The Summer Soldier (32 page)

Very slowly, he brought his left hand up to
the side of his face and scratched the bottom edge of his sideburn
with the nail of his little finger. It was a gesture he had seen
Byron Down make perhaps a hundred times, and with Byron it always
suggested the same refusal to be intimidated, to grant something
too much importance.

“You refer to the ladies? Vlasov, you
shouldn’t be so sentimental—it impairs the judgment.”

“Let us say, rather, that it provides a
motive.” Again Vlasov let his cigarette drop to the asphalt and
stamped it out. His hand felt at his breast pocket for a moment and
then dropped to his lap when, apparently, he remembered that the
pack had been empty and he had thrown it away. “We have each
suffered an injury that demands retribution. For each of us, then,
revenge is a duty we owe to the dead and to ourselves. It is a
categorical imperative.”

From the tone it was impossible to tell
whether he was serious or joking. Another man would have been
joking—would have had to have been. The whole idea was so unreal.
People in their line of work simply didn’t steer by those kinds of
coordinates. A categorical imperative, Jesus. It took a few seconds
before Guinness could even remember what a categorical imperative
was.

Yet it never crossed his mind that Vlasov
could be anything except serious, and in that seriousness Guinness
saw his chance.

He let his hand drop back down to his side.
Vlasov didn’t start, which was a good sign. Apparently there were
some things he was concentrating on harder than he was on staying
alive.

“Well, if you feel that way, it seems like
you’ve caused everybody a lot of unnecessary trouble. Why couldn’t
you have just stayed home in Moscow and blown your brains out there
without inconveniencing anybody?”

Vlasov didn’t reply. In fact, for a long
moment he didn’t do anything, didn’t even move. Which, by itself,
was reply enough. Guinness was pretty sure he had hit a nerve.

“That’s right, isn’t it, Vlasov? I wasn’t
sure before, not dead sure, but I am now—all this about how bad you
want to do a number on me is just so much self hypnotizing
horseshit, isn’t it? Hell, you’ve had a dozen chances at me, but
I’m not what you’re really after, not really. I’m just part of the
mechanism. You go through the motions, but what you really want is
for me, or somebody—anybody, really—to cancel your ticket for you
and take away all the pain. Isn’t that right, pal?”

Still, Vlasov did not move. And yet, without
changing, his whole carriage seemed to have undergone some subtle
change. As if in not moving he had lost the capacity to move. There
was about him a tension, a terrible rigidity, as if he were frozen
in place.

Then, slowly, he began to shake his head. And
the borrowed light from his spectacle lenses flashed off and on
like the warning signals from an oncoming train.

“No,” he said finally, almost to himself.
“No, it was by your hand, not mine.” He raised his bent arm
slightly from his lap, and the hand closed into a fist. Perhaps he
had wanted to point an accusation, but the fingers, in their
individual wrath, refused to open. It seemed so.

Then he allowed the arm to sink back down
into his lap, and he raised his head. The voice, when it came, was
hoarse with almost overmastering emotion, and the words seemed
directed at no one at all.

“It was you. She was. . .”

With the clarity of an hallucination,
Guinness suddenly could remember pulling away the sheet that had
covered Louise’s face. He could remember the way her eyes had been
half open, and the smell of her burnt hair. It was, at that moment,
a sustaining memory.

“Sure, Misha. It was me. I killed her. I
wired the dynamite to your ignition switch; I did that. But who put
her in the car, Misha? Who handed her in like she was Cinderella
going for a little ride in her magic pumpkin? Who married her, hey,
babe? And put her right square in the line of fire. Who did that to
her, hey, sweetheart?”

By the end, he was shouting. It was all
supposed to be calculated; just a technique, like the tongue
lashings he would sometimes give his classes of freshmen when too
many of them were late with their homework. But by the end he was
seething with a hatred that seemed born out of more grief than just
his own. It was just crazy. And then Vlasov was shouting too.

“You did this,” he half sobbed, his fist,
still apparently not able to unclench, shaking in the air. “You
murdered her. She never harmed a living thing, she would never. . .
and you murdered her. My wife, my wife.” And before his, Guinness’s
wrath evaporated.

“No, you poor silly bastard, you did it
yourself. It was my own wife that I murdered, but that’s my
problem.

“Don’t you see, even now? Wives and clear
consciences and the right to call ourselves human beings, we don’t
have any business with any of them. That’s all for other people,
not for you or me or the rest of our kind; it’s what we gave up our
share in when we went into our line of work.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then
Vlasov’s fingers, where they were resting on his right thigh,
spread slightly. It was probably as close as he would ever come to
a start.

“You are not armed,” he said at last. It was
as much a statement of fact as a discovery, like something at once
a surprise and obvious. Guinness smiled wolfishly.

“That’s right, sucker. I’m not.”

He was already most of the way across the
path before he saw Vlasov’s hand begin to drop down for his gun.
The shot, when it came, was already perhaps as much as a half
second too late and smacked harmlessly into the trunk of a
eucalyptus tree.

Two hundred yards through the fucking trees,
downhill and in the dark. Twice he caught his foot on something and
pitched over like a drunk in a vaudeville skit, but with all the
bobbing and weaving he was up to, he was probably lucky he didn’t
plow straight on into a nice, solid, foot and a half thick trunk
and knock himself cold. The gods were with him, at least so
far.

Finally he threw himself down and listened.
Not a sound. Not enough light to zip your fly by. Vlasov hadn’t
come after him.

But then, of course, Vlasov wouldn’t. Not a
dumb thing like that. You do not come charging after a man like
that, not through a forest, not in the pitch black, gun or no gun.
If you use a light, he can find you easier than you can find him;
and if you don’t, what the hell good is the gun? No, Vlasov might
be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He would find himself a spot
somewhere just out of the light and he would settle down to see
what happened. It was what Guinness himself would have done.

Or maybe not. Maybe Guinness would have just
decided that the moment was not propitious and would have gotten
the hell out of there. Would that be what Vlasov would do? After
all, the man wasn’t stupid.

But he was crazy. And at that moment, crazy
mad. Mad like a swarm of bees. He had been teased into a rage by
the man who had killed his wife, who had burned her to a cinder
right in front of his eyes. He had built his life around his
revenge, and no way in the world was he going anywhere until he had
had himself the satisfaction of cutting Guinness into inch wide
strips with a dull knife.

And that was his weakness, the poor tormented
son of a bitch. That was his one weakness.

But in the meantime, he had the gun. One must
not forget the gun. Guinness brought himself up to a low crouch,
his eyes nervously searching for a point of light among the trees.
There was none. No light, no sound, nothing. Pity, he almost might
have preferred it if Vlasov had just charged in after him, hardware
blazing. It would, at least, have settled everything.

But no. Vlasov had fired once, and he
couldn’t afford to fire again unless he had Guinness in his sights.
One shot, two maybe, you could get away with; but make it sound
like the battle of Culloden and somebody sitting on his back porch
three quarters of a mile off is going to phone the cops.

“Hey, them kids is at it agin over thar in
th’ park,” and in ten minutes a couple of squad cars would be
nosing in through the main gate.

No, Vlasov wouldn’t want to be disturbed
before he had his business finished, so he could be counted on to
be careful about how he popped off his little hand cannon. There
might be some small comfort to be drawn from that.

This wasn’t really an OK Corral type
situation, which was another part of the reason Guinness had left
his arsenal under the mattress in his motel room. That and the fact
that Tuttle and his people had specified that they wanted Vlasov to
just disappear from the face of the earth. It’s no cinch to dispose
of a body with several large, conspicuous bullet holes in it.

Slowly, Guinness began to make his circling
way through the trees. With the merry go round as the center, he
wanted to make as big a sweep as he could in hopes of finding out
where Vlasov was laying for him. He went counterclockwise to keep
from running into the road—try to get across that open space and
you would probably end up a dead man.

The grove, so far as he could figure, was
spread out like a fan, covering perhaps two hundred degrees of the
circle, and Vlasov would be in there somewhere. He would want the
cover too; and on the other side was a picnic area, with nothing
but a lot of two inch high grass you couldn’t have hidden a
grapefruit in.

The grove and the merry go round, then, were
to be their little theater of operations, in some dark corner of
which friend Vlasov would be sitting on his heels and waiting for
his chance. He would stay put for the time being, until he got
restless, hoping for Guinness to come wandering into range.

It was with some satisfaction that Guinness
remembered having read somewhere that eucalyptus trees were
evergreens. He did not, therefore, have to contend with a two inch
carpet of dead, brittle leaves. The ground was reasonably soft, in
fact, and if you paid attention to staying clear of the occasional
tangles of fallen branches, you could move around quietly enough. A
breath of wind to provide a little cover noise would have been
nice, but you can’t have everything.

As it was, it took him a little over forty
minutes to find where Vlasov was laying in wait.

He had picked himself a pretty good spot, but
then he would pick himself a pretty good spot—the KGB didn’t make
you a full colonel for standing around with your thumb in your
mouth. It was about sixty feet down a slope from the merry go
round, just beyond the penumbra from the flood lamps, so he had
plenty of shadow to hide in and the light was close enough to give
him something to shoot by. There were large tree trunks just behind
him and to the right, and that particular area happened to be very
bushy. It was a very good spot. Guinness might have stumbled right
up to him if Vlasov hadn’t just happened to have picked that moment
to move, and if his glasses hadn’t picked up and reflected a faint
twinkle of light. Probably after all this time crouched over like a
back alley crap shooter, his legs were beginning to give him
trouble.

The two of them were perhaps as much as fifty
yards apart, and all Guinness had to do if he wanted to bring on
Armageddon was to step on a dead branch. It might as well have been
fifty miles.

Well, that was hardly a big surprise. It’s
only in the movies that you can sneak all the way up on the guy
who’s waiting in ambush for you—not unless he happens to be deaf,
dumb, and blind.

There was nothing for Guinness to do but make
himself comfortable, because it was going to be a long wait. Close
at hand was a large rock, approximately the size and shape of a
beer keg that had been tipped over on its side and gotten itself
half buried, and one end of it was about four inches from the trunk
of a tree that probably you couldn’t have closed your arms around.
Guinness lay down behind them, resting his head on his crossed
forearms so that he could look out through the gap between. From
there he could just make out the corner of Vlasov’s left
shoulder.

Time. It was close to one in the morning, and
time was on Guinness’s side. If your primary interest in
enterprises of this kind is simply to stay alive, then you can
always wait. But Vlasov was less interested in surviving than in
revenge, so time was against him. Eventually, the high school
dropouts and the winos and the bored, dispirited mothers with their
five year olds would be back. Someone would come to turn on the
merry go round and collect the tickets from the people who wanted
to ride on the unicorns and the pink swans. And long before any of
that happened, Vlasov would have to have his business settled. He
had lost now whatever advantage he had enjoyed from being the
hunter. Who could tell—if he walked out of here alone in the
morning, the job undone, what would keep Guinness from starting to
shadow him? One anonymous phone call to the local Russian consulate
and Vlasov would never make it to dinnertime.

So it was now or never. This was his last
chance, and Vlasov would know it.

He would assume, of course, that Guinness was
out there somewhere, looking for him. Guinness wouldn’t have come,
wouldn’t have exposed himself like that, just to go skipping off
again into the darkness.

But could he count on that? Might not
Guinness just leave, and then make his call? Wasn’t it just
possible? And that would put Vlasov in a box.

The thought would have occurred to him, and
eventually he would leave his little nest and go looking for
Guinness. He would have to, just to find out. He would have to know
for sure, no matter what the risks.

Of course, Guinness would never leave it to
another man to pull Vlasov’s chain for him. The hell with the
Russians, and for that matter with Ernie Tuttle; it had to be
something he did himself or nothing would make any sense at all, as
if it ever had.