by Ralph Dennis
“Fine with me.” Mac led the way. They stepped outside and stood under a gray, overcast sky. A sprinkle of windblown rain tapped at them.
“There,” Hall said. The black Mercedes was parked at the far end of the line. The windshield was smashed on the left side, the passenger side on the European drive cars. The hole was large and regular.
“Odd.” Mac put a hand on the hood and leaned forward to examine the hole. “It looks almost manmade, doesn’t it?”
Hall used a hand to wipe moisture from the unbroken part of the windshield. “That’s it. See the seatback?”
There was a tear in the seat about shoulder high. It looked dark, wet, as if it had been scrubbed with a damp cloth.
“I’d say a rifle. That’s my guess.”
“That doesn’t explain the shape of the break in the windscreen,” Mac said.
“It does if you were trying to disguise the truth of what went through here. I’d say somebody gave it a few taps with a large stone.”
“You think somebody tried to kill your Mr. Rivers?”
“He’s not mine anymore.” Hall turned when the door to The Keep opened behind them. Denise stood there, one hand shielding her face from the light rain. Hall backed away from the Mercedes. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands. Denise waited for them in the entranceway.
“He wants to see you.”
“How is he?” Hall passed the handkerchief to Mac so he could wipe his hands as well.
“In pain.”
“He always did have a low threshold,” Hall said.
“Will you come?” Denise was at the edge of pleading.
“It’s either that,” Hall said “or stay out here and get rained on.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The room smelled of adhesive tape, sterile gauze and antiseptic. The medical scents warred with Rivers’ strong pipe tobacco and his cologne.
The bodyguard opened the door and let Denise pass. He turned and filled the doorway. His eyes were hard. “You two carrying?”
“Not even a nail file,” Hall said.
“Let him in,” Rivers said from back of the room. He sounded tasty.
“Just you,” the bodyguard said.
“He’s my lawyer.” Hall indicated Mac.
“Who is he?” Rivers asked.
“A friend. Air Vice Marshall MacIntosh.”
“Let them in, Aaron.”
The bodyguard, Aaron backed away. Then Hall could see Rivers. He was propped up in a bed, bare to the waist. A bulky bandage formed a hump on Rivers’ right shoulder. Already pale, untanned, now Rivers looked almost bloodless.
“Denny,” Rivers said, “see about a pot of coffee for our guests.”
“Denny” was a pet name for Denise. Hall knew that was part of the pattern with Rivers and his nieces.
Denise passed Hall on the way to the door. She was blushing and her eyes were lowered. The door closed behind her. Rivers said, “I understand you two were at The Keep when I had my accident.”
“What accident?” Hall said.
“We were here,” Mac said.
“Why are you here?” Rivers squirmed. There was a twitch of pain on his face. Then it was gone.
“Why are you here?” Hall said.
“You’re a pair,” Mac said. “Questions to answer questions.”
“He’s not the bloody police,” Hall said.
Mac grinned at Hall. “I like the way you used bloody. It makes all the difference in the world. Now I’m on your side.”
“Who made the try on you?” Hall stood on one side of the bed. Mac faced him from the other side.
“Aaron.” The bodyguard pushed his way past Mac and got a bottle of medicine and a water glass from the night table. He leaned over Rivers and dropped two pills into his open mouth. He held the glass while Rivers washed them down. Aaron backed away. “A rock was thrown against the windshield by a truck in front of us.”
“You sure it wasn’t a boulder?” Mac said.
“Aaron didn’t react well,” Rivers said. “He braked and I was thrown against the dash.”
“Careless of you,” Hall said to Aaron.
Aaron drew his lips into a tight, angry line. He didn’t answer.
“Is there someone else in your party?” Rivers said.
“We’re it,” Mac said.
“No contacts here? No wild Irish boys from across the north border?”
“Not a one,” Mac said.
“Curious,” Rivers said.
There was a tap on the door. Denise entered, followed by the waiter from the dining room. He carried a huge tray on his shoulder. On it there was a brightly decorated coffee pot. Talk stopped while the waiter arranged cups and saucers and a sugar dish and a creamer. Aaron saw him to the door and closed it behind him.
“All that talk about contacts and wild Irish boys,” Hall said. “You think I’m hunting you? The last I heard you were hunting me.”
“A fox will sometimes turn and run under the horses of the hunters. It is a way of confusing the scent.”
“Does it work?”
“It works unless one of the horses steps on the fox.” Rivers seemed pleased with his metaphor. He took half a cup of coffee when Denise offered it and drank with his free hand. He didn’t use a saucer. “How do you happen to be here, Will?”
Hall told a careful story. He had to protect Franklin. In his new version, the boy ninja had lived long enough to give him a name and an address on Tedworth Square in London. With that, and with Mac’s help, Hall traced Boyle that far and from there to Kinsale. The Keep address was on a receipt in Boyle’s room. He’d visited Kinsale two days before he flew to New York on his way to Washington and the try on Hall.
“Any truth in this?” The question was directed at Mac.
“Close,” Mac said. “He left out the fact that we had some help from a man at I branch.”
“Your influence reaches that far, Mr. Macintosh?”
“Old debts, old favors,” Mac said. “It might even reach into Ireland.”
“Denny,” Rivers said, “I think the Air Vice Marshal is trying to run a scam on us.”
Denise looked at Mac. “I have a feeling it’s true.”
“Is it true, Will?”
“My experience is that Mac has friends and IOUs spread all across Europe.”
“I’ll run a dossier on you the next free time I have.”
“Flattery,” Mac said. “I’m retired now.”
“Who took the potshot at you, Rivers?”
Rivers turned his head and stared at Hall. For an instant, denial was on the edge of his tongue. He swallowed that and said, “I thought at the time it might be you. That the fox might have grown some claws.”
Hall shook his head.
“Someone working with you?”
“If I get tired of the chase, I’ll do it myself. You were out early today, Rivers.”
“I had a call from town.”
“Anyone you know?”
“A man I didn’t know said, for a sum, he would tell me what you were doing here in Kinsale.”
“You talk to him?”
“He didn’t show. On the way back, I got this.” Rivers gestured toward his wounded shoulder.
“Your first Purple Heart?”
Rivers’ eyes fluttered. The painkiller was making him sleepy. “Let’s talk later. Denny will fill you in on what we’re doing here.”
Aaron closed the door behind them. Mac stood behind Denise. He lifted his eyebrows in a question.
“Why don’t you take a rest, Mac? I’ll talk to you later.”
Mac lowered his right eyelid in a lazy wink. “Take her for a walk in the garden,” he said.
It was a fair attempt at a formal garden, about half an acre of grass and hedges. In the spring, when the flowers bloomed and the grass was green, it might have been a pleasant walk. Now there was a tint of dull brown to it. Off to the side there was a screened-in pen where gold-necked pheasant strutted and preened.
“Denny is a nice nickname,” Hall said.
“Yes.” Her head was down and the toes of her boots kicked at the wet grass. “I’m only here to tell you what Mr. Rivers wants you to know.”
“Do you have a pet name for him?”
Her voice hard and flat: “Not during office hours.”
Hall backed away from it. “Will what Rivers want me to know be the truth?”
“The truth as we know it,” Denise said. “Do you really hate Mr. Rivers?”
“In the general way I hate mumps and small pox.”
“Do you trust him, Will?”
“Not a bit. He’d sell his mother or he already has.” There was a noise at the cage. A pheasant was beating his wings and his chest at the wire. “What do you know about him?”
“Not much.” Denise turned and looked at the screened-in cage. The pheasant who’d been trying to escape backed away and trembled and shook with rage or frustration.
“Ever hear of Beau Rivers? Dudley Rivers?”
Denise shook her head.
“Then you’re not a sports fan. Beau and Dudley were older brothers to our Rivers up there.” A thumb indicated the back of the Keep and the second floor. “Much older brothers. Both famous athletes. Football and track and basketball in a time when a man could letter in four sports if he wanted to. Beau was at Princeton and Dudley at Harvard. Both were household names for their time. Media stars. And then, years later, came our Mr. Rivers. Probably a late child, an accident when his mother considered herself safely beyond such concerns as motherhood. A weakling, a sickly child. In another time … or in our time if his mother had allowed it, he might have been drowned in the bathtub. His father did not like weakness. At any rate, he grew up somehow and went off to college. Not to Princeton or Harvard. To Yale. He couldn’t bear the comparisons to Beau and Dudley. He had four scholarly years at Yale. But he wasn’t to know the power of knocking heads the way Dudley and Beau had. So, he went after power in other ways. His bloodline demanded that. And, in time, he found that power in global chess games. Throw away two or three pawns here and catch a knight there. In global chess, none of the pawns bleed.”
“Mr. Rivers bled.”
“Not real blood,” Hall said.
Denise shook her head, impatient with him. “I think he needs your help now.”
“You’re joking.” He stared at her face and realized that she was serious. “He needs my help when he’s got all the resources of the Company?”
Denise looked past him, at the rear of the Keep, the walls, the gray fitted stones and the mortar. “You know what The Keep really is?”
“A fancy, expensive hotel.”
“That and a bit more. It’s the site for a number of yearly company retreats. Not our Company. Business companies. It’s private. All twelve rooms can be booked at one time. Mr. Hinson, the host, is discreet. The Keep is booked about six months a year, a week at a time, by some of the biggest organizations in the world. The check River did on Boyle, the man you killed in Washington, brought him here by a different route. The Company found a notebook in Boyle’s room in Washington. A travel journal, of sorts. Of course, there were no notes of a business kind. That would have been dangerous. What he described were the hotels, the food, the countryside. There’s even a semi-illiterate description of the gold-necked pheasant in these cages. The name of the hotel, The Keep, rang a bell somewhere in Rivers. He decided it was worth a deep check.
“What did he remember?”
“That a secret meeting of a few select members of OPEC took place here once. That was before the full meeting in Paris. It was probably a strategy session behind closed doors.”
Hall remembered that the same paper had crossed his desk in Costa Verde. It hadn’t, he thought, meant anything to him at the time. Movement caught his eye. At the second-floor window, Aaron was watching them.
“Two weeks ago, at the time Boyle was visiting The Keep, the other eleven rooms were taken by Worldwide Metals. Do you know of them?”
“No.”
“A cartel. Through its member companies it controls almost seventy percent of the world’s metals, the raw materials. Would you like to know a company that controls another ten percent?”
“You’ll tell me.”
“United Mining, Limited,” Denise said.
The company that owns Costa Verde. The Lear jet that flew the Team from Costa Verde after the murder of Marcos had been owned by United.”
“United was not represented at the meeting here at The Keep. It appears, from Company research, that a war is being fought between Worldwide and United. In the past, it was waged in the stock markets. Only recently it has progressed to the political arena as well.”
“Costa Verde.”
“Now you’ve got it, big boy.”
“And the Company was caught in the middle?”
Denise gave him a short, positive nod. “You were one of their pawns, if you’d like to talk some more about pawns.”
A thought, a dim possibility. “Paul Marcos?”
Denise smiled. “I wondered how long it would take you. Yes, your friend, Marcos. The moderate party. Worldwide had them in their hip pocket. The problem Marcos had was that United had us, the Company, in their hip pocket.”
“Choices,” Hall said, “choices.”
“If Marcos had been elected in Costa Verde, it might have meant a shifting of another three percent of the world’s raw materials to Worldwide. Seventy-three percent is always better than seventy percent. The moderate party and Marcos would have nationalized the mines and then turned around and made their deal with Worldwide. Will, you were taken by a pretty face and what Mr. Rivers would call too much optimism about the human animal.”
“Marcos was a pretty face, wasn’t he?” Hall said.
Aaron continued to watch them from the second level window of The Keep.
“The death of Marcos and the suspension of the promised free elections in Costa Verde meant that Worldwide had lost out. What we think happened then was that Worldwide decided to find a way to discredit United. At the same time, it’s an odd way of thanking you for your support of their man. They hatch a plot and they use you again. The first step is the article written by the disenchanted ex-field man. The expose of the Company’s work in Costa Verde and their involvement in the death of Marcos.”
“But United isn’t mentioned in the article,” Hall said.
“That’s too pat.” Denise said. “United’s part in the Costa Verdean political tangle would have been revealed in step two. At least that’s what Mr. Rivers believes. What starts out to be an expose of the Company’s ruthlessness in Costa Verde would have been followed by a second article or a series of letters to The Truth Seeker that would chart United’s dirty hands in the matter.”
“Wheels within wheels.”
“You’re thinking about Winford Boyle,” Denise said.
“About to,” Hall said. “Worldwide hires Boyle to waste me before the article comes out. Either I’m stirring up too much water, or they want to use my death to blacken the Company and through them to discredit United once more.”
“Can you imagine what The Washington Post would do when they made the connection? At first your death and the death of your friend …”
“Bilbo.”
“… would be listed as murder committed during a robbery. Then The Truth Seeker article appears. It wouldn’t take a genius at The Washington Post to make the tie-up. Ex-Company man writes article and dies a violent death, just before the article is published.”
“And there’s a second result if Boyle had been lucky. I wouldn’t be around to deny I wrote the article.”
“You’re convinced now?”
“I suppose I am,” Hall said.
They moved away from the pheasant pen and walked along the path in the formal garden. Aaron moved away from the window high above them.
“After he’s rested, Mr. Rivers will want to talk to you.”
“Denny
, huh? He calls you that?”
“This morning was the first time.” Denise stepped around him and faced him in the path. “I think it’s his way of getting back at you.”
“How would that bother me?”
“He had an exaggerated idea that there was something going on between us,” Denise said.
“Does he now?”
“Yes.” Eyes level, meeting his. “Absurd, isn’t it? He knows I sleep with anybody the Company tells me to sleep with.”
“How many men has that been?”
“You want a list? I’ll have to sit down with a pen and paper. It might take an hour to remember all of them.”
Hall caught her wrist. “Just a ballpark figure.”
She tried to pull her hand away. “I don’t remember. As I said I need …”
“A hundred? Less than a hundred?”
“You’re hurting me.”
“Fifty? Less than fifty?”
“Hurt me if it makes you feel better.”
“Twenty? Less than twenty?”
“One. And I didn’t have to sleep with you if I hadn’t wanted to.” She freed her hand and marched away from him.
Five minutes later, damp from the light windblown rain, Hall entered the hotel. Hinson, the host, was behind the desk.
“The Air Vice Marshal is waiting for you in the bar.” Hinson led the way.
The Guinness was cool and thick and dark. Mac passed a pint to Hall and sat down across the table from him.
“One thing about Guinness,” Mac said. “It doesn’t travel well.”
Hall sipped his pint. It was as smooth as cream.
“A sea voyage spoils it.” Mac said.
“A perfect reason to visit Ireland,” Hall said.
“It was a long talk you had with the girl.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Hall hadn’t decided how much to tell Mac. “I think I’ve been three or four kinds of a fool with the girl.”
“One kind of fool is enough,” Mac lifted his pint. After he drank, he said, “The business with Rivers, is it working out?”
“Maybe. At least, now there’s a good guess about what’s going on. From this point on, I think you’d better stay outside. In fact, I think you ought to return to London or Kent.”
