Mr. Murder (33 page)

He drifts toward healing sleep, confident of waking with full health and vigor in several hours.

A few feet from him, in the trunk of the car, lies the dead man who once owned the Buick—cold, stiff, and without any appealing prospects of his own.

How good it is to be special, to be needed, to have a destiny.

PART TWO

At the point where hope and reason part, lies the spot where madness gets a start. Hope to make the world kinder and free— but flowers of hope root in reality.

No peaceful bed exists for lamb and lion, unless on some world out beyond Orion. Do not instruct the owls to spare the mice. Owls acting as owls must is not a vice.

Storms do not respond to heartfelt pleas. All the words of men can’t calm the seas. Nature—always beneficent
and
cruel— won’t change for a wise man or a fool.

Mankind shares all Nature’s imperfections, clearly visible to casual inspections. Resisting betterment is the human trait. The ideal of Utopia is our tragic fate.

We sense that life is a dark comedy and maybe we can live with that. However, because the whole thing is written for the entertainment of the gods, too many of the jokes go right over our heads.

Four

Immediately after leaving the roadside rest area where the dead retirees relaxed forever in the cozy dining nook of their motorhome, heading back along I-40 toward Oklahoma City with the inscrutable Karl Clocker behind the wheel, Drew Oslett used his state-of-the-art cellular phone to call the home office in New York City. He reported developments and requested instructions.

The telephone he used wasn’t yet for sale to the general public. To the average citizen, it would
never
be available with all of the features that Oslett’s model offered.

It plugged into the cigarette lighter like other cellulars; however, unlike others, it was operable virtually anywhere in the world, not solely within the state or service area in which it was issued. Like the SATU electronic map, the phone incorporated a direct satellite up-link. It could directly access at least ninety percent of the communications satellites currently in orbit, bypassing their land-based control stations, override security-exclusion programs, and connect with any telephone the user wished, leaving absolutely no record that the call had been made. The violated phone company would never issue a bill for Oslett’s call to New York because they would never know that it had been placed using their system.

He spoke freely to his New York contact about what he had found at the rest stop, with no fear that he would be overheard by anyone, because his phone also included a scrambling device that he activated with a simple switch. A matching scrambler on the home-office phone rendered his report intelligible again upon receipt, but to anyone who might intercept the signal between Oklahoma and the Big Apple, Oslett’s words would sound like gibberish.

New York was concerned about the murdered retirees only to the extent that there might be a way for the Oklahoma authorities to link their killing to Alfie or to the Network, which was the name they used among themselves to describe their organization. “You didn’t leave the shoes there?” New York asked.

“Of course not,” Oslett said, offended at the suggestion of incompetence.

“All of the electronics in the heel—”

“I have the shoes here.”

“That’s right-out-of-the-lab stuff. Any knowledgeable person who sees it, he’s going to go apeshit and maybe—”

“I have the shoes,” Oslett said tightly.

“Good. Okay, then let them find the bodies and bang their heads against the wall trying to solve it. None of our business. Somebody else can haul away the garbage.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll be back to you soon.”

“I’m counting on it,” Oslett said.

After disconnecting, while he waited for a response from the home office, he was filled with uneasiness at the prospect of passing more than a hundred black and empty miles with no company but himself and Clocker. Fortunately, he was prepared with noisy and involving entertainment. From the floor behind the driver’s seat, he retrieved a Game Boy and slipped the headset over his ears. Soon he was happily distracted from the unnerving rural landscape by the challenges of a rapidly paced computer game.

Suburban lights speckled the night when Oslett next looked up from the miniature screen in response to a tap on the shoulder from Clocker. On the floor between his feet, the cellular phone was ringing.

The New York contact sounded as somber as if he had just come from his own mother’s funeral. “How soon can you get to the airport in Oklahoma City?”

Oslett relayed the question to Clocker.

Clocker’s impassive face didn’t change expressions as he said, “Half an hour, forty minutes—assuming the fabric of reality doesn’t warp between here and there.”

Oslett relayed to New York only the estimated traveling time and left out the science fiction.

“Get there quick as you can,” New York said. “You’re going to California.”

“Where in California?”

“John Wayne Airport, Orange County.”

“You have a lead on Alfie?”

“We don’t know what the fuck we’ve got.”

“Please don’t make your answers so darn technical,” Oslett said. “You’re losing me.”

“When you get to the airport in Oklahoma City, find a newsstand. Buy the latest issue of
People
magazine. Look on pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Then you’ll know as much as we do.”

“Is this a joke?”

“We just found out about it.”

“About what?” Oslett asked. “Look, I don’t
care
about the latest scandal in the British royal family or what diet Julia Roberts follows to keep her figure.”

“Pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, and sixty-eight. When you’ve seen it, call me. Looks as if we might be standing hip-deep in gasoline, and someone just struck a match.”

New York disconnected before Oslett could respond.

“We’re going to California,” he told Clocker.

“Why?”

“People
magazine thinks we’ll like the place,” he said, deciding to give the big man a taste of his own cryptic dialogue.

“We probably will,” Clocker replied, as if what Oslett had said made perfect sense to him.

As they drove through the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Oslett was relieved to find himself surrounded by signs of civilization—though he would have blown his brains out rather than live there. Even at its busiest hour, Oklahoma City didn’t assault all five senses the way Manhattan did. He didn’t merely thrive on sensory overload; he found it almost as essential to life as food and water, and more important than sex.

Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn’t measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city, too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the people seemed so inexplicably
. . . relaxed.
You would think they didn’t know that they, like everyone else, would die sooner or later.

He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o’clock yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen minutes late, and Alfie wasn’t on it.

In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to, traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor. Until yesterday.

They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu—perhaps a traffic accident—had delayed Alfie on his way to the airport, causing him to miss his flight.

Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a “cellar command,” implanted in his deep subconscious, should have been activated, compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command: sometimes it was so deeply buried in the subject’s mind that the trigger didn’t work and it
stayed
buried.

While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out. The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning and training, much the way that information could be lost when a computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.

But he hadn’t been at the motel.

He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.

Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on Sunday night, Alfie’s abandoned rental car had been found in a residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands. Alfie was renegade.

Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade. Catatonic, yes. AWOL, no. Everyone intimately involved with the program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of the
Titanic
prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight and one o’clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on schedule.

Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to assume that he’d snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M. Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would have been renegade for two full days.

Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours?
Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma City airport.

They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours, assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn’t slept. Alfie could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single-minded as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward assassin.

Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with which they had supplied him—and by which he could be tracked—and because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o’clock Sunday morning; the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm pistol.

The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store: multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

And at that point they had lost him for too long.

From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Anywhere.

Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.

But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.

Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.

Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe. By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he
didn’t
scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.

In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of
People
magazine.

Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said I’VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA—NOW I CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth
Star Trek
novelization.

Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.