Season of the machete

Nickie lay down on the scarred wooden table like a good little drunk.

CarTie's mind was racing as she elbowed her way out and onto the avenue. Two very good reasons for the murder.

First of all, poor Nickie was one of the few people left who could still identify her and Damian. Second, she'd liked Nickie too much to let him live like that. to let him go where he was obviously going.

Slightly dizzy from the bar scene, she crossed the avenue Marceau in a sea of Renaults, Simcas, wolf whistles. Up some side street. Stacked heels clicking, white butterfly stockings singing silk.

She took off the floppy white Easter bonnet. Tossed it over a slat fence into somebody's yard. She took off the uncomfortable high-heeled pumps and got into the black flats that were in her shoulder bag.

At avenue Montaigne, she met Damian. The two of them embraced for a long moment. Then the pretty young couple walked arm in arm across the murky, slow-moving Seine. Almost at once, they began to prepare to be double-crossed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The effect that we wanted most on San Dominica was helpless confusion. A feeling like darkness and light being turned on and off at our will. Things suddenly being dangerous that weren't supposed to be dangerous.... More important, there had to be no way to chart any of it. No known patterns.

The Rose Diary

Wylde's Fall, San Dominica

Between seven Sunday morning and the late afternoon, nothing happened on San Dominica that hadn't been happening for the previous thousand years or so. The more than 150 beaches were pearly white, striking, and perfect; the royal blue skies were clear and pure-a 1,000 percent improvement

on any metropolitan sky; the sunshine was uninterrupted.

And while nothing terrifying was happening, the Americans and Europeans still on the island had time to sit back and think about what had happened. Not least of all, the sixty-one members of the government assembly had time to consider their unlucky alternatives for the future.

At four in the afternoon, Colonel Dassie Dred stood on the verge of worldwide farne.

Looking down from the second highest and most beautiful waterfall in the Caribbean-Wylde's Falls-he could see a barefoot black boy and a white couple making the popular walking tour up the many-tiered water shoots.

The three people sloshed through the most beauti- ful, black, freshwater pools. they splashed together in cascading ten- and twenty-foot-high falls; occasionally shouted to one another over the crashing roar of the blue water; stopped once for a misty camera shot.

When the young guide finally turned the rocky corner beneath his hiding place, Dred extended his hand through a clump of bushes. The small boy allowed himself to be pulled up, leaving the white couple looking up at the leering face of the revolutionary. "Yo' go home now," Dred said to the boy. "Nenm-iine be lookin' back."

As he spoke, two of his men jumped through banana leaves into the bubbly pool below. One man came swinging a cane machete sideways like a baseball bat.

The long knife caught a screaming, @ishlooking woman across the front of her Town & Country summer blouse. The hard blow upended her in a clumsy three-point fall.

The second, stronger soldier brought his knife straight down. The woman's blond, bankerish-lookmg husband stood still for a moment, then he split from the shoulders down and toppled over Wylde's Falls.

Meanwhile, down at the park's entry gates, a handful of tourists and lounging guides were watching the day's final climbers make their way down the tricky falls. As they watched two couples and their guides climb down slowly, a body-a swimniing woman, it looked like-shot headfirst around a high curve in the swift water. The swimming woman disappeared again; then toppled over a smooth lip of the black rock; then caught sideways up against a jutting boulder shooting bubbly white water high in the air.

A man split like broken scissors came down next. The body made it around the jutting rock, bounced down several small falls, skinnned past the terrorstricken crowd at the gates, then disappeared without a sound into the sea. Colonel Dred had conducted his first official machete raid, and as it had been skillfully designed to be, it was the very best one so far. Dred was ready.

Trelawney, San Dominica

Sunday Evening.

A greasy dish of sticky brown rice sat in front of him. Gray shredded goat. Some shellfish that wasn't lobster, wasn't crab or shrimp, wasn't really edible' Peter Macdonald thought he saw a small black claw rise up and swim in the stew. He gobbled it UP. It was sixty cents for the meal and green teaa bargain. After his Sunday dinner, Macdonald sat in a dark rear corner of the native restaurant. He slowly smoked two cigarettes. He nervously pushed his hand back through his hair twenty or thirty times within five minutes or less. Sitting there all alone, Peter remembered a dumb movie he'd seen once. Some handsome blond actor had played a man who'd simply gone to The New York Times to get out of a pack of trouble. Gone to the Times the way people used to go to the police-and the next thing you knew, everything was copacetic. The man in the movie was safe and sound.

The screen credits rolled up over the man's frozen, sn-dling face. "America the Beautiful" played. Everybody in the theater went home as happy as clams.

Idle speculations of a drowning man.

Because what exactly could he tell The New York Times? Peter had begun to speculate. What could he tell anybody, really? That he'd seen this tall blond Englishman-maybe an Englishman-in the vicinity of one of the San Dominica machete murders? That he'd held a State Department man's face to the burner of an electric stove, and the man had begun to scream about the Mafia?

Suddenly the restaurant's waitress and cook were standing over him. A small, moon-faced black girl, she'd been flitting all night around the main room like a trapped moth. Table... table... window. stove... table... window.

Nobody would let the modi-girl out, though... table.

" Yo' lak yo' lobster, yes, mahn?" Loose translation: You're crazy to eat in here. Let me outside, please. I'm a moth.

Peter smiled at the moth thought; at something in the young girl's eyes. "Good food," he said softly. "Better than at the big hotels."

The waitress remembered the words later for the San Dominica police. She said that the young American left the restaurant around nine. That he'd gotten on a motorcycle outside.

The police told her that the American man had gone a little crazy on account of all the murders. they said they wanted him for questioning. Nothing serious.

Coastown, San Dominica

Almost simultaneously with the police mterview in the Trelawney restaurant, four men in expensive mw-silk suits-Park Avenue bankers, from the look of them-sat down to dinner on a handsome screened-in porch on the big estate in Coastown proper.

The four were San Dominica's prime minister, Joe Walthey; Great western Air Transport's Brooks Campbell; the Forlenza Family's Isadore Goldman; and Goldman's man on San Dominica, a beachboy type by the name of Duane Nicholson.

The meal that the four men were served began with Chincoteagues; then a Montrachet; stuffed lamb en ballon; bu@ celery; com. In the wings was a grand floating island.

All in all, a most delicious, civi@ feast.

On and off, the men watched the leggy nustress of Prime Minister Walthey swimming laps in the blue-bottomed pool that stretched out directly in front of the porch.

On and off, Izzie Goldman tried to explain the facts of life and death to the other three. A thin, liver-spotted hand floated out in front of the gangster as he spoke.

"I'm seventy-four years old," he said quietly, so that they all had to concentrate on his words. "I don't understand why you ask me all these schoolboy questions about the Roses." Goldman sighed. "Why can't you let them do their work? Pay the money and forget about it."

"Because they're a liability," Brooks Campbell said to him. "Because I have my orders from way, way up the ladder. "

The old man took a bird bite of his lamb. "They're too smart to carry tales." He talked and chewed. "I don't understand why everybody is trying so hard to make another Bay of Pigs catastrophe here. ' @

"This is hardly the liberation of Cuba." Campbell pointed a finger at the old man. "And besides, I think Rose has gone crazy. We never saw any plans like this. A few murders, yes. Massacres, no.

The prime minister of San Dominica brushed a fly away from his wine. Joseph Walthey, "Jose," was a short, stocky black. Forty-one years old. A demagogue and potentially a dictator. The black man had a neat pencil mustache, a big thumb of a nose, a very bumpy, pocked complexion.

"Just for the sake of... dinner talk"-he spoke with a soft, diplomatic lilt-"why won't you answer a few of our questions, Mr. Goldman? What possible harm could come from ridding the world of these two murderers, for example?" The old man sank even farther into his big rattan chair. His gray suit coat bunched terribly around a pink-and-brown silk tie. Pink flamingos were crushed all over the tie.

The prime minister's girlfriend dived into the pool again, and Izzie Goldman heard an insane old song start up in his mind.

Hubba hubba, ding ding

Baby, you got everything

What a face, what a figger!

What a shame that you're a

nigger!

Vaude-ville-bring it back! Please! Quick!

"Above and beyond everything else that was wrong here "-he glanced across the table at Brooks Carnpbell-"I don't think you'll catch them. Let them go back to France, Mr. Campbell. Prime Minister. Let it end after tomorrow. Trust me on this.

to his immediate left, Duane Nicholson sat flicking ashes from his cigarette into his empty dinner plate.

"No. We want the Roses dead," Brooks Carnp- bell repeated. "That's our position."

Isadore Goldman stared at the beachboy Nicholson before making his next statement on the matter. "The people who put their cigarettes in their plates," the old man finally said, "should have to eat out of their ashtrays."

And those were absolutely Isadore Goldman's last words on the fiasco.

Trelawney, San Dominica

A little after nine, Peter Macdonald hid the BMW motorcycle in thick brush, then walked inside the Trelawney bus station.

The station was one small, dim room that smelled as if an army had stopped to urinate and delouse there.

Peter examined a schedule for buses going across the island to Port Gerry. At Port Gerry, he thought he had a way to get off San Dominica safely. A way to get some help. Maybe. The question was whether to travel anonymously by bus or quickly by bike.

None of the hang-arounds. inside the station seemed to be noticing him, he believed. That was good, at least.

He sat down on one of the long gray benches. Saw a newspaper headline crumpled up under another seat. DOUBLE MURDERS! DRED ON THE MOVE.

Almost 9:15 now... starting to miss Jane like hell. Remembering what it was like to be lonely.

He began to read a six-foot-high-by-ten-footwide community blackboard. A child's handwriting, it looked like.

NOW THAT ELECTION RESULTS ALL OVER THE CARIBBEAN HAVE TURNED OUT VICTORIOUS FOR SO CIALISTS, AND JOE IS SERIOUSLY ]ILL, I THINK WE SHOULD TAKE A LONG LOOK AT COMING ELECtionS.

JOE'S PLAYBOY ATITTUDE IS UN BECOMING AN EXECUTIVE to OF FICE. PROFESSOR SAM HAS ONLY FOUR YEARS OF SCHOOLING

(CHECK RECORDS OF THE BAINTY SCHOOL IN COASTOWN), WHILE I AM, AS YOU KNOW, GRADUATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST IN DIES.

THOSE OF YOU WHO VOTE FOR "JOE" ARE VOTING FOR THE FOL

LOWING: MORE CONTROL BY FOR EIGNERS, CIA, HIGH PRICES, LOW WAGES, MORE CONTROL BY FOR EIGNERS, WILDNESS IN STREET BY COLONEL DRED, NO PRICE CON TROLS, UNSANrrARY-WITH FOOD SPREAD ON THE GROUND WHERE WE WALK, SPRF, ETC., to BE SOLD to CONSUMERS. MORE CONTROL BY FOREIGNERS. EVEN DRED HIM SELF WOULD BE PREFERRED BET TER THAN OLD BLACK "JOE."

TOMMY (THOMAS WYASS)

Macdonald the sign reader. Looking for direction? Clues? More control by foreigners. Prime Minister Joe Walthey. Dred on move.

Peter read: FORBIDDEN IN THIS TERMINAL: SMOKING, SCREAMING, OBSCENE LANGUAGE, SHELLING OF PEANUTS, EATING OF CHEWING GUM. THANK YOU. TOMMY.

Peter was chewing gum, smoking, screaming obscene language inside his brain. He went into a dark wooden phone booth, where he could chew and smoke his brains out in peace. He thought about where he ought to spend the night. Port Gerry? The woods again?... No one ever teaches you how to survive in America. Not even the army, really. they just teach the army how to survive.

Finally, against all his previous resolves, against his whole idea of trying to keep her out of this, Peter decided that he had to call Jane.

First he called her friends in Coastown. She left, they told him. Jane had gone back to the inn. Shit. Shit. slot. Shit.

Peter made the call to Turtle Bay. Number ninety. The Plantation Inn. Switchboard operator. "Cottage number fourteen, please.... Jane, it's me. Peter. I've been trying to call you all day in Coastown.

"Oh, Peter! Where are you?" There was a short pause at his end of the line.

"I want you to go back to the States," Peter finally said. "See what Westerhuis can do to get you on a flight out of here.... Janie?"

"Dammit all to hell, Macdonald! Tell me where you are. Cool it, Peter."

Peter smiled for a second. That was Jane. He stopped the melodramatics and told her where he'd been for the past day. Then he told her what he thought they ought to do now. What they shouldn't do. Only after he'd gone through it all-the talk about himself-did Jane mention the blond Englishman.

"He was here, Peter."

Small, shocking statement. He was here.

"I saw him this afternoon. I think... it had to be him. He was blond, maybe six feet two... "

Peter stopped her. Suddenly it was as if he were a combat officer again, giving orders that must be followed. "I want you to lock and latch all the doors and windows right now, Jane."

"Everything is locked. Just come and get me."

He tried to visualize the room. The cottage itself. Fool's Hot Toast. He tried to imagine how he would go about attacking it. Defending it.

"All right, that's good. Will you turn off all the lights in there? Do it right now, okay?"

"Okay! Okay.!"

He heard the sound of the phone being set down.

He'd been right there. Peter considered again. Came down into the inn as if he had some kind of diplomatic immunity. Brass balls, at least.

Suddenly he had a quick flash of the tall blond figure standing over Turtle Bay four days earlier. Looking as if he owned the place. Looking as if he owned the goddamn world.

Then Jane was back on the phone. Whispering, all of a sudden.

"It's pitch black in here," she told him. "I can see a couple walking out on the beach. Oh, Peter, this is so creepy I don't believe it's happening."

"For what it's worth," Peter said, "I'm on my way.

Turtle Bay, San Dominica

The sound outside cottage number fourteen was something like bomp. Bomp,bomp... bomp,bomp,bomp.

The noise stopped suddenly, and Jane Cooke stood perfectly still, quiet and afraid, inside the dark bedroom. First she caught her breath, then she tried to figure out the sound.

Rose apples-she finally solved the small mystery. The noise was rose apples dropping onto the bungalow roof.

Jane realized that she was letting herself get a little confused now. Stop it. Grab control.

One of her hands slid along the cool limestone wall. Her cheek pressed lightly against the wall. Long blond hair brushed against it. Her fingers groped along the sloppily laid wallpaper. Ruffles. Air pockets. Then an end to the wall altogether... doorjamb... gritty bathroom tile.

She put her face under the faucet. Soaked herself. Drank some rusty-tasting water. Then she put down the toilet seat cover and sat. Took cigarettes out of her T-shirt pocket. Looked down and saw the dark outline of a book on the floor. All the President's Men. Their bathroom book.

She smoked three cigarettes while thinking about her and Peter's situation. She heard another small noise... beetles flying against the window. Woof!

Like getting punched in the stomach. She decided she ought to be out where she could at least watch the front window.

The big window at the front of the bungalow was showing a crystal-clear black-and-white movie.

No more couple walking on the beach... thin, smoky, 'purplish clouds drifted past a full moon. Old, shriveled night clouds. A low line of frothy white surf running around the cove, outlining it like whipped cream.

She'd been all right until Peter called, Jane started to think....

A lot of men had ogled her around the inn. Even tall blond ones. Even tall blond ones who might look a little English....

Nice girl from the capital of South Dakota, she thought.... Boyfriend accidentally witnessed a murder. Just a glance. No more than ten seconds! Must be an Affied Hitchcock film... macabre throughout, ghoulish like Frenzy, but a happy ending. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant clink champagne glasses, then kiss.

Thinking about the tall blond Englishman again. The Tall Blond Englishman. Couldn't keep her hands from shaking now. Funny-odd, that is. He'd been drinking by himself on the Pineapple Terrace. A very good-looking, serious man. Nice tan. Black wraparound glasses that made her think of the Mediterranean. She thought he'd been watching her while she taught a little girl how to get water out of her ear. "First, hop on the foot opposite the clogged-up ear. Here-like this, silly-face. Now. Bang the side of your head. Bang it good.

After that, she was sure the blond man was following her. Keeping her in sight, anyway. Well, he seemed to be....

Jane looked down at her watch. Glowing red numbers in the dark bedroom: 10:43. An hour and ten minutes had passed since Peter had called. Usually the ride from Coastown took just over an hour. Add five minutes more from Trelawney. Standing there beside the dark front window, she heard another onslaught of apples on the roof. More blasted rose apples.

Then footsteps.

Then a young woman was outside, calling her name at the front door....

And then one of the shuttered windows was being broken down with something sharp md powerful like m ax.

May 7, 1979, Monday

Massacre at Elizabeth's Fancy

CHAPTEREIGHTEEN

The planning is usually interesting. Getting close to the final time is interesting. But the climax, the big kill, was usually something of an anticlimax... not to the victims, of course.

The Rose Diary

May 7, 1979; Mandeville, San Dominica

Monday Morning. The Seventh Day of the Season.

At 4:00 A.M. on the seventh day, Jane's eyes popped open wide.

She saw nothing at first. Then the long shadow of a man sitting by her bed. Then bright afterimages of running men and machetes. And a tall woman who spoke very sweetly, as if she were Jane's best friend.

As she began to scream, a night lamp clicked on. A shiny aluminum lamp nailed to the wall. The man sitting underneath the light was the chief of police. He had a small black pipe stuck in his mouth. A holster and gun were slung over his short-sleeved white shirt.

"Shhhhhhh... you're in the Mandeville Hospital," he whispered to the blond girl. "You're all right. Everything is all right.now." The black man smiled and winked at her, then he clicked the light off.

Jane lay in the dark, shivering badly. Her teeth began chattering, and she started to cry. Thought about Peter. Just wanted to hold tight. Hold tight.

"What is happening?"

She wasn't sure whether she'd said the words out loud orjust thought them loud. She started to shiver; then to cry; then to hug herself because it was so damn awful.

Then she was asleep again.

In her dreams they came to the hospital for her. they came somewhere for her. The two black men. The tall blond man with the wraparound sunglasses. The young woman.... they kept screaming at her to tell them where Peter was.... "I don't know! I don't know! Please don't hurt me."

The heavyset black police. chief smiled at her. He put his forefinger to his lips. Made a little fire in the bowl of his black pipe.

"Shhhh. Shhhh. No one can hurt you now," Dr. Johnson said. Even though the worst day of the season of the machete had begun.

Cape John, San Dominica

Monday afternoon.

Like a white kite in the wind, a seagull swung back and forth high over his head.

Aaaaa! Aaaaa! Aaaaa!

Lying in a buttery n-fidday sun, Damian felt a wonderful calm begin to drift over him. He and Carrie were approaching a definite benchmark now. The last of the island's terrors.

Ah-there was nothing like being in the sun for reviving one's prospects.

He could feel the salt water drying on his face and legs. The hot sun broiled him in a way that made it seem rather fun. For perhaps the five hundredth time, Damian reviewed the final details in his mind. The massacres.

Carrie's, then his own, escape.

There would be no Nickie Handy-style double crosses this time out. No meeting up-with Brooks Campbell or Harold Hill in dark, deserted alley S. All that was left for him now was to set out a last tasty morsel of bait for Great Western Air Transport. Something for King Rat Brooks Campbell to nibble on.

Then a check on the plot's final playing piecea tricky strong-arm killer named Clive Lawson.

Then it was home again, home again, jiggity jog

Mandeville, San Dominica

At 1:00 P.m. a man in a summer sports coat and white hat took a deep breath, then approached an old woman wearing a Red Cross hat who sat at the first-floor reception desk inside the Mandeville Hospital.

"My name is Max Westerhuis," the man announced in an impatient, self-importa ' nt tone. "I'm told I have to come to this desk to get a pass to see Miss Cooke."

The elderly nurse reached into her desk drawer. She took out a plain brown clipboard. She checked a list of visitors cleared to see hospital patients that was written on sheets of paper attached to the board. There was only one visitor cleared for Miss J. Cooke in room 206.

The nurse wrote out a slip for Maximilian Westerhuis, manager of the Plantation Inn.

As the policeman posted at room 206 opened the door for him, the man in the white hat put a finger to his lips. "Miss Cooke," he Said in the same official tone he'd used at the front desk.

"Peter," Jane whispered as soon as he'd closed the door behind him.

She looked very pale and shaken to him. Large gauze bandages were wrapped around her neck and both arms; an intravenous bottle hung over the bed.

Peter went to her and they held each other tightly, saying things that should have been said long before then, expressing feelings they'd both been afraid Of.

- As they finally pulled apart, Jane began to tell him about the du-ee people who'd come to their cottage at the Plantation Inn. How they'd wanted to know where he was hiding. All the things they'd done to try to make her talk.... For his part, Peter told Jane about his surprise visit at Brooks CampbeH's; the Mafia connection; the big blowup that was apparently coming soon.

"Well, what do we do now?" "The first diing-I want to get you out of this hospital. We must be dealing with a black version of the Keystone Kops here. Look at how easily I got in."

"Peter, if they'd been after me-they had me last night. All they wanted to know was where you were.

"That doesn't make complete sense. If you did see him yesterday, they'd want you, too. Wouldn't they? Oh, hell, I don't know what's going on around here.

The young man sat down on the hospital bed. His shoulders began to sag. His neck muscles felt unbelievably tense and twisted.

"Peter, did you see anything that day besides the blond man?"

"I don't know. I don't think I did.... The best solution I can come up with," Peter finally said, "is that we both have to get off San Dominica. I want to try Washington. " He looked at Jane. "Will you meet me there? In a day-a few days. There's a hotel in Washington called the Hay-Adams. It's right across from the White House."

For the first time that afternoon, Jane smiled. "Good. Then we can take this thing right to the top. We can't do any worse than at the U. S. embassy, right?" She kissed him hard, then rested her head on his shoulder. "Darling Max."

Somebody's going to listen to us. It can't be this unbelievably fucked-up everywhere."

Jane smiled again. "Maximilian Westerhuis! God, Peter."

they both started to laugh, hushing each other so the guard wouldn't come in. Then they hugged again, secured their pact to meet in Washington by 7 Wednesday. Peter left the hospital the very same way he'd originally come in.

Much, much too easily.

Coastown, San Dominica

Inside the Princess Hotel, meanwhile, Carrie sat with the gleaming white doors to her loggia flung open wide. Bright sunshine and a sympathetic breeze drifted in. Smells of fresh flowers came up from a pretty glen two stories below.

Carrie stared hard at the garish face looking back at her from the dressing room mirror. She was marginally, begrudgingly satisfied that her face looked about right for what it had to do. A subtle touch of.-Zle-dazzle. Real-hair half-lashes. Close attention to detail, right down to her silver slippers.

Carrie checked her wristwatch. if everything went well, she was about six hours away from Washington now. All she had to do was slip quietly past the police, the CIA, and half the army of San Domimca.

At 1:30 on the dot, Carrie Rose left for Robert Kennedy Airport with her fingers, legs, and eyes crossed. And when she walked into the airport terminal, she discovered that her dressing room preparation had really been quite thorough. She needn't have worried.

She looked like just about every other woman there.

By 2:30 Carrie Rose was on a Pan Am flight out of the Caribbean.

When the three o'clock news from Puerto Rico came on the brassy transistor radio nearby, Damian started to gather up his clothes. The tall blond man put on dark sunglasses, a white deckhand's hat, a white cotton-madras shirt.

At 3: 1 0 he walked into a shabby open-air cafe. The outdoor restaurant ran the length of Cape John Beach on thin, crusty gray pilings-pelican's legs.

From the cafe pay phone, Rose called the American embassy. Receptionist. Male secretary. Put on hold. Three-seventeen. Three twenty-one. Getting slightly humorous. Brooks Campbell finally spoke. "Hello, this is Campbell.

Damian said, "Listen very carefully and don't say a fucking word until I'm finished.... In fiftyfour minutes, at four-fifteen, Colonel Dred is going to comniit his first major act of violence. This will be the final act we've planned for you.

"Rose!... "

"Shut the fuck up!... We expect you to try to stop us from leaving San Dominica after this. But if you do, I'm going to kill you. I promise you, Campbell. Here's to poor Nickie Handy, chump.

"Rose.

Click.

"Goddammit, stop playing games!" Brooks Campbell screamed into the loud buzzing of the telephone.

Shortly after Rose's call, Campbell contacted Harold Hill in Washington.

"AU heff is about to break loose here. I'm going to need a lot of help now. But I'm going to get them, Harry.' f

"I think you will. I really do," said Harry the Hack.

Click.

At 5:30, feeling desperate and confused, Peter Macdonald telephoned Campbell at the U.S. embassy. He was informed by a very official-sounding American man that Mr. Campbell had left for the day. Peter was then told that all Americans were being asked to stay off the streets.

'Mere'd been a massacre.

Click.

EWAbeth's Fancy, San Do'minica

Tyndall's Goat Highway goes nowhere except to a restored nineteenth-century sugar-cane plantation.

alled Elizabeth's Fancy-and when Elizabeth's Fancy closes at four each afternoon, the Goat Highway goes nowhere.

The last bus from the plantation carried the final tour groups back to their hotels. It also brought back a woman ticket taker, a forty-two-year-old bartender-manager from Liverpool, England, and three security guards from Tanner Men.

The bus was a tongue-red-and-black doubledecker manufactured by Rolls-Royce in 1953. Its nickname was Grasshopper.

Grasshopper had a maximum speed of forty-four MPH and misaligned springs that made it appear to hop down the bumpy Goat Highway. Because its second deck was so much higher than the jungle brush, Grasshopper could be seen from five miles away.

In this case, however, the red top half of the bus was being observed from just two miles off.

The three black men standing at the edge of the Goat Highway all held high-powered M-16 rifles manufactured in Detroit, Michigan. Just behind them stood a line of teenage boys. Each boy held a sharp machete knife.

"How'd you compaare dis M-16 an th' old M14?" Colonel Dred was saying to the African.

Kingfish Toone's eyes didn't move away from the dirt road. Right beside him, the Cuban was toeing dust like a stubborn or angry horse. He was looking forward to shooting Dred very much now.

"There is no comparison." The African's deep voice finally came. "The M-16 will strike any target with three times the impact of a conventional rifle. It would shoot straight through a line of five men." The mercenary took a silver bullet out of his shirt pocket. He held the bullet lengthwise between thick, coal-black fingers.

"Still another war toy. Invented by the Americans, I suppose. The shell is coated with plastic. It leaves no stains. Impossible to find with a medical X-ray. Quite diabolical, really. think about it, Colonel Dred.

"Dey cost?" the guerrilla asked. "Th' guns, nah dose bullet. Diabolik bullet you have."

"I don't follow costs very closely. " Toone shrugged. "Perhaps five hundred apiece for the rifles.

"Hyiuuu. " The guerrilla chief shrieked and laughed. Then Dred walked away to make a last check on his soldiers.

In the back of his mind was the delicious thought that within hours he would be more important dm Che, maybe even than Fidel Castro. Something like a black Arafat... holding the sun for ransom instead of oil.

The driver of the red bus, forty-nine-year-old Franklin James, was feeling sweaty and itchy and st of all malcontent, this particularly sweaty afternoon. As the antique double-decker bumped along, he could feel the whole Goat Highway in the palm of his hand. In the shivering black knob of the stick shift.

Jus' what is th' problem now? James talked to himself. Tired of drivin' dis funny-time bus. Eamin' yo' money too easy, hey, mon? What to break yo' ass for it lak nigger? Admit it, mon, yo' got it easy. Admit to yo'self, truth, Franklin....

Just to break the everyday monotony, though, the driver thought he would do something revolutionary today: go left instead of right at the vee in the road about a quarter of a mile ahead. He would take the scenic route instead of the Goat Highway this day. Through the old sugar-cane fields.

Franklin James looked in his rearview mirror and saw straw beach hats and lobster red faces. A pretty blond bitch in a halter top was playing with her tittie straps. There were a few empty seats for a change,too.

At the vee in the road, the bus driver took a left instead of the usual Goat Highway route. As he made the wrong turn, the red-faced manager of Elizabeth's Fancy jumped up in the third seat of the bus.

"This is the wrong road, you idiot bastard. Back it up, boy. Get on the Goat road."

Which Franklin James did with a subservient smile and not a word of protest. Admit it, mon, yo' got it easy.

Most of Dred's men were lying on their stomachs back twenty to forty yards from the dirt road. A few bare-chested boys had shimmied up into coconut trees.

Colonel Dred was paying no attention. Instead the twenty-seven-year-old man watched the burly African and the Cuban.

A man smoking a cigarette and wearing a striped woolen hat shouted to Dred from out of a tree. "Dey comin' 'round in 'bout annudder minute." The soldier slipped his cigarette butt down out of the tree.

Monkey Dred turned and gave a hand gesture to the rest of his guerrillas. The sound of rifles clicked off echoes on both sides of the Goat Highway.

Then Dred put the sleek M-16 to his own cheek. He sighted it very carefully.

Squeezed.

Squeezed.

The whole top half of the Cuban's head splattered. Blood splashed onto tall stalks of grass as far as thirty feet away. Kingfish Toone was thrown forward with his huge black arms stretched out wide, a big dark hole in the back of his khaki shirt. "Bad kind a niggers," Monkey Dred shouted to the soldier in the tree. "Drivin' Cadillac. Warin' perfuume, yo' know.

Besides, the executions had been well paid for by Damian Rose. They'd earned Dred two more precious machine guns.

Speckles of red splashed through a latticework of jungle green. Then Colonel Dred could see the upper deck of the bus again. Sun rays ricocheted off the scaling red roof. Some banana wrens passed by. Every window in the old bus was flung open wide. Americans, Germans, English, and South Americans looked out on handsome mahogany trees, blooniing wild lilies, parakeets.

Jungle, mahn, jungle.

"Ay pretty!" Dred shouted to the treetop birds. Jacamars. Parrots. His adrenaline was flowing like the teeming streets of Trenchtown. The juices made him feel like a Rastafarian superman. Jah. A walking, fast-@ng contradiction.

The teetering double-decker bus had turned down a narrow straightaway less than a hundred yards away. It was coming straight at them, down a tunnel of coconut and fir trees.

Dred's men began to talk to one another. Enthusiastic shouts. Hypertense babble. The red bus was fuzzy and just a little unreal through shimmering waves of heat. High blond weeds fanned away from it like flying hair. Palms and fems loudly scraped the roof and windows. Dred was staring so hard, anticipating so very much, that the bus seemed to stop moving. to freeze on the straightaway.

"Ro-bert," he screamed. "Ro-bert!"

A tiny rifleman with sick yellow eyes and a yellow Che beret came running up beside him. The man's big M-16 rifle made him seem like a child.

"Stay by me, Robert. Now watch closely. I want you to shoot it."

As if the red bus were a charging elephant.

Up ahead, Franklin James watched a young woman and boy step into the Goat Highway. Barefoot, dressed in sun-bleached rags, they stood in the middle of the road, both of them waving excitedly at the bus. James cursed to himself, but he touched his foot to the brakes. He shifted gears and, before the bus stopped fully, had the folding doors crashing open. "Hey, what is it, woman?" the fat black man shouted angrily.

"Yo' can take us to main road?" the woman screamed through the open bus door. "Bway is bahd sick, mon. " The bus driver's face took on a pained look. "Oh, lay-dy! I can't ride no-body not frwn dat plantation, yo 9know. t 9

"My bway is sick!" the black woman screamed. Suddenly a rifle shot crashed through the top right -,corner of the bus windshield. The entire half of the windshield fell back inside the bus.

Franklin James put his foot to the ground, and the Grasshopper bucked and jumped forward..

The hollow popping sound of M- 16 rifles erupted everywhere.

Not thirty yards away from Dred's men, the tall, gawky bus seemed to strike a giant pothole. The bus slid quietly to the center of the road. It seemed to ride on its right tires for a while. Then it swerved sharply to the left.

Franklin James was already dead, bumping back and forth over the steering wheel. People inside the bus were failing out of their seats.

Like an enormous lawn mower, the doubledecker ran over five- and six-foot-high fems, thick brush, small trees. It hit a huge royal palm straight on, and the palm tree tore back through the engine and cab. The tree trunk continued five feet down the aisle, crushing people in the front seats, and then the Grasshopper finally came to a stop.

Gaping holes began to mottle the side of the bus that faced into the firing squad.

On the second level of the bus, the Tanner secunty guards answered the rifle fire with a few pistol shots. When the guards were lucky they managed to hit somewhere in the trees, where Dred's men were systematically destroying the bus. Shooting it to bits.

The heads of dead passengers sat still in several of the open windows. The broken engine had begun to spew thick black smoke. A few of the bus passengers climbed out far-side windows, tried to run, and were shot down. A small blond boy in red shorts lay dead in the grass to one side of the bus. An older man lay beside a big, black front tire. A twelve-year-old girl ran like the horses on her father's farin-a beautiful little girl from Surrey, England-and she was a survivor.

For ten minutes there were shouts and stomachfi-eezing screams from the forty-odd people trapped in the bus. Then there was no sound except for the lazy popping of M-16 rifles.

Colonel Dred and his marksman, Robert, walked to the bus in smoky, devastating silence. As they got up close, parrots and jacamars began to scream in the trees again. The tiny marksman took out a dull black Liberator pistol. The two disappeared into the bus, and more gunshots were fired. A man screamed inside the bus. Another muffled gunshot sounded inside.

When they came out again, Dred waved to the four boys standing up on the Goat Highwav. Each of the four had a long, scary fright wig. Each held a shiny field machete with a red neckerchief tied around the hilt.

At the same time, the other rebel soldiers were getting up out of the brush; dropping down from the trees. The guerrillas began to light up ganja sticks, regular cigarettes, cheap cigars. Only a few of them came forward to examine the bus.

It was Dred himself who saw the beige-and-green shadow moving through the thick backwoods behind the red bus. He recognized the face of Damian Rose, a pink smudge among the trees and bright green bushes. A shiny white smile.

"Aaagghh, Rose. Jeezus, mahn! " The young guerrilla screamed as he realized what was going to happen. He tried to turn away.

The first rifle shot pierced the -back of his head; it came out where the black man's nose and mouth had been. The wound was very hot, and for a split second Dred's eyes and nose seemed to be on fire. The ground rushed up at his face, and then it all disappeared on him. He was falling down a pitch-black hole that echoed his screams-R. o... s... e...

By 6.-OO P.m. that night, the president o f the United States knew about it.

Five members of the Cabinet Committee to Com- bat Terrorism-the chief of staff; the assistant to the presidentfor national security affairs; the press secretaryfor the president; the secretary of defense; and the director of the CIA-sat with him in the Oval Office of the White House.

The director of the CIA briefed the chief executive on selectedfacts about Lathrop Wells, Nevada; the Forlenzas; Isadore Goldman; Damian and Carrie Rose; San Dominica. His primary recommendation at the moment was that the contract operators Dam- ian and Carrie Rose be eliminated immediately. Searched out and destroyed.

"You're shitting me, " the president of the United states said after he'd heard the entire story. He looked around his Oval Office. At the chief of staff. At his press secretary. At his assistantfor national security. "Somebody tell me this man is shilling me. That's an order."

From 6.30 in the evening on, the world's 7'V and radio stations interrupted their regular programm ing to announce that the lefust San Dominican rebel, Colonel Dassie Dred, had been killer during an attack on a tourist bus some twenty-five miles east of the capital city of Coastown. At 8:00 P.m. Carrie arrived in Washington, D.C. Now the tricky stuff began.

PART 11 i

The Perfect Escape

May 8, 1979, Tuesday

. Bay of Pigs

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Damian and I had violent arguments about ' the Escape. My point of view: get out of the Caribbean immediately.

Damian's: finish the operation as it should be finished. Take care of Campbell and Harold Hill right. Stop them from coming after us.... That was how Macdonald became important. Also how Damian got the idea for what happened in Washington.

The Rose Diary

May 8, 1979; Fairfax Station, Virginia

Tuesday Morning. The Eighth Day of the Season.

The morning after the massacre at Elizabeth's Fancy, Mark Hill took a fast shower, combed his thick blond hair, then put on a freshly washed Wash ington Redskins sweatshirt and neat bell-bottom jeans.

The handsome teenager looked in the mirror over his bureau and gave himself an "okay" sign and a broad, comical wink.

Downstairs, he could hear his mother busily making breakfast. Fried-bacon smells were drifung upstairs. Bacon, and also fresh coffee, which Mark hated with a sincere passion.

The fourteen-year-old quickly brushed his teeth and used the family Water Pik. Then he took the front stairs in three broad jumps. He strode casually into the kitchen, unconsciously imitating a pro foothall quarterback named Bill Kilmer.

Bright sunshine streamed through the open back door and the saffron-curtained window over the sink. A man and a woman in white terrorist masks stood in front of the sink, on either side of his mother. Each of the two held a long-barreled black revolver.

"You just listen to what these people say." Car- ole Hill spoke in a calm voice that made the boy wonder how his mother had gotten so brave so quickly. Carrie Rose watched the boy through narrow eye slits 'm her mask. "That's right, Mark. We're not here to hurt either of you. Sit down there at the table. Your mother will make you some breakfast.

Never once taking his eyes off the intruders, the teenager slowly sat down.

Carole Hill walked over to her stove slowly and cautiously. Her hands trembled as she started to turn her bacon with a table fork. Little spits of grease flew up at her apron and face. "My husband will be home soon, " she said matter-of-factly. "He just-"

Carrie smiled under her mask. "Carole Ann, your husband isn't even in the country right now. Relax. Cook us all a nice breakfast, okay? We're going to be spending the day together, it looks like.

The man with her, a New York gumnan by the name of Kruger, sat down across from Mark at the breakfast table. "Pay it no mind," the man said. Doesn't concern you, Mark."

"How do you know my name?" was the boy's first question.

"Oh, we're friends of your father's." Carrie smiled.

CHAPTERTWENTY

One girl's candid evaluation of the CIA's Caribbean Account in '75.... Basic ineptitude down to a formal science. An inordinate paranoia about Fidel Castro, and/or Moscow. Paranoia about potential trouble in Puerto Rico. Paranoia over Cuban troops in Africa. A gross overestimation of Dassie Dred. A correct evaluation of Joseph Walthey as a potential strongman pig and ally....

Mostly bad information of all things. Bad intelligence....

The Rose Diary

Coastown, San Dominica

That same morning in Coastown, forty-four-yearold Harold Hill yawned so that his jaw cracked.

He stretched his thin arms and made eating noises with his lips, teeth, sticky furred tongue. He took off his hom-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.

Harold Hill then rearranged himself on a sighing wing chair inside the U.S. embassy. He glanced through an army report on Peter Macdonald: "Peter Stillwell Macdonald. born Grand Rapids, Michigan; 1950. Son of a U.S. Army colonel and a high school mathematics teacher. Youngest of six sons. U.S.M.A. 1969-71. Honorable Discharge. Above-average intelligence. Inferiority complex caused in part by older brothers' successes.... Mixes well but prefers to stay alone.... No close friends.... Subject of homosexual probe ('73-all branches): negative.... Strong combat skills but ambivalent attitude about current war. A model top sergeant.... " Tossing aside that report, Hill looked back at a yellow legal pad where he'd been free-associating about the Roses. He looked at a black folder marked "Secret-Sensitive." Then back at the legal pad. It was 5:00 A.M., and Hill hadn't slept since six the previous morning.

At the top of the yellow, blue-lined sheet, "Carrie & Damian Rose" was centered and underlined in red. The rest of the paper was covered with neat black handwriting in orderly columns. Ideas, phrases, names, reminders... fourteen items.

1. Tall. Blond. English-looking. Has shopped at Harrods.

2. St. Louis Hotel in Paris... Nickie Handy shot by woman in nearby bistro. Carrie?... Handy used by Campbell (1972). Coincidence?

3. Carrie: fair-haired; supposed to be a stunner; tall... beware! Don't be a chauvinist, shithead! Carrie is as dangerous as Damian.

4. Husband and wife squabbles... absolutely.... So What?

5. Dr. Meral Johnson. Street-smart. Useful? How best?

6. Peter Macdonald should be found today. Cajoled. Useful!!!!

7. Marines from South America. Colonel Fescoe. Hindrance!!

8. Prop planes going out at night. Marijuana to New Orleans. Shoot down? Shoot down.

9. Coast Guard can blockade island effec- tively.... Search private craft especially.... Would Goldman help Roses escape? Think so....

10. Can't let Joseph Walthey go crazy executing Dr-ed's people. This is important.*****

11. Why Damian Rose phone calls to Campbell? Important!

12. Clue in their organized disorganization also. Important!... Stu Leedman coming from L.A.... Czech: killing team on Rose's level on loan from Interpol. Hindrance!!

13. Lucky 13! Damian probably a psycho.

14. Pattern suggests bigger plays to come. Anti- pattern suggests no further plays.... Operative word is "play." Have to learn to "play," or lose this one in grand style.********

Harold Hill got up and paced around the large oak-and-brass embassy office. VIP office: like presidential suite at famous hotels. Private bath, breakfast nook. The nuts!

There was no way the Roses were going to get off San Dominica, he considered.

No, there was a way, plenty of ways-but Hill was trying to convince himself that Damian Rose had programmed himself to make a mistake before he took one of them.... The telephone calls to Brooks Campbell. Those were the key. Crank calls!

Harold Hill didn't have very much to go onbut he did have something: Damian Rose was a tall, blond, English-looking megalomaniac. With luck he could be had.

Hill finally put his cream suit jacket over his arm and walked out of the big, cool embassy mansion. He believed that he'd made a beginning, at least. A good night's work.

A big red sun was just coming over the green hills that rose high over the perfect little city and the sea. It was a loud sun -that would eventually give Hill a headache that day.

Two badly trained soldiers stood out by the front gates, laughing and poking at each other. they rerninded Hill how little the people of these countries ever got involved in the realities of their situation.

As he passed by the soldiers, Hill tipped his Panama hat and smiled. As he did so, he automatically thought of the famous poster mocking Richard Nixon. Why is this man smiling? the poster read. Why indeed?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

If everything went as Damian expected it to, we were to meet at the Hilton Hotel in Morocco on or around May 12. If not, not.

The Rose Diary

Cap Foyle, San Dominica

At a quarter past five on May 8, an old James Taylor song was blasting in Peter's head-"Sweet Baby James." He was also being mesmerized by the sight of twenty black soldiers guarding the remains of the bus from Elizabeth's Fancy.

The young American watched the quiet, terrible scene for ten or fifteen minutes, planted it forever in his war atrocities file, then left to forage around for something to eat.

For some disconnected reason, he had the Super Six on his mind: Neddy, Huey, Deli Bob, Bernie,

Tailspin Tommy. And little Pete-Little Mac. As he rode away from the ambushed bus, Peter couldn't help thinking that in his humble opinion, he was way, way out of his league right now. Even in Special Forces they didn't prepare you for this kind of miserable shit.

At about that same time, Damian Rose pinched a blue mite off the sleeve of a pale sand overshirt.

At 5:30 A. M. he stood tall and wide awake inside a phone booth in the neolithic farining village of Cap Foyle. Rose asked for number twenty-six and waited for his connection.

Two sleepy Cap Foyle residents, an old man and a girl, were already pushing skeletal bicycles along the town's dusty streets. Two cross streets down from them was the sharp green Caribbean.

"Hello... I say hello-"

Damian cut off Brooks Campbell by shouting at the sleepy-sounding man-screaming at the top of his lungs into the telephone. "You only have eight hours, asshole! Eight hours to decide to stop chasing us. to live up to your side of the contract.... If you're looking for us by midnight tonight, I guarantee both you and Hill will be sorrier than you can dream. I guarantee it! You have until midnight to be intelligent for once in your pitiful little greasestain lives. "

Damian then hung up the phone. The tall blond man walked back to his car, humming a favorite tune-"Lili Marlene." He was beginning to enjoy his escape plan.

Meanwhile, twelve rather striking-looking men were making their separate ways to San Dominica. they were coming from Miami and New York. From Acapulco, Caracas, San Juan. Each of the twelve was an expensive male model. From the Ford Agency. From Wilhelmina Men. From Stewart and zoii.

They'd all been hired by Carrie the week before. to pose for brochures for the new Le Pirat Hotel and for the Dragon Reef Condominium Homes. they'd been specially selected off composite and head sheets at rates of $500 plus expenses per day.

The peculiar thing was that all twelve men were between six feet two and six feet four.

All were s@ngly blond.

All looked terribly, terribly English.

Part two of the curious adventure had begun. The perfect escape.

CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO

Casinos are now being built by all the big motels. The island will have one bad season. Maybe two. Maybe even three. But then it will boom like nothing even they can imagine. The island has four times the area of Nassau and New Providence. It'stwice as beautiful as Jamaica. It should become Monte-Carlo West.

The Rose Diary

These days it is fashionable to be against the Americans. it is my hope to be in the vanguard of a countermovement, which, I suspect, could be equally fashionable one day. That is-to be for the Americans.

Joseph Walthey

Coastown, San Dominica

Tuesday Afternoon.

While all this was going on, Brooks Campbell sat hunched over a steaming pot of very strong, very good Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. During the morning and early afternoon of May 8, the young CIA man made person-to-person, heartto-heart telephone calls to some of the best homicide men in the world. In the big office next door, Harold Hill was doing much the same thing on a slightly larger scale.

Calls went out to Mr. Alexander Somerset, the comniissioner of crime at Scotland Yard; to Edward Mahoney in the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington; to the Assassination Bureau in Paris. Calls went to the biggest crime men in West Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada....

The subject was top priority and very confidential, the conversations made clear:

"A very large, very private manhunt is now being conducted throughout the Caribbean and South America. The objects of the hunt are two slithery white soldiers of fortune who have taught a ragtag band of guerrillas how to fight and think like MauMaus, the PLO, and the Japanese army. Who have, among other things, massacred forty-nine civilians

on board a bus. The names are Damian and Carrie Rose. "

The slip-catch was that the United States was handling the search like a top-secret, national security matter. The clear implication: Somebody had goofed again in the Caribbean. The exact nature of the mistake remained a secret. A top secret.

Before it was over, though, some wisenheimer at Interpol had nicknamed the operation Bay of Pigs H. By Sunday that slogan was a headline in London's Observer.

Beginning unofficially at 6:00 P.m. on May 8, officially at 9:00 A.M. on the ninth, a straight-faced, very serious attempt was made to take the eightyone-by-thirty-nine-mile island of San Dominica, turn it upside down, and shake, shake, shake it like a child's piggy bank. The long-shot hope was that both Roses and Peter Macdonald would tumble out into the waiting arms of Brooks Campbell and Harold Hill.

Beginning at nine, government sound trucks began to rumble through major cities and the - surrounding countryside. These trucks broadcast the politest lilting-voiced descriptions of a tall, blond, English-looking man; of a young American man, Peter Macdonald.

Meanwhile CCF soldiers and U.S. Marines from Georgia and Florida searched the beaches, the grasslands, even the island's large, steamy rain forest: West Hills. An exhaustive house-by-house, hotelby-hotel search was begun in the cities of Coastown, Port Gerry, and Cape John. Also, every country represented on the Elizabeth's Fancy bus sent some kind of special help: Germany; the United States; England; Canada; France; Israel; Trinidad; Jamaica; Argentina; Texas. Ballistics, riot, and interrogation experts were hurried in from New York and Washington. More federal marshals were flown in to help keep order in the cities. Headhunters, including a special team called "Czech"-came from as far away as Eastern Europe. Bounties totaling more than $150,000 were set. learning that "an English-looking man" was being sought, a small group was set up at Interpol's Secretariat in St. Cloud, France. Information known gunrunners and mercenaries was collated and sent out from Interpol's Criminal Records Department. Extensive checks were made on the dead men, Kingfish Toone and the Cuban, Blinkie Tomas.

Through all of this, Campbell and Harold Hill's "lead" on the Roses was never once questioned. Even the bitterest of police-world cynics wouldn't speculate and couldn't come up with what had actually happened in the Caribbean.

By early night of the first day, the hunt had turned up eight tall blond men. Two-thirds of the twelve.

Looking in on the eight-all blond, all handsome as hell, all between six feet two and six feet fourFederal Marshal Stuart Leedman of lose Angeles got the feeling that somebody wasn't telling him everything he needed to know about this grisly case. Something was as fishy as San Diego Sea World, Stu Leedman was thinking.

"Now what do you do for a living?" he asked Antoine Coffey, a wispy blond who had listed his address as the World of Free Spirits.

The blond model seemed confused by the question. "A living?"

"Yeah," Stu Leedman said. "What do you do for money, Antoine? How do you pay the rent? Get money to go to the movies?"

Coffey smiled suddenly. "Oh, that," he whispered. "thhodomy, you mean."

Marshal Stuart Leedman stood up in the quiet examination room and screamed at the open door. "Who ordered in all these blond faggots?" His voice carried up and down the serene, dignified hallway of the U.S. embassy. "What thefuck, Jesus Christ, shit is going on around this pisshole?"

It was every bit as maddening and confusing as the machete murders themselves. More so, because it cwne on top of them... which was exactly the way Damian wanted it.

Port Gerry, San Dominica

Tuesday Evening.

His nose pressed against the cool green glass of the number 9 bus window, Peter watched a row of flowered shirts drift by on Station Street. Stranger in Paradise, he thought.

He saw pink-and-purple shirts like the Spanish in big cities always wore. Leather mushroom caps and tiny fedoras. Black wraparound sunglasses. San Dominican country boys trying to look like the Tonton Macoutes.

People seemed to be forever waiting for buses around San Dominica, Peter had begun to notice. The Elizabeth's Fancy bus massacre was mindblowing when you thought about it like that. It was like attacking an interstate highway in the United States. Severing a main artery.

Black women in homemade dresses and sandals were pressed up closer to the station. A nest of young conchie girls. "Queen bees," they called them around Coastown.

As the number 9 bus started to brake, Macdonald put his hand on the Colt.44 under his shirt. His heart started to thump.... Peter had begun to imagine the tall blond man waiting around every corner, behind every palm tree. Like some slick, handsome bogeyman. Waiting just for him....

The bus station was a wooden shack covered with antique beer and Coke signs worth more than the building itself. Stopping in front, the number 9 bucked and shivered like an old belly dancer. All the people and livestock being transported inside woke up suddenly. Chickens squawked and flapped red-and-white wings like fans. A goat started kicking the seats, and an old black man started. kicking the goat.

"Ay maum in dat blue dress!" a Rude Boy shouted out a bus window.

There was a loud whooshing of steaming hot air, and the driver said something Macdonald couldn't follow. People started walking off the bus, though, and Peter guessed that he was there.

This hole-in-the-wall must be the summer capital of Port Gen-y.

Eating a thirty-cent meat pie from the station canteen, Peter climbed a dark street with no sidewalks. With dreary two- and three-story limestone buildings on either side.

The pie smelled like bad breath, the street smelled like human sweat. Peter's body felt as if it would collapse pretty soon.... The last time he remembered feeling so bad was when he'd had dysentery in Thailand.

He was feeling lonely as hell, too. Thought about Jane constantly.

The first time he'd seen her at the Plantation Inn, 'd thought she was trouble. Quiet-only with a bad dose of New York city smug... quick wiseass front. Shooting down every guy who said hello to her at the inn. In Peter's mind she was a blond version of Ali MacGraw. Trouble.... One week- end, though, he'd asked her if she wanted to go on a cross-island trip with him. See the West Hills' jungle. See the beaches on the other side. And surprise! She'd said sure.... Twenty-four hours later the two of them still hadn't stopped talking. An amazing day of straight talk about each other. Striking chords in each other like crazy. Strangers, practically. Crying together before the first day was over. Huddled together on a dark, deserted beach called Runaway... because they'd both been so damn lonely. Because there'd been so many things they'd wanted to tell somebody....

Halfway up the hill, Peter saw a sign: RENT. Another sign: ROOMS; it showed a little black angel sleeping on folded hands.

A doorway, at the crest of the hill read WELCOME, and that seemed just about right to Peter.

A tall goateed man and a boy sat at a buckling table covered with dominoes, in the foyer.

"Yes, mon?" The older fellow spoke. A soft, serious voice, much more businesslike than Peter expected from the look of the place from outside.

"I need a room, please. I'm very tired."

The black man looked at Peter strangely. Shrugged. Then he went to a little school desk, where he scrawled a line in a red ledger. He took six dollars in advance for the room.

"Dis bway will take yo' up. Yo' be served breakfas' in de momin', mon. "

The young boy pointed to a dark stairway. Then he walked ahead of Macdonald, holding a candle in a soup dish.

The boy began to whisper to Peter as they climbed the stairs. His small candle slowly revealed the hotel, like in a murder mystery.

"T'marra yo' cum fishin' in me fadder boat, mon. Catch grouper. Lotsa big snappers, too."

Peter suddenly started to laugh when they reached the top of the stairs. "I'm sorry. " He turned to the boy. "I'm not laughing at you. I can't go fishing tomorrow, though."

"Too bad, mon. Yo' missin' good shit."

Peter and the black boy turned into a slanting, lopsided hallway with unpainted doors on both sides of a long, tattered runner. A dim light shone at the other end of the hall. A black telephone sat on the floor under the light. Suddenly Peter understood that this was an all-black hotel. Welcome. Inside his room, he hid his wallet between the rusty pipes of the sink. He bumped his head hard on the pipes and felt strangely, ridiculously exhilarated. For a minute he even forgot about the tall blond man. The butcher.

Then he just sat on the bed with his head propped up so he faced the door. With the Colt revolver lying across his boxer shorts. Listening to the rickytick rhythms of reggae out in the streets; listening to pigs rooting in the hotel's backyard.

Before he could sleep, he had the urge to go back out into the moldy hallway. He picked up the black telephone and asked for number 107. He got through to a night operator with a beautiful lilting voice. Nighthird. Then to a groggy, very distant-sounding woman. Then to Jane.

"Hiya, Laurel." Peter's face lit up with a sleepy smile. "This is Oliver Hardy speaking. I think I'm going crazy, babe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Our strategy for Brooks Campbell was a simple one: we tried to give him too many choices and produce decision stress.

Harold Hill was a completely different problem. We went right for Hill's balls.

The Rose Diary

Fairfax Station, Virginia

At 2:30 in the morning, two Virginia state troopers, James Walsh and Dominick Niccolo, tramped across the dewy back lawns of a big white house way out in the sticks.

A nearby neighbor had reported that something strange was going on at the house. What sounded Re screams for help.

Around at the back, the policemen discovered that the kitchen door wasn't locked. Not all that unusual for the rural community of Fairfax Station. Not usual, though.

Inside the kitchen they were greeted with the loud ticking of an electric clock. The hum of a refiigerator. The indistinct sounds of an empty, or sleeping, house.

The kitchen was lit by an orangish night-light over the sink. Several coffee cups and half a box of Dunkin' Donuts were sitting on the kitchen table. The remains of half a dozen sandwiches.

Dom Niccolo turned on the hall light and called out in a high-pitched tenor's voice. "Hello. Is anyone home? This is the Virginia State Police." No answer.

The two men continued to walk through the dark house, turning on lights. Calling out, "Is anyone home?"

A standard lamp in the living room was already on. As they entered the comfortably furnished room, they were startled by the loud crashing of the refrigerator making ice.

"That son of a bitch. " James Walsh grit his teeth.

The troopers heard another noise. A young black retriever came running downstairs, wagging its tail and jumping up on the two men, licking them.

"Pup scared the shit out of me, too. " Walsh grinned.

"Jesus Christ, Jimmy." Dom Niccolo knelt to look closer at the dog. "She has blood all over her side. Look at this, Jimmy."

Both men unholstered their sidearms.

"This is the Virginia State Police! " Niccolo called from the foot of the stairs.

"We better get some more help here," Walsh whispered. Niccolo motioned for him to shut up. "Come on. IV

Dominick Niccolo, then James Walsh, headed up the shag-carpeted stairway. Both men had their guns pointed up into the dark hallway above.

Right at the top of the sWm they found a woman.

Carole Hill was barefoot, dressed in a flowered blouse and white walking shorts. Blood was caked on her face and chest. A pool of blood was on the carpet beside her.

Two bedrooms down the hall, James Walsh found a teenage boy.

Mark Hill was inside his clothes closet. The boy was gagged and tied up with a telephone wire. But at least he was alive.

In the master bedroom, Dominick Niccolo was calling the trooper barracks in Alexandria. "The house is on Shad Stream Road," he said into a pink princess telephone. "Belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Harold Hill. The husband doesn't seem to be here.... Johnny, you won't believe this, but there's a three-foot machete stuck in the poor woman's heart. Jimmy Walsh is up here puking in the hallway. Hurry up, will you?.

The machete murders had come to America. Almost to Langley. Just fourteen miles from the White House. The warning couldn't have been any clearer.

May 9, 1979 Wednesday

Stalk

Tall

Blond

Man

CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR

From the Rose Diary

In December of 1978 1 had wired, then telephoned, our last important player-an expensive English shooter named Clive Lawson. At that time, Lawson was buying and selling cocaine and fourstar pornography in North Miami Beach, Florida.

During our eventual phone conversation, I told Lawson that Sefior Miguel Alvarez of Caracas (Pietra Forte) and Anthony Patriarca of Miami (Cosa Nostra) were my sponsors; that I was interested in purchasing a large stock of 16-millimeter films I heard he had, or could get.

"Do you have anything that might stimulate older gentlemen?" I asked him over the phone. "Large, private screenings for older gentlemen?"

Lawson said that he might have something. He didn't know. He didn't do business over the phone.

On the fifteenth of December, we met in the ry unlikely Poodle Bar at the Fontainebleau Hotel.

For our meeting, the English killer was wearing a wrinkled white shirt. A funky plaid sports jacket. Thick, black-rimmed glasses that were so squarelooking, I couldn't quite believe them.... Because, you see, Clive Lawson was an exceptionally handsome man. A little like Michael Caine from a distance. A lot like Damian.

He ordered Tanqueray with a twist, and I had something chic like Campari. Both of us played our parts for a while, then I simply announced to him that I was Carrie Rose.

After that admission, we talked about the Congo and Southeast Asia-places where we'd both worked and vaguely heard of each other. We talked about how Clive had fallen into the pornography business through the Pietra Forte-the so-called Latin-American Connection. We talked about Darnian and me.

Then, as factually yet vaguely as possible, I exlained something about San Dominica to the English killer. "As a further introduction," I said at the end of my opening gambit, "I have to tell you that we can't let anyone in on the total picture down there. Like who holds the contract. That's rule number one.... On the other hand, we're offering very large fees for peripheral work that shouldn't be all that hard.

The green eyes behind Lawson's black-rimmed glasses sparkled like large emeralds. He had a relaxed, confident manner that I was beginning to like. "My favorite sort of work," he said. "Do go on."

"For one week in May," I continued, "your job will be to lead the San Dominican police on a wildgoose chase all over the island. That's where your time in the Congo fits in nicely for our purposes. It's also where you earn your money."

Lawson's eyebrows arched a little. "Will I be shooting at people? Or getting shot at?"

"If you're careless, you'll get shot at, I'm sure. The usual ground rules apply, Clive. There will be at least two hits for you. Probably military targets. Lower-echelon assholes." The tall blond man smiled. He understood perfectly. At least he thought he understood: he was to run cover for our escape.

"How much?" he asked next.

"Fifty thousand dollars."

Lawson started to laugh. "No haggling, ay? I don't even get a chance to try and bargain you up. All right, I think so.... How about sixty? I assume I have to get my own behind out of there.

"Sixty is fine."

"Money in advance, of course."

"Of course. "

I laid it right out in front of the English killer. A fat brown envelope on the Fontainebleau bar.

Damian and I had just purchased one of the most expensive pigeons in the history of crime. One of the keys to our getting away with murder.

On the morning of May 8, 1979-Tuesday-we let our pigeon fly. We had Clive Lawson make a big kill, while impersonating Damian.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE

Behind every successful woman, there's a big prick.

The Rose Diary

May 9, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica Wednesday morning The Ninth Day of the Season.

Harold Hill hadn't slept well the night of the eighth.

At 5:30 in the morning he called Brooks Campbell's home in Coastown. Yet another bizarre phone call for poor Campbell.

"We have to get that kid Macdonald," Hill blurted out with no introduction whatsoever-as if he and Campbell had been carrying on the conversation all night. "For all we know now, we could have Damian Rose locked up already. We can't identify him by ourselves."

Brooks Campbell tried to wake himself up in a hurry. Hill was saying something that sounded important. Hill was saying something....

"We, uhh... need someone who knows what Rose looks like," Campbell finally managed.

"Exactly," Harold Hill said. "So let's concentrate on Macdonald as much as we can today."

The configurations changed a little at 8:00 A.M. At eight Langley reached Hill with the news about his wife.

Langley didn't understand, though. Carole Hill's murder didn't make any sense.

Harry the Hack understood. Either he got Damian Rose, or Damian Rose would get him.

Port Gerry, San Dominica

That morning Peter woke with the bright Caribbean sun streaming in two windows, exploding on a mirror nailed over the sink.

A doctorbird stood on one of the windowsills, pecking at wood splinters.... The velvet, skullcapped head eyed the sleepy-faced man coldly, sneezed, then resumed its noisy woodworking.

"Hey. Be sociable or beat it," Peter said to the bird. He was feeling better-okay, human, anyway. Something about the hotel room, all the sunlight probably, the nearby water, reminded him of his family's place up on Lake Michigan. In daylight the hotel was both pleasant and pleasantly ridiculous. There were different patterns of tacky wallpaper on three of the four walls, but he could also see a wide lane of cherry blue sea without getting out of bed.

"God, throw me a crumb," Peter whispered to the open window.

Sitting yogi style on the rumpled gray sheets, the ex-West Point man in him wrote out a formal battle plan on the back of a single postcard he found in the nightstand.

Rockefeller resort (Caneel Bay).

Fly Martinique? St. Thomas?

New York City... transfer to Washington.

Senator Pflanzer. State Department? Washington

Post? Janie flight out.

Fish 'n Fool.

The Great Escape... the pretty good escape, anyway.

There was a sharp rap at the hotel room door, and Peter's stomach did a dramatic elevator-shaft drop. He grabbed the Colt.44 under his bedsheets.

A pretty brown girl with a full breakfast tray peeked into the room. "Breakfus, Sir."

"Oh, man." Peter moaned. "I just woke up about thirty seconds ago." He tried to smile. "It's okay. C'mon.

The girl had brought white toast with no crust. Enough marmalade and guava jelly for several loaves of bread. Steaming coffee in a child's thermos that showed cartoon pigs and a leering wolf.

Peter could see the tips of the girl's breasts as she put down the food. Pretty swaying breasts. Pretty brown legs. A nice, maidenish bum. The girl's thin brown hands moved smoothly on the plastic dishes.

Watching her work, Peter realized that he hadn't really spoken to anyone in a day and a half-not in person, anyway. Hi, there, he heard several times in his mind. I'm feeling a little nuts right now. Sit down. Have some of your good coffee there....

Peter said nothing, though. He watched the girl walk back across the room. A truly lovely little ass, Hearthreaking smile-travel poster material.

"Your breakfus gettin' cold." She smiled at the door. Then she left. Peter chewed his toast and watched the songbird, unexpectedly hard and alive. And a little more afraid because of it.

Shortly after eleven he changed into a secondhand muslin workshirt; brown chinos; a floppy blue hat.

It was a working disguise he hoped would work just one more time for him.

At quarter past he left the tiny hotel-the Welcome. Off to find a boat called the Fish 'n Fool.

Peter knew that the boat regularly brought guests back and forth from the expensive Rockefeller resort at Caneel Bay. From Caneel Bay he could take a prop plane to another island with safe flight connections to New York and Washington. Once he was in Washington... well, at least he wouldn't be in San Dominica. Someone was going to listen to him and Jane in Washington. His father had an old friend, for one thing-Senator Pflanzer. Peter himself knew an army general at the Pentagon....

It was going to be weird when it hit the fan in America, Peter started to think. It was going to be devastating, in fact.

Whoever hired the blond mercenary at Turtle Bay was in for a hell of a big surprise.

Around 12:15 Peter was floating on an adrenaline high.

It was close to the feeling he'd always gotten on afternoon patrols in Asia. No-man's-'Nam. Where he'd invented new ways to block out as much shit as possible. to drift. Go with the flow.

All the world a little grainy, he was concentrating hard on a handsome black dude collecting stubs at the stem of the Fish 'n Fool. The dude was wearing a shocking-pink T-shirt; short-shorts; tightly wound coral bracelets and a necklace. He didn't look as if he would be any trouble, but Peter braced himself anyway.

"Parlez-vous _franqais?" He grinned big babygrand piano teeth at Peter. "Nope. You're American, right?"

"New York City. West Sixty-third Street Peter lied so automatically, acted so well, it scared him a little. "We leave around twelve-thirty?"

"Twelve-thirty on the button." The young black kept his smile like a good trouser crease. "Give or take five minutes or a half hour for some of my lost turista friends... John Sampson, Norfawk, Virginah. " The man put out his hand. He widened his smile. "At your beck and call, New York."

Peter finally smiled back at the man. A pseudofag! Jesus. He tilted his floppy hat down and walked up on the main deck.

The afterdeck of the Fish 'n Fool was all polished brass and rich mahogany. It was jam-packed with bronze gods and goddesses. With designersigned T-shirts and Parisian jeans; forty-dollar sunglasses; the smell of benzocaine, camphor, hot burning flesh.

"Hi." Long black hair, jet-set tan. A red string bikini.

"How are you?" Peter smiled. Felt like a boat's chaplain.

Hyellow! " Frizzy, short blond hair. Mirror sunglasses. A man. "Hyellow. "

Seeming bashful and cutely backward, Macdonald made his way to a padded bench half in, half out of the sun. He was a little self-conscious about his hair-shaggy for him; about the inescapable fact that he smelled after his days on the road.

He put his tennis sneakers up on the brass rail. Pulled the floppy hat down over his eyes. Listened to the quick beat of his good, strong heart.

Tomorrow's going to be so unreal, he thought. Washington. No idea exactly where he would start.

'Men, very slowly, Peter drifted far, far away from it all. to a pretty, half-awake place with no guns, no machetes, no slick blond killers. Just Janie. Rest. Escape.

In the meantime the black dude, John Sampson, from Norfolk, Virginia, was up on shore making a phone call.

At 1: 15 the sky was a roaring firefight. Flame throwers. An entire South Vietnamese city on fire.

The hat was still over his face, but Peter's eyes were open wide. He was trying to see through the loose weave of the summer fabric.

For a long moment it was almost as if he were inside a large, packed, American sports arena. A low crowd murmur echoed all around him. As if were sitting in the bleachers during a brief lull in a dramatic World Series game. Tiger Stadium. Mickey Lolich on the mound. Everything but the hot-dog men.... "Mr. Macdonald." Crowd murmur. "Good afternoon, Peter." Crowd murtnur.

Clammy and dry tongued, with a disgustingly sour taste in his mouth, Peter slid back the hat. He wasn't properly prepared to believe the things he saw in the blinding sunlight.

A crowd, largely blacks, was being held back on the dock by CDS soldiers. Fifty people, maybe a hundred, were all straining to watch the Fish 'n Fool. Policemen carrying old-fashioned rifles were running single file onto the yacht.

Close up, Macdonald tried to focus on John Sampson from Norfolk, Virginia. Then on the island police chief.

On a gray-haired American man he didn't recognize. Finally, on Brooks Campbell. White linen suit. Hom-rinimed sunglasses that were too big for him. Handsome as ever....

Suddenly Peter was very tired, unbelievably weary. His head began to swim; his heart beat so hard and fast, it scared the living shit out of him.

"Good afternoon," Campbell repeated.

"You have to come with us," the black police chief said. "There's nothing to worry about.,,

Now there was a Bob Hope one-liner that should have gotten a laugh, Peter thought. Instead he just blinked at the four men. His mind reeled like three windows in a slot machine... Blond Englishmen, Colonel Dred, Cosa Nostra. Not going to get to Washington, Senator Pflanzer...

"Give you a hand, Macdonald."

Grubby, light bearded, he got up by himself. All the jet-setters on the deck were standing around watching now. Whispering in one another's ears how they'd thought he looked funny when he tcuxie on board.

Tourists were aiming fancy cameras into Peter's face. Stupid, grinning bastards. Grinning soldiers with dull black rifles-phony guns that looked as if they had been carved out of soap.

Campbell and the other American man walked right beside him. A very official-looking march. Leading him through the tunnel of ambulance chasers. The other man trying to introduce himself and saying something about Hill, trying to shake Peter's hand.

Then, in the middle of the mad crowd, in the middle of everything, the police chief suddenly swung Peter around. The sweating, heavyset black man stared him right in the face, looked pained and sensitive and a little crazy himself;

"Strange, unaccountable things are still happening on our island," Meral Johnson said to Peter. The man seemed to pause out of confusion, then tears started down the rolls of his cheeks.

"Jane Cooke was killed this morning," Johnson whispered to Peter. "I'm very sorry, mister."

Mandeville, San Dominica

At quarter to ten that morning, two short-haired men in conservative gray suits had taken Jane-in a wheelchair-out a rear-door exit in the Mandeville Hospital.

As the chair whistled along a flowery path with royal palms and plumbago everywhere, the pretty blond girl was starting to smile again. Laughing for the first time in years, it seemed.

"Re@nds me of Bermuda a little," one of the men said. "Reminds me a little of Ironsides," Jane mumbled, a small joke.

The man pushing her wheelchair laughed through his nose. He was James McGuire, fifty-nine, a paunchy, good-natured sort who reminded Jane of Santa Claus with no white beard.

The second man, James Dowd, was just thirtyone. James Dowd was quieter than McGuire, but very nice. Very old-world Irish.

When the wheelchair was out of sight of Mandeville Hospital, deep in rich green brush, James McGuire stopped pushing.

"Okay, Janie. " The red-faced man grinned. "You want to walk, you most surely can walk. You don't want to ride. I sure as heck don't want to push. As the three Americans continued down the path, walking, they began to see more and more colorful birds, and lizards, tree frogs, herinit crabs. An ornery little mongoose was looking for a snake in the grass.

Then the winding path they were on ended abruptly in a flat, breezy field.

Jane, even the two FBI inspectors, let out short gasps of delight and awe. Beyond the field was nothing but shining, royal blue sea.

"You know, I don't think I could be anything but happy in a beautiful place like this. " James Dowd finally entered the chitchatting. "I know that isn't strictly logical."

"That's how you're going to get trapped into staying here. " Jane smiled at the shy, likable man.

You'll quit your job and. James Without a sound of warning, three men suddenly appeared from behind thick brush and rocks. they wore green windbreakers and sports shirts buttoned to the throat.

"Freeze!" one of them screamed.

At the same time another man started to fire an Uzi submachine gun. A tall blond man.

Both Dowd and McGuire fell backward into high grass. Then two of the men jumped on Jane. One held down her flailing arms; the other pressed a wet handkerchief over her nose, mouth, across strands of her long, curly hair.

Understanding that it was all going to happen again, feeling as if she were on the edge of madness, Jane began to let loose amazing screams she wouldn't have believed possible.

they were putting the dripping cloth all over her face, and she was trying to bite the hand holding it. they were pushing her head back hard into the ground. Finally her arm snapped under a man's heavy leg.

Then everything was the suffocating white cloth. Its acrid, choking smell. Like trying to breathe inside a bottle of glue.

She started to give in to it finally. Blue sky, sun, angry or frightened faces flashing over her. The blond Englishman. Here.... She thought of Peter. Started to cry. Felt like a helpless child under their arms, legs, stomachs...

Then Jane bit down hard into a man's ugly, bulbous thumb.

"Don't fight, Jesus Christ," one of the men was yelling at her.

"Christ. She's biting my fucking hand!" the second man screamed.

Hospital people-white-coated doctors, nurses finally appeared on the far side of the field. -Which is when Clive Lawson bent down and shot the struggling young woman in the right temple.

Jane thought it was the tall blond man who bent over her. Not quite as good-looking as she'd thought... she wanted to hold Peter just one more time. Then it all seemed so stupid and awful.... Then it was nothing at all.

May 10, 1979, Thursday

Dragnet

Tight. Thousands

Stopped.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The part I was supposed to play around Washington and Europe from the sixth to the ninth was no part, really. It was all the things I thought I wanted to become....

Sitting in the Gralyn Hotel. Watching a college boy eat a sandwich outside. Thinking that Port-Smithe is nearly perfect. Thinking about the Loner from Coastown. About Nickie Handy. Damian... Bizarre thoughts. Like whether I'll be alive one year from this exact moment.... Am I?

The Rose Diary

May 10, 1979; Washington, D.C. Thursday morning. The Tenth Day of the Season.

At 10:00 A.M. San Dominica time, 9:00 A.M. in Washington, Mrs. Susan Chaplin sat out in the charming garden cafe of the Gralyn Hotel on N Street.

Mrs. Chaplin wore a cream blouse with matching scarf; a navy skirt; blue-and-white spectators; big sunglasses pushed back on her hair.

She was toying with warm baking-powder biscuits, creamed finnan haddie, and a London prostitute who went by the stage name Betsy Port-Smithe.

Mrs. Susan Chaplin was the stage name for Carrie Rose.

"What I have in mind," Carrie explained, watching a Washington hippie eat an impossibly stuffed Blimpie on the other side of beautifully sculpted hedges, "is a little, uhm, unusual...."

"Unusual?" Port-Smithe shrugged. "Well, let's see. I'm too young, and too good, to get beat up for it. That means any sum of money, Mrs. Chaplin... what is unusual?" The tall, sandy-haired woman started to laugh. "You want me to pop out of a charlotte russe at someone's fund-raising dinner?"

Carrie Rose began to laugh, too.

When Port-Smithe began to giggle, some of the other patrons of the garden cafe began to sneak glances at the two of them. The young women were framed against a background of plain green umbrellas and the beginnings of Georgetown. Both looked very muth a part of the expensive, former embassy scene at the Gralyn. From the look of them, the two women might even be sisters. The resemblance was startling.

An attentive waiter slipped away their breakfast plates (fish, bran flakes, porridge). He placed plump grapes and shiny pears at the center of the table.

"Some time in the next week," Carrie (Mrs. Chaplin) continued when the laughing had stopped, my husband, Damian, is due to arrive here in Washington. He's coming directly from an obnoxious, hectic, brutal series of business conferences in the Caribbean.... Damian sells clothes. Expensive women's clothes.

"At any rate, for some private reasons, I can't be here to meet him. At least I can't wait around here for the entire week...."

Port-Smithe sat with a plump grape ready to be popped into her pouty mouth. "And?

"I'd like you to meet Damian for me.... I'd like you to meet him at the St. James, and- stay with him a night if I'm not here. That's all.

"Do you know how much I might charge?" Betsy Port-Smithe asked. "For a week of waiting around?"

"I don't. But I'll pay you two hundred a day. Plus your room at the St. James. Plus your food.... You're free as a bird until Damian comes. You can even work, if you like. I mean, I realize you're very good, Betsy. That's the whole idea.

The London call girl smiled. She thought that she had it figured out now.... This prissy young American wife was looking for some kind of m6nage A trois. She just didn't have the nerve to ask for it.... Well, fine and dandy.

"to Damian. " Port-Smithe raised a cup of coffee with eau-de-vie.

6 6To Damian." Carrie Rose smiled demurely. She was beginning to get a very good feeling about the way things were breaking on her side of the partnership.

That afternoon she had to fly out of Dulles International. to Zurich. to money, power, and those wonderful little munchkins who make the world run so fast and furiously.

Carrie was well aware that -she had only one day left now. Approximately thirty hours to outwit several self-acclaimed geniuses, all of them male.

Coastown, San Dominica

they had carefully hidden Peter Macdonald in an expensive suite at the posh Coastown Golf and Racquet Condominiums.

A minimum of five CIA operatives-top men in the Caribbean account-ate, slept, and read Penthouse and Alistair Maclean novels in the sevenroom suite with him.

As many as eight agents were there the first day. Three times that many rode pink-canopied golf carts around the manicured lawns all through the night. It was an accepted fact that it would take an army to get Macdonald out of there alive. Up to his chest in steaming water in the pink marble bathtub, Peter floated quietly in one of the three condominium bathrooms. There was a strange feeling in his head.... He'd actually felt his mind go snap Wednesday afternoon.

Standing beside the Fish 'n Fool, the black policeman holding him by both shoulders, whispering loudly, "Jane was killed this morning. I'm very sorry, mister.

Snap.

Like breaking a bone, tearing a tendon. Never knowing before that his head was so fragile.

It wasn't exactly that he wouldn't be able to exist without Janie. He would. Had for twenty-odd years before he met her.... It was more that he didn't think he could be completely sane without her....

Sane was something he'd never been particularly good at, anyway. Sane. Coping; content; not painfully lonely; not jumping into West Point because you think it will make your father love you.

Six-fifteen A.M. on his old Timex. Ten days since it all began.

Red sun shooting streaks through a louvered bathroom window. Somebody already playing tennis outside. bonk. bonk... bonk... undoubtedly more agents....

They'd tried awfully hard to be nice. The San Dominican police. CIA. They'd left him pretty much by himself the night before. Not bugged him with too many questions....

He'd sat alone in a dark bedroom in the condominium most of the night. Big New York-cut steak untouched on a tray. Asparagus tips. StraWherry parfait sundae ' Feeling like a little kid left alone in a big house. Having some kind of bizarre Kodachrome-quality memory of the first time he and Janie had been together. A three-day cross-island trip while they were still practically strangers. The kind of great, dopey, romantic stuff that could happen only in a vacation spot. Making him cry, he missed her so badly.

Peter turned his body in the hot, soapy tub. The hot water felt unreal in the rush of air-conditioning. Like lying under the covers with the window open in winter... everything weird, and unreal, and impossible to relate to.

His mind had just gone snap. Snap, crackle, pop.

Peter didn't give a shit. He did: but he didn't.

What he wanted now-what he'd been thinking about since late last night-was how he could get his revenge. Everything was beautifully simple, for a change. Just one guiding light. Get the blond mercenary somehow. Blow his brains out. Just like Jane, only slower.

Sitting in the bathtub, Peter figured out one other important thing. He figured that he probably wouldn't have to worry about looking for the blond Englishman. One day he'd look up-and the blond man would just be there. Just like at Turtle Bay.

At nine o'clock Damian sat inside a Coastown church and carefully studied the place.

A small black boy came up to him, and Damian made the most horrifying face he could imagine. The boy laughed like a banshee. Visitors in the church turned to complain, then they began to smile, too. Meanwhile the hired English killer was accelerating the merry wild-mouse chase around San Dominica. He was also managing to round out Damian's flat and, until then, rather bloodless character. Clive Lawson was getting Rose labeled as a first-class pervert.

Sitting on one of the stonework terraces of the ramshackle Royal Caribbean Hotel, Lawson eyed a cocky little stinkpot chugging up toward Coastown under big mackerel clouds.

In a dilapidated white-wicker chair two feet across from him, a naked, mewing seventeen-year- was expounding some sort of psychedelic ami-Moon-Castaneda gibberish about oric orgasms. The adult-breasted teen had gray streaks in very long black hair. Her face was long, too, spare and striking.

"Like... like saffron and ocher paints... are like mixing on the insides of my eyelids," she said in a whispery voice that made the revelation sexy if nothing else.

Meanwhile she stuck two long fingers deep inside herself.

Clive Lawson watched the girl's fingers work back and forth, back and forth, like two long legs walking in dune grass. Very slowly he masturbated himself with both hands.

The girl's name was Stormy Lascher. Half of her brain had been blasted away by acid and psilocybin; the other half departed while she was working at a massage parlor inside New York's once mediocre Connnodore Hotel.

The blond Englishman, she was discoveringchauvinist and dirty old thirty-three-year-old that he was-also had an interesting (blue-veined, cockyhatted, well-muscled) Capricorn prick. In fact, his standard equipment compared favorably with the slinnner, cuter rocketships on so many of the college boys from nearby Sunshower Beach.

"I'm going to come any sec," the seventeenyear-old screamed, pointing her dirty silver-toed feet up like a ballet dancer. "Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ.

Stormy started to shiver, moan, and she brought a long tab of amyl nitrite up to her little pug nose. As she broke open the tab, she heard the blond man say very clearly, "I'm the one they're looking for. The Englishman. Now there's one for your record book, Storm.

The long-haired girl nodded her head once-then nothing but bright, mixing paints were there.

By ten A.M. the English killer was on the road up to Coastown, heading toward another of his targets. By ten Denise "Stormy" Lascher was sitting out on the terrace of room 334, screaming like the hopeless madwoman she would one day become.

At a little after eleven the police, the army, and the CIA swarmed over the Royal Caribbean like ants on a gingerbread castle. Harold Hill and Brooks Campbell marched through the ornate front lobby together, Campbell carrying a bulky M- 16 rifle. The police stopped all regular elevator service and began to search the ancient, sprawling dinosaur from the cellar up to the gabled rooftops.

Hill, Campbell, and Dr. Johnson went directly to room 334, where Denise Lascher was being detained. The hysterical teenager told them that the man must have left before all the police came bursting in. She didn't know for sure.... Yes, he was tall. Blond-haired. Like Michael Caine, she said.

No, she didn't remember anything specific he'd said. Just that he was the one... the machete killer everyone was looking for.

Harold Hill rummaged through the trash baskets in the suite's bedroom and bath. The gray-haired CIA director found empty, crushed packs of Dunhill cigarettes, marijuana roaches, an empty carton for Remington rifle shells, a box of French ticklers. Garbage.

Meanwhile Meral Johnson had put out an alert for the car the tall blond man had been seen driving. A blue 1979 Mustang, license number 3984-A, according to the hotel register.

Johnson sent his men and the American inspectors around the hotel to interview as many of the guests and help as possible. At the same time he had roadblocks set up outside Carolinsted and all through the surrounding villages.

Dr. Johnson had the feeling that they might finally be closing in on him. The black man hadn't slept for two days now; he was obsessed with getting the blond mercenary. More so than any of them, he believed privately... Johnson alone understood that the tall blond man had destroyed San Dominica. In front of the hotel, Campbell and Harold Hill leaned on a driftwood fence railing, both of them chain-smoking.

"I haven't known what to say about Carole."

Campbell flipped his cigarette onto the beach sand. "I'm sorry. I hope you know how I feel, Harry." "You feel that you have to say something," Harold Hill said, and smiled cruelly. "That's all you feel, Brooks. "

Campbell let his eyes drift out over the soothing, beautiful Caribbean. "What about Macdonald?"

"If we catch Rose, Macdonald makes the ID. I'd hate to do it off that photokit drawing.... I'm also prepared to try him as bait for Rose. If we can be clever enough to do that discreetly. "

"I think Rose might try to hit Macdonald anyway. What else is keeping him around here?"

Harold Hill extended his hands, palms up. He didn't know.

The two men walked back across the hotel's rolling lawns. As they approached a waiting Puma helicopter, men in blue jumpsuits began to take off the plane's chocks and hawsers.

"We're getting very close to him now," Harold Hill said, "or vice versa."

At eleven o'clock Peter made the first of four tape recordings for the CIA's more than 8.5-billionitem computer files.

For an hour and a half straight he talked into a reel-to-reel Sony for the edification of two very hip acadeniic-type interrogators from Washington. He told them about his odyssey through the West Hills jungle; about everything he'd seen at Turtle Bay; about his feelings toward the U.S. government after Watergate; after Cambodia; after, say,, Jane had been killed.... In short, the two interrogators were trying to determine whether Peter was going to give them any trouble. At twelve-thirty a police artist started a photokit drawing of Damian Rose, based on what Peter could remember from the unbelievable fifteen-second tableau on the Shore Highway.

By one o'clock his interrogators were in the offices of Alcoa Aluminum, color copying a fair likeness of the tall blond man.

Also at one o'clock, Peter asked the CIA for a gun to protect himself, but he was refused.

At two a crowd of agents removed him from the Golf and Racquet Condominiums. Things were going too fast all of a sudden. Everything fuzzy and unclear.

they took an elevator two floors down to the lobby. Then a fast walk through a garden-to a gray Ford with little American flags on the fenders. Switched back two cars to a blue Mercury Cougar with the shiniest front grille in captivity.

Doors shut like clockwork, then the blue Mercury jerked away from the curb. Flashed past palm trees and stately casuarinas. Tires screeched out onto Orange Boulevard, where unconcerned blacks sold bananas and papaya on the sidewalks. Off to the Church of Angels. Off to see a lot of the victims, including Jane.

Sitting in back-am-is folded, mind folded-Peter wondered why they had decided to go to the church in broad daylight. He forgot the thought momentarily. Saw Jane blinking on and off like licull lights. Saw the blond man over Turtle Bay. Saw himself on the flashy green Peugeot bicycle.

"You all right, Pete?"

"Yeah. Sure. I was just thinking.........

Inside the medium-size Catholic church, Harold Hill and Brooks Campbell waited in the sacristy. Both Washington men were wearing lightweight business suits; they looked appropriately respectful.

they were discussing important logistics with an oblate priest, Father Kevin Brennan. they wanted to know where all the side and back doors were. Where the press could get their photographs but not get in the way. Where an assassin-"if an assassin had it in mind,,Father"-might try to hide inside the church.

Meanwhile a crowd from the streets was starting to gather and move inside the front doors of the church. The crowd also included both Clive Lawson and Damian Rose.

As the government car swept around the church's circular driveway, Peter couldn't help thinking that the baby cathedral wasn't a bad place for a sniper. Ugly deranged crowd; busy city streets; lots of carnival confusion.

Stepping out of the official-looking Mercury, he heard the crowd's loud chant.

"United. State. Murderers!

"United. State. Murderers!

"Haile Selassie!

"Haile Selassie!"

He watched a blur of black faces craning long necks, bulging veins, trying to find out what was going on all over their island.

It was so goddamn weird. A lot like Saigon in '73. It made Peter feel like getting up with a microphone-explaining that most people in the United States were okay. That they didn't want all the island's bauxite-they didn't want to hurt anybody. Period. Five men in dark suits and crisp white shirts met him on the creaking front steps of the church. Brooks Campbell. Dr. Johnson. Harold Hill. The American ambassador himself.

A young Catholic priest took Peter by the arm. Brief condolences and clumsy apologies were exchanged. Then the entourage quickly moved inside.

A TV news cameraman followed close behind them, stumbling along like a proud uncle at a wedding.

Two marines followed with MAT submachineguns.

Meanwhile Peter had put on his old baseball hat. Like Green Berets wearing their hats to funerals. Fuck your silly rules; conventions; fuck you!

"Not in here, Peter," the priest whispered. "The hat. Please."

Peter heard nothing but the sound of two rows of plain wooden coffins being lined up in front of the church's central altar. The boxes contained bodies still unclaimed after the Elizabeth's Fancy mas- sacre. they held the two dead agents from Mandeville Hospital. One of the temporary Red Cross coffins held Jane.

"I know how you feel, Peter. But you're showing disrespect for Our Lord in this way."

"I doubt it means diddly-shit one way or the other to Our Lord. If it does, I don't buy his act, either.

Finally Father Brennan pointed to a particular coffin to the right of the bright gold-and-red altar.

Peter stopped in front of a coffin with a place card: JANE FRANCES COOKE.

He looked down the line of U. S. embassy and police officials. Praying? Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance?... The scene reminded him of the aftermath of some large tragedy he'd seen in some news clip. Hundreds of bodies laid out in a grammar school cafeteria. Mourners searching for friends and relatives. Violated in their grief by television cameras.

"Aren't you going to open it?" he finally said to the priest. "I'd like to see her once more, please."

"We haven't been doing that," the priest said in a whisper. "These aren't the best conditions, Peter. "

"I'd like to see her. I think we can all take it."

"Will you take off your hat?" the priest asked again.

Peter took off the baseball hat, and the oblate consented to lift the lid for a brief viewing. It wasn't what he thought best-but the police chief said yes; the American ambassador said yes; and the young American man seemed to know what he wanted....

With a loud tearing noise, the lid came off.

Peter looked down and saw a young-looking woman, only vaguely recognizable, surprisingly small now.... Jane had been prepared with what looked like an old lady's face powder and rouge. Her long blond curls looked brittle and stiff, like the artificial hair on a child's doll. they hadn't even used one of her own dresses.... Oh, my God, no, Peter said over and over to himself. Oh, God, Jesus. Goddammit. Goddammit. If all those bastards hadn't been watching him, he would have let himself cry.

At the same time, Damian was watching the English killer, high up in the church's choir loft. He was just three aisles behind Clive Lawson. No more than twelve feet away.

The expensive killer had had one opportunity, but he'd resisted it. Basically a good decision, Rose was thinking, calculating. This church was an interesting place for a shot, spectacular and unexpected-a thrill kill-but maybe it wasn't the best place. Nonetheless, I would have done it here, Damian thought. Maybe on the way out....

He studied Peter Macdonald standing in front of his girlfriend's coffin; he watched Brooks Campbell, Hill-ducks on a pond.

Soon, however, he saw Clive Lawson quietly leave the choir loft, then the church altogether. The English killer had on a dark, contemporary rug that made him look like many of the news reporters. Like the Secret Service men, for that matter. Not bad for a traveling disguise.

It appeared that the grand finale, the coup de grace, was going to have to wait just a little bit longer.

Damian left the Church of Angels with the main body of the crowd. He was an odd-looking sight with his baggy yellow trousers; his parasol; his jester's cap held respectfully in one hand.

Almost instantly he was accosted by a mob of kids who wanted to play with Basil, the Children's Minstrel.

Thursday Evening.

All Thursday, San Dominica had been overturned and researched as desperately as it should have been the very night of the Elizabeth's Fancy massa cre.

Owners of stores, cafes, taverns, and private homes were badgered by agents with the photokit drawing made from Peter's description.

Each and every motel, hotel, inn, chalet, haci enda, villa, lodge, casa, caravansary-black or white in clientele-all were assaulted by marauding teams of local police and U.S. federal marshals. Rude Boys were hired to go out and mine for information in the larger city underworlds; among the cocaine and ganja dealers. Thousands of ordinary people were held up at the airports and boat docks, as well as at the major roadblocks set all over the island.

Neither Damian Rose nor Clive Lawson turned UP in any of the searches, however. Like a Martin Bormann, a Mengele-they were simply not the type offish that wind up in a police dragnet.

Bay of Pigs II was fast becoming Bay of Panic.

At 7:00 P. M. that night, a communications expert-, Harvey Epstein, thought that he'd lucked into the first gold strike of the entire manhunt.

At the time of the discovery, Epstein was playing Canfield solitaire on the floor of a VW van. The van was parked about three hundred yards behind a large villa owned by the Charles Forlenza Family (Sunasta Hotels) on San Dominica. Inside the van, Epstein was illegally bugging the Forlenza phones.

For two straight days now the only thing he'd heard was the Forlenza cook calling in her giggly orders for groceries at a place called the Coastown Gourmet Market. When the phone rang at seven, Harvey had a hunger attack.

He pressed his earphones to one ear only, uncovered a club ace. Listened.

"Hello. "

The first voice he recorded was a hood named Duane Nicholson. Nicholson was the man Isadore Goldman had brought with him to Government House on May 6.

Epstein assumed that the second voice was that of Damian Rose.

"I'm going to need those favors done for me," Rose said. "Put your part of things into operation.

"Tomorrow, right?" Nicholson asked.

Click. Buzz. "Son of a bitch. Harvey! Son of a bitch!"

In less than an hour Campbell and Harold Hill were listening to the tape in Coastown.

"Interesting." Campbell recognized the silky voice. "It was Rose."

Still under guard at the Golf and Racquet Club, Peter sat in front of the San Dominican Broadcasting Corporation's blurry evening news.

For the first time in two days he was clear-headed enough to consider the effect of a sniper's bullet. Every president's daydream... your car wind- shield splattered against a bug. Half an ounce of steel entering your forehead at three thousand feet per second.'Insane and nauseating.

Around 8:30 he made a phone call to his family in Grand Rapids.

His mother couldn't understand why air force one hadn't flown him home already. "Make them put you on the first plane out of that place, " Betsy Macdonald told Peter. "My God, they've put you through enough already. they can come right up here to ask you any more questions they have. Tell them that, Peter.

Peter's father wanted to know what the real story was. He'd talked to his friend Senator Pflanzer, and Pflanzer wanted to know, too. "Pete, don't take any chances for those sorry bastards," Colonel Edward Macdonald said-Big Mac. "They're not doing shit for us anymore-the whole damn government. they don't deserve anything back from us. I mean it. "

As he listened, occasionally talked, Peter tried to picture Big Mac and Little Betsy. He saw them maybe ten years younger than they really were now.

He saw the Super Six posing like some roughneck hockey team.

"I'll try to get home real soon," he said to his father. "Tell that to Mom. Tell my brothers, too. Miss the hell out of all of you. I really do."

After the call, Peter just sat in the dark pseu- dotropics condominium bedroom. Thinking.

He imagined a slow-motion pistol shot to a man's forehead. Like the famous Vietnamese execution photograph. The tall blond man's head actually vaporizing.

At 1:30 in the morning one of the CIA agents came into the bedroom-a little Italian guy who was always imitating Peter Falk.

"We're going to move you, Pete. Get ready, will you?" Getting dressed, Peter prepared himself mentally. No point in getting scared now. Scared or stupid. maybe there was, but fuck it.

Three agents with automatic rifles walked him to a station wagon waiting outside with the motor running.

A quick breath of fresh air. Appropriately fishy smell of the sea. No ca-rack of a rifle from the dark palm trees.

they rode to the Dorcas Hotel in Coastown in eerie silence. No questions asked; no information volunteered. No phony-baloney bullshit on their side or his.

The gray-haired CIA man-Harold Hill-was waiting for him inside the new hotel suite. A pleasant enough place-like a Holiday Inn.

"My family has put in a formal complaint to the State Department." Peter lied simply and effectively. "It went through Senator Pflanzer," he announced to Hill and to Brooks Campbell, who were sitting in the living room. "If you don't give me a crack at the blond mystery man, I'm going to force you to send me home. You know the tune-'War Hero Claims CIA Monkeyshines!'

"All right, all right." The gray-haired man nodded. A very sober professor type, Peter noticed. "Let's sit down and talk, Peter."

By 2:00 A.M. Peter Macdonald was officially part of the manhunt for Damian and Carrie Rose.

Shortly afterward the fat black police chief arrived at the Dorcas. Strange man! Dr. Johnson just sat around talking with Peter. About the initial mistake by his constable at Turtle Bay; his own mistakes during the difficult case; the night he'd spent with Jane at Mandeville Hospital.

"I couldn't sleep at home the likable San Dominican finally said. "I thought you might understand. "

"I understand." Peter smiled. "I think this is going to be an awfully long night. Glad you're here, Dr. Johnson.

CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN

Damian had gotten uncharacteristically grubby-vacant-eyed and distracted during the last months of our preparation for San Dominica. His hair was hardly ever combed. He spent entire days inside the house, wandering in wrinkled silk pajamas. He was obsessed with the idea of master criminals.... I came home one night to find him reading a book called On Aggression, babbling about brown rats and piebald eagles. Another time he was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Lots of Nazi books after that. The Master Criminal Race, he called them....

The Rose Diary

Trelawney, San Dominica

in a small den lit by a black-and-white TV, Damian sat cleaning an M-21 sniper's rifle.

First he pressed out the rear pin and opened the rifle. Then he withdrew the bolt and bolt carrier assembly. He withdrew the thin firing retaining pin. Withdrew the cam pin, the bolt from the bolt carrier.

On and off he watched Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious coming over the island's erratic TV network. Overall, Damian decided, he could have been a much better performer than the very one-dimensional Cary Grant. He wasn't certain if he could have been as good as a Claude Rains or an Ingrid Bergman, though. Those two were perfectionists. they could have made something out of Basil, the Children's Minstrel.

When,the rifle was cleaned, when the M-21 was all back together, he went into the bathroom, where he worked for another hour or so. Using a mixture of Quiet Touch and Miss Clairol, he dyed his hair what the package called "blue black," with gray highlights. Damian's own hair color.

Now there was only one tall blond Englishman: Clive Lawson. And only one more day. Before Damian Rose called it a night, he took a new field machete out of its cheesecloth wrapping. He laid the knife out carefully by his rifle.

Then the tall black-haired American went off to sleep.

PART III

The Perfect Ending

May 11, 1979, Friday

Shoot-Out! Be4 i Die

May 11, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

Friday morning. The Last Day of the Season.

Dr. Johnson broke open a croissant, dabbed half of the crisp roll with guava jelly, watched Peter out of the corner of his eye. "What a damn wonderful time for living it could have been." Peter shook his head as he spoke to the fat black policeman.

The young American man was looking especially American in the bright light of morning. He was wearing a forest green (holey, punky) SEE BEAR MOUNTAIN T-shirt; wrinkled athletic shorts; no shoes or socks; his ratty old baseball hat.

He was rubbing his bare feet together like sticks trying to make a fire. "Swimming." He continued on with his spiel. Sailing. Playing baskethall, if you're a recidivist like me... running around in a baseball cap like you're ten years old again and don't care... all kinds of wonderful, life-wasting crap. Nothing too serious, you know, R and R."

The middle-aged police chief was beginning to feel very tired, depressed. He kept remembering the night he spent in the hospital with the blond girl. Moreover he was beginning to feel paternal toward the young American. He liked Peter. Sometimes he felt it was them against all the rest.

"This island used to be that way. When I was a boy. I don't know if the world will let you do that anymore. Be carefree."

Peter nodded without saying anything.

He and the police chief were sitting under a striped yellow umbrella on a sixteenth-floor terrace of the Dorcas Hotel. Across the terrace from them, two CIA men stood by the railing with their suit jackets off, old-fashioned shoulder holsters strapped across their white shirts. Behind them, Coastown stretched out like a giant, glittering carnival. One story above, the roof of the Dorcas was yellow, the color of gold teeth. The sloping roof was too steep for anyone to climb on, someone who knew about such things had decided.

Peter threw back his head and looked around and around a cloudless, china blue skyscape. He started to think about heroes, leaders, inspiration.... Once, when he was a plebe, he remembered going to a humanities symposium: "Is the Hero Dead in Western Civilization)" Four history and classics professors answered-shouted to the rafters"Yes! Yes! Dead and buried!"

Well, dammit, people still needed heroes. He did, anyway... Ulysses, Churchill, Lincoln... whoever! Somebody! That unbelievable ass Nixon. Gerry Ford. Jesus! Didn't they know anything about being leaders? Heroes?... If Kissinger could get to be a sex object, Richard Nixon could have at least gotten up to the level of human being.

"Man, oh, man, oh, man," he said in rhythm with his neck and head circles. "It's so damn unbelievable, isn't it? Worse than Vietnam, and that really sucked. Bad, Meral, bad.... I keep fantasizing that Janie is going to be alive again."

Trelawney, San Dominica

Dmfian Rose passed the first three hours of the morning struggling to fix a badly misused twentyfive-foot Bertram Sportsman.

Naked to the waist, dressed only in striped cotton pants, he worked on the speedboat's trimplanes first; then replaced all the plugs; then did what he could about the engine's timing.

The Caribbean was a pretty dark blue in the early morning. The cove where he worked was A Technicolor blur. Fuzzy blue-and-gold-and-white brilliance. Like movies shot through a Vaselinecovered lens.

The cove was also neady hidden from passing sea traffic; a little dogleg right behind a hill thick with palmettos.

Tucked up in the hills behind the cove was the home of a famous Caribbean landscape painter, the old recluse Eric Downes. Hidden in a closet with stacks of bare canvases, Downes now lay dead.

As he tuned the boat's engine, Damian's mind slipped back and forth between the Caribbean and France. Between the start of this working year and the end of it.... He remembered walks with Carrie through the Luxembourg Gardens; whole afternoons wasted in the Tuileries, the Place des Vosges, cafe sitting around St. -Germain-des-Pr6s.

After he finished the engine work, Rose took an extra gas tank and two M-21 rifles down below into the cabin. He left the new field machete up in the cockpit.

When he finally looked at his watch, he was sur- prised to see that it was nearly nine. That meant Carrie ought to be on her way to Morocco.

As he settled down to wait, Daniian began to whistle sweet "Lili Marlene." A truly great song. A tune that never failed to remind him of Carrie.

Zurich, Switzerland

Wearing a blue-gray shift and gray Valentino turban, she sat across from a red-mustached, very fat munchkin, S. 0. Rogin, in the Schweizer Kreditverein in Zurich.

A soft leather Herm6s attachd case lay on a heavy marble table between them. Over their heads a crystal chandelier provided adequate light, though filled with a blizzard of dust motes.

Rogin spoke English with a thick Gerrnan-Swiss accent with one bushy eyebrow curiously arched. "You wish to withdraw all six hundred twenty-nine thousand?"

Carrie considered the question for a moment. "Yes. All of it," she then said Very businesslike.

"Very well, then. All right. How would you like your money?"

The American woman took out a blue pack of cigarettes-Gauloises. The banker produced a klunky silver lighter. As Rogin lit her cigarette, a strong smell of kerosene wafted up. Then the lighter clicked shut like an aspirin tin.

"What would you suggest?" Carrie asked.

The fat munchkin began to grin. "What would I suggest? For starters, I would suggest we transfer the funds directly to your new bank. Tout de suite, Mrs. Chaplin. Easy as apple pie. No suitcases."

"No. I'm afraid I must have the cash in hand, Heff Rogin. "

"Hmmm. Of course." The redheaded man nodded. "Will madame be needing a security guard, then? I will explain to you the simple procedure for-

"I'll be fine." Carrie smiled, effectively cutting off the man. "If you read in New Zurchen about someone murdered in the streets downtown," she went on, "you'll know that someone tried to take away my money." The munchkin-an American and British detective fan-laughed with genuine good humor. "No one is ever murdered in Zurich, madame. Not in that manner, anyway." The banker laughed once again. Then he left to arrange for the six hundred twenty-nine thousand-one million five hundred thousand in Swiss francs.

As he walked through the elegant bank, S. 0. Rogin wondered if the pretty lady was running away from her husband. He viewed Mrs. Chaplin as a sort of... Faye Dunaway @. The fat man recalled Miss Dunaway in a scene from Win&nills of the Mind. No, no. From The Thomas Crown Affair. A wonderful escapist movie. All about robbing the banks of Boston.

Forty minutes later Carrie Rose walked out of the Kreditverein with the Henn6s briefcase full of Swiss francs. She was beginning to perspire now;

her skin was prickling. She was paranoid about strangers on the Zurich streets.

The tall, long-haired American woman went ust one block across the Stampfenbachstrasse, however. She entered the impressive Union Bank of Switzerland and redeposited the cash. All part of the master plan.

CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT

Sooner or later, we were certain they would throw Macdonald to us. Harold Hill was an executive: good executives are executors. Predictable because they try to be so logical.... Damian never tries to figure out the mazes, just the mice....

The Rose Diary

Wahoo Cay, San Dominica

Friday afternoon.

At two in the hot, hot of the afternoon, Damian floated over an exquisite range of shallow barrier reefs.

Sunbathing in the twenty-five-foot Sportsman, watching mullets and snipe eels forage and dart through the bottle green waters, he was beginning to let his mind drift to thoughts of meeting Carrie. in Seedy Morocco. Casbahs. A perfect ending for this crime. The two who got away with it.

Damian was convinced that San Dominica represented the best freelance work done since John Kennedy was hit in Dallas. He knew it.

Just a few more hours to go now. All of it heading helter-skelter yet inevitably toward a small pinprick in time and space.

Actually, the end began in a most understated manner, a curious contrast to everything that had gone before it. At 3:15 Dr. Meral Johnson and Brooks Campbell escorted Peter out of the Dorcas Hotel.

The young American man was wearing gray cotton pants with a loose-fitting gray zipper jacket. Underneath the _jacket was a German semiautomatic pistol. The Walther was a neat, tough gun. Compliments of Great Western Air Transport, of Harold Hill in particular.

The three men got into a wide Dodge Charger idling in the hotel carport. Campbell looked around for rooftop snipers, and that seemed almost funny to Peter. "Uh, that's our fort," he finally had to say.

From the hotel they drove to a secluded villa owned by the Charles Forlenza Family. A big flamingo pink Hollywood-style house.

Both Campbell and Harold Hill had hopes now that the man staying at the villa-Duane Nichol spn-would either contact, or be contacted by, Dan-fian Rose. They'd put a five-car stakeout team on the house.

Officially, Peter was along to make any necessary identification. Officially, he didn't have a gun.

Unofficially, Harold Hill was beginning to troll bait for Rose.

In some ways he too was reminded of the November of 1963. Very messy stuff. A marvel how you could smooth out these things in the end-national security matters.

At six o'clock in Washington, a Mrs. C. Rose checked into the St. James Hotel. Some mail was waiting for her-letters from Damian. Very mushy and adolescent, Port-Smithe thought.

At seven o'clock in Zurich, Carrie waited in her hotel suite. She watched swans glide over the lake of Zurich, made casual notes for the diary, tried to take care of all the final details the way Damian would....

At a quarter to eight, a chip of bumt-orange sun sank without a trace behind the Forienza villa. His heart started to thump out strange warnings as Peter watched Isadore Goldman's expensive lackey walk outside the big stucco house. He considered that Isadore Goldman was just a name to him; considered that he really didn't want to die. He wanted to shoot the tall blond mercenary somehow; wanted to go home to Michigan again. Like thriller-chiller novel endings.

"Blue. This is White Flag," Brooks Campbell whispered into the car's crackling shortwave radio. "You guys all awake?"

"Peter?" Meral Johnson winked into the car's rearview mirror. "Awake?"

"He's just going out for a roast beef on rye," Peter said, feeling electricity, anyway. "I'm wideawake, Meral." He grinned at the fat policeman. Neither of them talked to Campbell.

Easygoing and, to Peter's eyes, unconcerned, Duane Nicholson shuffled across the villa's front lawn in Indian moccasins, casual slacks, some sort of sky blue surfer's shirt. A very expendable type, Peter couldn't help thinking. The kind of guy who always got shot first in adventure movies. Having walked the length of the house, the curly-headed hood disappeared into a dark three-car garage.

Minutes later a duu-white Corvette rolled out onto the driveway. Low slung on the driver's seat, resting comfortably behind a stained pigskin steering wheel, the Las Vegas mobster wheeled the powerful car out to the dirt access road. Then bolting and roaring Re an animal that wasn't used to restraints, the Corvette chugged toward the Shore Highway.

Izzie Goldman's man was heading into Coastown.

Sitting on the backseat of one of five surveillance cars, Peter had already clicked his mind into combat readiness. Just in case. He figured the punk hoodlum was going to dinner, though. Everyone in the surveillance cars figured the same thing.

Tryall, San Dominica

A shadowy figure thrusted itself up a long sliver of dock due west of Coastown's twinkling pocket of electric lights.

to the running man's back, dark tuna boats lay on the horizon of the Caribbean. Beyond the fishing boats were several thousand miles of open sea. Then the southern extremes of Europe.

For this last night on San Dominica, Damian Rose had chosen a beige security guard's uniform. Pitch black makeup was smeared on his face and hands so that from a distance he looked like a native. An M-21 with a complicated-looking sight was slung over his left shoulder; a heavy sugar-cane machete was tied to his waist.

Looking both ways and back over his shoulder first, he started across a wide field toward a distant, narrow road.

Peter glanced at his watch: 8:35.

The Chevrolet Corvette and three surveillance cars were creeping slowly down Charles Henry Street on the northern outskirts of Coastown. The cars slunk up a crowded side avenue with old wrecks of American autos lined along both sides. Black children in colorful rags darted in and out of the parked cars. Slouch-hatted Rude Boys whacked the hoods of the passing night traffic.

The dusty Corvette swept up a dark, crowded lane that looped around and then ran alongside Queen Anne's Park. The park was still jam-packed with laughing, running blacks practicing for Labor Day Carnival, the official end of the tourist season.

"He's on to us," Brooks Campbell whispered inside the white Charger. "What the fuck is that bastard doing?"

On the side of a damp, grassy hill, Damian Rose waited calmly with his M-21 and machete. Not sixty yards away, completely unaware of Rose, Clive Lawson stood with an Uzi submachine gun resting on his hip. He too waited.

On the backseat of the Charger, Peter was absorbing flashing pieces of Queen Anne's Park. Nearly subliminal stuff. Men and boys in flowing white shirts. Dancing bonfires. A few purplish clouds moving fast in a high wind.... It was a little like being on patrol-a strange, worthless night patrol dreamed up by the usual morons. Shoot anyone who doesn't answer to the name Carl Yastrzemski. "He's leading us to the tall blond man." Peter answered Campbell's earlier question. "He's doing exactly what you wanted him to do.... All we have to do is figure out why. " Just then the Corvette swung wide around a big City of Coastown truck. The Corvette took an impossibly sharp, skidding left-then the low-slung car started to accelerate up a hill as if it were flat ground.

"Brace yourselves, gentlemen," Metal Johnson yelled out.

The steep hill came and went-then swept down roller-coaster style on quiet, narrow side streets.

An unofficial Grand Prix race was beginning. People along the sidewalks were screaming at the fast-moving, souped-up cars.

Eight thirty-nine. Damian checked the M-21 carefully. Checked the ammo.

Clive Lawson still had the submachine gun on his hip.

His stomach floating up in his chest cavity, his heart pounding like a tight bass drum, Peter watched Isadore Goldman's man shoot down a narrow, unmarked driveway.

"White Flag" nearly missed it.

A green Mazda missed; spun off into berry bushes. Harold Hill's blue Cougar made the hairpin turn in the middle of the road.

Another quick right turn followed in unfair progression. An immediate impossible left. Then a frightening straight, four-block-long speedway appeared out of nowhere.

One catch: the speedway was blanketed with people.

From the bouncing rear seat, Peter watched a blur of panic-stricken blacks running wildly. They'd been loitering around the street, catching the cool breeze.... Now they were diving onto the dirt sidewalks. A few crazy ones seemed to be imitating toreadors, flapping shirts and sweaters at the passing, weaving cars. A woman was hit-bang.

Eightforty-three.

Inside the white Charger, Brooks Campbell unholstered his revolver. Dr. Johnson was sitting on the car hom-creating one sustained scream.

The Corvette twitched into third. Then up into fourth gear.

Peter took his gun out of his shoulder holster. Semiautomatic Walther. Tough gun.

The low-slung sports car opened up nearly a twoblock lead on the others. It was getting small fast. A white box and flashing taillights-hugging the road-leaving the city like a ground rocket.

Then Brooks Campbell was screaming, pointing at the Corvette, which was suddenly way over on the right.

The Corvette was jetting down a dark country road. Opening up a quarter-mile lead.

Clive Lawson was getting the Uzi ready now. He planted his feet in the soft dirt of the hillside. He stretched his arms, right first, then left.

"We're losing him, goddamn-tit. We're losing him! "

The fat, sweating police chief twirled the steering wheel. The white Charger spun. Turned. Just missed turning over. Peter was thrown across the backseat. Felt his head crack against a side window.

they were accelerating down the dark back road with the Corvette completely out of sight now. Brooks Campbell radioing for reinforcements, armies. Asking where the Tryall Road came out.... Eight forty-four. Damian braced the M-21 against a coconut palm. Watched through his nightscope.

Then all of the surveillance cars braked suddenly for a fork around a huge, spreading kapok tree.

"Left! Hill will go-"

The last part of Brooks Campbell's instruction was drowned out. Peter was screaming at Meral Johnson to step on the gas.

Unbelievably, the Dodge Charger's side front window disintegrated.

A high-powered rifle was exploding over and over in the dark woods. Methodical sniping. A professional marksman.

The Charger's roof ripped apart. Another window blew up. The car's trunk took a blast that would have killed an elephant.

Meral Johnson was screaming for Macdonald to stay down.

Somebody's head slammed against a window and broke right through it.

"On the floor! On the floor!"

The roof was hit again. Another blast hit somewhere in the greenhouse-the window frame area. Gun blasts pounded the car like sledgehammers.

At least twenty explosions came within thirty seconds.

Then all was quiet on the dark back road. A magic silence. Millions of twitting bugs. Tropical birds. The transition back and forth was almost incomprehensible.

The wounded Charger was still rolling. Its tires were making pathetic little clicking noises.

Meral Johnson had his hand down on the floor in the front seat. Flat down on the gritty brake pedal. Finally he stopped the Charger.

Men from "Green Flag" were running to help. Bouncing sunglasses. Wingtips slapping on macadam.

Harold Hill was running from way down the road. Screaming something. Looking like the father of a drowning child.

"Macdonald!" the black policeman also suddenly screamed. "Macdonald!"

A low groan came from inside the car.

Peter sat up on the backseat. Started to shake off glass. Gash in his head, he realized. Blood...

shit....

He saw Campbell up in front. Looking at the shattered windshield as if he'd finally solved the whole goddamn awful thing.

Except that the Great Western Air Transport man was too dead to solve things anymore.

A revolutionary American-made bullet had pierced one side of the handsome face, tumbled over once, tried to tumble over again-exploded brain matter all over the walls and roof of the man's skull. Like a bulldozer gouging out a small living room. And then Peter wasn't looking at Campbell anymore. He was running. For the first time since April 25-Turtle Bay-he was moving like a certifiable madman, holding the Walther semiautomatic like a baton in a relay race.

He'd seen the tall blond man up in the woods.

Damian scrutinized Harold Hill and the black police chief in the steaming headlights of the unmarked police cars.

Then Rose retreated farther back into the thick brush and brambles. Back closer to the boat. Escape. Carrie.

Just one more scenario now.

As he pushed his way through dark tree shapes and hanging moss, Peter heard shrieking birds and bugs all around him. The moon seemed to be racing through the shiny leaf ceiling over his head.

After about seventy yards of the restrictive bushes, he emerged into the wide-open space of the Tryall Club's golf course. He could see the Caribbean then, faint line of foamy surf. He could make out the main clubhouse, a long low building with half. a hundred windows facing the golf course-closed for the summer season.

Peter's wide eyes methodically searched the dark Tryall golf course. He was in a combat trance now, all his movements automatic: search and destroy, kill the mercenary or get killed.

His eyes ran over the neat, handsome clubhouse; along the dark flagstone patio and walkway; past hedges, gardens; down a long porch filled with rocking chairs.

Somewhere between the bramble and the club- house he'd missed a turn by the tall running man. His powers as a tracker of men were rusty, Peter realized-gone altogether, kaput. A good Vietnamese soldier would have killed him by now.

A stitch of white lightning lit up the night sky. Then Peter heard Metal Johnson's first scream. Usually more athletic, he took a clumsy header onto the flat, rolling lawns.

Not very expert, he realized as he hit down hard. More like a heavy box bouncing out the back of a speeding truck.

Except that when he stopped bouncing, he was still alive. Chewing dirt, as Sergeant P. Macdonald once instructed new men in the field.

And Johnson was still screaming like an agonized madman. "Stay down, Macdonald! Stay there!... Stay there, Peter!"

Up near the clubhouse, Peter spotted the shadow of a man with a rifle. The blond man? One of Hill's people? Too dark to be sure.

His heart started to pound so hard, he couldn't catch his breath. His mind filled with choking rage. He wanted the bastard so badly! It was fucked up, pathetic as hell-it was against everything he'd been trying to make of himself since Vietnam. But he wanted the man all the same. He wanted him so badly it ached. Infinite pain... why didn't you shoot me, you prick?

Suddenly automatic rifle fire came out of a grove of trees to his right. Rifles winked in the night. Licks of orange flame.

As he looked on, bullets mercilessly ripped and pounded the clubhouse. Expensive windows crumbled out of the dining room. Lights broke all over. A drainpipe was blown off a wall like papier-mAch6. Peter carefully aimed the Walther at the shadowy man. He squeezed off a single wild shot. A long, impossible shot that came surprisingly close. Then the shadow with the rifle was gone. All the shooting stopped, and it started to rain.

"Fuck you!" Peter stood up in the rain and shouted.

"Fuck you!

"Fuck you, you lousy son of a bitch!"

Sheets of rain came in cool, streaming torrentsmaking it nearly impossible to see. Like having a gunfight in a waterfall. Total confusion.

Somehow or other, he was thinking, Clive Lawson-late guttersnipe out of Billingsgate, late of the British Commandos, late of the unannounced Third World wars-had gotten himself into a nasty little booby trap....

there'd been no word around that Damian and Carrie Rose were doubled dealers. Quite the opposite, in fact.... Christ! Why hadn't he stayed in Miami! Lived to fight another day?

The mercenary lay sideways like a hurt fish in a stonework gutter. He groped around for a flesh wound and found his left side to be numb. Then it burned as if he'd set a gasoline torch to himself.

Lawson turned his left arm to his face. Looked at the glowing silver dials on his watch: 9:12. Too bloody bad. His escape had been arranged for nine. Right after he'd gunned down Campbell. The Roses were supposed to get him out of there. Supposed to.

He started to crawl on his belly inside the littered gutter. He made little fish-fin strokes with his hands.

Then, at the end of the gutter, Clive Lawson got up and started to run.

Damian was God-slowly counting off the final few seconds of confusion.

He studied the teeming grounds through a light intensifier mounted on the stock of his sniper's rifle. The sighting device let him see in the dark. It threw whatever was in the rifle scope into a clear circle of eerie, Christmas-green light.

Watching the human vignettes in the strange green light, he slid his index finger gently down onto the rifle trigger. His finger took in the slack of the trigger....

Peter's face was so wet, it was a bitch just to stop his eyes from blinking. Rainwater was rushing off his forehead. Rolling off his nose. He was actually choking on the rain. Getting frightened now because he couldn't see.

There was no sound around him except for the downpour and his own heavy breathing. His mind was racing at a madhouse pace. Throwing out Technicolor combat images, firefight scenes, disconnected phrases.

Up ahead he could see the outline of overturned furniture on a dining veranda. Wrought-iron tables and chairs. Broken plants and flower pots.

He took one more step forward....

Then Peter saw the shape of another man across the open-air patio.

The man was crouching in front of baby palm lifts. So far, he didn't realize that someone was on the terrace with him.

Peter used the cover of the loud rain to circle around closer. Inch by inch he got ten feet closer. Fifteen feet... another ten feet and he thought he would have a decent pistol shot.

He conned his mind into thinking that he couldn't miss, not even in the rain. He would squeeze off at least two quick shots, he knew. Then as many more shots as he could get in. He hoped the man would never get to use his Uzi. Then the tall man actually began to move closer to him. He was moving sideways in a crouch, and he still had his back to Peter. He was moving like a professional army man.

Peter wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. 'ne rainwater made them sting like hell. Now he could see that the man's hair was blond.

There is no way I can miss hitting this man, he reminded himself. Zen marksmanship. It's like standing twenty paces away from one of those big overturned dining tables. Taking your damn good time for a shot. Seeing not whether you hit it, but ,how close you can come to the little hole in the center for the table's umbrella.

How close can I come to the axis of the tall blond man's spine? Kneeling on one knee, arms out stiff, perfectly straight, two hands on the Walther, Peter carefully got the blond man in his sight. He brought an image of the first machete murder into his mind. Then Jane-Jane on the beach at Horseshoe Bay, her shrunken body in the coffin in the cathedral.

He looked straight down the black barrel into the man's back. Then Peter finally spoke to the tall blond man.

"Hey!" he said. "Do you remember me, mister? Hey, shithead!

Inside the Tryall clubhouse, a nervous police constable lit a stick match.

As he struck match after match, the policeman tried desperately to figure out a row of master switches inside a steel gray cabinet. He considered the switches until his last match burned down, then decided to give number one a try. He flicked the black switch and the lights in the small room he was in came on bright and scary. Then the constable could see two distinct rows in the control box: number one through six, and seven through twelve.

His shaking hand moved quickly down the first row.

As the man on the dining veranda pivoted around to face Peter, every light in this magnificently frightening world seemed to come on all at once. Nightlights blinked on down the first fairway. A tape system on the veranda started to play soft dinner music.

Then loud thunder seemed to originate on the back patio of the Tryall clubhouse. Sparks of gunfire lit up all over the lawns.

Damian Rose was firing his M-21. Harold Hill was shooting an expensive Italian-made rifle. The entire force surrounding the Tryall clubhouse was blasting away at the suddenly bright, white building.

Peter's first shot hit the blond man-a dark hole opened on his forehead; then Peter was hit so hard, he couldn't believe it. He felt as if he'd been blindsided by a three-thousand-pound automobile. Hit deliberately. So fucking sad. So sad....

Windows were breaking everywhere. The wrought-iron furniture was ringing out pings and pangs. Wood thudded hard as it caught errant rifle shots.

A singularly loud crack echoed, and a speck of the dead Englishman's head flew off.

The fallen Englishman was hit again on the side of his face.

A third rifle shot entered the back of his head as he lay facedown on the flagstone patio.

Then it was all blinding light and rain. Clean rain that appeared slightly blue in the white light. It was all soothing, steady rain noise with no gunshots at all.

Men streamed across the flat, muddy lawns.... Gray suits soaked to darker colors. Short pants and pillbox hats. Submachine guns and pistols and dark rifles swinging loose on leather straps.

The rain was shining like expensive jewelry in all the trees. There was an eerie quiet now.

Harold Hill was walking straight ahead, looking ridiculous, as if he were lost in the rain. His TopSiders slapped down on the patio near Peter Macdonald's head, then he turned away.

Peter felt himself getting sick, and he fought the nauseated feeling with everything he had left.

A circle of curious faces began to form over him-like doctors around an operating table, like people staring at a heart attack victim on a New York City street.... Black soldiers and FBI and CIA men. All smiling as if they were his old best friends. Congratulating him as if he'd scored the winning touchdown.

The black police chief was bending over him, trying to show him where he'd been hit. The stomach? The rib cage? Goddamn nice bastard, Peter thought. "I'm okay. " He grinned at the black man.

And in the middle of all the confusion-the blinding lights, rain, police sirens, an ambulance driving up on the lawns-a, bearded white man in a suit was dragging a corpse by its hair. Some bearded CIA prick.

A creepy black policeman was snapping flashbulb photos. Spread-eagle shots of the body that was being dragged. Shots of Peter being cradled in Meral Johnson's arms.

An American man was working with a buzzing electric cwnera that took pictures in the dark.

Suddenly they brought the body to Peter, and everybody was trying to talk to him all at one time. Peter sat up and waved them away. He stared down at bloodshot eyes turned up as far as they would go in their sockets. Eyes caught in terrible shock and surprise.

No wonder, though, Peter thought. The right side of the head looked as if it had been bitten into. There was no nose to speak of; what was left of the mouth was frozen in a sniirky death cry.

Peter flashed back to Turtle Bay-the tall, haughty man. Fifteen seconds....

He concentrated on the blown-up face. Wet blond hair slicked down flat by the rain. Long, athletic body. He felt very tired now, mind fighting against big strong waves of ugly shit.... Dr. Johnson was saying something to him, but all he felt like doing was shouting at the dead man.

@ "He's the one," he finally whispered to the black police chief. "He's the one, goddamn him to hell. "

Which was about the time Peter finally heard what Meral Johnson was saying to him.

Running in a low infantry crouch, Damian moved forward, his trooper boots squashing across a slippery wooden ramp at the Tryall Club's yacht basin. He climbed movable stairs down onto the floating dock, stepped into the lurching Bertram Sportsman, and began to smile in spite of himself.

Then he began to laugh. A chilly, unnatural laugh.

He could barely distinguish voices in the distant, babbling conunotion coming from up around the main clubhouse. He saw the thousand-watt floodlights flashing through swaying palm and banana trees up and down the first fairway.

Then the bouncing red lights of two ambulances turned a corner of the clubhouse building. Siren screams cut through the rain and wind like sharp knives.

Finally, after more than a year, after the most insanely exhausting ordeal he'd ever put himself through, it was over and done with.

Up on the Tryall Club's veranda, the ex-Green Beret, all-American boy, unimpeachable witness, had identified Clive Lawson as the tall blond man from Turtle Bay.... The English killer's hair, his hairstyle, height, facial features, were nearly identical with the man Macdonald had seen April 25. At a quick glance, Rose and Lawson were look ikes-and a glance was all Peter had ever had. fteen seconds on a bicycle.

Moreover, the way Lawson's face wound up, it was academic anyway.

The great Damian Rose was officially dead. Killed on his most audacious tympanic contract. The psychological logic of the ploy was classic. Hubris struck again. Precisely the,end they all would have predicted from him. Like Evel Knievel dying on a motorcycle. Now, if Carrie succeeded in Washington, they were home free. No one would come looking for the Roses for quite some time. Maybe not ever.

Another smile drifted over Damian's thin, pretty lips. The pure satisfaction of playing the game well. The absolute, spine-tingling beauty of it. Like having built one's own cathedral in this slapdash age.

Moving quickly but quietly, Rose started the blowers, then untied the Dacron stem line that held the Sportsman to San Dominica. The twenty-fivefoot speedboat was shaking like mere flotsam in the unsteady sea; the rain continued to teem.

As he unlooped a final knot in the bowline, a man appeared in the hatchway, coming from the sleeping cabin below. The man was tall and thin, dressed in a gray slicker with a hood. He threw back the hood, and his silver-gray hair completed the perfect yacht clubber image.

Hello, there," the dark figure said. "My name is Harold Hill. I thought we should meet."

The director of Great Western Air Transport hoisted himself into the stonny cockpit. Harry the Hack. Dependable Harry.

"Actually, you do nice work." He continued to speak as he climbed up top. "Stay put, now. Don't get up on my account. Don't move a fucking muscle.

Pointing a dark Walther at the younger man's heart, Hill rested his bottom on the back of a swivel chair.

"Hair dyed a nice shade of black." He showed his teeth in an appreciative smile. "Cut to look like some goober from Lithuania. That's nice. What did you plan to do from here?"

Damian tried to keep himself calm. Icy. Think straight lines. Think nothing but straight lines. As he spoke, his mind raced back and forth through his alternatives, through all the possibilities for this situation. "I was going to take a commercial flight off the island. " He spoke softly. At the same time, he was thinking that something about Harold Hill was bothering him; he couldn't put his finger on it exactly. "Now that I'm officially dead, you know."

"Macdonald isn't, you know," Harold Hill said. "I'm curious-why didn't you kill Macdonald, too? The famous last shoot-out scenario?"

"I thought a live witness would be more convincing in the long run. Don't you think?... Macdonald was part of all this from the start, you know.

Hill seemed a bit confused. "Macdonald was working for you?

Don't laugh at him, Damian thought. Don't laugh in his face....

"No. No... but right from the beginning we knew we'd need a witness to identify Lawson. to make our escape work right... we knew that Peter Macdonald rode around Turtle Bay every afternoon' So we planned a murder right there. C'est ga. Macdonald saw me because he was meant to see me. We even went to great lengths to strengthen his credibility afterward.... Tell me something. Did Carrie do this?"

Harold Hill shook his head from side to side. "I ask the questions." The CIA director smiled and motioned for the younger man to get up. Slowly.

As he stood, Hill knocked Rose back down with a gun-butt blow to the cheek. A vicious hit.

6 6Best I can do right now, " Hill said through clenched teeth. "For Carole. My wife.... Get up now. I won't hit you anymore. I have lots of questions before I kill you, Rose. I have an interesting idea for that, too."

His mouth all bloody, Damian got up again. He held his hands high, in plain sight. Like a magician about to do a trick.

At Hill's direction, Rose took hold of the ladder going up to the dock. "On our way across the lawn"-he spoke in calm, measured tones-"I want you to listen carefully to what I have to offer you. We can renew our partnership."

As the tall dark-haired man put both hands on the metal ladder, the right side of his head exploded.

His face crashed forward against the aluminum slats. His chin bounced down two rungs, then he fell over backward into the boat.

Harold Hill looked up to find the black police chief standing on the wooden ramp. Beside him was Macdonald, slightly bent over, holding a Walther pointed down at the boat.

"We followed you," Meral Johnson said simply. Peter Macdonald said nothing.

As Hill started to climb past the dead or dying man, he saw the sugar-cane machete lying across a leather seat. The most obscene murder weapon. The cleaver they'd used on Carole in Virginia.

In one unbelievable stroke, he brought it down powerfully across Rose's face. The hacking blow made a noise like a butcher's cleaver. Damian snorted like a horse.

The field machete came down again. A clumsy guillotine.

Finally Hill kicked the head and it sloshed up against a sideboard. Floated in a dark pool of rainwater.

Then Harold Hill climbed up the movable ladder. He said nothing to the black policeman; nothing to Peter.

"What partnership was that?" Peter said. Then he let it go... let the sentence evaporate in the night air. It didn't matter. Of course the CIA was in on it.... For a long moment they all stood on the wet ramp. The black man and the young white man close together. None of them speaking.... Then Hill untied the last restraining rope. It doesn't end, the CIA man was thinking. Now these two have to be taken care of....

As the Sportsman slowly drifted away, Meral Johnson fired several shots into the boat's bottom and sides. "Let the fish have him," the black man said. At first Harold Hill's hands were trembling. Then, very slowly, the director began to feel rather good. In a way, he supposed, he was the hero of it all: the man who saved Central Intelligence.

Or maybe it was Carrie Rose who was the heroine.

After all, it was Carrie who'd phoned the embassy to tell him how to get Damian; who'd revealed the last details of the monster plot.... He should have told Rose that, Hill thought too late. He should have told Damian that, in the end, Carrie had turned on him and set him up. How very fucking pathetic.

The woman he'd slept with for nine years-loved, presumably. His prot6g6e, among other things.... Well, she was going to get hers, too... a perfect ending.

For a long time the three men stood in the rain, watching the speedboat drift away. Listening to the gulps of the bobbing, sinking boat.

"Peter asked you a question before," Meral Johnson said. "What kind of partnership did you have with him?"

Suddenly Peter raised the Walther again. Sideways. Almost without looking, it seemed, the force of the single pistol shot knocked Hill ten feet out onto the water.

"Let the fish have both of them," Peter said.

He and the short, fat policeman walked slowly back to the clubhouse.

may 12, 1979, Saturday

I Raid St. James

May 12, 1979; Washington, D.C.

Saturday Morning.

At quarter past six on the morning of the twelfth, two heavyweights from Langley-twenty-sevenyear-old Alex Fletcher and Deputy John Devereaux-stepped out of a white Pontiac Le Mans, then ran across the dewy back lawns of the sedate, prohibitively expensive St. James Hotel.

Inside the fancy hotel, some of America's richer and more noted personages were fast asleep on the already pretty, blue-skied spring morning. Outside on the manicured back lawns, blackbirds were just beginning to make their little peeps and tuwitts. One hale fellow disappeared over the garden fence as if he were going to fetch the morning's Post.

Alex Fletcher was wearing a film director's bush jacket and brushed corduroys, with a Smith & Wesson.38 strapped across a cotton workshirt.

Devereaux, fifty-six years old, wore a dark suit with an open-necked white shirt. A cigarette hung from his lower lip like a piece of white tape. The two men sneaked inside the gray metal door rarely used by anyone but St. James's maintenance men. Behind the door they found a security guard asleep with a white Siamese cat on his belly. The man had passed out on a folding beach chair and was snoring like broken-down machinery.

"Good morning." Devereaux grinned. "Monsieur Le Chat."

"Some fucking joint," Fletcher whispered. "No wonder the D.C. police have such a big, throbbing dick of a job."

The two men proceeded up battleship gray back stairs, uncarpeted and unexpectedly dreary. A smelly cat litter box sat on one stairwell. they came out into an elegant hallway marked with a big pink five on powder blue walls.

Fletcher whistled under his breath. "Now this is more like it."

The young agent tapped a real crystal chandelier with his fingernail. "Class, Devereaux, class." "I'll buy it for you and your girlfriend," John Devereaux growled. "Right after we finish our business here. Present arms!"

The two men stopped in front of room 502. Big gold numbers on the softest powder blue. Tasteful molding. Escarping. ,

Alex Fletcher took a deep breath, whispered a cynical ejaculation, then slowly slid a hotel passkey into the lock.

The deputy brought a.44 Magnum out from under his sports jacket, a loud, dangerous cannon young Fletcher disapproved of entirely. "Nuclear warfare," he'd nicknamed the long black pistol.

He gave Devereaux a funny little smile. "Try not to blow me up by mistake. Just a passing -thought. Ready?"

"For Harold Hill and Carole."

I'Mmm. 19 The elaborate door swung over thick mauve carpeting. The two agents looked in on a light-haired woman sitting up in a rumpled double bed. A bi room full of morning sun.

"Who are you?" the long-haired woman said. She reached toward her night table.

"No!" Fletcher screamed-the absolute top volume of his voice.

Then Devereaux's.44 detonated in the doorway.

The astonished woman literally flew against the red velvet wall, the brass headrails of her bed. She gave out one small groan, and her green eyes rolled back. Then Betsy Port-Smithe -slowly slid down to the floor.

Young Fletcher frowned and shook his head.

"No questions. No answers." The ambitious agent kicked over an end table. " Shit. Shit, Devereaux Devereaux shrugged. He sniffed the air. A funny combination of Joy perfume and smoky cordite.

The deputy threw open a window on Rock Creek Park, then stood there going through the woman's suede pockethook. Inside he found letters from a man named Damian; he found cards and papers that identified Carrie Rose.... Inside the night table drawer he found a small.38 revolver.

"Better call them." Devereaux'smiled. "Tell them they can stop worrying about this shitty bastard Mrs. Rose. No scandals in the White House for today. "

Like Harold Hill, fifty-six-year-old John Devereaux was thinking that he was a hero, too. They'd told him not to bring her back alive.

The Season of the Machete was finally over.

EPILOGUE

The Summer Season

CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE

I am Superwoman... SuperRat... Superscuz... Damian trained me so that I was capable of anything-then he let me do nothing. Stagnate. He would have never even let me sell my diary. When his own obsessions became impossible-a liability to both of us-I had to kill him. No choice in the matter. Had to... now I'm all alone at the top of the heap. The first Public Enemy on the loose in decades.... My prices start at $1,000,000, and I'm worth it. I'm like a Paris original, a one-of-a-kind operation. Hiring me is like being able to hire Manson, Speck, Himmier, Bormann... I'll do anything you can think of, and I'll think of things you wouldn't. The Season of the Machete was a preamble-as primitive as its name. It was just a beginning. The Tool Age of violence and disruption... now comes the interesting part. We're just entering the Machine Age, I believe.

The Rose Diary

June 13, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

Feeling like a national hero, Prime Minister Joseph Walthey paraded through large, enthusiastic crowds in Coastown's Horseshoe Beach District.

Paid admirers-civil servants, especially-circled him like birds. they patted his cream suede suit jacket, reached out for his curly, slicked-down hair, reached to touch his round, black Santa Claus face.

Thirty-five-nfillimeter news footage was shot for special release to San Dominica's thirteen movie theaters. Hundreds of publicity photographs were taken for the world's newspapers.

At a high, colorful dais built over the boardwalk, over the shimmering Caribbean, Walthey announced that an era of new prosperity was dawning for San Dominica. The smiling, affable prime minister didn't elaborate, however.

July 14, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

In a special session of the San Dominican Assembly, Prime Minister Joseph Walthey was named president for life on the island. He made a long speech about nationalism, the economy, and tourism on San Dominica: he lied at length.

October 1, 1979; Turtle Bay, San Dominica

The first casino to open on San Dominica was in the Playboy Club-not five miles from the Plantation Inn.

The grand opening was marred by minor student demonstrations. Black boys and girls waved a psychedelic poster of Dassie Dred that was making the rounds at the University of the West Indies and other schools throughout Central and South America. they played loud reggae and soul music, and some cars and walls at the Playboy were spraypainted DRED! The students waved signs that read

JOE IS THE BLACK HITLER.

March 3, 1980; Zurich, Switzerland

Nearly ten months after Damian's death, on the afternoon of March 3, 1980; 4.5 million Swiss francs were deposited in the numbered account of Mrs. Susan Chaplin in the Schweizer Kreditverein in Zurich. The money represented nearly $2 million from the diary sale.

Curiously, three days after her withdrawal of $600,000 (American) in May of 1979 (a Damianstyle safeguard-what if he had eluded Hill at the Tryall Club?), the woman had redeposited her money in a new account.

Filling out the necessary tax forms for the 1980 deposit,,S. 0. Rogin found himself thinking once again of Mrs. Chaplin in terms of the actress Faye Dunaway. So many actors and actresses, the redfaced munchkin thought. All the world a stage for these Americans.

May 9, 198 1; Paris

Peter Macdonald had begun to wear the swne Harris Tweed jacket every day, the same green crew-neck sweater. His brown hair fell down over his white shirt collars now, and he had a thick, bushy mustache.

Each morning from ten to eleven he sat in the same St.-Germain-des-Pr6s cafes-Fiore, Deux Magots, occasionally Brasserie Lipp. He always drank cafe au lait, read the International HeraldTribune, watched the pretty women like any other

American in Paris. Occasionally he even read the obscene, arrogant diary.

Beside Peter at the cafe table, Meral Johnson sat and ate half a dozen biscuits with his tea. Antagonist of the Joseph Walthey regime and the Central Intelligence Agency, currently on permanent leave from the San Dominican police force, Johnson exerted a steadying influence on Peter here in France. He was his traveling partner and occasionally his Dutch uncle as well.

According to their latest plan, they would spend at least the next six months in Europe. In and around Paris... down on the Riviera in Nice... in Zurich around the Stainpfenbachstrasse. Whatever it took.

Paris was nice in May, Peter thought as he sipped his coffee this particular morning. It wasn't the sunny Caribbean, there was no Jane to share it with him, but Paris was qpite acceptable, to his way of thinking.

At ten-thirty that morning, a hip little Frenchman carrying a thick leather valise approached. He sat with them at their cafe table. "You are the men who look for Carrie Rose?" the Frenchman asked.

The End