The Summer Soldier (27 page)

“How ’bout I decide to sell you back to y’r
friends up in Portland? How’d you like that, Mr. Lickweather? Hey,
how’d you like that?” He laughed and shook his head and laughed
again. He was feeling just fine, just fine and full of how
diabolically clever he was.

Oh, he was a whiz kid, sure he was. He was on
top of the world. He’d even put Guinness’s gun away, back in his
pocket. What the fuck, he didn’t need any gun to take care of any
little diabetic pencil pusher with his hands tied. Not him. Not a
smart boy like him.

Gradually, a little at a time, Guinness had
made his preparations. He would have liked to have gotten his hands
free, but it is never really practical to work knots loose right
under somebody’s nose. Besides, there was the tactical advantage
that almost no one expects to be jumped by a man with his arms sewn
together.

So he had settled for making it to his feet.
Pfeifer didn’t seem to mind. After all, he was the man in charge
here; what did he have to worry about?

“You just go right ahead,” Guinness said
finally, with a short, brutal little laugh. “You just try shaking
them down, sweetheart, and two minutes after they’ve finished with
me they’ll be converting your face into a sieve.” Pfeifer’s eyes
narrowed, and Guinness knew that he had scored his point. “In fact,
it might be a good idea if you just stayed out of this
altogether.”

They were perhaps fifteen feet apart now,
which was perfect. If Pfeifer came for him, and he would, he would
come in a rush—it was always that way. And by the time he had made
half the distance, he would be too deeply committed to his own
forward movement to save himself.

It was obvious from the way Pfeifer was
beginning to balance on the balls of his feet that he was at least
thinking about coming over there and showing everybody who was
boss, and when he did that he was a goner. When they charged you
like that, all hot and careless with anger and dented pride, they
set themselves up for you.

It wouldn’t take much to get him to take
those first few steps.

“Yes. Yes, you ought to stay out of this one,
Boyd. A punk like you is bound to get carved into stew meat if he
tries playing games with his betters, so you just cut me loose and
I’ll go on about my business and no hard feelings. Maybe I’ll throw
you a bone after I’ve gotten to where I’m going.”

He didn’t announce himself, didn’t start
yelling or making threats—he just came. Guinness waited until he
had crossed most of the distance and then stepped forward with his
right foot and, continuing the counterclockwise movement until his
back was completely turned, cocked his left foot up under him and
let it shoot straight back.

They say that if the person you’re mad at
lives through a kick like that, you haven’t done it right, but
Guinness had never made any claims to godlike proficiency in the
martial arts and so was pleased with less.

It caught Pfeifer just under the navel and
took him completely off the ground with a wheeze like that of a
cork coming out of a half flat bottle of champagne. After that, a
carefully placed kick to the temple rendered him perfectly
quiet.

Pfeifer never stirred while Guinness untied
himself, or while he patted him down, retrieving his revolver and
wallet, along with the drug case that, according to Ernie Tuttle,
had in it the means of rendering the world forever safe from
bearded hippies who preyed on runaway accountants from
Portland.

Guinness weighed the possibility in his hand,
and then decided to hell with it. Another time, should it prove
necessary, he would have with the greatest personal pleasure put
the big clod’s lights out, but there was no pressing reason why
right then and there he had to kill Boyd Pfeifer, and it wasn’t his
place to go around playing avenging angel. He was himself,
according to almost any criteria, a pretty terrible person. The
role of society’s guardian should go to someone with cleaner
hands.

So he contented himself with tying the still
limp form around one of the larger available redwoods. Pfeifer
would awaken to discover himself embracing the trunk, his hands
bound with the same length of clothesline he had used to tie
Guinness and about a foot and a half apart. It would take him
several hours, possibly on into the next day, to work himself
loose, and by then even the soft bark of these trees would have
burned and cut his face and bare arms until they looked like raw
liver.

The keys to the truck were in the ignition.
Guinness wasn’t wild about driving himself all the way to Los
Angeles, but events hadn’t given him a second choice. Anyway, it
was getting dark; no one would be able to see that clearly into the
cab. And he simply wasn’t an important enough criminal to have
justified an intensive statewide search. He was out of the Bay
Area, and that was what really mattered.

His fingers were already curled around the
door handle when he noticed that Pfeifer was beginning to stir.
Guinness hesitated for a second and then picked the drug case out
of the side pocket of his coat and went back over to where he had
left him tied. Okay, so he wouldn’t kill him; that didn’t mean he
couldn’t have a little fun with the bastard.

When Pfeifer opened his eyes, the first thing
he saw was Guinness, sitting on the ground next to him, loading up
a syringe from the plastic vial marked “2.” Guinness smiled at him,
the way Browning’s duke must have smiled at the envoy.

“Guess what, Boyd. I lied to you; this isn’t
insulin. Can you imagine what it might really be?” A yellowish
light came into Pfeifer’s eyes and he shook his head mechanically,
as if the joints in his neck were gradually freezing shut.

“No?” Guinness raised his eyebrows, as if
terribly surprised and disappointed, and then smiled again. “Well,
that’s all right; it’ll give you something to ponder over while you
feel your brains turning into jelly.” He slipped the needle in just
at the insertion of the neck muscle, and Pfeifer let out a short
muffled little scream. “So long, pal.”

He was out cold, even before Guinness could
withdraw the needle. Somewhere, some government chemist had really
known what he was doing.

It was the better part of an hour before
Guinness could find his way back to the Coast Highway. One little
dirt road looked pretty much like another, and at every fork you
just had to guess. Eventually, though, he found a paved road with a
sign that said he was in the Los Padres National Forest and could
get to where he was going if he would only turn to the left and
keep plugging along. The sign was correct, and within twenty
minutes he was back on his way south.

Dinner was a rushed business at a Howard
Johnson’s in Morro Bay. It was well after nine when he arrived
there, and he practically had the place to himself. They must have
been in a hurry to close up and go home, because the waitress gave
him the wrong flavor of ice cream for dessert—mocha fudge instead
of chocolate ripple—and slapped his check down before he had a
chance even to touch his second cup of tea.

At about five minutes before four, he pulled
into the parking lot of the Los Angeles International Airport. He
hadn’t, so far as he could tell, been followed, but that wasn’t
very far. A child could have tailed Pfeifer, and after their little
forest interlude anyone could have picked him up again and just
stayed with him all the way down. How are you going to know who’s
behind you on the freeway?

There was a line of cabs along the curb in
front of the loading area, but Guinness didn’t take one until he
had gone into the terminal, taken the up escalator to the ticket
desks on the second floor, stood around for a few minutes watching
the arrival notices change, taken the down escalator back to the
baggage docks, and passed back out through the double glass doors
to the outside. He didn’t want to be remembered by anyone who might
happen to be interested as the man who had hired a cab immediately
after coming out of the parking lot. Nobody would be interested—at
least nobody who wasn’t already—but it was bad technique to exhibit
unusual behavior, and sometimes bad technique can get you
killed.

He paid off his taxi at the corner of Sunset
and Vine, wishing he could simply find himself a bed and catch some
sleep, but of course that was out of the question. Unless
accompanied by a peroxide blonde, you couldn’t check into a motel,
not without luggage, and Guinness was a trifle short of blondes.
Fortunately, however, it was a Friday night, and along Hollywood
Boulevard there wouldn’t be any problem about staying occupied and
inconspicuous until daylight.

Walking the one block north, he found an all
night movie and sat through two and one half performances of The
Bedford Incident before the department store across the street was
open for business.

As soon as it was, Guinness bought himself
some underwear, socks, two pairs of wash and wear trousers—one tan
and the other black—two short sleeved dress shirts, a black long
sleeved turtleneck sweater, and some toilet articles.

All that, plus the canvas suitcase he
afterward purchased at a luggage store next door, cost him a total
of $137.64. Next time the police chased him out of town, he would
have to remember to pack.

Using his Linkweather driver’s license, he
rented a car from a pretty little brunette behind the Avis desk at
the Roosevelt Hotel and drove to a motel on Los Feliz Boulevard,
not more than three quarters of a mile from Griffith Park.

Throwing his suitcase on the bed, he headed
for the shower. Five minutes later, when he came back into the room
with a towel wrapped around his loins, the phone rang.

17

Without lifting it from its hook, Guinness
held the receiver under his hand through nine rings. Two. . .
three. . . His lips moved silently as he counted them off, one
after the other (five. . . six. . .) the way felons at the post
must have counted off the strokes of the lash. Finally, making
himself a small private bet (eight. . . nine), he picked up the
receiver and cradled it against the side of his face.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Guinness,” answered a suave, indefinably
foreign sounding voice. “You are no doubt fatigued from your
travels. Would tomorrow evening be too soon?” Guinness frowned at
the bare wall, counting at one the number of foreign gentlemen who
would be likely to call him at a Los Angeles motel he had picked at
random not more than twenty minutes earlier. Okay, so he had won
his bet. Didn’t that make him a clever fellow.

“That would be fine, Mr. Vlasov.” His voice
was under far better control than he had dared to hope.

“I am so glad. By the way, were you aware
that you have been followed? I mean, of course, by parties other
than myself. I leave it to you to deal with them as you think best.
Pleasant dreams.”

The line went dead, and Guinness replaced the
receiver. For a long moment he simply stared at the motel room
carpet, trying to decide why he wasn’t a whole lot more scared
than, in fact, he was.

Oh, he was scared; anybody would have been
scared. But he should, by rights, have been terrified. Vlasov was a
pretty terrifying person.

In their line of work what made the
difference was command of technique, and Vlasov had that. Jesus, to
tail a man for over four hundred miles, a man who knew you by
sight, who would be expecting you, looking for you, and not to be
spotted once. You had to be very good to do that, and Vlasov was
very good. All the time Guinness had known he was back there
somewhere—the whole trip down he had had that funny feeling in the
back of his neck that invariably meant he was being followed—but
there had never been a single sign.

And in thirty-six hours Vlasov wanted to play
hide and seek amid the eucalyptus trees in Griffith Park. Any
sensible man would be scared green.

“He’s a constitutional fanatic,” Tuttle had
said, “a man given to causes and holy crusades. Nobody could figure
out why he had defected—it’s the sort of question that has to be
answered in a deal like this—and that was all the shrink who looked
at Vlasov’s interrogation films could tell us. ‘This is not a man
who turns traitor so he can raise fruit trees in Oregon. No
way.’”

And yet he had defected. In response to a
higher loyalty perhaps—but he had broken faith. With the KGB, the
Party, Mother Russia, you name it. For all of which there would
have to be an atonement. That streak of fanaticism, which for those
outside the profession might go under the name of moral decency,
would demand no less.

And what of that higher loyalty, the late
Raya Natalia Vlasov? She would demand her revenge; it was only a
question of how wide a net she would cast, of how many little fish
would have to be dragged in before she would consent to rest quiet
in her grave.

One’s wife, what would she not demand of her
murderer, of the one who had put her in the line of fire? Guinness
understood the ethics of the thing as clearly as did Vlasov,
although perhaps he did not feel himself bound to them to quite the
same degree.

Who the hell wouldn’t be scared?

Somehow, though, he was only bored. The whole
thing had come to seem so inevitable, so outside the control of
either of them, that it seemed pointless to worry. One way or the
other, it would sort itself out.

For some reason, Guinness found himself
thinking not about Vlasov, but about the basement of a schoolmate
of his in Newark. He hadn’t been down in that basement in, hell,
probably thirty years. Probably it didn’t exist anymore.

In the basement had been a train set, an
enormously complex business laid out on a huge sheet of plywood.
The trains had belonged to Guinness’s friend (whose father, unheard
of luxury, had laid out the track for him), and sometimes Guinness
had been invited down there to help him play with them. There had
also been, on a wall shelf that was otherwise cluttered with
gardening tools and mason jars filled with preserved peaches, a set
of about fifteen of the Tom Swift novels. Guinness had always meant
to borrow a couple of them sometime and read them, just to see what
they were like, but he had never gotten around to it, and then his
friend had moved to Indiana and had taken the train set and the Tom
Swift novels with him, and that had been that.