

  “You and him?”

  “Me and everyone for a while there, if you believe the Star. I could play it differently, but you’ll hear that about me. What you believe, that’s up to you. People just love to talk about me.” She added, “Unfortunately, Alfonzo was for real. Caught me at a particularly weak moment. Percodan and Chivas Regal. That was a bad combo for me.” She waved a bejeweled wrist in the air, making clanking sounds. “Some people can handle it. Not me. Ended up dropping the Chivas in favor of Stoli. Now there was a kick in the seat!” She asked, “Ever seen Caddyshack?”

  “Sure.”

  “Chevy Chase’s opening line about doing drugs? When he encourages his caddy to take drugs daily? I love that line! Now that’s a cinemagraphic moment if there ever was one. Clark Gable, eat your heart out. ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ I mean, get outta town! What’s the big deal? Serpico — now there’s a picture with some language in it!” Off she went, naming film after film, sometime during which their dinners were delivered. She ordered red wine with the fish, and vanished into her headphones.

  Billy Sprague felt bedeviled by Doc Toland’s final words. You’re going over there to save the world as we know it. What had Doc known about the event? About Castro and the others? About Billy’s role in the tournament? Save the world? Billy thought. He felt as if he deserved to be no more than a caddy, just as Zamora had suggested. Alfonzo Zamora. Rita Shaughnessy. He didn’t dare look around. There were probably other legends on board as well. To caddy would be a privilege in such company. And the money! All that, plus expenses and travel for a week of golf in Scotland? But saving the world as we know it . . . that pushed at his temples, robbed his appetite. He stared at the mango chutney fish course on his plate, unable to eat. He owed Doc. He’d do anything for Doc. Anything! But save the world? How the fuck did a person do that?

  Gorman met a man named Thomas Franklin and a woman, Edna Zuckerman, on the footbridge at Oxford station that spanned the two sides of the platform, tracks running north and south. Pass
engers lugging suitcases and duffel bags walked past them in both directions.

  Zuckerman, a dark-eyed, athletic-looking type in her late twenties, had lit a cigarette, annulling Gorman’s first impression. She had wide hips and thick calves and a curiously tranquil face that he might have expected more from a nun. She wore a black leather jacket and a knee-length gray skirt with black tights. He would have thought slacks for a job like this, but maybe that was why she had worn the skirt. Gorman had found members of the intelligence community, as a group, to be the most fickle, the most unpredictable, the most quirky he’d ever met. He had to put himself into that camp, of course, what with a love of model trains, fast cars, and California wines. But the international set never ceased to amaze him.

  Thomas Franklin, at thirty, looked more fortysomething, with his bald spot and bad teeth. His green tie held some hollandaise, his right French cuff some mustard or yellowing toothpaste. His right eye hung slightly lower on his face than his left, as if he’d been crushed in the birth canal. He spoke in a gravelly voice with a thick Gaelic accent, making him nearly impossible to understand.

  “Three minutes,” Franklin said. He handed both of the others a small device the size of a Palm Pilot. “It’s called an E-nine,” he said, “for Electric Canine. Electronic sniffer,” he explained. “Has to come within twelve to twenty inches of the explosive to sense it. I’ve turned off the audible alert because we don’t want these things chirping and alerting our boy we’re on to him. But a red light illuminates if it smells trouble, so what we do is walk a car and check the lights on the sniffer. If we’ve got a red light then we know our boy is somewhere in that particular car, and we can try to narrow it from there. Okay?”

  “Three minutes? I should have stopped at the loo,” Zuckerman complained, glancing down the tracks. She told Gorman, “Whenever I get nervous I have to pee.”

  “Makes her hell in bed,” Franklin growled.

  “Don’t you just wish,” she snapped back at him. She turned to Gorman and glowed, suddenly a girlish child. “Do you like the States?”

  “Shouldn’t we get down to the platform?” Gorman encouraged.

  “We’ll meet in the dining car every half hour on the quarter hour,” Franklin instructed, assuming control. Gorman stiffened. His impression was that it was to be his operation, that these two were his backup.

  “If that’s the way our friend wants it,” Edna Zuckerman said, correctly reading Gorman’s thoughts.

  Gorman jumped in. “The dining car is fine. We don’t make contact unless there’s something to share.” He checked his watch. Remaining up inside the covered bridge instead of making for the platform made him nervous.

  All three continually scanned the passengers below, making short comments like, “How about the bloke by the trash bin?” “The couple by the little kid there . . . That looks like a heavy valise.” “The conductor doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing.” And each would then observe and inspect the individual in question, making a mental note so that they might be identified later.

  “You and I will travel as a couple,” Gorman instructed Zuckerman, who seemed delighted with this arrangement. “I’m visiting for the first time, and you’re pointing out everything we’re going to do and how much fun we’re going to have.” To Franklin he said, “You’ll hit on her a couple of times when we’re all in the dining car. Especially if there’s information to pass. Or you’ll flirt with him,” he told Zuckerman. “Either way. Just make it convincing. I’ll complain, and the other of you will either deny the flirting or claim to be old friends. Something that allows us to engage.”

  “The old friends thing is better,” Franklin said, not taking his eyes off the various passengers. “What about that long-haired bloke, with the cane? He’d be about the right age, wouldn’t he?”

  Zuckerman agreed. “Good eyes, Tommy. Yes. Brilliant! The cane is meant as a disguise to throw us off the scent.”

  Gorman reminded, “We should keep in mind that we’re looking for burns to the hands, or a man who never removes his gloves. Our experience is that these bombers inevitably have screwed up once or twice and carry trophies on their arms and hands.”

  “Brilliant!” Edna Zuckerman said again. “And you and me, Mr. Gorman? How friendly is this to be then? Lovers? School chums? How do we play it?”

  “She wants to drop her knickers for you in the loo,” said a jealous Franklin.

  “Bugger off!” Zuckerman objected, smacking her comrade in the shoulder and knocking him off balance.

  Gorman said softly, “In case we’ve been noticed up here, I would suggest we play the old friend angle in the dining car.” He had one person in mind as he said this, an old, haggard-looking fellow perched on a bench below who seemed to be studying faces as much as they all were. “Any other agents on the train?” he asked. “I’m thinking about that old guy on the bench.”

  Individually, and quite professionally, Franklin and Zuckerman took turns observing the man in question.

  “Got him,” Franklin said.

  “Likewise,” Zuckerman echoed.

  “That makes six or seven prime candidates.”

  “Plus another couple of hundred folks to pick from once everyone boards the train,” Franklin reminded.

  “School chums?” Edna Zuckerman inquired, glancing into her purse as if attempting to decide which lipstick to wear.

  “Former lovers,” Gorman informed her. “We’re nervous around each other. Awkward — ”

  “Shouldn’t be hard for Edna,” Franklin interrupted. “Can’t pour a cup of tea without spilling all over.”

  “Hush!” she fired back. To Gorman she said, “Former lovers it is, Ned. May I call you Ned?”

  “Leave now,” Gorman instructed Franklin. “You’ll start at the front of the train and work your way back. We’ll do the reverse.”

  “Assigned seats on the Edinburgh run, Yankee boy,” Franklin corrected. “We’ll look stupid if we don’t head to our seats first. You two will have to get some bloke to switch seats if you’re to sit together.”

  “That’ll be my job,” Zuckerman volunteered.

  “With that blouse you’re wearing, all you’ll have to do is bend over to win yourself a favor.” Franklin said to Gorman, “She’s stacked, though you’d never know it with the blood-constricting bras she wears.”

  “You’ve always wanted to put your face in them,” Edna Zuckerman countered. “And you’ll never get your chance, Tommy boy. Not with that attitude of yours.” She sounded a little Irish. By this point Gorman was catching about every other word of their dialogue.

  The train arrived from behind them.

  Gorman reminded, “Twenty kilos, don’t forget. Enough to leave a crater a quarter mile wide and a hundred feet deep.”

  Franklin turned and said softly, “Bates wanted to launch this new software with a bang. If we cock this up, maybe he gets the chance.”

  The train to Edinburgh rode smoothly, given its incredible speed. Nothing like Amtrak, Gorman realized, wondering how the United States could fall so behind in a given technology when it prided itself on maintaining the leading edge. The rolling green hills streamed past like a living oil painting. Rock walls. Stone churches. Clusters of blond-rock Cotswolds villages in the distance in breathtaking panoramas that held his face glued to the quiet glass window instead of searching the car for would-be bombers.

  Edna Zuckerman negotiated the seat exchange with a single eyelid-fluttering request, so that now she and Gorman sat side by side, her black tights exposed and inviting, her leather jacket folded on the floor, her white blouse vaguely translucent.

  Gorman made a quick seat count and estimated that they had upward of four or five hundred passengers riding the train’s ten cars, one of whom might be carrying enough plastique to level Madison Square Garden. His scalp itched. His stomach ached from too much coffee and not enough sleep. He’d lost track of how many hours he’d been awake. He nodded off watching the scenery, coming awake t
o a mirror image of himself kissing the glass and drooling down its surface. Zuckerman’s seat was empty. He caught a brief glimpse of her as she slipped out of the electronically controlled car doors, heading up the train. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes had been stolen from him. He stood and headed toward the back of the car, determined to find Le Tour and devise a way to get him off the train and away from that plastique.

  Would he know by a look? he wondered as he slowly moved from seat to seat, using each to balance himself even though it wasn’t necessary — the train ran so comfortably it proved difficult to tell it was moving. Gorman made a point of stealing a look at each and every passenger, though never deliberately nor heavy-handedly. A woman and her daughter. A grammy with her knitting. Businessmen. Businesswomen. Tourists. Tourists. More tourists. He heard more American accents than British. Backpacks. Briefcases. Duffels. Roller cases. Aluminum. Rip-stop nylon. Leather. Suddenly the task before him seemed insurmountable.

  He stopped at the end of the car and ducked into the coffin-size restroom. The E-9 showed no red lights. He slipped it back into his pocket, knowing he had to come up with a way to get it closer to the overhead racks where most of the luggage was kept. There were also luggage bins at both ends of the cars, but Le Tour wasn’t likely to leave his explosives so available. In fact, it seemed more likely the man would keep it under the seat in front of him, now that Gorman thought about it. And that could narrow the field considerably, given that most people wanted the extra legroom.

  Gorman’s head was beginning to feel leaden. He stopped thinking for a moment, urinated, and washed his face, then studied his weathered look in the mirror, wondering why he had accepted Roxbury’s offer. Explosives. The world’s most successful and wealthiest entrepreneur. A global party. Golf! He wasn’t simply over his head, he was on the bottom of the Marianas Trench looking up.