“No, really. Thanks.”
He watched the driver take down an address, then heard his voice as he repeated it.
“Tremayne. Sixteen Peachtree. Be there in five minutes, ma’am.” He hung up and saw Tanner watching him. “How d’you like that? She wants to go to a motel at Kennedy. Who do you suppose she’s shacking up with out there?”
Tanner was bewildered. The Tremaynes had two cars of their own.… Had Tremayne intended to ignore the command to meet at the Lassiter depot? Or, by making sure the single Saturday night taxi was away, was Tremayne hoping to isolate him in the Village?
Either was possible.
Tanner hobbled toward an alley running alongside of the Pub, used primarily for deliveries. From there, since it led to a municipal parking lot, he could escape undetected if it were necessary. He stood in the alley and massaged his leg. He’d have a huge welt in an hour or so. He looked at his watch. It was twelve-forty-nine. Another hour before he would drive to the depot. Perhaps the black car would return. Perhaps others would come.
He wanted a cigarette, but did not want to strike a match near the street. He could cup the glow of a cigarette, not the flame of a match. He walked ten yards into the alley and lit up. He heard something. Footsteps?
He inched his way back toward the Valley Road entrance. The Village was deserted. The only sounds were muted, coming from the Pub. Then the Pub’s door opened and three people came out. Jim and Nancy Loomis with a man he didn’t recognize. He laughed sadly to himself.
Here he was, John Tanner, the respected Director of News for Standard Mutual, hiding in a darkened alley—filthy, soaked, a bullet crease in his shoulder and a swelling bruise on his leg from a driver intent on murder—silently watching Jim and Nancy come out of the Pub. Jim Loomis. He had been touched by Omega and he’d never know it.
From the west end of Valley Road—the direction of Route Five—came an automobile traveling quietly at no more than ten miles an hour. The driver seemed to be looking for someone or something on Valley Road.
It was Joe.
He hadn’t gone to Philadelphia. There was no dying father in Philadelphia. The Cardones had lied.
It was no surprise to Tanner.
He pressed his back against the alley wall and made himself as inconspicuous as he could, but he was a large man. For no other reason than that it gave him security, Tanner withdrew the pistol from his belt. He’d kill Cardone if he had to.
When the car was within forty feet of him, two short blasts from a second automobile, coming from the other direction, made Cardone stop.
The second car approached rapidly.
It was Tremayne. As he passed the alley, Tanner could see the look of panic on his face.
The lawyer pulled up beside Cardone and the two men spoke quickly, softly. Tanner couldn’t make out the words, but he could tell they were spoken rapidly and with great agitation. Tremayne made a U-turn, and the automobiles raced off in the same direction.
Tanner relaxed and stretched his pained body. All were accounted for now. All he knew about and one more he didn’t. Omega plus one, he considered. Who was in the black automobile? Who had tried to run him down?
There was no point in putting it off any longer. He’d seen what he had to see. He’d drive to within a few hundred yards of the Lassiter depot and wait for Omega to declare themselves.
He walked out of the alley and started for the car. And then he stopped.
There was something wrong with the car. In the subdued light of the gas lamps he could see that the automobile’s rear end had settled down to the surface of the street. The chrome bumper was inches above the pavement.
He ran to the car and unclipped his pencil light Both back tires were flat, the metal rims supporting the weight of the automobile. He crouched down and saw two knives protruding from the deflated rubber.
How? When? He was within twenty yards every second! The street was deserted! No one! No one could have crept behind the Mercedes without being seen!
Except, perhaps, those few moments in the alley. Those moments when he lit a cigarette and crouched by the wall watching Tremayne and Cardone. Those seconds when he’d thought he’d heard footsteps.
The tires had been slashed not five minutes ago!
Oh Christ! thought Tanner. The manipulation hadn’t stopped at all! Omega was at his heels. Knowing. Knowing every move he made. Every second!
What had Ali started to say on the phone? Bernie had … what? He started toward the booth, taking the last dime out of his pocket. He pulled the pistol out of his belt and looked around as he crossed the street. Whoever punctured the tires might be waiting, watching.
“Ali?”
“Darling, for God’s sake come home!”
“In a little while, hon. Honest, no problems. No problems at all.… I just want to ask you a question. It’s important.”
“It’s just as important that you get home!”
“You said before that Bernie had decided something. What was it?”
“Oh … when you called the first time. Leila went out after you; Bernie didn’t want to leave us alone. But he was worried that you might not listen to her and since the police were here, he decided to go find you himself.”
“Did he take the Triumph?”
“No. He borrowed a car from one of the police.”
“Oh, Christ!” Tanner didn’t mean to explode into the phone but he couldn’t help it. The black automobile out of nowhere! The plus-one was really part of the three! “Is he back?”
“No. Leila is, though. She thinks he may have gotten lost.”
“I’ll call you.” Tanner hung up. Of course Bernie was “lost.” There hadn’t been time for him to get back. Not since Tanner had been in the alley, not since the tires were slashed.
And now he realized that somehow he had to reach the Lassiter depot. Reach it and position himself before any part of Omega could stop him, or know where he was.
Lassiter Road was diagonally northwest, about three miles from the center of the Village. The depot perhaps another mile or two beyond. He’d walk. It was all he could do.
He started as quickly as he could, his limp diminishing with movement, then ducked into a doorway. No one followed him.
He kept up a zigzag pattern northwest until he reached the outskirts of town—where there were no sidewalks, only large expanses of lawn. Lassiter wasn’t far away now. Twice he lay on the ground while automobiles raced past him, drivers oblivious to anything but the road in front of them.
Finally, through a back stretch of woods behind a well-trimmed lawn, neither unlike his own, he reached Lassiter Road.
On the rough tarred surface he turned left and started the final part of his journey. It wasn’t any farther than a mile or a mile and a half by his calculations. He could reach the deserted depot in fifteen minutes if his leg held out. If it didn’t, he’d simply slow down, but he’d get there. His watch read one-forty-one. There was time.
Omega wouldn’t arrive early. It couldn’t afford to. It—or they—didn’t know what was waiting for them.
Tanner limped along the road and found he felt better—more secure—holding Scanlan’s pistol in his hand. He saw a flicker of light behind him. Headlights, three or four hundred yards away. He crossed into the woods bordering on the road and lay flat on the muddy ground.
The car passed him traveling slowly. It was the same black car that had run him down on Valley Road. He couldn’t see the driver; the absence of street lights made any identification impossible.
When it was out of sight, Tanner went back to the road. He had considered walking in the woods but it wasn’t feasible. He could make better time on the cleared surface. He went on, hobbling now, wondering whether the black automobile belonged to a policeman currently stationed at 22 Orchard Drive. Whether the driver was a writer named Osterman.
He had gone nearly half a mile when the lights appeared again, only now in front of him. He dove into the brush, hoping to God h
e hadn’t been seen, unlatching the safety of his pistol as he lay there.
The automobile approached at incredible speed. Whoever was driving was racing back to find someone.
Was it to find him?
Or Leila Osterman?
Or was it to reach Cardone, who had no dying father in Philadelphia. Or Tremayne, who wasn’t on his way to the motel at Kennedy Airport.
Tanner got up and kept going, his leg about to collapse under him, the pistol gripped tightly in his hand.
He rounded a bend in the road and there it was. A single sagging street lamp lit the crumbling station house. The old stucco depot was boarded up, giant weed drooping ominously from the cracks in the rotted wood. Small ugly leaves grew out of the foundation.
There was no wind, no rain, no sound but the rhythmic drip of water from thousands of branches and leaves—the last exhausted effects of the storm,
He stood on the outskirts of the decayed, overgrown parking area trying to decide where to position himself. It was nearly two o’clock and a secluded place had to be found. The station house itself! Perhaps he could get inside. He started across the gravel and weeds.
A blinding light flashed in his eyes; his reflexes lurched him forward. He rolled over on his wounded shoulder, yet felt no pain. A powerful searchlight had pierced the dimness of the depot grounds, and gunshots echoed throughout the deserted area. Bullets thumped into the earth around him and whistled over his head. He kept rolling, over and over, knowing that one of the bullets had hit his left arm.
He reached the edge of the sunken gravel and raised his pistol toward the blinding light. He fired rapidly in the direction of the enemy. The searchlight exploded; a scream followed. Tanner kept pulling the trigger until the clip was empty. He tried to reach into his pocket with his left hand for a second clip and found he couldn’t move his arm.
There was silence again. He put down the pistol and awkwardly extracted another clip with his right hand. He twisted the pistol on its back and with his teeth holding the hot barrel, pushed the fresh clip into the chamber, burning his lips as he did so.
He waited for his enemy to move. To make any sound at all. Nothing stirred.
Slowly he rose, his left arm now completely immobile. He held the pistol in front of him, ready to pull the trigger at the slightest movement in the grass.
None came.
Tanner backed his way towards the door of the depot, holding his weapon up, probing the ground carefully with his feet so that no unexpected obstacle would cause him to fall. He reached the boarded-up door, knowing he couldn’t possibly break it down if it was nailed shut. Most of his body was inoperative. He had little strength left.
Still, he pushed his back against the door and the heavy wood gave slightly, creaking loudly as it did so. Tanner turned his head just enough to see that the opening was no more than three or four inches. The ancient hinges were caked with rust. He slammed his right shoulder against the edge of the door and it gave way, plunging Tanner into the darkness, onto the rotted floor of the station.
He lay where he was for several seconds. The station house door was three-quarters open, the upper section snapped away from its hinges. The street lamp fifty yards away provided a dull wash of illumination. Broken and missing boards from the roof were a second, inadequate source of light.
Suddenly Tanner heard a creaking behind him. The unmistakable sound of a footstep on the rotted floor. He tried to turn around, tried to rise. He was too late. Something crashed into the base of his skull. He felt himself grow dizzy, but he saw the foot. A foot encased in bandages.
As he collapsed on the rotted floor, blackness sweeping over him, he looked upward into a face.
Tanner knew he had found Omega.
It was Laurence Fassett.
29
He couldn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. Five minutes? An hour? There was no way to tell. He couldn’t see his watch, he couldn’t move his left arm. His face was against the rough splintered floor of the crumbling station house. He could feel the blood slowly trickling from his wounded arm; his head ached.
Fassett!
The manipulator.
Omega.
As he lay there, isolated fragments of past conversations raced through his mind.
“… we should get together … our wives should get together …”
But Laurence Fassett’s wife had been killed in East Berlin. Murdered in East Berlin. That fact had been his most moving entreaty.
And there was something else. Something to do with a Woodward broadcast … The broadcast about the C.I.A. a year ago.
“… I was in the States then. I saw that one.”
But he wasn’t “in the States” then. In Washington Fassett had said he’d been on the Albanian border a year ago. “… forty-five days of haggling.” In the field. It was why he’d contacted John Tanner, the solid, clean news director of Standard Mutual, a resident of the target, Chasm of Leather.
There were other contradictions—none as obvious, but they were there. They wouldn’t do him any good now. His life was about to end in the ruins of the Lassiter depot.
He moved his head and saw Fassett standing above him.
“We’ve got a great deal to thank you for. If you are as good a shot as I think you are you’ve created the perfect martyr out there. A dead hero. If he’s only wounded, he’ll soon be dead at any rate.… Oh, he’s the other part of us, but even he’d recognize the perfect contribution of his sacrifice.… You see, I didn’t lie to you. We are fanatics. We have to be.”
“What now?”
“We wait for the others. One or two are bound to show up. Then it’ll be over. Their lives and yours, I’m afraid. And Washington will have its Omega. Then, perhaps, a field agent named Fassett will be given another commendation. If they’re not careful, they’ll make me Director of Operations one day.”
“You’re a traitor.” Tanner found something in the dark shadows by his right hand. It was a loose piece of flooring about two feet long, an inch or so wide. He awkwardly, painfully, sat up, pulling the plank to his side.
“Not by my lights. A defector, perhaps. Not a traitor. Let’s not go into that. You wouldn’t understand or appreciate the viewpoint. Let’s just say in my opinion you’re the traitor. All of you. Look around you …”
Tanner lashed out with the piece of wood and crashed it with all his might across the bandaged foot in front of him. Blood erupted instantly, spreading through the gauze. Tanner flung himself upward into Fassett’s groin, trying desperately to reach the hand with the gun. Fassett screamed in anguish. Tanner found the agent’s wrist with his right hand, his left arm immobile, serving only as a limping tentacle. He drove Fassett back against the wall and ground his heel into Fassett’s wounded foot, stamping it over and over again.
Tanner wrenched the gun free and it fell to the floor, sliding towards the open door and the dim shaft of light. Fassett’s screams shattered the stillness of the station house as he slumped against the wall.
John lunged for the pistol, picked it up and held it tightly in his hand. He got up, every part of his body in pain, the blood flowing now out of his arm.
Fassett was barely conscious, gasping in agony. Tanner wanted this man alive, wanted Omega alive. But he thought of the basement, of Ali and the children, and so he took careful aim and fired twice, once into the mass of blood and flesh which was Fassett’s wound, once into the knee cap of the leg.
He lurched back toward the doorway, supporting himself in the frame. Painfully, he looked at his watch: two-thirty-seven. Seven minutes after Omega’s appointed time.
No one else would come now. Half of Omega lay in agony in the station house; the rest in the tall, wet grass beyond the parking lot.
He wondered who it was.
Tremayne?
Cardone?
Osterman?
Tanner tore off part of his sleeve and tried to wrap it around the wound in his arm. If only he could stop the bleeding, even a
bit. If he could do that perhaps he could make it across the old parking area to where the searchlight was.
But he couldn’t, and, off balance, fell backwards to the floor. He was no better off than Fassett. Both their lives would ebb away right there. Inside the ancient depot.
A wailing began; Tanner wasn’t sure if it was a trick of his brain or if it was real. Real! It was growing louder.
Sirens, then the roar of engines. Then the screeching of brakes against loose gravel and wet dirt.
Tanner rose to his elbow. He tried with all his strength to get up—only to his knees, that would be good enough. That would be sufficient to crawl. Crawl to the doorway.
The beams of searchlights filtered through the loose boards and cracked stucco, one light remaining on the entrance. Then a voice, amplified by a bullhorn.
“This is the police! We are accompanied by federal authorities! If you have weapons, throw them out and follow with your hands up!… If you are holding Tanner hostage, release him! You are surrounded. There’s no way for you to escape!”
Tanner tried to speak as he crawled toward the door. The voice sounded once again.
“We repeat. Throw out your weapons …”
Tanner could hear another voice yelling, this one not on a horn.
“Over here! Throw a light over here! By this automobile! Over here in the grass!”
Someone had found the rest of Omega.
“Tanner! John Tanner! Are you inside!?”
Tanner reached the entrance and pulled himself up by the edge of the door into the spill of light.
“There he is! Jesus, look at him!”
Tanner fell forward. Jenkins raced to his side.
“There you are, Mr. Tanner. We’ve tied you up as best we can. It’ll hold till the ambulance gets here. See if you can walk.” Jenkins braced Tanner around the waist and pulled him to his feet. Two other policemen were carrying out Fassett.
“That’s him.… That’s Omega.”
“We know. You’re a very impressive fellow. You did what no one else was able to do in five years of trying. You got Omega for us.”