The Chancellor Manuscript (52 page)

The unbelievable was happening! Dreyfus reached into his overcoat, his bony hand trembling. Peter knew he was reaching for a gun.

“Don’t do that! For Christ’s sake,
don’t
!
”

“I have no choice.”

Behind Dreyfus, on the mountain of sand in the cluster of wild bushes, Chancellor could see the figure of O’Brien suddenly stand up. He was seeing what Peter saw: The old man was going to take out a gun. He had come alone, but he had come armed. At the last he was prepared to kill.

Chancellor gripped the weapon in his own pocket, his finger on the trigger. He could not squeeze it! He could not
pull
the trigger!

A shot was heard above the wind. Dreyfus’s head snapped back, his throat a mass of blood and shattered bone. His body arched, then fell on its side in the sand. Beyond, O’Brien lowered the gun and raced over the dunes.

Christopher was dead, killed on a deserted stretch of windswept beach.

And then Peter saw what was in his hand. It was a folded page of paper. Not a gun. A letter. He knelt down, overwhelmed by a sense of revulsion, and removed the paper. He stood up, his breathing erratic, the pain in his temple robbing him of thought O’Brien was beside him; the FBI man took the paper and unfolded it. Chancellor stared at it, and together they read it. It was a Xeroxed copy of a handwritten letter. The addressee was a single name: Paris.

“He said he didn’t know what a sterile location was,” said Peter weakly.

“He didn’t know Varak was dead,” added O’Brien softly, rereading the letter. “He wasn’t the one.”

Chancellor turned away and wandered aimlesssly toward the water. He fell to his knees in the lapping waves and vomited.

They buried the body of Jacob Dreyfus in the sand beneath the dunes. The question of responsibility was not considered; time was needed. Desperately. Responsibility would come later.

Frederick Wells would not be met on an expanse of abandoned beach. Instead, the man known as Banner was to walk into a field south of a stretch of road off Route 40 west of Baltimore. O’Brien had used the location for an informer drop less than six months before. He knew it well.

It was a curving section of the highway removed from all-night diners and filling stations; it was bordered by fields that looked like marshland in the darkness.

Peter waited in the field several hundred feet beyond the embankment where Wells was to park his car. He looked up at headlights racing down the highway, flickering and magnified in the rain that drenched the field and sent chills throughout his body. O’Brien had concealed himself halfway down the embankment, his weapon drawn, waiting. Again, Chancellor had his instructions: At the first sign of the unexpected he was to immobilize Frederick Wells with his gun. Fire it, if need be.

For added precaution O’Brien had a flashlight. Should Wells bring others with him, Quinn would switch on the light, covering the lens with his fingers, and wave it in circles. It was the signal for Peter to run across the field and up to the road, where Alison waited in the car.

There were two blasts of an impatient horn from the road. An automobile slowed down and pulled over on the shoulder; the car behind swung around it, accelerating in anger.

The automobile stopped by the embankment, and a lone figure climbed out. It was Frederick Wells; he walked to the railing overlooking the field and peered through the rain.

The beam of light shot down briefly from the far end of the embankment. It was O’Brien’s first signal. Wells
was alone; there were no overt signs of a weapon. Peter did not move; it was up to Banner to come to him.

Wells climbed over the railing and made his way down the incline. Chancellor crouched in the wet grass and withdrew the .38.

“Take your hands out of your pockets!” he shouted as he’d been instructed to shout. “Walk forward slowly with your hands at your sides.”

Wells stopped and stood motionless in the rain, then did as he was told. His bare hands held out at his sides, he walked into the darkness of the field. When he was within five feet, Peter rose from the ground.

“Stop right here!”

Wells gasped, his eyes wide. “Chancellor?” He took several deep breaths, blinking as the rain pounded down on his face, saying nothing until his breathing was steady—an Oriental exercise to suspend thought, to restore calm.

“Listen to me, Chancellor,” Wells said at last “You’re beyond your depth. You’ve made friends with the wrong people. I can only appeal to whatever feeling you have for this country to give me their names. I know one, of course. Give me the rest”

Peter was stunned. Wells had taken the initiative. “What are you talking about?”

“The files! Files
M
through Z! They have them, and they’re using you. I don’t know what they’ve promised you—what
he’s
promised you. If it’s your life, I’ll guarantee it far better than he could. The girl’s, too.”

Chancellor stared at the shadowed, wet face of Frederick Wells. “You think somebody sent me. You think I’m a messenger. I never mentioned the files to you over the phone.”

“Did you think you had to? For God’s sake, stop it! Destroying Inver Brass is no answer! Don’t let them do it!”

“Inver Brass?” Peter’s mind raced back to the handwritten letter in a dead man’s hand, the covenant between Christopher and Paris.
I.B. must be dissolved.… I.B
.… Inver Brass.

“You can’t become a part of it, Chancellor! Don’t you see what he’s done? He programed you too well; you learned much too quickly. You were closing in on
him!
He can’t kill you now; he knows we’d know he did it So he tells you things, reveals Inver Brass, feeds you lies so you’ll set us against one another!”

“Who?”

“The man who has the files. Varak!”

“Oh,
Christ
.…” Peter’s stomach knotted.

It was not Frederick Wells.

“I have the answer.” Wells was speaking in his sharp, nasal voice; Peter barely listened, so futile did everything suddenly seem. “It will extricate you and get the files back. They
must
be taken! You tell Varak there’s no way he can connect Inver Brass with the events of last May. There are no records, no transactions that can be traced. Varak was the killer, not Inver Brass. He did his job too well; there are no links. But I can and will raise disturbing questions about his every move from the tenth of April through the night of May first. I’ll do it in a way that will leave no doubt; he’ll be exposed. And we remain unknown. Carry that message back.”

It was all too much for Peter. Truths, half-truths, and lies piled on abstractions; dates woven into a fabric of accusations. “You think Varak betrayed the others?”

“I know it! It’s why you must work with me. The country needs me now. Varak has those files!”

The rain came down in torrents. “Get out of here,” Peter said.

“Not until I have your word.”

“Get out of here!”

“You don’t
understand
!” Wells could not tolerate the dismissal. His arrogance gave way to desperation. “The country needs me! I must lead Inver Brass. The others are old, weak! Their time is finished. I’m the one! I must have those files. I’m
in them!”

Chancellor raised the revolver. “Get out of here before I kill you.”

“You want that excuse, don’t you? That’s what you
really
want!” Banner’s words were rushed, his voice again strident, now panicked. “Varak told you it was
me
, didn’t he? I had nothing to do with it! It was
him!
I asked him to intercede with Bravo, that’s all I asked him to do! He was closest to St. Claire; everyone knew that. He was sworn to protect us all, each one of us.… You were going back to Nuremberg! We couldn’t allow you to do that! Varak understood!”

“Nuremberg.…” Peter felt the rain on his skin. It had been raining the night his silver Continental was hit, the night Cathy had died. There was a highway in the distance
now, as there was then; and an embankment. And the rain.

“But good
God!
I never wanted him to kill you! Or the girl! That was
his
decision; he was never afraid to act.”

Varak. Longworth. The horrible mask of a face behind the wheel. A driver at night oblivious to the storm, staring straight ahead as he killed.

Varak, the professional, who used vehicles as weapons.

The pain in his temple was unendurable. Peter raised the gun, pointing it at Banner’s head. He squeezed the trigger.

Banner’s life was saved by the inexperience of an amateur. The safety catch prevented the hammer from exploding the shell.

Frederick Wells ran through the rain toward the road.

East of Annapolis, several miles beyond the Severn River, were the rolling hills of the Chanticlaire. It was a patrician golf club formed in the thirties by the proper aristocrats, thus given to exclusivity, and by extension, it was a gathering place for executives of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization prone to the old school tie.

It was also used as an information drop between agents of the FBI and the CIA during those times when J. Edgar Hoover stopped the flow of data from the former to the latter. O’Brien knew it well; it was to be the meeting ground for Carlos Montelán. Paris was to be there no sooner than midnight, no later than twelve thirty. On the tenth tee; the instructions were clear.

Quinn took the wheel; he knew the back roads from Route 40 to the Chanticlaire. Alison and Peter sat in the back. Chancellor did his best to dry off, his mind still numbed by the shock of Banner’s revelation.

“He killed her,” said Peter, drained, absently watching the headlights in the diminishing rain. “Varak killed Cathy. What kind of man was he?”

Alison gripped his hand. O’Brien spoke from behind the wheel.

“I can’t answer that But I don’t think he thought in terms of life and death. In certain situations he thought only of eliminating problems.”

“He wasn’t human.”

“He was a specialist.”

“Which is the coldest thing I’ve ever heard.”

O’Brien found an out-of-the-way country inn. They went inside for warmth and coffee.

“Inver Brass,” said Quinn at the table in the dimly lit dining room.
“What
is it?”

“Frederick Wells assumed I knew,” replied Peter. “Just as he assumed Varak had sent me to him.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t feeding you false information? Trying to throw you off?”

“I’m sure. His panic was genuine. He’s in the files. Whatever’s there could ruin him.”

“Inver Brass,” repeated O’Brien quietly. “The
inver
is Scottish, the
brass
could be anything. What does the combination mean?”

“I think you’re overcomplicating things,” said Peter. “It’s the name they’ve given their nucleus.”

“Their what?”

“Sorry.
My
‘Nucleus.’ ”

“Your book?” asked Alison.

“Yes.”

“I’d better read that damned manuscript,” said O’Brien.

“Is there any way,” asked Chancellor, “that we can trace Varak’s movements from April tenth through May second of this year?”

“Not now there isn’t,” O’Brien answered.

“We know Hoover died May second,” continued Peter. “So the implication—”

“The implication won’t stand scrutiny,” interrupted Quinn. “Hoover died of heart failure. That’s been established.”

“By whom?”

“Medical records. They were fragmentary but complete enough.”

“So we’re back at the beginning,” concluded Peter wearily.

“No, we’re not,” said Quinn, looking at his watch. “We’ve eliminated two candidates. It’s time for the third.”

It was the most secure contact location the FBI man had engineered, and for that reason he was particularly cautious. They arrived at the Chanticlaire an hour before Montelán was due to appear; the agent explored the area
thoroughly. When he had finished, he told Peter to walk out to the tenth tee while Alison remained in the car at the far end of the drive near the gates and he concealed himself in the grass off the fairway.

The ground was wet, but the rain had stopped. The moon struggled to penetrate the passing clouds, its light progressively getting brighter. Chancellor waited in the shadows of an overhanging tree.

He heard the sound of a car driving through the open gate and looked at the radium dial of his wristwatch. It was five minutes past midnight; Montelán was anxious. Yet no more filled with anxiety than he was, reflected Peter. He felt the handle of the gun in his jacket pocket.

In less than a minute he saw the figure of Carlos Montelán walking rapidly around the corner of the clubhouse. The Spaniard was walking too fast, Peter thought. A frightened man was a cautious man; the figure coming toward him was not cautious.

“Mr. Chancellor?” Paris began calling fifty yards from the tee. He stopped and put his left hand into his overcoat pocket Peter took out his .38 and leveled it in front of him, watching in silence.

Montelán pulled his hand from his pocket. Chancellor lowered the gun. Paris held a flashlight; he turned it on, shooting the beam in several directions. The shaft of light hit Peter.