Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (5 page)

The move Billy was contemplating was called an arm drag. It was one at which he had excelled in high school and particularly at Stanford. But this library was not a ring. Right now he had to lure his assailant closer. There was still too much distance separating them for him to make the move work, even in the modified form he was planning. Had Stuart been older or Emily stronger or less emotional, he might have called to them to join him. Cynthia could have been more useful, but after a drink and without any warning that she would be entering a trap, he wasn't sure. Even with pistol in hand, this man would not be able to overcome them all, but it wouldn't require much effort for him to pick them off one by one as they arrived or to take a child hostage. No, it was safer to face him down alone.

Billy took a cautious step back; by reflex the man extended his left arm, looking along the length of it, past the Walther's barrel, directly at him. “Calm down, will you?” Billy said. “I can't go anywhere.”

The false priest, too, drifted back. “Damn right you can't.”

“You'd better think about what I said.”

“I have. It's a crock.”

Billy moved with baby steps. He wanted to reverse their positions without the priest's realizing what he'd done. That way when his right hand flew up out of nowhere and suddenly struck the pistol, it would deflect any shot fired away from the house. He kept talking.

“I don't know what you think you're doing, going around in circles,” commented the priest. “All you've managed to do is get yourself a lot farther away from your only possible escape route than you were before, which is why I let you do it. Didn't notice that, I'll bet, how much farther you are from the door.”

Billy wished the priest had not been left-handed. It meant he would have to go for the man's triceps with his own left hand, after using his right in a hard swat to dislodge the man's grip on the Walther, or at least to deflect his aim, before Billy could spin him and take him from the back. With the weapon neutralized, there would be no contest. He sighed, as if to credit the priest for having gotten the better of him. He needed to stall, for just a few more seconds, to be certain he had not merely reversed their positions but was close enough. He would have to spring at the priest from this point, but it was as close as he was likely to get, and he decided he could do it.

He looked again at the sky above Mission Hills, hoping the priest's gaze would travel the same direction, if only for the necessary instant. When it did, Billy leaped. He let out a fierce, animal cry of attack as the outside of his right hand slammed into the priest's left thumb, flattening the pistol against his chest. With his left hand, Billy grabbed for the priest's triceps. Once he had gained a purchase on these muscles at the back of the upper arm, he would have the torque to turn the man around. Controlling him from behind, he would then have little trouble wrestling him to the floor.

They were staring face-to-face, the priest's forefinger still on the Walther's trigger, but its barrel, from which in their struggle the silencer had slipped, was now pointed to the window. Billy had the priest's upper arm, but only from the inside, not yet the back. He squeezed it, stepping forward into their match. Two or three more inches were all he required. Already he could see the fear, the resignation to loss on the priest's brow and in his eyes. Even so, the man managed to get off a stray shot.

“Daddy!” Cynthia called.

He could not reply as the priest struggled to release himself.

“Daddy!” Cynthia cried out once more.

“Grandpa,” Emily called. “What's the matter?”

“Grandpa!” Stuart screamed.

“Stay back,” Billy said as they opened the door.

“I've pushed the alarm,” Cynthia said, restraining the children. “The police will be here any minute.”

The priest kept silent. Billy still could not reach fully behind his arm. The two men watched each other. Each time the priest jolted toward freedom, Billy pressed in upon him.

“You won't get away once the police arrive,” Cynthia said.

Emily gave her mother a reproving look.

Another shot fired.

Cynthia drew the children back.

With a sudden, forceful shudder and a knee kick to the inside of Billy's left thigh, striking the nerves at his groin, the priest managed to loosen Billy's hold on his shooting arm. He took advantage of the breathing room. A second, lower, street-fighting kick, quick and sharp at Billy's ankle, released that hold completely.

Billy said, “Don't!”

The priest took aim at Billy's lips. He fired three shots. “The blood of a bloodsucker,” he declared as a dark puddle spread and stained the floorboards and coagulated in Billy's hair.

“Run!” Cynthia cried to her children, her voice, in shock, deeper, no longer brittle.

Stuart and Emily stood paralyzed by what they had witnessed. As if in disbelief at the speed and completeness with which death came, even their tears would not fall. Neither fear nor the instinct to self-preservation would connect their brains to their bodies, propel their fast legs as the priest moved toward them. The Walther's magazine held fifteen rounds. So he had, he calculated, ten left.

“No,” Cynthia said.

“You should have kept the children out of here where they belonged. You should have kept them alive. I wouldn't have come after you.”

“But we'd seen you.”

The priest hesitated. “I guess you're right.”

He shot Emily first, then Stuart, as the boy, in an attempt at manliness that was both premature and final, lurched bravely toward him. It was not until Cynthia had bent over the corpses of her children, her palms in pools of their young blood, that she was shot from behind.

Chapter Three

The young man in
the Lincoln Navigator watched the priest come out of the driveway onto the winding, tree-lined street at exactly the point upon which they had agreed. The image in his new ATN Viper Night Vision Scope was sharper than he had expected it to be, and even from the safe distance of five hundred meters, he could make out the frenzied desperation of an amateur. He had heard the gunfire—too much—from the direction of the house and could only assume that Wilhelm Claussen had put up more of a fight than had been anticipated. Perhaps the man he had outfitted as a lowly parish priest had permitted himself to be engaged in conversation. That was always a risk when you involved someone with a motive, especially one at variance with your own. Such people liked to give voice to their grievances before they did their work—a mark of stupidity! And what had happened to the silencer? Now that the murderer was in view, searching the traffic for the vehicle he expected to rescue him, it probably did not matter, but it might have done.

Sirens welled in the distance, a music he found reassuring. Patrol cars, their overhead lights alternating rapidly, converged on the Claussen house from both directions, blockading its entrance, illuminating it with search beams. In total it took less than ten minutes for the officers to make their discoveries and for support and reinforcements to arrive, which, the observer thought, was efficient by any standard and all the more so for a department no doubt unused to such things.

The young man hid patiently until he was sure no ambulance had been summoned. His sole remaining concern was for the wretched fellow he had stalked in a chat room for debtors, then contrived to meet in a clinic for the chronically indebted that convened in a moldy walk-up office above a packaged goods and check cashing store in South KC. He had chosen carefully. The man had been the sixth or seventh he'd approached on the Net and the second with whom he'd made physical contact. The first of those had struck him as too weak, too tentative. To that one he had revealed nothing of his plan, extending only empathy.

But the more the next man learned about Claussen, the more enraged he had become. The young man in the Navigator had parceled out information, usually clippings from newspapers and society magazines, over several meetings, gradually bringing the dots closer until the distraught man could connect them on his own, all at once recognizing that his despair was but a part of the price paid for his better's sunny circumstances. It had always amazed the young man how incompletely most people understood the world in which they lived, how innocent they remained of the forces that determined their fate. In the end he had not been coy. Over an early supper in a roadside diner, he'd made his pitch. Wilhelm Claussen had hurt him, too, he explained. Never mind how, or the fact that he hadn't the nerve or skill to do the job himself. Take out Claussen and the distraught man's debts would be seen to. There would also be money for his boy's medical expenses and more than enough extra for him to start over somewhere else. The getaway would be arranged, in a cul-de-sac half a mile from the Claussen house. As a down payment, in a black nylon shaving kit were one hundred one-hundred-dollar bills, already circulated and unmarked. The balance would be paid once Claussen was dead.

The prospective assassin had listened carefully, all the while eating as though famished. No doubt the charbroiled prime rib in front of him was the best meal he'd downed in a long while, though not ever, for a lingering gentility suggested he'd known better days. Waiting for his reply, the younger man knew he had made the correct decision to corrupt a broken man rather than hire a professional. It was a plan without loose ends.

He had arrived in the United States as Jonathan Cazeneuve, holder of a Kenyan passport, six weeks before. On that visit he had registered at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, bought tickets to two Broadway shows, and paid restaurant checks with a credit card in the same name. As Caswell Rubin, however, he had flown on to Chicago, and then, as Peter Steele, onward to Kansas City, where he'd had his first encounter with the man he hoped to employ.

At the debt clinic and in a nearby bar afterward, they had spoken three times: about the miseries of debt, the guile of creditors, the pressures and impossibility of life. The young man had grown stubble for the occasion, dabbed it with peroxide, and worn a theatrical wig. Lifeless chestnut flecked with gray, this had added at least a decade of defeat to his appearance. He'd tested it thoroughly, judging it sufficient to fool any surveillance camera beneath which he might inadvertently pass. As far as the candidate was concerned, Peter—no surnames having been exchanged between them—vanished into the city's underside between their meetings. Who didn't?

After two weeks Peter disappeared from Kansas City, as did Caswell Rubin from Chicago. As Jonathan Cazeneuve, he departed from New York, via London, for Nairobi. The next week, as Franz Schenkel, the crisp, dark-haired bearer of a German passport, he arrived in Washington from Frankfurt, took the shuttle into the city, and established himself at the hotel on Massachusetts Avenue that he'd listed on his landing card. After two days of regular comings and goings, as the dingy Peter Steele he had boarded a flight for St. Louis and there, once more as Caswell Rubin, rented the Navigator he'd driven across state. He had already manufactured an impressive inventory of identities. Caswell Rubin, in fact, had been fabricated several years before. A magazine subscription had been taken out in the name of a fictitious student on one midwestern campus. When, using that subscription list, a large bank had subsequently sent an offer of credit, their card had been accepted. Bills had been charged and paid regularly ever since. So the fictitious Mr. Rubin, alive in the consciousness of the financial world, would subsidize his part in the death of Billy Claussen with some of the same plastic that Claussen's bank had grown fat promoting. The sweetness of that irony was not lost on the young man.

As he observed the situation from the Navigator, he felt a surprising zest, which disturbed him, for he did not think of himself as evil. About violence—means in general—he was agnostic.

When no ambulances approached and enough time had elapsed for him to conclude that none had been called, he backed out of the shallow slag driveway and made his way toward a ridgeline, maintaining a steady speed of thirty-five miles per hour, braking for all stop signs. Once on this higher ground, with the Claussen property perhaps five hundred yards below and behind him, he removed a miniature radio transmitter from the console compartment. No sooner did he press it than a small firecracker exploded in the distance, only a few feet from the dark, vacant mock-Victorian cottage beneath whose eaves he had last spotted his dupe. As intended, the firecracker broke enough glass to set off the house's alarm; a highly pitched, undulating wail shattered the cool evening. Floodlights, sudden and bright, blazed from the cottage on every side, forcing the make-believe priest from cover and drawing the attention of the nearby police. All at once the stillness that shock had imposed upon the crime scene fractured, the routines of investigators giving way to the fury of a chase.

The young man continued for a short distance, then stopped the Navigator at the vantage point he had selected on his first reconnaissance of this operation. Farther along an unobstructed route to town and practically unnoticeable, it was close enough to the drama that after powering up his infrared scope he could monitor the priest's increasingly erratic flight. The man scurried north, then west, then north again, searching for the red Hummer Peter had promised would be at this cul-de-sac to evacuate him, the Hummer where he would find not only safety but all the money he would need to save his son and recover the lost ends of his own fraying life.

It took the police one and a half minutes longer than the young man had predicted to spot and gain on their quarry. Within another minute they had surrounded him, flushed him from a pathetic stand of forsythia that had gone brown and rigid with the season, trained their own lamps on him. Their K-9s barked. The murderer stood in the middle of the circular road, his dark shoes and trouser cuffs caked with mud, his clerical collar awry but still in place.

“Stop! He's a priest!” one officer cried out.

“We can't be sure,” said another.

“Put down the gun, Father.”

“Do what he says: Put down the gun, please!”

The priest remained still, his eyes looking past the police—surely for the Hummer, for Peter, for the freedom and anonymity that, if nothing else, had been his up until he'd shot the big tycoon, his daughter and grandchildren. Had he made a mistake? Maybe so, but it was too late now to rectify it. In life there was no going back. That much he understood.

So gradually he began to turn, as if the means of escape lay in the opposite direction. The police took aim. “Put your gun down, sir.”

The image the young man watched in his night scope, although too pronounced in its greens and reds, was of a weak, impressionable face upon which reality was dawning slowly but with finality.

When the confronted priest raised the Walther, inserted its barrel deeply into his mouth, and, without hesitating, squeezed the trigger, the wretch collapsed just as the young man had envisioned he would.

Without regret, satisfied with the efficacy of both his perception and his methods, he started the Navigator's engine.

Manning a hastily established checkpoint at the foot of Billy Claussen's driveway, Trooper Darnall regarded Trooper Larrabee across the darkened landscape, his voice and expression still incredulous. “I can't believe it,” he said.

“I know. I mean, he seemed like such a nice guy,” Larrabee agreed. “Didn't you think so? Imagine leaving all
this
behind you! Holy crap!”

“Believe me, it's just the beginning,” Darnall replied sagely as the flashing lights of their vehicles intermittently illuminated their faces.

“You know something about him?”

“Just what everyone does.”

“Which is?”

“Come on, you're kidding me? The biggest man in the state. Did you hear anything up at the house?”

Larrabee shook his head. “Nothing official. I was there only a minute or two.”

“Anything
un
official?”

“There were four of them: Claussen and, the sergeant thinks, his daughter and two young grandchildren.”

“Shit!” Darnall told him.

“The perp shot himself.”

“Who'd do something like this?”

“
Why
's the real question.”

“Money or love or hate,” Darnall told him. “It's always one of the three. First thing they teach you in criminology.”

“Okay, but who benefits if they're all dead?”

“They're not
all
dead. The old man has a son named Luke, one of those spoiled-shit playboy types. Been in the news.”

“For what?” Larrabee asked.

“Being an asshole.”

“It's like it goes with the job description. You have a father who's one way, a kid who's the exact opposite. Can I tell you something? If I'd been born rich like Luke Claussen, I wouldn't be an asshole.”

“You wouldn't be you either,” his friend told him.

“Bullshit!”

“Forget it. My guess is this asshole's a whole lot richer tonight than he was this afternoon.”