In The House Of Secret Enemies

forced me to. You panicked. That was hack work, Vladimir Denosovitch. Second- rate.'

'That was a mistake,' Raskolnikov said after a long pause. There was an edge to his voice. 'Now the situation has changed. It's no longer necessary to kill you; it would serve no purpose. It is necessary that I escape.'

'You're that valuable?'

'I am that valuable. What has happened thus far should have convinced you of that.'

'Then you're as good an agent as you are a high-wire walker?'

'I leave such judgments to my superiors. I'm coming now, Frederickson. Get out of my way.'

'No!' My own voice sounded detached from me. I could only hope it carried the force I'd intended. 'You come close enough for me to see you and you'll look like Bruno Jessum.'

'You've been investigated. I know you rarely carry a gun.'

He was right, and my only chance was that he was as much a professional as he said he was. 'Wrong again, Vladimir Denosovitch. Your men couldn't have had more than five or six hours to do their checking, the time between your talk with Bethel and my show at the circus.'

'What are you talking about?' For a moment, Raskolnikov sounded almost as confused as I was scared. 'We checked you after you killed our operative.'

'Patchwork job, Vladimir Denosovitch.' I said lightly. 'You probably used local talent. If you want to stake your life on that report, go ahead. Personally, I'd rather keep you alive.'

He was thinking about it, exactly what I wanted him to do. But not too much. Talk. I had to talk.

'You know, I remember the first time I saw you, Vladimir Denosovitch. You were good then, but I must admit you're even better now …'

My tongue kept going but, in my mind, I was suddenly back in Russia.

There were sounds behind me. Raskolnikov was moving.

'The Moscow Circus is the best in the world, Vladimir Denosovitch,' I said quickly. 'Too bad you never made it.'

The shuffling stopped. I'd hit pay dirt, his pride.

'My country needed me elsewhere.'

'As a spymaster setting up and coordinating a nationwide intelligence-gathering net. Beautiful. Everybody's watching everybody else at the U.N. and the embassies while the big boss himself is off performing for the kiddies at a Saturday matinee. Beautiful, Vladimir Denosovitch! Was that your idea?'

'You're guessing,' Raskolnikov said softly. 'Most of this is your imagination.' I had a feeling our conversation was rapidly drawing to a close.

Hot flashes: Russia, city after city, command performance after command performance. Then, in the central city of Chelyabinsk, where my guide said: 'This one will be great. This one walks the wire.'

Afterward, Vladimir Denosovitch Raskolnikov and I had drunk vodka together.

'But I'm right, aren't I, Vladimir Denosovitch? You're big. As big as they come. They trained you, set you up with false residency papers and smuggled you into Florida. Your assignment was to establish an intelligence drop route corresponding to the stop route of whichever circus picked you up. That circus happened to be Statler's.'

'You're thinking out loud.' His voice seemed much closer to me now, but I couldn't turn even if I wanted to. My head and shoulders seemed part of a single granite block. It was all I could do to keep talking.

'You couldn't have begun to put all this together before a few minutes ago,' Raskolnikov continued. 'Not before you called my name.'

Which was why, now, he did have to kill me. As long as the secret of the route was safe, it could continue to expand and operate. Raskolnikov would disappear back into the vastness of Russia and somebody else would be sent to take his place. I was the only one left, besides Raskolnikov, with all the pieces to the puzzle.

'You're badly hurt, Frederickson. Very badly hurt.'

Time had run out. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Raskolnikov standing beside me, his arms wrapped around the girder on which I was leaning. There was almost a trace of sympathy in the other man's voice-sympathy and chagrin at being held up for so long by a man who couldn't even stand.

He braced himself with his legs and placed his hands on my shoulders, pushing me forward and to the side. My arms and legs were now hanging limp and useless. I could see my blood flowing out onto the girder, dripping down into the darkness.

'My brother knows,' I whispered hoarsely. 'We've been talking about this for days. He'll make the same connections and backtrack along the circus route. The ring is smashed.'

'No,' Raskolnikov said. 'There was no time. I'm sorry, Frederickson. I truly am. You are a very brave man.'

I didn't find the sincerity in his voice any comfort. It was almost over now, and I vaguely wondered whether or not I would faint before I hit the sharp wooden and steel angles of the seats below.

Then Garth's shot caught Raskolnikov in the throat. It was a good shot, considering the fact that Garth had a bad angle leaning into a half-opened window and was firing into the shadows.

Raskolnikov gargled on his way down. There was the ugly sound of a body breaking on the seats, screams, then silence. I could see Garth in front of me, struggling to get his body through the window.

Good show; but considering the fact that I was already most of the way off the girder, I didn't think he was going to get to me in time.

It was the first time I'd been wrong all day.

Rage

Slow day; anathema to a criminology professor moonlighting as a private detective. I had a graduate seminar to teach later in the afternoon, but my lecture was prepared and I was in my downtown office, staring out my second-floor window, hoping for some business to blow in off the street. I had to settle for my brother.

Someone else was driving the unmarked car, but it was Garth-all normal six feet two inches of him-who got out on the passenger's side, then walked stiffly across the sidewalk and into the building. I ran my finger over a water spot on the glass. It wasn't unusual for Garth to drop by for coffee when he was in the neighborhood, but this time there had seemed a tension-an urgency-in the way he moved that was incongruous. I went out by the elevator to meet him.

The elevator doors sighed open-Garth's face was ashen, his eyes two open wounds. He pushed past a young couple, glanced once in my direction, then rushed into my office. I went after him, closing the door behind me. He had already stripped off his jacket, and the black leather straps of his shoulder holster stood out like paint stains on the starched white of his shirt. He took the gun from its holster and slid it across my desk. 'Find a drawer for that, will you, brother?' Garth's teeth were clenched tightly together and the voice behind them trembled.

'What's the matter with you?'

'Put it away! ' Now Garth's voice boomed. His fists slammed down on the plastic surface of the desk top. A stack of books on the corner teetered and fell to the floor.

Angry men and guns make a bad mix. As a cop, Garth knew that better than anyone. I walked quickly around to the other side of the desk, opened a drawer and dropped the gun into it.

Garth sat down hard in a straight-backed wooden chair. He planted his feet flat on the floor and gripped the edges of the seat. Instantly the flesh around his knuckles went white. His head was bent forward and I couldn't see his face, but the flesh of his neck was a fiery red, gorged with blood. I could see his pulse, framed by muscle cords that looked like steel rods implanted just below the skin.

I spoke very quietly. 'You want to talk, brother?'

Garth, in some soundproofed prison of rage, couldn't hear me. He suddenly sprang to his feet, grabbed the chair and flung it across the room, snapping a pole lamp in two and mining an ugly hole in the plaster wall. The shattered pieces fell to the floor; instant junk. In the same motion Garth spun around and with one sweep of his hand cleared the top of my desk. A heavy glass ashtray made another hole in the wall about a foot too low to be a perfect match for the other. Considering the fact that my office wasn't that large to begin with, I estimated that a