Deceptions (36 page)

The mysterious disappearance of five FBI agents, the discovery of the three bodies, the futile efforts of Mrs. Beekman to
learn what had happened to her husband, the stonewalling by the Bureau were all laid down block by block until they formed
their own wall of indictment. And when each of the missing agents was discovered to have been on special-duty assignment to
the FBI director himself, there was no denying the smell of something rotten.

Durning glanced at Mary Yung and found her watching
his face. Their eyes met and held, and there suddenly seemed little that each didn’t know about the other.

Hinkey was still going on with his injustice recital, but they were no longer paying attention.

“I guess it’s going to get a little sticky for you now, isn’t it?” she said.

Durning took her hand and could almost feel some of her serenity flow through to him. Yet how many of those three dead agents
sent to question her had she killed herself? No matter. They would have buried her if she hadn’t. But what he liked most was
that she showed no visible pleasure in the turn of events against him. If anything, she seemed warmer, more gentle. Lord,
this one did carry grace. Even with her loaded gun.

“Very sticky,” he told her.

“Will you be able to handle it?”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“You have a lot to lose.”

“No more than anyone else.” He shrugged. “We all leave the same way. Naked and alone.”

Durning put on a robe and excused himself. He wanted to call Brian Wayne from the safe phone in his downstairs study before
his friend got back to him up here.

Marcy answered on the third ring. She obviously was crying.

“I don’t understand,” she wept. “He’s your oldest and dearest friend. How could you have done this to him?”

Her apparent knowledge of it was his second shock of the morning. But he still needed to be sure.

“How could I have done
what
to him?” he asked.

“Whatever he did, he did for you. Now you’ve ruined him with your selfishness. Ruined him.” She dissolved in sobs.

“No one is ruined. There are ways to contain this. Just get hold of yourself, Marcy. Brian needs support, not hysterics. Now
let me speak to him, please.”

It was several moments before the FBI director came on. “Sorry about Marcy,” he said. “She—”

Durning cut him off. “When did you tell her about my part in all this?”

“I don’t know,” Wayne said dully. “But she’ll quiet down. You don’t have to worry.”

“I’m not worried. We’re stamping out this fire before it starts. I know exactly how to handle this.” Durning paused. “How
do you feel?”

“I had a couple of bad minutes, but I’m OK.”

“Good. Now listen carefully. We’re going down to your place on the shore. Marcy, too. I want us all incommunicado until we’ve
talked and gotten everything straight. Just make one call to your secretary. Tell her you’ll be at Cove Point for the day
and to cancel all appointments. And make sure she tells no one else. The last thing we need is the whole Washington press
corps streaming down there after us. And for God’s sake, muzzle Marcy and keep her away from the phone! You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll see you down at the point in about two hours. Everything’s going to be fine, Brian. Drive carefully.”

The attorney general hung up and made two brief calls. One, to his secretary to cancel the day’s appointments. The other,
to Tommy, to say he wouldn’t be using the limousine.

Upstairs, Mary Yung was in the stall shower. Durning took off his robe, quietly opened the door, and joined her.

Had flesh ever promised so much?

Yet it wasn’t only that. He was aroused before he entered the shower and touched. The tension, the fear, the excitement of
the past half-hour had all added to it in advance.

Still a crisis junkie.

The things it took to get him started. And now here she was to finish it, with the warmth of the misty spray, and the soft,
slipping, sliding of her lips and hands, and his own hands on the two perfect spheres of her bottom to lift and enter her
right there, seeing her eyes with their yellow rims where he could see himself reflected.

Then he held and moved with her across spaces crowded by the bodies of five dead agents, and the murdered widow of one of
the agents, and the equally wasted lawyer of the widow, and the sudden living presence of the lawyer’s son, who was even now
blowing everything to hell.

Durning felt sensations pulsing through her. He felt her moved by things far beyond him, of which he was less than a
vagrant thought, just someone to be used by her. As he was using her. As they were using each other.

Wide-eyed, clearly startled, she touched his cheeks. “Why are you crying?”

“Why are you?”

“Because people are horrible. And we’re two of the worst.”

“Maybe we can get better,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that be lovely.” She stared at him. “Why don’t we start by saving that little boy?”

Henry Durning took every shortcut he knew. Also, he drove fast, but not so fast as to risk being stopped for speeding. He
didn’t want any involvement with the police on this trip.

And much of the way, when his thoughts should have been focused on what lay immediately ahead, he was thinking of Mary Yung.

He had given her a house key before he left.

“This is yours,” he told her. “And so is the house and everything in it.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as you want it.”

“You’re a very generous man.”

“No. I’m a very selfish man. All I can think of around you are my own needs, everything I want most.”

“Just like the rest of us.”

Durning made it to the Waynes’ shore house overlooking Chesapeake Bay in exactly an hour and seventeen minutes. He had been
coming here for so many years that the place felt like his own.

Marcy and Brian were not there yet, and he hadn’t expected them to be. At best, Marcy was notoriously late, and today she
had good reason to be even later.

Durning parked in the gravel driveway and glanced around. The house itself was modest, but it had been in Brian’s family for
four generations, and the hundred acres it stood on were now worth millions. So it had the kind of privacy that was impossible
to find these days at the shore, with
no other houses anywhere in sight, and a view of the bay for which developers would happily sell their souls.

The attorney general found the key in its usual place under a rock beside the front lamppost. Then he opened the door and
went inside.

The gun cabinet was in the den. Its key hung from a nail in the wall behind it. Durning took out a 12-gauge, double-barreled
shotgun. It was well oiled and cleaned. Brian had always taken meticulous care of his guns. In the army, he used to call his
carbine his best friend. Durning broke the shotgun open, closed it, then broke it open again.

The ammunition was kept in a drawer next to the broom closet, and Durning found a box of 12-gauge shells. He slid two of the
shells into the shotgun’s chambers and closed the breech. Then he put back the box, brought the gun into a downstairs bedroom
off the kitchen, and put it behind some clothes in one of the closets.

He stood there for a while listening to the hum of the refrigerator, and the engines of a plane passing overhead, and the
sound of crows in some nearby trees.

Well, he thought, and wondered how it had ever come down to this. Not that he really had to wonder. He knew. It was just one
thing leading to another, getting you in deeper and deeper until it seemed the more you struggled, the further you sank.

But that was some John Hinkey. Who would have expected that whole piece of business with his son? Who even knew he
had
a son?

But that was enough to do it, all right. And it was easy enough to see the whole progression from there… with the appointment
of a special prosecutor, and the media sideshow that would follow, and Brian inevitably splitting apart at the seams, making
a full confession, and throwing him to the wolves as he turned state’s evidence.

So what options do I have other than this?

Blow my own brains out? Quietly waste away in prison?

Which in a practical sense meant no options at all. Maybe for others but not for him. Never for him. He had firmly established
that part of his nature ten years ago, when he had chosen to cover an accidental killing with his first deliberate one. That
was the
biggie
right there. That was the one that
programmed him for everything that followed. After that, it was just a matter of hitting the right buttons.

As the bodies kept piling up.

And with this thought, the sickness hit him. Sudden and unexpected. One moment he was standing in quiet contemplation. The
next, he was puking his guts into the kitchen sink. He had never known such a sickening. It was as if whatever good had been
left in him after all these years was leaving. It was a dissolution, a final revolt of the cells. Only instinct was left to
hold him together.

Then the moment passed and he put his face under the faucet and washed himself clean.

Durning was sipping scotch and listening to a Chopin etude in the living room when he saw the Buick enter the driveway and
pull up in front of the house.

He watched through the window as they got out of the car. Marcy was talking nonstop while dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
Brian just stared off somewhere.

Durning rose to greet them as they came in. He kissed Marcy on the cheek, embraced his friend, and handed them each a perfectly
chilled martini.

It was their house but he had taken over as host. Then wasting no more time on amenities, he moved right into it.

“The worst of it was the initial shock,” Durning said, “and that’s over.”

He spoke to Wayne. “Did you know Hinkey had a son working for him?”

The FBI director shook his head. “I met him only that one time in my office, and he never mentioned it.”

Marcy was crying again. “What would you have done if Brian had known?” she asked Durning. “Had the man’s son murdered, too?
And what about other possible law associates and partners? Or would you have just planned on putting a bomb in their offices
and getting them all at once?”

Durning looked at Brian Wayne. “What else did you tell her?”

Wayne sipped his martini and didn’t answer.

“I only wish to God he’d told me more,” said his wife. “I’d have screamed so loud none of these disasters would
have happened.” She bit her lip to stop its trembling. “Friendship! The next time I hear that word I swear I’ll spit.”

For the first time Wayne met Durning’s eyes and something passed between them, something they both understood and Wayne’s
wife never would.

“Marcy, please,” said the FBI director. “What’s done is done. We’re not here for recriminations.”

“Like hell we’re not,” said Marcy. “That’s exactly what I want. Recriminations!”

She took down half her martini in a single gulp. Then she breathed deeply and stared at her husband.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, suddenly calm and very cold. “I hate your friend Henry Durning. And I despise
what he’s done to you all these years. He’s cold and he’s self-serving and he doesn’t care if you or I or anybody else lives
or dies as long as he gets what he wants. You amuse him because he once saved your life, and you’ve been paying him homage
and kissing his ass ever since. You’re basically the most ethical man I know. Yet when he asked you to betray yourself and
your office for a reason he wouldn’t even tell you, you sacrificed the lives of five of your agents without batting an eye.”

The FBI director closed his eyes as though in pain. “For God’s sake, Marcy—”

“Don’t you‘for God’s sake’ me!” she rushed on. “Then when he has two more people killed to cover up the first five, and the
whole rotten mess explodes in
your
face, not
his,
he has the nerve to talk to
me
about my hysterics.”

She turned to face Henry Durning. “Well, Mr. United States Attorney General,” she said softly, her eyes dry and hard now,
her voice and face like glacial ice, “you haven’t even begun to see my hysterics. Because if you’ve got the idea I’m just
going to sit quietly by while my husband is crucified and you’re left untouched, you’re not as smart as I think.”

The room was silent.

Durning and Wayne stared at each other in a strange, almost embarrassed way. Marcy didn’t look at either of them. She just
stood there finishing her martini. Then moving very deliberately, she walked to the far end of the room and began mixing herself
another drink.

Gently, Durning took his friend’s arm. “Forget all that,” he said. “It’s a bad time for everyone. But it might be easier if
we talked alone for a few minutes and got a couple of things settled.”

His hand still on Wayne’s arm, Durning guided him to the bedroom as if he were a blind man, and followed him in.

Wayne never had a chance to turn around.

Durning swung the pistol butt only once, a flat solid shot to the back of the head that caught Wayne exactly right and dropped
him without a sound. He didn’t seem to fall as much as crumple.

The attorney general stood looking down at his friend. The calm Durning contained seemed delicate and he didn’t press it.
It was enough to just stand there for a moment, letting things settle. Then he returned to the living room.

Marcy had finished mixing her second martini and was standing at a window, gazing out and drinking as he quietly approached.

She must have heard him, yet she didn’t turn until he was almost on her. When she did see him, it was the moment he was taking
that final step, arm raised, and he faltered before her stare, all stomach for it leaving him. Until the sound of her glass
smashing on the wood floor shook him free of her eyes and he put her out.

I never knew she hated me so much,
he thought, and carried her in to join her husband.