“Given what I intend to propose, their participation is crucial,” Halloway said.
Kessler nodded.
Seth and Icicle.
10
Sydney, Australia. June. St. Andrew’s Cathedral, the foundation of which had been set in 1819, was as impressive as the guidebook maintained. Kessler roamed the shadows of its echoing interior, studied its vaulted ceiling, admired its stained-glass windows, and strolled outside. Squinting in the painfully brilliant sunlight, he descended a wide tier of steps to the sidewalk. Next to the cathedral here on George Street, he reached the town hall, used for concerts and assembly meetings, his guidebook explained. After lingering as long as seemed appropriate, he strolled to the corner, hailed a taxi, and proceeded to one of the many Oriental restaurants that Sydney was famous for. He’d arranged to meet his business connection there, but he arrived deliberately early, went to a phone booth, and dialed the number Halloway had given him.
A male voice answered. “Bondi Beach Surf and Dive Shop.”
“Mr. Pendleton, please.”
“The son or the father?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m the son.”
“Mr. Pendleton, do you have icicles in Australia?”
For a moment, the silence was so intense that Kessler thought the phone had gone dead. “Mr. Pendleton?”
“Who is this?”
“A friend.”
“I’ve got customers waiting. I rent and sell surfboards. I sell and fill scuba tanks. Icicles I don’t need. Or people with stupid questions.”
“Wait. Perhaps if I mentioned a name. Thomas Conrad. Post office box four thirty-eight.”
Again the line was silent. When Pendleton finally spoke, his voice sounded muffled, as if he’d cupped a hand to his mouth. “What do you want?”
“A meeting. It’s obvious if I meant you harm, I didn’t need to call. I wouldn’t have put you on guard.”
“You’re from them, aren’t you?”
“My name is Kessler.”
“Christ, I made it clear. I want nothing to do with—”
“Things have happened. Circumstances have forced me to come here.”
“You’re in Sydney? Mother of God!”
“I’m using a pay phone in a restaurant. I’ve never been here before. This call can’t possibly be overheard or traced.”
“But you know my name, where to reach me! If you’re picked up … !”
“I was careful not to be followed.”
“Careful?” Pendleton’s voice was contemptuous. “If you’re so sure you weren’t followed, you wouldn’t have called me. You’d have come here.”
“I didn’t want to risk surprising you in person. If I seemed a threat, I might not have had the chance to explain.”
Pendleton swore.
“I’ve tried to show good faith,” Kessler said. “Please, we need to meet. The sooner we talk, the sooner I’m out of the country.”
“Not here.”
“Not at the shop? Of course. I wouldn’t want to put you in danger.”
“Don’t write this down,” Pendleton said. “At four this afternoon …”
11
The instructions completed, Pendleton set down the phone. He’d kept his voice low. His assistant, waiting on a customer at the front of the store, could not have heard. Even so, he felt threatened. To be contacted so directly broke one of the most sacred rules he’d ever learned. God save me from amateurs. He stepped from his office, passed a row of scuba tanks, and pretended an interest in his assistant’s customer.
“That wet suit’s the top of the line. You shouldn’t have trouble keeping warm in it,” Pendleton told the customer. “Any problems, if the fit seems wrong, make sure you come back and tell us. We’ll make it right.” Though he and his father had come to Australia almost ten years ago, Pendleton still retained American patterns of speech. The local beach hogs thought him quaint; he liked it that way. Invisibility was sometimes better achieved by standing out. As a local character, he created the illusion of being ever-present, except for occasional diving expeditions, his absences easily explained.
He waved good-bye to the customer, patted his assistant on the back—“Nice big sale”—and returned to his office, stepping out the back door. Even in the off-season, Bondi Beach was surprisingly crowded. Tourists. A few die-hard surfers. Some muscle-bound gays on the make. In his terry-cloth pullover, faded jeans, and canvas deck shoes (no belt, no shoelaces, no socks), Pendleton looked like a beach hog himself. Overaged, granted. But even at forty, with his sun-bleached windblown hair, his deeply tanned face, and his iron-hard shoulders and chest, he could give the beach hogs competition if he wanted to. Not that he’d ever show off his full skills.
He scanned the activity on the beach and saw his father waxing a surfboard, talking to teenagers gathered around him, holding court.
Pendleton’s eyes crinkled with affection. He stepped from the deck at the back of the dive shop, crossed the sand, and reached his father.
Waves lapped the shore. The cool wind smelled salty. Pendleton waited respectfully while his father described to his audience an astonishing series of waves five years ago. His father—as tall as Pendleton, as muscular, and, even at seventy-two, wrinkled by age and ten years of sun, almost as ruggedly handsome—glanced at him.
“A minor problem’s come up, Dad. I need to talk to you.”
His father sighed in mock frustration. “If it’s really necessary.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“I’ll be back, lads.”
Pendleton walked with his father toward the shop. “A contact from your former friends just phoned me. He’s here in town.”
His father’s sigh was genuine now. “I told those fools to stay away from me. I never approved of maintaining contact. If it weren’t for the priest, I should have anticipated the problem and solved it years ago.”
“The contact wanted a meeting. It sounded like an emergency.”
“It must have been for someone to come all this way. The planet isn’t big enough to hide in.”
“The letter they sent last month …”
“Demanding a meeting in Canada.” Pendleton’s father scoffed. “Do they think I’m a fool?”
“It seems that they’re the fools. But I have no choice now. To keep him from coming to the shop, I have to meet with him somewhere else.”
“For the first and last time. Make sure he understands that.”
“What I wanted to tell you … While I’m gone, be careful.”
“Icicle’s always careful.”
“I know.” Pendleton smiled and hugged him.
12
Entering Sydney’s Botanic Gardens precisely at four as instructed, Kessler felt nervous. He suspected he hadn’t been convincing when he’d used sudden illness as his motive for leaving his business meeting in the middle of delicate negotiations. Though business was hardly the reason he’d come to Australia, it was what he believed was called his “cover.” Of the group that had met in Canada, he had the best excuse for traveling to Sydney without attracting attention. But now, by interrupting negotiations for a long-sought merger between his electronics firm and one in Sydney, he’d attracted the attention he’d hoped to avoid. In retrospect, he wished that he’d insisted to Pendleton that their meeting take place later, but on the other hand, Pendleton had been so reluctant to meet that Kessler was in no position to make demands.
As he proceeded along a path rimmed by exotic plants, Kessler worried that, despite his precautions in coming here, he’d been followed. Not just to these gardens but all the way from America. I’m a businessman, not an expert in intrigue, he thought. Perhaps my father would know—he almost changed the tense to “would have known” but tried to be hopeful—would know how to conduct himself in this sort of situation, but I was never trained for it.
Still, he didn’t think he could go wrong if he used his common sense. Don’t look around to see if you’re being
watched. The recent disappearances had demonstrated that the enemy was remarkably organized and skillful. A “tail”—he allowed himself what he believed was the correct melodramatic expression—surely wouldn’t be careless enough to let him know he was being followed. He’d made sure to bring his guidebook along. Though the nape of his neck itched from the strain of resisting the impulse to look back down the path, he forced himself to peer at the guidebook and then at the abundant plants before him. The path led upward. He reached a bench flanked by shrubs and paused, facing west, apparently to survey a building that his book explained was Government House, the home of the governor for New South Wales. His actual motive for pausing, though, was to obey the instructions Pendleton had given him.
Pendleton was another reason Kessler felt nervous. In his prime, Pendleton’s father, Icicle, had been one of the most feared men in Europe. Though Icicle would now be in his seventies, there wasn’t any reason to assume he wasn’t still dangerous. Rumor had it—Halloway was the source—that Icicle’s son was equally to be respected, trained by his father. This meeting, exposed, in a public place obviously chosen for its cover and its many escape routes, could pose a danger from Icicle’s son as much as from the enemy.
As instructed, Kessler sat on the bench. From the far side of shrubs where the path curved around and continued, he heard the voice of the man he’d spoken to on the phone.
“All right, so you’ve got your meeting. Make it quick.”
Kessler’s instinct was to turn toward the bushes, but the voice anticipated him.
“Look straight ahead. Keep staring toward Government House. If anybody comes along, shut up. And this better be important.”
Kessler swallowed. He started explaining.
13
On the bench on the opposite side of the bushes, wearing jogging clothes, wiping his sweaty forehead as if exhausted and needing a rest, Pendleton peered north toward the State Conservatorium of Music. Its design dated back to 1819, and Pendleton wished that he lived in that simpler time. No instant satellite communications. No computer files. No jets that made Australia no longer a hard-to-reach outpost. “The planet isn’t big enough to hide in,” his father had said. Of course, the obverse was that without those modern conveniences of communication and travel, he and his father would not have been able to practice their trade.
His face hardened as Kessler, unseen behind the bushes, explained. “What? All of them? Disappeared? For God’s sake, why didn’t the message you sent make that clear?”
“I didn’t draft the message,” Kessler said. “It seemed obscure to me as well, but I understood the need for caution. Since my own father had disappeared, the reference to ‘recent losses’ made me realize the implications.”
“Implications?” Pendleton’s voice, though low, had the force of a shout. “We thought the message meant that some of my father’s old acquaintances had died! We thought we were being invited to a wake! We didn’t come all the way to Australia to risk exposing ourselves by going to Canada for toasts and tears!”
“Then your father’s all right?”
“No thanks to you! Coming all this way! Maybe letting our hunters follow you!”
“The risk seemed necessary.”
“Why?”
“Just a moment. Someone’s coming.”
Pendleton debated whether to stay or disappear.
“Two kids and a dog. They went up a fork in the path. It’s fine,” Kessler said.
“Answer me. Why did you come? We made it clear we want nothing to do with the rest of you.”
“Halloway told me that’s what you’d say. I’m aware Icicle was never known for being sociable. But the group insisted.”
“Despite our wishes? At the risk of endangering … ?”
“With a proposition,” Kessler said. “If Icicle feels no nostalgia for his former friends, no sense of kinship in mutual adversity, then maybe he—or you—can be swayed by a different motive.”
“I can’t imagine …”
“Money. The group’s been financially successful. We have resources. You and your father—we know what you are, what you do. We’re willing to pay you handsomely to find out what happened to our fathers. And if”—Kessler’s voice became hoarse—“God help me for thinking it let alone saying it, if they’re dead, we want you to be our revenge.”
“That’s what this is all about? You came all this way to hire me?”
“We don’t know what else to do.”
“No, it’s impossible. I can’t.”
“The fee …”
“You don’t understand. You could offer a fortune, it wouldn’t matter. It’s too risky.”
“But under the circumstances … old friends …”
“And lead the enemy to us, as you maybe have? I’m leaving.” Pendleton stood. “Tell them no.”
“I’m at the Captain Cook Lodge! Think about it! Change your mind!”
“I won’t.” Pendleton started to walk away.
“Listen to me!” Kessler said. “There’s something else you should know!”
Pendleton hesitated.
“Cardinal Pavelic!” Kessler said.
“What about him?”
“He disappeared as well.”
14
His chest aching, Pendleton rushed down a sandy slope toward Bondi Beach. It was half past five. His jogging suit clung to him. He’d switched taxis several times to elude possible surveillance. When the final taxi had been caught in a traffic jam near the beach, he’d paid the driver and run ahead.
He had much to fear. Not just the risk that Kessler’s arrival had posed. Or the disturbing information that the priest had disappeared. What truly bothered him was that his own father might vanish as the others had. Icicle had to be warned.
But when he’d called from a phone booth near the gardens, he’d received no answer either at the dive shop or at the ocean-bluff home he shared with his father. He told himself that his assistant must have closed the shop early, though that had never happened before. He tried to convince himself that his father had not yet returned home from the beach, though his father never failed to get home in time to watch the five o’clock news. Closer to Bondi Beach, he’d phoned the shop again; this time his call had been interrupted by a recorded announcement telling him the line was out of order. His stomach felt as if it were crammed with jagged glass.
He reached the bottom of the sandy slope and blinked through sweat-blurred vision toward a line of buildings that flanked the ocean. Normally, he’d have had no trouble identifying his dive shop among the quick-food, tank-top, and souvenir stores, but chaotic activity now obscured it. Police cars, a milling crowd, fire engines, swirling smoke.
His pulse roaring behind his ears, he pushed through the crowd toward the charred ruin of his shop. Attendants wheeled a sheet-covered body toward an ambulance. Ducking past a policeman who shouted for him to stop, Pendleton yanked the sheet from the corpse’s face. The ravaged features were a grotesque combination of what looked like melted wax and scorched hamburger.
A policeman tried to pull him away, but Pendleton twisted angrily free, groping for the corpse’s left hand. Though the fingers had been seared together, it was clear that the corpse was not wearing a ring. Pendleton’s assistant had not been married. But Pendleton’s father, though a widower, always wore his wedding ring.
He no longer resisted the hands that tugged him from the stretcher. “I thought it was my father.”
“You belong here?” a policeman asked.
“I own the place. My father. Where’s—?”
“We found only one victim. If he’s not your father—”
Pendleton broke away, running through the crowd. He had to get to the house! Inhaling acrid smoke, he darted past a police car, veered between buildings, and charged up a sandy slope. The stench of scorched flesh cleared from his nostrils. The taste of copper spurted into his mouth.
The home was on a bluff a quarter-mile away, a modernistic sprawl of glas
s and redwood. Wind-ravaged trees surrounded it. Only as he raced closer did he realize the danger he himself might be in.
He didn’t care. Bursting through the back door, he listened for voices from the television in the kitchen where his father always watched while drinking wine and preparing supper. The kitchen was silent, the stove turned off.
He yelled for his father, received no answer, searched the house, but found no sign of him.
He grabbed the phone book in his father’s bedroom, quickly paged to the listing for the Captain Cook Lodge, and hurriedly dialed. “Put me through to Mr. Kessler’s room.”
“One moment … I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Kessler checked out.”
“But he couldn’t have! When?”
“Let me see, sir. Four o’clock this afternoon.”
Shuddering, Pendleton set down the phone. His meeting with Kessler had been at four, so how could Kessler have checked out then?
Had Kessler been involved in his father’s disappearance? No. It didn’t make sense. If Kessler were involved, he wouldn’t have announced his presence; he wouldn’t have asked for a meeting. Unless …
The suspicion grew stronger.
Kessler might have been a decoy, to separate father and son, to make it easier to grab Icicle.
Of course, there was an alternative explanation, but Pendleton didn’t feel reassured. Someone else could have checked Kessler out, the checkout permanent. To spread the reign of terror. In that case, Pendleton thought, the next logical victim ought to be …
Me.
Professional habits took over. He withdrew his father’s pistol from a drawer, made sure it was loaded, then went to his own room and grabbed another pistol. He searched the house again, this time more thoroughly, every alcove, not for his father now but for an intruder.
The phone rang. He swung toward it, apprehensive; hoping it was his father, he picked it up. The caller broke the connection.
His muscles became like concrete. Wrong number? An enemy trying to find out if I’m home?