The Summer Soldier (22 page)

McKendrick minced his way through the crowd
and sat down on Guinness’s bench. The two men didn’t exchange so
much as a glance for perhaps forty-five seconds, while the older
man took off his bowler, set it carefully down beside him on the
bench, and began smoothing back with his palm the thin, mouse gray
hair on either side of his head.

“Well, if you’ve finished pouting,” he said
finally, in the clipped accents of urban Yorkshire, “we have a
piece of work for you to do.”

He had unhooked the umbrella from his arm,
and as he spoke he stabbed vaguely with the tip at the gravel in
front of him. Nearby, a couple of squealing, plumply blond five
year old boys were straddling one of the Tower’s cannons, green
with age and disuse; the bigger of the two was peering over into
the muzzle. Twenty feet below them an emerald green beer bottle,
almost totally submerged, was making a clinking sound as the
lapping of the Thames kept nudging it against the ancient stones of
the embankment.

“Piss off.”

They sat together in silence for perhaps
another minute as McKendrick considered this response. He continued
to stab at the gravel with his umbrella while Guinness watched the
ponderous movements of the giant unloading cranes at work on the
other side of the river; they looked like elephants, come down to
the water’s edge to bathe.

“You know, you ought to go inside sometime.”
McKendrick jerked his head back slightly, the way some men do when
they wink coyly and tell you to, hey, check out the redhead at the
next table. Only McKendrick wasn’t winking; on his face was a
cruel, wintery smile that had nothing to do with the contemplation
of pretty girls. “You ought to visit the Bloody Tower,” he went on.
“They have the ax in there they used to cut off Sir Walter
Raleigh’s head.”

“No they don’t. The ax in the Bloody Tower is
from a later period. So is the block.” Guinness took a deep breath
and let it out again, removing his hand from his raincoat pocket,
where it had been resting lightly on the handle of his automatic,
and folding it over the other hand in his lap. Nobody was going to
shoot anybody. “And don’t threaten me, McKendrick. I don’t like
it.”

The two men turned slightly, just enough to
catch each other’s eye. Neither of them smiled and both were
wondering just how much the other one was bluffing.

Suddenly Guinness’s face split into an
irritating grin.

“Besides,” he said lightly, “I’ve retired,
remember? We’re all supposed to fall in the line of duty, I know;
but then I’m not even putting in for a pension.” The grin died, and
the voice went low and icy. “If you want to send one of your goon
squads after me, feel free. But make it your best effort, old man;
anything less and I’ll smear them and you all over London. Recent
history would suggest I’m not all that easy to kill.”

McKendrick, whatever his limitations, was not
a fool. Guinness, he realized, wasn’t bluffing. You can tell when a
man is bluffiing, when he’s afraid and playing it for effect, and
Guinness wasn’t bluffing. He seemed almost to wish they would put
out a contract on him so he could go down in a blaze of lethal
glory.

It wouldn’t do, however. The Foreign Office
would have a perfect fantod.

“Would it make any difference if I told you
that the man we want terminated is the one who set up the Oslo hit
on you? Are you the vengeful type, Guinness?”

Guinness considered it. Oslo hadn’t been the
first time somebody had tried to kill him, but what the
hell—business was business and nothing personal. If you made a
hobby of collecting grudges, you wouldn’t have much time for
anything else.

Yet it did make a difference. It was
childish, of course, but Oslo had indirectly cost him Kathleen.
Since Oslo, his life hadn’t been worth a tinker’s belch to him,
which of course was nobody’s fault but his own. After all, the poor
son of a bitch hadn’t specifically been trying to ruin his
marriage, merely to kill him. Still. . .

Yes, he supposed that finally it did make a
difference.

. . . . .

On the train from Rome to Florence, Guinness
watched the Tuscan countryside slipping by and pondered that final
conversation with McKendrick. The further he got from London, the
less sense his own reasons for doing this last little thing made to
him. Who really cared, anyway?

McKendrick did, of course. Jesus, did
McKendrick care. Guinness remembered his instructions with
distaste.

“We want this man mashed like an insect. We
want him to die messily, and in a way that will leave no doubt that
he has been the object of someone’s special consideration. We want
the Russians to know that they cannot order hits on our people and
get away with it. Teach them a lesson, Guinness—one they won’t so
soon forget.”

While he had said it, his eyelids had
fluttered angrily several times and once or twice his Adam’s apple
had pumped up and down inside his gaunt throat. He really hated
this guy Vlasov, whom he had probably never seen in the flesh and
whose only offense was that he had been doing quality work for his
own side. McKendrick was jealous, and like a fool he had allowed
the issue to become personal. It was such a god damned waste of
time.

Guinness stared out of the window at the
fields of sunflowers and the pale pastel farmhouses that seemed to
have taken on the color of the sunlight. He tried to keep track of
the number of olive trees they passed, but after a while he lost
count and began eavesdropping on a conversation between the two
pudgy, flaxen, middle aged German women with whom he happened to be
sharing the compartment. Evidently, they were on their way home
from a combination religious pilgrimage and holiday in Rome, and
their talk centered on the souvenirs they were bringing their
grandchildren. They spoke in a heavy southern dialect he found
rather tough sledding.

Finally one of them departed to visit the
w.c., and Guinness, left without distraction, took up again the
thread of his not very inspiring self appraisal.

It always came back down to the same
question, more an inquiry into character than motive: what the fuck
was he doing on this stupid train? He had been out of that line of
work, 100 percent out; he didn’t have a thing in the world against
anybody named Vlasov and not the faintest interest in bumping him
off.

Vlasov, it was true, had sort of loused
things up for him with Kathleen—or, rather, had been the means of
effecting a crisis that Guinness’s own blindness and stupidity had
made inevitable. He had been, in Aristotelian terms, merely the
efficient cause, and even that, if under the circumstances the word
was not wholly out of place, innocently. What sort of person, under
the circumstances, would want to do a number on poor little
innocent Vlasov? Who else but a total, irredeemable shit?

So why not just pack up and go home? There
would be a train back to Rome in the morning, so why the hell
not?

No, he couldn’t do that; he had taken the
job, and now he had to see that it got done. It was perhaps only a
point of professional pride, and at the moment that was the only
kind of pride he seemed capable of summoning up. It would just have
to do.

The train didn’t reach Florence until the
middle of the afternoon, so Vlasov and his outrageous insult to the
integrity of British espionage would just have to wait until the
following day. Guinness caught a bus to his hotel—the Astoria, if
you can believe it—and, having tipped the bellman to take his
suitcase up to his room, went into the tiny dining room for
dinner.

Except for the necessity of evading the
waiter’s persistent attempts to sell him, at a ridiculous figure,
an incredibly vulgar set of brass and enamel salt and pepper
shakers, it would have been a pleasant meal. He had a table near
the door to the patio, and after a couple of glasses of wine he was
ready for bed.

He left an early wake up call, and by five
the next morning was dressed and tapping cautiously on the
windshield of the only taxi he could find parked anywhere near the
entrance of the hotel. The driver, a man of heroic paunch and
mustaches, was asleep behind his wheel, and Guinness would have
preferred to awaken him into a good mood.

But, alas, it was not fated to be. When
finally the man opened one eye, he yawned widely, scratched himself
on the breastbone, and with his thumb made a brusque movement in
the direction of the rear seat. Guinness handed him a slip of paper
upon which he had written out an address, and they were off.

The address was for a house which, as it
turned out, did actually exist. The street was in a fairly
expensive but sparsely developed part of a suburb called Fiesole,
but Guinness had picked the number at random. Fiesole went up the
side of a hill that overlooked the city, and from the top Florence
looked like a relief map of itself. You could see the Arno winding
through town, with the grim tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and the
great dome of the cathedral, its bricky redness obscured in the
pale gray of predawn, dominating everything. It was quite a
view.

Vlasov lived in Fiesole, about a third of the
way down the eastern slope of the hill.

Picking a spot well away from the main road,
in a field of dried grass, Guinness sat down under a huge oak, the
shade of which would provide ideal cover, to wait. Vlasov’s house
was close to half a mile away but perfectly visible, and he wanted
to begin clocking the man’s routine.

If someone did the same thing at the same
time three days running, chances were he would do it again on the
fourth—and that was when you could hit him. The pattern was
important, because if he varied it, and you screwed up as a result,
he’d know he was being hunted. You had to know what the bastard was
going to do. You had to know so you could be ready for him.

As he sat with his back resting against the
tree trunk, looking at Vlasov’s house, Guinness could scarcely
credit his luck. The place was perfect; he couldn’t have asked for
more. A good two hundred yards from its nearest neighbor, it was a
two story affair with most of the windows facing off the second
floor, so there wouldn’t be much difficulty about approaching it
unseen. There was a small L-shaped garden behind and on the far
side, and, on the near side, screened from view by a row of low
trees, an open carport. The carport was really intriguing.

At a quarter to seven, Vlasov came out of the
house through the front door and went around to the carport, where
for a few seconds he disappeared from view. Then a dark blue sedan
of some make Guinness had never seen before nosed onto the roadway
and started on down the hill. Guinness stood up to follow the car
with his eyes until it was swallowed up in the outskirts of
Florence. Vlasov was on his way to work at an office which,
according to the work sheet Guinness had read in London, occupied
the third floor of a tiny building over the river, just two blocks
or so down from the Ponte Vecchio. After a few minutes, Guinness
started working his way down to the main road to catch a bus back
into town.

For three days, and at as great a remove as
he could manage, Guinness kept track of Vlasov’s movements. He
turned out to be a man of the most regular habits, driving to his
office every day at the same time, working there until noon, eating
lunch every day in the same restaurant off the Piazza della
Repubblica, returning to his office at a quarter to one, staying
there until he drove home again at five thirty-five. He never went
out at night, although sometimes Guinness would catch a glimpse of
him moving around in his garden. The lights went off in his bedroom
every night at ten minutes to eleven.

Clearly, the house was the best place for a
touch. It was isolated and provided maximum freedom from
interference, and it wouldn’t be crawling with cops within ten
seconds of the first loud noise. The problems of trying to do it in
the city, with its warren of little streets, were just too complex
to bother with.

And Vlasov’s area of maximum vulnerability in
the house was clearly the carport. It was perfect, screened from
view and yet accessible and out of doors; when he had a chance,
Guinness always preferred to work out of doors.

There were only two practical ways of doing
it in the carport: he could just wait there for the guy and plug
him, or he could wire the car. What with the hilltop winds, trying
to pick anybody off at several hundred yards with a rifle was a
pretty poor bet. And Guinness didn’t much relish the idea of
hanging around in that carport for two or three hours with a
pistol, so it would have to be the car. Besides, McKendrick had
specified that he wanted something dramatic.

That night Guinness broke into the supply
shack of a construction site he had spotted near the railway
station and stole two sticks of dynamite, some wire, and a couple
of blasting caps.

The fourth morning found Guinness again
sitting under his oak tree, this time with a pair of field glasses
he had picked up in a camera shop the afternoon before. He was
nervous as hell about this one—perhaps he was cracking up at last,
just coming apart at the seams; and when it was over, MI-6 would
gather him up and stash him in a nice, restful loony bin somewhere
up in the Orkney Islands, where he could wear out the rest of his
life making paper dolls.

Anyway, he didn’t want to miss anything; he
wanted to make sure everything worked according to plan. Although
he had gone through the usual training in explosives, it was the
first time he had ever used any—somehow the idea of all that fuss
and noise, the randomness of it, violated his aesthetic sense.

Dynamite, though, was supposed to be pretty
reliable, and presumably two sticks would do the job. They were
taped right up under the driver’s seat cushion, with the wires
running under the floor mats and the upholstery into the instrument
panel. He hoped to hell everything was hooked up right.