George Chesbro: The Language Of Cannibals

I stepped back a few paces and raised the machine pistol slightly-just enough to give the KGB operative pause in the event he was thinking about making any sudden moves. "What's the matter, Acton? Aren't you relieved that we've eliminated your dreaded KGB assassin? I don't understand your problem."

"Something's wrong."

"You're damn right there's something wrong. What's wrong is that you're full of shit. Culhane was no KGB assassin. I saw his face when he found out you were KGB, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Unless they teach you people to throw up on command, his reaction was no act. It would have made no sense for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti to have two of their agents working the same territory, blind to each other, constantly stepping on each other's toes. Nobody has ever confused the KGB with the Keystone Kops. Culhane showed up here because his old buddy Edward J. Hendricks gave him a little courtesy call to warn him that the shit had already hit the fan and that there was no way he could keep the whole story of Culhane's manipulation by the KGB from becoming public. Culhane flipped out. He must have figured that he had one last chance to wipe out all the people who could implicate him in this nightmare and then get away clean, counting on his right-wing buddies to cover up for him. There was never any KGB assassin after us, and there's no massive KGB network inside the ultra-conservative movement-as much as I find the notion enormously entertaining. As Garth and I suspected, there's just you-one very clever, valuable, and enterprising KGB officer looking to make lemonade out of lemons. So let's get out of here. We can all sit down at the Cairn police station and wait for the FBI to arrive."

Jay Acton still didn't move. "Frederickson, we're all dead if we end up in police custody. Somehow, in some way, the KGB will find a way to kill us."

On the road below, Dan Mosely was out of his car, talking to Garth and Mary, apparently getting an explanation of what had happened. At the base of the mountain, three patrol cars were parked across Pave Avenue, blocking off access to the quarry. Mosely looked up, saw me, and waved. I waved back.

"You don't quit, do you?" I said, looking back at Acton. I raised the machine pistol higher, leveled it on his chest. "Get your ass down there. I'll be right behind you. Don't even think of trying to run, because there's no place for you to go."

Acton walked stiffly across the ledge, paused at the fissure, and looked back to me. "You've killed us," he said tersely, then bent down and slipped through the crack in the stone.

"Hey, Mongo!" Garth shouted up to me. " You all right? Can you get down?"

"Yeah!" I shouted back. " Acton's already on his way! It's going to take me a little longer!"

I slipped through the fissure, started picking my way down through the sharp rubble in the narrow chute. The adrenaline that had kept me going was now fast draining out of my system, and I suddenly felt as exhausted as I had been in the canoe. My headache was returning, along with more pronounced double vision. I almost tripped on a rock and decided it was time for a breather. I sat down on a pile of crushed rock, took a series of deep breaths while I reflected on how nice it was going to feel to soak in a hot tub and then take to my bed for as long as it took for my body to completely heal.

Jay Acton had certainly been earnest, I thought, a great performer, like his father, but in his own case an actor determined to try to write his own ending to his own play right to the finish. Instead of escaping earlier, as I was certain he could have done, he had opted to save our lives as a necessary first step in trying to lend credibility to a cock-and-bull story that he'd hoped would enable him to burrow his way into the highest echelons of the American counterintelligence apparatus-or, at the very least, to sow a great deal of discord and suspicion.

"Mongo?!"

"I'm coming, Garth! Don't be so goddamn impatient!"

I used the stock of the machine pistol to push myself to my feet, then continued my descent. I came to a spot where there was a cleft in the rock wall to my right, affording me a clear view of the scene below. Acton had arrived and was cuffed, hands behind his back, to the handle on the passenger's door of Mosely's patrol car; he was standing very rigid, staring off down the road. Mosely had taken the automatic weapons from Garth and Mary, laid one on the hood of the car, and was holding the other. I whistled to get their attention, then saluted; Garth and Mosely saluted back, and Mary waved. I stepped around a boulder, continued down.

It was a damn good thing Acton had tried to be clever, I thought, or Garth, Mary, me, and every member of the Community of Conciliation would be dead. Clever, yes, except. .

Except. .

I only had another ten or fifteen yards to go in the rock chute before I reached the road, but I abruptly stopped, sat down again, and tried to sort out the problem in logic that had just occurred to me.

Assuming Acton had been believed, a massive vetting operation would have been instituted by the FBI, with every member of Congress, and possibly every official in the government, being obliged to prove they were who they said they were. But the process would have been fairly simple, focusing primarily on birth records and early childhood history; for the vast majority of those being investigated, a copy of a grammar school report card would probably suffice. No KGB operatives would turn up. So what had Jay Acton planned for an encore after he was exposed as a liar? Intelligence work as a double agent? No way. As he had pointed out, the CIA would never trust him, and by now Moscow Centre would certainly have learned that he had been blown.

What could Acton have been planning. .?

"Hey, Mongo?!"

"Yo! Hold your horses!"

Yet Acton had wanted to get straight to Washington, to an even tighter trap, where it would be proved even faster that he was a liar, and where he would be turned over even faster to the friendly ministrations of the CIA, with their walled-in safe houses, drugs, and other unpleasant interrogation techniques. Calling Hendricks to get home delivery of an assassin had been my idea, not his. He hadn't liked the idea one bit.

"Shit," I said to myself with venom, as I turned and scrambled back up the rock chute to the cleft. I leaned through the opening, whistled and waved.

"What the hell are you doing, Frederickson?" Mosely shouted, impatience ringing in his voice. "I haven't got all day!”

Indeed. The police manning the patrol cars at the base of the mountain had to be wondering by now why they had been ordered to stay in place on Pave Avenue for so long, perhaps even wondering why their chief had issued such an order in the first place. Maybe.

"Chief, I sprained an ankle! Send Garth and Mary up here to give me a hand, will you?"

Garth started forward, but Mosely abruptly reached out and grabbed his arm, restraining him. Garth wheeled around, them stiffened when he saw the service revolver in Mosely's right hand aimed at his chest. The machine pistol in the man's other hand was raised just slightly, leveled on the ground at Mary's feet.

"I can't allow that, Mongo!" Mosely shouted in a strained voice. "Until we get this business all sorted out, I have to place all of you under arrest! Throw out your weapon, and I'll let your brother come up!"

I ducked back as sweat suddenly broke out on my face, ran into my eyes. The muscles in my stomach knotted painfully, and I cursed Elysius Culhane anew-not only for being a KGB dupe in the first place, but for then continuing to be their dupe right up to his death, when he had served as a stalking horse to expose any ambush we might have set.