The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (26 page)

Slade came last, bringing with him a restlessness and unease, but his disquiet left him as he talked with her, and he was smiling at the end of his audience. After Slade arose and left her, the strange devotionals were over, and Breedlove wondered what each man in his turn had heard her say.

“I have bidden them all a formal farewell” was all the information Kyra volunteered when she returned, “but I’m saving my farewell to you for tomorrow on the meadow.”

Her promise lightened the gloom of the day and made Sunday’s long prospect brighter. Expectancy softened the Sunday
tristesse
that habitually came to him at twilight, and Kyra’s last dinner arrived in an atmosphere of sorrow touched with joy. Not a man at the table wanted to see her go, but the goal they had all worked for was soon to be achieved. Characteristically Turpin put the dinner in a religious context. From this Last Supper, he averred, would come no Crucifixion. Kyra would go straight to the Ascension, for this time the disciples would confound the Pharisees. But the ever-cautious Breedlove wondered if a Judas sat at the table.

None of the tension Breedlove expected pervaded a group intent on committing a crime that very evening whose scope and novelty would put it on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Though the monolithic pile of the Seattle General Hospital loomed large in Breedlove’s thoughts, his companions seemed intent only on Kyra.

Slade was optimistic about Kyra’s chances of finding a home. “The Rand Corporation estimates six hundred million habitable planets in the Milky Way alone, and that’s in spitting distance for you/’

“If there’s any real estate out there,” Kyra promised, “I’ll find it.”

Although he made an effort to fall in with the mood at the table, Breedlove felt a growing apprehension about the burglarizing of the radiology laboratory. Why had Slade insisted on Kyra entering the basement of the building? Because the exits from it were limited? This afternoon Laudermilk had successfully charmed the panties, bra, and uniform off a Navy nurse for Kyra’s use,—why had he not charmed the nurse into going all the way and doing the job for Kyra? It was true that Kyra might have more savvy about handling the cobalt and getting the core into the sphere, but Turpin would have done it for her with his bare hands. Why hadn’t Slade recruited one of his black-belt holders from the kitchen or scullery to play the feminine role in this caper?

Even apart from Kyra, for every reason Breedlove could summon to justify these three men’s actions in taking part in an illegal scheme, he could think of a better reason why they shouldn’t. All three were government agents and sensitive to their careers, which were being jeopardized by this act. On the other hand, they were intelligent game players who could spot the promotional advantages that would accrue from the betrayal of their own kind.

Kyra sensed his trepidations. After dinner they sat on the balcony alone together, waiting for Laudermilk to bring in Kyra’s uniform and to take over the interior watch on her while Breedlove delivered his car to the rental agency. It was then Kyra remarked, “Don’t worry about anything, Breedlove. Once I have the cobalt in the bag, it’s mine. You know I can outrun anyone on earth, and I have you to rely on.”

She spoke the truth. He had seen her darting among the parked cars after he had broken the Corsican’s wrist. And she had Turpin too. His loyalty to her was maniacal. If Slade was trying to get her jailed to make his security tasks easier, he would not be around long enough to guard her. Turpin would see to that.

At eight o’clock Laudermilk arrived to relieve the watch, bringing Kyra’s uniform freshly pressed and starched. Before taking his suitcase to the car, Breedlove stood looking around him, trying to remember the room as it was now with the books, the bookcase, and with Kyra seated on the sofa, reading, with the light throwing a halo around her hair.

Laudermilk interrupted his reveries.

“Wear these when you’re driving the hot car,” he said, handing Breedlove a pair of silk gloves. “You won’t leave prints.”

Breedlove pocketed the gloves, lifted his suitcase, and left the room.

An overcast had rolled in from the ocean by the time he had driven into downtown Seattle. The low-hanging clouds sopped up the city lights, and the few pedestrians abroad on the Sunday-night sidewalks scurried from streetlamp to streetlamp. He parked behind the rental agency, took his bags into the office, and settled his account. At 8:32 he stood outside on the sidewalk with his bags and wearing his silk gloves. At 8:32 a dark-colored sedan pulled up at the curb, and Turpin swung around from the driver’s side.

“Throw your bags in the back seat. You drive.”

As Breedlove complied, Turpin took a small walkie-talkie from his coat pocket, extended its antenna, and spoke into it, saying, “Checkpoint able, all clear.”

Breedlove was under the wheel when Turpin took his seat, closed the door, and handed the ranger an envelope. “Your tickets, confirmed, on the eleven-thirty flight to Spokane. The car belongs to a man who’s spending the weekend in San Francisco.”

As he pulled away from the curb, Breedlove said to the one agent who had his complete confidence, “Dick, there are elements to this plan I don’t like. Technically, you know, we’re committing treason.”

“Technically Christ was a criminal.”

“But Christ had no earthly ambitions.”

Turpin caught the thrust of his remarks and said, “Don’t worry about Slade. Kyra and I discussed that matter this morning, and all possibilities have been provided for.”

So the possibility of betrayal had occurred to Kyra early, and she had been ordering probabilities since this morning. Suddenly invigorated, Breedlove dropped Turpin off at the hospital with a cheerful “Good luck.” Caught up now in the spirit of the enterprise, he was eager for the night’s adventure, with an eagerness that mildly alarmed him; he was beginning to enjoy his temporary job as an undercover agent.

Everything was moving with precision. Very probably the car he drove would never be reported as stolen. At most its owner might think that someone had siphoned his gas tank. Laudermilk had got the uniform and identification for Kyra with no trouble, and the first checkpoint had been passed on schedule. He reached checkpoint baker exactly on schedule. At 9:02 he turned the corner at the intersection near the motel and saw Kyra under the streetlamp, looking pert and efficient in her cape and nurse’s cap. Somewhere in the shrubbery behind her Laudermilk crouched with his pistol at the ready.

Breedlove pulled up, threw open the door, and called, “May I give you a lift, ma’am?”

“Ma’am” was a code word to reassure the watcher in the bushes. Slade had figured no masher would use that term of address. Kyra slid into the seat beside him, and he continued the charade with a “Where to, ma’am?”

But for Kyra the fun and games were over—he could tell from the insistence in her voice.

“Move fast, Breedlove. Go directly to the airport. Slade’s setting a trap for me. The hospital’s swarming with police, and there’s nothing Turpin can do about it but kill Slade and I don’t want that to happen—for Little Richard’s sake.”

She was talking fast, without equivocations, and he knew she was telling the truth. What a comment this, he thought with a sinking heart, on the loyalty and trustworthiness of human beings. “How’d you find this out?”

“Gravy told me. Ben enlisted his aid, figuring an Army career man due for promotion in two weeks wouldn’t jeopardize his job with treason, but it wasn’t really Ben’s fault. His pride was hurt. He found out that my petition was going to be rejected after all his promises, and that your government was going to keep me from my people on the meadow. Your biologists knew I was helpless without them. Slade was leading us to the hospital’s morgue, not its radiology lab, and karate experts would have been there waiting for Little Richard. We’ll have time to get on the ten o’clock flight to Spokane before Ben is alerted to the fact that I’m not coming at all. Gravy bought our tickets. We’ll be traveling first class as Mr. and Mrs. Paige, spelled with an i.”

“I can get you back to the meadow, but where do you go from there?”

“Straight up. I have the cobalt in my bag. Gravy’s girl friend, the Navy nurse, was a radiology technician at the clinic, and she requisitioned the cobalt this afternoon and gave it to Gravy. It was that easy! Gravy said the only person to get sacked for his bag job was the bag he had to sack to get the cobalt.”

As she spoke she squirmed out of the cape and took off the nurse’s bonnet. Beneath the cape she was wearing the Polinski Creation.

From the Seattle airport the jet rose above the murk and climbed into starlight, rustling eastward. Breedlove ordered the free martinis that came with their seats, saying, “Figuring the surcharge for first-class fares, these drinks cost Laudermilk twenty dollars apiece.”

Sprawled on the seat beside him, Kyra said sleepily, “He always wanted to give me something to remember him by. Maybe this is it.” She stretched and yawned. “I’ll remember him, and all the men of earth, with kindness.”

“Even Slade?”

“Particularly Ben. He was almost hysterical with relief when he found that Fawn instead of me had been kidnapped… Maybe Fawn and I overdid the Huan Chung business.”

“What Huan Chung business?”

Fixing him with a lazy smile, she said, “Fawn wasn’t kidnapped. She slipped away for a weekend on the Quinault Reservation. It was she who signed Huan Chung’s name to the register while the night clerk was gone to the men’s room. I wanted to impress Ben with the danger to me to reinforce the appeal I had made to him earlier.”

“You fooled me,” Breedlove admitted. “Up to then I thought Huan Chung was only one of Slade’s fantasies.”

“Maybe it was, up to then. After that, we had Ben believing in his own creation… Aren’t the stars beautiful? Just think, tomorrow I’ll be out there among them.”

Her comment carried no note of anxiety, only wonder. Seemingly indifferent to the fate awaiting her, she leaned her head against his shoulder and fell instantly to sleep. It seemed to Breedlove her head had lain there only a minute before the cabin began to creak from decompression and the warning light began to flash. He fastened her seat belt without awakening her and heard the clunk of distending landing gear. She continued to sleep as they touched down and taxied toward the terminal, and in her profound sleep the luminosity seemed drained from her. When the jets ceased to rumble and the cabin doors were opened, she awakened torpidly to his repeated urgings.

No one opposed their entrance into the waiting room, where he went immediately to a telephone booth and called his father. He had decided not to attempt to rent a vehicle at the airport. By now Slade would realize that they were gone and would begin to make his moves to apprehend them. There would have to be no easily obtained description of the vehicle Breedlove was driving.

His father answered the phone, and Breedlove explained his situation in general terms, asked his father to have the farm Jeep gassed and waiting, and requested that his mother lay out one of his ranger uniforms. It was a short call, and Kyra waited outside the booth, slouched drowsily against a wall, the bag hanging nonchalantly from her shoulder. When he told her his family would be waiting to greet her, she smiled wanly. In the bright light of the waiting room her face looked chalky, and as she walked beside him to the luggage counter he noticed her usually bouncing stride had become languid and flowing.

Apprehensive and tense himself, it occurred to him that her apathy might be feigned to steady him, as a general might feign confidence to strengthen the morale of his soldiers. Certainly nothing about the semideserted Sunday—night airport looked sinister, but there had been nothing suspicious-looking, he reminded himself, outside Pierre’s restaurant when the Corsicans struck.

He lugged his suitcase to the taxi stand and tapped on the windshield of a cab to awaken its driver. As the cabbie was stowing Breedlove’s suitcase in the car’s trunk, the public announcement speaker rasped, “Will Ranger Thomas Breedlove take a personal and urgent telephone call in the manager’s office… Will Ranger Thomas Breedlove…”

The squawk box kept repeating the announcement in mechanical desperation as the cab pulled away and headed for the highway. Slade was acting out of character, Breedlove thought; he had committed a gross violation of security procedures by letting his quarry know that the chase had begun.

In the interval of her absence the strangeness of Kyra’s arrival on earth had been absorbed by Breedlove’s family, but the wonder of her had grown in the telling. When she came again into the Breedlove living room, she came as an embodied myth. The welcome she received was touched with awe but with genuine devotion the greater part of it, and in the presence of the Breedloves she bestirred herself from her languor. She gave Breedlove’s mother the diamond she had bought in Seattle and told them, with an assurance that Breedlove questioned, that Slade would send them her books, for Breedlove, and her clothes for Matty.

Since she needed something to carry the cobalt in, she exchanged Matty’s denim book satchel for her shoulder bag, because Matty was still undecided about what career she should follow.

“Go to college and study chemistry,” Kyra counseled her, “then analyze the fabric in this shoulder bag and you’ll make a killing in textiles.”

None of the Breedloves hesitated in accepting her gifts. They knew of her destination, and her beneficence was too queenly to affront with hollow protestations. They went with her and Breedlove, now back in uniform, to the front porch to stand in the porchlight and wave good-bye. As they got into the Jeep, the telephone rang, and Mr. Breedlove went to answer it.

“Get moving,” Kyra commanded. “That’s Ben calling.”

Breedlove gunned the Jeep in response to the urgency in her voice even as he wondered why Slade should call his home. Did the Texan expect his father to arrest him?… As he swung onto the road, heading north, Breedlove saw his father emerge from the house, waving for them to return, but he pressed the accelerator to the floorboard. Darkness whipped by them in a sibilance of wind past the windshield as the Jeep rocketed forward.