A Clear and Present Danger (16 page)

“Now move!”

Sigrid did as she was told, woodenly. Her plan was working. It was working! Soon she would be free!

Slayton approached the Wolf, who was oblivious now to anything real happening around him. He easily removed the small knife
in a leather sheath hanging at the Wolf’s belt. Then he walked the Wolf around behind his desk and helped him sit down.

He pulled Anthony’s body to a place of concealment behind the desk. If someone were to look in from the doorway, all would
appear normal. Then Slayton stepped behind the Wolf and ran the length of his knife blade into a lung.

None of the men milling about the plain outside had reason to suspect anything wrong had occurred inside the Wolf’s study.
No one had seen the two men argue. In fact, there had been a public display of respect when the men first met.

Slayton walked calmly, deliberately, around the inner edge of the plain, to the side of the first castle column. He crossed
over the moat bridge to the Maserati.

“Move over,” he said to Sigrid. “I’m driving.”

She obeyed him. As she shifted, she caught sight of one of the castle guards, standing high atop a section of the castle tower,
his carbine raised to the hip level. He was watching the two of them in the car, watching their hurried movements as they
believed they were out of sight.

“Ben,” she yelled as he fired the engine and learned the feel of the gear box, “we’ve got to move, fast. Up there!”

Slayton didn’t look. He could guess her meaning and her urgency.

He clamped down hard on the accelerator, spinning the wheels wildly in the dust and stone surface of the mountain road. The
shots were finding their mark on the rear deck of the car. He held the wheel firmly, swerving the car to the right and to
the left, trying to confuse the marksman with a fishtail course.

“Faster! It will go faster!” Sigrid shouted.

Slayton punched the floor pedal and the Maserati leaped over small piles of loose rock and bits of pine branches strewn over
the granite. The damaged car crashed back down to the road, but Slayton held the powerful car to his course, preventing its
going out of control.

The shots kept coming. And Sigrid kept screaming. Then he heard her no more above the low, fierce growl of the Maserati’s
engine. He couldn’t look at her, though he imagined the worst. The driving required his total effort.

When he finally reached the highway, Slayton put the Maserati at flat-out speed. Then he was able to glance over to Sigrid.

He saw her shining blonde hair flying lushly in the wind. She was so terribly beautiful.

And dying. Blood trickled from an ear. Her neck was bent backward, like a broken doll.

He braked the Maserati and brought it still at the side of the highway. Sigrid’s eyes still had some life. Her final energies
were put into words. Slayton strained to hear them:

“My Edward… my… Oh, Ben, stop him… the power plant… Oh, stop my baby… ”

Life left her then.

She had almost made it to freedom, to normalcy.

And Ben Slayton had escaped death.

This time, he thought.

PARIS, 17 March 1981

Slayton, numb and shaken, stepped off the DC-10 Air France jet at Orly Airport. He carried no luggage, which he knew would
make the customs agents suspicious.

He needed to clear French customs as quickly as he could. It was only two days before President Reagan’s trip to Japan. Winship
would be going crazy with worry, wondering when Slayton would make contact via the Parisian brothel.

He took a deep breath and proceeded from the plane to the baggage carousel in the Customs Building, where the passengers from
Andorra began milling about, waiting impatiently for the conveyor belts to begin spitting out their bags and parcels.

Slayton stood slightly behind a family group. A father, his overweight wife, and three children. They would be sure to have
plenty of luggage.

He stood with his hands in his pockets to keep them from sight. They were trembling. He was more nervous about the prospect
of stealing someone’s suitcase than he had been about slipping a knife into a man’s back in his own office. With the man’s
own knife!

And he was trembling because of Sigrid. By now, someone would have found her body. He could do nothing but pitch her out of
the car. He had rolled her body into a culvert at the side of the highway into Andorra. A woman he had made love to only…
how many days ago… how many hours? What was the day? The time? Slayton felt quite faint. He closed his eyes and bit down
hard, forcing blood up into his head and face. The last thing in the world he needed just now as to keel over.

At last the luggage began appearing, making its agonizingly slow crawl down a chute onto the carousel’s conveyor belt. Blue
bags and brown, black and yellows. Fortunately, one could tell pretty much what might be inside a bag by seeing it. In the
old days, everyone—men, women, and children—traveled with the same brown and black square valises. Today, a man carried brown
or black, women and children owned the colors. Thanks for small favors.

The man in front of him lifted a passing suitcase from the carousel, and, just as Slayton expected, set it down beside him
and watched for others. This time around, it was entirely unsuited to his purpose, which was to clear customs with a bag full
of jockey shorts, socks, and a change of shirts. When a standard brown bag came up and the man set it down with the four others
he had already hoisted off the carousel, Slayton deftly picked it up and walked away, quickly.

He had his American passport ready, along with his visa papers, as he approached the customs agent. The functionary rubber-stamped
his passport a few dozen times, for whatever reason customs agents are possessed by, and ordered the suitcase opened.

“Hope you don’t find any contraband,” Slayton joked, just to prove he was a regular sort. The customs agent kept his sour
face.

Slayton clicked open the fasteners and opened the lid. To his utter amazement, the suitcase was filled with a sea of Spandex
undergarments, definitely for a woman big enough to be told by a cop to break it up while standing on a street corner all
by herself.

The customs agent twitched his upper lip. His mustache, a little bit of a thing, rode up and down as if caught in a fit of
apoplexy.

His eyebrows shot up into the air, requiring a fast explanation from Slayton.

“You see,” Slayton began to say in English. He corrected himself and continued in French: “You see, my wife and I always fly
separately. She’s coming in on the next flight. We have matching bags and, would you believe it, I took hers instead of my
own. Well, I don’t suppose it makes a whole big difference, does it?”

The customs agent was sputtering, but Slayton sensed he didn’t see anything as ludicrous as his stealing someone else’s luggage.
Slayton quickly considered that his best route out of the situation was to make it even more ludicrous. He fished out a pair
of oversize panty hose and held them up to his chest.

“Doesn’t suit me, does it, Pierre?” he said to the agent.

The man bought it. He waved him through the customs gate, giving a Gallic shrug of his shoulders, meant to convey his long-held
mystification over anyone and anything American.

If he had the time, or the heart, Slayton would have delayed his return to the States for several days’ rest and relaxation
in the French capital. But on this trip, even the spectacular beauty of Paris was not enough to keep his mind off the events
of the past few days.

As his taxi took him down the Avenue Grand Armée, beneath the Arc de Triomphe and on to the Champs Elysées, Slayton grew increasingly
depressed. At the madness of the Wolf, whoever he was; at the horrible loss of a woman with whom he had been intimate but
had not known, a woman to whom he owed his life, a woman he had only a few hours ago thrown out of an automobile like a sack
of rubbish.

He shut his eyes to the beauty of Paris.

Slayton had given the address of the bordello to the driver. It was in the Montparnasse district, south of the Eiffel Tower
and Les Invalides. He slumped back into the taxi’s seat, overwhelmingly exhausted.

Facts swam through a mind too wired with recent action and split-second decisions to find rest and peace . . consnections
and discrepencies… try to fit the facts together, to make all the connections as tidy as possible.

… Congressman Barlow Hurgett was assassinated in Munich, more than likely by the Wolf, who was more than likely some manner
of C.I.A. operative who conspired to assassinate President Kennedy; Senator Richard Samuels died in Turin of a massive coronary,
more than likely brought on by tobacco poisoning, more than likely performed by the man he knew as Anthony, a suspected C.I.A.
operative or former operative; the attempt on Bush’s life was carried out by someone posing as an American backpack tourist,
and Slayton himself had prevented the London murder try; the Wolf and Anthony were dead…

… The young American tourist who supposedly lost his means of support to pickpockets in London was someone named Edward Folger,
an obvious alias with an obvious dummy address; presumably, Winship would be checking on that matter from the States while
Slayton was off risking life and limb in Europe; Winship was convinced that the Wolf was ultimately gunning for President
Reagan, though the Wolf himself had said something cryptic about it… what was it he had said?

The taxi stopped abruptly at a row house near the Edgar-Quinet subway train station in Montparnasse. Slayton paid his driver
and lumbered out of the back of the cab, leaving the stolen valise inside.

As he climbed the stairs of the stoop, the driver called to him: “Your bag, sir! Don’t forget it!” Slayton obligingly reclaimed
the suitcase full of girdles and corsets and whalebone brassieres. Would he ever be rid of them?

Yes, he suddenly realized. Yvonne would take them.

When he reached the door, Slayton tapped out the signal he had used twice before. Yvonne’s brothel owed its existence to the
courtesy of Interpol protection. Hers was a convenient center for message exchanges.

Three taps, wait; three more, wait; then two. A small peephole flap opened and Slayton could see the heavy blue-black mascara
of Yvonne’s right eye. The good one.

“Hiya, toots!” Slayton greeted her.

She took him in her huge, fleshy arms, more the hug of a great-aunt who kisses a lot than that of one of Paris’ busiest madames.

“Come on in, Benji boy, come right on in. We’ll get you a drink and a real good time while you’re here in the city of light,
okay?”

Yvonne’s French-accented English was more Brooklyn than French.
C’est lsa vie
, Slayton thought as he followed in her wake, which was the most appropriate way to describe walking behind Yvonne’s girth.
He was offered a seat on a huge, overstuffed pink couch, decorated on one end by a tall Nubian woman in an ivory negligee.
Slayton didn’t even perspire when he saw her, and wondered if he would ever be a well man again.

“Now, Benji boy,” Yvonne said, after settling her great hams on a settee opposite the couch, “I got some news to tell you,
you know?”

He stared at her glass eye, the one that was slightly off-kilter every time he saw her. It slipped downward, as if it were
made of steel shavings attracted by a magnetized bosom.

“I am to tell you—”

She stopped as one of the girls walked in, a trayful of drinks in hand. She bent over, revealing a pair of very white breasts
tipped in pink. He took a glass of champagne and looked dully at the girl’s wares.

When she left, finally—blessedly, as Slayton was beginning to worry himself sick about lack of appetite—Yvonne continued:

“The bad boys of Tokyo have been terminated with extreme prejudice and the coast is clear for Sir Jellybean. You’re to hustle
on home for a week off with pay, assuming all is connected on your end.”

Slayton remembered then what the Wolf had said about President Reagan’s travel plans: “Your people believe it is safe for
the President of Hollywood to travel to Japan. And that is exactly what we wish them to think… But the question is, will
he be able to return?”

He jumped up from his chair, spilling champagne over his clothes. The Nubian slid down the couch toward him, murmuring, grabbed
him inside his thighs, and tried coaxing him back to the seat.

“No,” he said quietly, firmly. He looked at the hurt expression on the prostitute’s face. “Sorry, but no. No thanks.”

His mind was clicking, suddenly come alive in spite of his fatigue and his sorrow.

He rushed from the room, toward the door and the street. Yvonne called after him:

“You forgot your suitcase, Benji boy! Your suitcase!”

He turned around and blew her a kiss.

“It’s a present for you, with all our love! I’ll catch you in a Maidenform ad. Bye-bye!”

And he was out the door.

At the nearest telephone booth, he attempted the impossible: the use of a public telephone anywhere in France.

He hailed a cab, hopped to the nearest police station, and instructed the operator to dial the special emergency number of
Winship’s office.

After several minutes of crackling sounds and after becoming accustomed to the echo in the trans-Atlantic telephone cable
wires, Slayton and Winship spoke.

“Just answer these questions, Ham, as briefly as you can. There may not be a whole lot of time.”

“Right. Go ahead.”

“The Edward Folger kid. What’s the word?”

“Nothing much. He was supposed to have been from Yonkers, up in Westchester County, New York… my home grounds—”

“Briefly, Ham.”

“Yes. Well, that’s about it. He had a phony family setup, of course. Good enough to fool the embassy in London, but that’s
it. The only thing we turned up with his name on it was a library card. Hard to believe he’s connected to the others.”

Slayton’s muscles tightened. This horror wasn’t over. Not by a long shot, so to speak.

“The President,” Slayton said. “He’s leaving exactly when?”