The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Kells walked out of the kitchen then. He was wearing a police radio copped from one of the prisoners. His hands glistened clean though there were specks of blood on the lap of his pants.

He walked past the chair and picked up the prisoner’s black North Face jacket, lighter and warmer than his own. He examined it for bullet holes before putting it on.

Tom Duggan pushed through the kitchen doors in his slender, stiff way; and Rebecca could see behind him that the others’ bodies were gone.

The prisoner groaned and the room reeked of chemical mace and Rebecca’s head continued to swim.

Kells gathered the prisoners’ rifles and revolvers and mace and started past her without a word. She did not attempt to question him. She had seen too much that day. The prisoner groaned as she followed Tom Duggan back down the hall to the lounge.

Kells scavenged the others’ bags, emptying Robert’s hockey duffel of his clothes and toiletries and filling it with the prisoners’ weapons, including a guard’s taser. Mia watched him with a hard, blank stare.

“Where’s the older couple?” asked Kells.

“Bert and Rita?” said Rebecca. “They’re gone. Their skis are gone.”

“Then we have enough sleds to transport everyone in one trip. Coe and I passed a farmhouse a few miles out, backed up into trees off the road, good approach views.”

They were leaving. That was something everyone wanted. “What about the others?” asked Rebecca.

Tom Duggan spoke. “The freezer. It will preserve them.”

Rebecca picked up her cargo bag and laptop case and found her gloves among the others lining the hearth. As she pulled them on, she noticed Kells saying something to a downcast Coe, standing near Fern’s old paisley carpetbag. Coe nodded reluctantly and went to find his knapsack.

Kells turned to the reception desk telephone. He pushed only three buttons.

Rebecca turned to Dr. Rosen. He had stopped in the middle of putting on his long coat, one arm halfway in the sleeve, watching Kells.

“I have a message for Enrol Inkman,” Kells said into the phone. “Tell him his friends from the inn were looking for him. You have the address.”

Kells replaced the receiver and picked up his own bag and the weapon-filled duffel.

“What did you just do?” said Dr. Rosen, pointing. “You called nine one one?”

“It’ll take them hours to get here in the dark.” Kells was moving to the hallway. “The snow will have swallowed our sled tracks by then.”

“What happened to the element of surprise?” Dr. Rosen cried.

“Things are moving more quickly than I expected.”

“Than you expected? ”

“The next wave will be prepared. Better to take the upper hand now. Intimidation can be just as effective as surprise.”

“Intimidation? You’re baiting them? A challenge?”

But he was talking to the hall. Kells had gone out the front doors. They could see him through the front window now, carrying his bags to the prisoners’ sleds.

Dr. Rosen looked at Rebecca and the others. “He’s crazy. We’re following a killer.”

Rebecca nodded in agreement. Then she and the rest of them took their bags and made their way to the door.

Luther Trait stood before the marielito sagging in the chair. The bullet hole in the Cuban’s gut cried out like a little mouth of pain. “A miracle you are still breathing, Octavio.”

Octavio blinked up at Trait, slumping off the chair like a forgotten attic doll. “Cut me down,” he whispered, huskily.

“You were left alive to scare us.”

“I told you everything.”

“You told them everything.”

Inkman entered just in time to watch Trait pull a revolver out of his waistband and execute Octavio with a bullet to the forehead. The Marielito’s neck flopped back and Trait knocked over his chair with a kick to the dead man’s chest.

Inkman took in the carnage as the smoky report rang in the room. It was the bleeding green words, dark against the night glass, that grabbed his attention.

Inkman’s face washed white. He felt for the back of a chair and lowered himself into it.

Trait stepped away from the smell of the cordite and seared flesh, returning the gun to his belt. He saw Inkman sitting there. “Your friends from the inn,” Trait said. “You called them, ‘an unremarkable bunch.’ ”

Inkman’s eyes were unbelieving. He was holding on to the seat of his chair as though the room were in danger of being overturned.

“At least two were killed,” Trait went on. “Between five and ten of them got away on snowmobiles.”

“They asked for me by name?” said Inkman.

“By your real name. Explain ‘Tick Tock.’ ”

“It is ‘Clock,’ ” said Inkman. He was deeply affected by the scene, and Trait was patient. “A code name.”

“Whose code name? Yours?”

“Not mine. I never met him. Not that I know of. Might have dealt with him indirectly. I did a year in Belize in the mid-eighties—”

“Are we still talking about the guests from the inn?”

“He was a legend. I didn’t know anybody in the CIA who knew who he was. Only rumors.”

“CIA, code names, Guatemala. I’m asking you how this person could have been at the inn.”

Inkman looked stricken. “I–I can’t explain it.”

Jazzed by the violence, Trait’s mind worked quickly and reasonably. “Someone is playing you. Somebody got into the town somehow—”

“Nobody got into town.”

“Then your inn friends are getting help by phone. Someone at the CIA came up with this.”

Inkman shook his head stridently. “It’s bad juju even to invoke his name. The Company itself was afraid of him. Look what he did to their faces. You think some retired florist from Hartford did that?”

“So this man was staying at the inn somehow, and you did not know it.”

“It was said he could turn it on and off. That you could stand next to him in a hotel elevator and never look twice — that was his greatest talent. He was faceless. The coldest of the Cold Warriors.”

“To the central question: How did he get here? And what does he want with you?”

But Inkman was still making sense of the past. “He was a devil to the Guatemalans — a demon, a spirit. His was the highest bounty ever offered by the leftists. He vanished in the early nineties just as the human-rights crimes were coming to light. It was said that he had been captured and tortured, then thrown into an active volcano or chopped up and fed to jackals. They never found his body.”

“Octavio said a black man did the killing and the cutting.”

Inkman remembered the inn guests. “It could be,” he said, chilled. “I don’t know. It could be he’s been following me the whole time, but... no. They dropped my surveillance when I went to Mexico. I’m sure of it.” But his gaze had fallen. “Why won’t they ever leave me alone?”

“The writer was here also. She remained in town.”

Inkman was suddenly disgusted, aroused. “Who cares about the writer? Listen to me. Clock’s brief was counterinsurgency warfare. He ran proxy wars. Toppling unfriendly governments in Central America and propping them back up with the CIA’s own. Drafting, organizing, and training indigenous fighters, that was the game. It was said he could melt plowshares into swords with just one glance. Subverting the economic and social fabric of a small country is textbook stuff — but every culture has character, a national psychology, and Clock knew how to exploit its weaknesses. He knew how to give an entire society a nervous breakdown in the name of America.”

“Octavio saw an old man, a teenaged boy, the writer. You are too easily impressed. This is a scare tactic. He is trying to rattle you, and he is succeeding.”