Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

He’d acted hastily with the sergeant, he realized that now. He should have tried to explain how essential it was for both of them to understand and embrace the width and breadth of the betrayal, examine its patterns and significances and, most importantly of all, identify the players and ferret out their varying motives and loyalties. But it was too late for regrets; it was done, the man was dead.

The phone on the dashboard was dead too. He’d tried to raise the operator but it was useless; no hum sounded from the instrument, not a crackle of static. A wire must have snapped or pulled loose when the Bentley went off the road and stopped with a crunch against the huge tree.

His hands were moist and slippery on the leather rim of the steering wheel. He needed the sergeant; there was work to do. Alert his people, put Belgium and London in the picture. But Correll couldn’t do it, he was hurt, he might be dying for all he knew. It’s my own fault, Correll thought. He should have tried to make the sergeant comprehend the enormity of the breach in security, a tape recorder in a ridiculous Madonna, on his desk, in his traveling case, in his goddamn bathroom perhaps, the wires spinning and listening and repeating everything for the monk Fabius at Olivet, and his tedious superior, His Excellency the Bishop Waring. “Is the lap dog an improvement over the Siberian wolf, Mr. Correll...?” Christ! Correll felt an encouraging surge of energy and anger. He should have taken the sergeant into his confidence. Made him understand. Instead he had shot the man, destroyed the tapes in his uniform pocket. But the sergeant’s own last despairing reflex had pulled the trigger of the .45 and the bullet had hissed around the projection room like an angry wasp, recoiling from surface to surface until it found a safe, soft home at last in Correll’s narrow, pulsing chest...

His mother had been disappointed in him when he was a child because she insisted he had no conscience. This had perplexed him. If he had no conscience, why had he been disturbed by the lack of one?

Put London in the picture. Yes! Call the general...

General Taggart knew the Lord Conestain and the Murray clan. Was impressed by their link to the British peerage. Their ancestors had fought one another in various skirmishes and wars, the Taggarts and the Murrays, and wore ribbons and rosettes and medals to celebrate the death of pikemen and lads in the colonies. Drink had done in the boys at Wexford... the general sang that song, and Correll remembered Taggart singing in his loud, cracked voice about someone who’d slain the Earl of Murray, in the highlands and the lowlands, and laid him on the green...

Stepping with great care and difficulty from the damaged car, Correll hailed a foursome of golfers and asked them to phone for a service vehicle. “I’m hurt,” he explained with an apologetic smile.

Their cheerful glances chilled him. They didn’t understand, they didn’t believe. As they walked off, one turned and waved good-naturedly, while the others continued to discuss the advisability of using an iron club to carry the water holes at... Their voices faded away.

Correll looked at the neat hole in his vest where Ledge’s bullet had found him. A stain no larger than a silver dollar surrounded the point of entry. Opening the vest, he studied the blood on his shirt. He tried to analyze it as he would any problem, any endangered sector.

The north gate, his apartment, the main plant? Too far away...

Summoning his reserves of strength, Correll walked at a measured pace toward the shopping mall with its public phone booths and its streams of people. His people, his creations...

They had broken Correll’s security, which could lead them to Van Pelt. But not to England, to Lord Conestain, blood-linked to the Earls of Murray...

Correll stopped a young man carrying a tennis racket. “I need to make a phone call,” he told him. “I need your help. I was shot by a security officer. It was a mistake. I have a phone credit number, but I’ll need coins to...

“Listen,” he shouted then. “I’m telling you the truth. I’m Simon Correll, I need to get to a phone. You’ve got to help me.”

The young athlete looked briefly at Correll’s blood-stained vest and was, Correll realized with dismay, relieved not to take his anguish seriously, not to believe in it . Ancilia Four had reversed his reality signals. Tennis was real. Blood, death were not. With a friendly nod of dismissal, the tennis player hurried on to the courts.

... He must phone Brussels. The bishop would be off to Belgium, he was sure, but Fabius would remain at Olivet to sing Masses for the repose of Ellyvan Correll’s soul.

How had they turned poor Jennifer against him? By giving her something to believe in, to be part of? Or did it matter?

The problem was not the clever nest at the convent, Bittermank’s source, nor was it Jennifer’s defection or the Kraagers or Van Pelts or the Murrays...

The problem was Harry Selby. He realized that with almost violent clarity. Yes, Selby. He must warn George Thomson. Call him now. Tell him that Harry Selby was not in Summitt City. Had never left Philadelphia. The trial would end this morning, the jury set the young man free... Nothing must interfere with—

Some splintered thought reminded him of a noisy tumult in England’s Picadilly Circus, a wrecking ball smashing a building to dust, a blind young girl and her crazed seeing-eye dog... Kipper. That was the dog’s name. Burdened by a responsibility too great for its nervous system, the animal’s discipline and intelligence had been shattered by the roar and violence and destruction of the world around him. He must have welcomed the policeman’s bullet in his poor, wild brain.

Correll could sympathize with that cringing animal now. A thousand thoughts clamored for his own attention and decision, a billion stimuli were beating on his naked, exposed nerves. But he must act, he mustn’t let the wrecker’s ball inside him have its way...

Like a distracted mendicant, Correll went up and down the length of the arcade, controlling his pain and exhaustion with an effort of iron will, stopping to speak to shoppers as calmly and persuasively as he could manage. Cajoling, wheedling and imploring, he importuned them for coins, for assistance, but they were incapable of believing in him, he realized, they were unable to care about the blood on his hands, they were programmed not even to imagine his pain...

He became enraged and anger gave him strength. He shouted at the crowds, cursed their indifference. But at last his steps became slower, his elegantly cut trousers were sodden and heavy with blood. Each dragging footstep told him that.

Correll possessed a respectable flair for irony, although he had never appreciated that mordant cast of mind in others; it had seemed to him a wearisome effect, the epitaph of energy. But he couldn’t escape the irony of this predicament.

He sat heavily on a bench, his back against a window display of scuba gear and fishing tackle. Music was playing, an up-tempoed waltz, and he thought of rain and snow and Jennifer dancing with distant, pink-lipped smiles.

It was coming at last, he realized, not in darkness but in deceptively pleasant shades of gray, opalescent lights which seemed to be trying to filter craftily through his conscious thoughts.

As long as he continued to think and plan, the darkness stayed in the distance like a gathering gray mist... so he concentrated on Mount Olivet and someone he loved dancing, but when he stopped thinking for even an instant of Selby and Thomson and the telephones, the darkness formed swiftly, and he realized then that the painless oblivion he had offered the world was not a condition he would choose for himself, thank you.