The Scorpio Illusion (53 page)

“For God’s sake, O’Ryan, we both agreed this madness had to stop!”

“Yes, we did, boyo, but not that way. That was just dumb, Davey, you should have used a cover. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they traced the word back to you? You’d last twelve minutes in the field, y’ninny!”

“No, you’re wrong, I thought it out completely; the angles were covered. The raison d’être had all the appearance of legitimacy and thus immensely tempting—”

“The raison d’être, is it?” the CIA analyst interrupted. “That sounds grand, I’ll give you that. And just how
was all this legitimacy so tempting while it covered the angles, whatever the hell that means?”

“The firm was looking for these people, not an individual, not
me
! I was merely the one who should be contacted for the reward. I even backed up the search with a notarized affidavit clearly stating that the woman and the young man were the inheritors of a great deal of money, the implication being seven figures. A finder’s fee of ten percent is perfectly normal.”

“Oh, that’s splendid, Davey, only I think you forgot that the searching parties you were appealing to wouldn’t be able to spell
affidavit
and couldn’t give a shit about legitimacy. However, they can smell out a rogue hunt faster than a spraying skunk in a jail cell.… No, boyo, you wouldn’t last five minutes in the field.”

“What are we going to do—what am
I
going to do? She said my death had to appear in the papers tomorrow, or the Baaka Valley—oh, Christ, it’s all getting out of control!”

“Calm down, Scorpio
One,
” said O’Ryan sardonically, looking at his watch. “I suspect that if your ‘disappearance’ is in the papers, that’ll suffice for a day or so.”

“Oh?”

“It’s only a diversion, Davey, I know what I’m talking about. For starters, you’ve got to get out of Washington right away—you’re kind of a minor celebrity, Counselor, and for a few days you don’t want to be seen. I’ll drive you to the airport; we’ll stop and get you sunglasses—”

“I have a pair in my pocket.”

“Good. Then buy a ticket to wherever you like, in cash, not a credit card. Do you have enough?”

“Always.”

“Good again.… There’s only one problem, and it could be a toughie, boyo. For the next day or so we’ve got to program your S-One number to me. If Bajaratt calls and doesn’t get an answer or isn’t contacted after leaving a message, the Baaka could explode, especially
her hotheaded tribe of lunatics. The
padrone
guaranteed as much to me.”

“I’d have to go back to the office—”

“You shouldn’t do that,” the analyst broke in. “Take my word for it, Davey, I know how these things are done. Who did you last speak to?”

“My secretary … no, it was the man from the rental agency who brought me a car. I drove out here alone; I didn’t want to use my limousine.”

“Very good. When that car’s found here, they’ll start looking. What did you tell your secretary?”

“That there was an emergency, a personal problem. She understood; she’s been with me for years.”

“I’ll bet she did.”

“That’s hardly called for.”

“Neither was Puerto Rico.… Did you have any plans tonight?”

“Oh, my
Lord,
” exclaimed Ingersol. “I forgot! Midgie and I are going to the Heflins’ place for their annual anniversary dinner.”

“No, you’re not.” Patrick Timothy O’Ryan smiled benignly at the panicked attorney. “It’s all falling into place, Davey. Your disappearance for a couple of days, I mean.… Let’s go back to the S-One telephone in your office; where is it?”

“In the wall behind my desk. The panel opens by a switch in my lower right-hand drawer.”

“Good. I’ll program the phone to my number after I drop you off at the airport.”

“It does it automatically if I don’t respond after five hours.”

“With this Bajaratt, we need it done right away, boyo.”

“Jacqueline, my secretary, would never let you in. She’d call security.”

“She will if you tell her to, won’t she?”

“Well, of course.”

“Do it now, David,” said O’Ryan, yanking the portable
telephone out of his jacket pocket. “This thing doesn’t work too well in a car—all that steel and no ground—and we won’t have time at the airport. I’ll just drop you off and get out of there.”

“You really mean it, don’t you? You think I should take a plane out of Washington right away, this afternoon. What will my wife think?”

“Call her tomorrow, wherever you are. It’s better she spend one miserable night worrying than the rest of her life without you. Remember the Baaka Valley.”

“Give me the phone!” Ingersol called his office and spoke to his secretary. “Jackie, I’m sending a Mr.… Johnson over to pick up some papers in my office for me. It’s extremely confidential, and I’d appreciate it if, when the reception desk announces him, you’d leave our doors unlocked and go out for coffee. Would you please do that, Jackie?”

“Of course, David. I understand completely.”

“All right, Patrick, let’s go!”

“Just a minute, I gotta take a leak, as I’ll be doin’ a lot of driving for the next hour or so. Keep your eyes on the bridge; we sure as hell don’t want anyone seeing us together.” O’Ryan took several steps into the woods, glancing at the attorney as he did so. However, instead of relieving himself, he bent down and picked up a large jagged rock the size of a softball. He walked silently back on the path, approached the excited lawyer, who was staring through the foliage at the bridge, and smashed the heavy rock with all his considerable strength into David Ingersol’s skull.

O’Ryan shoved the body off the path and whistled for the drunken young man he had temporarily employed; the response was immediate.

“I’m right here, man!” The hopped-up recruit came careening around the path. “I can smell the bread!”

It was the last thing he would ever smell, for he was greeted with a thick, jagged rock crashing into his face. Patrick O’Ryan again looked at his watch; there was
plenty of time to move both corpses to the waters below. And to remove a few articles from the clothes of one body, placing them in the other. After that it was merely a question of timing the logistics. First, the visit to Ingersol’s office; second, an angry, humiliating apology to the director of the CIA—the Arab blind never showed up in Baltimore; third, several anonymous phone calls, perhaps one from an unidentified source who had spotted two bodies on the west bank below the Riverwalk Bridge.

It was 10:15 at night and Bajaratt paced the sitting room of the suite in the Carillon hotel while Nicolo was in the bedroom, watching television and gorging himself on room-service fare. He had accepted her explanation that they would be moving in the morning, not that night.

The Baj, too, had the television on, but it was the local ten o’clock news. She kept staring at it, with every look growing angrier. Then abruptly her anger subsided, a smile creased her lips as the anchorwoman suddenly stopped in midsentence, the fortunes of some baseball team interrupted as a paper was shoved before her on the desk.

“We’ve just been handed a bulletin. The prominent Washington attorney David Ingersol was found dead roughly an hour ago beneath the Riverwalk Bridge in Falls Fork, Virginia. At his side was the corpse of a man in soiled clothes, identified as Steven Cannock, a man the nearby restaurant claimed was intoxicated and ejected for drunkenness and inability to pay his bill. Both bodies were bloodied, giving rise to police speculation that Attorney Ingersol put up a violent struggle when the drunken Cannock tried to mug him.… David Ingersol, considered one of the capital’s most influential lawyers, was the son of Richard Abercrombie Ingersol, who startled the nation eight years ago when he retired from the Supreme Court, claiming ‘intellectual stagnation,’
bringing up the question of life tenure for Supreme Court justices.…”

Bajaratt snapped off the television. Ashkelon had another victory. The finest was yet to come, but come it would!

It was close to two o’clock in the morning when Jackson Poole burst into the bedroom he shared with Hawthorne. “Tye, wake up!” he cried.

“What …? I just fell asleep, damn it!” Hawthorne blinked his eyes and raised his head. “For God’s sake, what is it? There’s nothing we can do until morning. Davenport’s dead and Stevens is on top of—is it
Davenport
? A breakthrough?”

“Try Ingersol, Commander.”

“Ingersol …? The lawyer, the cipher?”

“The corpse, Tye. He was killed in someplace called Falls Fork. Maybe our pilot, Alfred Simon, gave you more than a cipher.”

“How do you know he was killed?”

“Frankly, I was watchin’ a rerun of
Gone With the Wind
—that’s a hell of a movie—and when it was over they put on the news.”

“Where’s the telephone?”

“Right by your head.”

Hawthorne whipped his legs from under the sheet and off the bed and grabbed the phone as Poole switched on the lights. He dialed naval intelligence, unnerved to find Stevens himself answering the phone. “Henry … 
Ingersol
!”

“Yes, I know.” Stevens’s voice was weary. “I’ve known for damn near four hours. I’ve been expecting your call, but between an apoplectic Secretary of State Palisser, who’s activated his own channels over Davenport’s death, and the White House, where Ingersol was on the
A
list for invitations, and that killing in your parking lot that’s got the fucking
New York Times
on
my ass—our asses—I haven’t had a hell of a lot of time to call you.”

“Ingersol, goddamn it! Impound his law office.”

“Done, Tye-Boy—you were called Tye-Boy in the islands, weren’t you?”

“You did?”

“No,
I
didn’t. I had the FBI do it. That’s the way it works.”

“Christ, what the hell now?”

“The sun will come up and everything will be messier.”

“Don’t you see what she’s doing, Henry? It’s the bottom line. Everybody’s running for and against the clock, colliding with one another.
Destabilization
. Who’s suspect, who isn’t? That bitch has got us racing around in circles, and the faster we run, the more collisions take place, and she’ll jump through one of the cracks!”

“Words, Tyrell. The President’s still in isolation.”

“You think. We don’t know who else she’s manipulated.”

“We’re running micros on everybody on your list.”

“Suppose it’s someone not on the list?”

“What can I tell you? I’m not psychic.”

“I’m beginning to think Bajaratt is—”

“That doesn’t help us, it only confirms the worst we’ve heard about her.”

“She’s got a group here, a cadre high up that’s beholden to her … or her resources.”

“That’s logical. Would you do us a favor and find it?”

“I’ll do my damnedest, Captain, because now it’s between her and me. I want Little Girl Blood, and I want her
dead
.” Hawthorne slammed down the phone.

But it wasn’t only Bajaratt he wanted, it was a living lie named Dominique who had ripped him apart in a way no human being should ever do to another. Taking love and mocking it, trading the innermost secrets of the manipulated for lies from the manipulator. For so long,
so lovingly, so deviously. How often had the killer laughed at the fool who truly believed he had found the person he loved?

The
killer
.

She forgot something. He was a killer too.

23

P
atrick O’Ryan sat in the deck chair, wishing to hell and back that summer was over and the brats were in school—
away
at school, thanks to the Providers. Not that he didn’t enjoy the kids, he did, especially since they kept his wife occupied and he and she had less time to fight. Not that he didn’t love his wife; in a way, he guessed he did, but they had grown too far apart, basically because of him, he understood that. The average guy could go home and bitch about his job or his boss or the fact that he didn’t make enough money, but he couldn’t do any of those things. Especially not the money, once the Providers had come into his life.

Patrick Timothy O’Ryan was a product of a large Irish family in the borough of Queens, New York. Thanks to the nuns and a few priests in the parochial school system, he was urged to forgo the traditional police academy that three of his older brothers had entered, following in the footsteps of their father and grandfather, and his father before him. Instead, the assumption was made that Patrick Timothy had an exceptional mind, so far above the average that he was encouraged to seek a scholarship to Fordham University; it was a foregone conclusion that he would receive one. Then, having impressed the Fordham professors, he had received another to pursue his master’s degree at Syracuse University, Foreign Service Department, one of the prime recruiting pools for the Central Intelligence Agency.