Saint (23 page)

“I can try. Do we have a choice?”

Kelly shook her head and closed her eyes. “I can't believe we're doing this. Even if we get rid of the implant, Kalman will send Englishman after us.”

“I've beat him before.”

Her eyes opened. “Not in real life, you haven't.” There was a strange darkness in her eyes that bothered him. “Not when he pulls out the stops. We'll have to find a hole to live in.”

“I love the dark,” he said.

“And I hate it.”

They quickly packed two duffel bags, one for weapons and one for the rest. This was their collective material wealth, this and $87,000 in U.S. currency remaining from the $250,000 Kelly had brought with her.

Kelly scanned the room after they'd wiped it down. “One last question before we leave. Should I call you Carl or Johnny?”

He thought for a moment.

“Carl,” he said. “I don't know who Johnny is.”

25

H
e is called Englishman. He's not the Englishman, of course.

Neither is he Dale Crompton. He doesn't really know who he
is anymore, so he is who he wants to be, which is far more and far
less than any Englishman.

The man taps his thumb on the leather steering wheel in the Buick he took from a nameless parking lot this morning. The radio is on. He dislikes the song's lyrics, but the beat fills him with energy.

Pain is in the game,
And the game is in the name

The singer has no idea what pain is. If Englishman had enough time, he might find the singer's home and rearrange his view of pain.

The name is Slayer
If you really want to know
He hunts in the dark and kills in the light

Any man who can sing such words without knowing their meaning deserves to be hunted down. Still, the beat is good and Englishman hums with the guitars, unbothered by his butchering of the tune.

He's not Englishman. He's Jude Law. He's Robert De Niro. He's
Hannibal Lecter. He's whoever he wants to be . . .

The one called Englishman cracked his neck and cleared his mind. His drive to tell the story perfectly dogged him like those irritating hornets. And by
perfectly
he meant in a way that kept them forever in the dark where they belonged.

The story had to be more personal. First person. He started again.

I am called Englishman. I'm not the Englishman, of course.
Neither am I Dale Crompton. I don't know who I am, so I am who
I want to be, which is far more and far less than any Englishman.
An Englishman has a history; I do not. An Englishman is weak; I
am not.

I look like Jude Law. I smile like Robert De Niro. I laugh like
Hannibal Lecter. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Hallelujah, amen, you
are dismissed.

Englishman nodded and repeated the words that had become a kind of mantra to him. He'd touched the hand of the gas station attendant fifteen minutes earlier when he'd stopped to fill his tank. Did the girl have any idea whose hand she was touching? No.

Did she know how many throats he'd cut? No.

Did she even suspect that he hated women? No.

Did she want to kiss him? Yes.

Did she love him more than she loved Jude Law? Yes.

Did she realize how much he liked corn nuts? No.

Would he return and kill her for wanting to kiss him? He didn't know. Probably not—he wouldn't have much idle time in the next few days.

Englishman paused. He understood the plan, but he'd never liked it much. Yes, he embraced the idea in the very beginning, but that was before he understood that he had the power to find a better plan. Like telling a better story.

Playing the part of Englishman had grown stale and tired. The killings had become boring. How many ways could you kill a person anyway?

There would come a time when he would walk into Kalman's hospital and take off his head with a machete. Better yet, shave him bald and fry him in that electric chair of his.

Johnny had picked up some skills, but he was still weak. The show-down ahead made Englishman's skin crawl with anticipation.

I look like Jude Law and I'm . . .
He didn't bother finishing the thought because he drew a blank.

It didn't matter; he was close to the target now. He would kill the doctor as Kalman had ordered, and then, with any luck at all, the true game—the one he'd waited so patiently for—would begin.

He'd been watching Johnny's progress since he and the woman, whom he hated only slightly less than Johnny, set foot in New York. They'd gone off the reservation last night, leaving the hotel room spotless. Even so, Englishman knew their ultimate destination and in fact had anticipated that Johnny would do what he was now doing.

Englishman knew not only where they were heading but
how
they would get there, based on the last few tracking signals emitted by the implant before it had stopped transmitting.

He exited the freeway, backtracked a mile on the frontage road, cut west for half a mile, and pulled into a long gravel driveway. Horses grazed in a fenced green pasture on his right. He'd killed a horse once. The experience had left him cold. They were dumb animals. Household pets offered only slightly more fascination.

Dr. Henry Humphries was a veterinarian. Englishman had never needed his veterinary services, but the good doctor had once sewn part of the Ukrainian's finger back on.

“I am not Englishman today,” he said, parking by the large barn.

“Today I am simply . . .” He considered several choices. “
Un
man. I'm Unman.”

He put the Buick in park, interlaced his fingers, and cracked his knuckles loudly. This was a cliché, of course. But he loved cliché because it had become so vogue to hate cliché. In truth, those who cringed at the use of cliché were their own cliché.

He stepped from the car and scanned the barn. His favorite movie was
Kill Bill
. Despite his general hatred of women, he liked Black Mamba because she fought like a man. And she wore yellow leather, which appealed to him for no reason that he could understand, no matter how much he thought about it.

Unman
. Unman walked up to the door and wiped his black canvas shoes on a mat that read “All Animals Welcome, Whites Use Front Entrance.”

For a moment Unman wished he was black. Maybe he was. He tried the door, turned the knob, and walked in without announcing himself.

Fireweed Mexican tile floor. White walls in need of a fresh coat. Clean at first glance but dirty under the skin, like most people. The place smelled of manure.

Manure and Johnny.

A man in a brown tweed jacket stood to the right of a workbench that held a large metal tub, something you might wash an animal in. Behind him, a dozen stalls housed a couple of horses, some pigs, and a lamb of all things. A fluffy white lamb.

The lamb bleated.

“May I help you?”

Unman took his eyes off the sheep and faced the man. White, fat, and old. Not fat-fat, but a good fifty pounds of blubber on his gut. Unman imagined the man without a shirt because he had both the time and the imagination to do so. Evidently sewing up animals didn't burn the calories as much as, say, kickboxing or jumping on a trampoline, either one of which would do the doctor good.

The man wore gray polyester pants and an untucked yellow shirt. He held a syringe in his right hand. If he was expecting any female company, he wasn't concerned with impressing them. Maybe Unman liked this doctor.

“What's your name?” Unman asked.

“I'm sorry, was I expecting you?” The man showed only slight fear. He filled the syringe from a vial and laid both on the table.

“I'm Unman. I'm looking for a man and a woman who stopped here last night. Good-looking fellow, about so tall, and a hot woman who tends to boss him around. The man had a small device buried in his skull that evidently didn't go off as it was designed to. We think someone here took it out, thereby sealing his own fate. So I guess I'm not really looking for the man who's all that, or the woman who bosses him around, but the doctor who helped them escape. Need to clean things up, if you know what I mean.”

Surprisingly, the man still showed minimal fear. Interesting. Maybe Unman should drop the clever-meant-to-be-terrifying cliché and be more sinister. But that failed to interest him, so he continued.

“If you are that doctor, I'll need the implant. Then I'll have to kill you so that you don't tell anyone else about it. If you're not the doctor I'm looking for, then I'll have to kill you for knowing that I'm looking for a doctor to kill. So who are you, the doctor who needs killing, or the innocent bystander who needs killing?”

Now more fear showed on the man's face. Clichés and all.

“They were here,” the doctor said.

“And the implant?”

The man produced a small box from under the bench in front of him and held it out.

Unman walked forward. He knew what would happen now. Any man who showed only a little fear when presented with the prospect of his own death had a plan. The doctor obviously thought he could survive this meeting.

The clichés weren't working as well as Unman had hoped. He wanted to get this over with and make the call.

He stopped twenty feet from the man. “Throw it here,” he said.

The doctor made as if to throw the device with his left hand, but Unman didn't care about the implant. Syringe man was right-handed, and his right hand was under the bench top, holding something—probably a gun—that filled the doctor with confidence.

Unman could have waited for the man's hopeless attempt to distract him by throwing the implant.

He could have waited for the man's gun to clear the counter.

He could have even waited for the gun to go off. All of these would have been consistent with a tough villain defying death with elegance. Cliché.

But the time for cliché was gone, so Unman pulled a gun from his right hip and shot the doctor through his nose.

The man dropped like an elevator car, smacked the bottom of his jaw on the bench, bounced back with a few shattered teeth to go with his broken nose, and fell heavily to the ground.

In all likelihood, the doctor hadn't even seen Unman draw.

He walked to the window and pulled out his cell phone. Dialed the number. Two of the horses were looking at the barn, alerted by the gunshot. He wondered who would take care of the doctor's horses now.

“Yes?”

“The doctor is dead. I have the implant.”

He could hear Kalman's breathing in the silence.

“Kill Saint first,” Kalman said. “Then complete the contract.”

“Thank you.” Unman closed the phone.

Englishman hated Kalman, but he hated Johnny more. In fact, he'd been born to hate Johnny. Kalman didn't know this, Agotha didn't know, but Englishman knew. And now he was finally in a position to do something about that hate.

“Game on, Johnny,” he said. Was that cliché?

26

P
aradise was nestled in the Colorado mountains off the beaten path, several miles from the main road that passed through Delta.

The trees in Colorado were different from any Carl had ever seen. Tall evergreens that pointed to the sky mixed with deciduous trees similar to the ones that surrounded the compound in Hungary. The terrain was severe and sharp, with cliffs and huge outcroppings of rocks.

The Rocky Mountains. Carl watched from the car with fascination. It was familiar to him only because the boy had suggested it should be. Or did he remember?

They'd flown into Denver as Elmer and Jane Austring, knowing full well that Kalman could trace the false identities he himself had provided. But it would take even someone as powerful as Kalman at least a day to track them down. By then, they'd be gone. As soon as they'd visited Paradise, they would assume new identities and move on.

A taxi had taken them from Denver International Airport to a used car dealer off Interstate 70, where Kelly had paid $8,000 for the old blue Ford truck she now drove. They'd exchanged license plates with another vehicle in Vail, and then with yet another in Grand Junction. None of this would prevent Kalman from tracking them, but it would hold off the authorities in the event that Carl had been fingered as a suspect in the president's shooting.

News of the assassination attempt was everywhere. Shouting from all of the newspapers in the airport, all of the television monitors in the waiting areas, every station on the radio.

Carl was amazed by the reach of his one bullet. No one knew what to do with the information that the assassin's bullet had caused so little damage. The White House had released no specifics—a good thing, Kelly said. Any trained ballistics expert would know that the shot had been impossible. Better that the public didn't know.

“Why?” he'd asked.

She just shrugged her shoulders. “It's our secret.”

He nodded. “Paradise, three miles,” he said, reading a sign ahead on their right.

She took the turnoff and angled the truck up a narrow paved road. Within half a mile they were driving down a winding strip of black-top. The edge fell sharply on the right into a deep valley. A metal guardrail provided a measure of security.

This was the road to Paradise. It could have been the road to Mexico as far as Carl knew. None of it was more familiar than a suggestion.

“I like the mountains,” Kelly said.

“They're nice,” Carl said.

“Wait until you see the desert.”

They both knew that if the boy had been right and Paradise was Carl's home, Kalman would know as well. Regardless of what happened here, they had to be gone by the end of the day.

They would go to the desert in Nevada.

Kelly glanced at him. “Do you recognize anything?”

“No.”

“Maybe when you see the town.”