'No, Duane Insolers wouldn't tell us that, Lady Rawlings?'
'No, I don't know any such person!' she snapped, clearly angry now. 'You all have to leave this minute! If you don't, I'll call the police!'
I looked toward the car, motioned for Garth and Veil to present our calling card. The woman seemed numb. She had placed her hands back on her face, pressed against her cheeks, and she didn't protest when Garth and Veil got out of the car. They went to the rear of the Saab, opened the trunk, and pulled out a thoroughly dispirited Duane Insolers. They removed their belts from his wrists and ankles, and each firmly took hold of one of his arms as they marched him across the driveway to where we stood. Insolers seemed very different now from the man who had defied death in an attempt to get us to turn back; he looked defeated, and he averted his gaze as the woman shot him a fiery, accusing look.
'Duane,' Jan Rawlings said softly, 'what have you done?'
'Jan,' Insolers murmured, 'I can't tell you how sorry I am. I tried to stop them from coming here.'
The woman's initial shock had turned to outrage and seething anger, which now shimmered in her voice. 'Duane, what have you told these people?'
'Nothing. Be careful what you say, Jan.'
'Four strangers show up at my home to ask about Chant, they pull you out of the trunk of their car, and you tell me to be careful what I say? You've done something terrible, Duane. How could you? He trusted you completely.'
I looked at Insolers, who had begun nervously glancing around us, and up at the sky. He, too, had seen the helicopters. 'Damn,' I said quietly. 'So you're a friend of his too, part of the inner circle, just like Bo Wahlstrom, Gerard Patreaux, the Nicaraguan woman, and God knows how many other people in important places. If you'd told me that in the beginning, it would have saved us all a lot of trouble. What the hell are you up to?' When he didn't answer, I turned to the woman. 'Is he here, Lady Rawlings? We're not hunting him like the others. We know he's not what most people think he is. We won't betray him, or you, but I have to talk to him. Maybe we can help each other.'
'No, he's not here,' the woman said coldly.
'Jan-!'
'Shut up, Duane. You've already done enough damage with your mouth, and we're not going to be able to lie our way out of it. I'm not as good a liar as you are.'
'Will he be coming here eventually, Lady Rawlings?' I asked quietly, glancing at Insolers, who was continuing to scan the sky.
'I don't know,' the woman sighed. 'Who are you people? What do you want?'
'It's a long story which I'd love to tell you, Lady Rawlings. I'd very much like to hear your story too.'
'They're here, Jan,' Insolers said, his voice firmer now, unapologetic, 'and they're not going away until they hear what we have to say. It's true that they can be trusted. We all have to talk, and I suggest we go inside. Also, the car should be moved out of sight.'
Jan Rawlings sighed resignedly. 'I'll have someone put the car around in the back,' she said, heading up the stairs and motioning for us to follow her. 'Welcome to my home.'
'I met Chant in New York,' the beautiful, brown-eyed woman said as she poured Earl Grey tea into fine blue china cups. After hearing our story, she no longer seemed angry or shocked, but had become warm and courteous toward us. I suspected that Harper, with her decidedly warm and reassuring presence, had more than a little to do with Jan Rawlings' change of attitude. I was glad my snake-charming love was with us. Also, although it could well turn out to be an illusion, I felt safer within the thick stone walls of the castle.
She finished pouring, sat down next to Harper, across from Veil and me, on the semicircular sofa in the center of the castle's massive, two-story-high library that came complete with two walk-in fireplaces. 'Of course, he wasn't using his real name. He told me his name was Neil Alter. Even if he had said who he really was, it wouldn't have meant anything to me. I'd never heard of John Sinclair. I'd been working for the city's Human Services Department, and he'd been referred to me for job counseling.'
'And you placed him in the psychological research project at Blake College?' Harper asked, sipping at her tea.
Jan Rawlings nodded. 'Yes-as an interim measure that would allow him to make some easy money while I tried to find him a job. I would have done that with any client who had a long-term prison record, which was supposedly the case with this Neil Alter fellow. Chant, of course, knew that, which was why he had constructed Neil Alter's identity that way, and why he was in my office.'
Veil asked, 'To what end, Jan?'
'A Swedish diplomat who was Chant's friend had been killed by one of those drugged assassins Duane told you about, a killer whose services Blake had sold to somebody. Chant couldn't accept the idea that it had just been a random killing by some maniac, so he did some checking. He found out that within the space of a year there had been seven other incidents virtually identical to the one in which his friend had been killed. The killings had taken place in different countries, but all the victims were people of some importance in one way or another; all of the assassins were described by the police as crazed killers, and they had all subsequently committed suicide; all the killers were Americans who had only recently been released from American prisons. He did some more checking and found something else they all had in common: they'd all participated in the program at Blake College. He wanted to get into the project to find out what was going on. He did, through me, but then somebody recognized him.'
'Tommy Wing,' Duane Insolers said in a low voice that hummed with disgust. 'Hammerhead.'
We all turned to look at Insolers, who was standing twenty feet away looking out a window near the base of a staircase leading up to a wraparound balcony on the second floor. Now he pulled a heavy drape across the window, turned to face us.
'They knew each other in Vietnam,' he continued as he walked over to the glass table by the sofa and poured himself some tea. 'Wing was in Special Forces, and he had a very big reputation as a dangerous street fighter who liked to settle arguments with his teeth. He'd never lost a fight. He was a biter who'd absorb terrific punishment from another man's fists simply in order to get close enough for him to chomp down on an ear or nose, or any other part of a man's body he could reach. He and Chant apparently got into a hell of a battle over something, and the short of it was that Chant beat the shit out of him. They both spent some time in the hospital, but Wing was there a hell of a lot longer than Chant, and Chant was clearly the winner. It wasn't long after that when Wing was thrown out of the service on a medical discharge as a psycho. Then he bit a man to death in a bar fight, and he was shipped off to a hospital for the criminally insane. He was eventually transferred to a maximum-security prison and released on parole twenty-two years later. He was referred to the project. Blake had a decided taste for the bizarre, and Hammerhead was nothing if not bizarre. Blake pulled him out of the project and made him a bodyguard and personal aide. In the meantime, with a little help from me, Chant had made it through the selection process into the final stages of the program. That's when Hammerhead showed up one day and made him.'
Veil asked, 'With a little help from you? How did you get involved with Sinclair?'
'I didn't know who he really was any more than Jan did when she first met him. I was trying to set up a long-term ex-convict by the name of Neil Alter as a CIA asset I could run. You see, this Neil Alter character Chant had constructed had spent twenty years in prison for murder, but his sentence had been commuted when new evidence had turned up indicating he might be innocent. Only prison time, not guilt or innocence, was the criterion for getting into Blake's program, but the fact that he had been wrongfully imprisoned made me think he might be a likely candidate for my mole.
'By this time the agency had a pretty good idea of what Blake was really up to with this project of his. We'd made a link between the assassins and the college program, but we still didn't know exactly how he was transforming his subjects into self-destructing killing machines. It was my job to find out. Chant and I were, in fact, on the same case, but he was way ahead of me; he was actually going into the program. I knew enough about what kind of man Blake was really looking for to be able to feed Neil Alter the right answers to certain questions on a battery of psychological tests all the subjects were required to take in the early stages. This got him passed through to the final, secret phase of the program where men who would eventually end up as drugged assassins were selected.'
'Then Tommy Wing met and recognized him,' Jan said, her voice trembling slightly. 'That's when the killing started.'