Night Magic (19 page)

“For God’s sake, Clara …” He was kneeling; her head was in his lap as she crouched in front of him. Unable to fend her off with the shirt tethering his arms, he tried to rise. Her teeth sank into him viciously, making him yelp and sink back. Then she pushed him hard, turned into a feral creature
with her need to affirm life, to keep the darkness of fear away. He sprawled backward, unable to save himself without the use of his hands. Immediately she was over him, tugging at his open jeans, pulling them down around his hips as her mouth once again found and claimed him. This time he didn’t try to stop her. Through the haze that she was lost in she heard the harsh gasps of his breathing, but still she didn’t stop. She bit and sucked and kissed and caressed until he was groaning and jerking and needing her as she needed him.

“Ride me, baby. Please. Ride me.” The hoarse plea was accompanied by urgent movements of his pelvis. Clara ran her tongue up the length of him one last time, then sat back on her heels to survey her victim. With his shirt binding his arms and his jeans down around his thighs, he was naked and vulnerable to her. His manhood jutted enormously upright from its nest of black hair, thick and pulsing and wet from her ministrations. She bent her head to kiss it again.

He jerked sideways. Her lips met the furred skin of his belly.

“Ride me, Clara.” His voice was hoarse.

She stared at that pulsing shaft, felt an urgency start in her own loins, and straddled him. Her breasts were covered by silk and flannel and wool, but only the flimsiest of silk and lace kept the part of her that needed him most from him. Moving aside the wide lace-edged leg of her teddy, she held him tightly while she settled herself on him. Delicately, so delicately, the hot thick quivering shaft probed, slid inside. He gasped. She gasped. Then she closed her eyes, her muscles clenching, closing around him. He was so big, so hot.

She moaned, her fingers clenching in the hair on his chest, her head thrown back, her muscles contracting. He
surged upward, violently, unable or unwilling to let her set the pace any longer. She cried out, riding him, her movements matching his, her urgency matching his. She needed him, needed him, needed him. …

When the release came it was an explosion. Her nails dug into his chest, her neck arched, and she cried out as exquisite convulsions claimed her. He cried out too, pushed over the edge by her ecstasy, his hips coming up off the floor as he ground himself inside her. When it was over, she collapsed limply on his chest. Beneath her ear she could hear the pounding of his heart.

“God in heaven,” he said after a moment, his eyes still closed. “If that didn’t kill me nothing will.”

The fervent mutter brought her back to awareness. She became abruptly conscious of her position, sprawled across his lap, naked flesh still pressed to naked flesh. The haze of fear was crowding in on her again. It was hard to remember exactly what she had done. She had a feeling that, under normal circumstances, she would be mortified beyond bearing by the wantonness of her actions. But confronted with her own helplessness in the face of pain and death, she could not worry about such things as pride. She just wanted to stay alive.

“I’m scared,” she whispered forlornly, starting to shiver again. His eyes opened, dark as pine forests as they rested on her face.

“Don’t be scared,” he said swiftly, sitting up with her still atop him and pulling his shirt back over his head. Then he rolled with her onto the pallet, careful of her injuries, and lay with her wrapped in his arms, her head pillowed on his chest. “It doesn’t do any good at all. The best you can do is just concentrate on how you feel this moment, and let what happens later take care of itself.”

Clara thought about that, thought about how she felt at that moment with his long hard body next to hers and his arms around her and his breath in her hair, with the memory of their passion in her heart. If she refused to think of what horrors later might bring, she felt warm, cared for, content. Happy.

“Talk to me,” she murmured against his chest, enjoying the way the soft hairs tickled her nose. “Tell me everything about Jack McClain. I want to know it all. Please.”

“You know most of it,” he said after a moment, with an air of humoring hen His hand was stroking almost absently over her back. Her head was resting on his shoulder, her injured hand cradled carefully on his chest. “About how I grew up on a farm with five bossy sisters, and—”

“Did you go to college?” Clara interrupted.

“Yup. Texas Christian University. I was their star quarterback. What about you?”

“I hate football.”

“I meant did you go to college.”

“Oh. Wesleyan.”

“La-de-dah.”

“My mother’s like that.”

“Is she? Stuck up?”

Clara shook her head. “Not stuck up. Just … just a lady, I guess. We still have them, you know, in the South. She always knows the right thing to do, does it and looks marvelous all the while. Wesleyan was the right college to go to; her mother went there, she went there, and she wanted me to go there. So I did.”

“She sounds formidable as hell. Tell me about her. From the sound of her we don’t have anything like her in my neck of the woods.”

So Clara told him all about her mother. About the fur
coats and pearls and men she collected like some women collected porcelain. About her four husbands and the current candidate for number five. About the ballet lessons and piano lessons and equestrienne lessons that her mother considered essential to a young lady’s education and how hopeless she had been at all of them. About white gloves and white gowns and cotillions. About the battle they’d had over her debut. For the first time in her life Clara had stood up to her mother and flatly refused to be presented at the annual debutantes ball in Richmond. Her mother threw it up to her to this day, insisting that her daughter’s stubbornness over the matter was the sole reason she wasn’t married at age thirty. About her retreat to the world of books to escape a real world she had never felt quite adequate to cope with, and how her writing had grown from that. About her mother’s feelings on her daughter’s career: a nice, genteel way to pass the time until she got married. To her mother, marriage was the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence.

“Good God, how do you stand her?” McClain asked wryly when she paused for breath.

Clara shook her head. “It’s not a matter of me standing her. It’s more like how does she stand me? I certainly wasn’t the daughter she was expecting. I’m hopeless at all the things she considers important, and I don’t even have an urgent desire to get married. A total washout. But she loves me anyway. And I love her too. We’re just … different from one another, that’s all.”

“My mother’s not like that at all,” he said after a moment. “She never wears any makeup and screws her hair up anyhow and more often than not has a rip in her dress. All the animals on the farm follow her everywhere she goes. So do the grandkids. When I was in Nam and found myself in real trouble, I even caught myself wishing my mother
was there. She’s a terror in defense of children or animals. I kept thinking that if she were only there she’d take care of those Cong in a second. She’d go to hell barefoot in defense of her baby boy.”

“She sounds wonderful.” Clara giggled; she supposed the beer had gone straight through her empty stomach to her head. “I can’t imagine you as anyone’s baby boy.”

He chuckled, the sound rich in the darkness. “Hard, isn’t it? I only revert when I’m home. Which is probably why I don’t go home more often. It’s tough being fussed over by six women.”

“It sounds tough.” Clara was smiling. She felt happy, at peace. If one just thought of the present, it was easy, she found. There was a brief pause, and then Clara bethought herself of something that needed to be said. In case she didn’t get another chance.

“Jack.”

“Hmm?” He sounded sleepy.

“I want to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For not believing in you earlier. For doubting you. I should have known better.”

“You should have.”

Clara paused again. There was something else she had to know or she had a feeling she would never understand him at all.

“Jack.” Her voice was hesitant. “Did you really have some sort of a breakdown? Or was Thompson making that up to get me on his side?”

There was a brief silence. Beneath her head she felt a tenseness in his shoulder. When he spoke his voice was expressionless, carefully even.

“No, he was telling the truth. I spent six months in a hospital about four years ago. I had a breakdown.”

He seemed the least likely person in the world to have that kind of problem. Something horrendous must have happened to bring it on—something that he hated to remember even now. She could hear it in the starkness of his voice.

“Can you … tell me about it, Jack?”

There was a long silence. She thought he wasn’t going to say anything, that he would refuse to talk about it. Then he sighed.

“Why not? I was working undercover in Hungary. There was a cell, a network of agents, spies if you will. My cover was a writing assignment for a national news magazine; I was really supposed to find out who in our organization there was leaking information to the other side. I found and identified the traitor; a supposed student, just as I was a supposed journalist. I reported to my superiors and was told to eliminate him. The rest of the story’s a classic. While I was over there I’d met a girl, a beautiful Hungarian named Natalia. She was young and sweet, and I was so in love with her I was planning to take her back to the U.S. with me when I left. I was a deep cover operative, trained to tell no one—no one—what my job in Hungary or wherever really was. But I told Natalia. She had a family, parents whom she loved, brothers and sisters. I wanted to give her a chance to say good-bye. Whenever I left a country it was usually in a hurry, and as I said I planned to take her with me.

“My only excuse—and it’s not an excuse, but an explanation for such a lapse in judgment—was that I was drinking a lot then. I’d been going on occasional benders ever since Nam, and the drinking got worse in Hungary; there was damned well nothing else to do, and I thought I could handle it, not let it make a difference to my work.

“I told Natalia the truth the night before I was to carry out the operation. So she’d have just a little time. I was tight. Not drunk, mind you, but tight. Feeling no pain. I loved her, I thought. But pillow talk can kill, and mine was deadly. Of course she had connections with the
KGB.
She was a goddamn
plant,
because they suspected me. I should have been on to her in five minutes. But I missed all the signs. And there were signs all over the place, I realized later. But I didn’t suspect a thing. I went on with the assignment to eliminate Casanova—that was our codename for him. He was a good looking kid with a string of women. I was going to take him out from a window across the street from his flat, nail him with a silencer equipped, high-powered rifle. I got into position and waited. After two hours—the kid was normally as regular as clockwork—it became clear that something had gone wrong. I went to see my contact. He was dead, shot in the head in his flat. The backup man was dead, too. I went to the apartment that served as a meeting place for our cell and found one survivor, a sixteen-year-old kid who’d managed to hide. He told me that the entire cell had either been killed outright or picked up. The ones that were already dead were the lucky ones. The others would be tortured to death. I knew I had to get out of there fast if we’d been betrayed. There’d be time to deal with the traitor later. I went back to my own flat Natalia was there. She confessed everything, laughing at my gullibility, and then the knock sounded at the door. The bitch had set me up all the way around. I went out a window while she ran to let the goons in. I managed to save my ass, but a lot of the good guys had gone down because of me. Then Hammersmith—he was my superior officer—found out that Natalia had betrayed us. He was going to have her taken out. I lied, told him I’d already done it. I couldn’t
stand the idea of any more killing because I’d screwed up. Hammersmith believed me. But the guilt ate at me, and I went on the mother and father of all benders as soon as they had me safely back in Berlin. While I was drinking, I vowed to get my own revenge on Natalia sooner or later. Then it occurred to me: I was the real traitor, I’d gone against my training and compromised my contacts. Then I went a little crazy. I think I believed I could wipe out the whole KGB singlehandedly. I sure as hell tried. The agency rounded me up, hustled me into a sanitarium, dried me out, shrank my head a little, and when I got out gave me a job. A desk job. That’s all they were willing to trust me with, and I don’t blame them. Once a traitor, always a traitor, they say.

“That was four years ago. Then Yuropov, whom I had known some years before, defected. He asked for me, Hammersmith, who had also been reassigned to a desk job on the strength of my screwup, vouched for me, and they gave him to me. And now this.” He broke off, shook his head. “Christ, when you’re hot, you’re hot.”

That feeble attempt at humor told Clara more than any amount of soul baring could have how much he still despised himself for what had happened. She took his hand and held it to her breast in wordless comfort. There was nothing she could say to ease his pain, she knew.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said finally.

“Yeah.”

“I think you’re pretty wonderful.” The words came out of nowhere. Clara wasn’t even sure that she meant them. But the urge was strong in her to offer him what solace she could.

“Go to sleep.” From the sound of his response, he didn’t think she meant them either. Clara hesitated, wondering if
she should say something else, try to ease the tension she felt in him. But what could she say? There was no solace she could offer for his particular brand of bruised and battered soul.

“Only God never makes a mistake, Jack,” she whispered. He didn’t even bother to reply.

XIX

He sat through the night, wide awake, thinking. The truck had stopped, but no one had attempted to enter the trailer. They probably had orders to wait for Rostov to return. McClain half smiled. It would take a while for Rostov to discover that Puff was not in the pound. And when he did, he was going to get very, very angry. But it wouldn’t matter even if he did find the cat. Because there was no microfilm to be found on the furball.

Oh, it had been there, all right. He had hidden it in Puff’s blue vinyl collar during that miserable night spent in the log in the woods. It had occurred to him while he was lying there sleepless, sneezing his head off, that if he were caught and searched, and the microfilm found, that would be the end of the story right there. There were lots of places he could have hidden it—forests are full of hiding places—but be preferred to keep it close at hand in case he should need it in a hurry. For a moment he had thought about hiding it on Clara without telling her, but he’d decided against that almost instantly. Of course, if they were taken, they would search her too. Then his eyes had lit on the furball, and the
perfect solution had occurred to him. The cat’s collar was rolled and stitched blue vinyl, presumably fairly waterproof, a perfect size and the last place anyone would look. It had taken some doing and a badly scratched hand to separate the cat from his collar, but McClain, with what he modestly considered real heroism, had done it, sneezing all the while. Then he had slit the end of the collar open, tucked the microfilm inside the narrow tube, pushed it as far down as he could with the aid of the screwdriver, and replaced the collar around the spitting fury’s neck. Voila! And if Rostov or anyone had ever found it there he would have kissed their fannies for them.

The microfilm was in Ramsey’s hands now. The general was strictly a by-the-book military man, which McClain never had been, but he was known to have an almost fatherly feeling for those who had ever served under him. McClain had realized almost at once that Ramsey was his best, and possibly his last, shot at getting someone to listen to him before he got his head blown off, as seemed all too likely. So as Clara had been led away he had requested private speech with the general in the interests of national security. And Ramsey, bless his paternalistic heart, had heeded the call of the old outfit and granted his request, posting an armed guard outside his office door but otherwise seemingly content to meet alone with the crazy McClain knew he’d been made out to be.

Not that Ramsey had believed his story, of course. That would have been too much to ask. But he’d listened without interruptions, then asked about proof. Which was when McClain had made the gamble of his life and told him about the microfilm. The general had barked an order over the telephone, and after a wait of about fifteen minutes the cat had been brought in. Puff was wrapped in a blanket so that
only his head showed, but he was hissing and spitting like a demon straight from Hell, The young marine who carried him in looked like he thought he had a man-eating tiger by the tail. Which, McClain thought as the bundle was dumped on his lap with an air of relief by the young man, who saluted and hurriedly retreated, was exactly what he had. Puff was no ordinary pussy. Having learned to move fast and ruthlessly with the furball, McClain just managed to get the collar over Puff’s head before he erupted from the blanket with as much fire and fury as Mount Saint Helen’s. As Puff tore around the general’s office like a dervish with claws before winding up crouched on top of one of a set of built-in walnut bookcases, hissing at the world, McClain succumbed to a violent fit of sneezing.

“Here, kitty.” The general went to stand under the bookcase while McClain worked to extricate the microfilm, which he finally managed to do by slitting open the entire collar with the aid of Ramsey’s letter opener. When at last he had the capsule containing the tiny roll of film in his hand, the general had coaxed Puff down from the bookcase and was holding him on his lap, stroking his head. As McClain gaped. Puff, who had been purring under Ramsey’s ministrations, looked across the desk at him and hissed.

“I don’t think he likes you,” General Ramsey said with some humor.

“He hates me,” McClain said, eyeing Puff with revulsion. “And I’m not too crazy about him, either.”

“Ah, animals can always sense the way you feel about them. I’m a cat man, myself. Always did like them.”

“He obviously likes you,” McClain said. Puff’s acceptance of the general’s touch did more to elevate Ramsey in his mind than any of the heroics he had heard the man had performed on the field of battle. Any man who could coax a
purr out of that benighted feline was a miracle worker, no less. McClain’s respect for his former C.O. soared to new heights.

“So, did you find it?” Despite the enormous gray cat rumbling on his lap, the general was suddenly all business. By way of an answer, McClain held out his hand. The yellow and red capsule rested in his palm. Ramsey reached over and picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, then separated the two sides of the capsule. The miniscule roll of film fell out.

“By damn!” Ramsey sounded mildly surprised. He picked up his phone again and spoke through it, presumably to his secretary.

“Marge, get Captain Spencer in here, would you please? On the double.” He put the phone down and looked over at McClain. “Spencer’s a good man. I’d trust him with my life. I’ll have him check this out.”

McClain said nothing, just sat in the chair across the general’s desk and waited. Ramsey had not been asking his permission to give the microfilm to Captain Spencer; he had merely been telling him that he intended to do so. He had handed the ball off to Ramsey now; it was up to Ramsey to run with it.

When Captain Spencer entered after a brief knock, McClain had known instantly why this was the general’s assistant. Captain Spencer was spit-and-polish from the jaunty hat he carried under one arm to the shine on his shoes. Fortyish, with a balding head and a stocky but compact build, Captain Spencer was the quintessential marine.

“Davey, I want this microfilm looked at so we can see what’s what with it. Also, check it for prints and anything else that might help us identify where it’s come from. And do it yourself, Davey. It’s top-secret, and I don’t want
anyone else outside the three of us in this room to have the slightest notion that the thing even exists. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Captain Spencer saluted, took the microfilm from the general and nicked it carefully into his breast pocket.

“Be as quick as you can, Davey.”

“Yes, sir.” The captain saluted and turned to leave. When he was nearly at the door, the general stopped him.

“Oh, and send someone over to the
PX
to get some Tender Vittles, would you? This kitty looks like he’s hungry.”

Captain Spencer didn’t blink an eye, just saluted and was on his way.

When he was gone, Ramsey set Puff on the desk and stood up. Puff swished his tail and fixed baleful eyes on McClain. McClain did his best to ignore the smug looking cat, succeeding admirably except for the sneezing he couldn’t control as he rose to his feet along with the general.

“I imagine it will take Captain Spencer an hour or so. I will have someone show you to a room where you can shower and rest. A meal will be provided as well.”

“Yes, sir.” The military training fell over his shoulders like a cloak. Like riding a bicycle, McClain thought with wry amusement. He even found himself saluting as the general left the room, Puff tucked securely under one arm.

The microfilm provided all that Yuropov had promised it would: names, dates, places of operations compromised by Bigfoot; agency operatives revealed; codes mysteriously breached.

“Pretty damning,” Ramsey said two hours later as he stared through the scratchy, glaring field of the microfilm lens. “Not a doubt that the agency’s got a leak somewhere. The question is where? Who?”

“Yuropov said that Bigfoot was at the highest level,
general. It’s clear from the scope of information here that that’s true.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but if what Mr. McClain has told us about Bigfoot checks out, then it stands to reason that his information about a plot against the secretary of state is also legitimate. Shouldn’t we get on the horn and warn Washington?” Captain Spencer’s words were urgent.

“I’ve already done so,” General Ramsey replied, his eyes still on the microfilm. “Went right through the head of the Joint Chiefs. Nick Segram and I were at Annapolis together. He’ll get the word to the secretary of state, privately. No one else is to know.”

“That doesn’t mean that the hit won’t still go down.” All the extra security precautions in the world were little protection against a man with a high-powered rifle, as McClain well knew. Providing, of course, that that man was prepared to sacrifice his own life for the good of the Cause. And they couldn’t assume that whoever was charged with hitting the secretary of state wasn’t prepared to do just that.

“No, I realize that. But warning the secretary himself was the obligatory first step. From what you tell us, McClain, we can’t even trust our own Central Intelligence Agency with this. Which means that the little group of people who have proven they can be trusted—you, me, Captain Spencer here, and Nick Segram—are going to have to come up with a solution outside the usual intelligence channels. I have a call in to the White House. I expect to bring the president in on this. I am assuming we can trust
him.”

From the sudden jocularity in Ramsey’s tone, McClain recognized that this was an attempt at a joke. He smiled halfheartedly. The little band of freedom fighters Ramsey had named sounded pitifully small when he considered that they were pitted against the vast resources of the
KGB.
But
looking at old Wild Bill and Davey Spencer, McClain decided that they’d do.
Semper Fidelis.
To their backbones. Always faithful. As was he, whether he wanted to be or not. McClain grimaced to himself. Old marines never died. They just grunted away in different mudholes.

“In addition to the safety of the secretary of state, we must also give the highest priority to identifying Bigfoot. I would like to run this information through Big Floyd, sir. If I can access it,” Captain Spencer said to General Ramsey.

“My plan exactly,” McClain said, surprised into admiration. There was more to this spit-and-polish captain than appeared on the surface, apparently. Big Floyd was a widely known secret, but it was still a secret and not one that the average marine officer should be aware of. He regarded Spencer with some respect. “And I think I can get in, with the help of your modems.”

“And how do you intend to do that, I wonder?” General Ramsey asked with a fleeting grin. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know what lawless act you’re planning. You are in a peck of trouble already, McClain. Everyone from the police departments of fifty states to the
FBI
to the National Guard to the
CIA
to the
KGB
wants a piece of your ass for everything from car theft to mass murder. Are you going to add breaking and entering a computer to the list?”

“You only live once, sir.”

Ramsey laughed and agreed. McClain worked with Davey Spencer all through the night trying out different combinations of access codes. Finally they broke in. An hour later they had what they wanted. The list of individuals who had had access to every piece of information that Bigfoot had passed on was narrowed down to five: Tim Hammersmith, who was dead and thus effectively eliminated; Eugene Matlock, head of Counterintelligence; Oliver Simonis, deputy
director of the agency itself; Brandt Rowe, head of the Consular Operations within the agency; and Michael Ball, retired director of the
CIA,
who nevertheless still received weekly briefings on everything in which the agency was involved. And of course, as McClain sourly observed, he could add to that the entire Senate Intelligence Committee and the president and his key aides. Not more than two dozen or so, although as Spencer pointed out the five names selected specifically by Big Floyd were the most likely candidates.

“I was going to take this to Michael Ball,” McClain said, frowning over the list.

“Good thing we brought you down, then,” Spencer said cheerily, punching one last command into the enormous computer which ran the length of the room. At that early hour of the morning Camp Lejeune’s computer center was almost deserted. General Ramsey had ordered everyone out and posted a guard outside the door as McClain and Spencer worked. When summoned at last, after the two finally hit paydirt, General Ramsey was impressed with the speed and efficiency with which the computer spewed out information. He was a secretary and typewriter man himself, he said. McClain barely managed a grimace at the joke. He was dead on his feet.

Finally it had been agreed that things must go forward just as they would have if McClain had not convinced General Ramsey of the truth of what was happening. If the KGB got wind that their plot was coming unglued they would bury Bigfoot so deep that it would take years to find him. The plan was to keep up the pretense that everyone accepted wholeheartedly the story that McClain had gone off his rocker. So he was to leave Camp Lejeune in the morning; General Ramsey had already been notified that an escort of
agents was arriving to conduct the prisoner back to Langley. McClain would be assisted to escape before he got there—Ramsey was working out the details of that with Nick Segram—and then he would be brought back to Camp Lejeune in the greatest secrecy where he would assist in the identification of Bigfoot. Rostov, meanwhile, would be scouring the country for McClain, but Bigfoot would have no idea that McClain was anything more than a hunted fugitive and thus would consider himself safe. And therefore would be far easier to expose.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. McClain shook his head wryly at his own naiveté at imagining it would. Wishful thinking, he supposed. He’d done a hell of an acting job with Knebel and Thompson if he did say so himself, playing the reluctant prisoner desperate to convince a skeptical audience of the truth of what he said. They would report everything to their superiors, he knew. Hell, there had probably been a tape recorder in the car. All so Bigfoot wouldn’t get suspicious. And he’d been counting on that escape.