Deceptions (21 page)

“For the CIA, I suppose?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course. You’re the third they’ve sent to try.”

“And I won’t be the last. They won’t stop until Homaidi’s the one who’s finally dead. And we both know that’s got to be sooner
rather than later, don’t we?”

She just stared at him through the dark.

“Unless I stop it,” Vittorio said. “And right now I’m the only one alive who can do that.”

She still stared at him, eyes almost lost in their own shadows. “You?”

Translated, it meant,
A dead man ?

“Yes. Me.”

“How?”

“By sending a coded message saying Homaidi’s dead in the sea with two bullets in his eyes.”

She stood unmoving and silent.

“Once he’s officially dead.” said Peter, “who’s going to be trying to kill him?”

“You’d really do that?”

Vittorio flexed his arms against the top of his head to keep them from going numb. “If it’ll keep me alive.”

“Yes, but—”

She cut herself off. The faint sound of voices and laughter drifted into the alley from The Ramblas.

“But what do I think happens to me,” he finished for her, “after I do my little act and Homaidi doesn’t need me anymore?”

She nodded.

“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “They’re a lot better than having you finish me right now. Besides, I couldn’t just tell
my people Homaidi’s dead, then disappear. They’d get suspicious. So I’d have to be kept around for a while to contact them.”

“It’s too crazy.”

But she said it without conviction.

“At least take me to Homaidi and let him decide. There’s always time for the other if he doesn’t like it.”

The automatic was still steady in her hands and aimed between his eyes. Looking at the gun was like looking over the edge
of a high building and feeling the fall suck at his stomach. Still, for one instant, he could sense something in her eyes
waver.

That was when he went for it, hands reaching, feet leaving the ground in a flat-out dive.

He heard the soft sounds of two silenced shots and felt something burn across the top of his head.

Then he had his hands on the gun barrel as his body took her down. It was her back that hit the cobblestones. Peter was on
top. He felt only the yielding of her flesh beneath him.

He had the gun.

He also seemed to have gone blind.

Trying to understand what had happened, he found blood leaking into his mouth and licked it. It poured from his scalp. It
ran into the wells of his eyes, down his face, and dropped from his chin. He felt her tugging at the automatic as she tried
to yank it away. Swinging blindly with an open hand, he hit only air.

He swung again, this time with his fist, and caught her.

She went loose from him and he heard her cry out. It was in Arabic, a loud, keening wail of pain.

Then everything suddenly stopped between them and he felt her break away, and he heard her feet on the cobblestone.

If she reaches Homaidi and the others, I’m dead.

He brushed an arm across his eyes and blinked through a fall of red rain. He did it once more and glimpsed her in silhouette…
a poor stick figure, all moving disjointed parts, stumbling toward escape. Hers, not his.

Lying stretched out, prone position, elbows braced on the wet stones, he again blinked his eyes clear and got her lined up
with the automatic. His finger tightened on the trigger.

Until he faltered and hung there, all grace deserting him.

He had never done a woman.

Good for you, asshole. Then widow your wife, orphan your son, and let Homaidi murder another three hundred.

He squeezed off a cluster of three quick shots, heard their deceptively innocent sounds, and saw the stick figure break apart
and fall.

The girl was dead when he got to her.

Not looking at her face, he picked her up and carried her deeper into the alley. She weighed nothing. She was already air.

Peter Walters sat beside her. He kept his mind empty. He just watched himself sit there with the girl.

He felt his head. It burned like hell, but it was just a scalp wound and the bleeding had stopped. He was a good clotter.
A doctor, patching him up for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, had once called him the best damn clotter he’d ever seen.

Battaglia the Clotter.

So you took your talent and celebrity where you found it.

He spit into a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his
face as well as he could. He finger-combed his hair and cleaned off his hands. There was a bad taste in his mouth and he brought
it out with some phlegm. The rest he had to take with him as it was.

Then he looked at the girl.

Her eyes were still open. They stared past him, looking all the way to Palestine, where she had never really lived because
it had been Israel since long before she was born.

Peter closed her eyes.

One more for Abu Homaidi.

He pushed himself up and started back to his car.

I
T WAS EARLY
morning and three boys and two dogs were playing Indians in a patch of woods near Greenwich, Connecticut.

The boys moved stealthily through the brush, shot arrows into the air, and sent the dogs to retrieve them.

Until at one point, sniffing, scratching and digging, the dogs came upon a lot more than just arrows.

Because such things always took time to filter through properly authorized channels, it wasn’t until much later in the day
that FBI Director Brian Wayne strode briskly into the attorney general’s office and made sure he closed the door behind him.

“Some kids just dug up three of my missing agents,” he told Henry Durning.

Working in rumpled shirtsleeves, the attorney general looked across his desk at Wayne’s face and didn’t especially care for
what he saw there.

“Where?”

“In some woods near Greenwich, Connecticut.”

“Which agents?”

“The ones sent to question Mary Chan Yung.”

Durning put down his pen and sat there. Simply hearing her name seemed to react on him. “How were they killed?”

“Shot. All three.” Wayne shook his head. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly. “Once they’re missing, you know they have to have
bought it. But it always hits harder when the damn bodies actually turn up. Then it’s for real. Now we fucking wait for the
other two.”

Anger changed the director’s voice, made it shrill. His color had been near crimson since entering the office. Durning waited
for him to gain control.
I’m the one he’s really furious with.

“But even worse,” said Wayne, “it’s finally out. The thing’s gotten away from us. It’ll be the lead item on tonight’s news.‘Three
FBI agents dug out of unmarked graves.’ And you can be sure they’ll give us the whole bit. Cameras at the open holes. Interviews
with the kids who found them. Probably even close-ups of the fucking dogs who goddamn sniffed them out.”

Durning fought down an urge to smile. That would really push his friend too far. Old weights shifted inside him. They turned
him properly solemn. He even managed a sigh.

“I’m sorry, Brian.”

The apology did its usual good work. It almost seemed what the FBI director had been waiting for, what he had come into the
office to receive. Christ, the stroking people needed. But it did take the edge off Wayne’s anger and allow him to sit down.

“The damn locals just handled it so badly,” Wayne said. “The bodies had been stripped so they had to ID them through prints.
Then the assholes turned it into a media feeding frenzy instead of letting us stonewall it.”

“The press have already been at you?”

“Like sharks. When was the last time they had three naked Fibbies with bullets in them to dance around? You can imagine the
questions.‘What kind of case were they on?’‘Any others on it with them?’‘Any threats to the national security?’‘Any racist
overtones?’‘Why has the Bureau been tar
geted?’‘How much further is it expected to go?’ And ad infinitum.”

“How did you deal with them?”

“By the book. By saying it’s under investigation and classified.”

Wayne had calmed himself enough to actually produce a wry smile.

“Too bad the Soviets had to collapse,” he said. “Good old Commie conspiracies were such handy scapegoats for just about anything.”

Durning nodded, wondering how Brian would react to knowing about Mary Yung’s two brief calls and her offer to deal.
Probably with mild hysteria,
he thought.

But about to leave the office moments later, and almost as if following some delicately balanced form of psychic interplay,
the FBI director took a sealed manila folder out of his attache case and dropped it on the attorney general’s desk.

“This just came in from Background Checks and Research.”

Durning picked up the folder. It was classified “Top Secret” and was otherwise unmarked.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Wayne. “I haven’t opened it. But since you called and insisted on seeing as much as possible on the woman,
I had a few people out digging for whatever they could find.”

It took some effort, but Henry Durning had to restrain himself for almost seven hours before opening the folder.

First there were the last two appointments of the day in his office, both landmark civil rights cases, to keep him from it.
Then there was his address to the American Bar Association and the formal dinner that followed. And finally, he had to deal
with the need to briefly show his face at the secretary of state’s reception for the Israeli prime minister.

Still, there was almost an exquisite pleasure just knowing it would be there, waiting for him, at the end of the evening.
At moments he felt like an impatient child, forcing himself through a dull, seemingly endless meal, by concentrating on the
unbelievably delicious dessert that lay ahead.

At just past midnight, freshly showered and in his study with a bottle of his favorite brandy, he ended his waiting and unsealed
the folder.

A covering letter from the researcher was taped to a second sealed manila envelope inside the first. It described the primary
source of much of the enclosed material as the subject’s onetime manager and agent during her early years as a model and performer.

The later material apparently came from a variety of sources and was, in most cases, self-explanatory. Wherever further clarification
was needed, it was generally supplied by the researcher himself or one of his assistants.

Durning opened the second envelope and took out a clutch of what appeared to be a haphazard mix of photographs and text, of
pages torn from magazines, of home camera prints and glossy studio shots, some in color and some in black-and-white.

A note from the researcher indicated that everything was arranged chronologically, with the earliest material representing
the subject at the age of six, and the last when she was twenty-seven.

Unaccountably, Durning felt his palms start to sweat and something in his chest catch fire.

She’s coming to me now.

And she did, arriving in a mystic bombardment of childish innocence and nubile perversion so subtle and delicate that at first
it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

Christ, they had started her early. With those two lovely eyes, black and shining as pitch, gazing so proudly into the camera
while all sorts of unmentionable erotic things were being done to that perfect little six-year-old body below.

Yet her eyes stayed the same as her body grew.

Somehow, the pride was still there, and it wouldn’t have been for many. Not with what they had her doing in those gaming houses
of lust, with all kinds of players swarming over her open heat like teams of hungry maggots.

It was as though they had never even touched her.

So that up through the years, she was the one who remained the true handmaiden of love. The others about her,
whatever else they may have thought, were never really anything more than pretenders.

Insanely, Henry Durning gazed at the filthiest of the nubile Mary Yung’s dirty pictures, and felt himself all but cleansed.

As she grew older, he started seeing the hunger in her eyes and, later, the greed. Breathing deeply, he could almost smell
it.

And he was sure it had nothing to do with the million she was trying to squeeze from him. It was simply her nature. Which,
in anyone else, might have taken the edge off his desire.

With her, it just made him want her more.

G
IANNI
G
ARETSKY AND
Mary Yung, about to leave New York for Rome, were careful to maintain their usual security.

They had booked and picked up their Alitalia tickets separately and paid for them in cash. They took two cabs to JFK Airport.
And at the airport itself they made sure they never came within fifty feet of one another.

Gianni was working on the assumption that whatever watchers might be around would be concentrating their attention on couples
made up of an Asian woman and a Caucasian man. Which didn’t mean they were anywhere near being out of danger as separate individuals.
It just helped edge the odds a bit in their favor.

Racial origin was the single ingredient their disguises couldn’t do a thing about.

They were booked for one of the busiest and most popular departure times in Europe, and JFK’s International Terminal was swarming
with passengers and those seeing them off.
Which was why Gianni had chosen this flight time to begin with. The more crowd confusion, the better.

Right now he was on a long check-in line, with Mary Yung about twenty passengers ahead of him. Thinking every second, she
had attached herself to a small group of Taiwanese tourists, and the camouflage was perfect. Talking and laughing with them,
she was all but invisible as just another member of the tour.

Still, there was tension. The nature of what they were doing made it inescapable. From being hidden in a citywide base of
nearly 8 million people, they were about to be fun-neled through a limited number of ticket agents… with one of whom, for
a brief moment, they would have to abandon all anonymity, present their phony passports, and be subject to scrutiny and questioning.