He couldn’t pin down what was alerting him now. It was pure instinct, and he couldn’t explain that to the lieutenant any more than he could explain why soldiers were comfortable with the expected sounds of combat, but that something unexpected like screaming banzai charges or the wild, thrilling music the North Koreans had used so effectively could turn seasoned troops into disorderly mobs.
It was hard to explain things like that unless you’d experienced them.
“For one thing, his strides are longer now,” Boyd said.
Then he noticed something that gave support to his previous instinctive anxiety. He moved swiftly but silently to a twisted thorn-studded Japanese angelica tree and from one of its spikes picked off a strand of coarse brown wool. Even though the cluster of threads was small, no larger than a fingertip, they exuded a rank, animal-like odor.
“Brown sweater,” Boyd said.
“The Juggler,” Tonnelli said.
“And one other thing,” Boyd said. “He wouldn’t have walked into that tree, unless he was looking over his shoulder, worried about something behind him.”
“What could have stirred him up?”
“Psychopaths usually have physical compensations.”
“Better eyes, better ears?”
“Right. So far, he’s made only one mistake. When I found my daughter’s Scottie, that gave me a direct fix on him. When I heard Kate scream, I ran toward the sound. But I could have missed it by a hundred yards or more if the dog’s body hadn’t given me the line.”
“Jesus Christ,” Gypsy Tonnelli said softly. “Colonel, compared to you, an iceberg would look like a blast furnace. How can you just stand here?”
“Because I must,” Luther Boyd said. “Let him calm down. I want my daughter alive.”
Boyd began to consider options, a tactical administration of his simple strategy. They stood presently on the east-west line of Seventy-third Street. Transverse Three to the north ran a curving course from Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street to Central Park West, Eighty-sixth Street.
“Lieutenant, do you have fifty officers in your reserve?”
“We got a hell of a lot more than that, and I’m taking a hell of a responsibility not committing them.”
Central Park was about a half mile wide. Fifty times fifty would cover it.
“Then commit fifty patrolmen to Transverse Three with transistor radios. Post them at fifty-foot intervals. Tell them to take positions north of the transverse, to take cover in shrubbery or shadows, and to turn their radios onto rock stations at full volume.”
“That going to stop the Juggler?”
“Lieutenant, we learned a bitter lesson from North Koreans on the psychology of sound in combat. We paid a stiff price for not doing enough research into troop response to unexpected audio impacts. A soldier expects artillery fire, braces himself for it. But if silence is broken by something unexpected, laughter or singing, for instance, it can bring a column of troops to a full halt.
“You used the phrase ‘a wall of cops.’ I’m proposing a wall of music. It may not stop him, but it will confuse him. He’s bracing himself for sirens, flashing dome lights, police whistles. Not music. It’s a chance to destroy his game plan, take away the north end of the park. Then we’ve got him in a box. And when we make visual contact, you can take him out with one shot.”
Tonnelli made up his mind with a figurative finger snap. Putting the two-way radio to his lips, he flipped the switch and asked quietly for Sergeant Rusty Boyle.
Chapter 16
Kate Boyd was half running to keep up with Gus Soltik’s long strides.
His huge hand was tight on the collar of her ski jacket and her breathing was labored and difficult. With a flex of his thick wrist, he could strangle her or break her neck, she knew, but an instinct for survival and the genetic temper of her father strengthened her conviction that to show signs of panic and terror or to make any attempt to struggle against him would again create that dreadful response in his body.
They must be close to Seventy-fifth Street, she thought, trying to anesthetize her torturing fear with distracting considerations. They had already passed the Bethesda Fountain in one of the southern coves of the lake. She had walked the steps to the water there many times and had had ice cream in the fountain cafe, with the smell of the fresh lake around them and the sun shining on bronze statues. Somewhere off to their right was the Conservatory Pond. She remembered a story about it. Stuart Little had won a race there at the helm of the
Luther Boyd’s estimate of the Juggler’s line of march and his eventual destination had been on the mark; the Juggler was heading north with Kate Boyd, following the East Drive toward the Receiving Reservoir, which was still almost two miles ahead of them. There he planned to swing east to avoid the precinct on Transverse Number Three, skirting the reservoir and continuing on toward the trackless sanctuaries in the jungle above Ninety-seventh Street.
But a word was forming in Gus Soltik’s mind, a word symbolizing a dangerous, frightening concept. The word that blazed now in the darkness of his mind was “coldness.” It was his surrogate for a dread expectation of shame and punishment. By people angry and loud. He couldn’t always remember who the people were, but he sensed that they were after him now.
The messages drumming on all of Gus Soltik’s physical receptors warned him that the men who would hurt him were close behind him. Above the sound of sporadic, spiraling winds he had heard someone shouting at the cars on Seventy-second Street, and that voice brought frightening memories of a powerful man with a scarred face who hated him and wanted to make him cry out in pain for mercy.
This was Gus Soltik’s deepest fear. He knew he deserved to be hurt.
(His mother and Mrs. Schultz had told him this, and they wouldn’t lie to him.) But the conditions of that punishment, consisting of relentless and endless torments whose nature he could only guess at, on occasion would pull him sharply from sleep, a moan in his throat, icy sweat on his trembling body.
He knew that he deserved to be beaten unconscious, then revived and hurt still more, but the cruelest terror was that this torture would never end, that there was no way he could be forgiven and allowed to die.
He stopped, tightening his grip on the collar of the young girl’s ski jacket, and looked back through the darkness toward Seventy-second Street.
Shadows drifted, and moonlight lay in silver patches on the ground. When he saw his big footprints in one of these pools of light and beside them the impress of the girl’s boots, he nodded then, knowing. .
Gus Soltik steered Kate through a thicket of trees at a right angle to his previous course until he came to a path formed of shale and rock.
He went north for another fifty yards, dragging the girl along behind him, leaving no trail on the hard surface of the path. The sound of their footsteps was covered by the traffic on the East Drive, which was twenty or thirty yards to their right, with automobile headlights flashing against the trees.
He was too close to the drive to feel safe. When they stopped following him, he would go back through the trees toward the lake and go north again past the boathouse to the big reservoir.
Gus Soltik sat in the shadow formed by a thicket of trees and pulled the girl down beside him. He put his airlines bag on the ground and looked at the girl.
Kate had been trying hard to control her emotions, but the effort was so physically draining that she felt faint and exhausted. There was an aching tension in her stomach, and she was afraid that at any instant she might burst into tears and begin to scream. But she knew that would be dangerous for her; she knew what that would do to him. That was one thing she was certain of.
She did not know specifically what he wanted to do to her, but her maturing sexual instincts warned her it
