Asterisk (23 page)

“The plane,” Brinkerhoflf said.

“Get down,” Hollander said.

There was a flash in the dark from alongside the hangar. Brandt, he thought. It was what he had been trained for: survival. The propellers of the Centurion began to spin. He felt Brinkerhoff at his side. They crouched beside the Fiat. Where is Brandt? Where is he now? He peered across the dark at the hangar.

“The plane,” Brinkerhoff said.

“Stand up now and you're dead,” Hollander answered.

He heard the propellers.

There was another flash through the dark. It cracked the windshield of the Fiat. Hollander could hear the safety glass splinter. Brinkerhoff made to rise. Hollander tugged at his coat.

“It's only a few yards,” Brinkerhoff said.

“A few yards is all he needs.”

“In this darkness?”

“In this darkness,” Hollander said. He had seen Brandt on the practice range: lethal. One of the best.

“We sit like this for how long?” Brinkerhoff asked.

Hollander said nothing. He thought of the envelope in his pocket. He was giving them Asterisk. He was giving them a plain brown envelope. He was giving them everything. The doubts again—when would he learn that there was a time and a place for everything? When would he grow up?

The propellers whistled. He felt the draft they created. He looked once more up into the cockpit and he knew what he would do in Brandt's place. The pilot. A certain target. A sitting duck. He would take the pilot out of it. But Brandt was programmed, his movements and urges preordained. He had not been told to get the pilot. The pilot did not figure in any of this. Hollander, only Ted Hollander.
Destroy
.

Across the airfield there were the lights of a second car. They were bringing up reinforcements now, Hollander thought. It was what he expected. He watched the car come across the field. It had come in from the Baltimore side. Who was working out of Baltimore these days? McKay? Mulholland? Old-timers, maybe they had been retired, put out to pasture, maybe this was one of the new crew.

He watched the lights as they came closer.

He took aim with the Colt, fired at a dark place between the lamps, as if the lamps and the head of the unseen driver formed the points of a triangle. The car went into a spin and then, like something run by a remote control device gone berserk, went on running into the hangar. He heard glass shatter, the engine run, the sound of wheels going nowhere as they spun around and around on concrete.

“We could make it to the plane,” Brinkerhoff said.

Brandt was out there still. What to do with the man?

“Stay down,” he said. The Russian obeyed.

Hollander moved around the side of the Fiat. The goddamn darkness. Brandt could play a waiting game. He could afford to. Before long there would be more reinforcements. He raised the gun and fired a shot randomly in the direction of the Chevrolet. There was an immediate response. He saw the glare, the sudden glow; he fired quickly toward it. In this dark how could you tell? How could you know you had hit anything?

He heard Brinkerhoff sigh.

You take a chance, Hollander thought. You have to.

He stood up. He held the gun between his two hands. The old nerves. The old sharp sensation in the head. The same old need for the electricity of clarity.

He began to walk toward the hangar.

He had written the book on this. And now he was breaking his own rules. He had a sudden flash of his family, as if he saw three young faces smiling out of a snapshot done in garish color. Going soft, he thought. Nothing is like what it used to be. Change, flux, uncertainty—say what you wanted to, nothing remained still for very long.

He would give them Asterisk.

Then they would be equal all around.

The world would be safe—not for democracy or for totalitarianism, but for three kids whose faces came to him as he walked toward the darkened hangar.

He heard Brandt move. He heard a sliver of glass slide and snap under a foot. He threw himself down on the concrete, remembering the manual, remembering how he had written the book. He saw the flare and he fired directly at it.

Silence.

A great silence came in at him.

“Hollander.”

It was Brinkerhoff calling to him across the darkness.

“Hollander.”

He heard Brinkerhoff come across the tarmac toward him.

He saw the Russian bend over him.

“You've been hit,” Brinkerhoff said.

Hollander was dizzily conscious of having passed one perilous moment only to encounter another. He thought of the envelope. The pain started to hurt him.

“Where is it?” Brinkerhoff asked.

The wound or the envelope? Hollander wondered.

Brinkerhoff was kneeling now. He could feel the other man's fingers undo the buttons of his coat.

“How bad is it?”

Hollander said, “It hurts like hell.”

Brinkerhoff was silent for a moment. It was as if he were considering something important; it had fallen into his lap. He could take it, he could take it and leave, he could leave Hollander where he was.

Do what you're going to do
, Hollander thought.

Whatever it is
.

In the darkness, he could not see Brinkerhoff's eyes.

“The plane,” Brinkerhoff said after a moment.

He helped Hollander up; it was like a needle now in the center of his chest. He twisted his body this way, that way, trying to alleviate it. It would not budge. He groaned: his shirt was moist.

“You could take the envelope,” he said. “I couldn't stop you now.”

Brinkerhoff said nothing.

Hollander looked at the shadow inside the cockpit.

He was aware of the night all at once, the stars overhead, the moon that had the appearance of something newly minted in some impossible forge. He was aware of his consciousness seeping away from him as a tide finally ebbs. He barely felt himself being helped onto the Centurion. And by the time it had taken off and swung eastward toward the great impenetrable dark of the Atlantic, he was conscious of nothing.

“Buffalo Nine,” the communications man was saying. “Buffalo Nine, are you reading?”

He had a pipe between his teeth and a look of incurable placidity; Sharpe imagined the only thing that might shake him would be the thought of falling behind in his mortgage payments.

“Buffalo Nine,” he went on saying. He was silent a moment, glanced at Sharpe, then went back to his microphone. “Marvin, are you getting this? Are you getting any of this?”

Sharpe turned to look at Dilbeck but averted his eyes at the last moment, for he knew the expression of hollowness he would encounter there. Neither Brandt nor Mulholland was answering his signal. He wanted to think there was some electronic failure somewhere, a blown terminal or a broken circuit or, at the least, the existence of some geographical obstacle—a mountain, a hill—that had caused this state of affairs.

Dilbeck, who considered the failure of machines and devices personal affronts to him, leaned forward in his chair and said, “Well, Sharpe. Well. What now?”

Sharpe dropped his hands. “Brandt's last message was something about a plane—”

“I heard,” Dilbeck said. Ted Hollander, he was thinking. You could not put one over on Ted. You would have to be up very early to catch Ted.

“So now we assume that Hollander and his Russian friend have flown,” he said.

“It looks that way,” Sharpe said.

“Okay.” Dilbeck rose from his chair. There was the most curious smell in this communications room, he thought. It was like burned rubber. “He takes a flight with his chum. Where?”

“I hate to think the rest,” Sharpe said.

“So do I, Sharpe, so do I—but what else is there?” Dilbeck blew his nose, rolled the handkerchief up, stuck it away. “They have five or six routes they use in these situations. So far as I know, they use Mexico City, Toronto. They've used Montreal before now. Where else?”

Dilbeck tried to bring to mind old intelligence dossiers.

“And Havana,” he added.

“Which is it to be?”

“All of them, of course. All of them. Alert every air base and control tower within a three-hundred-mile radius of—what's it called?—Damascus? We want one unauthorized flight—”

“We don't even know the type of craft,” Sharpe complained.

Dilbeck stared at him. There had lately been a whine in the man's voice he had grown mightily to dislike. “I don't give a tinker's shit if we know its serial number, make, year of production and the personal names of the spot welders who put it together—every unauthorized flight must be brought into radio contact and its credentials ascertained.”

Sharpe turned to his communications man. “Get your ass on that, Vic.”

“It's going to take all night,” the communications man said.

“You haven't got all night.”

The communications man opened a drawer and brought out a manual of call signals: he began to flick through the pages.

“Get other people in here, Sharpe,” Dilbeck said. “Delegate this operation. Use telephones. Use the radio. But for Christ's sake, get on it!”

Dilbeck left the room and sat down on the sofa in Sharpe's office; he was very tired. He felt a sense, too, of emptiness, and on the edges of consciousness the uneasy knowledge that he would have to explain all this. They would not understand. He could not get them to understand, not ever. The Soviets. Who would have thought it of Hollander? Airtight boxes, sealed pigeonholes, the inside of a camera. They thought you could bottle everything.
They
thought. Well, Whorley hadn't exactly been able to keep his old major general in tow, had he? Let
him
try to cast the first stone.

God, he hoped they could bring that plane out of the air, preferably into the sea somewhere so that it might never be found save for some fragmented items of wreckage that might one day wash up on obscure beaches for the puzzled delight of holidaymakers. Yes, let that happen.

He sat with his eyes closed. In the other room he could hear telephones ringing, the radio chattering; it all sounded so hideous and unreal.

And now his tired mind came around to Thorne.

Even Leach was agreed. They had gone as far as they could with that young man.
Ball's in your court, Dilbeck, I wash my hands of him
.

He rose, called Sharpe out of the communications room, then closed the door as Sharpe, chewing a toothpick, stepped into the office. He looks haunted, Dilbeck thought.

“Finesse isn't getting us anywhere,” Dilbeck said.

Sharpe, as if he understood nothing, stared dumbly.

“Thorne's your baby now,” Dilbeck said.

He once more closed his eyes. He was thinking of the Russians. If they had their teeth in Asterisk, courtesy of friend Hollander, they would worry it like a dog with a marvelous bone. When would his colleagues learn that there was not a hope in hell of forever containing something like Asterisk?

The sound of the telephone on Sharpe's desk startled him.
Brrrnnng. Brrrnnng
—it was like some fresh alarm. He watched Sharpe pick it up. Sharpe listened a moment, frowned, then covered the mouthpiece with the palm of his hand.

“Our young friend's at the airport,” Sharpe said.

“Intending to travel?” Dilbeck asked.

Sharpe shrugged.

“Nothing would astonish me,” Dilbeck said. “Put a lid on it. Put a very tight lid on it, Sharpe.”

5

In the men's room Thorne caught his own ragged reflection and, for a moment, it was as if the face he saw in the glass were not his own. There were new lines under the eyes; the pallor of his skin reminded him of the weird bleached quality of a newspaper that has lain too long in bright sunlight. He turned on the cold-water faucet, splashed his face, combed his hair, but he did not check the results of these efforts in the mirror. One look had been enough. There are days, he thought, when what you see is a fool staring back at you.

Over the intercom, the sound of which echoed in the tiled bathroom, he heard a girl's voice lisp:
Passengers for Rome are presently boarding through gate number six
. Rome, Thorne thought. I could go to Rome and do as the Romans do, whatever that might be.

He let the cold water run across his wrists and fingers.

The door opened. A uniformed man came in, went inside a cubicle, closed and locked the door. In the space under the door Thorne could see the pants being dropped around shiny black shoes.

Even pilots have needs, he thought.

Even pilots.

He dried his fingers on a towel that had come to the end of its tether and lay strewn across the floor like a flag of defeat. Sullied, soiled, ashen.

There was the noise of a toilet flushing.

The pilot came briskly out of the cubicle and went to a washbasin, rolling his sleeves up. He moved with the quick economy of a man who lives every day of his life with decisions of importance.

Thorne opened the door.

He walked through the main lounge, past the vacant, vaguely anxious faces of those who waited for flights or for arrivals. He went inside the cocktail bar and sat up on a stool and ordered a Bloody Mary.

The bar was crowded. There was Muzak playing. Early Beatles hits processed through the Muzak factory and sounding now like the death throes of Lawrence Welk. He looked around the bar for a sign of his fat friend, but he wasn't around. Maybe he clocked out at a certain time? Could you hope for that? Maybe he simply went off duty and slept and then, like a toy made to function by a spring, rolled out of bed the next day and got back on the job.

There were a couple of beautiful people standing next to him at the bar. She was in dark-green pants and white blouse and carried her expensive jacket casually over her shoulder. He wore a blue jean suit and a white ruffled shirt open to the navel and brown-tinted glasses. He had seen them in the pages of
Vogue
, those asexual glossy demonstrations of what was up to date in the world of fashion. What is it tonight? Thorne wondered. A quick jet to Vegas? A jaunt down to New Orleans to enjoy some late-night fun in the French Quarter? Her face was made up in an immaculate manner; she talked as if she knew she was being observed, an actress's flair. He hung on every word, or so it seemed, but there was a glaze across his eyes and a dead quality in the way he laughed at the right moments.