League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  “You’re going there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me go with you,” Mac said.

  “No. I’m going to take her out of there. I don’t really trust Krueger at all.”

  Mac bit his lip. “I don’t like him but I don’t much like most medical people.”

  “He’s a druggist. Rita won’t get better. Just more addicted. Dependent.”

  Mac said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In town. I live alone in a big house.”

  “Is it big enough?”

  Since Margaret died, he had lived in a town house on Rhode Island Avenue. The daughter was married and had three kids and lived in Santa Barbara. He sometimes flew out to the Coast at Christmas. New York wanted to make sixty-three the mandatory retirement age at the magazine. They might even try to buy him out before then, give him a golden parachute, turn over his office to one of the pastel people sitting out there. When he walked out the door for the last time, he had it all planned: He would go to the lobby bar, drink four giant martinis even though it was the middle of the day, go home to the town house, and blow his brains out with the army Colt .45 he had kept from service days.

  He wrote down the address and handed it to Devereaux. As he had done before, Devereaux stared at it, memorized it, and handed the paper back to Mac. “I’ll bring her to your house when I get her.”

  Mac nodded. He felt strangely exhilarated in that moment. She was important and this would be an important thing. Devereaux had already infected him with the life-celebrating sense of doing something important again. There were only a few points left in the world—the grandchildren growing into a strange, tanned breed of Californians, still showing some affection for the funny pale grandfather of the East, but that would pass, one point; point two was Margaret’s grave in Larchmont; point three was the magazine; and what the hell was the other point? Maybe a giant double martini in the bar at the Willard. Life was boring. Now it would be important again, for a little time.

  Mac said, “You’re going to kidnap her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And bring her to my house?”

  “It’s safe. I doubt Dr. Krueger would think you betrayed him. In my experience, he isn’t very smart about a lot of things.”

  “He treated you?”

  “He put me on a variation of lysergic acid. I recognized the hallucinations. It was the stuff they tested at Aberdeen Proving Ground in the early sixties, though in a safer dose. I wasn’t completely out of my mind, just mildly so. There was heroin as well, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Why are you sure?”

  “I was in Asia for five years, Mac.”

  “Is he doing that to her?”

  “Sure,” Devereaux said. He said it without any special inflection.

  “Krueger will get the police after you.”

  “Perhaps. Everything can be arranged if you know the people who arrange things.”

  “So you’re still a spook?”

  Devereaux smiled. “No. That’s what I was. Now I’m something else.”

  “What? What else have you become?”

  “The man who loves Rita Macklin,” Devereaux said.

  17

  The nameless girl was waiting for him when he entered the glittering bar.

  He sat down next to her and signaled for a Paddy without ice. He watched the girl in profile. A part of him admired her—she was very cool, she betrayed neither eagerness nor nervousness. He could have used a girl like her. Maureen Kilkenny was pretty good, but he wondered if Maureen could have pulled off something like this—to set out to hire a man like himself by using his own weapons against him.

  Another part of him was merely waiting for the moment he would put the barrel of a .45 in her mouth and let her taste the metal for a moment before he pulled the trigger and blew off the back of her head. It would come. Matthew O’Day had every certainty of that.

  “Well?” she said at last when the barman moved away. She turned to look at him. Her eyes were flat with cunning.

  “You and your fellas put me in a bad way. And did you have to kill Brian? There was no point to that, just senseless.”

  “There’s a point to everything,” Marie Dreiser said.

  “The problem is you’ve pretty well destroyed my cell, at least for the time being,” Matthew O’Day said. “The coppers raided the farm, they got everyone. No tellin’ how long they’ll be interred. You didn’t hafta bring the whole bloody Garda down on us to get our attention.”

  “They didn’t arrest the girl, Maureen. So that’s one. And you’re two. Now one more man, a younger man. Brian was too young to be useful. Someone with a bit of polish, a bit of manners.”

  “God, you’re a cool bitch,” Matthew said.

  “Listen, love, this isn’t a game. I tried to tell you that Tuesday,” Marie said. Her hand grasped the sleeve of his tweed coat. “Everyone assembles Sunday morning in London.”

  “How did you know Maureen got away?”

  “We know a lot of things.”

  “You’re in with the bloody cops.”

  “Tuesday we were SAS, today we’re policemen.” She smiled. “You just can’t get over the fact that we’re very good.”

  “But who are you? Who the bloody hell are you?”

  “Your friends at the moment. Your benefactors. One hundred thousand British pounds.”

  “Who do we have to kill then?”

  She patted his sleeve. “That’s better.”

  Matthew waited.

  “You’ll find out in London,” she said.

  “I’m not even sure Maureen’ll make it to Dublin—”

  “Oh, she will, love. She’s a resourceful girl. Like me.” Marie rubbed his sleeve. “A girl can get by if she has to. Men just crack up when it gets too hard but women don’t break, not very often. We can just bend and bend until men get tired of pushing and then we spring right back in their face.”

  “You’re a fucking feminist.”

  “Not at all, love. When’s Maureen due here?”

  “She’ll try to get here by nightfall.”

  Marie grinned at him. She put her hand on his shirt and pushed at his chest. “Would a feminist pay you with sex? Did you still want sex, love? As part of the deal? Sealed with a kiss?”

  “You’re crazy, you know?”

  “Maybe that’s right. What do you say, Matthew? Do you want to have sex with me now before your girl gets here? I won’t tell her if you won’t. Or maybe you’d like to tell her to show what a big man you are and that you weren’t scared by the little girl in Dublin at all.”

  “I wouldn’t give you to my dog,” Matthew said.

  And Marie laughed out loud at that so that several tables of people turned to stare at her. Her face went red with laughter and Matthew only gaped at her.

  “It’s not your dog I want,” Marie finally said.

  “That’s all you’re fit for—”

  “You’re taking this so personal. I thought you were professional,” Marie said. She was still grinning but she took her hand away from his chest. “All right. I won’t violate you, love. Maybe you’re saving yourself for marriage.” She stood up. “Ten A.M. sharp, Twenty-one Dunhill Road.”

  “You’ll have the money?”

  “What money, love?”

  “Twenty-five thousand up front,” he said.

  She touched his shoulder and stared into his eyes. She was very close to him. She kissed him suddenly, with something like passion.

  He wanted to struggle away from her but could not. She held the back of his head and pressed her lips into his. People stared and the barman frowned. When she was finished, she pulled back. Her grin was insatiable.

  “That was Tuesday, love,” she growled in a low voice. “Tuesday was different. Now you’ll get paid when the job’s done. Tuesday I wouldn’t go to bed with you but today is different. I told you I’d pay you in sex but you turned me down.” She sh
rugged. “C’est la vie, love. London. Ten o’clock Sunday. And I wouldn’t want you to regret again, love. Next time might turn out to be serious.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” he said.

  “Next time,” she said very softly.

  He was angry and it showed in the set of his jaw.

  “Next time, you might be on the floor of the urinal,” she said.

  18

  Dr. Krueger turned on the light in his study and saw Devereaux sitting in the winged leather chair.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “Sit down,” Devereaux said.

  “I’m going to call the police.”

  “Sit down,” Devereaux said.

  “You can’t stop me,” Dr. Krueger said. He walked across the room to the telephone on the rosewood desk. The walls were lined with books and paintings. The town house above Rock Creek Park was old and cared for. He picked up the receiver and it took a moment for him to realize there was no dial tone. He put the receiver back on the cradle. Then he saw Devereaux’s gun.

  “This is crude. What do you want? I knew you were a danger. To yourself and others. I told Mr. Hanley.”

  “I’m only a danger to you, Dr. Krueger. Sit down.”

  The thin man went around his desk and sat behind it. He carefully slid open the center drawer. The .32 silver-plated pistol was gone. He glanced up and saw that Devereaux was now pointing the gun at him. It was a very large, dark pistol and Dr. Krueger began to feel afraid for himself. He lived alone. He had treated Miss Macklin honorably, given her comfort and care, tried to ease her pain. He made his silent case to himself.

  “What do you want?”

  “You know.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Please help me,” Devereaux said.

  “I can’t. You’re a sick man and you’re in no condition—”

  “Pretty please.” Devereaux unsnapped the automatic’s safety. “Pretty please with sugar on top.”

  “You’re crazy,” Dr. Krueger said.

  “And you’re dead. Do you want to be?”

  Quiet.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Write out an order for her release. Now. Into your hands. I’ll go with you to the sanitarium. Then you’ll drive us back to Washington. Then I’ll let you go about your business.”

  “You’re kidnapping her.”

  “Dr. Krueger. I want you to understand this so that you don’t make an eventual miscalculation that might harm you. I want to harm you, every instinct tells me to harm you, but it would be better if I didn’t. So you’re going to free Miss Macklin and then you’re going to forget this whole business.”

  “You’re threatening me.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Devereaux got up from the leather chair. He walked across the room to the rosewood desk. He stood over Dr. Krueger and placed the barrel of the pistol alongside the young man’s head, at the part in the long black hair.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The room exploded for a moment and Krueger made a convulsive move sideways and fell off the chair. The bullet was embedded in the floor. Devereaux bent and picked up the shell casing and put it in his pocket.

  “My God, you are insane,” Dr. Krueger said.

  “Perhaps,” Devereaux said. He stared at the man on the floor. “Perhaps it will help you to think so. In any case, that constitutes a threat. Think about it. While we drive out to the sanitarium.”

  Slowly, Dr. Krueger got up on his knees and then on his feet.

  “This is kidnapping,” he said again. “You’re going to harm that woman.”

  “Krueger. You’re a drug dealer. I know what you are and you know what you are but you’ve fooled a lot of people. This is a nice house and you make good money. Go about your life. The world is full of people who want your drugs and your soft words. But there are two exceptions I want you to respect: me and Rita Macklin. Stay away from me and stay away from her.”

  And he fired again, sending the bullet two inches from Krueger’s head. It became embedded in a book about phrenology.

  Krueger trembled. The tic went from his head to his hands. He jerked his hands convulsively and his right eye began to twitch.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Krueger said. He had to do what the madman said. For now.

  “No. I don’t think you understand. You’ll sign her release and you’ll drive us back to the District, but later, after a couple of whiskeys and after I’ve gone and all you have left is memory, you’re going to tell yourself that it wasn’t as bad as you thought and you’ll call the police and put them on me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No. I think I can assure you you won’t, but not by anything I’ve done or said so far.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. You’ll have to be the judge of that.”

  “Christ,” Krueger said.

  Devereaux said nothing for a moment. Then: “We’ll take your car. You drive.”

  “I should call them.”

  “By all means.”

  “You’ve cut the phone.”

  Devereaux smiled and put the pistol in his pocket. The move gave him pain but he thought the physician could not see it in the half light. “That’s in the movies, Doctor. I pulled out the jack. Plug it back in and call the sanitarium and tell them to get her ready.”

  19

  Trevor Armstrong, president of Euro-American Airlines, carried his briefcase as the entourage floated into the building off Oxford Circus. He thought of the study that showed traffic in London had scarcely advanced its pace in a century, since the horse and carriage. The narrow streets were so clotted with the foul fog of auto and bus fumes that a pall always came over Regent Street in late afternoons. He considered this and a dozen other things because he was a man infinitely interested in the world he moved through.

  Strode through.

  Dennison was his security man, which meant he carried a pistol. Jameson was his secretary—he didn’t trust himself to have intimate business relations with women, he couldn’t keep his hands off them—and Dwyer was chauffeur and gofer. His little family. He was so devoted to Jameson that he named his fox terrier after him, a singular honor that Jameson acknowledged with a gift each year on the dog’s birthday.

  Armstrong was forty-seven, wore a light ginger mustache, and played racquetball four times a week. He wasn’t afraid of anything in the world.

  There were three elevators in the brass-and-marble lobby of the renovated building and the door was always kept waiting for Armstrong. It was Friday morning, ten A.M.

  The elevator brought the silent group to the sixth floor. Here the din of Regent Street and Oxford Circus was muted by foot-thick walls hung with Altman prints, all of them signed artist’s proofs. Armstrong loved Altman’s colors of parks in Paris and New York, and everyone else was expected to love them, too. The colors were sensitive to light. All the lighting on the sixth floor was muted in tribute to the prints. The drawings had been obtained through corporate funds set aside for art acquisitions, and these works were among the things Armstrong intended to take with him when he parachuted goldenly out the hatch just before the big plane of the corporation shattered into a million pieces.

  Dwyer veered left at the oak door leading to Armstrong’s office and only Jameson and Dennison followed him in. Dwyer was off to fetch coffee for the boss.

  Miss Turnbull, the receptionist, smiled in greeting as Armstrong burst through the doors. She was fifty-five, singularly ugly, and the only safe woman in the building. Armstrong smiled at her as she rose behind her desk. And then he saw the man on the plastic chair by the wall.

  He only looked at Henry McGee for as long as it took for Miss Turnbull to hand him the morning messages. He noticed a tan, successful-looking man in a seven-hundred-dollar suit of rich blue wool. Henry stared at him.

  He swept into his sanctum, Jameson at his side.
His routine was set: He saw no one for a half hour in the morning, the better to frame the strategy of the day. The man in the outer office annoyed him. Miss Turnbull followed the boss into the inner sanctum and explained once she had closed the door.

  “He said he’s from the American FBI,” she said. “He said it was a matter of urgency, related to One forty-seven.”

  No one in the airline spoke of the crash caused by a terrorist bomb. It was merely 147, the number of the flight.

  “That’s annoying,” he said to Miss Turnbull. He turned to Jameson. Actually, he turned on Jameson.

  “I thought we had agreement on questions related to One forty-seven. I thought we handled these matters out of office.” The statements were accusations. Somehow, this man who had been given the singular honor of having Armstrong’s dog named for him had failed.

  “We do, sir.”

  “Obviously, there’s a breach. Who’s our man at Grosvenor?”

  Grosvenor was short for Grosvenor Square, the location of the American embassy that had handled the necessary liaison on the investigation. Police forces of two countries were involved; the terrorist cell had been identified as being based in Libya. Beyond that, Trevor Armstrong had little interest; the matter of 147 was an upset in his plans for “placing” EAA in the middle of the European market in time for 1992 and the restructuring of European trade. Any mishap—any perceived inadequacy in the handling of security at the airline—did threaten in that it caused unwanted publicity, cancellation of expected ticket orders, a general “softening” over a period of a few months of public confidence in EAA. EAA had lost six points in New York and seventy-five pence in London in the exchanges. It was too bad. It would cost the airline settlement money as well. Also too bad. But Trevor Armstrong really wished the FBI and the British police would just go away, do what they had to do, and leave him alone.

  There was another reason as well, hidden even from Jameson. EAA was now at a point where its value exceeded its price on the stock exchanges. In fact, broken into pieces around the world, the company would be a golden corpse. Armstrong knew it and he knew that Carl Greengold in New York knew it. Very quietly, both men had been buying up more and more shares of EAA—Armstrong to profit when the takeover came and Greengold to effect a takeover that would dazzle the financial world, spin off into two or three books, be denounced on the floor of the Senate, and generally make Carl Greengold even richer than he already was. Armstrong had met Greengold just once at a charity affair. He longed to be like him.