“For being a pain in the ass,” she said. Then she got out and went into the building.
Nick waited and waited. Twice, a cop car prowled along the street and flashed a beam onto him, but his bland white face and coat and tie spoke the Esperanto of class to the cops, and they let him be. The streets were otherwise deserted. He knew up there in the office the skeleton crew was on—the FBI never sleeps, all that stuff—and he could visualize her hunched at her terminal, the low buzz of the office at quarter-staff, the sense of restfulness and ease that comes on the graveyard shift. He’d worked it himself his first year in the office and was aware how lulling it could be.
At last, she emerged but he could tell by the tentativeness in her body language that her luck hadn’t been good.
“No home runs?” he said when she got in.
“Nick, I tried and tried. There’s not much to go on.”
“Yeah. Well, you’re right. Did you get anything?”
“Well, first off, the license number idea doesn’t pan out at all. It seems that cab plates are all numerical—there aren’t any letters in them. Don’t ask me why. So there aren’t any license numbers beginning with an R.”
“Dammit, that’s right! I think I even knew that once.”
“Maybe it was an 8, or a 5, and the number sort of fell apart, but—”
She trailed off.
“Okay. One down. What about names? Did you get any names?”
She sighed, and handed him the printout. He opened the door just a bit to bring on the dome light.
“It’s not great. It’s not even promising. There are two first names and one last name that begin with ROM, in which the other name has a DO in it.”
“Shit,” said Nick, stricken, feeling like an idiot.
“Nick, don’t take it so hard.”
“Ah, Christ, I just—”
But he couldn’t finish. He looked up the deserted street. He looked down the deserted street. Another failure.
He looked at the names.
The list read:
ROMNEY DONAHUE
ROMAN DOHENY
D’ORLY ROBARDS
And that was it.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Nick, in despair.
“It’s no good?”
He groped.
“You got me exactly what I asked for. But … why would he only write down part of the first name and part of the last name? I just don’t—”
He trailed off. The connection to Lanzman’s dying message, ROM DO, suddenly seemed vaporous.
Well, he thought. It was an extremely long shot, but he still ought to look them up, check out their cabs and—
“What are these other names?”
“Well, just to be on the safe side, I got all the cabbies whose first names begin with either R or D and whose last names begin with R or D. That was my first field of discrimination. Just in case your copy was wrong or—”
“It wasn’t. I saw it. I saw it. Sally, the guy wrote it in his own blood as he was dying on a linoleum floor. I saw it in the linoleum, on the tiles, and then watched as it disappeared when—”
Nick stopped talking.
He stared at the list.
“Nick? Nick, are you all right? Nick, what’s going—”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
He pointed to a name on the list.
“Suppose the blood ran together in some spots. It connected letters that shouldn’t be connected. And suppose he died before he finished.”
“I don’t—”
“Look, Sally. Look. He was writing a name but the last two letters joined together at the top. The blood ran across a crack in the tile and bridged two letters. And he didn’t finish.”
Nick had one of those weird sensations you get once or twice in a career, when it all comes together.
“An N and an I at the end of the first name; they ran together and it formed an M. And he wrote the middle initial. And then he couldn’t quite finish the last name. But here it is.”
He pointed to it, on the list.
Roni D. Ovitz, it said. Sun Cab Co., 5508 St. Charles Avenue.
It was a magnificent workup, Shreck acknowledged. The Defense Cartographic Agency had created a masterpiece. Represented in multicolored Plasticine topography were the many heights and levels of the Ouachita range, the gaps, the valleys, the enfilades. It stretched for twenty feet, almost six feet wide. On the relief map, dappled in green for forestation exactly as the satellite had recorded it, the mountain range had been resolved into a maze of elevations. They were all there: Black Thorn, Winding Stair, Poteau, Mount Bayonet, Hard Bargain Valley …
“What do you see, Mr. Scott?” Shreck asked.
The man in the wheelchair hunched forward, his keen shooter’s eyes devouring the landform represented before him.
“Space,” he said. “I want space. Lots of space.”
“It’ll turn on some sort of transfer. We have the woman; they’ll have Dobbler’s treasure. They’ll want to trade; we’ll want to trade. We’ll use the girl. We’ll draw them to us with the girl.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Lon. “Give me the shot, and I guarantee you I will make it.”
“Mr. Scott,” said the Colonel, “pardon me for not being polite but being polite isn’t my business. You’re about to go against a combat sniper. You don’t have any mobility. Shit, you don’t have any legs. You may have to take fire, to return fire under fire. And … your disability. He can move, if it comes to that, and you can’t. And what happens if we’re hit or have to retreat? There you are, out there, paralyzed, on the ground, with no help. Nobody will come for you. There’s nothing for you except death.”
Scott met his stare for what seemed the longest time. The handsome head and shoulders on the collapsed body and the dead legs: even now Shreck hadn’t quite grown accustomed to it.
“Do you know, Colonel Shreck, you’ve given a cripple a chance that no cripple ever had.” He smiled, almost ruefully. “You’ve given me a chance to go to war. And to test myself against the very best. You’ve given me the chance to be complete, if only for a few seconds.”
Shreck said, “I don’t know who you are, Mr. Scott, or what the hell you’ve done. But I’ll say this for you, you’ve got a set of balls on you.”
At Sun Cab, it turned swiftly to anticlimax. First came the news that Roni D. Ovitz, an Israeli émigré, had been shot in a robbery two months ago and though only suffering a flesh wound had quit the taxi business and was working as a counterman at his brother-in-law’s TCBY franchise in a suburban mall. But his cab was still the property of Sun Cab and a quick check of the records located it, now on the road with another driver.
The dispatcher, faced with two people with earnest faces and FBI identifications, didn’t hesitate an instant. He ordered the cab in, and it dropped its fare in the French Quarter, and got to the garage in about ten minutes.
“So what’s the beef, Charlie?”
“Fed beef. These two FBI agents. They—”
“Hey, I didn’t do a damned thing, I—”
“That’s okay, pal,” said Nick, in his calming voice. “This isn’t about you. It’s about the cab.”
“That buggy is bad luck. Somebody shot Roni Ovitz through the neck and before that a guy named Tim Ryan was fuckin’ killed and—”
But Nick wasn’t listening.
Okay, he thought. You’re in the backseat of the cab. You know you’ve been made. You’ve just got a few seconds. What do you do? The trunk? How can you get to the trunk? You can’t get to the trunk.
Under the front seat? No. The driver would see you, and whatever you stashed, he’d dig it out a few seconds later.
Nick said “Excuse me” to Sally, then went and climbed into the automobile, a 1987 Ford Fairlane. He sat there, his eyes closed, smelling the odor of the old and sodden upholstery, the stench of a hundred thousand other, unremarkable passengers, the tang of gasoline and oil, and, he supposed, one other coppery whiff in the air, the
whiff of fear. Roni Ovitz’s fear. Tim Ryan’s fear. And, for surely by the time they reached the motel, Lanzman knew he was quite probably doomed, Lanzman’s fear.
Oh, you were a cool one, Nick thought. You held together to the very end. Whatever it was that motivated you—patriotism, faith, machismo—whatever it was, it was strong and beautiful stuff. Oh, you were a man, my friend. An hombre. Oh, yes you were.
His fingers had of their own accord fallen to the seat where, blindly, they probed and pushed at the juncture between cushion and back. There was a gap there, when the yielding cushioning was peeled back; you could slide a document through.
Nick got out of the car, turned, leaned in and pushed his hand through. He gave a mighty tug and yanked, and the seat lurched forward on hinges. Underneath it lay a tapestry of Western civilization and its contents: candy wrappers, cigarette packs, combs, pens, quarters and tokens, two playing cards, a business card and a rolled wad of some kind of heavy paper.
“Nick,” said Sally at his shoulder, pointing. “Is that it?”
Nick picked it up.
He unrolled it carefully. He saw immediately that it was on some sort of light-sensitive paper that made it impervious to photocopying. And even as he unscrolled it, he thought he watched the type dilute in clarity; an hour in the sun and this baby was history. No one could duplicate it, except maybe the geniuses at the Bureau’s legendary Forensic Documents Division.
The cover letter was written in Spanish, addressed to somebody named General Esteban Garcia de Rujijo of the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger), First Brigade, First Division (“Acatad”), Salvadoran Army. It was signed by a Hugh Meachum, no affiliation given. It said, as best as Nick’s clumsy Spanish could understand, that the mission as outlined orally in their last meeting was being undertaken by the extremely efficient organization with which the writer was certain the general was familiar, and that it was to everybody’s best interest that the business be completed as quickly as possible. The writer also took the liberty of enclosing some background material—highly sensitive! most secret!—so that the general could rest assured the very best professional people were handling the job, and that therefore he was not to make any attempts himself, as that would completely undermine the cause in whose service they all labored so diligently.
Nick lifted the cover letter to examine the document itself.
It was Annex B.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
When he wasn’t shooting, Lon was studying.
He began with rote memory; he divided the map into one foot squares and attempted to commit each to the files deep in his brain. He worked everything out, slowly, one step at a time, with plodding thoroughness. He sat there in the field headquarters hut in Virginia in his wheelchair and just stared and stared at the miniaturized plastic mountain range spread out on the table before him, rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his belly.
After memorizing the material so perfectly that he could see it in his dreams, he began to look for firing lines. He needed a certain distance, height, a good vantage point, the light behind him, no cross breezes, plenty of camouflage. One by one, he tested sites against his cluster of requirements, finding and discarding possibilities.
When he worked, no emotion showed on his face. It was a wintry Yankee face, iron as New England, the face of a man who knew death because he was himself mostly corpse.
Finally, days into the study, he beckoned to Colonel Shreck.
“Here,” he said. “I found it.”
His finger touched a valley deep in the vastness of the Ouachitas, far, far from the town of Blue Eye.
Shreck bent to read the inscription where the blunt finger marked it.
HARD BARGAIN VALLEY, it Said.
Dobbler was astounded at how banal Bob found him. He had presumed, with no small amount of vanity, that Bob would find him fascinating, would ply him with questions, would in some way admire him.
Using Bob as others had used him, Dobbler had unburdened himself in one epic purge, like a mega-couch-session, letting it all pour out, his sins, his fears, his weaknesses, his guilts. He even blubbered as he confessed, while secretly admiring his own performance.
But Bob had just looked at him all squinty-eyed.
“What do you want?” Dobbler demanded when he was done. “Tell me, and I’ll give it to you.”
Bob regarded him without much interest.
“Don’t you trust me?” Dobbler wanted to know.
“It doesn’t matter a lot.”
“Why don’t you ask me more questions?”
“You’ve talked enough. You’ve talked too much.”
“Don’t you want to know how Shreck’s mind works? About the relationship between him and Payne? Don’t you want—”
“Can you tell me how to kill him?”
“Uh—no.”
“Then you don’t know a thing that interests me.”
“But there’s so much more—”
“You think what you told me is so important. But it doesn’t matter a spoon of grease to me, unless it can give me an advantage in a week or so. Meanwhile, you save it for Memphis; he’ll listen to you. I just want you to stay here and don’t wander off, you hear? You’re just another problem I have to solve.”
That was the beginning. Then Bob went out with his rifle for several hours, leaving Dobbler cabin-bound. Bob didn’t have to tell him that to wander off was to die in these remote regions.
In the cabin, Dobbler was always cold. He shivered from dawn till dusk, threw wood on the fire—“If you don’t stop using up that goddamn wood, I’m going to make you chop it your own damn self,” Bob had said testily—and sat there, sinking into misery, unmoved by the showy blaze of autumn that was exploding like napalm bursts all around. He hated the filth of it also, the lack of a toilet and toilet paper, the same socks and underwear day in and day out. He hated his own smell and wondered why he just got dirtier and Bob somehow seemed always immaculate.
Then one night, late, the door burst open.
Dobbler bolted up in sheer terror, sure they’d been discovered by one of the colonel’s raiding parties. But it was a large, angry young man with a thatch of blond hair and a rumpled business suit who seemed to be wearing four guns under his coat. This would be Memphis, the doctor surmised, and indeed it was. He smiled, anticipating someone more in his world than Bob.
“Who’s this sorry sack of shit?” Nick wanted to know.
“Says he’s one of Shreck’s men. He’s come over to our side because he didn’t realize these boys were Nazis. He has a tape over there with the massacre on it.”
“Who the hell are you, mister? Are you working for Shreck?”
“My name is David Dobbler. I’m a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard Medical School. I’m a practicing psychiatrist—although some years ago the board removed my certification.”
“He was the smart boy who looked at me like a bug on a pin back in Maryland, Pork.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“As I told Mr. Swagger, I recently discovered that the acts of RamDyne were not, as I had been informed, in the national interest but rather the adventurings of a rogue unit. Naturally, I felt—”
“That’s all shit, mister,” said Memphis, who had the policeman’s gift for locating weaknesses swiftly and exploiting them greedily. “You must have found something out that you thought Shreck would kill you over. And he probably would.”
“Yes, he would. I have—evidence. Of a massacre.”
“Evidence,” snorted Nick. “The world is full of evidence.”
“Visual evidence. On tape.”
Bob pointed to the cassette, which lay haphazardly on the mantel.
“He says they filmed it.”
“Terrible things,” Dobbler said. “Women, children, in the water. The machine guns, the laughing soldiers, the commanders. The Americans.”
“You have this Shreck? On tape?” Nick said, astounded.
“Yes. And little Jack Payne as
well. Giving the orders, guiding a Salvadoran general. It’s all—”
Nick turned to Bob.
“Jesus, just maybe that would do it. It would certainly suggest a motive for killing the archbishop, and with a motive we could get the investigation reopened and other things might come out.”
Bob thought on this for a second.
Then he said, “Hear him out. See what he’s got. I’m getting out of here for a time. You two geniuses of education jawing away like piglets in the slop could give me a serious pain in the eyes.”
It took time but Nick and Dobbler, fierce adversaries at first, soon enough found their common ground. Bob himself disappeared with his rifle and as the two of them were talking there came the far-off sound of shots. When he returned, he regarded them without enthusiasm. Nick rose and came at him.
“Now what have you got cooked up, Memphis?” Bob asked.
“It’s all here,” Nick finally said. “With what he’s got and what I’ve got, we can put them away. We can clear you.”
But Bob just went to the cabinet where he stored his cleaning rod and equipment, and began the laborious, greasy job of scrubbing down the bore of the rifle.
In his remoteness, it wasn’t so much that he offered a counterargument, but that he communicated his displeasure by his stoicism and the hard look on his face. Nick pressed on, bringing a trophy out for all to see.
“Annex B. This is it.” He lifted the green bag of documents he’d found under the cab seat in New Orleans. “It turns out that Annex B is simply the Bureau abstract of the Agency file on its contract outfit, RamDyne, except that all the names and dates and pertinent memoranda are included. The facts are what we knew from the Bureau file itself. It was started in 1962, right after Bay of Pigs. Who started it? My bet is that it was founded by somebody who was formerly with CIA who was actively involved in planning the invasion, but who got the ax when the invasion failed. Does that add up?”
Dobbler said, “Yes. Bay of Pigs was weakness, failure, lack of nerve. They hated weakness.”
“Of course,” said Nick.
“Neurotically. And I can see how to them the Bay of Pigs was the beginning of American weakness—of committing to something, then changing your mind, beginning to equivocate, beginning to undercut, and finally dooming your operation to failure by your own doubts. RamDyne was about following through. About seeing the course.”