The bullet hit him squarely between the eyes. He crumpled to the ground with the smile still on what was left of his face. Two more silenced shots whooshed in the air and the rest of the Leather Boys scattered into the woods.
The man lowered the pistol and stepped into the light of a streetlamp. He was a white guy in a khaki suit.
“Mr. Carey,” he said. “You have fucked things up, but good.”
“Call an ambulance.”
The man stepped over and took a cursory look at the Doorman.
“It’s too late.”
“Call a fucking ambulance!”
The man spoke in a mild Southern accent. “The tendons are cut. Have you ever seen the life of a cripple in Kowloon? You’re not doing him any favors.”
The image of the beggar across the street from the hotel came back to Neal. He stroked the Doorman’s head and then felt along the side of his neck. There was no pulse.
“Believe me, he’s better off,” the man said. “Now it’s time to go.”
“What about the bodies?”
“They’ll be taken care of.”
Neal took off his watch and put it on the Doorman’s wrist. Then he looked up at the man.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
“You might say I’m a friend of the family.”
Neal figured that the house was somewhere on the Peak, because they hadn’t driven more than five minutes before they were let in through a guarded gate to a long driveway. Neal couldn’t see very well through the heavily tinted windows in the back of the car, but he could tell that the house was large and secluded. The man ushered him in through a downstairs door and led him down a hallway past a large study and into a bathroom.
“I’ll see if we can scare up some clean clothes,” the man said.
“Who-”
“I’ll answer all your questions later. Right now I don’t want you getting bloodstains all over these people’s nice furniture. Why don’t you get washed up and then join me in the study?”
The man left and Neal stripped off his clothes. His slacks and his shirt were sticky with blood. He bundled them up and threw them in a trashcan. The he ran some hot water into the sink, took a washcloth and soap, and scrubbed himself. His hands were trembling. He looked at himself in the mirror, and the man who looked back seemed a lot older than he remembered.
Then he heard a timid knock on the door. He opened to see an old Chinese man in servant’s livery. The man handed him a white short-sleeved shirt, some baggy black cotton trousers, and a pair of black cloth rubber-soled shoes, then shuffled away. Neal put the clothes on. The shoes were a little too large, but they would do. He padded down the hallway into the study.
Thick red drapes masked wall-to-ceiling windows, and a rich Oriental carpet covered the floor. The effect was one of tremendous quietude. An enormous black enameled desk took up most of one wall, and a smaller black enameled coffee table flanked by a sofa and two straight-backed chairs occupied another. The man was sitting in one of the chairs. His tie was unknotted, his shoes were off, and he was sipping from a nearly translucent cup.
“You want some tea?” he asked Neal.
“Fuck you and your tea. Who are you?”
“Sorry about the coolie clothing. It’s all we had around.”
Neal didn’t answer.
“My name is Simms,” the man said. He had thick blond hair cut very short, and blue eyes. He looked about thirty plus.
“Are you with Friends?”
“I’m not against them.”
“I’m not in the fucking mood-”
Simms set his cup down. “See, I really don’t care what you’re in the fucking mood for. I just had to kill someone because of you, because you just couldn’t do what you were told. So let’s forget about your mood, all right? Have some tea.”
Neal took the other chair. He poured himself a cup from the teapot that was set on the table.
“And please don’t trouble yourself to thank me for saving your ass. I’m just a public servant doing my job,” Simms said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re just barely welcome. Believe me, Carey, if I didn’t need you, I just might have let them chop you up, I’m that pissed off at you.”
The Book of Joe Graham, Chapter Eight, Verse Fifteen: Don’t give the bastards anything, not when you’re right, and especially not when you’re wrong.
“Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,” Neal said. “And by the way, fuck you. I’ve been doing this shit for half my life and I’ve never seen anyone killed before. Now I see a kid get his legs half hacked off and another get his face blown away and I’ve got blood all over me, literally and figuratively, and I figure you’re involved in all of it. So don’t give me this guilt trip, you preppie fuck. I have plenty already.”
Simms smiled and nodded his head.
“Can I have a real drink instead of this goddamned tea?” Neal asked.
Simms went to the sidebar and poured Neal a healthy scotch.
So you have a file on me, Neal thought. And you’re not with Friends. Which leaves alphabet soup.
“CIA?” Neal asked.
“If you say so.”
“So AgriTech is just a paper corporation.”
“AgriTech is real, all right. It has laboratories, offices, a lunchroom, company picnics, the whole nine yards.”
The whiskey burned pleasantly in Neal’s stomach. He wished he could just go out and get drunk.
Instead he said, “Yeah, AgriTech also has a treasurer named Paul Knox, who has a-how shall I put this-‘fantastic’ employment record.”
“Paul’s a good man.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a credit to his race and a terrific fourth if you’re caught short at tee-off time, but I want to know why one AgriTech research scientist is worth all this killing.”
Simms held his teacup gently in both hands and inhaled the smell, as if the answer were in the tea’s aroma.
“AgriTech,” Simms explained in a slow, soft drawl, “is what we call a ‘bench company.’ It’s a place to put players you can’t use on the field at the moment but who you want around in case you need them. In the good old days before Watergate and Jimmy ‘I’ll never lie to you’ Carter, we had a lot more money to keep people on our full-time payroll. As it is now, anytime we want to hire a janitor, we have to appear before a Senate subcommittee and explain to some alcoholic wazoo why we can’t clean the toilets ourselves.
“So we took some of the monies that were sitting around in nooks and crannies and invested it in businesses that perhaps needed a little help. We even created companies out of whole cloth. These companies are expected to conduct actual business, turn a profit, meet a payroll-”
“The whole nine yards.”
“-and in return they employ some people we can’t keep on our lists but might want to use from time to time. Naturally, we need to have understanding people in executive positions in these companies, because, as you have demonstrated, the books do not always bear the closest of scrutinies.”
“And these execs might have to okay some frequent and lengthy leaves of absence.”
“That too.”
“But Pendleton isn’t on an authorized leave.”
“Not hardly.”
“So what happened?”
“So what happened is we got greedy. See, we had ourselves this bench company called AgriTech. AgriTech makes pesticides. At the same time, we found it a little difficult to obtain appropriations for research funds. So it seemed like a natural solution to ask AgriTech to carry a little bit of that load for us.”
Neal finished his drink. He didn’t feel any better.
“So you funneled illegal money into AgriTech to conduct unauthorized chemical experiments.”
“Which is another way of putting it.”
“Under the watchful eye of Paul Knox.”
“Probably.”
“And Robert Pendleton was conducting the actual research.”
“Can I freshen that drink for you?”
“So that whole story I was given about chickenshit-”
“Was chickenshit. For all I know, Pendleton might have been working on some sort of super-fertilizer for AgriTech, but for us he was working on herbicides.”