Walking Back The Cat Page 13
Swan Song swung his night glasses back to the town. Lights —electric in the houses that had generators, gas elsewhere—were blinking on from one end of it to the other. A dozen teenagers were kicking around a white soccer ball on Sore Loser Road. From the shadows of a back porch came the faint notes of an accordion. In the shack near the river the one-armed Apache appeared at the door, smoking a cigarette.
So the Apaches were holding Early and Lahr prisoner, which meant they knew who had been milking the casino. Swan Song ticked off alter-
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natives: he could send Gonzales and his Brazilian cousin and J. J. Knopf and even young Lefler, who was itching for a chance to play at cowboys and Indians, to free them, but that would end in a shoot-out, a shoot-out would result in deaths, and deaths would lead to a police investigation — which would end any hope the consortium had of making wetwork history, of shaking the Western world to its foundations. His twenty-nine-year career would fizzle out without a swan song.
On the other hand, he had to liberate Early and Lahr. Without them the Apaches could cry about being shaken down from now to doomsday, but they'd have no warm bodies and no proof.
If only he could find some leverage, something to offer the Indians in exchange for Early and Lahr . . .
Swan Song was mulling over the dilemma when he caught a glimpse of the beam from a powerful flashlight working along the path from Watershed Station. It blinked off and on as the figure carrying it disappeared behind boulders and bushes, then reappeared again. Lying flat on the overhang, Swan Song could hear someone whistling to himself as he came up the trail. About fifty yards below the overhang, whoever was carrying the flashlight set a plastic pail down on the ground, waded into the river and blocked the flashlight under his foot in the water. Focusing his night binoculars, Swan Song could make out an Indian boy standing absolutely still in the knee-deep water flowing around his bare feet, his hands poised just under the surface of the river.
The chief of the Adobe Palace station lowered the binoculars and pulled his worry beads from his pocket. Click, click. The Indian boy could be the solution to his problems.
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"You from Watershed?"
"You bet."
A second shadow loomed alongside the first on the bank of the river. The tip of a cigarette glowed. "We'ze got usselves lost hiking/' he called. "If you was to look at our map, you could maybe show us where we is."
"He's only a kid," the first man said. "He can't read a map."
"Sure I can," Doubting Thomas said. Secretly he was happy to have an excuse to move. He fetched the flashlight from the bed of the river and, playing it on his feet in the water, started toward the bank. When he was close he raised the flashlight and shone it on the men, which was when he saw the pistol. The taller of the two men was gripping it in both hands and pointing it directly at his head.
Curiously, he wasn't afraid. "Is that thing real?" he asked, his voice so steady that even he was surprised.
"Bet on it," the man smoking the cigarette said. He reached down, took a grip on the boy's collar and hauled him up onto the bank.
"What's your name?" demanded the figure holding the pistol.
"What's yours?" Doubting Thomas retorted.
The man smoking the cigarette slapped him hard across the face. "Don't act smart-ass with the man," he said. "You got a name, spill it."
"I got a name. It's Doubting Thomas."
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"Downriver?"
"Up."
Shining his flashlight just ahead of his feet, Eskeltsetle turned onto the path at the end of Sore Loser Road and made his way toward the Sacred Lake. The river flowed beneath the trail, murmuring with its almost human voice as it washed over and around boulders. Fifty yards or so below the lake, he came across the spot where two people had pushed through branches to the river's edge. He fingered the break in one of the branches. It was recent. Stepping off the trail, he discovered Thomas's red plastic pail.
"Thomas," Eskeltsetle called. Above his head the moon slipped behind gauzelike clouds. He took a deep breath, cupped a hand around his mouth and bellowed, "Tho-mas!"
Eskeltsetle bent close to the ground. In the beam of his flashlight, he could make out several sets of footprints. One came from a slight man wearing cowboy boots with worn heels and worn soles. The second came from hiking boots, fairly new, with thick rubber soles crisscrossed by deep gashes for traction. Judging from the depth of the imprints, the man must have weighed roughly a hundred and fifty pounds, which meant he was short and thickset or tall and thin. Where the prints started up the trail toward the Sacred Lake, the stride was long, which meant that the man was tall and thin.
Mingled with the marks of boots were another set of prints—those of a barefoot boy weighing around ninety pounds. The little toe on the right foot was folded in toward the other toes, a peculiarity that Eskeltsetle recognized instantly.
The footprints had been made by Doubting Thomas.
Eskeltsetle noticed traces that indicated a slight dragging of the feet, as if the boy was being pulled. His heart beating rapidly, he rose to his feet and gazed into the darkness. Then, following the trail of footprints and broken branches, he hurried up the path toward the Sacred Lake.
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when you try to pin them down, which I did, they aren't sure which cousins they were doing the favor for."
"They passed the Russian defector to the Americans, but they can't remember which Americans?"
"Correct. They are mightily embarrassed about the whole situation. All they're willing to say for the record is that they were dealing with an agent who went by the code name of Swan Song. They assumed Swan Song was licensed because he turned up in Bonn waving letters of credit signed by people whose names, when pronounced, open doors. The Germans had the impression that Swan Song, who spoke perfect Russian, had been shopping around Moscow for a defector. And not just any defector, as you will soon see. When he came up with one he asked the Germans to act as shipping agents; they were to pick up the package in Kiev, provide her with documents identifying her as a German national and whisk her out of the country. Once she was on German soil Swan Song and his man Friday, who spoke Italian and looked like a central-casting mafioso, showed up to take possession. They flashed bundles of crisp twenty-dollar bills under the woman's nose and sweet-talked her into continuing on with them to the Promised Land, which in this case turned out to be Texas. The Germans I talked to were a bit pissed —in return for taking care of shipping and handling, they were supposed to get access to the cream during the milking process. But they never heard from Swan Song again. The Russian defector and her handlers disappeared from the radar screen. The Germans lodged several informal complaints with the CIA front office, which claimed they didn't have a Swan Song on their books or a female Russian defector on their hands. That's the last anybody heard of her until the police, alerted by a suspicious super who wondered how someone could live without occasionally going out for food, discovered her body in the Dallas apartment."
"What do you have on the woman?" Finn asked.
"The Mossad guy says his people think she wasn't as middle level as we first thought. According to the Jews, before the fall, before Yeltsin, she was a deputy to the chief of the First Department of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, who just happened to be the individual responsible for all Soviet espionage activity on the North American continent. . . . Just a sec."
Finn could hear Pilgrim talking to someone in the office. "Take his number," he called. "Tell him I'll get back to him before the Second Coming." He came back on the line. "This is radioactive," he said. "The
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feeling here is the whole thing is going to blow up in our hands." Again he called to someone, "Put him through. . . ." He told Finn, "I need to take another call." The line echoed with static, went dead, then was filled with chimes. After a
moment Pilgrim returned. "Sorry. Where was I?"
"Something was about to blow up in your hands."
"Right. Okay. If the female defector had a foot in the door of the First Department of the first Chief Directorate, there's a good chance she could identify the KGB's agents in North America. So it sounds to us as if your consortium went shopping in Moscow, at a time when United States of America dollars could buy almost anything, for someone who could hand them a working Soviet network on a platter. You told me the Russian lady defector had been debriefed by de Wey, alias Dewey. We have got to assume she gave him a list of Soviet agents, along with the cryptograms that signaled to them they were being controlled by Moscow. We have got to assume that Dewey passed this information on, which means that Dewey's consortium is in a position to use these agents to further its own agenda. As long as the orders arrived with the appropriate identifying codes and cryptograms, the KGB agents would assume they were getting their instructions from the new KGB Center in Moscow."
Pilgrim must have covered the phone with his hand, because his voice suddenly sounded as if it came from another planet. "Tell the congressman to shove it up his arse. On second thought, tell him I'll be right there." He spoke to Finn again. "The select committee is sounding general quarters here. Decks are being cleared for action. We have a rogue group which calls itself the consortium and is staffed by former CIA agents who are supposed to have drowned. These former agents may or may not have ties to the DC flagship. That's something we're going to have to sort out when the dust settles. Or not sort out if the select committee wants to avoid destroying the CIA. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, thanks to the Apache casino, we know that the consortium has a cash flow, and they don't have to explain to us how they spend it. They have an agenda, and they have a group of highly trained Soviet agents who, thinking their orders are coming from Moscow, are ready to carry out that agenda."
Pilgrim called to someone in the office, "I'm on my way." To Finn he said, "What we have is a nightmare. I have to move my ass. I won't pin you down now, but next time we talk you need to confirm something I already know—that the joker who was going to kill you is a Russian agent who
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started to suspect his orders weren't coming from the new KGB Center in Moscow."
When Pilgrim had hung up, Finn dialed the number of Parsifal's mobile home in Truth or Consequences. "Do you remember Dewey's last words?" he asked when Parsifal picked up the phone.
Parsifal thought for a moment. "He said 'swan.' Then he said 'song.' "
"The agent who turned up in Germany to take possession of a Russian lady defector was code-named Swan Song. He spoke perfect Russian. He was accompanied by someone who spoke Italian and looked like a central-casting mafioso."
Parsifal laughed into his end of the line. "Dewey!" he said. "Parallel lines meet. Prince Igor and Swan Song are the same person."
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through the woods. Pushing himself, oblivious to the tangle of underbrush scoring his legs and arms with welts, he plunged through the scrub oaks parallel to the wash until he broke out onto the boulder-strewn flat eight miles beyond Watershed. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he sank to one knee and drew a dozen deep breaths. As a child, he had been sent off every morning, barefoot even in winter, his mouth filled with river water so he would be sure to breathe through his nostrils, to run to the roof of the world and the Anasazi altar embedded in its heart, and back. Now, fifty years later, his breath came in shallow gasps and each gasp was accompanied by a stitch of pain in his chest, but the loping gait of the longdistance runner still seemed second nature to him. He ran on, splashing through shallow water as the smallest of the fingers of the river skimmed over water-smoothed shale into what was left of a two-hundred-year-old irrigation ditch. Wading through icy water, he continued along the ditch as it curled through a gorge with sheer sides. In places the opening narrowed to three yards and the cliffs towering overhead seemed to touch, blocking out the Milky Way.
Gasping for breath, his eyes stinging as the sweat dripped into them, his arms and legs smarting from razorlike cuts, Eskeltsetle burst out of the gorge into the box canyon. Sinking onto one knee again, he gazed across the canyon. Gradually it came into focus—the chalk white cliffs shimmering in the moonlight, the adobe walls of el Palacio Adobe on the rocky saddle atop the cliffs, the torreon at each of its three corners, the bell tower of the Church of San Antonio de Gracia floating over the walls.
The sight of the Adobe Palace provoked a flood of memories. His maternal grandfather, instructing him in the fundamentals of tracking, had taken him through the narrow gorge to the very spot on which he was kneeling and filled him with tales of the Adobe Palace: how Spanish con-quistadores had flogged the naked backs of the Pueblo slaves constructing it; how the Apaches had heel-kicked their frightened ponies through the narrow gorge and angrily brandished their lances at the adobe walls; how the canyon, which had been an Anasazi burial ground from the dawn of time, had been turned into a killing field as the Spanish on the heights, their silver helmets sparkling in the sun, kept the Apaches at bay with muskets. Long after the Spanish had abandoned the fortress, Suma Apaches still considered the canyon bad medicine, a valley of death to be avoided at all costs. The bleached bones of animals scattered over the Anasazi burial ground —Eskeltsetle had spotted them the previous year
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when he came to check on rumors of trucks kicking up trails of dust on the unpaved road snaking along the chalk cliffs toward the fortress —reinforced the feeling that the Adobe Palace was cursed.
A light flickered in a window on the second floor of the church. Cursed or not, the canyon floor had to be crossed. Whoever kidnapped Doubting Thomas had taken him to the Adobe Palace. Pushing himself to his feet, Eskeltsetle murmured a prayer in Athapaskan. "I ask you, Wakantanka, to guide me over this killing ground so I can reach my boy Thomas before harm comes to him." He let another ten minutes go by to give the moon time to slip behind the cliffs. Then, stepping over or around the bones of dead animals, moving with great deliberation so as not to disturb the spirits of his ancestors haunting the ground, he started across the canyon floor toward the fortress.
Halfway across, with the cliffs and the fortress looming closer, Eskeltsetle sank again onto one knee and studied the situation. When the moon was still up he had noticed a steep ravine that led to a section of the fortress wall where the adobe had crumbled. The ravine was blocked by a coyote fence entangled with coils of razor wire. With at least four hours of darkness remaining, Eskeltsetle figured he had a good chance of squirming through the coils and reaching the fortress without being seen. He rose to his feet and headed in the direction of the bell tower, which was visible against the stars in the Big Dipper, and the ravine directly below it. Skirting the skeleton of a deer, he sensed something hard under his left moccasin. Horrified at the idea that he might have stepped on the bones of an ancestor, he flung himself to one side just as the small plastic antipersonnel mine exploded beneath his foot.
At first there was no pain, only a feeling of numbness spreading from his toes to his ankle. Reaching down in the terrible darkness, his fingers discovered something wet and sticky where his toes had been. Then the pain lashed at him in waves, starting at the sole of his foot and spiraling up his leg.
"I am killed," Eskeltsetle moaned.
High above him, in the one tower that was still standing, a spotlight snapped on and played slowly over the killing field. Biting down on the collar of his shirt, Eskeltsetle lay deathly still as the light swept past his body and moved on across the canyon. After a while someone on the tower cursed in Spanish. The spotlight stabbed into the sky and switched off.
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Clinging to the ground in the still darkness, Eskeltsetle tried to cope with the pain that was branding the flesh of his foot and burning up through his leg. He shook his head vio
lently to keep from fainting. The pain didn't recede, but he began to dominate it. He had, after all, an advantage ... a working relationship with pain . . . the pain of his people, the pain of the young Apaches who scorned him, the pain of his lost youth and his lost pride and his lost dreams . . . the unbearable pain of his lost love. He would have liked to turn on his flashlight and inspect the wound, but he didn't dare. Fumbling with the buckle, he eased his belt through the loops of his corduroys and, twisting it around his left ankle, tugged it tight to stem the flow of blood. Curiously, the makeshift tourniquet seemed to dull the burning sensation in his leg. Willing himself to move, he staggered to his feet. The rim of the chalk cliffs and the sea of stars swam above his head. Squinting, he made out the mouth of the gorge at the entrance to the canyon.
Guided by an enormous reddish star poised over it, and over Watershed Station beyond, dragging his mangled foot behind him, Eskeltsetle set off on the long painful journey toward Betelgeuse.
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"Sure." The boys had exchanged high fives. Eskinewah would tell all this to Skelt, who would start up the footpath parallel to the river.
Some of the younger Apaches could read a trail pretty good, but Skelt was by far the best tracker on the reservation, maybe the best Apache tracker in all of New Mexico. He was bound to come across Thomas's plastic pail. If he had his flashlight with him, he'd read the footprints on the ground; Thomas had dragged his feet as often as he could so Skelt would understand he was being taken against his will. Knowing Skelt, Thomas was sure he'd be able to figure out the height and weight of the two kidnappers from their prints. He would track the prints up to the Sacred Lake. He'd lose them where they disappeared onto the boulders, he'd pick them up again where they came off. But once they reached the Jeep, would Skelt lose the trail? Not in a million years! Oh, you just had to know he'd do it: he'd follow the tire tracks up the firebreak, he'd figure out where they were heading, he'd race back to Watershed and organize a rescue party. Any minute now Thomas was going to hear war whoops as the Apaches swept down on the fortress and freed the prisoner. He'd be a hero. Shenandoah would be real sorry she'd been angry at him for not showing up for supper. The young braves would punch him playfully on the shoulders. The other boys would crowd him with questions.