“What are you doing?” Flannagan asked suspiciously. “We’re waiting for you.”
“Your friend may find it too difficult to stay in here, but I don’t. I can’t afford to, there’s too much to learn.”
“I thought you said we shouldn’t touch anything.”
“Looking isn’t touching, Sergeant. Unless you remove something, then no one knows it’s been touched because it isn’t here.” Bourne suddenly walked over to an ornate brass-topped coffee table, the sort so common in the bazaars of India and the Middle East. It was between two armchairs in front of the study’s small fireplace; off center was a fluted glass ashtray partially filled with the remains of half-smoked cigarettes. Jason reached down and picked it up; he held it in his hand and turned to Flannagan. “For instance, Sergeant, this ashtray. I’ve touched it, my fingerprints are on it, but no one will know that because I’m taking it away.”
“What for?”
“Because I smelled something—I mean I really smelled it, with my nose, nothing to do with instincts.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Cigarette smoke, that’s what I’m talking about. It hangs around a lot longer than you might think. Ask someone who’s given them up more times than he can remember.”
“So what?”
“So let’s have a talk with the general’s wife. Let’s all have a talk. Come on, Flannagan, we’ll play show and tell.”
“That weapon in your pocket makes you pretty fuckin’ brave, doesn’t it?”
“Move, Sergeant!”
Rachel Swayne swung her head to her left, throwing back her long, dark streaked hair over her shoulder as she stiffened her posture in the chair. “That’s offensive in the extreme,” she pronounced with wide accusatory eyes, staring at Bourne.
“It certainly is,” agreed Jason, nodding. “It also happens to be true. There are five cigarette butts in this ashtray and each has lipstick on it.” Bourne sat down across from her, putting the ashtray on the small table next to the chair. “You were there when he did it, when he put his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Perhaps you didn’t think he’d go through with it; maybe you thought it was just another one of his hysterical threats—whatever, you didn’t raise a word to stop him. Why should you have? For you and Eddie it was a logical and reasonable solution.”
“Preposterous!”
“You know, Mrs. Swayne, to put it bluntly, that’s not a word you should use. You can’t carry it off, any more than you’re convincing when you say something’s ‘offensive in the extreme.’ … Neither expression is you, Rachel. You’re imitating other people—probably rich, vacuous customers a young hairdresser heard repeating such phrases years ago in Honolulu.”
“How dare you …?”
“Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous, Rachel. Don’t even try the ‘How dare you’ bit, it doesn’t work at all. Are you, in your nasal twang, going to have my head chopped off by royal decree?”
“Lay off her!” shouted Flannagan, standing beside Mrs. Swayne. “You got the iron but you don’t have to do this!… She’s a good woman, a damn good woman, and she was shit on by all the crap artists in this town.”
“How could she be? She was the general’s wife, the mistress of the manor, wasn’t she? Isn’t she?”
“She was used—”
“I was laughed at, always laughed at, Mr. Delta!” cried Rachel Swayne, gripping the arms of her chair. “When they weren’t leering or drooling. How’d you like to be the special piece of meat passed out like a special dessert to very special people when the dinner and the drinks are over?”
“I don’t think I’d like it at all. I might even refuse.”
“I couldn’t! He made me do it!”
“Nobody can make anybody do anything like that.”
“Sure, they can, Mr. Delta,” said the general’s wife, leaning forward, her large breasts pressing the sheer fabric of her blouse, her long hair partially obscuring her aging but still sensual soft-featured face. “Try an uneducated grammar school dropout from the coal basins in West Virginia when the companies shut down the mines and nobody had no food—excuse me, any food. You take what you got and you run with it and that’s what I did. I got laid from Aliquippa to Hawaii, but I got there and I learned a trade. That’s where I met the Big Boy and I married him, but I didn’t have no illusions from day one. ’Specially when he got back from ’Nam, y’know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure I do, Rachel.”
“You don’t have to explain nothin’, kiddo!” roared Flannagan.
“No, I wanna, Eddie! I’m sick of the whole shit, okay?”
“You watch your tongue!”
“The point is, I don’t know nothin’, Mr. Delta. But I can figure things, y’know what I mean?”
“Stop it, Rachel!” cried the dead general’s aide.
“Fuck off, Eddie! You’re not too bright either. This Mr. Delta could be our way out.… Back to the islands, right?”
“Absolutely right, Mrs. Swayne.”
“You know what this place is—?”
“Shut up!” yelled Flannagan, awkwardly plodding forward, stopped by the sudden ear-shattering explosion of Bourne’s gun, the bullet searing into the floor between the sergeant’s legs.
The woman screamed. When she stopped, Jason continued: “What is this place, Mrs. Swayne?”
“Hold it,” the master sergeant again interrupted, but his objection was not shouted now; instead, it was a plea, a strong man’s plea. He looked at the general’s wife and then back at Jason. “Listen, Bourne or Delta or whoever you are, Rachel’s right. You could be our way out—there’s nothing left for us over here—so what have you got to offer?”
“For what?”
“Say we tell you what we know about this place … and I tell you where you can start looking for a lot more. How can you help us? How can we get out of here and back to the Pac Islands without being hassled, our names and faces all over the papers?”
“That’s a tall order, Sergeant.”
“Goddamn it, she didn’t kill him—we didn’t kill him, you said so yourself!”
“Agreed, and I couldn’t care less whether you did or not, whether you were responsible or not. I’ve got other priorities.”
“Like getting ‘caught up with some old comrades’ or what-ever the hell it was?”
“That’s right, I’m owed.”
“I still can’t figure you—”
“You don’t have to.”
“You were dead!” broke in the perplexed Flannagan, the words rushing out. “Delta One from the illegals was Bourne, and Bourne was dead and Langley proved it to us! But you’re not dead—”
“I was taken, Sergeant! That’s all you have to know—that and the fact that I’m working alone. I’ve got a few debts I can call in, but I’m strictly solo. I need information and I need it quickly!”
Flannagan shook his head in bewilderment. “Well … maybe I can help you there,” he said quietly, tentatively, “better than anyone else would. I was given a special assignment, so I had to learn things, things someone like me wouldn’t normally be told.”
“That sounds like the opening notes of a con song, Sergeant. What was your special assignment?”
“Nursemaid. Two years ago Norman began to fall apart. I controlled him, and if I couldn’t I was given a number to call in New York.”
“Said number being part of the help you can give me.”
“That and a few license-plate ID’s I wrote down just in case—”
“In case,” completed Bourne, “someone decided your nursemaid’s services were no longer required.”
“Something like that. Those pricks never liked us—Norman didn’t see it but I did.”
“Us? You and Rachel and Swayne?”
“The uniform. They look down their rich civilian noses at us like we’re necessary garbage, and they’re right about the necessary. They needed Norman. With their eyes they spat on him, but they
needed him.”
The soldier boys couldn’t run with it. Albert Armbruster, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Medusa—the civilian inheritors.
“When you say you wrote down the license-plate numbers, I assume that means you weren’t part of the meetings that took place—take place—here on a fairly regular basis. That is, you didn’t mingle with the guests; you weren’t one of them.”
“Are you crazy?” screeched Rachel Swayne, in her own succinct way answering Jason’s question. “Whenever there was a real meeting and not a lousy drunken dinner party, Norm told me to stay upstairs, or if I wanted to, go over to Eddie’s and watch television. Eddie couldn’t leave the cabin. We weren’t good enough for his big fancy asshole friends! It’s been that way for years.… Like I said, he threw us together.”
“I’m beginning to understand—at least, I think I am. But you got the license numbers, Sergeant. How did you do that? I gather you were confined to quarters.”
“I didn’t get ’em, my guards did. I called it a confidential security procedure. No one argued.”
“I see. You said Swayne began to fall apart a couple of years ago. How? In what way?”
“Like tonight. Whenever something out of the ordinary happened, he’d freeze; he didn’t want to make decisions. If it even smacked of Snake Lady, he wanted to bury his head in the sand until it went away.”
“What about tonight? I saw you two arguing … it seemed to me the sergeant was giving the general his marching orders.”
“You’re damn right I was. Norman was in a panic—over you, over the man they called Cobra who was bringing out this heavy business about Saigon twenty years ago. He wanted me to be with him when you got here, and I told him no way. I said I wasn’t nuts and I’d have to be nuts to do that.”
“Why? Why would it be nuts for an aide to be with his superior officer?”
“For the same reason noncoms aren’t called into situation rooms where the stars and the stripers are figuring out strategy. We’re on different levels; it isn’t done.”
“Which is another way of saying there are limits to what you should know.”
“You got it.”
“But you were part of that Saigon twenty years ago, part of Snake Lady—hell, Sergeant, you were Medusa, you are Medusa.”
“Nickels and dimes’ worth, Delta. I sweep up and they take care of me, but I’m only a sweeper in a uniform. When my time comes to turn in that uniform, I go quietly into a nice distant retirement with my mouth shut, or I go out in a body bag. It’s all very clear. I’m expendable.”
Bourne watched the master sergeant closely as he spoke, noting Flannagan’s brief glances at the general’s wife, as if he expected to be applauded or, conversely, to be told with a look to shut up. Either the huge military aide was telling the truth or he was a very convincing actor. “Then it strikes me,” said Jason finally, “that this is a logical time to move up your retirement. I can do that, Sergeant. You can fade quietly with your mouth shut and with whatever rewards you’re given for sweeping up. A devoted general’s aide with over thirty years’ service opts for retirement when his friend and superior tragically takes his own life. No one will question you.… That’s my offer.”
Flannagan again looked at Rachel Swayne; she nodded sharply once, then stared at Bourne. “What’s the guarantee that we can pack up our stuff and get out?” asked the woman.
“Isn’t there a little matter of Sergeant Flannagan’s discharge and his army pension?”
“I made Norman sign those papers eighteen months ago,” broke in the aide. “I was posted permanently to his office at the Pentagon and billeted to his residence. I just have to fill in the date, sign my own name, and list a general delivery address, which Rachel and I already figured out.”
“That’s all?”
“What’s left is maybe three or four phone calls. Norman’s lawyer, who’ll wrap up everything here; the kennels for the dogs; the Pentagon assigned-vehicle dispatcher—and a last call to New York. Then it’s Dulles Airport.”
“You must have thought about this for a long time, for years—”
“Nothing but, Mr. Delta,” confirmed the general’s wife, interrupting. “Like they say, we paid our dues.”
“But before I can sign those papers or make those calls,” added Flannagan, “I have to know we can break clean—now.”
“Meaning no police, no newspapers, no involvement with tonight—you simply weren’t here.”
“You said it’s a tall order. How tall are the debts you can call in?”
“You simply weren’t here,” repeated Bourne softly, slowly, looking at the fluted glass ashtray with the lipstick-stained cigarette butts on the table beside him. He pulled his eyes back to the general’s aide. “You didn’t touch anything in there; there’s nothing to physically tie you in with his suicide.… Are you really prepared to leave—say, in a couple of hours?”
“Try thirty minutes, Mr. Delta,” replied Rachel.
“My God, you had a life here, both of you—”
“We don’t want anything from this life outside of what we’ve got,” said Flannagan firmly.
“The estate here is yours, Mrs. Swayne—”
“Like hell it is. It’s being turned over to some foundation, ask the lawyer. Whatever I get, if I get, he’ll send on to me. I just want out—we want out.”
Jason looked back and forth at the strange and strangely drawn-together couple. “Then there’s nothing to stop you.”
“How do we know that?” pressed Flannagan, stepping forward.
“It’ll take a measure of trust on your part, but, believe me, I can do it. On the other hand, look at the alternative. Say you stay here. No matter what you do with him, he won’t show up in Arlington tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for him. There’ll be questions, searches, an investigation, and as sure as God made little Bobby Woodwards, the media will descend with its bellyful of speculations. In short order your ‘arrangement’ will be picked up—hell, even the guards talked about it—and the newspapers, the magazines and television will have a collective field day.… Do you want that? Or would it all lead to that body bag you mentioned?”
The master sergeant and his lady stared at each other. “He’s right, Eddie,” said the latter. “With him we got a chance, the other way we don’t.”
“It sounds too easy,” said Flannagan, his breath coming shorter as he glanced toward the door. “How are you going to handle everything?”
“That’s my business,” answered Bourne. “Give me the telephone numbers, all of them, and then the only call you’ll have to make is the one to New York, and if I were you, I’d make it from whatever Pac island you’re on.”
“You’re nuts! The minute the news breaks, I’m on Medusa’s rug—so’s Rachel! They’re going to want to know what happened.”
“Tell them the truth, at least a variation of it, and I think you may even get a bonus.”
“You’re a goddamned flake!”
“I wasn’t a flake in ’Nam, Sergeant. Nor was I in Hong Kong, and I’m certainly not now.… You and Rachel came home, saw what had happened, packed up and left—because you didn’t want any questions and the dead can’t talk and trap themselves. Predate your papers by a day, mail them, and leave the rest to me.”
“I dunno—”
“You don’t have a choice, Sergeant!” shot back Jason, rising from the chair. “And I don’t care to waste any more time! You want me to go, I’ll go—figure it all out for yourselves.” Bourne angrily started for the door.
“No, Eddie, stop him! We gotta do it his way, we gotta take the chance! The other way we’re dead and you know it.”
“All right, all right!… Cool it, Delta, We’ll do what you say.”
Jason stopped and turned. “Everything I say, Sergeant, down to the letter.”
“You got it.”
“First, you and I will go over to your place while Rache
l goes upstairs and packs. You’ll give me everything you’ve got—telephone and license numbers, every name you can remember, anything you can give me that I ask for. Agreed?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go. And Mrs. Swayne, I know that there are probably a lot of little things you’d like to take along, but—”
“Forget it, Mr. Delta. Mementos I don’t have. Whatever I really wanted was long since shipped out of this hell hole. It’s all in storage ten thousand miles away.”
“My, you really were prepared, weren’t you?”
“Tell me something I don’t know. You see, the time had to come, one way or the other, y’know what I mean?” Rachel walked rapidly past the two men and into the hall; she stopped and came back to Master Sergeant Flannagan, a smile on her lips, a glow in her eyes, as she placed her hand on his face. “Hey, Eddie,” she said quietly. “It’s really gonna happen. We’re gonna live, Eddie. Y’know what I mean?”
“Yeah, babe. I know.”
As they walked out into the darkness toward the cabin, Bourne spoke. “I meant what I said about not wasting time, Sergeant. Start talking. What were you going to tell me about Swayne’s place here?”
“Are you ready?”
“What does that mean? Of course I’m ready.” But he wasn’t. He stopped suddenly on the grass at Flannagan’s words.
“For openers, it’s a cemetery.”
Alex Conklin sat back in the desk chair, the phone in his hand, stunned, frowning, unable to summon a rational response to Jason’s astonishing information. All he could say was “I don’t believe it!”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know. Everything, I guess … the cemetery on down. But I have to believe it, don’t I?”
“You didn’t want to believe London or Brussels, either, or a commander of the Sixth Fleet or the keeper of the covert keys in Langley. I’m just adding to the list.… The point is, once you find out who they all are, we can move.”