The Brotherhood of the Rose (31 page)

That insult may have been why Hardy made his choice.. Number two put a briefcase on the coffee table. Opening it, he took out a hypodermic and a vial of liquid. "I'm surprised they didn't use the chemicals sooner," Hardy said."I wanted to talk to you first. To reminisce."

"To gloat, you mean."

"I don't have time for this. It's my turn now. Hang up."

"No, wait. There's something I want you to hear." Hardy turned to number one. "In that cabinet." It was plastic-coated plywood, from the K-Mart. "Excuse the expression. There's a shot left in a fifth of Jim Beam. Would you bring it to me?"

The drone looked uncertain. "For God's sake, I'm thirsty."

"Lush." Lips curled, the drone opened the cabinet and gave him the bottle.

Hardy stared at it. As if caressing a woman he loved, he slowly turned the cap. He swallowed the inch of liquid, savoring its wonder. On balance, it was the only thing he'd miss. "Still listening?"

"What was that about?"

"Hang on."

I'm seventy-two, he thought. My liver's a miracle. It should have killed me long ago. I'm a goddamn remnant, a fossil. Thirty minutes after the chemicals had been administered, he knew he'd have told the drones everything Eliot wanted. Saul and Chris would be killed. Eliot Would have won again.

The sonofabitch kept winning. Not anymore. A lush? Saul wouldn't take me along because he couldn't depend on me. Eliot sent two drones because he didn't respect me.

I've got a confession to make," Hardy said: "We'll still use the chemicals"

"It doesn't matter. You're right. Saul came to see me. He asked questions. I gave answers. I know where he is. I want you to understand that."

"Why so direct? You know I won't make a deal."

"You'll have me killed?"

"I'll make it as pleasant as possible. Alcohol poisoning. I doubt you'll mind."

"Keep listening."

He set the phone on the coffee table and glanced beyond the drones toward the window. He weighed 220 pounds. In his youth, he'd been a tackle on Yale's football team. With a wail, he surged from the sofa, ramming past them, charging toward the window. For an instant, he feared the closed blinds would hold him back, but he should have expected they were as cheap as everything else in this goddamn crackerbox.

His head struck the window, shattering the glass. But his girth jammed in the window frame, his stomach sinking on jagged shards. He moaned, but not from pain, instead because the drones were grabbing his feet, straining to pull him back. He kicked, struggling, hearing the blinds rattle as the shards rammed deeper into his stomach. Desperate, tilting forward, he wrenched his feet away and suddenly hurtled bleeding into space. More glass went with him, glinting from the sun. He saw it vividly, feeling suspended. Gravity insisted. Plummeting, he leftthe splinters above.

Objects fall at an equal rate, provided their mass is the same. But Hardy had a great deal of mass. Faster than the shards of glass, he swooped toward the sidewalk, praying he wouldn't land on someone. Fifteen stories. The drop made his stomach swell. Toward his testicles. After all, he was upside down. Before he hit, he blacked out. But a witness later said his body exhaled on impact.

Almost as if he laughed.

The estate was huge. Saul crouched in the dark on a wooded bluff, peering down a murky slope toward the lights of the English manor house below him. Three stories high, its rectangular shape made it seem even higher. Long and narrow, it had a large middle section flanked by smaller wings to the right and left. Its clean straight lines were broken only by the row of dormer windows projecting from the slight slope in the roof and by the confusing array of protruding chimneys, stark against the rising moon.

Saul aimed a nightscope toward the wall enclosing the estate. In its earliest form, a nightscope had been based on the principle of projecting an infrared beam to illuminate the dark. This beam, invisible to the unaided eye, could be easily detected through special lenses in the scope. The device worked well, though the objects it revealed were necessarily tinted red. Nonetheless it did have a crucial drawback. After all, an enemy using the same kind of scope could detect the infrared beam from your own. In effect, you'd advertised yourself as a target.

A better principle was obviously needed, and during the late sixties, in response to the escalated fighting in Vietnam, an undetectable nightscope was finally invented. Known by the trade name Starlite, it illuminated the dark by magnifying whatever Minuscule light source, such as the stars, was available. Since it projected no beam, it couldn't draw attention to the person using it. In the seventies, the scope had become commercially available, mostly in sporting goods stores. There'd been no difficulty in obtaining this one.

Saul didn't use it to study the manor, however, because the lights from the windows would have been so magnified they'd stab his eyes. But the wall was in darkness, and he saw it clearly. It seemed to be twelve feet high. He focused on its weathered rocks, its vivid chinks of ancient mortar.

But something about it troubled him. He felt " if he'd knelt here before and studied the wall. Struggling with recollection, he finally understood. The estate in Virginia. Andrew Sage and the Paradigm group. The beginning of the nightmare. At once he corrected himself, for the wall down there reminded him of someplace else, the orphanage, and that was where the. nightmare had really started. With eerie vividness, he imagined Chris and himself sneaking over the wall. In particular, he recalled the night... The screech of crickets stopped. The forest became unnervingly quiet. As his skin prickled, he sank to the ground, drawing his knife, his dark clothes blending with the gloom. Controlling his breath, he kept his face down, straining to listen.

A bird sang, paused, then repeated its cadence. Saul rose to a crouch. Still cautious, he huddled against an oak, pursed his lips, and mimicked the song of the bird.

Directly, Chris stepped from the dark. A second figure emerged like the rustle of wind through bushes. Erika. She glanced back down the slope, then crouched beside Saul and Chris. "The security's primitive." Chris kept his voice low. "I agree," Erika added. She and Chris had separated down the slope, checking the estate's perimeter. "The wall's not high enough. There ought to be closed-circuit cameras. There's no electrified fence at the top."

"You sound like that disappoints you," Saul said. "It bothers me," she answered. "England's in a recession. Its lower class resents its upper class. I'd be frantic for security if I were Landish. Given his position in MI-6, he ought to know how to protect his estate."

"Unless he wants to make it seem there's nothing to protect," Chris said. "Or hide," she added. "You think the security's not as primitive as it seems?"

"I don't know what to think. And you?" She turned to Saul. "I scanned the grounds," he said. "I saw no guards, though there must be some in the mansion. We were right, though."

"Dogs?"

Saul nodded. "Three of them. Maybe others I didn't see. They're roaming freely."

"Breed?"

"All Dobermans."

"The marines would feet at home," Chris said. "Thank God, it isn't shepherds or standard poodles."

"You want to forget about it?"

"Hell, no," Erika said. The two men smiled. "Then let's do it. We were worried about timing-how to get our hands on him. He might have solved the problem for us. Take a look."

Saul pointed toward the rear of the manor. "See the greenhouse?"

"The lights are on."

The long glass structure glinted in the night. "Like Eliot, he worships roses. Would he let a servant in there? Or a guard? In his holy of holies? I don't think so. Only the high priest enters the sanctum."

"Maybe he's showing his roses to guests," Chris said. "And maybe not. Just one way to tell."

Again the two men smiled at each other.

They crept down the slope through mist and bracken toward the rear of the estate. Clouds drifted across the moon. The night was chilly and damp. Chris braced his hands against the wall and bent a knee so Erika could climb to his shoulders, grip the top of the wall, and pull herself up. Saul went up next, climbing to Chris's shoulders, but when he clutched the top, he dangled, allowing Chris to use his body as a ladder. At the top, Chris and Erika helped Saul squirm beside them.

Flat, they scanned the estate. Lights gleamed. Below them, dark objects loomed.

Chris raised a tiny cylinder to his lips and blew. Though the night stayed quiet, Saul imagined the ultrasonic tone. The dogs would hear it, though. But what if they'd been trained to ignore its appeal?

They weren't. The massive Dobermans came with such deceptive softness Saul would never have heard them if he hadn't been prepared. Their paws didn't seem to touch the grass. Their dark shapes streaked through the night, abruptly materializing at the bottom of the wall. Even then, Saul wasn't sure he saw them till their white teeth suddenly glinted, flashing savagely. Despite their obscene sneers, they didn't growl.

They couldn't, Saul realized. Their vocal cords had been cut. A dog that barked was useless for protection. Growls alerted an intruder and gave him a chance to defend himself. These Dobermans weren't intended to be a burglar alarm. They served one purpose only-to surprise an intruder.

And kill him. Erika reached in a knapsack. Pulling out a fist-sized canister, she twisted its top and dropped it among the dogs.

The canister hissed. The dogs attacked it. Suddenly backing off, they blinked in confusion, then slumped unconscious.

Saul held his breath as he squirmed off the wall and dropped to the grass, rolling in a parachutist's pose. Retreating from the fumes toward the cover of a hedge, he waited for Chris and Erika. In the moonlight, he studied the lawn before the house. Shrubs had been trimmed to form geometric shapes: pyramids, globes, and cubes, their shadows grotesque. "Over there." Saul pointed.

Chris nodded at a tree, whispering, "I see the glow. An electric eye."

"There'll be others."

"But the dogs had the run of the grounds," Chris whispered. "They'd have passed through the lights and triggered the alarms."

"The light must be higher than the dogs."

Saul sank to his stomach on the dew-wet grass, crawling forward, squeezing beneath the almost invisible beam of the electric eye.

The greenhouse gleamed, before him, gemlike. More spectacular were the roses, their various sizes, their brilliant colors. He watched a lean, stooped, white-coated figure walk among them, recognizing Landish from Hardy's description, especially the shrunken face. "He looks mummified," Hardy had said. It's like he's dead, but his hair's long as if it kept growing." Saul crept to the greenhouse, waiting while Chris and Erika slipped behind bushes, one on each side of the path between the manor and the greenhouse, on guard for anyone coming. He stood and walked inside.

The lights hurt his eyes. The roses smelled oversweet, cloying. Landish stood at a table, his back to Saul, mixing seed in trays of sand. He heard the door and turned, but he must have guessed it was a servant because his movement was calm. Only when he saw who'd entered did he react, stepping back against the table, his mouth open in surprise.

Saul was ten feet away. That closer Landish looked ill, his pinched skin waxy, jaundiced. Even so, as his shock diminished, his sunken eyes gleamed. "I wasn't expecting company." His voice sounded frail, but his British accent made it seem, urbane.

Saul aimed his pistol. "Don't move. Keep your hands and feet where I can see them."

"You're surely not frightened of an old man harming you."

"I'm more concerned about this." Saul pointed toward a wire leading up beneath a grafting table. He stepped across. took pliers from his pocket, and snipped the wire. Feeling under the table, he yanked an alarm button free. "My compliments." Landish bowed slightly. "If you're a burglar, I have to tell you I carry no money. Of course, you'! I find silverware and crystal in the house."

Saul shook his head. "You intend to kidnap me for ransom?"

"No."

"Since you don't have the lunatic's glare of a terrorist, I confess to--2' "Information. I don't have time. I'll ask you once."

"Who are you?"

Saul ignored the question. "We debated using chemicals."

"we?"

"But you're too old. The strain. We thought you might die."

"Considerate."

,,We discussed torture. The problem's the same. You could die before you told us what we want." Why go to such extremes? Perhaps I'll tell you freely."

"Hardly. Anyway, we wouldn't know if you told the truth. Saul lifted a pair of shears from a bench. "We finally agreed on the way to persuade you." He crossed to a bed of roses, glanced at their first-prize ribbons, and snipped the stem off an exquisite dwarf Yellow Princess.

Landish groaned, swaying off balance. "That rose was- "Priceless. Sure. But not irreplaceable. You've still got four others - On the other hand, this scarlet Tear Drop over here is rarer."

"No!"

Saul clipped it, watching the bloom fall on a plaque it had won.

Landish clutched a table. "Have you lost your mind? Don't you realize what?"