The Eiger Sanction (25 page)

“Let's get the little fish out of the pond first, Hemlock, so we can clear the field of fire.”

Jonathan crossed his arms and leaned against the wall by the door. “Let's mix any metaphors you want.”

Pope glanced at his first note card. “You wouldn't have any news about the whereabouts of active 365/55—a certain Jemima Brown, would you?”

“I would not.”

“You better be telling it like it is, pal. Mr. Dragon would be mucho pissed off to discover that you'd harmed her. She was just following our orders. And now she's disappeared.”

Jonathan reflected on the fact that Jemima was in the village and that he would be meeting her within the hour. “I doubt that you'll ever find her.”

“Don't make book on it, baby. SS has a long arm.”

“Next card?”

Pope slipped the top card to the bottom of the pack and glanced at the next. “Oh, yeah. You really left us with a mess, baby.”

Jonathan smiled, a gentle calm in his eyes. “That's twice you've called me 'baby.' ”

“That's kind of a burr under your blanket, isn't it?”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” Jonathan admitted with quiet honesty.

“Well, that's just tough titty, pal. The days are long gone when we had to worry about your feelings.”

Jonathan took a long breath to contain his feelings, and he asked, “You were saying something about a mess?”

“Yeah. We had teams all over that desert trying to find out what happened.”

“And did you?”

“The second day we came across the car and that guy you blew out of it.”

“What about the other one?”

“Miles Mellough? I had to leave before we found him. But I got word just before I left New York that one of our teams had located him.”

“Dead, I presume.”

“Plenty dead. Exposure, hunger, thirst. They don't know which he died of first. But he was beaucoup dead. They buried him out on the desert.” Pope snickered. “Weird thing.”

“Weird?”

“He must have been real hard up for chow there toward the last.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He ate a dog.”

Jonathan glanced down.

Pope went on. “You know how much it cost us? That search? And keeping the whole thing quiet?”

“No. But I assume you'll tell me.”

“No, I won't. That information's classified. But we get a little tired of the way you irregulars burn money like it was going out of style.”

“That's always been a burr under your blanket, hasn't it, Pope? The fact that men like me earn more for one job than you get in three years.”

Pope sneered, an expression his face seemed particularly designed for.

“I admit that it would be more economical,” Jonathan said, “if you SS regulars did your own sanctioning. But the work requires skill and some physical courage. And those qualities are not available on government requisition forms.”

“I'm not pissed about the money you're making on this particular job. This time you're going to earn it, baby.”

“I was hoping you'd get around to that.”

“You've already guessed—a big university professor like you must have guessed by now.”

“I'd enjoy hearing it from you.”

“Whatever turns you on. It's different strokes for different folks, I guess.” He flicked to the next card. “Search has drawn a blank on your target. We know he's here. And he's on this climb with you. But we don't know which one for sure.”

“Miles Mellough knew.”

"Did he tell you?'

“He offered to. The price was too high.”

“What did he want?”

“To live.”

Pope looked up from the note card. He did his best to appear coldly professional as he nodded in sober understanding. But the cards fell from his knee, and he had to paw around to collect them.

Jonathan watched him with distaste. “So you've set me up to make the target commit himself, right?”

“No other way, buddy-boy. We figured the target would recognize me on sight. And now he has you spotted as a Sanction man. He's got to take a crack at you before you get him. And when he does, I have him identified.”

“And who would do the sanction, if he got me?” Jonathan looked Pope over leisurely. “You?”

“You don't think I could handle it?”

Jonathan smiled. “In a locked closet, maybe. With a grenade.”

“Don't bet on that, buddy. As it happens, we're going to bring in another Sanction man to do the job.”

“I assume this was your idea?”

“Dragon OK'd it, but it came from me.”

Jonathan's face was set in his gentle combat smile. “And it really doesn't matter that you've blown my cover, now that I have decided to stop working for you.”

“That is exactly the way it crumbles.” Pope was enjoying his moment of victory after so many years of smarting under Jonathan's open disdain.

“What if I just walk away and forget the whole thing?”

“No way, pal. You wouldn't get your hundred thousand; you'd lose your house; we'd confiscate your paintings; and you'd probably do a little time for smuggling them into the country. How does it feel to be in a box, pal?”

Jonathan crossed to pour himself a Laphroaig. Then he laughed aloud. “You've done well, Pope. Really very well! Want a drink?”

Pope was not sure how to handle this sudden cordiality. “Well, that's mighty white of you, Hemlock.” He laughed as he received his glass. “Hey, I just said that was mighty white of you. I'll bet this Jemima Brown never said that to you. Right?”

Jonathan smiled beautifically. “No. As a matter of fact, she never did.”

“Hey, tell me. How is that black stuff? Good, eh?”

Jonathan drank off half his glass and sat in a chair opposite Pope's, leaning toward him confidentially. “You know, Pope, I really ought to tell you in advance that I intend to waste you a little.” He winked playfully. “You would understand that, in a case like this, wouldn't you?”

“Waste me? What do you mean?”

“Oh, Just West Side slang. Look, if Dragon would rather I did the sanction myself—and I assume he would—I'm going to need a little information. Go over the Montreal thing with me. There were two men involved in the hit on whatshisname, right?”

“His name was Wormwood. He was a good man. A regular.” Pope flipped through several cards and scanned one rapidly. “That's right. Two men.”

“Now, you're sure of that? Not a man and a woman?”

“It says two men.”

“All right. Are you sure Wormwood wounded one of the men?”

“That's what the report said. One of the two men was limping when he left the hotel.”

“But are you sure he was wounded? Could he have been hurt earlier? Maybe in a mountain accident?”

“The report said he limped. Why are you asking? Was one of your people hurt in some kind of accident?”

“Karl Freytag says he hurt his leg in a short fall last month.”

“Then Freytag could be your man.”

“Possibly. What else have the Search people dragged up about our man?”

“Almost nothing. Couldn't have been a professional. We'd have gotten a line on him by now, if he were a professional.”

“Could he have been the one who cut Wormwood open?”

“Maybe. We always assumed Kruger did the actual cutting. It's his kind of thing. But it could have been the other way, I suppose. Why?”

“One of the climbers had the capacity to kill a man with a knife. Very few people can do that.”

“Maybe he's your man. Whoever it was, he has a weak stomach.”

“The vomit on the floor?”

“Right.”

“A woman might do that.”

“There's a woman in this?”

“Bidet's wife. She could have worn male clothing. And that limp might have been anything—a twisted ankle coming down the stairs.”

“You got yourself quite a can of worms there, baby.”

For some perverse reason, Jonathan enjoyed drawing Pope along the mental maze he had wandered through for the last two nights. “Oh, it's more a can of worms than you think. Considering that this whole affair centers on a formula for germ warfare, it's kind of interesting that one of these men owns a company that makes aerosol containers.”

“Which one?”

“Bidet.”

Pope leaned forward, his eyes squeezed up in concentration. “You might be onto something there.”

Jonathan smiled to himself. “I might be. But then, another of them is in the business of making insecticides—and there is reason to believe that they made nastier things during the war.”

“One of the two of them, right? Is that the way you figure it?” Pope looked up suddenly, the light of an idea in his eyes, “or maybeboth of them!”

“That's a possibility, Pope. But then—why? Neither of them needs the money. They could have hired the thing done. Now the third climber—Meyer—he's poor. And he needed money to make this climb.”

Pope nodded significantly. “Meyer could be your man.” Then he looked into Jonathan's eyes and blushed with the angry realization that he was being put on. He tossed off the rest of his drink. “When are you going to make your hit?”

“Oh, I thought I would wait until I knew which one was the target.”

“I'll hang around the hotel until it's done.”

“No, you won't. You're going to go right back to the States.”

“No way pal.”

“We'll see. One more thing before you go. Mellough told me that you were the one who paid him for Henri Baq's sanction. Is that right?”

“We found out he was playing switchy-changey with the other side.”

“But it was you who set him up?”

“That's my job, pal.”

Jonathan nodded, a distant look in his eyes. “Well, I guess that's about it.” He rose to see Pope to the door. “You should be pleased with yourself, you know. Even though I'm the man in the box, I can't help admiring the skill with which you've set me up.”

Pope stopped in the middle of the room and looked at Jonathan narrowly, trying to decide whether he was being put on again. He decided he was not. “You know, pal? Maybe if we had given each other a chance, we might have become friends.”

“Who knows, Pope?”

“Oh. About your gun. I've got one waiting for you at the desk. A CII standard with no serial number and a silencer. It's gift wrapped in a candy box.”

Jonathan opened the door for Pope, who stepped out then turned back, bracing his weight against the frame, one hand on either side of the opening. “What was all that about 'wasting' me?”

Jonathan noticed that Pope's fingers had curled into the crack of the door. That was going to hurt. “You really want to know?”

Sensing a put-on again, Pope set his face into its toughest expression. “One thing you'd better keep in mind, baby. So far as I'm concerned, you irregulars are the most expendable things since paper contraceptives.”

“Right.”

Two of Pope's fingers broke as Jonathan slammed the door on them. When he jerked it open again, the scream of pain was in Pope's eyes, but it did not have time to get to his throat. Jonathan grabbed him by his belt and snatched him forward into an ascending knee. It was a luck shot. Jonathan felt the squish of the testicles. Pope doubled over with a nasal grunt that spurted snot onto his chin. Jonathan grasped the collar of his coat and propelled him into the room, driving his head against the wall. Pope's knees crumpled, but Jonathan dragged him to his feet and snapped the checked sports coat down over his arms before he could pass out. Jonathan guided Pope's fall so that he toppled face down across the bed, where he lay with his face in the mattress and his arms pinned to his sides by the jacket. Jonathan's thumbs stiffened as he sighted the spot just below the ribs where the kidneys could be devastated.

But he did not drive the thumbs in.

He paused, confused and suddenly empty. He was going to let Pope go. He knew he was going to, although he could hardly believe it. Pope had arranged Henri Baq's death! Pope had set him up as a decoy! Pope had even said something about Jemima.

And he was going to let Pope go. He looked down at the crumpled form, at the silly sports coat, at the toed-in flop of the unconscious legs, but he felt none of the cold hate that usually sustained him in combat. For the moment, something was missing in him.

He rolled Pope over and went into the bathroom, where he dipped a towel into the toilet, holding it by one end until it was sodden. Back in the room, he dropped the towel over Pope's face, the shock of the cold water producing an automatic convulsion in the unconscious body. Then Jonathan poured himself a small Laphroaig and sat in the chair again, waiting for Pope to come around.

With an unmanly amount of strangled groaning, Pope eventually regained consciousness. He tried twice to sit up before succeeding. The total of his pain—the fingers, the groin, the throbbing head—was so great that he could not tug his jacket back up. He slid off the bed and sat on the floor, bewildered.

Jonathan spoke quietly. “You're going to be all right, Pope. For a few days, you may walk a little oddly, but with proper medical attention you'll be just fine. But you won't be of any use here. So you're going to go back to the States as soon as possible. Do you understand that?”