The Scorpio Illusion (49 page)

“Ah told you, we were in a hurry and we paid cash.”

“At these prices, you must carry a lot of cash, then. Maybe more than a lot.”

“That’s none of your business,” said Tyrell sharply.

“Listen, mister, the victim down in that parking lot was set up,” said the clipboard. “He brought a box of fancy chocolates for whomever he was going to meet. The card read, ‘To my generous friend.’ ”

“Oh, that’s terrific!” exclaimed Hawthorne. “We shot him, stayed around for the parade, and didn’t even take the chocolates!”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Definitely,” agreed the officer at the door, reaching under his tunic and pulling out a police radio as he unsnapped the flap of his holster. “Sergeant, we’ve got three weirdos up here, all possibles, rooms five-oh-five and five-oh-six. Send a detail as fast as you can.… Guess what I just spotted? Hurry up!”

Following the gaze of the patrolman, four heads whipped around to the other side of the room. On the top of the bureau were Poole’s Walther P.K. automatic and Hawthorne’s .38-caliber revolver.

Bajaratt looked out the window at the crowds below. She was not interested in the mayhem or the proceedings, she knew both only too well—the morbidly jostling onlookers beside themselves to catch a glimpse of a bloodied corpse, and the police trying to maintain a semblance of order until higher authority arrived to tell them what to do. Until then, the mutilated body had to stay in
place; it was meat for the frenzied bystanders, a bloody sheet covering the corpse in no way diminishing their appetites.

The Baj was not concerned with the infantile activities of the useless; she was desperately trying to find Nicolo, whom she had sent downstairs the instant she returned to the suite, his instructions explicit.
Something terrible happened and we must leave. Find a car even if you have to subdue the owner! Take the suitcases and use the fire stairs
! There he
was
! In the shadows of a pole supporting a floodlight, raising his right hand, holding something in it, and nodding his head. He had done it!

Bajaratt checked the mirror, adjusting the wig of thin white hair. The liquid adhesive on her face held the accentuated lines together; the pale powder, the dark gray half-moons under her lidded eyes, and the thin, white-drawn lips produced the countenance of an old woman, an eccentric old woman who wore a man’s brown hat over her head.

Bajaratt opened the corridor door, instantly astonished by the noise and the stream of running police who were converging on a room down the hall, their guns drawn. She proceeded toward the elevator, skirting the uniforms, a bent-over figure fighting the advancing years.

“You sons of bitches, let go of me!”

“Don’t get near me, you hogs, or yer all gonna be a lot fuckin’ sorrier than me!”

“Don’t you dare touch me!”

The Baj was suddenly paralyzed, her every muscle, tendon, and joint inoperative.
You sons of bitches, let go of me
. Only one voice, only one man.
Hawthorne
! Instinctively, she spun her bent-over body to the right, the chaos inside commanding her attention.

Between the bodies and the outstretched arms pinning Tyrell against the wall, their eyes met, hers narrowed in shock, his wide, bewildered, disbelief joining panic.

*    *    *

Howard Davenport, acknowledged powerbroker and giant of industry, yet withal a frustrated, defeated head of the insatiable Department of Defense, poured himself a second Courvoisier from the brass dry bar in his study and walked slowly back to his desk. He was a relieved man, the relief having come roughly two hours before when the D.O.D. security car had radioed the night watch, confirming that Van Nostrand’s limousine had left the estate with a passenger or passengers in the back seat.

If Hawthorne is driven away by my limousine, you’ll know my information was wrong, and you must never mention that I brought it up
.

Davenport had no intention of ever doing so. There was more than enough muted hysteria over the hunt for Little Girl Blood. To burden the hunters further with blatantly false rumors would only add to the panic—some intelligence zealot would factor them into an esoteric computer, thus spreading more confusion as some other zealot picked them up. Van Nostrand understood that only too well; it was the reason he gave his final instructions should it turn out that former Lieutenant Commander Hawthorne was
not
a member of the infamous Alpha market.… Good God, what kind of Defense secretary was he? considered Davenport. He had never heard of the Alpha, whatever it was!

No, the time had come, he thought. He wished his wife were home rather than in Colorado, visiting their daughter, who had just delivered her third child, but there was no separating mothers and daughters and emerging grandchildren; it was a given. He really did want her with him, because he had finally typed out his resignation on the old Remington his parents had given him a lifetime ago. The newspapers frequently made a point of the old typewriter; the scion of Short Hills wealth pecking away, making notes at the antique machine
when he could have the finest computerized equipment, to say nothing of an army of secretaries. But the “old Rem” was an old friend, a friend he could think with, so Davenport saw no reason to change.

He sat down, swiveling his chair to the right, facing the typewriter stand, rereading his short letter to the President. Yes, his wife should have been with him, for she loathed Washington, longing for their horse farm in New Jersey’s hunt country, and delighted in their joint conspiracy. She especially enjoyed it as the doctors at the Mayo Clinic, where they both went for their annual summer checkups, had pronounced her in excellent health. Davenport sipped his brandy, smiling.

The secretary again sipped his cognac, chuckling at the sight of the phrase that caught his eye and for a few seconds lingered there. He wondered, to be consistent with his image of integrity, whether it wouldn’t be more honest to add the words “should be.” The passage would then read, “… following your precepts, the Department
of Defense stands tall and
should be
committed.”… No, there would be no recriminations, no telltale books placing the blame of excess on others. Perhaps a series of articles might be helpful to those who would succeed him—they would certainly garner attention—but in the final analysis it was up to the man who took the job. If he was the right man, he’d see the flaws of the procurement system and correct them with a steel fist. If he was not the right man, his hands barren of steel, no amount of extraneous warning would help him. And Howard Wadsworth Davenport understood that he fell in the latter category; in fact, he had fallen in office.

He put the brandy glass on the desk, only to have it slip off the edge and crash on the parquet floor. Odd, Davenport thought, he had placed it on the blotter—or had he? His eyesight was becoming blurred, his breathing suddenly audible, difficult—where was the
air
? Unsteadily, he got to his feet, thinking the central air-conditioning had malfunctioned and the night was hot, humid, increasingly suffocating. Then there
was
no air! Instead, a sharp pain formed in his chest and spread rapidly through his whole upper body. His hands trembled; his arms in seconds became uncontrollable, then his legs could no longer bear his weight. He fell facedown on the hard floor, his nose smashed, bleeding, and with an agonizing effort pushed himself up, spastically twisting, finally collapsing again, his eyes wide, focused on the ceiling, yet he saw nothing.

Darkness. Howard W. Davenport was dead.

The study door opened, revealing the figure of a man dressed in black, a filtered mask covering his face, black silk gloves on his hands. He turned and crouched beside a metal cylinder of deadly gas, roughly two feet in height with a rubber tube attached to the petcock and extending to the base of the door, its nozzle narrow and flat. He turned the knob on top, twice checking the closure with strong twists. He rose to his feet, crossed to a pair of French doors leading to a patio, and opened them. The
summer night’s damp, warm air slowly filled the room with the scents of a garden. The man walked to the typewriter stand and read Davenport’s letter of resignation. He yanked it out of the platen, crumpled it, and stuffed it into a trouser pocket. He then inserted a blank page of Davenport’s stationery and typed the following:

The letter ended abruptly, and Scorpio 24, under orders given him the previous morning by the original Scorpio One, gathered his lethal equipment, leaving by way of the French doors and the patio.

The Fairfax, Virginia, police had left the adjoining rooms at the Shenandoah Lodge, and in their place stood the uniformed Captain Henry Stevens.

“For Christ’s sake, Tye, get with it!”

“I will, Henry, I will,” said a still-pale Hawthorne sitting on the edge of the bed, Neilsen and Poole anxiously leaning forward in chairs across the room, “It’s just so
crazy
! I knew her, knew those eyes, and she knew me! But she was an old woman, barely able to stand up, but I
knew
her!”

“I repeat,” Stevens said, standing over Tyrell. “The woman you saw is an Italian countess named Cabarini or something, and very vain, according to the front desk.
She wouldn’t even sign the register downstairs because—catch this—she wasn’t ‘properly dressed’; she had them bring it up to her. I checked her credentials with Immigration. She’s golden, right to the top, her millions and all.”

“She left—why did she leave?”

“So did twenty-two other guests, and the place holds only thirty-five. A man was killed in the parking lot, Tye, and these tourists aren’t exactly a Delta Force.”

“All right, all right … I’ll ‘get with it.’ I just can’t get that face out of my mind!” Hawthorne repeated, shaking his head slowly. “The age, she was so
old
, but I knew the eyes—I
knew
them.”

“Geneticists say there are exactly one hundred thirty-two variations of eye shape and eye color, no more and no less,” Poole announced. “That’s one hell of a small equation when you figure the number of people in this world. ‘Don’t I know you?’ is one of the more common questions people ask.”

“Thanks for nothing.” Hawthorne turned back to Henry Stevens. “Before all this craziness began, I was calling you. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but you’ve got to.”

“Got to what?”

“First, and tell me the truth, does anybody—
could
anybody—know that Van Nostrand’s dead?”

“No, the information’s capped, the house sanitized and guarded. The Fairfax dispatcher and the two patrolmen are professionals and understand. So they can’t be tracked down in case of a leak; all three are out of the area.”

“Okay. Then you use every button you’ve got and get me an appointment with the secretary of state. Tonight—this morning, now. We can’t waste five minutes.”

“You’re a lunatic. It’s almost midnight!”

“Yes, I know, and. I also know that Van Nostrand
was getting out of the country secretly because the secretary of state cleared the way for him. Very officially.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“Believe
. The elegant pinstriper, Bruce Palisser, made the arrangements, including a military escort and a maximum security passage out of Charlotte, North Carolina. I want to know why.”

“Jesus, so do I!”

“It won’t be that difficult. Tell him the truth—he probably knows it anyway—that I was recruited by MI-6, not by you or anybody else in Washington, because there aren’t too many people inside the Beltway whom I trust. Tell him I claim to have information about Little Girl Blood that I’ll give only to him, insofar as my British recruiter was killed. He won’t refuse; he’s close to the U.K.… You might even exaggerate and also tell him that despite the fact that we don’t get along, I was once pretty good at my job and may really have something.… There’s the phone, Henry.
Do
it.”

The chief of naval intelligence did so, his words to the secretary of state containing the proper mixture of alarm, urgency, and respect. When he had finished, Hawthorne pulled him aside, handing him a piece of paper. “This is a telephone number in Paris,” said Tyrell quietly. “Contact the Deuxième and tell them to put it under surveillance—total.”

“Who is it?”

“A number Bajaratt has called, that’s all you have to know. It’s all I’ll tell you.”

The taxi pulled up to the curb in Georgetown, that select acreage of Washington that houses the capital’s elite. The imposing four-story brownstone stood atop a three-tiered rolling lawn, punctuated by a brightly lighted brick entrance, the black-enameled door polished, the brass hardware glistening. The steep concrete steps were
whitewashed, the bordering wrought-iron railings enameled white, all obviously to aid a climber’s sight at night. Hawthorne paid the fare and got out of the cab.

“You want me to wait, mister?” asked the driver, glancing at Tyrell’s informal open-collared safari jacket and obviously aware of the late hour, if not the home of the secretary of state.