The Favor (34 page)

The woman behind the bar was a chubby,
fortyish blonde who looked like she knew everything there was to
know about the tactful defense of her ass when the closing time
crowd began to get a little rowdy. She smiled at Guinness and
seemed startled when he spoke to her in English; they tried German
and French and finally settled back on English, over which her
command was less than perfect, and he managed to talk her around to
a bag of sandwiches and a quart of what turned out to be very good
lemonade.

On the other side of the square there was a
men’s clothing shop and what looked like a hardware store. Guinness
stowed his provisions in the car and went across to see what he
could come up with. A black windbreaker jacket cost him the
equivalent of about thirty-five dollars, and he picked up a spool
of picture hanging wire, a pair of wire cutters, a roll of
electrical tape, and a nice heavy rigid fisherman’s knife with a
four inch blade for about another twenty at the hardware store. The
clerk gave him rather a peculiar look as he sorted out Guinness’s
purchases, but he didn’t say anything, possibly only because of the
language gulf.

He sat in the car eating one of the
sandwiches, which was filled with mustard and thick slices of some
extremely spicy variety of lunchmeat, and drinking from the quart
jar of lemonade and feeling a lot better. Food always had a calming
effect, but it wasn’t simply the tranquilization of the vagus
nerve. All the way from Amsterdam he had been thinking about
Flycatcher’s Palace Guard, about the problem of laying siege in
open country to a farmhouse guarded by five armed men. All he would
have to balance those deplorable odds was the element of surprise,
and he really doubted that Flycatcher would be much surprised.
Flycatcher and his army of five—shoot one of them and they still
had you outnumbered five to one; shoot one of them and you lose
surprise. Guns were noisy, and Flycatcher wasn’t some tame little
citizen who would assume it was simply a car backfiring.

Guinness had the Luger and George’s little
beretta, which on the whole he preferred, locked in the glove
compartment. They would have their uses later on, but, at least to
begin with, he would need something subtler. And now he had a knife
and a spool of wire, which improved things enormously; probably, at
that moment, a particularly reckless bookie might have offered a
wager at something as low as two or three to one of his surviving
on into the next morning, so things were looking up.

“About four miles outside of a little burg
called Tulp, there’s a dirt road that forks off the highway—you
can’t miss it; just this side there’s a stone pylon, about seven
feet high, with a brass plaque. I stopped to read it once, but it’s
in Dutch; I think it’s some sort of war memorial. Anyway, another
three miles on that dirt road and you pull up in front of the
house—they can see you coming, plain as day, for the last three
quarters of a mile.”

George had been right, you couldn’t miss it;
but Guinness didn’t turn off onto the narrow dirt road that
branched to the right about a hundred yards beyond the pylon
commemorating some obscure tragedy of July 20, 1944. He didn’t
really imagine that George had expected him to.

He continued on for another couple of miles,
until he found a spot where it was possible to take the car off the
road. There was a crossover, a place where sections of drainage
pipe had been placed in the ditches that ran along either side and
then covered over with dirt, probably so that farm machinery could
be moved from one side of the highway to the other. Guinness bumped
along over the unplowed rim of the field until he could pull up
behind a stand of trees that would shield him from the eyes of
passers by.

He put on the black windbreaker—in a few
hours it would begin to get dark, and he wouldn’t care to be any
more visible than necessary—and threaded his belt through the
leather loop of the knife scabbard. The guns went into the pockets
of the windbreaker; carrying both of them was a trifle awkward, but
there was nothing for it since they were slightly different
calibers and therefore he wouldn’t be able to pirate the Luger’s
ammunition for the beretta. They would both have to come.

He made a heavy loop with the picture hanging
wire, just large enough to be a comfortable fit when he slipped his
hand through, and then ran off about two and a half feet and made
another loop at the other end. He wrapped the loops with the
electrical tape so there wouldn’t be any chance of his cutting his
fingers on the wire, and he had himself a very serviceable garrote.
He wound the thing up into a loose coil and put it in the back
pocket of his trousers. He was ready now, there was nothing else he
could do. So he hid the car keys under the carpet and started out
on his hike. He figured, what with following the contour of the
land to keep himself hidden, that he probably had a good five miles
ahead of him.

It wasn’t going to be an easy five miles,
either. The land was plowed, which made it troublesome to walk
over, and the only cover came from the rows of trees that had been
planted with the apparent motive of marking off one farmer’s field
from another. There were also irrigation ditches, but they were
usually only about three feet deep—it was with something less than
enthusiasm that Guinness considered he would probably end up making
the final several hundred yards of his approach crawling through
them on his hands and knees. Well, it was better than driving up in
style to get your head blown off.

Time, he decided, was probably not much of a
factor. He wouldn’t be working against the clock because, after
all, Flycatcher was waiting for his troops to come back with their
illustrious prisoner, and they couldn’t have any idea when Guinness
would be returning to his borrowed apartment—they didn’t even know
what he was doing in Amsterdam.

Of course, it would have been a long time
since Flycatcher had figured out that Amalia Brouwer wasn’t going
to show up. Had he connected Guinness with that affair yet? Would
he have gotten nervous enough to send one of his boys around to the
bookstore to see what had happened, and would they have found that
fat slob still sleeping like a baby on the stockroom floor? They’d
make the connection fast enough then. Guinness wished to hell he
had done the professional thing and killed the greasy bastard when
he had had the chance; now, when they finally managed to wake him
up, he would be eager enough to spill his bloated guts. It had been
a mistake, a moment of weakness. An unwillingness to pay the full
price in blood.

Still, it was perfectly possible the guy
would have snapped out of it on his own before they found him, and
doubtless he would have been smart enough to know that it was not
an occasion to hang around. So Flycatcher might not have tied
Guinness in yet with his other troubles—he might assume that Amalia
had simply been arrested, and he would have no reason to worry then
because he wouldn’t have told her about his little rustic hideaway.
Flycatcher was many things before he was that dense.

It was his pattern to leave the end games of
his little intrigues to underlings, while he waited at a safe
distance to see how everything turned out. It was his strength and
his weakness—if an operation went sour, he wasn’t there to get
captured or killed; at the same time, however, he wasn’t there to
keep his people on track, to give that vital word that might
prevent the whole shebang from blowing up in their faces at the odd
unexpected little snag.

Flycatcher had survived a long time in a high
risk business, but there had been costs. If he had been in
Amsterdam this afternoon, he most probably could have ensured
Guinness’s death, but he hadn’t been, and his troops, who seemed a
lackluster enough collection, had had to fall back on their own
limited resources of guile. And now he waited, out of contact with
his men—a fair share of whom were already either disaffected or
dead—and unsure of his position. Maybe this time his own caution
would form the noose that hanged him.

Guinness just hoped the son of a bitch didn’t
get an attack of nerves and skip out over the border into Germany.
It seemed little enough to ask.

It was already after five o’clock, but the
summer sun was still hot. Guinness could feel it pressing down on
his shoulders like a weight; he had a vivid impression he might
simply simmer to death inside his black windbreaker before
Flycatcher ever had a chance at him, and that wouldn’t be fair. He
tried to stick to the trees, but there was hardly enough shade to
matter. It took him close to two hours to get within sight of the
farmhouse.

There were men out right enough. Guinness
threw himself down into an irrigation ditch, coating his trousers
with mud in the process, and looked over the edge through a thin
little fringe of marsh grass. About two hundred yards away, sitting
on a patch of high ground, there was visible a male figure—with the
sun behind him, he was little more than a silhouette—with what one
assumed was a rifle across his knees. He meditatively smoked a
cigarette. No one else was in sight, but Guinness assumed
Flycatcher wasn’t relying on a single guard. Probably, in another
quadrant of the perimeter, another man was sitting with a rifle
over his knees.

The tactical problem, of course, was that the
guy had his back to the farmhouse, which was probably two hundred
to two hundred fifty yards behind him. This was reasonable
enough—after all, he wouldn’t be watching out for an attack from
that direction—but it made things damned inconvenient. It meant
that Guinness would have to slip in close enough to the house to be
out of the guard’s peripheral vision and still contrive somehow not
to get spotted by anyone who, out of sheer boredom perhaps, might
happen to be glancing out a window.

And George hadn’t been kidding—the
surrounding countryside was almost as flat as a billiard table.
There had to be easier ways to make a living.

The evening breeze had begun to stir, so at
least there would be a little covering noise. With a reptilian
slither, he began making his clumsy way down along the bottom of
the ditch, hoping to get a little more parallel with the house
before he risked showing himself on higher ground.

The irrigation ditches traced their way
around the borders of the rectangular fields, each of which was
probably about seventy yards by forty, making rather a more orderly
pattern than the usual patchwork quilt one sees from the windows of
airplanes. There was no going straight across from one side to the
other because, unfortunately, all the fields had been cleared at
some time in the not too distant past and the only cover they
provided consisted of strawlike stubble, about four inches high,
which would probably make a terrific racket while it was cutting
you to ribbons through your shirt. So the ditches were it—you had
to crawl along through the half dried mud and then do a right angle
turn when you were behind your quarry. Guinness hadn’t made a
hundred yards before he thought he would die of exhaustion.

And the worst part of it was that, while he
was trying to keep his ass down so no one could see him, he
couldn’t see them. He couldn’t see anything, really, except the
sides of his goddamned ditch; Flycatcher could have been standing
directly over him, grinning maniacally as he lined up the muzzle of
an AK-47 with Guinness’s left ear. It was almost more than flesh
could bear.

Every thirty or forty yards he would stop,
rest for a few seconds, and hazard a quick peek up over the marsh
grass—it was an absolute necessity, that furtive little check
across the landscape; it was all that kept him from scaring himself
to death with his own morbid imaginings. His thighs and upper arms,
after a while, felt like they weighed a thousand pounds to the
square inch, but there was always the thought that at any moment
some goon might spot him, that the longer he was out there the more
likely that was to happen, to keep him going. In a sense, fear and
weariness canceled each other out.

It probably took him something like the
better part of an hour to get directly behind his mark, who never
stopped smoking cigarettes as he sat quietly on his fragment of
raised ground near the intersection of two ditches—that was a piece
of luck; Guinness would be able to get almost within arm’s reach of
him without having to rise up where he could be seen from the
house.

The man’s tranquility was amazing. It was
obvious he expected simply to rest there, peacefully looking out
over the barren fields that stretched away from him in a mud
stained grid, right up until someone came along to relieve him. The
watch was obviously the merest formality. No one was going to try
to sneak up on the place. No one would dare.

The last forty feet seemed to take forever.
Guinness had taken the beretta out of his jacket pocket and was
crawling along with it in his left hand, trying to keep it up out
of the mud—if the guy turned around, he would have to shoot him;
the game would be up then, but he wouldn’t have any choice. He
would have to shoot him. And then he would be stuck out there in
the open, where Flycatcher and his boys could pick him off at their
absolute leisure.

He could hear the little sucking sound of the
mud every time he lifted his hand to move it. He could hear his
breathing, which was even louder, and the pounding of his heart,
and yet the guy didn’t move. It was a miracle, an inexplicable
mystery. Thirty feet, twenty, ten—Guinness could see the very weave
of the heavy plaid coat (why would anyone wear a coat like that in
the middle of summer?), and yet the broad back never turned and the
automatic rifle remained flat across the man’s lap, as inoffensive
as a plank of wood.

Slowly, slowly, Guinness raised himself up to
a low crouch. He was so close now he could smell the cigarette
smoke as it drifted backward toward him in casual, trailing little
puffs; it seemed impossible the man shouldn’t be able to feel him
through the back of his head. He slipped the beretta back into his
jacket pocket and took out the garrote, pulling the wire tight to
take the kinks out of it.