“We’ll stop at your place and close the house,” she said. “Then you’ll stay with me.”
When she conducted him into the library, he was envious. She had grown up here, in huge rooms with twenty-foot walls in two tiers, all of them lined with paintings and books. It didn’t matter what the books were about or who had written them. To him they were a symbol of privilege: the more ancient and eccentric they were, the greater the advantage. The room represented how many generations of people who had titles and money and manners and tutors and parents—ten?
“Do you have to go? You could stay here and call for help. Or we could drive up to Yorkshire. Even if they’d been watching you, nobody could know about that, and lots of people must have been hidden there over the years. My forebears in the time of Henry the Eighth didn’t feel comfortable with the forced conversion and may have hidden a monk or two—lots of people did. I do know somebody hid from Cromwell there three generations after that. We were exactly the sort of people he was born to rid the world of—still are, to the degree we can manage it. It’s a huge, rambling place with lots of rooms, but the village is small enough so nobody could come after you without being spotted.”
It entered Schaeffer’s mind that her ancestors really weren’t from the same planet he was. Time meant nothing to her, or to any of them, really. If he chose to stay at the family estate, she would feed him and bring him the daily newspapers until one of them died, and then he would be part of the story too. He opened his suitcase and pulled out his two passports. He looked at one of them and handed it to Meg. “I’ve got to go to the United States. When I’m ready to come back, I may call you and ask you to mail this to me.”
She looked at it, then plucked the other one from his hand and read the name aloud. “Charles Frederick Ackerman. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might have another name,” she said, her voice a little hollow.
“Michael Schaeffer is the real one.” He put his arm around her waist. The name already sounded strange to him, like the name of someone long dead.
“What I’ve been trying to say is, are you going because you have to, or because you think being with me puts me in danger? Because I really don’t mind.” It struck her as an odd thing to have said, so she added, “Really.”
“I have to find the mole.” He studied her face. There was no possibility of an argument; of course he had to find the mole. Whose job was it if not his? She had read all the spy novels, then given them to him to read. He wished he had paid more attention to them, but he hadn’t. Her questions might grow more astute and penetrating, so he needed to think more carefully about what he said. But he also needed to think about reality, and time was passing.
The Satterthwaites would stay on at his house indefinitely, keeping it open and clean and inhabited, and they would feed his cat. Mrs. Satterthwaite had understood that he sometimes traveled, and she would continue to pay the bills out of the household account. He had always been like a ghost in his own house, coming and going quietly without having any discernible effect on the daily business of the place. The Satterthwaites were the real occupants, living high among the rafters upstairs and showing little curiosity about anything he did. If he never came back, the will he had filed in the solicitor’s office a few blocks away would be revealed to them. Mr. Satterthwaite would paint a neat, hand-lettered sign that said BED AND BREAKFAST, and they would continue to care for the place and serve the food; the only difference would be that he would be replaced by other ghosts who came and went quietly.
He closed his suitcase. “I have to get back to London tonight for the plane.”
“I’ll get the keys to the Jag.” She moved to pull open the library door.
He watched her go. He knew that someday, if he lived to be old and alone, he would look back on this moment and grind his teeth with anguish and remorse, straining his memory for the exact color of The Honourable Meg’s hair and the way her yellow dress swayed as she tugged open the big oak door.
Charles Frederick Ackerman walked down the long accordion tunnel past the smiling flight attendants, all poised to dart out and block the narrow aisles and offer assistance. The travelers were barely able to negotiate the cramped space with their burdens of carry-on luggage, let alone balance dwarf pillows or chemical-smelling blankets. They paid no more attention to him than to any of the others. If they’d had to describe him to a policeman, one of them might have been perceptive enough to have judged that his coat was a good piece of English tailoring but not new, and that he was no longer in his twenties but wasn’t yet wearing the strangely driven look that men acquire on their fiftieth birthdays. He was, at this stop on the crew’s route, invisible through protective coloration: eyes and hair a dull brown; maybe English, maybe American, maybe German, not thin enough to be French or elegant enough to be Italian. They looked at him only long enough to assure themselves that he wasn’t disabled and probably spoke enough English to do what he was supposed to without exaggerated gestures on their part.
He took his seat by the window and looked out at England with regret. But all the England he could see was a patch of lighted tarmac and part of a baggage rack. The ten years were already over. Michael Schaeffer had made his final appearance before this man had gotten onto the airplane.
He settled back in his seat and meditated on the time that would come now. He knew only the name in the wallet of the man who had been carrying the pistol: Mario Talarese. That would be enough. As the rest of the passengers filled the seats around him, he tried to fathom the reasoning of the people who would send a pickup team of amateurs to find and dispose of a man like him.
Somebody should have given it more consideration. If they remembered the contract, they should have remembered who he was. In all the councils that were intended to keep these men’s pride and ambition and greed from interfering with the steady, predictable profits they shared, wasn’t there one calm old voice left to remind them that if they killed him it would gain them nothing, and if they failed they might bring back old trouble?
He had done everything he could to convince them that he had relinquished that life. Why hadn’t they just let him die? He knew the answer already: they had. There was nothing in it for the dozen old men who had the power and the right to decide things, and if they had decided, it wouldn’t have been two weasels with knives and a guy with a pistol designed to fit in a lady’s purse. The south of England would one day have filled up with quiet men who called themselves Mr. Brown or Mr. Williams, but each had return tickets to three American cities in other names. It couldn’t have been the old men.
It had to be that an eager small-time underboss had decided to do it on his own. He even knew who it was. If the one with the gun was named Talarese, the man who had sent him had to be Antonio Talarese. That knowledge gave him one small chance to stay alive, and even that would disappear unless he took it now. If the idea had been to pull off a sudden triumph a couple of thousand miles from home and collect on a ten-year-old contract, then it had to be a secret until it was accomplished. Talarese couldn’t have told anyone else that he had found the quarry, or he would have had rivals he couldn’t hope to compete with.
Ackerman had no choice now but to come back, and to do it as fast as he could. Because the minute Talarese told the rest of the world what he knew, it was over. Michael Schaeffer had not made the sort of preparations that would allow him to slip into another life in time. Ackerman had to get to New York before the news that Mario Talarese was lying behind a building in Brighton.
Ackerman leaned back in the padded seat as the huge airplane lumbered down the long runway, its wheels bumping over the cracks faster and faster until its engines screamed an octave higher and lifted it into the night. Talarese had made a terrible mistake to fail in his first try. When a man’s peace and confidence and the tranquility of his home were gone, there wasn’t much left.
* * *
The Honourable Margaret Holroyd sat on her bed and looked at the clock on the nightstand. The clock had a red digital readout and had been manufactured no more than a year ago of microchips shipped to Japan from a company outside San Francisco. The nightstand had been made in France in the sixteenth century out of a tree that had been young at the time when Charles Martel was gathering his troops near Tours to rid France of the baneful influence of Islam. Michael would be midway across the Atlantic by now. It was very likely that a mile from here the Filchings were awake too, sitting up thinking, trying to discern a way that they could accept the rest of their lives after what had happened to Peter and his friend Jimmy. Tomorrow the telephone would ring and one of them would tell her what they knew. She would have to feign—what?—surprise, shock, horror … No, the horror was real enough. She had no choice about that. What she wasn’t prepared for was lying to those poor, sad people.
She put on her robe and walked along the hallway to the back stairs, then down to the library, closed the
