Asterisk (22 page)

“Yeah,” Thorne said. “It figures.”

He was silent for a time. He watched a family get out of a station wagon and walk toward the supermarket. Mom and Dad and the whole tribe. The ordinariness of it depressed him somewhat. He imagined them sifting through the vegetable racks, feeling tomatoes for firmness, scrutinizing squashes, examining eggplants. Doing plain straightforward things.

“Look,” he said. “Stay at your mother's place—”

“Is that going to keep you alive?”

“It just might,” he said.

She paused, then said: “A few days ago wasn't everything kinda normal? Refresh my memory—”

“It was normal,” he said.

She paused again. “This thing you're into … is it worth any of this?”

“I never asked you if Coleridge was worth all the trouble, did I?”

“Oh, screw Coleridge. I don't like going to the funerals of loved ones, you understand? I get quite weepy and out of control.”

He said, “It isn't going to come to that—”

“John. Why am I a little bit scared?”

“You don't need to be—”

“Hah! Someone just steps in and says, Hey, the man you love is going to be offed and you tell me not to be scared like it's something that happens every goddamn day of the week?”

He stared at the green car. “Take it easy—”

“I don't like playing traditional waiting roles, John. It just isn't my scene. I could never have been in love with a sailor or somebody like that, you know, hanging out waiting for his return—”

“Just sit tight, okay? I'll be in touch.”

“And what I don't want,” she said, as if she weren't listening to him; “what I don't want is some stranger calling me in the middle of the night to say you got in the way of a truck or you decided on a midnight swim.”

“Don't worry about me.” What else could he say?
Be terrified for me?

“I love you, John Thorne,” she said.

“It's a feeling I share, kid,” he answered.

He hung up, went back to his car. The Catalina followed him out of the parking lot.

“Your friend is persistent,” Brinkerhoff was saying.

The tan car was behind them again. They had come off Highway 240. They were going toward Damascus. Hollander turned around in his seat. He had the Police Positive in his hand. You had to admit: Brandt was good with the car, neither too risky nor too careful. But he had managed to get in back of them once more.

“How far is it to the airfield?” he asked.

“Seven, eight miles,” Brinkerhoff said. “You have a suggestion?”

“I'm playing it by ear,” Hollander said. Brandt would be on the radio constantly, reporting the positions, waiting for instructions. And he would not be alone in this. There would be others. The radio would bring them in when the positions were reported. How many? Two? Three? It would depend on who was in the field now.

He turned back around in his seat.

The headlights cut a broad band in the dusk ahead.

It was a small apartment of the kind sometimes advertised as “an efficiency unit,” which meant that the rooms were small and the kitchen narrow. When the congressman came to the door, he had an expression of pained surprise.

“John, this is unexpected—”

Thorne stepped inside. It was a place of white walls and few decorations, Leach's spartan Washington domicile.

“One question,” Thorne said. “What is Asterisk?”

Leach looked puzzled. He moved very slowly to the sofa and sat down. He wheezed as he moved; the impression of a man waiting patiently to die. For a moment, Thorne thought he should feel some pity for the old man, some sense of sympathy, but he could not overcome outrage.

“We've been through this,” Leach said.

“Let's run through it again,” Thorne said.

“I'm sorry, John. I can't help you.” Leach reached for his walking stick. He raised himself to a standing position with obvious strain, his face the kind of white Thorne associated with the dead.

“Asterisk, Congressman, that's all I want to know.”

“I said it before, I can't help you—”

Thorne rubbed his face wearily: “I think you can—”

“No,” Leach said.

“People have died,” Thorne said. “Beginning with Major General Burckhardt. Add his wife to that—”

“The names mean nothing to me,” Leach said.

The congressman walked to the window, looked out a moment, then let the drape fall back in place. Momentarily, Thorne wondered if perhaps there were someone outside, if Leach were signaling something. It would make as much sense as anything else.

“Asterisk,” Thorne said.

Leach turned around to look at him: “John. Let me give you a word of advice. Drop it. Leave it alone.”

“I'm not prepared to do that now,” Thorne said.

“I knew your father pretty well, John. I always liked him, always did. Sometimes, politically, we were poles apart, but I had a lot of time for him. If he was alive now, he would be telling you just the same as me.
Leave it alone.
”

Thorne shook his head. “I want some answers.”

“What makes you think I'm in a position to give you answers?”

“I figured it out,” Thorne said. “It isn't hard. After I approached you, I was suddenly offered the chance to run for Congress. Out of the blue. Just like that. I walked away from it. Next thing, I'm being sent to Paris. I walked away from that too. Suddenly I'm out of work, suddenly my girlfriend is threatened—you don't have to be clairvoyant to recognize when strings are being pulled, do you?”

Leach hobbled around the room on his stick for a time, saying nothing.

Thorne licked dry lips; all at once he realized he was tired, as if he had reached some limit to himself. But he wasn't going to let this slide, not now, he wasn't going to walk away from it.

“Asterisk,” he said. “What is Asterisk, Congressman? Why is Escalante listed as a missile base when the kind of staff it has obviously has nothing to do with missiles?”

Leach stared at him; his skin reminded Thorne of a crumpled white handkerchief.

“You're a fool, Thorne. You're a plain old-fashioned fool. I didn't think they made fools like you these days. People have been trying to do you favors you don't goddamn deserve. You're too blind to see your own position. But people don't have the patience of saints, Thorne. It's not a limitless supply, you understand that? It comes to an end.”

There was a harsh note in the voice, something ugly in the way Leach sounded and, as he turned his face full round, in how he looked. This wasn't an expression you ever caught in newspaper pictures; here the mask was off, the defenses down. And then, just as abruptly, the voice became friendly again.

“John, John, John. You don't need to be involved. Believe me. Trust me. You don't need any part of this.”

Thorne sat on the arm of the sofa. Why was he perspiring like this? He stared at the palms of his hands, saw the crystalline sparkle of sweat in the lines.

“Look, Congressman. Somebody—some
thing
—fucks with my life. I don't like it. I don't care for it. I don't even know what it is. And you ask me to leave it
alone?
”

Rather shakily, the congressman extended one hand as if he were making an uncertain plea, like a lawyer on behalf of a client he knows to be guilty as hell.

“There's time to walk away, John.”

Thorne shook his head. “No. Not that easily.”

Leach sat down a moment, fell into silence, then he rose and, clutching his cane, went into the kitchen. Thorne could hear a faucet running, the sound of ice cubes in a glass. He walked to the kitchen, stood in the doorway. Leach was pouring two glasses from a bottle of Laphroaig.

“Probably sacrilege to put ice in this,” he said. “Probably there are Scotchmen turning in their graves.” He looked at Thorne, smiling.

Thorne swallowed a little of the malt whiskey. It burned in his throat and chest.

“Cheers,” Leach said, and drank.

Thorne watched him: the smile was still there, but it was untrustworthy, wily, concealing things.

“Play ball, John. Play ball.”

“And if I don't?”

The congressman shrugged. “We don't have Siberias in this country.”

“No?” Thorne put the glass down.

“You're a young man, John. Bright. What I hate to see is a waste of potential. You only get one quick shot at life, John. Grab what you can while you can. Don't throw it away.”

We don't have Siberias, Thorne thought. No, we have killings that look like suicides. We have secrets and conspiracies and God help you if you try to puncture the bubble. God help you.

“Just think, John. Just pause and ponder a moment.”

Thorne shook his head. “It's gone past that stage.”

“John. For the sake of your father's memory—”

“That won't work,” Thorne said.

Leach was silent for a time. Thorne moved toward the door.

“Wait,” Leach said.

Thorne hesitated in the doorway.

“If you won't give me your word that you'll stop this, I can't do anything more for you. Do you understand that? I can't do anything more.”

Thorne looked at the congressman for a time. The pale, pathetic face: was Leach actually sorry? Was he truly sorry?

“Thanks for what you've done so far,” Thorne said. “Whatever it is.”

He went out, closing the door.

In the corridor, which was empty, lit by bright fluorescence and almost startling in its unbroken white gleaming, he paused: the fear was coming in at him again and this time it wasn't a fear of his own capabilities. It was a strange emptiness: a terror.

Nobody would raise a finger now to help him.

There was nobody.

He looked down the white corridor. It might have been the kind of passageway—clinical, stark, unshadowed—you would expect to find in a hospital for the incurably insane.

Dilbeck hated Sharpe's office despite the surprising domestic touches of the floral sofa and the color TV. These were superficial things: take them away and you were left with your standard bureaucratic sterility. Sharpe was in the communications room, sitting behind a row of receivers, when Dilbeck came in. A radio operator was filling his pipe with tobacco as if he had all the time in the world. If anything, this room was more hideous than Sharpe's office. The gadgetry, the consoles, the dials—here you ran smack into the technology of it all and you knew it was for real.

“I didn't want to drag you in,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck waved the apology aside. “It doesn't matter.”

“Hollander's in a Fiat with somebody else—”

“Do we know who?”

Sharpe was silent a moment, the radio crackled, there was a disembodied voice of the kind one might expect to hear at a fraudulent seance.

“It's an airstrip,” the voice was saying.

“Do we know who the companion is?” Dilbeck asked.

“I had the license plate checked out.”

“And?” Why was Sharpe being so reluctant?

“It's registered to someone called Brinkerhoff—”

“Do we know this person?”

“You want me to fetch his file?”

Dilbeck was becoming irritated. Brinkerhoff. What did that name mean?

“Instructions requested,” the voice was saying over the radio, a cold voice that might have emerged from an android.

“Never mind the file,” Dilbeck said.

“Brinkerhoff is attached to the Soviet embassy,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck felt as if he had been struck.

He sat down and stared at the dials.

And he had told them. He had told the committee. He had come right out and told them that there was nothing in Hollander's background to suggest any association with a foreign power.
He had said that
.

It was a matter of record now.

He shut his eyes.

“I'm awaiting instructions, for God's sake,” the voice was saying.

“Who's out there?” Dilbeck asked.

“Brandt,” Sharpe answered.

“Alone?” Dilbeck asked. He opened his eyes.

“I've got Rupert Mulholland coming in from Baltimore,” Sharpe said.

“But Brandt's on his own?”

Sharpe nodded.

“What in the name of God kind of tinhorn operation are you running, Sharpe?” Dilbeck tried to still his anger. It did his blood pressure no good and, besides, he knew he was projecting his own stupidities, taking his own flaws out on Sharpe.
I swore by Hollander at that meeting
, he thought. I put my own damn head on the chopping block.

“There's a light aircraft of some kind,” the voice was saying. “
Please instruct me.”

Twenty minutes ago Leach had been on the telephone. Thorne. Thorne-in-the-side. One thing at a time, he thought. Be logical. A question of priorities.

“
Please instruct me—
”

Sharpe looked at Dilbeck. “Do I finalize this? Have I your authorization?”

Dilbeck saw the shadow of a noose dangling on a scaffold of his imagination. “You not only finalize,” he said calmly. “You pulverize.”

Sharpe pulled the microphone toward his mouth.

“Green,” he said.

“Got you,” the voice said from the other end.

Sharpe smiled. He looked at Dilbeck as if for approbation now; Dilbeck wondered what Socrates felt with all those inquisitive pupils sitting at his feet.

Across the airfield there was a Turbo Centurion sitting behind a darkened hangar. Brinkerhoff drove the Fiat alongside the aircraft, braked, threw his door open at once. Hollander turned in his seat. The headlights of the Chevy came burning toward them, glowing, growing, bearing down on them with the speed of some unavoidable impact. Hollander opened his door. He glanced up at the cockpit of the Centurion. There was a shadow behind the thinly lit glass. He saw Brinkerhoff moving out of the beam of the Chevrolet. He moved behind the Fiat. He had the Police Positive in his hand; kneeling he took aim, fired, the tan car swung to the side as if to avoid collision. It ran up against the side of the hangar, its headlights out. He heard a door slam shut.