The Traitor

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Going over the fence in broad daylight was a little different than doing it after midnight. For one thing, the night vision goggles weren’t going to do me a lot of good. On the other hand, my unassisted eyes might. The yin and the yang…

I made sure the ray gun was on, with the capacitor charging, but left it in my pocket. If it went off accidentally I would never need a vasectomy.

As I walked I kick-started the brain. They had surveillance cameras on trees, but was anyone watching the monitor? The bugs seemed to indicate that no one was in the main house. Maybe and maybe not. If they had discovered the bugs, they might have moved them to the basement and put a radio nearby. Or the people might be camped out in the attic. Or using another building on the property— as I recalled, there was an apartment over the garage, a barn or two, and a couple of outbuildings. Or they might be sleeping off a wild night of sex and alcohol, which wasn’t very likely.

I got tired of weighing the ifs. When I came to the corner of Rodet’s property, I looked around for possible passersby or gawkers — and didn’t see any.

“I’m going over,” I said to Willie.

“Okay,” he replied. With Mrs. Grafton sitting beside him, he had apparently cleaned up his act.

I climbed the fence and worked my way over the barbed wire on top, managing to rip my trousers on a barb and put a nasty groove in the back of my thigh. I silently cussed a little, but I didn’t really mean it; I figured things would probably get worse.

I dropped onto the ground on the other side and hunkered down behind the nearest tree. “I’m over the fence.”

“Okay.”

I scanned the trees for cameras and the grounds for dogs while I probed my wound with my fingers. The dang thing stung. Fortunately I had a tetanus shot just last year. There was a camera in the tree, all right, but not a dog in sight. I twisted around for a look at the tear in my trousers and the hole in my hide, which was bleeding. Well, it wasn’t going to kill me and there was nothing I could do about it now.

I got out my ray gun and checked it. A little green light glowed on the top. No use sneaking. Trying to ignore my smarting leg wound, I trotted for the main house.

One thing was certain: If anyone was watching the video from the surveillance monitors, life was going to get interesting very quickly. I didn’t think Rodet or his hired hands would just shoot me, but they would undoubtedly loose the dogs and come looking.

I got to the wall of the house. I froze against it, listening. “I’m against the house,” I reported to Willie, who merely clicked his mike twice in reply. He was learning.

My head was on a swivel. I was in the field of view of the monitor on the corner of the house. If there was anyone watching he had to see me.

Nothing moved except the bare limbs of the trees. The leaves on the ground hadn’t been raked; they were too wet to blow around.

Where were the people?

More to the point, where were the dogs?

From where I stood I could see the main gate and portions of the long driveway that wound up through the trees and curved in behind the house. The barns, garage and dog pens were back there. I moved along the wall toward the rear of the house, detouring for shrubbery, listening…

Not even the sound of a dog barking. The wind was carrying my scent away from the dog pens, thank heavens.

In better days I would have enjoyed this. As a kid I always liked sneaking around, going places I wasn’t supposed to go, seeing things I wasn’t supposed to see, learning things that other people thought no one knew. No doubt shrinks would say I had a problem, and one did, by the way — a doc who worked for the agency. He had a serious ethical dilemma: He had to explain to the brass why I liked my work, then offer help to get my head on straight, yet not cure me so much I would be useless to his employer.

I came to the rear of the house and eased over between the shrubs and the wall. Getting as low as I could and still see over the greenery, I eased my head around.

The shrink’s solution, which I thought was sorta neat, was to declare me neurotic but not paranoid. Apparently there’s a very thin, crooked line in the dirt that separates the serious sickos from the rest of us twisted freaks, people like you and me, and mental health pros are the only people who know where that line is. In any event, they pretend to know. We amateurs—

I saw something descending toward my head just in time and jerked it back. A machete! The man wielding it had tried to take my head off!

The force of the downward blow carried the big blade to the ground. The man had swung it so hard he couldn’t stop it. I dropped the ray gun and grabbed at the wrist that held the weapon with my left hand while I drove my right at his neck.

He rolled away and my knuckles smashed into his cheek.

Before I could close, he rolled and came up with the machete ready for another swipe. He looked like an Arab, young, wiry, medium height. I outweighed him by at least thirty pounds and was four or five inches taller. Didn’t matter — with that machete he looked big as King Kong.

He waggled it and stepped to his left to clear the house and shrubs.

If I turned around to retrieve my ray gun, I was going to lose a few body parts. I reached up my sleeve and pulled out the fighting knife.

When he saw it, he charged, swinging the big blade.

That was the wrong move. I went over backward, under the arc of the singing machete, and let his momentum carry him onto the knife. It went up to the hilt in his solar plexus.

Impaled, he tried to draw a breath as his eyes widened. He drew back the machete… and dropped it.

I gave the knife a savage twist, then shoved him off it. He fell over backward, tried to rise, gasping, then fell back.

I hunted around for my ray gun, wasting valuable seconds. Where was it?

Under this juniper. Must have kicked it. I dropped to my knees and retrieved it.

I didn’t know anything about knife wounds, didn’t know what my assailant’s prognosis might be. Was he going to get up, go for help, follow me for another try, or die quietly dreaming of the virgins that awaited him in paradise?

Since I didn’t know, I helped him on his way. I stabbed him in the throat with the knife and jerked it upward, slashing, as I pulled it out. Blood shot all over the place — the sight and smell of it hit me like a hammer. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Probably have to answer for it at the Pearly Gates, if I ever get that far.

I keyed the mike on my headset. “Better call the cavalry. I just got attacked by a raghead.”

“You okay?” Willie asked, worried.

“Yeah. Get Grafton and tell him to step on it.”

I stood over the rapidly dying man, looking around. The grocery van was parked beside Rodet’s Mercedes. Another car was there, an older small Fiat; figured that belonged to the maid or security man. Beside it was a small pickup. The gardener? Hell, for all I know, French upstairs maids drive pickups.

I headed for the dog pens.

When I was fifty feet away, I saw a body lying beside the fence. I slowed. Walked. Before long I saw the corpses of the dogs inside. I couldn’t tell if they had been shot or poisoned, and it didn’t really matter. The man, though, had been hacked with the machete.

I stopped. Looked around at the buildings and the empty windows looking back at me. Could hear the wind sighing in the big pines that shaded the pen.

Where were the people?

“Dead man here by the dog pens,” I said to Willie. “Dogs look dead, too. Grocery van still here.”

“Grafton’s on his way.”

“Don’t know where the people are,” I said to Willie. “Gotta be here someplace.”

“One of them is coming,” Muhammed Nada told the old man. “The infidel warrior, Shannon.”

“The others will be here soon,” Abu Qasim said, and carefully knotted the rope around Marisa. He stepped around the chair that held the sagging corpse of Jean-Paul Arnaud and checked the rope that held Henri Rodet to his chair.

“You have been a brother and father to me,” he said softly to Rodet. “Someday I will welcome you to paradise.”

“It will be soon, I think,” Rodet said.

“Oh, no. You have much to do before that day. Allah will help us both.”

With that, he removed a cloth from his pocket and used it to gag the Frenchman.

“Your precious faith,” Marisa said acidly as her father was tying the knot. “What if you are wrong? What if hell awaits murderers?”

“Don’t blaspheme, woman.”

“Can’t you admit that there is no way to be absolutely certain you are right?”

“With Allah there is no doubt.”

“Only a fool is absolutely certain of anything in this life,” she shot back.

“She may betray us,” Muhammed Nada suggested to Qasim. “One word from her, and all our preparation and suffering will be for nothing.”

Qasim finished the knot behind Rodet’s head and looked at his daughter.

“One word,” Nada repeated.

“He’s right,” Marisa Petrou said, and bowed her head. “Why take the risk? I am tired of living and I loathe you all. Kill me. And explain that crime to God, if you can.”

Rodet made a noise, and Qasim glanced at him. He was shaking his head from side to side.

Abu Qasim walked over to Rodet with the silenced pistol in his hand. The Frenchman closed his eyes. At a distance of three feet, Qasim aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger.

The barn was nearest, so I went to the door, eased it open and looked into the gloom… and saw nothing. Not even a horse. The building was empty. I put on the goggles, flipped them on, turned them to infrared and studied the ceiling. No humans up there, I concluded.

Raising the goggles onto my forehead, I checked the courtyard, then stepped outside. One other barn, the garage, or the house. They had to be in one of them.

I pulled down the goggles and looked. The daylight shining on the walls had warmed them so much the goggles were nearly useless. I played with the contrast control, trying to see something, anything.

Wait! In the garage … on the second floor. The apartment above. A moving shape. At least one.

I pulled up the goggles, checked everything I could see one more time, then trotted for the personnel door of the garage.

I was halfway across when the door opened and a man with a submachine gun stepped out. He didn’t hesitate. God, he was quick! He braced the weapon against his hip and started shooting.

He should have aimed. As the bullets went over my head, I dropped down and squeezed the trigger on the ray gun. The laser shot out.

I kept the trigger down for what seemed like an eternity. When nothing happened, I thought I had had the stroke. This guy might not be a marksman, but he had lots of bullets and it would only take one to do me. Despair and panic welled up in me, and then the lightning flashed and strobed from the weapon in my hand.

The report was almost lost in the thunder of his gun, but the effect on him wasn’t. His back arched and the gun muzzle went up and he fell with the weapon still hammering. I held the trigger down and the lightning pulsed across the thirty feet that separated us.

The lightning stopped about the same time his gun went silent. The pulse lasted maybe half a second, though it sure as hell seemed longer. I could see smoke wisping from the corpse.

“God almighty!” I whispered, stunned.

Mesmerized by the smoke rising from his flesh, I walked over to him. The electrical charge had hit him in the chest, burned a hole in his shirt and cooked his flesh. The smell turned my stomach.

Still standing there like a blithering fool, I glimpsed a motion in the doorway. Another man with a gun.

Before I could get the ray gun up, his gun flashed — that was the last thing I saw. A tremendous blow hit me on the head and everything went dark.

Jake Grafton was in the car that roared up alongside the van. Another car was right behind. Callie was already standing outside; Willie was in the van, monitoring the radio, waiting for Carmellini’s call.

“Tell him Jake’s here,” Callie said through the window before the cars braked to a stop.

Willie complied. “No answer,” he said, and hopped out of the van.

Willie and Callie piled into the rear seat of the lead car with a man neither of them knew. Jake turned around in the passenger seat and said names. “Pink Maillard,” indicating the man at the wheel, “and Inspector Papin, of the French police.”

“Bonjour,” Callie said to the Frenchman. She was all business. She said to Jake, “Tommy called on the radio and said he had been attacked by an Arab. Now he doesn’t answer when we call.”

“Sounds as if they arrived a bit quicker than I thought they would,” Jake muttered as the car sped along the road adjacent to Rodet’s estate. “Did he say where the people were?”

“I don’t think he ever got inside.”

“Yeah, he would have said,” Willie added. Then he pointed. “Up there on the right. That’s the entrance.”

“What if the gate’s closed?” Pink Maillard wanted to know.

“Go right on through anyway,” Jake Grafton said matter-of-factly. He glanced through the rear window. The other car was immediately behind them. The admiral grabbed the hand strap and held on firmly.

“This the first time I ever been in a car with the police without wearin’ handcuffs,” Willie declared as Maillard braked for the turn ahead.

Fortunately the gate was still open. Maillard feathered the brake and slewed the car, then accelerated up the driveway.

Two guys were dragging me up a flight of stairs when I came to. It took me a few seconds to figure it out, and that was the answer I came up with. One had each arm, and they were yanking and lifting and tugging as my feet dragged over each step. Something was wrapped around my face; I thought it was the headset or straps for the night vision goggles. Whatever it was obscured my vision — or maybe the blow I took had affected my eyesight.

I tried to move and couldn’t. My head was splitting; my face was numb; my legs felt as if they were being hammered on by lumberjacks. I must have moaned or something, because one of them paused and slugged me in the face. Then they resumed their ascent.

Somehow I knew we were going up the stairs to the apartment over the garage. I don’t know how or why I knew that — I just did.

I was in damn big trouble — that I also knew. Two of these holy warriors had already tried to kill me. These two and however many more were waiting upstairs were going to finish the job if I didn’t get to kicking and scratching pretty damn quick. My muscles didn’t seem to work. Panic set in, probably stimulated by a quart or so of adrenaline.

As these two dragged me up the stairs they were jabbering loudly in some language I didn’t recognize — calling to someone in the room above, a man who answered them.

As Pink Maillard braked to a stop near the rear corner of the house, he stuck his arm out the window and motioned for the car behind to pass him. It did. It roared between the garage and the house and stopped near the dog pens, where the four men inside came tumbling out. Someone in a window of the apartment over the garage opened fire with a pistol.

One of the men below was hit in the arm, and he dived back behind the car. As one, two of his colleagues opened fire with submachine guns at that window. The glass shattered; the framing around the window splintered. Pieces rained down.

The third man ran for the door of the garage.

I was going to die. Unable to move, I was going to be slaughtered like a steer by these Arab lunatics.

Not like this — no!

I tried to move, to resist, oh, my God, how I tried, but I couldn’t make my muscles respond!

Then I heard the pop of a pistol, followed by the roar of submachine guns.

One of the men released an arm. They were going to kill me right here!

I grabbed a handful of balls and tried to rip them out. The man they belonged to screamed and went nuts. In that enclosed stairwell, the sensation was like being in a barrel with a tiger. His high-pitched wail of agony was like a tonic to me.

The other man tried to release me to get to his weapon but found that I had him, rather than the other way around. I didn’t have a good hold, though, and there wasn’t much I could do about it with this other guy kicking and pounding on me, trying to get me to release his scrotum.

Somehow I got my feet under me and regained my balance. I was screaming, too, I guess, because the noise in there was unbelievable.

Muhammed Nada ran into the bedroom in response to a call from the lookout as the two cars roared in. He got there just as the lookout fired his pistol out the window, then died under a hail of submachine-gun bullets.

Nada was tempted to rush to the window and return the infidels’ fire, but he changed his mind: They couldn’t get in through the window. He scrambled for the stairs.

Jake Grafton and Pink Maillard also charged for the stairs. Grafton was carrying a borrowed pistol and Pink had a submachine gun. They arrived behind the Secret Service officer from the lead car. The three of them started up the narrow staircase just as Muhammed Nada opened the door at the top.

He looked over the men struggling at the top of the staircase, ignored the screaming of tortured souls, and fired his pistol at the men at the bottom of the stairwell.

I didn’t really have a grip on the man on my left; I was banging him off the walls as I tried to rip the balls off the man on my right, who was down, kicking wildly, threatening to break my ribs. I was about all in, at the absolute limit of strength and endurance, when the gun went off right over my head.

I let go of the man on my left and fell on the man who was down.

A burst of submachine-gun fire followed, and the man beside me collapsed over me. I tried to shrug him off and couldn’t.

I couldn’t breathe under his weight. With all this wrestling around, I lost my radio headset and night vision goggles. Relieved of the obstruction, I found that my eyes still worked, even if I wasn’t getting much air.

I let go of the scrotum I had been tearing at and transferred my attention to the guy’s throat. That stopped his screams. As another burst of submachine-gun fire assaulted my ears, the guy under me struggled feebly, tugging at my wrists; I stopped squeezing when I felt his larynx go and he went limp.

I fought to free myself of the dead weight on me and get my feet under me, fought to fill my lungs. As I did, my hand hit something that I recognized. My ray gun. One of these guys had pocketed it. I pulled it loose and felt the switch to ensure it was charging.

Somehow I managed to fight loose of the corpses and crawl up the stairs. Nearing the top, I saw a body on the floor. I recognized him at a glance: old Muhammed Nada, holy warrior, a little worse for wear now that he sported at least five bullet holes that I could see.

There were three other people in the room, all tied to chairs. I looked at Rodet, who was slumped in the chair with blood covering his left side. I raised Arnaud’s head and saw the hole in his forehead.

I heard voices, turned, and saw the good guys coming into the room.

There was another figure slumped in a chair. No clothes. Covered with streaks of blood. Long hair.

Oh, my God…

I walked toward her. Lifted her head. They had sliced her terribly. I couldn’t even tell for sure who she was. Then I saw her eyes flicker.

“She’s still alive! Somebody — quick!”

Two people rushed by. One was a woman — Callie Grafton — and Willie Varner. They began tearing at the ropes that held the woman to the chair.

“Rodet’s alive, too,” Jake Grafton said. He and a man I didn’t recognize were examining him.

The room was spinning by that time. Later they said I had a concussion from the bullet that ricocheted off the night vision goggles. Whatever, everything faded to black; that was the last I remember.