Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  In seconds, McGraw was connected to one such bulletin board. He entered a password, then asked the Chilean customs outpost in Punta Arenas, Tierra del Fuego, for certain information from the navigational ‘satellite that served the Southern Hemisphere. Then he switched to several other sources and bulletin boards to put together the picture he was painting. This process took about an hour. Lastly, using the computer again, he called up the available flights to Santiago de Chile, booked the cheapest seat on the first available plane to that city, and telephoned Norman Carlisle Blackstone at the White House.

  “Has Alfonso been in touch?”

  “Yes,” Blackstone answered. “I have the item from the client, and the other man is with me now.”

  “Is he cooperating?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Glad to hear it. Can you messenger the stuff out to me at Dulles? I’m leaving on a flight at four-twenty.”

  “Quick work.”

  “No time like the present.”

  “I agree,” Blackstone said. “A man will meet you at the gate exactly one hour before flight time.”

  “Thanks. If you’re talking to Alfonso again, just tell him I should be back the day after tomorrow.”

  After hanging up, McGraw consulted his map of the Washington area and drove to a shopping center off Interstate 66. In a Giant supermarket he bought a three-day supply of dehydrated meals-in-a-cup, bottled water, dried fruit, and granola bars—he had no time for a bout of diarrhea induced by foreign food—and, on sale in the Eddie Bauer store elsewhere in the mall, a waterproof Gore-Tex parka with a zip-in woolen lining. Then he drove on to Dulles International Airport, where he turned in the rental car. In the airport bookstore he bought diskettes of Lottman’s Truly Exhaustive Guide to South America and a novel about the Troubles in Ireland that he had already read twice. Settling down to wait for Black-stone’s messenger, he inserted the novel into his computer and began to read. At three-twenty sharp, a young lawyer from the White House delivered the package. McGraw identified himself with his private investigator’s badge and license and signed the receipt.

  “The originals are in sealed envelopes inside here,” the messenger said. “Your own copies are separate.”

  “Great,” McGraw said. He put the envelope, unopened, into his gym bag. He could look inside after he got to Santiago. Between now and then he wanted to rest his mind, so after passing through security and checking in at the gate, he went back to the novel. Some of the contents he remembered, other parts seemed new, and he noticed details this time that he had missed in earlier readings. This was why he read the books he liked over and over again. They reminded him that you seldom understood everything the first time you looked at something, no matter how systematic you thought you were being. It was impossible to see every detail unless you kept going back for another look, and then another and another.

  3

  McGraw, who lived by making comparisons, had expected everyone in Chile to be Incan, pensive, and aloof, like Alfonso Olmedo C. Instead, they looked Mediterranean, hurried, and preoccupied by the petty details of life, like the clientele of Katz’s delicatessen (“SEND A SALAMI TO YOUR BOY IN THE ARMY”) in his old Lower East Side neighborhood.

  The boatman he hired to ferry him out to the yacht Caroline, which was anchored in the roadstead off the remote southern port of Ancud, wore an especially worried expression. In keeping with McGraw’s often-tested belief that waking people up out of a sound sleep was a good way to begin an investigative relationship, they set sail before dawn. Ancud is located near the forty-second parallel, even in midsummer one of the stormiest of the southern latitudes. The continental shelf is precipitous along the Chilean coast, so the water, which in the murky half-light seemed as gray and heavy as molten lead, is hundreds of feet deep. And because the waves had encountered no significant obstacle on their six-thousand-mile progress across the empty South Pacific Ocean, the surf was mountainous.

  The boat, an antique diesel-powered lighter with a wooden hull, rose and fell dramatically. As the rim of the sun appeared over the Andes, McGraw noted with interest that the difference between the trough of one wave and the crest of the next literally became the difference between night and day. When the boat went up, it ascended into hesitant sunlight; when it went down, it descended into a starless night that smelled of icebergs. McGraw had never before smelled anything so unpolluted, so primeval.

  The engine thumped loudly as the rolling, pitching boat skidded down a steep wave and the whirring propeller came out of the water. “Very difficult!” the helmsman shouted in Spanish. Nevertheless they porpoised steadily closer to the Caroline. It was an odd process. One moment the big white yacht was hidden from sight; the next they were looking down on its masthead lamp from the vantage point of a gull. “Maybe impossible!” cried the helmsman. McGraw used his hands and his bushy red eyebrows to mime two vessels rising and falling in frenzied opposition to each other, then, after adjustment, in happy coordination. In the pidgin Spanish he had picked up as a young cop in East Harlem he shouted, “!Como bailar, no como foliar!”—like dancing, not like screwing. The helmsman grinned.

  But when the moment came, the helmsman mated his shabby vessel to the elegant yacht with practiced seamanship. While clambering from one boat to the other, however, McGraw lost his footing and nearly fell into the heaving sea. As he was saved by a sailor on the yacht, who seized his arm and hauled him aboard, he felt a small detonation of anger within himself. Each time he was placed in a situation like this one, in which he had to call on his cobbled body to do something it could no longer do, he remembered every detail of the shooting. The terrorist had had a shaved head and a beautiful face with large frightened eyes, set wide apart. Because of the shaved head, McGraw had never been sure whether this person was a woman or a pretty boy. The doelike eyes had remained wide open and unblinking as she or he fired off the entire magazine. The weapon had been equipped with a silencer. It was a weird sensation to see the red-yellow-and-blue sparkle of the muzzle blast, and to feel—actually consciously feel—the needle-sharp rounds stinging your flesh, but to have this happen in absolute silence, hearing no noise of gunfire even though you knew you were in the act of being killed by a lunatic.

  “Forget that shit,” McGraw said to himself, staggering on his artificial hip and knee as he gained the pitching deck of the Caroline. To the deckhand who had grabbed him before he fell into the sea he said, “Thanks for giving me a hand there, pal.”

  The sailor said, “No problem. What do you want?”

  “I saw this boat from shore and wondered if it’s for sale.”

  “You’ve got the wrong boat, pal.”

  “I have? Then I guess I’m stuck.”

  The workboat from which McGraw had debarked had already cast off and was thumping back toward the wave-lashed shore. McGraw shivered, as he had been doing all the way from shore, in his drenched Eddie Bauer parka; Gore-Tex provided little protection against the frigid seawater. Two more crewmen, big North Americans who kept their right hands in the pockets of their yellow slickers, had joined the first one. Naturally they took it for granted that he was a terrorist or a cop.

  McGraw said, “I’m going to go into my inside pocket for a piece of paper, okay?”

  They nodded. He produced a calling card and handed it to the largest sailor, who glanced at it indifferently. Then, raising puzzled eyes, he said, “This is Julian Hubbard’s card. But what’s this written on it?”

  Scribbled across the face of the engraved card, in Greek letters, was the following message: “” By referring to the international character sets in the memory of his pocket computer, McGraw had transliterated these Greek letters into the English words “Name of the poet.” What the phrase meant in Julian’s circle, he did not yet know. Shrugging, he replied to the crewman’s question. “It’s Greek to me. But maybe somebody on board will know. Give it to the tallest grown-up you can find.”

  “The tallest one?”

 
McGraw nodded. The man stared at him for a moment, then disappeared through the door into the yacht’s interior.

  Thirty seconds later a lanky bareheaded man with a long Anglo-Saxon face emerged. He had the milky English gaze that McGraw’s Dublin-born great-grandmother, who remembered the Troubles of 1916, had called “hangman’s eyes.” Smiling amiably, he held out his hand to McGraw. “Welcome aboard, sir,” he said. “I’m Horace Hubbard.”

  McGraw said, “Glad to meet you. My name’s John McGraw, and I’ve got a letter for you.” McGraw handed the tall man the letter from Lockwood, still sealed in its blank envelope.

  Horace Hubbard tore it open, read it at a glance, and then, instead of returning his gaze to McGraw, looked beyond him for a long moment toward the disk of the sun as it broke free of the mountaintops. Then he turned his gaze on McGraw again, this time with no trace of a smile, no hint of friendliness. In the brief moment consumed by these actions, dawn turned into daylight, rendering the color of Horace’s eyes an even icier blue. “Do come below, Mr. McGraw,” he said in a basso cantate boarding-school voice that sounded a lot like his half brother’s. “You’re just in time for breakfast.”

  4

  Although Franklin Mallory did not hunt—in moments of tender irony, Susan Grant had sometimes called him the lama because he would sooner open a window to let a fly escape than swat it—he owned a big game reserve in the Uinta Mountains near the Utah-Wyoming border. Horned and antlered species from every continent except Antarctica grazed or munched on air-dropped fodder inside electrified fences. These barriers, disguised as natural features of the land, were designed to protect the animals from the formerly endangered grizzly bears, wolves, and coyotes that overran the high country as the result of two decades of corrective wildlife management. Some of the reestablished carnivores had been genetically enhanced by animal scientists to give them a better chance of survival against their cruelest enemy, man, and of course this endowed them with more than natural advantages in attacking their prey. These now consisted primarily of Mallory’s exotic deer and antelope because the predators had already killed and eaten most of the range cattle, sheep, mule deer, and other creatures on which they ordinarily fed.

  Mallory regarded his nearly complete collection of beautiful ruminants as a work of art and permitted no one to harm the animals, but visitors were free to shoot any carnivore detected in the act of stalking them. Over the years, O. N. Laster, an enthusiastic sportsman, had slain many such predators. Laster hunted only in the dark—even the more intelligent and dangerous beasts produced by genetic engineering were too easy by day—and his private jet had landed on Mallory’s airstrip in the early hours of the morning so as to give him some relaxation before the two men met for a working breakfast at six-thirty. Two hours before dawn he bagged three gray wolves, a huge male and two younger animals—he let the mature females escape—that were about to attack a rare Siberian sable antelope. The wolves were dead before they knew they were being hunted. Correcting his aim for a brisk crosswind, Laster brought them down in an elapsed time of 1.97 seconds with three perfect head shots from a range of 535 meters. He was certain of the arithmetic because the night-vision electronic telescope on his noiseless, nonmetallic 6mm antiterrorist sniper’s rifle, manufactured by his own company, Universal Energy, measured time and distance with the same laser beam that guided the tiny mercury-filled vinyl bullet to the target at a muzzle velocity that only just escaped breaking the laws of ballistics.

  Because he was operating in a different time zone, Laster made his kills at about the same hour that John McGraw went aboard the Caroline, so by the time he returned to the lodge to have breakfast with Mallory, the personal assistant traveling with him was able to tell him that McGraw had made contact with Horace Hubbard. Laster’s man knew this because the Caroline had at last broken radio silence for a phone call from Horace to Julian Hubbard, and Universal Energy’s computers had been programmed to intercept any transmission from the yacht that passed through the southern communications satellite—which had, of course, been manufactured and placed in synchronous orbit by Universal Energy. (It was by no means unusual for the name of this supremely efficient and profitable multinational corporation, or consortium, as Laster preferred to call it, to occur three times in any single sentence describing the inner workings of the purified technological society in which mankind was just beginning to live. Universal Energy was the prime creator of this new society because Laster, nearly alone among American entrepreneurs, had understood that the future lay in investing in the next stage of technology at a time when most people in U.S. industry and government were fixated on the twentieth-century technology that Japan had brought to a state of perfection at the precise historical moment when it was ceasing to be relevant. Now Japan was irrelevant, and would remain so until it was time for it to be late for another technological revolution.)

  At breakfast with Mallory, Laster played a recording of this conversation. There wasn’t much to it—just Julian confirming McGraw’s bona fides and the Hubbards keeping stiff upper lips after, as Laster put it, Yale had lost the big game to John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “What a joke that this one little ex-cop from New York did what the entire investigative apparatus of the U.S. government could not do,” said Laster to Mallory.

  “I don’t suppose,” Mallory replied, “that you’re surprised by the outcome.”

  “Ha!”

  O. N. Laster believed as strongly in the comical incompetence and impotence of the federal government as the leftists whom he hated, and who hated him, believed in its sinister and all-encompassing power and knowledge. As for Mallory, he had long ago learned that there was no more point in arguing with either opinion than in trying to convince an evangelical that the Bible was allegorical or an evolutionist that the Book of Genesis provided a not-altogether-implausible explanation for the existence of life on earth. Mallory himself was capable of holding both ideas in his mind at the same time, and routinely did so—together with a couple of additional theories about the origin of species that made much more sense to him in terms of scientific and political probabilities.

  The two men were seated at a rustic table before a roaring fire of aspen logs. Wind whistled down the chimney, scattering sparks over the stone hearth. There was the hint of a blizzard in the air, and Laster, though happy with himself and with the good news from Chile, was impatient to get down to the business that had brought him here from London. It was he who had requested the meeting, and Mallory had flown out from Washington in his own identical Gulfstream.

  Because he was slightly deaf and could not hear other people speak while he chewed, Laster ate his high-protein, low-fat breakfast before getting down to business. In the relentless protection of his body from all alimentary dangers Laster resembled his arch-enemy, Archimedes Hammett. Although they were alike in other ways because both were single-minded political extremists, there was no physical similarity between the two. Unlike the stooped, furtive Hammett, Laster was a large, outdoorsy man who believed that appetite was the great driving force of creation. Few people outside his intimate circle of supercapitalists and oil sheiks knew what he looked like, or even exactly how rich and powerful he was. He avoided being photographed or interviewed.

  “Tell me something, Franklin,” he said. “Are you going to use the Ibn Awad thing on Lockwood or not?”

  “As I’ve told you before, Oz, I hope not.”

  “You hope not. What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that I hope proving the theft of the election—or the certainty of proving it—will be enough to remove him from office without having to provide a casus belli for a resumption of the holy war between Islam and Christendom.”

  With a precise click of cup into saucer, Laster put down his herbal tea. “There won’t be a holy war if justice is done and the Arabs see it done by you, the best friend they ever had in the White House,” he said. “This man ordered the assassination of a foreign head of state who was al
so considered to be an authentic saint by half the world. You’ve got it all on tape.”

  Laster did not add “thanks to me,” but he had, in fact, arranged for the delivery to Mallory of a copy of the taped conversation between the President and Jack Philindros in which Lockwood seemed to issue specific verbal orders for the murder of the Arab patriarch.

  Mallory, who had never acknowledged receipt of this gift, said, “No argument. Lockwood did what he did. But he thought he had good reason to act.”

  Laster replied, “You mean he wanted a reason and the Hubbard boys invented one for him.”

  “Terrorists blowing up New York and Tel Aviv with suitcase fission bombs is a pretty persuasive reason to do what he did.”

  “Would you have done what Lockwood did in the same circumstances?”