The Second Saladin

Goddammit. He’d told them it would never work. A dozen discs — that’s still nearly the entire New York Library system.

“Well?”

“Am I breaking any laws if I ask you how it’s indexed?”

Jerry looked at him.

“It sounds to me like you’re just fishing, Miles.”

“Come on, Jerry. Give me a break.”

Jerry made another face. “Whenever an item is transmitted, it’s automatically recorded in a master directory by slug line. When the master directory reaches a certain level, all the stuff is automatically transferred to tape. But when that happens, at the same time the Extel printer generates this” — the metal notebook — “printout. Then later we index by months of the year.”

“So it’s chronological?”

“Yeah, but the machine gives you other breakdowns too. The idea is to be able to get your hands on something fast.”

“Sure, I realize that.”

“It’s got a listing by target, by geographical zone, by—”

“What about alphabetically?”

“You mean by the code group?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, it does that. Let me—” He flipped through the thick notebook.

“Yeah, here it is. It’s—”

“Jerry, look for shoe.”

Jerry looked at him. “You’ve got something exceedingly strange going on, Miles. I never heard of—”

“Jerry, when a Deputy Director tells you to check something out, you don’t exactly tell him he’s full of shit.”

“Well, I’ve been here a long—”

“It might not be shoe, S-H-O-E. It might be H-S-U, a Chinese word of the same pronunciation. Or it could be, well, I suppose it—”

Jerry pushed through the printouts. He halted.

Miles bent forward, over the desk. He could smell Jerry’s cheap cologne and the plastic, oceans of plastic, in the calm air. Jerry’s finger pointed to the middle of the page and had come to rest at a designation for the ninth disc. It said, CODE SERIES P-R-O to H-S-U.

“I don’t like it. No, I don’t. I don’t like it at all,” said Leo Bennis, driving tensely through the late night traffic as they turned off Key Bridge onto M Street in Georgetown.

Chardy agreed by inserting the magazine into the grip housing of the Ingram. He’d already checked that the bulky silencer was screwed on tight. He unfolded the metal stock, then folded it again, purely to familiarize himself. The entire weapon weighed less than six pounds, yet it could spit its load of thirty-two.380s in four seconds in almost absolute silence. The Bureau people loved it; Chardy hated it and would have given anything for an AK-47 or an M-16, a piece he could trust.

“There are really only two possibilities,” Leo said tonelessly. “Either Danzig just flipped out and bolted on his own, in which case he’s walking the streets like a madman and will be picked up by morning; or, more likely, the man inside got to him somehow and has lured him out. In which case we’ll find out soon too — find the body.”

“How does the safety work?”

“There’s two. A lever in the trigger guard, just in front of the trigger. And the bolt handle: by twisting it a quarter turn you put the piece on safe.”

Chardy cocked the weapon.

“Be careful with that thing,” Leo said.

“They kick much on you?” he asked.

“Not hardly. There’s not enough powder in that pistol slug. Paul, I think you’re going to have to re-join the operation. You tell ’em you’re out of the hospital, you’re okay. You go back to Danzig’s and see what the hell is going on. You could put some questions to the Security people. Sam’ll probably be there too. Shit, it just occurs to me they’re going to raise hell looking for Lanahan. We can—”

“What’s the trigger? About fifteen pounds?”

“No, it’s much lighter. They vary: some of ’em go off if you look at them. That’s why I said to go easy with it. But it should be about ten pounds unless some hotdog has messed with the spring. I wonder how long he’s been gone? He could have been gone hours and they only noticed forty-five minutes ago. Paul, I’ll head back—”

A Pontiac jumped into the lane ahead, then careened to a halt at the light and Leo had to pump his own brake hard.

“Jerk. Goddammit! Look at this terrible traffic. You can’t drive in this city anymore.”

“It’s okay, Leo,” Chardy said. He opened the door. “Paul!”

“See you, Leo.” He hung in the door as a car swooped by them.

“Paul, they need us back there, they—”

“They want you back, Leo,” Chardy said. “You work for them. I don’t.” He smiled, and stepped into the dark, the machine pistol and a radio unit hidden in his gathered coat.

54

After a long drive they dropped Ulu Beg at a Metro station in a suburb of Washington. It had been a silent trip, through twilight across farm fields, then over a great American engineering marvel, a huge bridge, and then into the city, but now Speshnev turned to him from the front seat.

“You remember it all?”

“I do.”

“It will be easy. The killing is the easiest of all. He’ll be alone this time. You’ll shoot for the head?”

“The face. From very close. I will see brains.”

“May I tell you a joke?”

The Russian and his jokes! A strange fellow, stranger than any of them. Even the young man who’d done the driving turned to listen.

“The man he expects to meet,” Speshnev said, “is Chardy. Delicious, isn’t it? This war criminal flees his own protection to meet the one man in the world he trusts; instead he meets the one man in the world who has willed his death.”

These ironies held little interest to Ulu Beg; he nodded curtly.

The driver climbed out and walked around the car and opened Ulu Beg’s door.

“AH right,” said Speshnev.

Ulu Beg stepped into light rain. The street teemed with Americans. Globular lamps stood about, radiating brown light to illuminate the slant of the falling water. They were at a plaza, near a circle of buses. People streamed toward the station; he could see the trains on a bridge above the entrance. It was all very modern.

“You must not fail,” said the colonel.

“As God wills it,” said Ulu Beg.

The door closed and the car rushed off through the rain. He stood by the curb for a second, watching it melt into the traffic, then pushed his way through the crowd to the station. With the exact change he bought a fare card from a machine and went through turnstiles to be admitted to the trains. He carried his pack in his left hand; inside it was the Skorpion.

Danzig left the theater at 11:30. His brain reeled from the imagery: organs, gigantic and absurd, abstract openings. He thought of wet doorways, of plumbing, of open heart surgery. It had given him a tremendous headache. He’d had to sit through the feature three times. As a narrative the film had an inanity that was almost beyond description: things just occurred in an offhand, casual way, contrived feebly so that the actresses could drop