Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (39 page)

 
          
Valerie,
her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby
Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the
slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of
the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake,
carrying bits of string, cord, twine and rope.

 
          
Is
this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about
to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns,
this?
But what else is there to do?

 
          
She
hurried down the farther slope.

  
 
          
Crouched
on the blacktop in front of the van,
Vernon
shook open the map, holding it by its very
edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his
grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a
hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the
woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone
discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled
around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the
Trend
editor, came over to place his
Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes,”
Vernon
said, looking up at him, squinting as
though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes
were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just
foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.

 
          
There
was some wistfulness in that idea.

 
          
“Everything’s
fine,”
Vernon
said.

  
 
          
Innocent
said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on
the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby
above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled
all over. “A
crazy
idea,” he said,
more loudly.

 
          
Kirby,
studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a
better one?”

 
          
“Radio
the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British
Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.

 
          
“I’ll
do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right,
there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them
down.”

 
          
Innocent
looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him
because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d
been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth.
Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he
said.

 
          
“And
our deal still holds,” Kirby told him.

 
          
Was
there something underhanded about the deal if Valerie were not dead? No;
nothing you could put your finger on. Innocent sighed. “I suppose it does,” he
said.

  
 
          
The
false Gurkhas entered the village.

  
 
          
Valerie
looked up from her knot'tying as the plane suddenly jolted forward. She looked
at Kirby, then out at the Indians backing away from the plane. Innocent St.
Michael was out there, waving, offering her a kind of sad smile. She hesitated,
then smiled and waved back.

 
          
Had
she been wrong about him? Was Innocent not the arch villain? His almost
pathetic pleasure in seeing her alive—she was sure for just one second she had
seen a tear in his eye—could not possibly have been pretense. The plane taxied
forward, and Innocent was left behind, out of sight. But if
Vernon
and the skinny black man had not been
obeying Innocent’s orders, then whose? Who
was
the master^ mind behind the plot?

 
          
This
man Kirby, coming so promptly to the rescue of poor endangered Indians he’d
never even met, couldn’t be the ringleader. All you had to do was look at him
when he wasn’t waving a sword in your face to see he wasn’t the type.

 
          
Who,
then?

 
          
There
came into her memory again the last words she had heard between Vernon and the
skinny black man in that filthy shack where they’d been holding her prisoner.
The skinny black man had said, “Say it out,
Vernon
. Say what you want.” There had been a
pause, and then
Vernon
had said, so low she could barely hear it, “She has to die.”

 
          
It
had been his order.

 
          
Vernon
was the ringleader? He’d certainly been the
one to make that particular decision, but somehow the idea of
Vernon
as Mister Big . . .

 
          
The
plane had swung about, and now it suddenly raced madly out across the dry and
bumpy ground, shaking itself to pieces. The angle of the plane was such that
from inside it they couldn’t see the ground out the windshield but only the
sky; how could Kirby be sure there was nothing in front of them?

           
The roar, the speed, all were so
much more
present
than in a big
sensible airliner, and then all at once the tiembling stopped, the roar grew
somehow less frantic, and out the side window Valerie could see the ground
falling away below.

 
          
“Tie
knots!” Kirby yelled.

 
          
“Oh!
Yes, sorry.” She bent her head, tied knots, then paused to look at his profile.
He was reaching for the microphone, turning dials on the instrument panel. She
leaned toward him: “Do you know someone named
Vernon
?”

 
          
He
frowned at her. “
Vernon
What?”

 
          
“Never
mind,” she said, and went back to tying knots. He gave her an irritable
confused look, then started talking into the microphone in his cupped hand.