The Summer Soldier (13 page)

Jesus, it had been a while since he had had
to do anything along those lines.

Outside, he stayed close to the corner of the
building. It was only a matter of time before our friend with the
shoulder holster would begin to wonder what the hell was taking so
long in the fucking john and come across the street to investigate.
When he worked himself up to coming in, he would see the turned
over trash can and the open window, making the obvious deduction
that he had been spotted and that Guinness had ducked out on him,
and then come back out through the bathroom door. As soon as he
came back out—BAM! Right over the gourd.

But with what? Guinness considered for a
moment the side of his horny hand—it would hardly have been the
first time—but decided against it. He was out of practice, and you
don’t try to take on a working agent barehanded when you’re out of
practice.

Ultimately, he settled for removing his left
sock, sifting in a couple of handfuls of the heavy gravel that was
lying all around the back of the gas station, and tying it off to
make a perfectly serviceable little blackjack. He balanced it in
his palm for a moment, estimating its weight and how hard a blow he
would have to strike. After all, this yoyo wouldn’t be any use to
him dead.

Finally, he could hear the gravel crunch and
then someone trying the bathroom door. It was locked, of course,
and a gentleman would simply have walked away, finding somewhere
else to take his leak. Not this baby—after a few seconds there were
the sounds of a lock being picked and then the door opening.

Instantly the door closed again. Guinness
raised his cosh, there were two quick steps on the gravel, and then
they were on each other. There in the alley behind a men’s room,
two pros face to face.

Guinness took advantage of that inevitable
instant of surprise and brought his weapon down against the side of
the other man’s neck. It was enough to stun him and he pitched
around a quarter of a turn, instinctively bracing himself with his
hands and forearms against the side of the building. One more blow
to the base of the skull and he was out, first sinking to his
knees, and then gradually, still pressed protectively against the
building, he slumped to the ground.

Dragging him into the men’s room, Guinness
was astonished at his weight, but then an unconscious man always
feels like he has been padded out with lead.

Once inside, a quick frisk was in order. Yes,
Virginia, there really was a shoulder holster, and in it a lethal
looking 7 mm automatic of Spanish manufacture.

But the big surprise was in the guy’s wallet,
in the form of a small, plastic coated federal identity card in a
leather holder. Guinness leaned back against the bathroom door to
drink it all in: he had just clobbered a member in good standing of
the U.S. Secret Service.

8

Ernie Tuttle, for such was his name, emerged
from the bathroom of his quarters at the Casa Belmont Motel holding
a damp washcloth against the back of his head. He had taken his
shirt off and on his right shoulder, just at its insertion into the
neck, could be seen a large oblong reddish smear that promised to
develop into a dandy bruise.

In his free hand he carried two bathroom
glasses, which he set down on the glass topped chest of drawers in
order to extract a half empty bottle of Teacher’s Scotch from the
pouch of a folding suit bag that lay open on one of the room’s two
single beds.

“You want a snort?” he asked, holding the
bottle up to about eye level of where Guinness was sitting in the
chair nearest the door. “I’m sorry I don’t have any ice.”

“No thanks. I’m not the one who got tagged
today.”

Tuttle grinned, very much the good fellow,
and took the washcloth from the back of his neck, tossing it back
through the bathroom door and into the sink. For all his gray at
the temples, it was a boyish grin, open and friendly. He had a
certain animal liveliness of manner that made you think of a
slightly decayed fraternity brother at a college reunion, still
game for a few beery choruses of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” The
sort of man you trusted instinctively because he didn’t give the
impression of having brains enough to be devious, the sort of man
it would be childishly easy to underestimate. It wasn’t a mistake
Guinness was much interested in making.

Tuttle poured himself about two fingers of
the Scotch and set the bottle down next to the still empty glass on
the chest of drawers before allowing himself to sink into the other
chair.

“Yeah well, most people would expect an
apology at the very least. You really laced me, you know.” He
pulled a rueful face and Guinness laughed. Then Tuttle laughed—it
was a big joke.

“Okay, so it might not have been very elegant
tradecraft coming around a corner flat footed like that, but I was
beginning to think I was never going to get an opening. You sure as
hell aren’t an easy man to invite by for a drink and a quiet word.”
He took a sip of his Scotch and shook his head slowly, as if
engaged in some lengthy meditation on how hard Guinness had been
making his life lately.

“If that was all you wanted, I haven’t
precisely been in hiding. What’s the matter with the phone?”

“Rule Number One—sacred.” Tuttle raised one
finger in a warning gesture. “Never unnecessarily involve the local
police. The Company wouldn’t like it.” He looked at Guinness as if
he expected some sort of reaction, but Guinness’s face remained
masklike. Suddenly Tuttle understood, and he grinned again. “Or
didn’t you know they’ve had your hotel phone wired?”

Guinness had not, in fact, known. The
possibility hadn’t actually occurred to him, a lapse of vigilance
he found difficult to explain to himself. In the old days you had
always simply assumed that someone was listening in. He must be
slipping.

It wasn’t the sort of thing he much cared to
admit, however—although he would have liked knowing how Tuttle had
found out; perhaps he had cultivated a source in Creon’s office—so
he picked up Tuttle’s little plastic identity card from where it
was lying on the table between them and held it up by a corner. “Is
this your ‘Company’?”

Tuttle shook his head and laughed. “The
Secret Service? That band of fairy godmothers? Not likely. The card
is strictly out on loan; it gives us something to flash at the cops
if things go drastically sour. Sorry, pal—the people I work for
aren’t in the habit of advertising.”

For an uncomfortable moment Guinness had the
sensation of looking into some sort of weird retrospective mirror,
of having reflected back at him his own insane hubris as a younger
man. With perfect clarity he could recall the perverse egotism, the
professional pride he had felt at being one of those who did the
really nasty stuff, of numbering himself among the world’s
political garbage men. Oh boy, the traps they laid for you.

“And besides,” Tuttle went on, with a slow
contemptuous wave of his hand, “if Uncle Sam has got business with
a hit man of your particular distinction, what concern is that of
some small time cop trying to polish his badge on a little domestic
murder?”

Guinness started to say something but then
thought better of it. Instead, he picked himself up out of his
chair and took a few heavy steps to the bureau to fix himself a
drink. He really didn’t care much for Scotch, but it wasn’t the
moment to be fastidious.

So they knew. They absolutely knew now who he
was.

In the end, as he had always realized they
would be, all the elaborate precautions he and Byron Down had taken
had been for nothing. He could almost see his dead patron shaking
his head over the sad certainty of it. As if to say, I told you so.
Well, he had.

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t easy.” Tuttle’s tone of voice
suggested a world of blind leads and wasted labor. He laughed
shortly, as if at some private irony. “Man, you really know how to
go about burying yourself; I don’t imagine even the British have
any clear idea of what became of you.”

More by a kind of general relaxation than
through any perceptible movement, he took on the attitude of a man
settling down to begin some favorite story, the kind you would hear
sometimes from people in The Business when they were tired and had
had a drink or two more than was good for them and thought it might
be safe to unbutton a little and recount some particularly
significant and instructive personal triumph, or some disaster that
after years and years still had the power to make them cringe. It
was by definition a lonely and secretive line of work, and
opportunities to brag or confess, or simply to talk openly, were
rare enough to be enjoyed almost voluptuously.

Guinness prepared himself to listen, to nod
and to grunt from time to time and to let Ernest Tuttle talk on for
as long as he liked. People want to tell their stories on their own
terms, and in present circumstances Tuttle’s good will might be
worth something. Besides, there was no hurry. And it was nice after
all these years to have a moment or two during which he didn’t have
to wear his psychic disguise, when he could put off his sheep’s
clothing.

“I joined the Company in sixty-five,” Tuttle
began quietly, his eyes seeming to focus on some point behind
Guinness’s left shoulder, where he might have been reading the Book
of the Damned. “I was in the CIA then; they’d recruited me right
out of college and set me to fieldwork in Honduras. Jesus,
sometimes it feels like I spent the whole two and a half years down
there crouched all night in the middle of a damned banana grove,
listening to some greasy little urban terrorist tell how for five
hundred dollars and a Benrus watch he was going to sell me Che
Guevara’s ass.

“Anyway, that August a guy came around to the
little office we were using in Tegucigalpa and asked if I wouldn’t
be interested in a transfer to another service. He said I’d be
posted back to Washington at first, but that if things panned out
for me I could expect to get in on some real action. Well, that
time of year down there you can’t see the wallpaper for the flies,
so I said okay.

“For the first year I was in Research. They
always do that; it gives them a chance to watch you for a while and
teach you enough to keep you from getting your head plucked off,
and also they can kind of break it to you gently that you haven’t
exactly joined the Boy Scouts. Anyway, I spent the time putting
together files on current operations being mounted by other
governments, mainly so we wouldn’t accidentally fuck up anything
for our beloved allies, and on any new players our people might
come across in their own games.

“D.C. isn’t a bad town to play spy in. Every
embassy had its own little gig going, so you kept busy; and if
things got too dull you could always pull a black bag job on HEW or
something. Hell, we were burgling our own people more often than we
ever did the Russians.

“And the women, you wouldn’t believe.
Everyone of those government office buildings was about six deep in
broads and they all have a weakness for bad guys. A man could die
of tuberculosis just trying to keep up.

“Anyway, about that time we were just
beginning to get some rumbles that MI-6 had this new headhunter. We
like to keep track of the talent in that field, so we opened a file
and made a few inquiries, but there was nothing. Not a god damned
thing. We never got a fingerprint or a photograph or even so much
as a decent description.

“I mean it was embarrassing. All we had was a
file full of assassinations we couldn’t hang on any of the
established pros, and that was about it. We couldn’t even be sure
all of them were the work of the same hand because the methodology
kept changing. There were plenty of rumors, which we figured the
British were probably spreading themselves just to scare the hell
out of everybody. Just whispers, something that would float by one
day in an internal memo we’d get a peek at, but nothing we ever had
any hopes of being able to check.

“Anyway, we kept up the file. Nobody we cared
about was getting zapped, but we like to stay informed. That way we
know who to keep off the guest list for the State Department’s
Fourth of July party.

“All that cold meat. God, there must have
been close to thirty hits in all and each one a tailor made. The
only thing they all had in common was a stylishness, a certain
aesthetic polish to the work. Every time it was a very tidy job—no
loose ends, no clues, no witnesses spilling their guts about the
mysterious stranger in a tan raincoat. Somebody would just die.

“Word was that Byron Down ran things, but
that wasn’t much of a shock. Down held the strings on most of the
British hit men, and he generally kept them out of the normal lines
of command. Even then, most of the time we can come up with a name
and a photograph and a pretty complete track record, but not on
this one. Down was being extra special careful, even for Down—I
guess he knew when he had a good thing—so we were left with
nothing.

“But you’ve been through all this already,
haven’t you, sport?” Tuttle punctuated his grin with a slow theater
wink. “No need to tell you what a hotshot you were.”

The hotshot might have been cast in bronze.
If he was breathing, it didn’t show. Finally, in an almost
imperceptible movement, he began to shake his head and his eye
fixed on Tuttle in a way that suggested he was not prepared to be
joshed.

“Watch yourself, sport. If you want to tell
stories I’m prepared to listen, but don’t try to hang things on me.
I figure I don’t have the patience to be suspected of more than one
murder at a time.”

Guinness shifted uncomfortably in his chair,
wondering why the hell he bothered protesting his innocence. Habit,
he supposed. They both knew perfectly well who he was.