Hopscotch (24 page)

The longer he kept them at bay the more desperate they'd become. It wouldn't be long—if it hadn't happened already—before the orders would come down to take off the last of the kid gloves; probably the orders would be to make it look like an accident. They wouldn't shoot him in a public place.

They were governed by no code except expedience. There were no Commandments except Thou Shalt Succeed. Some of them had consciences of one kind or another but they all were caught in the gears of their great machinery. They believed in using any necessary means to preserve what they thought of as the greater good. It was a curious sinister idealism that motivated the best of them; the rest didn't count, they were merely Good Germans, they'd do as they were told—lost souls who'd settled years ago for the usual hypocrisies and specious rationalizations.

He'd always recognized the weakness in himself and that was why he saw it in the rest of them. In his own case it had never been put to the test. He had never been ordered to kill anyone. Lurid fictions to the contrary it was not part of the usual plays of espionage to commit murder; there had been assassinations, politically motivated, of which he had knowledge afterward and of which he had
written with feelings of genuine outrage in his book. But he had never participated in any effort to take out a person, whether an ally or an enemy agent. It simply wasn't done. The objective nearly always was to obtain information or to plant false information. In either case it had to be done without the other side's realizing it had been done. Ideally the operative worked in such a way that nobody found out he'd been there at all. That sort of ideal couldn't be achieved if he left the landscape littered behind him with dead bodies.

Kendig was not certain what he might have done if Myerson had given him a kill order. He'd had training in the use of weapons and the tactics of unarmed combat but he'd never had to use them; last night's football yardage in the police station had been the most violent escape of his life except for the night he'd taken a bullet in the head on the Czech border wire; and he'd done no one any real injury. The game was one of wits, not of brute strength or ruthlessness.

But now they meant to kill him. This was something he'd known all along but the full realization had been creeping up on him for a while that there was a point at which they were bound to succeed if he kept playing the game with them: time, numbers and all the probabilities were in their favor. A matter of ten minutes one way or the other this morning might have delivered him onto Mikhail Yaskov's chopping block.

He visualized himself walking through a door and into the guns. It would happen sooner or later. And what then?

It distressed him in an almost comical way to realize how ordinary he was after all. Neither a pacifist
nor a first-strike Neanderthal; merely a man who believed in self-defense. He knew, studying it as honestly as he was able, that if they tried to kill him he would try to kill them first.

A squall rattled the windows; it had become a cloudburst, the rain oiled across the panes and shattered in a haze on the surface of the street, cars spraying high turbulent wakes from the spitting puddles. A man sprinted out holding a tent of newspaper over his head; dodged a car and dashed across the street to catch the tall red double-decker that swayed around the corner.

He saw no point going out into that. He had no dry clothes to change into.

The place had a saloon bar and he was able to get a drink at his table; he ordered Dewar's straight up. He finished the meal, enjoying it, and when the whiskey came he sipped it and took pleasure in the flavor. His appetite had been ravenous for weeks—the voracity of a condemned man eating his last meal—but now he was luxuriating in the subtler tastes and textures of things.

The Dewar's was Carla Fleming's brand. He'd been flashing images of her. He'd no passion to rejoin her; she hadn't been or done anything extraordinary; it wasn't infatuation. But she was a vivid bookmark, marking the place where he'd turned a page. That night in Birmingham he'd begun to look at things beyond self-pity and the escape from boredom. That was when he'd discovered the moral outcry of the book he was writing.

The joy she took from flying had triggered something in him. It hadn't been superficial; it was the genuine joy with which she justified her existence and in some profound osmotic way it had communicated
itself to him: the rediscovery of pleasure in the simple act of living.

The challenge of the game had begun as a desperate lunge against the blackness of his terrible ennui. He'd been greedy for the matching of wits, He might have gone on enjoying it indefinitely if he'd been able to sustain it as an open-ended excuse for staying alive.

But he wasn't sure he needed the excuse any more. Being alive had become its own justification. That was what he'd re-learned: that was what the Dewar's reminded him of.

He was thinking too clearly today, no longer overcharged by the surge of emotionalism that had carried him soaring through the heady weeks of writing and running. The ability to reason coldly was bringing him to a logical conclusion he'd been able to evade before. He'd not speculated on the finalities of the endgame; he'd shied away from it consistently but it had crept up on him anyhow.

Of course Chartermain or Yaskov might get to him first but most likely it would be Joe Cutter who'd end up facing Kendig over gunsights—literal or figurative; pull the trigger or order it pulled, it came down to the same thing. But Joe Cutter was no more a killer than Kendig was. What gnawed Kendig was that he'd put Cutter in an intolerable dilemma. He was making a murderer of Cutter.

The irony was inescapable. He'd set the avalanche in motion; it was too late to get out from under it; and Cutter would be buried with him through no fault of Cutter's own.

He ordered another Dewar's and thought the thing the whole way through. There was no calling it off, not in the usual sense; he couldn't simply
phone them and tell them where to pick up the manuscript and say he was stopping the game. They'd come after him anyway—they could never trust him not to start it up again.

But there was a way it might be done. It depended on a number of things but most of all it depended on Joe Cutter's willingness to be fooled as a means of escaping from his dilemma.

He paid his bill and went out, carrying his umbrella and the empty school-book briefcase. The rain had moved on; the air was fresh and wet. He went up the street almost jauntily.

– 23 –

C
UTTER CAME INTO
the storeroom, ducking his head to clear the doorway; Ross looked up from the scribbled note in his hand—
Better luck next time. M.K
.—and tossed it disgustedly back into the empty carton; and Myerson shot a bitter look at Cutter. “Have you ever considered shining shoes as a trade, Joe? Maybe you ought to keep it in mind—maybe you're equipped for it.”

Cutter said, “I grant you in the long parade of stupid mistakes we've made this one deserves a special float all to itself.”

Myerson pulled the cigarette from his mouth with a perceptible tremor of his plump fingers. “By God this is enough. I want the bastard dead, you hear me?” It was the first time he'd seen one of Kendig's pranks firsthand and he was distressed.

“All right,” Cutter said. He was squinting as if the light was too strong. “It's got to be done but let's not rationalize it into one of God's Commandments.”

Myerson stood unsteady, the muscles of his feet making constant corrections in his balance. Abruptly Cutter smiled at him. Ross thought it wasn't because there was anything worth smiling about; it was just that Myerson was already discomfited
and Cutter's smile was designed to make him more so.

Kendig had pulled the storeroom apart with a vengeance—to make sure it didn't escape anyone's notice that he'd been there. The housekeeper had reported it to the desk at breakfast time and the manager had reported it to the Yard and Myerson had been in Merritt's office at the time; Myerson had collected Ross and they'd left a message for Cutter and now here they were looking at the strewn soap cartons and the amiable little note from Kendig in the box where the manuscript must have been.

“Under our noses,” Myerson grouched. “Right here under our noses all the time.”

He was talking to Cutter but Cutter was listening with a lack of interest that he didn't bother to conceal. He was pensive; Myerson walked around him in a circle, too agitated to stand still, but Cutter didn't turn to keep facing him and Myerson had to come around again to see Cutter's face. Myerson began to shout but Cutter cut across him: “Spare me the recriminations, all right?”

The skin on Myerson's ruddy face tightened. “I suppose you've got a rabbit to pull out of the hat now, have you? Because if you don't Joe, I have a very strong premonition that you're likely to spend the rest of your career decoding signals from the Russian scientific base in Antarctica.” Myerson beamed wickedly but the quality of Cutter's answering glance smothered the smile quickly from his face.

“There aren't any rabbits,” Cutter said quietly. “There's only a fabric of assumptions and suppositions and surmises. He left it here forty-eight hours
and then he collected it. He could have left it here indefinitely but he collected it. That means something.”

“Does it? I'll ask my Ouija board.”

“It means one of two things,” Cutter went on. “Either he wants to mail out another chapter or he's planning to leave the country.”

“Give that man a cigar.”

“Am I still running this show?”

Myerson dropped his cigarette and ground it out under the sole of his shoe. “Hell Joe, of course you are.”

“Then I want more men. I want to double the cover on every airplane and boat that leaves this island. And I want to double up on Follett's idea, covering the post offices.”

“Makes sense,” Myerson conceded. He turned a final distasteful glance on the jumbled array of overturned cartons, fished Kendig's note out of the empty one and dropped it gingerly into ah envelope, glanced bleakly at Ross, scowled again at Cutter and went.

Ross said, “I have a feeling it's the post office idea that's going to do the trick. I don't mean anything personal, Joe.”

“I misjudged Follett. It was a brilliant idea. Don't apologize.”

The Yard technicians arrived. Cutter and Ross relinquished the basement to them and went upstairs through the lobby to the car. Ross got behind the wheel. “Where to?”

“Chartermain's office.”

Ross put it in gear and vectored into the traffic. The sun was a pale disk in the haze. Last night he'd dropped by Cutter's room to ask him something.
Cutter had been reading the Bible. Ross had picked it up and glanced at the open pages.
Deuteronomy
. Something had leaped out at him.
I have set before thee life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life
.

Suspicion wormed in him. “Sometimes I get the feeling Kendig thinks if he just charges head-on hard enough at death it'll get out of his way.”

Cutter said, “There's a classic rat-psychology experiment where they send a hungry rat down a tunnel. There's food at the far end of the tunnel. But to get to the food the rat has to walk across an electric grid. The shock current is increased as he gets closer to the food. They keep testing the rat, increasing the current. The rat has to decide for himself how hungry he is—whether the reward's worth the pain.”

Ross pulled up in the jammed lane of traffic. He looked straight at Cutter. “Who are you talking about, Joe—you or Kendig?”

“When I was a little kid there was a fight on my street. A couple of kids a little older than me—maybe they were eight or nine. I don't know what the fight was about. One of them hit the other one in the nose and the kid fell down flat on his back. He was a little dazed—I mean an eight-year-old can't hit very hard. But the kid died. They told us later if we'd turned him over on his side he'd have been fine. But the blood ran back in his throat, he drew it into his lungs and strangled on it.”

“Christ.”

“It wasn't anybody's fault. But sometimes you get the feeling it's all been written down in the book long before you were born,” Cutter said. “I think I was talking about Kendig before. If there's food in
sight you can't starve to death. He'll cross the grid sooner or later, even though he knows the shock current's too high to survive. But he's got no choice. It's an inevitable accident—like the kid dying because the rest of us were too ignorant to turn him over.”

Ross said, “You could duck it. You could tell Myerson to pull you off the job.”

“Wouldn't help. I'm still the most likely one to catch him. If it's not me it might be Yaskov and we don't want to think about what Yaskov's people would do to him before he died.”

“I'm sorry, Joe. But he brought it on himself, didn't he?”

“Sure he did. Just like the rat in the tunnel.”

– 24 –

H
E HAD PADS
in his cheeks again; he dyed his hair jet black, trimmed and blackened the eyebrows, made himself up swarthy with a pencil mustache and a dark mole on the left cheek.

It was October eighteenth, Friday evening; the West London Terminal was crowded with week-enders on their way to and from the airports. His cursory study fixed at least five stakeouts holding up walls, reading newspapers on benches and standing in queues at the airline counters. He passed a pair of them close enough to hear their Russian dialogue; they were deciding whether the bald man at BOAC check-in was their quarry in disguise. They stood face to face so that between them they had a 360-degree field of view. Their eyes slid across Kendig and moved right on as if he weren't there. Disguise was only minimally a matter of makeup; attitude was at least half of it and Kendig moved at a hunched shuffle like a mongrel dog who'd begun life by making friendly overtures and been kicked hard and spent the rest of his lifetime being reprimanded for violations he didn't comprehend. His expression in repose was a cowardly half-smile and he was ready at all times to burst into apologies. He stopped as if uncertain of his bearings and snatched off his hat and clutched it in
both hands, looking around anxiously—a man who'd come here to meet his nephew and didn't see the lad anywhere.