David Morrell - Desperate Measures

“And when your men caught me, they were going to help me along.”

Gable spread his hands. “Unless the police caught you first, in which case I had the resources to arrange for you to commit suicide in jail.”

“You’re awfully confident that you can manipulate the system to make it do anything you want.”

“I’m a diplomat. I helped design the system. I guarantee that the plan would have worked.”

“Then why didn’t it?”

Gable glanced at the floor.

“Well?” Pittman asked.

“I congratulate you. You’re far more resourceful than your profile led me to believe. If you weren’t so resourceful, I wouldn’t have agreed to this conversation, I assure you. For a man determined to commit suicide, you have a remarkable talent for survival.”

“You see, I changed my mind.”

Gable looked puzzled.

“I don’t want to kill myself any longer. Because of you.”

“Explain.”

“What you did to me made me so afraid that I had to ask myself, If I was so eager to die, why was I running? Why not let you do the job for me? I rationalized by telling myself that I wanted my death to be my idea, not yours. But the truth is, you forced me to reconsider where I was in my life. I love my dead son. I miss him desperately. But you distracted me enough that I think I can accept my grief now rather than fight it.”

Gable studied him as if he had no understanding of the emotions Pittman referred to. At last, he sighed. “It would have been so much easier if my men had been able to shoot you when you were running from the Scarsdale estate.”

Sloane fidgeted. “First Jonathan. Then Anthony. Now Victor. No more. I want this settled. I want it stopped.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Gable said. “To settle things.”

Throughout, the man known as Mr. Webley stood against the wall to Pittman’s right, watching the group, holding Pittman’s.45.

“For a negotiation to be successful,” Gable said, “each side must have something to gain. So tell me, Mr. Pittman, what do we gain in exchange for the million dollars and the two passports that you gain?”

“Security. Peace of mind.”

“All very well. Desirable conditions. But vague. How exactly are you going to give us security and peace of mind?”

“By disappearing.”

“Be specific.”

“I’ll make it look as if I carried through on my intention to commit suicide. I’ll do it in such a way that my body can’t be identified.”

“Again, be specific.”

“I thought perhaps I’d arrange for your men to trap me on one of your yachts. I’d blow it and myself up. My body would never be found. Presumably sharks and other scavengers would have eaten what was left of me. Of course, I wouldn’t actually have been on the yacht. But your men, having watched the explosion from another yacht, would testify that they’d seen me go aboard.”

Sloane’s voice trembled with enthusiasm. “It might work.”

“One of my yachts?” Gable squinted. “You imagine expensive ways to disappear.”

“Another factor that makes it convincing. Given the magnitude of your property loss, the police wouldn’t think that you were involved.”

“He has a point,” Sloane said quickly.

Gable scowled at his fellow grand counselor, then redirected his calculating gaze at Pittman. “Forgive my colleague’s outbursts. He’s forgotten one of the primary rules of negotiation. Never let your opponent know your actual opinion of his argument.”

“I thought we were here to be candid,” Pittman said.

“Then why haven’t you yourself been completely open? You expect me to believe that after you pretend to commit suicide you’ll disappear forever and we’ll have nothing to fear from you.”

“That’s right,” Pittman lied.

“What guarantees do we have?”

“I told you. I want to live. I don’t want to be hunted anymore. I want to be left alone.”

“Under an assumed name.”

“Yes.”

“With Ms. Warren.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps in Mexico. Perhaps farther south. In a country where the economy is such that a million dollars is worth considerably more.”

“Yes.”

“And after the barrage of telephone calls last night,” Gable asked with irritation, “how do you intend to protect us from the other people who-thanks to you-have acquired knowledge of our private affairs?”

“Your daughter, for example?”

“In particular.”

“Those phone calls were staged to get your attention,” Pittman said. “To put pressure on you so you’d agree to this meeting. To make you want to end this before it spreads any farther. The truth is, your daughter doesn’t know anything for certain. If you agree to my terms, I’ll go back to her and-”

From somewhere in the house, a phone rang, the faint sound echoing.

Pittman glanced past Webley toward the hall as the phone rang a second time.

“It’s not important,” Gable said. “The fax machine in my home office is on a line that’s separate from the main telephone line. That’s what you heard, the fax machine. Two rings and it answered.”

Pittman nodded. “If you agree to my terms, I’ll go back to your daughter and behave irrationally enough that she’ll lose faith in my credibility. My apparent suicide will make her even more skeptical about me. She’ll be forced to conclude that her accusations, based on what I told her, are the nonsense you say they are.”

“I like it,” Sloane said eagerly. “It makes sense. It can get us out of the mess we’re in.”

“Winston.” Gable’s aged eyes flashed. “Your persistent outbursts force me to violate protocol. I have never before done this in a negotiation. But you leave me no choice. I must ask you not to interrupt me again.”

“But-”

“Winston!” Gable’s chest heaved, the effort of emotion having an obvious weakening effect on him.

Sloane looked abashed and lowered his gaze toward his hands.

Gable’s breath rate subsided. He composed himself and studied Pittman, frowning. “So you restricted the information that you gave to my daughter.”

“That’s right.”

Gable shook his head in disagreement. “I suddenly have doubts about you.”

“Doubts?”

“To enlist my daughter’s aid, it isn’t logical that you would have held back. To make your strongest case, you would have told her everything you know. I’m beginning to worry that all of this has been needless. What exactly do you know? What are we buying? What precisely is worth one million dollars and two passports?”

“Duncan Kline was an instructor at Grollier Academy.”

Gable raised his bushy white eyebrows and gestured for Pittman to continue.

“He liked to gather the brightest students around him,” Pittman said. “He persuaded them to join him in small study groups. He nurtured them.”

“Of course. Nurturing is something that a good teacher does automatically.”

“But good teachers don’t molest their students,” Pittman said.

Gable’s face became rigid, his wrinkles deepening.

“Duncan Kline carefully prepared his few chosen students,” Pittman said. “It took time and devotion, painstaking kindness and delicate reassurance. At last he made himself so necessary in their lives, so essential to their emotional well-being, that they found themselves incapable of resisting his advances. You and the other grand counselors, all of you were molested by him. It’s affected you ever since.”

Gable kept staring, his wrinkled features reminding Pittman of a crust of mud that was cracking.

“Molested?” Gable asked. “You honestly think I’d go to all this trouble to hide the fact that we were molested as students at Grollier? Which we were, by the way.” Gable raised his face to the beamed ceiling and burst out laughing, his feeble Adam’s apple bobbing, his bony throat sounding as if gravel were stuck in it. At once he seemed to strangle on his laughter. In pain, he lowered his face, tugged out his handkerchief, and coughed repeatedly into it. His pale face turned red from effort. The spasms slowly subsided. “Of course we were molested.” He swallowed and put away his handkerchief. “If you revealed that information, I could easily turn it to my advantage, eliciting sympathy from the media. In America today, there is no such thing as shame, only prurience and pity. You know nothing that threatens me, Mr. Pittman. You’re wasting my time.”