Cobra Strike (15 page)

Winston said, “Right on, brother.”

Harvey Waller wanted to kill him—strangle him with his bare hands—as soon as he saw him, but the crowded Wall Street sidewalk
in the middle of a business day was neither the time nor the place for that. Even Harvey could see that, and Harvey liked
to kill people in places where they least expected to die. Another thing threw Harvey also. The guy seemed glad to see him,
and this was a guy he had sworn to kill for having gotten cold feet and betraying him. He had never even known the joker’s
last name before. He just knew him as David when they were both members of an ultralight society trying to save America by
eliminating known communist agents operating there. David and others had accused Harvey of getting out of control. When the
FBI net started closing in, they all bolted like frightened rabbits,
leaving Harvey To Whom It May Concern: face the music. Harvey often thought about how surprised they must have been when he
eluded the FBI, and on his own, continued liquidating those on the society’s hit list. He had completed the job solo, without
their funds or inside information, after they had all scampered off to hide in the woodwork. He didn’t know their last names,
but neither could they locate him. He didn’t need the likes of them to zap fucking commies. Harvey could manage right well
on his own.

He still had some high-level contacts in Washington, D.C., and other places who thought like he did. Recently Harvey had read
Winston Churchill’s
The Gathering Storm,
about how nice-guy English politicians had been no match for Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Mussolini. Harvey could see
himself today, if he had been rich and educated, warning his fellow members of Congress about the Red danger creeping onward
all around them, and they yawning during his speeches and leaving the chamber for a smoke, like they did to Churchill. Only
difference between him and Churchill was he would have waylaid them in the corridors and kicked their butts.

Harvey Waller had gone into the Marines as a kid and found himself in Vietnam. He came home to his New Jersey town “funny
in the head,” as his stay-at-home friends liked to say. They sneered at him when he pointed out to them that their heads were
empty, and soon quit tangling with them because he saw that it was a waste of his time. He kept himself honed and in fighting
trim by working as a soldier of fortune, nearly always with Mike Campbell, whom Harvey respected as a man and a soldier, even
if they did not see eye to eye on most things. With his regular army combat experience and his skills as a mere, it was only
natural that Harvey became the executioner of the nameless ultralight group. This guy David was the only one he had ever seen
after they had ditched him, and Harvey was sorry it turned out to be on a crowded city sidewalk.

The coffee shop where David brought him was not a good place, either. Harvey only stopped thinking about how to kill him immediately
when David pushed his business card across the table to him.

“I’m a corporate lawyer with a big financial house on Water Street. I have a job for you that needs doing right away. Fifteen
thousand, half in advance, to cover your expenses and so forth. This man is a dangerous communist plant, Harvey. A mole.”

They met once again, and Harvey picked up half the cash and all the details. He was to hit the target while David was on a
three-day cruise out of Miami. Piece of cake.

On a plane from Newark to O’Hare, Harvey began to wonder if he hadn’t been maneuvered into all this too easily by that smooth-spoken
Wall Street lawyer. By the time he rented a car with a forged driver’s license and Visa card and found his way onto Route
90 northwest out of Chicago, he was convinced he had been suckered into something. It would all have been so much simpler
and cleaner if he could just have strangled David without ever getting to talk with him again.

He drove through the flat farmland of Wisconsin and exited from Route 90 at Madison. His target was a student at the University
of Wisconsin who lived in the student residential area on Langdon Street. Harvey Waller found a motel near the edge of town,
an inconspicuous place. He left nothing in the room, since he would not return to it if he got his work completed today. The
danger of working in a small town like Madison, more than fifty miles from any other sizable town, was that if something went
wrong, there was no place to hide and escape routes were easy to cut off. Waller knew he didn’t look like a student at the
university or a civil servant working at the State Capitol, and there didn’t seem to be much else happening in this town.
But to Harvey, considerations like that only added spice to an otherwise bland job of work.

He leafed through the copy of the
Wall Street Journal
he had bought at O’Hare airport. Harvey used this newspaper only because he could usually find it anywhere he happened to
be in the country, not because he had an interest in or knowledge of the financial market. It had only been a coincidence
that he had met David on Wall Street: Harvey was in the downtown area to visit an electronics store. He found what he was
looking for in the classified ads: BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES.
He scanned the ads in this column, looking for coded messages. Each of his contacts had their own format, and taking an ad
here for a few days in succession was the only way they could signal him. Then he contacted them. His eye settled on one item:
ARIZONA DENTAL PRACTICE —Root Canal Work a Specialty—Partner Wanted. He nodded in satisfaction. That was from Andre Verdoux.
He’d get this job done fast, then phone Andre from Chicago. He didn’t trust the phone exchanges of anything less than a big
city, where everything was beyond control.

He had to pull into the driveway of the house on Langdon Street because he could find no place to park on the street. From
one clapboard house, amplified rock music blasted from a stereo. Not far behind the house, a lake stretched in a calm sheet.
Everyone on the street looked nineteen years old. Bicycles were stacked against porches. All these kids looked friendly. They
looked like they were having a good time here and had big hopes for the future. Harvey thought that if he had been given a
chance, he would have liked to have come here.

So who or what was this kid he had come to kill? Arthur Putnam. He pressed the bell, one of six with names alongside each.
A head and shoulders stuck out of a window upstairs. A big guy, a jock.

“Who’re you looking for?”

“Arthur Putnam.”

“That’s me.”

Waller pointed to the rented Chrysler in the driveway. “We got to talk.”

The big lug clumped down the stairs, came out the door in shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and got in the car without asking a
question, such as who Waller might be and what he was here for. Did the kid think he was a communist contact? Was he used
to strangers showing up like this? He looked more like a naive, well-behaved youth who was used to obeying adults without
question.

Waller backed the car out of the driveway and drove down the street without saying anything. They passed through what appeared
to be the main campus center on the lakeshore,
with a lot of high-rise buildings. He just kept driving, making random turns, not saying anything.

“Where’re we going?” Arthur Putnam finally asked.

“Just driving around and around.”

Waller saw out of the corner of his eye that Putnam was finally giving him some suspicious looks. It took most people about
two seconds to start doing that. Waller knew he struck most people as “creepy.”

“What do you want?”

“You a communist?”

“A what?”

“Communist. A believer in Marx and Lenin. Maybe you never heard of them.”

“I know who they are,” Putnam said indignantly. “Can’t say I’ve read anything by them because they’re not on any of my courses,
and I’ve got a big enough workload as it

“You ever heard of David Forbes?”

“Sure. He’s my mother’s brother, lives in New York City.”

“Has he any reason to kill you?”

A long silence now. Finally Putnam asked in a hesitant way, “Are you a cop?”

“No. A hit man.”

Another long silence.

Waller snapped, “I asked you a question. Has he some reason to kill you?”

Short silence. “I suppose so. We’re the only two left in the family. My parents were killed in an air crash three years ago.
They left me a lot of money. I’m not allowed to touch it till I’m twenty-one—my father stipulated that in his will—and I won’t
be that till next year. David is the trustee of the funds. He knows all about those things, being involved in the stock market
and such. He paid you to kill me?”

“Fifteen thou was all you were worth, body dumped in a bad neighborhood of Chicago. Make it look like a street crime, he said.
He’s on a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. Left early yesterday.”

“Why aren’t you going to kill me?” Arthur Putnam asked.

The kid was maybe not so dumb, Waller decided. “ kinda like this place, college and all.” Waller smiled his sinister smile.
“I enjoyed killing a guy in Harvard. I didn’t like that place at all. But this is all bullshit. I don’t kill people for money,
that’s all.”

“That why you were asking about me being a communist?”

“Don’t ask questions. What is this place?”

“Aboretum. Like a botanical garden,” Putnam explained.

Waller’ parked, got out, and looked around him at the lawns and trees. He took a large, extra strong plastic garbage bag from
the trunk and told Putnam to bring the Polaroid camera that was on the backseat. Waller lit a Viceroy and stubbed it out after
a few puffs. He made a round black mark the size of a bullet entry wound on Putnam’s left cheek, then another on his right
forehead.

“I don’t have nothing to make you look pale. You’re too fucking healthy-looking. Get into that sack with your head and shoulders
sticking out-maybe one arm-like I was stuffing you into it so your corpse wouldn’t mark up the trunk of the car or leave hairs
or skin traces that lab guys could analyze.”

Waller spent some time getting his arms and head into unnatural positions.

“You always know a dead guy by the way he lays,” he instructed Putnam. “No matter how bad a guy is hurt and unconscious, so
long as he’s still alive, he lays in a natural way. Only after he’s dead does he get what they call a broken-doll look. Yeah,
now you’re doing good. That’s better. Much better.”

He took three shots from different angles quickly. Then he uncovered the Polaroids in turn without bothering to count off
seconds. They could have been better photos, but one thing all three of them plainly showed was a dead youth half in a garbage
bag with two bullet holes in his face.

“David’s gonna love them,” Harvey said, gloating.

Harvey Waller was wrong. David Forbes didn’t love the photos. When Waller thrust them before his eyes, the lawyer
made little gurgling sounds like he was going to throw up. They were walking west on Wall Street, after Waller had waited
for him to arrive that morning at his place of work on Water Street.

“I believe you, Harvey. I don’t need to see that. Please destroy them.”

Waller produced a lighter and touched it to all three photos held together. They burned fiercely, and to save his fingers
he tossed them in a steel mesh trash basket. The contents of the basket caught fire.

“This is just what my reputation needs, Harvey, to be caught setting fires before my day’s work. I know what you’re here for.
Your money. I don’t have it. No one in this city walks around with seven and a half thousand in their pocket.”

“So we go to your bank,” Harvey suggested.

“My bank is where I live, in Connecticut.”

“I know someone who will take your IOU and pay me on it.” Harvey pushed him down the subway steps of the Lexington Avenue
IRT, ignoring his pleas to take a taxi and that he had an important appointment in fifteen minutes. Waller had tokens and
pushed Forbes through the turnstile ahead of him. They stood on the uptown platform, and Forbes complained to the silent Waller
but made no effort to disobey him. When they heard the grinding of steel wheels on steel rails as the approaching train rattled
toward them at speed, Harvey began shouting over the din.

“I don’t want your fucking money! Forget the second payment! Those photos were fake! I didn’t kill the kid because he was
no commie! You’re the rotten bastard, not him! You stabbed me in the back once! Think I had forgotten that?”

Harvey Waller waited only long enough to see the fear in the lawyer’s eyes and then pushed him headlong in the path of the
train.

With Andre Verdoux it was a case of “old soldiers never die,” except he had no intention of fading away, either. The Frenchman
was in his fifties, but he considered himself fitter in many ways and a hell of a lot wiser than when he was in his twenties.
Mike had been trying to ease him out of missions recently and, when that didn't work, shunt him into a noncombat managerial
position. In his wily way Andre had turned that ploy against Mike by taking on as much responsibility and undertaking as many
arrangements for each mission as he could possibly handle. That way he knew who was going to be where and when, and so included
himself in an indispensable role. Although Andre was definitely included on this mission, he found all the same that he was
saddled with all the arrangements.

Besides Campbell, Andre was the only member of the team to know where they were going. And he had just now found out where
they would train.

“Now, I want you to repeat for each man before he goes,” Mike said, “that it's illegal for U.S. citizens to plan within U.S.
borders to violate U.S. neutrality in the internal
affairs of another country. Since none of them will know where they're going, they can't plan to violate the place. But we
take no weapons, no military gear—it's strictly running shoes and shorts.”

Andre nodded.

“There's another problem,” Mike went on. “The Nanticoke Institute people pointed out to me that they consider their big mistake
was in sending in a three-man team who did not know Afghan languages and customs. They said they now have an expert on the
area working for them, and they want to send him with us. I said I'd have him checked out by one of my men and warned them
that he was not to reveal the mission's destination to this man. So I phoned Bob Murphy before he left Hilton Head Island
and told him to try to find out where the mission was to, that this guy knew it. Bob called me an hour ago. He said the guy
was a beanpole but real smart—he had been able to find out nothing from him about where we're going. So that's good. I asked
Bob what else the guy could do. Bob said, ‘He can swim.' ‘Anything else?' I asked. Bob said, ‘No. I gave him a rifle to shoot
and he didn't know how to hold it. He admitted he'd never fired a gun in his life.'