Azrael (12 page)

“In a minute. Tell me about the girl.”

“Why did you want to know about the girl?”

Trotter had promised himself years ago he wouldn’t let his father goad him into losing his temper. He now broke that promise for the three hundredth time. “Why do you keep
testing
me? From my first breath, you trained me for this goddam job. No matter how hard I try to run away from it, whenever something nasty turns up, you haul me back again to handle it. So why don’t you just have a little faith in your creation, and believe when I ask you a question, there’s a reason for wanting to know the goddam answer?”

The Congressman’s voice took on a tone of sublime patience that made Trotter want to kill him. “I
know
you have a reason, son. I just wanted to know what it is.”

“Is there anything on Hannah Stein?”

“On her? Not to say
on
her. She signed a few petitions against nuclear power. She’s a Democrat.” So are you.

“That’s only for elections. I,” the old man pronounced, “am above politics.”

“Yeah,” Trotter said. “Or below them. Was Hannah Stein involved in something beyond the stuff any ordinary citizen has a right to be involved in?”

“No. I could have told you that twenty minutes after she died, but we listened to what you told Albright, and did the business up, got reports on her womb to tomb, and a more normal little girl I never hope to see. Did my heart good, checkin’ up on somebody who stood up to it so well. I thought, this is the kind of person we’re fightin’ to save the country for. Then I remembered she was dead.”

“Because she got too close to Cronus.”

“It’s your theory, boy.”

“Do you have a different one?”

“No. We’re together on that one, all right. But you’re actin’ like there’s still some kind of mystery about it.”

“Not about why these young people are getting killed—they’re putting pressure on Petra Hudson. First children of her employees, now her son’s fiancée. Closer to her own children all the time.”

“This could be a good time to talk to her,” the Congressman suggested.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?” The Congressman lit one of his thin black cigars. “I’m not testin’ you, by the way. If you’re goin’ sensitive on me. I just want to know.”

“Okay. If we’re right about this at all, Petra Hudson is—or at least was—a deep-cover Cronus operator.”

The Congressman nodded. It was one of those things too obvious to say for any reason except to establish it as a basis for further discussion. Of
course
the Hudson woman had to be a Cronus operative. The fake telegram her daughter had heard by mistake had threatened her with Cronus, and no one but a Cronus operative would know what it even meant.

“All right, then. That means she got the best training that Russians could offer. Could threats to her personally have any effect? Could torture?”

The Congressman remembered his son’s reluctant mother. She’d been a Cronus operative, too.

“No, son, it wouldn’t.” He finished his son’s argument. “And if she’s defying Moscow, which she apparently is, though I’m damned if I can even guess why—you got any ideas on that?”

“No. Although it would be nice to know, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” the old man said. “It would be nice to know what the Russians are planning that’s so disgusting a woman who signed on as an agent for the Cronus project wouldn’t do it.”

“Something worse than Cronus,” Trotter said. “It boggles the mind.”

“Yeah,” the Congressman said. “It might be a good idea to find out what it is.”

“Sure,” his son said. “But the time is not yet.”

“I caught up with you a while back, son. Seems like the only leverage to use on the woman is threats to her children, and leaving aside the fact that it isn’t my favorite way to operate ...”

Which means, Trotter thought, that it’s the kind of thing he’ll do only if he can’t think of anything else.

“... we
can’t
do it because the Russians are doin’ it already.”

“Right.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, three things can happen. The Russians might offer Petra Hudson another chance to cooperate, now that they’ve shown they can reach into the woman’s own house for a victim.”

The Congressman held up a palm. “Wait a second, son. That one of the mysteries you were talkin’ about a little while ago?”

“Yeah. That’s the big one. The cops in Kirkester aren’t even looking at it.”

“Why
the
hell not?”

“They’re convinced she was sneaking out to see me. The body was found in my hallway, after all. They’ve been round and round with me on that one. ‘What was she doing
there,
Trotter?’ Why is it that the dumber a cop is, the more sure of himself he is?”

“It’s not just cops you have to complain about, son. Just hope you never get elected to Congress. What did you tell them?”

“Testing me again? I told them I had no idea, that I could conceive of no reason why she’d be coming to see me and would fall and break her neck on my stairs.”

“They’re still sold that these have all been accidents.”

“They’d love to call it murder, with me in the starring role, but considering that I was making love to one of the town’s most prominent citizens at the moment, they’re inclined to accept my alibi. I was hardly going to teach the cops better. What was I going to say? A hit man working for the Russians killed the fiancée of one of Petra Hudson’s kids and dumped the body on the stairway of the other’s boyfriend to show the town’s leading citizen they could get to anybody?”

Trotter shrugged. “So, as far as they suspect anybody, I’m the suspect. Back to the mystery. Hannah Stein was tucked up in bed, safe and sound. If the Russians got her out of that house, how did they do it? I don’t think
I
would be able to get past all the electronic stuff they have there. Hannah must have sneaked out of there, but
why?
”

“You were lookin’ for some kind of guilty secret she’d sneak away for. Or maybe she was an agent planted on this Jimmy Hudson strictly in order to be sacrificed.”

“I was looking for something,” his son said.

Trotter took a breath. “Anyway, that’s the big mystery. And believe me, whoever is running this is going to play it to the—”

“What’s the little one?”

“Huh?”

“You said, that’s the big mystery. What’s the little one?”

“Oh. Her hair was wet. No other part of her body. Just her forehead and hair. There was no rain.”

“You go swimming, hair is the last thing to dry.”

“Tap water, according to the State police lab. I thought of a lake, or a river, or a swimming pool, or even that she’d stopped somewhere and took a shower. But it was just plain water, with traces of chlorine and stannous fluoride. No soap. No pond or river life.”

“Tap water,” the old man said.

“Or fountain water. There’s a Civil War memorial in the middle of town, and she’d have to pass it to get to my place, but why the hell should she go dunking her head?”

“Or why did the killer dunk it for her?” the old man said. “Son, I don’t like this.”

“Whereas I, on the other hand, love it.”

The Congressman looked at his son and wondered if the boy knew how right his supposed sarcasm was. He should see himself now, the old man thought. Eyes bright behind the glasses, his whole mind and body alert and clicking away. Of
course
he loved it. He
had
to love it. Loving it was in the chromosomes the Congressman had given him, and just as much (maybe more) in his inheritance from his Russian mother. It was a job that had to be done, and some people were suited to do it. The young man who currently called himself Allan Trotter would be a lot happier, his father knew, if he could just admit to himself that this job was his destiny.

He’d said as much to his son, on occasion, and had been rewarded with scorn and rebellion. Now, he just said, “They’ve shown how close to home they can strike, they might give the Hudson woman another chance to come across. That was one possibility of three.”

“Possibility two: They might come after me.”

“That would give you the hit man. Think he knows enough to make it worthwhile catching him?”

Trotter grinned. “Thank you for the compliment.
If
he failed to catch me, and I got him instead. If he even tried. I don’t think it’s too likely. Since I took up with her daughter, and especially since she found out Regina and I have been sleeping together, Petra Hudson would smile while she watched me being flogged, then give me a sodium chloride rubdown.

“The third possibility, of course, is that they’ll try to decide which of her children she cares about the most, then kill the other one.

“That one doesn’t sound too likely to me, either,” the Congressman said.

“No,” his son agreed. “If she’s tough enough to stand still and let other people’s kids be slaughtered, she’s tough enough to really go nuts if anybody actually hurts her own kids. She’d have nothing left to lose.”

“So we look for an approach to Petra Hudson.”

“We draw a circle around Petra Hudson. And when the Russians make their move, I make mine.”

T
ROTTER PAID TWO MORE
calls while he was in Washington. The first was to a dead woman.

Her name, since the Russians had sent her to America to institute phase one of the Cronus project, was Sheila. As soon as it succeeded, she was Sheila Fane. No one but she and possibly Borzov knew what the name she’d been given at birth was, and the Congressman and those who worked for him had stopped trying to find out. The woman called Sheila Fane had been induced, over the last several years, to part with many secrets, but she would not tell her name.

Trotter had heard about the name business from his father just before coming here to see her.

“She’ll talk about anything, now,” the old man had said, “but she hangs on to the secret of what they called her at birth as if we really gave a shit what it is.”

Trotter figured it for a face-saving gesture. “Sheila Fane” had been defeated and disgraced and ultimately wiped out of existence. None of this had happened to the young Russian girl who’d loved her country so much she volunteered to go to a strange land, bear an enemy’s children, and ultimately sacrifice them for the good of the Motherland.

Because that was what the Cronus Project had been all about. Borzov had targeted one hundred American men, all those years ago, men who seemed certain to become important to their country—in science, industry, politics or whatever. The men were watched and studied. Analyzed. Soon Borzov knew more about each man, about what he wanted, than the man did himself.

Then he recruited one hundred young women, the smartest and most dedicated he could find. Each was assigned one of the men, told to study him, learn what he wanted in a woman,
and then to become that woman.
Then, a few at a time, with the best cover stories and documentation the experts at the KGB could provide, the women infiltrated the United States. Their job was to meet the man, marry him, and bear his children.

Children who, when the time came, when one key man’s actions could affect that constantly shifting abstraction called the balance of power, could be taken, or killed, or hurt, or whatever seemed necessary. It would be easy, because the essential inside help would be provided by the child’s own mother. It would be safe, because the Americans would never suspect someone’s
mother,
now, would they?

In a fit of poetic fancy, Borzov had named it the Cronus Project, after the father of the gods, who had swallowed his own children as they were born.

One hundred women, according to Sheila Fane, constituted the Cronus invasion force. One, because of the press of urgency during the Korean Conflict, had been diverted to other duties. She had been captured, and she managed to kill herself without passing on any information. She had not, however, succeeded in destroying the baby she carried. The Congressman’s baby.

Trotter sometimes pondered how close he’d come to never having been born, then tried to decide whether he was glad or angry that he had been. On the one hand, his was not exactly a happy life. On the other hand, he was here to do something for the other children of Cronus. Like Trotter himself, they were monsters—children not even of hate but merely of
tactics.
He was born to be a tool; they were born to be victims. He’d fight that with whatever strength and skill and ruthlessness his father had managed to instill in him.

So. His mother had been one. Sheila Fane, who had sent her daughter to be defiled in body and mind by a gang of psychopathic terrorists, was two. Petra Hudson was almost certainly a third.

How many more? There could be ninety-seven more Cronus women out there, hundreds of children and young adults with an invisible knife held to their throats by a loved hand. Trotter didn’t think that was the case;
no
intelligence operation of that magnitude achieves a hundred-percent success.

But there had to be some. Thirty successful women wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, or even forty. One was too goddam many.

They kept Sheila Fane’s body in a private hospital. Her body was alive; only her past and future were dead. Her past had died in the flames of a staged car wreck, with a borrowed corpse standing in for Sheila Fane. The same fire had also burned one of Trotter’s previous identities, but he was more used to changing them.

Her future was dead because she had no future, aside from the pale green corridors of the small private hospital she was confined to. Just how private this hospital was could be seen in the fact that it was listed in no telephone book anywhere. That it took no patients, except those referred by certain doctors with whom it had long-term working arrangements.

The doctors also had long-term working arrangements with the Congressman.

For the record, the woman who had been Sheila Fane was now known as Jane Peterson, a paranoid schizophrenic. This was to cover the (extremely) remote possibility that she might somehow wind up speaking to someone who had not been approved by the Congressman.