"Beautiful People," Burdich sang in a thin, shaky voice to the tune of "Beautiful Dreamer." "Wake unto me. . . ."
Had to stay awake. He was in the middle of nowhere and (something) sat crouched and waiting. But it
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wouldn't touch him. He was the Beautiful Dreamer. Weave a circle 'round him thrice, and touch his eyes . . .
His eyes were sealing shut. The icicle eyelashes, the swollen frostbite on his eyelids, the terrible, aching desire for sleep made him close them, and it didn't matter, he was still on his feet, he would just rest his eyes (touch his eyes with holy dread) for a moment and keep on walking, the important thing was to keep on walking, go ahead, you're not going to meet anybody along this road, Beautiful Dreamer.
"For he on honeydew has fed," Burdich shouted into the night, his voice a rasp that the wind caught and smashed almost before the words were out of his mouth. Keep walking. You're not going to meet anybody.
But he did.
With an effort, he opened his frozen eyes and saw that he had wandered into a cluster of trees on the edge of a deep pine forest. Where was the road? He was hip-deep in snow, leaning against the trunk of a sturdy blue spruce. And there he saw him, Him, in the same cluster of trees. Crouching. Waiting.
"You've been looking for me all along, haven't you?" Burdich said in a low whisper that hurt his lungs.
He sat down in the snow. It felt so good. Eyes so tired (touch his eyes with holy dread). And as Death wove its circle around him, Burdich smiled, his lips barely moving as he repeated the last lines of the poem. "For he on honeydew has fed ..." It was going to be all right now. Death wouldn't stay long here. St had another appointment, up the road, with a houseful of people who expected him.
"And drunk the milk of Paradise," he whispered.
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He didn't have the strength to close his eyes, so the snow swirled in and filled in the open slots and blanketed him in brilliant white. And then Death went on up the road.
Chapter Twelve
In Washington, D.C., some 280 miles due southeast of the cluster of pines where Seymour Burdich's corpse lay blanketed with snow, Secretary of the Army Clive R. Dobbins sat in the back seat of his dark blue Lincoln Mark V, surreptitiously peering at his wrist-watch as his wife prattled on with a thousand complaints.
"Really, Clive, I can't see why we had to leave so early. It was a simply fabulous party. Nancy even gave me her recipe for that scrumptious Charlotte Russe she makes. And Henry was in marvelous spirits."
"The snow," Dobbins said lamely. Washington hadn't been hit very hard by the snowstorm that was sweeping the country, but the weather made a better story than the truth.
"What?" Mrs. Dobbins registered a surprise greater than any she could have felt, but exaggeration was part of her personality, so Dobbins let her go on. "There aren't two inches of snow on the ground, dear. And Forsythe is an utterly splendid driver. Aren't you, Forsythe?"
"Yes, ma'am," the driver agreed from the front seat.
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"I've got to make a meeting," Dobbins muttered. Which was true. The meeting was with a twenty-four-year-old public relations girl with the State Department. Rhonda had the brains of a duck, but a rack on her that could halt an ICBM coming out of its silo.
Dobbins had told her he'd meet her at one A.M. on the nose, and he was twenty minutes late already. It would take another half-hour or so to get from Georgetown to Rhonda's section of Sixteenth Avenue. She was never much good if he dropped by while she was sleeping. The girl slept like a rock. Fooling around with Rhonda after waking her up was like diddling a mummy.
"Step on it, Forsythe," he said.
Out of the rear window he could see the headlights of the green Ford belonging to the Secret Service. They followed him everywhere like shadows. Dobbins had objected to their presence ever since the boys had first started to trail him around, but the order was from the president himself, and you didn't buck orders like that.
So he had put up with their bothersome lurking and checking, even though it made him feel like a pansy. He'd commanded men in three wars, damn it, and now a bunch of civies who looked like college frat men were fluttering around him like butterflies in order to "protect" him.
Protect! Hah! He'd like to see the son of a bitch who popped off Watson and Ives. He'd like to see the whites of that pud-puller's eyes as he tried to attack him, a retired four-star general of the United States Army, because if he did attack him, Dobbins's clenched fist going smack into that yellow-bellied turd-eater's nose would be the last sight the so-called assassin was ever going to see.
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The big car rambled into Georgetown, passing by the elegant houses with their covered pools and their steaming greenhouses. Behind it, the green Ford followed doggedly.
"Punks," Dobbins muttered.
"What, dear?" Mrs. Dobbins said, her false eyelashes batting so fast she looked about to lift off. "Now you know how I feel about your getting overexcited, Clive. You know, I've always held that you play much too much golf."
"I don't golf in the winter, Hilda."
"Don't you?" Again the look of unbridled amazement. "Well, work then. You spend altogether too much of your time working. All these meetings." She clucked disapprovingly.
"I'm the Secretary of the Army," Dobbins said mildiy.
"But it's past midnight. Surely the Russians wouldn't be so uncivilized as to attack us before breakfast."
Dobbins sighed and tuned out the rest of Hilda's monologue. At least Rhonda limited her talking to smut. He liked that in a woman. No wasted words. Hilda was still jabbering when the Lincoln pulled up in front of the three-story Tudor with "Dobbins" printed over the bell. She hardly seemed to notice when Dobbins led her out of the car and into the house; the verbal river that flowed from her lips never ceased. She was still talking when he closed the door behind her and headed back out to the car.
"Get out, Forsythe," he snapped.
"Sir?"
"Quick, before the Secret Service boys get here." They were undoubtedly nearby, cooling their well-bred heels inconspicuously somewhere near the en-
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trance to Dobbins's driveway, butit was worth a shot. "Give me your hat."
The driver, clearly put out, climbed reluctantly out of the car. "Sir, I was given instructions-"
"Damn it, I'm your employer, and I give the instructions around here!"
"Yes, sir." He handed Dobbins the navy blue chauffeur's cap he wore. Dobbins grunted in acknowledgment and squeezed in behind the wheel. "You go home now, hear?"
"Yes, sir," Forsythe said dejectedly.
Dobbins pulled out of the driveway slowly, then laid rubber heading for 34th Avenue. Headlights were behind him. Oh, the boys are on their toes tonight, he thought. But not for long. He jumped one red light, gassed the car hard, and sped up Wisconsin Avenue. The lights were still tailing him.
"Here we go, kids. Earn your pay," he said out loud, grinning as he pushed the Lincoln as fast as it would go up onto the ramp leading to Connecticut Avenue and along the Potomac.
No peach-fuzzed protectors were going to hang around spying on Clive R. Dobbins, he thought triumphantly as he gunned along the snow-slicked highway toward Bethesda. His personal life was his own, and if he was going to bang Rhonda behind his wife's back, nobody was getting in on that action except for him and for Rhonda, if she was awake, and the souls on Judgment Day. Certainly no flab-headed civilians in a Ford.
The river sped by alongside, the cold moonlight glinting off the water and bringing up the dull-white shapes of the ice floes that regularly dammed up the river at this time of year. There was some traffic, not much. What there was, was inching along at a snail's
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pace, while Dobbins sped past them like a black bullet. He was ahead of all of them.
He checked his rear-view. Not all of them. There was one pair of headlights behind him, going at his pace, no
slower, no faster.
Dobbins cursed under his breath. Those Fords had to be built with Maserati engines in them. Well, it was going to take more than a hot engine and a car full of youngsters just barely off the tit to catch him.
"Try and follow this, you suckers!" he shouted as he spun into the inside lane. With one momentous burst of power, he jumped the median strip and headed full speed in the other direction.
"A trick, boys," he roared, coughing with laughter. They must have been asses to think he was going to Bethesda in the first place, Dobbins thought. Who screws in Bethesda, anyway?
Out of his rear-view he watched the green Ford skid and spin out into an uncontrollable donut across four lanes of traffic. It hit two vehicles superficially while siting toward the far side of Connecticut Avenue. Several cars braked behind it, sending them into herringbone patterns along the roadway. The green Ford crashed into a guardrail and at last lay still.
Dobbins hooted with delight. It was clear sailing now. He put the car on cruise control at 60 and glided down Connecticut Avenue back toward the city. His thoughts filled with Rhonda. Rhonda, in a transparent pink negligee, with maybe the black garter belt he'd given her for Valentine's Day underneath. Rhonda of the deliciously foul mouth who knew just how to bring his wildest fantasies to life. Rhonda... if Rhonda was awake. Otherwise, he might as well be at home with Hilda. He cut the cruise control and gunned the pedal.
Back in the city, he made his way toward the north-
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east section of town. Traffic was light and he made good time. He didn't notice until he'd reached Sixteenth Avenue that the same headlights had been behind him since the crackup on the highway.
Damn it, if it wasn't the Secret Service boys, it was the turd-eating reporters. Although no official word about the assassinations of the secretaries of the Air Force and the Navy had been given, the press boys had noticed the added security around Dobbins and took every opportunity to grili him about it. Ever since the advent of the Secret Service guards, he'd denied all press interviews and eschewed them with a hurried "No comment" when they ran up to him on the street.
Oh, that's all I need, Dobbins thought as he checked the rear-view again. It certainly looked like a tail. The crud-mongers. He could just see the headlines now: "ARMY HEAD ELUDES SECURITY TO RENDEZVOUS WITH WASHINGTON MISTRESS." And there would be a picture next to it of Rhonda in her flamingo-pink negligee with the black garter belt underneath. Read all about it in the Pentagon Report. Details in Clive R. Dobbins's dishonorable discharge papers.
"Get off my ass, you wang-wavers!" he shouted as he turned into a narrow sidestreet. He slowed down at the entrance to an alley. If it wasn't a tail, the car that had been driving behind him for the past twenty minutes would pass by harmlessly.
But it didn't. It turned into the same side street with a deliberation that sent a sudden involuntary chill down Dobbins's spine. He entered the alleyway, rolling slowly to avoid the stacks of piled-up garbage on either side. Then he turned onto another side street. And after that, another alley.
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The car was still behind him.
Rhonda's plush apartment building was less than two blocks away. If he was going to get his portrait snapped, it sure as hell wasn't going to be in front of that building. He ground the Lincoln to a halt.
Fine. Snap away, boys. Think you're so damned smart. The only picture you're getting of me is going to be right here in this alley, while I give you the news that my lawyer's going to slap a harassment suit against your muckraking paper.
Stick that in your turd-eating notepads.
He got out slowly and walked toward the car behind him with kingly grandeur. They were going to see who's boss around here, by God. The car was a nondescript Chevy, as battered and dented as every other car in Washington. Something was poking out of the driver's window. In the darkness of the alley, Dobbins guessed it was the ubiquitous press credentials, which reporters seemed to think gave them access to every skeleton-filled closet in America. Well, he'd show them where they could stow their toe-sucking press cards.
Only it wasn't a press card. And the boys inside weren't jumping out like hyenas with their questions and their flashbulbs. Dobbins frowned as he moved closer, hearing nothing but the gritty sound of his own footfalls on the dirt and snow-covered brick of the alleyway. They certainly didn't act like any Washington reporters he ever saw.
Rookies, probably. Independents. Trying to get their first big public expose, and not knowing a donkey's fart about how to get it. Well, here's your scoop, boys. And the subpoena will come in the morning to verify it. He pulled himself up to full height. He jutted
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an accusing finger at the car to throw a little scare into them. He put on his most authoritative general's voice. "What the hell are-"
The words choked off as the dark object poking through the driver's window lengthened and another, just like it, elongated sleekly out the rear window. And then he knew what they were as the men in the car- what were they wearing?-raised them to their shoulders and sighted through them and then the things bellowed bright fireworks in a deafening crash that sent brick flying off the walls behind Dobbins, and the general gasped once in red bubbles of blood, and his feet splayed out beneath him and the car was gone.
As he lay in the alleyway, riddled with what would later be determined as more than 100 wounds delivered from a Chinese copy of a Soviet AK-47 submachine gun at point-blank range, Clive R. Dobbins's last thought was that the Secret Service boys could never have stopped the men in that car. The president himself couldn't have stopped them, just as the president wouldn't be able to stop them the next time.
And the next time was going to be worse. Much worse.
Chapter Thirteen
DESTINATION 2ADNIA.
The Folcroft computers spewed out another piece to the puzzle of Felix Foxx. Dawn was peeking in through the Venetian blinds of Smith's office, and the light stung his eyes. He'd stayed awake in his office for two nights now, trying to sort out the tangled mess the computers had brought to him.
it was all there, he knew. Somewhere. During the past 48 hours the Folcroft Four had given him a million pieces of information. In Smith's weary brain, he began to see the trusted computers as four diabolically wise beings from some unearthly plane, who gave him ail the parts to a machine and then said with a wink, "Okay, Smitty. Now you make it run."
But he hadn't been able to make it run. A hundred times over Smith had written down the salient points of the case. The overflowing wastebasket full of scraps of paper were testimony to his efforts. But nothing had jelled. The parts of the machine were as disparate as oranges and apples. With a sigh, he drew out another sheet of notepaper and began again.
First, there were the murders of the Secretary of the Air Force, Homer Watson, and the Secretary of the
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Navy, Thornton Ives, both killed in strange ways that reflected combat conditions. Every branch of the military had launched full-scale investigations on their own, without turning up so much as the smell of a lead. CURE'S own man, Remo, had come up almost as empty-handed. The only thing Remo had locked onto was some middle-aged diet doctor named Foxx who, for some unknown reason, the computers had decreed to be a ninety-four-year-old man named Vaux who was last heard from some fifty years before in connection with a scandal involving the youth-restoring properties of a drug called procaine.
"2," Smith wrote neatly. Point Two was that Foxx/ Vaux had last been seen in the company of a woman who was found-murdered, her body drained of what might have been an unusually high level of procaine. The New York police were after Foxx on that one, but they were looking in the wrong places. Foxx was at a so-called aging clinic in Pennsylvania called Shangri-la with Remo, and Smith wasn't about to turn the information over to standard law enforcement agencies until Remo had found what he had gone after.
Shangri-la was Point Three. Appare
ntly this was no ordinary massage-and-mud-bath resort. Remo had reported guests to the clinic, who were in their seventies, even though they looked barely old enough to buy a drink. The procaine connection. Large amounts of the drug might keep them young. At least that was the theory advanced by Vaux in the thirties before he disappeared off the face of the earth. That would explain Foxx/Vaux's advanced age, but little more. So far, there was nothing to connect the strange goings on with the two military murders.
Secret Service guards had been posted around
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Clive R. Dobbins, the secretary of the Army, since he was the next logical choice for an assassination team bent on eliminating the country's military leaders, but if the hit team got through the Secret Service to Dobbins, who would be next? The Folcroft Four had answered with chilling efficiency, flashing the names of the next three possible victims: the secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the president of the United States.
Time was running out. It was still eminently possible that Felix Foxx, for all the interesting revelations about him, had nothing to do with any murders except for that of the gir! in New York City, and even that lead was circumstantial at best. Remo might have been on the wrong track all along. In the interests of time, Smith was on the verge of pulling Remo out of Shangri-la and having him start over.
And then, at 4:51 A.M., Smith wheedled Point Four out of the computers. Point Four was DESTINATION ZADNIA, and the words were printed on the console screen four times. Foxx, under the name of Felix Vaux, had traveled to Zadnia three times during the past year, and purchased an open ticket to the same place two months before.
That was the stickler. Why would a nationally celebrated diet doctor want to make four unpublicized visits to an unstable country in the north of Africa? Zadnia had nothing-no technology, no arable land, not even enough overweight people to fill one of Foxx's lectures. All Zadnia possessed was a power-mad dictator named Ruomid Halaffa who would buy arms and secrets from any source at any time in order to fuel, indiscriminately, the terrorist forces of the world. That and just enough oil to buy Halaffa's weapons from the lowest bidder.
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