George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

"Veil killed the killers Madison sent. Madison is responsible for the deaths of five people in New York, and six in Seattle."

"But Mr. Madison hasn't submitted a signed confession, has he? I'd say Mr. Kendry is finished."

Andrews was probably right, I thought; Veil would be destroyed. Even if Veil killed him, Orville Madison would still have defeated Veil Kendry. And the Frederickson brothers. I'd been beaten, burned, and jerked around a lot, but as things now stood it would all have been for nothing; Veil could have gone after Madison from day one, without involving me. I wasn't earning my ten thousand dollars.

Andrews nervously cleared his throat, continued: "We both agree that you can't negotiate for Veil Kendry, Dr. Frederickson. What about negotiating for yourselves?"

"Meaning what, Andrews?"

"It's my understanding that the two of you now have some legal difficulties of your own. Even if you manage to get these problems behind you, it's quite possible that your careers could suffer irreparable damage. On the other hand, if you and the lieutenant could be counted on to continue to exercise the caution and discretion you have so admirably displayed up to this point, I wouldn't be surprised if ways could be found to extricate you from this situation without penalty so that you can get on with your careers and your lives."

A curious offer, spoken, combined with a clear threat, unspoken, of lots and lots of additional problems if we didn't go along quietly. I had a serious urge to get up, walk around the desk, and punch the other man. Instead, I said: "I wasn't bluffing before, Andrews. I can prove a solid, very personal connection between Orville Madison and Veil Kendry."

"Oh, really? And how will you do that?"

I pressed the call button on the captain's desk intercom.

"What is it, Frederickson?" It was McGarvey himself, and he sounded a bit bemused. His trooper had obviously told him that I was sitting at his desk.

"Captain, would you be kind enough to bring in my backpack? It's the smaller, brown one."

"I know which one it is, Frederickson." Suddenly the captain's voice sounded strained, unnatural.

The three of us sat in silence, waiting. Five minutes later, McGarvey entered the office carrying my backpack. The burly trooper captain looked decidedly uncomfortable; his face was set in a kind of stiff mask as he walked across the room and set the backpack down on the desk in front of me. "Here you are, Frederickson," he said in a flat voice, and immediately turned away.

"Stay, if you will, Captain," I said as I repositioned the pack and snapped open the top. "I'd like you to witness this."

I dug my hand into the pack, pushed it down through dirty clothes into the middle of my bedroll, where I had stuffed the yellow oilskin packet. "Captain," I continued, "I have something here that I want you and Mr. Andrews to see. It's something that Veil Kendry had a friend bury for him up in the mountains a lot of years ago; a good forensic chemist will be able to tell us exactly how many. It will prove a link between Kendry and Madison that goes back to the war. Andrews, at the very least it will prove that Madison is lying through his teeth when he denies knowing Veil."

Wriggling my fingers, I continued to search for the feel of the oilskin, but found nothing where I thought I had put it. Fighting a growing sense of panic, I upended the pack and spread the contents out over the surface of the desk. I sifted through the dirty clothes, unrolled the sleeping bag. The packet was not there.

"There was a small package sealed in yellow oilskin inside this backpack," I said to McGarvey as I walked around the desk to stand directly in front of him. "I know it was there when you brought us in. What the hell did you do with it?"

McGarvey said nothing, but he did not avert his eyes. There was a curious expression on his face, a mixture of sympathy, embarrassment, and not a little anger. He was a man of integrity and honor, his eyes and expression said, but there was only so much he could do for us. He'd already bent far under heavy pressure once, but he was afraid he would be broken if he tried to do it this time; he could not buck the wishes-or actions-of an official presidential emissary, especially when, as had almost certainly happened, the spectral issue of national security had been raised.

Burton Andrews had been allowed to search our belongings. He had found the packet, opened it, and examined its contents. Whatever had been in the packet must have proved all I'd said it would, because the presidential aide had felt compelled to steal it.

"Dirty pool, Andrews," I said, turning to the baby-faced man with the large brown eyes who was sitting stiffly in his chair, steadfastly staring out the window. His hands were clenched tightly together on top of his briefcase. "Tough bargaining is one thing, but stealing and concealing crucial evidence in a series of crimes including murder is something else again. Now, you get your skinny ass out to the car and bring that packet back in here so that Captain McGarvey can see what's in it."

Andrews didn't move. Garth did. Deliberately, with disarming casualness, my brother rose from his chair and walked over to where the presidential aide was sitting. Sensing Garth's presence, Andrews turned his head back just in time to catch the full force of Garth's fist smashing into his face. Andrews' head snapped back as a crimson geyser of blood spewed from his shattered nose. Andrews and his chair flipped over backwards, while his attache case and the papers it contained went flying through the air.

"My brother almost died getting that package," Garth said to the fallen man in a voice that was all the more chilling for its lack of passion, its cool, measured tone. "Maybe you should die for taking it away from him."

McGarvey and I reached Garth at about the same time, and while the trooper wrapped his arm around Garth's neck in a choke hold I went for my brother's legs, trying to trip him up. But an aroused Garth is something-or not something-to see. My brother swatted me to one side and, with McGarvey lifted off the floor and hanging on his back, bent over and cocked his fist in preparation for another blow that would really put Andrews' lights out, and possibly even kill him. I wished McGarvey would hit Garth over the head with his gun butt, but it was very obvious where the trooper's sympathies lay, and it was too late for that anyway.

"Garth, stop it!" I screamed as I pulled at my brother's belt. "Don't hit him again! You'll kill him! It doesn't make any difference that he took the packet! I know what's in it! Nothing is lost!"

Garth's fist stopped in midair, and his arm dropped back to his side. McGarvey took his arm away from Garth's throat, stepped back and-like my brother-stared at me quizzically.

"You do?" Garth asked softly.

I looked down at Andrews. The presidential aide was holding both hands cupped over his broken nose, but in his eyes, plainer than either shock or pain, was the same question.

"I do," I said defiantly, staring hard at Andrews. "After the Operation Archangel abort and Veil's banishment from the army by Madison, he eventually learned to control his madness through painting. From the beginning, Veil's style and technique had been to compose massive, realistic murals comprised of smaller, surrealistic canvases that appeared abstract when viewed singly. I've seen many of those murals myself-surreal landscapes, peaceful, and without people. But I realize now that his work wasn't always like that. When he first started, his style- but not his technique-was different.

"When I spoke to Viktor Raskolnikov, Veil's dealer, he told me that Veil's style had been different when he first started to paint; the colors were richer, more vivid, and many of the shapes in the individual canvases more pronounced. Those first shapes were fragments of portraits of people, and the subject of his first mural, or murals, was the story of what had happened to him-his assignment in Laos, his conflicts with Orville Madison, his replacement by Colonel Po, the Archangel plan, the incident with the pimp in Saigon, his defection, and, finally, his banishment and the sentence of death imposed by his ex-C.I.A. controller. All of it was included in his first work, in fine detail. You can bet that Orville Madison's face is all over the place, along with Colonel Po's, and Veil's.