Top Gun (24 page)

“Well! What can I do for you, Steven?” Layten asked brusquely, settling back into his desk chair. “I’m very busy.”

“Oh, yeah, I can see that,” Gold remarked, perching on a stack of packing cases. He looked out through the office windows,
which afforded a sweeping view of downtown, dominated by ARCO Plaza’s twin monoliths. “Nice office you have. Or should I say,
nice office you
used
to have… ?”

“These offices are expensive to maintain, and are no longer necessary,” Layten said stiffly.

“So Agatha Holding is folding up its tent and slinking out of town, eh?”

Layten smiled indulgently. “That’s hardly the way I’d put it,” he sniffed. “Now that the airlines have placed their jetliner
orders, Agatha Holding has become a mostly bookkeeping and inventory-control operation. For that reason, Mr. Campbell had
decided to combine it with his existing accounting operation.”

“I must confess I was surprised when Tim didn’t try to renege on his Payn-Reese financing and spare-parts-inventory offer
to the airlines,” Gold acknowledged. “I guess he couldn’t get out of the deal, huh?”

“Tim Campbell stands by his word,” Layten replied archly.

“Yeah, sure,” Gold said, taking quiet satisfaction in what he’d heard through the grapevine: that Tim had moved to abrogate
Agatha Holding’s marketing agreement with Payn-Reese and the airlines, but that Campbell’s lawyers had warned that litigating
to get out of the deal would have cost Campbell more than honoring it. “Tim must really be pissed that he got stuck paying
the piper without being able to call the tune?”

“Is that why you’re here, Steven?” Layten asked coldly. “To nose around in other people’s business? To gloat?”

“Well, yeah, sure.” Gold shrugged. “Gloating is definitely on my list.…”

“I suppose you think you’ve won!” Layten snapped.

“I’ll presume that’s a rhetorical question,” Gold replied. “No, on second thought, I’ll answer it.” He stroked his chin. “Let’s
see: GAT ended up with everything it wanted, and you and Tim got screwed royally.”

“That’s not true!” Layten protested, adding lamely, “I made a lot of money trading Amalgamated-Landis stock!”

Gold nodded. “Okay, so you made some money. But we both know that money wasn’t what this was about. We both know what you
wanted, and we both know that you didn’t get it, so on the whole I’d say GAT won.”

“And here you are to crow about it, like the immature, overblown jerk you are,” Layten smirked.

“You tried to destroy my company,” Gold said, growing angry at being talked down to by this son of a bitch.

“So what?” Layten scowled. “Sure Tim Campbell and I tried to take you down, and we came damn near close to pulling it off,
too.”

“Not close enough. Turner,” Gold laughed, regaining his composure.

“There’s always next time.”

“There won’t
be
a next time.”

“Fuck you,” Layten scoffed. “That just shows how little you know! Tim has a lot more ideas up his sleeve—” He stopped abruptly,
his eyes narrowing slyly as he regarded Gold. “But then, you’d like me to talk about that, wouldn’t you?”

Too bad.
Gold thought.
The loudmouth was just beginning to get interesting.
“Talk about what?” He shrugged, trying to play innocent.

Layten laughed. “Give it up, Steven. Subtlety was never your strong point.”

“I don’t think you and Tim have shit up your sleeve,” Gold tried again, but Layten dismissed the attempt to ferret out information
with a wave of his hand.

“You know, Tim was absolutely right about you,” Layten mused. “He said that I should expect a visit like this from you. I
said no, that while I had no use for Steve Gold, I had to give him
some
credit. That he had to have more class than
that.”

“Thanks for sticking up for me, old buddy,” Gold said wryly.

Layten shook his head in mock sorrow. “But I was wrong, huh?” He paused, his smile hardening. “What’s the matter, Steven?
Are you here because your partner at GAT—the brains of the organization—hasn’t seen fit to give you any more busy work to
do?”

Don’t get mad, get even.
Gold reminded himself. He patted the packing box on which he was sitting. “Some things never change. When you were Jack Horton’s
CIA stooge, he had you following him around to clean up his messes. Now that you’re Tim Campbell’s stooge, I guess it makes
sense that while Tim’s moved on to other,
important
things, he’d keep you hanging around here to sweep out this failed venture.”

Layten jumped out of his chair and came around his desk. “You’ve got a lot of balls to come here and talk to me like that.…”

Gold slid off the packing cases and took several steps toward Layten, until their faces were scant inches apart. “Yeah, I
do have a lot of balls. Turner. You should have remembered that before you let Tim Campbell talk you into trying to ambush
me.”

“Talk me
into
it?” Layten echoed, amused. “Nobody had to talk me into anything. I was
glad
to do it.”

“That’s because you’re an ambusher by nature,” Gold said.

“Shut up,” Layten warned.

“You’re a back-shooter….”

“You son of a bitch!” Layten was shaking with anger.

Gold said, “Your trouble all along has been that you’ve blamed
me
for the mess you and your CIA honcho Jack Horton got yourselves into over the MR-1 spy-plane project.”

“You’re
the one who fucked things up!” Layten’s jowls were crimson. His eyes were wild.

“No.” Gold shook his head. “You’re wrong. You and Horton fucked it, but then, your kind
always
wants to blame someone else for your own failings.”

“Get out!” Layten demanded, his voice rising. “Get out of here before I throw you out!”

“What are you going to do. Turner? Call Security?” Gold winked. “Why don’t you call that redhead you’ve got sitting out front?”

“Shut up, you bastard!”

Layten lunged, taking Gold by surprise. He grabbed hold of Gold’s wrist and tried to twist Gold’s arm up and around behind
his back.

“Nice try,” Gold muttered, stepping away from Layten to rob him of any leverage advantage. Gold brought his arm up and around
in front of him, twisting his wrist free of Layten’s grip using an
aikido-derived
unarmed-combat technique he’d been taught in the Air Force.

Layten reached a second time for Gold’s wrist. This time, Gold simply batted Layten’s hands away.

“Get real, Turner. You and your whole family going back to the Mayflower couldn’t take me.”

Layten looked frenzied. “You think you’ve got it covered, huh?” He took several steps backward, pawing at his right hip beneath
the hem of his shirt-jac.

Gun,
Gold thought, tensing.
Jesus Christ, he’s got a gun.

Time seemed to slow for Gold, the way it always had in air combat through three wars. For an instant Gold found himself back
in 1966, crouching fearfully beneath the palm fronds in a North Vietnamese jungle: Several hundred yards away his shot-down
Thud fighter lay in flaming wreckage while looming over Gold’s hiding place was a Vietcong soldier armed with an AK-47.

Layten had produced a small, blued, snub-nosed revolver from out of a high-ride hip holster.

Gold moved instinctively, catching hold of Layten’s gun with both of his own hands and then bending Layten’s wrist around
so that the revolver’s snout was shoved into Layten’s protruding gut. Layten, grunting in shock and pain, tried to twist free,
but Gold hung on, keeping the gun jammed against Layten’s stomach while his fingers spread over Layten’s hands. Then Gold
found the revolver’s hammer and managed to thumb it back with a loud
click!

At the sound, Layten froze, his eyes widening in alarm. “D-don’t,” he whispered, looking very pale. “D-don’t shoot.…”

Layten winced as Gold drove the revolver’s snubbed snout deeper into his gut. At the same time. Gold surreptitiously put a
finger in front of the cocked hammer to keep it from falling in case the trigger got pulled. He despised Layten, but he didn’t
want to shoot the guy. Anyway, it was probably impossible to get bloodstains out of a hundred-percent-natural-fibers linen
suit.

“I’ve got to say, old buddy, for an ex-CIA man you are one sorry tub of lard when it comes to throwing down on a guy,” Gold
observed. “Didn’t they teach you
anything
useful at spook school?”

“Let go of me,” Layten demanded.

“What the fuck are you doing carrying a piece in the first place?” Gold wondered. “It’s not your style, Turner. It smacks
of prowess.”

Layten tried to pull away.

“Easy now,” Gold warned. “Single-action, these babies can have a hair trigger. “

Layten again froze. “Let go…” he began to whine.

Gold, his pulse racing, feeling giddy from adrenaline, couldn’t resist taunting,
“Does
this gun have a hair trigger? Have you ever even fired it. Turner? You hunk of shit!”

“Let go of me!” Layten repeated, shouting.

“Or what?” Gold sneered. “You’ll shoot yourself?”

Gold roughly tore the gun out of Layten’s grasp and looked at it. It was a Smith & Wesson, a five-shot .38 special. Gold had
known fighter jocks in Korea and in ‘Nam who’d carried similar revolvers as backup guns to their standard-issue sidearms.

Gold opened the Smith’s cylinder and dumped out the rounds onto the carpet. He then tossed the gun into a large potted palm
in the far corner of Layten’s office.

“You get out of here,” Layten ordered.

“Oh, shut up,” Gold said tiredly. “You couldn’t manhandle me, and now I’ve taken away your gun. Don’t you know when to quit?”

Layten actually stamped his foot. “I said get
out
!”

Gold, gathering up a handful of Layten’s shirtfront, lifted him and spun him around, slamming him against the wall.

“You clearly
don’t
know when to quit, you little shit,” Gold swore, shaking Layten. “So I’ll tell you that the time to quit gunning for me and
my company is
now.
You reading me, Turner? It’s
now!
You’d better get yourself a new job, because staying on with Tim Campbell is going to be hazardous to your health.”

“You don’t scare me,” Layten said. He tried to wriggle free, but Gold kept him pinned. “I’ll never quit watching you,” Layten
defiantly vowed. “I’ll always be watching and waiting for my chance to bring you down the way you did me! Tim Campbell and
I make a
great
team! Together we’ve got what it takes to lay waste to everything you and your asshole
kike
father—”

Kike?
Gold savagely punched Layten in the stomach, and felt his fist sink into Layten’s gut up to his wrist.

Layten cried out, his face twisting in pain. Gold stepped back, turning him loose. Layten, moaning, dribbled down the wall
like splattered molasses. He slumped to his green-and-black-plaid knees, and then doubled over with his hands laced across
his belly until his face was pressed against the carpet.

Gold nudged him in the ribs with the toe of his shoe. “Give it up, Turner,” he muttered. “You aren’t built to take the kind
of punishment I can mete out.”

Layten, wheezing, was curled up in a fetal position, but he slowly turned his head to look up at Gold with malevolent eyes.

“You’re looking a little green around the edges, Turner,” Gold said. “I hope you aren’t going to be sick…. Oh, and you’ve
got some lint sticking to your upper lip.”

“This isn’t over,” Layten gasped, pushing himself up to a sitting position on the floor. “It will
never
be over, not until one of us is broken once and for all! Now,
get out
of my office!”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll leave.” Gold sighed. “Don’t bother to get up.”

Gold left the office and headed back down the corridor. He’d anticipated feeling great after coming here, but instead he felt
depressed and somehow degraded, like a man who’d given in to a tawdry temptation.

It had been a childish, stupid stunt he’d pulled when he’d passed that Mercedes, Gold brooded. It had been even more reckless
to have come here in the first place.
Turner Layten had been right to ridicule me for gloating.
Gold brooded.
What the fuck was I thinking of.’
He shuddered as he replayed in his mind the tussle for control of Layten’s revolver. How easily either he or Layten could
have died in that office!

Gold’s dark thoughts once again found their way back through the years to 1966 and that North Vietnamese jungle. The Vietcong
soldier that had stood over Gold’s hiding place had left Gold with no choice, so Gold had killed him, rising up from out of
his hiding place with his pistol to blow off the top of the enemy soldier’s head at point-blank range.

That had been the first and only time that Gold had killed at close quarters, and the memory of the look in that soldier’s
almond-shaped eyes just before Gold blew his brains out had haunted Gold’s dreams for months. After that incident, Gold had
thanked God that as a warrior his chosen weapon was the fighter plane, that he could wage war for his country without ever
having to see his enemy’s face….

Until now,
Gold brooded.
Now you have very clearly seen the enemies’ faces; they belong to Tim Campbell and Turner Layten. And don’t kid yourself:
this war is not over, and it is every bit as bloodthirsty and potentially violent as any you’ve survived in the past….

Yeah, it had been very foolish and childish to come here today. As was so often the case. Gold had done it without thinking
through the ramifications of his actions. Now he would have to prepare himself for the consequences, whatever they might be.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Gold!” the receptionist said brightly as he came through the door into the lobby.

“Some turn out better than others. Red,” Gold said, passing her desk and continuing to the elevators, where he punched the
Down button. While he was waiting, he tried to light a cigarette.

He couldn’t do it. His hands were shaking too much.