Bleeding Hearts (48 page)

I lay flat facing the cabin and started firing, only to have the magazine die on me. It took a few seconds to reload, by which time another thwump had signalled a fresh grenade. I crawled again. The blast was a lot closer this time. It closed off my eardrums and rattled my head. I rolled and kept rolling, bits of earth and tree-bark raining down on me. There was nothing but a mute hissing in my ears, and somewhere behind it the distant firing of guns.

I tried to shake my head clear, and realised something had hit me. A rock or something. My left arm felt numb from the impact. I bit my fingers, trying to force some sensation back into them. Then got on to my feet and started firing again. There were bodies in front of me, three of them. They were lifeless. Two I had hit on the porch, and another hit since then, I couldn’t say by whom.

Then I saw another figure darting through shadow. I put the night-sight to my eye and made out Spike. He knew I could see him, and gave an OK sign with thumb and forefinger. Not that he could see me, but he gave it anyway. I fired another spray towards the cabin. There were no more thwumps, which meant that Kline only had the two grenades. Now I could hear a woman shrieking, and hear two men shouting. I checked over to my right with the night-sight, but there was no sign of Bel.

Then the cabin door flew open, and Alisha came stumbling out.

‘Don’t shoot!’ she yelled. ‘I’m not armed or anything!’ She was wailing, and holding her arm. It looked like she’d been winged.

‘Everybody else out of the cabin!’ I called. My voice sounded firm enough, from what I could hear of it. ‘Out of the cabin
now!’

Spike had come forward and was yelling Bel’s name. There was no answer.

‘Go find her,’ I ordered, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I took a slow-burn flare out of my pocket, stuck it in the ground, and lit it, moving away immediately. Spike was moving towards the side of the cabin. A man appeared at the cabin door. It was Jeremiah Provost. He had his hands up. Now that the flare was lighting up the scene, I saw he had blood on his white shirt. But it was a smear, nothing more, and I guessed it to be not his blood but Alisha’s.

‘Lie on the ground, Alisha,’ I ordered. ‘Why don’t you join her, Provost?’

‘Who are you?’ He wasn’t moving. ‘What do you want?’

There was a sudden pistol shot, and Spike slumped to the ground. I moved towards him, then realised my mistake. I half-turned in time to see Alisha drawing a gun from beneath her. I shot her in the head with the Colt. One shot was all it took.

Then I turned again, and saw Kline stepping over Spike’s body. He had his pistol pointed at my head. I ducked down, firing as I did so. His body fell forwards and landed on the ground. From behind him stepped Bel. Wisps of smoke were rising from the barrel of her pistol. The back of his head was matted with blood where she’d hit him.

She collapsed to her hands and knees and threw up on the ground.

‘Are there any of them left, Bel?’

She managed to shake her head. I turned the Colt to Provost. He’d come down the cabin steps and was kneeling over Alisha.

‘Why?’ he said, repeating the word over and over again. I left him there and checked the cabin. It was empty. The back window Kline had climbed out of stood wide open. Smells of forest and cordite were mixed in the air. I walked back out, and found Bel sitting on the ground next to Spike. She was stroking his forehead.

‘He’s alive,’ she said. ‘Should we move him?’

‘We may have to.’

I took a look. There was warm sticky blood all over his chest. He’d taken a clean hit in the front and out the back. If he’d been a little further away, the bullet might have stuck or burst open inside him. I didn’t know whether he’d live.

‘You got a stretcher here?’ I said to Provost. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes, and mouthed the word ‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why. Because she had a gun. Why did she have a gun? Because she wasn’t a Disciple of Love, she was working for Kline, the way Nathan was. Did you know Nathan was Kline’s brother? Did you know he was Nathan
Kline?
No?’ Provost shook his head. ‘It’s in the files in your own office. How come your beloved Alisha didn’t tell you? Work it out for yourself, but first tell me if you’ve got a first aid kit and a fucking stretcher!’

He stared at me. ‘No stretcher,’ he said. ‘There’s first aid stuff in the office.’

I turned to Bel. ‘Go fetch it.’ Spike was breathing in short painful gasps, but he was breathing. I went over to him again. His eyes were closed in concentration. He was concentrating on sticking around.

‘Spike,’ I said, ‘remember, you can’t afford to die. I suppose I better tell you the truth, Spike. There aren’t
any
guns in heaven.’

He almost smiled, but he was concentrating too hard.

I went back to Provost and stood over him.

‘Time to talk,’ I said.

‘Talk? We could have talked without
this.’

‘Not my choice, Provost, Kline’s choice. Your man’s choice.’

‘My man?’ He spoke like his mouth was full of bile. ‘Kline wasn’t my man.’

‘Then who was he?’

‘He used to work for the NSC. Have you heard of them?’

‘A bit.’

‘They retired him after an accident.
I
was the accident.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will.’ He stood up. ‘You really think Alisha was working for Kline?’

‘It doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.’

He glowered at me. ‘Don’t patronise me, Mr West. Kline told me about you. He said you were coming after me. He failed to specify why.’

‘Questions, that’s all.’

He turned away from me and sat on the cabin steps, holding his head in his hands. ‘Fire away,’ he said without looking up.

Fire away? I hardly knew where to begin. Bel had returned with the first aid kit and was starting to staunch Spike’s bleeding. I walked over to the steps and stood in front of Provost. I’d taken Sam Clancy’s recording walkman from my pocket, and switched it on.

‘A woman was killed in London,’ I said. ‘Her name was Eleanor Ricks. She was a journalist, investigating the Disciples of Love.’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘You didn’t sanction her killing?’

‘No.’

‘Then Kline acted alone.’

Now he looked up at me. ‘You killed her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then answer me a question. Why would Kline need to pay someone to do the job when he had his own hired army?’

It was a good question. So good, in fact, that I didn’t have an answer ...

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You tell me.’

Provost smiled. ‘I can’t tell you. I can only tell you what Kline told me. He doesn’t
know
why you’ve been snooping around. He didn’t order any assassination, and he, too, was wondering who did. When you started asking questions, you became a threat.’

‘He’s had journalists killed, hasn’t he? He had Sam Clancy shot.’

‘Kline didn’t have much of a conscience, if that’s what you’re saying.’

‘But what was he trying to protect? Why was he shielding you?’

‘Money, Mr West, what else? Oh, I don’t mean I was paying him. I mean
he
paid
me,
and he’s been paying for that mistake ever since.’ He glanced down at Kline’s body. ‘He paid most dearly tonight.’

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘Kline worked for a part of the NSC involved with funding the Nicaraguan Contras. This was back in the mid-80s. He managed to wheedle ten million dollars out of ... I don’t know, the Sultan of somewhere, some Middle Eastern country. At this time, I had a little money. Elderly relatives kept dying. I got bored attending so many funerals. I liked to keep my money my own business, so I held an account in Switzerland.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was quite a coup for Kline, getting so much money for the Contras, but he didn’t exactly know what to do with it. Someone at the NSC, I’m not saying it was Colonel Oliver North, suggested holding it in a bank account until it could be disposed of as intended.’

‘A Swiss bank account?’

‘The NSC held just such an account. Only the gods of fate and irony stepped in. Kline copied the details of the account down wrongly. I can’t recall now exactly why I decided to check the state of my account, but I telephoned Switzerland one Thursday morning their time, and was told the exact amount I had on deposit. It seemed larger than I remembered, about ten million larger. I asked my account manager how much notice I had to make of a large withdrawal.’

Provost stopped there.

‘You took out the whole ten mil?’

‘No, in the end I merely transferred it to a new account.’

‘Christ.’

‘It was Kline’s mistake. He was sent to reason with me — no matter how discreet Swiss banks are, the NSC has ways of tracking people down. We came to a compromise. I handed back half the money. The other half I kept.’

‘And he went along with that?’

‘He didn’t have much choice.’

‘He could have killed you.’

Provost smiled. ‘The NSC weren’t mentioned in my will, Mr West. He still wouldn’t have gotten the money. Besides which, his superiors were furious with him. They couldn’t possibly sanction something so messy.’

‘So they booted him out?’

‘No, they booted him into the shadows. His remit was to make sure no one ever got to learn about the whole thing.’

‘And that meant stopping reporters from snooping too deeply?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which is why Eleanor Ricks had to be stopped.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve already told you, Kline denied it. And he went on denying it.’

‘Then it doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe someone else hired your services.’

‘Yes, but I’ve ...’

He saw what I was thinking. ‘You’ve come all this way and killed all these people, and you’re no further forward?’

I nodded. My mind was reeling. I’d got most of my hearing back, but it didn’t matter, I could hardly take any of it in.

‘Two digits, that’s what did it,’ Provost was saying. ‘Kline wasn’t much of a typist. He transposed two of the digits on the account number. And in doing so, the NSC paid for the Disciples of Love.
That,
Mr West, is why they had to keep it quiet. They’d funded a religious cult, and the interest on their money is still funding it.’

‘Where’s the proof?’

‘Oh, I have proof.’

‘Where?’ I wasn’t sure I believed him, not completely. There had to be something more. He looked to be having trouble with his memory, so I tickled his chin with the Colt.

‘Remember what I do for a living, Provost.’

‘How can I forget? There are papers in my wall safe, and copies with my lawyer.’

Maybe it was the word ‘lawyer’ that did it. I almost felt something click in my head.

‘You’re going to open your safe for me.’

‘It’s not here, it’s in my home in Seattle.’

‘Fine, we’ll go there.’

‘I want to stay here. The combination’s easy to find. I can never remember it myself, so I keep it written on a pad beside the telephone. It’s marked as an Australian telephone number.’

I knew I had to see it for myself. I had to hold some proof of his story in my hands. Even then, it wouldn’t be enough. I’d come through all this, and dragged Bel and Spike with me, and still there was no answer, not that Provost could provide.

A shot rang out. I spun round with the Colt. The guard had crawled from where Spike must have left him. There was blood all down his front. I didn’t make things much worse by snuffing out what life he had left. I’d robbed him of a few minutes, that was all.

But when I turned back to Provost, I saw that he’d taken a shot to the heart. The guard had been aiming at him, not me. Suicide orders from Kline, no doubt. I eased the body on to the ground. Bel barely glanced up from her work. She’d patched Spike up as best she could.

‘He’s still losing blood,’ she said. After feeling for Provost’s pulse and finding none, I walked over to her. Then I saw the car between the cabins. Its rear windscreen had been shattered, but when I went to look, it had its tyres intact. I felt in Kline’s pockets and drew out the keys, then reversed the car into the clearing.

With Bel’s help we got Spike into the back of the car. He groaned and winced a little, so I repeated my warning to him about gun heaven. Then we got in the car and drove off.

‘What are we going to do?’ Bel asked.

‘Get Spike to hospital.’

‘But after that? I heard what that man said back there. He was telling us we’d come all this way for nothing. He was saying all those people died ... and my father died ... for nothing.’

I looked at her. She was crying. ‘Maybe he was lying. Maybe ... I don’t know.’