Desperate Measures (45 page)

“Your career.”

“Precisely,” Gable said. “Nothing else matters. I’m afraid that I brought you here under false pretenses. The million dollars,
the two passports, I regret to say that I never intended to provide them. I wanted to discover what you knew. Quite a lot,
it turns out. But without proof, it’s all theory. You’re hardly a threat to my security. But you are very much a threat to
my reputation. Winston’s behavior this afternoon shows that he, too, is a threat to my reputation. He can’t guard his tongue.
Fortunately both problems have a common solution. Mr. Webley.”

“Yes, sir.”

Webley proceeded toward Pittman and stopped behind him. Pittman’s bowels turned cold when he heard the hammer on his .45 being
cocked.

“No!”

The barrel of the .45 suddenly appeared beside him. The shot assaulted his eardrums. Across the room, Winston Sloane gasped,
jerking back, blood erupting from his chest and from behind him, spattering the sofa upon which he sat. The old man shuddered,
then collapsed as if he were made of brittle sticks that could no longer support one another. His head drooped, tilting his
balance, sending his body sprawling onto the floor. Pittman was sure he heard bones scraping together.

The shocked expression on Pittman’s face communicated the question he was too horrified to ask.
Why?

“I told you, I need to eliminate problems,” Gable said. “Mr. Webley.”

The gunman stepped from behind Pittman and walked toward the entrance to the room. He stopped, turned, set the .45 on a table,
and pulled a different pistol from beneath his suit coat.

“Perhaps you’re beginning to understand,” Gable told Pittman.

Terrified, Pittman wanted to run, but Webley blocked the way out. The instant Pittman moved, he knew he’d be killed. His only
defense was to keep talking. “You expect the police to believe that I came in here, pulled a gun, shot Sloane, and then was
shot by your bodyguard?”

“Of course. The .45 belongs to you, after all. Mr. Webley will wipe his fingerprints from it, place the weapon in your hand,
and fire it so that nitrate powder is on your fingers. The physical evidence will match what we insist happened.”

“But the plan won’t work.”

“Nonsense. Your motive has already been established.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Pittman’s voice was hoarse with fear. He stared at the pistol Webley aimed at him. “The plan won’t
work because this conversation is being overheard and recorded.”

Gable’s wrinkle-rimmed eyes narrowed, creating more wrinkles. “
What
?”

“You were right to be suspicious,” Pittman said. “I did come here wearing a microphone.”

“
Mr. Webley
?”

“You saw me search him thoroughly. He’s clean. There’s no microphone.”

“Then shoot him!”

“Wait.” Pittman’s knees shook so badly that he didn’t know if he could support himself. “Listen to me. When you searched me,
you missed something.”

“I said shoot him, Mr. Webley!”

But Webley hesitated.

“My gun,” Pittman said. “The .45. Before I came here, I went to a man I interviewed five years ago. He’s a specialist in security,
in electronic eavesdropping. He didn’t recognize me, and he didn’t ask any questions when I said I wanted to buy a miniature
microphone-transmitter that could be concealed in the handle of a .45. I knew the gun was the first thing you’d take from
me. I was counting on the fact that you’d be so pleased to get it away from me, you wouldn’t stop to realize it might be another
kind of threat. You checked my pen, Webley. But you didn’t think to check the gun.”

Webley grabbed the .45 off the table and pressed the button that released the pistol’s ammunition magazine from its handle.

Pittman kept talking, nauseous from fear. “I have a friend waiting in a van parked in the area. It’s loaded with electronic
equipment. She’s been recording everything we said. She’s also been rebroadcasting the conversation, directing it to the Fairfax
police. Her signal is designed to block out normal police transmissions. For the last hour, the only thing the police station
and all the police cars in Fairfax have been able to hear is our conversation. Mr. Gable, you just told several hundred police
officers that you killed Duncan Kline, Jonathan Millgate, Burt Forsyth, and Father Dandridge. If I’d had time, I’d have gotten
you to admit that you also killed your wife.”

“Webley!” Gable’s outrage made his aged voice amazingly strong.

“Jesus, he’s right. Here it is.” Webley looked pale as he held up a bullet-shaped object that was obviously intended for another
purpose.

“Damn you!” Gable shouted at Pittman.

“I’ll wait in line, thanks.
You’re
damned already.”

“Kill him!” Gable roared toward Webley.

“But…”

“Do what I say!”

“Mr. Gable, there’s no point,” Webley said.

“Isn’t there? No one subjects me to ridicule.” Spittle erupted from Gable’s mouth. “He’s ruined my reputation.” Gable’s face
assumed the color of a dirty sidewalk.

As Webley continued to hesitate, Gable stalked toward him, took the gun from his hand, aimed at Pittman…

“No!” Pittman screamed.

… and fired.

The bullet struck Pittman’s chest. He groaned in anguish as he felt its slamming impact. It lifted him off his feet at the
same time that it jolted him backward. In excruciating pain, he struck the floor, cracking his head, graying out for a moment,
regaining consciousness, struggling to breathe.

From where he lay, his chest heaving spastically, he watched in panic as Gable coughed, faltered, then lurched toward him.

Gable’s shriveled face towered above him. The pistol was aimed toward Pittman’s forehead.

Paralyzed from shock, Pittman couldn’t even scream in protest as Gable’s finger tightened on the trigger.

The roar of the gunshot made Pittman flinch. But it didn’t come from the pistol in Gable’s hand. Rather, it came from behind
Pittman, from the direction of the wall-length window as glass shattered and gunshots kept roaring, Gable’s face bursting
into crimson, his chest shuddering, obscene red flower patterns appearing on it. Five shots. Six. Gable lurched against a
chair. The pistol fell from his hand, clattering onto the floor. A bullet struck his windpipe, blood gushing, and suddenly
Gable no longer had the stature of a diplomat, but the gangly awkwardness of a corpse toppling onto the floor.

Through gaps in the window that had been shattered by gunshots, Pittman heard Denning shout in triumph.

Denning’s grotesquely manic face was framed by a jagged hole in the window. The old man’s skin seemed to have shrunk, clinging
to his cheekbones, making his face like a grinning skull.

Hearing a noise from the other side of the room, Pittman twisted in pain and saw Webley stand from behind a chair, where he
had taken cover. He raised the .45, aiming toward Denning.

The pistol that had fallen from Gable’s hand lay on the floor next to Pittman. Sweating, wanting to vomit, mustering resolve,
Pittman reached, grasped the weapon, and fired repeatedly at Webley, too dazed to know if he was hitting his target, merely
pulling the trigger again and again, jerking from the recoil, concentrating not to lose his grip on the pistol, and then the
gun wouldn’t fire anymore, and it was too heavy to be held any longer anyhow, and Pittman dropped it, his chest seized by
agonizing pain.

He waited for Webley to retaliate. No response. He listened for a sound from Webley’s direction. Nothing. He fought to raise
himself, squinting past Gable’s corpse, still seeing no sign of Webley.

What difference does it make? Pittman thought. If I didn’t kill him, I’m finished.

But he had to know. He squirmed higher, clutching a chair, peering over it, seeing Webley lying motionless in a pool of blood.

Pittman’s painful elation lasted only a second as he heard a groan from beyond the shattered window. His chest protesting
from the effort, he turned and saw Denning clutch his own chest. The old man’s elated grin had become a scowl. His eyes, which
a moment ago had been bright with victory, were now dark with terror and bewilderment. He dropped his pistol. He sagged against
the windowsill. He slumped from view.

By the time Pittman staggered to the window, Denning was already dead, collapsed in a flower garden, his eyes and mouth open,
his arms and legs trembling, then no longer trembling, assuming a terrible stillness.

Pittman shook his head.

In the distance, he heard a siren. Another siren quickly joined it. The wails became louder, speeding nearer.

Bracing himself against a chair, Pittman peered down, fumbling to open his sport coat. The bullet that had struck his chest
protruded partly from his sweater. When Gable had commented that the two garments were the reason Pittman reacted badly to
the eighty-degree temperature in the room, Pittman had been afraid that Gable would become suspicious about the sweater. After
all, the sweater was the reason Pittman had needed to contact someone else he had once interviewed before he came to the mansion
to confront Gable.

The person he’d gone to see was a security expert. The sweater was a bullet-resistant vest whose state-of-the-art design made
it look like ordinary clothing.

I’m the sum of all the people I ever interviewed, Pittman thought morosely as he stared again out the shattered window toward
Denning’s corpse.

He turned away. The effort of breathing made him wince. The security expert had explained that the woven fibers of the bullet-resistant
vest could stop most projectiles but that it offered no protection against the force of their impact. Bruises and injured
ribs were sometimes unavoidable.

I believe it, Pittman thought, holding himself. I feel like I’ve been kicked by a horse.

The sirens, joined by others, sped nearer and louder.

Pittman staggered across the living room, passing Gable’s corpse, then Sloane’s, then Webley’s. The stench of cordite and
death was cloying. He had to get outside. He had to breathe fresh air. He stumbled along the stone-floored hallway, his legs
weak from the effects of fear. As he reached for the main door, he heard tires squealing on the paved driveway outside. He
opened the door and lurched onto the terrace, breathing sweet, cool air. Policemen scrambled from cruisers. Weapons drawn,
they didn’t bother slamming their car doors. They were too busy racing toward Pittman. He lifted his arms, not wanting them
to think he was a threat. But then he saw Jill among them, racing even harder to reach him, shouting his name, and he knew
that for now at least he didn’t have to be afraid. He held her, clinging to her, oblivious to the pressure against his injured
chest. She was sobbing, and he held her tighter, never wanting to let her go.

“I love you. I was so afraid that I’d lose you,” she said.

“Not today.” Pittman kissed her. “Thank God, not today.”

Love is an act of faith, Pittman thought. People get sick and die, or they die in traffic accidents, or they eat food that
hasn’t been properly cooked and they get salmonella and they die, or they fall from a ladder and break their necks, or they
get tired of you and they don’t want to see you anymore and they don’t answer your phone calls, or they divorce you. There
were so many ways to be tortured by love. Indeed, eventually all love, even the truest and most faithful, doomed the lover
to agonizing loss—because of death. Love required so much optimism, so much trust in the future. A practical person might
say that the possible immediate benefits did not compensate for the ultimate painful result. A cautious person might deny
his or her feelings, closet the temptation to love, smother it, and go through life in a safe, emotionless vacuum. But not
me, Pittman thought. If love requires faith, I’m a believer.

These thoughts occurred to him as he held Jill’s hand and walked between rows of tombstones toward his beloved son’s grave.
It was Thursday again, a week after the events that had taken place at Eustace Gable’s mansion and two weeks after Pittman
had tried to save Jonathan Millgate’s life at the Scarsdale estate. Following the arrival of the police and the discovery
of the corpses in Gable’s blood-spattered living room, Pittman and Jill had been held in custody. But as Pittman had hoped,
the damning conversation that had been broadcast to the police was his salvation. After he and Jill had been questioned at
length, after Mrs. Page corroborated those portions of their story about which she had personal experience, after the police
in Boston and New York verified other details (with help from the Vermont State Police, who went to Grollier Academy), Pittman
and Jill were eventually released.

Now in New York, they stopped before Jeremy’s grave, and the warm sunshine-filled spring afternoon made Pittman’s heart ache
worse from love for his absent son. It was terrible that Jeremy would never again see and experience weather so beautiful.

Pittman put his arm around Jill, drawing comfort from her, while he studied the amazingly green grass that covered Jeremy’s
grave. As his tear ducts stung his eyes, he was reminded of something that Walt Whitman had written, that grass was the hair
of graves. Jeremy’s hair. The only hair he has now. Except that isn’t true, Pittman thought. A hundred years ago maybe, when
coffins were made of wood and weren’t surrounded by a concrete sleeve and lid. In the old days, the coffin and the body would
decompose, become one with the earth, and generate new life. Now the way bodies are hygienically sealed within the earth,
death is truly lifeless, Pittman thought. If his ex-wife had agreed with Pittman’s wishes, their son’s body would have been
cremated, his ashes lovingly scattered in a meadow where wildflowers could bloom from him. But Pittman’s ex-wife had insisted
so strongly and Pittman had been so emotionally disabled, Jeremy’s body had been disposed of in a traditional manner, and
the sterility of it made Pittman want to cry.

The thought of death, which for the past year had preoccupied him, now weighed heavier on his mind. Since his escape from
the Scarsdale estate, he had seen his best friend killed, and Father Dandridge, and that didn’t include several men whom he
himself had killed, and it certainly didn’t include the slaughter at Gable’s mansion. The more Pittman brooded about it, the
more he wondered if the other grand counselors—Anthony Lloyd dead from a stroke, Victor Standish dead from suicide—should
also be included. And of course, Jonathan Millgate. I set out to do an obituary on a man who wasn’t dead, Pittman thought.
In the process, I inadvertently ended up causing the death of that man and of all his associates.