find him. I can finish it outside if you want, take him somewhere even safer than the pond.”
There was a sudden glimmer in Cabot’s eyes, and you could tell he was giving the idea one last hearing. Then the light dimmed, and he sighed deeply, another long rattle more forlorn than the others.
“It’s over, Kyle. Go into town. Have a beer.”
Anderson kept the barrel pressed against my head for another few seconds, then withdrew it and backed away. I exhaled, but didn’t move. Behind me, Anderson sighed wearily.
“I’ll wait out on the porch in case you-”
“ No, Kyle. Take the Jeep into town, that’s an order. I’ll be the one to finish it, and I’ll do it on my own terms.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to hear the engine start, and I want you to call from the phone at the Mohegan Cafe. Stay put until I phone you back. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. His glumness was infuriating. He would have enjoyed killing me, and he left the room with the disappointed air of a hunter who’d failed to bag his limit.
He’d parked the Jeep farther up the drive than normal to keep me from hearing his arrival, but we heard the departure just fine-the roar of the engine, then the cracking of the shells beneath the tires as he reversed at full throttle. We saw the swing of his headlight beams through the lacy European curtains, then he was gone.
“Roll me over by the window,” Cabot said.
I did.
The sky was brilliant, a starry night.
“Fresh air, that’s what I need right now.”
Cabot didn’t have the strength to push up the sash, so I did it for him. He pulled his blanket tighter as the night air rushed in, but he seemed to relish the autumn scent of burning leaves, a hint of brine. The moon shone through a scudding cloud.
“Move closer,” he said. “Look off to the right.”
I did as he asked, and for a shaky moment I wondered if he’d given some coded order to Anderson to lie in wait across the lawn with a sniper rifle. But the only sound from outside was the sigh of the wind in the brush.
“Do you see that small rooftop maybe two hundred yards off, to the right?”
“Yes.” It was lit by a neighbor’s floodlight.
“That’s Nethercutt’s outbuilding. It’s where we found his papers. After Wils died I went over to comfort Dorothy. Then I told her I needed to go through his old belongings for the Agency.”
“She believed you?”
“She never knew how bad things really were between us, or what all the fighting was about. She gave me the keys. It was alarmed seven ways to Sunday, but she told me the code for the keypad. Even then it took quite a while to find it.”
“The floorboards?”
He frowned.
“Wils was better than that. It was in his refrigerator, behind a false wall. Cold storage.”
The pun made him wheeze with laughter, which returned the disturbing rattle to his breathing. It tired him enough that he had to pause before continuing.
The phone rang, and he sighed with impatience.
“You’ll have to fetch it. On the end table. The cord will reach.”
I handed him the phone. The volume was turned up high, and even I could hear the clink of glasses and the general roar of the tavern crowd at the Mohegan. It brought back memories of my dinner there with Dad the night of the funeral, and the way we’d first discussed this strange set of neighbors, Nethercutt and Cabot, as we carved our prime rib.
Cabot hung up. I shut the window and took the phone back to the table.
“By now I suppose you’ve seen what I found there,” Cabot said. “I was quite excited. Finally I had the leads I’d always needed to try and nail the bastard. Vladimir, if I could find him, plus a few other odds and ends. But the existence of Lothar’s book, that was the real revelation. Years ago Wils had put out the word that every copy had been destroyed, and I’d believed him. Now I knew there was still one out there. There were other leads, too, of course. But I needed an operative, a traveler. Kyle was eager to go, but none of his talent is between the ears. He never could’ve passed muster in Europe. Then I saw you and your father at the funeral, and I knew right away. And when that bastard Preston-he was Ed’s first handler, you know, the very fellow who let this happen right under his nose-when he got up in my face about letting sleeping dogs lie, well, hell, how could I do anything but go back on the hunt?
“I sat up late for six nights running, assembling the pieces. The more I went over it, the more everything came together, just like a plot line in one of Ed’s damn books. I had characters, twists, scenarios. It only took a few phone calls to set it up. I sent Kyle down to Georgetown to put some of his old tricks to work. I hired a few cameos here and there…”
“Like the girl in Georgetown.”
“With a red carnation. Your son is a sharp one. She knew he’d made her.”
“What if we hadn’t seen her?”
“No matter. It was window dressing. Like the story Litzi told you about the man in the seersucker.”
“You reeled me in perfectly, I’ll give you that.”
“But you really found Lothar’s book, didn’t you? That must be why they grabbed you.”
“Read it cover to cover. He had all the code names. He had pretty much everything.”
Cabot’s eyes were aglow, partly in envy, partly in fascination. But the glow was tenuous, flickering. I sensed he was down to his last reserves.
“Tell me,” he asked, voice fading. “He was guilty, wasn’t he? Our man Edwin? He was one of theirs, correct? You can tell me, now that you have everything else.”
I could hear the rattle of his breath up close now, and when I’d rolled his chair to the window I’d sensed the frailty in his birdlike lightness. I knew then with the certainty that only arises at moments like this that the real reason he’d spared my life was because he was dying. It softened something in me, or maybe I just decided that there had already been too many casualties. So, even for all his ruthlessness, why not part on a note of gentleness, a note of grace? No more hollow victories.
“Yes,” I said. “He was. I’ll never be able to write it, of course, but he was.”
For that moment, at least, I think I even believed it. It was sobering to think that I had helped uncover a traitor, one whom I had greatly admired for most of my life.
“Surely you can find some way to get around that agreement, can’t you?” Cabot said, his voice querulous again. “You could work with a coauthor. Handle his ‘research,’ that sort of thing. They wouldn’t dare sue you and risk having everything else come out.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, humoring him. “But it could take a while.”
“Of course.”
He probably knew I was lying, but he played along for both of us.
“So there’s your bonus then, in lieu of payment and expenses,” he said. “Thanks to me, you’ll be a writer again. You’ll have your career back.”
Not that he really gave a damn about that, the crabbed old bastard. But he deserved a few points for bothering to pretend.
Cabot ran out of steam then. His head sagged to his chest, and a long, tired breath sputtered out of him. If he’d been able, I think he might have died on the spot. Instead, after a brief pause, I saw his chest rise as he finally inhaled. He didn’t look up again. He just flapped his right hand in a weak farewell. Without a further word from either of us, I left the house.
I was on full alert the entire bike ride back to the hotel, expecting the Jeep at every turn. But I made it back without incident, and sighed deeply in relief upon entering the well-lit lobby.
I’d made it. I’d succeeded. I was done.
It was time to go home.
