Kathy shook her head, and smiled at him. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘Daniel will fix you some of his special fried shrimp. Daniel runs a restaurant, you know. He’s a genius when it comes to cooking.’
‘Cooking is a substitute for oral sex, didn’t you know that?’ said Daniel.
‘I thought it was the other way around, said Rick. ‘I thought oral sex was a substitute for cooking.’
They went into the house, Rick carrying his backpack slung over his shoulder. It was a typical rented Hollywood house: with a Spanish-style sitting-room with dark polished floortiles, a fitted kitchen, and off-white bedroom rugs that had probably been white when they were new.
‘It’s not the Wilshire House,’ said Daniel.
‘Who cares? As long as it’s not the Y.’
Kathy said, ‘Daniel.’ There was a warning in her voice which immediately made Daniel freeze.
‘What is it?’
‘Someone’s been in here. Look. The garden door’s been broken open. I left it locked.’
Daniel felt a chill sensation of sudden alarm. He moved quickly and quietly past Kathy, and checked the bedroom; then the bathroom, kicking the door open with his foot. The house was empty, but there was no question that during the afternoon someone had intruded here. Rick stayed where he was, in the hallway, his pack by his feet, looking puzzled and anxious.
‘Are you sure you guys really want me around? I don’t mind leaving if I’m getting in your way.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Daniel. ‘At least, I think it’s all right.’
There couldn’t be a bomb anywhere, could there?’ asked Kathy.
‘A bomb?’ asked Rick. ‘You’re not the men from UNCLE are you?’
‘I’m not a man from anywhere, said Kathy.
‘Jesus,said Rick. ‘I think I’m beginning to wish I was back on the Pacific Coast Highway.’
‘Have a beer and settle down,said Daniel. They’re in the icebox.’
Rick opened the icebox and took out a six-pack of Coors.
‘At least the icebox isn’t booby-trapped, said Kathy.
Rick stared at her. ‘Supposing it had been?’
Daniel shrugged.
They found the letter in the sitting-room, on the table beside the sofa. It was neatly addressed to D Korvitz, in green fibre-tipped pen. Kathy said, ‘You think you should touch it? Maybe it’s got fingerprints on it.’ Daniel ignored her, and tore it open.
In the same green handwriting, the letter said simply, ‘Dear Mr Korvitz. We are now in-Los Angeles, and we have your daughter with us. We have some serious business to discuss with you, and we would like to meet you personally. If you come to the multi-storey parking lot on Santa Monica Boulevard at Wilcox at 9.15 a.m. tomorrow morning, we will return your daughter and take you with us to a suitable locale for more extensive talks.’
Daniel’s hand was shaking as he read the letter. When he had finished, he handed it to Kathy without a word.
‘You know what they meant by wanting to discuss business with me, don’t you?’ he asked.
Kathy folded up the letter, and laid a hand on his arm. They want to kill you, Daniel, I’m sure of it. You can’t possibly go.’
‘And Susie?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s time we called the police.’
They probably are the police, if what you’re saying about Cuba has any truth in it.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ Kathy demanded. ‘Give yourself up like a cow going to the cannery? What’s the point of Susie going free if they kill you? Who’s going to look after her?’
‘She’s got a mother.’
‘Oh, stop trying to be so ridiculously heroic.’
Daniel snatched the letter away from her. ‘Damn it, it’s nothing to do with heroism, Kathy. She’s my little girl. I’ve brought her up day by day from the time she was tiny. She’s seven years old, and God knows what those bastards have been doing to her. Think what they did to you. Besides, they probably don’t want to kill me. Just frighten me off.’
‘Daniel, Kathy retorted, ‘if you were them, and you knew that somebody had discovered everything about the killings you’d been doing; and why you’d done them; what the hell would you do?’
‘I’m still going,’ Daniel insisted. His fear and anger about Susie were almost overwhelming. He felt like shouting at Kathy, except that none of it was Kathy’s fault. By God, if those animals had so much as laid one finger on Susie … But all he could think of was Susie’s face, bruised from repeated beatings; and Susie’s body, raped by foul-smelling men.
‘Daniel, said Kathy. Then, when he turned away, ‘Daniel. There has to be some other kind of answer.’
I can’t think of one, can you? What’s the choice? Either Susie dies or else I take my chances. Come on, Kathy, I’m older than Susie. At least I’ve got the strength and the experience to protect myself. She’s just a seven-year-old kid who’s never known anything but friendly smiling people.’
‘Daniel -‘
‘You can’t change my mind! Don’t try!’
Kathy rubbed her eyes in tension and tiredness. Daniel screwed off the cap of a bottle of Coors, and poured it out, too quickly, so that the glass was filled to the brim with foam. ‘Shit, he said, but drank it all the same.
Rick said, I honestly feel like I’m intruding or something.’
‘You’re not intruding, said Daniel. ‘Just shut up and find yourself someplace to crash down.’
‘I don’t mean to be presumptuous or anything/ said
Rick, ‘but it seems like you’ve got some kind of real gnarly problem going on here. Maybe I could help.’
‘Have you ever seen anybody killed?’ asked Daniel.
‘Only by accident. One stuntman I knew, got smashed up in a car crash when they were shooting The Kings of Ozark.’
Daniel finished his foamy beer, and poured himself some more. Rick watched him expectantly. ‘Let me tell you something, said Daniel. .‘Tomorrow morning at a quarter after nine I’m supposed to go to a multi-level parking-lot on Santa Monica Boulevard and surrender myself to one or more known killers in exchange for my seven-year-old daughter Susie, who was kidnapped in Arizona last week. The possibility is that the killers will seek to widen their expertise by killing me, too.’
‘Are you kidding?’ asked Rick. Is this Candid Camera or something?’
‘It doesn’t matter to you whether I’m kidding or not, Daniel told him. ‘You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to worry about any of us. So why don’t you just unpack your bag, make yourself comfortable, and keep your mouth shut. What you don’t know about won’t hurt you.’
Rick pushed his hands into the tight pockets of his lederhosen. Ts that the parking lot at Seward, or the parking lot at Wilcox?’
‘Wilcox. Why?’
‘Well… this is only a thought… but a friend of mine got spaced out one day when he was driving into the Wilcox parking-lot, and he drove right through the railings between Level 3 and the roof of the building next door to the parking lot, and that’s where he ended up, parked on the roof.’
‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’ asked Daniel.
‘Well, just hold up a minute; what my friend said was that anybody who might have had a mind to could have driven clear across the roof, and clear across the roof of the next building, as far as Cole.’
Kathy said tautly, ‘I still don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘Well, is this real, what you’re telling me, or are you making a movie?’ asked Rick. He bit his lip, and his eyes flicked from Daniel to Kathy, and back to Daniel. ‘I mean, is it real?’
‘Supposing it were?’ asked Kathy.
‘Well, if it’s real … if you’ve really got to come face-to-face with some killers in the Wilcox Avenue parking lot, then you’ve got to plan it like a movie stunt, you know? Plan it first. I’m always looking for good stunt locations, and this place is one of them. I mean, you could snatch your daughter back, right, and then drive up the ramp instead of out of the parking lot - which is the way they’d normally expect you to go - and right through the railings and over the next-door rooftops. Then you could leap out of the car and get away while these killers are still fooling around wondering which level you’re on.’
‘You’re nuts,said Kathy.
‘But it’s what people do in the movies. For Christ’s sake. And if they can do it in the movies, why can’t you do it for real?’
Daniel set down his glass, and looked at Rick thoughtfully. At last, he said, ‘Lef s go down to Wilcox, and see what this parking lot looks like. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do have a chance. You said, drive across the rooftops?’
That s right. You might knock over a couple of ventilation stacks, but nothing worse than that. You see what I’m trying to say to you, don’t you? You could snatch your daughter back and get away yourself, if you planned it properly. I can tell you something, all of the stunts we do for the movies are planned like clockwork. We could be in and out of that place in six seconds flat, and nobody would scarcely know we’d been there.’
‘We?’
‘You don’t think you’re going to leave me out of this, do you? Besides, I don’t have anyplace else to stay.’
Daniel looked down at his empty glass. ‘Melech Ham’lo-chim,’ he said, under his breath.
Twenty-Eight
The same afternoon, Titus left the State Department and drove in his own Porsche down to Boiling Air Force Base in Virginia, wearing dark sunglasses and a white fishing hat in the hope that nobody would recognize him. The sentry outside Boiling had already been alerted to let him through without stopping him, and he was waved by a white-gloved MP towards the outer perimeter road, past rows of giant C-141 Starlifters, and all the organized confusion of Jeeps and ammunition boxes and half-tracked vehicles that were the hallmark of a Military Airlift Command base.
General Caulfield’s shiny black Lincoln was parked under the shade of a large Virginia oak, not far from the perimeter fence. General Caulfield himself was standing nearby with his hands on his hips, watching a C-5A transport taxi around to the main runway in preparation for take-off. The noise and the heat came in waves.
‘How are you keeping, Pierce?’ asked Titus, as he slammed the door of his car and came walking across with his white fishing hat held in his hands.
‘I’m well,’ said General Caulfield. He had a relentlessly short military haircut which gave him the appearance of a 55-year-old boy. ‘I haven’t had too much time for fishing lately; but I guess we all have our crosses to bear.’
‘Fishing is the least of my worries right now/ said Titus.
‘Well, I guess. It shook me, when I was first told about it. I couldn’t believe my own ears. It depressed me, I can tell you. It does, when you first understand that everything you ever fought for, everything you ever believed in, your flag, your country, it’s all been taken away from you and you never knew.’
Then it’s true,’ said Titus. He looked at Pierce Caulfield narrowly, his head slightly angled to one side, as if he were challenging the general to deny everything; to admit that Ikon was all an impossible joke.
Pierce Caulfield watched the C-5A thundering up from the runway, one of the largest aircraft in the world, capable of carrying 125,000 Ibs for 8,000 miles. Then he turned to Titus, and said, crisply, ‘Yes, it’s true. The United States has been administered by the Soviet Union since the summer of 1962. And one of the very first things the Soviets did was to ensure that the American forces could no longer effectively threaten the Soviet Union.’
‘But why didn’t they simply dismantle the US forces? Surely that would have been easier than all this elaborate pretence?’
They weren’t stupid, said Pierce. “They knew that in spite of the nuclear edge they had managed to win over us, it would still be touch and go if they tried to take us over by brute force. I don’t know all of the details; I wasn’t privy to what was going on at the time. In fact, I personally wasn’t told until 1974, nearly twelve years later. But, as far as I can gather, they decided to convert us to Communism over a very long period of time; to break us down, socially and morally, politically and economically, until at last we would consider that Communism was the only option left open to us, and we would consider that amalgamating with the Soviet Union was the only sensible answer.’
‘You have to be kidding,said Titus.
Pierce shook his head. ‘I think that they were far too optimistic about the time that it would take for the American people to be converted to international socialism. I believe that Ikon’s been having some trouble over that with the Kremlin. But the deliberate destruction of the US economy seems to have gone according to plan; and
there’s no question that it’s brought with it all the social disillusionment that Russia expected.’
Titus stood with his head lowered while Pierce Caulfield shaded his eyes and followed the flight-path of the C-5A as it turned around and headed west. ‘That’s a magnificent airplane, you know that? An amazing technical achievement. Do you know how much that airplane weighs? Over 325,000 Ibs, empty. They had some difficulty with wing fatigue, but they’ve solved it now. That’s one of the reasons the Soviets didn’t want to tamper too much with America as she was. They recognized our technical expertise, they recognized our educational advancement, they saw us as leaders in almost every field of sophisticated life. It would have been absurd and wasteful of them to throw our space programme away; or take our armed forces to pieces. What was the point, when they could infiltrate enough of their own officers into US military ranks to ensure that our key defences were useless; and that none of our major weapons would ever work? All that our Distant Early Warning stations do these days is to monitor air traffic, for the express benefit of Aeroflot and the Soviet forces. There’s no threat from the Soviet Union any more, there hasn’t been for twenty years. It’s no good fearing the coming conflict; it’s all over, and all of us here in America are nothing more than prisoners of war.’
‘But our missiles - ‘ said Titus. ‘Our troops, our airplanes … We’ve just ordered a new tank, damn it!’
‘I know,’ said Pierce, with great calmness. ‘I know how you must be feeling. I wondered when I first found out if I ought to kill myself; I even considered launching a one-man suicide mission against the Kremlin. But, in the end, it was strangely reassuring to know that everything that had happened in American life over the past twenty years was planned, that America’s recent moral decay was not our fault. The sexual revolution was planned; the widespread introduction of addictive and hallucinogenic drugs was planned; so was large-scale birth control in order to keep the American population under control.