Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

  But Will just couldn’t accept it. Everyone had his work to do for the Lord, and his was very special. When it was time for him to stop wandering, the Lord would call him to his One True Home.

  Currently, he was minding the store for the Reverend Mr. Nethercott, who’d led the Kirkester congregation for twenty-seven years. Mr. Nethercott was in New Hampshire, at the bedside of his son, who had been hospitalized since February when he’d received a serious head injury during a skiing accident. Will had spent some time in that part of the world himself. He prayed daily for young Nethercott’s recovery.

  Will was pleased to note that attendance had held steady during his tenure in Mr. Nethercott’s place. Attendance today was even greater than usual, it seemed.

  Of course, tragedy would do that, and there had been tragedy here. Tragedy in human terms, at least. It was one of the few unresolved questions of his theology: Why is it that humans, even Christians, who should know better, are incapable of seeing the reunion of a soul with its Maker as the joyous event it should be? Even he, who had counseled many of the bereaved, sometimes felt twinges of doubt, tiny but real. At times like that, he called upon his Faith. It had seen him through war, and it would see him through doubt, however small.

  The Hudsons were here today, even young Regina, who hadn’t been here in ages. They were back from New York, where they’d attended the poor Stein girl’s funeral. Young Jimmy was still shattered by the loss, but he was young, and his Faith was strong; he’d prevail. God willing.

  The pressure seemed to be telling on Mrs. Hudson. She looked paler than ever, in her black clothes, and she trembled during the sermon.

  He preached on Courage and Humility, Christian virtues he judged were essential at times like these. Humility to submit to the will of God, and Courage to carry out the responsibilities one has assumed.

  As always, he took the pulpit with just the barest of notes. He always preached better when he preached from the heart.

  And as always, he felt joy as he saw his words have an effect. Tina Bloyd began quietly to weep, and Will knew at last that she had come to be at peace with herself.

  It would be a long time before Petra Hudson would be at peace with herself. Her trembling had become an undisguised case of the shakes, and she couldn’t make it to her feet unaided. Her son and her chauffeur helped her from the church. Jimmy Hudson looked contritely at the reverend. Will nodded benignly, but kept preaching, so as not to make a bigger spectacle of the woman than was unavoidable.

  He was nearly done, anyway. He blessed the congregation and finished up. As always, he went around front to mingle with the people leaving, but this week he hurried, to see if he could do any good with Mrs. Hudson. It was too late—the big black car was leaving.

  He did see one thing to lighten his heart, though. That nice Mr. Albright was talking earnestly to Tina Bloyd. She was using his handkerchief to dry her eyes, and smiling shyly at him.

  Life does go on, he thought. In spite of everything, it is His will that life go on.

  Chapter Two

  WHILE THE HUDSONS ALL went to Queens for Hannah Stein’s funeral, Trotter went to Washington to talk to his father and Rines. Nobody Trotter knew was being buried in Washington that day, but the weather was gloomy enough for a horror movie. A cold wind whipped sheets of rain across the parking lot of the Agency’s new headquarters, a small shopping center in Fairfax, Virginia.

  There was more furniture around this time. Trotter was allowed in by his father’s own hands, which, he supposed, was an honor. It was ironic, Trotter thought, that if you had an appointment and he was willing to see you, it was much easier to get to the Congressman in his guise as the head of a secret espionage organization than it was for one of his constituents to see him on Capitol Hill.

  His father told him to sit down. Trotter settled into an old, leather-covered armchair that faced the old man’s desk. It was probably the most comfortable visitor’s chair in the D.C. area, and Trotter was half convinced the old man lugged it around from office to office as a point of vanity. The Congressman didn’t subscribe to the theory of management that prescribed uncomfortable chairs for office visitors. The idea was to shorten appointments, and by keeping the visitor from relaxing, give the owner of the office an edge. In this theory, an uncomfortable man (or woman) was already halfway toward being intimidated.

  The Congressman didn’t need furniture to intimidate anybody. He did it with his eyes. And his voice. Sometimes, Trotter was convinced, he did it just for practice.

  Like now, for instance. When Trotter had called the Agency’s special eight-hundred number (never knew when an agent might have a tip-off on the start of World War III to pass on, but no change in his pocket) to set up this little visit, the Congressman instructed his secretary (who, along with the technicians who ran the Agency’s communications network, worked in another building entirely) to set it up without a word of protest.

  Now, if you could believe the expression on his face, he was disgusted with the whole idea.

  He looked sternly at his son. There was a time Trotter would have squirmed under those eyes, at least internally, but that time was long over. It ended the day he’d first run off from the old man and the Agency.

  The Congressman saw he wasn’t getting anywhere with a glare. He switched to a cold scowl. “Well?” he said.

  “Where’s Rines?” Trotter asked.

  “He’s in New York, lookin’ after your girlfriend and her family at that funeral. Usin’ some of his own boys. Don’t know how he’s justifying that to the Bureau, but it’s nice for me. All my New York people are keepin’ an eye on Libyans.”

  One thing about his father Trotter would never understand was the old man’s inability to stop playing word games. His son, of all the people in the world, knew that the Agency never “kept an eye” on anybody. What the Agency men in New York were undoubtedly doing was setting Libyans up to be: a) arrested by U.S. authorities; or b) killed by fellow Arabs in the most embarrassing way possible for the enemies of the nation.

  Suddenly, Trotter started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny, dammit?” the old man demanded. “Sometimes I worry about you, son.”

  “That’s really touching,” his son said, “but don’t trouble yourself this time. I just got a flash of Rines and a bunch of his men wearing yarmulkes, trying to look inconspicuous in a Jewish cemetery.”

  “Doesn’t have to be yarmulkes, you know. I went to a service for Javits, found out it can be any kind of hat.”

  “I know that,” his son said.

  “Then what’s so funny?”

  Trotter sighed. “Never mind.” The vagaries of his father’s sense of humor were something else he’d never understand. “I assume you’ve run those checks I asked for. Or Rines has, since he seems to be doing all the work around here these days.”

  That the old man smiled at. “The reports have been done,” he said.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Well, the bodyguard is clean. Wesley Charles. Ex-Special Forces, did a lot of fancy anti-kidnapping driving in Italy during the worst of the Red Brigades stuff. Divorced. Ex-wife is an interior decorator out in California. Makes good money. One child, daughter. Goes by mother’s name; in school out there. Charles puts money away for her.”

  “And he’s clean.”

  “Absolutely. Unless he’s just gone over. It does happen, but I can’t see it here.”

  “All right. Just a thought.”

  “Thoughts should be shared, son.”

  “In a minute. Tell me about the girl.”

  “Why did you want to know about the girl?”

  Trotter had promised himself years ago he wouldn’t let his father goad him into losing his temper. He now broke that promise for the three hundredth time. “Why do you keep testing me? From my first breath, you trained me for this goddam job. No matter how hard I try to run away from it, whenever something nasty turns up, you haul me back again to handle it. So why don
’t you just have a little faith in your creation, and believe when I ask you a question, there’s a reason for wanting to know the goddam answer?”

  The Congressman’s voice took on a tone of sublime patience that made Trotter want to kill him. “I know you have a reason, son. I just wanted to know what it is.”

  “Is there anything on Hannah Stein?”

  “On her? Not to say on her. She signed a few petitions against nuclear power. She’s a Democrat.” So are you.

  “That’s only for elections. I,” the old man pronounced, “am above politics.”

  “Yeah,” Trotter said. “Or below them. Was Hannah Stein involved in something beyond the stuff any ordinary citizen has a right to be involved in?”

  “No. I could have told you that twenty minutes after she died, but we listened to what you told Albright, and did the business up, got reports on her womb to tomb, and a more normal little girl I never hope to see. Did my heart good, checkin’ up on somebody who stood up to it so well. I thought, this is the kind of person we’re fightin’ to save the country for. Then I remembered she was dead.”

  “Because she got too close to Cronus.”

  “It’s your theory, boy.”

  “Do you have a different one?”

  “No. We’re together on that one, all right. But you’re actin’ like there’s still some kind of mystery about it.”

  “Not about why these young people are getting killed—they’re putting pressure on Petra Hudson. First children of her employees, now her son’s fiancée. Closer to her own children all the time.”

  “This could be a good time to talk to her,” the Congressman suggested.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” The Congressman lit one of his thin black cigars. “I’m not testin’ you, by the way. If you’re goin’ sensitive on me. I just want to know.”

  “Okay. If we’re right about this at all, Petra Hudson is—or at least was—a deep-cover Cronus operator.”

  The Congressman nodded. It was one of those things too obvious to say for any reason except to establish it as a basis for further discussion. Of course the Hudson woman had to be a Cronus operative. The fake telegram her daughter had heard by mistake had threatened her with Cronus, and no one but a Cronus operative would know what it even meant.

  “All right, then. That means she got the best training that Russians could offer. Could threats to her personally have any effect? Could torture?”

  The Congressman remembered his son’s reluctant mother. She’d been a Cronus operative, too.

  “No, son, it wouldn’t.” He finished his son’s argument. “And if she’s defying Moscow, which she apparently is, though I’m damned if I can even guess why—you got any ideas on that?”

  “No. Although it would be nice to know, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” the old man said. “It would be nice to know what the Russians are planning that’s so disgusting a woman who signed on as an agent for the Cronus project wouldn’t do it.”

  “Something worse than Cronus,” Trotter said. “It boggles the mind.”

  “Yeah,” the Congressman said. “It might be a good idea to find out what it is.”

  “Sure,” his son said. “But the time is not yet.”

  “I caught up with you a while back, son. Seems like the only leverage to use on the woman is threats to her children, and leaving aside the fact that it isn’t my favorite way to operate ...”

  Which means, Trotter thought, that it’s the kind of thing he’ll do only if he can’t think of anything else.

  “... we can’t do it because the Russians are doin’ it already.”

  “Right.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well, three things can happen. The Russians might offer Petra Hudson another chance to cooperate, now that they’ve shown they can reach into the woman’s own house for a victim.”

  The Congressman held up a palm. “Wait a second, son. That one of the mysteries you were talkin’ about a little while ago?”

  “Yeah. That’s the big one. The cops in Kirkester aren’t even looking at it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “They’re convinced she was sneaking out to see me. The body was found in my hallway, after all. They’ve been round and round with me on that one. ‘What was she doing there, Trotter?’ Why is it that the dumber a cop is, the more sure of himself he is?”

  “It’s not just cops you have to complain about, son. Just hope you never get elected to Congress. What did you tell them?”

  “Testing me again? I told them I had no idea, that I could conceive of no reason why she’d be coming to see me and would fall and break her neck on my stairs.”

  “They’re still sold that these have all been accidents.”

  “They’d love to call it murder, with me in the starring role, but considering that I was making love to one of the town’s most prominent citizens at the moment, they’re inclined to accept my alibi. I was hardly going to teach the cops better. What was I going to say? A hit man working for the Russians killed the fiancée of one of Petra Hudson’s kids and dumped the body on the stairway of the other’s boyfriend to show the town’s leading citizen they could get to anybody?”

  Trotter shrugged. “So, as far as they suspect anybody, I’m the suspect. Back to the mystery. Hannah Stein was tucked up in bed, safe and sound. If the Russians got her out of that house, how did they do it? I don’t think I would be able to get past all the electronic stuff they have there. Hannah must have sneaked out of there, but why?”

  “You were lookin’ for some kind of guilty secret she’d sneak away for. Or maybe she was an agent planted on this Jimmy Hudson strictly in order to be sacrificed.”

  “I was looking for something,” his son said.

  Trotter took a breath. “Anyway, that’s the big mystery. And believe me, whoever is running this is going to play it to the—”

  “What’s the little one?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said, that’s the big mystery. What’s the little one?”

  “Oh. Her hair was wet. No other part of her body. Just her forehead and hair. There was no rain.”

  “You go swimming, hair is the last thing to dry.”

  “Tap water, according to the State police lab. I thought of a lake, or a river, or a swimming pool, or even that she’d stopped somewhere and took a shower. But it was just plain water, with traces of chlorine and stannous fluoride. No soap. No pond or river life.”

  “Tap water,” the old man said.

  “Or fountain water. There’s a Civil War memorial in the middle of town, and she’d have to pass it to get to my place, but why the hell should she go dunking her head?”

  “Or why did the killer dunk it for her?” the old man said. “Son, I don’t like this.”

  “Whereas I, on the other hand, love it.”

  The Congressman looked at his son and wondered if the boy knew how right his supposed sarcasm was. He should see himself now, the old man thought. Eyes bright behind the glasses, his whole mind and body alert and clicking away. Of course he loved it. He had to love it. Loving it was in the chromosomes the Congressman had given him, and just as much (maybe more) in his inheritance from his Russian mother. It was a job that had to be done, and some people were suited to do it. The young man who currently called himself Allan Trotter would be a lot happier, his father knew, if he could just admit to himself that this job was his destiny.

  He’d said as much to his son, on occasion, and had been rewarded with scorn and rebellion. Now, he just said, “They’ve shown how close to home they can strike, they might give the Hudson woman another chance to come across. That was one possibility of three.”

  “Possibility two: They might come after me.”

  “That would give you the hit man. Think he knows enough to make it worthwhile catching him?”

  Trotter grinned. “Thank you for the compliment. If he failed to catch me, and I got him instead. If h
e even tried. I don’t think it’s too likely. Since I took up with her daughter, and especially since she found out Regina and I have been sleeping together, Petra Hudson would smile while she watched me being flogged, then give me a sodium chloride rubdown.

  “The third possibility, of course, is that they’ll try to decide which of her children she cares about the most, then kill the other one.

  “That one doesn’t sound too likely to me, either,” the Congressman said.

  “No,” his son agreed. “If she’s tough enough to stand still and let other people’s kids be slaughtered, she’s tough enough to really go nuts if anybody actually hurts her own kids. She’d have nothing left to lose.”

  “So we look for an approach to Petra Hudson.”

  “We draw a circle around Petra Hudson. And when the Russians make their move, I make mine.”

  Chapter Three

  TROTTER PAID TWO MORE calls while he was in Washington. The first was to a dead woman.

  Her name, since the Russians had sent her to America to institute phase one of the Cronus project, was Sheila. As soon as it succeeded, she was Sheila Fane. No one but she and possibly Borzov knew what the name she’d been given at birth was, and the Congressman and those who worked for him had stopped trying to find out. The woman called Sheila Fane had been induced, over the last several years, to part with many secrets, but she would not tell her name.

  Trotter had heard about the name business from his father just before coming here to see her.

  “She’ll talk about anything, now,” the old man had said, “but she hangs on to the secret of what they called her at birth as if we really gave a shit what it is.”