In one unbelievable stroke, he brought it down powerfully across Rose's face. The hacking blow made a noise like a butcher's cleaver. Damian snorted like a horse.
The field machete came down again. A clumsy guillotine.
Finally Hill kicked the head and it sloshed up against a sideboard. Floated in a dark pool of rainwater.
Then Harold Hill climbed up the movable ladder. He said nothing to the black policeman; nothing to Peter.
'What partnership was that?' Peter said. Then he let it go... let the sentence evaporate in the night air. It didn't matter. Of course the CIA was in on it.... For a long moment they all stood on the wet ramp. The black man and the young white man close together. None of them speaking.... Then Hill untied the last restraining rope. It doesn't end, the CIA man was thinking. Now these two have to be taken care of....
As the Sportsman slowly drifted away, Meral Johnson fired several shots into the boat's bottom and sides. 'Let the fish have him,' the black man said. At first Harold Hill's hands were trembling. Then, very slowly, the director began to feel rather good. In a way, he supposed, he was the hero of it all: the man who saved Central Intelligence.
Or maybe it was Carrie Rose who was the heroine.
After all, it was Carrie who'd phoned the embassy to tell him how to get Damian; who'd revealed the last details of the monster plot.... He should have told Rose that, Hill thought too late. He should have told Damian that, in the end, Carrie had turned on him and set him up. How very fucking pathetic.
The woman he'd slept with for nine years-loved, presumably. His prot6g6e, among other things.... Well, she was going to get hers, too... a perfect ending.
For a long time the three men stood in the rain, watching the speedboat drift away. Listening to the gulps of the bobbing, sinking boat.
'Peter asked you a question before,' Meral Johnson said. 'What kind of partnership did you have with him?'
Suddenly Peter raised the Walther again. Sideways. Almost without looking, it seemed, the force of the single pistol shot knocked Hill ten feet out onto the water.
'Let the fish have both of them,' Peter said.
He and the short, fat policeman walked slowly back to the clubhouse.
may 12, 1979, Saturday
I Raid St. James
May 12, 1979; Washington, D.C.
Saturday Morning.
At quarter past six on the morning of the twelfth, two heavyweights from Langley-twenty-sevenyear-old Alex Fletcher and Deputy John Devereaux-stepped out of a white Pontiac Le Mans, then ran across the dewy back lawns of the sedate, prohibitively expensive St. James Hotel.
Inside the fancy hotel, some of America's richer and more noted personages were fast asleep on the already pretty, blue-skied spring morning. Outside on the manicured back lawns, blackbirds were just beginning to make their little peeps and tuwitts. One hale fellow disappeared over the garden fence as if he were going to fetch the morning's Post.
Alex Fletcher was wearing a film director's bush jacket and brushed corduroys, with a Smith & Wesson.38 strapped across a cotton workshirt.
Devereaux, fifty-six years old, wore a dark suit with an open-necked white shirt. A cigarette hung from his lower lip like a piece of white tape. The two men sneaked inside the gray metal door rarely used by anyone but St. James's maintenance men. Behind the door they found a security guard asleep with a white Siamese cat on his belly. The man had passed out on a folding beach chair and was snoring like broken-down machinery.
'Good morning.' Devereaux grinned. 'Monsieur Le Chat.'
'Some fucking joint,' Fletcher whispered. 'No wonder the D.C. police have such a big, throbbing dick of a job.'
The two men proceeded up battleship gray back stairs, uncarpeted and unexpectedly dreary. A smelly cat litter box sat on one stairwell. they came out into an elegant hallway marked with a big pink five on powder blue walls.
Fletcher whistled under his breath. 'Now this is more like it.'
The young agent tapped a real crystal chandelier with his fingernail. 'Class, Devereaux, class.' 'I'll buy it for you and your girlfriend,' John Devereaux growled. 'Right after we finish our business here. Present arms!'
The two men stopped in front of room 502. Big gold numbers on the softest powder blue. Tasteful molding. Escarping. ,
Alex Fletcher took a deep breath, whispered a cynical ejaculation, then slowly slid a hotel passkey into the lock.
The deputy brought a.44 Magnum out from under his sports jacket, a loud, dangerous cannon young Fletcher disapproved of entirely. 'Nuclear warfare,' he'd nicknamed the long black pistol.
He gave Devereaux a funny little smile. 'Try not to blow me up by mistake. Just a passing -thought. Ready?'
'For Harold Hill and Carole.'
I'Mmm. 19 The elaborate door swung over thick mauve carpeting. The two agents looked in on a light-haired woman sitting up in a rumpled double bed. A bi room full of morning sun.
'Who are you?' the long-haired woman said. She reached toward her night table.
