Part 21 (1/2)

He lowered the saddle onto her as carefully as if it were a souffle. She cozied into it. He let the straps and stirrups cascade down her flanks, then knelt to put them in place. Even in broad daylight, it would take hours just to figure out how to lace the straps in and around the rings. And still she might be girthy, a discomfort horses remedied by kicking. His eyes wandered to her hooves. This close, they were anvils.

He looked over the stall to Drummond, who leaned against a strut, on the verge of dozing again. 'I don't suppose you've ever hot-wired a horse?' Charlie whispered.

'Not that I recall.'

'That could still mean that your appliance dealers convention in Rochester was a cover for equestrian training so that you could pose as an Arab prince, right?'

'I can tell you that the amount of blood in a horse's body is generally one eighteenth of its total weight.'

'Here's hoping we don't put that to a test,' Charlie said. He settled for tying things together wherever he could.

Twenty-one minutes later, a sleek, black Lincoln seemingly materialized from the night and parked in the cobblestoned circle in front of the house. Watching from the foyer, Charlie was reminded of a vampire.

There were three prospective outcomes now. One, the Lincoln had indeed come to the rescue. Two, it hadn't, but he would get the answers he needed, and he and Drummond would get away. Three, they wouldn't get away.

The driver's door popped open, revealing a man who, by virtue of being in his early forties, probably was Fielding. Whoever he was, he was too handsome to be Hattemer's driver, or anybody's driver this side of Sunset Boulevard. This was Lancelot with golden hair and a lower body-fat percentage. He didn't just step onto the driveway, he landed, the way a superhero came onto the scene, sculpted jaw set in determination, fists clenched, and eyes burning with a zeal to set things right.

Not your prototypical killer, Charlie thought. But who was? The late Cadaret's neighbors on St. Bart's probably thought he was a h.e.l.luva guy.

Lancelot blazed around the hood, plucked open the pa.s.senger door, and lent an arm to a thickset, older man. Hattemer. Charlie recognized him from somewhere, maybe the news*in which case it probably was a piece he'd seen while waiting for the sports report to come on.

Hattemer's full head of silver hair was combed neatly into place, his flannel suit was crisp, and his tie was dimpled with precision. None of that set him apart from all the hustlers and shysters on Capitol Hill, but there was an undeniable geniality etched between his jowls, and his sharp eyes were full of a certain rea.s.suring gravitas. He was one of the good guys*Charlie felt it.

Still Charlie's circ.u.mspection remained high as he opened the front door. As he'd been reminded too many times at the track: Even when you know, you don't know.

Hattemer squinted through the blob of exterior lights. 'Charlie, it's good to see you,' he said with a warmth that couldn't be artifice.

Charlie allowed that Hattemer had just done some simple checking, then reasoned, thoughtfully, that Drummond and his son could stand some supper.

With a wave at Lancelot, Hattemer added, 'I took the liberty of bringing along Nick Fielding, who was your father's protege and has been the acting chief of the agency's Geographical a.n.a.lysis Ecosystem Subcommittee since your father went on the disabled list.'

While leading them into the foyer, it dawned on Charlie that he knew Nick Fielding, or rather knew the name. 'Aren't you a treasure hunter?' he asked him.

'That's just schtick,' Fielding said.

Charlie was unnerved. It didn't seem like the sort of secret Fielding would allow someone to just walk away with.

'Gentlemen, I need to tell you something straight off,' Charlie said. 'My father's watching us through a rifle scope, and the way he's been lately, he's liable to plug all of us if you don't hand over your weapons now.' Really, Drummond was stashed safely out of earshot, probably taking a post-supper nap.

Hattemer and Fielding exchanged glances so precise that Charlie wondered whether they were explicit communications, an appraisal of his claim perhaps. These men almost certainly had been trained to spot lies via s.h.i.+fts of eyes or fluctuations in rate of speech, nervous movements, and more ways he couldn't begin to guess. Thinking of the card players' saying*'After the first few minutes, if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you'*he cursed his gall in imagining he could fool these men.

'We understand,' Hattemer said.

'We regret it's come to this,' added Fielding.

Charlie's self-a.s.surance rebounded. 'I'll need you to step against the wall and shrug off your coats, one sleeve at a time,' he said. This was the technique the lieutenant at the Monroeville club had used.

Fielding and Hattemer wriggled out of their suit coats, tossing them forward onto the floor before Charlie remembered to ask. The closest thing to a weapon the coats contained was Fielding's cigar case. But removing the coats brought into plain sight the rugged gray pistol tucked into Fielding's waistband. If Hattemer carried a firearm, it was disguised as a fountain pen in his breast pocket.

Charlie had heard of pens capable of discharging a single .22 caliber bullet. Better to appear the fool than be shot to death by a pen, he thought. 'Please put the pen and the gun on the floor,' he said.

They did, and he knelt and gathered up what appeared to be an ordinary fountain pen and a SIG Sauer. Rising, he executed a rendition of the Monroeville pat down, turning up a thin billfold on Hattemer and, in Fielding's pockets, some change and the Lincoln's keyless remote. He weighed taking the lot, but decided against it; his disinclination to appear foolish was compounded by a sense of futility. If it came down to a fight, he thought, himself armed with the SIG Sauer and everything else, versus Fielding armed with nothing, the smart money was on Fielding.

'Charlie, know that we're here to help,' Hattemer said.

'So let's put our cards on the table,' Fielding said. 'As you've probably antic.i.p.ated, in one minute, we can have a backup team here with enough pop to take over certain small countries. In addition, we're painfully aware that Duck is not watching us through a rifle scope. He'd never play it like that. My guess is he's resting somewhere.'

Charlie's stomach fell so violently that Hattemer and Fielding must have heard it. The team a minute away probably heard it.

'We also know he sketched you a schematic,' Fielding said.

'A schematic, what schematic?'

'Of the Device, of course.' Fielding spoke as if Charlie were a child.

'Actually, I have no idea what device you mean.'

'Please, I had people watching when he showed it to you.'

'Is this something that happened when I was, like, ten?'

'No, twenty-seven past two yesterday afternoon.'

'The was.h.i.+ng machine he drew on his hot dog wrapper?'

'You know that that wasn't just a was.h.i.+ng machine.'

'Then what was it? Or am I better off not knowing?'

'You're absolutely better off not knowing,' Hattemer interjected.

'Nick, he doesn't know.'

Seeming to have reached the same conclusion, Fielding softened. 'Then, ironically, he needs to learn now, if he's going to help us.'

34.

Fielding paced in front of the mantel, the sputtering fire transforming him into a kinetoscope leading man. 'In the late sixties our Special Forces left crates of ammunition on the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong,' he said. in front of the mantel, the sputtering fire transforming him into a kinetoscope leading man. 'In the late sixties our Special Forces left crates of ammunition on the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong,' he said.

Hattemer perched on the sill of one of the bay windows, his attention wavering*clearly he'd heard this before. Charlie sat on the sofa, rapt. 'Wait, I thought the Vietcong were the bad guys,' he said.

'The ammo was doctored so it would misfire,' Fielding said. 'That's where your father first got the idea for the operation that was later code-named Placebo.' He began it in the seventies as an off-the-books joint project of the agency's counterproliferation division and counterintelligence. A few years later, when he and his team had perfected the technology, they used some Saudi spare change funneled through a Swiss venture capital sh.e.l.l and bought a failing Argentine appliance manufacturer.'

'Perriman?'

'Of course you know all about Perriman, including that it has offices worldwide. What you probably don't know is that those offices serve as bases for our people, under cover as Perriman employees, to sell specially modified appliances.'

'Are we talking washers with a detonation' setting?' Charlie asked. He noticed Hattemer smile. Fielding did too, but it appeared forced.

'Sort of,' Fielding said. 'The atomic demolition munition we work with looks like the innards of a was.h.i.+ng machine, and the weights of the two are about the same. So was.h.i.+ng machine housings make excellent concealments, and Perriman's network allows for ease of trafficking. What we do is simple: We sell the bombs to terrorists, rogue nations, third world potentates, and any other lunatic with the means and inclination to detonate a nuclear weapon.'