The Summer Soldier (8 page)

According to those maps, the city of Hull was
168 miles from the center of London, well within range of a tanked
¬up Jaguar. Wherever else he was going in Yorkshire, Hornbeck
probably wouldn’t feel compelled to buy gas before Hull.

Any time after the Jag’s tank was half empty,
say after a hundred miles or so, all that sawdust floating on the
surface could be expected to begin clogging up the fuel lines.
Guinness would follow along, keeping at a discreet distance, and
wait for that to happen.

At about twenty minutes past four in the
afternoon, Hornbeck’s car pulled past and along the way anyone
would take to connect up with the highways leading north.

Guinness let him establish about a two block
lead and then started squeezing into the flow of cars behind him.
It wasn’t easy. The London rush hour was just beginning in full
earnest and traffic looked like it had been pasted together in
impenetrable walls. It was necessary simply to take it on faith
that Hornbeck was out there in front somewhere.

All the way through the city, just once did
he catch a glimpse of him. The Jag pulled off into the Ealing Road
and was visible for just a second, but that was enough. Hornbeck
was going in the right direction, so it was enough to wait until
they both got clear of this damn jam jar.

In the dark of the turnpikes, as they cut
through mile after mile of the flat British countryside, Guinness
began to worry that something might have gone wrong. He hadn’t seen
the Jag in nearly two hours, not since just after they had cleared
London. What if he had misread everything? What if Hornbeck were
meeting someone well before he got to Yorkshire, or had switched to
another car?

Then there it was, parked outside a roadside
tavern, where Hornbeck had apparently stopped for a little eye
opener. Okay. Let him have it. He hadn’t stopped for gas—Guinness
would have seen him—and it was only a matter of time before his
fuel pump shut off and left him stranded.

It happened in what had to be the world’s
most perfect spot for an assassination. About four miles north of a
little village called Deeping Market, Guinness sighted the car. It
was pulled over on the shoulder of the road with its hood up, and
Hornbeck was standing beside the engine, patting his upper arms to
keep warm. There wasn’t a light on the horizon and not one car in
five minutes on the road. Perfect. You couldn’t ask for more.

Guinness pulled off behind the Jag and
climbed out of his Morris. He was nice and noisy about it, slamming
the door for effect. Everyone automatically trusts a door slammer.
Obviously, a door slammer is a man with nothing to hide.

Everyone, perhaps, except Hornbeck. At
Guinness’s approach his hand went into the pocket of his coat and
his eyes narrowed.

“Can I give you a hand?” Guinness almost
shouted, smiling his best boyish smile. “This is a hell of a place
to be stuck on a winter night.”

You could almost watch the debate going on
behind Hornbeck’s eyes. He needed help or he would never make it to
wherever he was going, but he didn’t like being caught out in the
open like this. For just a second Guinness wondered whether
Hornbeck might not just decide to burn him where he stood and take
off in the Morris. It was a relief when the eyes relaxed and the
hand came back up out of the coat pocket, empty.

“I don’t know what happened. It just died on
me.” The voice was thick and harsh, as if all that nice frosty
night air was beginning to make itself felt. “I don’t know much
about cars.”

Hornbeck smiled suspiciously.

Against his will, Guinness experienced a
surge of compassion for the poor bastard. This was a shitty thing
to do to somebody—it made him feel like a real heel. Here the guy
was, asking for his help. . .

Then he remembered the gun in Hornbeck’s
pocket, and what the major had said about everyone getting full
value, and he decided he had better reserve his finer feelings for
a more appropriate time.

Guinness reached back through the window of
his car to get his little set of crescent wrenches and flashlight
and then walked around to where the other man was standing. He
squatted down and let his light rest on the tiny glass globe that
housed the gas filter. The globe was only about a third full, with
the gas line just at the bottom of the filter.

“Well, there’s your problem. You aren’t
getting any juice. You’ve probably got a bad pump.” He used one of
the wrenches to loosen the induction line, and then went around to
turn the key over. “Is anything coming out?”

Hornbeck shook his head sadly.

Guinness came around again to retighten the
line, going on all the time about how a friend of his had had a lot
of trouble with the fuel pump on his Jaguar, and trying all the
time not to think about the .25 caliber automatic that Hornbeck
doubtless had his thumb on. It wasn’t easy.

“Let’s see what the pump looks like,” he said
brightly.

Guinness unscrewed the little panel in the
right wall of the Jag’s trunk, telling Hornbeck to turn the key
just to see if the pump wouldn’t click on. It didn’t, and as he
flashed his light over it, Guinness could see a particle of sawdust
in one of the lines. That car wasn’t going anywhere.

They fiddled with it for some time. Guinness
banged on the pump with one of his wrenches while Hornbeck worked
the key, and gradually Hornbeck began to defrost. He became more
talkative. He was beginning, without even being aware of it, to
trust the helpful young Yank who seemed to be having such a good
time tinkering with his fuel system. It was a mistake, the mistake
Guinness had been counting on.

“Here, come have a look at this,” Guinness
called out excitedly from the front of the car. “Look at that, that
right there. No, a little further down. That’s it, right there. See
it?”

A week later, staring out of the same tea
shop window at what might have been the same rain, Major Byron J.
Down, who had by then dropped his alias and come at least partially
clean, found it hard to keep a rein on his enthusiasm.

“It was lovely,” he said, his voice low but
fervent as he vigorously stirred sugar into what might have been
the same cup of tea. “You dropped him like a poled ox. The other
side’s Number One iceman for the whole of the British Isles, a man
with twelve confirmed hits on his ticket, knocked over by a
twenty-three year old college boy. Son, you’re a natural, a born
killer. You have found your true vocation, your true self.”

Guinness wondered if he perhaps wasn’t being
put on. No, the guy was serious. It was scary.

“You might have told me who the hell he
was.”

“I might have, but would you have tried it if
you had known?” After a moment of silence, Down turned up his open
palms and smiled. “My point precisely. I’m sorry, son, but we were
in a hole. We needed to get rid of Hornbeck; he was giving all the
nancies in the Foreign Office palpitations, and he was making our
organization look bad. We couldn’t use any of our own
men—Hornbeck’s been around and would have spotted them in a minute.
It was a job for the gifted and lucky amateur.”

There were, of course, still quite a few
things that Down wasn’t being entirely candid about, things
Guinness would eventually figure out for himself, after he had
gotten to know more about how The Business was run.

Such as the fact that Down probably hadn’t
expected him to survive, that he had probably had in mind some sort
of sacrifice play. Probably he had hoped to nail Hornbeck in a nice
legal way for murder, his murder.

Down knew too much. It was almost as if there
had been a tail on Guinness while Guinness was tailing Hornbeck.
Had they been there, watching the whole show from a comfortable
distance, hoping to rush in and catch Hornbeck with his hands
covered in Guinness’s fresh gore?

Well, this didn’t seem a business where you
could afford to resent such things. And, in any case, it hadn’t
worked out that way.

Guinness had stood up slowly while Hornbeck
was still stooped over, trying to see just what it was that was so
interesting under the hood of his car. Guinness came down hard on
the back of Hornbeck’s neck, driving home with the heel of his
fist. It worked in the movies, and it worked then—Hornbeck went
down, after first bringing his head down with a thud on the Jag’s
fender.

But he was still alive; out like a light, but
alive. Guinness put his head on the man’s chest and listened to the
heart beating. After a few panicky seconds of considering what to
do, he took off his coat and pressed it down against Hornbeck’s
nose and mouth. He waited five minutes, the longest five minutes of
his young life, and then once again put his ear down against
Hornbeck’s chest. There was nothing. Hornbeck was dead. Even in the
winter cold he couldn’t bear to put that coat back on. He simply
threw it in the trunk of the Morris and fled. All he wanted in the
world was to get away from there, and in his haste he nearly
collided with a vegetable truck that was carrying a load of
Valencia oranges to the good people of Humberside.

And now the protectors of all things
democratic and humane had arranged his future for him. First he
would be carefully trained—three months at an unspecified location
in Western Scotland to study weapons, tactics, the personnel and
administrative structures of the other side, everything he needed
to convert him into the finely honed instrument of Her Majesty’s
revenge.

And there were other things. A part time job
teaching in a public school in London, a school the headmaster of
which MI-6 had in its pocket. And his employers, the ones who
mattered, could be counted on to be generous, generous and
tolerant. After all, he was a valuable property. And all he had to
do was once in a while a little job of work for Mr. Byron J.
Down.

“You’ll do the work, son. I haven’t a doubt
in the world that you’ll work out just fine. We’re enough alike,
you and I, that I can read you like the lettering on an eye chart,
and this sort of thing is quite your line of country.

“Oh, you’ll spend a few more weeks feeling
sick and shaky over this little episode—it’s always that way with
the first job—and then you’ll be back.”

Down leaned toward him over the table, his
fingers digging into the tablecloth like a hawk’s talons into the
flesh of its victim, and his eyes were round and bright.

“It’s the hunting. Not the killing so much,
even if that is a part of it, but it’s the stalking that takes
possession of you like divine fire and makes you feel like the
master of worlds. You against him, your life measured against his.
It’s what every man on earth was designed specifically to do, and
you more than most. We have you now, boy; you won’t be able to help
yourself. It’s in the blood, you know.”

And he was right, of course.

5

But Creon wasn’t. He wasn’t even close, the
stupid bastard. Down would have loved talking to Creon; he ran so
perfectly to type.

Apparently Down had had a lot of ugly
dealings with the police and had developed, in addition to the
instinctive dislike everyone in the profession entertained for the
cops, rather settled opinions about how they should be handled.

“Basically, they all use the a priori
method,” he would say, comfortably crossing and recrossing his legs
as he sat by a half open window after one of his enormous lunches.
He was always much given to theory during that part of the
afternoon. “What they believe to be true is what you have to worry
about, not what they can prove—after all, what do they care about
proof?

“The policeman will always construct an
initial view of things, sometimes within a few seconds of arriving
on the scene, and the evidence, as it filters through to him, will
be made to conform. God knows what the ingredients of that
marvelous solution are likely to be—how he felt about his mum when
he was five, or the quality of his wife’s conjugal embraces—but the
great thing is to give him a push in the right direction, or at
least in some direction away from you, and allow him to chart his
course on that.

“The analogy with bulls and red flags should
be obvious.”

Creon, it seemed, had the beginnings of a
theory, and he was very busy fitting the world around it.

His office was a little partitioned off cube
on the second floor of the new city hall, and, although lacking the
floor space taken up by a queen size bed, it represented a shade
more than 10 percent of the working quarters of the whole police
force, which had to share the second floor with the comptroller’s
office and the Department of Youth Services.

There wasn’t much in that cramped space to
suggest the character of its occupant. Aside from the usual pale
gray metal desk, which was covered with half filled out yellow
forms, nested chrome in and out trays, and of course the black
plastic telephone with one red and five clear plastic buttons,
there were only a metal filing cabinet and two chairs, both made
out of metal and naugahyde, both on rollers and both pale gray.
There wasn’t even the usual little clear plastic cube on the desk,
filled up on five of its six sides with pictures of Mrs. Creon and
her brood.

Well, you couldn’t fault him for that;
perhaps he preferred to keep those parts of his life separate.

Still, as he waited there alone for the great
man to come and take his statement, Guinness couldn’t help but
compare Creon’s office with his own, which was twice the size, had
furniture made out of real wood, and was decorated with four
paintings—three watercolors and an oil—which he had bought at
various times from students in the art department. It gave him a
small psychological boost to think of the policeman grubbing out
his life in this soulless little box.

Of course Guinness didn’t have any pictures
of his wife and daughter on his desk either.