Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online
Authors: John R. Maxim
“Paul?” she asked quietly. “You're Mama's Boy, aren't you.”
He said nothing. There was no need.
She shook her head ruefully. Poor Harold. Stuffed into that trunk downstairs. She'd tried to tell him they were getting too old for this.
“Paul?” She made a face, “is there a way in the world to convince you that me and Harold never knew who you were until we saw Carla and Billy here?”
“Would it have made a difference?” he asked coldly.
“Sure as heck would.” She raised her eyebrows. “For one thing, we would never have let you see us. For another, even if we took this job, which I'm not real sure we would have, we never would have fooled with drugs. Harold and me don't like 'em anyhow.”
“Who hired you?”
”I truly want to answer that, Paul. Like Harold said, we got an awful careless briefin' and I'm not feeling real loyal to the son of a bitch who left out all those details. I got a suggestion.”
Paul waited.
“Let me go and I'll let his air out myself. My word on it.”
“Carla?” Paul asked.
“She'd keep her word, but no.”
“Billy?”
“That's games,” he shook his head. “Don't play games.”
Bannerman nodded agreement. Saying nothing, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the plastic glove containing the suppository. He held it up for Lurene to see, then placed it on the counter next to Carla.
Lurene understood. She'd just been given a choice. Hard or easy.
Ah, me,
she thought,
there were sure worse ways to
die.
She'd take easy. Still, it was going to be damnably unhygienic, considering where that thing had been.
“The man I'd have got for you,” she said, “is Oscar Or-tirez. He's a general down in La Paz. I swear those people got more generals than bathtubs.”
Bannerman frowned. The name meant nothing to him. “How is Palmer Reid involved?”
Her eyebrows went up again. “If he is, Paul, we don't know it. Me and Harold got our standards.”
“What's the connection between this Ortirez and Susan?”
“My guess?” she shrugged. “None at all except Lesko. And Lesko's friend, Elena. She used to work with
Ortirez.
Maybe Lesko did too.”
“Then why?” he asked. “Why do this to Susan?”
She shrugged. “These people have done whole families. They do them first. It's for the hurt of it.”
“To punish Lesko.” Bannerman closed his eyes. Deep within himself, he felt a stirring of something akin to relief. He wanted to believe it. That Lesko was the reason. That he himself was not. But when he looked again at Lurene
“He was next, all right,” she said. “Then Elena Brugg. Thing is, no one said we had to give either one time to stew.”
Bannerman's jaw tightened. “You think it's me.” She smiled. “Not till today, I didn't. But seein' who you are, Paul, it just don't seem too likely that you're an innocent bystander.”
He had to accept, however grudgingly, that Lurene Carmody's intuition was correct. He was not an innocent bystander. Someone, perhaps Reid, perhaps not, was trying to punish him, more likely to manipulate him. But into doing what? Starting a war against some obscure Bolivian? Against the drug traffickers? Against Reid himself? He had no idea.
But if someone was indeed trying to use him, he would soon know it. All he had to do was the unexpected. Which was to do nothing at all. Then wait and see who suggested what.
The telephone rang. He took the call. It was the receptionist, Helge, at Davos hospital. Susan Lesko, she told him, was regaining consciousness. She seemed to recognize her father. She comes and goes. Too early, the doctors say, to know if there will be lasting damage. But she would live. Bannerman let out the breath he had been holding.
“There have been more calls,” the young Swiss told him. “And there are flowers.”
“Who called?”
”A Mr. Zivic from Westport. He said he is your friend.”
“He is. Who else?”
”A Mr. Clew from Washington. Also a friend. He said he is flying here today.”
“This Mr. Clew. Could he be one of the Americans who called earlier? The young one?”
“It was the same man, I think. The older man called as well. A Mr. Reid. It was he who sent the flowers.”
Bannerman grunted. Christian charity from Palmer Reid. “Is there a message?”
“The card said ... I wrote it down,
You are in my
prayers. A speedy recovery.”
“No, I mean for me.”
Bannerman sighed. Reid was nervous. He was right to be. But Bannerman could not imagine what Reid had to gain by trying to hurt him through Susan.
“Thank you, Helge,” he told the young Swiss. “You've been most helpful. I want to do something for you. I'll send you something.”
“We have discussed that sufficiently. You are not coming to the hospital?” There was rebuke in her tone.
”I don't think so. As long as her father is with her, I . . .”
“You will come,” she said firmly. “It is the correct thing.”
A long pause. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He surrendered. “I'll be there shortly.”
The correct thing, he thought. But to what purpose? At best, another angry scene with the father who despised him. More lies to Susan. But they would be the last.
Billy McHugh came with him. Billy insisted. “We get to the hospital,” he told Bannerman, “you let me handle her father. He comes at you again, I'll take him. It wasn't dignified, you rolling around the floor like that.”
On a Zurich-bound TWA flight less than two hours out of Washington, Roger Clew, his expression drawn, stared at the screen of the laptop he'd opened up on his tray table.
He'd reserved two seats, the window for himself, the aisle to be kept vacant, and had asked for the last row in business class so that a bulkhead would be at his back. On the tray table next to him his lunch sat untouched. He was too sickened to eat. And not a little afraid.
Only a few hours before, the Ripper Effect had been theory. Not any longer. Now it was real. It had predicted the murder of Susan Lesko.
Granted there were other predictions, ranked in order of probability. And granted that the attack on the girl was far down the list of the possible courses of action that might be taken by Palmer Reid. Still, it was there. He had seen it. He had known it could happen. He had done nothing to prevent it.
But it was not his fault, he shouted within
himself. Who
in his right mind would have predicted that Reid would react to the appearance—not the fact, the
appearance—
of a linkage between Bannerman and Elena by moving to destroy the chain? Even the computer predicted that surveillance, not action, was far and away the most likely course he would follow. Even allowing for the fact that Reid was
not
in his right mind. That he hated Bannerman. That Reid, given two or more possible courses of action, would almost always choose the most devious.
ASSASSINATION/SUSAN LESKO:
FUNCTION/PREDICT
He tapped the “return” key, his eyes on the screen. The reply appeared in milliseconds, again in ranking order.
ENMITY: BANNERMAN/PP UNKNOWN 100.0
ENMITY: LESKO/BANNERMAN 94.0
ENMITY: LESKO/BRUGG 21.4
ENMITY: BANNERMAN/BRUGG 16.3
ENMITY: BANNERMAN/LESKO 11.7
ENMITY: BANNERMAN/REID 0.4
There it was. A 100 percent certainty that Bannerman would now turn all his energy toward hunting down the person or persons unknown. A 94 percent probability that the father, Lesko, would hold Bannerman to blame for what happened to his daughter and was very likely to be in a killing rage when he saw all that had been done to his daughter. A much lower probability that Lesko would blame Elena but, Clew realized, that assessment would change drastically if he told the computer that the weapon was cocaine. Similarly, only a small chance of Bannerman blaming Elena. Or the father. Almost no chance at all that he'd blame Reid. Reid, Clew realized, would not even have appeared on the list had he not built in the presumption that, if Bannerman were harmed in any way, Reid's involvement could never be ruled out entirely.
And yet Reid had done this. He knew it. He could almost see the meeting in which the decision was taken. Reid and his bitchy little assistant, Whitlow.
Whitlow would take the cue. He'd farm out the job, outside the company, probably to the traffickers, telling them it's time Lesko and Elena paid their bill. He would say nothing about Bannerman; no use dampening their enthusiasm. And Reid would keep his back turned. Not even Whitlow would see the gleam in his eyes as he envisioned Paul Bannerman, crushed and broken by the girl's death, lashing out in impotent rage, making mistakes, scattering his forces. He would see Bannerman, Elena, and the girl's father all at each other's throats, whatever plot they might have been hatching now in tatters. He would see a vulnerable Bannerman. A careless Bannerman. He would begin to see a day, not far off, perhaps even at hand, when a clean sweep couid be made of Westport once and for all. His humiliation avenged.
“Jesus Christ,” Clew muttered aloud.
It was all so damnably dumb. So pointless. There was no plot. Nothing. Bannerman
happened
to get involved with a girl whose father
happened
to know Elena Bragg who
hap
pened
to have some dirt on Palmer Reid. You couldn't even call it coincidence. Almost everybody knows somebody who has dirt on somebody else except most times they never know it because the chain never connects.