Azrael (31 page)

Wrong again. Trotter took the receiver and walked its extra-long cord right out the back door, closing it behind him. Nobody even noticed.

Trotter came back a few seconds later looking sick. “His wife says he’s gone to hold Jimmy Hudson’s hand.”

“So? He’ll do the kid good. He did wonders for Tina, helped her deal with the loss of her baby.”

“It was the least he could do. It was his job.”

“So it was his job. He did it very well, turned her around when she touched bottom.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean it was
his job.
He killed Tina’s baby, he killed all of them, and I’ve got to warn Rines before he kills Jimmy Hudson and ruins everything.”

“But I
know
him, Trotter. He’s absolutely sincere. He’s a
good man.”

“That’s the worst kind. Go see how Tina’s doing.”

Joe’s mouth went dry. “You don’t think—”

“No, I don’t. No leverage to be gained in hurting her now. Just go up there, see to her, and get on the phone. Hurry up.”

Joe went. He pushed people aside and sprinted, like a man desperate for the bathroom.

As he climbed the stairs Joe was thinking, this is going to kill her. She had forgiven herself for her baby’s death because Will Nelson had shown her why she should and made her believe it. If she found out he was a spy and a murderer, that he had in fact
caused
the death he had helped her get over, it would all collapse—faith, hope, confidence, everything. Nothing would be left but bitterness, and Joe couldn’t blame her. He felt pretty bitter about it, himself.

Tina was still sleeping soundly. She seemed more peaceful now than when he’d left her. She looked very innocent and pretty, like a woman redeemed. No, like a woman who’d never
needed
to be redeemed. How much of that was him, he wondered, and how much of it was Mr. Nelson?

He stood looking at her for a few seconds, aching for her so much that he almost forgot to pick up the phone. She moaned softly as the receiver left the hook but didn’t awaken. Joe smiled.

The smile deepened when he heard Rines’s voice over the phone saying, “Oh, he’s been and gone already.”

Trotter’s silence was eloquent with surprise. “And everybody’s okay?” he said at last.

“All Hudsons present and accounted for. He showed up at the gate, said Jimmy had asked for him. They checked with me, and I told them to send him up. He saw Jimmy in company of one of my men—”

“Thank God for that,” Trotter said. “By the way, Albright’s joined us.”

“Hello,” Joe said quietly. “I don’t want to wake her up.”

“Wake who up?” Rines demanded.

“Don’t be a goddam prude,” Trotter told him. “Go on. He saw Jimmy Hudson ...”

“Jimmy asked him for reassurance in a general way, nothing specific, or I wouldn’t have let Nelson go, got it, and left.”

“Are you sure?”

“I sent Swinton to see him off.”

“Check,” Trotter told him. “Ask Swinton exactly what he said and did.”

Rines sounded resigned. “Right away,” he said, and put Trotter and Joe on hold.

“This stinks, Joe,” Trotter said over syrupy music.

Albright wanted to ask him if it had ever occurred to him he might be wrong, but that might wake Tina. He grunted noncommittally.

“If I’d been less timid about my conclusions, we could have nailed him on the scene. And I should have thought of him long ago. He got here just about the time the murders started. He’s close to the Hudsons; he
got
close to the others after the deaths. He’s the one who’d think of baptism. Why else do you
wet
somebody’s
head?
What a mind; what a sick, brilliant mind. I should have been on to him days ago—should have seen it would take a friend of the family to lure the Stein girl off the grounds. The Congressman would have my balls for hemming and hawing like—”

The music cut off. “I can’t find Swinton,” Rines said. “He didn’t come back.”

Trotter cursed; Rines said it went double for him. Albright thought, the man is scary, but whatever this business takes, he’s got it. It was a very low-percentage operation to laugh at one of Trotter’s conclusions.

“What do we do now?” Joe said, forgetting about Tina for a second.

“Joe?” she said sleepily. She lifted her head, looked around for him, smiled when she saw him. She reached out for his hand. He let her have it. She lay back down, still smiling.

Trotter said, “Yeah, what do we do now? Joe, you get down to the church. Don’t go in. Just try to spot if he’s there, and tail him if he comes out. If he doesn’t come out, wait for one of Rines’s men. Rines, have you got a tame Federal judge around here?”

“Friendly, at least.”

“Friendly enough to give you a search warrant for a church on not much?”

“And the warrant says what?”

“Who cares? This is never going to be a court case. The idea is to get in the door, and defuse the local cops if Mrs. Nelson is there and wants to call them.”

“She could be, um, persuaded not to call.” Joe could hardly believe his own voice. Was he really volunteering to go into a woman’s house and beat her into submission? Or was he just playing devil’s advocate? He wanted to believe the second, but he was honest enough with himself to know he wasn’t sure. This spy business was insidious. From things Rines and Trotter had let slip, Joe gathered Trotter had been doing this kind of work all his life. Joe was beginning to understand how he got so weird.

“Goddammit, Joe!” There was real anger in Trotter’s voice. “You said you had to learn sometime, so learn this now:
We don’t hurt people for practice.
Got that? We’re fighting swine, and we’re covered with plenty of our own pig shit, but we are American enough not to have sunk that low. Yet. Okay?”

“It’s better than okay. Lets me off the hook.”

“It won’t always. Get moving.”

“I’m sending two men,” Rines put in. “Maybe three. I want to make sure they get there.”

“You’re sure Swinton is dead?”

“Dead or crippled. He wasn’t a plant.”

“You never know,” Trotter said. “I’ll be out there right away.”

Rines grunted and hung up. As Joe replaced the receiver, he thought of the background checks Rines had run on prominent local citizens. The one on Nelson had come out absolutely clean. No, he thought, you never
did
know.

“Tina, are you all right?”

“I’m fine now. I’m sorry about blowing up that way.”

“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” He said it as if he meant it. He had no problem sounding as if he meant what he said next. “I love you, Tina.”

“I love you, too, Joe.”

“I’ve got to go do some work.” And may you never find out what it is, he thought. “I’ll call you later.” He kissed her and left, to go hunt the Reverend Mr. Will Nelson.

R
OGER SAT IN THE
office of Mel Famey, Senior Editor of
Worldwatch
magazine and KGB agent, looking down at Mr. Famey’s corpse, telling himself the truth. Telling himself many Truths.

Faith. Faith was the important thing. To a man of Faith, anything was possible. God did not try us beyond our strength. It raineth even on the just as on the unjust—it
had
to, otherwise the unjust would have an excuse. But Roger knew that the trials God sent did not depend on your righteousness. No one was more righteous than Job, but Job suffered more than anyone.

Everything that happened was God’s will; it was all a part of the working out of the Plan. God could have lifted His Hand and brought the Plan to fruition instantly, but it was reflection of the love He felt for Man that He chose to work His will through men.

Roger bowed his head and prayed for Faith to accept the Will of the Lord, and to know what to do.

Because God had a new task for him. That had been made obvious by the events of the past few hours. Or perhaps it was just a new phase of the old plan. Whatever it was, it would require changes in the life he had made. It would mean giving up Donna. It would mean he could no longer be Will Nelson. So be it.
Not my will be done,
he thought,
but Thine.
The Lord was demanding no easy sacrifices, but Roger could draw one consolation. The Lord must now feel that Will’s memory had been sufficiently honored by Roger’s dual ministry. He was cheered by the belief that he had brought the name of his only friend to the Lord’s attention, and that Will rested happy in the bosom of the Father.

As for Donna, he would miss her terribly. But she was a good woman, a pearl beyond price. She would find a place; she would continue to serve the Lord.

As would he. Roger’s ministry was not over, just the phase of it that had seen him using the Russians to his ends.

They had
turned
on him. They were so blind to the workings of the Lord that they had thought they could kill him.

Worse than that, they’d tried to use a confused, innocent soul like Jimmy Hudson to get to him. Apparently, some information Control would find very embarrassing was about to be released by Jimmy’s mother. Of course, Roger had known she must have
something
to do with Moscow, or they wouldn’t have devoted so much attention to her, but Borzov (during another panic-stricken radio message early this morning, before the christening) had gone into excruciating detail about it.

Roger hadn’t listened. He had no interest in their evil purposes, he just wanted to know the next soul Azrael was to bring to judgment. He said as much.

Borzov had turned cold and terse. “You will receive instructions.”

As he had, instructions relayed unknowingly by Jimmy Hudson during a plea to his pastor for help. “Could you please come out here? I—I’d really appreciate it.”

“Of course I’ll come,” Roger—still Will Nelson, then—had said, but the boy was talking again before he’d had a chance to hear the words.

“Not just for me, either,” Jimmy had gone on. “Mel Famey is working on a story about my mother—he’d like to talk with you, too. To get your viewpoint. He told me to say you might serve as a control on the sensationalism—you could help tone it down.”

And that was it, the words
control
and
tone
in the same sentence. Roger had known there was a Russian agent inside at the Hudson Group. Now he knew he was this Mel Famey, and that Borzov required a face-to-face meeting. Famey, Roger had to admit, had been quite resourceful, taking advantage of the opportunity to avoid making personal contact through an obviously monitored switchboard.

Tone
also meant it was to be a secret meeting, but from the security he had been subject to when he spoke to Jimmy, that was not going to be possible if he simply honored Mr. Famey’s request for an interview. He had no intention of speaking about the soul of a member of his Congregation for public consumption, which was all he’d have been able to do with an FBI man present.

Instead, when he’d finished with Jimmy (and he thought he’d done the boy some good—Jimmy had the will to holiness, but he had not yet learned to subjugate his emotions to that will), he ostentatiously spurned the invitation to be interviewed and allowed Special Agent Swinton to drive him to the gate.

Roger felt terrible about Special Agent Swinton. Granted, it was the Will of the Lord that he die, but he seemed a man of such
quality.
It seemed almost wasteful for his part of the Plan to have been simply an obstacle for Roger to clear before confronting his destiny. That, of course, and as the source of a gun.

But that was how it worked out. As Swinton drove his car through the woods that hid Hudson Group Headquarters from the highway, Roger told him there was an insect on his collar.

“Odd for October,” Swinton had said, and tried to brush it off.

“No,” Roger said, “you keep missing it. Let me get it.” Once Roger’s hands were that close to a man’s undefended throat, even a
trained
man’s undefended throat, the outcome was almost a certainty. Roger rendered Swinton unconscious, gained control of the automobile, pulled off to the side of the road, trickled a few drops of water from a vial in his pocket on Swinton’s forehead, and finished him.

Then he removed his clerical garb and replaced them with Swinton’s shirt and jacket, taking as well his revolver and identification. He had no intention of using either—the identification would have done him little good in any case, since he looked only superficially like Swinton—but the Lord was guiding his actions.

Roger turned the car around and drove back to the building’s rear parking lot. He found a use for the gun almost immediately, shooting the lock from a loading-dock door and going in that way. Again, the Lord was with him. No one heard the shot, and no one saw him as he made his way through the busy pressroom and upstairs to the editorial offices. He had spotted Mel Famey’s office when he was there before. It was down at one end of the corridor, the other end of which held the executive offices and the entrance to the Hudson family suite.

He opened the door and walked in. Famey jumped.

“We were to meet,” Roger told him.

Famey’s beard twitched. “Yes,” he said. Roger was wondering what the man was so nervous about when Famey’s hand came up from under his desk with a gun in it.

Roger dropped to the floor. While he was falling, he heard the spitting sound of a silenced revolver. He took Swinton’s gun from his pocket and fired once. Famey fell backward from his chair. His head thumped heavily on the floor.

Roger turned and faced the door, his brain working madly. The shot, the crash of the body—an army of FBI men should be here any second. He couldn’t shoot it out with all of them, and he couldn’t think of a way to explain the gunplay, either on his part or Famey’s.

No one came.

A masterpiece of modern architecture. Roger’s memory supplied him with the phrase from some old magazine article he’d read while preparing for his stay in Kirkester. No expense spared. All offices soundproofed for maximum working efficiency.

Roger offered a short prayer of thanksgiving. Barring a telephone call, he would have a few minutes to sort this all out.

He went and looked at the body. There was no obvious wound, but there was a dark pool of blood around Famey’s head. Roger tilted the body with a toe to see underneath. He saw a ragged exit wound in the back of Famey’s neck. He’d shot the man through his open mouth. Roger had once heard an emergency-room intern describe that phenomenon as a “hole in one.” It had seemed completely tasteless at the time, but now it struck him as rather amusing, and he began to giggle.