Operation Damocles (22 page)

Fred smiled sickly, his eyes meeting Townsend’s briefly, then sliding away. “Sure, of course, Jimmy,” he said.

“Well, let’s get out of here, then. C’mon, I’ll spring for dinner somewhere.”

“Okay, Jimmy, just let me hit the head before we go, my teeth are floating.”

Ten minutes later, Fred returned. He wouldn’t meet Townsend’s eyes, and Townsend knew that he had lost the battle. He felt sick inside for the loss of a friend, and for what he must do. He didn’t have that many friends, and he held dear those that he did have. His heart was bitter with the irony of his position. Fred was loyal to the government of his country. Only a few months before, Townsend would have felt this same sickening loss, but he would have killed Fred if he had found out that he was a traitor to that government. Now, it was reversed. Townsend was the traitor in Fred’s eyes.

He followed Fred out of the building. They had come in Fred’s car, a blue Nissan sedan, and except for a half-dozen parked cars, the darkened parking lot was deserted.

As they approached the passenger side of the car, Townsend put his hand on Fred’s shoulder, and Fred turned to face him. Townsend put both hands on Fred’s shoulders, and looked at him sadly. “I am truly sorry I involved you, Fred. I would give anything if I could go back and undo it. Please God, forgive me.” With a sudden move, he snapped Fred’s neck. Fred’s lolling face looked momentarily surprised, then his eyes clouded over as he fell dead in Townsend’s arms.

Townsend dug the keys out of Fred’s pocket, put his body in the front seat of the car, then went around to the driver’s side and got in. His eyes were moist as he pulled out of the deserted parking lot and drove away. “I’ve been trying for the last fifteen minutes to think of some way to keep you from compromising me without killing you, boy. I just couldn’t come up with anything. If you had told your section chief, he would have warned Broderick, and millions would have died. God help me, I couldn’t do anything else.”

He drove out of the city, passing through darkened, thinning suburbs until he found a long, sloping stretch of road bordered by pine forest. He slowed just at the crest of the hill and made a U-turn, stopping beside the road, just off the pavement. He waited for a couple of solitary cars to pass by, thankful that there wasn’t much traffic this time of night.

He put Fred’s body behind the steering wheel, and sat beside him on the passenger side. He lined up the wheel and put Fred’s body against it to hold it. He waited till another car passed and was out of sight, then he put the car in drive, released the emergency brake and slid out the passenger door.

The car began to roll slowly at first, down the gentle incline, picking up speed gradually. It was only doing twenty-five or thirty miles an hour when it went off the road into the trees. Townsend heard a thud, a crunching jangle of sheet metal and glass, then silence. The police might puzzle at how such a minor crash could break a man’s neck, but stranger things had happened.

Townsend began walking back toward town through the darkness of the cold Georgia night, ducking into the trees to avoid passing traffic when he could, and was back into the sparsely settled outskirts within half an hour. After that, he no longer tried to hide, since there was no cover anyway, and he was far enough removed from the scene that he was unlikely to evoke any connection in peoples’ minds when the body was discovered in a day or two. To any passing motorist, he could have come from any of the nearby houses.

As he walked, he couldn’t help but go over the evening’s events—his conversation with Fred. Over and over again, he chastised himself for suddenly dumping his own, newly acquired bias on the boy and expecting him to swallow it all in one sitting. He wouldn’t have, in Fred’s place.

It suddenly occurred to him—what if Fred had managed to contact someone, or leave a message for someone? He was gone to the bathroom a long time. He had trusted Fred out of habit, even when he knew the boy doubted him, and it hadn’t occurred to him that Fred might give him up right away. God, Townsend thought, when am I going to wake up and realize what I’m doing?

He knew he had to get to Broderick soon, tomorrow if possible. He had entertained half-formed ideas of torturing information out of Broderick—information that would lead him to bigger fish. Now, that was unimportant. If Broderick learned of Townsend’s efforts to find him, he would bring all the government’s law enforcement resources to bear on finding Reed, and all those who had helped him or been in any way connected to him. Eve, Eddie, Hector—maybe dozens of their innocent friends and acquaintances. It might already be too late.

The highway he was on became a main thoroughfare as it entered the city, with side streets branching away into affluent-looking neighborhoods of single-family homes. Eventually, he came to a corner convenience store, and called a cab.

XXX

Once back in his hotel, Townsend called the airport and the bus station. Greyhound had a bus going to Charleston, South Carolina, within the hour. He packed a single duffel bag with a change of underwear and some extra clothing, left the rest of his things in the room and took another cab to the bus station. He got a sandwich and coffee in the terminal restaurant, bought a Charleston paper and perused the classified ads as he ate, looking for a cheap used car for sale by an individual. He circled a few.

Later that night, he got off the bus in downtown Charleston, and walked a few blocks to a brick-front motel. He rang the night bell, and stood listening to the hissing neon sign, with its darkened no and lighted vacancy and its blinking arrow pointing toward the office where he stood.

After a few seconds, a porch light came on and an old man opened a screeching, screened door. Townsend registered under the name of Robert Hill and paid cash, explaining when asked that he lived in New York City and didn’t own a car, and had taken the bus down for a visit, but didn’t want to wake his relatives in the middle of the night.

The next day, he paid a young black man $500 for an old Volkswagen Beetle with a rusted-out floorboard. A loose piece of gray-painted plywood barely covered the hole in the floor, and Townsend could see the passing road surface sliding by through the peripheral openings.

He took the car to a gas station and had one new tire put on, and the engine and transmission serviced. Then he drove to another private address that he had found in the classified ads, and bought a pump-action .22-caliber rifle from an older man who had several guns for sale. On his way south out of town, he stopped at a hardware store and bought a pair of binoculars and a hundred rounds of ammunition.

A few miles south of Charleston, he saw a narrow stretch of paved road cutting off into the trees. He took it, and was soon on a two-lane dirt road that wound through high marsh grass and swampy pools of water. About a quarter-mile from the turnoff, he stopped and got out of the car. He leaned against the car and listened awhile.

Crickets and cicadas sawed away, sometimes loudly, and above their sounds and that of the saw grass rustling in the lightly moving air, he could barely hear the distant sounds of cars on the highway.

He extracted the rifle from the rear floorboard of the Volkswagen and loaded seventeen cartridges into its tubular magazine. He had carefully inspected the little rifle when he bought it. He was sure that the action was tight and worked smoothly, that the barrel was straight and the bore in good condition. He knew it would shoot well, but he wanted to test-fire it and adjust the sights.

He picked out the limb of a fallen, waterlogged tree sticking up out of the water about fifty feet away. He doubted that the sharp crack of the little gun could be heard at the highway. After four rounds he had the rear sight elevated to the point that the bullets were hitting at the right elevation, but about three inches to the left.

He cursed himself for not buying a screwdriver and hammer at the hardware store he had stopped at earlier. He looked around and found a smooth rock a bit larger than a golf ball. He rested the end of the gun barrel across the top edge of the Volkswagen’s bumper and used the rock to hammer the front sight a minute amount to the left in its dove-tailed slot. He tried the rifle again.

After two more adjustments, he was hitting the limb dead-on and holding a shot group that could be covered with his thumb.

Satisfied, he reloaded the rifle, put it back in the rear floorboard and returned to the highway. He headed south to find Broderick.

###

Broderick was in a rented beachfront house on Edisto Island, a charming mixture of modern beach resorts and old-world, antebellum culture that typified the southern cotton-plantation era.

Broderick liked remote places with lots of tourist attractions. They provided perfect cover. Strangers came and went continuously without provoking anyone’s interest, and Broderick could hold meetings with any of his nefarious friends and contacts without fear of the neighbors noticing.

Since beginning his career with the government, Broderick was, in simple terms, a logistics man. He arranged for people and supplies to be in certain places at certain times. He choreographed a simple show here and there, from behind the curtains, then he was on to other things. Few people even knew of his existence, much less any connection between him and events that took place clear across the country. He pulled strings at a safe distance, and when satisfied with the misery that resulted, he moved on to the next event.

Townsend found the address, a typical two-story, beachfront house with first-floor garage, and stairs leading up to a wide, covered porch that wrapped around the house on the three sides overlooking the shore. The next nearest house was a half-mile north along the beach. For almost a mile to the south it was open, public beach, deserted at this time of day in February.

A boardwalk with handrails led across the dunes to the beach a hundred yards away. The coastal road passed within fifty yards of the house. A driveway cut through the low, wide dune that paralleled the main road, and circled around to the side of the house. The dune obscured the lower part of the house from the road, otherwise the house had a clear field of view in all directions.

Townsend could see two eight-passenger vans parked near the corner of the house as he drove by the driveway entrance, and off to one side, a pair of satellite dishes were set up on a flat-bed trailer.

Sand roads tend to form ripples over a period of time that depend on the amount of traffic and, if not graded often, they become so rough that speed is reduced to a crawl in order to maintain control of the vehicle. From the way the little car’s shocks were machine gunning at twenty-five miles per hour, Townsend figured that the road grader was due again soon. He hoped he wouldn’t need to make a fast getaway.

###

It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Townsend drove on past the house for another half-mile, then turned around and went back toward town. He found a small restaurant, ate and gassed up the car. Afterward, he wandered around on foot, looking at streets and shops, noting the casual foot traffic. He changed clothes in a service-station restroom, from slacks and shirt to jeans and a dark blue jersey, and replaced his dress shoes with a pair of blue canvas athletic shoes. He put on two undershirts beneath the jersey. The February temperature had gotten to almost sixty degrees during the day, and it had been fairly comfortable inside the car with the sun heating up the interior. Now, the thermometer was falling rapidly as the sun went down.

By six-thirty, it was twilight and getting dark rapidly. Townsend drove back out the beachfront road, going on past Broderick’s house for at least a mile without slowing. He encountered no traffic.

He returned to a roadside pullout where he had turned around earlier that afternoon, about a half-mile south of the house, and parked the car. He didn’t know if there was a regular beach patrol along this road, or even if Broderick had his people run an occasional check, but he had no choice but to risk discovery of the little car. If someone happened by, he reasoned, they might think it was just someone taking a walk along the beach, and not bother to investigate.

Unless Fred had gotten a message out, Townsend doubted that Broderick would feel the need for strict security. His work seldom required direct contact with anyone, and he had no reason to think that anyone outside his superiors knew where he was.

He didn’t believe that Broderick had anticipated any retaliation from James Reed either over the past months. He thought it likely that Broderick assumed that he and Beverly Watkins had left the country for parts unknown, or were too busy hiding to retaliate. He was a vindictive sort though, and he wanted Reed and Watkins dead just on general principles. Watkins because he had ordered it done and wanted his sentence carried out. Reed, because he feared and hated him.

Townsend didn’t think that Broderick had put much effort into finding them. He had more immediate things to worry about, and it probably gave him pleasure to think that he had destroyed their lives and sent them into hiding. He had cut Reed off from agency resources, made him a fugitive, and if Reed showed his face or tried to come in, Reed would end up in a cell. He wouldn’t consider Reed much of an immediate threat, if any at all. Of course, if he learned that Reed was hunting him, that attitude would change.

Townsend pulled on a pair of thin, latex-rubber gloves, the kind surgeons wore, and used his handkerchief to wipe the rifle clean of prints. He didn’t intend to leave it behind, but he prepared for eventualities. He never left fingerprints at the scene. It was part of training and lifelong habit. He had handled the small .22 cartridges when he loaded the gun, but he had held each one by the lead tip of the bullet. The surface area was too small and irregular to retain a fingerprint, and as for those that were left at the scene—after they had passed through the gun barrel and impacted anything at a thousand feet per second—no fingerprint lab in the world could lift a print from them.

Pocketing the loose cartridges, he crossed over the dune to the beach, and keeping low and as close as possible to the irregular contour of the dune, he made his way toward the house.

An icy breeze was blowing in from the sea, and the rushing gurgle of the constantly ebbing and flowing surf muffled the sound of his progress as he trudged through the soft, sinking sand. The smells and sounds reminded him of the flight along the Florida coast to Miami. It seemed a thousand years ago.

It would have been easier walking out on the wet, packed surface of the beach, but the risk of being seen was too great to chance it. He slowed as he approached the house, gingerly creeping closer, staying in the darker shadow of the dune.

He was almost winded by the time he reached the house from walking in the uneven, foot-dragging sand at the toe of the dune. He stopped within fifty feet of the house and stayed there, silent and motionless for a while, watching, listening, regaining his breath. The second-floor windows were lit, and an occasional, indistinct shadow would cross one or the other.

Once, someone came out a screened door onto the porch, lit a cigarette and paused for a few minutes in the shadows, smoking and looking out to sea. After a bit, the individual went back inside, the screen door slapping noisily behind him.

Townsend couldn’t hear anything intelligible from inside, and had no idea how many were present. He eased up to the side of the house. The garage walls were of heavy, wooden piles covered with plywood and tar paper, and an outer layer of tongue-and-groove lumber painted white. He climbed the slope of the dune where it met the garage wall, easing up until he could see above the floor of the banistered porch. He hoped that the glossy, gray-painted, wooden flooring of the porch wasn’t creaky.

He swung the arm that held the rifle and one leg up onto the porch, then rolled in under the banister, and kept rolling until he was up against the wall beneath the window. Again, he lay silent for a time, listening. The noises were indistinct. Easing up on his knees, he peered over the sill of the open window, through the screen and the edge of a gauzy curtain into a spacious living room, warmly lit by several incandescent table lamps.

He saw the partially bald top of one man’s head over the back of a sofa that faced the front door. He was reading a paper and smoking. Broderick sat at a table across the room, working on something that Townsend couldn’t see from his low angle. He sat almost facing the window where Townsend kneeled. An arm came up in front of Townsend so suddenly that he flinched backward and almost fell. A third man was lying down on a sofa or window seat just under the window. His arm had come up when he changed position. When Townsend realized it, the relief made him want to curse. He hunkered there, not moving, until his pounding heart subsided. No one else had moved.

He backed away from the window and got down on one knee, slightly behind the side curtain, the gun to his shoulder. He took a breath and relaxed, got the sights up and level, then shifted his weight to the right as he straightened his knee beneath him, and into the center of the window.

He fired three shots into Broderick’s head and face, as fast as he could work the pump. The man on the far sofa was trying to get up. Townsend shifted and shot him in the head. He crumpled to the floor like a loosely filled sack.

The third man screamed, diving through Townsend’s field of vision and momentarily obstructing his view of the room, then he was through the screen door, leaving it banging against the doorframe, and Townsend heard his feet on the steps of the stairs leading down from the porch. He didn’t attempt to pursue. In a moment, he heard the engine of one of the vans roar to life, and the ping and rattle of sand and gravel hitting the house as the spinning tires threw it out. He heard the tires squeal as they hit the harder surface of the main road, and the sound of the vehicle faded into the night.

###

Townsend rose and looked in the window. He could see Broderick’s face and upper torso, lying on the floor by the table legs. The other man was heavy, and lay where he had fallen, an oblong lump on the dirty floor.

Townsend walked around the corner of the porch and through the screened door. He looked at the wound in the fat man’s head, and didn’t touch him, passing on around the sofa to where Broderick lay beside the table. He was still, one eye gone, the other staring vacantly into eternity. Townsend put the gun barrel in Broderick’s ear and shot him again.

He looked at the material on the table that Broderick had been working on. There was a soft briefcase and some papers. The mechanical pencil Broderick had been using lay on the linoleum floor near the wall. Townsend put the papers into the open briefcase, zipped it up and hurried down the front steps.

He stayed out on the harder wet beach this time, and ran the half-mile to the car at a brisk jog, the briefcase in one hand, the gun in the other. He crossed the dune, and slowing, crept over the edge until he could see the car. It was as he had left it, with no one in sight.