The Favor (38 page)

So he waited, crouched behind a tree, far
enough away from the edge of the cleared land so that there was no
chance of his being seen from the farmhouse. He waited with the
rifle cradled in his hands, just on the off chance that Flycatcher
might be dumb enough to show himself at a window. He crouched in
the darkness and waited for the final act.

“GUINNESS?”

He found he had actually started at the
sound—he had been expecting it, but somehow it had come as a total
surprise. He remained quiet and waited.

“GUINNESS, ARE YOU OUT THERE?”Needless to
say, no human outlines appeared framed in any of the windows—well,
he really hadn’t thought any would. Flycatcher was probably pressed
up against a wall, clutching a rifle against his chest in just the
way Guinness was. Anyway, he was inside the house—there wasn’t
going to be any ambush.

It occurred to Guinness then, as something of
a shock, that the bastard knew his name. But, after all, there
wasn’t anything to be shocked about. It was the sort of thing that
could be found out, and Flycatcher would want to know.

“I HEAR YOU, FLYCATCHER—SPEAK YOUR
PIECE.”

Was Flycatcher surprised to have gotten an
answer? Maybe so—at any rate, it was several seconds before he
spoke again.“GUINNESS? NAME YOUR TERMS.” There was a short pause,
but he wasn’t waiting for an answer—maybe he only needed to catch
his breath. “I’M SICK OF THIS. JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT AND
YOU’VE GOT IT—NO TRICKS.”

Really, it was hysterically funny. Guinness
didn’t even try not to laugh; he hoped Flycatcher could hear him.
After all this, to suggest there was any way they could keep from
going to extremes—really, if Flycatcher could imagine that, it was
too droll. But he really didn’t suppose Flycatcher imagined
anything of the kind.

“NO DEALS. YOU’RE A CORPSE, PAL. COME OUT OR
STAY WHERE YOU ARE—YOU SUIT YOURSELF. BUT EITHER WAY I KILL YOU.
COUNT ON IT—YOU’RE ALREADY A DEAD MAN.”

It was a long speech to be shouted across
maybe twentyfive yards, and he didn’t suppose Flycatcher even hung
around to hear the end of it. Probably he was already on his way,
but that, of course, had been the whole idea—on both sides.

Guinness stood up and stepped out into the
clearing. He was no longer worried that anyone would shoot at him;
it hardly even crossed his mind. The light from inside was still
streaming through the farmhouse windows, and he kept his rifle at
the ready, but it hardly seemed to make any difference. His left
hand was so swollen and tender by then that he could hardly bear to
curl his fingers around the wooden stock. Perhaps, if it came to
it, he wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. He was no longer sure,
even of that.

But no one fired at him. The farmhouse was
already empty. He had not taken half a dozen steps before he heard
the engine of a car roaring into life; Flycatcher was in a great
hurry to get away.

Almost right up to the final moment it went
exactly as Guinness had expected. The dark blue Mercedes jumped out
onto the road almost as if it had been kicked; Flycatcher must have
had the accelerator right down to the floor, because the back
wheels were shooting up great plumes of dust that hung gloomily in
the yellowish light. A good guess was that the car was up to
seventy before it had gone much over a hundred feet. The noise was
deafening.

And Flycatcher was running blind. He wouldn’t
have any desire to turn himself into a target, so he relied on the
light from the farmhouse for as long as he dared. Perhaps a hundred
and fifty yards before the night would close over him—the road
began to turn there, and the trees were right up against you; after
a hundred and fifty yards you had to turn on your headlights and
hope you were out of effective range, because you had to be able to
see where you were going.

But by then it was too late. Or perhaps
Flycatcher never even saw the mower blade. If he did, it was
probably too late even to get his foot to the brake pedal. At any
rate, watching the thing happen from a distance of about three
hundred yards, Guinness didn’t have any sense that the Mercedes had
tried to slow itself. It must have been going at close to ninety
miles an hour at impact.

There was an explosion—the front tires
blowing, presumably—swallowed up immediately in a chaos of sound.
It was ghastly—a piercing squeal as the car went into a skid, the
sound of tearing metal, a heavy rolling, another explosion, but
this time like the muttering of thunder in the restless heat of a
summer night. It was beginning to burn, and the flames parted the
darkness like a curtain, opening to you what had happened.

The Mercedes was off the road, lying on its
side against the trees, burning. In that first instant it was
almost completely engulfed in the lurid fire—the mower blade must
have been kicked up underneath and ruptured the gas tank.

Guinness began to run toward it. He dropped
his rifle and simply started to run. This was beyond anything he
had expected, beyond anything he had intended. He had to get there
while there was still time.

In a matter of minutes the fire would catch
the trees enough to be visible out on the highway. Someone would
see and call in, and trucks would come to see what was the matter
and contain the blaze. In twenty minutes, certainly no more, there
would be people everywhere, and eventually they would find the
other bodies and realize that something terrible had happened,
something they would never understand. Guinness knew that, and he
knew that by then he would be long gone, but before then he had to
get Flycatcher out of that car—he couldn’t simply let him burn to
death.

But he needn’t have worried. Flycatcher had
been thrown clear. He was lying in the road, perhaps thirty feet
from the burning car—close enough, certainly, to feel its heat—but
in a few moments he would be beyond danger from anything
mortal.

Because when he had been thrown out—or had
tried to get out—the car must have gone over on him. He was simply
smashed, smashed like a china figurine that had fallen to the
floor. He would never get up again; that he was alive at all was a
cruel joke.

Guinness knelt down beside him and took the
limp hand in both of his, trying to find a pulse. He was surprised
when the fingers closed around the ball of his thumb and the eyes
opened and looked into his face. Somehow, by some miracle,
Flycatcher was still conscious. There was still some flicker of
life in his ravaged, sunken face, a face much older than the one
Guinness had first seen in the lobby of a motel in South Carolina.
Of course, he was dying now—that might have been it.

His lips moved, as if he wanted to say
something, but Guinness couldn’t hear him over the muffled roar
from the fire and bent down until he was almost touching the dying
man’s shattered chest that jerked and quivered painfully as it
tried to catch and hold a breath of air.

“Is it enough for you?”

The question was nothing more than a whisper,
but Guinness was reasonably sure that was what he had said.

“Are you quite satisfied now?”

Whatever answer Guinness would have made, he
never had the chance. Almost as soon as Flycatcher had spoken, the
convulsed breathing was stilled. The face took on the immobility of
a stone mask, and he was gone.

21

Guinness had been in Düsseldorf for three
days, and already it was beginning to itch like crazy under the
cast on his left hand.

“Take it easy,” the Company doctor had said.
“Just make sure you exercise the fingers for twenty minutes every
day and you should regain about ninety-five percent full
function—at forty-one, you’re getting off lucky.”Well, he wasn’t
complaining. After all, the trade didn’t absolutely demand that he
be a fast-draw artist. He was alive, which was more than could be
said for a lot of people.

And Amalia Brouwer, it seemed, was going to
America. At Guinness’s insistence, they were giving her the full
treatment, the sort of thing usually reserved only for high level
defectors, which, God knew, she wasn’t. They would manufacture her
a new identity, a full history of documentation, and they would set
her up somewhere—she seemed to have taken a fancy to the idea of
California, so presumably they would put her down there—and they
would keep a loose watch on her for the first year, just to be sure
she didn’t run afoul of anything she shouldn’t. It was all
perfectly unnecessary, as Guinness had had pointed out to them more
than once—after all, Flycatcher was dead, and who the hell else
would take the slightest interest in a Dutch bookstore clerk?—but
he wanted it impressed upon her that this was to be a radical break
with her former life, that people were willing to go to a lot of
trouble to wipe the slate clean for her. Maybe then there was a
chance she’d be smart enough to keep out of mischief.

And Flycatcher really was dead. Guinness had
brought back the collection of passports—there had been five of
them, all in different names, even one of the bright red numbers
reserved for officers in the KGB—and the wallet he had lifted from
the inside pocket of a dark brown sport jacket that had already
grown stiff with blood in the heat from the burning Mercedes.

He had been received as something of a hero
when he presented himself to Teddy MacKaye at the operations desk
at the Düsseldorf consulate. His clothes were dirty and he probably
smelled bad, and his hand was blown up to the approximate size of a
baseball glove, but the man who had closed the file on Flycatcher
was entitled to a little extra consideration. And if he wanted some
little chit of a girl treated like the biggest catch since Rudolf
Hess, then so be it.

“Do you really think he was KGB?” MacKaye had
asked.

Guinness, whose hand was soaking in a bucket
of ice water, had shaken his head. No, he didn’t think so—he didn’t
think Flycatcher had ever really worked for anybody but
himself.

And MacKaye had nodded, having received the
definitive opinion on the subject. For a while there, Guinness
wouldn’t have been surprised to have had his opinions solicited on
the origins of Stonehenge; for a while, he was treated like a cross
between Captain Marvel and the Oracle of Delphi.

Of course, they weren’t quite as happy with
him when they found out about all those unexplained homicides over
which the Dutch police were scratching their heads. Eleven dead
bodies in a little under thirty-six hours were deemed to be just a
trifle more than such a small country could comfortably absorb, but
since none of the victims had been the sort of people anyone could
care about—just a little whore, a Belgian traitor, and a crowd of
foreign criminals—no one really minded very much. Flycatcher was
dead, that was the main thing, and the rest they would let
pass.

In the end, the Dutch authorities decided
that they must have come in on the tail end of some sort of gang
war. They ran ballistics tests on all the guns involved and found
that several of them were linked with other crimes, and, since the
carnage had ended as abruptly as it had begun, they were inclined
to let the matter drop. At least, that was the official story; what
they really believed was something impossible to know.

“It was a pity about Janine,” Ernie had said
when they had a chance to talk with comparative safety over the
consulate phone lines. “Did you get a chance to know her at all?
She was a hell of a girl.”

“No, I didn’t get to know her very well.” It
was only a casual reference—Janine was a white chip on Ernie’s
poker table, and people died every day. Oddly, Ernie was much more
upset about Renal. Everybody, it seemed, was upset about Renal. It
made you wonder what they had had going for them.

And that was okay with Guinness. He couldn’t
have cared less about him, but he was much more willing to talk
about Renal than about Janine, He discovered that Janine was on his
mind a good deal, and that they weren’t very happy reflections.
When the debriefings were over, he would go to London for a long
vacation while he waited for his hand to mend, and he would think
about Janine while he was there too. And maybe, finally, he would
get her out of his system. Certainly he didn’t want to talk to
anyone about her, and especially not to Ernie. It was none of
Ernie’s business.

And for the time being, until Amalia Brouwer
was shipped off to the New World, he hung around the consulate
offices, avoiding casual conversations and trying not to let the
way the secretaries looked at him get on his nerves—he knew it
wasn’t anything personal, that like everyone else they had heard
the stories, but it made him feel like Jack the Ripper.

In the afternoons teams of intelligence
analysts asked him all sorts of stupid questions, the answers to
which were picked up by the tape recorder they thought they had
concealed so cleverly under the table, and in the evenings he would
take long walks through town, trying not to make it too hard on the
guys who had been assigned to follow him. That was standard
procedure after someone has been through a very rough mission and
knows more than makes people feel quite comfortable, and he didn’t
take that personally either.

And the rest of the time he spent in the
apartment they had assigned him—it was full of microphones too;
they even had one concealed behind a heating grid in the bathroom.
He kept busy reading
Middlemarch
. Other men had booze, or
heroin, or the treasured fidelity of their wives. Guinness had
Middlemarch
. He would lie in bed until eleven thirty in the
morning, drinking tea and reading. It was a way to pass the
time.

And when he was sick of reading, and they had
run out of questions, and his feet hurt, he could always divert
himself with pondering over what had been so terribly important
that eleven people had had to die for it.