Under Siege

CHAPTER THREE

Jack Yocke and his date could hear the voices through the door. When he knocked the door was immediately opened by a black-haired, gawky colt of a girl, about twelve years old or so. She smiled, flashing her braces, as she stood aside to allow them to pass.

“Hi,” said Jack.

“Hi. I’m Amy. My folks are here somewhere. Drinks are in the kitchen.” She spoke quickly, the words tumbling over each other.

“Jack Yocke.” He stuck out his hand solemnly. “This is Tish Samuels.”

The youngster shook hands with her eyes averted, blushing slightly. “Pleased to meet you,” she murmured.

They found their hostess in the kitchen talking with several other women. When she turned to them, Yocke said, “Mrs. Grafton, I’m Jack Yocke, one of your students. This is Tish Samuels.”

“I remember you, Mr. Yocke. You had such a terrible time with your pronunciation.” She extended her hand to Tish. “Thanks for joining us. May I fix you a drink? Snacks are in the dining room.”

“What a lovely apartment you have, Mrs. Grafton,” Tish said.

“Call me Callie.”

His duty done, Yocke left Tish to visit with the women and wandered into the dining area. He surveyed the crowd with a professional eye. His fellow students he knew, and their spouses and dates he quickly catalogued. But there were some other guests he didn’t know. He was greeting people and reminding them of his name when he saw the man he wanted to meet lounging against a wall, beer in hand, listening to a shorter man wearing a beard. Jack Yocke nodded and smiled his way through the crowd.

The bearded man was monopolizing the conversation. Yocke caught snatches of it: “… The critical factor is that real communism has never been tried … commentators ignore … still viable as an ideal….”

The trapped listener nodded occasionally, perfunctorily. Steel-rimmed glasses rode comfortably on a prominent nose set in a rather square face. His thinning, short hair was combed straight back. Just visible on his left temple was a jagged scar that had obviously been there for years. As his gaze swung across Yocke, who grinned politely, the reporter got a glimpse of gray eyes. Just now the man’s features registered polite interest, although when his eyes scanned the crowd, the expression faded.

The reporter broke in, his hand out. “Jack Yocke.”

“Jake Grafton.”

Grafton was a trim six feet tall, with just the slightest hint of tummy sag. He looked to be in his early forties. According to the people Yocke talked to, this man was destined for high command in the U.S. Navy, assuming, of course, that he didn’t stumble somewhere along the way. And Jack Yocke, future star journalist, needed access to those on their way to the high, windswept places.

“Our host,” Yocke acknowledged, and turned to the other man.

“Wilson Conroy.”

“Ah yes, Professor Conroy, Georgetown University. You’re something of a celebrity.”

The professor didn’t seem overjoyed at that comment. He grunted something and took a sip of his drink, something clear in a tall glass.

“Political science, isn’t it?” Yocke knew that it was. Conroy was a card-carrying communist with tenure on the Georgetown faculty. A couple of years ago the paper had a reporter attend several of his classes, during which Conroy vigorously championed the Stalinist viewpoint in a one-sided debate with his students, few of whom could defend themselves from the professor’s carefully selected facts and acid tongue. The resulting story in the Sunday edition of the Post had ignited yet another public drive to have the professor fired. The encrusted layers had been thoroughly blasted from the pillars of academic freedom with columns, editorials, and a flood of letters to the editor, all of which sold a lot of newspapers but accomplished nothing else whatever. A half dozen congressmen had gotten into the act for the edification of the folks back home, on the off chance there might be a couple of votes lying around loose in their districts.

Conroy had relished the villain’s role, reveled in the notoriety, right up until the fall of 1989, when communist governments in Eastern Europe had begun collapsing like houses of cards. Since then he had been keeping a low profile, refusing to grant interviews to the press.

“Yes. Political science.” The academic’s eyes flicked nervously over the crowd of people, who were chattering in the usual cocktail-party hubbub.

“Tell me, Professor, what do you make of the latest moves in the Soviet Politburo?”

The professor turned to face Yocke squarely. As he did Jake Grafton lightly touched Yocke’s arm, then slid away from the wall and moved toward the snacks.

“They’re abandoning the faith. They’re abandoning their friends, those who have believed and sustained them.”

“Then, in your opinion, communism hasn’t failed?”

The professor’s lips quivered. “It’s a great tragedy for the human race. The communists have become greedy, sold their souls for dollars, sold their dream to the American financial swashbucklers and defrauders who have enslaved working people….” He ranted on, becoming more and more embittered.

When he paused for breath, Yocke asked, “What if they’re right and you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong! We were never wrong!” Conroy’s voice rose into a high quaver. “I’m not wrong!” He backed away from Yocke, his arms rigid at his sides. His empty glass fell unnoticed to the carpet. “We had a chance to change mankind for the better. We had a chance to build a true community where all men would be brothers, a world of workers free from exploitation by the strong, the greedy, the lazy, those who inherit wealth, those …”

All eyes were on him now. Other conversations had stopped. Conroy didn’t notice. He was in full cry: “… the exploiters have triumphed! This is mankind’s most shameful hour.” His voice grew hoarse and spittle flew from his lips. “The communists have surrendered to the rich and powerful. They have sold us into bondage, into slavery!”

Then Callie Grafton was there, her hand on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. Wilson Conroy’s eyes closed and his shoulders sagged. She led him gently from the silent room and the startled eyes.

Subdued conversations began again.

Jack Yocke stood there isolated, all eyes avoiding him. Tish Samuels was nowhere in sight. Suddenly he was desperately thirsty. He headed for the kitchen.

He was standing there by the sink working on a bourbon and water when Jake Grafton came in.

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Jack Yocke, Captain. Look, I owe you and your wife an apology. I didn’t mean to set Conroy off.”

“Umm.” Jake opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and took a sip. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a reporter. Washington Post.”

Grafton nodded once and drank beer.

“Your wife is a fine teacher. I really enjoyed her course.”

“She likes teaching.”

“That comes through in the classroom.”

“Heard anything this afternoon about that Colombian druggie, Aldana? Where is he going to end up?”

“Here in Washington. Justice announced it three or four hours ago.”

Jake Grafton sighed.

“Think there’ll be trouble?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Yocke’s host said. “Seems every age has at least one Caligula, an absolute despot absolutely corrupted. Ours are criminal psychopaths, and we seem to have a lot more than one. I hear Chano Aldana has a net worth of four billion dollars. Awesome, isn’t it?”

“Is the American government ready to endure the problems the Colombian government is having?”

Jake Grafton snorted. “My crystal ball is sorta cloudy just now. Why’d you take a Spanish class, anyway, Jack?”

“Thought it would help me on the job.” That was true enough, as far as it went. Jack Yocke had taken the course so he could get bargaining chips to talk his way onto the foreign staff where reporters fluent in foreign languages had a leg up. Still, he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to meet anybody who might help him later in his career, so he had come to the end-of-semester party to meet Jake Grafton. “Maybe I can get a jail-cell interview with Aldana.”

That comment made Grafton shrug.

“I understand you’re in the Navy?”

“Yeah.”

“On the staff of the Joint Chiefs?”

Those gray eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles appraised Yocke’s face carefully. “Uh-huh.”

Yocke decided to try a shot in the dark. “What do you think will happen when they bring Aldana here for trial?”

Jake Grafton’s face registered genuine amusement. “Enjoy the party, Jack,” he said over his shoulder as he went through the door.

Oh well, Yocke reflected. Creation took God six days.

He heard someone knocking on the hall door and stepped to the kitchen door, where he could inspect the new arrival. The daughter, Amy, passed him and pulled the door open.

“Hey, beautiful.” The man who entered was about thirty, five feet ten or so, with short brown hair and white, even teeth. He presented Amy with a box wrapped in Christmas paper. “For you, from some ardent admirers. Merry yo ho ho and all that good stuff.”

The girl took the box and shook it enthusiastically.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the newcomer said seriously. “That thing breaks, the world as we know it will cease to exist. Time and space will warp, everything will be twisted and grossly deformed and sucked right in — rocks and dirt and cats and kids and everything.” He made a slurping sound with his mouth. “The moon’ll probably go too. Maybe a couple planets.”

Smiling broadly, Amy shook the box vigorously one more time, then threw her arms around the man. “Oh, Toad! Thank you.”

“It’s from me and Rita.” He ran his fingers through her hair and arranged a lock behind an ear.

“Thank her too.”

“I will.”

As Amy trotted away, Jack Yocke introduced himself.

“Name’s Toad Tarkington,” the newcomer informed him.

Another navy man, Jack Yocke thought with a flash of irritation, with another of those childish buddy-buddy nicknames. He wondered what they called Grafton. “Toad, eh? Bet your mother cringes when she hears that.”

“She used to. The finer nuances, sometimes they escape her.” Tarkington gestured helplessly and grinned.

Jack Yocke suddenly decided he didn’t like the smooth, glib Mr. Tarkington. “Most civilians don’t understand the subtleties of male bonding, do they? But I think it’s quaint.”

The grin disappeared from Tarkington’s face. He surveyed Yocke with a raised eyebrow for two or three seconds, then said, “You look constipated.”

Before he could reply, Jack Yocke found himself looking at Tarkington’s back.

A half hour later he found Tish in a group on the balcony. The view was excellent this time of evening, with the lights of the city twinkling in the crisp air. Washington had enjoyed an unseasonably long fall, and although there had been several cold snaps, the temperature was still in the fifties this evening. And all these people were outside enjoying it, even if they did have to rub their arms occasionally or snuggle against their significant other. To the left one could catch a swatch of the Potomac and straight ahead the Washington Monument rose above the Reston skyline.

“Everybody, this is Jack Yocke,” Tish told the five people gathered there.

They nodded politely, then one of Yocke’s fellow Spanish students resumed a monologue Yocke’s appearance had apparently interrupted. He was middle-aged and called himself Brother Harold. “Anyway, I decided, why all the fasting, chanting, special clothes, and mantras to memorize? If I could reduce meditation to the essentials, make it a sort of subliminal programming, then the balance, the transcendence, could be made available to a wider audience.”

“You ready to leave?” Yocke whispered to his date.

“A minute,” she whispered back, intent on Brother Harold’s spiel.

Yocke tried to look interested. He had already heard this tale three times this fall. Unlike Jake Grafton or Wilson Conroy, Brother Harold thought it would be a very good thing for Yocke to do a story about him for the newspaper.

“… So I introduced music. Not just any music of course, but carefully chosen music of the soul.” He expounded a moment on the chants of ancient monks and echo chambers and the spheres of the brain, then concluded, “The goal was ecstasy through reverberation. And it works! I am so pleased. My followers have finally found quiescence and tranquility. The method is startlingly transformative.”

Yocke concluded he had had enough. He slipped back through the sliding glass door and waited just inside. Toad Tarkington was standing alone against a wall with a beer bottle in his hand. He didn’t even bother to look at Yocke. The reporter returned the compliment.

In a moment Tish joined him. “What is quiescence?” she asked as she slid the door closed behind her.

“Damned if I know. I bet Brother Harold doesn’t know either. Let’s say good-bye to the hostess and split.”

“He’s so sincere.”

“Crackpots always are,” Yocke muttered, remembering with distaste his scene with Conroy.

Callie Grafton was at the door saying good-bye to another couple, her daughter Amy beside her shifting from foot to foot. Callie was slightly above medium height with an erect, regal carriage. Tonight her hair was swept back and held with a clasp. Her eyes look tired, Jack Yocke thought as he thanked her for the party and the Spanish class.

“I hope Professor Conroy is all right, Mrs. Grafton. I didn’t mean to upset him.”

“He’s lying down. This is a very trying time for him.”

Yocke nodded, Tish squeezed her hand, and then they were out in the corridor walking for the elevator.

“I really like her,” Tish said once the elevator doors had closed behind them. “We had a delightful talk.”

“She has strange friends,” Yocke remarked, meaning Wilson Conroy.

“Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” Tish explained, “people have been laughing at Conroy. He never minded being hated, reviled—”

“Never minded? The poisonous little wart loved it!”

“—but the laughter is destroying him.”

“So Mrs. Grafton feels sorry for him, eh?”

“No,” Tish Samuels said patiently. “Pity would kill him. She’s Conroy’s friend because he has no others.”

“Umph.”

In the parking lot she asked, “Did you meet Toad Tarkington?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He and I had a nice chat. His wife is out of town, so he came by himself. He’s very nice.”

“Navy, right?”

“Golly, I’m not sure. I didn’t ask.”

“The military is what’s wrong with this town. Every other guy you meet is in the service.”

“So?”

Yocke unlocked the car and helped her into the passenger seat.

“I don’t like the military,” he said when he was in the driver’s seat. He stuck the key into the ignition and engaged the starter. “I don’t like the simplistic way they look at the world, I don’t like the rituals, the deference to seniority, the glorification of war and suffering and death. I don’t like the demands they make on the public purse. The whole gig irritates me.”

“Well,” said Tish Samuels tentatively, “I’m sure that basically the people in the service are pretty much like the rest of us.”

Yocke continued his train of thought, unwilling to let it lie. “The military is a fossil. Warriors are anachronisms in a world trying to feed five billion people. They cause more problems than they solve.”

“Perhaps,” said his date, looking out the window and apparently not interested in the reporter’s profound opinions.

“Did you meet Mrs. Grafton’s husband?”

“Oh, I said a few words to him. He seems very nice, in a serious sort of way.”

“Want to go get a drink someplace?”

“Not tonight, thank you. I’d better be getting home. Maybe the next time.”

“Sure.” Jack Yocke flicked the car into gear and threaded his way out onto the street.

After he dropped Tish Samuels at her apartment building, Jack Yocke drove downtown to the office. As he had expected, Ottmar Mergenthaler was working late. The columnist was in his small glassed-in cubicle in the middle of the newsroom tapping away on the word processor. Yocke stuck his head in.

“Hey, Ott. How’s it going?”

Mergenthaler sat back in his chair. “Pull up a chair, Jack.” When the reporter was seated, the older man asked, “How did it go this evening?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Well, what do you think of him?” Mergenthaler had been the one who suggested he try to meet the husband of Callie Grafton, the Spanish instructor.

“I don’t know. I asked him for a simple opinion and he grinned at me and walked away.”

“Rome wasn’t written in a day. It takes years to develop a good source.”

Yocke worried a fingernail. “Grafton doesn’t give a hoot in hell what anybody thinks, about him or about anything.”

Mergenthaler laced his fingers behind his head. “Four people whom I highly respect have mentioned his name to me. One of them, a vice admiral who just retired, had the strongest opinion. He said, and I quote, ‘Jake Grafton is the most talented, most promising officer in the armed forces today.’ ” Mergenthaler cocked an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Another senior official put it a little differently. He said, ‘Jake Grafton is a man of war.’ ”

Jack Yocke snorted. “We really need guys like that with peace breaking out all over.”

“Are you a natural-born cynic, or are you trying to grow into one?”

“These military people — a damned clique of macho knotheads worshiping the phallic gun. Grafton is just like all of them — oh, he was pleasant enough — but I could feel it.”

Mergenthaler looked amused. “My very young and inexperienced friend, if you have to like the people you write about, you are in the wrong line of work.”

Yocke grinned. “What’re you writing tonight?”

“Drugs again.” Mergenthaler turned back to the screen and scrolled the document up. He tapped the cursor position keys aimlessly while he read. Yocke stood and read over his shoulder.

The column was an epitaph for three young black men, all of whom had died yesterday on the streets and sidewalks of Washington. All three had apparently been engaged in the crack trade. All three had been shot to death. All three had presumably been killed by other young black men also engaged in the crack business. Three murders was slightly above the daily average for the metropolitan area, but not significantly so.

Mergenthaler had obviously spent most of the day visiting the relatives of the dead men: the column contained descriptions of people and places he could not have acquired over the phone.

When Yocke resumed his seat, he said, “Ott, you’re going to burn yourself out.”

The older man spotted something in the document he wanted to change. He punched keys for a moment. When he finished he muttered, “Too sentimental?”

“Nobody cares about black crackheads. Nobody gives a damn if they go to prison or starve to death or slaughter each other. You know that, Ott.”

“I’ll have to work some more on this. My job is to make people give a damn.”

Yocke left the columnist’s cubicle and went to his desk out in the newsroom. He found a notebook to scribble in amid the loose paper on his desk and got on the phone to the Montgomery County police. Perhaps they had made some progress on the beltway killing.

Jack Yocke had two murders of his own to write about, whether anyone gave a damn about the victims or not.

After all the guests had left, Toad Tarkington was washing dishes in the Graftons’ kitchen when Amy came in and posed self-consciously where he could see her. She had applied some eyeshadow and lipstick at some point in the evening, Toad noted with surprise. He consciously suppressed a grin. This past year she had been shooting up, developing in all the right places. She was only a few inches shorter than Callie.

“Little past your bedtime, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Toad, don’t be so parental. I’m a teenager now, you know.”

“Almost.”

“Near enough.”

“Grab a towel and dry some of these things.”

Amy did as requested.

“Nice party, huh?” she said as she finished the punch bowl and put it away.

“Yeah.”

“Is Rita coming for Christmas?”

“I hope so.” Rita, Toad’s wife, was a navy test pilot. Just now she was out in Nevada testing the first of the Navy’s new A-12 stealth attack planes. Both Toad and Rita held the rank of lieutenant. “Depends on the flight test schedule, of course,” Toad added glumly.

“Do you love Rita?” Amy asked softly.

Toad Tarkington knew trouble when it slapped him in the face. His gaze ripped from the dishes and settled on the young girl leaning against the counter and facing him self-consciously, her weight balanced on one leg and her eyes demurely lowered.

He cleared his throat. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” she said softly, flashing her lashes, “you’re only fifteen years older than I am, and I’ll be eighteen in five years, and …” She ran out of steam.

Toad Tarkington got a nice chunk of his lower lip between his teeth and bit hard.

He took his hands from the water and dried them on a towel. “Listen, little one. You’ve still got a lot of growing left to do. You’ll meet Mr. Right someday. Maybe in five years or when you’re in college. You’ve got to take life at its natural pace. But you’ll meet him. He’s out there right now, hoping that someday he’ll meet you. And when you finally find him he won’t be fifteen years older than you are.”

She examined his eyes.

A blush began at her neck and worked its way up her face as tears welled up. “You’re laughing at me.”

“No no no, Amy. I know what it cost you to bring this subject up.” He reached out and cradled her cheek in his palm. “But I love Rita very much.”

She bit the inside of her mouth, which made her lips contort.

“Believe me, the guy for you is out there. When you finally meet him, you’ll know. And he’ll know. He’ll look straight into your heart and see the warm, wonderful human being there, and he’ll fall madly in love with you. You wait and see.”

“Wait? Life just seems so … so forever!” Her despair was palpable.

“Yeah,” Toad said. “And teenagers live in the now. You’ll be an adult the day you know in your gut that the future is as real as today is. Understand?”

He heard a noise. Jake Grafton was lounging against the doorjamb. Jake held out his hands. Amy took them.

He kissed her forehead. “I think it’s time for you to hit the sack. Tell Toad good night.”

She paused at the door and looked back. Her eyes were still shiny. “Good night, Toad.”

“Good night, Amy Carol.”

Both men stood silently until they heard Amy’s bedroom door click shut.

“She’s really growing fast,” Toad said.

“Too fast,” said Jake Grafton, and he hunted in the refrigerator for a beer, which he tossed to Toad, then took another for himself.

Ten minutes later Callie joined them in the living room. The men were deep into a discussion of the Gorbachev revolution and the centrifugal forces pulling the Soviet Union apart. “What will the world be like after the dust settles?” Callie asked. “Will the world be a safer place or less so?”

She received a carefully thought-out reply from Toad and a sincere “I don’t know” from her husband.

She expected Jake’s answer. Through the years she had found him a man ready to admit what he didn’t know. One of his great strengths was a complete lack of pretense. After years of association with academics, Callie found Jake a breath of fresh air. He knew who he was and what he was, and to his everlasting credit he never tried to be anything else.

As she sat watching him tonight, a smile spread across her face.

“Not to change the subject, Captain,” Toad Tarkington said, “but is it true you’re now the senior officer in one of the Joint Staff divisions?”

“Alas, it’s true,” Jake admitted. “I get to decide who opens the mail and makes the coffee.”

Toad chuckled. After almost two years in Washington, he knew only too well how close to the truth that comment was. “Well, you know that Rita is out in Nevada flying the first production A-12. She’s going to be pretty busy with that for a year or so, and they have a Test Pilot School — graduate bombardier flying with her. So I’m sort of the gofer in the A-12 shop now.”

Jake nodded and Callie said something polite.

“What I was thinking,” Toad continued, “was that maybe I could get a transfer over to your shop. If I’m going to make coffee and run errands, why not over at your place? Maybe get an X in the joint staff tour box.”

“Hmmm.”

“What d’ya think, sir?”

“Well, you’re too junior.”

“Oh, Jake,” Callie murmured. Toad flashed her a grin.

“Really, Callie, he is too junior. I don’t think they have any billets for lieutenants on the Joint Staff. It’s a very senior staff.”

“Then it needs some younger people,” she told her husband. “You make it sound like a retirement home, full of fuddy-duddies and senior golfers.”

“I am not a fuddy-duddy,” Jake Grafton told her archly.

“I know, dear. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.” She winked at Toad and he laughed.

The lieutenant rose from the couch, said his good-byes, and after promising to tell Rita the Graftons said hello, departed.

“Really, Jake,” Callie said, “you should see if he could transfer to the Joint Staff.”

“Be better for his career if he cut his shore tour short and went back to sea in an F-14 squadron.”

“Toad knows that. He just thinks very highly of you and wants to work nearby. That’s quite a compliment.”

“I know that.” A smile spread across Jake Grafton’s face. “The ol’ Horny Toad. He’s a good kid.”

Henry Charon stood leaning against an abandoned grocery store in northeast Washington and watched the black teenagers in the middle of the street hawk crack to the drivers of the vehicles streaming by. Some of the drivers stopped and made purchases, some didn’t. The drivers were white and black, men and women, mostly young or middle-aged. Knots of young black men stood on the corners scrutinizing traffic, inspecting the pedestrians, and keeping a wary eye on Charon.

The wind whipped trash down the street and made the cold cut through Charon’s clothes. Yet he was dressed more heavily than most of the crack dealers, who stayed in continual motion to keep warm. Somewhere a boom box was blasting hard rock.

He had been there no more than five minutes when a tall, skinny youngster detached himself from the group on the corner across the street and skipped through the cars toward him.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey,” said Henry Charon.

“Hey, man, you gonna buy this sidewalk?”

“Just watching.”

“Want some product?”

Charon shook his head. Four of the teenagers on the corner were staring at him. One of them sat down by a garbage can and reached behind it, his eyes glued to Charon and his interrogator. Charon would have bet a thousand dollars against a nickel that there was a loaded weapon behind that garbage can.

“A fucking tourist!” the skinny kid said with disgust. “Take a hike, honkey. You don’t wanta get caught under the wheels of commerce.”

“I’m curious. How do you know I’m not a cop?”

“You no cop, man. You ain’t got the look. You some little booger tourist from nowhere-ville. Now I’m tired of your jive, honkey. You got ten seconds to start hiking back to honkey-town or you’ll have to carry your balls home in your hand. You dig?”

“I dig.” Henry Charon turned and started walking.

The intersection two blocks south was covered with steel plates and timbers. Under the street, construction was continuing on a new subway tunnel.

Using his flashlight, Charon looked for the entrance. He found it, closed with a sheet of plywood. He had it off in seconds.

The interior resembled a wet, dark, dripping cavern. Henry Charon felt his way along, inspecting the overhead when he wasn’t looking for a place to put his feet. The tunnel continued ahead and behind him as far as he could see.

He began walking south, stepping over construction material and dodging the occasional low-hanging electrical wire. He inspected the sides of the tunnel and the overhead, looking for the ventilator shafts he knew would have to be there. He found three.

It was warmer here than it had been on the street. There was no wind, though a match revealed the air was flowing gently back in the direction from which he had come. Actually quite pleasant. Charon unbuttoned his coat and continued walking.

In several places the workmen had rigged forms to pour the concrete floor. The precast concrete shells were already in place on the arched top and sides of the tunnel, probably installed as the tunnel was dug.

After what he judged to be four hundred yards or so of travel, he came to a giant enlarged cavern. His flashlight beam looked puny as it examined the pillars and construction debris. When finished, this would no doubt be a subway station. Another tunnel came in on a lower level. Charon descended a ladder and walked away in the new direction.

This was his third exploratory trip to Washington in the past four weeks and the second time he had been in these tunnels. If the construction crews were making progress, it was not readily visible to Charon’s untutored eye.

Tassone had visited him a month ago at the ranch in New Mexico, and he had had a list. Six names. Six men in Washington he had wanted killed. Was it feasible? Would Charon be interested? Charon had looked at the list.

“George Bush?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re asking me to kill the President of the United States?”

“No. I’m asking you if it can be done. If you say yes, I’ll ask you if you’re interested. If you say yes, I’ll ask you how much. If all those questions are decided to the satisfaction of everyone involved, then we will decide whether or not to proceed, and when.”

“These other names — all of them?”

“As many as possible. Obviously, the more you get, the more we’ll pay.”

Charon had studied the names on the list, then watched as Tassone burned it and crumbled the ashes and dribbled them out onto the wind.

“I’ll think about it.”

So after three trips to Washington, what did he think?

It was feasible to kill the President, of course. The President was an elected officeholder and had to appear in public from time to time. The best personal security system in the world could not protect a working politician from a determined, committed assassin. All the security apparatus could do was minimize the possibility that an amateur might succeed and increase the level of difficulty for a professional.

The real problem would come afterward. Charon had no illusions on that score. Successful or not, the assassin would be the object of the most intensive manhunt in American history. Every hand would be against him. Anyone found to have knowingly aided the assassin would be ruthlessly destroyed — financially and professionally and in every other way. In addition, accused conspirators would face the death penalty if the government could get a conviction, and God knows, the prosecutors would pull out all the stops. Before the hit the assassin would be on his own. Afterward he would be a pariah.

For the assassin to walk away from the scene of the crime would not be too difficult, with some careful planning, but as the full investigative resources of the federal government were engaged, the net would become more and more difficult to evade. The longer the killer remained at large, the greater the efforts of the hunters.

Yes, it would be a hunt, a hunt for a rabid wolf.

As Henry Charon saw it, therein lay the challenge. He had spent his life stalking game in the wild mountain places and, these last few years, in the wild city places. Occasionally a deer or elk or cougar had successfully eluded him and those moments made the kills sweeter. After assassinating the President, he would be the quarry. If he could do the unexpected, stay one jump ahead of those who hunted him, the chase would be — ah, the chase would be sublime, his grandest adventure.

And if he lost and his hunters won, so be it. Nothing lives forever. For the mountain lion and the bull elk and Henry Charon, living was the challenge. Death will come for the quick and the bold, the slow and the careful, the wise and the foolish, each and every one.

Death is easy. Except for a moment or two of pain, death has no terrors for those who are willing to face life. Henry Charon’s acceptance of the biologically inevitable was not an intellectual exercise for a philosophy class, but subconscious, ingrained. He had killed too often to fear it.

Now he reached that place in the tunnel he had found on his last visit. It was in a long, gentle curve, halfway up the wall. As he had been walking along he had momentarily felt a puff of cooler air. Investigation had revealed a narrow, oblong gap just wide enough for a wiry man to wriggle through. On the other side was an ancient basement, the dark home of rats and insects.

After checking the area with his flashlight, Henry Charon squirmed through the gaping crack, which was lined with stones at odd angles. He was now in a room with a dirt floor and walls of old brick. The ceiling was a concrete slab. Above that, Charon had concluded after an afternoon of discreet pacing, was dirt and an asphalt basketball court.

This basement was at least a century old. The house which had stood above it had apparently been demolished thirty or forty years ago during a spasm of enthusiasm for urban renewal. The ceiling slab had not been poured here: the edges were not mated to the brick walls in any way. No doubt the demolition contractor had thought it cheaper to just cover the hole rather than pay to haul in dirt to fill it.

There was no way out of this room except through the subway tunnel. That was the bad news. The good news was that the subway tunnel was the only entrance. A man would be reasonably safe here for a short while if he could get in without being observed.

Air entered this subterranean vault from several cracks in the brick walls and around the large stones that choked the opening through which coal had once probably been dumped into the basement. Charon suspected that nearby were other basements, other century-old ruins of nineteenth-century Washington, and the dark air passages were used by rats to go back and forth.

He checked the supplies he had brought here on two evenings last week, on his last trip to Washington. Canned food, a sterno stove, a first-aid kit, two gallons of water, three blankets, and two flashlights with extra D-cell batteries. It was all here, apparently undisturbed. He examined one of the blankets more carefully with his flashlight. A rat had apparently decided it would make a good nest. He shook out the blanket and refolded it.

He picked up a handful of dirt from the floor and sifted it through his fingers. It was dry, the consistency of dust. That was good. This would not be a safe place to be if water in any quantity ever came in.

Charon turned off the flashlight and sat in the darkness near the exit hole, listening. The sounds of traffic on the street twenty to thirty feet over his head were always there. Faint but audible. There was another sound too, of such low frequency as almost to be felt rather than heard. He eased his head out into the tunnel for a look, then crawled out. Now he heard it, a faint rumble. It seemed to be coming down the tunnel.

Standing in the subway tunnel he reinspected the hole with the flash. He wanted to leave no obvious evidence that anyone had been in there. Satisfied, he walked south as the rumbling noise faded again to silence. Not total silence, of course. He could still hear the street sounds from the world above.

If Tassone just wanted George Bush assassinated, that would be a large enough challenge to satisfy anyone, Henry Charon mused as he walked along. Make the hit, ride out the manhunt that would immediately follow, then leave Washington several weeks later for the ranch. Sit at the ranch for several years enduring the agony of waiting for the FBI to come driving up the road, and hoping they never came.

But Bush was merely the first name on the list. The other five, they would have to be killed after the presidential hit. That was the rub. The sequence was dictated by logic. If he first shot the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the attorney general, the Secret Service would surround Bush with a security curtain that one man could not hope to penetrate. So Bush had to be the first target.

That sequence inevitably created an escape problem of extraordinary complexity. He had to move in spite of the dragnet and find his targets. And escape without revealing his identity. Again and again.

Could it be done? Could he do it?

He glimpsed light ahead and doused the flashlight. Two hundred yards of careful walking brought him to a steel mesh. Here the new tunnel joined an existing one. He stood in the darkness and waited.

Yes. Here comes the rumble again, much louder, swelling and growing, rushing toward him.

He stood watching as a subway train rushed by with a roar, the passengers plainly visible in the windows, standing, sitting, reading, talking to each other. And as fast as the train had come, it was gone, the sound fading.

Henry Charon extracted a subway map from his hip pocket and consulted it in the dim glow of the flashlight. He traced the lines and looked again at the layout of the system, committing the routes to memory. The avenues and streets and subway lines, they had to be as familiar to him as the ridges and mesas of the Sangre de Cristos.

With the map back in his pocket, he examined the steel fence carefully and the padlocked mesh door in the middle of it. He could cut that lock if he had to. A Yale. He would buy one just like it, just in case.

It felt strange here in this tunnel, walking through the darkness with just the glow of the flashlight and the smell of earth in his nostrils. In fifteen minutes he arrived at the cavern that would someday be a subway station and picked his way around and through the scaffolding. He found the opening to the outside world, kicked the plywood off, then reset it.

It was chilly on the street. After buttoning his coat, Henry Charon walked along absorbing the sights and sounds, looking, examining the terrain yet again, searching for cover, committing everything to memory.

Could it be done? Could he do it?

Even if he pulled it off, did everything absolutely right and fate had no nasty little surprises for him — like a cop at an unexpected place or a tourist snapping pictures at the wrong time — Tassone and his unknown masters were still the weak links.

Who did Tassone work for? How many people in Tassone’s organization knew of the New Mexico hitter, Tassone’s trips, the cash in the suitcases? Were any of these people government informers? Would they become so in the future? Were any of them alcoholics or drug addicts? Would someone whisper to a mistress, brag at a bar?

All who knew the identity of the assassin of the President of the United States were serious threats for as long as they lived. They would always carry this immense, valuable secret. If they were ever arrested or threatened, the immense, valuable secret could always be sold or traded.

The project tempted Henry Charon. The preparations, the anticipation that would grow and grow, the kill, the chase afterward, just thinking of these things made him feel vigorously alive, like the first glimpse of a bull elk against a far ridge on a clear, frosty morning. Yet the unknown, faceless ones could ruin him at any time. If he successfully escaped he would have to live with the possibility of betrayal all the rest of his life.

Yet you had to weigh everything, and the hunt was what really mattered.

Henry Charon walked on, thinking again of the hunt and how it would be.