Azrael (11 page)

Someone was lying there, faceup, head down. It was the body of a woman, but the face was no longer a woman’s face. The color was wrong, and the expression on it could not be described as human.

Regina recognized it, anyway. Hannah Stein. My God, Hannah Stein.

Regina found herself sheltering a sudden hope that the figure on the stairs might be alive, a hope that had been let in by her love for her brother. She picked her way down the stairs to see if she could help.

Hannah Stein couldn’t be helped. Her head was at a right angle to her body, and there was a smell in the hallway that told Regina that death had not even left her brother’s fiancée the dignity of continence.

Regina would have been sick, but there was something taking up too much of her brain to make room for nausea.

Hannah’s hair was wet, plastered by water into dark spikes. It didn’t make any sense. She’d have to talk to the police about this. Talk to Allan.

Why in the name of God should Hannah’s hair be wet?

T
ROTTER CAUGHT SIGHT OF
the heel of a black shoe disappearing through the doorway. He stopped just long enough to see that nothing could be done for the girl, then took off after the owner of the heel.

Gravel dug into his feet as he ran up the driveway to the road. Trotter ignored the pain. If there was a chance to grab one of these guys, to sit him in a chair, and squeeze him and make him talk, Trotter had to take it.

According to his father, the Objective was everything; you had to look at the Big Picture. You had to be willing to let A, B, and C die here today in order to save a whole alphabet of lives tomorrow, somewhere else.

Trotter knew that sometimes there was no other way. But he also knew something he had never been able to convince his father of—a picture is the sum of its elements of design. If too many details are ugly, the Big Picture will be a mess.

What was going on here in Kirkester was very ugly. If he could stop it now, he would. Let his father worry about getting the Russians by the balls. Trotter would save a few lives, if he could.

Trotter reached the road in time to see a car driving away, slowly now, but picking up speed. It was a dark car, black in the artificial light of the street lamps, maybe a dark blue or dark gray in daylight, That was all Trotter could make out, because like an idiot, he had run outside without putting on his glasses first. He squinted. He put the tips of the thumb and forefinger of both hands together in front of his left eye and pressed to get a pinhole focus, but it was no good. Trotter watched the fuzzy shape of the car disappear in the distance, cursing himself under his breath.

Failure, he thought. Acknowledge it and forget it. Get on with something constructive.

The first constructive thing to do was to ask himself if the car going by had been coincidence, and that whoever he’d seen leaving the stairway was still around, ready to jump him as he headed back to Regina.

Or had doubled back to Regina already.

Trotter put a lid on the panic that was trying to boil over in him. No. He’d heard footsteps ahead of him on the gravel. Then the crunching sound had changed to the tap of leather on a sidewalk. The footsteps stopped, the car door opened, the car drove away. Regina should be safe enough. Even if she weren’t, there was something he had to do. He had to look at his own Big Picture.

Trotter became aware of the cold pavement under his bare feet, and the cold night air on his chest and back. He waved his arms around to speed his circulation. He hoped no one looked out a window and saw him; dealing with the police would be a big enough pain as it was.

Trotter squinted again and made out a rectangle of light that could only be the neighborhood pay phone. He ran to it, went inside, put a quarter in, and dialed a local number.

The phone rang seven times, driving Trotter half crazy with impatience, before a sleepy voice said hello.

“It’s a good thing you’re there.”

“Where the hell else would I be?” Special Agent Joe Albright sounded amused. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“I never forget anything. Listen. There’s been another one, but they’ve stepped it up. The Hudson boy’s fiancée. Dumped on my doorstep. Get on a safe line and put Rines to work on it.”

“On what?”

“The victim. Name’s Hannah Stein, from Queens, New York. I want family, background, the works.”

“I thought these people were just supposed to be examples to put the fear of the Sickle into you-know-who.”

“Where the hell did you get a stupid idea like that?” Trotter demanded.

“Relax,” Albright told him. “Nobody leaked. I do have a brain, you know.”

“Brains can be dangerous. What’s different is that the last I saw her, she was about to be tucked away safely in a secure mansion. I don’t think anyone could have gotten to her without her help.”

“I’ll get right on it. Anything else?”

Trotter took a second to think. “No,” he said at last. “Not now. Just get me up-to-date on anything they’ve turned up on this. I’ll get back to you later.”

“Good-bye, sleep,” Albright said.

“You want to sleep, become a politician. Meantime, the place is going to have cops all over it in a minute, and I want to be available to welcome them.”

Trotter hung up the phone and found himself squinting into a flashlight, the glint of a badge, and, he supposed, a gun.

“Police officer,” the police officer told him. “Out of the booth. Hands up.”

Trotter complied. “High enough?” he asked.

T
HE REVEREND WILL NELSON
looked out at the congregation with a feeling of satisfaction. He was always aware that he was the custodian of the faith and trust that had been earned by the men he substituted for, and he tried never to mishandle that trust. He even, like a banker entrusted with mere money, endeavored to make it grow while in his care.

It was a nomadic life, but the job he did was an important one. God bless Donna for understanding. More than once, the preacher he filled in for couldn’t return for one reason or another, and the congregation had asked him to stay. He knew Donna would love to settle down somewhere, establish a household where
she
could decide what drawer to keep the hot pads in. It was the one sadness of an otherwise perfect marriage that Donna couldn’t have children, but wherever they went, she taught Sunday school and came to know and love the children of each new town. It was always a wrench for her to say good-bye.

But Will just couldn’t accept it. Everyone had his work to do for the Lord, and his was very special. When it was time for him to stop wandering, the Lord would call him to his One True Home.

Currently, he was minding the store for the Reverend Mr. Nethercott, who’d led the Kirkester congregation for twenty-seven years. Mr. Nethercott was in New Hampshire, at the bedside of his son, who had been hospitalized since February when he’d received a serious head injury during a skiing accident. Will had spent some time in that part of the world himself. He prayed daily for young Nethercott’s recovery.

Will was pleased to note that attendance had held steady during his tenure in Mr. Nethercott’s place. Attendance today was even greater than usual, it seemed.

Of course, tragedy would do that, and there had been tragedy here. Tragedy in human terms, at least. It was one of the few unresolved questions of his theology: Why is it that humans, even Christians, who should know better, are incapable of seeing the reunion of a soul with its Maker as the joyous event it should be? Even he, who had counseled many of the bereaved, sometimes felt twinges of doubt, tiny but real. At times like that, he called upon his Faith. It had seen him through war, and it would see him through doubt, however small.

The Hudsons were here today, even young Regina, who hadn’t been here in ages. They were back from New York, where they’d attended the poor Stein girl’s funeral. Young Jimmy was still shattered by the loss, but he was young, and his Faith was strong; he’d prevail. God willing.

The pressure seemed to be telling on Mrs. Hudson. She looked paler than ever, in her black clothes, and she trembled during the sermon.

He preached on Courage and Humility, Christian virtues he judged were essential at times like these. Humility to submit to the will of God, and Courage to carry out the responsibilities one has assumed.

As always, he took the pulpit with just the barest of notes. He always preached better when he preached from the heart.

And as always, he felt joy as he saw his words have an effect. Tina Bloyd began quietly to weep, and Will knew at last that she had come to be at peace with herself.

It would be a long time before Petra Hudson would be at peace with herself. Her trembling had become an undisguised case of the shakes, and she couldn’t make it to her feet unaided. Her son and her chauffeur helped her from the church. Jimmy Hudson looked contritely at the reverend. Will nodded benignly, but kept preaching, so as not to make a bigger spectacle of the woman than was unavoidable.

He was nearly done, anyway. He blessed the congregation and finished up. As always, he went around front to mingle with the people leaving, but this week he hurried, to see if he could do any good with Mrs. Hudson. It was too late—the big black car was leaving.

He did see one thing to lighten his heart, though. That nice Mr. Albright was talking earnestly to Tina Bloyd. She was using his handkerchief to dry her eyes, and smiling shyly at him.

Life does go on, he thought. In spite of everything, it is His will that life go on.

W
HILE THE HUDSONS ALL
went to Queens for Hannah Stein’s funeral, Trotter went to Washington to talk to his father and Rines. Nobody Trotter knew was being buried in Washington that day, but the weather was gloomy enough for a horror movie. A cold wind whipped sheets of rain across the parking lot of the Agency’s new headquarters, a small shopping center in Fairfax, Virginia.

There was more furniture around this time. Trotter was allowed in by his father’s own hands, which, he supposed, was an honor. It was ironic, Trotter thought, that if you had an appointment and he was willing to see you, it was much easier to get to the Congressman in his guise as the head of a secret espionage organization than it was for one of his constituents to see him on Capitol Hill.

His father told him to sit down. Trotter settled into an old, leather-covered armchair that faced the old man’s desk. It was probably the most comfortable visitor’s chair in the D.C. area, and Trotter was half convinced the old man lugged it around from office to office as a point of vanity. The Congressman didn’t subscribe to the theory of management that prescribed uncomfortable chairs for office visitors. The idea was to shorten appointments, and by keeping the visitor from relaxing, give the owner of the office an edge. In this theory, an uncomfortable man (or woman) was already halfway toward being intimidated.

The Congressman didn’t need
furniture
to intimidate anybody. He did it with his eyes. And his voice. Sometimes, Trotter was convinced, he did it just for practice.

Like now, for instance. When Trotter had called the Agency’s special eight-hundred number (never knew when an agent might have a tip-off on the start of World War III to pass on, but no change in his pocket) to set up this little visit, the Congressman instructed his secretary (who, along with the technicians who ran the Agency’s communications network, worked in another building entirely) to set it up without a word of protest.

Now, if you could believe the expression on his face, he was disgusted with the whole idea.

He looked sternly at his son. There was a time Trotter would have squirmed under those eyes, at least internally, but that time was long over. It ended the day he’d first run off from the old man and the Agency.

The Congressman saw he wasn’t getting anywhere with a glare. He switched to a cold scowl. “Well?” he said.

“Where’s Rines?” Trotter asked.

“He’s in New York, lookin’ after your girlfriend and her family at that funeral. Usin’ some of his own boys. Don’t know how he’s justifying that to the Bureau, but it’s nice for me. All my New York people are keepin’ an eye on Libyans.”

One thing about his father Trotter would never understand was the old man’s inability to stop playing word games. His son, of all the people in the world,
knew
that the Agency never “kept an eye” on anybody. What the Agency men in New York were undoubtedly doing was setting Libyans up to be: a) arrested by U.S. authorities; or b) killed by fellow Arabs in the most embarrassing way possible for the enemies of the nation.

Suddenly, Trotter started to laugh.

“What’s so funny, dammit?” the old man demanded. “Sometimes I worry about you, son.”

“That’s really touching,” his son said, “but don’t trouble yourself this time. I just got a flash of Rines and a bunch of his men wearing yarmulkes, trying to look inconspicuous in a Jewish cemetery.”

“Doesn’t have to be yarmulkes, you know. I went to a service for Javits, found out it can be any kind of hat.”

“I know that,” his son said.

“Then what’s so funny?”

Trotter sighed. “Never mind.” The vagaries of his father’s sense of humor were something else he’d never understand. “I assume you’ve run those checks I asked for. Or Rines has, since he seems to be doing all the work around here these days.”

That the old man smiled at. “The reports have been done,” he said.

“Anything interesting?”

“Well, the bodyguard is clean. Wesley Charles. Ex-Special Forces, did a lot of fancy anti-kidnapping driving in Italy during the worst of the Red Brigades stuff. Divorced. Ex-wife is an interior decorator out in California. Makes good money. One child, daughter. Goes by mother’s name; in school out there. Charles puts money away for her.”

“And he’s clean.”

“Absolutely. Unless he’s just gone over. It does happen, but I can’t see it here.”

“All right. Just a thought.”

“Thoughts should be shared, son.”