The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) (4 page)

Bannerman takes care of his own.

Clew moved on. He scrolled through the dossiers on Bannerman's known agents, past a list of fifty or more possibles —agents who'd been known to work for him at least twice— and reached a set of supplementary files listing various other people known to have had a business or personal relationship with him. He tapped a key to stop it and backed up to the photograph of the young woman whose face had been cropped out of the other shot. Her name was Susan Lesko. Bannerman's current lady friend. A straight one. He called up her file. The more he read, the more he frowned.

The relationship had been going on for several months now and showed no sign of ending. That was not like Bannerman. He tended to stay in his own world. He'd had occasional affairs with outsiders before but he tended to end them at the first sign that they might intensify. Before they could become a distraction. This one seemed not only distracting but foolhardy. The girl, aside from being too young for him, worked for a newspaper. A reporter. She'd been sniffing around Westport, but not on an assignment. On her own. Apparently she'd been helping a friend move into a new house in Westport and had come across a Welcome Wagon brochure that bragged about the unusually low crime rate. She wondered why, dug some more, and then came on another set of figures showing that Westport's suicide and accidental death rates were remarkably high for a town that size. Her curiosity was aroused. Thought there might be a story in it. Stress among the affluent, maybe. Or another rash of teen suicides.

Whatever. She did lose interest in the story. There was no reason for Bannerman to keep seeing her. Now she was nothing but trouble.

Another concern was the girl's father. Roger Clew hit the “scroll” button again. He stopped at a photograph taken from newspaper files. A huge man. The build of a wrestler. Mean face. Daughter must have been adopted. In the photograph, a television reporter was asking him a question he must not have liked. Lesko looked like he was about to eat him.

Raymond Lesko. Former New York City police detective. Highly decorated. Retired two years ago under a cloud. Suspected of a triple murder. Story is that Lesko's partner went bad. Was ripping off drug dealers. Did it once too often. They blew his head off in the driveway of his home. A few days later, Lesko slaughtered two Bolivian nationals and one Colombian in the back room of a Brooklyn barbershop. Or so they say. Lesko was never charged. But Irwin Kaplan, who knows Lesko from way back, says it's true. Says Lesko splattered them all over the walls, reloaded his shotgun, then emptied it into a million dollars worth of cocaine until the whole room turned red and white.

Lots of stories about Lesko. One says there was a woman in that barbershop. And that she was the one who ordered the hit on Lesko's partner. Lesko blew all the others to hell but not her. He left her standing there. Some say he just couldn't kill a woman. Others say he didn't know who she was until later. A few say that he did know her and was on the take from her and wanted to teach her a lesson. Irwin Kaplan says that's horseshit; he says the partner turned out to be a thief but Lesko was straight as they come, and the partner was lucky to get killed before Lesko could get his hands on him.

Which brings up one of the weirder Lesko stories. Kaplan says that Lesko doesn't seem to want to let the partner, whose name was David Katz, stay dead. Says he stiJJ talks to him sometimes. Maybe it's not so weird. You work with the same partner for ten years, day in and day out, counting on each other, you find yourself finishing each other's sentences after a while. You develop a kind of ESP. Same way, maybe, that a widower would go on talking to his dead wife as if she were still out in the kitchen. Or that people visit graves and have long talks with the person buried there. Not so weird. Maybe it's just lonely.

Whatever. Clew wasn't interested in Elena, especially not in Reid, and he didn't really care about Raymond Lesko. Except that, retired or not, Lesko was a cop, a very formidable cop, and except that he was a father who presumably took an interest in his daughter's choice of lovers. Especially one who was pushing forty. Especially one who was about to take her on a ski trip to Switzerland. Bannerman had to realize that. Clew could only hope that Bannerman knew what he was doing. And that he was not in love.
That,
Clew thought,
is all we need.

Switzerland.

Clew made a face.

Zurich.

Kaplan said the woman, Elena, might be in Zurich. Reid had to know that as well.

Damn.

He tried to imagine what Palmer Reid would make of this. Paul Bannerman had almost certainly never heard of Elena. He'd never even met Lesko. Has probably been ducking him. Yet here we have a neat little circle that seems to run from Bannerman, to the girl, to the father, to Elena, to Reid, and back again to Bannerman. Reid hates and fears Bannerman. But he doesn't dare move against him. And Bannerman has promised to live and let live as long as Reid keeps his distance. But now here's Bannerman, all of a sudden, apparently developing a connection with a woman who could, conceivably, blow the whistle on Reid. Yes, definitely; Reid would see a plot unfolding here. The topper would be Bannerman's upcoming trip. Where is he going? Switzerland. Who else lives in Switzerland? Elena. What could be clearer?”

“But,” he muttered softly, “what will you do about it, Palmer?”

Roger Clew stared at the telephone on his desk. He should, he knew, call Bannerman. Tell him about Lesko, about Elena, and what Palmer Reid was likely to be thinking. But what might Palmer Reid actually do?

Wouldn't it be great, Clew wondered, if he could ask the computer. What if the Cray-3 system were programmed to predict Palmer Reid's behavior? It would take a while but it ought to be possible. Even for a mind like Reid's. Reid might be borderline crazy but probably no more so than any terrorist. If he fed the computer everything they had on file about Reid, his personal and professional history, his psychological profile, the mind of a probable paranoid schizophrenic who does nothing except circuitously, he would be able to tell Bannerman what actions Reid is most likely to consider in ranking order of probability.

And how Bannerman should respond. For maximum effectiveness and maximum damage. Bannerman would be grateful. He'd owe him big.

If it doesn't, who's to know?

Still he was not greatly alarmed. The van, colored maroon and brown, with German plates, had a ski rack on its roof. There were many like it on this road every day. And the driver, as best he could make out, seemed no more than a boy, traveling alone. At one point, driving through the town of Küblis, Josef had seen the boy honk and wave at a knot of skiers who were trudging along the road in their heavy boots, their skis on their shoulders. Two or three of the skiers had raised their arms in response. That their response was tentative, even questioning, Josef Brugg did not notice. He relaxed. Josef tugged the hem of his trench coat so that it covered the automatic pistol that rested on his lap and concentrated on the road ahead. Soon, in any case, his brother, Willem, would be catching up to them in the other Mercedes. Willem would not be far behind, perhaps five kilometers, depending on how long it took him to help the other Americans clean up the mess they had left in Davos.

He adjusted his rearview mirror so that he could see the back seat. The van snapped out of sight. Slouched directly behind him was the wounded American doctor, Russo. He was barely conscious now. His head lolled in rhythm with the springs of the Mercedes. Elena was holding him, her arm around his shoulder. With her free hand, she kept pressure against the most serious of his injuries, low on his chest, where the assassin's knife had entered. The others, those under his right armpit, were flesh wounds made by bullets. Elena had torn her cotton blouse to make a packing for them.

Elena was talking to the American, encouraging him. Only a little farther, she said. The clinic is not far. They know we are coming.

Russo grunted. He lifted his head and nodded feebly.

He felt no fear. Only humiliation. There was not much pain where the knife had entered. But there was a sense of fullness, a coldness, which he knew to be a sign of internal bleeding. It was the bullet wounds, although far less serious, that hurt the most. The bullets had only grazed him but the muzzle blast from Bannerman's pistol had also seared his flesh and set his clothing afire. And yet he knew that Bannerman, in shooting through him, had probably saved his life.