Another lightning move, and again I had to make a lightning response. How did I want Ten Eyck to see me — as a crackpot like most of the others at that meeting, or as a clever opportunist like himself? A crackpot he might consider useless, but another rogue male he might consider dangerous.
It was probably egotism more than sense that made me choose the way I did. Whatever prompted it, I replied, “I suppose each of us is most concerned with number one. The only difference is, my number one is spelled Raxford.”
Flint struck steel within his smile. “Naturally,” he said. “Except that the murder of my sister would seem, perhaps, inconsistent.”
Of course it seemed inconsistent! Busily manufacturing as I went, afraid to look either back or down, I said, “I get emotional at times. And that situation was never really in my control.”
He nodded, acceding the point. “True. Also,” and he smiled the knowing smile of insiders confiding in one another, “the Raxford name is perhaps a disposable identity.”
“Possibly,” I said, and tried to smile the way he did it.
He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar, studying the scarred table top. “Now,” he said at last, “we come to the present. You have sought us out. You are here. Why?”
“We can help one another,” I told him. “For a while.”
“Can we?” he said, and glinted humorously at me. “For instance,” he said, “how can I be of help to you?”
“I’m a hunted man now. You have contacts in foreign countries, you can get me out of the States, line me up with people who can use me, pay me for what I can do.”
He nodded agreeably. “I could,” he said. “And how, in return, do you propose to be of help to me?”
“I assumed,” I said, “that was what you came here to tell me.”
“Hah! Well said, Mr. Raxford! We will get on!”
I practiced the glinty smile again. “I had hoped so,” I said.
He suddenly looked more serious, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “One point,” he said, “I wish to make clear. You are one of only three men in the world who know that Tyrone Ten Eyck is anywhere near the United States. I want it kept that way.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’d expect you to do the same for me.”
The briefest of silences fell. We met one another’s eyes, both unblinking, both urbane, both well aware of at least one set of hidden truths. Ten Eyck had use of me, for the moment, but the time would come when he would surely try to kill me, if only because I knew his real name. I knew this, and he knew I knew it, and I knew he knew I knew it, and so on through an infinity of facing mirrors, each of us aware of the receding levels of the other’s knowledge, neither of us with any intention of voicing that knowledge aloud.
If I were actually the man Ten Eyck thought me, what would I do now? It seemed to me I would smile and appear to believe everything he had said, and plan to watch him, get what I could from him, and kill him myself as soon as I knew nothing more could be gained from him. And he of course, must even now be thinking that that was what I would plan.
What a nerve-racking way to live! If I’d never found any other reason to advocate pacifism, this would be it; it is so much easier on the nerves not to perpetually be circling your fellow man, hand warily on the hilt of your knife.
Ten Eyck now leaned back, relaxed, puffed at his twisted little cigar. “Eustaly’s net,” he said, with easy contempt, “dragged in mostly fish. They call themselves terrorists!”
Something cynical was required of me. I shrugged and said, “Every army needs its privates.”
“Of course. But specialists even more. It is for specialists that I had Eustaly cast his net. He produced a few, but in the main they are, or were, as you call them, privates.”
“I take it,” I said, “you have a specific goal in mind.”
“Oh, definitely. The United Nations Building.”
“Yes?”
“We are going to make it full,” he said, smiling slightly. “More than usually full. Full to bursting. And then... we shall blow it up.”
17
I said, “Why?” It wasn’t a clever thing to ask, it wasn’t a question in character, it wasn’t a question I should have expected an answer to; the word merely popped out of me, like a cat out of a bag.
But Ten Eyck didn’t seem to notice that my mask had slipped. He was, for the moment at least, too caught up in the pleasure of thinking about his own schemes to notice a false nuance from his audience. His smile phosphoresced and he said, “Each of us has his own reasons, Mr. Raxford. For some, an ideal. For others, more practical considerations. In your own case, you will be taking part in expectation of the assistance I will be able to give you later on.”
“Of course,” I said. “Naturally.” Thinking back to the meeting, I said, “That’s why you started discussing the United Nations and plastic bombs.”
“Certainly. It is my intention to bring the two together.”
He had made a joke, ha ha. We smiled at one another like brother cobras in a pit. Little did he know he was smiling at a cobra suit worn by a rabbit! The rabbit, settling his cobra suit more securely around himself, said, “There were other things you talked about at the meeting, too. China, and Congress, and the Supreme Court.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “As to Congress, the Supreme Court, all that, I had originally intended to set a prior bomb in Washington, probably in the Senate, leaving evidence pointing to the Communist Chinese. The United States, it seemed to me, would surely call an extraordinary session of the General Assembly in order to accuse China, filling the UN Building to the brim. Remember, I want it full.”
He was completely out of his skull, of course, but in quite the wrong way. If only he’d chosen to go catatonic, to sit unmoving and unresponsive, staring at a wall, how much simpler life would have been for everybody. But no, not him; Tyrone Ten Eyck had to be actively insane.
I said, “But could you make a frame like that stick?”
Smiling, glimmering, he said, “I have the excellent but expendable Sun Kut Fu for that purpose, he and his Eurasian Relief Corps.”
“Are they Chinese Communists?”
“They think so. The Red Chinese themselves have more sense than to be connected with such lunatic-fringe organizations. Mao and his government severed all relations with the Eurasian Relief Corps over a decade ago, but that won’t make any difference. Let the American Senate be destroyed, let Sun and his friends be found — fuses in hand — amid the wreckage, and the conclusion in the American mind will be inevitable. The dirty Red Chinese did it! Hotheads will demand instant retaliation, atomic attack on Peking, which by the way could use it, if only for slum clearance purposes. A filthy city. However, more rational Americans will urge restraint, will recommend a formal complaint to the United Nations. And so on.” He waved his hand carelessly. “But of course all that’s changed now.”
“You have a new plan,” I suggested.
“A definite improvement,” he said, “from every point of view.” He tapped white ash from his gnarled cigar. Smiling, glinting, he said, “And all because of you. Isn’t that odd?”
“Because of—”
Behind me, the door burst open. Ten Eyck all at once was on his feet, dumping the table in my lap, flinging his chair side-arm at the doorway, leaping to the side wall and producing from within his black cloak a black Luger; all in a second, less than a second. He had lived this nerve-racking life, it seemed, for a long while, and had learned its lessons well.
The table had toppled me off my own chair onto the damp concrete floor. I struggled upward, peered over the table — now lying on its side — and saw in the doorway a terrified and shaking Sun Kut Fu, his hands high in the air. “D-don’t shoot,” he stammered. “It’s me.”