The Comedy is Finished

11

Lynsey Rayne, having had her little “victory” over the question of the transmitter, had finally agreed to go home and get some rest, leaving Mike free to supervise the tracking operation from the office. There’d been no positive result from the sweep at the Sunset Boulevard end, so the transmitter was their last shot at the basket. Mike suspected Jock Cayzer had private doubts about the wisdom of using the transmitter, but that was why Jock was local and Mike federal; you had to know when to play hardball if you wanted to get into the big leagues. And at any rate, if Jock did have qualms, he kept them to himself.

One of Jock’s people had come in with plastic cups of orange juice, and Mike had surreptitiously spiked his from the pint of hundred-proof vodka he kept in the glove compartment of his car, so he was feeling more relaxed now, more alert and sure of himself. He was in radio contact with the two monitor vans, and from their first reports things were going well; the subject car appeared to be moving in a fairly straight line northwestward across the valley. There’d be no attempt at visual contact until it came to rest.

The workroom, where Mike and a radio technician sat together at a table, was filling up with people; mostly men, with a sprinkling of women. Assembling here were uniformed and plainclothes officers from Jock Cayzer’s force, plus FBI agents from the Los Angeles office, waiting for the suspects to settle back at last into their nest, which at exactly twenty-three minutes to four they did.

“Been in one place now for over a minute,” the voice said from Van Number One. “I think they’ve lit.” The voice maintained the proper tone of professional detachment, but underneath the excitement could be heard.

It was infectious excitement, vibrating in the very air of the workroom, in the quick bright-eyed glances people gave to one another, in their inability to remain seated quietly in one place. Mike felt it as a kind of tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers, in his throat, buzzing through his body. They were going to wrap it up, they were going to put it on ice even before the statutory twenty-four hours and the FBI’s official entry into the case. Beautiful. Beautiful. Washington, here I come.

It was another five minutes before the vans, moving cautiously, announced the location: “Intersection of White Oak Street and Verde Road, Tarzana.”

“Can you give us a house address?”

Two minutes later they had it: 124-82 White Oak Street. Two of Jock’s people got busy on telephones, and Jock came back with the result. “Family called Springer. Gerard Springer, forty-six, engineer out at Cal-Space. Wife, four kids. Owns the house, bought it five years ago.”

Mike frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. Unless they’ve invaded the house. Could be they’re holding the family.”

“At this hour of the morning,” Jock said, “there’s no way to check, find out if the kids’ve been at school, if Springer’s been at work.”

“Aerospace engineer, huh? Deep cover agent, do you think? Surfaced for this job?”

Jock Cayzer shook his head. “Mike, I do believe anything is possible.”

Five hours of surveillance at the Springer house produced nothing out of the ordinary. Gerard Springer himself drove away at seven-forty, in a red Volkswagen Golf, taking with him two of the children. Two more children, dawdling and carrying bookbags, left at eight-oh-five. FBI agent Dave Kerman entered the premises at eight-thirty-five, showing ID from Pacific Gas and Electric and claiming to be a repairman looking for a potential gas leak; on his return to the mobile headquarters a block away he said, “It can’t be right. I’ll swear there’s nothing going on in there.”

Mike said, “Then they must have dumped it. Either they found the transmitter or they just dumped the whole package. Let’s go take a look.” And when they drove past the Springer house Mike and Jock Cayzer both said, at the same instant, “The mailbox.”

In the mailbox they found the brown paper bag, and inside the bag was the transmitter, with a piece of human dung, inside a sealed plastic bag. Also another cassette. With an uneasy tremor beneath his anger and humiliation, Mike traveled back to Burbank to listen to this new tape.

It was shorter than the first, and the voice was not that of Koo Davis, but was recognizably the same as the individual who had done the phoning. It said: “I’m taping this ahead of time, and I’m having a nice shit ahead of time, too, because I know what you people are like. You have no ethics. You have no morality. You think you’re on the side of good, and therefore it’s impossible for you to do wrong. You’ll promise not to plant a bug on us, but you will plant a bug on us. And I’ll find it. And I’ll send it back. I’m talking to you, Michael Wiskiel, I remember you from Watergate. We’ll be listening to the radio news all morning. Until we hear an apology from you, Michael Wiskiel, in your own voice, Koo Davis gets no medicine.”

That was it. In the profound silence that followed the harsh self-righteous voice, Mike sighed and said, “Lynsey Rayne is going to have my head on a platter.”