BOOK I (37 page)

"He came within a hairsbreadth of having it.

Outside, the sun was knifing into the horizon. From under the window of their room came the sound of someone walking on gravel-except there was no gravel under the window, there was just prairie. Everyone in the room stiffened.

"He may still get his revenge," Francis said. He stared vacantly at the tiny pistol in Carroll's hand. "Don t you see it, Carroll-to G. Sprowls we are all loose ends."

"You are my loose end," Carroll sneered. He lowered his gaze until he was looking directly into Francis' eyes. "I detest you as much as anyone can detest another human being."

Francis straightened with an effort and regarded his executioner. "I have loathed you from the moment I met you," he told Carroll. His lips seemed to curl insolently over the words he spoke. "If your life depended on it, you couldn't see the forest for the trees. '

Carroll's tiny pistol jumped imperceptibly in his fist. Francis exhaled as if he had been punched in the chest. He looked down at the ragged hole that had suddenly appeared in the front of his tweed jacket. Blood oozed from it. He brought a hand up to cover the hole, almost as if it embarrassed him.

Carroll stepped up to Francis and pressed the pistol to a point over his heart and pulled the trigger again. When he removed the pistol, Francis sank to the ground.

Kaat, thoroughly frightened, leapt off the bed to join the Potter at the bay window. "Here's the thing, ' she whispered fiercely. "The Tibetans say that your last thoughts determine the quality of your reincarnation.

Mine are of you. I hope to God we are reincarnated at the same time. I would like to spend an entire life with you sometime."

The Potter took the Beretta from his jacket pocket and pulled Kaat close to protect her from what was surely coming. He smiled at his last, best Sleeper as he spoke into Kaat's ear. "We will share conspiracies," he said. "It will be us against the world," he said. "For us, there will be life before death, he said. "If you please," he said.

"What did I do with the fucking lighter?" Ourcq muttered to himself.

Appleyard stopped imitating someone walking on gravel long enough to say, "Don't tell me you maybe can't find it."

Ourcq finally produced the lighter from a side pocket. "Stop imitating every fucking thing you hear and cover me," he ordered. Fitting a crutch under one armpit, gripping the homemade incendiary grenade filled with a flammable magnesium-like substance, he limped along the side of the house until he was directly under the bay window.

Appleyard fitted the silencer onto his pistol and bracing his arm with his other hand, aimed at the window. He caught a flicker of light-Ourcq would be igniting the fuse now, he knew. In a moment he would maybe arc the grenade up through the second-floor window. It would explode with a great whooshing sound, sucking up all the oxygen in a split second, suffocating every living thing in the room. The air would be sucked maybe out of their lungs even.

If ever there was an appropriate moment, this was maybe it. Filling his own lungs, drawing his lips back against his teeth, Appleyard began to imitate the sound of the sun setting.

In a car parked down the road, G. Sprowls heard a noise he couldn't identify, and then one he could-glass breaking, followed by a great sucking sound, as if all the air in the universe were being consumed. G.

Sprowls frowned. He was not happy to be working with Russians, but it was unavoidable. The Director's instructions had been explicit. People in high places had communicated with each other; had decided that each side had too much on the other; that if they continued to play the game, there would only be losers. The only thing left to do was acknowledge the standoff and assign trusted people on both sides to tie up the loose ends. The suspect in police custody had been shot that morning by a local bar owner. All traces of a second shooter on a grassy knoll had been removed. The world would be invited to accept as fact that there had been one shooter, a demented loner acting on his own initiative. G.

Sprowls had been given the phone number of the Canadians. Together they had just taken care of the other loose ends.

The idea flashed through G. Sprowls's head that someone might one day consider him a loose end. But he dismissed it as preposterous.

The Canadians were coming down the unpaved road toward the car now. The heavyset one was limping painfully along on two crutches, cursing with each step. The other one trailed after him, imitating the sound (so he claimed) of a noiseless patient spider spinning its web.

Ourcq thought he had finally tripped up Appleyard. "How come I can hear it if the fucking spider is fucking noiseless?"

"Concentration," Appleyard, unfazed, suggested, "is what it's a question of. You have got to listen with both ears so you can maybe hear what's there to be heard." And he repeated the sound that he said was produced by a noiseless patient spider.