Without Remorse

CHAPTER 23

Altruism

'Where am I?' Doris Brown asked in a barely understandable voice.

'Well, you're in my house,' Sandy answered. She sat in the corner of the guest bedroom, switching off the reading light and setting down the paperback she'd been reading for the past few hours.

'How did I get here?'

'A friend brought you here. I'm a nurse. The doctor is downstairs fixing breakfast. How are you feeling?'

'Terrible.' Her eyes closed. 'My head...'

"That's normal, but I know it's bad.' Sandy stood and came over, touching the girl's forehead. No fever, which was good news. Next she felt for a pulse. Strong, regular, though still a touch fast. From the way her eyes were screwed shut, Sandy guessed that the extended barbiturate hangover must have been awful, but that too was normal. The girl smelled from sweating and vomiting. They'd tried to keep her clean, but that had been a losing battle, if a not terribly important one compared to the rest. Until now, perhaps. Doris's skin was sallow and slack, as though the person inside had shrunk. She must have lost ten or fifteen pounds since arriving, and while that wasn't an entirely bad thing, she was so weak that she'd not yet noticed the restraints holding her hands, feet, and waist in place.

'How long?'

'Almost a week.' Sandy took a sponge and wiped her face. 'You gave us quite a scare.' Which was an understatement. No less than seven convulsions, the second of which had almost panicked both nurse and physician, but number seven - a mild one - was eighteen hours behind them now, and the patient's vital signs were stabilized. With luck that phase of her recovery was behind them. Sandy let Doris have some water.

'Thank you,' Doris said in a very small voice. 'Where's Billy and Rick?'

'I don't know who they are,' Sandy replied. It was technically correct. She'd read the articles in the local papers, always stopping short of reading any names. Nurse O'Toole was telling herself that she didn't really know anything. It was a useful internal defense against feelings so mixed that even had she taken the time to figure things out, she knew she would have only confused herself all the more. It was not a time for bare facts. Sarah had convinced her of that. It was a time for riding with the shape of events, not the substance. 'Are they the ones who hurt you?'

Doris was nude except for the restraints and the oversized diapers used on patients unable to manage their bodily functions. It was easier to treat her that way. The horrid marks on her breasts and torso were fading now. What had been ugly, discrete marks of blue and black and purple and red were fading to poorly defined areas of yellow-brown as her body struggled to heal itself. She was young, Sandy told herself, and while not yet healthy, she could become so. Enough to heal, perhaps, inside and outside. Already her systemic infections were responding to the massive doses of antibiotics. The fever was gone, and her body could now turn to the more mundane repair tasks.

Doris turned her head and opened her eyes. 'Why are you doing this for me?'

That answer was an easy one: 'I'm a nurse, Miss Brown. It's my job to take care of sick people.'

'Billy and Rick,' she said next, remembering again. Memory for Doris was a variable and spotty thing, mainly the recollection of pain.

'They're not here,' O'Toole assured her. She paused before going on, and to her surprise found satisfaction in the words: 'I don't think they'll be bothering you again.'

There was almost comprehension in the patient's eyes, Sandy thought. Almost. And that was encouraging.

'I have to go. Please -' She started to move and then noticed the restraints.

'Okay, wait a minute.' Sandy removed the straps. 'You think you can stand today?'

'... try,' she groaned. Doris rose perhaps thirty degrees before her body betrayed her. Sandy got her sitting up, but the girl couldn't quite make her bead sit straight on her neck. Standing her up was even harder, but it wasn't far to the bathroom, and the dignity of making it there was worth the pain and the effort for her patient. Sandy sat her down there, holding her hand. She took the time to dampen a washcloth and do her face.

'That's a step forward,' Sarah Rosen observed from the door. Sandy turned and smiled by way of communicating the patient's condition. They put a robe on her before bringing her back to the bedroom. Sandy changed the linen first, while Sarah got a cup of tea into the patient.

'You're looking much better today, Doris,' the physician said, watching her drink.

'I feel awful.'

'That's okay, Doris. You have to feel awful before you can start to feel better. Yesterday you weren't feeling much of anything. Think you can try some toast?'

'So hungry.'

'Another good sign,' Sandy noted. The look in her eyes was so bad that both doctor and nurse could feel the skull-rending headache which today would be treated only with an ice pack. They'd spent a week leaching the drugs from her system, and this wasn't the time for adding new ones. 'Lean your head back.'

Doris did that, resting her head on the back of the overstaffed chair Sandy had once bought at a garage sale. Her eyes were closed and her limbs so weak that her arms merely rested on the fabric while Sarah handled the individual slices of dry toast. The nurse took a brush and started working on her patient's hair. It was filthy and needed washing, but just getting it straightened out would help, she thought. Medical patients put an amazing amount of stock in their physical appearance, and however odd or illogical it might seem to be, it was real, and therefore something which Sandy recognized as important. She was a little surprised by Doris's shudder a minute or so after she started.

'Am I alive?' The alarm in the question was startling.

'Very much so,' Sarah answered, almost smiling at the exaggeration. She checked her blood pressure. 'One twenty-two over seventy-eight.'

'Excellent!' Sandy noted. It was the best reading all week.

'Pam...'

'What's that?' Sarah asked.

It took Doris a moment to go on, still wondering if this were life or death, and if the latter, what part of eternity she had found. 'Hair... when she was dead... brushed her hair.'

Dear God, Sarah thought. Sam had related that one part of the postmortem report to her, morosely sipping a highball at their home in Green Spring Valley. He hadn't gone further than that. It hadn't been necessary. The photo on the front page of the paper had been quite sufficient. Dr Rosen touched her patient's face as gently as she could.

'Doris, who killed Pam?' She thought that she could ask this without increasing the patient's pain. She was wrong.

'Rick and Billy and Burt and Henry... killed her... watching...' The girl started crying, and the racking sobs only magnified the shuddering waves of pain in her head. Sarah held back on the toast. Nausea might soon follow.

'They made you watch?'

'Yes...' Doris's voice was like one from the grave.

'Let's not think about that now.' Sarah's body shuddered with the kind of chill she associated with death itself as she stroked the girl's cheek.

'There!' Sandy said brightly, hoping to distract her. 'That's much better.'

'Tired.'

'Okay, let's get you back to bed, dear.' Both women helped her up. Sandy left the robe on her, setting an ice bag on her forehead. Doris faded off into sleep almost at once.

'Breakfast is on,' Sarah told the nurse. 'Leave the restraints off for now.'

'Brushed her hair? What?' Sandy asked, heading down the stairs.

'I didn't read the report -'

'I saw the photo, Sarah - what they did to her - Pam, her name was, right?' Sandy was almost too tired to remember things herself.

'Yes. She was my patient, too,' Dr Rosen confirmed. 'Sam said it was pretty bad. The odd thing, somebody brushed her hair out after she was dead, he told me that. I guess it was Doris who did it.'

'Oh.' Sandy opened the refrigerator and got milk for the morning coffee. 'I see.'

'I don't,' Dr Rosen said angrily. 'I don't see how people can do that. Another few months and Doris would have died. As it was, any closer -'

'I'm surprised you didn't admit her under a Jane Doe,' Sandy observed.

'After what happened to Pam, taking a chance like that - and it would have meant -'

O'Toole nodded. 'Yes, it would have meant endangering John. That's what I understand.'

'Hmph?'

"They killed her friend and made her watch... the things they did to her... To them she was just a thing.'...?ill? and Rick,' Sandy said aloud, not quite realizing it.

'Burt and Henry,' Sarah corrected. 'I don't think the other two will be hurting anybody anymore.' The two women shared a look, their eyes meeting across the breakfast table, their thoughts identical, though both were distantly shocked at the very idea of holding them, much less understanding them.

'Good.'

'Well, we've shaken down every bum west of Charles Street,' Douglas told his lieutenant. 'We've had one cop cut - not seriously, but the wino is in for a long drying-out period at Jessup. A bunch have been puked on,' he added with a smirk, 'but we still don't know crap. He's not out there, Em. Nothing new in a week.'

And it was true. The word had gotten out to the street, surprisingly slow but inevitable. Street pushers were being careful to the point of paranoia. That might or might not explain the fact that not a single one had lost his life in over a week.

'He's still out there, Tom.'

'Maybe so, but he's not doing anything.'

'In which case everything he did was to get Farmer and Grayson.' Ryan noted with a look at the sergeant.

'You don't believe that.'

'No, I don't, and don't ask me why, because I don't know why.'

'Well, it would help if Charon could tell us something. He's been pretty good taking people down. Remember that bust he did with the Coast Guard?'

Ryan nodded. 'That was a good one, but he's slowed down lately.'

'So have we, Em,' Sergeant Douglas pointed out. 'The only thing we really know about this guy is that he's strong, he wears new sneaks, and he's white. We don't know age, weight, size, motive, what kind of car he drives.'

'Motive. We know he's pissed about something. We know he's very good at killing. We know he's ruthless enough to kill people just to cover his own activities... and he's patient.' Ryan leaned back. 'Patient enough to take time off?'

Tom Douglas had a more troubling idea. 'Smart enough to change tactics.'

That was a disturbing thought. Ryan considered it. What if he'd seen the shakedowns? What if he'd decided that you could only do one thing so long, and then you had to do something else? What if he'd developed information from William Grayson, and that information was now taking him in other directions - out of town, even? What if they'd never know, never close these cases? That would be a professional insult to Ryan, who hated leaving cases open, but he had to consider it. Despite dozens of field interviews, they had not turned up so much as a single witness except for Virginia Charles, and she'd been sufficiently traumatized that her information was scarcely believable - and contradicted the one really useful piece of forensic evidence they had. The suspect had to be taller than she had said, had to be younger, and sure as hell was as strong as an NFL linebacker. He wasn't a wino, but had chosen to camouflage himself as one. You just didn't see people like that. How did you describe a stray dog?

'The Invisible Man,' Ryan said quietly, finally giving the case a name. 'He should have killed Mrs Charles. You know what we've got here?'

Douglas snorted. 'Somebody I don't want to meet alone.'

'Three groups to take Moscow out?'

'Sure, why not?' Zacharias replied. 'It's your political leadership, isn't it? It's a huge communications center, and even if you get the Politburo out, they'll still get most of your military and political command and control -'

'We have ways to get our important people out,' Grishanov objected out of professional and national pride.

'Sure.' Robin almost laughed, Grishanov saw. Part of him was insulted, but on reflection he was pleased with himself that the American colonel felt that much at ease now. 'Kolya, we have things like that, too. We have a real ritzy shelter set up in West Virginia for Congress and all that. The 1st Helicopter Squadron is at Andrews, and their mission is to get VIPs the heck out of Dodge - but guess what? The durned helicopters can't hop all the way to the shelter and back without refueling on the return leg. Nobody thought about that when they selected the shelter, because that was a political decision. Guess what else? We've never tested the evacuation system. Have you tested yours?'

Grishanov sat down next to Zacharias, on the floor, his back against the dirty concrete wall. Nikolay Yevgeniyevich just looked down and shook his head, having learned yet more from the American. 'You see? You see why I say we'll never fight a war? We're alike! No, Robin, we've never tested it, we've never tried to evacuate Moscow since I was a child in the snow. Our big shelter is at Zhiguli. It's a big stone - not a mountain, like a big - bubble? I don't know the word, a huge circle of stone from the center of the earth.'

'Monolith? like Stone Mountain in Georgia?'

Grishanov nodded. There was no harm in giving secrets to this man, was there? 'The geologists say it is immensely strong, and we tunneled into it back in the late 1950s. I've been there twice. I helped supervise the air-defense office when they were building it. We expect - this is the truth, Robin - we expect to get our people there by train.'

'It won't matter. We know about it. If you know where it is, you can take it out, just a matter of how many bombs you put there.' The American had a hundred grams of vodka in him. 'Probably the Chinese do, too. But they'll go for Moscow anyway, especially if it's a surprise attack.'

'Three groups?'

'That's how I'd do it.' Robin's feet straddled an air-navigation chart of the southeastern Soviet Union. 'Three vectors, from these three bases, three aircraft each, two to carry the bombs, one a protective jammer. Jammer takes the lead. Bring in all three groups on line, like, spaced wide like this.' He traced likely courses on the map. 'Start your penetration descent here, take 'em right into these valleys, and by the time they hit the plains -'

'Steppes,' Kolya corrected.

'They're through your first line of defense, okay? They're smoking in low, tike three hundred feet. Maybe they don't even jam at first. Maybe you have one special group, even. The guys you really train.'

'What do you mean, Robin?'

'You have night flights into Moscow, airliners, I mean?'

'Of course.'

'Well, what say you take a Badger, and you leave the strobes on, okay, and maybe you have little glow lights down the fuselage that you can turn on and off - you know, like windows? Hey, I'm an airliner.'

'You mean?'

'It's something we looked at once. There's a squadron with the light kits still at... Pease, I think. That used to be the job - the B-47s based in England. If we ever decided like you guys were going to go after us, from intelligence or something, okay? You gotta have a plan for everything. That was one of ours. We called it Jumpshot. Probably in the dead files now, that was one of LeMay's specials. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev - and Zhiguli. Three birds targeted there, two weapons each. Decap your whole political and military command structure. Hey, look, I'm an airliner!'

It would work, Grishanov thought with an eerie chill. The right time of year, the right time of day... the bomber comes in on a regularly scheduled airliner route. Even in a crisis, the very illusion of something normal would be like a touchstone while people looked for the unusual. Maybe an air-defense squadron would put an aircraft up, a young pilot standing night alert while the senior men slept. He'd close to a thousand meters or so, but at night... at night your mind saw what the brain told it to see. Lights on the fuselage, well, of course it's an airliner. What bomber would be lit up? That was one op-plan the KGB had never tumbled to. How many more gifts would Zacharias give him?

'Anyway, if I was John Chinaman, that's one option. If they don't have much imagination, and go with a straight attack, over this terrain, yeah, they can do that. Probably one group is diversionary. They have a real target, too, but short of Moscow. They fly in high, off vector. About this far out' - he swept a hand across the map - 'they make a radical turn and hit something, you can decide what's important, lots of good targets there. Chances are your fighters keep after them, right?'

'Da.' They'd think the inbound bombers were turning away for a secondary target.

'The other two groups loop around from another direction, and they smoke in low. One of 'em's gonna make it, too. We've played it out a million times, Kolya. We know your radars, we know your bases, we know your airplanes, we know how you train. You're not that hard to beat. And the Chinese, they studied with you, right? You taught them. They know your doctrine and everything.'

It was how he said it. No guile at all. And this was a man who had penetrated the North Vietnamese air defenses over eighty times. Eighty times.

'So how do I -'

'Defend against it?' Robin shrugged, bending down to examine the chart again. 'I need better maps, but first thing, you examine the passes one at a time. You remember that a bomber isn't a fighter. He can't maneuver all that great, especially low. Most of what he's doing is keeping the airplane from crunching into the ground, right? I don't know about you, but that makes me nervous. He's going to pick a valley he can maneuver in. Especially at night. You put your fighters there. You put ground radars there. You don't need big sexy ones. That's just a bell-ringer. Then you plan to catch him when he comes out.'

'Move the defenses back? I can't do that!'

'You put your defenses where they can work, Kolya, not to follow a dotted line on a piece of paper. Or do you like eating Chinese all that much? That's always been a weakness with you people. By the way, it also shortens your lines, right? You save money and assets. Next thing, you remember that the other guy, he knows how pilots think, too - a kill is a kill, right? Maybe there's decoy groups designed to draw your people out, okay? We have scads of radar lures we plan to use. You have to allow for that. You control your people. They stay in their sectors unless you have a really good reason to move them...'

Colonel Grishanov had studied his profession for more than twenty years, had studied Luftwaffe documents not merely related to prisoner interrogation, but also classified studies of how the Kammhuber Line had been set up. This was incredible, almost enough to make him take a drink himself. But not quite, he told himself. This wasn't a briefing document in the making, wasn't a learned White Paper for delivery at the Voroshilov Academy. This was a learned book, highly classified, but a book:Origin and Evolution of American Bomber Doctrine. From such a book he could go on to marshal's stars, all because of his American friend.

'Let's all stay back here,' Marty Young said. 'They're shooting all live stuff.'

'Makes sense to me,' Dutch said. 'I'm used to having things go off a couple hundred yards behind me.'

'And four hundred knots of delta-V,' Greer added for him.

'A lot safer that way, James,' Maxwell pointed out.

They stood behind an earthen berm, the official military term for a pile of dirt, two hundred yards from the camp. It made watching difficult, but two of the five had aviator's eyes, and they knew where to look.

'How long have they been moving in?'

'About an hour. Any time now,' Young breathed.

'I can't hear a thing,' Admiral Maxwell whispered.

It was hard enough to see the site. The buildings were visible only because of their straight lines, something which nature abhors for one reason or another. Further concentration revealed the dark rectangles of windows. The guard towers, erected only that day, were hard to spot as well.

'There's a few tricks we play,' Marty Young noted. 'Everybody gets vitamin-A supplements for night vision... Maybe a few percentage points of improvement in night vision. You play every card in the deck, right?' All they heard was the wind whispering through the treetops. There was a surreal element to being in the woods like this. Maxwell and Young were accustomed to the hum of an aircraft engine and the faint glow of instrument lights that their eyes scanned automatically between outward sweeps for hostile aircraft, and the gentle floating sensation of an aircraft moving through the night sky. Being rooted to the land gave the feeling of motion that didn't exist as they waited to see something they had never experienced.

'There!'

'Bad news if you saw him move,' Maxwell observed.

'Sir, sender green doesn't have a parking lot with white cars on it,' the voice pointed out. The fleeting shadow had been silhouetted against it, and only Kelly had seen it in any case.

'I guess that's right, Mr Clark.'

The radio sitting on the berm had been transmitting only the noise of static. That changed now, with four long dashes. They were answered at intervals by one, then two, then three, then four dots.

'Teams in place,' Kelly whispered. 'Hold your ears. The senior grenadier takes the first shot when he's ready, and that's the kickoff.'

'Shit,' Greer sneered. He soon regretted it.

The first thing they heard was a distant mutter of twin-bladed helicopter rotors. Designed to make heads turn, and even though every man at the berm knew the plan in intimate detail, it still worked, which pleased Kelly no end. He'd drawn up much of the plan, after all. All heads turned but his.

Kelly thought he might have caught a glimpse of the tritium-painted M-79 sights of one grenadier, but it might as easily have been the blink of a lonely lightning bug. He saw the muted flash of a single launch, and not a second later the blinding white-red-black flash of a fragmentation grenade against the floor of one of the towers. The sudden, sharp bark made the men at his side jump, but Kelly wasn't paying attention to that. The tower where men and guns would have been disintegrated. The echo had not yet dispersed through the theater of pines when the other three were similarly destroyed. Five seconds later the gunships came skimming in over the treetops, not fifty feet separating their rotors as minigune ripped into the barracks building, two long neon fingers reaching in. The grenadiers were already pumping white-phosphorus rounds into the windows, and any semblance of night vision was lost in an instant.

'Jesus!' The way that the spreading fountains of burning phosphorus were concealed inside the building made the spectacle only more horrid, while the miniguns concentrated on the exits.

'Yeah,' Kelly said, loudly to make himself heard. 'Anybody inside is a crispy critter. The smart ones who try to run come right into the mini fire. Slick.'

The fire element of the Marine assault force continued to pour fire into the barracks and admin buildings while the snatch team raced to the prison block. Now the rescue choppers came in, behind the AH-1 Huey Cobras, landing noisily close to the main gate. The fire element split, with half deploying around the choppers while the other half continued to hose the barracks. One of the gunships began circling the area now, like an anxious sheepdog on the prowl for wolves.

The first Marines appeared, dragging the simulated prisoners in relays. Kelly could see Irvin checking and doing a count at the gate. There were shouts now, men calling off numbers and names, and the roar of the big Sikorsky choppers almost covered it all. The last Marines in were the fire-support teams, and then the rescue choppers increased power and lifted off into the darkness.

'That was fast,' Ritter breathed as the sound faded. A moment later two fire engines appeared to extinguish the blazes left behind by the various explosive devices.

'That was fifteen seconds under nominal,' Kelly said, holding up his watch.

'What if something goes wrong, Mr Clark?' Ritter asked.

Kelly's face lit up in a wicked grin. 'Some things did, sir. Four of the team were "killed" coming in. I assume maybe a broken leg or two -'

'Wait a minute, you mean there's a chance -'

'Let me explain, sir?' Kelly said. 'From the photos there is no reason to believe there are any people between the LZ and the objective. No farming on those hills, okay? For tonight's exercise, I eliminated four people at random. Call all of them broken legs. The people had to be carried into the objective and carried out, in case you didn't notice. Backups on everything. Sir, I expect a clean mission, but I messed it up some tonight just to check.'

Ritter nodded, impressed. 'I expected everything to be run by the book for this rehearsal.'

'In combat things go wrong, sir. I allowed for that. Every man is cross-trained for at least one alternate job.' Kelly rubbed his nose. He'd been nervous, too. 'What you just saw was a successful simulated mission despite greater-than-expected complications. This one's going to work, sir.'

'Mr Clark, you sold me.' The CIA field officer turned to the others. 'What about medical support, that sort of thing?'

'When Ogden forms up with Task Force 77, we cross-deck medical personnel over to her,' Maxwell said. 'Cas is on his way there now to brief the people in. CTF-77 is one of my people, and he'll play ball. Ogden' s a pretty large boat. We'll have everything we need to care for them, medics, intel guys to debrief, the works. She sails them right to Subic Bay. We hop them out of Clark ASAP. From the time the rescue choppers get off, we'll have them in California in... four and a half days.'

'Okay, this part of the mission looks fine. What about the rest?'

Maxwell handled the answer. 'Constellation' s whole air group will be in support. Enterprise will be farther up north working the Haiphong area. That should get the attention of their air-defense net and their high command. Newport News will be trolling the coast shooting up triple-A sites for the next few weeks. It's to be done randomly, and this area will be the fifth. She lays ten miles out and lobs in heavy fire. The big antiaircraft belt is within the range of her guns. Between the cruiser and the air group, we can blast a corridor for the helos to get in and out. Essentially we'll be doing so much that they oughtn't to notice this mission until it's already over.'

Ritter nodded. He'd read through the plan, and had only wished to hear it from Maxwell - more to the point, to hear how he expressed himself. The Admiral was calm and confident, more so than Ritter had expected.

'It's still very risky,' he said after a moment.

'It is that,' Marty Young agreed.

'What's the risk to our country if the people in that camp tell everything they know?' Maxwell asked.

Kelly wanted to step back from this part of the discussion. Danger to country was something beyond his purview. His reality was at the small-unit level - or, more recently, even lower than that - and though his country's health and welfare started at that lowest common denominator, the big stuff required a perspective he didn't have. But there was no gracious way for him to withdraw, and so he stayed and listened and learned.

'You want an honest answer?' Ritter asked. 'I'll give you one - none.'

Maxwell took it with surprising calm that concealed outrage. 'Son, you want to explain that?'

'Admiral, it's a matter of perspective. The Russians want to know a lot about us, and we want to know a lot about them. Okay, so this Zachary guy can tell them about SAC War Plans, and the other notional people there can tell them other things. So - we change our plans. It's the strategic stuff you're worried about, right? First, those plans change on a monthly basis. Second, do you ever think we'll implement them?'

'We might have to someday.'

Ritter fished out a cigarette. 'Admiral, do you want us to implement those plans?'

Maxwell stood a little straighter. 'Mr Ritter, I flew my F6F over Nagasaki just after the war ended. I've seen what those things do, and that was just a little one.' Which was all the answer anyone needed.

'And they feel the same way. How does that grab you, Admiral?' Ritter just shook his head. 'They're not crazy either. They're even more afraid of us than we are of them. What they learn from those prisoners might scare them enough to sober them up, even. It works that way, believe it or not.'

'Then why are you supporting - are you supporting us?'

'Of course I am.' What a stupid question, his tone said, enraging Marty Young.

'But why then?' Maxwell asked.

'Those are our people. We sent them. We have to get them back. Isn't that reason enough? But don't tell me about vital national-security interests. You can sell that to the White House staff, even on The Hill, but not to me. Either you keep faith with your people or you don't,' said the field spook who had risked his career to rescue a foreigner whom he hadn't even liked very much. 'If you don't, if you fall into that habit, then you're not worth saving or protecting, and then people stop helping you, and then you're in real trouble.'

'I'm not sure I approve of you, Mr Ritter,' General Young said.

'An operation like this one will have the effect of saving our people. The Russians will respect that. It shows them we're serious about things. That will make my job easier, running agents behind the curtain. That means we'll be able to recruit more agents and get more information. That way I gather information that you want, okay? The game goes on until someday we find a new game.' That was all the agenda he needed. Ritter turned to Greer. 'When do you want me to brief the White House?'

'I'll let you know. Bob, this is important - you are backing us?'

'Yes, sir,' replied the Texan. For reasons that the others didn't understand, didn't trust, but had to accept.

'So? What's the beef?'

'Look, Eddie,' Tony said patiently. 'Our friend's got a problem. Somebody took down two of his people.'

'Who?' Morello asked. He was not in a particularly good mood. He'd just learned, again, that he was not a candidate to be accepted as a full member of the outfit. After all he'd done. Morello felt betrayed. Incredibly, Tony was siding with a black man instead of blood - they were distant cousins after all - and now the bastard was coming to him for help, of course.

'We don't know. His contacts, my contacts, we got nothin'.'

'Well, ain't that just too fuckin' bad?' Eddie segued into his own agenda. 'Tony, he came to me, remember? Through Angelo, and maybe Angelo tried to set us up, and we took care of that, remember? You wouldn't have this setup except for me, so now what's happening? I get shut out and he gets closer in - so what gives. Tony, you gonna get him made?'

'Back off, Eddie.'

'How come you didn't stand up for me?' Morello demanded.

'I can't make it happen, Eddie. I'm sorry, but I can't.' Piaggi hadn't expected this conversation to go well, but neither had he expected it to go this badly, this quickly. Sure, Eddie was disappointed. Sure, he had expected to be taken in. But the dumb fuck was getting a good living out of it, and what was it about? Being inside or making a living? Henry could see that. Why couldn't Eddie? Then Eddie took it one step further.

'I set this deal up for you. Now, you got a little-bitty problem, and who you come to - me! You owe me, Tony.' The implications of the words were clear for Piaggi. It was quite simple from Eddie's point of view. Tony's position in the outfit was growing in importance. With Henry as a potential - a very real - major supplier, Tony would have more than a position. He would have influence. He'd still have to show respect and obeisance to those over him, but the command structure of the outfit was admirably flexible, and Henry's double-blind methods meant that whoever was his pipeline into the outfit had real security. Security of place in his organization was a rare and treasured thing. Piaggi's mistake was in not taking the thought one step further. He looked inward instead of outward. All he saw was that Eddie could replace him, become the intermediary, and then become a made man, adding status to his comfortable living. All Piaggi had to do was die, obligingly, at the right time. Henry was a businessman. He'd make the accommodation. Piaggi knew that. So did Eddie.

'Don't you see what he's doing? He's using you, man.' The odd part was that while Morello was beginning to understand that Tucker was manipulating both of them, Piaggi, the target of that manipulation, did not. As a result, Eddie's correct observation was singularly ill-timed.

'I've thought about that,' Piaggi lied. 'What's in it for him? A linkup with Philadelphia, New York?'

'Maybe. Maybe he thinks he can do it. Those people are getting awful big for their pants, man.'

'We'll sweat that one out later, and I don't see him doing that. What we want to know is, who's taking his people down? You catch anything about somebody from out of town?' Puthimonthe spot, Piaggi thought. Make him commit. Tony's eyes bored in across the table at a man too angry to notice or care what the other man was thinking.

'I haven't heard shit about that.'

'Put feelers out,' Tony ordered, and it was an order. Morello had to follow it, had to check around.

'What if he was taking out some people from inside, reliability problems, like? You think he's loyal to anybody?'

'No. But I don't think he's offing his own people, either.' Tony rose with a final order. 'Check around.'

'Sure,' Eddie snorted, left alone at his table.