Catacombs (35 page)

"Maybe it's the best medicine. Or maybe Roper One is holed up in a Holiday Inn while someone from Cobra Dance who looks like him through a telescopic lens is taking his place. The same for the other two. But if Cobra Dance is here, they made me in a hell of hurry. How?"

Duke scratched a newly sunburned and peeling nose. "Given the circumstances, the fact that you're close to the president, the KGB made an educated guess. And your activities of the past few days confirmed it."

Jade nodded and finished his sandwich. "These sons of bitches just might be a load of trouble for everybody.""

"We could get a friend of Roper or Clemons down here for a positive ID."

"Negative vibrations. They'd have a contingency plan which might provoke some wet action. For the same reason, we don't want to take them into custody for the next day or so."

"Couldn't do that anyway. Roper and Clemons have been missing all day. We don't know where they are."

Jade stared at him. "Lem and Raun went back a couple of hours ago. Is my Bronco in the parking lot?"

"One of your hands drove it to town this morning. Want me to go along?"

Jade thought about it. "No. If we're dealing with the trade here, I want to get along home looking dumb and happy."

F
ive twenty-four in the afternoon. A leaden overcast had stifled the sun when Bill Sawyer put away the binoculars he was using to keep the Warshield ranch buildings and the road under surveillance. No sign of life there except for the corralled remuda horses; nothing had stirred in the spacious yard since ten after three, when he had seen Lem Meztizo the Third, then Raun Hardie, stagger and go down loaded with a potent combination of thiobarbiturate and succinyicholine.

They had subsequently been removed to the house by Roper and Clemons. He couldn't guess what was happening inside now, or how soon it might be over. His head and eyes ached from the continual effort of focusing through the binoculars. And his bladder infection was worse.

Later he would blame eyestrain and his need to pee for his carelessness. The wind was blowing luminous snakelike waves through the grama grass below the rocks where he'd been maintaining his watch. With his binoculars and walkie-talkie in a shoulder bag he climbed down and sought a stand of trees and unzipped his pants to relieve himself. While he was dribbling erratically on a lichen-covered windfall he heard sage grouse explode from cover somewhere to the northeast, behind his back. His camper was parked in that direction. He turned slightly to see what had gotten the birds off and saw Matthew Jade standing about forty feet away, observing him. Jade had one of Sawyer's fishing rods in his right hand. His other hand was free, and empty.

The shock of seeing him gave Sawyer a painful stricture. He tried to smile. A few drops of urine dribbled on his pants.

Jade said in street Russian, "It's too quiet over at my place. No dogs barking. When you've got a dozen dogs around, they're always carrying on over a rabbit or a pika. The business you're in gets pretty crude sometimes, but I hope like hell your buddies didn't kill any of my dogs."

"What?" Sawyer said, looking terribly perplexed. "What was that you said? I don't speak any foreign languages."

"Face me," Jade told him in English. "Full front. Now what about my friends?"

Sawyer was carrying a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .44 magnum upside down under his partially zippered nylon Windbreaker. As he turned slowly he dropped his leaking weenie, which he'd been holding between the thumb and middle finger of his gun hand, and went for the revolver. It looked like a pretty good deal. Jade was not, apparently, armed. No need to ventilate him, just put him somewhere on ice temporarily until Roper and Clemons decided what to do with him.

Jade's wrist flicked and the reel sang alluringly in a glimmer of sunlight through the lowering overcast and Sawyer, drawing but not drawing fast enough, blinkingly saw the curve and dip of the sinister, multi-hooked thing, saw it coming, flying at the whim of the slickly cast and sizzling filament. But he couldn't stop pissing and draw his weapon and get his feet moving all at the same time and so the plug hit him full on the exposed pecker, dropping its several complicated hooks to the plump underside, biting, as pressure was applied, like a clot of bees.

Sawyer was now willing and eager to blow Jade's brains out but free of the upside-down holster under his left arm, the revolver hung up in the teeth of the zipper track just long enough to thwart any advantage his firepower would have given him.

Jade then gave a firmer, no-nonsense-now tug to the line, the tip of the casting rod nodding Sawyer's way, and Sawyer almost screamed, more from fear of potential damage than actual pain.

Mouth open, he brought the revolver all the way out, but slowly and with no steel in his wrist, and deposited it in the grass. He looked down reluctantly at his full-fledged pecker and saw it half erect, held up by the taut line and the articulated, phony-bug lure, dark blue with wavy yellow lines down its back. Blood was oozing at three barb points but happily he was intact, at least for the moment.

Jade began reeling in his catch; Sawyer, wincing, stumbled toward him, still too shocked to feel humiliated,

T
he interior of Jade's plain-looking log ranch house followed a simple floor plan. There was a large central living area with a fourteen-foot beamed ceiling, a combination kitchen and dining room on one side, and a sleeping wing on the other, with three ample bedrooms and two full baths, one of which contained a sauna and hot tub. There was no attic and no basement. Windows were small and high: The winter winds blew long and fiercely in this part of the country, and snow frequently drifted as high as the eaves outside.

The ranch office and Jade's study were in a separate wing connected to the kitchen by a short entryway, which also contained a mud room-half bath. The kitchen had enough stainless restaurant-size equipment to handle meals for up to thirty men a day. The year-round hands, Andy von Boecklin and Clete Davis, lived in one bungalow on the eastern perimeter of the fenced garden plot behind the main house; Ken and Lee had a similar bungalow on the west side of the garden, which Ken had just finished composting in anticipation of the new growing season. Two thirty-foot windmills pumped water for irrigation and provided electricity for the ranch.

Steve Roper and Ted Clemons spent a lot of their time after three fifteen in Jade's study, looking at the reconnaissance photos of the Makari Peninsula on Jade's Betamax. There were a lot of them. At intervals Clemons raised Bill Sawyer on the walkie-talkie. Reception was marred by static but everything looked okay down there. Roper and Clemons had a long talk, putting together everything they knew and could deduce about Jade's mission to Tanzania. It was quite a bit, but not enough to satisfy them yet.

Clemons poured coffee from the hot plate and looked at his watch. Five thirty-two.

"Call Sawyer again," Roper said. He was engrossed in a stack of weather projections for East Central Africa, the two-week period commencing May eighteenth.

Clemons tried, but got nothing but static. Then he heard a faint voice, but no words he could distinguish.

"Waste of time. He'll page us when
numero uno
shows up. I'll be back in a little while."

Clemons picked up a cassette recorder and slipped it into a pocket of his camouflage jacket. He walked through the house. Clemons was a virtuoso whistler; he could handle anything–classical, show tunes. As he walked toward the bedroom wing, turning on lamps to brighten the rooms, he worked on the high notes of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing." He was almost, but not quite, satisfied with the crystal purity of the sounds he was producing when he looked in on Raun Hardie. He rapped his knuckles on the partly opened door. Her eyelids fluttered. He was encouraged to turn on the overhead light.

"Hello, sleepyhead," he said cheerfully, and approached the bed.

Raun took him in without moving, neither frightened nor very curious. She yawned and brought up a slow hand to rub her face.

"Feeling okay, Raun?'

"I don't know. Who're you?"

Clemons pulled out a folder and showed her some identification. "I'm Ted Clemons. CIA." He sat beside her on the bed. "Thirsty?"

Raun licked her lips. "Uh-huh."

"You would be. You got socked with a helluva load of winky-bye time. Here." He put a hard finger against her left thigh, and she winced. "It'll be swollen and sore for a couple of days."

Clemons turned to the night table and poured water for her from a pitcher.

Raun was thinking about his cryptic explanation. Some of the mist in her head drifted away from an overly sharp picture of Lem Meztizo collapsing on the sod with a dart: stuck in his back. Trouble and dismay welled up in her but the tranquilizer in her blood smoothed the emotion away.

"Where's Lem?"

"Taking a longer nap. You managed to jerk that dart out of your leg before you absorbed the full dose. He'll be okay, though, don't worry about that hard-nosed bastard."

"But–what happened? Who–" She tried to sit up. Her movements were awkward, her head drooped. Clemons eased her back down and shook his head regretfully.

"You won't feel so spunky for a little while. Don't try to move around. Want to go to the bathroom?"

". . . No."

He gave her water to sip. "Looks as if the other side got wind of the Tanzanian operation and decided to shut us down. Fortunately we've had the ranch under surveillance, so you didn't come to any harm. But they may have got away with the information they needed."

"What . . . 'other side'? What's going on? Where's Matt?"

"He said to tell you he'd be along in a few minutes. Unfortunately we've had to, uh, scrub the mission."

"Does this . . .. could it have anything to do with Zola trying to kill me?"

His blond brows knitted together in a frown.

"Raun, we just don't know yet. Haven't put it all together. But–yes--I think it could have something to do with Zola."

Raun handed the water glass back to him, blinked at the ceiling.

"It's off? We're not going?"

"Too risky."

"Now I–I guess I don't have to worry anymore. Funny, you know, it was getting to me, even when I convinced myself–it couldn't possibly make any difference. I mean, not telling them about the real location of the Catacombs." She looked sideways at Clemons. He was smiling.

"Hey, you're full of surprises."

"Will I still get my pardon?"

"Sure. No problem." He took the cassette recorder from his pocket, tested it. "Raun, what we need to do now, with the mission aborted, is debrief you. I just want you to talk through everything that's happened since–well, you might start with Zola."

"At the prison. But I've been over and over that."

"I know, just one more time if you don't mind. Start with the prison and relate everything up to the moment you were hit by that dart outside today. Keep in mind that something you think is trivial, not worth mentioning, might be a big help–"

There was a sound of a boot scraping floorboards, a convulsive coughing. Raun looked past Clemons, who had turned his .head like a shot. Lem Meztizo was collapsing in the bedroom doorway, trying to cling by his fingers to the jamb, his artificially blond hair in a wild thatch around his head, his skin drained of color.

"Raunie . . . wrong guys . . . don't say nothing . . ."

He started to fall, but in the instant before he lost his grip Clemons drew an oddly shaped pistol that fired either tranquilizer darts or explosive pellets loaded with nitrogen mustard gas at a muzzle velocity of seven hundred feet per second. He shot Lem in the side of the head with it. The crash of Lem going down shook the bed.

Raun screamed.

Clemons put the pistol away and turned around. He looked different when he wasn't smiling. Some bitterness had seeped into his eyes. The red in his apple cheeks now looked like wrath.

"We can still do this nicely," he said.

"Who are you?"

He reached out and cradled her face in the one hand. Where his fingers pressed–and he didn't have to bear down all that hard–she felt excruciating pain.

"Or not so nice. You decide."

O
n Red Cloud Mesa the Vassals of the Immaculate Light, partaking of supper by their campfires, turned to look at the Custom Bronco, with only its parking lights on, flying up the rutted road, coming straight at them. The men got up slowly in their burgundy burlap robes, their nearly shaven heads gleaming in the firelight. They gathered around as Matthew Jade climbed down from the cab.

A tall black man with a scar across the bridge of his nose said, "Reason is strength, and strength is peace. The universe is but Light, the perfect Light of our immortal souls in their myriad journeys through Space and Time. Concentrate on the Light, and ye shall find the answers ye earnestly desire."

"Never mind that shit," Jade said. "The rumble's on.

The scarred man turned instantly and said over his shoulder, in a less ethereal voice, "Jacky, Vince, round up the kids and fall back to Point Bravo. The rest of you break out the Sterlings and the XM177s. Stun grenades and full Teflon loads."