The Summer Soldier (33 page)

But Vlasov wouldn’t know that. Would he think
that he was the only one with a score to settle? Hadn’t Guinness
told him that that kind of nonsense was for suckers?

Screw it. It would have to wait, Guinness
thought to himself. He could sort it all out once his head was off
the block. Now was the time to concentrate on staying alive.

Every once in a while, not more than three
times in an hour, Vlasov’s shoulder would move in the darkness.
Usually up and then down again, as if he might be getting ready to
leave the protection of his hiding place and go on the prowl. And
every time, Guinness felt his insides turning into ice water.

He wondered sometimes what must have been
going through the poor bastard’s mind, but that was something else
that could wait. Tomorrow, if he lived, he could feel all the
compassion in the world, but not now. Tomorrow he could yield
himself to wave upon wave of sad and sentimental regret, he could
rage at life’s injustice and the fatal coils of the gods, but it
would have to wait until tomorrow.

Right now he had to want to kill Misha
Fedorovich Vlasov. He didn’t have to hate the guy’s guts—excesses
of that sort can get in the way too. It would be enough simply not
to like him very much.

Guinness thought perhaps, for now, he could
manage that.

Finally, at a quarter to five, only an hour
or so before the sky would lighten enough to let you make out the
line of the horizon, at what he must have judged to be the very
last allowable minute, Vlasov began to stir. Keeping his back
against a tree, he edged himself up very slowly into a standing
position.

He took his time, peering cautiously into the
darkness behind and to either side of him. For a long moment he
stared right at the spot where Guinness lay hidden, but then he
turned away.

When apparently he was satisfied, he cleaned
his glasses with a handkerchief drawn from somewhere Guinness
couldn’t see and pressed them back on the bridge of his nose with a
delicate gesture of his middle finger. Grace under pressure.

Now Vlasov would have to come down into the
grove, away from the flood lamps, down where he would have little
to shoot at except sounds. And perhaps a little less cautious than
he might be, knowing that the dawn was coming and his one chance
was slipping through his fingers.

Guinness waited until Vlasov’s back was
turned and then pulled himself up as quickly as he dared. Crablike,
he made his way down the sloping ground. Knowing that Vlasov would
come down and then begin working his way to the right, since there
would be nowhere else to go except out onto the grass, he went that
way too. Eventually, Vlasov would come within range, and then they
would both see what would happen next.

The spot he settled on was about fifteen feet
above a natural trail that in this dark Vlasov would almost have to
follow. There was a good sized tree for cover, and he would have
the advantage of the slope.

A few minutes later Vlasov came. Guinness
couldn’t bring himself even to breathe. It seemed forever before
Vlasov came even with where he was waiting—and then a little
further, just a little. Just enough that Vlasov would have him at
his back.

It was a distance a running man could cover
in only a few steps: not more than about twenty feet. He hadn’t
gone five before he knew that Vlasov was beginning to turn. In what
seemed like slow motion, Vlasov’s right elbow began to come out
from his body and he began to step backward with his right foot.
They were no more than six or seven feet apart when Guinness could
see the gun. It circled around on the end of Vlasov’s arm, as the
arm seemed to turn faster than the body. And then it fired.

21

The spring semester had ended and summer
school wasn’t scheduled to begin for another week, so there were no
students on campus. Even at the multilevel parking structure where
Ernest Tuttle left his car there was no one in the booth to give
him a ticket with his entrance time stamped on the back or to
collect his money when he would be ready to leave. Having been out
of college long enough to have lost touch with the life cycle that
begins in September and ends in June, he was a little
surprised.

From the central quad he looked around at the
buildings, mostly flat roofed and modern, with brick facades and
tiny oblong windows that made you think of the arrow slits in
medieval castles, and wondered which of them was likely to be the
Humanities Building and what could have gotten into a man like
Raymond Guinness to have made him want to bury himself in a dump
like this.

He shrugged imperceptibly and wandered over
to a soft drink machine jammed in under the outside staircase of a
thing called McCoy Engineering Hall, and for thirty-five cents he
bought a can of Sprite. Lunch had consisted of two tacos and a cup
of black coffee, and it had left him thirsty.

After the first swallow, he made a face and
dropped the can into an adjacent trash barrel; the stuff was flat.
Well, that figured.

Tuttle was a practical sort of man; he did
not believe in astrological signs, tea leaves, pyramid power, or
the efficacy of consulting one’s biorhythms. Things had simply not
been going his way of late, that was all. A string of lousy luck
that was bound shortly to reach its end.

In a year or two, with just a few decent
breaks, he might be all finished with this back alley stuff and
have himself a nice, safe desk job in the planning end of things,
possibly even a regional directorship. It wasn’t unimaginable.

Over the last three or four years, and
especially after a nasty screw up in Vienna, after which he had
spent ten weeks in the hospital having shrapnel fragments pulled
out of his legs, he had come to see that there was no percentage in
fieldwork. How many guys did he know who were doing that kind stuff
and had made it to fifty? How many did he know who were dead or
basket cases in some veterans hospital somewhere? If you were
smart, you got out while there was still time and lined yourself up
a soft spot in administration, where you could go home at five
o’clock and not worry that some clown might be waiting around the
next corner to shoot your ass off.

And he could do it, too. He had a good record
and his papers were on the coordinator’s desk this very minute. If
everything had gone precisely as planned on the Vlasov caper, he
might have been on his way home right now, with a month’s extra
leave in front of him and his own little gig going right in the
Washington office the first Monday back. As it was. . .

Damn California, land of the crazies. Go to
the best seafood restaurant in San Francisco and you couldn’t get
soft shell clams for love nor money. He wouldn’t be sorry to leave;
there seemed to be something in the climate that turned people off
their heads.

If he could have come back with Guinness on a
silver platter, they would have been ready to give him the world,
and he had halfway promised Prescott in Operations. A shooter of
that standing was hard to come by.

But so far Guinness was being very
unreasonable.

To give him his due, though, in points of
technique he was as reliable as a Swiss watch. Tuttle had to admit
that the man knew what he was up to, even if he did make everybody
around him jump through hoops. This latest thing had been
beautiful, like he had never been away.

It was all a question of velocity and impact,
as if they had been weights colliding in a vacuum, and not men. How
far apart had they been when Vlasov fired? A yard, perhaps two—and
Guinness closing fast. He might not ever have seen the flash, let
alone felt anything. Anything less than a clean kill—the heart or
the brain—would not have mattered. There would have been no time
for a second try.

He had grabbed Vlasov’s arm, just above the
elbow, using his grip to pull himself in even faster and to keep
the gun away from him, punching out with his right hand into the
man’s thorax. That was when he felt it for the first time, the
terrible scorched wrenching, as if every sinew in his arm were
being torn loose. The pain shot through him, through the whole
length of his body, it seemed; but by then Vlasov was already
stunned and helpless.

They went over together, tumbling and rolling
down the gentle slope, further and further into the darkness.
Guinness contrived to bring his knee up so that it came down into
Vlasov’s solar plexus the first time they made contact with the
ground, and then his own momentum pitched him free. He managed one
turn on his shoulder, trying to protect the injured arm, and then
landed on his back with a shock. It was a second or two before he
was sure he could still move.

Then came a moment, only a flicker, of blind
panic.

What about Vlasov? Where was he, the bastard?
That gun, that damned gun.

But no problem. The gun hadn’t landed two
feet from Vlasov’s right side, but he couldn’t have picked it up,
couldn’t have squeezed the trigger if it had been lying in the palm
of his hand. He was too busy dying.

Guinness brought himself up to where he was
resting on his knees and looked at the dim outline of his enemy,
knowing that it was over, that he had won, Vlasov lay on his back,
his hands down at his sides as they trembled mechanically against
his trouser legs. He seemed to be concentrating every shred of his
will on trying to breathe, but he couldn’t—the only sound he made
was the gurgle from his smashed windpipe as he suffocated in his
own blood. It was over for him. Without the glasses—they had been
lost somewhere in all that bouncing around; Guinness would have to
find them—his was already the face of a corpse.

Just to be on the safe side, Guinness picked
up the gun: a nasty little thing but of small caliber, which was a
blessing. In a minute or two he would take a look at how much
damage it had done and then decide if he was likely to live or not,
but just then the question didn’t strike him as very interesting.
All that seemed permanently important was that Vlasov was
dying.

And he was taking his time, the poor bastard.
He might be getting a little air, just enough to draw the process
out another fifteen or twenty minutes; he might be at it for
another half hour. It probably wasn’t much fun.

Guinness brought the gun to level, resting
the muzzle directly against Vlasov’s temple—Vlasov didn’t seem to
notice—and then thought better of it. No bullet holes. Just in case
something went wrong, just in case the disposal people messed up
and Vlasov somehow managed to become police property, there
couldn’t be any bullet holes. Nothing absolutely inconsistent with
accidental death.

And besides, guns make noise.

Until they were hanged for it in 1829, an
enterprising pair of hoodlums named Burke and Hare had kept the
medical school at Edinburgh supplied with fresh cadavers, no
questions asked. They had developed a technique: finding a vagrant
in the streets at night, then covering the mouth with the palm of
the hand and pinching off the nose between first finger and thumb.
It left no mark, no sign of violence.

Guinness wiped his hand on the front of his
shirt and then covered Vlasov’s face with it. Vlasov didn’t even
struggle, never lifted his hands, never tried to twist away—perhaps
he was already unconscious; perhaps he had simply stopped caring.
After three or four minutes, when he pressed his thumb against the
side of Vlasov’s neck, there was no heartbeat, and Guinness gently
closed the blind eyes. The war between them was over; they would
both simply have to be satisfied with the result. The night had
suddenly become very cold, and haunted with the spirits of the
restless dead.

On the fourth morning after Guinness’s
disappearance, the phone in Tuttle’s motel room in Belmont rang,
waking him up. The message had been brief and very much to the
point: “That package in which you were interested is buried under a
pile of branches in Griffith Park. Take the main road in about a
half mile past the merry go round, then get out of your car and
head into the trees on your left. About fifty yards should do it.
It won’t stay hidden forever, so I wouldn’t linger.”

Tuttle was scribbling furiously. “Where the
hell is Griffith Park? Listen, Guinness, are you okay?”

“Los Angeles, stupid. And I’ll live. I’m
coming home this evening. When I get back to my hotel room, I plan
to have about three drinks more than is good for me and then go to
bed, and I’ll be very angry if at any point along the way I’m
arrested. So that gives you the rest of today to do your little
number with the cops. Any trouble, and all bets are off.”

Then the line went dead.

Tuttle didn’t like it, not at all. The man
sounded very ragged, like maybe the first badge that came near him
might just get itself blown away. Guinness didn’t strike him as the
type to make idle threats.

Tuttle frowned and replaced the receiver. Ten
minutes later he was dressed and standing in a phone booth next to
the entrance of a Safeway—which, except for the neon tubes in the
dairy cases, was still dark inside—dialing a number you simply
didn’t call from your motel room. It wasn’t done.

The phone at the other end rang only once
before Tuttle heard the familiar voice of a middle aged woman whom
he had never seen and probably never would.

“Yes?”

They ran through the current security
procedure and then Tuttle gave his instructions for having Vlasov’s
body retrieved. Whoever was sent was to keep his eyes open and call
back between twelve and one that afternoon with a quality report.
Tuttle would be in his room.

What he heard had scared the hell out of
him.

“We borrowed a station wagon from the City
Recreation Service and got there a little after ten. You should
have seen the joint—we almost decided that we had better forget the
whole thing and wait for dark.