Nick Carter

The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Dedicated to the Men of the

Secret Services of the

United States of America

Chapter One

There was no moon. There was only starlight. The shadows cast by the boulders at the foot of the limestone cliffs that rimmed the beach were either ominous or romantic, depending on whom you were with. Up to now, they had been as romantic as only the Riviera can be when you’re with a beautiful, uninhibited girl.

Clarisse pressed her nude body closer to mine, whispering into my ear in a voice as soft and as dark as the Mediterranean night that shrouded us as we lay on a soft wool picnic blanket.

She whispered again, but this time my attention leaped away from her voice to a fainter sound, the scrabbling grate of a loose pebble on sand-covered rock.

I put my hand over her mouth, feeling her moist lips on the palm of my hand, and rolled away from the softness of her body to the edge of the blanket.

I heard it again. The sliding rasp of sand on rock.

All along the Côte d’Azur, from Marseilles to Toulon, the coastline is indented by a continuous series of deep water inlets. The waters of the Mediterranean cover ancient river beds, so that in these small bays the limestone cliffs drop precipitously into the sea. Here and there, along the edges of some of the inlets — the calanques — there are small, rough sand beaches.

Clarisse and I had found one earlier in the day, not far from Cassis. We had picnicked and gone swimming, and when the sun went down, going pink and then red and finally flaring out as it went into the sea, we had made love in the dark.

Now, in an instant, the whole atmosphere changed. The sound I’d heard could only have been made by leather slipping on sand-covered rock — and a footstep made that stealthily in the night meant danger!

I half rose, bending over Clarisse, putting my face close to hers so she could see me touch my lips with the index finger of my left hand. Clarisse’s eyes questioned mine, but she made no sound. I took my hand away from her lips.

Reaching for the tangled bundle of my slacks and jersey, I pulled out my Luger. With my other hand I found Hugo, the small but deadly knife I usually carry strapped to my wrist, and put him back in place.

I would have put on my sandals, too, because that calanque sand is not just coarse, it’s cutting. It can scrape the soles of your feet raw in no time if they’re not thickly calloused.

But I knew that only bare feet would be silent on those sandy rocks and decided not to make the same mistake as my pursuer. Leaving my sandals by the blanket, still in the nude, I moved away from Clarisse into the shadows of the nearby boulders. I motioned to her to hide behind another cluster of mountainous rocks and, her naked body glistening in the moonlight, she followed my instructions.

Silently I waited. Let them come to me. I was ready.

For a long time there was nothing. Minutes passed. And then I saw it. Moving slowly into the far waters of the inlet, gliding soundlessly like a dark ghost in the black night on the even blacker water, its silhouette was all that gave it away. With its blunt bows, wide beam, and triangular sail drooping because there was no wind to fill it, the fishing sloop moved into the inlet from the sea so slowly it hardly caused a ripple on the water. The phut-sput of its engine was so muffled it could barely be heard.

There are a lot of craft of that sort all along the French coast. And along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, too. Hell, I might as well add the Italian and Greek coasts. In fact, everywhere along the Med, you’ll find boats like these. They’re painted in a variety of dark colors, and they look just like other fishing boats. But they sound very different, for they’re almost completely silent. They’ve had their engines altered and muffled because they’re used for smuggling.

I heard the scraping sound for the third time. Only now it was fainter and came from the other side of the narrow inlet. There was more than one man out there.

I hunched down in the shadow of the boulder and waited, wondering who had set this ambush for me. And why.

The flash of light from the fishing sloop was so small it could have been made only by a penlite. It winked on and off twice, paused and then winked a quick triple flash.

I twisted my head to scan the blackness of the cliffs around me. Sure enough, there was an answering flash.

Now the scrape of footsteps was clear. This time there was no stealthiness about them. They came in a hurried rush, as if someone were scrambling down the steep slope of the cliff, anxious to get at me. I turned, putting my back to the solid safety of the stone boulder. My left hand snapped back the elbow action of Wilhelmina, cocking the Luger and driving a fat, deadly 9mm round into its chamber.

I heard a scramble of running footsteps coming at me. Instinctively, I started to slide away. I wasn’t going to shoot until I had a clear target, but suddenly the target was past me, racing at full speed to the water’s edge.

He had taken three big leaps into the sea when the gunfire opened up.

There were two of them. The man at the top of the cliffs across the inlet wasn’t doing much good. He had too high an angle of fire to be accurate even if he had a sniperscope mounted on his rifle and could see what he was aiming at.

The one halfway up the cliff behind me was more accurate. A Kalashnikov has a distinctive, coughing stutter that you can’t forget if you’ve ever heard one close up, and I’ve heard more than one. That Russian automatic rifle is one of the best in the world. It was a shame that the guy using it wasn’t as good. He just put the piece on “auto” fire and held down the trigger.

The water’s edge erupted in a display of miniature geysers. In the same second, the body of the man who’d started to wade into the sea snapped erect, jerked spastically a couple of times and then collapsed in a wild thrashing of arms and legs.

Up on the cliff behind me, the Kalashnikov stopped firing. He’d run through a complete clip in seconds. In my mind I could see him unsnapping the magazine, trying to jam a fresh one in place.

His victim was still alive. Water splashed crazily as be threw himself backwards toward the shore, crawling in panic for the sand and the safety of the boulders that rimmed the inlet.

Two more shots came from the cliff top across the inlet. They kicked up sand yards away from their intended victim.

And then the bullets from the reloaded AK-47 began to smash the boulder above me. I swore as stone splinters sliced painfully into my back and flung myself sideways toward a better shelter.

For a moment I thought I was the new target. Then I saw that their original victim had lunged his way in desperate thrusts far up the beach and was scrabbling toward me, dragging one leg. his hands clawing blindly at the sand like a sightless, wounded crab.

The shots from the cliff tops were methodical even if they weren’t accurate, spaced only seconds apart. It was a question of which one of the two gunmen would kill him first. The poor son-of-a-bitch didn’t have a chance in hell of coming out of this alive. By now I knew they weren’t after me, and I damn well wasn’t going to interfere. I told myself it was none of my business, and I wouldn’t have gotten involved except that I heard the victim cry out.

In Russian.

Chapter Two

Out in the bay, the sloop had turned sharply, cutting out its muffler. The deep chugging roar of its powerful diesel engine snarled away hoarsely at full power. Its stern settled heavily into the water. At its prow, a bow wave surged up. Whoever its captain was, he obviously wanted no part of what was going on. He was getting himself and his crew out of the action as fast as he could.

I didn’t blame him. I’d just as soon have stayed out of it myself, but after what I’d heard, I knew I couldn’t.

For a moment I was tempted to play deaf and dumb. Hell, I was supposed to be on a vacation, wasn’t I? Hawk had promised me a rest. Up to now I’d had three days of the two weeks he’d promised me. I knew that if I interfered, there’d be no more vacation for me. It would be back to Washington, back to Dupont Circle, back to AXE and an assignment to finish whatever the hell it was that was starting on this beach on the French coast.

Sometimes I like to forget that I’m not just Nick Carter, that I have a designation — N3, Killmaster — in the supersecret organization known as AXE. Known, that is, to the few that have to know about us because we do their dirty work.

If I just stayed where I was and did nothing, I could look forward to another eleven days — and nights — with Clarisse. And it was worth almost any sacrifice just to enjoy the delights of her company for even that short a time.

Hawk wouldn’t know if I didn’t tell him, would he? I asked myself the question and knew the answer immediately. The hell he wouldn’t! In spite of the stink of his cheap cigars in his nostrils, David Hawk could smell out every damn secret any one of his agents in AXE ever uncovered.

I compared the pleasures of Clarisse’s body with what Hawk would do to me if he found out It wasn’t even a toss-up.

So I gave a deep sigh and tensed myself mentally before I broke from cover, every muscle in my thighs and calves driving hard into the coarse sand, like a linebacker going in to make a low, hard tackle. I reached the collapsed body in four plunging strides, my arms reaching low.

The man was short but heavy. My fingers scraped sand. I grunted with the strain of scooping him up, one arm under his knees, the other under his broad back. Holding his body to my chest, I kept driving forward, lunging desperately for the security of the boulders just a few yards in front of us.

Around us, the sand exploded in angry spurts. The crackling bark of the Kalashnikovs echoed furiously in the confines of the small inlet. Both rifles were on “auto” now.

With one last effort, I hurled us into a crevice at the foot of two mountainous boulders resting together.

I was out of breath, panting hard. At my feet, the man I’d saved groaned and rolled painfully over onto his back. A dark bubble of froth formed and burst on his lips. I started to wipe the sweat off my chest with the palm of my hand, but the moisture felt sticky and thicker than perspiration. I was literally covered with blood.

The man whispered something. I leaned forward.

“Spasebo,” he gasped. “Thank you.”

“It’s not over yet.” I answered him in Russian.

I saw his eyes wander to the Luger in my hand.

“Make them burn in hell!” He reached out and put one hand on my arm. “Make them pay!”

“‘They’?” I asked. “Who are ‘they’?”

But I knew without his answering. “They” could only be KGB agents. No one else merited such hatred. Especially from another Russian.

“Why are they after you?”

He took a shuddering breath. “I accidentally learned more... more than was good for me.” His voice was barely reaching me. It was a cultured, slightly guttural Moscow accent. “It is supposed to... to be very secret. Most... most secret I didn’t know... how secret until too late.”

“And the boat?”

“I was trying to get away. I arranged to be smuggled out of France. Someone gave me away.” He wasn’t bitter. Slavic fatalism had been inbred in him. It was as if, all along, he had expected to be turned in, to be betrayed. “You can never trust the French,” he muttered. “They know from childhood that two payments add up to more than one.”

“You’re still alive,” I told him.

I thought I saw him smile in the dark.

“For how long?” he asked cynically. “How... long... will it take them... to reach us?”

I put my hand on his chest. My searching fingers found ripped flesh on his rib cage and a gaping hole in his shoulder, but the pulse at his neck was steady. Unless there was internal bleeding, the chances were damn good that he could pull through if I could get him medical attention in time.

That is, assuming I could get both of us out of this mess. The Kalashnikovs were silent. Yet I knew it would be mere minutes before the two of them converged on us. And when they opened up from only a few yards away — well, that would be it!

I had stood up and started to wriggle out of the back end of the crevice formed by the boulders when I heard the scream.

“Nick! Where are you?”

And then Clarisse’s second, panic-stricken scream was abruptly cut off.

I swore out loud.

At my feet, the Russian glared up at me. He, too, had heard Clarisse and my answering curse.

“Amerikanski!” he accused.

“Would you rather I were Russian?” I threw back at him. “How quickly do you want to die?”

He made no answer. I slithered quickly out into the night on my hands and knees.

They should have left Clarisse alone.

Up to now I hadn’t really felt personally involved in what was going on. Clarisse’s screams changed all that A surge of anger flooded through every part of me, but furious as I was, I still knew enough not to go charging rashly into the muzzles of a couple of Kalashnikovs. Not with just a Luger and a knife. Losing your temper is out-and-out suicide in a situation like this, and I never was the suicidal type.

I transferred Wilhelmina to my left hand and slid Hugo into my right palm. The haft of the small knife felt good to the touch. The blade was as keen as careful, deliberate honing could make it. The steel was the best. The point was razor sharp.

Hugo was made for night fighting, for battling in deadly silence in the dark, for a stealthy approach, a shadowy attack, a quick lunge that ended in death for whomever he bit in his quick, savage way.

Cautiously I circled the edges of the tiny beach. Now I was glad I hadn’t taken the time to don my slacks. They were white duck and would have turned me into an easy target. Since I had always sunbathed in the nude, my tan was not broken anywhere by a band of light skin. I blended into the shadows from head to toe.

I knew that whoever had stumbled across Clarisse was trying to use her as bait, to tempt me into making a rash move to save her.

Let him keep thinking I would do that.

I went after the other Russian first.

Ears attuned to even the smallest of sounds in the night, I finally heard the noise I had been waiting for. It came from the far end of the inlet. The careless rap of a gunstock against stone.

In a night as dark as this, it’s damn hard to move around with a gun as big as the AK-47 without banging into something unless you have the agility of a panther. The Russian was careless. The soft crack was all I needed to locate him.

I moved sideways to the base of the limestone cliffs and circled the inlet until I was as close to him as I could get without seeing him. I crouched down at an angle to the slope of the cliff. He was up there, somewhere.

Night fighting calls for patience. Assuming his combat ability is equal to his opponent’s, the man who can wait the longest usually wins. I’d been trained to wait for hours without moving a muscle or making a sound.

The Russian wasn’t as patient or hadn’t been trained as well. He came down the cliffside, heading for the crevice where he must have thought we were still in hiding.

I let him get down almost to my level. When his body loomed above me, blocking out the faint starlight, I rose to my feet and hurled myself at him. Wilhelmina, in my left hand, slashed at his grip on the AK-47. Hugo, in my right hand, stabbed upward in what should have been a deadly stroke.

But luck ran against me. The impact of the Luger striking the stock of the automatic rifle stung my hand. The barrel of the gun canted up sharply, just in time to deflect Hugo. It saved the Russian’s life.

He gasped in pain as the knife cut across his chest. His reflexes were fast He turned on his heel, swinging the Kalashnikov blindly at me in the dark.

The gun caught me across the left biceps, paralyzing every nerve from my shoulder down to my wrist. Wilhelmina fell out of my hand. I slashed at him again with Hugo. Once more the Kalashnikov slammed into me, knocking me to my knees.

Whoever he was, the Russian was powerful. What saved my life was his obvious lack of training in night combat. He should have stepped back and blasted away with the Kalashnikov. I wouldn’t have had a chance. Instead, he closed in and tried to hit me again. It was the only chance I was going to get, and I took full advantage of it. My knuckles slammed into the bridge of his nose.

Blindly the Russian dropped the rifle, grabbing at me with his hands. Fingernails raked across my back. One of his hands clamped itself around my wrist, immobilizing Hugo. I slammed my left elbow across his throat.

He tucked his chin into his chest and tried to butt me with his head. Christ! He was all hard skullbone! It was as though he’d hit me with the Kalashnikov. I took the blow on my shoulder.

His face was tucked into my collarbone so I couldn’t reach his eyes. His grasp on my wrist was like a steel handcuff. In my ear, the heavy, panting rasp of his breathing was like a roaring bellows as he sucked air into his lungs in spasmodic gasps. He tried to get a grip on me with his other hand, but his fingers kept slipping off my forearm. My chest and arms were still wet with the blood of the man he’d tried to kill earlier. It made it impossible for him to hold on to me.

And then I twisted my right wrist out of his fingers. He could feel his grip loosening. In desperation he tried to knee me in the crotch. I took the blow on my thigh instead.

Hugo was still in my right hand. And Hugo was free now. My forearm jabbed forward. Just a few inches, but that was all that was necessary. Hugo touched him and slid into him just below his rib cage, opening a small, bloody mouth in his chest. I kept driving my weight against the Russian, lifting him off the ground, my left hand finding his face in time to clamp his mouth shut and prevent him from crying out.

He grunted hard, a muffled sound, and then he collapsed, stumbling away as if he were suddenly tired and wanted to rest. He took one lurching step, and then another, and then he was falling away from me into a seemingly boneless dark heap on the ground.

Wearily I straightened up, dragging deep, painful breaths into my aching lungs. The Kalashnikov lay on the ground near my feet. I picked it up, checking it over in the darkness as best I could. At least now I was on more even terms with the other Russian.

I heard him call across the inlet:

“Petrov!”

He called again. “Petrov, answer me!”

I didn’t have time to hunt for Wilhelmina. With Hugo in my left hand, I cradled the Kalashnikov in my arms and began to trot slowly around the rim of the beach. The sand cut into my bare feet with every step I took. It was like running on a carpet of steel brushes.

I knew he could see me, but that was alright It was so dark that it was impossible for either one of us to make out more than movement That I was slimmer and taller than Petrov couldn’t be discerned. Nor the fact that Petrov had been dressed and that I was stark naked.

The Russian finally caught sight of me, because he yelled out, “Damn you, Petrov, answer me! Have you seen them?”

I was around the inlet now, less than fifty yards away from him, trotting toward the sound of his voice. In my hands, the Kalashnikov was pointed in his general direction. I still couldn’t make him out because he wasn’t moving, but I had the safety of the rifle off, the switch was on “auto” fire, and my finger was on the cold, cross-hatched metal of the trigger.

“Petrov?”

This time there was uncertainty in his voice.

“Da!” I shouted back, and the moment’s hesitation on his part before he realized that I was not Petrov was enough to get me as close as I needed to be.

My finger was tightening on the trigger when the beam of a powerful flashlight slammed into my eyes. Even as I flung myself to one side, I opened up with the AK-47. I hit the ground in a rolling tumble and stopped firing.

I must have hit him with that burst because his flashlight dropped away. It came to rest between us, its beam streaming along the sand. In its reflected glow I saw him standing with his legs wide apart, straddling Clarisse’s supine form, his own Kalashnikov aimed at where I’d been a moment before.

Furiously he pulled the trigger, racketing the night with the blasting staccato roar of the gun, searching for me with a spray of lead.

Even before he ran through the clip, I was returning his fire, keeping him in my sights as the bullets slammed him off his feet onto the sand. He lay motionless, arms wide, legs drawn up like an enormous dead insect. I waited for him to move. After awhile I rose slowly, still aiming the AK-47 at him as I approached his body.

I rolled him over. He was still alive.

Half a dozen yards away, the flashlight shone along the sand, its spreading beam giving off enough light for us to see each other.

There was an expression of surprise on his face as his eyes roamed over me, taking me in from head to toe.

“Naked...” he gasped. “B-bloody...” They were his last words. The breath wheezed heavily out of his chest and with it went his life. His eyeballs sightlessly reflected the beam of the flashlight.

I turned away from him, picked up the flashlight and went to Clarisse. She was unconscious. I felt her head gently, finding the slight swell of a contusion behind her right ear. I pried open one eyeball and shone the beam of the light on the retina. There was a normal reaction. Apparently, the Russian hadn’t hit her too hard; she’d be okay, I knew.

For the time being I didn’t try to bring her back to consciousness. I had other things to do first that it would be best Clarisse knew nothing about.

I went down to the water and washed myself clean, scouring my skin with handfuls of rough sand. I dried most of the moisture off my body with quick, scooping slashes of the edge of my palms before I donned my shorts, slacks, jersey and sandals. The leather felt cool to my burning feet.

Dressed, I went back to the first Russian I’d killed to find Wilhelmina. Finally, I returned to the crevice that had been my original hiding place. I shone the light between the boulders onto the Russian. His eyes closed against the brightness of the light in his face.

“Well...? Why are you waiting, tovarich? Shoot me quickly.” He spoke angrily in Russian.

“Wrong guess,” I told him. “It’s your friends who are dead.”

There was a moment’s pause before he answered, his eyes still tightly closed.

“Both of them?”

“Both of them.”

“Turn the light away, please.” This time he spoke in English with only the faintest touch of an accent. I moved the beam so that it reflected off the boulders. He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

“You... you are very good, whoever you are,” he said. He drew a deep breath.

I made no reply.

“And now?” he asked after several seconds.

“It depends on you,” I said. “I can walk away and leave you here...”

“Or?”

“Or I can give you the sanctuary you were trying to find when your friends caught up with you.”

He took a moment to think it over. Hurt as he was, this Russian didn’t panic easily.

“What is the price?”

“What do you care what it is? You’ve nothing to lose.”

“Sometimes the price is too much to pay.”

“Do you want to die?”

He answered with a question of his own.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want to know what it was that almost cost you your life.”

The Russian grimaced as another shudder of pain went through his body.

“I’m cold,” he said, almost in surprise.

“That’s shock. You need medical attention. Are you ready to trade?”

He shrugged fatalistically. “I have no choice, have I, Amerikanski? Not if I want to live — is that it?”

“That’s right.”

“And you...” He swallowed hard, afraid to hope. “Can you really give me protection?”

“More than that, Russian. I can promise you medical attention, hospitalization until you’re well again and a whole new identity. I can even arrange protection for you while you settle in any city in the States you’d like to call home. Is that enough?”

In the flashlight’s reflected glow, I saw his bloodstained lips twist in a smile. He let his eyes close.

“I like it,” he said dreamily. “But the irony of it amuses me. I’ve been a patriotic citizen all my life. Do you know, Amerikanski, I am a Hero of the Soviet Union? Oh, yes, I earned that medal! Now...” He drew another painful breath. “...Now I must become a traitor to Mother Russia if I want to live. What would you do in my place, Amerikanski?”

He reached out and touched my hand.

“Even... even more ironic... is the fact that I must save your country... just... just so that it can give me sanctuary! Don’t you find that... amusing?”

Amusing? Hell, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He let go of my hand. “You have a deal, my friend.”

“The name is Carter,” I said. “Nick Carter. Now, let’s hear it. What’s this secret that almost cost you your life?”

He told me. It took him less than five minutes. He interrupted himself only occasionally to grit his teeth as spasmodic waves of pain racked his body.

What he told me was enough to make me realize that I had accidentally stumbled onto a threat to America more devastating than any atomic war could ever be!

There were no mad scientists. No atom bomb, no hydrogen holocaust, no skies full of Soviet nuclear MIRV missles. On the contrary, the Kremlin would sit back comfortably and do exactly nothing while our own country would go crazily to hell, destroying itself completely in just a matter of months!

Would you believe that the plan was created by a Soviet economist?

And there were just twelve days before the plan was scheduled to go into effect!

Chapter Three

I had to drive the Citroen station wagon down onto the sands of the calanque before I could get the Russian into it. He was almost unconscious by then and completely helpless, so I had one hell of a time trying to lift him over the tailgate of the car. I’d taken the precaution of wrapping him in the blanket so I wouldn’t get more of his blood on my clothes.

Clarisse was light enough to carry easily. I put her in the front seat with me. She was still unconscious. I didn’t know how long that would last, but every minute she was out gave me one more minute before I had to think up explanations for her. I was damn glad she hadn’t seen me kill the two Russians.

The road to Marseilles is Route N559. When you get into the environs of the city, it becomes the Avenue du Prado. There wasn’t much traffic on it at that time of night.

In the heart of the city I turned right onto La Canebière, the best known of the avenues of Marseilles. In the daytime La Canebière is jammed with shoppers, shop girls and sailors. Now, at three in the morning, the street was practically deserted. I drove past the Church of St. Vincent de Paul and onto the Boulevard de la Liberation.

Half a dozen turns in the small streets that cluster to the southeast of the railroad yards of the Gare St. Charles finally took me to the house I’d been looking for.

I left the Citroën at the curb and went up to the old, heavy wooden door. The brass knocker was green from years of neglect, the paint had long since peeled away, and the frame canted at a slight but definite angle. There was a modern doorbell to the right of the jamb. I pressed it and waited. After a long time a small panel in the top half of the door slid to one side and a voice asked, “Qui est la?”

“C’est moi — ouvre la porte, mon vieux!”

Jacques Crève-Coeur wasn’t as old as the house, but he looked it, and I doubt he was much younger. I’ve known him for years. He’s always looked on the verge of stumbling into his death bed from malnutrition, but you wouldn’t want to let his feeble, aged appearance fool you. He can get around pretty fast when he has to, and when he does, he’s deadly.

He opened the door wide, smiling broadly at me.

“You forgot to put your teeth in, you old rascal,” I told him. “Stop grinning at me like that.”

Jacques threw his scrawny arms around me in a tight, enthusiastic Gallic embrace. His breath was almost overpowering with the smell of garlic.

“What do you want from me now?” he asked in his thin voice, stepping back.

“What makes you think it isn’t a social visit?”

“At this time of night? Bah! In all the years I’ve known you, mon ami, you’ve never come to me unless you were in trouble, hein? What is it now?”

I told him about the wounded Russian in the car and about Clarisse. He paused for only a moment. Hiding wounded men from the authorities was nothing new to Jacques. He’d been a maqui leader during World War II and had hidden scores from the Nazis.

“Bring the Russian into the house,” he said. “I’ll see that he’s taken care of.”

“Will you get in touch with Washington for me, too?”

Jacques nodded. In the light coming from the house, I could see his scalp glowing pinkly under his sparse white hair. “I’ll inform them. Leave everything to me. Where can David get in touch with you?”

David. How about that! I’ve never yet had the nerve to call Hawk by his first name, but this old Frenchman did, and I’ll bet he even called him that to his face. Sometimes I wondered how many years those two had known each other and what adventures they had gone through together.

“He can’t,” I said. “Have Washington set up a direct flight for me. Top priority. Hawk will arrange it I’ll be at the airport in Marseilles in the morning. When I get to the States, I’d like to have him meet me at Andrews Field.”

“You know David doesn’t like to leave the office. The matter is truly that important?”

“Yes.”

The single word was enough. I knew Hawk would get the message. Jacques didn’t question me further except to ask, “And the girl?”

“We’ve been staying at the Ile Rousse in Bandol,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think it would be smart for either of us to go back there. Where do you suggest I leave her? She may need medical attention, too. She’s been hit on the head.”

Jacques took only a moment. “Aix-en-Provence,” he said. “It’s not too far a drive. I’ll have a friend meet you at the Roy René Hotel.”

I nodded my approval. Then, together, Jacques and I got the Russian into the house. He was completely unconscious by now. I left him stretched out on the couch in the living room. Jacques was on the telephone even before I closed the door behind me. I knew that in minutes there would be a doctor attending to him. I also knew that within the hour the Russian would be in a private clinic receiving the best medical attention and that when he was well enough to travel, he’d be flown secretly to the States. Hawk would keep my promises to the Russian.

Clarisse began to stir when we were halfway to Aixen-Provence. The highway was unwinding itself monotonously in the beams of the headlights when she finally awoke. She put a hand to her head, staring blankly out the window of the car.

“Merde!” she said, more ruefully than in anger. “I hurt.”

“Sorry about that, chérie,” I said.

“What happened?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No. We were on the beach, making love. Now I’m in a car. I’m fully dressed. I don’t remember anything,” she said, puzzled. “Were you that violent with me?”

I chuckled. French women are really something. “You fell and hit your head,” I told her, not taking my eyes off the road.

“Moi-même je me coupe?” she asked dubiously.

“Oui. You fell and cut yourself,” I said in French. “It was quite a blow you took.”

“I don’t remember,” she said, a tiny frown making small creases in her brow. “Isn’t that strange, Nick? I remember that the beach was full of rocks of all sizes, but I don’t remember falling down.”

“You hit one when you fell.”

“And you are a liar,” Clarisse said almost conversationally. “Because if that’s what happened to me, then why aren’t we on the road to Bandol? Why aren’t we going back to our hotel? This is the way to Aix-en-Provence. You think I don’t recognize the highway just because it’s dark?”

“I’m a liar,” I said cheerfully.

Clarisse moved closer to me so that we touched all alone the right side of my body. I could feel the weight and the heat of her breast pressing against my arm. She put her head on my shoulder.

“Is it a little lie, or is it something too important for me to know?” she asked, snuggling closer with a small squirm of her body.

“It’s a little lie, and it’s also something of utmost importance.”

“Ha! Then I shall not ask questions. You see how nice I am not to ask questions that would embarrass you to answer?”

“You are very nice,” I agreed.

“Where are we going?”

“To a hotel in Aix-en-Provence.”

“To make love?”

“You are hurt,” I pointed out. “How can we make love?”

“I’m not hurt that much,” she protested, a mischievous grin on her pixie mouth. She shook her short ash-blonde hair against my cheek. “Besides, it is only my head that pains me. An aspirin will take care of it.”

Clarisse was quite a girl. If Hawk only knew how much I had sacrificed!

“We will make love when I come back,” I told her.

“You are going away?”

“Tonight.”

“Oh? What is so important that you must leave tonight?”

“I thought you weren’t going to ask questions.”

“I’m not,” she said quickly. “I just want to know...”

“No questions,” I said firmly.

“All right.” Petulant. Lower lip thrust out moistly in a tiny pout. “When are you coming back?”

“As soon as I can.”

“And how soon is that?”

Her hand was on my right thigh, moving slowly in a most intimate caress. “I don’t want to wait forever, cheri.”

I pulled the car over to the side of the road, set the handbrake and switched off the lights. Turning, I took her in my arms and put my lips to hers.

Her slender arms went around my neck. She made a quiet, amused sound in her throat and said, “How wonderful! I haven’t made love in a car for years!” and bit me in fierce, but controlled nips that traveled the length of my neck. Her hands slid inside my shirt.

One moment we were dressed, and the next, there were no clothes between us. My hands cupped the plump, ripe contours of her breasts as her lips found their way to mine again and our tongues explored each other’s mouths, warm and wet and teasingly hot.

And then we explored the most intimate warmth and the wetness of our bodies, Clarisse exclaiming in breathless whispers about my hardness and I savoring her softness. The car was filled with the musky aroma of passion. Clarisse squirmed down onto the seat beneath me as I thrust myself into the slippery cave of her body.

“Quel sauvage!” The sound was half a whisper, half a cry, pain and pleasure, delight and agony all in one phrase, and then I was caught in the wine press of her thighs as they wrapped tightly around me, extracting the juices of my body in one final, explosive tremor that she shared.

When I finally started the car again and turned back onto the highway, Clarisse reached up and touched my cheek with her palm.

“Come back as soon as you can, mon amour,” she said languidly.

Hawk looked even more rumpled and disgruntled than usual. I don’t know whether it was because of the time of day, or because I’d caused him to leave the comfort of his office. We hadn’t bothered to drive back to Dupont Circle. We were sitting in a room at the Marion Hotel just across the Alexandria Bridge. Pick a hotel at random and pick a room in that hotel at random — the chances are damned good that you won’t be bugged.

“Go ahead,” he said, lighting up one of his cheap cigars. “Let’s hear what made you drag me out here.”

In self-defense against the stench of his smoke, I lit one of my own gold-tipped cigarettes, inhaling deeply. Hawk was sitting in a big easy chair. There was a pot of coffee on the low table between us.

“Hawk, what does an insurance company do with its money?”

“Is this a quiz on economics?” the head of AXE asked tartly. “Is this what you hauled me out here for? Get to the point, Nick!”

“Be patient. Just answer the question. It’s important, believe me.”

Hawk shrugged. “They invest it, of course. Any idiot knows that. They have to earn money with the money they take in.”

“And banks?”

“Same thing.”

“What do they buy, Hawk?”

He cocked a shaggy eyebrow at me and then decided to humor me a little longer.

“Stocks, mostly.”

“What would happen,” I asked him, “if, on a given day, several of the largest insurance companies in the country suddenly dumped every share of stock they owned?”

Hawk snorted. “Assuming that improbability, they’d lose their shirts. The stocks would plummet to practically nothing. They’d have to be crazy to do something like that.”

“Suppose they didn’t care if they lost every penny. What would happen, Hawk, if hundreds of millions of shares of stock — stock of every major corporation in the country — flooded the market simultaneously?”

Hawk snorted and shook his shaggy gray head. “Preposterous! It couldn’t possibly happen!”

I persisted. “But just suppose it did happen. Tell me what the result would be if that situation arose.”

Slowly, deliberately, as though talking to a child, Hawk said, “What would happen would be the worst financial panic this country’s ever had. It would ruin us completely! I shudder to think of the consequences.”

“That’s right, Hawk. Unlike a communist state where the government owns everything and determines the value of everything, this country lives on trust. Trust in pieces of paper. Paper money, stocks, bonds, mortgages, leases, letters of credit, IOU’s, bank books, deposit slips — you name it. Take stocks, for example. None of them are worth more than someone is willing to pay for them. If the value of a stock is seventy-two, that means someone’s willing to pay seventy-two dollars a share for it. Now, what makes that stock worth seventy-two dollars, Hawk?”

Hawk was controlling his impatience. He glowered at me and then answered, “The present assets of the company to a large degree, but mostly its potential, future sales, the dividends it’s expected to pay—” he stopped short. “I guess what you’re trying to get me to say is that, in effect, no stock is worth any more than people believe it’s worth. Right?”

I nodded my head slowly. “That’s right. Hawk. It comes right back to trust again. Destroy that trust—”

“—and you’ve destroyed the American system!”

“So,” I said, taking a deep breath, “if any given stock were dumped on the market in huge quantities without any explanation, it would be like announcing that it’s worthless.”

“Come on, now, Nick, you know better than that! That’s not the way the market works,” Hawk protested. “The trading specialists in that stock from the brokerage houses would have to keep the price up — even if they had to buy it themselves.”

“If two or three million shares of a single major corporation were dumped all at once? Say the stock was selling for over a hundred dollars a share. How many brokerage houses could afford to buy it to keep its price up?”

Hawk shook his head. “None,” he said. “Not one. There isn’t a brokerage house that has that much money. Assuming it could happen, the value of the stock would drop like a rock.”

“How far would it drop?”

“It depends. Probably, it could go to a fraction of its value.”

“Sure. You drop enough shares of any stock into a market without enough buyers to absorb it, and each share finally winds up worth less than the paper it’s printed on!”

“Couldn’t happen,” said Hawk firmly. “The Board of Governors of each of the Exchanges would suspend trading in the stock immediately.”

“And suppose that when the market opened again the next day, even more sell orders came in, Hawk? And not just one stock, mind you, but stock in every major company in the whole United States!”

“I don’t believe it!”

I pressed on. All I was doing was telling him what the wounded Russian had told me. “Suppose half a dozen of the biggest commercial banks joined the insurance companies in selling off all their stocks?”

“Christ! You’re out of your mind, Nick!” Hawk exploded. “They wouldn’t dare! There’d be a run on every bank in the country!”

“Now you’re getting the idea.”

Hawk looked at me carefully. His cigar had gone out. He made no attempt to light it.

“Add to that three or four of the major mutual funds,” I said. Hawk waved a hand for me to stop.

“Are you telling me this is what’s due to happen?”

“That’s what the Russian said.”

Hawk took a moment to relight his cigar. He took a deep breath.

“It’s pretty farfetched, Nick.”

I shrugged. “Hell, Hawk, I don’t know. It was devised by one of the top Soviet economists. The way he figures it, our economy is the most vulnerable area they can attack. You remember what happened a couple of years back when the Russians bought a few million tons of grain? Christ, the price of food shot sky high. Inflation took off like a rocket. It triggered a round of strikes because the cost-of-living went soaring. I guess that’s what gave this economist the idea that the quickest, easiest way to destroy this country is not through war but economically!”

Hawk was somber. “The domino theory,” he said musingly. “Yes, the plan could work, Nick. If the market goes to hell, the banks follow. Then every industry in the country would have to close down in a matter of days. Once that happens, tens of millions of people are out of work. The country goes broke. Without enough money to take care of our own people, there’d be no foreign aid, no foreign trade, no NATO, SEATO or other alliances. The European Common Market would have to turn to the Soviet bloc to survive. Japan would turn to Red China. The United States would be reduced to less than a fifth-rate power!”

I’ve never seen so serious an expression on Hawk’s face. He went on, thinking out loud, “There’d be riots in every city and town in the country!”

Then he got to his feet angrily and began pacing the room in short, rapid steps. “But how, Nick? For God’s sake! You’re asking me to believe that every responsible financier and money man in the country would act contrary to his own self-interests! I just can’t see men like that acting that way!”

“The Russian says there are only a few of them, Hawk. Just a few key men, strategically placed — men with authority to issue sell orders of that magnitude. They could trigger it. The others would follow out of panic and desperation.”

“He could be right,” Hawk said finally. “Dammit, he could be right!”

“The Russians believe it can be done,” I said. “That’s why they almost killed him when he found out what was going to happen.”

Hawk paced the room like a caged leopard. “There’d have to be an organization,” he said savagely. “A tight little group, with each man a power in his own company.” He nodded, talking almost completely to himself now. “Yes, an organization, but with one man at the top. One man to give the orders.”

He turned to me suddenly. “But why? Why would they do it, Nick?”

I knew better than to answer. With Hawk’s knowledge of human nature, it had to be a rhetorical question.

“Power!” he exclaimed, slamming his fist down on the table top. “That’s the only motivation for men of that stature! They’d do it for power! Tell them that they’d be running the country the way they think it should be run and you’d have them eating out of the palm of your hand! You take a man who’s fought his way into control of a giant company and ten to one he wants to control the country as well.”

Hawk dropped the stub of his cigar into the ashtray. The outburst seemed to calm him down. I poured myself a cup of the now cold coffee and sipped at it. Hawk came over and picked up his own cup. He took his time about filling it.

“Alright, Nick,” he said almost quietly, “now you tell me how the hell the Russians fit into this thing. How did the Kremlin get their hands on the top man? Blackmail? I can’t believe that.”

“He’s a plant,” I said and watched the expression on Hawk’s face. Only a quick flash of surprise in his eyes showed that he’d even heard me.

“When did they bury him?” he asked quietly.

“According to the Russian, he was planted here right after World War II — somewhere around 1946. He’s been lying low ever since. About eight years ago he began forming this organization. You guessed it, Hawk, there is an organization. And every one of its members has a key position in his own company. Every one of them is a top financial officer.”

“You know anything else about this organization? It’s name?”

I shook my head. “The Russian didn’t learn that much. But he was able to tell me the outline of the plan. Actually, the Kremlin didn’t know what the hell to do with this organization until Krasnov — that’s the Russian economist — came up with his idea. That was about a year ago. They’re ready to go now.”

“When? When’s the kick-off date?”

“Twelve days from now,” I said. “Eleven, if you don’t count today.”

Hawk drained the rest of his cold coffee, made a face and put the cup down on the table.

“Anything else? Any clues as to who this top man might be?”

“The Russian said something strange,” I said, remembering. “He said the man was a Brahmin. Whatever that means.”

Hawk was silent for several seconds, then suddenly he whispered, “Boston!”

“What?”

“He’s a Bostonian, Nick! Upper class, old family, high in the hierarchy of the financial world. Only one group in the U.S. are called ‘Brahmins,’ because they’re top caste.”

He saw I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“Certain Bostonians got tagged with that nickname around the middle of the nineteenth century, Nick. That’s when Boston considered itself the intellectual hub of the universe. Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow were their literary and philosophical leaders. Old Yankee families had a pretty high opinion of themselves. So much so that Boston society looked down on New York society as Johnny-come-latelies. Like high-caste Hindus, they got to be known as Brahmins. The man we want is a Bostonian, Nick. You’ll find him there.”

I got to my feet. It was time to go. I’d been given my assignment. As I put on my jacket, I said, “Hawk, are you going to let the White House know about this?”

David Hawk looked at me strangely. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder in a rare gesture of warmth.

“Nick, so far you’ve done a fine job. You just haven’t thought far enough ahead. If I tell the White House, word will get to the Treasury Department in minutes. What makes you believe that this organization hasn’t got someone in there at the top level?”

He was right. I hadn’t thought it through. Well, I wasn’t in the think-tank group at AXE. I was Killmaster N3. My forte was action.

“How do you want it handled?”

“The quickest way. Eliminate the top man,” Hawk told me grimly. “Find him and get rid of him!”

“Any way I want?”

“No,” Hawk shook his head. “Definitely not! If he’s that big a man, who knows what would happen if he died under extraordinary circumstances? No, Nick, it’ll have to be an ‘accident.’ A believable accident,” he stressed. “The kind no one will ever question — or investigate.”

I shrugged. He knew he was cramping my style.

“That’s an order, Nick,” Hawk said quietly. “It’s got to be an accident.”

Chapter Four

The 727 tri-jet came winging in to Boston from Washington on a long, swooping curve from the southwest, its wing tilting down like a giant aluminum finger to point out the thin five-mile peninsula of Hull that served as an enormous breakwater for one of the great natural harbors of the world.

From my seat in the midsection of the plane I could see the sparse modern skyline of the city rising bravely in the crisp, bright air. There were the tinted glass and steel towers of the Prudential Insurance Building, the John Hancock Insurance Building and the First National Bank Building. In their midst, almost overwhelmed by them, yet catching your eye before all else, was the round, gleaming gold-leaf dome of the State House rotunda.

Like Virginia and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts isn’t a “state.” It’s a Commonwealth and very proud of it. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston, its capital, is a bankers’ town. A town where old money has had more than 300 years to grow and spread its influence throughout the rest of the world, let alone the rest of the United States. And it’s quiet about its money. It doesn’t like to talk about it. Banks and insurance companies and enormous investment funds have quietly taken a firm grip on our economy.

The more I thought about it, the more I believed the Russian was right. If money is the basis of a capitalistic society, then it’s the most vulnerable part of our society. The wonder of it is that it hadn’t been subject to an onslaught by the Soviets long before now.

Or maybe it had been. The gold crisis of a few years back shook our economy to the core. First, we had to get off the gold standard, and then we had to devalue the dollar. The repercussions were international. Were they also plotted — by the Kremlin?

Calvin Woolfolk was waiting for me at the Eastern Airlines arrival gates at Logan International Airport. I had no trouble recognizing him, even though all Hawk had said was, “Look for a Yankee lawyer.”

Woolfolk was in his seventies, tall and lean, with the spare, gaunt look of a Maine farmer. His hair was white, thick and uncombed. The lines on his face had been carved one by one over the years, each experience deepening a line or adding a new one. When we shook hands, I felt callouses on his palm. His grip was as tight as if he were more accustomed to hefting the helve of an axe than gripping a pen to write torts. The creases on his face split slightly to show the thin line of his lips. I guess you could call it a smile.

“David Hawk said you could use my help,” he said abruptly in a frosty voice as he fell into step beside me. “You want to talk in my office, or somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else,” I said.

He nodded. “Makes sense.” There’s something about a New England accent that sets it apart even more than its nasal tone. It fits the region’s terse, no-nonsense, taciturn way of communicating. Woolfolk reached into his pocket and took out a single sheet of paper.

“Five names there,” he said. “Man you’re looking for could be any one of them.”

I put the paper in my pocket.

“You got any baggage?” Woolfolk asked as we came down the escalator to the lower level. The baggage turntables spun slowly and aimlessly, parading a variety of boxes, luggage, knapsacks and travel cases like horses on a carousel.

“It was sent directly to the hotel,” I told him. Automatically I looked around, trying to spot anyone who might be following me. Sometimes a tail gives himself away by showing too much interest in you — or too little. Only experienced pros know how to strike the right balance. There didn’t seem to be anyone.

By this time we were outside the glass doors. A cab pulled up. Woolfolk climbed in, and I followed him. The cab took us through the Sumner Tunnel under the Charles River, up onto the Expressway, and then curved off onto the Drive. We exited at Arlington Street.

Woolfolk insisted on paying for the taxi We strolled across the intersection of Arlington and Beacon Streets and turned into the Public Gardens, walking along a path until Woolfolk spotted an empty park bench. He sat down, and I sank onto the bench beside him. Across from us, on an hourglass-shaped lake, floated the swan boats. Forty to fifty feet long, some ten to twelve feet wide, each boat held rows of slat benches, each bench wide enough to seat four or five people. Most of the passengers were children, well-dressed, wide-eyed with delight.

At the stern of each boat was a carved, larger-than-lifesize, white-painted swan. Between its wooden wings, sitting on a bicycle seat was a teenager, who foot-pedaled away to provide the power for the small paddle wheel at the stern. By pulling on tiller ropes he guided the boat as it glided gently, silently on the calm water, circling the tiny islands at each end of the lake. It was all very quiet and very peaceful and very clean.

“Read the list,” Woolfolk said sharply. “I haven’t got all day.”

I opened the paper. Woolfolk’s handwriting was as crabbed and compact as the man himself.

Alexander Bradford, Frank Guilfoyle, Arthur Barnes, Leverett Pepperidge and Mather Woolfolk. Those were the five names.

I tapped the paper.

“This last one,” I said. “Mather Woolfolk. Is he any relation to you?”

Calvin Woolfolk nodded. “Yup. He’s my brother. We’re not close, though.”

“What can you tell me about these men?”

“Well,” said Woolfolk, “from what little information I got from David Hawk, I understand you’re looking for someone with a lot of influence in financial circles.”

“Something like that.”

“They all fit,” said Woolfolk. “That is, if you’re looking for a man with real power.”

“I am.”

“They’ve got it. So much that most people don’t know they have it. The only ones who really know how much power these men have are the people they let deal with them directly. And I can tell you they let damn few people deal with them directly!”

“Mr. Woolfolk...”

“Calvin.”

“Calvin, did Hawk tell you about me?”

Woolfolk’s thin lips twisted in a slight smile. He said, “Son, I’ve known about you for a long time. Nick Carter. N3. Killmaster. You ought to know that my knowledge of AXE goes back almost to its very beginnings. I’m an old friend of David Hawk’s.”

“What are the men on this list really after?”

“Not money. For them, money is just a tool. They don’t really give a damn about money. Control is what they’re after. When you can control the lives of hundreds — hell, thousands — of other men, well, son, that’s a pretty heady feeling.”

“Which of them has the most power?”

Woolfolk stood up slowly. “I can’t tell you that, Nick. I just don’t know. I guess it’s your job to find out, isn’t it?”

“Alright, Calvin. Thanks for the help.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Think nothing of it. You just call on me any time you feel like it.”

I watched him walk off in a loping, loose-jointed stride, quickly disappearing around the curve of the path.

Five men. Eleven days in which to uncover the KGB “plant.” There were two ways to root him out. I could start digging for him — and it might take a year or more to get the information. Or I could make him come after me.

He wouldn’t do it himself. He’d send someone else. And if I could spot that someone else, I’d be able to track him back to the man who’d issued the order, and from that man to the next one higher up. And if there weren’t too many in the chain, and if I were lucky and they didn’t get me first — well, I’d get my man. Maybe.

After awhile I got to my feet and walked down Arlington Street to Newbury Street and the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Every city has at least one hotel like it. The hotel where people with quiet money and social status stay because of the panache, the atmosphere, the ambience — whatever you want to call it. It’s something that takes two or three generations to develop; an individual tradition of superbly efficient but unostentatious, service.

My bags were already in my room. Hawk had seen to it that they were sent directly from Andrews Air Base even while I was being driven to National Airport to catch the Eastern shuttle flight. All I had to do was sign the register at the desk. The first thing I did after I closed the door behind the bellhop was to put in a transatlantic call to Jacques Crève-Coeur in Marseilles.

The telephone rang half a dozen times before he picked it up.

I said, “’Allo, Jacques?” and before I could go on, the receiver crackled with his curses.

“You know what time it is here?” he demanded. “Don’t you have any consideration at all? Why must you deprive an old man like me of his sleep?” It was not quite 9:00 P.M. in France.

“You’ll get all the sleep you need in your grave. Jacques, were there any repercussions from that little incident on the beach?”

“Little incident! An understatement, mon ami. No, there were no repercussions. Why?”

“Do you think the opposition found out I was responsible?”

I heard him gasp. “Mon dieu! This is an open line! Why are you suddenly so careless?”

“Trust me, Jacques.”

He caught on quickly. “No, so far they don’t know about you, although they’re trying hard to find out who it was. Is it that you want me to pass the word along?”

“As soon as you can, Jacques. Such a channel is available to you?”

“One of the best. A double agent. He thinks I don’t know that he works for the KGB as well as for us,”

“Let them know that I rescued the Russian, Jacques. Let them know he told me everything he discovered. Also, let them know that I’m now in Boston.”

Jacques said somberly, “They’ll be after you, Nick. Take care.”

“Someone will be after me, Jacques. Let’s hope it will be soon.”

I hung up. There was nothing more to be said. What I had to do now was to wait, and my hotel room was not the place for it. Not if I wanted action. I had to expose myself and see what happened.

What happened was that two hours later I met a young woman. She was in her late twenties or early thirties and carried herself with the kind of poise other women envy and try to imitate. Brown hair, neatly brushed so that the ends curled in to frame an oval face. Just enough makeup to accentuate grey-blue eyes and the barest touch of lipstick to outline her full mouth. A blue, rough-nubbed linen jacket and short skirt and a paler blue turtleneck cashmere sweater covered the lines of an exceptionally feminine body.

Downtown Boston is a city made for tourists. Within a dozen blocks there are half a hundred places of historical interest. I had wandered across the Common to the Granary Burial Ground on Tremont Street — Ben Franklin’s final resting place.

Like most of the other tourists, she carried a camera. As she unslung it from around her neck, she came up to me and held it out. Smiling, she asked politely, “Would you mind taking my picture? It’s very simple. I’ve already set it. All you have to do is press this button.”

The smile was friendly and, at the same time, remote. It’s the kind of smile that pretty girls learn to turn on when they want something, and yet still want to keep you at arm’s length.

She handed me the camera and moved back, lithely stepping up onto the edge of Franklin’s grave marker.

“Be sure you get it all in,” she said. “The whole monument. Okay?”

I raised the camera to my eye.

“You’ll have to step back a few feet,” she told me, still smiling her warm but impersonal smile. But there was no warmth in those blue-grey eyes. “You’re really too close.”

She was right. The camera had a telephoto lens mounted on it. All I could see of her through the finder was the upper part of her torso and her head.

I started to move back, and as I did so, the weight and the feel of the camera in my hands told me that something was wrong. It looked like any one of a hundred thousand Japanese single lens reflex cameras of that particular popular model. There was nothing outwardly different about it to arouse my suspicions. But my instincts were suddenly screaming at me, telling me that something was wrong. I’ve learned to trust my instincts thoroughly, and to act on those instincts without delay.

I took my finger off the shutter release and moved the camera away from my face.

On the pedestal, the woman stopped smiling. Anxiously she called out, “Is there anything wrong?”

I smiled reassuringly back at her. “Not a thing,” I said and turned to the man standing a few feet away. He’d been watching the little by-play between us with an envious expression on his round face. He was short and bald and wore heavily-framed glasses, and he was dressed in a plaid summer jacket and bright red slacks. The look on his face said plainly that, while he wished she’d chosen him, he was used to the fact that pretty women never noticed him. I guess he might have been a nice guy. I’ll never know. He was a loser, one of the world’s little people who somehow always wind up with the short end of the stick.

I pressed the camera into his pudgy hands and said, “Do me a favor, will you? Take a picture of both of us.”

Without waiting to hear his reply, I sprang up onto the base of the marker beside the young woman and put one arm tightly around her waist before she could stop me.

She tried to twist away. There was real fright in her face. I held her even more firmly to my side, my arm gripping her torso, feeling the softness of her flesh under the softness of the cashmere sweater.

“No!” she cried out. “No! Don’t!”

“He’s just going to take one for my scrapbook,” I told her pleasantly, but my arm never relaxed its unbending grip on her in spite of her struggles and the smile on my face was as false as hers had been a moment before.

Desperately she tried to wrench herself away.

The man put the camera to his eye.

“Hey! That’s a great shot,” he commented admiringly.

“Damn you! Let go!” she cried out, panic filling her voice. “You’ll kill us both!”

“Hold it,” said the pudgy little man. I threw the woman to the ground, with myself on top of her, just as his finger pressed down on the shutter release.

The explosion fractured our little world with its sharp blast.

As explosions go, it wasn’t much. Just enough to tear the head off the man with the camera and splatter us with his blood. An ounce or so of plastique doesn’t take up much space. Neither does the tiny electric battery that makes it go off, but together they’re enough to do the job if all you want to do is kill the man who’s holding it to his face.

Some part of the camera — I guess it must have been the lens — flew across the few feet and slammed into the side of my head. It was like being hit with an axe handle. Everything went a reddish, hazy black and out of focus. Beneath me, I could feel the woman’s body squirming in her frantic attempts to escape. My hands wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t hold onto her.

People were shouting. There were a few screams that seemed to come from very far away, and then the noise swallowed me up.

I wasn’t out very long. Just a few seconds, but it was long enough for the woman to pull herself from underneath me and get to her feet. Dimly I could see her run down the path to the gate. She turned left on Tremont Street.

Groggily I pushed myself to my hands and knees. Someone helped me stand up.

“Are you alright?”

I didn’t answer. Like a drunk, I staggered down the path after her, knowing that I had to keep her in sight.

Someone shouted at me, “Hey, you’re hurt!” and tried to hold me back. I pushed him aside with a hard shove that sent him sprawling to his knees and continued my staggering run over the graves toward the gate. As I came out of the cemetery, I saw her turn the corner and head up toward Beacon Hill.

By the time I reached the intersection, she was far up the street. She had crossed to the other side and had slowed to a walk. If a running man attracts attention, the sight of a woman sprinting is enough to turn every head. Whoever she was, she was smart enough to know that. She walked at a quick, determined pace, looking neither to the right nor the left.

I slowed to a walk, too, staying on the opposite side of the street to keep her in sight. She went up the hill, past the State House, then turned right on Joy Street, still a hundred feet or more in front of me. When I got to the corner, it was just in time to see her turn left onto Mount Vernon Street.

The streets on Beacon Hill are narrow and not very crowded with people. It’s easy to spot anyone trying to follow you. I hung back as far as I dared, gambling that I wouldn’t lose her.

I didn’t.

She came to Louisburg Square, that small, privately-owned enclave that is the home of old Boston families, and turned into it. Two rows of adjoining townhouses that are not very wide and not very pretentious face each other across a small park. You’ve got to have more than just money to be able to buy one. They’re passed down from generation to generation, a legacy to be kept in the family. Outsiders are not welcome.

I watched the woman pause momentarily to unlock one of the townhouse doors. Not once had she turned her head to see if she were being followed.

The sidewalks of the Square are of brick, and in the street the original granite cobblestones are only partially covered by a thin sheeting of asphalt that time and traffic have worn away. The whole damn place looks slightly seedy, slightly run down, but you’d better not believe its appearance. Louisburg Square means something special to anyone who knows New England. The people who live there hide behind a facade of genteel poverty, and what they hide is old money. Old money and old family and what Calvin Woolfolk and I had been talking about earlier in the day. Power.

She’d led me to where I wanted to go.

Now the question was, which one of those five names on Woolfolk’s list lived at 21½ Louisburg Square?

Chapter Five

None of the five names was listed as being a resident of 21½ Louisburg Square. Neither the telephone directory nor the reverse directory, which lists by street addresses rather than by names, carried any information about who lived there. All that meant was that whoever it was had an unlisted number. It was too late to check City Hall for the tax records. I’d do that tomorrow.

It had been a pretty full day, considering that at six in the morning I’d boarded an Air Force fighter jet in Marseilles, had lunch and a talk with Hawk in Washington around twelve-thirty, and had almost had my head blown off before six o’clock that same evening in Boston.

There was a message for me in my box when I got back to my hotel. Calvin Woolfolk had called and invited me to dinner. He’d meet me at Gaspar’s, which was thoughtful of him because the restaurant is only about three blocks from the hotel.

I showered and changed and walked up Newbury Street to Gaspar’s. The maitre d’ came up to me before I’d taken half a dozen steps inside.

“Mr. Carter?”

“Yes.”

He smiled his professional greeter’s smile. “Mr. Woolfolk is waiting for you in the other room, sir. If you’ll follow me, please...”

Calvin’s white hair caught my eye as soon as we walked into the far dining room. He looked up and lifted a hand in greeting. There was a woman seated with him, but her back was toward me. When I got to the table, Calvin rose and said, “Nick, I’d like you to meet my niece. Sabrina, this is Nick Carter.”

The woman turned and lifted her face to me, smiling the same kind of smile she’d worn earlier in the afternoon when she’d come up with a camera in her hand at Ben Franklin’s grave and asked me to take her picture with it. Warm and impersonal, a facial gesture polite enough to hide behind with impunity.

She held out her hand. It felt both delicate and strong at the same time.

I smiled back at her.

“Sit down, Nick,” said Calvin Woolfolk. The maitre d’ pulled out the chair between Calvin and his niece. I gave him my order for a drink.

“I thought there’d be just the two of us,” I said to Calvin. “Your message didn’t indicate...”

“...that we’d have the pleasure of Sabrina’s company?” Calvin finished. “No, it didn’t. I wasn’t aware that Sabrina was in town at the time I called you. She stopped by my place as I was leaving. Came as a complete surprise.” He reached over and touched her hand affectionately. “But a pleasant one. I hardly ever see her these days. She’s gadding about the country, flying from one place to another so a body can’t keep track of her.”

I turned to Sabrina. “You must be Mather’s daughter.”

“I didn’t know you knew Father,” she said. Her voice had a husky body to it. Its tone, though, was as reserved as her smile.

“I don’t,” I said. “Calvin’s mentioned him. I’m assuming Calvin has no other brothers.”

“Thank God,” said Calvin. “Mather’s enough!”

The waiter came up with my drink. The three of us touched glasses and made small talk that lasted through the meal.

Sabrina’s poise was perfect. She acted as though I were just another friend of Calvin’s. You’d never guess that only a few hours earlier she’d tried to blow my head off.

Did Calvin know about Sabrina’s attempt on my life? Was he part of the conspiracy? Did she deliberately drop in on Woolfolk because she knew he was having dinner with me, or did that turn of events take her by surprise?

Sabrina. I looked across the table at her. She was completely at ease. It takes a particular kind of murderess to do what she’d done this afternoon and then to act as cool and as poised as she was right now. She knew that I recognized her. Apparently, she just didn’t give a damn. Perhaps she felt so sure I’d be dead within hours that I posed absolutely no threat in her eyes.

Every once in awhile, I’d catch her looking appraisingly at me, though. There was a hint of amusement in her gaze, and mockery, and if I read it right, a touch of scorn.

Calvin insisted on paying the check. We walked out into the street. The night was one of those pleasant New England summer nights, clear and cool, with the wind coming down the street from the north. Calvin stopped on the corner.

“Nick,” he asked, “would you mind taking Sabrina home? I’m heading the other way.”

I looked at his niece.

“Not if she doesn’t mind.”

Sabrina said politely, “I’d appreciate it, Mr. Carter.”

Calvin patted me on the arm. “Talk to you soon,” he said and moved off in that loping, gangly stride that belied his age.

I took Sabrina by the elbow, turning down Newbury Street toward the center of town.

We had walked half a dozen steps before she spoke up. “You seem to know where we’re going. Do you know where I live, Mr. Carter?”

“Beacon Hill.”

“And the street?”

“Louisburg Square.”

Even in the darkness I could see a faint smile on her lips.

“And, of course, you know the number.”

“Twenty-one and a half.”

She put her arm through mine. “You’re quite a man, Mr. Carter, aren’t you?”

“Nick,” I corrected her. “No, it’s just that when someone tries to kill me, I find out as much about him — or her — as I can.”

“Do people often try to kill you?” Still the touch of amusement in her voice.

“Often enough for me to have learned to be careful. And you? Do you often try to kill others?”

Sabrina ignored the question. “It must seem that way to you,” she said thoughtfully. “Looking at it from your point of view, I’m sure it would appear that I did try to kill you.”

“Is there another way of looking at it?”

Who the devil was she trying to con, I wondered. And how would she try to lie her way out of attempted murder?

“Did you ever think that I might have been the intended victim? After all, it was my camera that was tampered with.”

“Is that why you ran?”

“I ran because I can’t afford to be involved in any form of scandal,” she said. “Mr. Bradford will not stand for any publicity about him — or about anyone who works for him.”

“Bradford?”

“Alexander Bradford. I’m his executive secretary.”

Alexander Bradford. Another of the names that Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

“Tell me about him.”

Sabrina shook her head. “That would cost me my job. I shouldn’t even have mentioned that I work for him.”

“You do more than just type and take shorthand. Right?”

“Oh, definitely,” she said, the tone of her voice telling me that she was laughing at me now, and it was as if, in that instant, she’d finally made up her mind about me and decided to put me to the final test. She’d issued a challenge to me, daring me to play the game with her.

In the past I’ve played at the game with other women like Sabrina. They’re a special breed, set apart from most women. For one thing, a woman like her is completely amoral. She won’t conform to the rules of society. She won’t behave like other women. She has a compulsion to be different, to be noticed.

For another thing, she’s intensely feminine, alive with animal vitality. Damned few men, however, can trigger a response in her because she doesn’t think much of men. She despises them as weaklings.

But when she does meet one of the rare men who can turn her on, that’s when she begins to play the game. She’ll use every wile in her repertoire, first to get you interested in her, and then to get you involved with her. It’s a test of strength that can only end in the capitulation and destruction of one of you. Once you start the game, that’s the only way it can end.

We had reached the Public Gardens. We turned into the park without saying a word, the tension between us so high, it was almost palpable. Neither the Public Gardens nor the Boston Common are safe places to walk after dark. Like so many of the once-pleasant parks in cities all over our country, they’ve become hunting grounds for muggers and rapists.

“It’s supposed to be dangerous to walk through here at night,” Sabrina said with pure pleasure in her voice. A swift, cool breeze blew through the park and her flying hair struck me softly across the cheek like the fur of a sleek animal that touches you in the dark and is gone.

“There’s safety in numbers,” I said, lightly placing my hand on her arm as we rounded a corner.

“I often walk here alone at night,” Sabrina responded coolly. “I’m never afraid.”

All the same, she began leaning slightly against me as we walked. Her body was pressed next to mine, warm and savage beneath her clothes.

Overhead the foliage on the trees blocked out the moon and most of the light from the lamps so that we walked together in the dark. There was nothing for us to say. Silently we responded to each other in a way so primitive that speech would have spoiled it.

In the same silence we left the Gardens and walked along Charles Street, turning the corner and striding up the incline of Mount Vernon Street to Louisburg Square. Still without a word, Sabrina unlocked the door to the house and closed it behind us without turning on the lights.

In the dark she turned to me. Her arms came up around my neck. Along the entire length of her, from her neck through her torso to her waist, hips, pubic arch, thighs and legs, she pressed hotly against me.

Her fingernails dug into the nape of my neck, pulling my head down, forcing my mouth against hers. She pried my lips apart, her tongue wildly searching inside my mouth for an instant, and then, like a wild jungle cat, she clamped her teeth into my neck.

I gathered her hair into my hand and closed my fist, pulling her head away from me so I could see her face. Sabrina’s eyes were closed, but I felt that if she opened them, they would be green slits glowing in the dark.

My other hand reached out to catch the soft weave of her silken dress at the throat. In one savage wrench I ripped the material from neckline to waist.

She moaned softly, her throat a pale arch of soft flesh in the dim light that filtered through the windows.

“Oh, yes!”

Acting instinctively, knowing it was what she wanted, I slapped her across the face.

“You tried to kill me this afternoon, you bitch!”

“Yes.” Her breath was coming in gasps. “Yes, I did.” She tried to press her nude torso against me. I held her away.

“Why?”

She shook her head.

I ripped the dress from her completely. Now she was wearing only the smallest of bras and a tiny triangle of silk beneath her sheer pantyhose.

“Why did you try to kill me?”

In answer, her arms came up and her hands beat futilely at my face. I twisted her head savagely from side to side, still gripping her hair in my left hand.

“Why?” I pulled away her bra. A husky moan rose from her throat, a moan filled with pleasure.

“Make love to me!” It was a cry, beseeching and demanding, begging and imperative all at the same time. She fell to her knees, pressing her head into my groin, putting her arms around my waist.

“Damn it, why?”

I could feel her head moving from side to side in a silent ‘no’ that set my groin on fire. Quickly I stripped off my own clothes.

Beneath us the rug was thin, and beneath the thin rug the wooden floor was hard, but Sabrina was soft and full and took me into her quickly. She was my cushion, my toy, my plaything, my animal.

Claws raked my back; fingernails and teeth sank into my flesh; hands, arms, and thighs clutched at me. Her mouth was bloody from biting my shoulder. More than once I had to slap her to make her let go. Her moans turned to snarls. One moment she cringed beneath me, the next she fought me savagely, striking me with her fists in violent fury until I matched it with my own anger, and then she made sounds of delight and pleasure. Finally, after an eternally long spasm that shook her uncontrollably, she collapsed completely. The savagery went out of her.

Her body became langorous; it burned with the warmth of fulfillment In the dark her sigh was like the purring of a cat, deep and full and content.

I groped for my trousers and took out my gold-tipped cigarettes and my lighter. The flare of the flame lit her eyes. In the yellow of the small light they were green slits.

“Give me one,” she said, reaching out I gave her the cigarette I’d lit and took another for myself.

“Why did you try to kill me?” I asked. Her head was on my shoulder. She exhaled, holding the cigarette away to look at its tip glowing in the dark.

“I can’t tell you,” she said.

“I could make you talk.”

“You won’t” Sabrina said, almost casually. “You’d have to hurt me too much.”

“If I have to, I’ll kill you,” I told her.

Sabrina lifted herself on one elbow and tried to look into my face. I flicked the lighter on. The tiny flame was more than enough. She looked deeply into my eyes and touched my cheek with her fingertips. She took her hand away.

“Yes,” she said soberly. “Yes, I think you would.”

“Why did you try to kill me?”

“I was told to.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know. There was a telephone call.”

“You do things like that when someone calls?”

“I have to,” she said. She turned away slightly. “Put out the light, please.”

I snapped the lighter shut. We were in darkness again, with only the indirect glow of the street fight coming in through the windows to make darker shadows in the gray around us.

I reached up to touch her face. My hand felt her neck. There was a thin chain around it I felt a tiny, flat metal pendant. I moved my hand up to her chin and then to her cheek. It was wet. Sabrina was crying.

“Please don’t make me say any more. I really don’t know any more,” she said, shivering against me.

“What has Alexander Bradford to do with it?” I asked.

“Bradford?”

Sabrina suddenly moved away from me. In the dark I made out her silhouette moving around the room. She went through a doorway and disappeared.

I got to my feet and turned on a lamp. By the time Sabrina came back in a negligee, I was fully dressed, ready to go.

“You’re not leaving now?” She was disappointed.

I nodded.

“Will you come back?”

“Perhaps.”

She came up to me. There was nothing remote about her now, nothing impersonal. The game had been played, and I had won. Sabrina touched me on the cheek meekly.

“Please come back,” she said. And then, as I opened the door to the street, I heard her swear softly, despairingly.

Chapter Six

I came down Mount Vernon Street, turning on Charles Street on my way back to the hotel. At that time of night — it was after three o’clock in the morning — the street was deserted. The old-fashioned, black-painted, cast iron street lamps were on, forming pools of light with large patches of dark in between. I kept to the outside of the narrow sidewalks until I got down the hill to Charles Street.

There’s something menacing about a city in those early hours. There seems to be danger lurking in every alleyway, in every dark entrance and at every corner.

If I had been more cautious, I would have walked along Beacon Street around the edge of the Public Gardens, but that’s the long way around, and cutting through the Gardens at a diagonal is a lot shorter. So that’s what I did.

The path takes you first to the lagoon and then part way around it before you come to the small bridge that crosses over the narrowest part of the pond. The path is very close to the willow trees that border the water’s edge. The weeping willows are old and huge, thick and very tall, so their branches hang down heavily to block out most of the lamplight. The elms and maples, too, are big. They provide huge patches of darkness, and the grass is well kept and short-cropped. It bides footsteps completely.

Not until he was on the asphalt path only a few feet behind me did I hear the slap of his shoes on the pavement as he made his final rush. The walk down the deserted streets had sharpened my senses, made me totally alert. Without conscious thought, I dropped to one knee as soon as I heard the sound of his feet. His blow went over the top of my head, missing by only inches. The momentum of his attack crashed him into me, knocking me sprawling on my face.

He was a big man. I rolled away from him, scrambling off the pavement and onto the grass. He sprang for me again before I had regained my balance.

Whoever he was, the only thing he had going for him was his size and his strength. He wasn’t very fast and he didn’t know much about how to kill a man quickly or silently.

I fell onto my back when he made his leap. I barely had enough time to draw my knees up to my chest. As he flung himself on me, I uncurled both legs with all the power of my thighs, catching him full on the chest. The impact flung him over my head. It should have broken half a dozen of his ribs. If it did, he didn’t show it.

Twisting to my feet, I turned in time to see him stand upright. He was more cautious now. In his right hand he carried a length of lead pipe.

He came at me for the third time, swinging the pipe first one way, and then trying a backhand stroke with it to catch me off guard. I dove in under the swing of the lead pipe. My shoulder caught him at the knees, knocking him down. I scrambled away as fast as I could.

I didn’t try to close in. To do that with a man of his size would be sheer suicide. He was more than a head taller than I am. You’ve seen a football lineman towering over the others, his shoulder pads making him look gigantic. That’s how this one looked, only he wasn’t wearing shoulder pads. It was all his own muscle.

I moved crabwise to one side, legs apart, balancing on the balls of my feet. My assailant heaved himself upright. He took a step toward me, his arm going back for another blow. I took a short step, leaping high in the air, my right leg lashing out in a furious kick.

Karate and savate and Thai foot boxing have one thing in common. They all make use of the fact that a man’s legs are stronger and more lethal than his arms.

The thin edge of my shoe sole should have caught him flush on the chin, just under the ear, with the force of my leg and body behind it. If you do it right, you can split open the thick canvas of a heavy, sand-filled punching bag.

I missed.

Not by much. My foot scraped along his jaw as he moved his head away a fraction of an inch, but that fraction was enough to save his life.

He lunged back at me with the lead pipe, sideswiping me along the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me. A fire of pain spread out along my ribs, knocking the breath out of me. I tumbled away in a rolling fall.

He let me get to my feet. Gasping, I moved backward away from him. He stepped menacingly toward me, measuring me for another blow. I gave ground, not letting him get set, keeping him from that one instant he needed to strike again. Step by step I retreated, staying just out of range of his powerful swing.

I didn’t want to kill him. If I had, I would have shifted Hugo into my palm the moment I heard his footsteps. I wanted the man alive so I could get him to talk. I wanted to know who’d sent him after me. This was no ordinary mugging. A mugger would have been long gone once his first attack had failed.

Someone wanted me dead. Sabrina had set me up for the attack, but she was just an agent. I’d known from the beginning what was happening when, on our way to her house, she’d taken every opportunity to walk me under the lights. If anyone was watching us, he’d gotten a good look at me.

The lagoon curves in toward the footbridge. There is one exceptionally tall weeping willow at the small point that juts out into the water right there. It’s eight to ten yards from the steps that lead up onto the bridge itself. The footpath goes under the bridge. At that point, it’s only a few feet wide, with the stone buttresses of the bridge on one side and the water of the lagoon on the other.

I backed away under the bridge so that he would be able to come at me only from the front. One step at a time he advanced, the lead pipe in his big fist swinging threateningly from side to side, his body crouched to make it difficult for me to lunge at him.

There was one moment when we faced each other in the darkness under the bridge when it seemed that the whole world had paused in silence to await the outcome of our duel. There was no one walking on the bridge over our heads. The few nighttime noises of the city were too far away to break the deadly quiet. There was only the sound of a lone cricket nearby and the sound of my assailant’s breath coming in gulping heaves as he dragged air into his lungs. Mano a mano. One on one.

But he wanted me dead and I wanted him alive — if possible. The advantage was all on his side.

As he began to pull back his arm for another swipe at me, I spun away on my heel and ran a dozen yards. In front of the wooden dock where the swan boats are tied up at night, I stopped abruptly and whipped around again. He’d taken the bait and had run after me. He was off balance when I sprang at him. My left arm knocked the lead pipe to one side, my right forearm slammed him across the throat as he tried to swing the pipe. I wasn’t quite fast enough to evade it completely. It sideswiped me just above the left ear. Suddenly the sky was full of more stars than I’d ever seen before.

Staggering backward along the wooden planks of the dock, I tried to clear my head. His shadow was huge and ominous. The pipe was still in his hand.

By now we were only a foot or two from the edge of the dock. There was no place left for me to go, except onto the nearest swan boat itself, and its metal-framed wooden-slat seats were too close to each other to give me room to maneuver.

I realized that my chances of taking him alive were pretty slim. At this point, it was a case of saving my own life.

He took a moment, to measure me for what he probably thought would be a last crippling blow. As he ran at me, the pipe came up head height and then flashed down.

I moved a hairsbreadth to one side. The bludgeon missed me by inches. As his hand and arm came across my chest, I seized his right forearm in one hand and clamped the other behind his elbow. Pivoting from the waist, I slammed my hip into his and bent myself almost double. His momentum is what did it. That and the leverage I exerted on his locked arm.

Involuntarily he rose up off the ground in a giant arc, swinging over my head, flying over the end of the dock to come crashing down on the hard, unyielding edges of the metal and slat seats of the swan boat.

Under the impact of his more than 200 pounds, the swan boat dipped sideways in the water, bobbing up again and then down before it returned to a level keel. Ripples spread out in concentric arcs across the still water of the pond. He lay in a broken, unnatural attitude, his head and neck supported by one seat edge, his knees and legs by the seat back in front of him.

Panting, I moved slowly onto the swan boat, waiting for him to stir. He made no movement. I pulled Hugo from his sheath and pressed the blade gently against his throat, ready to shove hard in case he was feigning unconsciousness.

He wasn’t. He was dead. The back of his neck had come down with the full weight of his body on the thin edge of the back of the seat and crushed the vertebrae.

His face was toward me. The man was in his middle thirties. His slacks and shirt were expensive and tight fitting. Heavy facial features were topped by a shock of lank blond hair that fell across his forehead.

I turned him so that I could reach into his hip pocket, pulling out his wallet and putting it away in my own pocket. I’d look at it later. Right now I had to make him look like the victim of an ordinary mugging attack. His wristwatch was a Patek Phillipe. The least expensive models cost several hundred dollars, and this one was far from the least expensive in their line. I took his watch, too.

And then, suddenly, I changed my mind. I decided I wanted his death to attract more than ordinary attention. I wanted word to get back to the opposition that he’d failed to carry out his assignment. I wanted them to send someone better for the job — someone I could track back to the top. I was going to stir up public attention. If Bradford — whether or not he was in the conspiracy — hated publicity, then the others must share the same feeling.

Well, I’d give them publicity. The morning papers would carry the story of the tourist who’d had his head blown off by a camera. Tomorrow’s evening rags were going to have an even juicier item.

I looked around. There was still no one in sight. Considering the lateness of the hour, that wasn’t unusual. I bent and heaved his heavy, limp body across my shoulder. Stepping back onto the dock, I struggled to the far end of the boat.

It took a few minutes to do what I had to do. When I finished, I knew it would make the front page of every newspaper in town.

He looked quite natural.

It had taken a lot of effort on my part, because you just don’t heave around an inert 200-pound body without exertion, but it was worth it. He now sat on the bicycle seat between the great white wings of the wooden swan. I’d lashed him upright with the tiller ropes, and I’d put his feet on the pedals and tied them there. Except for his head drooping forward onto his chest, he looked as if he were waiting for morning to come, ready to propel the swan boat filled with children in a quiet, pleasurable ride around the islands of the lagoon.

One final touch. On his chest, buttoned to his shirt by a tear in one corner of the paper, I had fastened the list of five names that Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

I took one last look at him and walked away, up the steps to the stone footbridge, across to the path that leads directly to the far exit of the Gardens. There is a temporary link fence at the end of the path at Arlington Street, but there is a two-foot gap between it and the permanent cast iron picket fence. I squeezed through it onto the sidewalk.

The Ritz Carlton is just across the street, its blue awning with white piping looking crisp and elegant and welcoming.

Exhausted, I headed for the front entrance and my room.

By the time I closed the door to my room behind me, the left side of my rib cage was throbbing with a sharp ache and my head felt swollen to twice its size.

I undressed, took four aspirin tablets and a long, hot shower, letting the water pound on me with the faucets full open. After about twenty minutes of steaming, I began to feel more like myself again.

I was about to climb into bed when my glance caught the wallet and wristwatch lying on top of the dresser where I’d dumped them along with my own belongings. I went through the wallet quickly. A Massachusetts driver’s license, four credit cards and $350 in cash. The driver’s license was in the name of Malcolm Stoughton. So were the credit cards. I put them aside, picking up the Patek Phillipe watch. The case and the expandable metal strap were of eighteen carat gold. On the royal blue face of the watch, the numbers were picked out by tiny chip jewels, small but perfect garnets, glowing a deep red.

Idly I turned the watch over to look at the back of the slim casing. Normally, you’ll find tiny, engraved print that identifies the type of metal the casing is made of, whether it’s waterproof and, if it’s expensive, the maker’s hallmark. What caught my eye was a miniature engraving of a sort I’d never seen before.

It was hard to make out because it was so small. No matter how much I twisted or turned the watch in the light of the bedlamp, I just couldn’t determine exactly what the emblem was. I needed a magnifying glass.

Now damned few people carry magnifying glasses with them. I sure didn’t, and at four in the morning I wasn’t about to call room service to ask them to get one for me. Then I remembered an old trick. I went over to my suitcase and took out my camera. Removing the lens, I turned it upside down, looking through it at the engraving on the back of the watch.

The image leaped up, because a reversed lens makes a fine magnifier of about five to eight diameters of enlargement, depending upon the focal length of the lens.

What I saw, etched delicately into the metal of the gold casing, was a reproduction of a Revolutionary War flag — the famous Snake Flag. Underneath a partly-coiled snake are the words “Don’t Tread on Me!”

Puzzled, I put the watch down, replaced the lens on my camera and got into bed. I lit one of my gold-tipped cigarettes and lay there thinking for some time.

The flag on the back of that expensive watch made no sense, even though for more than a year Boston had been filled with trinkets and souvenirs of the Bicentennial, celebrating the two hundred years of our country’s existence. There was hardly a place you could turn without being confronted by historical banners, posters, flags, photographs, paintings, etchings, postcards and whatever else anyone could think of on which to slap a Bicentennial slogan. But not on a watch like this! You just didn’t do that to a Patek Phillipe that must have cost well over a thousand dollars. No one’s that patriotic.

I mulled it over until I could hardly keep my eyes open. Then I crushed out the stub of my cigarette in the ashtray and turned out the light. I fell asleep trying to dream of Sabrina and not succeeding.

I awoke late in the morning and ordered breakfast sent up. The tray it arrived on also carried a folded copy of the Boston Globe. Splashed across the front page were the headlines: “SWAN BOAT KILLER SLAYS PROMINENT ATTORNEY!” and “DEATH AT HANDS OF LUNATIC!”

The story went on to describe the finding of the body by a couple of teenagers who’d called the cops.

There were three inches at the bottom left of the front page devoted to the “bizarre murder” of a smalltime mobster who’d had his head blown off by an exploding camera in the Granary Burial Ground the previous day. The police were ready to term it a “gangland killing.” Which just proves that all chubby little men with horn-rimmed glasses aren’t as innocent as they look. At least the cops wouldn’t be sniffing up my trail.

But the “swan boat killing” was the important story. Important enough for the editors to have replaced the front page and brought out a special late-morning edition. Normally, the morning paper is made up and printed the night before. I read through the four columns they gave to the story, along with a “feature” on the dead man’s background.

Malcolm Stoughton was a member of a prominent Boston law firm. He also had a reputation as a sports buff. In college he’d played as middle linebacker and had spent two years playing for a pro team to earn enough money to pay his way through law school. Apart from this bit of information, the only other thing outstanding about him was that he came from a family that traced its beginnings back to the Mayflower.

There was no mention whatsoever of the list of five names I’d pinned on his chest.

Sometime between the finding of the body and the arrival of the reporters on the scene, someone had removed the list. I knew that the teenagers who’d discovered the body must have seen the list. They couldn’t miss it. The first cops to get there must also have seen the list. And if they saw it, then the sergeant and the homicide detail had seen it, too. God alone knows how many others saw it.

Yet there wasn’t a word in the news story about that list!

And that in itself told me a lot about the men whose names were on it.

About the time I was finishing my second cup of coffee, the telephone rang.

“What the hell is going on up there?” Hawk was angry.

“Right now,” I said, “I’m having breakfast. I was out late last night.”

“So I understand!” snapped Hawk. “For Christ’s sake, Nick, what the devil’s the idea of pinning those names on his shirt? Don’t you know who you’re fooling around with?”

I interrupted him. “How did you know about the list? There wasn’t a word about it in the newspapers.”

“There wasn’t?”

“Not one word. They kept it out. How’d you learn about it?”

“I get copies of requests for information made to the FBI by local police departments,” Hawk said. “And it’s none of your business how I get that information out of the FBI office.”

“Well, you’re not the only one who knows how to pull strings. Someone up here has done a lot of tugging to keep this quiet.”

Hawk made no comment, but I knew it had made an impression on him.

“I gather all hell must have broken loose down there for you to call me,” I ventured.

“Damn right.” Hawk was furious. “Just about everyone but the White House has been putting pressure on me to get me to call off whatever it is — you’re doing up there. I’d like to know how the hell they know you’re there!”

“Jacques Crève-Coeur,” I said. “I had him pass the word to the KGB that the Russian had talked to me and that I was in Boston.”

Hawk said nothing for a moment, letting the implications sink in.

“Does Washington know the mission I’m on?” I said finally, breaking the silence.

“No,” said Hawk. “They only know that someone from AXE is up there creating havoc, and they want it stopped. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next call came from the Oval Room itself!”

“Lots of power working behind the scenes, I take it.”

“More than you can believe! First of all, most of them shouldn’t even know that AXE exists. When a civilian not only knows about us, but knows whom to call to apply pressure on me, you’d better respect the kind of influence he has! So far, four Senators and two Cabinet members have telephoned.”

“Who put them up to it? That should clue us in on the man we’re after.”

Hawk snorted. “Every one of the five names on your list! That tell you anything?”

“So you’re calling me off the assignment?”

“Don’t be a damn fool! I’m still running AXE! And I’m telling you to get on with your job before they have my head. I want it finished and over with as soon as possible!”

“Maybe I need a secretary.” I heard him sputter, but stopped his response with a question. “Where are the dossiers on these men? When I called you last night, you promised to have them up here by courier this morning.”

Hawk took a deep breath. “There aren’t any,” he confessed. “There are no files on any of them.”

It was a bombshell. Things like that just don’t happen. Somewhere, in some government agency, there’s a dossier on everyone of any importance in this country, and AXE has access to any file in any Federal department.

“FBI? CIA? Secret Service? Department of Defense? Damn it, Hawk, someone’s got to have something!”

“You heard what I said.”

“Look,” I persisted, “every one of these men has met with the President at least once, and you know that no one — I repeat — no one ever gets to meet the President in person for the first time without being cleared by the Secret Service. They’ve got to be notified twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting to check him out. Now, where are those clearances? What were they based on? Someone’s got to have files on these men!”

“I’m well aware of the procedure!” Acid dripped from Hawk’s voice.

“And there’s no file on any of them?”

“Not a trace. We’ve been checking all morning.”

It was hard for me to believe. “You’re telling me that each one of these men has had his files removed from every intelligence unit in the country?”

“No,” said Hawk deliberately. “I think that just one of them has had all the files removed. Getting rid of his own would just single him out for attention.”

“Computer banks? What about the computer banks?”

“Nothing,” said Hawk. “They’ve been reprogrammed so that the information is either erased or simply won’t appear on a print-out.”

Hawk made a difficult admission. “I underestimated our opponent, Nick. The man has more influence than I thought. I didn’t really understand how much power our man can wield. What you’ve done, Nick, has pushed him into making his move earlier than we expected. You may not have eleven days to find him.”

There was something in Hawk’s tone of voice that told me he had kept something back.

“Spit it out, Hawk. What else is there I should know?”

“As of ten minutes before this phone call,” said Hawk, “you’ve been put on the wanted list by the FBI. And the Secret Service just got word that you’ve made a dangerous threat on the life of the President. Agents from both departments will try to pick you up as soon as their Boston field offices receive word. Get the hell out of that hotel and go underground!”

“And finish the assignment?”

“Certainly!” snapped Hawk. “What else did you expect?”

And with that he hung up.

Chapter Seven

When you have to move fast, you travel as light as you can. Pierre, the miniature gas bomb that’s gotten me out of more than one tough scrape, was taped to my groin under my shorts. Hugo was strapped to my forearm in his chamois sheath, and Wilhelmina sat in her holster concealed under my summer jacket. The only other things I took with me were Malcom Stoughton’s wallet and wristwatch. There was no way I was going to leave them in the room for the Feds to find, not unless I wanted them to pin a murder rap on me along with all the other charges they’d trumped up.

I was halfway down the corridor to the elevators when a bellhop came out of a room just ahead of me. He let me pass him, and at that moment another bellhop turned the corner of the corridor about thirty feet further on. Alarms went off in my head hike a destroyer’s wha-wha-wha-wha-wha call to action stations.

Bellhops aren’t usually over six feet tall and built like pro athletes. These were. Bellhops either ignore you or, if they look at you, give you a pleasant professional hotelman’s smile. The one ahead of me was giving me a hard, calculating stare. I saw him deliberately nod his head at the other just before I heard the footsteps behind me begin to quicken.

I didn’t wait to be trapped between them. I broke into a headlong run directly at the one in front of me. About four feet from him I launched myself into the air, feet first.

He went down like a bowling pin. I was back on my feet and running. At the turn of the corridor, I bounced off the wall, racing for the emergency stairs. Behind me there was no excited outcry. There was only the menacing sound of footsteps racing purposefully after me, barely muffled by the corridor carpeting.

Hastily I threw open the door to the exit and slammed it shut behind me. At that point I had two choices. I could either run up the stairs to the roof — or I could run down to the lobby or basement. The door to the roof could be locked, so that wasn’t a wise choice. And I didn’t know the layout in the basement. It could turn out to be a dead end for me, in more ways than one.

So I took just one step away from the door, flattening myself against the wall. In less than five seconds it burst open as the first of the two bellhops ran in. I gave him no time to look around. I chopped hard at the base of his neck with the barrel of Wilhelmina. As he sagged, unconscious, I gave him a push. He tumbled down the cast iron stairs like a sack of potatoes.

The second bellhop flung open the door only a second later. He came to a dead stop as I shoved the muzzle of the Luger under his ear.

“Don’t move!” I threatened. “Not unless you want your head blown off!”

He froze, his face only inches from mine, glaring at me in repressed, impotent fury.

“Alright,” I said. “Who sent you?”

He didn’t quiver. Not a muscle. I could see that he’d made up his mind not to talk, and I didn’t have the time to persuade him otherwise. I had to get out of that hotel before the Feds arrived. I spun him around and rapped his skull with the Luger. He crumbled to the floor.

What I wanted was his uniform and time enough to get away. If two of them were on this floor after me, the odds were pretty good that there were others covering the exits to prevent me from getting out.

Peeling the clothes off the unconscious hulk of a 200 pounder is not an easy task. I wasn’t any too gentle with him, either. I was in a hurry, and if his head bounced on the concrete floor a few times, well, that was his tough luck! As it was, it took me a full five minutes to strip off his bellhop’s uniform down to his shorts. The trousers fit. The jacket was a little loose, but that didn’t matter. I folded my own trousers, turned my jacket inside out and draped both items over my left arm. I was on the point of leaving when I noticed his limp, outflung arm. What caught my eye was a silver identification bracelet on his wrist. Quickly I unhooked it and put it in my pocket.

Then, with my trousers and jacket hung over my left arm, I opened the door and boldly walked back down the corridor toward the elevator just as if I were a bellhop bringing a suit of clothes down to the valet service to be cleaned and pressed.

I pressed the “down” button and waited. It was a damned long minute and a half, but no one else showed up. The elevator doors slid open. Three businessmen carrying briefcases were inside. They didn’t look once at me. With a pleasant but impersonal smile on my face, I stood in the rear of the elevator as it descended.

The three stepped out when we reached the lobby. The doors remained open long enough for me to spot two men who seemed to be out of place in that hotel. The Ritz Carlton just wasn’t their speed. I noticed that they turned their heads, taking a hard look at the elevator as the doors slid open, and they did more than just glance at the three businessmen who left it. They scrutinized them from head to toe.

I had my head turned away, but it was the bellhop uniform that did the trick.

The elevator doors finally slid shut. The cage descended to the basement. Most hotel basements are basically alike. They’re service units for the rest of the hotel. While they may be laid out differently, they are all planned to be functional.

I made my way along two corridors, then down a third until I finally found a short flight of stairs that led me to an exit to an alleyway. I ducked back in behind the door to change back into my own clothes. A bellhop’s uniform would be too damned conspicuous out in the street. I left the outfit behind the door and walked out into the sunshine.

The streets that make up Boston’s famous Back Bay run perpendicular to the Public Garden and are parallel to each other. They are Beacon Street, Marlborough, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury and Boylston, which is a wide boulevard. Between each of the streets, running along their entire length, matching them block after block for more than a mile, are “Public Alleys.” The alleys are barely wide enough for a car or truck to pass through. They have miniature sidewalks on which the rubbish and trash from the buildings are placed for pickup by the garbage haulers.

I walked along the alley between Newbury Street and Boylston Street, and then emerged on Berkeley Street in broad daylight with no place to hide until the heat died down a little. I needed a telephone, too, and unlike New York, Boston doesn’t seem to want to clutter its streets with phone booths.

But right across the street from the alley mouth was the big, red brick, square building of Bonwit Teller’s Boston branch. I couldn’t think of a better place in which to roam around freely for an hour or so. I cut across the street, dodging between the speeding cars like any good Bostonian does, and walked under the long, pale green canopy, up several red-carpeted steps to the entrance, entering the store like any other customer, although most of them were women.

I consulted the store directory. The shoe department on the second floor would be perfect.

Just before I went upstairs, I used one of the telephones at the bottom of the stairwell to put in a call to the Boston Globe.

“City Desk,” I said when I got the switchboard operator. When City Desk answered, I asked if John Reilly were in. He was.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked him abruptly without any preamble.

“I never turn down a drink. Who the hell is this?”

“Nick Carter.”

“Oh, Christ! You again?”

I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in more than five years.

“That’s no way to talk to an old friend.”

“The last time I saw you, I let you talk me into doing you a favor that cost me three months in the hospital. I’ve no relish for the smell of antiseptics or having drainage tubes coming out of my body in strange places!”

“It’s nothing like that, John. I need information from your morgue.” A newspaper’s library files are called a morgue.

“Get it yourself,” he snapped.

“I can’t, John.”

The tone of my voice told him more than any words could have.

“It’s that serious?”

“It is.”

“When do I get the drink?”

“As soon as you get the information for me.”

“I’ll meet you at Grogan’s bar in Field’s Corner,” Reilly said. Field’s Corner is the heart of Irish Boston. “And it’ll take more than one drink to satisfy my thirst.”

“No problem. I’ll buy the bottle.”

“Good enough. Now, what is it that you want to know?”

I told him. There was a long pause. When he spoke again, I could hear the excitement in his voice.

“You want me to look through our files on five men,” he summarized, “and to let you know if anything there strikes me as being out of the ordinary?”

“That’s right.”

“Would you by any chance know anything more about these five men whose names you’ve given me? Aside from the fact that they are rich, live in this area, and any one of them can have me fired just by lifting the telephone?”

“I would,” I said. “Those five names were on a list that should have, but didn’t, appear in today’s paper.”

Reilly didn’t bother to ask what list I was referring to. Or how I happened to know about a list pinned to a dead man’s shirt that was never once mentioned in the most lurid news story of the year.

“That could be one hell of a story for me to break,” he said. “Do I get it?”

“Yes, but you’ll never be able to print it.”

I could almost see Reilly’s smile spread out on his freckled face.

“That’s the best kind of story,” he said. “It’s a deal. I’ll see you tonight in Grogan’s bar.”

I hung up. If there was anyone who could dig something out of the files, it would be John Reilly. Reilly’s one of the last of the old-time Boston newspapermen. He’s been on the rewrite desk and on the police beat, on the City Hall beat and the State House beat and back to the police beat a dozen times. He’s known every District Attorney and assistant DA in Suffolk, Norfolk, Middlesex and Essex counties over the past thirty years. He knows enough about the town and its suburbs and about a variety of its citizens, ranging from legislators to petty thieves, to trigger a hundred libel suits if it were ever published. But none of those suits would be won, because Reilly’s info is solid truth. He’s been threatened, shot at and beaten up more than once — until he learned from me to tuck away so much of this information — to be released in case of his death by violence — that one hell of a lot of influential people in the underworld have spread the word that John Reilly is to be protected at all costs!

I went up the red-carpeted stairway. The second floor of Bonwit’s is two stories high. A couple of superbly beautiful crystal chandeliers hang majestically down from the high ceiling to illuminate the displays. Sitting down on a sofa in the shoe department, I made myself comfortable. Then I pulled out the identification bracelet I’d taken from the “bellhop” I’d left unconscious in the stairwell of the Ritz Carlton. Engraved on the flat surface was a name: Henry Newton. I turned the bar of the bracelet over. On its back, engraved large enough for me to see it clearly without a magnifying glass, was the “snake flag” with its motto: “Don’t Tread on Me!”

I wondered if my other assailant, the second “bellhop,” also carried similar identification. What the hell did it stand for?

While my mind was occupied with these thoughts, someone came up quietly from behind, touched me on the shoulder and, as I took in the delicate fragrance of her Chanel perfume, said in her lovely, familiar, slightly husky voice, “Darling, I know I’m late, and I’m so sorry.”

She bent down and kissed me on the cheek. It was all very sweet, and she carried it off beautifully. That was her style. Yesterday she was a tourist, today she was a wealthy, beautiful young Bostonian late for an appointment with her boyfriend.

“Hello, Sabrina,” I said, not bothering to turn my head as she sat down beside me. “How’d you find me?”

“I was told you were here.”

“When did they first spot me?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I wasn’t told that.”

“Probably on the street,” I surmised, thinking out loud. “If they could do that, then they must have had a lot of men around the hotel.”

“Probably.” She was giving nothing away.

“How big is the organization, Sabrina?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or won’t tell?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Not really. Well, what do you want?”

“Personally, I’d love a repeat of last night, darling! However, I’m afraid that will have to wait. Right now I’m to escort you downtown. They’d like to talk to you.”

Before I could reply, she added, “You’ll be perfectly safe. Nothing will happen to you.”

I’ve heard that before. I turned my head to scrutinize her face. Sabrina was dressed in an Ultrasuede outfit in different tones of blue. She wore a short blue skirt with buttons up one side, a blue safari-type jacket over a lighter blue turtleneck jersey, and a blue felt Aussie Digger hat with the brim turned up at one side perched rakishly on her head.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Terrific.” I rose to my feet. There’s no use trying to delay the inevitable.

We took the elevator down to the first floor and headed for the main entrance. Sabrina caught my sideways glance and said, “If you’re thinking of trying to get away, Nick, don’t.”

“The exits are covered, right?”

She nodded. “Every one of them.”

“With orders to shoot to kill?”

“They’re on the rooftops,” she said, her eyes betraying her concern. “They have rifles with silencers, and they’re all excellent marksmen.”

I took her by the arm as we walked down the red-carpeted outside stairs under the pale green canopy.

“You’ve convinced me,” I told her jauntily. I didn’t know whether she was lying to me, but in view of the fact that they’d found me within half an hour of my leaving the hotel, I was certain that there were enough of them around to cover the few exits from Bonwit’s. And, in view of the previous attacks on my life, if Sabrina said they were prepared to kill me, I had to believe her.

Besides, wasn’t this what I’d wanted all along? To meet the higher-ups?

The taxi took us into the heart of the Boston financial district: Water Street, Congress Street, Battery-march, Chatham and High Streets. Some of the buildings are new and tall and modern. Others are almost as old as the city itself. It was to one of the new buildings on one of the old streets that Sabrina took me.

We went up more than twenty stories and along a corridor to a door that bore no name. For that matter, none of the doors along that corridor were marked.

Without bothering to knock, Sabrina opened the door. There was no receptionist on the other side. The door led directly into a handsome, mahogany-paneled office. Richly carpeted, discreetly draped, illuminated by shaded lamps, the office was the kind you see pictures of in slick financial magazines like Fortune and Forbes.

The man behind the massive desk in the center of the room looked as if he belonged there. A rich, successful young executive type, he was dressed expensively in a conservatively-cut gray suit. He gestured at the chair next to his desk.

“Sit down, please.” He was coldly polite. He looked at Sabrina.

“I assume you’ve told him that it will do him no good to be violent with me?” he asked her.

“I don’t have to,” Sabrina answered. “I think he knows.”

“He hasn’t acted that way up to now.”

“I do tend to get violent when someone’s trying to do away with me,” I said coolly.

He turned to me for the first time. His face was smooth and emotionless. His eyes gazed blankly at me as if they were more used to looking at numbers, percentages, cost-efficiency ratios and returns on dollar investment figures. I had the feeling that he really didn’t like to deal with human beings.

“I have no intentions of trying to do away with you,” he said.

“Then you’re safe.”

He turned to Sabrina. “I think you can leave.” He dismissed her as if she were a parlor maid. Sabrina touched me on the shoulder as she walked toward the door.

“Don’t do anything rash,” she said. “No matter what you think, the organization’s too big for you. Believe me.”

Then she was gone. I settled back in the chair and took out one of my gold-tipped cigarettes. He pushed an ashtray closer to me. There wasn’t a speck of dust on it. Pure Tiffany crystal.

“Go ahead,” I said, lighting my cigarette with an air of indifference. “What’s this all about?”

“You’ve been a nuisance to us,” he said as if he were stating an obvious but objective fact, like announcing that it was now the daytime and the sun was shining.

“I suppose I have been,” I answered.

“We don’t like it.”

“I didn’t think you would. Who’s ‘we’?”

He ignored my question and went on as if it were a speech he’d rehearsed and had to get out without interruption.

“You could be taken care of,” he continued, “but we’d rather not go to all that trouble. It’s worth it to us to let you live if you’ll cooperate.”

I cocked my head and decided not to interrupt. I didn’t think it would do any good anyhow.

“In return for your cooperation,” he said, “we are prepared to deposit a large sum into a bank account—”

“Swiss?” I couldn’t help throwing it in.

“—in a Zurich bank in your name, or number, whichever you prefer. The amount is quite large, I assure you.”

“What kind of cooperation are you talking about?”

“Leave,” he said. “Just go away, anywhere, for the next two weeks.”

“After that, it won’t matter,” I said. “Right?”

“Exactly.”

“How large an amount are we talking about?”

“Name it.” He was happy now that we were talking figures.

“A million?”

He nodded his head, not in the least perturbed by the size of my request. “In dollars,” he said. “That’s quite acceptable to us.”

I held up my hand. “Wait a minute. I didn’t say I’d take it. I just pulled a sum out of the air.”

His face flushed a deep scarlet. “We are not joking, Mr. Carter! Please be serious!”

“Alright, then,” I said. “Let’s try five million” — he started to nod, but I kept on — “and if you agree to that, I’ll go up to ten million.”

His hands had clenched into fists, but he forced himself to keep his voice even.

“Are you playing games?” he asked.

I nodded. “That’s right. With play money. Because if your plan comes off, that money won’t be worth a dime in a couple of months! Ten million, twenty million — hell, make it thirty million! If you pay me off in American dollars, in three months’ time none of it will be worth the paper it’s printed on!”

He leaned back in his big leather swivel chair, eyeing me with more respect than he’d shown since I came in.

“Well,” he said. “Well!”

I got to my feet. “You’ve found out what you wanted to know,” I told him. “Go tell your boss my answer is ‘no’.”

Carefully he asked, “How do you know what I wanted to find out, Mr. Carter?”

“Your bribe attempt was a ploy — a cover-up. Your people weren’t really sure that the Russian told me everything.” I leaned across the desk and spoke in a low, menacing voice. “You tell them that he told me everything! Got it? Everything he knew!”

He said, “I’m afraid we shall have to use more extreme measures in your case, Mr. Carter.”

“You’ve already tried that,” I told him coldly. “Now, you take this back to whoever sent you. Just tell him that I said, don’t try to step on me!”

He suddenly went pale.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll put it another way. Don’t tread on me!”

It was as if I’d physically assaulted him. His face went tight with shock. All of a sudden his neat little world was collapsing around him in confusion. I could almost look into his mind and see its fanatical orderliness being replaced by chaos. That one phrase blew his universe apart.

I walked over to the door. Then I turned and came back again. I’d almost done a very stupid thing. I realized that he must have some kind of prearranged signal to indicate whether I’d gone along with the bribe attempt. If so, they’d let me leave the building alive.

If not, I wouldn’t get halfway across the street without being gunned down, blown up or run over!

He looked up at me fearfully as I came around the big mahogany desk, and he started to get up out of his chair. He sat down abruptly when I shoved Hugo’s sharp little blade up against his throat.

It’s a strange thing about knives. They’re the most terrifying of weapons. Somehow a gun doesn’t carry so intense and immediate a threat. It’s more impersonal, more abstract. We don’t really react to a gun with the panic we feel about sharp steel. There isn’t that gut-wrenching paralysis that makes a man feel naked and helpless.

The executive tried to talk with vocal cords that were in a state of revolt. Muffled, incoherent sounds came out of his mouth, more like moans than words. I pulled him close to me.

“What’s the signal?” I growled.

He knew what I meant. He tried to shake his head. I pressed harder with Hugo. The point stung him into speech.

“The window... window... shade...” he gasped.

“What about it?”

“If... if you’d gone along...”

“Out with it!”

“I’m to leave it alone. Otherwise... I pull the blinds... Venetians... closed.”

I let him feel Hugo’s edge cut a thin gash along his jawline. It was no worse than what he’d do if he cut himself shaving, but it must have seemed to him as if I’d just slit his throat.

“For God’s sake!” he burst out. “I swear... swear I’m telling... telling the truth!”

Perhaps he was. There was only one way to find out, and that was to walk out of the building with the shades untouched. Which meant I couldn’t leave him behind to get at them.

“Let’s go,” I said, prodding him.

“Go?” He was in a state of paralyzing fear.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I told him. “Not unless you force me to. On the other hand, I can’t leave you here.”

I took the knife away from his throat. He nodded his head. “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. Of course.”

“Am I going to have trouble with you?”

He shook his head. “No.” He took out his handkerchief, touching it to his throat. It came away spotted with a few drops of blood. I saw his eyes grow wide.

We walked out of the room and down the corridor. Together we rode down in the elevator, together we walked through the lobby of the building. It was after five o’clock. The lobby was deserted. Together we went out the front door and we walked, almost arm in arm, across the street into the lobby of the building on the far side.

They wouldn’t be able to get to me here, I knew. For the time being I was safe. I stopped and swung him about.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His eyes queried me. He didn’t know what I would do to him next.

“John Norfolk,” he answered. There was still a tremor of fear.

“What do you do, John? Aside from trying to bribe people?”

“I’m an investment banker,” he informed me stiffly, but his lips trembled as he spoke. He didn’t know that all I felt toward him was scorn — and a little pity. He just wasn’t tough enough to do the job they’d sent him to do.

“Goodnight, John,” I said. For a moment he didn’t believe that I was letting him go. Then, hastily, almost as if he were doing his best to keep from breaking into a run, he left the building.

Boston is a strange town. It’s so damn old and the streets are so narrow in the oldest section that a number of buildings have been erected over what were once lanes. Legally, they have to leave access open to the public, so the lanes have become ground floor central corridors, leading from one end of the building to the other. By law, the exits and entrances of these buildings must be kept open twenty-four hours a day, every day in the year, so the doors are never locked.

Because of the slope of the land, in some of these buildings, you’ll actually go up or down half a flight of stairs, make a turn or two, and then continue along the public access corridor. Legally, it is still a city street.

Such a lane ran through this building. I went in the opposite direction from John Norfolk and presently found myself coming out a revolving door into an alley. I made my way through the alley to Washington Street.

I was more careful now than I’d ever been. I knew that in minutes they’d be on my trail. I also knew that they had a considerably larger organization than either Hawk or I had originally estimated. How large remained to be seen, but I sure wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating them again.

At Washington and Summer Streets, I ducked into the subway station, went down and dropped my quarter into the slot of the turnstile.

Boston’s Green Line trains are not trains — they’re trolleycars. Two and sometimes three of them travel coupled together. I went up from the lower level to the main level and took the first trolley that came along.

Unconsciously I was heading back to my hotel, planning to get off at Arlington Street station. And I did, then realized that I’d made a mistake. A very big mistake.

The trolley had slammed shut its doors and was gone down the tunnel when I looked around the platform and saw them. Not just the two who’d been following me and who got off the trolley when I did, but two others who must have been staked out there from the time they threw their net around the hotel earlier that afternoon.

And there I was, right in the middle of an ambush.

Chapter Eight

Behind me the tracks of the trolley line were level with the platform. There was no third rail because the power line ran overhead.

To my right, the escalator rose to the Arlington Street level, its steps moving in a slow, endless procession. Aside from the fact that one of their men was positioned right beside it, the escalator was a trap. Pinned between its narrow walls while it hauled me slowly upward, I’d have no chance to escape even a bad marksman.

To my left were stairs that would take me to a second level, then along a corridor whose tiled walls ran without a break for more than half a city block to wind up finally at the Berkeley Street turnstiles. If I made it past the grim-faced young man standing threateningly at the foot of these stairs, I would certainly be trapped in the corridor on the level above. With only an eight-foot width to move in, and with the corridor running almost a hundred yards, I’d be a helpless target in a ceramic-lined shooting gallery! I crossed that one off my list, too.

Which left just one way to go, and because they weren’t expecting it, I got away with it.

I sprinted down the platform toward the man at the foot of the Berkeley exit, pulling Wilhelmina from her holster.

There was no mistaking what their orders were this time. His hand came from behind his back, a pistol gripped in his fist. Arm extended, he brought his gun to eye level. Without missing a step, I fired from the hip. I wasn’t trying to aim. All I wanted to do was to distract him. I fired again, and then a third time, the boom and whup-crack of the Luger blasting echoes off the walls, reverberating the length of the station.

He was new at the game. I don’t think he’d ever really tried to kill anyone before. He flinched at the sound of the shots, his own going astray.

I was almost up to him, still firing as I ran, when he suddenly sagged to the concrete floor. Behind me there were other furious echoes as the three men began to shoot at me.

I leaped into the tunnel mouth, racing as fast as I could into its protective darkness. The firing went on. An occasional ricochet off concrete walls whined its way down the length of the tunnel past me.

Then the firing stopped. In the silence I heard the shouts and the pound of feet in hot pursuit. They weren’t going to give up so easily!

The ties on the tracks weren’t spaced right for the length of my stride. I had to adjust to them. It wasn’t completely black. There were lights built into the walls every thirty to forty feet. But the bulbs were low wattage and so covered with years of soot and dirt stirred up by the passing trolleys that their glow was even further dimmed. It’s damn hard to run like a gazelle under those circumstances.

I ran about 200 feet and cut between the steel girders separating the inbound from the outbound tracks. I wanted to be facing incoming trolleys — I’d be able to spot their lights before I heard their rumble.

There was the terrible stench of ancient debris. The dry dust floating in the air clogged my nostrils. I could feel soot begin to settle on my face. My eyes watered from the sting of grit as the tunnel draft blew microscopic-size particles under my lids.

It was time to stop running and do some fast thinking if I ever expected to get out of this situation alive. I stepped off the tracks, flattening my back against one of the steel girders.

They came within ten yards of me before they, too, had to leap off the track.

First, there was the single yellow eye on the front of the oncoming trolley. And then there was a swelling, racketing noise as it sped down the tracks toward us. The men might have been able to switch to the other track, only there was a second trolley approaching from that direction. The two streetcars would pass each other just about where we were standing between the sets of tracks.

I don’t know if they expected me to try to leap onto the back of one of the streetcars. It can’t be done. Not in real life. Not at the speed a trolley goes when it’s in the tunnel and has a string of green signal lights in front of it.

The roar became almost unbearable. My eardrums felt ready to split. There was the rush of air being pushed ahead of the two cars, the rocking of the long steel bodies, and the smashing surge of air pressure as the two great masses whipped past one another.

In the bellowing, racketing noise, I dropped to the track level, closing my eyes tightly. I couldn’t afford to be blinded by either the headlights on the cars or by soot whipped into my eyes from their passage.

And then the cars were gone. I could open my eyes and I could see.

The three men were on the right side of the tracks, where they’d dodged into an alcove in the tunnel wall. They were pressed together like sardines.

Still lying prone, dirt, soot and debris of the concrete floor of the tunnel trackage grinding all along the length of my body, I slowly raised my head and right arm. It wasn’t quite enough. I brought up my left arm and leaned on both elbows as I aimed Wilhelmina with both hands.

The targets were only ten yards away from me. At ten yards, even in the semi-gloom, they were hard to miss.

I didn’t miss.

I got off two, fast, aimed shots and rolled quickly onto my back, the steel girder support giving me the best protection I could ask for.

The dying echoes of the Luger’s crack-crack barely covered their screams. I heard one of them cry out for help, and I saw him stumble along the track. He tripped, falling in a headlong sprawl only a few feet away from me, his face in clear view. His eyes stared appealingly at me for a long moment, and then the begging, helpless look was gone. One hand tried to reach out to me. It fell limply along his side. Black soot was streaked on his face as if he were mourning his own death, and on his shirt the black was mixed with the bright crimson of the blood that gouted from the hole in his chest.

The other man lay in a heap right in front of the alcove.

There was still one more to go.

I looked down at Wilhelmina. Her elbow action was cocked at its furthermost rearward travel. I’d used up the last bullet in the clip! I started to reach into my pocket for another clip of 9mm bullets before I remembered I hadn’t taken any along with me. A clip of rounds for a Luger isn’t something you want to carry in your pocket for any length of time. It’s heavy.

Wilhelmina was helpless now. And so was Pierre. In a confined space, the gas in that miniature bomb will paralyze anything around, but the tunnel was open at each end and there was a strong draft through it. Strong enough to disperse any of the fumes Pierre could generate.

That left me with Hugo, so I slid the narrow blade out of its sheath and held the knife firmly in my right hand. If I could get close to my remaining attacker, I’d be able to do more than just defend myself. The trouble was that he had a gun, and I knew he’d do his best to keep me at a distance where he could pick me off at an opportune moment.

The man lying dead beside me was no help either. I picked up the gun he dropped when he stumbled to his death. It was a Smith & Wesson .32 calibre revolver with a two-inch barrel. It’s a weapon to be used at close range only. This one was completely useless to me because the only thing left in each of its six chambers was a cylindrical copper cartridge casing. He’d fired every round. I wondered if he’d known he was coming after me with an empty gun. It’s happened before. In the excitement of the chase, a green man will get carried away and forget to keep track of the rounds he’s fired. Just when he needs it most, the hammer of his weapon will click harmlessly down on an expended round.

A quick search of his pockets proved fruitless. He carried no extra ammunition.

I rolled over to the opposite tracks, trying to keep my last assailant in view. I got a glimpse of him scuttling across the tracks. It was enough.

I slipped off my loafers. I couldn’t afford to have an accidental scrape of leather on concrete betray my whereabouts. Rising to a crouch, I moved out onto the trackage he’d just crossed, trying to come up behind him. I got two girder lengths from him before I heard his heavy breathing and cut back in again, putting the safety of the steel beam between us.

Now we were separated by only a few feet. I knew exactly where he was. The question was, did he know my whereabouts?

The gloom began to grow lighter. I realized a trolley was approaching. But on which set of tracks? If it came down the inbound line, the driver would see the dead body and slam on his brakes. He might still hit it, but in any case, within minutes the tunnel would be filled with police.

I peered down the tracks and drew a sigh of relief. The trolley was speeding down the outbound lane.

Now, if I could only take advantage of the noise and the dust and dirt whipping the air to get to my opponent!

Patiently I waited, trying to control my breathing, bringing myself to the fine pitch of tension I needed for the final attack. The streetcar was fifty yards away, then ten, then five. Then it was blasting away beside me, rocking from side to side, metal wheels screeching on metal tracks, the tunnel filled with the violence of its passage. I sprang to my feet and ran after it.

As I did so, the last man came sprinting out of his niche head on toward me. He’d had the same plan in mind!

We met in full collision. His arm came swinging at my head, his gun clenched in his hand, and I flung my fist and forearm up at him with Hugo pointing into his soft guts.

My left arm knocked his hand away. His left arm knocked my right arm to one side. Neither of us succeeded in striking a fatal blow. But he made me drop Hugo.

Then we were together, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, pounding at each other’s faces, forgetting for the moment every fighting trick we knew.

You have to be sure of your footing to engage in karate, kung fu, judo or any of the other martial arts. You have to be sure that you’re not going to stumble over any one of a dozen things that can turn an ankle or twist your foot when you least expect it. That tunnel trackage, with its steel rails and old wooden ties and loose gravel between them, and dirt and debris strewn everywhere in the darkness, was no place to take a chance on losing your balance. One slip and I’d be dead.

My opponent was strictly a street fighter, a barroom brawler, a back alley thug. Fists, elbows, knees and teeth. I kept his arms too busy to give him a chance to fire his pistol. He should have reversed his hold and tried to slug me with the butt.

He punched at me. I grabbed his wrist and tried to bend it back. He was too strong for that trick to work. I slugged him in the gut. It was like hitting a canvas sack of sand. There was a little give, but that’s all.

He tried for my eyes with his fingers. The nails raked my cheek as I twisted my head away and grabbed at his fingers. I caught two of them and bent them backwards. I heard the crack of knuckles being dislocated and his choked-off cry of pain.

Then the back of a forearm caught me across the bridge of my nose. An elbow slammed into my ribs, knocking the air out of my lungs. I grabbed him tightly and pulled him close to me so he wouldn’t have room to swing. I felt his hands come up around my throat. He began to squeeze.

I tried to kick him in the groin, but I was too close to get any leverage. The pressure tightened. Straining every muscle in my neck in resistance, I tried to force my forearms between his to separate his arms and break the hold.

I couldn’t get through. I tried punching two knuckles into his eyes, but his head was turned away, so it didn’t have much effect.

The fingers of my right hand found his chin and then his mouth. I pushed the first two fingers of my hand inside his lips. My thumb found and pressed against the cartilage of his throat. The pain of that hold is normally unbearable. But despite the intense pain he must have been feeling, he held on to my neck.

My vision began to black out. I heard a roaring in my ears. It took a moment for me to realize that the sound was not inside my head. The gloom began to lighten. The roar grew louder.

Over his shoulder, down the track, I could make out the yellow glare of an oncoming streetcar headlight.

A trolley will do about forty miles an hour when the track is clear and the lights ahead are green for a long way. This one was rocking along at full speed, hurtling down on us like a blind metal leviathan.

He heard the noise at the same time, but he wouldn’t let go. Neither would I.

If we had been standing still in the middle of the track, the conductor would have seen us in time to throw on his brakes. Streetcars are powered by DC current. There’s no other land vehicle that can accelerate so fast in so short a distance — or come to a halt so quickly when the brakes are applied and the current is reversed.

The trouble is, we weren’t standing still. One minute we’d be struggling in the middle of the tracks, and the next second we’d be bouncing off the steel girders or the concrete tunnel walls. No one inside a trolley could have peered into the murk ahead and seen us in time to stop.

He wouldn’t let go of my neck, and I wouldn’t let go of his jaw.

It became a contest to see which of us would let go first, to see how close each of us dared come to the very edge of death!

He gave way first. Because he was facing away from the oncoming trolley, he couldn’t gauge how close it was. The sound was terrifying. He released his grip on my neck and threw himself headlong to one side, off the tracks.

I wasn’t a second behind him, except that I flung myself in the opposite direction into a niche in the wall. As I did so, the bulk of the trolleycar barreled past me, a huge, blind, monstrous thing that could have destroyed us both, mindlessly, in a fraction of a second.

It was gone as fast as it had come. One moment it was a horrible, death-dealing instrument; the next, it was a harmless carriage rolling away from us with its terrible sound fading to merely an irritating racket.

Tired as I was, I forced myself out of the niche toward my attacker. The battle still wasn’t settled. One of us had to die.

Something had gone out of him. He saw me lurching toward him, and he quit. He turned and began to run down the track back to the Arlington station. Hugo gleamed dully at me from the wood of a crosstie where he’d fallen. I stooped, retrieved the knife and straightened up, holding the blade balanced in my fingers.

There’s a way to throw a knife quickly, and another way to throw it powerfully. If a man’s running at you, you throw it quickly because you haven’t much time and there’s a lot of soft, vulnerable surface to hit: his stomach, his throat, his face, his groin. And you don’t have to hit him hard with a sharp blade for the steel to penetrate mortally.

If he’s running away from you, the targets are his back, thighs and legs. The only really vulnerable point is the nape of his neck, which is much too small a target to aim at, especially when you’re in the semi-dark and have to act fast. So you throw for power.

I made the throw, leaning into the pitch as I hurled Hugo through the air. It was perfect — blade over handle with half a turn in the air, point driving forward at the moment of impact with the full force of the throw behind it and with the heaviness of the haft adding its weight to the point of the knife.

It buried itself almost to the hilt, through the cloth of his jacket and shirt into the cartilage of his spine.

He stumbled for a pace or two, his knees bending a little more with each step until he hit the gravel of the trackage and sprawled full onto his face.

I came up to him. Bending, I pulled Hugo loose and turned him over.

He wasn’t quite dead. His eyes looked up into mine, surprise, astonishment, bewilderment on his face. He made an effort to focus on me.

“We... we’ll get... you... get you...” he mumbled. “Too... too many of us... You... you’re trapped, you know... Can’t... no matter what station... get... get you...” and then his voice trailed away.

Swiftly I searched his body until I found what I was looking for. I ran back up the track to the man who’d died beside me. I found what I wanted on him, too. There was no need to search the third man. Two would be enough. Picking up Wilhelmina, I left the bodies there, a gruesome trio to surprise the next trolleys that came down the tracks in either direction. I began to trot toward the next station. It was about a city block away.

Just before I got there, I stopped. If what the dying man had said was true, there’d be more of them waiting for me to come out of the station. I couldn’t stay underground. It wouldn’t be long before the bodies were reported and police would swarm all over the subway line. I had to get out into the open, and I had to do it without my exit being observed.

There was one way to do it. I don’t know which French general said it first, but he was right. Audace! Toujours l’audace! Do the unexpected. Audacity pays off!

I peeled off my jacket, shirt and socks. Hugo’s sharp edge sliced away the legs of my slacks, cutting them at mid-thigh, and then I picked at the rough hem with the point of the blade to fray them even more. Picking up handfulls of dirt from the tunnel floor, I smeared what remained of my slacks until they were thoroughly grimy. I disheveled my hair with both hands. Then I made a headband out of my necktie, looping it around my forehead, Indian style. When I was through, I looked like a barefoot, suntanned, dirty “street person” — and Boston has more than its share of them.

I wrapped Wilhelmina in my jacket and shirt, and tucked the package away in the upper reaches of a steel girder support. I’d be back for the gun later.

In the meantime I had to get out onto the street where I could blend with the crowd. Barefoot, I trotted up the track and cut onto the platform of the Copley Square station at the Dartmouth Street exit. There were a few people on the platform who stared at me. Most of them paid no attention at all. The street people are everywhere in the Back Bay area of Boston, and they’re concentrated around Copley Square. They’ve been known to do crazy things like walking the tunnel.

I went up the first set of stairs and waited at the bend. In a few minutes I heard a trolley screech to a halt on the level below. In a minute a crowd of students and “street people” and hippies surged up the stairs. I melted in with the crowd as we came up onto the street. About the only thing I didn’t have was a guitar, but several of them did. No one looking at the group of us could have picked me out from the others.

Right across the street from the exit was Copley Square. Alone with the rest of the group, I headed across to the plaza.

What’s really unusual about Boston’s Copley Square is that it’s an open-air center where half a dozen subcultures meet and, to a great extent, ignore each other.

There are what the hippies call the “straight” people: all the young clerks and junior executives from offices in the buildings near the plaza. There are the tourists, aiming their cameras at the picturesque juxtaposition of the old — Trinity Church — and the new — the Hancock building whose skyscraper glass facade reflects the area from every angle. There are the winos — helpless, stumbling carcasses who barely manage to exist from drink to drink, seeking an hour or two of rest in the warmth of the sun. Boston has more young winos than any other city in the whole United States. In their teens and early twenties, teeth knocked out, faces raw, bruised, cut and savaged from drunken brawls over the remnants of a pint of red wine, begging for a dime to go towards another bottle. For the most part they are violent only among themselves.

There are the students. Hundreds of them. A locust swarm covering every inch of the Back Bay area. There are the street people and the hippies, each a sub-culture within a sub-culture.

It’s a great place to hide, right out in the open. You just find the right little group and blend in with them. Each group pretty much has its own territory. Like the street people, for example. The sidewalk along the west side of Boylston Street from Dartmouth to Fairfield is their territory for the most part.

I found the group I was looking for. They were sitting on the grass on the south side of the plaza. I sat down on the fringes of the group. In the center was a young man playing his guitar and singing a folk song of his own composition. He wasn’t very good, but he was sincere.

The late afternoon sunlight was warm. The shadows were lengthening to make another soft New England summer twilight. The objects I’d taken from the two dead men were in my pocket. I took them out to look at them. The first was a silver money clip. The metal was flat. On its surface was a bas-relief design. It took but a glance for me to recognize the now familiar design of the Snake Flag and the ever-present slogan.

The second object looked like a half-dollar at first. It was a round pocketknife. Usually a half-dollar is sliced apart and the coin used to face a half-moon steel blade by soldering it to both sides of the small circular handle. It looks like a coin, but it’s a handy pocketknife. I’d always presumed it was illegal to deface American money, but there are a lot of them around.

There are damned few, however, that carry a Kennedy half-dollar face on one side and a Snake Flag on the other! And once again, circling the rim, were the words that had thrown such fear into John Norfolk when I uttered them: “Don’t Tread on Me!”

What the hell was the significance of that phrase? How did the flag and the phrase tie-in with the organization I was after?

The young man had started on another of his plaintive compositions. He sang in an earnest voice, his face to the sky, his eyes closed, letting the fading sunlight strike his tanned cheeks and long brown hair that fell down to his shoulders.

I started to reach into my shirt pocket for a cigarette and then remembered that they were in my jacket in the tunnel.

Someone, tapped my arm.

“Want one?” The girl was in her early twenties. She held out a pack to me.

“Thanks.”

Crouching beside me, she cupped a match in her palms against the slight breeze.

“You being hassled?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Fuzz?”

“No.”

She inclined her head toward the guitar player. “What do you think of him?”

I shrugged. “He’s doing his thing,” I said. “If it makes him happy, that’s what counts, isn’t it?”

She smiled at me warmly. “Right on!”

I finished the cigarette in silence. I was facing the subway exits on Dartmouth Street, trying to pinpoint which of the loiterers were the men who were after me.

She touched me on the arm again to attract my attention.

“Hey, man,” she said quietly. “You act like you’re real uptight about something.”

“You could say that.”

“You sure it’s not the fuzz? They giving you heat?”

“It’s not the fuzz.”

“Your old lady giving you a hard time?”

“I don’t have an old lady.”

“Oh?” She seemed surprised that I had no girlfriend. A little embarrassed, too.

“Look, I know it’s none of my business, but you — well, there’s...” She didn’t know how to go on.

“Something about me?”

She nodded.

“The way I look?”

She nodded again.

“It’s bugging you?”

“Yeah, it sure is.”

I smiled at her. In a confidential tone I said, “The squares can’t tell the difference. They think I look like, street people.”

She laughed. “Well, I can tell the difference.”

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Julie.”

We looked each other over carefully, openly, frankly. I liked what I saw. Julie was about five feet two inches tall and probably weighed just over 100 pounds. She was slender, with small breasts and a small waist, and she had slender, shapely legs. Her hair was tawny and cut short. She wore a man’s shirt, unbuttoned but tied over the midriff by the shirttails so that there was an expanse of smooth, tight skin between the bottom of the shirt and the top of her patched blue jeans. She had a small, straight nose, a thin-lipped but wide mouth and a delicate chin. Her eyes were freckled. Have you ever seen a girl with freckled eyes? Hers were hazel with brown and gray spots in the iris. The kind of eyes you want to gaze into for hours.

“Well?”

She smiled at me. “The vibes are real good,” she answered. “What do you think?”

I nodded. “They’re very good.”

“You seem like real people,” she said. “You need help?”

“I guess so.”

“Like what?”

“Like you name it.”

“A pad?”

“Yeah.”

Julie got to her feet, a slender reed of a girl, but reeds bend and sway in the wind. They’re flexible and don’t break easily. Julie was like that. She was also very decisive.

“Let’s go,” she said, standing up.

I raised an eyebrow in question.

“I’ve got a pad.”

I got to my feet beside her.

“I’ve also got two roommates,” she said. “But they’re away for the week, so there’s plenty of room.”

“What makes you so sure you can trust me? Don’t you read the papers?”

She flashed a gamin grin at me. “I’m not afraid of you. The vibes are too good, man. What sign are you?”

I didn’t know enough about astrology to know the sign I was born under, so I threw out the first one that came into my mind. “I’m Cancer.”

“We’ll get along. I’m Pisces,” she announced, as if that explained everything.

We set off across the street. At one point Julie must have seen the tenseness in my jawline, because she put her arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder, and that’s how we passed the tall, brawny man who’d been eying me suspiciously for the past twenty minutes.

Chapter Nine

Julie’s apartment was small. It had been partitioned off from one of the great, old, rambling apartments of the early twenties. Bedroom, living room, half-kitchen and bathroom had once been just the living room of the original apartment. The girls had tried to decorate it Burlap sacking had been made into window drapes. A multi-colored, imitation Tiffany lamp shade hung down from the ceiling. One wall was painted chartreuse, another was in mauve. Posters were pinned on the third wall so thickly you could hardly see the wall itself.

While I took a shower to clean the grime off my body, Julie made something for us to eat. Health food. The raw vegetables ground in a blender to a thin, pulpy drink wasn’t too bad. I’ll pass over the rest of the meal. Let’s just say looking at Julie across the small dining table made it easier to get down.

Afterwards she washed the few dishes and turned up the hi-fi set before we went into the bedroom. Julie pulled off her shirt and blue jeans and, clad only in her bikini panties, flung herself onto the waterbed that took up most of the small room. There were a dozen throw pillows of all sizes, shapes and colors at the head of the bed. The bed itself was covered with a patchwork crazy quilt. Julie sat with her knees drawn up, her back against one of the larger pillows. She patted the bed beside her.

I had nothing much to take off, but I couldn’t let her see either Hugo or Pierre. Fortunately the light was dim and I turned partially away from her, so when I dropped what was left of my slacks, Hugo and Pierre were wrapped in them. When I turned back, Julie saw the effect she was having on me and smiled.

She rolled a double cigarette paper deftly with the fingers of her left hand, sprinkling the finely-ground marijuana into it in a thin line. Licking the paper with the tip of her tongue, she sealed it and twisted the ends.

“Nicaragua Red,” she said, grinning proudly at me. “It’s hard to get these days.” She picked up the sheet of paper in her lap and shook the spillings neatly into a small film cannister. She lit the joint, inhaling deeply, sucking air around the end of the butt to mix with the smoke of the weed.

She took another drag and then held out the joint to me. I took it from her and placed it between my lips, inhaling as deeply as she had.

I’ve had hashish in North Africa. I’ve snorted cocaine in Chile and Ecuador. I’ve chewed peyote buttons in Arizona and Mexico. And I’ve smoked more than one pipe of opium in Viet Nam, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. As a secret agent, you do whatever you have to do to blend in with the group you’re with, and the people I’ve had to mix with aren’t the kind that would meet with the approval of Elks, Lions and Rotarian Clubs in the States.

Marijuana has different effects on different people. It made Julie feel like talking.

She waved the joint in the air and said, peering at the smoke as if she could discover a great, important meaning in the drifting, formless wisps, “You know something, whatever your name is?”

“Nick,” I told her. “Nick Carter.”

“That’s a nice name,” she observed. “I like it. You know something?”

“What?”

“I used to think I was a rebel. Boy, did I rebel! Against my father and mother. Against the snobbish finishing school they sent me to for a couple of years before I walked out. Against the whole damn society!”

“You burned your bra,” I said.

She laughed. “Hell, I don’t have a bra to burn. You think I need one?” She touched her small breasts.

I smiled, shaking my head slowly. “Never. Did you need to rebel?”

“I thought so. I marched in protest parades. I led demonstrations. They kicked me out of one college.”

“And?”

She turned on her side and looked at me sadly. “But I’m not a rebel. All I am is rebellious, Nick. And that’s a damn shame!”

I touched her face gently.

“Not really,” I said. “There are very few rebels in the world. But there are a lot of rebellious people. If you understand what you’ve just said to me, it’s a sign you’ve stopped being an adolescent and become an adult.”

Very carefully Julie considered what I’d said.

“Hey, man,” she exclaimed. “You’re right!”

“What were you really rebelling against?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said casually, “mostly it was against my father and his friends. You know, they’ve got loot. They’ve got so much loot they don’t even bother to count it. I used to think — all that money and it’s not helping anyone! That used to tee me off. But what was worse — they’ve got power. Power, man, like you wouldn’t believe! And they never used any of it to help anyone! Now, that really got me!”

“What kind of power?” I asked, the first stirrings of interest coming alive in me.

“Don’t you know who my old man is?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t even know your last name,” I pointed out.

Julie nodded soberly. “That’s right. You don’t. Alcott Chelmsford is my father.”

“I don’t know him,” I said, disappointed but not surprised. Well, hell, it would have been too much of a coincidence if her father had been one of the men whose names Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

“No reason you should,” she said. “He tries to keep out of the public eye. Did you ever hear of Frank Guilfoyle, or Alexander Bradford or Arthur Barnes?”

It was like hitting the jackpot in a slot machine in Las Vegas. Three out of the five names!

“I’ve heard of them. They’re biggies like Mather Woolfolk and Leverett Pepperidge, right?”

“Right,” she said. “The whole bunch of them! My father’s one of that crowd. Man, did they bug me!”

“You know them well?” I asked.

“From the time I was born. Alexander Bradford is my godfather. Would you believe it?” She laughed bitterly.

“Tell me about old Bradford,” I suggested, trying to be as casual as I could.

Julie turned away.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about them! I’ve spent the last five years of my life running away from that bunch. You don’t want to hear about them.”

“I want to hear about Alexander Bradford,” I said, reaching out to stroke her neck. It was the first chance I’d had to get some inside dope on Sabrina’s employer.

Julie shook her head in refusal. “No way, man,” she said. “I don’t want to spoil the mood. I dig you too much!”

She clipped the remnant of the joint into a spring holder, inhaled deeply and handed it to me. “Let’s ball,” she suggested, as simply and as innocently as a child would say, “Let’s go play.”

I knew there was nothing I could do right then to make her talk, so I took the final drag on the joint, put it down and turned to her.

Julie made love as simply and uninhibitedly as she talked. My body was a plaything for her, to be explored and enjoyed as if I were a giant panda toy she’d taken to bed. At the same time, she gave herself to me completely, to do with as I wished. She derived as much pleasure from pleasing me as I did in making her discover the little, uncontrollable excitements the female body is capable of.

Her breasts were small. My hand covered each completely, and then my mouth, and I looked up to find an expression of ecstasy on her face so acute it almost seemed she was in pain. I kissed the taut, smooth skin of her stomach, and as I moved down, Julie squirmed around so that she could match each of my actions.

We became the yin and yang of that ancient Chinese symbol of completeness. Our bodies were intertwined in a tangle of soft and hard flesh, of smoothness and roughness, of skin so moist that we slid easily into one another.

There was no moment when it was suddenly over. We reached peaks and then quieted down slowly, until, finally, we felt no more urgency to explore each other. She snuggled into me.

“Hey, man,” she said tiredly, “that was good.”

I kissed the tip of her nose. She brushed away a lock of my hair that had fallen over my forehead.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How come you want to know so much about Alex Bradford?”

It really didn’t take me by surprise. Julie was too bright to be fooled for very long. I decided to take a chance because I could use whatever information she had.

So I told her. Not all of it. Specifically, not about AXE or my role as Killmaster in that supersecret organization. I did tell her about the Russian who’d almost died because of what he’d learned. I told her about the plot and about the organization that had been trying to kill me. Julie listened carefully and seriously. When I was through, she said, “That’s big trouble, man.”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” she said gravely. “I mean, if they succeed, what’s going to happen to all the little people?”

I didn’t say anything. Before she’d give her cooperation, Julie had to work it through according to her own scale of values, in her own terms.

She said thoughtfully, “I don’t think our present society is the best. I think there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it, but it’s something we can work with. If they have their way, they’ll smash it completely. Okay. So it gets smashed. Then what? Do the little people take over? No way! They’ll run it for their benefit and the hell with the little people. All the riots! All the people killed! The millions who’ll starve — just so they can take over! That’s Hitler and Stalin and Franco all over again!”

She turned serious eyes on me. She’d made her commitment. “Nick, how can I help you?”

“I want to know as much as you can tell me about Alexander Bradford. Somehow I get the feeling he’s the key to this whole thing.”

“What about the others?”

“I don’t think they’re in it. There’s just one man at the top. I think it’s him.”

“Bradford could be your man,” she admitted. “Alex always seemed to me to be a little different from the others.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “I can’t really put it into words. There’s something about him. Like he’s always standing back and watching you and kind of filing you away in his mind, like he’s got a computer there and everything you do or say gets punched into it. You know what I mean? Even though he’s my godfather, he gives me the creeps!”

“Can’t you be more specific?”

“He’s a loner. He’s secretive about what he does. God, Nick, even in that group of people who didn’t say much about what they were doing, Alex was the most secretive. I mean, he’s charming and all that, but it’s all on the surface. Underneath, he’s cold as ice. He never lets you know what he’s thinking. Like you can’t pin him down about anything he’s involved in. Know what I mean?”

I knew. Like me, all she had was a gut feeling and no facts, and that really shouldn’t be enough to go on. Certainly not if I had to justify it to Hawk. However, it was enough for me. If Julie’s gut feelings about Bradford matched mine, it added up to something.

I reached for my wristwatch.

“You going somewhere?” she asked, amused.

“I’ve got to meet a man,” I told her.

“At one-thirty in the morning?”

I nodded. “He’s waiting for me now in a bar in Fields Corner.”

“Hey, you’re serious!”

“Right. Only I have a problem. I need a shirt, slacks and shoes.”

Julie popped out of bed. “Stand up,” she said. I obliged her. She looked at my nude body with a measuring eye. “I’ll be right back,” she said and ducked out of the bedroom. Two minutes later she came in carrying a pair of men’s slacks, socks, shirt and shoes. She dumped them on the bed.

“There!” she said proudly. “I think they’ll fit close enough. Raymond’s about your size.”

“Raymond?”

“He’s one of my roommates.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

Julie shook her head disapprovingly at me. “Hey, where’ve you been? We just live together. All the colleges have coed dorms these days. Everybody lives with everybody else, but it doesn’t mean everybody’s screwing everybody! It’s the same with us. We tried — three girls together. Man, I’ll tell you, it’s a drag! So when Barbara left, we asked Raymond if he wanted to take her place. It’s better if there’s a man around. He comes in handy when there’s heavy work to be done. And we don’t get hassled as much by guys who take us out on a date and then try to make it when they bring us home. I don’t know if Raymond has eyes for Sheila or me, but his girl would kill him if he tried making a pass. She’s the jealous type.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get it.” I started dressing. The shirt and slacks fit well enough. The shoes could have been half a size smaller. They were really half-boots with long rawhide laces.

Julie looked me over when I was through dressing. “You’ll do. Now, how were you planning on getting across town to Fields Corner?”

“Subway or taxi.”

“I’ve got a Volks,” she offered. “I’ll drive you.”

I was going to say no, then I changed my mind. “Let’s go,” I said.

Grogan’s is the kind of bar that Jimmy Breslin likes to write about. Its patrons are blue-collar, working Irish. Some of them work for the city, some of them can’t find work, and some of them only work from time to time — at things the law frowns on. The place is paneled in mahogany gone dark from the years and the furniture wax rubbed into it by hand, and from the spillings of whiskey and beer and the countless wipings down with a wet cloth every few minutes. The strong smell of brew is in the air, ingrained in the wood of the booths and the tables and the floor. It’s a man’s place.

At that time of morning there weren’t many customers, so I spotted Reilly as soon as we walked in. He was sitting by himself in the middle booth along the righthand wall.

I turned to Julie, slipping my arm around her shoulders. “How about keeping the motor warm? I won’t be long.”

She glanced at Reilly, then back at me, and shrugged her slender shoulders. “Okay, but don’t forget about me.” She winked as she turned back to the door. “I’ll be keeping my motor warm, too!”

I gave Reilly a hopeful smile as I slid into the booth opposite him. “Do I owe you a bottle?”

His pugnacious face was more irate than usual. “You owe me a hell of a lot more than a bottle!” he growled. He turned his head so I got a full view of the side of his face. His left eye was completely closed. Blood had scabbed along a savage cut that ran from his temple down his cheekbone. The left side of his mouth was badly swollen.

“You want to tell me about that?” I asked.

“Try to stop me from the telling,” he replied. Reilly is third generation but he still has a touch of brogue. The Boston Irish hang onto it longer than their kinfolk anywhere else in the country. “Sweet Jesus, Nick! I knew I should never have gone along with you in the first place! Then I said to myself, what the hell, lookin’ through the morgue for information doesn’t seem like the most dangerous thing in the world, now does it? So I did. I spent the afternoon goin’ through all the old clips. To tell the truth, I was lookin’ forward to a cold glass of brew, it was so dry and dusty in there.”

“You found something,” I said. “Otherwise, that wouldn’t have happened.” I pointed to his cheek.

He shook his head. “I found nothing. Nothing, that is, except trouble on my way here.”

“When?”

“About ten o’clock. Four of them. Big ones, they were, too.”

“Hoods?”

He shook his head again. “You know better than that, Nick. There’s not a punk in town with connections who doesn’t know better than to leave me alone. No, my lad, these were a different breed. Too well dressed, for one thing. Not the right class, for another. There was something about them that tells me they don’t belong in this neighborhood. And they didn’t try to hold me up or anything. Just came right at me like they meant to finish me off. Didn’t say a word. One of them caught me a good lick with a blackjack. That’s how come I got this.” He pointed at his swollen, split cheek. “I was lucky. I got away from them and started shooting. I don’t think I hit any of them, but it was enough to throw a scare into them, so they took off running.”

He was almost embarrassed. “Four years I’ve had that gun and never once had to use it. I’m too well known, Nick. Now, it’s like they don’t care what happens if I get knocked off.”

“So it’s not the Syndicate?”

“Not unless they’ve gone clean out of their minds! And I doubt that! No, my boy, it was someone else’s work.”

“What’d you find in the morgue?” I asked. “You must have found something or they wouldn’t have gone after you.”

“Not a thing,” he said ruefully. “Every one of those five men is a model upstanding citizen — about whom not much is written, I’ll admit,” — he flashed a trace of his old, cynical smile — “because of their influence. They’ve a lot of that, y’know.”

“What about Alexander Bradford?”

“He’s the most interesting of them all,” Reilly said, his eyes locking into mine. “Why are you so interested in him alone now? How come not the others?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Just tell me about him.”

“Well,” said Reilly, “he’s old family — like the others. They all go back to the Mayflower, or maybe the second or third ship after it, at the latest. He’s the only one left of his family. That’s what’s different about him. His father and mother both died when he was a child. He was brought up by his grand-aunt. Served in World War II. He was a lieutenant-colonel in an infantry outfit. He was captured by the Germans, spent a year in a prisoner of war camp—”

“Hold it,” I said. That was it. That was what I had been looking for. “Which stalag?”

Reilly was puzzled. “What the hell difference does it make?”

“Did you learn which camp?”

Reilly looked at me as if I were a teacher accusing him of not having done his homework thoroughly. My question was an insult to a newspaperman as good as he was.

Reilly mentioned the stalag number. And it fit. That particular stalag, I knew, was located in what is now the DDR. Deutche Democratische Republic. East Germany.

“He was liberated by the Russians,” I said. “Right?”

Watching my face carefully, Reilly asked, “Is that a guess or do you know?”

“I’ll do some more guessing,” I said, growing more and more certain of my hypothesis because it was the only way it could have happened, the only way the Russians could have made the swap. “He wasn’t returned to the States right after he was liberated, right?”

Reilly nodded. “Word came back that he was a hospital case. It took him almost a year to recuperate, first in a Russian hospital and then back here in the States at Walter Reed. There was a lot of surgery. For a time, they thought he might not pull through.”

“Plastic surgery?”

“Some. Not much,” said Reilly.

“Just enough so that if someone who knew him before the war wondered about the difference in his appearance, the surgery would explain it.”

“You could say that,” said Reilly.

“No family? No relatives? Right?”

“Just a grand-aunt, like I mentioned before,” said Reilly. “She raised him, but she was very old by the time he returned from Germany.”

“So if he not only looked different, but acted differently, there’d really be nobody to notice it?”

“Is that a question or a statement?” asked Reilly.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re trying to tell me something,” Reilly observed, staring intently at me with a cold, inquisitive look in his eyes. “You think the Russians got their hands on him and brainwashed him. Is that it?”

“Suppose they substituted another man for him, John? Suppose the original Alexander Bradford’s been dead since 1945 and another man — a Russian, a KGB infiltrator, a ‘plant’ — has been taking his place ever since?”

“It could have happened that way,” he admitted grudgingly.

“It did happen that way, John.”

The expression on Reilly’s face changed. Not irreverently, he whispered, “Holy Mother of God! That’s a wild statement, Nick. Is that what this is all about? Are you trying to tell me that the men who came after me tonight are Russians?”

“No, they’re Americans. John, you know enough. Stay out of it now.”

“So that’s the story you said I’d never be able to print,” Reilly mused out loud. “You’re right, m’lad. No one’d ever believe it! Not in this town! It’d be like trying to claim that the Pope, himself, is a Communist spy!”

I slid out of the booth.

Reilly reached out and caught me by the arm.

“There’s more to it, Nick, isn’t there?”

I nodded my head.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Later on? When it’s over?”

I smiled at him. “No way, John. Never. You’ve learned enough. Maybe too much for your own good.”

“Well,” said Reilly, leaning back against the wooden partition between the booths, “take care of yourself, Nick.”

“You, too, John.”

I started to turn away when he suddenly reached forward across the corner of the table and fastened his hand on my arm.

“Sit down, Nick!” The sudden urgency in his voice made me obey without questioning.

“What’s the matter, John?”

“Two men just walked in the door.” His voice was pitched low, barely reaching me.

“You know them?”

He shook his head, his eyes staring past me at them. “Not by name. But I know them alright. They’re two of the men who tried to kill me earlier tonight. But I think you’re the one they want now, laddie. They haven’t taken their eyes off you since they came in.”

“Is there a back door to this place?”

Before Reilly could answer, the front door of Grogan’s swung open and Julie strolled in, impatiently jangling her car keys. She marched right over to our booth and slid in beside me.

“I’m running out of gas,” she announced, unsmiling.

“You and John, here, were just leaving, sweetheart,” I answered.

Reilly knew what I meant. This was no place for Julie. I wanted him to take her out of the bar. And to get the hell out himself. One side of his face had already been smashed in because of me. He grinned crookedly and shook his head.

“You two” — he pointed a chubby finger first at my chest, then Julie’s — “go through the kitchen. Then up a flight of stairs. Don’t go all the way to the top, though. The door to the roof hasn’t been unlocked in years. Go down the hall to the end of the first floor. You’ll find a window there. It opens out onto the fire escape. It’ll take you to the roof. From there, you’re on your own.”

He reached inside his coat and surreptitiously took out his revolver, sliding it under the table to me.

“I think you’ll be needing this more than I will.”

Cupped in my hand, muzzle up, the snub-nosed .38 gleamed brightly under the dark shadow of the table top. I looked down at it. Light reflected off the round chambers and from the trigger guard. The hole of its barrel gaped blackly at me. So did four of the chambers I could see into.

“I appreciate the offer, John, but this thing won’t do me any good...”

Reilly frowned. “Since when will a gun not do—”

“—unless you have cartridges to go with it, friend,” I finished. “You fired all six of them.”

Reilly flushed with embarrassment. “Wait here a minute.”

For a heavy-set man, Reilly moved nimbly. He got to his feet and went across the room, motioning to the bartender to join him. The two of them conferred in whispers at the end of the bar. The barman went into the back room. Reilly drummed his fingers impatiently on the hard mahogany surface until the man came back.

I put my arm around Julie’s thin shoulders and put my head against hers. “Can you look around the end of the booth and take a gander at the two men Reilly was talking about?”

Julie turned her head casually, looked around and then turned back to me. “I saw them,” she said.

“What do they look like?”

“They’re in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. One’s about five-ten, the other’s a little taller. Musclemen. They’re standing at the end of the bar near the door looking this way. They give me the shivers. Real bad vibes, if you dig what I mean!”

Reilly came back and slid into the booth again. He said quietly, “It’s taken care of, Nick. As soon as the action begins, get the hell out of here.”

He passed me a small cardboard box. “Thirty-eights,” he said. “A favor from a friend of mine.”

The bartender went over to a group of three men talking together at the middle of the bar. They looked like regular customers. Work shirts and high-laced work boots. He spoke briefly to them. They looked quickly at the two newcomers and nodded. The bartender moved off.

I put the cartridges in my pocket along with the .38 revolver. This was no place to load it.

“Give the man my thanks, John.”

“Just buy me another bottle,” Reilly said sourly. He touched his split cheek gingerly. “How many do you owe me now?” That was the thing about Reilly. He always talked about buying the bottle, but he never drank anything harder than beer.

I never got a chance to answer. Halfway down the bar one of the three drinkers — a short, square-set middle-aged man — pushed aside his beer glass and strode pugnaciously toward the two men at the end of the bar.

“What’d you say about this place?” he demanded in a loud voice. “If you don’t like it here, get the hell out!”

The two men straightened up. One said in surprise, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I heard you! You come into a place like this and make remarks about it! If it ain’t good enough for you, then get the hell out!”

“Look,” said the other placatingly, “whatever we were talking about, it wasn’t that.”

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“For Christ’s sake—”

I heard the crash of a beer bottle being smashed against the bar and the sudden shout, “Duck, Charlie!”

Reilly leaned forward. “Now, Nick! On your way!”

Julie and I scooted out of the booth and made a run for the kitchen. Behind us there was the crash of a table being overturned and more shouting. As we went through the swinging door to the kitchen, I took a quick look behind me. The short middle-aged man had been joined by his two drinking friends. Those three and the two on my tail were throwing punches at each other.

Someone shouted, “They’re getting away, Charlie!”

Charlie tried to break free of the fight. He made it to the end of the bar. The barman rapped him with a sawed-off billiard cue and he went down.

Then the swinging door slammed behind us, and Julie and I were racing through the kitchen. The door at the back of the steamy white-tiled room opened onto a hallway barely illuminated by a twenty-five watt bulb hanging naked on the end of a black electrical cord. We ran up the flight of stairs to the first landing. To our left, at the far end of the corridor, I made out a grime-covered window. We ran toward it. Like the rest of the building, the window was warped and dirty. Julie pushed fruitlessly at the frame.

“Stand back!”

I lifted my right leg and kicked out the glass. Two more kicks cleared out the broken shards still remaining in the woodwork. “Now!”

Julie clambered out. I followed right behind her. The fire escape was rusty and soot-covered. Below was an alley. I heard a shout come from the street end.

“I’ll go first,” I said to Julie. “We don’t know what’s up there.”

As quietly as we could, we mounted the metal rungs. The shouting grew louder.

Black against black, the dark shadows of the fire escape melted into the soot-blackened bricks of the building. As long as we were on it, we couldn’t be seen from below.

Three stories down, the kitchen door burst open. One of the men who’d come into the bar after us ran out into the alley. In the spill of light from the open door I could see him clearly as he peered both ways.

He shouted, “Did they come your way?”

Someone yelled back at him, “Try the fire escape!”

I heard the screech of rusting metal as he leaped up and caught the bottom rungs of the vertical ladder at the lowest stage of the fire escape. It descended protestingly under his weight.

I urged Julie on. We were now on the fifth landing and that was it. The roof was in front of us. I lifted Julie over the edge onto the asphalt-tarred surface. Pausing to catch my breath, I looked around. In the starlight I could make out a cluster of half a dozen vents and chimneys from the building’s heating system.

“Over there!” I pointed them out to Julie. “Wait for me over there!”

Julie picked her way across the rooftop. The ledge across the edge of the roof was about two and a half feet high, with a stone coping topping the bricks of the building. I ducked down behind the ledge and waited. He was in a hurry — and he was careless. As he came scrambling over the top of the ledge, I straightened up and hit him along the jaw with a sidearm swing, my two fists clenched together. It was like pole-axing a steer.

I ran toward Julie.

“Let’s go,” I panted.

Together we stumbled our way across the rooftops toward the end of the row of adjoining buildings. Every forty feet or so, we crossed from one roof to another, scrambling across the low partitions. We made it to the far end. Cautiously I peered over the edge.

Down on the street below, silhouetted by the lamplight, a man waited by the alley entrance.

Julie touched me on the arm. “How are we going to get by him?”

I looked around. In the middle of the roof of the building was a shed-like structure. I knew that the door inset into it had to lead to a stairwell.

Crossing to it, I pushed against the door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge. I smashed against it. It gave way slightly. I slammed full force into the door and the lock gave way.

“Can you see?” I asked Julie.

“Barely.”

“Then follow me.”

Step by step, putting our feet down on the inner edge of the steps to keep them from creaking, we descended four flights of stairs. I stopped. Julie leaned against my back. “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

“I think it’s time I loaded Reilly’s gun,” I told her.

It took me only a moment to break open the cardboard box and push six bullets into the chambers. The rest of the cartridges I dumped into my pocket. I started down the steps again. In a moment we were at the foot of the stairs, around the turn from the front door. I held Julie back.

“Stay here out of sight until it’s quiet. Don’t come after me. Just get to your car and get the hell out of the neighborhood! Got it?”

Julie didn’t try to argue with me.

I left her standing there, hidden by the bend of the stairs, and made my way to the front of the corridor. There was a door leading to a pocket-sized vestibule. The upper half of the door was stained glass except for a small center panel of clear glass. The outside door, I could see, was solid oak. I wondered who was waiting beyond that door for me.

Well, I couldn’t wait forever. With Reilly’s gun in my right hand. T opened the inner vestibule door — and almost jumped ten feet! The vicious snarl scared the hell out of me because it was the last thing in the world I expected.

The cat was a big one. He was an old torn, scarred by years of alley fights, with one ear hanging down, almost severed by some rival who must have been as tough as he was. He crouched in the corner of the vestibule, spitting at me angrily, mad because he couldn’t get in or out. God knows how long he’d been waiting there.

I made gentle sounds at him. Slowly I edged my way toward him, ready to duck if he showed even the slightest sign of leaping at me. Slowly he responded. I don’t think anyone had made a friendly gesture toward him in years.

It took almost five minutes before I could get close enough to him to reach out my hand. For a moment I thought he was going to slash at it with his razor-sharp claws, but he didn’t. And then I was stroking his fur and scratching him under the chin. I finally dared to pick him up in my arms, and he weighed at least fifteen pounds if he weighed an ounce.

Outside the door, I heard two men talking. A deep voice said, “Alright, I’ll wait here. If that son-of-a-bitch shows up, he’s in for trouble!” Then there was silence. Whoever he had been talking to apparently had left. I waited a full sixty seconds before I opened the door and casually started to walk down the four steps that led to the sidewalk.

I held the cat high in my arms, my face turned away. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the burly stranger standing with his back against the wall of the building next to the alley mouth. For a moment he stared at me and then turned away. You just don’t expect a man walking out the front door of a house with a cat in his arms to be anything more than another peaceful householder. That’s what caught him off guard. Before he could get a good look at my face, I was abreast of him, and by the time recognition took place, it was too late!

He started to raise the gun in his hand, but by then I was already flinging the big, fighting tomcat straight into his face!

Fifteen pounds of nasty-tempered, raging alley cat with claws like barbless hooks gouging at his eyes made him forget everything else in sheer terror! The man let out a scream as high pitched as the tomcat’s furious yowl and began fighting off his furry assailant.

The tom clawed with blinding speed at the man’s face, and I got a quick glimpse of a row of deep, bloody furrows suddenly appearing from his forehead to chin, and then I was gone, running down the street and around the corner into the darkness.

I ducked into the first alleyway I spotted. Halfway down, I vaulted over a broken-slatted wooden fence, finding myself in a yard littered with rusted metal cans and broken bedsprings. I finally made my way between two, narrow, old wooden houses and came out onto a street.

I walked slowly to the corner. I was two blocks away from where I’d started. Back there I could see half a dozen men gathered in a group. Lifting Reilly’s pistol, I aimed above their heads and began a rapid fire.

I wasn’t trying to hit them. I just wanted them to see the muzzle flash as I shot at them. They scattered.

Turning, I ducked away down the street, drawing them after me, but I had a head start of two blocks and no one’s going to catch me when I’ve got that kind of a lead!

Ten minutes later I was casually sauntering down Olney Street when a battered Volks pulled up alongside me.

“Can I give you a lift?” Julie leaned out the window.

I got into the car. “I told you to get the hell out of the neighborhood!”

“Not if I have to leave a friend behind.”

“You mad at me?”

I had to admit I wasn’t.

Julie’s old Volks sputtered its way back across town to her apartment. Halfway there she asked, “What do we do now, Nick?”

“Find Alexander Bradford,” I said out loud. To myself, I added silently, “...and kill him!”

Chapter Ten

How do you find a man like Alexander Bradford who surrounds himself in secrecy? A man who travels by private jet and private helicopter? A man who employs dozens of hirelings to keep the public from knowing where he is at any given moment?

Julie and I were too tired to think about it — and too tired for anything else — when we got back to her apartment. So we tumbled into bed and fell asleep immediately, her warm, small body snuggled into mine in a tight curve.

How could we find Alexander Bradford?

The answer came from Julie. She woke me at eight o’clock by jabbing me in the ribs with her elbow.

“I haven’t seen my godfather in years,” she began without introduction, “but if anyone knows where Alex is, it’ll be my father.”

I was fully awake in a flash.

“The problem is,” Julie went on, her small features set determinedly, “that I haven’t talked with him in more than a year. That’s when I broke with my family.”

“Make up with him.”

Julie considered the idea with obvious distaste. “Do I have to?”

I knew I couldn’t push her into anything. She was too strong-minded. I leaned back against the pillows and shrugged my shoulders and said casually, “It’s up to you, baby.”

“Oh, hell,” said Julie, aggrieved. “I’ve gone this far, I might just as well go all the way!”

Naked, she jumped out of bed and ran into the other room. I lit a cigarette, looking at the cracks in the ceiling, trying not to hope too hard that the breaks would come my way.

Ten minutes later Julie ran back into the bedroom. “He’s at his estate in the Berkshires,” she announced. “And Daddy told me he loved me and asked when I was coming home.”

I got out of bed and patted her on the head. “I hope you told him soon.”

“Damn you!” said Julie angrily. “I wasn’t ever going to see them again!”

As I started to put on Raymond’s clothes again, I asked her, “How long will it take you to draw a map for me?”

Julie stared at me in surprise. “What’s this map business? I’m coming with you.”

I was going to try to talk her out of it. Then I thought, what the hell, she’s old enough to know what she’s doing. After last night she had fair warning that what was happening was dangerous. Julie could take me directly to Bradford’s estate. I wouldn’t have to lose time hunting for it.

While she ducked into the bathroom to shower, I finished lacing up Raymond’s work boots. The damned rawhide thongs went from instep to halfway up the calf. I took Hugo and Pierre out of the bundle of my ruined slacks and fastened them where they belonged: Pierre taped to my groin and Hugo strapped to my forearm. Wilhelmina was still in hiding back at the trolley station. Reilly’s stubby .38 revolver would have to take her place.

A few minutes later we were barreling along U.S. Route 90, the fastest way to the western part of Massachusetts.

The Volks did its usual seventy-five to eighty mph, Matting away like a frenzied sheep. We weren’t afraid of speed traps: everyone was exceeding the speed limit.

I was sitting back, enjoying the luxury of not being behind the wheel, letting my mind wander, when Julie asked without preamble, “How did they know how to find you last night?”

I came out of my reverie. “What did you say?”

“How did they know how to find you last night?”

“I don’t think they did,” I answered. “They were after Reilly. They must have followed him to Grogan’s and were waiting for him to come out when we showed up. I was sort of an unexpected dividend, you might say.”

“How did they know about Reilly looking up Bradford and the others in the newspaper’s files?”

“Someone tipped them off.”

“You’re saying they’ve got men everywhere?”

I thought about it. “I guess so. So far they’ve kept track of every move I’ve made. I helped them for awhile. I wanted them to come after me so I could find Mr. Big. But I thought I’d shaken them off when I came out of the subway. If I didn’t lose them, then they followed me to your place and later to Grogan’s.”

“I think that’s what happened,” said Julie.

“In that case, when you picked me up after the ruckus and we drove back to your apartment, they knew where I was going.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which means they know I spent the night with you,” I said, following the thought to its logical end. “And if they do, then they could be on our tail right now.”

Julie’s small head nodded briefly. “That’s what I’ve been thinking. Especially since there’s been a green Ford station wagon behind me for the last twenty miles. Even when I gave him the chance to pass us, he wouldn’t take it.”

“Take the next turn-off,” I told her. “Let’s see what happens.”

It came up in about a mile. We swung off to the right in a cloverleaf, came to the toll station, paid our toll and headed for Auburn, a few miles southwest of Worcester. The green Ford was still on our tail when we swung onto Route 20.

“Pull over to the side of the road and stop.”

“Now?”

We were passing through Auburn. “In a minute. Let’s wait until there are no houses around.”

Sturbridge was eleven miles away, the signpost said. A mile or two later the road was as deserted as it was going to get.

“Now.”

Julie turned the little Volks off the road. I opened the door, popped around to the back and lifted the lid to the rear engine compartment. The green Ford came down the highway, passed us, slowed to a stop, then began backing up. I eased Reilly’s stubby .38 out of my hip pocket and held it in my hand by my side. The green Ford backed up until it was abreast of us. There were two men in the car. The one in the passenger seat got out and came over to me.

“Anything I can do?” he asked. He was another of the big young men they had so many of.

I straightened up and smiled disarmingly at him, taking a step toward him. Before he knew what was happening, I had the .38 jammed into his stomach.

Still smiling, I said in a soft voice, “Sure. Just don’t move or I’ll blow you in two!”

He looked down at the gun, his face going gray. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked, trying to control the quaver in his voice.

“Trying to control my temper! I feel like blasting you — and your friend. Don’t push me into it, okay? Now, let’s go over and talk to your pal.” I prodded him with the gun. We walked around the back of the green Ford to the driver’s side. His partner started to come out of the car. I let him get partway out before I slammed the door against him, catching him just as he was straightening up. The door bottom slammed against his shins; the upper part of the door drove into his chin. His head snapped back against the roof frame sharply. Groggily he slid to the ground.

I let him see the gun in my hand. “On your feet!”

Holding onto the door to pull himself up, he began to reach for his hip pocket. “We’re FBI,” he said, trying to give his voice a tone of aggressive authority.

“Don’t!” I jabbed my gun deeper into his friend’s side.

“You’re making one hell of a mistake!” he snarled. “I’m just going to show you my identification.”

“I don’t want to see it. If you’re FBI, you know the stance. Hit it!”

They knew what I meant. Turning, they put their hands on the roof of their car, spread their legs and leaned heavily on their palms, completely off balance. I flipped up their jackets, taking a pistol from each of them. I flung the guns into the bushes across the road. I also took their identification wallets, those little folds of leather that contain the FBI badge on one side and the card with the photograph and FBI seal on the other.

“You’re not going to get away with this!”

I didn’t bother to answer. I was busy scanning the inside of the Ford. Under the dash was a two-way radio, but it wasn’t a standard police model.

“You’re in real trouble, mister!” growled the other over his shoulder. “You know you’re committing a Federal offense, don’t you?”

My answer was a single shot. It smashed the hell out of the radio. It also shut him up.

“Around to the front.” They pushed themselves erect and went around to the hood of the Ford.

“One on each tire,” I commanded, positioning myself midway between them. “Unscrew the valve and toss it to me!”

Air hissed; the tired sagged. It took less than a minute before both front tires were flat on the ground. We repeated the process at the rear of the station wagon. When they were through, the car was a forlorn hulk, squatting unnaturally on the roadway, all four of its tires completely deflated.

“Now,” I said. “Off with your trousers — and your shorts!”

“Hey, wait—”

My thumb cocked the hammer of the .38. I shoved it under his nose. He shut up. They began to fumble with their belts.

That’s the way we left them, naked from the waist down, stripped even of socks and shoes. As I stepped back into the Volkswagon, Julie threw the car into gear and raced us away. For about five minutes she was silent, then without looking at me, she asked, “Doesn’t it worry you that they’re fuzz?”

I didn’t answer. My attention was focused on the gold-and-blue badges. Unfastening first one and then the other from their leather holders, I examined each carefully. I found what I was looking for.

Julie repeated her question. “Hey, man, doesn’t it bother you that they’re FBI?”

“They’re not FBI.”

Julie turned to look at me, her eyes wide.

“Why do you say that?”

“The badges. They’re damned good imitations,” I said, “but that’s all they are. I never saw an FBI badge with a Snake Flag emblem engraved on its back!”

Julie made no comment. After a few minutes she said quietly, “It’s like they’re everywhere, huh?”

“You got it, baby.”

“Now what?”

“Well,” I mused out loud, “they know we’re headed for Bradford’s estate. The question is, what are they going to do about it? If I were in their place, I think I’d let us get in real close and then set a trap. I don’t think we’ll be bothered by them again until we get to Lenox.”

Julie shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for it. This is all new to me. Do we cut back onto the Turnpike?”

“No, let’s stay on Route 20. The Turnpike’s too dangerous for us without a car a hell of a lot faster than this one.”

Route 20 is the old route west. It takes you through a lot of small New England towns like Sturbridge, Brimfields and Palmer. Each village we passed through was having some sort of Bicentennial celebration, its more theatrical citizens dressed up in colonial costumes.

From the time we left Springfield, we were in the low, rolling mountain country of the Berkshires. Between Chester and Lee, a section of the Appalachian Trail crosses Route 20. It’s some of the most scenic, most beautiful mountain country in the world. But I had too many other things on my mind to appreciate the beauty of the scenery. Somewhere in those mountains was a man who posed a threat to the U.S. far worse than any world war. He was a leader who needed an army of young musclemen, even though the masterplan from the Kremlin called for the destruction of our economic system. Why?

We drove through Stockbridge, Lenox and Tangle-wood, with its huge outdoor auditorium, where the Music Festival is held every summer.

West of Tanglewood the land drops off into a valley about five miles wide. Across the valley, the mountains rear up, just as wild and almost as untouched as they were 300 years ago.

Julie knew these mountain roads like the palm of her hand. She made one turn and then another and then a third, each of the lanes getting a little narrower than the preceding one.

“Another mile or so,” she told me just before we came to a crossroad and a State Police officer held up his hand for us to stop. His cruiser was parked across the middle of the road, blocking it effectively. The rooftop lights flashed authoritatively at us.

The big trooper sauntered over to us in his whipcord trousers, tailored jacket, Sam Browne belt and gleaming boots. “Sorry, folks.” The smile on his face was pleasant. “You’ll have to turn back here. The road’s closed up ahead.”

“What’s the trouble?” I asked casually.

He was a young man with short brown hair, pale skin and a heavy-featured face. “No trouble,” he answered. “Just road repair.”

His hands were on his hips, seemingly in an informal manner, but I noticed that his holster flap was unbuttoned and folded back. His right hand was only inches from the protruding wooden gun butt. The gun was a .357 Magnum. It’s a killer gun. He made no move toward it; the pleasant smile on his face remained firmly fixed as he watched Julie maneuver the volks in a tight turn.

“Hold it,” I whispered to her. Julie stepped on the brakes. The trooper strode up to the car as I leaned out the window. He walked as if he were pacing off steps on a dusty Old West Main Street, ready to fast-draw his gun for a shoot-out. He was deadly serious. He wanted an excuse to start shooting.

“Anything the matter?” His voice was cold and flat.

“My watch stopped,” I said. “What time is it?”

Without turning his head, he brought up his left wrist to eye level. He shook his uniform sleeve back with a snap, glanced at the dial for a fraction of a second and had his eyes back on me immediately. The watch was a large-faced chronometer in a stainless steel case held to his wrist by a wide aluminum band.

“It’s almost four o’clock,” he said curtly.

I thanked him. Julie put the car in gear. We drove off.

“What was all that about?” she asked, puzzled. “You know what time it is.”

I didn’t answer. I was holding a detailed picture of the trooper’s wristband in my mind. Even at a distance of several feet, I had made out the emblem on the flat aluminum link next to the watch face. The Snake Flag!

“I can take the next crossroad,” Julie said. “It’s a mile or so longer, but it’ll take us to Alex’s place.”

“No, it won’t,” I told her. “Ten to one there’ll be another trooper there. And he’ll tell us the road is closed.”

Julie didn’t say anything until we came to the crossing. The State Trooper stood in a spraddle-legged stance, holding his hand up for us to stop. Behind him his patrol car blocked the narrow roadway, its flashing rooflights rotating.

He was just as pleasant as the first trooper — and just as firm. The road was closed for repairs. We’d have to make a detour. Sorry about that, folks.

We turned around.

“How’d you know?” Julie demanded.

“Have you ever been on a jackrabbit hunt?” I asked. “They have them in Australia. A line of beaters circle the territory and gradually they begin driving the rabbits. When the animals try to veer off. they’re driven back. Pretty soon the rabbits are all headed in one direction because that’s the only way they’re allowed to go. The rabbits run like hell, thinking they’re getting away — until they come to the line of men waiting for them with shotguns.”

“You saying that we’re the rabbits?”

“Not if I can help it,” I told her grimly.

“Well, what do we do?”

“We go back to town. If there’s any killing to be done, I’m the one who’s going to do it.”

Julie threw me a strange glance but said nothing. I knew she detested violence; I don’t like it, either. But it’s part of my job, and using it is the only way I stay alive.

We were lucky enough to get a room in an old New England inn that dated back 150 years. The bed was old; the bathroom had old-fashioned, heavy porcelain plumbing fixtures. The few electric lights, installed in tulip-shaped, frosted glass shades, were dim, and the wallpaper was a fusty, yellow, floral pattern. Julie flipped over it. I had more serious things on my mind.

She drew a map for me. I watched her sitting in a straight-backed chair pulled up to a rickety table, her head bent so that her hair fell down to shield her face from the light. Her tongue was stuck in the corner of her mouth like a little child’s as she concentrated on sketching everything she could remember about the layout of Alexander Bradford’s estate and the roads leading to it.

Finally, she was finished. She brought it over to me and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“See,” she said, pointing with the stub of the pencil. “Here’s Alex’s place. And here are the roads we tried to take to get there this afternoon. It’s right in the middle of this valley. None of the roads, except this one, comes anywhere near it. Alex bought up all the surrounding property. He likes his privacy.”

I went over the map carefully, memorizing it.

“That’s the only road in?”

“Right,” said Julie. “And if what we saw this afternoon is any indication, it’s pretty well guarded.”

“What’s this mark over here?”

Julie bent over the map. “Oh, that’s the mountain,” she said. “It’s kind of a landmark. I just put it in to show the lay of the land, you know. All small mountains and hills. This is the tallest. It’s about a mile north of Alex’s house. His property ends at its base on the southern side.”

“How high is the mountain?” I asked.

“High? I don’t really know. Maybe 1800, 2000 feet. Why?”

“Are there any other houses around?”

Julie shook her head. “No, not for more than a mile in any direction. I told you Alex likes privacy.”

I took the map from her hand, putting it on the small fumed-oak bedside table. Turning off the lamp so that the room was in semi-darkness, I reached for her and said, “So do I, at times.”

“Now?” Julie asked willingly.

“Now.” I took her into my arms, a small-boned, warm, compliant, completely feminine little girl-woman.

I’ve learned to take my pleasures when and where I can, if it’s with someone special. Julie was someone special. For the next hour we thought of nothing but each other. Later we bathed in the big, deep, old-fashioned bathtub. Then we dressed and went down to dinner.

The dining room of the inn held about ten tables, each covered with a blue checked gingham cloth, matching napkins and pewter flatware place settings. Some of the tables were large, set for six or more people. Julie and I started across the room, heading for a small table for two beside a window that looked out onto the porch. Halfway across the room, I stopped dead.

Sabrina was sitting at a table by herself, her eyes fixed on my face, waiting for me to recognize her. There was an expression of superior amusement on her features.

“Hello, Nick,” she said. Her eyes skimmed over Julie, catalogued her in one swift, coldly measuring glance as only one woman can do to another, and then dismissed her as being unimportant. Sabrina had been toying with a cup of coffee. It was practically untouched, although the ashtray in front of her was filled with crushed cigarette stubs. The other place setting at her table was still pristine. It was obvious that she was alone and that she’d been waiting for some time.

“Hello. Sabrina.”

“Surprised to see me?”

“In a way.”

Her manner showed she didn’t care to be introduced to Julie. The glance she’d given her was enough recognition.

“I’m glad I ran into you,” she said. Reaching into her purse, she took out a pair of tickets. “I can’t go tonight, and I really hate to waste these. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the concert.” She rose, handing me the pasteboards.

“I have to ran now,” she said and flashed me the same impersonal smile she’d given me when we first met at the Granary Burial Ground. “Be sure to attend. You may meet some interesting people.”

She strode off across the room, conscious that every man in the place was eyeing her, aware that she was radiating an animal appeal.

I took Julie by the arm and steered her to the small table by the window.

“I didn’t know that you knew Bradford’s secretary,” Julie commented as we sat down.

“I didn’t know that you knew her, either.”

“I told you I know everyone in that group.” Julie was slightly exasperated. “Sabrina is Mather Woolfolk’s daughter. I know her father, too.”

“And Calvin Woolfolk?”

“Sure. He’s the nicest of them. What’s Sabrina doing here? And what was all that business about the tickets?”

“They want me,” I said. “Sabrina’s meeting us was no accident. She’s been waiting here especially to give me the tickets. If I use them, I can expect to find a reception committee.”

“Are we going to use them?”

I looked at her.

“I’m going to use one of them,” I said. “You’re staying here.”

Julie started to protest. I cut her off. “Look, baby,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve got to get to Alex Bradford! I’m taking a chance that they’ll bring me to him.”

“And if they don’t? What if they’re setting you up to kill you?” There was concern in her voice.

“That’s the gamble I’ve got to take.”

“And I’d be a burden?”

I was blunt. “Frankly, yes.”

Julie was practical. She considered the matter carefully and finally nodded her acquiescence.

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll wait for you here.”

“Go back to Boston.”

Julie was also stubborn. She shook her head, her mouth set in a determined line. “I said I’ll wait for you here!”

I didn’t eat much of my dinner. My mind was on other things. Halfway through the meal I left Julie at the table and went upstairs to our bedroom. I checked out Pierre and Hugo. I wished like hell that I also had Wilhelmina with me. The feel of that beautifully balanced Luger in my hand gave me a real sense of security. However, Reilly’s little .38 revolver would have to do. Flipping open the cylinder, I shook out the rounds, checked them and reloaded the gun. I added a sixth bullet to make up for the one I’d fired into the two-way radio of the “FBI” agents’ Ford. I tucked the gun into the waistband of my slacks under my open shirttails.

I didn’t want to give Julie a chance to change her mind, so I took the back stairway down and went out the rear exit. I set off down the village street to the rotary where Route 7 splits and the road to Tanglewood begins.

It was twilight now. Tanglewood was not too far away. I had time to walk there at a comfortable pace, and time to prepare myself mentally for whatever might happen once I got there. It was nearing the end of the third day. I didn’t know how many were left. Hawk had told me that the schedule had probably been shortened. My own feeling was that, with the pressures I’d been putting on them, they’d moved up the date of D-Day even more. “D” for destruction. Pick up the telephone and issue a sell order. Lots of telephones being picked up that day. Lots of sell orders. Watch the market go crazy. Watch the American economy go to hell. Watch the jobless as they riot. Watch the world go to hell as the Soviets take command and some creep of a Russian economist gloats over the success of his nightmare scheme.

But not if I could help it. No way!

Chapter Eleven

Tanglewood at night under the stars with the soft summer evening breeze coming across the valley; the open-sided acoustic shell glowing under the spotlights; the full panoply of one of the world’s great symphony orchestras playing as a single finely-tuned instrument is something that can take your breath away. All around are wooded hills, and the valley is fragrant with the sharp resin scent of pine needles. And because the groundskeeper had mowed the expanse of lawn around the old, green-painted house that was the original Tanglewood estate, that night the pungent odor of newly-cut grass was in the air.

There were well over a thousand people. Some from Boston, some from New York, Albany, Pittsfield — the rest from the inns and hotels of the middle Berkshires where they had been vacationing. The parking lot was filled with cars; the road had been jammed with couples walking to Tanglewood; the grounds swarmed with clusters of people of all ages chattering away at each other.

Now — except for the sound of the orchestra sweeping triumphantly toward the conclusion of Beethoven’s Ninth — all was tranquil. It should have been the one place in the world a man could relax completely.

But it wasn’t.

The conductor swept his baton across the air in front of him, cutting off the final note. The audience rose to its feet, shouting, clapping, cheering. The lights came up. The crowd began filing out for the intermission.

And suddenly they were there. Half a dozen brawny young men. In less than a second I was surrounded by them as I stood in the aisle. They isolated me completely from the crowd, none of whom suspected anything out of the ordinary.

One of the men came up to me. It was John Norfolk, the young lawyer who’d tried to bribe me. The last time I’d seen him, he was scuttling away from me in fear of his life. Apparently, the presence of the others gave him a great deal of confidence.

“You remember me, Mr. Carter.” It was a statement, not a question.

Maybe that’s why they’d sent him along — to let me see a face that I didn’t associate with a threat to my life.

“We’d like you to come with us.”

“Are you taking me to Bradford?” I asked.

Norfolk met my stare. “You’ll meet someone,” he said.

I looked around. Unless I wanted to start one hell of a commotion. I didn’t have a chance. It was like being in the middle of the Minnesota Viking offensive team huddle. They were big.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Grim-faced, they formed a phalanx around the pair of us as we walked to the parking lot.

Two cars were waiting there. One was the green Ford station wagon. Beside it stood the phony FBI agents. Norfolk gestured for me to get into the other car, a black Mercury four-door sedan. He climbed in beside the driver. The two men who pot in the back seat — one on either side of me — were all muscle.

With the station wagon following us, we drove out of the parking lot, gravel crunching under the tires. We turned onto the country road heading away from Tanglewood and Lenox.

No one said anything. I was surprised that they’d made no attempt to disarm me. Maybe they figured that, pinned in between the two men, I wouldn’t be able to move fast.

The cars swept on through the night, taking one lane after another. Inside the sedan there was nothing but silence.

Off in the distance I could see the dark mass of the mountain Julie had shown me on the map. It was outlined against the lighter, star-flecked darkness of the night sky. I kept it in view as a reference point. We seemed to be heading in its general direction. Maybe they were taking me to Alexander Bradford’s place, after all. My gamble might be paying off.

And just about the time I made that assumption, the driver of the sedan spun the wheel. The car lurched, swaying into a tight turn. We drove off the road and down a lane about a hundred yards or so before coming to a stop. The driver flicked on the dome light and turned around. The gun in his hand was a Colt .45 automatic.

Norfolk opened his door and got out. So did the man on my right.

“You just sit still,” said the driver, aiming the pistol at my forehead. His hand was shaking.

I sat very still. I didn’t want to make him any more nervous than he already was. You never know what an amateur will do. They can kill you without meaning to.

“Get his gun,” the driver ordered the man on my left.

I didn’t want him searching me too closely. I said, “It’s in my belt behind my back.”

“Shut up!”

The man on my left pushed my head forward almost into my lap, flipped up my shirttail and found Reilly’s .38 revolver. He let me sit up again.

Norfolk poked his head in through the open door on my side of the car.

“This is as good a place as any,” he said.

It was pretty clear that they had no intention of taking me to Bradford. Norfolk’s words were the final proof — if I needed any. My gamble hadn’t paid off.

The Ford station wagon came up behind us, jouncing heavily on the ruts of the narrow lane. Its headlights were on high beam as it rolled to a stop a few feet in back of us. The glare came through the glass of the big rear window of the Mercury, shining directly into the eyes of the driver facing me. It must have been like looking full into a battleship searchlight at that short distance.

The driver winced involuntarily, closing his eyes and ducking his head away from the blast of light. In that instant I whipped my right forearm across his head, jabbed my left elbow into the ribs of the man next to me and made a flying leap out the open door. I dived headlong into Norfolk, sending him stumbling against the other man who’d been on my right. They both went down. I was out in the open, away from the dangerous confines of the sedan.

They could see all this very clearly from the station wagon, because the Ford’s headlights lit up the scene brilliantly. But they hadn’t as yet opened the doors.

There’s one thing about a pro. He doesn’t care what he smashes when he’s out to do a job. Amateurs have an ingrained respect for property that they haven’t been able to shake.

There I was in the full glare of the headlights. Bumping into Norfolk slowed me for a second or two. It took another three or four seconds for me to race to the security of the trees to the left of the sedan. And yet, in all that time — and four or five seconds is long enough to give you time to draw, aim and fire — no one thought of shooting at me through the window glass of the station wagon!

The six of them got in each other’s way as they tried to throw open the doors and pile out into the open before they began shooting. As I plunged into the underbrush, I heard them shouting at each other.

“He’s getting away! God damn it, shoot!”

By the time the first shot came, I was ten feet into the brush, angling away so that the trees would protect my back. I had one other advantage. They had been light-blinded by the headlights, and I’d been facing away when the station wagon came up. I still had most of my night vision.

When they finally started shooting, they were wide. Twenty yards wide. I took a rolling dive under the cover of a fallen oak tree, stretched out and lay absolutely still.

“Hold it! Damn you, hold that fire!”

The gunshots died away.

“Where the hell’d he go?”

“Shut up and let me listen!”

There wasn’t a sound. The night noises had died away. The gunfire had frightened the night creatures into silence.

“We lost him!”

“No, we haven’t. He hasn’t had time to get far enough away.”

“Well, there aren’t enough of us to go chasing him in the dark!”

One of the voices took command. “You three stay here. Keep him pinned down. He must be close by. You hear a noise, you start shooting.”

Another voice spoke up. The accent was deep South. “Mr. Essex, Ah got me a hi ol’ sniperscope rifle in the back of that wagon. Ah kinda think Ah oughta stay, ’steada Greg. Ah kin shoot the head off n a squirrel at a hundred yards even if it’s blacker’n a coal mine at midnight without no lights.”

There was a flurry of talk. Mr. Essex — whoever he was — cut it short. “Charlie’s right. He stays. He’s got the rifle. George stays, too. He’s a Nam vet. If he could take care of himself in the jungles, then this patch of woods is just his meat. Jerry comes with me. We’ll go back and get more men. We’ll need them to pin down this son of a bitch! The rest of you — spread out along the lane! Don’t move around. Just keep him from getting out of the area! Got it?”

I saw Charlie open the tailgate of the station wagon and take out a U.S. Army rifle with an infra-red sniperscope mounted on it. He slung the battery pack over his shoulder. George, the Viet Nam veteran, pulled out an M-14 carbine. Christ! You’d have thought they were taking on an army instead of just one man!

The green station wagon started up, backed out of the lane and disappeared. Charlie and George took off into the woods, one striking out to my left, the other to my right. They were going to outflank me and trap me between them. The other men remained where they were.

Charlie worried me. He was dangerous with that infra-red sniperscope. He could use it like an invisible searchlight to sweep the woods hunting for me, and I’d never know when the beam lit me up as a target for him. Not until a bullet came slamming into me!

George was an unknown factor. I didn’t know how good a woodsman he was. I heard Charlie crashing around to my left. If he were that clumsy in the woods, he’d give me ample warning if he came anywhere near me.

I went after George.

Not directly. Even though I knew that time was on their side, I couldn’t be impatient. I had to lure George into a trap.

The leader had been wrong. There’s one hell of a difference between the jungles of Southeast Asia and the forests of New England. The jungles are wet and damp and thick. They hide footsteps, swallowing up sound, so that you can’t hear a man until he’s right on top of you. I know. I’ve been there. New England forests are dry, except right after a rain. Leaves rustle; fallen twigs crackle when you step on them.

I took off Raymond’s boots. His socks were thick enough to give me the protection I needed and still let me feel my way. I was going to discard them, but as I was loosening the long rawhide laces, I had another thought. I took time to pull each lace free and tucked them into my hip pocket.

Then I set out after George.

I made a long sweep in his general direction. I wanted to get as far away as I could from Charlie with his dangerous sniperscope rifle. It took me about ten minutes to get where I wanted to be. Occasionally I heard movement. George wasn’t living up to his reputation as a jungle fighter.

I finally found the spot I wanted. It was next to a small clearing. Two trails led into it. They were both narrow and lined with young, second-growth trees. As quietly as I could, I used Hugo to trim some of the branches from one of the saplings. Then I bent it in an arc, fastening it with a slipknot to a fallen log with one end of a rawhide lace. The other end was in my hand. I lay down behind the log.

When you set a trap, you’ve got to bait it. The bait was me. I had to be sure that Charlie and his damned sniperscope were nowhere around. About five minutes went by. I heard a shot come from about 200 yards away.

Faintly I heard someone shout, “You get him?”

There was no answer. The only sound came from more than a mile away. So faintly you could hardly hear it, the strains of the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing a Brahms concerto came floating across the valley on the light breeze. I wondered what the audience would think if they knew about the deadly manhunt going on within a mile or two of them!

Charlie had sense enough not to give his position away by answering. But now I knew that he was nowhere nearby.

I tossed a rock into the middle of the glade. I wanted some noise, not too much. Just enough to make it sound as though I’d stumbled.

Nothing happened.

I let another few minutes go by and then baited my trap again. The stone landed, rolling a few feet. The noise was barely discernible.

Then I heard the soft scrape of a boot on the trail. I tightened my grip on the rawhide lace whose other end slipknotted the bent sapling. The second rawhide lace was doubled, the ends wrapped around each of my fists with two feet of slack hanging down.

George came down the trail. He was quiet; he moved slowly. I would never have seen him if I hadn’t been expecting him. He came abreast of me and stopped.

Animals have an instinct that tells them when an enemy is near. So does man. George sensed something, but he thought I was in front of him somewhere in the clearing.

He moved forward two steps more, and I pulled the rawhide lacing. The slipknot pulled free. The sapling whipped erect with a swoosh of branches in front of his face. George recoiled from what he thought was an attack.

Under the cover of the noise, I leaped to my feet. From behind I flipped the loop of the second rawhide lacing over his head and around his neck. The garrote was effectively deadly. It cut off the sound that tried to burst from his throat. Clawing desperately with his fingers at the leather thong that bit mercilessly into his flesh, he flung the M-14 away from him in a spastic jerk. The carbine landed somewhere deep in the brush. I maintained the pressure. George had no chance at all, but then he would have given me none, either. When I lowered him to the ground, the stench let loose from his uncontrolled sphincter muscle filled the air.

I tried to find the carbine, but it was no use. It would have taken me all night, and time was my enemy. Charlie and his deadly sniperscope were next, and all I had were two rawhide laces. I knew I couldn’t pull the same trick on Charlie. He had a sniperscope to look through. The closest I could get to him might be ten or twenty yards — if I were lucky.

Which meant that I wouldn’t be able to use the garrote again, or Hugo.

Or could I? The thought intrigued me.

I moved off the trail, going deep into the underbrush. My eyes had become almost totally accustomed to the darkness. The starlight gave me more than enough light. I found what I was looking for. It took me a few moments to cut down a six-foot length of supple branch about as thick around as my wrist. I trimmed it. Hugo’s sharp blade made the work go fast. I cut away the thin bark, except for the center section, where I had to be sure my grip wouldn’t slip. Tapering the branch, I cut a groove in each end. The branch was so thick I had to use all my strength to bend it into an arc. I took a rawhide lace and fastened it to each notched end, and when I was finished I had a rough but highly effective bow!

The arrow took me a little longer to make. I had to find a branch that was straight enough. When I’d found one suitable, I trimmed it clean, cutting off one end squarely and then carving a vee into it to take the rawhide bowstring. I had no vanes to make it fly without a wobble, but then vanes are needed only if you’re shooting over a considerable distance. I’d be only a few yards away — that is, if I got a chance to use it at all!

Hugo was my arrowhead. With part of the second lace, I bound the stiletto to the end of the crude arrow. When I was through, what I had, in effect, was a crossbow bolt that would be propelled by a version of the English longbow! The short pull required almost every ounce of my strength, but it would hurl the arrow with force enough to penetrate two inches of lumber!

I wanted to test the rig to see how it would shoot, but that was impossible. I had to go after George hoping the makeshift weapon would do its job. Arrow notched into the bow, I stalked down the narrow trail of that New England undergrowth. Overhead the sky was lighter than the darkness of the forest. The trees were black hulks in the night.

I finally found him. A sniperscope is an unwieldy weapon at best. I heard him thrashing around with the gun in his hand, striking low-hanging branches with the barrel as. he swept the scope from side to side, using it as an invisible searchlight to scan the forest for me.

I sank down beside the trail and waited. If he spotted me first with that damned beam, I was dead. No matter how you looked at it, all the advantages were his.

George came down the trail, the rifle held to his shoulder, his eye against the sight of the scope, using it as a flashlight. He would take a few steps, stop, sweep the path ahead of him and then take another few steps. I lay burrowed in the thick undergrowth beside the trail and didn’t move a muscle. An ant crawled across my face. It explored my lips. I still didn’t move. The ant moved over my upper lip and then into my nostril. The tickling sensation was overwhelming. I used all my self-control not to sneeze.

George came closer. He stopped only inches away from my head. I blanked out my mind, The ant bit. Fire raced through my nostril. And I took it. The techniques of yoga concentration enabled me to place myself away from my body. The itches and pain my body felt had nothing to do with me. I was somewhere else.

George took three more paces down the trail, and I came back to my body, rising silently to my feet. With every ounce of strength I had, I drew back on the bowstring. The heavy, crudely carved branch reluctantly bent into an arc until the haft of the stiletto was even with the handgrip.

The branch creaked slightly as it bent, and George spun around, aiming the rifle at me. I released the bowstring at almost the exact instant he pulled the trigger.

The short, heavy crossbow bolt whipped through the few yards that separated us. The explosion from George’s gun blasted my ears. There was a burning sensation along my left shoulder, and then, almost in slow motion, George let the heavy sniperscope rifle fall from his hands. His knees crumpled. He collapsed awkwardly on the trail, both hands fastened around the shaft of the arrow.

Hugo had been driven into his chest the complete length of the slender blade. If the haft of the knife hadn’t prevented it, the arrow would have gone completely through him!

I went over to George and took the rifle. Dismantling the scope from the weapon, I took it and the battery pack from his body and set off back through the woods.

Now the advantage was mine. Now I had no trouble in spotting where their men were and avoiding them easily. I made my way to the main road, skirting the last of their flankers.

It was almost dawn before I reached Lenox on foot. I knew that Julie must have been waiting impatiently for me to return and that the strain on her nerves must have been brutal. I wanted to take her in my arms and let her know that I was safe. I wanted a hot bath and a dressing put on the shallow flesh wound of my left arm.

In the darkness of pre-dawn, I came tiredly up the twisting, narrow village streets of Lenox. The Volks was parked about fifty yards from the inn, under a street lamp. Curiously I peered into it as I passed. And stopped.

Julie was sitting in the driver’s seat, her head thrown back against the headrest as if she had fallen asleep.

But she hadn’t. Someone had broken her neck, and she was dead.

Chapter Twelve

Pittsfield was too close. I drove the Volks south out of Lenox to Monterey, took Route 23 to Otis, Route 8 to New Boston and, finally, Route 57 through Granville and Southwick. They’re all country roads. At that hour of the night there was no traffic on them.

Julie was my silent companion for the first part of the trip. Silent and dead. Between Otis and New Boston, I found a deserted stretch of road, pulled over and took her from the car. I propped her against a tree where she would be found soon and continued my lonely journey. Now there was more driving me on than just my duty to AXE. There was more than just a feeling of responsibility not to let Bradford — or whatever his true Russian name was — get away with the Kremlin plot. From the time I found Julie dead in the Volks, I began to burn with an intense, personal hatred for the man. From that moment on, my mission was revenge and retribution!

In Springfield I had an early breakfast, dawdling over coffee until the stores opened. Not wanting to call undue attention to myself, I didn’t want to be the first customer of the day. It was around eleven o’clock before I entered.

The shop specialized in sporting goods. I bought a pair of 7×50 Zeiss binoculars. I looked at a couple of pistols. They had a Luger that balanced in my hand almost as beautifully as Wilhelmina did. I hefted a Winchester 70 with a Browning 2-7x scope that would have been perfect, but I had to discard them both. Hawk’s words of warning were clear in my mind: It has to look like an accident!

I can’t really say that the idea was full grown in my mind. It was just an impulse, I guess, but I’ve learned to trust my impulses. I bought an air gun.

It wasn’t the sort of air rifle kids play around with. It was a Feinwerkbau 300 match rifle that fired .177 calibre pellets. The barrel was of rifled steel, nineteen and a half inches long. In that type of gun the barrel and receiver recoil together, independently of the stock, so that there’s no recoil to feel. You hand cock it by pulling a side lever and, even though it’s a single shot, you can work it pretty fast. The muzzle velocity of that little .177 pellet is 575 feet per second, which isn’t much slower than a .45 calibre pistol. And it’s built for accuracy. The palmswell pistol grip, combined with a Monte Carlo gunstock, makes it fit into your arm and shoulder like a part of you. I guess that’s why you shell out some $200 for one of these weapons.

Before I left town, I gassed up the Volks and picked up a map of the area at the service station. It didn’t give me enough information about the terrain, so I drove out to the airport and picked up an Airman’s Sectional Chart, which pinpoints every hill, road, pond and landmark — and gives you its exact height above sea level.

Then I drove out to the mountain that Julie had told me about.

It took me until almost four in the afternoon to circle my way around by way of Pittsfield and come in from the north. I left the car at the foot of the mountain, hidden in a grove of trees, and started my climb. By five o’clock I was lying prone on a ledge near the crest of the mountain. Almost a mile away was Bradford’s estate. The 7×50 binoculars pulled in every detail.

Julie had been right. There was only one road into the area. Through the glasses I could see that it was patrolled by Massachusetts State Troopers. I remembered the two bogus troopers we’d met yesterday, and I knew that these were more of Bradford’s private army.

Around the perimeter of the estate were two double fences. Each pair of fences consisted of a chain-link fence and a wire mesh fence. The inner pair of fences had another foot and a half of barbed wire on top of them. Between the inner and the outer pair of fences was about thirty feet of space.

The layout was familiar to me. I’d seen it before in the Soviet Union. It’s the kind of set-up they’d copied from the Nazis, who used it to surround many of their concentration camps and all of their stalags — the prisoner of war camps. Which meant that the inner fence was electrified! Then, through the glasses, I spotted the dogs. In five minutes I counted eight of them. They ran free between the fences, which provided a runway for them to roam at will. Doberman pinschers usually run in pairs. They’re fast. Once they hit a man, they’ll take less than two minutes to rip him to death. In the dark no man stands a chance against them.

No one — and I mean, no one at all — could get down that road, past the troopers, climb the first pair of fences and try to get over the second pair of fences without it costing him his life. If he made it over the outer fence, the dogs would tear him to shreds before he reached the inner fence. If they didn’t, he’d just damn well electrocute himself the second he laid a hand on the wire.

The estate itself, the manor house, sat in lonely splendor in the midst of an enormous expanse of closely-clipped lawn. It was 200 yards to the house from the nearest point of entry — 200 yards of wide-open terrain without an inch of cover! It was a safe bet that at night the grounds were crisscrossed with electronic sensor beams.

Alexander Bradford had made sure that no one was going to get at him!

After awhile, I rolled away from the crest of the mountain and went back down to the Volks. I had to think this one out carefully. In spite of Bradford’s precautions, there had to be a way to get at him. I had to find it. Every defense has a built-in flaw. What was his?

I drove away from the area, back toward Pittsfield, stopping at a small diner to eat a sandwich, have a cup of coffee and think this problem over.

One way of looking at it was to assume that Bradford was keeping the world away from him. The opposite point of view was that he was just as much a captive in his own private stalag as any prisoner! If he’d set up so impregnable a defense, I figured he wasn’t going to run away from it before D-Day.

I knew I couldn’t get to him in daylight. For whatever good it would do me, I needed the cover of darkness. Most of all, I needed some way of getting past the bogus troopers, past the dogs and over the fences to the house.

It’s strange where ideas come from. I was sitting in a small booth in the diner, finishing the last of my second cup of coffee and not paying much attention to anyone else. Across the aisle from me was a family of four. Nice, tourist types. The father was in his middle thirties, I guess. His wife held a baby in her arms. The other child was a boy about five. Idly I watched them. The little boy’s father was occupied with folding a paper place mat. When he was finished, he held it up, showed it to the kid and then flipped it into the air.

It swept across the room, soared up in a zoom, circled and came diving down again. A simple delta-wing paper airplane.

There it was. The answer to how I could get past the road patrol, the fences, the dogs and the electronic sensor beams!

Maybe.

If I could find the equipment.

I paid my bill, got into the Volks and set out for the airport at Pittsfield. If what I needed was to be found anywhere, it would be at an airport in the mountain country, because that’s where you find swift air currents and where the sport is most popular.

It’s called “hang-gliding.” You’re suspended by an aluminum framework from a giant delta-wing kite covered in ultra-light nylon fabric. You’d be surprised how far you can hang-glide and how long you can stay aloft. I’ve done it a few times. It’s quite a thrill to soar through the air without a sound, except for the whisper of wind in your ears, and nothing — not even the cockpit of a glider — around you.

I was lucky. At the airport I found a man who sold me his personal kite. He also charged me too damned much for it, but I had the kite. A big son of a gun. Big enough, with the currents you get in the Berkshire mountain country, to lift me and the equipment I needed.

At dusk I was back at the foot of the mountain. Once again I left the Volks in the grove of trees. Once more I climbed up to the peak. According to the airman’s sectional chart, it had an elevation of 1,680 feet. The valley below — Bradford’s private valley — was about 300 feet above sea level. With good air currents, taking off from that height, I could fly several miles. Much more than I needed to get to Bradford’s estate.

I assembled the aluminum and nylon framework of the kite before it got completely dark. Then I made myself comfortable and waited.

While I waited, I mentally reviewed another problem. That damned manor was big! The house had at least sixty rooms. Two L-shaped wings branched off from the main section, which was three stories in height. Assuming I got in, where the devil would I find Bradford? I just couldn’t go roaming down the hallways, asking people where he was!

I rolled over, uncased the binoculars again and began to study the house in detail, memorizing it.

At midnight I put the binoculars in their leather case and left them on the mountain ledge. I had no further use for them. I slung the Feinwerkbau pellet rifle over one shoulder. I crisscrossed the battery pack of the sniperscope I’d taken from George’s dead body over my other shoulder. I carried the kite to the very edge of the mountain ridge, fastened myself into its aluminum frame seat, and — taking a deep breath — I launched myself into the night sky!

For a moment I plunged sickeningly downward before I could correct my balance. Then the updraft sweeping along the side of the mountain caught me, lifting me a hundred feet higher. The equipment made it awkward at first, but I finally found the right position. And then I was a giant bat in the sky, soaring effortlessly through the dark night. Through the sniper-scope sight I had no trouble spotting Bradford’s mansion. I could make out every detail of its flat-surfaced, semi-mansard roof. I could actually count each individual chimney and flue that stuck up through the tiles. Every eave and window was as brightly delineated as if it were daylight!

Below me “police” cruisers guarded the road as I crossed high over their heads. The attack dogs sniffed and snarled against the metal of the chain-link inner fences, furious at their inability to get at the “troopers” patrolling along the outside of the fences. The invisible beams of the ground sensors crisscrossed the lawn uselessly.

Had anyone looked up at the sky, he would have had a difficult time seeing me, because the covering of the hang-kite was black nylon. I was just a darker shadow against the blackness of the sky, and tonight there was no moon to silhouette me.

I banked the huge kite to lose altitude. It doesn’t take long to fly a mile in a hang-kite, and I had almost 1500 feet of altitude to lose before I could touch down on Bradford’s roof. Presently I was a 100 yards away and perhaps fifty feet above it. At the last moment I took my eye away from the sniperscope finder, grabbed both aluminum sidebraces with my hands and got ready for the landing impact.

When you touch down with a hang-kite, you come in at a run. I didn’t have much room on that roof to run. I was just damned lucky I found enough space for the half-dozen paces I needed to come to a stop without breaking a leg.

Taking a deep breath, I unlatched the safety belt, laying the hang-kite down on the roof surface. I unslung the sniperscope battery pack and equipment, placing them on top of the hang-kite. The framework, the equipment and the Feinwerkbau pellet gun I wrapped in the nylon covering, stowing the. whole package away neatly beside one of the chimneys.

Cautiously I made my way across the roof to the edge. An eave was directly below me. I swung onto it. The window was no problem. Since it was on the third floor of the mansion, no one had bothered to lock it against intruders.

Then I was inside, treading carefully across the darkened room to the doorway. Easing open the door, I peered into the corridor. The hallway was empty. Walking softly, I made my way to the far end.

Sixty rooms, and where was Bradford?

The corridor ended at a railing. Above me was an enormous skylight. Three stories below, the main hall of the manor spread out, with the stairwell circling the sides all the way down. Corridors branched off the stairwell at each landing.

Somehow the layout seemed vaguely familiar. I knew damn well I hadn’t been there before, but I kept getting the feeling that I knew the place!

Then I remembered. The mansion had originally belonged to one of the earliest and richest of the families in the region. Over the years the family had made the estate into one of the great showplaces of New England. Its halls were hung with the finest collection of early American art in the world. Two original Stuart portraits of Washington were in the collection. Most people know the Stuart painting of George Washington that’s on dollar bills and postage stamps. There were others. Two of the best hung in this collection.

It was no coincidence that I remembered so much about the manor house. It had been the subject of a lengthy article, complete with color photographs and floor plan, in American Heritage magazine.

You wouldn’t know it to look at Hawk, who dresses in crumpled clothes and smokes cheap, foul-smelling cigars, but he’s one of the best-read men I’ve ever known. Just a few months ago, over a drink in his home, he had dragged out that particular issue of American Heritage and had made me read the article about “Pentwick Hall” — the name of the estate Alexander Bradford now owned. Hawk had wanted to show me photos of the collection of paintings.

What I remembered was the floor plan of the mansion. Now I knew exactly where to find Alexander Bradford! It took me a moment to sort through my memory and to orient myself. Then, as silently as I could, I stole down a flight of stairs to the second floor and took the corridor on the right to the master suite.

To my surprise, there was no one guarding the halls, but then, why should there be? With troopers on patrol, with a double electrified fence, with savage attack dogs and sensor beams, who’d think protection was necessary inside the house?

Bradford’s bedroom was actually a full suite with a huge salon opening onto the hallway and a large bedroom to the right of the salon.

Quietly I turned the door knob. I inched the door open, stepped inside and carefully shut it behind me. I was in a small foyer. I could see part of the room, lit comfortably by the warm glow of table lamps and wall sconces. The furniture was genuine Sheraton and Hepplewhite, the rich woods polished by age, wax and hand rubbing to a deep, glowing patina.

I moved into the salon — and stopped. Sitting in an armchair facing me was a distinguished-looking, lean-faced man with black hair streaked with gray. His eyes were deep-set and burned with an inner intensity. He was wearing a brocaded dressing gown. In his lap rested a large, very old, leather-covered book.

In his hand, pointing at me, was a large, very modern automatic pistol!

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said in a well-modulated voice. “You are Nick Carter?”

I nodded.

“I lost my bet,” he said with an almost whimsical smile. “I didn’t think you could do it.” His accent was pure Harvard-Boston. It sounded almost English. “I wagered that you’d not be able to get through the defenses I’d set up. I seem to have underestimated you.”

“Who’d you bet with?” I asked.

“With me.” Sabrina’s voice floated across the room to me. She was sitting in a corner in an armchair, a delicate crystal wine glass in her hand. “I knew that if anyone could do it, it would be you, Nick. Would you tell us how you managed it?”

Bradford murmured, “It really doesn’t matter, my dear. The point is, he’s here.” He eyed me appraisingly. “No weapons? I’m surprised.”

“He has a knife,” said Sabrina. “It’s strapped to his forearm.”

Bradford lifted an eyebrow. “Oh? How did you find that out, my dear?”

“I made love to him,” Sabrina answered.

Bradford lifted the gun. “Take it off,” he ordered. “And be sure to move slowly.”

I unstrapped Hugo and let the knife and its sheath fall to the floor.

“No other weapons?”

“Search me,” I said.

Bradford laughed. “Not a chance. Take off your shirt.”

I took off Raymond’s shirt. I stood there, nude from the waist up.

“My God,” said Bradford, fascinated, “the man’s covered with scars!” He continued his observation for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Carter, you intrigue me. I doubt if there’s another man alive who could have gotten to me at all — let alone in the short time you’ve taken to learn my identity and seek me out. Nor could anyone else have escaped my men as you’ve done. Several of them are among the best mercenary soldiers in the world.”

“How’d you know I was coming?” I asked.

Bradford’s saturnine face turned toward Sabrina. “She told me to expect you. She said you were good.” Sabrina crossed the room to sit on a hassock beside Bradford’s knee. She rested her cheek against it.

“Sabrina’s quite a useful person,” he said, putting his hand on her head, almost as if caressing a trained hunting leopard. “Did you know she killed your little friend?”

I managed to hide the quick flash of fury I felt. “Julie was your god-daughter,” I pointed out.

Bradford shrugged indifferently. “She was in the way,” he said. “She had to be disposed of.”

I didn’t want to think about Julie just then. I changed the subject. “The KGB will be proud of you,” I commented. “Do they give you a special medal?”

Bradford broke into a laugh. “The KGB? Good Lord, Carter, when the KGB find out what’s actually going to happen, they’ll start hunting for scapegoats! Heads will roll at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square!”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Would you let me in on the joke?”

Bradford smiled. “Why not? It’s much too good not to share. So far Sabrina’s the only one who knows the story. After you’re dead, it can never be told again. Sabrina, do get the man a glass of brandy!”

Sabrina rose lithely, crossing the room with her catlike tread to bring me a brandy snifter. Napoleon. Only the best for Bradford.

He indicated a chair some ten feet from him. “Sit down, Carter, but don’t try anything. I’m an excellent shot. The gun is a .357 magnum. At this distance I couldn’t possibly miss hitting you.”

Bradford eyed me carefully until I was seated. “How much of the story do you know, Carter?”

“I know what the Russian found out,” I said. “You’re a plant. You were switched with the real Alexander Bradford when he was in a Nazi military prison hospital that was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Since then you’ve lived here in New England, completely assuming his identity. You’re one of the power elite in Boston—”

“In the whole country,” Bradford interjected.

“—and I know that shortly you’ll try to trigger the economic collapse of the United States.”

Bradford nodded agreement to each of my statements.

“All for the sake of Mother Russia,” I added, a sour taste in my mouth.

Again Bradford broke into a laugh.

“That,” he said with great amusement, “is where you’re quite wrong! It’ll be for the sake of the United States of America!”

I stared at him in astonishment.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Bradford leaned back, still keeping the gun on me. “At first,” he said, “even though I acted the role of Alexander Bradford, I still felt like myself — Vasily Gregorovich Sudarov, born in Leningrad, educated at Moscow Technical Institute, and a member of the KGB. Then, as the years passed, something in me changed. I actually felt more like the real Alexander Bradford than he would have himself if we hadn’t killed him! I continued Bradford’s hobby of delving into every facet of the American Revolution of 1776, especially the ideals and goals of the original members of the Sons of Liberty.” A tone of fervor began creeping into his voice.

“As I began to get deeply into this hobby, I wondered what would have happened if this country had not gotten off the track its original founders had tried to set it on.”

His voice took on a hard, angry pitch. “The little people have taken over! The uneducated and the illiterate own this country! The vote of the dirtiest, scummiest drunk is just as valid and just as important as the vote of the most educated, most brilliant man! Does that make sense to you? No wonder this country’s in the trouble it’s in now!

“So I began to ponder about what would happen if one man took over. One man, completely indoctrinated in what the founding fathers really wanted! Did you know that some of them favored a king? An American king? Yes, Carter, they did! And George Washington came within a hairsbreadth of being the first American dictator!”

Bradford could no longer contain himself. Excitedly he got to his feet and began pacing the room.

“So I laid my plans. Bradford was rich. Bradford was well connected. I spent years in developing even more contacts among the most influential men in this country. Secretly I created an organization of men who believed as I do — the new Sons of Liberty! Their motto is—”

“Don’t Tread on Me!” I broke in. “And the emblem is the Snake Flag!”

Bradford stared coldly at me for a moment, then he let a superior, arrogant smile touch his lips. “Very good, Carter. You’re right. Now there are several thousand of us. When the time is right, we will arise in revolt and take over the country! We are the new American patriots — the true descendants of the American Revolution!”

“And you will be at their head?”

“Yes, I’ll be at their head,” Bradford acknowledged.

“Where do the Russians fit into this scheme?”

“They don’t,” said Bradford. “They showed me how to disrupt the economy of this country to a point where an armed revolt will succeed. The plan will be put into operation on Monday.”

I really wasn’t surprised that D-Day was so soon. “The day after tomorrow?”

“Yes. On Monday we issue the first sell orders. By the end of the week, there will be complete financial chaos throughout the country. Within a month the time will be ripe for the Sons of Liberty to take over the government in Washington. Almost exactly 200 years to the day this country was founded!”

“Who gives the word?” I asked.

“I do,” said Bradford. “No one else knows who the others are.”

“And if you’re not around to give the word?”

Bradford looked sharply at me, then chuckled. He shook his head. “Oh, no, Carter. Don’t even think you can do it! I assure you, I will be around on Monday to give the word. It’s a shame that you won’t be here for the occasion. Your public execution is set for tomorrow.”

“Public execution?”

“Tomorrow at high noon,” he stated, “you will be the first traitor to the new American Revolution to be executed! You’ll go down in history, Carter — the history books to come, that is!”

I had barely enough time to assimilate his wild remarks. Bradford reached for the bellcord and gave it a sharp tug. Almost immediately the door was flung open and half a dozen men marched in.

I swear to God, for a moment I thought I was hallucinating. Every man jack of them was dressed in colonial costume! They wore knee breeches, white stockings, black leather shoes with big square buckles and square toes, sleeveless leather jackets and white powdered wigs topped by tricorn hats! And every one of them carried a muzzle-loading flintlock rifle or pistol!

“Take him away,” said Bradford. “Lock him up!”

In seconds they had me in their midst, two of them at each arm. We were at the door when Bradford spoke up again.

“Carter, I haven’t told you the end of our plans.”

They let me turn around to face him.

“We realize that the only enemy this country has,” he said slowly, “the only thing that stands in the way of our dominating the Western world, is Russia. Once we have taken over, when we feel the time is ripe, when we have complete control of the government and of the armed forces—”

He paused dramatically to let the effect of his next phrase sink in.

“—we will then unleash a total atomic attack on Russia that will paralyze her for centuries to come! The United States and the Soviet Union cannot live together in the same world! I have been taught that since childhood!”

His words were still ringing in my ears as they took me down several flights of stairs and locked me into an old stone wine cellar.

Chapter Thirteen

Even though it was summertime, it was cold in that wine cellar. All I had on was a pair of slacks and boots. My only weapon was Pierre, still taped to my groin.

It was not only cold in the wine cellar, it was dark. The glow of the radiant dial and the hands of my watch told me what time it was: 2:30 in the morning. At twelve noon, according to Bradford, they were going to take me out and execute me.

The whole affair had become Bradford’s private lunacy. The Russians had unconsciously created a monster, a megalomaniac as vicious as Hitler or Stalin! Now he was turning on them. The horror of it was that he had a damned good chance of succeeding! I wondered what that Kremlin economist would say now if he knew how his brilliantly conceived scheme to destroy the U.S. economy had been transformed into the plan for an atomic holocaust that would wipe out Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Dniepepetrovsk, Minsk and all the rest of the USSR!

The irony of the situation struck me suddenly. With me rested not only the last hope for a stable U.S. economy... but the safety of the Soviet Union, too!

There was still a slim chance of stopping Bradford. Not much of a chance, but as long as I was alive, I had a reckoning coming up with Bradford.

I bided my time. Right after you’re captured, your jailers are most alert. Give them time to settle down. The best time to strike is shortly before dawn, when a man’s body mechanism is at its lowest ebb, when his reactions are slowest and his mind is least alert.

I sat back, trying to ignore the cold and trying to relax as best I could while I figured out exactly what I had to do next. The details of my escape were just the first part. Once I knew what I intended to do to get away, I had to plan what would come after that: killing Bradford. But how? Hawk’s words to me were still ringing clearly in my mind: It has to look like an accident!

The wine cellar hadn’t been used in years. They’d cleared out all the wooden racks. There wasn’t a thing in the place to use as a weapon or even to hide behind. I explored every inch by feel in the pitch dark. Pierre was my only chance. I had to think of a way to use him — and not kill myself in the process. That little gas bomb is absolutely deadly in confined quarters.

At 4:30 I began pounding on the door.

At 4:33 two guards in colonial costume opened the cellar door and pointed guns at me. Not muzzle loaders, but modern M-14 military carbines.

I held up my hands peaceably. “Hey, take it easy! All I want is some hot coffee. It’s cold in here.”

They looked at each other.

“Alright,” said one of them. “I guess it’s okay.”

They shut and bolted the door. They were taking no chances.

I fished out Pierre from his hiding place and held him concealed in my right hand.

At 4:42 they came back.

Before they opened the door, I heard one of them shout at me, “Get away from the door! All the way back to the end of the room!”

“I heard you,” I shouted back, but I moved against the wall beside the door. I heard the bolts being drawn back, then the door swung open, spilling a flood of light into the room.

They took a step inside and stopped.

Bradford should have used some of his world-famous mercenaries to guard me. These two were amateurs.

“Where the hell—” began one of them, looking around for me. That’s when I whipped my arm up, knocking the coffee pot into his face. The other tried to spin around to get at me. I slashed at him with the edge of my palm, sending him sprawling across the room. Almost in the same movement I flung Pierre against the far wall, its fumes beginning to pour out even while it was still in the air. Hastily I ducked out the door. I slammed it shut, throwing home the bolt.

There was a choked-off scream, a wild thrashing of bodies that gradually subsided and then silence. All in seconds. The fumes from that little bomb act almost instantaneously.

I peered down the corridor. It was empty. Apparently they’d thought that two guards at a time would be enough to watch over me, especially since I was being held in a stone cellar without a single chink in its thick walls. There was a small window set high in the wall across the corridor from the wine cellar door. I smashed out the glass. Then, holding my breath, I opened the door to the wine cellar to air it out. I turned and ran to the far end of the corridor, where I opened a second window, filling my lungs full of the clear, clean night air.

At 4:56 I went back to the wine cellar that had been a dungeon for me and was now a crypt for the two dead men.

At 5:10 I was fully dressed in a colonial costume I’d taken from one of the men. I felt like I was decked out for a masquerade ball, except I carried an M-14 U.S. Army rifle with a full clip, and I was prepared to use it if anyone got in my way!

No one did. Not a soul was in sight as I made my way to the ground floor. But at least twenty of them were standing in the main hall. I left the rifle tucked around the corner of the stairs. Right now camouflage was my best defense. I had to look like the others. And none of them were carrying M-14’s.

Bold as brass, I walked through the center hall to the stairway. No one paid any attention to me. I mounted the stairs, passing several low-ranking Sons of Liberty. All of them were in uniform, and all wore sleepy, glazed expressions as if they’d been awake most of the night. At the third floor I turned down the same corridor I’d come down earlier that night trying to find Bradford. I found the darkened bedroom and went out the window I’d crawled through several hours before.

It was a scramble getting from the window ledge to the eave roof, but once I’d made that, I had little trouble in getting onto the roof itself.

Crouched down against the base of the chimney beside which I’d tucked my hang kite and the rest of the equipment, I watched the dawn come up down the far end of the valley.

At 8:30 the sharp, brassy notes of a bugle filled the air and men began pouring out of the mansion and its wings onto the wide expanse of clipped lawn. There must have been a hundred of them — all dressed in colonial costume, all carrying flintlock rifles. They fell into formation.

And then, at 8:45, I witnessed the damnedest sight you ever saw. Around the corner of the far wing, mounted on a prancing white stallion some sixteen and a half hands high, dressed in the full rig of a Revolutionary War general, came Alexander Bradford! Sword in his right hand, reins in his left, he advanced at a walk, jouncing uneasily in the saddle.

I moved to the edge of the roof parapet. From my vantage point I watched the scene below. The officers shouted orders, the men drew up their ranks, and Bradford tried to control the stallion to walk him past the troops in review.

Bradford wasn’t that good a horseman. To make it worse, while the stallion was impressive to look at, he hadn’t been fully broken in. And the flashing steel of the sword that Bradford was brandishing was distracting the animal, making him even more skittish. The long military spurs on Bradford’s high knee boots didn’t help any. The “general” didn’t have a firm seat, and his spurs would punch into the stallion’s flanks so that he reared and tossed his head in fright. Bradford was getting angry.

And that’s when I knew I had him.

I took out the Feinwerkbau 300 match rifle, loaded a tiny .177 calibre pellet into it, cocked the mechanism and took aim. I lined up the globe front sight with the micro rear peep sight. My target was the stallion’s left hindquarter. Allowing for the high angle, I pulled the trigger.

I knew there must have been only the faintest of popping sounds. No one more than ten feet away could have heard it.

But that pellet stung the tough hide of that stallion like a giant bee sting. The horse screamed and reared up, almost throwing Bradford off his back. Bradford dropped both reins and saber and clutched frantically at the stallion’s neck, hanging on to him as tightly as he could. Even three stories up I could hear him cursing loudly at the horse.

I reloaded and fired again.

The stallion bolted.

There wasn’t a damned thing Bradford could do except to hang on.

Again and again I reloaded that pellet rifle and fired, each shot becoming progressively more difficult. But I hit the stallion often enough to drive him in the direction I wanted him to go.

My last shot was at an incredibly far distance for an air gun, but it was all I needed. The stallion was now racing at a full, wild, panic-stricken gallop across the turf in an effort to escape the stinging pains in his haunches.

When a horse like that bolts, he literally goes crazy. He’ll run off a cliff; he’ll run full tilt into the heaviest brush. This one associated the rider on his back with the pain in his hindquarters.

Full out, his mane and tail flying wildly, the big stallion galloped madly toward the inner wire mesh fence. Bradford saw what was coming and began to curse. But he was helpless, unable to control the animal in any way at all.

And then there was the moment of impact when some 1800 pounds of horseflesh slammed into the electrified wire fence! The horrible, high-pitched scream from the big animal was cut off sharply. There was a blinding flash, almost as if lightning had struck them both. They went down together, Bradford and the stallion, sparks flying all around them, burning up horse and rider and even the steel of the mesh fence.

The men broke ranks, running helter-skelter around the grounds, none of them daring to come close to Bradford’s scorched body, which still leaped and twitched from the high voltage pouring through it.

At 8:55 someone had sense enough to throw the master switch, turning off the electricity. Bradford’s corpse lay still. The huge stallion partially covered his body.

Even at my distance — almost 200 yards away and three stories high — I could smell the stench of scorched horseflesh and man flesh drifting up on the soft morning mountain air.

I put down the pellet rifle and moved away from the edge of the roof.

My job was done.

Chapter Fourteen

“And how did you get away?” Hawk asked me, peering through the foul smoke of his cheap cigar.

“I was still dressed in colonial costume,” I answered. “So were more than a hundred other men. And everyone of them had the same idea. To get the hell away from that place before they had to explain what was going on to the police. It was just one mad exodus!” I smiled at the recollection. “I stopped long enough in Bradford’s suite to pick up Hugo. I’d hate to lose him. Then I went down and joined the throng.”

“It was that easy?”

“Would you believe,” I asked, “that I actually was given a ride all the way back to Boston by three of them? And in a Cadillac El Dorado at that!”

Hawk made a harrumphing sound. It was about as close to a laugh as he ever came.

“By the way, sir,” I said. “I still have eleven days coming to me from my last vacation. Now that I’ve finished this assignment, am I entitled to another couple of weeks?”

Hawk looked at me from under his shaggy eyebrows.

“You’ll find your French girlfriend waiting for you in Aix-en-Provence,” he said before turning away. “Take the extra two weeks. You deserve it.”

I made my travel arrangements with Air France, but I made one stop in Boston first. There was a loose end to tie up.

The house at 21½ Louisburg Square seemed peaceful and serene in the morning sunlight.

Sabrina answered my ring. She looked at me silently and held the door open so I could enter.

I shook my head. “It’s not necessary,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you in person.”

“I can explain, Nick,” she said pleadingly, and then as my words sunk in, she asked, “What do you have to tell me?”

“You killed Julie,” I said. “That’s why I made the telephone call.”

“What call? What are you talking about?”

“To a friend in Marseilles,” I said coldly. “He’ll pass the word on to a double agent. We use him when we have to communicate with the KGB.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sabrina. The sunlight struck her hair and her face, and she truly looked like an elegant woman at that moment, a woman whose greatest concern would be her shopping trip to Shreve, Crump and Low, or to Bonwit Teller or Lord & Taylor.

“I passed on the word about Alexander Bradford’s ultimate plan to the Russians,” I told her in a conversational tone. “And I also emphasized that it was you who subverted him from his mission as a KGB officer.”

Sabrina’s face went pale.

“It isn’t true!” she gasped.

“I know that,” I said evenly, no emotion in my voice.

“They’ll kill me!”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they will.”

With that I turned and walked away from the house on Louisburg Square and from Sabrina. I took a cab to Logan Airport and Air France Flight 453 for the first stage of my journey to Aix-en-Provence and the waiting arms of Clarisse.

Content

Nick Carter
The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen