The Favor (18 page)

The black Mercedes was parked just where it
had been the night before, and Guinness found a place where he
could lie down behind the cover of some bushes—when the fireworks
started, those rubber plant leaves wouldn’t offer him much
protection, but at least the bad guys wouldn’t spot him the second
they stepped out the door. The ground was reasonably flat there; he
could lie prone, making as small a target as possible. It was about
seventy feet from the car, a bad distance for the shotgun, even
with the choke tightened to full. He wished to hell he had a good
old fashioned 30-06 hunting rifle, but it was too late now; there
had been no way of knowing how the setup would look inside
Flycatcher’s compound, and a shotgun was better if you had to go up
against several men at once. Anyway, seventy feet was a bad
distance for pistols too—he supposed he was permitted to hope there
wouldn’t be much in the way of automatic weapons to contend
with.

Forty feet from the front door to the car.
How fast could a man cover that distance, running for his life? So
there wasn’t going to be much time, either. Wonderful—better and
better.

For a brief while, sitting over his smoked
tuna, he had considered taking some electrical wire and twisting it
around the two door handles to anchor them together. That would
have slowed down anybody trying to climb inside to safety and would
have ensured him of all the time he needed—it would have been like
having them at the end of a target range. But he had finally
discarded the idea. It was one more chance to get caught; the risks
were simply unreasonable. And even in the hoped for confusion they
might spot it.

Guinness laid his shotgun down on the ground,
careful to find a spot where he wouldn’t have to worry about dirt
jamming the mechanism, and circled around again to the back of the
house.

Now, of course, the idea was to get everybody
out, and to prevent them from using the back door. As he sat
squatting in the undergrowth, filling up his tequila bottles with
gasoline, he thought about how he was going to manage to do that
without spending so much time back there that he would miss the
main show up front. And manage not to get himself killed in the
bargain—he would have to be standing right out there in the open,
all the time he was trying to con Flycatcher into believing there
was a regular posse assembled in the bushes beyond his swimming
pool.

And how the hell long was the burn time on a
gasoline bomb anyway? He didn’t much relish the prospect of having
one of them blow up in his hand and turn him into a six-foot
candle.

Five was too many, too chancy. He would
settle for three. One at the back door, where the flames would lick
up over the tip of the shingle roof and set it going, turning the
whole area, hopefully, into an inferno; one through the window of
what looked like the front room; and the last right through
Flycatcher’s bedroom window—at least, he hoped it was Flycatcher’s
bedroom. Three bottles, and a fourth one with just the gas soaked
rag stopper that he could use to light the others—that might save a
few seconds’ fumbling with the damn cigarette lighter, and seconds
were what mattered. It was all he had—the moment, or two, of
paralyzed distraction, the brief few instants while they tried to
sort out what was being done to them.

He carried the bottles with him, setting them
down at intervals as he made his careful way across the stone
patio, keeping almost to the edge of the swimming pool, along a
line that ran parallel to the back of the house and about
thirty-five feet away. When he stood opposite the back door, with
the last of the gasoline bombs on the ground between his feet, he
took out his small, bright red, plastic butane cigarette lighter
and applied its half inch of flame to the rag stopper of the fourth
bottle. His heart was pounding as he watched it kindle, and he kept
wondering why the floodlights hadn’t gone on yet, why he wasn’t
already lying on the stones with six or seven bullet holes in
him—surely they could hear the racket his heart was making. Surely
they could hear his breathing. These two seemed to him the loudest
sounds in the world.

He put the lighter back in his pocket, picked
up the gasoline bomb in his left hand—his throwing arm—and lit it
against the orangish yellow flash of the burning rag. Glancing back
the way he had come, he could see the two other bottles, just
catching a trace of reflected light from somewhere, just barely
visible.

Then he caught his breath, concentrating all
his attention on the back door, as if it were the only object in
the universe, and threw.

The bottle sailed dimly through the dark air,
just a sputtering little point of flame, and then, in an explosion
that shattered the quiet night, turning it in an instant into such
a murky dawn as the world might know on its final day, that whole
part of the building was suddenly a sheet of fire.

Guinness stood watching, transfixed for some
fraction of a second, and then started running toward the next
bottle. Sweeping it up, he lit it, fixed himself to the ground, and
threw again. This time he didn’t wait—he could hear the crash of
the window shattering and, out of the corner of his eye, the ball
of white fire. He could even hear the alarm ringing. By then he had
the last bottle. He lit it, threw, and ran for the cover of the
undergrowth. He didn’t have to see now—he knew it had gone
home.

As an afterthought, an idea out of nowhere,
he took the revolver from his belt and fired a couple of rounds
through the broken bedroom window, through the smoke that was
pouring out of it now, not even hoping to hit anyone. He just
wanted to make more noise. He just wanted to rattle the sons of
bitches.

“FLYCATCHER!!” It was his own voice, but he
could barely believe the sound of it. “COME OUT AND DIE, YOU
BASTARD. . . FLYCATCHERRR!”

He didn’t wait around. The house was an
inferno—it must have been bedlam in there. They wouldn’t have much
time to think, and they couldn’t stay inside more than another
quarter of a minute or so, not if they wanted to leave alive, so
Guinness ran around through the protected border toward the front.
They would have to come out through the front. The whole rear of
the house was going up like a funeral pyre, and they would have to
assume the attack was coming from that direction. No, it would have
to be the front for them. They would have to see that as their best
chance. They would have to.

And so he waited, flat on the ground with the
shotgun brought up against his shoulder; he waited through what
seemed like the rest of the decade. He lay there, trying to will
the door to open.

Come on, you sons of bitches, come to
papa.

And then it did open, swinging wide as if of
its own weight. They weren’t going to just come rushing out; they
weren’t that dumb. They would expect an ambush.

And then one man, moving with his head down,
as low to the ground as he could manage, started to make a dash for
the black Mercedes—they would go for the Mercedes; it was the
closest, and those armored doors would beckon to them like their
mothers’ arms. Guinness took aim, and then let him go. The man
scrambled for the front door on the passenger’s side, pulling it
open and diving out of sight behind it in what seemed like a single
movement. That was all right. Guinness could wait. He wanted
Flycatcher, not just some faceless foot soldier. There was no point
in giving his position away. He could wait.

Come on, baby—what’s keeping you?

They did it the right way. Guinness was
almost caught off guard when the rest of them—one, two, three, four
of them, with Flycatcher right in the middle, protected by the
bodies of his minions—the whole mob made their run for the open car
door. Guinness let them get about fifteen feet, as close as he
dared, before he opened fire.

It was too far—it was just too far. It didn’t
allow you to make sure of them, not at that range. You couldn’t be
absolutely sure of your kill.

The first shot caught the lead man in the
abdomen. He didn’t even have time to scream; he just dropped to the
ground as if some giant hand had swatted him down like an
insect—whether he was dead or not there was no saying. The others
almost fell over him, but Flycatcher never even broke stride.

There he was, looking tall even while he ran
hunched over. All Guinness could see was the white hair, nothing of
the face. He just kept on running, closing on the car door, running
because he knew he was the only target. The poor sucker was still
in his pajamas.

The head? Should he go for the head? No, too
much chance of missing at that distance. Guinness fired once more,
at the middle of what he could see, taking in everything from the
knees to the middle of the chest, and there was a little explosion
just at Flycatcher’s hip as the cloth of his drawers went flying
away and a long red smear instantly appeared halfway down his
thigh.

And then once more, but it was too fast and
the shot was wild. It seemed to catch him somewhere in the chest,
and there was more blood, and Flycatcher stumbled and looked up.
And the expression on his face said that he believed he was already
a dead man.

But somehow, in the instant before Guinness
could bring the shotgun back down to aim again, Flycatcher had made
it to the car. Maybe he did it on his own, maybe one of his men
helped him—Guinness would never know. In either ease, the door
slammed shut, and the car started backing away, like a frantic
animal. And then it whipped around, faster than you would have
thought such a big car could turn, and then it was gone.

“No. NO!”

There was one man they had left behind, and
he raised his hands in supplication, looking around in front of him
to find where the shots had come from, searching for someone with
whom to plead for his life.

Sorry, pal. Not a chance. Guinness stood up
and stepped from behind the cover of his rubber plant leaves. The
man watched him, his face blank, and then his eyes widened with
horror as Guinness raised the shotgun. Probably he never heard the
explosion.

No one else came out of the house. If there
had been any more inside, they were dead. Guinness looked at the
two still corpses on the ground, and then at the bloody tire track
that made a dark smear glistening in the light from the burning
house. It was Flycatcher’s blood, and there was a lot of it, so
maybe he had been dead even then, even as somehow he managed to get
inside the car. If not, then he would die quickly enough. Maybe he
would die. Maybe the earth would be free of that encumbrance.

Guinness wiped off the shotgun and left it
behind, wedged under the arm of one of the two dead men who lay
twisted there before him, their faces to the asphalt. In a few
minutes, no more than that, the house would be a smoldering ruin,
and by then he would be gone, swallowed up again by the darkness
like a damned soul.

10

But, of course, Flycatcher hadn’t died,
although for a while it had looked that way. For several months
there had been no word of him. No one had spotted him—he seemed to
have fallen off the face of the earth—and the Company had just
about made up its collective mind to transfer his dossier to the
inactive file. But Guinness wouldn’t hear of it.

“He’s just gone to ground,” he would say.
“He’s nursing his wounds somewhere, but he’s alive. I know when
I’ve killed a man, and I haven’t killed that one—he’ll be
back.”

And, if asked, he could give you good enough
reasons to suppose he was right. After all, Flycatcher had always
employed a lot of very heavy talent—had there been any sudden glut
on the thug market? You didn’t see a lot of guys standing around on
street corners, idly cleaning their AK-47s while they waited for
offers of employment. People like that tend to make themselves
highly visible when they want something, and the rumor mill was
quiet. The organization was holding together, Guinness would tell
them. The troops were just waiting for their captain to mend.

That was what he would say, and there was
every reason to suppose he believed it. But it wasn’t the real
reason he kept going down to the film room to comb through the
archives for every ten second cutting of every goon said to have
taken Flycatcher’s shilling. It was a feeling, almost a
superstition, that he would have known if this particular Nemesis
had really bled to death on the front seat of his armor plated
Mercedes. They were like Siamese twins, Flycatcher and he, and he
would have felt some change within himself if the world had been
relieved of that burden.

And he felt nothing. There was no release. So
Flycatcher was alive.

And then, of course, it was confirmed.

“He’s back,” Tuttle had said over lunch in a
seafood restaurant in Baltimore, whither he had driven, on his own
time, apparently for no other reason than to break the bad news to
his friend Guinness. “He was spotted the day before yesterday in
Montreal—we almost managed to collar him, but he got away. I’m
sorry, Ray, but I don’t think it comes as much of a surprise.”

“No. It’s no surprise.”

And then, when they had finished their soft
shell crabs and were walking out to the parking lot, just as Ernie
Tuttle was about to open the door of his car and drive off to
resume his life in the vast bureaucracy of the United States
intelligence establishment, Guinness took him by the arm, holding
him just firmly enough to command his friend’s undivided
attention.

“I want him, Ernie—you understand me? When
you’ve got even half a lead, he’s got to be all mine. I won’t take
no for an answer.”

So the hunt had continued. A dozen times, in
Madrid and Belfast and Tunis and the mountain resorts of the Swiss
Alps, over and over and for months, Guinness would find himself a
week, or a day, or sometimes just a few hours behind his quarry.
The trail was always just cold enough, as if Flycatcher knew he was
there and was trying to tease him.