Without Remorse

  “Fine, just so I’m not in custody or anything. I could use a lift up to Baltimore.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Greer said as the plane came to a halt.

  Two security officers from the Agency were the first up the mobile stairs, even before the oversized cargo hatch swung up. Ritter woke the Russian up.

  “Welcome to Washington.”

  “Take me to my embassy?” he asked hopefully. Ritter almost laughed.

  “Not quite yet. We’ll find you a nice, comfortable place, though.”

  Grishanov was too groggy to object, rubbing his head and needing something for the pain. He went with the security officers, down the steps to their waiting car. It left at once for a safe house near Winchester, Virginia.

  “Thanks for the try, John,” Admiral Maxwell said, taking the younger man’s hand.

  “I’m sorry for what I said before,” Cas said, doing the same. “You were right.” They, too, had a car waiting. Kelly watched them enter it from the hatch.

  “So what happens to them?” he asked Greer.

  James shrugged, leading Kelly out and down the stairs. Noise from other aircraft made his voice hard to hear. “Dutch was in line for a fleet, and maybe the CNO’s job. I don’t suppose that’ll happen now. The operation—well, it was his baby, and it didn’t get born. That’ll finish him.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kelly said loudly. Greer turned.

  “No, it isn’t, but that’s the way things are.” Greer, too, had a ride waiting. He directed his driver to head to the wing-headquarters building, where he arranged a car to take Kelly to Baltimore. “Get some rest and call me when you’re ready. Bob was serious about what he said. Think it over.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelly replied, heading to the blue Air Force sedan.

  It was amazing, Kelly thought, the way life was. Within five minutes the sergeant drove onto an interstate highway. Scarcely twenty-four hours earlier he’d been on a ship approaching Subic Bay. Thirty-six hours prior to that he’d been on the soil of an enemy country—and now here he was in the backseat of a government Chevy, and the only dangers to which he was exposed came from other drivers. At least for a little while. All the familiar things, the highway exit signs painted that pleasant shade of green, traveling in the last half of the local rush hour. Everything about him proclaimed the normality of life, when three days earlier everything had been alien and hostile. Most amazing of all, he’d adjusted to it.

  The driver didn’t speak a word except to inquire about directions, though he must have wondered who the man was that had arrived on a special flight. Perhaps he had many such jobs, Kelly mused as the car pulled off Loch Raven Boulevard, enough that he’d stopped wondering about things he’d never be told.

  “Thanks for the lift,” Kelly told him.

  “Yes, sir, you’re welcome.” The car pulled away and Kelly walked to his apartment, amused that he’d taken his keys all the way to Vietnam and back. Did the keys know how far they had come? Five minutes later he was in the shower, the quintessentially American experience, changing from one reality into another. Another five and he was dressed in slacks and a short-sleeve shirt, and headed out the door to his Scout, parked a block away. Another ten and he’d parked the car within sight of Sandy’s bungalow. The walk from his Scout to her door was yet another transition. He’d come home to something, Kelly told himself. For the first time.

  “John!” He hadn’t expected the hug. Even less so the tears in her eyes.

  “It’s okay, Sandy. I’m fine. No holes or scratches or anything.” He was slow to grasp the desperation of her hold on him, pleasant as it was. But then the face against his chest started sobbing, and he knew that this event was not for him at all. “What’s wrong?”

  “They killed Doris.”

  Time stopped again. It seemed to split into many pieces. Kelly closed his eyes, in pain at first, and in that instant he was back on his hilltop overlooking SENDER GREEN, watching the NVA troops arrive; he was in his hospital bed looking at a photograph; he was outside some nameless village listening to the screams of children. He’d come home, all right, but to the same thing he’d left. No, he realized, to the thing that he had never left, which followed him everywhere he went. He’d never get away from it because he’d never really finished it, not even once. Not even once.

  And yet there was a new element as well, this woman holding him and feeling the same blazing pain that sliced through his chest.

  “What happened, Sandy?”

  “We got her well, John. We took her home, and then I called today like you told me to, and a policeman answered. Doris and her father, too, both murdered.”

  “Okay.” He moved her to the sofa. He wanted at first to let her calm down, not to hold her too close, but that didn’t work. She clung to him, letting out the feelings that she’d closeted off, along with worry for his safety, and he held Sandy’s head to his shoulder for several minutes. “Sam and Sarah?”

  “I haven’t told them yet.” Her face came up, and she looked across the room, her gaze unfocused. Then the nurse in her came out, as it had to. “How are you?”

  “A little frazzled from all the traveling,” he said, just to put words after her question. Then he had to tell the truth. “It was a washout. The mission didn’t work. They’re still there.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We were trying to get some people out of North Vietnam, prisoners—but something went wrong. Failed again,” he added quietly.

  “Was it dangerous?”

  Kelly managed a grunt. “Yeah, Sandy, you might say that, but I came out okay.”

  Sandy set that one aside. “Doris said there were others, other girls, they still have ’em.”

  “Yeah. Billy said the same thing. I’m going to try and get them out.” Kelly noticed she didn’t react to his mention of Billy’s name.

  “It won’t matter—getting them out, unless ... ”

  “I know.” The thing that kept following him around, Kelly thought. There was only one way to make it stop. Running couldn’t distance him from it. He had to turn and face it.

  “Well, Henry, that little job was taken care of this morning,” Piaggi told him. “Nice and clean.”

  “They didn’t leave—”

  “Henry, they were two pros, okay? They did the job and now they’re back home, couple hundred miles away. They didn’t leave anything behind except for the two bodies.” The phone report had been very clear on that. It had been an easy job, since neither target had expected anything.

  “Then that’s that,” Tucker observed with satisfaction. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat envelope. He handed it to Piaggi, who had fronted the money himself, good partner that he was.

  “With Eddie out of the way, and with that leak plugged, things ought to go back to normal.” Best twenty grand I ever spent, Henry thought.

  “Henry, the other girls?” Piaggi pointed out. “You’ve got a real business now. People inside like them are dangerous. Take care of it, okay?” He pocketed the envelope and left the table.

  “Twenty-two‘s, back of the head, both of ’em,” the Pittsburgh detective reported over the phone. “We’ve dusted the whole house—nothing. The flower box—nothing. The truck—nothing. The truck was stolen sometime last night—this morning, whatever. The florist has eight of them. Hell, we recovered it before the all-points was on the air. It was wise guys, had to be. Too smooth, too clean for local talent. No word on the street. They’re probably out of town already. Two people saw the truck. One woman saw two guys walking to the door. She figured it was a flower delivery, and besides she was across the street half a block away. No description, nothing. She doesn’t even remember what color they were.”

  Ryan and Douglas were listening on the same line, and their eyes met every few seconds. They knew it all from the tone of the man’s voice. The sort of case that policemen hate and fear. No immediately apparent motive, no witnesses, no usable evidence. Nowhere to s
tart and nowhere to go. The routine was as predictable as it was futile. They’d pump the neighbors for information, but it was a working-class neighborhood, and few had been at home at the time. People noticed mainly the unusual, and a flower truck wasn’t unusual enough to attract the inquiring look that developed into a physical description. Committing the perfect murder wasn’t really all that demanding, a secret known within the fraternity of detectives and belied by a whole body of literature that made them into superhuman beings they never claimed to be, even among themselves in a cop bar. Someday the case might be broken. One of the killers might be caught for something else and cop to this one in order to get a deal. Less likely, someone would talk about it, bragging in front of an informant who’d pass it along to someone else, but in either case it would take time and the trail, cold as it already was, would grow colder still. It was the most frustrating part of the business of police work. Truly innocent people had died, and there was no one to speak for them, to avenge their deaths, and other cases would come up, and the cops would set this one aside for something fresher, and from time to time someone would reopen the file and look things over, then put it back in the Unsolved drawer, where it would grow thicker only because of the forms that announced that there was still nothing new on the case.

  It was even worse for Ryan and Douglas. Yet again there had been a possible link that might open up two of their Unsolved files. Everyone would care about Raymond and Doris Brown. They’d had friends and neighbors, evidently a good minister. They’d be missed, and people would think what a shame it was ... But the files on Ryan’s desk were for people about whom no one but police officers cared, and somehow that only made it worse because someone should mourn for the dead, not just cops who were paid to do so. Worse still, it was yet another MO in a string of homicides that were somehow linked, but not in a way that made any sense. This was not their Invisible Man. Yes, the weapon had been a .22, but he’d had a chance to kill the innocent twice. He’d spared Virginia Charles, and he had somehow gone dangerously far out of his way to spare Doris Brown. He had saved her from Farmer and Grayson, probably, and someone else....

  “Detective,” Ryan asked, “what was the condition of Doris’s body?”

  “What do you mean?”

  It seemed an absurd question even as his mind formed it, but the man on the other end of the line would understand. “What was her physical condition?”

  “The autopsy is tomorrow, Lieutenant. She was neatly dressed, all cleaned up, hair was nice, she looked pretty decent.” Except for the two holes in the back of her head, the man didn’t have to add.

  Douglas read his lieutenant’s mind and nodded. Somebody took the time to get her well. That was a starting place.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could send me anything that might be useful. It’ll work both ways,” Ryan assured him.

  “Some guy went way out of his way to murder them. We don’t see many like this. I don’t like it very much,” the detective added. It was a puerile conclusion, but Ryan fully understood. How else did you say it, after all?

  It was called a safe house, and it was indeed safe. Located on a hundred rolling acres in the Virginia hills, there was on the estate a stately house and a twelve-stall stable half-occupied with hunter-jumpers. The title for the house showed a name, but that person owned another place nearby and leased this one to the Central Intelligence Agency—actually to a shadow corporation that existed only as a piece of paper and a post-office box—because he’d served his time in OSS, and besides, the money was right. Nothing unusual from the outside, but a more careful inspection might show that the doors and doorframes were steel, the windows unusually thick and strong, and sealed. It was as secure from outside assault and from an internal attempt at escape as a maximum-security prison, just a lot more pleasant to behold.

  Grishanov found clothing to wear, and shaving things that worked but with which he couldn’t harm himself. The bathroom mirror was steel, and the cup in the holder was paper. The couple that managed the house spoke passable Russian and were just as pleasant as they could be, already briefed on the nature of their new guest—they were more accustomed to defectors, though all their visitors were “protected” by a team of four security guards inside who came when they had “company,” and two more who lived full-time in the caretaker’s house close to the stables.

  Not unusually, their guest was out of synch with local time, and his disorientation and unease made him talkative. They were surprised that their orders were to limit their conversations to the mundane. The lady of the house fixed breakfast, always the best meal for the jet-lagged, while her husband launched a discussion of Pushkin, delighted to find that like many Russians, Grishanov was a serious devotee of poetry. The security guard leaned against the doorframe, just to keep an eye on things.

  “The things I have to do, Sandy—”

  “John, I understand,” she told him quietly. Both were surprised at how strong her voice was, how determined. “I didn’t before, but I do now.”

  “When I was over there”—was it only three days before?—“I thought about you. I need to thank you,” he told her.

  “What for?”

  Kelly looked down at the kitchen table. “Hard to explain. It’s scary, the things I do. It helps when you have somebody to think about. Excuse me—I don’t mean—” Kelly stopped. He did, actually, mean that. The mind wanders when alone, and his had wandered.

  Sandy took his hand and smiled in a gentle way. “I used to be afraid of you.”

  “Why?” he asked with considerable surprise.

  “Because of the things you do.”

  “I’d never hurt you,” he said without looking up, yet more miserable now that she had felt the need to fear him.

  “I know that now.”

  Despite her words, Kelly felt a need to explain himself. He wanted her to understand, not realizing that she already did. How to do it? Yes, he killed people, but only for a reason. How had he come to be what he was? Training was part of it, the rigorous months spent at Coronado, the time and effort spent to inculcate automatic responses, more deadly still, to learn patience. Along with that had somehow come a new way of seeing things—and then, actually seeing them and seeing the reasons why killing sometimes had to be. Along with the reasons had come a code, a modification, really, of what he’d learned from his father. His actions had to have a purpose, usually assigned by others, but his mind was agile enough to make its own decisions, to fit his code into a different context, to apply it with care—but to apply it. A product of many things, he sometimes surprised himself with what he was. Someone had to try, and he most often was best suited to—

  “You love too much, John.” she said. “You’re like me.”

  Those words brought his head up.

  “We lose patients on my floor, we lose them all the time—and I hate it! I hate being there when life goes away. I hate watching the family cry and knowing that we couldn’t stop it from happening. We all do our best. Professor Rosen is a wonderful surgeon, but we don’t always win, and I hate it when we lose. And with Doris—we won that one, John, and somebody took her away anyway. And that wasn’t disease or some damned auto accident. Somebody meant to do it. She was one of mine, and somebody killed her and her father. So I do understand, okay? I really do.”

  Jesus, she really does ... better than me.

  “Everybody connected with Pam and Doris, you’re all in danger now.”

  Sandy nodded. “You’re probably right. She told us things about Henry. I know what kind of person he is. I’ll tell you everything she told us.”

  “You do understand what I’m going to do with that information?”

  “Yes, John, I do. Please be careful.” She paused and told him why he had to be. “I want you back.”

  32

  Home Is the Prey

  The one bit of usable information to come out of Pittsburgh was a name. Sandy. Sandy had driven Doris Brown back home to her father. Just one wo
rd, not even a proper name, but cases routinely broke on less than that. It was like pulling on a string. Sometimes all you got was a broken piece of thread, sometimes you got something that just didn’t stop until everything unraveled into a tangled mess in your hands. Somebody named Sandy, a female voice, young. She’d hung up before saying anything, though it hardly seemed likely that she’d had anything at all to do with the murders. One might return to the scene of the crime—it really did happen—but not via telephone.

  How did it fit in? Ryan leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling while his trained mind examined everything he knew.

  The most likely supposition was that Doris Brown, deceased, had been directly connected with the same criminal enterprise that had killed Pamela Madden and Helen Waters, and that had also included as active members Richard Farmer and William Grayson. John Terrence Kelly, former UDT sailor, and perhaps a former Navy SEAL, had somehow happened upon and rescued Pamela Madden. He’d called Frank Allen about it several weeks later, telling him not very much. Something had gone badly wrong—short version, he’d been an ass—and Pamela Madden had died as a result. The photos of the body were something Ryan would never fully put from his mind. Kelly had been badly shot. A former commando whose girlfriend had been brutally murdered, Ryan reminded himself. Five pushers eliminated as though James Bond had appeared on the streets of Baltimore. One extraneous killing in which the murderer had intervened in a street robbery for reasons unknown. Richard Farmer—“Rick”?—eliminated with a knife, the second possible show of rage (and the first one didn’t count, Ryan reminded himself). William Grayson, probably kidnapped and killed. Doris Brown, probably rescued at the same time, cleaned up over a period of weeks and returned to her home. That meant some sort of medical care, didn’t it? Probably. Maybe, he corrected himself. The Invisible Man ... could he have done that himself? Doris was the girl who’d brushed out Pamela Madden’s hair. There was a connection.