The Green Ripper Part 15

I unlocked the door for them and stepped back out of the way and let them go in. I went back and leaned on a car. In five minutes two of them came out, looking a little green. Max was one of them. After they breathed in some fresh air they went back in. Ten minutes later Max came out, another man following him with a notebook.

"-and I want unmarked trucks up here, with secure drivers. The biggest that can make that last hill and the curves. They'll take the long way around from here to Fort Bragg and go into cla.s.sified storage. Our people will look at the stuff there to see if there's anything new and different. Got that?"

"Got it."

"I want to sneak a helicopter in here big enough to fly out with eleven bodies. They should bring body bags and some graves registration people. Secure people, of course."

"Got it."

"I want them taken to Home Town fastest. I want a priority on those pix and prints they're taking in there. They should be about ready to give them to you, and then you can take off. Who's got that black tin suitcase?"

"It's in the trunk of Red's car."

"They'll fly back with us to Home Town, and when you're setting the other stuff up, make sure they get good people on E. and A. Take them off other stuff if necessary. Now read back, just the highlights."

"Mmm. Unmarked trucks, secure drivers, cla.s.sified storage at Bragg. Bodies out on helicopter. Body bags and graves registration people, direct to Home Town. Priority on the pix and prints, and I take them in. Take black suitcase out with me... no, that goes with you. What I do is get Evaluation and a.n.a.lysis primed to go when it gets there."

That was all. He went back into the warehouse. Max motioned to me, and we strolled across the flats. I told him I would show him where the airplane went in.

"So many of them," he said. "Jesus!"

"I know."

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know what the h.e.l.l it is. Like some kind of combat fatigue. Look at my hand shake. It was a long time ago, and it all came back at once."

"You went kind of crazy?"

"No. Not like that. I was pretty calm, actually. I mean you go along and you figure the odds of doing this and the odds against doing that, and whatever you do, you make it sudden and final."

"You say three were in the Cessna? So you waxed eight of them."

"Nine. There's one buried over a week ago. Nicky. They gave me the gun and told me to shoot him and I did. That was what started all the rest of it. Like letting some kind of bad spell out of the bottle. I thought it was a fake execution, so I fired and killed him."

We got to the slope and looked down to where we could see bits of the airplane. "I got all the records out of there I could find," I said. "And I looked everywhere for that G.o.dd.a.m.n missing arm. I looked high and low. I can't imagine how it hid itself so d.a.m.n well." My voice was getting high and thin, but I couldn't seem to stop. "Somehow we've got to find that d.a.m.n arm!"

"Hey," he said. "Hey, fellow. Take it easy, huh?" He turned me around and headed me back toward the cars. "I'll have some of my guys go down there and find it."

We walked in silence. "How'd you get them all?"

I used as few words as possible.

He gave me a strange sidelong look. I've seen people at the zoo look at the big cats that way, as if they are wondering if the creature could bang right through those bars if he felt like it.

"You're going to have to come back for debriefing."

"Debrief somebody who was never briefed?"

"It's just a word we use, McGee. I think they'll go at you for a week or more. It won't be bad. You'll get good food and rest. The motivation people will want to know just about every word those people spoke to you."

"The one they should talk to is Sister Elena Marie. She used to be Bobbie Jo Annison, the evangelist."

"We know. We'd like to talk to her for a long long time. And the people who pull her strings, and write her words. We think she's on an island off the south coast of Cuba. Maybe there'll be a lead in those papers. You shouldn't have gathered them up for us."

"I did that when I was going to blow the whole place to rubble, buildings, people, and all. I was saving the papers for you and Jake. I collected all the money. I think I was saving that for myself. Some of it is mine, about nine thousand. Some twenty-seven thousand is theirs."

"I can't understand why they didn't kill you out of hand. That's their style. That's their standard program. No infiltration. No way to do it."

"I was looking for my daughter."

"Daughter!"

"I'm sorry. I'm past making much sense."

"We'll leave here soon. It's a strain on you, having to stay here."

"Can we stop in San Francisco? I left my ID there, and my clothes."

"Of course. You're not under detention."

"For murder?"

"For self-defense. We'll let the record read there was a jurisdictional squabble and they fought among themselves. Look, you should be getting a medal, McGee. But what you are going to get is some very serious and earnest advice about keeping your mouth shut forever. I think you cut down their firepower and manpower some. If the doc.u.ments give us a lead to other camps, we can cut it down some more. But the summer timetable is probably still on. They can't keep their tigers waiting forever. And they have to have something to show the folks helping them from overseas. No matter how much security we lay on, they are going to create one h.e.l.l of a series of b.l.o.o.d.y messes from border to border and coast to coast. A lot of sweet dumb people are going to get ripped up. Headlines, speeches, doom, the end of our way of life, and so on. Terrorism is going to pay us one big fat b.l.o.o.d.y visit, McGee. But it will only be a visit. They underestimate our national resilience. Aroused by that kind of savagery, we can become a very tough kind of people. You are a pretty good example of that."

"My luck was running, and I let it run."

"They were supposed to be their best, huh? Educated abroad. Honed fine. During the debriefing, you'll have to go into infinite detail about the training, what you saw of it."

"Everything I can remember."

"They'll want to go into hypnotic drugs to make sure they pull everything out."

"I'm in no position to object."

He stopped walking and turned to face me. "And when it is over and they turn you loose, all the information stops, then and there. You never get any more from us, and n.o.body ever gets any of what you have from you."

"Except Meyer."

"n.o.body!"

"Except Meyer."

"I am serious, dammit!"

"Me too. So you better not turn me loose. There is no way on earth that I can keep from telling him every d.a.m.n detail of every d.a.m.n day I spent here. Can't you remember the clearance he used to have? You checked it out. Remember?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l, yes. Okay. Meyer. And only Meyer." Two of them came out and spoke to Max in low voices. He came over to me and said, "Take your last look around. And hope they never find out who did their people in."

"I think they know."

"If I was sure they know, I would set up a whole new. ident.i.ty for you, from plastic surgery to colored contact lenses."

"I wouldn't accept it anyway."

"You don't care if they come after you?"

"Frankly, not a h.e.l.l of a lot, Max. Not a h.e.l.l of a lot."

In a little while we headed down out of the hills. Jake told me that when everything had been taken out, they were going to truck a couple of bulldozers up there and knock everything flat and push it off the edge. I said that would be nice. They said we would stay overnight in San Francisco, so I could rest up a little, and fly out in the morning. I said that would be nice. They said that maybe the money problem could be resolved in my favor. Like a kind of unofficial reward. Like, maybe, a bounty. I said that would be nice. So they stopped talking to me. I looked out the car window at the tall evergreens and wondered why all the birds had left this part of the world. Jake turned the wipers on, smearing the small sad rain. I think they were glad to stop trying to relate to me. They felt uneasy about me, about being close to me in a small car. I think they felt not exactly certain of what I might do next. And I knew they would not have felt better about it if I had told them I didn't have the faintest notion, either, of what I might do next, today, tomorrow, or ever.

Epilogue.

WE HAD found a little cove around behind the Berry Islands, and with the small chop slapping us in the transom, I had b.u.mped twice getting over the bar into the still water. But that was at low tide, and the charts for that day in late June said it was unusually low, so no sweat about getting out, getting that absolute jewel of a cruiser out of there.

It was named Odalisque III, and it was the splendid playtoy of Lady Vivian Stanley-Tucker of St. Kitts. It was a fifty-three-foot Magnum Maltese Flybridge cruiser, built in North Miami Beach. Twin turbocharged diesels cruised it at an honest thirty miles an hour. Paneling, radar, recording fathometer, air conditioning, ice-maker, tub and shower, huge master stateroom, double autopilot system, stereo music, wine locker, microwave oven, live wells, loran, pile carpeting. I knew it would knock close to a half million without extras, and it was the third time her husband had given her a boat for her birthday.

"The other two were huuuuuge!" she had said. "Great vulgar monsters. Had to have a crew aboard at all times. Now this one is cozy, what? Intimate, you might say. The old boy was playing the gold market and got pinched a bit. Apologized for the smaller boat."

I was over on the beach and had found a sandbar that was supporting more than its share of clams. Lady Vivian and I had been out about two weeks, provisions were running a little short, and soon we would have to decide whether to put in to Na.s.sau or run on over to Miami. I was putting the clams in a string bag. The sun felt needle-hot on my bare back. I was turning saddle brown, and Lady Vivian had turned to a very lovely reddish gold, except for the sunburned tip of her nose.

The deep chord of the air horns made me look out toward the Odalisque. Shave and a haircut, two bits. Then she came out onto the bow, a tiny golden figure in a white bikini, and motioned me to come aboard.

I hung the string bag around my neck, swam out through the warm crystal-clear water, and came up the boarding ladder.

"Good nap?"

"Splendid! And I felt absolutely marvelous until, like the dutiful person I am, I turned on the thingajiggy at call time, as usual, and d.a.m.n me if the old bustard wasn't trying to get me. Baaaaad news, sweet McGeeee. I have to fly on down. His d.a.m.ned awful sister has decided to come out for a visit, and he thinks it would look most odd if I'm not there to greet the old party. So what I told him, I would go on into Na.s.sau tomorrow and fly from there, and find some dear friend who'll take the Odalisque on over to Lauderdale. Who might that dear friend be?"

"Give me a hint."

"d.a.m.n, I was having such a lovely time. And we're getting so horribly healthy. All this popping into bed must be awfully good for one."

Though tiny in the distance, she was substantial up close, a green-eyed, toffee-haired woman just barely on the sunny side of forty, if you could believe her. She gave the healthy impression of someone about to burst out of her clothes, and in fact was willing to do so when the provocation was sufficiently explicit. She had very fine-textured skin, gentle as cream, and her body temperature seemed to run permanently at about four degrees above normal. In bed she was like a stove. She radiated both heat and need.

I put the clams away for later, washed up, and then mixed us a pair of the sour rum drinks she doted on. We sat out on the afterdeck under the tarp I had rigged for shade.

We touched gla.s.ses, and she sipped, as she smiled with her eyes.

"So, there will be another cruise at least," she said.

"As long as I can last."

"You are a dear man. I see no sign of faltering, as yet."

"I sneak megadoses of vitamins, Viv."

"You are the only person in this whole wide world I have ever allowed to call me Viv. Why do I like it when you say it?"

"Because you are helplessly in love with me."

That got a hoot of laughter, her great bawdy laugh of derision. "You know, dearest McGeeee, I would feel a great deal better if I'd been able to pin you down about really helping us."

"I don't think I could do any good."

"Utter nonsense! You could do it easily, probably. It was my money, you know, not Sir Charles's. From my Uncle Merriman. His people made it in the War of the Roses, or some b.l.o.o.d.y thing like that, selling slop to both sides, I imagine. After death duties, not very much came down to me, as you can imagine. But it was comforting. You would know. You wake in the night and think of some thing that you might want, and you know you can buy it. It was truly a magnificent necklace. For forty thousand pounds, it had to be. And somehow, between appraisals, that wretched little animal switched it on us and now pretends to know nothing about it, and there is nothing we can do. Should you get it back for us, dear heart, we shall auction it at Christie's and give you half the gavel price. Your customary arrangement, isn't it?"

"When I work, it is. I work when I need money. Otherwise I am retired. Like now."

"Ha! Living off my involuntary generosity? Last night the only possible roll to escape a double gammon was that incredible six four you rolled. Dear, I am really terribly serious about the necklace. Would you try? For me? For jolly old Viv?"

"Why not? I'll need the one he subst.i.tuted, probably. I'll try to work something out."

"Bless you!"

And the great warm tide of her pleasure and her grat.i.tude took us down into the cool humming, buzzing grotto of the Odalisque below decks, into the deep bunk-leaving behind us on the carpeting a hasty trail of bikini top, swim trunks, and bikini bottom where, with the accompaniment of her giggles and sighs and little instructional signals, we played our favorite game of winding up that luxurious engine of a body of hers to such an aching pitch that a single slight touch, carefully planned, pushed her over the edge. After that, as always, she went into lazy yawning, smiles, a gentle kiss, and her deep deep sleep.

I picked up the discarded clothing, put on my trunks, and quietly fixed an oversized oldfashioned gla.s.s full of ice and Boodles. Sipping size. I went topside to the fly bridge, lounged on the padded bench in the fading heat of the late afternoon sun.

I remembered how it had been when I had come back home to Bahia Mar, to the Busted Flush, in mid-February, after the teams of skilled interrogators had pulled every last sc.r.a.p of information, no matter how trivial or unrelated, out of the stubborn tangle in the back of my mind. It took me a week to tell Meyer all of it, at my own pace, quitting whenever I came up against something that needed more thought before I could talk about it willingly.

Meyer had been patient and understanding and, best of all, willing to believe what I still considered unbelievable.

"Travis, did you get any clue at all about whether they can stop the other teams?"

"I saw Max and Jake one more time, a few days before they let me come home. They let me ask some questions. They didn't answer a lot of them. They'd acted quickly enough to terminate a few of the training centers, but the rest of them moved out in time. At best it will push the target date further into the future. Maybe it will begin to happen a year from now."

"What about that Brussels thing?"

A dead end. It was probably going to be one of their restaging areas, for retraining and reequipping the survivors of the early strikes."

"And Gretel had the bad luck to see t.i.tus. That was why they... did away with her?"

"He was the link between the Church of the Apocrypha and the terrorist arm. They had a fat file on him, but not as an important wheel in the Church. Now the Church has gone underground. That cripples the financing. They probably overreacted. If they had just given up the land purchase, forfeited the payment, it would have been enough. What could Gretel have done, other than tell Ladwigg she had recognized his visitor? Overkill. Paranoia. Maybe just an urge to test a new deadly toy."

"Who did kill her?"

"n.o.body seems to know. Or care very much. It wasn't anything particularly personal, killing her or Ladwigg. It was just a case of trying to tidy up a security lapse."

"Will you be told anything more?"