The Sisters Read online

  The area beyond, a large storage room stacked with round banquet tables of various sizes standing on their edges, along with hundreds of folded chairs, was totally dark except for the eerie red halo above the

  "Emergency Exit" sign at the far end. Ourcq, still flattened against the wall on the corridor side of the door, strained to catch the faintest sound in the storage room. Hearing nothing, he bent his body until he was doubled over in a crouch, then sprang over the threshold and straightened with his back Hat against the wall inside the room. Barely breathing, he devoted another long minute to listening. It was Ourcq's theory that he had a fixed amount of time to spend when stalking a target; that half of it should be spent on his own safety, and the other half on the target's death. Having used up the portion for himself, Ourcq stepped off smartly from the wall and headed down the aisle formed by the stacked tables toward the emergency exit. He was halfway across the room when he heard a scraping sound ahead. He stopped in his tracks.

  "I know you are fucking there," Ourcq called. "Come out where I can fucking see you and nothing will happen to you. I just want to ask you a few fucking questions."

  In the dull glow of the "Emergency Exit" sign, Kaat moved into his field of vision farther along the makeshift aisle. "Why are you following me?"

  she asked.

  Ourcq could see her outline, but not her features.

  He had to make sure it was the right woman. Keeping his pistol parallel to his leg so that she wouldn't notice it, he said, "I'm the fucking house detective. You asked at the fucking desk about one of our clients.

  The clerk said there was no one registered under that fucking name. Then you fucking described who you were looking for."

  Kaat said, "Are you really incapable of saying a sentence without using the word 'fucking' in it?"

  "I can fucking well say a sentence without the word 'fucking in it if I fucking want to. But I don't fucking want to. Now, how about if you describe for me the fucking man you were looking for,"

  Kaat described Peter Raven to Ourcq.

  "That is who I fucking thought you were looking for," he said. He took a step in Kaat's direction. "You were looking for him in the fucking Seventh Heaven, too, weren't you?"

  "And you were one of the two men in the Dodge who shot my cat," Kaat said.

  "I definitely did not shoot no fucking cat," Ourcq contradicted her.

  "Appleyard shot the fucking cat. Where is the fucking dwarf who was travelling with you?"

  It was at that instant that Ourcq felt the icy burn of metal against the nape of his neck. "The dwarf is right behind you, if you please," the Potter said with quiet passion. "Far enough so that if you kick a foot back or try to catch me in the stomach with an elbow, you will come into contact with nothing but air. Near enough so that I can put a twenty-two-caliber bullet through your neck the instant I feel you move. Listen to me carefully. I am now going to count out loud to three. If you move before I reach three, or if I do not hear your gun fall to the floor, I will pull the trigger. I do not have a silencer. My Beretta makes a soft coughing sound. But you will not hear a thing. So. One. Two."

  Ourcq's pistol clattered to the floor.

  "Kick it away. Slowly. Good. Now undo your belt and let your trousers drop to your ankles. Good. Now turn very slowly to your right, facing the table, and reach up with your hands and grip the top edge of it, and lean your forehead against it. Very good. You have saved your life. For the moment." The Potter took a step backward. "You can turn on the lights now," he called to Kaat.

  She found the switch, and the storage room was bathed in light. "Move your head so I can see your profile," the Potter instructed Ourcq.

  Ourcq did as he was told.

  "I have seen you before," the Potter announced.

  Kaat came up behind the Potter. "In the Dodge," she suggested.

  "I have seen him before the Dodge," the Potter said. "In Moscow." To Ourcq he said, "When were you in Moscow, if you please?"

  Ourcq turned back to the table. "I have never been in Moscow in my fucking life," he said.

  The Potter smiled faintly. "If you do not understand what I am now saying to you," he told Ourcq in Russian, "I am going to shoot you through your spinal column,"

  "I understand, I understand," Ourcq answered in Russian, which he spoke with a Canadian accent. In English he added, "We are both of us on the same fucking side!"

  "You are sweepers," the Potter said.

  "Fucking sweepers, yes,' Ourcq agreed enthusiastically.

  "Dispatched by a Soviet rezident to sweep the trail of an agent on a mission?"

  "You know as much as I fucking do," Ourcq said. "Can I take my fucking hands down and pull up my fucking pants now?" And he added in a low voice, "In case you didn't notice, there's a fucking lady present."

  "No," said the Potter.

  "But I told you," cried Ourcq, his voice suddenly hoarse with emotion,

  "we are on the same fucking side."

  "I think I know whose side you are on," the Potter said, "but I am not yet sure whose side I am on."

  "What are you going to do with him?" Kaat asked.

  "I am going to bombard him with questions. And I am going to shoot him if he does not answer them."

  "All you can fucking talk about is shooting people," Ourcq complained.

  "I did see you in Moscow, didn't I?" the Potter demanded.

  "How should I fucking know if you saw me in Moscow? I was there three fucking years ago. There was a fucking medal ceremony. There was a fucking cocktail party with some fucking department bosses. There was a fucking debriefing on a job I had pulled off' for my fucking rezident.

  There was even a fucking orgy in a fucking dacha on the fucking Black Sea."

  "I saw you at the cocktail party," the Potter remembered. "You spread caviar on a slice of toast as if it were butter. I was a novator at the time, which is why I was invited. Everybody loved your accent when you spoke Russian. You were a big success. It comes back to me now-you had a Canadian father and a Russian mother."

  "A Canadian mother and a Russian father," Ourcq corrected him.

  "You didn't say 'fucking " Kaat noted. "Keep up the good work."

  "Fuck off," Ourcq snapped in irritation.

  "Watch how you talk, if you please," the Potter warned sharply.

  Oureq laughed under his breath. "You going to shoot me because you don't like the way I fucking talk?"

  "I may," the Potter said.

  "He might," Kaat chimed in, though she doubted he would.

  Ourcq laughed out loud this time. "Imagine getting wiped away because you talk fucking dirty!"

  "You are not a regular sweeper," the Potter suggested. "You are a hit man. A specialist in wetwork."

  "Wet fucking work/' Ourcq agreed. "But they needed sweepers fast, and we were fucking available'

  "You were given an itinerary,"the Potter said quietly.

  Ourcq didn't say anything.

  "Here's the thing," Kaat said from behind the Potter. "We know where he's going. How do you think we found him at Seventh Heaven? How do you think we found him here?"

  Ourcq grunted. "You fucking missed him at Seventh Heaven. You fucking missed him here too." He turned to look over his shoulder at the Potter.

  "You are a fucking professional. You and I talk the same fucking language. You know where he's going, my fucking ass! If you knew where he was fucking going, you wouldn't need to ask me. I can give you any fucking answer under the sun. Why are we playing this fucking game anyhow?"

  Ourcq turned back to the table and took a deep breath, and wondered if it would be his last.

  The Potter grabbed Kaat's arm and pushed her in the general direction of the door with the "Emergency Exit" sign over it. She took a few steps, then hesitated. The Potter, who was wrapping a handkerchief around the muzzle of his Beretta, waved her on impatiently. She turned and walked briskly away.

  "Where is the fucking lady going?" Ourcq inquired nervously.

 
"Do not turn around, if you please," the Potter instructed him.

  "Jesus fucking Christ," muttered Ourcq. His knees started to tremble.

  "How many people have you shot in your day?" the Potter asked him.

  "My fucking share," Ourcq admitted. His voice was pitched high, off its usual key.

  "Did you enjoy shooting them?"

  Ourcq shrugged, and for an instant it looked as if he were physically shaking off the question. Then he decided to answer it; maybe it would give him more time. "I did not fucking enjoy it. I did not fucking not enjoy it. It was what I did for a fucking living. We have all of us got to fucking eat!" He pressed his forehead to the table and closed his eyes and said in a harsh voice, "Do me a fucking favor, get it fucking over with."

  The Potter glanced at Kaat, who was watching from the door. They looked at each other for a long moment. Then in one flowing gesture he bent and pressed his pistol to the toe of Ourcq's right shoe and pulled the trigger. The Beretta coughed discreetly, just as the Potter had said it would. Moaning softly, Ourcq sank to the ground. "Is that fucking all?"

  he asked in a weak voice.

  "Isn't it enough?" the Potter asked. He felt very tired.

  "It will definitely give you a fucking head start," Ourcq muttered. He was looking at his foot as if it belonged to someone else.

  "That is all I will need," the Potter said.

  "Do not waste any fucking moment of it," Ourcq advised him, and grimacing from the pain, he started to unlace the scuffed black oxford from which blood was seeping.

  Khanda knew the building inside out. On one errand or another, he had investigated every corner of it. At the very beginning he had toyed with the idea of shooting from the roof. He could keep out of sight beforehand behind the giant neon Hertz sign that flashed the time and temperature, or the enormous rusted boiler, abandoned when the warehouse switched from steam heat. But he had given up the idea because the police accompanying the target would be scanning, as a matter of habit, rooftops for the silhouette of a rifleman. Windows, because there were literally hundreds of them along the route, offered a much surer sniper's nest, he had decided.

  Early on he had selected one. In the far corner of the sixth floor, which gave him the best vantage point. He stood motionless before it now, watching as the motorcade going through a dress rehearsal jogged right off Main Street and headed directly toward the warehouse in which he worked. Just below the warehouse the motorcade turned sharply left toward the railroad underpass and, eventually, the freeway that would take the target to his luncheon rendezvous. Squinting through an imaginary telescopic sight, Khanda went through the motions of working the bolt of his rifle twice and firing off three shots at the back of the Prince's head. It would be difficult to miss at this range, since his four-power scope would make it appear as if he were shooting at a target a mere twenty-two yards away. Then, too, his rifle had less recoil than the average military weapon, an advantage that increased its accuracy under rapid fire conditions. It also had a tendency to fire a bit high and to the right, a perfect defect when aiming at a target moving away and slightly to the right; it meant that he wouldn't have to make allowances for the apparent upward drift of the target due to the height of his snipers nest.

  Having fired off three shots in his imagination, Khanda punched his stopwatch, then trotted across the filthy warehouse floor toward the enclosed stairway in the northwest corner of the building. Taking the steps two at a time, he descended to the second-floor lunchroom, where he inserted a coin in the vending machine and bought himself a Coke. It was a touch Khanda was particularly proud of; someone wandering down the steps casually sipping a Coke would appear particularly innocent to a policeman racing up looking for a sniper. Then he made his way, Coke in hand, down to the main door and out into the sun-drenched street.

  He punched his stopwatch and looked at it. Even stopping for the Coke, it had taken him three minutes from the time he fired the rifle until the moment he emerged from the warehouse. It was extremely unlikely that the police would be able to seal off the building in that time span.

  Hell, it would take them that long just to figure out where the shots had come from!

  Sipping from his Coke, squinting this time because of the sunlight, Khanda surveyed the traffic passing the warehouse. A thin smirk stretched across his lips. In four days he would know if his calculations were correct.

  The Director, tall, thin, Midwestern in origin but very nouveau Georgetown in the way he dressed and carried himself, came around the desk and held out the box of chocolates toward Carroll. "The ones with the gold wrappers are filled with brandy," he told him. He flashed what had passed for an encouraging smile in the days when he had been an investment banker. "Two of them will ruin you for an afternoon. Three and you can testify before a Senate oversight committee and feel no pain whatsoever."

  The Deputy Director, sitting on a couch made of leather as soft as kid gloves, chuckled appreciatively. G. Sprowls, leaning casually against a bookcase, looked on with his usual half-smile etched on his face.

  Carroll helped himself to a candy, undid the gold wrapper and popped it into his mouth.

  "What did I tell you?" said the Director, settling back into his wicker swivel chair, a family heirloom that he had brought with him when he took the job.

  Carroll swallowed. "Very good," he agreed. He arched his neck and wedged a finger under his starched collar. "You have done what you can to put me at ease. Now why don't we get on with it."

  The Deputy Director leaned forward on the couch. "You are not going to he difficult, I hope."

  Carroll concentrated on the wall above the Director's Toulouse-Lautrec, another family heirloom. "I'm not at all sure what I'm going to be," he admitted.

  The Director tapped the eraser end of a pencil against his desk blotter.

  "If I understand you correctly," he told Carroll, "you take the position that I personally authorized an operation."

  A muscle in Carroll's cheek twitched once as he nodded in agreement.

  "Good. Fine," said the Director. "You are one of the old hands around the shop. I don't for an instant doubt that you and your colleague-what is his name again?"

  "Francis," Carroll offered.

  "Francis, exactly I don't doubt that you and Francis are not motivated, like some people around here who shall remain nameless, by the current watchword, 'Don't do something, just stand there.' "

  "We view the world situation as desperate," Carroll conceded. "We think it is-you yourself said it when you were pinning a medal on one of our neighbors recently-two minutes to midnight. If someone doesn't do something about it, and fairly quickly, time will run out on us."

  "That is exactly how I see things," the Director, who had been well-briefed by G. Sprowls, insisted.

  Carroll shrugged. "You spoke about the need for unleashing the Company.

  "I have made no bones about where I stand," the Director readily agreed.

  "It is a matter of life or death, in my view."

  "When you spoke at that reception for one of our British colleagues,"

  Carroll continued, "you made a point of recalling Winston Churchill's preference, during the Second World War, for invading the Dardanelles before France."

  "It would have changed the map of Europe," the Director pointed out. "It would have been the allied armies, and not the Red Army, that liberated the captive countries of Eastern Europe. We would have installed friendly democratic governments before they could have installed their dictatorial Communist regimes." "Everyone understood what you were getting at between the lines," Carroll went on. "What we need in the Western world are leaders who are not soft on Communism."

  "Leaders who are not afraid to bite the bullet," the Director offered.

  "Who will stand up to the Communists," the Deputy Director added, "and not cut and run every time they confront them, whether at conference tables or invasion beaches."

  "That's nicely put," the Director said approvingly. "I co
uldn't have phrased it better myself."

  Everyone was staring at Carroll. Carroll was still focusing on a spot on the wall.

  "So you see,' the Director went on, "we are all of us in the same boat.

  If I authorized an operation, I won't back away from it now."

  "Between us," the Deputy Director said, "what are you up to?"

  "You can count on me to stand behind you," the Director vowed.

  G. Sprowls straightened up at the bookcase. "You awakened the Soviet sleeper," he drawled, "and sent him off to kill someone whom you knew the Director wanted dead. That's it, isn't it?"

  Again a muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek, only this time it wouldn't stop. He nodded imperceptibly. "Who?" G. Sprowls asked quietly. "Is it anyone we know?" the Deputy Director demanded. "The Russian ambassador, say, or that actor out in Hollywood who plays the Commie game by speaking out all the time against racism?"

  "I have no doubt whatsoever that you have done the right thing," the Director observed. "But there may be loose ends to tie up. There may be ways we can enlarge the operation, or set in motion other auxiliary operations designed to take advantage of your"-he searched frantically for an appropriate word, and came up with-"initiative Carroll brought his fingertips up to his cheek to still the twitching.

  Then he quietly pronounced the name of the target of the operation that he and Francis had launched.

  The Director stiffened in his wicker swivel chair as if he had received a heavy jolt of electricity. The Deputy Director s mouth gaped open and he collapsed weakly into the relative safety of the couch. Only G.

  Sprowls accepted the revelation with anything resembling equanimity. "Of course," he muttered to himself, 'how could I have missed it!"

  "You what?" the Director cried when he discovered how his vocal cords operated. "You had the audacity, the temerity, the gall to order the assassination of-" He couldn't bring himself to say the name of the target.