“Intimidation? You’re baiting them? A challenge?”
But he was talking to the hall. Kells had gone out the front doors. They could see him through the front window now, carrying his bags to the prisoners’ sleds.
Dr. Rosen looked at Rebecca and the others. “He’s crazy. We’re following a killer.”
Rebecca nodded in agreement. Then she and the rest of them took their bags and made their way to the door.
Chapter 14
Luther Trait stood before the marielito sagging in the chair. The bullet hole in the Cuban’s gut cried out like a little mouth of pain. “A miracle you are still breathing, Octavio.”
Octavio blinked up at Trait, slumping off the chair like a forgotten attic doll. “Cut me down,” he whispered, huskily.
“You were left alive to scare us.”
“I told you everything.”
“You told them everything.”
Inkman entered just in time to watch Trait pull a revolver out of his waistband and execute Octavio with a bullet to the forehead. The Marielito’s neck flopped back and Trait knocked over his chair with a kick to the dead man’s chest.
Inkman took in the carnage as the smoky report rang in the room. It was the bleeding green words, dark against the night glass, that grabbed his attention.
Inkman’s face washed white. He felt for the back of a chair and lowered himself into it.
Trait stepped away from the smell of the cordite and seared flesh, returning the gun to his belt. He saw Inkman sitting there. “Your friends from the inn,” Trait said. “You called them, ‘an unremarkable bunch.’ ”
Inkman’s eyes were unbelieving. He was holding on to the seat of his chair as though the room were in danger of being overturned.
“At least two were killed,” Trait went on. “Between five and ten of them got away on snowmobiles.”
“They asked for me by name?” said Inkman.
“By your real name. Explain ‘Tick Tock.’ ”
“It is ‘Clock,’ ” said Inkman. He was deeply affected by the scene, and Trait was patient. “A code name.”
“Whose code name? Yours?”
“Not mine. I never met him. Not that I know of. Might have dealt with him indirectly. I did a year in Belize in the mid-eighties—”
“Are we still talking about the guests from the inn?”
“He was a legend. I didn’t know anybody in the CIA who knew who he was. Only rumors.”
“CIA, code names, Guatemala. I’m asking you how this person could have been at the inn.”
Inkman looked stricken. “I–I can’t explain it.”
Jazzed by the violence, Trait’s mind worked quickly and reasonably. “Someone is playing you. Somebody got into the town somehow—”
“Nobody got into town.”
“Then your inn friends are getting help by phone. Someone at the CIA came up with this.”
Inkman shook his head stridently. “It’s bad juju even to invoke his name. The Company itself was afraid of him. Look what he did to their faces. You think some retired florist from Hartford did that?”
“So this man was staying at the inn somehow, and you did not know it.”
“It was said he could turn it on and off. That you could stand next to him in a hotel elevator and never look twice — that was his greatest talent. He was faceless. The coldest of the Cold Warriors.”
“To the central question: How did he get here? And what does he want with you?”
But Inkman was still making sense of the past. “He was a devil to the Guatemalans — a demon, a spirit. His was the highest bounty ever offered by the leftists. He vanished in the early nineties just as the human-rights crimes were coming to light. It was said that he had been captured and tortured, then thrown into an active volcano or chopped up and fed to jackals. They never found his body.”
“Octavio said a black man did the killing and the cutting.”
Inkman remembered the inn guests. “It could be,” he said, chilled. “I don’t know. It could be he’s been following me the whole time, but... no. They dropped my surveillance when I went to Mexico. I’m sure of it.” But his gaze had fallen. “Why won’t they ever leave me alone?”
“The writer was here also. She remained in town.”
Inkman was suddenly disgusted, aroused. “Who cares about the writer? Listen to me. Clock’s brief was counterinsurgency warfare. He ran proxy wars. Toppling unfriendly governments in Central America and propping them back up with the CIA’s own. Drafting, organizing, and training indigenous fighters, that was the game. It was said he could melt plowshares into swords with just one glance. Subverting the economic and social fabric of a small country is textbook stuff — but every culture has character, a national psychology, and Clock knew how to exploit its weaknesses. He knew how to give an entire society a nervous breakdown in the name of America.”
“Octavio saw an old man, a teenaged boy, the writer. You are too easily impressed. This is a scare tactic. He is trying to rattle you, and he is succeeding.”
“He left this for us. He wanted us here.” Inkman jumped to his feet. “He could be outside right now.”
Trait pushed him back into the chair. “He’s not. We were too careful.”
“If he’s here in town, then he’s not just coming after me. Do you understand that? He’s coming after all of it — the town, you, everything.” Inkman looked again at the bodies and the writing. “He wants you to go after him. I’m telling you: Don’t.”
“I won’t. Not tonight, not in the dark. But tomorrow. We will put an end to this tomorrow.”
Trait signaled to Spotty to admit the remaining Marielitos. The burn hole in Octavio’s forehead had stopped smoking, and the snowmobiles idling outside had masked the revolver’s report.
Trait met the four at the edge of the carpet. Four middle-aged Cubans coming off twenty years of U.S. incarceration, their eyes were bright as they tried to see around him into the room, skin tanned, builds tight and compact. Trait nodded solemnly and allowed them inside.
The Marielitos shouted words of anguish and one man gripped the shoulder of another as they viewed their fallen comrades. Their eyes glared with rage.
“Your brothers-in-arms were ambushed,” Trait told them. “We have a handful of citizens who foolishly decided to hide in town. Your brothers killed at least two.”
The one who spoke English turned to Trait, his top lip curled in fury. “Faces,” he said.
Trait glanced at Inkman. “There might be one among them who knows torture and revolt.”
The man translated this to others, furiously, before turning back to Trait. “Where they go?”
“The snow will keep them slow tonight. They can’t go anywhere except deeper into town. You will have your day. I promise you an opportunity for vengeance.”
“No,” said the spokesman, the smallest and angriest of the four Marielitos. “We promise you.”
The fourth day
Chapter 15
It was hours before dawn at the farmhouse they had broken into. The lingering stink of cigarette smoke and the childproof catches on the lower kitchen cabinets were the only signs of an adult ever having been in residence. At some point children and pets had taken over. Food was ground into the shag carpeting, toys lay overturned on the stairs, and a handprint smudged the bottom third of every wall and door. So lived-in was the house that the absence of little voices and the tapping of paws brought out for Rebecca the deathlike stillness of the town.
Rebecca had been paired with Coe for the hour’s journey from the country club, sitting against his back as they ran without headlights along property lines and iced fences, slipping across the countryside like field mice. He had worked the sled hard through the unspoiled snow like a dirt bike in soft sand, while she had been vigilant for prisoners.