The Killing Man

It was my turn to laugh. 'You're some kind of doll, Miss West. You make a guy feel like he walked into a propeller.'

'Please, call me Edwina.'

'Okay, Edwina. Just tell me . . . is it genetic?'

She took my arm and folded it around her own. 'My mother seemed to have some sort of attraction for men too. Don't all women have that?'

'Honey, not the way you have it. You must have been a terror when you were growing up.'

'Do you know how old I am, Mr. Hammer?'

'Mike,' I told her. 'And I'd say you were forty, forty-two.' Usually, when you lay that on a beautiful woman you feel the chill. A cold can come off them like a shore-bound fog and you get the thrust of mental death.

But not her. She said, 'I am forty-eight. Does that disappoint you?'

I said, 'Watch it, Edwina, you're touching nerves I didn't know I had.'

She squeezed my arm with her fingers. It was a long, gentle, but soft grasp and she said, 'Don't be surprised at what I know about you. I've read the profile the general has on you, the accounts the press have touched on and a lot of information you probably consider extremely personal.'

I stopped, turned us around and looked at the door forty feet behind us. We were in a big foyer, a generous room lined with expensive fixtures I hadn't noticed until now. I said, 'Kid, we just met, we walked about thirteen yards together and I could write a book about what's happened inside three minutes. Does that happen all the time?'

The way her mouth worked when it was starting to smile was startling. Those incredibly blue eyes were almost hypnotic. 'Only when I want it to,' she said. 'And there is something else.'

'What's that?'

She turned me around toward a pair of heavy hand-carved oaken doors, tugged very easily on an ornate brass handle and the door opened noiselessly and without effort. 'That I will tell you later.'

The house was real enough, the kind you could get lost in, the kind they used for background in period motion pictures, or classic horror films.

Edwina gave me a small, tour on the way to see the general, but everything got lost in the throaty rich tone of her voice. There was music in it, low and demanding. There was a light touch of lust and overtones I could feel, but couldn't describe, and when we got to the final door I began to wonder what the hell had happened to me. I was in some kid's damn daydream acting like I had my head up my ass and enjoyed it. I finally let out a laugh and she knew I was laughing at myself, gave me one of those lovely grins back and knocked on the door.

A buzzer clicked and the door swung open. We stepped inside and the door closed automatically.

A light was on us, so bright it cut off all vision of anything behind it like a solid wall.

I heard a chuckle, and a voice that hadn't changed at all with the years said, 'Good afternoon, Michael.'

The light went off with a metallic ping and another came on that lit up the office. Back there at the same old desk, but now surrounded by rows and banks of electronic equipment, was General Rudy Skubal.

I said, 'Hello, General.'

'What do you think?'

'Pretty damn dramatic,' I told him.

'You're only looking at the surface.' He waved at us. 'Come on over here.' He pushed himself out of his chair and held out his hand. I took it, enjoying the good grip the old man still had. 'How long has it been, Michael?'

Hell, he would have known to the day, but I said, 'Many moons, General. You still look pretty sharp.'

'Eyewash. I'm becoming enfeebled. It's a pain in the butt, yet unavoidable.' He tapped the side of his head. 'Up here I can go on indefinitely, and with the machines much can be accomplished, but the old physical thrill of the chase is gone. I haven't popped anybody in the teeth in so long I hardly remember what it sounded like.'

'It never sounds,' I said. 'They break off quietly. If you cut your hand on them, you can get one hell of an infection.'

General Skubal squinched up his face and shook his head angrily. 'Hell, man, you see that? You remember? Damn, you still get to do those things and have the fun. You kick ass and get laid and I push buttons.'

'Don't sweat it, General. It's only fun when you live to remember it,' I reminded him, 'and with the security you have here you'll live long enough.'

He ran his fingers through his mop of blazing white hair and let me see a small smile. 'Don't overrate Edwina here. She causes me more anxious moments than the enemy. You know she's CIA, don't you?'

'Of course.'

'You tell him?' he asked her.

'No, he knew,' she answered.

'See, that's why I wanted to recruit this guy,' he said. 'What an agent he would have made.' He paused, looked at the both of us a second, a wrinkle showing in his forehead. 'He would have straightened you out, gal.'

She looked straight at me, a bright blue stare daring me to say it. So I said it. 'General, you never straighten out lovely curves like that.'

I watched old Skubie frown again and look up at me from under his whiskery eyebrows. Finally he said, 'Edwina, go rassle us some coffee and Danish, okay?'

She winked at us both, waited for the general to trip the door buzzer and left. 'Crazy,' I said.

'I never had that when I was young,' the general muttered. 'Now, Michael, I assume this is not a 'just happened to be in the neighborhood' call.'

'Pure business, General.'

'Our kind of business?'

'Right.'

He flipped a set of switches on a control panel in front of him, then leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. 'One more assumption . . . this has to do with the death in your office?'

The old guy was on the ball all right. 'That's how it started.'

'Okay, shoot,' he said. 'Tell it your own way.'

I gave it to him in detail the way it opened up, setting the stage with the way I found Velda and the mutilated body of DiCica in my office. He knew about the note, but when I mentioned the name Penta, his lips pursed, he took his hands down and wrote out the name on a pad, then sat back and listened again. I ran the whole thing down for him without bothering to tail off into DiCica's initial role. Anything he could give me I wanted to point directly at the killer himself.

Halfway through, the buzzer sounded. Edwina came in with the coffee and Danish, put them down on the desk and went back out again. When we stirred the coffee up, the general nodded for me to continue.

I took him through the details Russell Graves had dug up, the data Ray Wilson had brought out of the computers and the events that led to Harry Bern and Gary Fells being mentioned as cadets the general had in his old unit.

When I finished, the general leaned on the desk and touched his fingertips together. 'You're stirring up old memories, Michael. The names you mentioned, I know those people well. Carmody has always been a good career man. If you remember, he was the one who grabbed that bunch hijacking trucks last year. Ferguson spent his early years in the European sector. Speaks four languages, I understand. The last administration brought him to this area. Bennett Bradley was always a good man for State. He had the makings of an operative, you know, but too conservative. His forte, as I remember it, was political science. Too bad they're forcing retirement on him.' He stood up, pushing his chair back. 'However, before we get to Bern and Fells, let me have a brief consultation.' He nodded toward a computer bank. 'Want to watch?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Why not?'

This was the new battlefield now. Nothing dirty, no wild screams of terror or staccato noises of fast-firing guns. No sliding around in muck or taking high dives onto hard flats to get out of a field of crossfiring rifles. No knives or insidious poisons or wire garrotes nearly decapitating a human. Now it was quiet button-tapping sounds and lighted letters and numbers flashing on the screen, being rearranged, rechanneled for new information,