the sociopath’s inability to accept any blame for his own misfortune. Don’t you think it interesting that the perpetrator of a horror never forgives his victims? On another level he blames you directly for his troubles. You are his overall scapegoat.”
“Who broke him out of prison?” Paul wanted to see what this critter would allow. He might know more than Paul did.
There was no hesitation. “Two men in suits entered the prison using forged credentials. They were CIA-hired freelance, one brought in from Houston and the other from Seattle. Martin was far too valuable to be allowed to fall into a position where he might trade information for his freedom. The information he has might be classified as embarrassing and destructive to some powerful entities. They flew him south with a promise of life in paradise. Then they tried to kill him.”
“They planned to kill him?”
“They did, indeed. Oh, that’s right, you were in a coma when all of that happened. And it wasn’t a story that received wide circulation through channels you would have had access to, anyway. You haven’t kept up at all, have you?”
“You’ll tell me, though. Tell me what I missed.”
“Certainly. You should know, since it’s surely the main reason he’s back. Well, three young and brutally minded men met him and his wife and child at a small strip in the jungle of Guatemala. They should have sent ten times that many or killed him on the spot while he was unarmed. They struck at night and Martin dispatched them as you would expect. In the hoopla Martin’s wife, technically his girlfriend, Angela something…” He snapped his tiny fingers twice.
“Lopez.” Paul remembered Angela Lopez. She was the kind of woman you noticed and didn’t forget.
“Yes. Miss Lopez and their small child were killed. He blames you, and to some lesser degree your team members.”
“That’s crazy. I had nothing at all to do with it. I was in a coma, doesn’t he know that?”
“Well, Martin Fletcher is stomping-the-ground nuts, and guilty of untold horrors.” Tod Peoples nodded and interlocked his small fingers. “He’s also brilliant. The best example of what a twisted background and our finest brain-and-brawn trainers are capable of producing.”
Paul lit another cigarette. “A bull-goose nightmare.”
“A bull-goose nightmare you could have rid the world of.”
“I wasn’t authorized to order or condone murders. I thought the way I handled it was the right way.”
“But we all know there’s authorization and… there’s authorization.”
Tod Peoples reached over and pulled the cane to him. He ran his hands, as fragile looking as bird eggs, over the length of it and examined the handle.
“Some people seem to think you can take him. Not man on man, naturally. But the feeling is that you’re every bit his equal. Well, you were once, anyway. It is a friend’s opinion that you may not be able to take him due to mental and physical…”
“Shortcomings? I’ve thought about that.”
“I am prepared to offer you a team you can utilize, deploy as you see fit. I have files on all the professionals in the group. They will undoubtedly suit your needs.”
Tod lifted another folder from his valise and passed it to Paul. “These are the men I have chosen for you. If for any reason one of them is not to your liking… I can make substitutes.”
Paul looked at the sheets and photographs. “Rangers, SEALs, and freelance goons,” he said.
“No, sir. Not one goon in the crowd. Each of these pros is capable of taking orders in a team, thinking independently, and staying on task. They will not quit until Martin is stopped cold. They aren’t kids. The sort of people you need aren’t on the DEA payroll.”
Paul leafed through the personnel records. “I’ll think about it. Let you know.”
“Do! No skin off my teeth. There is one long, unbreakable string attached to your little expedition, though.”
“One string?”
“One I know of.”
“I’m listening.”
“A member of your team has been preselected. A young man by the name of Woodrow S. Poole.”
“One member. I see.” Paul started flipping through the file.
“He isn’t in there.”
“If I refuse?”
“You could refuse him, but I’m afraid that without him you’ll find the going much rougher. Red tape tends to ruin everything, and as interference goes, it’s almost impossible to see where it’s coming from.”
“One of yours?”
Tod Peoples shrugged in reply.
Paul crushed out his cigarette, locked his fingers behind his neck, and exhaled the smoke at Tod Peoples. “So, Mr. Peoples, tell me about this Woodrow Poole.”
“As nice a young man as you’ll meet.”
“Nice.”
“I like you, so I’m going to tell you something. There are others after Martin. There is a great deal more at stake than your family. A lot of ebbs and flows under the seemingly calm surface. Crisscrossing interests. And where there is a big interest in something, there is money invested. Investments have to be covered.”
“I see. Martin has friends. Ex-friends.”
“There’s something else I’m going to tell you, but you must never breathe a word of it to anyone.”
“Do I cross my heart and hope to die?”
“Precisely put, Mr. Masterson. Most precisely put.”
9
Paul Masterson had come by his dislike of hospitals honestly.
In his mind those institutions represented pain beyond description. As he walked the carpeted hallways of Nashville’s Vanderbilt Hospital, his heart hammered and a swallow lodged in his throat as fragments of memory slammed into him like flying shrapnel. Ancient memories, recent memories, were sliding around together in his mind.
As a child he had been brought by his mother again and again to a small hospital, where he had been required to sit and watch some poorly constructed, yellow-skinned effigy of his father wither away by degrees. Finally all that was left was an empty hull connected to life by plastic tubes, each hard-fought breath measured by whirring and throbbing machines. He remembered the face he had been held up to to kiss good-bye. He remembered how the skin was drumhead-taut over the skull, how the hollowed bones felt under his hands. He remembered the dry half eyes, the black holes of his nostrils, packed around the breath that smelled of decaying tissue. Paul’s young dreams had been haunted by his father’s corpse floating through at inappropriate moments. No matter how deeply he tried to bury him in his mind, he surfaced. He could not locate one moment of his loving father as a living man. Death is evil, blind, and cruel.
Paul was away from his Montana nest for the first time in five years, and the world he had found beyond the mountains was alien, the smells focused and sharp, the colors garish and liquid, and the faces filled with fear, angst, suspicion, and disapproval.
Six years earlier he had almost died in a hospital not dissimilar to this one and had had to be taught again a few basic human skills, like walking. It had taken all the king’s horses and all the king’s men a year to put him together again.
Paul had no memory of being gunned down, but he remembered the before and after well enough. He knew from the accounts of others that he had been shot while trying to open a room-sized container reportedly filled with tons of cocaine. Two agents, Joe Barnett and Jeff Hill, both street virgins dressed in black assault suits with clammy palms and infinite trust in Paul, had perished. Sometimes he still saw them in his dreams. In the dreams the two
