Reckoning (4 page)

“Plastic and micro circuitry would have been consumed in the blast,” Malleson said. “Must have been powerful stuff for a cassette-size
charge to do that much damage. Doesn’t sound to me like a bunch of Iranian or Arab terrorists were running loose on Cape Cod.
Doesn’t make sense. Like you say, Dartley, why jump back and forth between the Middle East and Texas to kill people? Iranians
or Arabs would be conspicuous. They would try to cut their travel to a minimum. One thing I don’t understand—have you taken
this job or not? Am I looking deep or just dabbling?”

“You’re looking deep, Herbert,” Dartley said. “Our investigative expenses are covered, even if I decide to turn down the job.
So charge them for everything you can get. All they care about are results. I can’t take the job on unless you can tell me
who gets hit next.”

Malleson sniffed and picked up the list of names.

John Arnold (dead, Kuwait)

Nicholas Avedesian (Shell, North Sea)

Joseph Donovan (dead, Saudi Arabia)

Paul Egan (Global, Zaire)

Roger Elliott (dead, Indonesia)

Leonard Hill (dead, Cape Cod)

Peter Ligeti (unemployed, whereabouts unknown)

Harrison Murdoch (National Science Foundation,
Antarctica)

Bernard Phillips (dead, Texas)

Gary Sonderberg (Global, California)

I can’t say this means much to me,” Malleson confessed. “A rational explanation, which I suppose has occurred to you, is that
several teams are operating and hitting as opportunity presents.”

“You had difficulty buying an Arab or Iranian hit team,” Charley pointed out. “Now you’re suggesting a whole league of them.”

“I think this is the work of one man,” Malleson said. “Just a personal opinion, of course. And not anyone recognizably Middle
Eastern. They can afford to hire anyone they please to do the work for them.”

“World American and Global reached the same conclusions,” Charley said, “which is why they came to me. CIA, FBI, Interpol,
nobody has anything on a gang of Iranians or Arabs zipping around where the action has been. They’d sure as hell have been
noticed down in Texas or up in Cape Cod. Let’s face it, these oil companies can handle their own shit. They can handle some
cowboys with Kalashnikovs. When they have to come to us, they know they are dealing with something other than slogan-chanting
self-destruct maniacs. A game is being played against them. They want us to play their hand and take our turn at deal.”

Dartley yawned. He said to Malleson, “Five down and five to go. You tell me who’s next.”

* * *

Richard John Woodgate, son of Richard Woodgate and Martha Dartley Woodgate, found out at the age of twelve that he had been
adopted. Like many another adopted child in a similar situation, he wished he had either been told earlier or not at all.
As it was, he felt he had been suddenly cast adrift, that he no longer was Richard John Woodgate but some mysterious other
person with a last name he didn’t know. His adoptive parents didn’t know either—the court records were sealed. It was not
until ten years later, at the age of twenty-two, that he gained illegal access to these court records. He discovered that
his original name had been Paul Savage and that his natural parents had been teenagers, members of two prominent Washington,
D.C., law families. These days he sometimes used the name Savage. Mostly he went by his adoptive mother’s maiden name, Dartley.

Added to the growing boy’s vagueness about his identity was his uncertainty about what his adoptive father did for a living.
Other boys’ fathers, in their well-to-do Maryland suburb of Chevy Chase, were doctors or lawyers or senior civil servants.
His so-called father was “with the State Department,” although he never seemed to have an office or even a phone number there.
In all their years together, his father never once admitted that he was in the CIA.

In the mid-1970s, when morale was at an all-time low in the nation’s intelligence services, some ex-CIA agents defied the
government and published tell-all accounts of their activities. They named names, regardless
of the consequences for men who had trusted them as fellow agents and colleagues. Hours after one such list of American intelligence
operatives was published, on September 11, 1976, Richard Woodgate was shot to death on a street in the Argentine capital of
Buenos Aires. He had been named on the list. He was coming out of the American Embassy and walking to his car when he was
hit in the forehead by a single bullet from a rifle later identified as a Soviet AK-47. His wife had thought he was in Florida.

The Russians were not suspected of direct involvement in the assassination, since Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles were readily
available anywhere in the world to anyone with hard cash to pay for them, regardless of their political persuasion. Leftists
could hope for a small discount on the price, but not much, because the Russians proved themselves to be hard-nosed businessmen
when it came to cash deals. A lot of groups had scores to settle with the CIA. Killing one of their high-level agents was
sweet revenge.

The
New York Times
obituary referred to Richard Woodgate as “an American security advisor,” and at his funeral the Vice President of the United
States called him “a courageous warrior.” His family received no further official enlightenment about his activities.

By this time, Dartley himself was no stranger to violence. After a couple of years of getting low grades and getting high
at college, he went to Vietnam. There he messed up his mind. He wanted a straightforward soldiers’ war; instead, he found
that his adversaries
were as often women, children or old people as they were enemy soldiers. When he came back, he tried to put the whole thing
out of his mind, pretend that it had never existed or that he had never been there. Booze and pot helped for a while, then
became problems themselves. Changing women and changing jobs distracted him for a while, until he found it hard to kid himself
any longer.

All that changed after his father’s death, for Dartley had always thought of him as his real father, in spite of everything.
Overnight he cut out alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. He found himself a one-room apartment over a store on K Street in Georgetown,
lived on a spartan diet, worked out, ran every day beside the C&O Canal. His father’s brother, Charley Woodgate, impressed
at how his nephew had straightened himself out, tried to get him a job as a Treasury agent with the CIA. Both these agencies
wanted young college grads with spotless records, not a thirty-year-old with Vietnam and a lot of ups and down behind him.

Dartley did not become a professional assassin right away. He did not even begin to use the name Dartley right away. He had
been doing a lot of target shooting out at his uncle’s farm. To earn some cash, he often helped Charley out with his gunsmithing
business—mostly in firing the hundreds of rounds it took to break in a new weapon. He used the range out at the farm and gradually
took to staying in a “studio” he cleaned out for himself over a barn.

He also often delivered the weapons that his uncle
prepared. These might be standard factory pieces with special adjustments and fine tuning, or they could be custom-made pieces
designed for certain requirements. A gunsmith charging very high prices for very special work has to be careful about his
clients. Charley was very careful. But occasionally he made a mistake. Dartley delivered a weapon to one of these “mistakes,”
who hoped to avoid payment and cover his tracks by eliminating his supplier. Thinking that Dartley was his uncle, the client
tried to murder him with the newly delivered weapon. Dartley was more familiar with the gun than its new owner was and used
it on him.

A few more incidents forced Charley to decide that his nephew should disappear and be reborn as Richard Dartley, gun for hire.
From the start, the two men agreed that Charley would front for him and accept only assignments in which the target did not
deserve to go on living. If there was any doubt, the target got the benefit of it. Times were lean for the next year. No one
wants to hire a newcomer, especially not if there are plenty of skilled men available with successful track records.

For six years Dartley worked abroad, turning down nothing that fitted his requirements. He always went after the bad guys,
never once accepting a job to hit anyone who wasn’t an out-and-out bastard. Fortunately there was no shortage of these.

He always nailed his man. He never got caught. He never talked. He never failed. Some people were willing to pay big money
for that kind of performance.
These days they were the only people Dartley accepted assignments from.

Sylvia Marton was an odd name for a Yugoslav, but from early on she knew she would go nowhere as an actress in European and
American movies with a six-syllable name non-Slavs found hard to pronounce. In Dubrovnik, Sylvia Marton had sounded like dynamite.
And Sylvia had done all right. Even if she had never become another Loren or Deneuve, she had appeared in French, Italian
and Hollywood films as the exotically beautiful, usually sinister lady who brought misfortune to the men who loved her. Such
a role couldn’t have been further from her real-life personality.

Her film career having made her a reasonably wealthy woman, she enjoyed being sociable and fashionable, meeting people, going
to the latest resorts and restaurants. About the only thing any way sinister in her life was a man named Richard Dartley.

A lot of her friends had heard stories about him. The one most of them had heard was about the independent producer who had
jeered at Dartley as powerless to do anything about the contract problems he was inflicting on Sylvia. Next morning when the
producer left his home, high in the Hollywood hills, he found himself in a typical situation from one of his own movies—going
downhill out of control in a car with tampered brakes. The producer survived, but Sylvia had no more contract problems.

Dartley had phoned her after Malleson left the farm. “I thought we might get together,” he said.

“I’m booked on a flight to Rome.”

“Work?”

“Not really,” she said. “I suppose it could wait if you’re going to be around for a while. One of us always seems to be coming
or going.”

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be here,” he said. Malleson had given him no time schedule. “I have something in the works. But
if that falls through, maybe I could go to Rome with you.”

“I doubt if the count would be pleased to see you. I gave him the impression I was coming alone.”

Dartley laughed. He and Sylvia were not possessive of each other. They rather enjoyed their catch-as-catch-can relationship,
and both secretly suspected that a fond weakness developed by either side would finish them quick.

They went for dinner to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House on Lafayette Square.

“See anyone you want to shoot, Richard?” she asked conversationally.

“I never do it for fun, only for money.”

She knew more about him than he would have wished, although he trusted her totally. She had even helped him on a few occasions,
just for the excitement of it. She was always pleased by what she knew was a sincere compliment from him: he didn’t know a
better wheelman anywhere than her.

“Where are you headed this time if things work out?” she probed.

“I honestly don’t know.”

She smiled, clearly disbelieving him. He knew there would be trick questions later, suddenly sprung on him to see if she could
find out. He was tempted to let slip that he too was headed for Rome. He wondered if he could get her to believe him. Probably
not.

After dinner, they returned to her apartment. It had been a few weeks since they had been together and they were hungry for
each other’s bodies. They wasted no time on preliminaries, hurriedly peeling their clothes off and throwing themselves together
on the bed.

Gary Sonderberg came in from the marine survey and drove south out of Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Oilmen were not too popular
in Santa Barbara since the offshore rigs had gone up and there had been some spills onshore. He was tired and in a bad mood.
The smog was thick over Los Angeles and he just didn’t feel like going to his sister’s place and putting up with bad air and
her bratty kids. On an impulse, he took the San Diego Freeway and exited for LAX. There he caught a plane for Las Vegas, hired
a car and took a room at the Tropicana, out on the Strip.

He played craps in the casino and lost maybe a hundred over two hours. A wave of weariness hit him and he felt he could no
longer concentrate on the fast-moving dice. He switched to a blackjack game dealt from a shoe by a pretty girl and won back
what he had lost in fifteen minutes. He felt tired again, tipped
her heavily and wandered around for a while before going to the elevators.

Sonderberg was a big man who rarely bothered to be watchful. He had been working twelve hours a day for three straight weeks,
living at close quarters with other members of the survey team, and he needed to let loose some of the tension he had built
up inside him. He thought of finding himself a woman, but he was too tired for that. He’d just catch himself some sleep. But
he was too restless to go to his room. He wandered around the big casino which covered the ground floor of the highrise hotel.
Beneath the ceiling of lighted colored glass the size of a football stadium, the slot machines rattled in long rows as hardworking
earnest people played them, often two machines at a time. Sonderberg played a few times himself and won once, but shoveled
the coins into his pocket uncounted. He was more interested in watching the people, with plastic pails half filled with coins,
move from machine to machine in patterns known only to themselves, like bees moving from flower to flower. He was so busy
watching them that he never noticed he was being watched himself.