Mindfield, p.22
Mindfield, page 22
Borko’s head was bowed to his pen as Kellen quietly entered and found cover behind the stairway wall.
“Sir, I think you’ve had one too many. Now collect your thoughts. Tell me what he did to you.”
Kellen stepped lightly down the stairs.
“He dragged you into the bathroom.”
Kellen swore softly: the armory’s steel door was padlocked and chained. It would take a cutting torch. Someone had to have left a gun behind in this building. Station Twenty-six cops are notoriously careless. In unlocked closets: uniforms, commando gear, riot gear. No guns; he can’t go armed with a wooden club or an electric prod.
He grabbed a flak jacket and a heavy white sweater, and struggled into them as he ran down the hall to the back stairwell, and up its narrow staircase to the second-floor landing.
Borko was below him on the ground floor, still on the phone, facing away. “Where the bloody heck is that girl you said you could spare?”
The lights were on in Borko’s office. Kellen pulled the Beretta Model 12 submachine gun from the fasteners holding it to the wall, and buckled its clip belt diagonally across his chest. He pushed a clip in, and he turned to the door just as Borko walked in.
“Oh, my God.” Borko stopped dead, frozen. He was sure he was going to die. “Let’s talk about it, Kellen, whatever it is, maybe you’ve got a legitimate grievance, we were probably a little unfair.”
“Move away from the door, okay, Eugene?”
Borko edged into the room. Kellen had the barrel pointing down, but he was cradling the gun, ready.
“I’ve been thinking about some of your theories on this case, Kellen, maybe you —”
“Shut up and listen hard, Eugene. They tried to murder me again tonight. I think they used some kind of drug to question me — I don’t remember. They are going to try to kill Sarah Paradis now. She’s surrounded by cops, but these guys don’t care. They’re professionals and they’re desperate.”
Borko observed a massive bandaged welt on Kellen’s head. “Would you mind telling me —”
“Phone her. Keep trying, I couldn’t get through. Tell them it’s an emergency. Tell Sarah not to move from there. They have a sniper’s rifle.”
This seemed a rational voice, Borko realized.
Kellen went to the door. “Give me time, twenty seconds. Think of it as a career move.”
He raced to the stairs, skidded to a stop just past the fire pole, hesitated a split second, then clamped his knees around the pole and rode it swiftly down.
From a wall downstairs, he grabbed a set of keys for one of the cars in the garage.
Tuesday, one-thirty a.m.
They were finally on Ile Sainte-Hélène, on an unplowed road, circumnavigating the rocky islet, getting the lay of it. Eddie the Cube’s gloved hands were tight on the steering wheel, and the cold silence was screaming at him.
He had forced himself to throw up — the anchovy pizza, he’d decided, was the culprit — but he still felt a little jacked-up on something, felt like he’d been hot-wired just like this old pickup truck. His bald spot was tingling, and there was a sound like little hornets buzzing past his ears.
Also he was getting inklings of major disaster, hot tips he should be heeding.
He was concentrating hard at the controls. Eddie could feel energy radiating from Rudy Meyers beside him, an energy angry and sick.
They’d got lost. It wasn’t his fault. Crowder had got him all mixed up with his goddamn map and his Porky-Pigged directions, and they went over the wrong fucking bridge. Meyers had barked at him. Meyers doesn’t bark. He’s losing his cool, his glorious, mother-fucking, ice-cold control.
Evergreens drooping under the snow. Montreal shining across the frozen river. A circular road to nowhere. Round and round we go, we never get off Rudy’s merry-go-round.
A series of small parking lots, and they came into a lit area, cars in front of a big stone building, a TV van, four or five reporters hanging around.
“T-too much action,” said Mick Crowder, who was squeezed between Eddie and Rudy.
“Don’t slow down,” said Meyers.
Eddie drove carefully, anonymously, past. He wanted to say: Let’s go back over the bridge, Rudy. It’s time to go home.
Meyers looked up through the windshield at something above them. “There it is. Find a place to park.”
They pulled off into a lot out of sight of the restaurant, and when they got out, Eddie saw, beyond a grove of trees, a high network of steel ribbing rising above the trees.
“The American Pavilion,” Meyers said. Eddie stared at him; the man was standing at military attention, shoulders back, arms straight. Why don’t he salute? Old Rude was definitely becoming a little lunched-out, maybe like an Iranian fanatic on a suicide mission.
The blizzard had whirled off toward northern New England, and a nearly full moon above them was struggling to show through the sky’s haze. The snowdrifts were grimly gray. Eddie could hear a rumbling of voices. It was coming from the restaurant. Muchas policias, he thought. Rudy esta loco.
“There’s good available light,” Meyers said. “Watch for taxis, Mick, especially the Hot Dog Taxi Company — O’Reilly uses a jigaboo driver from there.” He pointed to an eighty-foot-high platform inside the geodesic dome. “Up there, Mick. Just like in Dallas.”
Tuesday, one forty-five a.m.
Though it was nearly two o’clock, Mario told his mother he wanted to stay. Thérèse didn’t want to go home, either; she preferred being in this place of high energy to being at home with weeping sisters, weeping mother. She was gathered with friends at a table in the kitchen, and they were telling stories on each other, keeping it light.
They tried to comfort Mario, but he felt smothered by them, and quietly told his mother he’d be happier just being by himself. He went to a corner and opened a Hercule Poirot, and read for a while — the first page of Chapter Six about five times.
Everyone seemed to understand his need to be alone, and although the kitchen volunteers brought him sandwiches and cans of pop and ruffled his hair, they didn’t try to break into his silence.
He did, though, want to see Kellen, his godfather, but wasn’t too disappointed that he was not here. Kellen was going after those guys; he was going to get them.
Mario went back to the hall with his book, and pretended to read there — so no one would bug him — and listened to the men and women talk about drafting a statement for the press. He tried to concentrate on what they were saying, tried to understand the issues — the detectives in his books never seemed to have to deal with this kind of stuff.
He wasn’t so sure now that he wanted to be a cop. His teacher told him he could be a writer. Straight A’s in composition; his dad had been proud.
He kind of covered his face with his book so no one could see him wipe the wetness from his eyes.
When the meeting broke for twenty minutes for coffee and sandwiches, he had to escape from everybody again, and he found a dark corridor leading to a side door, a staff entrance. He pressed his nose to the window of the door, and stared out through its melting ice into the grayness.
Beyond the trees, shining silver under the moon, he saw the dome of the U.S. Pavilion.
Sarah was next in line for one of the pay phones outside — the ones inside were impossible. Two dozen cops were out here, smoking or catching the air, a warming night air now; barometers were rising fast.
Sarah knew it was ridiculous to call Kellen at almost two in the morning, but she’d started worrying again, and begun asking around, and for some reason no one could tell her who’d made the arrangements for his protection. “Oh, I heard that somewhere,” was what she’d got from various shop stewards.
Inside the Ile Sainte-Hélène restaurant, Taillefeur was in caucus with his troops; they’d been quiet since Thérèse’s speech, but were reorganizing.
Sarah heard Ouimet’s amplified voice from inside, calling the meeting to order. The man in front of her hung up the phone.
She stuck in a quarter and quickly dialed Kellen’s number.
She got his recorded message.
“Kellen, are you there? Is anyone there?”
No one came on the line.
“Miss Paradis?”
She turned: a smiling man with a round balloon face. In a long coat with its collar turned up, his hands in the pockets.
“I’m Agent Herb Trotter, FBI.” A hand came out of a pocket and held up a badge. Agent Herb Trotter, FBI, it said. She didn’t like the look of him.
“Press invited in for this session,” someone called out at the door.
“Lieutenant O’Reilly asked me to leave a message that he’s safe and secure.”
He turned and walked away toward one of the parking lots, and Sarah hung up the phone. “Wait.”
The man stopped. “He’ll be in touch with you in two days. He said you’re not to worry.”
He turned again, and Sarah ran toward him, untrusting of him, but there were still some people out here. “Just a minute.”
She caught up but he didn’t stop, strolled placidly forward.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” she said. “Where is he?”
“I’m sorry I’m under instructions not to say more.”
“Where is he?”
The man stopped. “Okay. We’ve been running an on-going investigation, ma’am, into this MK-ULTRA business. We had to bring Kellen into our confidence before he accidentally dismantled it. Please protect this confidence. Good-by, Miss Paradis.”
He began walking again. Sarah paused, then took ten steps to catch up to him, and, as he abruptly turned to her, she felt something very hard and sharp against her breastbone. She felt it rip the fabric of her blouse — a knife.
“No talking, keep walking. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want information.” Meyers burped those short phrases like a machine gun, fast, before she could react. “Try to scream and I will cut your vocal cords.”
She stopped, frozen with fear. The point of the knife was now touching her lower throat. He was slightly behind her, with his arm across her chest. She wanted to glance back quickly to see if anyone was still outside but dared not.
“Move.”
She walked forward like a zombie.
In a few seconds they were in the shadows of the building, heading in the direction of the geodesic dome.
From behind his darkened window, Mario saw them come distantly into view, a big man in the long coat huddled around a slight woman, both of them walking stiffly away from the restaurant. The lady, he thought, was walking like she was sick or something. It looked pretty weird; they were going away from the parking lot, toward the big dome.
Tuesday, two a.m.
The cross hairs quartered a La Salle Taxi, and Crowder waited. Two men came from the building and walked toward it. He lowered the rifle.
He looked down into the gloom, trying to make out Eddie Comacho on the tier beneath him. He called down softly, “Eddie, you there?”
“Yeah.”
“You g-going to do surveillance, you got to be where you can see.”
“I don’t like it in the light.”
Rudy had warned Mick: The Cuban would show cowardice under pressure. In the end there’d just be Rudy and Mick, the way it always should have been.
Tuesday, two-o-five a.m.
The silence was soft and heavy — shouts from within the meeting place came distant and muffled to Kellen’s ears. A silver moon shimmered through the lattice of the dome as he moved from shadow to shadow along its fenced perimeter, keeping the ball of the moon on a plane with the platform.
There. No question this time. The man stood framed within the moon’s penumbra.
At one of several breaches in the woven wire fence, he saw fresh footprints, and followed them in.
The walls of the burned-out ground floor theater were splashed with graffiti: YANK OFF! SCREW THE CRUISE! NICARAGUA SI!
Two hundred feet away, on the other side of the theater, Meyers had Sarah backed against the wall, his left hand holding the stiletto knife to her chin. She saw the bandaged right hand, and she knew who he was — Happy Face from the Pharmacie Lagasse.
“Where did you put the film, Miss Paradis?”
“Film . . . I have no film.”
“Open your bag and empty it, item by item.”
With trembling hands she did so: purse, notebooks, makeup kit, loose change sinking into the snow.
“Just tell me why you think I have this film. I’ve never seen it.”
“Time is of the essence. You have thirty seconds of it —”
He heard a rustling in the snow and quickly turned his head to see what made the noise — there was nothing but snowbanks and shadows.
Mario, about to race back to the restaurant, had slipped and fallen into a hole in the snow, and was covered to his waist. He knew he daren’t move or even breathe, because the man threatening Sarah Paradis was only ten meters away, behind a snowdrift.
He heard the man say, “And after thirty seconds, unless you tell me about the film, I am going to cut off your face with this knife.”
And he began counting.
“A thousand and one. A thousand and two . . .”
Mario felt a gloved hand go over his mouth.
Tuesday, two-ten a.m.
Eddie Comacho clenched his hand tightly on his handgun, all his muscles held taut to fight his jitters. His body, by getting sick, had tried to warn him, he was free-falling toward Calamity City. Rudy was loony with stubbornness, he’d led them on a mission of endless disaster.
He would sneak down, run for the pickup truck, be the only one to survive.
He glanced up at Crowder on the level above, who was aiming his rifle at another taxi. He stepped slowly backwards deeper into the shadow of the upper stairway.
And froze when he heard Kellen O’Reilly’s quiet voice behind him.
“That’s fine, stop right there.”
Eddie turned his head sideways, tried vainly to see into the dimness. But he recognized the voice.
“Now slowly bend, spread both arms away from the body, and put the piece on the floor.”
“If you make me a deal,” Eddie said, “I’ll talk.”
Tuesday, two-eleven a.m.
“Thousand and twenty-nine.”
She opened her mouth to scream and his middle finger darted at her throat, and she gagged and closed her eyes and tried desperately to catch her breath.
“Thousand and thirty. Miss Paradis, this isn’t personal, but you won’t talk and I have to kill you.”
He drew the knife blade back for a sharp hard thrust, but his arm didn’t come forward — it was caught at the elbow in an iron grip.
Hugh McVeigh said from close behind his ear, “It’s bad for the image, Rudy.” He let the elbow go.
Sarah opened her eyes. Meyers was whirling away from her, quickly positioning the knife between him and the tall black man who’d come up from behind him, and who stood calm and serious, weaponless, tamping tobacco into a pipe. Frock coat and a small-brim hat with a feather.
“McVeigh,” Meyers said. The tone sounded of sadness.
Sarah took a step to the side, then another.
“You pathetic old crackers haven’t kept up with the changes. We have this new corporate image, my man. We don’t kill indiscriminately.” He caressed the word, syllable by syllable.
Sarah started moving away quickly.
“Don’t go too far, ma’am, he’s not alone.”
She stopped near the wire fence, uncertain, twenty feet away from them; she could hear their voices but not their words.
“Her daddy’s a big player in this country,” McVeigh said softly to Meyers. “That makes it flagrantly indiscriminate.”
“Hugh, this is about project forty-seven; it sprung a leak.” Meyers put his smile back together but his voice cracked.
“Who asked you to plug it?” McVeigh put a lighter to his pipe and got it going.
“We were being blackmailed.”
“By a couple of Mafia paper pushers,” McVeigh said. “I don’t see how a Mafia factor works its way in here. This was sold to the director as a program to wipe foreign agents’ memories.”
“You have it exactly, Hugh. I’ve been out here protecting the Company’s name, you should thank me.”
“Thank you, Rudy. Now toss the knife off to the side. It has a cooling effect on our relationship.”
Meyers hesitated. He held the stiletto loosely in his good hand, the left one, belt high and up.
“To be fair, Rudy, you need two good hands against me.”
McVeigh smiled. Meyers watched his eyes.
McVeigh darted to the side and his hand flashed toward the wrist of Meyers’s knife-hand, and as Meyers drew it quickly back, a boot drove at full acceleration into his groin. He dropped the knife and clutched himself there, in terrible agony.
Mario saw this lightning skirmish just as he finally pulled himself from the snowpit and came scrambling to his feet. The black man had whispered to Mario: “Stay here and stay quiet,” but he was going to do neither, he was going to go for that hole in the fence and raise the alarm. These are the men who blew up his dad’s car. Everyone had to get out of the building. He slogged toward it as fast as he could through the knee-deep snow.
Meyers slowly straightened up, and grunted, “You’re not going to kill me. I’m ex-Company. We’re fighting the same war.”
“Be forthcoming, Rudy. What were you meatballs up to with this Satorius? I have my private theory. The year was 1963. Crowder, who was like your personal valet and had a rep as the best rifle in the Agency, was posted to Dallas that year. Do I read it right?”
