"Hold it!" I yelled as I stood and pointed toward the water. "What's that boat out there doing?!"
Lippitt tore the binoculars from the neck of the agent squatting next to him and raised them to his eyes. I watched the muscles in his jaw and neck begin to quiver. He threw the binoculars to one side, then turned to the crowd of police and agents behind him. "Shoot that boat out of the water!" he yelled. "Goddamn it, blow it away!"
Immediately the air was filled with the din of automatic- weapons fire. Two agents sprinted out onto the sand and began firing down at the water, their guns braced against their hips.
"There's no one in the boat!" Lippitt shouted. I could barely hear him above the clatter of the weapons. "It's a drone, radio-controlled! Somebody wants to blow Rafferty up!"
The pilotless boat zigzagged as the rain of bullets fell into the water around it; there were dozens of hits, but the boat kept coming. It wasn't going to stop until it hit the boat house.
"He's got to see it coming," Tal said through clenched teeth. "Why doesn't he get out of there?" He again cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled. "Thomas! Rafferty! Get out of there! Run!"
A bearded figure immediately recognizable as Elliot Thomas suddenly appeared in the doorway of the crumbling boathouse. He was carrying an automatic assault rifle. He seemed to be groggy as he staggered out onto the sand, fell back against the side of the house, and began firing up the beach in our direction. Bullets whined in the air, chewed up the sand, thwacked into the wooden barricades.
Lippitt yelled, "Hold your fire!"
I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was Garth sprinting toward the boathouse, his arms pumping. Tal's reflexes were faster than mine. He tackled Garth at the knees and both men went down. Garth took a swing at Tal's head, missed, then tried to struggle to his feet again as Tal hung on to his legs. I tried not to think of the bullets singing around my head as I ran forward, jumped on Garth's back, wrapped my arms around his neck.
"You can't just let that man die down there without making an effort to get him out!" Garth shouted, clawing at my arms.
"It's too late," Tal said quietly.
The boat hit the rotting wood structure and exploded. It was something a lot more powerful than dynamite, probably plastique. The force of the blast shook the ground around us. The entire boathouse quivered for a moment, lifted off the ground, then disintegrated into bits and pieces of wood and metal. Instantly flames shot up into the temporary vacuum, burning with the white-hot glow of phosphorus or napalm.
Someone had wanted to make certain the job was done right.
23
There was numb, shocked silence in the aftermath of the explosion. The silence, broken only by the fierce crackle of the flames, lasted almost thirty seconds and seemed an eternity. Then Lippitt suddenly sprang forward and punched Malakov in the mouth. The stunned ambassador sat down hard on the sand and put a trembling hand to his bleeding mouth.
"You fucker!" Lippitt growled. "You killed him! I should blow you away!"
Malakov struggled to his feet and spat blood. His face was purple. "We didn't kill him!" he shouted, ignoring the gun aimed at his heart. His voice trembled with outrage. "It was your people who must have done this thing! You're a fucker!"
They glared at each other across a distance of less than a yard. Then the tension was suddenly broken when two men with rifles came running up the beach from the direction of the remaining boathouses. One man's arm hung limp, and the other appeared to have singed hair. Otherwise they seemed to be all right.
"Excuse me," Tal said weakly. "I think I'm going to be sick." He walked shakily down the beach toward the undamaged boathouse on the right. He was holding his left arm tightly against his side; his shirt on that side was stained with blood, and the dark patch was spreading. No one else seemed to notice.
Garth nudged me. "All right, brother, let's hear it from the top."
"Huh?" I wasn't really listening. The apparent chaos suddenly did not seem so confused, not in light of some of the things that had begun to bother me. Had Lippitt ordered the killing? It seemed highly unlikely, considering Lippitt's ambiguous feelings toward Rafferty, and Malakov just hadn't had time, even if he'd had the inclination. Then who had arranged the explosion?
Rafferty.
He'd staged an apparently fatal end for himself, just as he'd done five years before. But this time he'd arranged for the entire world to look on.
"I want to hear the whole story, Mongo," Garth was saying. "I want to know what happened here."
"Over steaks and drinks, Garth. Just give me a few minutes."
Tal had disappeared from sight into the boathouse on the right. I went after him.
The boathouse was dark and smelled of still, dead air. Tal was standing at the opposite end, silhouetted by the late- morning light streaming in a window. He was smoking a cigarette-the first time I'd ever seen him do so. The smoke curled up around his head like a halo, or a mist from hell.
"I'll be damned," I said, the dank air muffling my voice. "Here I've been following you around all this time and I haven't found a single hamburger wrapper. You certainly did go through some changes, didn't you?"
I instinctively held up my hand and shied away as I felt an almost imperceptible tingling in my head. It was a sensation I'd experienced before and hadn't been able to put my finger on. This time I'd been looking for it.
"I assume you can control what you do," I said. "I'd appreciate it if you'd respect my privacy."
The tingling stopped. Tal was still silhouetted against the window, and I couldn't see his face. I wondered what he was thinking.
"How did you manage the fingerprints on the pencil? That was good. It threw me off the track right at the beginning."
Tal said nothing. He continued to smoke.
"You know that I know."
" What do you know, Mongo?"
"I know that you're Victor Rafferty. That was the French agent who died in the boathouse. Elliot Thomas was the 'Frenchie'-an American working deep undercover for France." I pointed to his side. "You're bleeding, but there aren't any bullet holes in your shirt. You've been favoring that side since yesterday; you ripped open an already existing wound when you tackled Garth. My guess is that Thomas-or whatever his name really was-finally caught up with you. After all, he'd been at it a long time, and he'd really been digging ever since the Nately Museum went up. He knew, just as your ex-wife knew, that Victor Rafferty had designed that building. Somehow, you got on Thomas' list of candidates; when he got around to checking your background, your cover didn't hold."
Tal remained silent.
"God only knows how Thomas did it," I continued, "but he must have gotten the drop on you. Unlucky for him: Thomas didn't make out any better than Lippitt did five years ago. You've been keeping Thomas on ice for the past few days; Rolfe Thaag's been baby-sitting him while you put this plan into operation. You knew what was in my mind, so you had every reason to think I'd buy it. I can't point to any one thing that convinced me; it's the sum of a lot of little things. Considering the fact that you've been winging it for the past few days, you've done damn well. But then, you read minds, don't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Mongo," Tal said quietly.
"Now you're just playing out the string, hoping I'll back off. I won't. Putting Thomas in that boathouse down there was pretty murderous for Victor Rafferty, but you certainly had cause. He's been trying to kill or capture you for years. That would try my patience too."