He instructed the one on his right to go down the road to the house and cut the telephone wires. The «lieutenant» seemed to understand, which told Bonner something about the man. The second, addressed as «Augie,» was told to walk back behind the car and watch for anyone driving up the road. If he saw anything, he was to shout.
The man called Augie said, «Okay, Mario. I can’t think what happened!»
«You can’t think, fratello!»
So Mario de Spadante was protecting his flanks.
Good, thought Bonner. He’d remove the artillery, expose the flanks.
The first man was really quite simple. He never knew what happened. Paul followed the telephone cables as he was sure the «lieutenant» would do, and waited in the darkness by a tree. As the man reached into his pocket for a knife, Bonner came forward and crashed a karate hand into the base of his neck. The man fell, urinating through his trousers. The Major removed the knife from the immobile hand.
Since he was a short distance from the study, Paul ran down the slope to the terrace and knocked quietly on the door. It was a time for instilling calm. In others. Andrew spoke through the thick wood.
«Paul?»
«Yes.» The door opened. «Everything’s going to be fine. This De Spadante’s alone,» he lied. «He’s waiting in the car; probably for his friend. I’m going to talk to him.»
«Bring him here, Paul. I insist on that. Whatever he’s got to say, I want to hear it.»
«My word. It may take a little more time. He backed his car up, and I want to approach him from the rear. So there won’t be any trouble. I just wanted you to know. No sweat. I’ll have him here in ten, fifteen minutes.» Bonner left quickly, before Trevayne could speak.
It took Bonner less than five minutes to pass De Spadante’s car in the woods. As he came parallel, he could see the huge Italian standing by the hood, lighting a cigarette, cupping the flame. He seemed to be kneading something in his hand. He removed the cigarette with his left and then did a strange thing; he placed his right hand on the car and scraped the hood. It was a harsh, grating sound, and incomprehensible to Bonner. It was some kind of furious, destructive gesture with metal against metal.
The man called Augie was sitting on a large whitewashed rock in a bend on the road. He held an unlit flashlight in his left hand, a pistol in his right. He was staring straight ahead, shoulders hunched against the cold wetness. He was also on the opposite side of the road from Paul.
Bonner swore to himself in irritation and backtracked swiftly, to cross the road unseen into the opposite woods. Once there, he edged his way west until he was within ten feet of his target. The man had not moved, and Paul realized he was faced with a problem. It would be so easy for the pistol to be fired in surprise, and even if it was silenced, as had been the weapon fired by his assailant, De Spadante would distinguish the sound. If there was no silencer, the report might be heard by Trevayne back in the study. Even soundproof rooms weren’t guaranteed against gunfire. Trevayne would telephone the police.
The Major did not want the police. Not yet.
Bonner knew he would have to risk murder.
He withdrew the knife he’d taken from the man at the telephone wires and inched his way forward. The knife was a large utility knife that locked into position. Its point was sharp, its edge like a razor. He knew that if he inserted the blade in the lower-right midsection of a body, the reaction would be spastic: appendages, fingers, would fly out, open, rather than be clutched. The neck would arch back, again spastically, and there would be a brief instant before the windpipe had enough air to emit sound. During that instant he would have to yank the man’s mouth nearly out of his head in order to keep him silent, and simultaneously crack the pistol out of his wrist.
The man’s life was dependent upon three problems of the assault: the length of blade penetration—internal bleeding; shock, coupled with the temporary cutting off of air, which could cause a death paralysis; and the possibility that the knife would sever vital organs.
There was no alternative; a weapon had been fired at him. The intent was to kill. This man, this mafioso of Mario de Spadante, would not weep for him.
Bonner lunged at the sitting figure and executed the attack. There was no sound but the quick retch of air as the body went limp.
And Major Paul Bonner knew his execution had not been perfect, but, nevertheless, complete. The man called «Augie» was dead.
He pulled the body off the road, into the woods, and began making his way back toward De Spadante’s car. The snow was heavier, wetter now. The juxtaposition of ocean and land created a moisture inhospitable to clean, dry snow. The earth beneath him was getting soft, almost muddy.
He reached a position parallel to the automobile. Mario de Spadante wasn’t there. He bent down and crept to the edge of the road.
No one.
And then he saw the outline of the footsteps in the snow. De Spadante had gone toward the house. As he looked closer, he realized that the first few imprints were separated only by inches, then immediately by over a foot or two. The track signs of a man who’d started to run. Something had caused De Spadante to race toward the house.
Bonner tried to imagine why. The «lieutenant» by the telephone wires would remain unconscious for at least three or four hours; Paul had made sure of that. He’d moved the body out of sight and used the man’s belt to tie his legs. It hadn’t been pleasant. He’d had trouble with the belt, and the man’s trousers had been drenched with urine; he’d rubbed his hands in the snow to try to cleanse them.
Why had De Spadante suddenly, in such a hurry, run to Trevayne’s house?
There was no time to speculate. Trevayne’s safety was uppermost, and if De Spadante was near the house, that safety was in jeopardy.
Time couldn’t be wasted using the woods, either. Bonner started down the road, keeping the footsteps in view. They became clearer, newer, as he approached the drive. Once in sight of the house, his instincts told him to take cover, not expose himself on the open driveway, assess the area before entering it. But his concern for Trevayne overrode his alarms. The footsteps led to the telephone cables, and then sharply angled away onto the driveway, toward the front of the house.
De Spadante was searching, obviously for the man he’d sent to cut the wires. He had to know there’d been a fight, thought Paul. The ground around the telephone housing was disturbed, the snow parted by his dragging the body to the woods.
It was then that Bonner knew he’d been taken—or was about to be taken if he wasn’t careful. Of course, De Spadante had seen the ground and the interrupted patterns in the newly fallen snow. Of course, he saw the path created by the immobile body pulled into the tall grass. And he’d done what any man used to the hunt would do; he’d faked out the hunter. He’d tracked away from the area and then doubled back somewhere, somehow, and was waiting; perhaps watching.
Paul rushed to the steps of the front entrance, where the footprints stopped. Where? How?
And then he saw what De Spadante had done, and a grudging respect surfaced for the mafioso. Along the base of the building, behind the shrubbery, the earth was simply damp, black with dirt and peat moss; the snow deflected from above. There was a straight, clear border nearly two feet wide heading straight to the end of the house, to the corner where the telephone wires descended. Bonner bent down and could see the fresh print of a man’s shoe.
De Spadante had doubled back, hugging the side of the house. The next logical thing for him to do would be to wait in the shadows. Wait until he found the man who’d attacked his «lieutenant.»
De Spadante had seen him on the road approaching the drive, had waited, perhaps yards away, for him to run toward the front steps from the telephone wires. Only seconds ago.