Time to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  She’d out-argued him, Slater accepted. ‘It would be self-protection. Doesn’t the law allow someone to protect themselves?’

  ‘But you don’t think he’s a killer – capable of being a killer?’

  She was tying him up with his own words. ‘If I’m wrong and he tried to harm Ann or myself, I’d kill him.’ He wasn’t being honest, Slater admitted to himself. He did think Mason would be capable of killing him and Ann if he found them. How else was he not being honest? By not admitting at last, now, that he’d always been terrified of Mason, he answered himself.

  ‘Are you going to buy a handgun? Ann tells me she wants you to.’

  ‘If I thought there was a need.’

  ‘For self-protection?’

  ‘Only for self-protection,’ insisted Slater, exasperated.

  ‘Ann told me she wants a handgun, too. Are you going to get her one?’

  ‘I haven’t decided the need, not yet.’

  Slater sat regarding the psychiatrist steadily, wanting to twist her reasoning as she was twisting his. ‘Do you believe that Ann saw Jack Mason outside her gallery?’

  ‘I believe that Ann believes she saw him.’

  ‘So, she has a problem?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ denied the woman. ‘I have found nothing, not even under hypnosis, that gives me any cause to think or diagnose that Ann is suffering any sort of mental difficulty. Most certainly she does not have, in my opinion, any hallucinatory difficulty. After the life she led with Jack, and after that going into a protection programme with you, and then suffering the trauma of David’s death, in my professional opinion it’s quite remarkable that she’s as stable as she is.’

  ‘She’s different from how she used to be,’ insisted Slater. ‘She seems …’He stopped, groping for the words to express himself. ‘She seems to be floating above everything.’

  ‘It’s her way of coping. She surely deserves that?’

  ‘She drinks!’

  ‘No, she doesn’t, not unless you can convince me otherwise. She drank when she was with Jack. She’s been quite honest with me about that. It was another way of coping with the circumstances in which she found herself. And she had a drink or two, when you got the letter about Jack. She’s been quite honest about that, too, even admitted that’s how she came to miss most of what she says was on the CCTV loop. But she hasn’t drunk since. Or has she?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Slater. He came forward in his chair, towards the woman. ‘I do need your help. I need you to tell me what to do about Ann, about her thinking, believing, that she saw Jack.’

  Hillary’s shoulders rose and fell in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I’ve gone through all the logic with her, after speaking to you. Talked about how secure Witness Protection Programmes are supposed to be and how unlikely it is that Jack would have been able to find you, particularly as I understand it was so soon after being released from a penitentiary. She’s still adamant it was him.’

  ‘What can I do?’ pleaded Slater.

  ‘You went to Washington, to see the man who wrote you the letter about Jack. Couldn’t you find out Jack’s whereabouts from him? If Jack’s on the other side of the country – not in the country even – that could possibly reassure her. So might buying her a handgun.’

  ‘You’re actually suggesting I buy her a gun!’ exclaimed Slater.

  ‘It’s not against the law. And if you’re right she’s never going to have to use it, is she? If she had a gun and learned how to use it, it would give her more reassurance, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Slater, perfectly describing his mindset. Was it he who needed the help that Hillary Nelson had consistently offered? According to the psychiatrist, Ann was suffering no mental imbalance, but was convinced beyond persuasion to the contrary that she had definitely seen her ex-husband just yards from her gallery within days of his release from a reduced twenty-year imprisonment, and that he should try to discover from God knows who – the CIA, presumably – Jack Mason’s whereabouts, and in the meantime buy her and have her trained in the use of a gun!

  ‘You don’t think I have been – am being – much help, do you?’ openly challenged the woman.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ agreed Slater, at once, angrily. Still held by the anger, he went on, ‘I came to you for help, about Ann’s illness, her delusions. And got nothing!’

  Spacing her words, as if doubting Slater’s comprehension, Hillary Nelson said, ‘Ann doesn’t have a mental illness! I’ve told you she’s remarkably, surprisingly, stable. It’s you who is insisting she’s deluded about seeing Jack. I’m not going to tell you that she’s deluded. I’ve no way of deciding if she is or if she isn’t, apart from taking your word, and to take your word that Jack hasn’t found you I’d need some proof to the contrary – and I don’t have it any more than you do. I’ve given you all the advice and help I can. Bizarre though it might be, like a lot about this is bizarre. You want recommendations to other psychiatrists, I can give you as many as you need. I can’t do any more, suggest or advise any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Slater. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just …’ He broke off again, searching for the words. ‘I don’t know what to do …’

  The woman stared at him across her desk, waiting. When he didn’t continue she said, ‘I think Ann should come back in, don’t you?

  Slater shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  As the psychiatrist talked, encapsulating her opinions, Slater acknowledged that she was summing up their sessions and their conversations with complete, objective honesty and total impartiality. She described both of them as being remarkable and insisted it was a natural reaction that they should both feel the need to visit David’s grave as often as they were doing, which reminded Slater he’d forgotten to mention it to the woman. He presumed Ann had. Ann’s only objection came when the psychiatrist gently pressed her to accept she might have been mistaken if it were proven that Mason was nowhere in the vicinity of Frederick when she’d believed she’d seen him on the CCTV loop.

  ‘What would you accept as positive proof?’ Ann demanded suspiciously, speaking for the first time since she had joined them.

  ‘That’s more a question for you to answer,’ replied Hillary, still gently. ‘But Daniel’s going back to the man who wrote you the release letter, people he’s still got numbers for at Langley, aren’t you Daniel?’

  He’d been manoeuvred into attempting the reassurances the psychiatrist had suggested, Slater realized, unoffended. The more he digested Hillary Nelson’s insistence upon Ann’s mental stability, the more he acknowledged that he’d welcome the reassurance, too. He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘When?’ asked Ann, at once.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ promised Slater. ‘Tomorrow if I can set up a meeting. I’ll try to do that later today.’

  ‘What about the handguns?’ persisted Ann.

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ said Slater.

  ‘I want a promise from both of you,’ said Hillary Nelson. ‘I want you both to keep in the closest touch. I want to know that you stay OK.’

  Jack Mason realized the limitations of the cemetery as the double murder location, just as easily – and quickly – as he had first thought it perfect.

  Drawing upon his professional training – ‘Do everything you can to vanish into every environment’ – Mason entered the graveyard wearing the darker of his two suits, a muted tie and a mournful expression, and carrying the at-the-last-minute remembered bouquet of flowers hurriedly purchased from a gas station on the way, the bright wrapping dumped at the first refuse bin he’d come upon as he’d begun his search for David’s grave. The cemetery was landscaped with trees and shrubbery to create a parkland rather than a flat, regimented burial place. There were places where an assassin could safely hide at virtually every meandering twist and turn of the path he followed to locate David Slater’s grave. It was still covered with bare earth, the grass around it still marked with the
tread of feet from the funeral. There was a simple naming marker in place of the eventual tombstone and Ann and Slater’s wreath – ‘in memory of our darling, beautiful son’ in Ann’s recognizable handwriting – dominating the floral tributes that included a tasteless reproduction of a basketball, the dedication card of which Mason didn’t bother to read.

  David’s grave was at the top of a small knoll, which isolated it from its three immediate, lower-level neighbours. The outstretched branches from a long established beech tree, its thick trunk almost three yards away, came close to shading the spot, and slightly closer a bordering privet hedge provided a perfect sniper’s nest. As he’d wandered the cemetery trying to locate the grave, but unable to ask because of the risk of identification, Mason had, professionally again, counted only three mourners, one dog walker and three groundsmen, one driving a grass cutting machine the noise of which would have drowned any gunshots, even if they had been audible so far away, which he doubted. He thought about the Glock, securely hidden in the First National safety deposit vault in Washington, but more so about his limited ammunition. He had to get more as soon as possible. Wonderful though it would be for them to die in some exotic way – the rattlesnake fantasy still his favourite – it was going to have to be the gun.

  At the moment of their killing, it was essential that they knew he had found them – in fact, as long before as possible, without giving them any chance of defence or escape. And he couldn’t achieve that skulking in bushes or behind trees. He could, though, conceal himself behind bushes and trees to wait for them to visit and become engrossed in their mourning and flower-laying before approaching unseen. Their awareness had to be longer, their suffering greater, than mere seconds. He’d have to injure both of them sufficiently to subdue and incapacitate them for the fantasized torture without fear of Slater being able to fight back, or of being disturbed by another passing, uninvolved mourner.

  Mason had actually turned from the grave and started to move away before he became aware that he was still carrying the flowers. He looked around for a garbage bin but abruptly stopped, held by a thought. He carefully wrapped the stems in his handkerchief, transferred them to his other hand and even more carefully wiped with as much cloth as remained every stem, from flower to base, where his hand and fingers might have come into contact. And then tossed the bouquet on the boy’s grave, on top of the wreath from Slater and Ann.

  Which was where Slater and Ann found them, an hour later. Ann, who’d left the path slightly ahead of Slater, saw the flowers first and said, ‘Where are they from? Who?’

  Slater passed his wife, who’d stopped abruptly, and leaned over the mound. ‘There’s no card.’

  ‘They weren’t there before!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And they’re fresh.’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘It’s him! Jack! Taunting us!’

  Slater shook his head. ‘We can’t say that.’

  ‘Who are they from then?’

  ‘They could be from anyone. Put there by accident even.’

  ‘They’ve been deliberately put on top of ours.’

  The placing seemed contrived, conceded Slater. ‘Let’s not build this into something it’s not.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I don’t know! There’s no indication who they’re from but you mustn’t, we mustn’t, make a big thing out of it. Like I said, they could have been put there by accident.’

  ‘Call him back on your cell phone! That man, Peebles.’ At Ann’s insistence they’d detoured to Slater’s office to arrange the following day’s meeting with the records clerk in Washington. If they’d driven directly from Hillary Nelson’s office they would have come upon Mason at the graveside.

  There was something he could do, Slater decided, ridiculous though it would seem to anyone but to Ann and hopefully to the facility who knew him as a security consultant who had in the past approached them with unusual demands. ‘There’s nothing to talk to Peebles about, not yet. But I know a laboratory where I can get the stems checked out, for fingerprints. I could ask him then to get a comparison made.’

  ‘Can we do it now?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Try,’ insisted Ann. ‘We can come back here later.’

  Peebles would dismiss him as mad, Slater guessed. Maybe he’d have to identify himself to whomever he’d spoken to at Langley after all. Who’d probably think he was mad too.

  Twenty-Four

  This time John Peebles had remembered to record the incoming telephone contact and Slater’s identity had been confirmed by Langley from the extensive voiceprints on file from the former KGB colonel’s defection debriefing. Upon Langley’s instruction the meeting had been fixed at the site of their previous encounter and Peebles assured the second meeting would be monitored by a CIA headquarters-based field agent who came early to the man’s Justice Department covert office to identity himself and to fit Peebles with automatic voice-activated recording apparatus.

  ‘He didn’t give any indication what he wanted?’ asked the field agent, Peter Denver. He was a bespectacled, nondescript man coincidentally undergoing the same sort of reassignment training for which Mason had been withdrawn from Moscow so many years earlier.

  ‘Just that it was about the same thing as before but he didn’t say what, precisely.’ Today Peebles wore a suit, with a collar and tie. He felt restricted, fitted with the wire, the self-consciousness increasing when he followed Denver’s instructions to move about the office to become accustomed to the equipment. He was aware of Barry Bourne smirking. Aware, too, that he was leaking sweat, despite the air conditioning.

  ‘There’s no cause for you to worry,’ soothed Denver, aware of the perspiration too. ‘We’re just being ultra-careful, after the first approach we weren’t able to supervise.’

  ‘I’m not responsible for faulty equipment,’ said Peebles, defensively, remembering the excuse he’d made for forgetting to tape Slater’s initial call.

  ‘This time everything’s going to work,’ assured Denver, who’d tested three times what he’d fitted to Peebles. ‘You’ll have back-up every step of the way.’

  ‘Why hasn’t this ever happened before?’ demanded Peebles.

  ‘Because it’s never happened before – at least not for a long time,’ said Denver, unhelpfully. ‘It’s most likely to do with the death of his kid, but we can’t second-guess it. That’s why you’re wired and I’ll be in the park with you. All you do is listen to what he tells you, say you’ll get back to Langley and fix another meeting at his convenience. Just build in a couple of days in case we have to set anything up.’

  ‘What happened to his kid?’

  Denver kept any surprise from his face, but then thought why should Peebles have known? Langley probably wouldn’t if it hadn’t been for the publicity in the local newspaper and a chance recognition of the name by a retired Burt Hodges, who’d handled Dimitri Sobell’s defection. ‘He got killed in a traffic accident. A hit and run.’

  ‘They get the guy?’

  ‘No. Someone else got killed, too. Separately the police think. It’s a murder enquiry.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘You’re not in any danger. I told you you’re going to be covered, all the time.’

  ‘What should I ask him?’

  Denver looked curiously at the younger man. ‘Whatever you think is necessary to ask him. We don’t know what he wants, do we? Just keep it going. Listen to him.’

  ‘I’ll give it my best shot.’

  ‘That’s all we can ever do,’ said Denver, who was uncomfortable having to rely on someone he considered an amateur and could never understand the Agency putting out low level jobs to untrained people, not even contract employees. ‘You got any other questions?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. Trust me.’

  Peebles walked to the park, as he had on the first occasion, unable to lose the self-consciousness. By the time he got as far as the
Treasury Building the transmitter at the hollow of his back was beginning to chafe. He hadn’t been able properly to see in the washroom mirror before he’d left but he was sure it would be visible beneath his jacket, despite Denver’s insistence that it wasn’t. Denver had left the Justice Building thirty minutes ahead of him and Peebles was disappointed not to see the man already in place when he crossed from the Treasury into the flower-bordered park. Not one bench was occupied. Peebles chose the one that had been designated by Denver, in the very middle, looking directly at the White House. One of the bench struts was directly against the top of the transmitter, driving it into his back and Peebles groped behind him, pushing the waistband of his trousers down. He wished he could stop sweating. The stupid son of a bitch was probably playing spy games, like he had before. Where the fuck was Denver? If he was going to be fully protected the guy should have been here, prepared. Prepared for what? Peebles felt a fresh flush and tried to mop the perspiration under the pretext of blowing his nose. He wanted to piss, despite having done so trying to locate the bulge at the back of his jacket. Where the fuck was Slater? Denver? Anyone?

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  Peebles jumped at the voice directly behind him, not having heard Slater’s approach. ‘That was the arrangement, wasn’t it?’

  Slater came around from the back of the bench and sat with his leg crooked between himself and the other man, one arm along the back rail, so that he could look directly at Peebles with a view as well of two thirds of the open space around them. ‘I want you to do something for me. Or have Langley do it, through whatever links you have.’

  Peebles himself twisted towards Slater, better to position the receiving microphone, which was taped in the middle of his chest. The movement relieved the discomfort of the transmitter but made the securing tape of the microphone pull the hairs on his chest, which was even more discomfiting. ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me where Jack Mason is. I don’t mean an actual address. You told me before you didn’t think you could legally do that. I just need to know whereabouts he is in the country.’