Reckoning
Authors: Ian Barclay
BRAKES SQUEALED AND A CAR swerved to avoid Dartley as he rode the competition bike onto the avenue like a bat out of hell,
steering with one hand, carrying the gun case with the other. He wove in and out of traffic and zoomed along between the lines
of cars stopped at the light. The Cadillac’s window was still down, and the bushy-haired dope dealer looked out at him with
a lawbreaker’s constant wariness and sixth sense for trouble. Dartley stopped the bike and took his right hand off the handlebar.
“This is for Frank Leeson,” he snarled, hauling a 9-mm Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol from his shoulder holster. He hammered
home two of the gun’s rounds into the dealer’s head…
The Crime Minister
The Crime Minister: Reprisal
The Crime Minister: Rebound
Published by
WARNER BOOKS
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1987 by Warner Books, Inc.
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Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56758-9
Contents
They left the highway at Snail Road and then followed Commercial Street into Provincetown, catching glimpses of open water
in the gaps between the white clapboard houses.
“You can see what it must have been like when it was an old New England fishing town,” Leonard Hill said to his wife, beside
him on the front seat of the car.
“It’s pretty,” she said without much enthusiasm. The kids in the back seat had been getting on her nerves all the way from
Hyannis Port. She could not even be sure back there if the house behind the tall hedges had been the Kennedy compound. Leonard
had been too stubborn to stop and ask. Now he wanted to show them whales and had brought them farther along the Cape to Provincetown.
Frankly, she was more interested in Kennedys.
Closer to the center of town, stores lined the streets and people had to step off the narrow sidewalks
to pass one another. The parking lot was at the harbor. They walked along the Town Wharf to where white painted boats, with
two decks, were tied. Toward land, behind the town, they could see the tower of the Pilgrim Monument. At Plymouth Rock, a
couple of days ago, they had been told that there was no historical evidence that the
Mayflower
had landed first here in Provincetown before going on to Plymouth. No doubt people thought differently here. Leonard bought
tickets at a wooden kiosk on the wharf.
“We’re in luck,” he said. “The
Sao Vicente
sails in a few minutes and has been having sightings every time out this week.” He noticed his son fiddling with his Walkman
tape cassette player. The kid was forever walking around with the headphones on and the damn thing booming through his brain.
“Don’t play that now,” Leonard said to his son. “Let in the real world for a change.”
“That man gave me a new tape while you were buying the tickets,” the twelve-year-old boy explained. “I never heard the group
before.”
“Just wait,” Leonard said. “Play it later.” He looked down the wharf at the back of the man walking away, the one who had
given the tape to his son. He had broad shoulders and cropped blond hair. Leonard turned to his wife. “Why did he give him
the tape?”
“Said it was a promotion for some new band. He mentioned the name.” She shrugged. “They’re supposed to be the new thing.”
She was certain she had seen the man before at Plymouth. Well, almost certain.
But she would certainly know him again, and if she thought he was … Leonard would just laugh at her, or get mad and say she
was flirting with the guy, being kind of sensitive about that since he was away a lot and had to wonder what was going on
at home.
They crossed a gangplank onto the boat after Leonard handed a pretty girl their tickets. They climbed a flight of metal steps
to the upper deck and sat on a bench. Ahead of them, a man spun the ship’s wheel and looked through the glass-fronted wheelhouse
as he took the boat slowly away from the wharf, its big engine vibrating down below. He and another man had several days’
growth of beard and spoke to each other in Portuguese. A short chubby guy announced that he was the ship’s naturalist and
went into a spiel about whales being mammals and suckling their young and having to breathe air. The land slipped away from
them.
Leonard’s wife had two questions for the naturalist. Was it going to stay calm? What if a big whale, just fooling around,
lifted up the boat on his back?
The first whales they saw were minkes, which looked not much bigger than porpoises and didn’t spout. Nobody said so, but these
weren’t exactly the Moby Dick class. The Portuguese captain had been scooting the powerful ninety-foot boat around like a
motorbike, and now he took off at top speed, doing a kind of “wheelie” with the back end of the boat. The naturalist explained
that although the ship had all kinds of sophisticated equipment for navigation, measuring water depth and temperature, and
so forth, they still had
to use the old ways to sight whales. Radar cannot detect them because they contain no metal. Most sonar cannot pick up the
sounds whales make, except for supersensitive equipment not suited to rushing around on top of the water.
“We look for three things,” he said. “Birds dancing, footprints and puffs of smoke.” He paused to enjoy the mystification
he had caused. “The birds dancing are usually petrels. They often touch the surface with their feet as they hover over the
water to pick up small fish frightened to the top by the whale’s movements beneath them. A footprint is a slick boil in the
watei made by the flukes on the whale’s tail after it dives. This remains quite a while, because a good-sized whale can create
twelve G’s of force in a dive, about the same that an astronaut feels in a rocket launch. The puffs of smoke are the most
reliable sign. This is the plume of mist raised when a whale surfaces to blow. It has been holding its breath underneath the
water and lets it out in a big gasp when it surfaces, just like we would. The main difference is that the whale has mucus
to filter out the nitrogen, so it doesn’t get the bends when it surfaces quickly. It blows this mucus out along with condensation
and spray.” The naturalist looked at the Hill’s son. “What did the old whaler call out when they saw this?”
“Thar she blows,” the boy replied in a bored matter-of-fact voice as he fiddled with the headphones of his Walkman.
Next they saw a school of finbacks making foot
prints and blowing. They took in the facts that finbacks grow up to eighty-eight feet long, can swim at twenty-seven miles
per hour for seventeen hours without stopping, and can eat as much as three tons of food per day.
The kids were getting restless, apparently having expected some kind of scene out of a monster movie. Leonard’s wife was grateful
that the animals were ignoring them. His son said it was a pity they couldn’t harpoon one. That would be fun.
“Dad, can I listen to the tape now? I’ll use the headphones, so no one will hear.”
Leonard sighed. He wished his family had a closer feel for the outdoor world. It was partly his fault, spending so much time
away from them. The boy probably spent all his time in front of the TV. He nodded for his son to go ahead.
The boy pushed the PLAY button on the Walkman.
A ball of bright orange flame expanded instantly to a sphere of writhing, blinding light. The shock wave blew out the wheelhouse
windows and lifted two passengers bodily over the rail and dumped them -in the sea. Others were less fortunate. Leonard Hill,
his wife, boy and girl lay on the deck, unrecognizable, blackened, mutilated, dead. The heat of the explosion had blistered
the paint ofiF the ship’s steel. Those sitting nearest the Hill family had been partly protected by the bench and by the bodies
of the bomb’s first victims. They lay on the deck, injured, groaning with pain. The naturalist and the two Portuguese had
been knocked unconscious by the blast. They lay on the wheelhouse floor. One of
the Portuguese sat up and looked in a bewildered way through the smoke at the bodies and people staggering around. The ship
was still moving forward, veering to starboard.
An unhurt passenger at the stern rail yelled forward, “We’ve lost two overboard. I threw life preservers to them.” He pointed
to where they were in the water.
The Portuguese got unsteadily to his feet, went to the wheel and brought the
Sao Vincente
around. He slowed the engine and sent out Mayday calls over the radio, giving their position.
A humpback whale rose alongside, its tiny eyes peering at them from its huge barnacle-encrusted bulk. It was as if the sea
creature sensed they were in trouble and came in close, wanting to help.
Charley Woodgate threw the
Washington Post
on the Maryland farmhouse kitchen table and said, “Last thing the naturalist fella remembers was seeing the kid push the
button on the Walkman. It had to be the cassette. Someone must have given it to the kid.”
“Who were the victims?” Richard Dartley asked.
“No names given until they notify next of kin. Seven dead, nine badly wounded. A cassette bomb.” Charley shook his head in
disgust. “I don’t like the sound of it.” Woodgate made weapons for a living, so he had more than an idle interest in what
exactly had happened. “There’s no one in this country who makes stuff like that, unless it’s one of those IRA men from Northern
Ireland, hiding out. They use cassettes over
there, radio-controlled. But those fellas are usually not for hire.”