The Snake Flag Conspiracy

by The Snake Flag Conspiracy (fb2)

  * * *

  What's really unusual about Boston's Copley Square is that it's an open-air center where half a dozen subcultures meet and, to a great extent, ignore each other.

  There are what the hippies call the "straight" people: all the young clerks and junior executives from offices in the buildings near the plaza. There are the tourists, aiming their cameras at the picturesque juxtaposition of the old — Trinity Church — and the new — the Hancock building whose skyscraper glass facade reflects the area from every angle. There are the winos — helpless, stumbling carcasses who barely manage to exist from drink to drink, seeking an hour or two of rest in the warmth of the sun. Boston has more young winos than any other city in the whole United States. In their teens and early twenties, teeth knocked out, faces raw, bruised, cut and savaged from drunken brawls over the remnants of a pint of red wine, begging for a dime to go towards another bottle. For the most part they are violent only among themselves.

  There are the students. Hundreds of them. A locust swarm covering every inch of the Back Bay area. There are the street people and the hippies, each a sub-culture within a sub-culture.

  It's a great place to hide, right out in the open. You just find the right little group and blend in with them. Each group pretty much has its own territory. Like the street people, for example. The sidewalk along the west side of Boylston Street from Dartmouth to Fairfield is their territory for the most part.

  I found the group I was looking for. They were sitting on the grass on the south side of the plaza. I sat down on the fringes of the group. In the center was a young man playing his guitar and singing a folk song of his own composition. He wasn't very good, but he was sincere.

  The late afternoon sunlight was warm. The shadows were lengthening to make another soft New England summer twilight. The objects I'd taken from the two dead men were in my pocket. I took them out to look at them. The first was a silver money clip. The metal was flat. On its surface was a bas-relief design. It took but a glance for me to recognize the now familiar design of the Snake Flag and the ever-present slogan.

  The second object looked like a half-dollar at first. It was a round pocketknife. Usually a half-dollar is sliced apart and the coin used to face a half-moon steel blade by soldering it to both sides of the small circular handle. It looks like a coin, but it's a handy pocketknife. I'd always presumed it was illegal to deface American money, but there are a lot of them around.

  There are damned few, however, that carry a Kennedy half-dollar face on one side and a Snake Flag on the other! And once again, circling the rim, were the words that had thrown such fear into John Norfolk when I uttered them: "Don't Tread on Me!"

  What the hell was the significance of that phrase? How did the flag and the phrase tie-in with the organization I was after?

  The young man had started on another of his plaintive compositions. He sang in an earnest voice, his face to the sky, his eyes closed, letting the fading sunlight strike his tanned cheeks and long brown hair that fell down to his shoulders.

  I started to reach into my shirt pocket for a cigarette and then remembered that they were in my jacket in the tunnel.

  Someone, tapped my arm.

  "Want one?" The girl was in her early twenties. She held out a pack to me.

  "Thanks."

  Crouching beside me, she cupped a match in her palms against the slight breeze.

  "You being hassled?" she asked.

  I nodded.

  "Fuzz?"

  "No."

  She inclined her head toward the guitar player. "What do you think of him?"

  I shrugged. "He's doing his thing," I said. "If it makes him happy, that's what counts, isn't it?"

  She smiled at me warmly. "Right on!"

  I finished the cigarette in silence. I was facing the subway exits on Dartmouth Street, trying to pinpoint which of the loiterers were the men who were after me.

  She touched me on the arm again to attract my attention.

  "Hey, man," she said quietly. "You act like you're real uptight about something."

  "You could say that."

  "You sure it's not the fuzz? They giving you heat?"

  "It's not the fuzz."

  "Your old lady giving you a hard time?"

  "I don't have an old lady."

  "Oh?" She seemed surprised that I had no girlfriend. A little embarrassed, too.

  "Look, I know it's none of my business, but you — well, there's…" She didn't know how to go on.

  "Something about me?"

  She nodded.

  "The way I look?"

  She nodded again.

  "It's bugging you?"

  "Yeah, it sure is."

  I smiled at her. In a confidential tone I said, "The squares can't tell the difference. They think I look like, street people."

  She laughed. "Well, I can tell the difference."

  "What's your name?" I asked her.

  "Julie."

  We looked each other over carefully, openly, frankly. I liked what I saw. Julie was about five feet two inches tall and probably weighed just over 100 pounds. She was slender, with small breasts and a small waist, and she had slender, shapely legs. Her hair was tawny and cut short. She wore a man's shirt, unbuttoned but tied over the midriff by the shirttails so that there was an expanse of smooth, tight skin between the bottom of the shirt and the top of her patched blue jeans. She had a small, straight nose, a thin-lipped but wide mouth and a delicate chin. Her eyes were freckled. Have you ever seen a girl with freckled eyes? Hers were hazel with brown and gray spots in the iris. The kind of eyes you want to gaze into for hours.

  "Well?"

  She smiled at me. "The vibes are real good," she answered. "What do you think?"

  I nodded. "They're very good."

  "You seem like real people," she said. "You need help?"

  "I guess so."

  "Like what?"

  "Like you name it."

  "A pad?"

  "Yeah."

  Julie got to her feet, a slender reed of a girl, but reeds bend and sway in the wind. They're flexible and don't break easily. Julie was like that. She was also very decisive.

  "Let's go," she said, standing up.

  I raised an eyebrow in question.

  "I've got a pad."

  I got to my feet beside her.

  "I've also got two roommates," she said. "But they're away for the week, so there's plenty of room."

  "What makes you so sure you can trust me? Don't you read the papers?"

  She flashed a gamin grin at me. "I'm not afraid of you. The vibes are too good, man. What sign are you?"

  I didn't know enough about astrology to know the sign I was born under, so I threw out the first one that came into my mind. "I'm Cancer."

  "We'll get along. I'm Pisces," she announced, as if that explained everything.

  We set off across the street. At one point Julie must have seen the tenseness in my jawline, because she put her arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder, and that's how we passed the tall, brawny man who'd been eying me suspiciously for the past twenty minutes.

  Chapter Nine

  Julie's apartment was small. It had been partitioned off from one of the great, old, rambling apartments of the early twenties. Bedroom, living room, half-kitchen and bathroom had once been just the living room of the original apartment. The girls had tried to decorate it Burlap sacking had been made into window drapes. A multi-colored, imitation Tiffany lamp shade hung down from the ceiling. One wall was painted chartreuse, another was in mauve. Posters were pinned on the third wall so thickly you could hardly see the wall itself.

  While I took a shower to clean the grime off my body, Julie made something for us to eat. Health food. The raw vegetables ground in a blender to a thin, pulpy drink wasn't too bad. I'll pass over the rest of the meal. Let's just say looking at Julie across the small dining table made it easier to get down.

  Afterwards she washed the few dishes and turn
ed up the hi-fi set before we went into the bedroom. Julie pulled off her shirt and blue jeans and, clad only in her bikini panties, flung herself onto the waterbed that took up most of the small room. There were a dozen throw pillows of all sizes, shapes and colors at the head of the bed. The bed itself was covered with a patchwork crazy quilt. Julie sat with her knees drawn up, her back against one of the larger pillows. She patted the bed beside her.

  I had nothing much to take off, but I couldn't let her see either Hugo or Pierre. Fortunately the light was dim and I turned partially away from her, so when I dropped what was left of my slacks, Hugo and Pierre were wrapped in them. When I turned back, Julie saw the effect she was having on me and smiled.

  She rolled a double cigarette paper deftly with the fingers of her left hand, sprinkling the finely-ground marijuana into it in a thin line. Licking the paper with the tip of her tongue, she sealed it and twisted the ends.

  "Nicaragua Red," she said, grinning proudly at me. "It's hard to get these days." She picked up the sheet of paper in her lap and shook the spillings neatly into a small film cannister. She lit the joint, inhaling deeply, sucking air around the end of the butt to mix with the smoke of the weed.

  She took another drag and then held out the joint to me. I took it from her and placed it between my lips, inhaling as deeply as she had.

  I've had hashish in North Africa. I've snorted cocaine in Chile and Ecuador. I've chewed peyote buttons in Arizona and Mexico. And I've smoked more than one pipe of opium in Viet Nam, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. As a secret agent, you do whatever you have to do to blend in with the group you're with, and the people I've had to mix with aren't the kind that would meet with the approval of Elks, Lions and Rotarian Clubs in the States.

  Marijuana has different effects on different people. It made Julie feel like talking.

  She waved the joint in the air and said, peering at the smoke as if she could discover a great, important meaning in the drifting, formless wisps, "You know something, whatever your name is?"

  "Nick," I told her. "Nick Carter."

  "That's a nice name," she observed. "I like it. You know something?"

  "What?"

  "I used to think I was a rebel. Boy, did I rebel! Against my father and mother. Against the snobbish finishing school they sent me to for a couple of years before I walked out. Against the whole damn society!"

  "You burned your bra," I said.

  She laughed. "Hell, I don't have a bra to burn. You think I need one?" She touched her small breasts.

  I smiled, shaking my head slowly. "Never. Did you need to rebel?"

  "I thought so. I marched in protest parades. I led demonstrations. They kicked me out of one college."

  "And?"

  She turned on her side and looked at me sadly. "But I'm not a rebel. All I am is rebellious, Nick. And that's a damn shame!"

  I touched her face gently.

  "Not really," I said. "There are very few rebels in the world. But there are a lot of rebellious people. If you understand what you've just said to me, it's a sign you've stopped being an adolescent and become an adult."

  Very carefully Julie considered what I'd said.

  "Hey, man," she exclaimed. "You're right!"

  "What were you really rebelling against?" I asked.

  "Oh," she said casually, "mostly it was against my father and his friends. You know, they've got loot. They've got so much loot they don't even bother to count it. I used to think — all that money and it's not helping anyone! That used to tee me off. But what was worse — they've got power. Power, man, like you wouldn't believe! And they never used any of it to help anyone! Now, that really got me!"

  "What kind of power?" I asked, the first stirrings of interest coming alive in me.

  "Don't you know who my old man is?" she asked.

  I shook my head. "I don't even know your last name," I pointed out.

  Julie nodded soberly. "That's right. You don't. Alcott Chelmsford is my father."

  "I don't know him," I said, disappointed but not surprised. Well, hell, it would have been too much of a coincidence if her father had been one of the men whose names Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

  "No reason you should," she said. "He tries to keep out of the public eye. Did you ever hear of Frank Guilfoyle, or Alexander Bradford or Arthur Barnes?"

  It was like hitting the jackpot in a slot machine in Las Vegas. Three out of the five names!

  "I've heard of them. They're biggies like Mather Woolfolk and Leverett Pepperidge, right?"

  "Right," she said. "The whole bunch of them! My father's one of that crowd. Man, did they bug me!"

  "You know them well?" I asked.

  "From the time I was born. Alexander Bradford is my godfather. Would you believe it?" She laughed bitterly.

  "Tell me about old Bradford," I suggested, trying to be as casual as I could.

  Julie turned away.

  "Oh, hell," she said. "I don't want to talk about them! I've spent the last five years of my life running away from that bunch. You don't want to hear about them."

  "I want to hear about Alexander Bradford," I said, reaching out to stroke her neck. It was the first chance I'd had to get some inside dope on Sabrina's employer.

  Julie shook her head in refusal. "No way, man," she said. "I don't want to spoil the mood. I dig you too much!"

  She clipped the remnant of the joint into a spring holder, inhaled deeply and handed it to me. "Let's ball," she suggested, as simply and as innocently as a child would say, "Let's go play."

  I knew there was nothing I could do right then to make her talk, so I took the final drag on the joint, put it down and turned to her.

  Julie made love as simply and uninhibitedly as she talked. My body was a plaything for her, to be explored and enjoyed as if I were a giant panda toy she'd taken to bed. At the same time, she gave herself to me completely, to do with as I wished. She derived as much pleasure from pleasing me as I did in making her discover the little, uncontrollable excitements the female body is capable of.

  Her breasts were small. My hand covered each completely, and then my mouth, and I looked up to find an expression of ecstasy on her face so acute it almost seemed she was in pain. I kissed the taut, smooth skin of her stomach, and as I moved down, Julie squirmed around so that she could match each of my actions.

  We became the yin and yang of that ancient Chinese symbol of completeness. Our bodies were intertwined in a tangle of soft and hard flesh, of smoothness and roughness, of skin so moist that we slid easily into one another.

  There was no moment when it was suddenly over. We reached peaks and then quieted down slowly, until, finally, we felt no more urgency to explore each other. She snuggled into me.

  "Hey, man," she said tiredly, "that was good."

  I kissed the tip of her nose. She brushed away a lock of my hair that had fallen over my forehead.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "How come you want to know so much about Alex Bradford?"

  It really didn't take me by surprise. Julie was too bright to be fooled for very long. I decided to take a chance because I could use whatever information she had.

  So I told her. Not all of it. Specifically, not about AXE or my role as Killmaster in that supersecret organization. I did tell her about the Russian who'd almost died because of what he'd learned. I told her about the plot and about the organization that had been trying to kill me. Julie listened carefully and seriously. When I was through, she said, "That's big trouble, man."

  "I know."

  "I wasn't talking about you," she said gravely. "I mean, if they succeed, what's going to happen to all the little people?"

  I didn't say anything. Before she'd give her cooperation, Julie had to work it through according to her own scale of values, in her own terms.

  She said thoughtfully, "I don't think our present society is the best. I think there's a hell of a lot wrong with it, but it's something we can work with. If they have their way, they'll smash it comple
tely. Okay. So it gets smashed. Then what? Do the little people take over? No way! They'll run it for their benefit and the hell with the little people. All the riots! All the people killed! The millions who'll starve — just so they can take over! That's Hitler and Stalin and Franco all over again!"

  She turned serious eyes on me. She'd made her commitment. "Nick, how can I help you?"

  "I want to know as much as you can tell me about Alexander Bradford. Somehow I get the feeling he's the key to this whole thing."

  "What about the others?"

  "I don't think they're in it. There's just one man at the top. I think it's him."

  "Bradford could be your man," she admitted. "Alex always seemed to me to be a little different from the others."

  "How?"

  She shrugged. "I can't really put it into words. There's something about him. Like he's always standing back and watching you and kind of filing you away in his mind, like he's got a computer there and everything you do or say gets punched into it. You know what I mean? Even though he's my godfather, he gives me the creeps!"

  "Can't you be more specific?"

  "He's a loner. He's secretive about what he does. God, Nick, even in that group of people who didn't say much about what they were doing, Alex was the most secretive. I mean, he's charming and all that, but it's all on the surface. Underneath, he's cold as ice. He never lets you know what he's thinking. Like you can't pin him down about anything he's involved in. Know what I mean?"

  I knew. Like me, all she had was a gut feeling and no facts, and that really shouldn't be enough to go on. Certainly not if I had to justify it to Hawk. However, it was enough for me. If Julie's gut feelings about Bradford matched mine, it added up to something.

  I reached for my wristwatch.

  "You going somewhere?" she asked, amused.

  "I've got to meet a man," I told her.

  "At one-thirty in the morning?"

  I nodded. "He's waiting for me now in a bar in Fields Corner."

  "Hey, you're serious!"

  "Right. Only I have a problem. I need a shirt, slacks and shoes."

  Julie popped out of bed. "Stand up," she said. I obliged her. She looked at my nude body with a measuring eye. "I'll be right back," she said and ducked out of the bedroom. Two minutes later she came in carrying a pair of men's slacks, socks, shirt and shoes. She dumped them on the bed.