He went to sleep with some question half-formed in his mind, but he wakes up with another one all ready, on the tip of his tongue. He turns his head a little and whispers, “Larry.”
“—into the communal pot, and—Did you say something?”
“Question.”
“Of course, Koo.” Larry’s sincere intern’s face comes closer. “What is it?”
“Not an insult,” Koo whispers. He can only bring out fragments of the sentences in his mind. “Really want to know.”
“I understand, Koo. I promise I won’t be insulted. What do you want to ask?”
“If you like—Russia—so much—why don’t you—go live there?”
Larry doesn’t look insulted, but he does look astonished. “Russia? Koo, what does Russia have to do with anything?”
“Commie—Communist—”
“Marxist, you mean.” Larry smiles with indulgent understanding. “Marxism isn’t Russia, Koo. Russia is at least as decadent and far more repressive than the United States. What we’re talking about is a new order, something never seen on the planet before, a wedding of people and resources, and finally the salvation of the planet itself. Koo, do you think it’s an accident that the developer of the aerosol spray can was a friend of Nixon’s?”
This non sequitur is so striking that Koo can only stare at Larry in admiration. “I could use you—as a writer,” he whispers, and the door is burst open and in marches the mean one, the tough guy with the beard. Koo first notices, in amazement and sheer unalloyed pleasure and delight, that in the tough guy’s hand is Koo’s pill-case! By Christ, they’ve done it! Salvation is at hand! But then Koo notices that the guy is raging mad, and his delight turns to fear. Something bad is coming.
It is. The guy slaps the pill-case onto a counter and says, “There it is.” Pointing at Koo he says, “And you don’t get it.”
A terrible weakness runs through Koo’s throat and into his eyes, and he can only stare, beaten down, unable anymore even to wonder why.
But Larry asks the question Koo might have asked: “Mark? You won’t give him his medicine?”
“Not yet,” Mark says. (So now Koo knows another name.) “Not for a while yet.”
“But why not? Look at the poor man!”
“You look at him.” Mark, the son of a bitch, leans over Koo and speaks loudly and angrily into Koo’s face: “We didn’t have to deal with them at all. We could have left it up to them, either release those people and get you back, or fuck around until you’re dead. That’s what I wanted to do.”
You would, you bastard, Koo thinks. He stares in fear and hatred up at the angry face.
“But we were humanitarian,” Mark says, twisting the word and giving a contemptuous quick glance over his shoulder at Larry. “We got your goddamn pills. But could they play it straight? They could not. They bugged the case, they put a directional transmitter in it. I knew they would. And you’re going to pay for it.” Turning to Larry, whose face shows he’s full of protests, tough guy Mark says, “Out. I’ll watch our beauty for a while.”
Larry will argue, but he won’t win; Koo can only watch, sharing Larry’s helplessness as he says, “Mark, you can’t ex—”
“I can. Go complain to Peter, and see what good it does you.”
Koo stares across the room at his case. His stomach burns, it burns as though charcoal briquettes are smoldering there. Even a bastard like this fellow Mark wouldn’t act like this if he understood the pain. Would he? I’m not going to cry, Koo promises himself, blinking.
11
Lynsey Rayne, having had her little “victory” over the question of the transmitter, had finally agreed to go home and get some rest, leaving Mike free to supervise the tracking operation from the office. There’d been no positive result from the sweep at the Sunset Boulevard end, so the transmitter was their last shot at the basket. Mike suspected Jock Cayzer had private doubts about the wisdom of using the transmitter, but that was why Jock was local and Mike federal; you had to know when to play hardball if you wanted to get into the big leagues. And at any rate, if Jock did have qualms, he kept them to himself.
One of Jock’s people had come in with plastic cups of orange juice, and Mike had surreptitiously spiked his from the pint of hundred-proof vodka he kept in the glove compartment of his car, so he was feeling more relaxed now, more alert and sure of himself. He was in radio contact with the two monitor vans, and from their first reports things were going well; the subject car appeared to be moving in a fairly straight line northwestward across the valley. There’d be no attempt at visual contact until it came to rest.
The workroom, where Mike and a radio technician sat together at a table, was filling up with people; mostly men, with a sprinkling of women. Assembling here were uniformed and plainclothes officers from Jock Cayzer’s force, plus FBI agents from the Los Angeles office, waiting for the suspects to settle back at last into their nest, which at exactly twenty-three minutes to four they did.
“Been in one place now for over a minute,” the voice said from Van Number One. “I think they’ve lit.” The voice maintained the proper tone of professional detachment, but underneath the excitement could be heard.
It was infectious excitement, vibrating in the very air of the workroom, in the quick bright-eyed glances people gave to one another, in their inability to remain seated quietly in one place. Mike felt it as a kind of tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers, in his throat, buzzing through his body. They were going to wrap it up, they were going to put it on ice even before the statutory twenty-four hours and the FBI’s official entry into the case. Beautiful. Beautiful. Washington, here I come.
It was another five minutes before the vans, moving cautiously, announced the location: “Intersection of White Oak Street and Verde Road, Tarzana.”
“Can you give us a house address?”
Two minutes later they had it: 124-82 White Oak Street. Two of Jock’s people got busy on telephones, and Jock came back with the result. “Family called Springer. Gerard Springer, forty-six, engineer out at Cal-Space. Wife, four kids. Owns the house, bought it five years ago.”
Mike frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. Unless they’ve invaded the house. Could be they’re holding the family.”
“At this hour of the morning,” Jock said, “there’s no way to check, find out if the kids’ve been at school, if Springer’s been at work.”
“Aerospace engineer, huh? Deep cover agent, do you think? Surfaced for this job?”
Jock Cayzer shook his head. “Mike, I do believe anything is possible.”
Five hours of surveillance at the Springer house produced nothing out of the ordinary. Gerard Springer himself drove away at seven-forty, in a red Volkswagen Golf, taking with him two of the children. Two more children, dawdling and carrying bookbags, left at eight-oh-five. FBI agent Dave Kerman entered the premises at eight-thirty-five, showing ID from Pacific Gas and Electric and claiming to be a repairman looking for a potential gas leak; on his return to the mobile headquarters a block away he said, “It can’t be right. I’ll swear there’s nothing going on in there.”
Mike said, “Then they must have dumped it. Either they found the transmitter or they just dumped the whole package. Let’s go take a look.” And when they drove past the Springer house Mike and Jock Cayzer both said, at the same instant, “The mailbox.”