Atropos

by William L. DeAndrea

  And, as he had from the moment he’d met the man, he wondered what the hell Trotter was up to. r

  Chapter Fifteen

  Washington, D.C.

  “SENATOR, HAVE YOU HEARD from the kidnappers?”

  “Senator, do you have any indication that your son is still unharmed?”

  “Was your son involved with Miss Fraser, Senator?”

  “Senator, how about speculation that—”

  “Senator, is it true that—”

  “Senator, would you say—”

  “Senator—”

  “Senator—”

  They were going to get their shot at him sooner or later; Hank had agreed with Ainley that it would be wisest to get it over with right away. Hank knew from experience that if a thing like this happened, the smart move was to get the press on your side as soon as possible. Of course, sometimes, as in the Pina thing, you couldn’t actually get them over to your side, the best you could do was to keep them from being mad at you for not cooperating with them. Something else Hank had learned over the years—the one thing the press can’t ever forgive is your trying to ignore them. They didn’t like that. They needed the constant reassurance that they were as important as they thought they were.

  This would be simple compared to the Pina thing, since Hank was absolutely innocent. He didn’t know a damn thing more than these vulture reporters did.

  Yesterday morning, the maid had shown up at Helen Fraser’s apartment to find the Fraser kid lying on the floor with a hole from a 9-millimeter automatic between her eyes, wearing her overcoat, and surrounded by the contents of a bag of groceries she’d been carrying when she entered. She hadn’t been raped.

  Mark’s fingerprints were all over the place. People pretended to be surprised, but Hank knew that for the hypocrisy it was. For one thing, everyone in Washington who counted had seen them together, and for another, if Mark had been spending time in the company of a girl that good-looking without collecting her scalp, the boy wouldn’t be much of a Van Horn. And everybody who counted knew that, too.

  Mark’s car had been found parked nearby, which helped scotch the nasty rumors that Mark had done for the girl himself, and arranged for his own disappearance. People had such nasty minds. Hank had found that out for himself. Here the poor kid’s girlfriend had been killed for some reason, and he’s been kidnapped, and there are some people who’ll probably never believe it wasn’t a put-up job.

  Although, Hank had to admit, if the kidnapping business had been a ploy, the kid’s not taking off in his own car had been a really smart move. Hank had wanted to discuss it with Ainley, but Ainley wasn’t in a discussing mood. All he could talk about was the danger to Mark, my God, we have to get Mark back.

  Well, of course they had to get Mark back. The sooner the better, too. This was going to mess up the Presidential campaign the way things were going. Take the country’s attention away from Senator Van Horn’s forthcoming (one of these days) Presidential endorsement, and put it back on the continuing soap opera the public seemed to love to make of the Van Horn family.

  And they had to get Mark out of danger, too. He didn’t need an adviser to tell him that. He was the boy’s father. Ainley wasn’t.

  Things were a little better once the kidnappers got in touch with Hank, since the FBI had been monitoring the phone, and they vouched for the message’s being genuine.

  The message hadn’t said much—your son is unharmed, you will hear from us again. The voice was clear and unaccented, and didn’t sound like anyone Hank or Ainley knew. The FBI had said they’d play the tape for some people who got around in different circles, and Hank had said that would be fine.

  In a way, it was kind of fun to be innocent.

  Now the press was baying, so Ainley (whose nervous dithering in private didn’t seem to effect his cool, public efficiency one bit) arranged this press conference in the room the Senate keeps for such things.

  As usual, they started screaming the questions the minute Hank showed his face. As usual, every time he moved his head, a new flashgun went off in his eyes. He could handle it. He’d stopped wincing at flashguns long ago—it made for bad photos in the paper.

  As for the chaos of voices, he’d been trained to handle that practically since birth. Hold up a hand. Smile—in this case, a little wearily, a little sadly. Say, “One at a time, gentlemen, please.” Then call a name.

  The questions were easy, nothing he wasn’t ready for. Except one, from a good-looking redhead from some paper in Texas. “Senator, have you spoken with Undersecretary Fraser since the incident?”

  Hank made his face suitably grave, but inside he was smiling. He thought he might be in love with this young thing who threw such nice fat ones over the plate. He’d have to arrange for her to have a private interview with him at the earliest possible moment.

  Lots of things had to be taken care of first though, like answering her question.

  Hank sighed. “No,” he said sadly. “Actually, I was going to call on him as soon as we were done here, then I was going to go into seclusion while we work on getting Mark back. I know you people have your jobs to do, but can we please try to keep Al Fraser’s grief and my concern from becoming a media circus?”

  The answer to that turned out to be no. It was beautiful. A media caravan followed Hank’s limo to Undersecretary Fraser’s house (fortunately, the driver knew where it was). On the way, Ainley congratulated him for handling matters so deftly.

  Hank shrugged. “I just thought of what you’d want me to do.”

  “What’s this about seclusion?”

  “I thought it would be a good idea to get the press off my back.”

  “Of course it would, but we can’t afford it now. What if the kidnappers call? What if you’ve got to do something to get Mark back?”

  “I’ll be in seclusion, not incommunicado. Relax, Ainley, it’s all taken care of. Gus Pickett’s helicopter is going to pick me up and fly me to his place in Virginia. Instant worldwide communication, and protection you can’t beat anywhere.”

  Ainley thought he was going to argue, but the driver’s voice came over the enunciator telling them they were at the Fraser Residence, and Hank was popping out of the car before Ainley had a chance to say anything.

  Al Fraser himself opened the door. Apparently an enterprising reporter had phoned ahead to tip the Undersecretary off and to set up a better photo-op. Fraser didn’t let them down. The poor guy opened the door with his hair combed crooked and his face puffy from crying. Tears glistened in his eyes at this very moment. Hank, going with the moment, embraced him, and five thousand flashguns went off. This picture would be on every front page in the country, and the tape would run on TV for a week. You couldn’t buy that kind of coverage. You couldn’t plan it. People would see those images and see what a brave, sensitive guy Hank Van Horn was in a time of crisis. Maybe some of them would decide to forget about Pina Girolamo. Most of them would think better of him than they had, no matter where they were starting from. And in this business, good opinions translated into power. In this business, you could never have too much power.

  Hank went inside, and the reporters pitched camp. Hank spent ten minutes listening to Fraser say, “Why? For God’s sake, why?” and making soothing noises, and left. The press yelled that it wanted to know what had been said. Hank looked sad and simply said, “Now, come on, folks,” in tones of gentle admonition. He got into the limo with Ainley. Ainley had apparently decided not to waste his energy trying to talk Hank out of going to Gus Pickett’s place. Ainley had always been smart.

  They made it to the heliport just in time. Hank climbed in the bubble of the chopper, the pilot welcomed him and made sure he was safely buckled in, and then they took off.

  Chapter Sixteen

  TROTTER REFLECTED AS HE unplugged the miniscrambler and hung up the pay phone that he should have waited a few days before letting his father step back in as head of the Agency. When he was in charge, if he wanted to give permissi
on for a semi-authorized personnel unit (as Rines insisted on referring to a human being) to blow his cover to a totally unauthorized unit, he could just do it. Now that he was back in the ranks, he had to sneak around.

  Now it was up to Regina. She’d have to decide how much she trusted Murphy with her fiancé’s life. She’d do fine.

  Trotter sighed. Stopped talking to her thirty seconds ago, and he missed her already. All right, he told himself. Forget about that now. An operation has started to break. Your audience awaits.

  It was late enough in the year now that there was no more spring chill. Trotter walked the six blocks to Fenton Rines Investigations, Inc., and his legs hardly hurt at all.

  “Well, son,” the Congressman said as Trotter entered the inner office, “it worked. You bagged a big one.”

  “Save the congratulations.” Trotter did not like to be congratulated on the success of operations that ended in innocent people dying, something his father could never understand. Trotter hadn’t been a big fan of Helen Fraser’s during the few minutes they’d spoken. He’d thought her silly and not too bright. But she didn’t deserve to die. Nobody deserved to die for a reason she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have understood. Trotter would have liked to be able to believe there was something to the young woman’s belief in reincarnation; that even now, she was being born smarter and wiser in some infant’s body. It would ease the guilt. But he couldn’t.

  Even telling himself it was shockingly unprofessional for a kidnap squad to kill a witness in a situation like that didn’t get him off the hook.

  Trotter had deliberately and consciously provoked one of the most dangerous men in the history of the planet into lashing out. He had thought the provocation to be relatively mild; he had believed that Borzov’s response would be measured.

  He was wrong, and Helen Fraser was dead.

  Rines was talking.

  “What did you say?” Trotter asked.

  “I was wondering if you suspected his target would be Van Horn when you set this up.”

  “Not really. I mean, it was always a possibility, but after the party I discounted it.”

  Rines nodded. It was almost a rule that when you had someone in deep cover, you never associated with him openly in any way.

  “We’ll never get Borzov going by the book,” the Congressman said. “He wrote the goddam book.”

  “We weren’t after Borzov, Congressman,” Trotter said. “We were out to flush his mole.”

  Rines was shaking his head. “Van Horn. Well, at least they think big. I wonder what’s in it for him. It can’t be money. It can’t be a matter of principle. The Van Horns have never had any.”

  The Congressman chuckled. “You can take the boy out of the Bureau, but you can’t take the Bureau out of the boy.”

  Rines was stiff. “What’s that supposed to mean, Congressman?”

  “Just that the Bureau never got along too well with that family.”

  “There are excellent reasons for that going back to World War Two—”

  Trotter cut in. “Can we stop playing ‘Be True to Your School’ for a minute and address the question? What is in it for Hank Van Horn?”

  “Protection,” Rines said. “I was leading up to that.”

  “Borzov’s got something on him,” the old man added. “You’ve been figuring that way all along, or you wouldn’t have sent Borzov that fake bomb.”

  “Obviously. But what—”

  Trotter stopped. Suddenly he knew what.

  “Tapes,” he said. “They’ve got tapes of something bad.”

  “The girlfriend barbecue,” the Congressman suggested.

  “Of course! It fits, it all fits. When was that? Can you call that up on the computer, Rines?”

  “I don’t need to. August 1974. The day before Nixon resigned. The Bureau may hold a grudge, Congressman, but sometimes it pays off.”

  “Well, you’re not in the Bureau anymore.”

  “Catch me forgetting that,” Rines said. He turned to Trotter. “Okay, I admit a tape of Senator Van Horn committing murder and arson is one of the few things I can think of that could put any Van Horn in the power of an outsider. And I think it’s hilarious that a Van Horn could be screwed by a wiretap, since for years the Bureau has known Ainley Masters has a better file of electronic security people than the secret services of half the world’s governments. But is this just an inspiration on your part, or do you have something?”

  “I’ve got twelve dead electronic surveillance men. All active during the right period. All killed during the months before Borzov felt himself moved to visit America for the first time.”

  “My God,” the Congressman said. “My God. That guy in Minneapolis. He was the youngest one, the last one who was in business soon enough to have planted a bug on the Senator.”

  Rines looked sour. “Why would they kill all of them? If they wanted to shut up the one who did the job for them, why didn’t they just kill him?”

  “Smoke screen,” Trotter said. “If they just killed one, somebody like us might dig into it and find something Borzov couldn’t afford to have found.”

  “I’ll get people digging on all of them as soon as we’re done here,” Rines promised.

  The Congressman scratched his jaw. “It could be, you know, that Borzov has had to kill all these guys because he doesn’t know who the right one is.”

  Trotter nodded. It was embarrassing to admit it, but sometimes a supersecret operation could become too secret. An intermediary is told to hire someone to plant a bug. This is done, the tape is sent back to headquarters, and no one, not even the man at the top, knows any more than necessary.

  But then, perhaps, the intermediary dies. That was something that happened with remarkable regularity in the spy business. If, after that, it became desirable to find the man who had planted the bug for you, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do it. The better agent the intermediary had been, the less chance there was that he had left any documents behind to help you trace his contacts.

  That could leave you with the messy necessity of killing a dozen men to get the one you want.

  Trotter shook his head. “What about Jake Feder?”

  “What about him?” the old man said.

  “He never did any work for the Russians. You know that, and I know that, and Borzov damned well knows that. He couldn’t have been on their list.”

  “They were being subtle,” Rines offered. “They didn’t want to leave anyone out, or we might ask why, and the fact that Jake Feder worked only for the Congressman would stick out.”

  “Does it bother you as much as it does me,” Trotter asked, “that we never did ask ourselves any of these questions Borzov is supposed to have been afraid we were going to ask?”

  “He couldn’t take any chances,” the Congressman said.

  “It also shows what a piss-poor Agency chief I was.”

  “Rines and I were here, too, son,” the Congressman said softly. “We didn’t think of it either.” He cleared his throat. “Maybe that son of a bitch just decided, while he was at it, to cost us a good man.”

  A good man, and, Trotter knew, the closest thing to a friend his father had ever had.

  “I don’t know,” Trotter said. He scratched his chin. “I don’t like it. It doesn’t add up.”

  He stared at the wood paneling for a second. Then he shook his head as if to clear it.

  “Okay, what are we doing now? I assume we’ve got the Russian Embassy under surveillance.”

  “We do, but it’s just a formality. Borzov isn’t there.”

  “Oh? Where the hell is he?”

  Rines was even more sour now. “I don’t know. He left the embassy right after he got your little gift. I figured he might be a little goosey, so I didn’t have him tailed. The idea at the time was to leave him free to tip off his partner, right?”

  Trotter sighed. “Right, right.”

  “Well, he just never came back.”

  “You’ve
got someone on Van Horn?”

  “Five of them. There are so many reporters around him, we could have a dozen. I should be getting a report any minute. In the meantime, what are we going to do about this?”

  Trotter had a few ideas. He lined them out for a while.

  The computer on Rines’s desk beeped. He hit a few buttons and punched up the report.

  “Son of” a fucking bitch,” said Rines, who never swore. “This clinches it, at least for me.”

  “What happened?” Trotter demanded.

  “The Senator climbed into a private helicopter that is whisking him off to the Virginia estate of Augustus Pickett.”

  The Congressman laughed. It seemed to Trotter that his laugh had gotten stronger once the old man took his job back.

  “Gus Pickett,” the Congressman said. “Another one of the Bureau’s old favorites.”

  “A great American,” Rines said through his teeth.

  “Borzov is playing this like a wild man,” Trotter said. “Let’s wait a little and see where he goes with it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Virginia

  “IF YOU WANT YOUR son back,” General Dudakov said severely, “you will listen carefully.”

  Hank Van Horn took a long pull at his Gibson. He was still trying to figure out what the hell the General was doing here.

  Things had been happening fast since the helicopter landed. Gus Pickett, all smiles and heartiness, had risked getting his silk smoking jacket drizzled on in order to meet Hank at the landing pad. Gus had put his arm around the Senator and led him inside the house, a big stone palace of a place some tobacco baron had built around the time Gus Pickett had been born.

  Gus brought him to the drawing room, showed him to a seat, and asked Hank what he wanted to drink. Then the multibillionaire fixed a pitcher of Gibsons with his own hands and placed it, along with a crystal glass full of pearl onions, on a table at Hank’s elbow.

  Still smiling, Gus had said, “See you in a minute,” and disappeared.