“I have any trouble, I’ll scream,” I said.
“You want one of those electromagnetic bangers to cut the power?” Willie asked.
“We do that in the daytime, they’ll know I’m coming.”
“Watch yourself, Tommy,” Callie Grafton said as I closed the door and latched it.
Walking along the road felt good. I was wearing a light jacket, which was enough coat if I didn’t do any serious sitting. The truth was, I didn’t have any more sitting in me. I wanted to be up, moving, doing something. I was being nervous and silly, I knew, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was out of patience. Didn’t have a drop left.
I suppose I wasn’t thinking logically. For some reason Marisa Petrou was on my mind, and Henri Rodet. Jake Grafton didn’t want them dead, and I sure as hell didn’t want to find them in that condition.
I took some deep breaths as I walked along, trying to think.
There were three of them; they had Jean-Paul Arnaud tied to a chair in the room over the garage. They said nothing to him, merely tied him up with a rope they had with them and waited. They were armed. One of them was always at the window, looking out.
He heard steps on the stairs. A head appeared, that of a grizzled old man. Yet he came up the stairs lightly, without much effort. The old man wore a threadbare coat and baggy trousers with visible stains. He spoke to the three in Arabic.
While they were talking Arnaud heard someone else ascending the stairs. Henri Rodet!
“You bastard,” Jean-Paul hissed. “You’re in with this scum.”
The old man removed the pistol from one coat pocket and the silencer from another. In no hurry, he screwed the silencer into the barrel while Arnaud struggled against the ropes.
When the silencer was tight against the barrel, the old man pulled the slide of the Beretta back until he saw the gleam of brass, then let it go forward. Rodet watched impassively.
“This used to belong to a Mossad Kidon man. He used it to kill my son. Then I killed him. Now I use it to kill infidels.”
“Killing infidels — will that bring my brother back from the dead?”
The old man turned. Marisa was standing at the head of the stairs looking at him. He hadn’t heard her footsteps.
“Bah, woman, what do you know?” the old man hissed. He drew himself erect.
“You ask me to sell my soul — and I have obeyed because you are my father. I have a soul also, and you have never once thought of me. You think only of yourself, and vengeance. God sees! He knows.”
“You think it was easy in that Egyptian prison?” the old man asked. “They tortured us, made us scream for mercy, and they showed no mercy. Still, I believed in civilization. With all my heart I knew that the world of the French — the world of ideas, grace, beauty — all of that was superior to the mud and dirt and squalor of the Arabs. God didn’t love the Arabs more — he loved the French. I, Abu Qasim, knew the truth. So I betrayed them. Betrayed their jihad. Gave their secrets to their deadly enemies, who used them to thwart and murder the men of the faith.
“Yes, woman, I did that. I, your father. Covered my hands with the blood of the faithful, covered myself with sin that will never wash off. And God sent me a sign. He sent a Mossad killer who murdered your brother … my son. My only son, whom your mother died giving birth to. God spoke to me, and the message was blood. Evil for evil, wickedness for wickedness, betrayal for betrayal, drop by drop and dram by dram I was to suffer until the whole foul debt was paid in full!
“At long last, I listened to God. Listened and thought again, for the thousandth time, of the men I had betrayed. And I saw God’s will. I, Abu Qasim, was to take up the sword and slay the infidels. And I have. I will. I swear it on the beard of the Prophet.”
With that, he extended the pistol to arm’s length and pointed it at Jean-Paul Arnaud’s forehead.
“Allah akbar” he said, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Going over the fence in broad daylight was a little different than doing it after midnight. For one thing, the night vision goggles weren’t going to do me a lot of good. On the other hand, my unassisted eyes might. The yin and the yang…
I made sure the ray gun was on, with the capacitor charging, but left it in my pocket. If it went off accidentally I would never need a vasectomy.
As I walked I kick-started the brain. They had surveillance cameras on trees, but was anyone watching the monitor? The bugs seemed to indicate that no one was in the main house. Maybe and maybe not. If they had discovered the bugs, they might have moved them to the basement and put a radio nearby. Or the people might be camped out in the attic. Or using another building on the property— as I recalled, there was an apartment over the garage, a barn or two, and a couple of outbuildings. Or they might be sleeping off a wild night of sex and alcohol, which wasn’t very likely.
I got tired of weighing the ifs. When I came to the corner of Rodet’s property, I looked around for possible passersby or gawkers — and didn’t see any.
“I’m going over,” I said to Willie.
“Okay,” he replied. With Mrs. Grafton sitting beside him, he had apparently cleaned up his act.
I climbed the fence and worked my way over the barbed wire on top, managing to rip my trousers on a barb and put a nasty groove in the back of my thigh. I silently cussed a little, but I didn’t really mean it; I figured things would probably get worse.
I dropped onto the ground on the other side and hunkered down behind the nearest tree. “I’m over the fence.”
“Okay.”
I scanned the trees for cameras and the grounds for dogs while I probed my wound with my fingers. The dang thing stung. Fortunately I had a tetanus shot just last year. There was a camera in the tree, all right, but not a dog in sight. I twisted around for a look at the tear in my trousers and the hole in my hide, which was bleeding. Well, it wasn’t going to kill me and there was nothing I could do about it now.
I got out my ray gun and checked it. A little green light glowed on the top. No use sneaking. Trying to ignore my smarting leg wound, I trotted for the main house.
One thing was certain: If anyone was watching the video from the surveillance monitors, life was going to get interesting very quickly. I didn’t think Rodet or his hired hands would just shoot me, but they would undoubtedly loose the dogs and come looking.
I got to the wall of the house. I froze against it, listening. “I’m against the house,” I reported to Willie, who merely clicked his mike twice in reply. He was learning.
My head was on a swivel. I was in the field of view of the monitor on the corner of the house. If there was anyone watching he had to see me.
Nothing moved except the bare limbs of the trees. The leaves on the ground hadn’t been raked; they were too wet to blow around.
Where were the people?
More to the point, where were the dogs?
From where I stood I could see the main gate and portions of the long driveway that wound up through the trees and curved in behind the house. The barns, garage and dog pens were back there. I moved along the wall toward the rear of the house, detouring for shrubbery, listening…
Not even the sound of a dog barking. The wind was carrying my scent away from the dog pens, thank heavens.
In better days I would have enjoyed this. As a kid I always liked sneaking around, going places I wasn’t supposed to go, seeing things I wasn’t supposed to see, learning things that other people thought no one knew. No doubt shrinks would say I had a problem, and one did, by the way — a doc who worked for the agency. He had a serious ethical dilemma: He had to explain to the brass why I liked my work, then offer help to get my head on
