The Summer Soldier (26 page)

“Right. When were you planning to stop for
lunch?” Somehow the planes of light shifted slightly in Pfeifer’s
face, as if a new possibility had just opened for him. He seemed to
make a deliberate effort at unhardening a little. But just a
little. “I guess around Monterey sometime. Sure, you hungry?” With
his free hand he stroked his chin whiskers. Somehow it wasn’t a
reassuring gesture.

“Not now, but I will be by then.” Pfeifer
only nodded and gestured toward the inside of the camper. Guinness
took the hint, and they were on their way.

Once the truck was back on the highway,
Guinness lay down again. He closed his eyes and laughed quietly to
himself, thinking how upset old supercautious Boyd would be if he
had any idea who might actually be trailing along behind them.
Lucky little Boyd, all he was worried about was the police.

And, of course, Vlasov would be back there
somewhere. A man who can track you all the way from Italy to
California isn’t likely to screw up between San Francisco and Los
Angeles, not bloody likely. Not after seven years of finding his
way from one shadowy little fragment of information to the next,
sifting through them until they all added up to the same thing.
Guinness tried to remember every slip he had ever made, everything
that might conceivably have ended up in a KGB dossier somewhere.
There couldn’t have been many.

Then of course there was the cap on the
bottle—it was obvious enough how Vlasov had managed that.

The name. Once he had had Guinness’s name it
would have been easy. In all those years of working for the British
there had been two rules upon which Guinness had insisted: he had
never allowed himself to be fingerprinted, never once in his life
(the only ones on record anywhere would have been those at the
police station in Belgrade) and he had never done a caper while
traveling under his own name. Byron had made quite sure that the
name had remained a secret.

Just to satisfy his own morbid curiosity,
Guinness would have given something to have known for how much
McKendrick had betrayed him. Probably not very much. Perhaps only
the right to broker Vlasov’s defection to the Americans.

“Certainly, if you want him he’s yours. He
buggered out on us, you know; so you can kill him with our
blessing.”

McKendrick had always hated his guts, even
more than he had hated Vlasov’s. And after Florence, Vlasov had
probably ceased to be a major direct irritant.

It had to have been McKendrick. Sooner or
later Vlasov’s inquiries would have led him in that direction, and
from McKendrick’s point of view nothing could have been tidier than
the deal Vlasov would have been ready to offer. Selling out
Guinness would have been no skin off his ass, and God only knew how
many debts to Uncle Sam he must have cleared by offering a prize
like Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. It would have been irresistible.

So Vlasov was back there somewhere, bouncing
along down Highway 1. So what? Vlasov would keep.

Guinness had by now become attuned to the
erratic rhythm of the truck’s bouncing and no longer felt sick to
his stomach, which meant, he supposed, that you could get used to
anything. It was a thought worth keeping in mind.

After a couple of hours, he could feel the
truck slowing down and turning off the road. When it came to a
stop, the door opened and Pfeifer stuck his head in.

“We got a Burger King here,” he said, without
noticeable enthusiasm. “What ’ll it be?” Guinness ordered a
cheeseburger with fries and a 7-Up, if they had one. After a
shorter time than one would have imagined possible, the camper door
reopened and a white paper bag was set down on the floor. “You want
to pay for that?”

Two dollar bills were produced and the door
closed again without the subject of Guinness’s change even so much
as coming up. The truck was moving again before he had had a chance
to open up the bag.

He sat on the cot to eat, bracing both feet
up against the edge of the other cot and his back against the wall
behind him. Plastic top or no, he didn’t care to set the waxed
paper cup down, so he had to keep putting his cheeseburger back
into the bag every time he wanted a French fry; it was rather like
trying to extract your door key from an inside pocket when both
your arms are full of grocery bags. But after all, you couldn’t
very well expect table service with a wine steward wearing white
gloves.

It wasn’t more than two or three minutes
before he began to notice it, and then it came on very fast. His
arms, his legs, and his tongue all started at once to feel as if
they were doubling in size every five seconds, and he stared down
at his cheeseburger and his cup of 7-Up, looking stupidly from one
to the other, wondering which of them the creep had doped up, and
what he could have used. Have it your way.

Jesus, how could he have been so fucking
stupid? It was such an obvious move—he must really be deteriorating
in his old age. And by a flake like Boyd.

He tried to stand up, not knowing precisely
what he would have done if he had made it. Anyway, he didn’t; his
knees buckled under him before he could even straighten up out of
his crouch. On the way down he hit his head against the metal edge
of one of the cots—he couldn’t seem to decide which one—but the
blow didn’t quite manage to put him out. He made one more attempt
to get to his feet, then said to hell with it and let
unconsciousness come down on him like a broken wall.

16

Guinness was still lying on the camper floor
when he woke up. The first thing he discovered was that his hands
were tied behind his back, and the second that his right eye
wouldn’t open. Apparently, the blood from where the edge of the cot
had cut his forehead had run down his temple and formed a crust
over his eyelid. With a few seconds of frantic winking, however, he
managed to work his lashes free, and finally to make the eye
functional again.

The third thing he discovered was that he had
a crashing headache, but that wasn’t until he tried to move. He
wondered whether it was from the crack on his head or a hangover
from the knockout drops Pfeifer had put into his cheeseburger. He
was reasonably certain it had been the cheeseburger—all that
ketchup and pickle relish would have masked the taste of snail
poison. Jesus, his head felt like it was full of rusty tacks.

A little feeling around his wrists with the
tips of his fingers suggested that friend Boyd had trussed him up
with cotton clothesline. That was a break; the knots would be large
enough for him to have a chance of working loose.

Slowly, so as to keep himself from shattering
like glass, he worked himself up into a sitting position. The truck
was stopped, fortunately, and the door to the camper was open. When
he had turned himself around enough to look out through it, he
could see Pfeifer sitting on a fallen log about twenty yards
distant, looking through what appeared to be the contents of
Guinness’s wallet. The guy displayed all the self possession of a
park bear leisurely poking around inside an expropriated picnic
hamper.

Apparently, they were parked in the middle of
a red¬ wood forest somewhere. The only sound was the faint stirring
of a breeze in the treetops—there probably wasn’t another soul for
five miles in any direction.

“You find what you were looking for?”

Guinness had tried to shout, but it came out
as not much more than a reedy whisper. He sat down in the open
doorway of the camper, swinging his legs over the edge as he tried
to catch some air in his lungs. How far had he come, two yards? It
felt like two laps of the Santa Catalina channel. He Was going to
have to rest up some before he would be in any shape for coming to
terms with Mrs. Pfeifer’s cherubic man child.

As it turned out, though, he had only about
half a minute’s grace before Pfeifer crossed the distance between
log and camper, took a handful of Guinness’s coat lapel, and jerked
him loose from his perch on the doorsill. The ground came up and
smacked him painfully in the right shoulder, barely giving him time
to develop enough turn to land rolling and with his collarbone
intact. No, he and Boyd were just not going to hit it off.

Standing over him, Pfeifer was holding up in
his right hand several small slips of paper. Guinness shook his
head a couple of times to bring them into focus: They were the
cards from his wallet.

“I never hearda nobody that had two social
security cards.” As it usually did with his type, having the upper
hand had thickened Pfeifer’s hillbilly accent. He was crouched down
so that his face was about two feet directly over Guinness’s.
“Course, you got two o’ everthing, don’tcha.” He held up the two
driver’s licenses, both of which displayed the same photograph, so
that Guinness could see them. “Lickweather ’r Guinness—which is it,
sport?”

“Linkweather.” Guinness spat out the first
syllable as if he didn’t like the taste of it. Certainly he didn’t
like the taste of whatever had been in there with the Bermuda
onion; it was as if something had crawled inside his mouth to die.
He hoped to hell he was reading his guy right.

He was, at least so far. Pfeifer’s mouth
opened into a cruel grin, displaying widely spaced teeth as square
as bathroom tiles.

“Okay, Mr. Lickweather. Whatever you say.”
Once again he took hold of Guinness’s lapel, this time pulling him
up into a sitting position before he sat down himself in the now
unoccupied camper doorway. “You wanna tell me who y’r runnin’ away
from? Come on now, don’t be shy.”

Guinness glanced down quickly at his knees,
giving it his best shot at looking cowardly and indecisive. Under
the circumstances, it wasn’t really very difficult; there is
something profoundly unsettling about trying to provoke a man into
kicking hell out of you, especially when you have your hands tied
behind you.

“Suppose I decide not to,” he ventured, after
what felt like an appropriate delay. As with every illusion, if you
want them to think you’re bluffing, the timing is crucial.

His head cocked slightly to one side, Pfeifer
made a number of disapproving little clicking sounds with his
tongue as he hopped down from the camper. Guinness, who had managed
to work himself around to a kneeling position, tried to prepare
himself for what was coming.

The kick caught him just a little below the
solar plexus, but by tightening his stomach muscles and turning
enough aside at the last second, so that the blow glanced off at a
slight angle, he contrived to keep at least some of the air under
his ribs. It was a good kick, however, and several seconds passed
before Guinness stopped making funny little grunting noises and
could remember what it felt like to be able to breathe.

God damn the bastard. Damn—damn the son of a
bitch.

It would just have to be with a pair of
cowboy boots, wouldn’t it? And ones with pointed toes. Never once
sometime could it be maybe just tennis shoes or something. Just for
variety.

Well, what else was new. His guts might feel
as if they had been mashed to pulp back against his spinal column,
but otherwise everything was going great.

There is a certain kind of man who never
believes what he hasn’t beaten the shit out of somebody to find
out, and then he’ll believe anything. Absolutely anything. Pfeifer
was pretty clearly of that kind. It might momentarily be a little
rough on the diaphragm, but ultimately it would make everything a
lot simpler. Those kinds of men are generally pretty stupid.

But when the time came, Guinness promised
himself, when the time came. . .

“Look,” he managed, after perhaps three
minutes of concentrated effort, “look, I can’t. Please. They’ll
kill me.”

Pfeifer just smiled. He was having such a
good time. “Well then, Mr. Lickweather, I’m afraid I’ll just have
to settle for what you got in y’r wallet and leave you planted
under one o’ these here big ol’ trees.” Still smiling, he pulled a
familiar looking revolver from the back pocket of his jeans. Then,
using both hands to steady it, he lined up the sights on a spot
just perhaps a quarter of an inch under the bottom inside corner of
Guinness’s left eye.

“Okay.” Guinness had his eyes screwed shut
and had turned his head away, as if trying to avoid the bullet. It
was a realistic performance. He would have believed it himself
except that Pfeifer hadn’t bothered to draw back the hammer,
something almost anybody would do if he really had it in mind to
shoot. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you. Just put that thing away.”

The story also was very good, full of those
specific little details that add such an aura of authenticity. It
seemed that Mr. Linkweather had been, until comparatively recently,
an accountant for certain parties in Portland, Oregon, who
controlled most of that city’s gambling and vice. Mr. Linkweather
had been skimming from the receipts and, when things got warm, had
taken himself off and was now en route to join his mistress and the
rest of his ill gotten gains in one of the Banana Republics.

Really, it was a very good story. It
accounted for everything—the two sets of identification, all the
cash he had on him, the gun. Guinness was very proud of it.

Of course, there was still the drug case,
with its needle and its three little vials of colorless fluid—but
it turned out that Mr. Linkweather was a diabetic.

Friend Boyd bought it, the whole package from
start to finish. Hell, who lies about being a bookkeeper? Guinness
was beginning to experience that delicious feeling of power that
comes when everything falls into place precisely as it should, when
you know, positively know, that your brilliant plan has worked
right down to the tiniest detail.

The poor simple bastard—you could almost hear
the wheels turning as he tried to figure how Mr. Linkweather’s
troubles could be made to pay something. It was going to be such a
pleasure stomping his ass.