The Comedy is Finished

enough to get the order reversed; his name definitely was influential enough to get Lynsey Rayne a hearing. It was now five-thirty in the morning, Washington time, and Mike Wiskiel was not going to be the man responsible for rousting a lot of important people out of bed at this hour. The problem had to be solved here, in this office.

Unfortunately, Mike had to fight the battle alone, Jock Cayzer having artfully eased himself out of the conversation the instant trouble began to emerge on the horizon. Jock was now in the workroom next door, dealing with the arrangements for the medicine delivery, while Mike was here in the main office, alone with Lynsey Rayne. “Look, Miss Rayne,” he said, and tried very hard to control his impatience and contempt. But the woman was getting in the way of the job to be done, arguing tactics when what mattered was results. And basing her convictions on the sound of a voice on the telephone! “Look. The important thing is to get Davis out of these people’s hands.”

“No, it is not.” She wouldn’t even accept that much. “The important thing right now is to keep Koo alive. Don’t you plan to negotiate at all?”

“Washington negotiates,” Mike said. “If we can do it a quicker way, we do it. Miss Rayne, this isn’t the kind of negotiation you’re used to, we’re not dealing here with a bunch of calm businessmen. These people are terrorists, they’re criminals, and they’re most likely more than a little psychotic. If we can deal with them, we will, but if we can get Koo Davis out of their hands, that’s the goal to aim at.”

“You’ll want it to finish with a shootout,” she said bitterly. “Everybody killed, and all you button-down types being manly with your walkie-talkies.”

Mike closed his eyes. “Miss Rayne,” he said, “a shootout is the last thing I want, I swear that on a stack of Bibles. I want Davis alive and safe just as much as you do.”

“Then get the medicine to him and don’t try to outsmart them.” Her bone bracelets jangled when she waved her arms about, and her expression was becoming increasingly helpless and agonized. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Wiskiel, I know I’m getting your back up and I am sorry, I don’t mean to. I know you know your business, and I know you’re right about the kind of people we’re dealing with, but even by your description you can see we shouldn’t take chances. They are criminals, they know their business as well as you know yours. That man knew you were thinking about helicopters the second Doctor Answin mentioned six o’clock; I didn’t. He knows you’ll want to try this transmitter thing, and he even warned against it, said don’t bug the case. If you challenge them, if you try to be trickier than they are, and if they catch you at it, they’ll be insulted. And they’ll take it out on Koo. ‘More than a little psychotic,’ you said. But you want to taunt them while they’ve still got Koo!”

“It would be better if we could use a case or box of our own,” Mike admitted, “with the transmitter already built into it. But the doctor let them know it was Davis’ own case, so we have to stick with what we’ve got, and if we put this little gizmo inside a capsule, it won’t be found.”

“It might be found. You don’t have the right to take that kind of chance with Koo’s life. With anybody’s life.”

Dave Kerman, the other FBI man on duty here tonight, came in from the workroom to say, “Mike, we’re ready to go. The doctor’s typed up a set of instructions, what pills to give and what symptoms to look out for and all that, and we’re set. And time’s a little short.”

Mike sighed and shook his head. “All right, Miss Rayne, you win. I think you’re wrong, but you probably can throw a lot of weight around, so we’ll forget it.”

In victory, Lynsey Rayne looked unhappy, defensive. “It isn’t whether or not I can throw weight around.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Mike told her. Turning away, he dropped the transmitter into Dave Kerman’s palm, winking at him on the side away from Lynsey Rayne as he said, “Take this back to the office, Dave.”

“Right,” Dave Kerman said, and went off to install the transmitter in the pill-case.

9

Mark Halliwell crouched in shrubbery on a front lawn, completely invisible. His lips stretched in a smile as he watched the slow-moving car ease along Sunset Boulevard, obliviously passing his hiding place. The police were so predictable, so inept. This car was as anonymous as it was possible for a white Ford Granada to be, but at this hour of the morning here in this residential section of Brentwood there was virtually no traffic, so any car traveling at five miles an hour on the four-lane-wide winding roadway of Sunset Boulevard would be bound to call attention to itself.

They were, of course, taking down—probably on film—the license numbers and particulars of all the cars parked in the neighborhood. After the delivery car had gone by at three o’clock, they would return to see what car was missing, and then have a description to broadcast to police waiting at every freeway exit for miles around. Mark, who almost never smiled in the presence of other people, luxuriated in a broad taunting grin as the Granada went by. Safe in the thick ornamental shrubbery on this lawn, he’d be invisible even if they were using infrared. He watched the Granada out of sight, then settled back to wait.

Mark burned with a pure fire. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it. The people who made pain in the world would be stopped. The uncaring, the smug, the self-confident, the lofty, too high and mighty to think about the people down below; they would all be toppled from their pedestals, and afterward the world would be clean. No more hatred, no more pain, no more suffering, no more pity. No need for pity in a world without pain.

“You don’t feel sorry for me, you only feel sorry for yourself!” They’d both written that, in an exchange of letters, each accusing the other, and Mark had thought, If we make a joke of it, perhaps we can get past all this despair and love one another, mother and son at last. But he hadn’t made the attempt, nor had she; neither ever spoke of the coincidence, the same sentence in both letters, crossing from bedroom to bedroom. Had she failed to notice the identity of the words? He knew she read his notes, she quoted selected pieces back at him out of context in her own subsequent writings. This was at a later stage, after the screaming and crying, when he was in high school, in the larger apartment with her own bedroom, so she was no longer sleeping on the convertible sofa in the living room. (How he hated her out there, heavy, humid, unconscious, imprisoning him in his room with her presence.) She had started leaving him notes on his pillow about cleaning his room, washing up after himself in the kitchen, putting out the garbage, and he’d responded at first with scrawled remarks at the bottom of her notes, placed on her pillow at night while she was out working at the bar. But soon what he had to say was too extensive for the remaining corners and margins of her notes, so he bought his own paper with money stolen from her purse, and the correspondence began.

Tonight, Mark had been the one to find Koo Davis, and now his mind kept filling with that extraordinary scene. After he’d heard Larry at last go to bed—without checking Davis—he’d got up again to see to Davis himself. The man’s jokey treatment of the cassette still rankled; it was time he learned that everybody was serious.

Mark had expected to wake Davis, maybe put a little respect into him—not slap him around, Larry always overstated things—but he hadn’t at all anticipated what he’d actually found. There was good reason to believe he’d in fact saved Davis’ life. What irony!

He’d gone down to the utility room, moved all the empty wine cartons concealing the door, unlocked and opened it, and there was Davis bubbling and strangling in a lake of his own vile vomit, his bloated red face streaked with it, his arms and legs twitching like an impaled bug. The stink of the place! And the helplessness, the terrible gross flabby weakness, of the man gargling and retching on the couch. Mark had rolled him over, pounded his back, got Davis at last breathing again, and had then gone off to wake Peter, who would have to decide what to do next.

The action had been instinctive, saving Davis’ life. Now, after the event, would he repent at leisure? A dead Koo Davis would make no more tapes, of course, but he’d still be usable as a counter in the negotiations. The other side needn’t know of his death until it was all over. And mightn’t it be better, simpler all around, for Koo Davis to be dead? In imagination now, Mark saw himself not enter the room, not save Davis’ life, but instead close the door, walk away, and never tell anyone he’d been down there that night.

There was nothing personal about it. There was nothing personal in it. The fact that Davis had been Mark’s choice of subject—so subtly inserted into Peter’s mind during the early discussions that