The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series)

by Maxim, John R.

  “You listen, that's how. If what you hear is really shitty, you know it's you. ”

  Lesko ignored this last. “Was that you this morning?”

  “When?”

  “You came in with Danish. Like you used to. ”

  “Oh, yeah. I got mixed up. ”

  “Why? What were you doing there?”

  “I'm your partner. Remember?”

  “You're not my partner. You're dead. And if you weren't dead you 'd be up in Sing Sing right now getting corn-holed by everyone you ever busted up there because you were a fucking thief”

  Lesko heard a sound from the window seat. Like a catch in the throat. He turned. Katz's face was lit by the screen. Tears welled in his eyes.

  ”0h, Chri—Now what?”

  “You're such a prick, Lesko.” Katz hid his face.

  A loud sigh. “David,” he shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, I9m sorry.”

  No answer.

  “What do you want from me? Just tell me.”

  ”I want us to be partners. Like before.”

  “David—you're dead.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “David, this is crazy,” said Lesko, not unkindly. “Maybe it9s me who's nuts. I9m sitting here talking to you. I know you're not there. I know you're not real—”

  “Sir?” A woman's voice. Distant.

  “So? Then what difference does it make?”

  “Sir? Mr. Lesko?” It was closer. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Lesko?” Katz's voice was fading. “What could it hurt?”

  Lesko lifted his head. The stewardess. Leaning close. Kneeling. Another woman, two rows forward, tuming and glowering at him, fingers to her lips, shushing him.

  “Huh? What?” he blinked.

  “You were talking in your sleep.”

  “Right. Yeah. I'm sorry.”

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked. “How about some coffee.”

  «No—Yeah. Coffee's fine.”

  “Right away.” She walked briskly toward the galley.

  Lesko rubbed his eyes. He glanced at the window seat. Then up to the screen. Field of Dreams. Shoeless Joe Jackson walking off the field. Into the dense corn. Back to where he came from. Fading into it. The cornstalks never moved. And the window seat was empty.

  “God damn you, David,” he whispered. But maybe you're right. What could it hurt? And maybe you're also all I got.

  Bannerman had decided on a team of five. It would mean, he realized, leaving Westport thinly defended but, with luck, most would be back before their absence could be noticed.

  He and Billy would travel as a unit. They would fly to Lisbon, from there to Malaga. That would leave them less than an hour by car from Marbella. Carla Benedict would

  head the second unit, arriving by a different route. She would fly to Madrid, connect at Seville, then make her way south by train.

  He'd chosen Carla reluctantly. She was good, no question, she was fluent in Spanish, and her appearance was such that she would blend nicely among the fading showgirls and minor actresses that were drawn in great numbers to the resort towns of the Mediterranean. But Carla liked to improvise—sometimes to good effect, as when she gambled on intercepting Lurene Carmody, but just as often to bad effect, as when her gamble left Gary Russo in a situation for which he was not trained. That was the other thing. Russo. This was personal with Carla. She would want to be the one to avenge him. If she saw the opportunity she would strike, regardless of her assigned role, regardless of the plan. Ban-nerman had shared his concern with her. She had promised to behave. Be a team player. And she had begged for the chance. Bannerman had relented. But now, her team already there—they had left even before Lesko—Bannerman's misgivings still nagged at him. Asking Carla to be patient was like asking a cat to ignore a crippled bird.

  The third unit, their backup, was John Waldo. Waldo worked best alone. His job was to arrange alternate escape routes, cover their retreat, create diversions if necessary, and to acquire weapons, which should be waiting for him by the time he and Billy arrived.

  Would be waiting, Bannerman corrected himself. John never missed. Goes in, does his job, disappears. No one ever remembers seeing him. Like a ghost compared to ... what had Susan called her? Oh, yes. Calamity Carla.

  Susan.

  She had taken it well. That he must suddenly take a trip. Two days, three at the most. She'd asked no questions. She seemed to know that he was waiting to see if she would. But except for an awkward silence here and there, a staring into space, they had passed the evening as any other couple might. A quiet dinner. A walk, afterward, down to the water's edge. The stars were bright. She taught him the names of some. She pointed to Regulus in the southwestern sky. It was in her sign, she told him. She was a Leo. His sign, Aquarius, was opposite, far away. Somewhere down by Pegasus. It could be seen, she said, only when her sign could not. Then, as if this had meaning to her, came the longest of the silences. They walked back from the beach, they held each other, and, once again, they made love through the night. There would be time enough to sleep during the flight to Lisbon.

  He'd found himself wanting to tell her where he was going. Even why. To let her know that he trusted her. But there were the others to think about. He had no right to trust her with their lives. She assumed, he felt sure, that he was off to Zurich. That phone call from Urs Brugg. Better to leave it at that. But she hadn't even asked that much. She asked only, that morning, that he call her if he could. Talk about the weather. Anything at all. Just so she'd hear his voice. He said he would try.

  “You thinking about Susan?” Billy touched his arm.

  Bannerman straightened. He'd been staring through the window at the cloud cover five miles below them.

  Billy pointed to the surface of Bannerman's tray table. There were a series of 5's on it, traced with Bannerman's finger using the condensation from his cold drink. Bannerman had not realized he was doing it. He nodded. “Among other things.”

  ”I do that too,” the bigger man told him. ”I write Angela a lot.”

  Angela DiBiasi. His landlady.

  “Sometimes I write . . . Mr. and Mrs. William Me-Hugh. Just to see how it looks. You ever do that?”

  Embarrassed, Bannerman wiped the letters away. “No. Not lately.” Not since he was fifteen. He folded his napkin. “What did you tell her, by the way, about this trip?”

  “She knows you get free tickets to places. And you're my friend. Sometimes you take me with you, that's all.”

  “Would you ever tell her about your life? What you've done?”

  “Like what?”

  Bannerman glanced meaningfully at the heads of a couple in the seats in front of them. “Like . . . um . . . what you do.”

  Billy understood. “What good would that be?” he asked.

  ”I don't know.” He wished he hadn't brought it up. “I've never been . . . with someone . . . this long before. I don't think I'm very good at it yet.”

  ”I never been with someone at all, not counting hookers. And not counting your mom.”

  Bannerman said nothing. Billy gasped. He brought a hand to his mouth. ”I didn't mean—”

  ”I know what you meant,” Bannerman said gently.

  Billy was silent for a long moment. “She used to teach me things. Nice things. Did you know that?”

  “You told me.”

  ”A lot of people . . . they were afraid of me. Because of things they heard. But not Cassie.”

  ”I know.”

  “She was trying to teach me about art. All kinds. Paintings and statues.”

  Bannerman remembered. The first time he'd ever set eyes on Billy was that day in Vienna when he'd gone to see the blackened remains of the house on Gruenstrasse where his mother and two men were murdered. Billy was there. Covered in soot to his knees and elbows. His clothing soaked through from a steady rain. Eyes moist, yet cold and dead. Holding a charred art book he had found under a collapsed section of roof. She had bought it f
or him. He had left it with her so he would not lose it. Or get it dirty. He still had that book, Bannerman knew. But before the pages had fully dried, eight men were dead. Five by Billy. Two by himself. One a suicide. It might have been more had not the Americans sent Roger Clew, a reluctant innocent, to negotiate a peace.

  “You remember that day I first saw you?” Billy asked. “One look at your face, one word out of your mouth, I knew who you were.”

  ”I was just thinking about that myself.”

  “Lot of people came by from the cemetery. She had a lot of friends. But with me, she was special.”

  Bannerman had not seen anyone else. Perhaps a passing car or two. “How long had you been there?”

  ”I don't know. Couple of days.”

  “In the rain?”

  Billy shrugged. “No place else to go. Till you came.”

  “But these friends ... no one tried to ... ?”

  “They were scared, I think. I wasn't in a good mood. But Johnny Waldo brought me a dry coat. I ruined it on him.”

  Bannerman grunted. A month or so later, Waldo drove up next to the car of an American agent who was involved in the killing and put a bullet through his head. As Billy said, his mother had a lot of friends.

  Billy was still talking. Mentioning others who came to Gruenstrasse. Some names were familiar, others not. Some were long dead. Through his own drifting thoughts, Banner-man thought he heard the name of Roger Clew. That couldn't have been. The better part of a year had passed before Clew had even—

  “Did you say Roger? He was there?”

  ”Uh-uh.” Billy shook his head.

  Bannerman rubbed his eyes. Roger was too much on his mind of late.

  ”I said his boss. Guy Clew works for.”

  “Bart Fuller?”

  Billy nodded. “Clew worked for him back then too. But mostly all he did was go to trade shows for the State Department. He was nothin' until they got him to—”

  Bannerman interrupted him. He knew all that. “What about Fuller? You're saying he was at the burial?”

  “And then the house. Yeah.”

  “What connection did he have with my mother?”

  The bigger man frowned. He seemed uncomfortable with the subject. He tossed one hand to show that it had no significance.

  “Billy,” Bannerman turned in his seat. “Don't you think this is something I should have known about?”

  “It was private. With Cassie. It was none of your business.”

  Bannerman blinked. “Are you saying they were lovers? My mother and Bart Fuller?”

  “Not like you think.”

  “How many ways are there, Billy?”

  “He just liked being with her. Nothing ever happened. Your Mom told me so. Also I followed them a couple of times, just to make sure she wasn't being set up or anything. They took walks, mostly. You know how you can hold a woman up so high you're even afraid to hold her hand? He was like that.”

  “Did you ever speak to my mother about him?”

  ”I told her I followed them. She wasn't mad.”

  “What did she say about him?”

  “She liked him. But he was married. And neither one of them wanted to screw that up. I'm trying to tell you, it was nothing. It was . . . there's a word.”

  “Platonic? An infatuation?”

  “Both of those. Yeah.”

  “Did you talk to him after the funeral?”

  ”I never talked to him. Well . . . once, maybe. I'm not sure.”

  “Tell me about the maybe.”

  Billy hesitated. “Remember we went to Paris to line up Carla and Doc Russo? It was like two weeks after she died. Anyway, this guy calls me at the hotel to tell me to check my box. He says there's a list of names. He says the first name on the list is this Austrian cop and he's the most scared. I should start with him.”

  Bannerman remembered. It had never occurred to him to ask Billy how he'd found these people. Billy was the professional then. He was a babe in the woods. It was enough that the first man had talked and confirmed the other names on Billy's list, before Billy cut his throat and bumed his own house down around him.

  “And the man who called,” Bannerman said quietly, “you think that was Barton Fuller.”

  ”I didn't know his voice. I only thought so.”

  “Why?”

  Billy shrugged. “It just figured. I knew he worked in Paris and it sounded like a local call. He also called your mom “Cassie.” Everyone else called her “Mama.” And he sounded all torn up. He sounded like he wanted to kill them all himself.”

  “But if he was not involved, how could he have known all those names?”

  ”I don't know. He knew them.”

  “Could it be,” Bannerman pressed, “that he was part of it? That he knew about the raid but didn't realize they intended to kill her? And had ... I don't know ... an attack of conscience afterward?”

  “We got them all. You talked to a couple of them. They would have given us their own mothers by the time the Doc got through with them.”

  Bannerman nodded slowly. Yes. They would have.

  The story, as it was ultimately pieced together, began with what should have been a fairly routine operation. A KGB agent had been turned by Cassie Bannerman. He was left in place, in Budapest, but he was about to be exposed. She sent another agent, a Hungarian national, to bring him out, spiriting him up the Danube to Vienna. The KGB wanted him back or they wanted him dead. They offered to release two imprisoned American agents in trade. Cassie refused. The KGB went to her superiors, this time sweetening the offer with cash. They accepted it and were recorded doing so by the KGB. The Russians now had them. They insisted on the verifiable death of not only the KGB defector but of Cassie Bannerman as well.

  The Americans knew of, and occasionally employed, three Viennese who were former members of Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen—killing squads—during the war and had since built new careers as policemen with the help of forged identity papers. They were given the job. They, in tum, hired the two German gunmen, kept escape routes open and created a diversion.

  The Americans, as one of them later insisted, weeping, had not wanted Cassie Bannerman's death. KGB blackmail or no, he had even tried to lure her away from 16 Gruenstrasse. But something, perhaps that, had made her suspicious. She would not leave the defecting Russian or the agent who had brought him over. She was in the act of finding a new place to hide them and the Americans realized that they could wait no longer. Nor could they save her.

  “Is it possible,” Bannerman asked, drumming his fingers on the tray table, “that Fuller had been warned to keep his distance from Gruenstrasse? I mean, if you knew he was seeing my mother, they must have known it too.”

  ”I told you,” Billy was trying to doze, ”I don't even know it was him.”

  “But it would make sense. They couldn't risk letting an American consul get killed. After it happened, he realized why they wanted to keep him away.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And he had to know that you were close to her. Why else would he have picked you to call?”

  Billy took a breath. “Like I said—”

  ”I know. You don't know who it was. But weren't you curious?”

  McHugh looked at him. “You don't think I would have dusted him if I thought he was part of it? I mean, even thought it?”

  “How could you be sure he wasn't?”

  “Like I said,” he answered patiently, “no one fingered him. No one even mentioned him. They would have.”

  “You've seen him on television a dozen times since then. What about his voice? Was it familiar?”

  Billy grumbled. “You know what you sound like?”

  Bannerman waited.

  “You sound like that kid I picked up sixteen, seventeen years ago. You wanted all the answers. You wanted everything neat. It doesn't ever come that way. You go with what you got.”

  Bannerman sat back. He stared through the window. There would be time enough, he thought
, to ask Barton Fuller. Perhaps he'd see the answer in his eyes.

  Not that it mattered, necessarily. After all these years. Except that it might explain a few things. Such as why Palmer Reid never tried harder than he did to retake West-port. Fuller might well have blocked him. But why? Out of sentiment for Cassie Bannerman? Somehow he doubted that.

  Whatever the answer, and if it was indeed Fuller who made that call, Bannerman would need to rethink his assessment of the man. He'd always respected him, certainly. Even liked him. Perhaps seeing in him some of the qualities his mother must have seen. But he'd never thought of Fuller as the sort of man who could mark other men for death.