Deep Cover (44 page)

There was rain. It struck the flagstones outside and began to steam. Ronnie said, “If we're going to be stranded here until the flash floods subside then we've got time to think of another way.”

“There is no other way.”

“There has to be. Do that much for me, Les—let me have the time.”

In the corner of his vision Forrester saw Top Spode close his fist around the heavy glass ashtray on the table beside the window but in that instant the storm burst like a bomb. The thunderclap drew Suffield's attention involuntarily toward the window. Suffield whipped around and spoke from a semi-crouch, pistol leveled:

“Get away from it, Jaime.”

Fragmented lightning licked across the sky and metal in the hill rocks brought it down, fizzling and streaking, reflected in the windows. Thunder shattered the quiet with ear-splitting explosions; rain battered the shingles as if someone had dumped it out of airplanes in tank loads. The sky was dark and wild; Suffield spoke crisply and Ronnie went around turning on lights. “Go behind him,” Suffield adjured. “Don't get between him and my gun.”

Spode was by the window and when Ronnie reached up under the shade of the lamp Suffield said, “Step back away from her, Jaime,” and wiggled the gun; and Spode, stepping aside, hooked his foot through the lamp's trailing electric cord and stamped down. The lamp tumbled forward and when Ronnie dodged out of its way she came within reach: Spode grabbed her wrist, yanked her around into a hard embrace. He had her arm twisted behind her back; Forrester heard her tiny outcry.

Spode talked very fast. “Now drop that damned thing before I break her arm.”

In his anxiety Suffield had stepped forward; he shook his head, stubborn, weighing it, and finally he said, “I guess not, Jaime.”

Ronnie cried, “Les!” Her face was taut with pain. Suffield began to walk toward them. Spode reached around with his free hand, slid his grip down to Ronnie's left hand, grabbed the middle finger and bent it back hard. “This goes first, Les.” Ronnie gave a broken sound of agony.

Suffield had crossed half the length of the room, bringing
up the revolver and sighting carefully past Ronnie's shoulder at Spode's face, but Spode kept turning Ronnie in front of him. Forrester waited his chance and jumped Suffield, snapped both hands around the outstretched wrist and twisted in opposite directions with all the strength in his big fists.

The gun wobbled out of Suffield's fingers and Suffield sucked wind through his teeth.

Suffield cracked the leather rim of his shoe against Forrester's shin. Pain shot up Forrester's leg. Suffield twisted out of Forrester's grip and dived for the gun but Spode had thrown Ronnie aside and leaped forward: he butted Suffield in the kidney and the blow knocked Suffield against the brass-cornered coffee table. The table caught him behind the knees and he went over bringing the table down with a clatter of ashtrays and snapping wood.

Suffield's fist closed around the broken table leg, its brass corner still attached. He turned on one knee wielding the massive leg like a club, swinging it in a wicked circle while Spode scooped up the revolver.

Forrester, swaying to get balance, saw it from the corner of his vision in the broken instant. The jagged club whistled toward Spode and because Spode's weight was on one arm and one knee, Spode couldn't parry, and there was only one thing left: Spode shot to kill because he didn't have time not to.

The walls threw back stunning echoes of the explosion. The point-blank charge splintered bone fragments from Suffield's forehead; Suffield's mouth sagged with stupefaction and he toppled, grazing Spode's shoulder with the club. The room was instantly filled with a cordite stink.

The fierce lightning of the thunderstorm crackled around the house. Forrester's face was hot and prickly: his eyes felt sticky. Uselessly he kicked the bunched-up throw rug out of his path and knelt by Les Suffield, laying his finger along the man's wrist to feel for a pulse. It stopped beating under his hand. He reached for the rug to pull it up over Suffield's face.

Spode had turned to train the pistol on Ronnie. “I'd stand still.” Spode was sweating.

Ronnie stood quivering in every rigid limb. Her face seemed all bones and eyes—huge eyes. Her hair was lank with sweat and her voice was a hollow monotone from which everything alive had been sucked. “Go ahead. You may as well.”

“Nuts.”

Forrester got to his feet. He could see the anger rising in Spode, the coming explosion, but Spode snugged the stubby .38 into his hip pocket.

Ronnie slid down against the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She sat hunched over, like a sick aged wreck. “Oh, Les.”

Spode said, “He was your brother, right?”

She nodded. Her face dipping, the long hair swayed forward to mask it; her fingers reached the edge of the carpet and began to pick fluff.

Spode said, “Had to be.”

Forrester walked across the room and crouched on his haunches beside Ronnie. “You've got to tell us everything—right now.”

She pressed her hands to her temples. “They'll kill me if I talk.”

Spode said harshly, “They'll have to wait in line.”

“Who,” Forrester said very quietly, “is they?”

Her voice was thin, far away. “I knew I was going to hurt you. I tried not to. It was the first time in years anyone ever mattered to me—I wanted to be everything you wanted me to be.… If you knew how I despise myself …”

Spode moved forward. “Snap out of it. Both of you.”

Forrester put out a detaining hand. Spode stopped where he was, and Forrester stood up, gripping Ronnie's hand and pulling her gently to her feet. She smiled, childlike, but her eyes had lost focus. Spode said, “We've seen that before. Battle shock.”

“Ronnie.”

She did not reply and when her eyes began to roll up Forrester lifted her off her feet and carried her to the couch. Her eyelids slid shut like those of a plastic doll.

Spode said, “Let's wake her up.”

“Not yet, Top.”

Spode gave him a curious look. “What's that supposed to mean?”

He dragged fingers across his eyes as if to scrape away a film. “She blacked out before—when her husband was killed. She had to be institutionalized and it took a long time to bring her out of it. I'm afraid to rush her now.”

Spode stared at Ronnie. “Hell, she's just fainted.”

“Maybe. We'll see.” Her breathing was shallow and even; her face had gone white. Forrester straightened and turned. “We can't just leave Les like that.”

“We're not supposed to touch the body.”

“I don't know if we want the police, do we Top?”

Their eyes locked and Spode said slowly, “I don't know what in the hell we do want.”

“They said something about its being all over in thirty hours from now. Whoever they are and whatever they're doing, they've put it into high gear.”

Top was down on one knee, as if by physical proximity he could vitalize the secrets that had died in Suffield's brain. “How long did we know him, anyway? Ten years? Fifteen? He used to teach math at the university, remember? There was some kid worked on your last campaign said he was the best teacher she ever had because he had the best sense of humor. I don't know what he was but I liked the son of a bitch.”

Forrester said slowly, “I have a feeling if we had time to dig back we'd find Les's history stops cold eighteen or twenty years back. When he came to Tucson from wherever it was—Des Moines, I think he said. It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a shred of evidence in Des Moines to prove he ever lived there.”

“Like Trumble, you mean.” Spode scrutinized him over his shoulder. “I see what you're getting at.”

Forrester was watching Ronnie and he felt as if a plug had
been pulled and everything drained out of him. She looked heartbreakingly beautiful. Spode's voice rode across the room: “Her too.”

“Yes, her too.” There had been no visible flaw, no slightest hint that she was a forgery. The contradiction between reason and fact was staggering. He sat down by her; her perfume was in his nostrils, and he gripped her hand although she was still unconscious. When he looked into her immobile face it was hard to regard her as the same woman she had been forty-eight hours ago, to recall her smile, her body's intricate capacity for abandon, the words that went with the expressions that chased one another across her animated face.

Everything he remembered about her had been wiped away as if by death and what was happening inside him was like an assassin's knife between the ribs. His mind observed, cataloged events, drew conclusions without believing; his scalp shrank and the delayed shock thudded into him in waves: his heart chattered with a fast violent thumping. He shot to his feet and tramped back and forth slamming his feet down hard.

“Belsky, Trumble, Craig, Les, Ronnie. God knows how many more of them. She said the letter mentioned half a dozen names.”

“That might not be all of them. That's one of the rules when you're working under cover—you don't know anybody so you can't fink on anybody. For all we know there's a hundred of them.”

“A hundred of what?”

Spode replied, “We have to assume they're KGB, don't we.”

“You mean because of Belsky.”

“Sure. Has to be.”

The roots of Forrester's hair began to prickle, an outbreak of needles. “How could they possibly have operated in this country for twenty years or more without being caught?”

“That seems to be the whole point—they didn't operate. They just melted in and waited. That's the KGB hallmark—infinite patience.”

The adrenalin pumping through Forrester's body made his
hands shake. He was staring down at Ronnie and the design was taking shape in his mind but the tendency to discredit the whole thing was still strong: the enormity of it was beyond acceptability, there must be some mistake.

“Got to be,” Spode muttered. “Can you doubt it?”

“I can. I want to. But I don't.”

“Listen, they're plants—Belsky came here to turn on the switches and get them all moving like wind-up toys. Thirty hours, she said.”

“We've got to crack them, haven't we, Top?”

“How? The only name we've got is Belsky's and there's already an army of people looking for him. They don't know his contacts so they're not going to find him. And look, even if we did find one of them he'd have nothing to gain by confessing. Whatever we could do to him if he refused to talk would be nothing compared to what the KGB's people could do to him if he did talk. They're glued together and the cement's had twenty or thirty years to dry.”

It was a feeling like ice across the back of Forrester's neck. “Tomorrow night. And we don't even know what to look for.”

Spode picked up the phone, listening, put it back. “The line's still dead and we can't get a car out until the rain quits and the gullies flush out. Look at that stuff come down, we won't get out of here before midnight.” He came away from the window, still pacing the room as if it were a zoo cage. “Listen, you got a raincoat or a poncho or something?”

“Coat closet in the hall,” Forrester said absently, and then snapped his head around. “No, I'll go. You stay here with Ronnie. I'll walk out of here and try hitching a ride on the highway and get to the nearest phone that's working.”

“Nuts. You ain't thinking. It's got to be me. I'm the one who knows the people in the Agency—I know who to call and what to say. You don't.”

“Then give me the names and phone numbers. We're in a time trap and I've got more clout than you've got—it boils down to that, Top, I can get them moving faster.”

While he talked Forrester was striding across to the foyer closet. But Spode followed him and planted his feet, obstructing
the way. “Listen, Senator or no Senator, what the hell is it, your personal crusade? No infidels allowed? You know damn well where the Agency's concerned I carry more weight than you do because they know me and they don't know you. They've seen nut cases in Congress before.”

“We're wasting time, Top.”

“And wasting wind, but let's spell it out—you just want to be a fucking hero, don't you?”

It staggered him. “Is that what you really believe?”

“What other excuse have you got? You've got to be the one stays with her because she's the only one who can lead us to them and you're probably the only man in the world she'll spill to. That makes me the one that goes to the phone.” He plucked the oilskin slicker out of Forrester's hand. “I'm sorry about what I just said. I didn't mean that. I know better.

Forrester was looking at Ronnie. “You're right—I had my mind on something else.”

Spode shrugged into the slicker and Forrester turned to him. “Pay attention before you go—there was a reason I felt I ought to be the one to talk to the Agency people. If we call in the Agency we've got to do it discreetly and make sure the Agency keeps the lid on it.”

“I'm not sure I get that. We don't know what Belsky's orders are but I'd say the odds against tomorrow were damned high. We may need to call out the troops before this is over—what do you mean keep a lid on it?”

“I mean our primary objective is to get to Belsky and neutralize him and get these undercover people of his out of this country.”

“Go on.”

“If we put everything we know in the lap of the authorities they'll put out a net—and you can only use a net when you can afford to have a lot of innocent fish swim into it. But if that happens the word will get out. You see?”

“You'd better go a little slower for us country boys.”

“If the public finds out the Soviets are intriguing in our own back yard the result could be catastrophic. We've got to keep
the Cold War cold, but it won't stay cold if we start a full-scale witch hunt. Another round of McCarthyist paranoia. If we can avoid that we must.”