Jig (38 page)

Tumulty, balanced on the bottom step, had a finger to his mouth for silence.

‘You've sold me,' Cairney whispered.

‘Will you please shut up?' Tumulty said.

‘You bastard, you sold me.'

Tumulty shook his head. ‘They forced me. It's not what you think.'

Cairney said nothing. He wondered how much force it had taken to turn Joe Tumulty around.

‘Is Pagan alone?' he asked.

Tumulty said, ‘There's another one in my office upstairs.'

‘I'm in a hell of a spot then,' Cairney said. He looked up the stairway. He was thinking wildly now, which wasn't the way Jig had been trained to react. But all the placebos his instructors had drummed into him about turning adversity to your own advantage meant absolutely nothing right then. He had walked straight into this.

‘There's one way out,' Tumulty said.

‘How?'

Tumulty was moving quietly up the stairs. Cairney, who felt he had little to lose, followed. They reached the landing. The door of Tumulty's office stood open. On the other side of the landing was a second door.

‘In there,' Tumulty whispered. ‘The bathroom window.'

As Cairney moved towards the door, Tumulty pressed a piece of paper into his hand like an uncle surreptitiously passing a five-dollar bill to a favourite nephew.

‘They took the weapons,' Tumulty said, his quiet voice filled with apprehension. ‘This is the best I can do. Now go. For God's sake, go.'

Before Cairney could open the bathroom door he heard Frank Pagan coming up the stairs. At the same time he was conscious of a man standing in the door of Tumulty's office. He had a pistol in his hand. It was clear from the expression on the man's face that he'd use the gun without weighing ethical questions beforehand. Indeed, he had his arm extended now and was going into the kind of crouch universally favoured by law enforcement officers. Only Joe Tumulty stood between Cairney and the weapon.

‘Stand very still,' the man said. ‘Don't even breathe.'

Cairney, shielded by the priest, saw Frank Pagan rushing upwards. From the folds of his clothing Pagan had produced a weapon. There was a curious little smile on Pagan's face that wasn't quite triumph. It contained fatigue.

Pagan reached the landing. With the gun held out in front of him, he approached cautiously. ‘I want a damn good look at what we've caught.'

Cairney turned his face away. There was one slender chance left to him. It would take a quick smooth movement, a moment of sudden imbalance in the group of people around him, temporary confusion. He concentrated hard, reaching down into the depths of himself for the answer. One perfect motion. That was all. He felt elated all at once, anticipating the moment of action, his entire being consumed by the notion of movement. He was alert now, and sharp, and his senses had the efficiency of surgical instruments. Tumulty's frightened face, Pagan's smile, the other man's hard little eyes – all these things made a heightened impression on him. And then he was out in a place where there was no thinking, no rationalising, nothing but pure movement and the overwhelming instinct to survive, a place that was quicksilver, where he ceased to exist except as an embodiment of action.

He did two things at once in a movement so fluid, so swift, that it was a blur to the other people around him. He pushed Tumulty forward, thrusting him forcefully across the landing in the direction of the man with the Mexican moustache, and he simultaneously swung his leg upwards at a right angle to his body, his foot connecting with Frank Pagan's hand. Pagan didn't drop the gun and the blow barely affected him, but it was the opening Cairney knew he had to achieve, the fraction in time when the concentration all around him was punctured, the only time he'd ever have.

He lunged towards the bathroom door, which swung away from him, and then he was inside, kicking the door shut at his back and sliding the bolt in place hurriedly before he ran towards the window at the far end. He heard two gunshots, wood tearing, the rattle of a bullet on the lock, all sounds from another world. He lashed at the window with his foot. Glass shattered and the rotted wood frame collapsed, creating a jagged opening out on to the roofs above Canal Street. He squeezed through to the roof. He heard, distantly, the bathroom door being kicked open, and then Frank Pagan was shouting, but Cairney wasn't about to stop and listen. He scampered gracelessly along the roof, struggling to maintain his balance on a surface made slick by morning frost.

The sound of a gunshot split the air around his head. He heard the bullet burst into the concrete casing of a chimney just beyond him. The shot had come from across Canal Street, not from behind as he'd expected. He glanced at the other side of the street, seeing a figure on the roof opposite. Crouching low, he crossed the roof. The firing continued, kicking up fragments of asphalt and brick. He kept his head down as he moved in the direction of the next building. How many men had Pagan planted in the vicinity? When he leaped the narrow space from one rooftop to the next, he heard Pagan call out again and he turned to look. The Englishman was two buildings behind and running, and his breath left small clouds on the chill air.

‘Jig!' Pagan shouted.

Cairney smiled and slithered down the incline of the roof that faced away from Canal Street so that at least he was out of the line of fire from across the way. He heard Pagan grunting, and then there was the sound of gunfire coming from Pagan's direction. The first shot was erratic, whining several feet from Cairney's head and crashing uselessly into brickwork. The second, closer and more urgent, cleaved the air about three feet from his shoulder. Either Frank Pagan wasn't a very good shot or else he wasn't shooting to kill.

Why would he want to kill Jig anyhow? Cairney wondered. Like the curator of a zoo who has coveted a certain exotic animal for years, Pagan wanted to
capture
the creature that had tantalised him for so long – he didn't want a corpse. He couldn't put a dead man on display. Where was the satisfaction in that? Pagan wasn't going to shoot his own prize.

Cairney found something amusing in this perception. He took a deep breath, listened to Pagan calling out his name, then he ran. He reached the roof of the next building, a flat expanse of concrete with a couple of wooden tubs in which the brown wreckage of dead plants wilted in hard soil. Two deck chairs and a plastic table. Somebody's summer eyrie dead in the grip of winter. At the centre of the roof there was a door. He dashed towards it. A season of moisture had swollen the wood, jamming the door tightly. Cairney kicked at the handle, then thrust his shoulder against the wood and the door flew backwards, revealing a flight of steps. He plunged down into the darkness below. It was an empty office building, a shabby place that seemed to house a variety of small companies.

On the first landing Cairney stopped. He looked back up the way he'd come. He heard the sound of Frank Pagan on the rooftop. Then he moved to the next flight of steps and went down quickly. Now, free from the exposure of the roof, he thought about his predicament. Unless there was a rear exit to this building he'd have to leave by the front door, which would lead him straight back on to Canal Street. A sorry prospect. Another alternative, which he rejected immediately, was to conceal himself somewhere inside the building and wait the whole thing out – but that was a trap he wasn't going to encourage. The building would be sealed off and thoroughly ransacked, and he'd be discovered sooner or later. There was one other possibility, also rejected, and that was to confront Frank Pagan, somehow overpower him and get the gun away, but he knew that the Englishman, taken by surprise once, wasn't going to allow himself to be caught off balance a second time.

He heard Pagan on the floor above. He took the next flight of stairs and found himself on the first floor, a hallway with a glass door to Canal Street. He turned in the opposite direction, back along the hall. Pagan was directly overhead and coming down loudly, his feet clattering on the wooden steps. Cairney ran to the end of the corridor. There, the only possible route he could take was down to the basement. If there were no rear exit from the basement, then his chance of escape was screwed. He shoved the basement door open and found himself going down into the dark heart of the building. It was a large room of angular steam-pipes and the kind of dampness no boiler could ever dispel, and the air, like that inside a box locked for years, was still and rancid and unbreathable. He could see nothing save for a slot of pale light in the distance. It had to come from a window, and if there were a window then there might also be a door if the original architect, in his infinite wisdom, had included both in his plans. Moving, hands outstretched in the dark like a blind man, he crossed the basement floor, which was strewn with objects – boxes, rags, bundles of papers, tools.

He heard Pagan call out to him again. The man's voice sounded muffled down here in this stifling space.

‘You can't get away, Jig. There's no place for you to go. Even if you got out of here, there are twenty or thirty men outside. Think about it.'

Cairney said nothing in reply. He went towards the source of light. He heard Pagan come after him. The man was moving with great caution, measuring his steps.

‘In your situation, Jig, I'd call it a day,' Pagan said.

Cairney put his ear towards the origin of the sound. How far, how near, was Frank Pagan? He cursed this abominable darkness that prevented him from estimating distances. Pagan could be thirty feet away, or a lot closer. He just couldn't tell.

He ducked his head beneath an overhanging pipe and saw, just ahead of him, the rectangle of a window, light filtering in from outside. It was perhaps fifteen feet from where he stood. The problem with light was the fact that, as soon as he reached the window, he'd create a silhouette for Frank Pagan to see. A cobweb brushed his forehead and he wiped it aside. Still keeping his head low and his shoulders hunched, he approached the source of the light.

There was no goddam door, only the window, ridiculously small and streaked with dirt, impossible for him to squeeze through.

‘Jig,' Pagan called out. ‘You don't have a chance, man.'

Cairney wanted to tell Pagan that he could talk all day and it would make no difference because Jig hadn't been programmed to surrender, but he said nothing. He went down on the floor now, crawling towards the light. Tilting his head up, he stared at the pane of glass. He'd have to be a midget to get out through that space. He pressed his face into the dirt of the floor, thinking, thinking. Finn had once told him that there was no box a man couldn't get out of except despair, and it was despair, like a cold-gloved hand, that touched the fringes of his mind now.

Twenty or thirty men. Was Frank Pagan lying? Cairney had only seen three, Pagan included.

He went forward on his hands and knees.

Out of the dark he heard Pagan's voice again. ‘Jig? Why don't you talk to me?'

Cairney, flat against the wall under the window, moved his head slightly. Pagan was very close now. He could hear the man breathing.

Cairney stretched his hand along the wall. His fingers encountered a hollow rectangle of metal, an opening that puzzled him only a moment before he understood what it was.

A coal-chute
.

Unused probably for forty, fifty years, filled with dirt and stuffed with garbage, it was a goddam coal-chute, a way out! He gripped the inside of the metal opening and drew himself slowly up into the black funnel, which ran at a sloping angle towards the street. There would be a lid, of course, but beyond that cover there would be air and daylight and opportunity. He climbed, shoving aside the assorted detritus of whoever had used this basement over the years, through the dank narrow tube where the trapped air was even worse than in the basement itself. Beer bottles and cans and ancient newspapers and the pervasive stench of cat urine. Straining, he reached the cover and thumped it desperately with the heel of his hand, and it yielded in a shower of rusted flakes that fell into his eyes, but at the same time there was daylight, glorious daylight, streaming against his face from the alley behind the building.

A few more feet. That was all. A few more feet and he'd be clear.

He felt Frank Pagan's hand clutch his ankle. It was a ferocious grip, powerful, and it threatened to bring him down out of his precarious position inside the chute and back into the basement. He freed one of his legs in the cramped space and kicked out as hard as he could, bringing his foot down on Pagan's fingers. He heard Pagan say Bastard, then felt his fingers slacken. He was free. With one last thrust, he shoved his face up beyond the lid of the chute and hauled himself out into the alley. It was empty. No men. No cars. Nothing. He reached down and slammed the cover shut before he turned and ran.

Washington, D.C
.

The Director of the FBI was a small man called Leonard M. Korn. He wore rimless glasses to correct his notorious short-sightedness, and he shaved his head so that it resembled a blunt little bullet. He spoke always quietly, never raising his voice, not even when angry. To his subordinates, he was perhaps the most frightening man on the face of the planet. His sense of control, both of himself and the Bureau, was awesome. His taste for punishment, when an agent had disappointed him, was absolutely merciless. Many good agents, with otherwise meticulous records, had found themselves posted to places like Nebraska and South Dakota because they had made a single slip. With more bitterness than affection, some said the middle initial of his name stood for Magoo, the cartoon character Korn resembled in appearance though not in action.

About an hour after Jig had vanished in an alley behind Canal Street, Leonard M. Korn was seated behind his desk at Bureau Headquarters staring at his Special Deputy, a man named Walter Bull. Bull had been with the Bureau all through the Hoover years and was known to be a big-league survivor around whom administrations came and went. A plump man with a face that resembled a used khaki handkerchief, Bull perspired regularly and copiously, no matter the temperature of the day. He was sweating as he stood in front of Korn's desk right then. His associates called him B. O. Bull.