The Road To Ruin

by Donald E. Westlake

  “What problem?”

  “His.”

  “Andy,” Anne Marie said, “what’s John’s problem that you keep thinking about?”

  “Do I keep thinking about it?” He considered that. “Huh. Maybe I do, from time to time. You see, Anne Marie, we wanna get into this place—”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s what you do.”

  “Right.” Andy nodded. “That’s what we do. Get into a place, get what we want, get out, game over. The thing is, this place, you can’t get in. I mean, you really can’t get in.”

  “So no game,” Anne Marie suggested.

  “Well, the thing is,” Andy said, “John came up with a great way to get in, a really great way. But now we’re stuck. We can’t make that way work. I mean, John can’t.”

  Anne Marie said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “It won’t do any good, but sure, why not?” He adjusted himself more comfortably in his chair, and said, “The guy has this huge compound surrounded by electric fence and guards, no way through it without being seen and heard. The guy is also a rat, so the ships are deserting him. Not the ships, his crew, his staff, the people that work for him. So he’s got like a skeleton crew there, and John’s brilliant idea is, we hire on. We’re working for the guy, naturally we’re on the property.”

  “Well, that is a brilliant idea,” Anne Marie said, “if he’s hiring.”

  “Oh, he’s hiring,” Andy said. “Or he would be, if anybody’d show up. Our trouble is, anybody he hires has to be checked by the law. Chester couldn’t work for him any more because he was an ex-con. All of us are ex-cons, Anne Marie, all four of us, John and Tiny and Stan and me. What we need is new ID, and we don’t know how to do that. I mean, we know how to go to Arnie Albright the fence and buy a driver’s license, a credit card, it won’t burn to the ground for another two, three days, but that stuff doesn’t survive an inspection. Not by a bankruptcy court or a lot of feds. How do you get a different identity that stands up? That’s why John is down in the dumps about right now.”

  “And you, too,” she told him.

  “Well, maybe a little.” He shrugged. “Still, it’s John’s brilliant idea, so it’s John that feels so bad.”

  She shook her head, surveying him. “You just wasted three days,” she said.

  He gave her his alert look, almost like the old days. “I did?”

  “We’re gonna have to remember this, Andy,” she said. “Any time you’ve got a problem, you’ve got to talk it out with me. Mostly, all I’ll be able to give you is sympathy, but that’s not so bad.”

  “Not bad at all,” he agreed.

  “But this time,” she said, “I’m almost positive I can solve your problem.”

  “Come on, Anne Marie,” he said. “You’re gonna run some birth certificates off on your computer? This stuff has to stand up.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Andy, you know, when I was a kid, my father was a congressman, in Congress, from the great state of Kansas.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, for a lot of that time,” she said, “and when I was in college, and after, he was on the Select Intelligence Committee in the Congress, to liaise with the FBI and the CIA and all of those other people in the intelligence community. The spooks.”

  “Spies.”

  “They call themselves spooks,” she informed him.

  “They do?” Andy scratched an ear. “Have they thought that through?”

  “It’s what they call themselves.”

  “Okay.” Nodding, he said, “Select Intelligence, you said. What’s Select Intelligence?”

  “You have all this news coming in,” she explained, “from all over the world, all this intelligence, what they call the raw data. Select Intelligence is when you select the parts that agree with what you already wanted to do.”

  “Okay,” Andy said. “That sounds about right.”

  “And my father,” Anne Marie said, “got to know this guy called Jim Green that was a substitute identity specialist.”

  “Jim Green.”

  “He said he called himself that because it was the easiest name in the world to forget.”

  “That wasn’t his real name? What was his real name?”

  “No one will ever know. Andy, Jim Green’s job was to put together new identifications for spooks, identification packages so real, so secure, they could travel in foreign countries, they could be arrested, they could testify in court, they could do anything and the identification would hold up.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Andy allowed.

  Anne Marie said, “It’s better than the Witness Protection Program. There’s retired spooks now with murder charges against them, fatwas out on them, death sentences passed on them, living under a new identification that Jim Green gave them, they’re safe forever, die in their own beds at a hundred.”

  “Of what?”

  “Old age. The point is, he could give you and John exactly what you need.”

  Andy, doubtful, said, “Why would he?”

  “I knew him for years,” she said. “He and my parents were neighbors in D.C. He’s retired now, but I’m sure I could find him.”

  “And you think he’d do this for you.”

  “Oh, sure.” Laughing lightly, she said, “He always liked me. He used to dandle me on his knee.”

  “When you were a little girl.”

  “Oh, seventeen, eighteen,” she said. Getting to her feet, she said, “Let me make some calls.”

  12

  “BENSON,” JIM GREEN said. “Barton. Bingam.”

  “Bingham has seven letters,” Chiratchkovich objected.

  “Not without the ‘H.’”

  Looking surprised, Chiratchkovich said, “We can do that?”

  “We can do whatever we want,” Jim Green told him, “as long as it’s six letters long and starts with ‘B.’ Burger. Bailey. Boland.”

  The room Jim Green and Anton Chiratchkovich sat in, almost knee to knee, was small, square, windowless, illuminated almost completely by the dials and screens on just about every surface. Jim Green, a lanky soft-edged man of indeterminate age, with features that faded away as you looked at him—nose-shaped nose, boring eyes, just enough eyebrow, thin but not too thin mouth, completely unnoticeble jawline, a rug that so thoroughly imitated the onset of male-pattern baldness in shades of tan and gray that it was impossible to believe it really was a rug, because who would go out of their way to make their head look like that?—perched on a metal folding chair, feet up on tiptoes to raise his lap slightly so he could better peck away at the laptop he held, its dim light rising from the surface of the screen to fade into the folds of his face.

  Opposite him, seated on a sagging old oft-recovered armchair, waited Anton Chiratchkovich, bulky, sixty-ish, heavy-browed, fat rolls on neck, overdressed in a too-tight black suit and white shirt and dark thin strangling necktie, who looked exactly what he was: a longtime small-time bully and embezzler who’d swum for years in the stew of a corrupt government somewhere east of the Urals until his string had run out, and who at the moment was being hunted down like a dog.

  Well, not at the moment. Not in this secure room here, so deep within Jim Green’s bland suburban development house outside Danbury, Connecticut, that it wasn’t even within the house any more, but burrowed into the hillside behind it, reachable only through a long passage lined with both copper and lead, to keep intrusions out and radio waves in.

  Unlike Chiratchkovich, Jim Green had never attempted to turn his government service into cash. He was an artist, identification manipulation was his art, and the United States government his patron. It had been sufficient for him to do his job better than anyone else in the world, to recognize the awe in the eyes of the cognoscenti who knew of his works, and to move like the shadow of a shadow through the greater world of the unknowing.

  Green’s own distant past contained secrets so horrible, so chilling, from the years before he’d learne
d self-control, that he himself couldn’t stand to look in that direction. Like the volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, he had slipped into the persona of “Jim Green” to forget, and except for the rare nightmare, he had forgotten.

  He had been happy in government service, but times change, and sometimes a valued skill becomes less valued. When the enemy was German or Russian, there was much for Jim Green to do, because basically everybody in the cast looked the same. But when the enemy became Pakistani, or Indonesian, or Korean, the skills of identity morphing gave way to the skills of bribery and subornation. His final years with the agency, Green had less and less to do.

  And yet, he loved his work, and wanted to go on doing it. Outside the government, there were still, as it turned out, many who needed desperately to be able to say, “Here!” to a new name, and who had the money, a whole lot of money, to make it happen. Thus Jim Green became a freelancer, his work now as secret as his history.

  Chiratchkovich, for instance, had come to him, as most of them did, through the recommendation of a previous satisfied customer. After preliminary telephoning, and Green’s own background check to be certain Anton Chiratchkovich was (so far) who he claimed to be, they had met today in a parking garage in Bridgeport, where Chiratchkovich had submitted to the blindfold and the handcuffs and the trip in the trunk of Green’s no-color Honda Accord. In his own attached garage outside Danbury, he’d helped his guest out of the trunk, then led him, still blindfolded and cuffed, through the invisible door at the end of the garage, down the cement steps, along the metal corridor, and into this secure room, where he’d removed the cuffs and blindfold, both had sat down, and Green had gone to work.

  Photos had been taken, eyes scanned, blood tested, voice recorded. Some of Chiratchkovich’s more blameless history had been noted down, to adapt to the new persona.

  Chiratchkovich had a slight but noticeable eastern European accent, which meant he couldn’t present himself as native-born American, but that wouldn’t be a problem. In some ways, it made the job easier.

  Every day, the web of information grows thicker, more convoluted. When so much is known, what can still be secret? But the very complexity of the knowledge stream at times betrays it. Here and there, in the interstices of the vast web of details covering the globe, there are glitches, hiccups, anomalies, crossed wires. Jim Green could find those like a hunting dog after a downed quail. He could find them and store the knowledge of them for later use.

  Now, for instance, he could use one of those lacunae in order to insert into the system, as though he’d always been there, a naturalized American citizen who had shortened and anglicized his name to something of six letters that started with “B.” All Chiratchkovich had to do was choose the name he would answer to the rest of his life.

  “Buford. Bligen. Beemis.”

  “Beemis!” said the customer.

  Green looked up at him. “Beemis?”

  “Beemis!”

  “You’re sure.”

  “It feels like me,” Chiratchkovich said, and breathed it like a drawn-out prayer: “Beeee-mis. Yes. I like.”

  “Fine,” Green said. “Beemis it is.”

  “Ah, but the first name,” the new Beemis said. “What do I do for a first name?”

  “Keep your own,” Green advised. “You’re used to it. Americanize it. Anthony. You’ll be Tony.”

  “Tony. Tony Beemis.” The heavy jowls parted for a heavy smile. “I know that is me.”

  “Good.” Green made a note. “In two weeks, I’ll have your paperwork.”

  “And I,” Tony Beemis assured him, “shall have the gold.”

  “I’ll phone you,” Green said, “at the same number.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Green closed his laptop, rested it on the floor, and leaned it against the front of a cupboard. “And now,” he said regretfully, getting to his feet, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to button you down for the return trip.”

  “Certainly,” Beemis said, rising, extending his hands for the cuffs. “I understand.”

  •

  It was when he returned home after delivering Beemis to his car in the garage in Bridgeport that Green found the message on his answering machine from little Anne Marie Hurst: “Hi, Jim, it’s Anne Marie Carpinaw. Remember when I was Anne Marie Hurst, my father was your neighbor, the congressman from Kansas, John Hurst? I’ve got a question that, gee, you’re the perfect guy to ask on this. I hope I’m not intruding, I got your number from Fran Dowdy, remember her? She’s still a secretary there at the agency, isn’t that something? Let me give you my cell phone number, and I hope you’ll call. Be nice to talk to you again.”

  Copying down the number as she reeled it off, Green couldn’t help but grin. Oh, yeah, he remembered little Anne Marie Hurst, all right. Not even that little. Just right, in Jim Green’s estimation.

  It had been years, though. He wondered if she was at the peak of perfection these days, or maybe just a little over the hill. Oh, sure, he’d call her, all right. Nice to see little Anne Marie again.

  It didn’t even occur to him to wonder what she wanted.

  13

  “THEY AREN’T GONNA DO IT,” Os said.

  This troubling possibility troubled Mark as well, but he was hoping against hope. “But it’s the right thing to do,” he insisted.

  “They aren’t gonna do it,” Os said. He sounded pretty sure of himself.

  The two were seated in the knotty pine rec room in the basement of Mark’s mother and stepfather’s home in Westport, the rec room being just next to the lumber room he was unfortunately bunking in these days. It was difficult enough to have to move back in with one’s parents at the age of forty-two—and a bit irritating to the old folks as well, as they had subtly but relentlessly made clear—but it was even worse to have to live in the basement.

  That huge house above him contained room after room, yet not one of them was considered appropriate housing for a prodigal son. True, this was not the house in nearby Norwalk where he’d grown up, nor the Daddy he’d grown up with, so he wasn’t actually returning, but why couldn’t there be a comfy bedroom upstairs somewhere, with a view?

  But, no. Mum had made that perfectly clear. “You’re not to clutter up my sewing room with your tubular socks, and Roger needs the library for his research as you well know, and the keeping room is out of the question, being right in everybody’s traffic pattern,” and on and on, till it began to seem, if they’d had a manger, there wouldn’t have been room for him there, either.

  What was he to say? That he hadn’t worn tube socks in twenty years? What good would that do?

  Besides, the unspoken recrimination in all this was that some of the money that bastard Hall had siphoned out of Mark had, in fact, come from Mum and Roger. So the basement lumber room, with its faint essence of heating oil, was not the extent of Mum’s beneficence; there was her silence, as well.

  Mark sighed. When would he get his own place back, his independence back, his life back? “They ought to do it,” he insisted. “They’re a union. They’re a workforce.”

  “Mac and the others won’t ask them,” Os insisted right back.

  “But why not? Mac says they have over twenty-seven hundred members in their W-whatchacallit. How many would we need? Twenty? Less.”

  “Fewer,” said Os, who was a stickler for the language. “And they won’t do it.”

  “A tunnel,” Mark reiterated. “Way in the back where nobody can see anything. Late at night, along that dirt road by the cornfield. How long a tunnel would we need, just to get under the electric fence? A bunch of men with shovels, a few pickup trucks to carry in the shoring and carry out the excess dirt, and we’re into the compound.”

  “They won’t do it.”

  “Lickety-split across the estate,” Mark went on, not even caring that he was repeating himself, just loving the concept from beginning to end. “Into that white elephant of a house of his, truss him up like a Christmas tree, cart him back
to the tunnel, pop him out of there like a champagne cork, and off to the hideout.”

  “We don’t have a hideout,” Os said.

  “We’ll have a hideout,” Mark said, brushing that off. “By then, we’ll have one. Os, twenty-seven hundred members! Working men, strong horny hands, powerful backs. I’ll bet you, they all have their own shovels.”

  “They won’t do it.”

  “It could be like one of those prisoner of war escape movies. Many hands make light work.”

  “They won’t do it.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because it’s true. Because Mac is just a little too noble for our own good.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “He is, Mark,” Os said. “And if you suggest this thing to him, we’ll lose the three of them, never mind the twenty-seven hundred. He’ll decide we just want to use them.”

  “We do just want to use them.”

  “Collaboratively,” Os said. “That was the agreement. Think about this, Mark. That fellow Mac and his friends are sacrificing themselves for their union mates. They will not take kindly to your suggestion that they lead those selfsame mates into a life of crime.”

  “Crime, crime, we’re kidnapping Monroe Hall, that’s no crime, that’s poetic justice.”

  “Poetic justice is often a crime. But this one they won’t do.”

  “Then what’s your suggestion,” Mark demanded.

  “I never said I had one.”

  “No, all you do is rain all over my ideas. The agreement with those three was, we would combine forces, and we would all work at coming up with something we could do together to get our hands on Monroe Hall, and then we would get back in touch. But you don’t want to get back in touch, not with my idea. So why don’t you come up with something?”

  “Well, if I have to come up with something,” Os said, “how about that green Subaru station wagon?”

  Bewildered by the sudden change of topic, Mark said, “What about it?”

  “It’s in and out of the estate all the time,” Os said. “Where we can’t go, it goes constantly.”