The Gamma Option (28 page)

“Yo, boys,” a new voice came suddenly, “I think you’ve bothered the old guy enough for one day.”

The voice was hoarse and raspy, like that of a man who’d smoked too many cigarettes in his time. McCracken and Wareagle spun together into the center of the room as if to search for it, knowing already it was being broadcast on some hidden speaker.

“Now I’d like you boys to know …” There was a slight laugh. “… Hey, don’t this sound corny… . Anyway, we got you surrounded and I’d be much obliged if you would kindly raise your arms into the air where the camera can pick ’em up.”

Blaine did just that as Wareagle glided toward one of the room’s corners.

“Be a good idea if your rather large friend got ’em up too, boss.” McCracken nodded the Indian’s way. “Yup, that’s better. Now just hold tight for a minute… .”

Actually it was considerably less than that when the door to Bechman’s apartment burst open to allow six men armed with shotguns to charge through, half leveling their weapons at Blaine and the other half at Johnny. That remained the situation, frozen for upward of two minutes, before the sound of a Jeep squealing to a halt at the door could be heard. Boots clip-clopped in the apartment’s direction, and from out of the sun stepped in a man decked out in black suit, black vest, and old-fashioned western tie. He had a heavy dark mustache and wavy hair hidden beneath a narrow-brimmed black cowboy hat. In his hands he held a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun, so much a part of him as to make it appear he may have slept with it nightly.

“Afternoon, boys,” he greeted formally. “The name’s Holliday, Doc Holliday.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Blaine followed without missing a beat. “And your friends here are the Earp brothers, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickock.”

Doc Holliday regarded him with a cold stare. “You boys be in a heap of trouble, I’d say.”

“Gonna give us until sundown to ride out of town?”

“Nope.”

“Settle this at dawn then?”

“Sorry.”

“Then let’s you and me go gun to gun at high noon.” Then he added to Wareagle, “Whatever you do, darlin’, don’t forsake me.”

Holliday showed his sawed-off a little higher. “Keep it up, friend. You’re just makin’ my day. Sorry I got to ruin yours by taking you and your injun friend over to my jail.”

“Watch out, Doc. The rest of the boys are certain to bust us out. Have to get yourself a posse and everything, and I wouldn’t want to trust my life to these here tenderfoots.”

Doc Holliday fired a blast from one of his twin barrels that blew a huge chasm in the floor six inches before McCracken and showered him with splinters. Bechman looked on in amazement, waving his arms in protest.

“Was up to me, mister,” Holliday continued, “I’d hang your ass right now, but I’m betting the United States government’ll have its own plans for you and the big fella over there.”

“For a minute there,” Blaine said, “I thought we were in trouble.”

“I know who you are,” Holliday told him, lowering his still-smoking sawed-off gun as his deputies approached and fastened handcuffs around Blaine and Johnny’s wrists. “’Nam, right? The Phoenix Project?”

“You know, Doc, one thing I loved about that country was that they didn’t discriminate over who could get in.”

“I was in Eye-Corps. Bastards like you fucked us up good.”

“For following orders?”

“Or your interpretation of them.”

“I don’t suppose if I say I’m sorry, you’ll let me and the Indian go.”

Doc Holliday stripped off his cowboy hat and mopped his brow with a sleeve. McCracken noticed his hair was as raven dark as his mustache.

“Out of my hands, pal. The line lookin’ for you runs straight around the block.”

The O.K. Corral’s single jail cell was located in the back of the old-fashioned sheriff’s office. There was a plastic toilet and sink and a pair of cots squeezed in across from each other. Holliday’s deputies took the handcuffs off their prisoners, leaving with one guard posted outside the cell and another in view at the end of the corridor. Holliday was taking no chances, even rotated a shift regularly himself and spent it twirling the handlebars of his wide mustache.

“Not polite to wear your hat inside, Doc,” Blaine taunted.

“Always wanted to have a fuck-up like you in my jail, McCrackenballs. Heard about England and France and all your other fucked-up exploits since you’ve been out. People like you give people like me a bad name.”

“Yup, I know just what you mean. Here you are running herd over a bunch of old folks, giving them sponge baths and emptying their bedpans. Maybe call out an occasional bingo game on Sunday nights. You really have reached the top. Hell, I’d never want to give you a bad name.”

Holliday came a little closer to the bars. “Know what I hope? That Washington misplaces the communique about you I sent and I get the privilege of watching you rot right here in my jail… .”

Holliday might have been about to go on when one of his deputies appeared with a note. The chief law-enforcement official of the O.K. Corral rose to take his leave and Blaine took a seat next to Johnny Wareagle on one of the cots.

“Is this what
our
retirement’s gonna be like, Indian? Stashed away at a modified old-folks home under the watchful eye of a cardboard maniac?”

“We are already in the midst of our retirement, Blainey, and have been for several years now.”

“Hasn’t slowed us down much, though.”

“My point exactly,” Wareagle followed with the barest hint of a smile.

“Gonna come a time pretty soon when we’ll have to figure ourselves a way out of here, Indian.”

“The spirits have already revealed several.”

“In one of your secretive moods, are you?”

“It feels like we belong here. For a time.”

Holliday returned just then, looking red-faced and flustered. “Looks like I’m not gonna get my wish, McCrackenballs. Someone’s en route from Washington now to pick you boys up.”

“I knew I could rely on our blessed government to right this wrong.”

“Not our government, pal. Your taxi driver hails from Israel.”

It was six hours later, night having fallen in the Arizona sky, when Doc Holliday escorted a short but powerfully built man down the corridor leading to the single cell. The man’s features were sharp and angular, his hair held in brown waves, and his eyes a strangely crystal shade of blue.

“Was this really necessary?” the man asked of Holliday.

“This is my town, pal.”

“But they’re my prisoners now, aren’t they? Have your man take his leave.”

Holliday gave the
order but seemed inclined to stay himself until the short man thrust a powerful forearm in the office’s direction.

“You, too, if you please.”

“I don’t.”

“It wasn’t a request. Just leave me the keys.”

Holliday was steamed. “Pal, you go in there alone with those two and I hear screams, don’t expect me to come running.”

“If they wanted to kill me, there would be no screams.”

“You know who I am,” the Israeli said to McCracken after Holliday was gone. “I can tell by your eyes.”

“Only one Israeli I know of would come here on his own. You’re Isser, chief of Mossad.”

The smaller man nodded. “Your government has been kind enough to place you in my custody. We’ve been looking for you for days.”

“The ones at my home. Yours?”

Isser nodded again. “Ours. I imagine they ended up warning you off. It was a foolish undertaking, I suppose, but they were desperate, just as I am.”

“You don’t know the whole of it.”

Isser’s expression relaxed. “Precisely why I’ve exhausted considerable resources to track you down ever since you were identified in the Jaffa market.”

“You want to know what made me work for the Arabs.”

“With, not for. That much is already obvious.”

“There’s plenty more that isn’t, Isser. We’re running out of time and I can’t think of a better man to talk to.” Blaine thought briefly. “Unfortunately, there’s something I have to do before we talk.”

“What’s that?”

“I have to die.”

The bearded man watched them from the chair, head pressed high and tight against its back, arranged so his eyes could not leave the bed.

“Please,” Tilly muttered, squirming so she was directly beneath Lace.

Their mouths met again as Lace’s hand slid down Tilly’s belly for her vagina, feeling the slit and slipping her fingers inside it. Tilly moaned. Lace was working the hand feverishly now, sliding and probing.

The bearded man bore silent witness to it all; silent because he was dead and had been for some hours now. Their failure in Boston had upset the women gravely. Failure was rare for them indeed, especially on the scale of Wednesday’s debacle. Tilly and Lace took their passion from their killing, the ultimate intermixture of life and death. Neither saw anything cosmic in this; it was merely a means to extend pleasure beyond its momentary rush.

But there had been no pleasure after Blaine McCracken had first escaped and then turned the tables on them in Boston. The passion was stripped away and the women were left empty. The fact that he was by far the most competent adversary they had ever faced served only to heighten their expectations. The passion that would follow his killing would bring them to new levels of ecstasy. Yet the potential of that anticipated high made the low they experienced even greater in depth. Blaine McCracken would die at their hands. Soon. Very soon. But in the meantime, in the meantime …

It had taken forays into three bars for them to find a bearded man who looked enough like McCracken to serve as surrogate. Luring him to their hotel room had not been difficult. Barely inside the door, Lace had grasped his shoulders and, lowering her head, pressed her mouth against his.

Tilly slithered around to his rear.

Lace became more ardent, forced her tongue against his and felt his bristly McCracken beard scrape at her cheeks.

Tilly plucked up a length of twine and raised it for his head.

Lace pulled her mouth away in perfect rhythm with the smaller woman’s looping of the twine over the man’s head. She closed it around his throat and yanked out the slack, thrusting her leg against the back of his knees to pull him down to provide leverage. The bearded man whipped his hands wildly about, clawing for her—for anything—dying eyes locked on Lace.

Lace stood there smiling, letting Tilly have the kill.

At last he stopped flailing. His arms flapped to his side and twitched. A raspy gurgle pushed its way up his throat past the protruding tongue, all of it over faster than either of the women would have preferred.

They put him in the chair before the bed, and in the near dark of the room he could almost have passed for McCracken. Passion again. Pleasure again. Both, though, would be fleeting. With the return of light, the fantasy would die. The women could squirm in the dark with McCracken on their minds, but McCracken was still out there, the corpse in the chair a mere proxy.

We’ve got a chair waiting for you, Blaine McCracken
,
Lace thought, while beneath her Tilly arched her hips upward and screamed in ecstasy, the task of her fingers completed.

The bearded corpse looked on.

Chapter 24

“AT LAST WE HAVE
a chance to speak,” General Amir Hassani said.

Evira gazed out at him from her cell deep in the bowels of the royal palace. She had been taken there directly from the airport the previous morning, and had spent almost twenty-four hours with a cup of water as her only nourishment. The construction of the complex might have been relatively recent, but the Shah had been a man who liked to consider all eventualities. Hence the fully equipped prison hidden away in his grandest home.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“At least a comment about how surprised you are to see I’m still alive.”

“Or how sorry.”

Hassani waved a disparaging finger at her. “You disappoint me, Evira.”

“I killed a double. But why would you need one?”

“You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”

“Figured what out?”

“Telling you would eliminate the fun. I would have thought it would all be as obvious to you now as it would certainly have been to …” His eyes sharpened here. “… McCracken.”

She came forward until she could smell the steel of the bars. “How do you know about McCracken?”

“No pointless denials. That is a good start.”

“No start at all. His involvement in this couldn’t possibly mean anything to you,” Evira insisted, perplexed by the direction Hassani’s interest was taking.

“Then you won’t mind telling me what he knows.”

“I have no idea.”

His eyes scolded her. “Evira …”

“We haven’t been in contact. I retained him to—”

“To what?”

“It doesn’t matter to you.”

“Doesn’t matter to me that you coerced McCracken into finding Yosef Rasin for you and stopping him from employing a weapon that could destroy my world? Come now, give me more credit than that, please. You were helping me from the beginning. Why not help me some more?”

Evira felt numb. “You knew. How could you know?”

“It doesn’t matter to you,” the general shot back, using her own words against her.

“You’re asking questions you already know the answers to.”

“Then don’t bother holding the rest back. Where can I find McCracken? What system of contact did you set up for him?”

“None,” Evira insisted, trying to collect her thoughts while keeping her calm. How Hassani had learned of McCracken’s involvement wasn’t as pressing as why it seemed so important to him. If anything, as he had noted, the two men were allies in a twisted sort of way. Thanks to her.

“I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt, Evira. But only if you provide the answer to a question I’m sure you
do
know the answer to: where is McCracken’s son stashed?”

Evira’s response was to stare at Hassani in confused helplessness.

“You do know that, don’t you?”

“Why is it important to you?”

“It is. That is all you need to know.”

“The boy cannot possibly be of service to you.”