The Danger

TWENTY

'You're not doing that,' Kent said.

'Yes I am.'

He gave me a sidelong look. 'You're in no shape…'

'I'm fine." A bit tattered as to fingers and toes, but never mind.

He shrugged, giving in. We were out in the road by the police cars, silent as to sireas and lit only by parking lights where I'd been telling him briefly what had happened.

'We'll go back the way I came,' I said. 'What else?'

He told his men, shadowy in the cars, to stay where they were and await orders, and he and I went up through the woods, up past the house I'd waited in, and up past the one with the frightened lady: up to the top of the slope, over onto flat ground and through the wire fence.

We were both quiet, our feet softly scuffling on the sodden leaves. The rain had stopped. Behind broken clouds the moos sailed serene. The light was enough to see by, once we were used to it.

'Somewhere here,' I said, half whispering. 'Not far.'

We went from laurel clump to laurel clump and found the familiar clearing. 'He came from that way,' I said, pointing.

Kent Wagner looked at the uprooted tree for a frozen moment but without discernible expression, and then delicately, cautiously, we passed out of the laurel ring, merging with the shadows, a couple of cats stalking.

He wasn't as good as Tony Vine, but few were. I was conscious just that he would be a good companion in a dark alley, and that I wouldn't have gone back up there without him. He, for his part, had explained that his job was chiefly indoors now, in his office, and he was pleased for once to be outside with the action.

He was carrying a gun like a natural extension of his right hand. We went forward slowly, testing every step, aware of the chance of trip-alarms. There were a good many laurels here among a whole bunch of younger trees and we could get no distant view, but approximately fifty paces from the clearing we caught a glimpse of a light.

Kent pointed to it with the gun. I nodded. We inched in that direction, very careful now, conscious of risk.

We saw no look-outs, which didn't mean there weren't any. We saw the front of a modern split-level house looking perfectly harmless and ordinary, with lights on downstairs and, curtains half drawn.

We went no closer. We retreated into the first tine of trees and followed the line of the driveway from the house to the road. At the roadside there was a mailbox on a post, the mailbox bearing the number 5270. Kent pointed to it and I nodded, and we walked along the road in what he confidently assured me was the direction of the city. As we went he said, 'I heard the tape you made. Your company relayed it to us from London this morning. Seems the Jockey Club had got it by express courier.'

'My company,' I said wryly, were no doubt displeased with me.'

'I talked with some guy called Gerry Clayton. All he said was that while you were alive and negotiating it was OK.'

'Nice.'

'They did seem to want you back; can't think why.'

We walked on, not hurrying.

'I talked to the Goldonis,' he said. 'Parents.'

'Poor people.'

I felt him shrug. 'He was furious. She was all broken up. Seems she did see her son, did tell him about you. But no use to us. She met him by the Potomac, they walked about a bit, then went to some quiet restaurant for lunch. He'd telephoned her in their hotel to fix it… never told her where he was staying, himself.'

'It figured.'

'Yeah.'

A step or two further on he stopped, parked the gun in his belt and unclipped a hand radio instead.

'Turn around,' he said to his men in the police cars. 'Go back to 45th Street, make a left, make another left into Cherrytree, and crawl along there until you reach me. No sirens. No, repeat, no noise. Understood?'

The policemen answered in regulation jargon and Kent pushed down the telescopic aerial of his radio and stuck the black box on his belt.

We stood waiting. He watched me calmly in the moonlight, a hard man offering parity. I felt at ease with him, and grateful.

'Your girl-friend, he said casually, 'will be one happy lady to have you back.'

'Alessia?'

'The jockey,' he said. 'White face, huge eyes, hardly could speak for crying."

'Well,' I said, 'she knows what it's like to be kidnapped.'

'Yeah, so I heard. I was talking to her this afternoon. In addition she said she didn't know she loved you that way. Does that make sense? She said something about regretting saying no.'

'Did she?'

He glanced with interest at my face. 'Good news, is it?'

'You might say so.'

'Something about prisoners coming home impotent from Vietnam.'

'Mm,' I said, smiling, 'I told her that.'

'Glad it makes sense to you.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'She's still at the Regency Hotel,' Kent said. 'She said she wasn't leaving until you were free.'

I made no immediate reply, and after a pause he said, 'I didn't tell her you wouldn't make it. That if you did, it would be a miracle.'

They happen,' I said; and he nodded.

'Once in a while.'

We looked back along the road to where I'd escaped from.

The house back there is three and a half miles in a pretty direct route from the Ritz Carlton,' he said. 'And… did you notice? No pumpkins.' He was smiling in the semi-darkness, his teeth gleaming like Halloween.

He checked things pretty thoroughly, however, when his cars came, climbing into the back of one of them, with me beside him, and flicking through sheets and sheets of computer print-out. The print-out, I discovered, was of properties offered for rental, or rented, during the past eight weeks, not only in the District of Columbia itself but in adjacent Arlington and pans of Maryland and Virginia. It seemed to me to have entailed a prodigious amount of work: and again, like Eagler's efforts, it produced results.

Kent growled a deep syllable of satisfaction and showed me one particular sheet, pointing to the lines:

5270 Cherrytree Street, 20016, Rented October 16, period 26 weeks, full rental prepaid.

He picked up a map already folded to the right page and showed me where we were.

There's the house you called from, on Davenport Street. We walked a block up diagonally through the woods to Cherrytree, which is parallel with Davenport. The woods are part of American Ulniversity Park.'

I nodded.

He heaved himself out of the car to talk to his men, and presently we were riding back in the direction of 5270, driving slowly with side lights only.

Kent and Lieutenant Stavoski, who'd come in the second car, were in full agreement with each other that» sudden all-out raid was best, but a raid on their own well-prepared terms. They sent two policemen through the woods to approach from the rear but stay out of sight, and positioned the cars also out of sight of the house, but ready.

'You stay out here,' Kent said to me. 'You keep out, understand?'

'No,' I said. I'll find Freemantle.'

He opened his mouth and closed it again, and I knew that like all policemen he'd been concentrating almost exclusively on capturing the villains. He looked assessingly at me for a moment and I said, 'I'm going in, don't argue.'

He shook his head in resignation and didn't try any further to stop me, and it was he and I, as before, who made the first approach, quiet as cobwebs, to the house with no pumpkins.

In the shadow of a laurel I touched his arm and pointed, and he stiffened when he saw what I was showing him: a man standing in an upstairs unlit window, smoking a cigarette.

We stayed quiet, watching. So did the man, unalarmed.

'Shit,' Kent said.

'There's always the back.'

Behind bushes we slithered our way. The windows facing rearwards to the woodland looked merely blank.

'What do you think?' I asked.

'Got to be done.' The gun was back in his hand, and there was both apprehension and resolution in his voice. 'Ready?

'Yes.'

Ready, if that included a noisy heart and difficulty in breathing.

We left the shelter of the bushes at the nearest point to the house and crept from shadow to shadow to what was evidently the kitchen door. The door was double; an outer screen against insects, an inner door made half of glass. Kent put his hand on the screen door latch and pulled it open, and tried the handle of the main door beneath.

Unsurprisingly, locked.

Kent pulled the radio from his belt, extended the aerial, and said one single word, 'Go.'

Before he'd finished returning the radio to his belt there was a sudden skin-crawling crescendo of sirens from in front of the house, and even at the rear one could see the reflections of the revolving lights racing forwards. Then there were searchlights flooding and voices shouting incomprehensibly through megaphones: and by that time Kent had smashed the glass panel of the door and put a hand inside to undo the lock.

There was pandemonium in the house as well as out. Kent and I with the two rear patrolmen on our heels raced through the kitchen and made straight for the stairs, sensing as much as seeing two men pulling guns to oppose the invasion. Stavoski's men seemed to have shot the lock off the front door: in a half glimpse after the staccato racket I saw the blue uniforms coming into the hall and then I was round the bend of the stairs, heading for the upper level.

Still quiet up there, comparatively. All doors except one were open. I made for it, running, and Kent behind me cried agonisedly, 'Andrew, don't do that.'

I looked back for him. He came, stood out of the line of fire of the door for a second, then leaped at it, giving it a heavy kick. The door crashed open, and Kent with gun ready jumped through and to one side, with me following.

The light inside was dim, like a child's nightlight, shadowy after the bright passage outside. There was a tent in the room, greyish-white, guy ropes tied to pieces of furniture: and standing by the tent, hurrying to unfasten the entrance, to go for his hostage, stood Giuseppe-Peter.

He whirled round as we went in.

He too held a gun.

He aimed straight in our direction, and fired twice. I felt a fierce sting as one bullet seared across the skin high on my left arm, and heard the second one fizz past my ear… and Kent without hesitation shot him.

He fell flat on his back from the force of it, and I went over to him, dropping to my knees.

It was Kent who opened the tent and went in for Morgan Freemantle. I heard the Senior Steward's slow sleepy voice, and Kent coming and saying the victim was doped to the eyeballs and totally unclothed, but otherwise unharmed.

I was trying with no success at all to wad a handful of folded tent against my enemy's neck, to stop the scarlet fountain spurting there. The bullet had torn too much away; left nothing to be done.

His eyes were open, but unfocused.

He said in Italian, 'Is it you?'

'Yes,' I said, in his tongue.

The pupils slowly sharpened, the gaze steadying on my face.

'I couldn't know,' he said. 'How could I have known… what you were…"

I knelt there trying to save his life.

He said, 'I should have killed you then… in Bologna… when you saw me… I should have put my knife… into… that Spanish… chauffeur.'

'Yes,' I said again. 'You should.'

He gave me a last dark look, not admitting defeat, not giving an inch. I watched him with unexpected regret. Watched him until the consciousness went out of his eyes, and they were simply open but seeing nothing.