Soft Targets

against a chair, and dropped the knife as pain bludgeoned him.

Everett stooped to retrieve the knife, mov­ing protectively toward the front door. Chaim stepped through.

Chaim was no one. There was no tomorrow; there was not even a now. But there was a big man with frightened eyes, and he held a knife, and a knife had caused the death of Fat'ah. He raised the handgun and fired as Everett ducked behind Hakim's media center.

The report was a cannonade in the confined space, blowing a tape machine into plastic con­fetti. Chaim needed an instant to recover from the recoil and to cock the single-action revolver, holding it in both hands, and in that instant Everett grabbed the handle of a portable televi­sion set. Both men shifted simultaneously, Chaim squeezing another round off, Everett swinging the portable set overhand. Everett had not released the set when the slug plowed into its steel chassis.

Chaim's handgun was one of a family of weapons designed to stop the headlong charge of a madman. At close range, the energy of one slug from a .44 magnum is such that its impact against any part of an onrushing enemy will literally stop him dead. Everett was hurled spinning away, stunned, his arm nearly dislocated at the shoulder as the television set absorbed the slug in its guts.

Charlie George concluded from the first explosion that Hakim Arif had returned. Only his ankles were free, his waist and wrists still taped to the table. Charlie, his feet facing the door, could not see Chaim or Everett but he knew mortal combat when he heard it. He brought his legs up, then flung them down again. The table tipped for an instant, almost brought him erect. Charlie hooked his heels over the lip of the table, levered his body along the table. This brought his head up. It was then that he lost his breathing tube. Frantically, Charlie folded his legs again, bringing them back nearly over his head, and gathered his strength.

Satisfied that he had blown the knife-wielder away, Chaim Mardor turned toward the doorway and looked into the gloom toward the noise, cocking the revolver again. He saw buttocks and widespread arms, Charlie's legs poised for an instant, and Chaim did not understand what he saw. It did not look like a human form from his view and his finger paused on the trigger.

Charlie's legs came crashing down, the table tipping him up as it fell, and Charlie stabilized himself to stagger upright, arms still pinioned horizontally, the table strapped to his waist. He faced Chaim, strangling.

Chaim Mardor stood rigid, facing the appari­tion that had appeared before him like every butchered victim of every war in history. Its arms carried no weapon, could carry none in their imitation of the crucified orthodox martyrs of Neturay Karta liturgy. Its head was an almost featureless filmy horror, eyes staring through a shining red slickness. To Chaim Mardor it was victim, retribution, and golem combined in one flesh. He brought the revolver up with great deliberation and fired. Through the roof of his mouth.

Everett was only half aware of the report, strangely muffled, that removed the top half of Chaim Mardor's head. He swung himself to a sitting position against the wall, saw Charlie George reel against the doorway before collaps­ing.

Everett needed an interminable ten seconds to clear the mist from his brain, to stumble forward and tear the plastic bag from the head of Charlie George. He found the knife, stepping over things he did not want to see, and separated his friend from the table top. Coughing, gasping, Charlie gulped free air, then relaxed with closed eyes.

'Come on, pal,' Everett croaked, 'don't go to sleep on me now.' He saw the unspoken question as Charlie looked at him, chest still heaving. 'Those other two cock-wallopers; which one will be coming back?'

The keys were still in the Volkswagen bus. Somehow, weaving like a drunk, Everett drove it to Moorpark.

SATURDAY, 24 JANUARY, 1981:

Everett did not attend the private cremation service for Charlie George in Pasadena, con­vinced by physicians, the eloquent threats of David Engels, and telephone pleas of Gina Vercours. Instead, he waited at a Beverly Hills ren­dezvous for Rhone Althouse, who did attend.

Althouse gained entry by way of a conduit tunnel with its own guarded entrance. The only identification procedure was a handprint analysis, but its brevity was deceptive. Gas chromatography assured that the whorls were not synthetic while standard optical matching techniques pronounced Althouse's hands to be the genuine articles.

'Somehow I never thought of you as a red-head,' was Everett's first remark as Althouse entered the waiting room.

'Life is a puttynose factory,' Althouse returned, taking the big hand. 'I wouldn't have recognized you at all except for the newspaper shots of Simon Kenton.'

'That's one photographer I'd like to get my hands on,' Everett growled. 'For those of us bent on nudging it, a free society can get awfully expensive.^'

'You'll slide off the back pages of the papers in a few days,' Althouse predicted, 'now that Charlie is dead.'

Everett, frowning: 'Helluva loss to NBN.'

'We have to think of it that way: of Charlie is defunct, expired, gone to his reward. And that's okay, so long as my old friend Byron Krause is still sniffin' the breeze,' Althouse waved a glee­ful finger.

Everett glanced at the wall clock. 'Visiting hours are a sham in here, Rhone; let's jump the gun a few minutes.'

'Don't say 'gun',' Althouse grumbled, follow­ing Everett to the elevator. Moments later they submitted to another print-check before entering the private room of Byron Krause. The attendant who opened the door never spoke but he did a lot of watching. Instinctively the visitors made every gesture slow and cautious.

The face behind the bandages must have tried to smile, to judge from the crinkles around the mouth and eyes: 'Ow, dammit,' said the famil­iar voice. 'Maury, do you live here? I saw you this morning.' The slurring was not any lack of alertness, but implied the constraints of the tiny anchors that kept the facial planes properly positioned.

'You were just whacked out this morning, Charlie. Sure I live here, until they get me patched. They're going to make me a new fingertip, too; guess where the skin is coming from,' he smiled sadly, laying a hand on his hip.

'Pain in the ass, I expect,' from Althouse.

From the bed: 'Listen Rhone, glad as I am to see you, first good one-liner out of you and my silent partner here will cut you down.'

'Don't say 'cut',' Althouse muttered, then slapped his own mouth. 'Look: I'm a compulsive. Change the subject. What really happened at that farmhouse?'

Everett found a chair, Althouse another. Fed­eral agents had pieced much of the story to­gether, aided by tire tracks, reports of a high-speed chase, and fingerprints linking the destroyed van to the Iraqi, Hakim Arif. Everett supplied some of the information as he had it from Engels. 'But I guess the biggest surprise, after all, was your opting for the identity change,' Everett finished, nodding toward the comedian.

'I had a lot of time to think, before the media people got tipped off to who and where I was,' was the reply. 'I decided I'd rather be a live Krause than dead with all those other charlies. Funny thing is, that sadistic little shit Hakim messed me up so much, cosmetic surgery was necessary anyhow.'

'How about the ear?'

'They can make me a new one. Some agent found my ear; stepped on it. Boy, some of the apologies I get,' he shook the bandaged head ruefully.

Althouse brightened. 'I gather from the news that Fat'ah's home base in Syria got creamed by some other bunch there—and that should write 'em all off, now that Hakim Arif is feeding flies all over Los Padres National Forest.'

'No, he isn^'t,' the big Commissioner said, and shrugged into the silence he had created. 'This is for your ears only, God knows it's little enough. Seems that the Soviets get nervous when anybody but themselves begins to panic the American public. They leaked the word—don't ask me why, a quid pro quo maybe—that the Iraqi turned his whole fanatical gang under interrogation.^'

'Probably the kind we don't like to do,' Althouse put in.

'I expect so. But Arif got away into the moun­tains afoot after that explosion. They think it was the other guy, Guerrero, who's the flies' breakfast. But the Soviets think Arif was dying.'