by David Wind
The room was empty.
The window on the left was open. Cold air blustered through.
With the blood pounding through his temples, Steven went to the window and saw a wide gouge in the snow of the roof, leading toward the ledge. Latham had slid down the roof after shooting the agents, and jumped to the ground. He saw Blayne and Grodin still on the ground. A deep scarlet pool was spreading around Grodin.
An engine started. Then the garage door shattered into a thousand pieces as a black four-by-four vehicle burst out of the garage and into the street. The four-by-four stopped and, in a sudden burst of acceleration, slammed backward into the FBI car, destroying the front end before taking off down the street.
Steven fired by instinct, emptying the nine-round clip before the black Jeep was out of sight.
“Goddamn him!” he shouted, slapping the windowsill with an open palm.
He turned to Carla, but she was already on her way out of the room. He raced after her, hitting the front door a half second behind her. They reached the fallen agents at the same time.
Blayne was trying to sit up. He motioned to Carla to help Blayne while he went to Grodin. The man’s features twisted in shock. A glistening pool of blood, from the fallen agent’s chest, had spread out on the crusted snow. Steven knelt beside him. Before he touched Grodin’s neck, he knew that the agent was dead. The lack of a pulse confirmed it.
He stood slowly. Carla had helped Blayne to sit. Blood washed down the side of his face. A bullet had furrowed a nasty looking channel across Blayne’s forehead. A second round had gone into his left shoulder. Blood was seeping out, onto his coat.
Blayne was staring at Carla, his eyes held no comprehension. Then Blayne turned and saw Steven.
The agent’s face twisted with hatred. He pulled away from Carla and looked around frantically. He spotted his service piece five feet away. He half threw himself, half fell toward the weapon.
Carla reached it first and kicked it away. “Damn you,” he snarled, levering himself up by his arm to stare at Steven. “I’m going to kill you Morrisy, you son of a bitch!”
Steven crossed the distance between them. He bent low and, when his face was inch from Blayne’s, spoke in a level voice. “I’m not your enemy. It’s time you accept that.”
Blayne snarled like a trapped animal.
Steven backed away. “Call Banacek,” he told Carla. “Then report in. Tell them what happened, and tell them who the mole is.”
“Where are you going?”
“After him,” Steven said as he ran to their rental car.
“Wait!” Carla shouted, ignoring the wounded inspector and racing after him.
He stopped and turned. “Help him!”
She gazed at him, her face lined with uncertainty. “Steven, I can’t let you go alone.”
“You don’t have a choice. Get help Blayne. Now!” He turned and walked to the car.
As he walked, his eyes focused on the street where Latham had driven. He ejected the spent magazine and slammed a fresh one into the butt of the Colt.
Only when he was on the road, the Colt on the seat next to him, did his breathing return to normal. It was almost over if he was right.
He turned the wheel hard when he reached the two-lane blacktop highway, and floored the accelerator. The speedometer reached ninety, and stayed there. He couldn’t get any more speed out of the four-cylinder rental.
The road was pitch black; the only light came from the beams of his headlights. When he reached a long and level stretch in the highway, he saw a set of taillights in the distance. Once again, he tried to coax more speed out of the car, but there was nothing left except his own frustration.
The taillights disappeared over the crest of a hill. A minute and ten seconds later, Steven made the crest of the hill. On the down stroke, the car gained another ten miles an hour, but it didn’t matter. The taillights were gone.
Where? This section of the highway crossed three minor hills, but was dead straight for five miles. Could he have made the next crest? No, not yet, Steven told himself.
A hundred yards later, his lights struck the remnants of an old billboard. Something clicked in his mind, and he knew exactly what happened to the taillights.
He hit the brakes hard. The car started to fishtail. He fought the wheel, getting the car under control as he slowed. When he was down to fifty, he took his foot off the brakes.
The billboard triggered a memory, one he hadn’t thought about in years. With the unexpected memory came the knowledge of where Chuck was going.
There was only one place between here and the interstate where Chuck could hide. It was a special place, a hideout for a half dozen pre-adolescent boys—at least that’s what it started out to be. By the time they were fourteen, it was their private place, their escape from parental authority, from school, and from the world in general.
They used it when they camped out: they used it to run away to. When they had traded in their bicycles for cars, they used it to pass more than one of the rites of manhood. It was their special place—his and Latham’s and Savak’s.
They had been ten years old, and out on a camping trip, when they’d discovered the old and forgotten hunting cabin. It was deep in the woods, on the side of Big Hand Mountain, which was part of the state’s park system. To Steven’s knowledge, then and now, they were the only ones ever to use it.
As they were growing up, they’d periodically worked on the cabin, repairing the roof with tarpaper and the sides with lumber. They’d added discarded furniture, scavenged from the sidewalks of Greyton, and painted the interior once every few years.
With the disappearance of the taillights from the open road, Steven’s only alternative was to believe that Chuck was going there. It was the insane doctor’s most feasible option. And just as he accepted the basis of his thought, he knew Latham expected Steven to follow him.
He slowed the car down a half mile later, and turned onto a single lane gravel road partially hidden by evergreens. He sped up again, holding the car at fifty, until the twists and cutbacks became too much. He slowed to thirty, his anger and impatience building at the delay.
The four-wheel-drive vehicle would get Latham to the cabin ahead of Steven.
He drove for four more miles, until the gravel road turned into a path barely wide enough for a car. He stopped at the mouth of the dirt path, and used his headlights to give him a glimpse ahead. The first thing he saw were the fresh tire tracks in the crusted snow. He had been right. Latham had come this way.
He started onto the dirt road, realizing that with the passing of the years, the road had narrowed almost to the point of impassability. The leafless branches of the trees scratched the sides of the car like fingernails dragging across a blackboard. Uncaring, he continued on, using the tracks Latham had cut into the snow to give his lighter car more traction.
Seven minutes later, the headlights illuminated a three-foot high white stake set off the side of the road. He hit the brakes and slowed to a stop.
He had a choice to make. The cabin was a quarter of a mile further down the road. He could drive, or he could walk.
Latham was expecting him. Did the quiet really matter?
He leaned his head against the steering wheel. Latham had been a ranger scout in Nam, possibly the best ranger in the damned army.
It mattered.
Steven shut off the engine and sat quietly. His mind whirled with the day’s events. Helene Latham’s dead eyes stared at him. How could he have been so wrong about Chuck? He had never once thought of his friend as a killer—as psychotic. Had Vietnam done so much more to him, than to Savak or himself?
Speculation was pointless. When he was face to face with Chuck, he would have his answers. He took a preparatory breath, and got out of the car.
He pulled off his jacket and tossed it on the front seat. Then took his shirt out of his pants and ripped off two strips. Bending, he secured his pant legs to his calves with the strips. When he sto
od again, he tucked in the ragged shirttail, and grabbed the Colt from the front seat.
He held the pistol in his right hand. He checked it, cocked it, and thumbed off the safety.
He waited until his eyes adjusted to the quarter moon’s light, momentarily flashing back to Nam and his last mission. Once again, lies and false objectives had propelled him into combat. But at the core of this solitary mission would be justice.
He started into the woods. His only advantages were that he knew this piece of land, and he knew his mission, and not what anyone else intended it to be.
“Enough,” he told himself as he walked deeper into the leafless world of the winter forest.
He moved with stealth, as he’d done a half world away and almost two decades before. He made no loud noises, avoided scraping against trees, and carefully skirted fallen branches. Loud noise carried for miles in the dead silence of a winter forest.
He threaded a quiet and careful path to the cabin, continually checking for footprints. Knowing what Latham had been in the war, and what he was today, Steven was all too aware that the man he had called his friend might have set booby traps that would, if not kill him, warn Latham of his approach.
Despite his concern over possible traps, he found nothing in the ten slow minutes it took him to make the quarter mile. At last, when he stood behind the bole of a huge oak that he had climbed as a boy, he stared at the weak light coming from the crack between the bottom of the old warped door and the floor.
A hulking black Jeep was on the side of the cabin closest to him. Footprints led from the jeep to the front door.
He was there.
Was Latham waiting inside, or was he hiding somewhere within shooting distance, waiting for Steven to step into his line of fire?
Steven looked around, searching the trees at ground level, looking for any form of disturbance on the snow’s surface. He scanned the branches above and saw nothing. But if Chuck was hiding in the trees, he would be impossible to spot.
He watched his white and misting breath float before him with each exhalation. He was getting cold now. The wounds on his back were hurting, and he knew he had to move before the cold stiffened him too much.
Going into a low crouch and, using the trees and bushes for cover, Steven ran toward the cabin. He stopped at a tree ten feet from the cabin, and peered from behind it. The cabin was quiet. Nothing had changed during his slow run forward.
He pulled back, leaning his head against the tree. The sounds around him were normal and distant. He looked at the cabin again. The door was closed, the windows boarded up. He didn’t remember if there were any openings large enough for a rifle or pistol barrel.
It didn’t matter. He moved forward in a crouched slow run. With every step, he expected to hear the sound of gunfire, and feel the lethal bite of a bullet.
He made it to the cabin with no problem. Why? It didn’t make sense. Did Chuck have something else planned?
His heart pounded with a combination of fear, and the constant pumping of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He took a deep breath and stepped to the door. “Chuck!” he shouted. “Goddamn you, come out!”
He waited four seconds before repeating his order. When nothing happened, Steven knew Chuck wanted him inside.
The old fear and jitters from the war hit him as it always had just before he went into combat. In Nam, he never knew if he would return; but here, the reason was different—it was more than just his life that was on the line. Steven had to win; he had to survive so that others would live as well.
He made himself see Ellie again, the scars on her stomach and the emptiness in her eyes; he pictured Helene Latham’s helplessness, as her husband tortured her; and, he listened to what he knew must have been Lomack and Londrigan’s screams as their plane arrowed to the ground and crashed.
Steven lunged at the door. He hit it on the run, using his left shoulder and ignoring the pain erupting across his back. The old catch mechanism held, but the hinges didn’t. The door crashed open loudly.
Steven kept his balance and spun inside. He aimed the Colt ahead of him, swinging it in short arcs around the room.
Just when he thought the room was empty, he caught a vision to his left. He turned hard, staring in shock.
Hanging from a rafter, his naked body suspended by a rope tied around his wrists, was Chuck Latham.
He was dead.
Steven stared at his friend’s disfigured abdomen. Drying blood had formed a second brownish red skin from his stomach to his feet. Blood puddled on the floor beneath his hanging body. A bucket of water was on the floor near Latham’s left foot. Steven was certain it was salt water.
“Don’t move, Steven.”
Steven held himself still. The recognition of the voice sent his anger spiraling almost out of control.
Steven’s shoulder’s sagged. He didn’t turn to face his killer. Instead, he lifted his head and looked at the suspended body of Chuck Latham. “Why?”
“Because you changed. You doubted. And then that stupid bitch you fell in love with was in the office when she shouldn’t have been.”
Steven’s hands trembled with rage as he slipped the automatic into his belt. Slowly, with a taut casualness, he turned to face his killer.
“How could you have killed them? How could you have given Entente to the Soviets, and to the Chinese? It doesn’t make any sense. Tell me why, Arnie.”
”
Chapter Thirty-two
Every vision of the life he had led, and the life he had hoped to lead, crumpled when Savak spoke, destroying all his beliefs with the knowledge that his closest friend was a murderer, and a traitor.
“Why?” Steven repeated. The single word, coming husky and tight from his throat, hung heavily in the air between them.
Arnold Savak shrugged. “What difference does it make? You’re a dead man now.”
“It makes a difference to me. Arnie, if nothing else, you owe me an answer.”
Cocking his head to the side, Savak gazed at Steven reflectively. He looked like someone patiently deciding on whether or not to humor one who might not understand him. Slowly, he raised his left hand and double stroked the side of his nose with a bent finger. His eyes flicked to the pistol in his hand. The corner of his mouth curled into a sneer. “I don’t owe you a fucking thing.”
Seeing the insanity glowing in Savak’s eyes, Steven used the horror of what had happened to his friend to help him keep his anger in check. “You owe me a lot, Arnie. Without me, there would be no Entente,” he said, his voice steady as he faced Savak without showing fear.
“Oh, no, Steven, you’re wrong. With you or without you, there would be Entente. I’ll grant that because of you, it came about a lot sooner. I needed you, Steven. I needed that clean cut analytical mind of yours to push through all the debris and find the fastest and smoothest road to bringing Entente to life. No one else could have done it as quickly or as perfectly as you.”
Steven continued to control his anger, smothering it with the knowledge that if he reacted strongly to Savak’s barbs, he would force Savak’s hand too soon. If that happened, and he died, Savak would walk away free. “Why did they have to die, Arnie? Why do I have to die?”
Savak’s eyes narrowed into slits of hatred. “Because you were becoming a person I could no longer trust. And then Ellie overheard me.”
Steven didn’t flinch at the mention of Ellie’s name. No matter what, he told himself, he had to appear strong before Savak. Reason and logic were the only weapons he could draw on. He needed to wield them precisely if he were to survive.
“When you realized she had uncovered your scheme, you came up with the plan to kill her and plant her body in the lake. Did you really think that when spring came, I would be labeled as her killer?”
“Definitely,” Savak said with a death’s head grin. “It was also a convenient way to accomplish what I needed. I’d known for a while I would have to take you out, and I’d already designed a plan to get rid
of you, but this was too perfect an opportunity to waste,” Savak said, waving the pistol with jerky up and down movements as he spoke.
Steven kept his eyes fastened on Savak’s face, not on the pistol. “I don’t understand what I did to turn you against me,” Steven said quickly, fighting hard now to keep Savak’s attention on his plans.
Savak shook his head. “I told you. You were starting to doubt. I knew that when the time came to use Entente properly, you wouldn’t have the courage. You’d try to stop it. But I wasn’t worried, because once everything went into motion; there would be no way for you to prevent it from reaching the point I intended.”
Steven listened intently to his every word, measuring the tone, the inflection, and the unnaturally precise cadence of Savak’s voice. All of it told him just how deeply unbalanced Savak had become. “I understand about Lomack and Londrigan. They would have been able to clear me. Why Chuck and Helene? They had nothing to do with Entente.”
Savak’s eyes flicked to Latham’s hanging body. “You were better than I expected. Every time I thought I had worked out the perfect ploy, the ideal trap, you slipped by me. I just couldn’t take the chance you would get someone to believe you. By killing Chuck and Helene, I added another solid piece of evidence. The FBI is convinced you’re the mole who’s leaking secrets to the Soviets, and that you’re a killer as well.”
Steven shook his head. “Not any more—not after what happened at Chuck’s house.”
Savak’s smile was victorious. Triumph glistened in his eyes. “No one saw me. Blayne and his partner are dead. Dead men, even FBI agents, can’t talk.”
Steven didn’t correct Savak about Blayne; rather, he concentrated on the job at hand—to keep Savak talking, and his mind off the pistol in his right hand. “Blayne doesn’t matter. The Bureau will know who Blayne’s informant is. He had to have been keeping some sort of records.”
Savak’s pupils dilated. His grin became obscene. “Actually, Steven, Blayne doesn’t know who I am—he never has. His informant is a CIA operative.”
