Vertical Run (23 page)

She didn’t turn. She passed by, slowly patrolling the hallway, a bored soldier on boring duty. Her steps faded. Soon she was gone.

Dave worked his jaw back and forth. He’d almost killed her just for the hell of it.

Made enough statements for the night, have we?

This business was turning him into something he didn’t want to be. It was taking him back twenty-five years. He had almost gone over the line then. Now he was close to going over it again.

Ransome keeps saying that you’re still one of them, cut from the same cloth
.

He shook his head. He wasn’t going to let them do it to him. The price was too high. He remembered the price; he remembered the look of damnation and despair on Mamba Jack Kreuter’s face when Jack realized what he’d done, and knew that he’d gone so far that there was no coming back.

Okay, pal, so cool it. You already know what you’re going to
find, so let’s just get this over with and then get the hell out of Dodge
.

Dave frowned. He didn’t know what he was going to find.

Oh yes you do
.

He started up the hall, turned into the laboratory corridor, and stepped past what had been Laboratory one. It had been, like every other room in the building, stripped bare.

It’s not Lab one. You’ve got to quit pretending that you still don’t know what it is
.

Lab
two was in the same condition. Likewise Labs three and four.

Lab five.

Even the door was gone. They’d not only removed the furniture and fixtures from Lab five, but they’d even taken the door. And inside it was …

The linoleum had been ripped up. The ceiling tiles were removed. They had attacked the walls, the ceiling struts, the concrete floor with a flame gun. They had sterilized every inch of plaster, concrete, and steel with fire. Nothing, not a fly, not a flea, not a microbe, could have survived in Lab five.

David Elliot doubled over, and fell to his knees. For the second time that day, he vomited.

Ransome had been right—Dave would be coming back. He had no choice. He had to see the file on Lockyear, the file in Bernie’s credenza that held the secret about why Bernie—Bernie and everyone else—wanted David Elliot dead.

He was back on the Long Island Expressway, racing west toward New York. The rental car was whining at the speed. Dave pressed the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer registered 85 mph. It was all the car could take. Any more and it would blow apart. He cursed Hertz and he cursed the Korean car industry.

And he cursed Bernie Levy. He knew now what Bernie had done—at least in general terms. He knew because Scott Thatcher had told him.

It had been a year and a half earlier. Scott and his wife, Olivia, had invited Dave and Helen to Thursday night dinner at their Sutton Place
pied-à-terre
.

Thatcher’s Thursday night dinners were legendary. You never knew who the other guests would be. Visiting heads of state, political pundits, Nobel laureates, artists, writers, musicians, and once a troupe of circus performers—Thatcher hosted them all, or at least the interesting ones.

There had been five couples that night: the Thatchers, the Elliots, a much lionized novelist and his undergrad inamorata, a senator and his wife from one of the western states, and Mike and Louise Ash—the latter executives of Thatcher’s company, married and warring as only people deeply in love can war.

Dinner ended. The dishes were cleared. Thatcher rose and walked to the sideboard. He lifted a bottle of Fonseca’s port and an ebony box. He placed both on the dinner table, and opened the box.

“Cigars, anyone?”

The women fled.

Thatcher withdrew a long, brown Monte Cristo. He sliced its tip with a Buck pocketknife, and, igniting it with a wooden match, grinned a foxy grin. “The last weapon left to the male race, gentlemen.” Thick blue smoke rolled slowly out of his mouth. He passed the humidor to Mike Ash. “All of our other arms are defeated, our stratagems overthrown, our armor pierced. Only the cigar remains, the last tattered banner of manhood, still waving over a battlefield otherwise fallen to Amazons.”

Ash lit his own cigar, passing the box to the senator. “If Justine were here …”

“Ms. Gold, Senator, ever dear to my crotchety heart and surely the only woman in the world who rivals me for sheer wickedness. She handles my public relations—the labors of Hercules, that—and would be here this evening had she not been called out of town on business. A fine woman, with as keen an appreciation of a good Havana as any man I’ve ever met.”

The senator declined to take a cigar, pushing the box across the table to Dave. Dave chose one, rolling it lovingly through his fingers. While he had long ago given up cigarettes, a good cigar was not to be resisted.

The novelist made his apologies and left. Cigar smoke made him sick.

Thatcher leered like a wolf. “Now that the women and the wimps have departed, in what bestial male viciousness might we indulge? Politically incorrect language?
Salaciously demeaning stories? Conspiracies to restore female-kind to subjugation? Plots to corrupt children, pillage the environment, plunder minorities, oppress the weak, exploit the poor, and humiliate the handicapped? Or alternatively, perhaps we might wallow in the subject women most despise and speak of sports?”

Mike Ash smiled at Dave. “He’s in one of his moods again.” Ash turned to Thatcher. “What’s got your goat today, chief?”

Thatcher glowered. “Have you observed that in these decadent times, it is no longer enough to feel good yourself?” His voice rose, reverberating with indignation. “Self-esteem is not enough. A sense of achievement is not enough. Dignity and self-respect are not enough. No, sir, not at all. Rather it has become the case that I cannot feel good unless you feel bad!”

“The California Commission on Self-Esteem …” began the senator.

Thatcher walked right over him. “I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about being a man. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we will have none of it. Equality, likewise; it is condescending at best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and apprehension. Oh, whole new vocabularies and crafty code words have they …”

Ash interrupted. “You accepted that invitation to speak at the university, didn’t you? Damn it, Scott, I told you not to do it. Dealing with academicians is bad for your blood pressure.”

“As indeed it is. Those slinking worms of sophistry dared to carp at my using the word ‘Indian,’ sneering me bigot and boor for not using ‘Native American,’ which is as sly and snooty a racist neologism as was ever coined, implying that those of us sprung from generations of honest New England yeoman aren’t
real
Americans …”

“You’re ranting, Scott.”

Thatcher flourished his cigar and showed his teeth. “Of course I am ranting. It is the prerogative of my years, one of the few joys left to me in the autumn of my days, and indeed, given my white hairs and black reputation, it is expected of me. I am a curmudgeon, after all, and have a certain illiberal reputation to maintain.”

“You voted Democrat in the last election.”

Thatcher shot him a sour look. “A moment of weakness, a mistake that shall not be repeated. The man has since exhibited all the character of a stuffed squirrel, or so I might say did it not slander a noble animal, lacking in neither resolve nor mother wit.” Thatcher leaned back, took another long pull on his cigar, and exhaled. “But change the subject if you will. I am only a poor old man, and best ignored by youth.”

Ash looked at the ceiling and spread his hands in open prayer for inspiration.

Dave offered up a distraction: “Did I ever tell you the story of the Dong Hoi cathouse?”

Thatcher arched a bushy white eyebrow. “Something to do with the Vietnam War?”

“Yes.”

“A lamentable business. My opposition to it resulted in Mr. Nixon putting me on the White House enemies list. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Fifty or sixty times.”

“There are so few accomplishments in life in which one can justly take pride. But I interrupt. Please, David, tell your tale.”

Because Scott Claymore Thatcher III was something of a puritan and much disliked obscene language, Dave had
to be circumspect in describing how the CIA, learning that a meeting of top Vietcong and North Vietnamese commanders would be held in the Cambodian border town of Dong Hoi, surreptitiously purchased the town’s bordellos, populating them with legions of remarkably contagious prostitutes. Recognizing that the scheme was a violation of Geneva Convention prohibitions against biological warfare, the Agency had clapped (“no pun intended,” Dave added) a strict security seal on the operation, advising no one—not even the military high command—of its scheme. Unfortunately, the Army learned through its own intelligence channels of the impending enemy conference. It reacted by launching a preemptive strike, seizing and garrisoning the town before the enemy arrived.

“Oh no,” gasped Thatcher, who guessed the punchline.

“Oh yes,” Dave said. “Six hundred hormonal young GIs, far from home, with nothing to do on a Saturday night.”

“Dear me!” Thatcher laughed so hard that tears streamed down his cheeks. “Is this true, David? You are not making it up?”

“It’s very true. I knew the CIA agent who ran the operation.” Dave did not mention that the man shortly fled the country because a group of Special Operations officers, led by Mamba Jack Kreuter, had put a price on his head.

Thatcher wiped his eyes. “Ah, the intelligence establishment. They are such rascals. But so dedicated, so sincere. One almost might admire them, had they the merest scintilla of morality. I have my own spy story, by the way. Should you like to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you are aware that from time to time they approach us—business people, I mean, executives of a certain stature and seniority?”

Dave and the senator nodded. Mike Ash looked perplexed. “Ahh …?”

“Oh, not at PegaSys. I won’t have it in my company.
But elsewhere? Why, there has not been an American businessman returned from Moscow since Mike Todd and his bride honeymooned there in the 1950s who was not debriefed by the naughty boys from Langley It is hard to turn them down, you know. One does have a certain patriotic duty. Unfortunately, and I speak from experience here, gentlemen, a little cooperation is but the beginning. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. Unless you are careful, your executive cadre will be suborned into tattling to Washington on the affairs of your foreign suppliers and customers. Worse, you will have your balance sheet weighed down with unproductive Agency assets. In these days of budget deficits and with the Soviet Union gone to its just reward, the spies and the spooks desperately need to find corporate angels to sponsor their grubby little projects. They have too many front operations, too many shell corporations, and now that the cold war has ended, too little money. Therefore they come to you, wrapping themselves in the flag, and asking in the nicest way, ‘Oh, sir, might you do a favor for your country? There is a certain skunkworks that will be closed for lack of funds. If you could find it in your heart to fold it into your corporation so that it might be kept alive, we would be forever in your debt.’ ”

Thatcher snorted. “Rascals! But that’s by the by, and not germane. More port, David? Help yourself. Well then, to begin at the beginning …”

Would Bernie Levy do that? Would he allow Senterex to provide cover for an intelligence operation? Of course he would. Bernie was an ex-Marine. Fiercely patriotic, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
Semper Fidelis—
always loyal.

A front. It would be a going business like any good front. It would have employees, products, services, and customers. There would be an audited balance sheet, a profit and loss statement, and a credible earnings history. From the outside it would be indistinguishable from any
other business. Only the insiders—and usually only a handful of them—would know that somewhere in a back room something wasn’t quite kosher. Something like Laboratory number five.

Dave spotted a sign above the freeway exit:
GAS, FOOD, LODGING
. He cut across two lanes, and sped onto the off-ramp. Behind him a big-rig driver leaned on his horn.

The gas station was just up the road—an all-night station with two pay phones plainly in sight. Dave turned in, switched off the ignition, and tumbled out of the car.

He snatched a phone, dialed Marge’s number, waited while it rang. No answer. Three more rings. Still no answer. On the fifth ring, he heard it pick up. “Hi, you’ve reached 555-6503. We can’t come to the phone right now, so please leave a message at the sound of the tone.”

Smart girl. Her answering machine message contained no names. And she said “we” not “I.” Too many single women didn’t take those simple precautions. And regretted it.

Had she done what he told her to do, and run for cover? “This is Dave. If you haven’t …”

Stop! Just shut up, you goddamned idiot!

Dave gulped. Leaving a message on Marge’s machine was a mistake, a bad one. It would be like Ransome to tap Marge’s phone—he was the sort of man who covered all his bases. And if he overheard Dave making a call to her, then Marge would be in even greater danger than she already was.

“Err … sorry, wrong number.” It was weak, but it was the best he could do. He hung up the phone, and glanced at his wrist.