Reckoning (11 page)

“I remember seeing him around on board the flotel. He was pretending to be an American, and since I didn’t want any detailed
talk about my own background, I avoided talking with him. I guess he was doing the same thing with me. At some point he must
have guessed that I was there to cover Avedesian. After that, he had all the more reason to stay away from me.”

“At least now you’re not operating in a vacuum,” Charley said. “You know who your adversary is. How sure are you about this,
Malleson?”

“As much as I can be. His physical description fits Dockrell. He was successfully pretending to be American, he’s available
to anyone with money to pay. And he’s good. Sorry to say this, Richard, but he beat you. No one else has quite the same profile
as this. If it’s not Dockrell, it’s his twin brother.”

“I know the Scotland Yard detectives spent some time questioning him,” Dartley said. “They were kind of suspicious of me too,
especially since I had spent so much time with Avedesian. But I was in a chopper coming from Brent Alpha to the flotel, when
Avedesian was killed, so they couldn’t get too inquisitive with me. They probably had to let Dockrell go when the coroner
told them he was looking for a verdict of death by misadventure—that’s when they’re not sure what happened. The detectives
knew they had no case. There was nothing they could do. Like you said, Herbert, Dockrell is very good. He beat me, I admit
it.”

“He’ll be watching for you next time, Richard,” Charley warned. “He may be out to hit you before he tries for the next oilman
on his list. You better get him before he gets you.”

Dartley didn’t look too worried. “I wonder if he wouldn’t prefer to snuff them all right under my nose just to show me how
good he really is.”

“I’d play it safe and shoot you first,” Charley said.

“You’re not a triggerman, Charley,” Dartley murmured with a grim smile. “That’s why you say that. Dockrell is the sort who
will rub my nose in it if he thinks he will be able to. That’s what’s going to make it easier for me to take him.”

“Abdel Saleh,” Charley said ruminatively. “So far he’s up to Abdel Sa. L is next. Who’s that, Herbert?”

“Of the three remaining, only one has a first or last name beginning with L. That’s Peter Ligeti. As you know, he resigned
from Global Hydrocarbons when it became evident that he was in danger. So far as the oil business is concerned, he has disappeared.”

“Do I detect a trace of smugness in your voice, Herbert?” Charley asked. “Do you know something that no one else knows?”

Malleson was almost purring with satisfaction. “You may not have to worry about Dockrell ever finding Ligeti, Richard.”

“If you did, he will,” Dartley said shortly, irritated by Malleson’s self-satisfaction.

“I did. I don’t think Dockrell will, although Ligeti is still using his real name. He was involved in a minor traffic accident,
a fender bender, in Charleston, South Carolina, last month. The other driver was unlicensed and uninsured, and the cops nabbed
him for that and took Ligeti’s name and address as part of the procedure. They took his birthdate, Social Security number
and Pennsylvania driver’s license number also, so there’s no
doubt this is your man. It’s amazing what computers can find if you cast the net wide enough.”

Douglas Dockrell had taken his time about contacting the Iranian Embassy in London. The Scotland Yard detectives had been
nosy about him, and when he left the offshore oilfield for Aberdeen, they had politely requested that he keep in touch with
them “to aid in their enquiries.” Having told them he would be in Aberdeen for a week, he a took a train down to London immediately
and stayed put for a few days before phoning for Mr. Rajavi at the Iranian Embassy.

London was quite a change from the windswept rigs in the North Sea. It was a calm sunny morning as he left his small hotel
near the South Kensington Underground station. He crossed Cromwell Road and followed Exhibition Road between the Natural History
Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He passed the Imperial College on his left and turned left into Kensington Gore,
where the Royal Albert Hall faced the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s prim and proper husband, was said to have died of rage and shock on hearing about his son
Edward’s exploits with a loose woman. Dockrell’s own mother accused him of sending his father to an early grave, as she put
it. In Dockrell’s view, the Victorians would have felt at home in present-day Prince Edward Island. The island had been the
first Canadian province to vote dry and had kept prohibition until 1948. The wrath of a vengeful Lord was believed
to hover particularly close over the island. It was focused there, so to speak, meanwhile freeing the population of nearby
Nova Scotia to holler and whore to their hearts’ content.

After the death of his wife, a neighboring old farmer had taken himself a young second wife. She was too lively for him, and
after only a few months of marriage she led the sixteen-year-old Douglas Dockrell astray. One afternoon the old farmer caught
them making love on the straw in his barn. The farmer came at Dockrell with a pitchfork, trying to spear him in the gut with
it. The old boy was fast and light on his feet; he’d been handling a fork all his life. Dockrell was lucky to get away with
a scrape along the ribcage from one fork tine in the farmer’s first thrust. He took the fork away from him before he could
try for a second, grabbing the implement’s handle and twisting it out of his attacker’s hands.

The farmer ran for his farmhouse and Dockrell ran for home, which was in town. The youth heard the shot as he ran. At the
time he thought the gun was aimed at him. Next day he heard the farmer had shot himself. Dockrell’s father denounced the widow
as the cause of her husband’s death—this was when Dockrell learned he had not been the only one easing her loneliness. In
a rage at Dockrell’s father for his self-righteousness, the widow screamed at him that his own son had been involved. At first
Dockrell’s father refused to believe this. When it finally sunk in, he had a stroke and lived less than a week.

Dockrell put these thoughts out of his mind and went to work. He could not trust the Iranians. He had no idea how many people
they wanted him to kill—with the Iranians it might be an endless succession, a lifetime of steady work. Presumably there was
a finite number of American oilmen they wanted liquidated. He had just killed the seventh for them. Were there ten or twenty?
Or seven, and now that he had completed his work, would his own death be a final seal of silence on the affair?

He intended to sanitize the meeting place by patrolling the area of Kensington Gardens around the Albert Memorial. He kept
on the move for the next two hours between Queen’s Gate and Alexandria Gate, and back into the Gardens as far as The Flower
Walk. It was tedious, but by the time he was due to meet the Iranian emissary, he judged he was safe from attack from the
park side. He could still be attacked by the emissary himself or from a car passing on Kensington Gore, but this was less
likely and a risk he would have to take.

The meeting went smoothly, almost exactly like all those before. The man delivering the stuff to him seemed low-level and
ignorant of what he was doing. As usual he had one large envelope stuffed with his advance payment of $200,000 in U.S. currency,
and a smaller envelope containing information on his next victim. He would count the money carefully in his hotel room. But
first he was curious about where he was to go next. China? Spain? He did not like to be tantalized.
He walked into the Gardens some distance from the Memorial and tore open the smaller envelope.

America again! These Iranians were crazy! He studied the photos of the man he was to hit, a balding, thin-faced man with big
frightened eyes. He had quit his job and gone into hiding. But he had not wanted to be completely cut off, so he had subscribed
to oil industry journals. One of the journals had sold the computerized list of its subscribers to a protective clothing firm,
which existed only as a post office box number in Farmingdale, Long Island. Peter Ligeti had an address in Charleston, South
Carolina.

To play it safe, Richard Dartley flew Piedmont Airlines to Columbia, South Carolina, in the center of the state. He hired
a car from Hertz with an American Express card in a fake name at an address which Malleson had arranged. So long as the name
remained good, the bills were paid on time and Dartley continued to use the card. Experience had taught him not to take the
unnecessary risk of using counterfeit or stolen credit cards. Dartley did not regard himself as a thief. If he ever had to,
he would answer those who accused him of being a coldblooded killer. But he was not a thief.

Route 26 ran through flat pinelands all the way from the state capital to the low country. On the car radio, there were hymns,
country and rock in about equal proportions. Dartley tried a little of each and took in a fiery Baptist preacher who promised
him a hot old time if he didn’t mend his ways. A violent thunderstorm
came as a fitting conclusion to the sermon. Dartley had to pull into a rest area because of the heavy rain.

Some miles before Charleston, he saw a roadside sign for a Knight’s Inn and exited for it. The place was ideal, an anonymous
motel of three separate two-story buildings off a highway lined by fast food outlets, secondhand car dealers and dozens of
other enterprises signaling with extensive neon displays. Sherman could have brought a whole regiment of Union soldiers in
here for burgers and they wouldn’t have been noticed.

He drove into Charleston an hour later and parked his car alongside the park at the Battery. He went to the wall and looked
out across the waters of the bay at Fort Sumter. The park displayed live oaks draped with Spanish moss, cannons and a World
War I Maxim gun. A horse-drawn carriage driven by a guide in Confederate uniform hauled a bunch of tourists by, pausing before
ante-bellum and Victorian mansions with white pillared balconies and lush gardens.

Dartley walked back along Meeting Steet and followed Tradd Street as far as Limehouse Street. The whole area was an impeccably
restored residential area, a sort of Confederate Beverly Hills. The address he had for Peter Ligeti was a big two-story house
fronted by plantation-style columns. The second-story floor extended beyond the building proper to the columns to create two
building-length porches, one over the other; fine-mesh wire was stretched between the columns to keep mosquitoes out, and
wood-bladed fans revolved slowly on the ceilings. The house stood on an acre of gardens,
with a bubbling fountain and blooming azaleas, surrounded by a twelve-foot fence consisting of iron bars tipped with ornamental
spearheads. An elderly black man wearing a straw hat raked a gravel path.

Dartley walked along the railing until he was out of sight of the man in the garden. He looked up and down the tree-lined
street. It was deserted. After securing what he had in his pockets, he clambered up the iron bars of the fence, did a handstand
on the top and a back flip so that he landed ankle-deep in a flower bed inside the fence. It would have been easier to have
opened the heavy iron gate, but the gardener would have seen him—and Dartley had a point to make to Peter Ligeti: that if
he could enter undetected, so could any potential assassin.

He plodded through the soil, crossed a bit of lawn and looked in a window. An old lady sat dozing in an armchair. Who was
this? Ligeti’s mother? Like Avedesian and a number of other of the oil geologists, Ligeti was divorced. Presumably their long
absences in remote places played hell with their domestic lives. Maybe this was the old lady’s house and she let the second
floor as an apartment to help pay for the maintenance of the place, which must be considerable.

The fluted columns seemed carved from stone but were, in fact, cleverly carpentered wood. One column had lost a vertical board.
Its interior struts provided Dartley with footholds as he climbed the column to the second-story porch. He was now in full
view of the gardener if the man happened to look up from his task.
Dartley worked fast. The fine wire mesh anti-mosquito screen was stretched on frames that fitted closely in place from floor
to ceiling, behind a low wooden decorative railing. With his knife blade, Dartley freed the catches and pushed one frame inward.
He climbed over the railing, stood on the balcony and started to replace the frame. The gardener was still raking the gravel.

Dartley saw the security system sensing devices—two magnets, one mounted on the movable screen frame, the other on the ceiling
support. When the frame was in place, the two magnets were close to each other but not touching. When the frame was moved,
the force field between them was broken and the alarm sounded. But no alarm had sounded.

The sensors were not hard-wired to a control console. Instead, the magnet on the ceiling support had a short wire leading
to a small radio transmitter, also fixed to the support. Dartley recognized the model. It was part of the Keepsafer Plus Home
Security System, manufactured by the Schlage Lock Company of San Francisco. In Dartley’s line of work, he had to keep up with
all the new systems, household and high tech. Schlage had solved the bugbear of all household radio security systems—false
alarms. A radio-controlled garage door opener often set them off, along with taxi dispatchers, C.B. radios, police cruisers
and so forth, so that no one paid much attention when the alarm did go off. Schlage’s radio frequency signal was unlike any
other in the environment, and thus alarms were not
triggered by “lookalike” signals from transmitters other than those attached to sensors.

Dartley had not broken in undetected. But who the hell would expect sensors on insect screens around a porch? Peter Ligeti
went up in Dartley’s estimation.

Since there was no audible alarm, there was a chance that the system was not in operation and that Ligeti himself might be
inside. There was an equal chance that a silent alarm was in operation. Dartley knew that the Keepsafer Plus offered several
options in silent alarms, including an automatic phone dialer to any number programmed into it, such as a local precinct or
private detective agency. He had failed to make his point in making an undetected entry; there was nothing to gain by sticking
around and a lot to lose.