Turn Loose the Dragons

by George C. Chesbro

  Rage suddenly, unexpectedly, flared in him again. Christ, how he hated them! He picked up a broken shell and flung it far out over the shimmering surface of the water, clenching and unclenching his fists as he glared at the undulating ripples. He wouldn’t be doing this, he thought, if the Company had been fair with him. He had always done his best job for them; he had been the best of the dragons, doing the CIA’s bidding for years, at constant risk to his life.

  He knew Alexandra had come to despise the work, while he had increasingly grown to love it, to—yes, he admitted to himself—need it. He’d come to understand that he would never be able to do anything else, never be able to adjust to life as a “civilian.” The CIA should have understood that, he thought. They should have taken him in when the dragons were no longer needed. He would have made as good an agent as he’d been a dragon. But they were fools. Instead of giving him work, they had expected him to simply walk away. They had rejected him, and that rejection had been an unforgivable act of contempt.

  Now, after all the years of seething humiliation and bitterness, he finally had the opportunity to get back at them. He had found a way to literally ruin the CIA while at the same time balancing things out with the only woman he had ever loved and who had also rejected him. They wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop him.

  That, he thought, was the neatest trick of all.

  The advantage had shifted back to him; he still had an edge. Thanks to Alexandra’s “peace offering,” he’d learned that there was, there had to be, a CIA operative after him, and the agent wasn’t aware that he knew. He would have to be extra cautious and alert in order to avoid being trapped alone, but the all-important weapon of secret knowledge remained his.

  Perhaps the most crucial advantage of all, Peters thought, was the fact that his hunter did not know how he planned to carry out the assassination. He would still do it, and he would still manage to escape. The CIA agent would be left with nothing but bloody chunks of Manuel Salva and Alexandra Finway.

  The presence of the Company agent changed nothing.

  Peters turned around and started to run back along the shoreline. He loped easily for almost a half mile with his head down, mesmerized by the clear water exploding beneath his pounding feet. When he glanced up, he stopped so fast that he almost stumbled and fell.

  John Finway was walking slowly toward him.

  If Finway were the hunter, Peters thought, this was the trap. Although they were not a great distance from the hotel and the beach would surely be crowded later in the day, Peters could think of no reason why Finway, of all people, should be here at such an early hour. Not unless the lawyer had been following him. The other man was dressed in slacks and a baggy windbreaker, and could easily be armed. There was no place to run, even if he wanted to; he was hemmed in to his right by the sea and to his left by the embankment, which was too steep to climb quickly. He could not outrun a bullet.

  The fact that Finway was walking so slowly, head down and hands jammed into the pockets of his windbreaker, could be a ruse to put him off guard, Peters thought. It wouldn’t work. He slowly backed up the beach to a place where the sand was dry and reasonably firm. He stood with his right foot planted slightly behind his left, his muscles tensed. He knew that Finway would have to take him alive if he hoped to extract any information. Peters was confident that there were few men who could best him in hand-to-hand combat, and he intended to make the other man pay a heavy price if he intended to use a sap or other crippling device.

  Then Finway looked up, and Peters’ thinking instantly changed. The startled look on the other man’s face was genuine, Peters thought; no one was that good an actor. Astonishment turned to anger in the lawyer’s face, and Peters was absolutely certain that Finway was not the hunter. He was exactly what he appeared to be: a troubled man who, unable to sleep, was walking the beach.

  Peters eased out of his fighting stance and waited, arms hanging loose but ready at his sides, as Finway stalked angrily up the beach and stopped a few paces away from him.

  “I told Alexandra I wouldn’t talk to you,” the lawyer said huskily, the cords in his neck distended and writhing, “but I can’t let a precious moment like this go by. I just want you to know that you’re the dumb son-of-a-bitch I’m going to hold responsible if anything happens to my wife. I’m going to cut off your balls if she gets hurt.”

  He would kill Finway now, Peters thought calmly, almost dazed by his good fortune. Finding the man alone on a deserted beach was more than he could have possibly hoped for, and he knew he would never get a better opportunity. It would be easy to make it look like a drowning accident; Alexandra might even consider her husband’s death a suicide. However, Peters knew that he had to be careful how he handled the killing. There were sharks in the water, but there was no guarantee that they would get at the body. It would be necessary that Finway have water in his lungs and no marks on his body if the “accidental drowning” were to look genuine; Finway would have to be unconscious but alive when he went into the water.

  Peters considered the finger jab the best blow for disabling a man, but his quarry had already experienced that and could be expected to be on guard against it. He decided he would try to get the other man to move on him, and then counterpunch.

  “Your wife’s a big girl, Finway, in more ways than one. She doesn’t need your permission to do anything.” He paused and smiled suggestively. “And I do mean anything.”

  Peters’ heartbeat quickened as the lawyer moved up to him and pressed a trembling index finger against his chest. “Don’t try to play dirty teenage word games with me, you little prick. If you were getting laid, you wouldn’t feel the need to flap your mouth. Make damn sure you understand what I’m saying: you and the fucking CIA had absolutely no right to approach Alexandra and disrupt our lives after all these years. If she gets a cold while she’s here, I go to the Sierrans and tell them everything I know. I may even make up a few details, just to make sure they shoot your fucking heart out. And I go to the newspapers when I get back. I may not be able to prove shit, but you can bet your ass I’ll stimulate one hell of a lot of investigative reporting. Then again, maybe I’ll just get a shotgun and blow you away, you motherfucker. Isn’t that what you people do? Don’t you just murder people you don’t like?”

  Peters waited, savoring the moment. He could see that Finway was on guard, his stomach muscles tensed; he decided he would strike with the butt of his palm over Finway’s heart at the same time as he lifted his knee into the other man’s groin.

  Peters shifted his weight to his left leg and was about to bring his right knee up when he heard the gargling shout in the distance. Finway spun around, and they could both see a man struggling in the water perhaps a hundred yards down the shore and twenty-five yards out to sea. The man’s arms flailed the water, and his head kept bobbing up and down like a charred, fleshy cork. He shouted again, a desperate, bubbling plea for help.

  “Jesus Christ,” Finway said, his tone a curious blend of alarm, amusement, and disgust. And then he was sprinting down the beach toward the man, kicking off his shoes as he ran.

  Peters remained where he was, watching, cursing softly under his breath. Finway reached the place where the man had left his clothes on the beach. The lawyer stripped off his jacket, shirt, and slacks, dove cleanly into the water, and swam out toward the man with quick, powerful strokes. Peters grunted, then started walking down the beach, picking up Finway’s shoes along the way. By the time he reached the twin piles of clothes, Finway had pulled the naked man, coughing and spitting water, onto the sand. Finway started to give the man artificial respiration, but the man shook his head and pushed the lawyer away.

  “You okay?” Finway asked as he straightened up.

  The swimmer coughed some more, but finally managed to speak. “Yeah, thanks to you,” he said weakly. He tried to stand, but didn’t make it. He slumped back down to the sand, then grabbed his shirt and clutched it to his genitals. “Boy, I thought I was a goner o
ut there.”

  “It was a good thing we happened to be around,” Peters said evenly. “You shouldn’t swim alone.” He found he was growing suspicious. The way the man was holding himself—knees up to cover his nakedness, wrists held limply—made him appear effeminate and comically frail. Peters was not sure that was the case; it was almost as if the man were somehow creating an illusion with his body, like a mime. Looking beyond the weak pose, Peters saw hard muscles. There were scars, one of which on the right shoulder looked like the kind of puckered crater a bullet wound might leave. It was the same man, Peters thought, who had fainted outside the bus at the airport; and he hadn’t been in the water a few minutes before when Finway had come walking down the beach.

  Peters immediately put the swimmer at the top of his list of suspects.

  The man giggled inanely. He struggled to his feet, still holding his shirt over his genitals. “You’re telling me! I’m an early riser. I was walking, and all of a sudden I just had an urge to take a swim. Like they do in the movies, you know? Well, what the hell Screwing up is the story of my life.” He extended his free hand toward Peters. “I’m David Swarzwalder,” he said, grinning broadly. “I already know John, here. What’s your name?”

  “Rick Peters. Nice to meet you.” He nodded in the direction of Finway, who had picked up his clothes, stepped around them, and was continuing up the beach in his shorts. “He could just as well dry out here. Not a very friendly guy, is he?”

  “Hey, I’m not about to knock the guy who saved my life. Besides, John’s an okay guy. Something’s bothering him; he told me.”

  Peters ignored the silly, ingratiating smile on the other man’s face and looked past what could be a mask into his eyes. If the man were an agent, Peters thought, he was very good—the best at psychological projection he’d ever seen. The man’s deep blue eyes revealed nothing but a kind of boyish, overeager desire to be friendly. But then, he thought, Langley would send nothing but the very best. He wondered how well the man fought, and he knew he needed more time to study him.

  “You look like you could use a drink, David. Why don’t you come back to the hotel with me? We’ll see who we have to bribe to get the bar open for breakfast.”

  “Thanks, Rick, but I’m not much of a drinker. I’m still a little shaky. I think I’ll just wait here until I dry out.”

  “Then I’ll finish my run. See you around.”

  The man nodded, then sighed and sat down hard on the sand. Peters started off at a slow lope, but gradually increased his speed as he widened the distance between himself and the other two men. By the time he reached the sand pines near the hotel, he was sprinting.

  David Swarzwalder could be acting as Finway’s watchdog, Peters thought. That contingency narrowed his options considerably. He had just lost the kind of opportunity he was too professional to think would ever arise again. He knew he would have to take advantage of the next opportunity, however small or tenuous. And such an opening was now presenting itself: both Finway and Swarzwalder were out, giving him an opportunity to search Finway’s room and look for a personal item of the lawyer’s that could be booby-trapped.

  As before, he walked at a casual pace through the lobby of the hotel, nodding to a few early risers in the tour group who were heading for the breakfast room. When he reached the stairway, he bounded up the steps to his room. He estimated that he had perhaps a half hour before one or both men returned to their rooms. But that was assuming. David Swarzwalder, bumbling, gurgling drowner, didn’t suddenly metamorphose into a spy and killer.

  He would allow himself fifteen minutes, Peters thought; five to determine if Finway’s belongings included anything that could be rigged, and ten to prepare the booby trap if they did.

  He quietly eased open the door of his own room and was relieved to find that Alexandra was gone. He called the desk, identified himself with the name of a passenger he had talked to on the plane, and got the number of John Finway’s room on the second floor. He quickly slipped into slacks and a shirt, picked up his radio, and went out.

  He cursed when he found that the Russian-made lock on Finway’s door would not yield to his skill with a plastic credit card. Glancing around to make sure that the corridor was empty, he quickly knelt down and snapped open the back of the radio. Inside the hard plastic case was everything he would need for the assassination, a highly specialized tool chest and electronics kit built so ingeniously into the guts of the radio that none but the most canny of experts who knew what to look for would see anything more than the labyrinth of wires and transistors of an ordinary, if powerful and complex, multiband radio. He selected a long, thin piece of metal and immediately succeeded in picking the lock.

  He found what he needed almost at once, in the bathroom. It was an electric shaver fitted with the necessary voltage adaptor, resting on top of a leather toilet kit that bore the lawyer’s initials.

  Peters set the radio on the floor, again opened the back, and took out what he required. Within six minutes he had made the necessary adjustments to the shaver. He replaced the appliance, making certain that the metal body, adaptor, and cord were in precisely the same position he had found them. He opened the door a crack, waited until two couples had disappeared into the elevator, and then stepped out into the hallway. He was satisfied that the problem posed by John Finway was solved.

  John

  It took twenty minutes of brisk walking before John felt the pressure of the anger inside him begin to subside. By then his shorts were dry and he was sweating copiously under the hot, fast-rising sun. He stripped off his shorts and dropped them into a pile on the white sand with the rest of his clothes, then plunged into the calm, clear aqua blue of the sea.

  The chill of the water slammed against his body and squeezed him, causing him to shudder violently as he swam a few strokes underwater. However, after recovering from the initial shock, John found that the cold was not an altogether unpleasant sensation; the chill seemed to temporarily wash away his chagrin, resentment, and anger along with the oily sweat on his body. He surfaced twenty yards from shore, rolled over on his back, and floated, lazily kicking his legs, until his body adjusted to the temperature of the water. Then he narrowed his eyelids and squinted up in the direction of the sun through a spiderweb of misty, concentric rainbows.

  His outrage at Peters and the CIA smouldered unabated, but the ire directed toward Alexandra had been largely dissipated in the glow of the realization that she was still his. She loved him, John thought, and that was probably the only thing that mattered; considering how he’d felt less than twenty-four hours before, he now felt virtually reborn. He had not been betrayed. He could live with the fact that she had spied and informed on him in the past. She had, he realized, been doing what she thought was right, at considerable risk to her life, and she had stopped when they’d fallen in love.

  He needed no instruction in understanding the desire, however ill-advised, to keep something secret for fear of losing someone you loved.

  It troubled him that Alexandra and Peters were sharing the same room, but he dismissed the anxiety as being adolescent; the living arrangement was obviously necessary for them to preserve their cover as lovers, and he knew he couldn’t very well expect Alexandra to move in with him for the week just because he was jealous. He had begun this journey assuming he was cuckolded when he was not, and he considered it silly to worry about such an eventuality now.

  His sole concern, John thought, had to be for getting his wife safely back to the United States. He was not insensitive to the problems Alexandra and Peters had outlined to him, and he had decided that he would cooperate with them for as long as he could and hope that they would succeed in what they had come to do. But there was a point he would not go beyond. He would not sacrifice his wife and the mother of his children for Manuel Salva, the CIA, or the image of the United States government.

  He would go to the Sierrans at the first sign of risk to Alexandra. Regardless of the political uses to which the
Sierrans might want to put the two captive dragons, they still had debts to him. He would call in all of them and take his wife home with him.

  The Sierrans could have Peters if they wanted him, John thought with a grim smile. Fuck Peters.

  He emerged from the water and stood quietly, eyes closed, in the hot sun for a few minutes until he was dry. Then he dressed and headed back to the hotel.

  It was nine-thirty when he arrived at his room. He had a half hour before the breakfast room closed, he thought, and he would hurry. He had not eaten since just before leaving for the airport the previous morning, and he found he was suddenly ravenously hungry.

  He laid out clean clothes before stripping to the waist and going into the bathroom. He ran a hand over his face, picked up his electric shaver and plugged it in. The tiny device that had bridged the two stripped, short-circuited wires inside the shaver head instantly fused into the wires, sending the amplified current arcing front the metal shaver to John’s hand.

  The deadly, spitting current made a circuit of John’s skull, then coursed down through his collarbone and neck muscles into his heart, seizing the great pumping muscle and killing him.

  Harry

  Harry waited a few minutes until he was dry, dressed, then climbed up the far embankment and sat down on a rock just inside a line of trees where he could not be seen but where he had a clear view of the expanse of beach in front of him. He lit a cigarette and smoked slowly, thinking.