“Sure. You're right.”
“Don't be so damned smug. You only think you've won.”
“Gee, Dad, I didn't know this was a contest. I didn't know I could win or lose.”
“Sure.”
Canning stepped over the corpse, went to the kitchen door, and looked down at the courtyard. The two potted cherry trees shivered in the wind. So far as he could see, no other men were waiting out there.
He locked the door, reached for the light switch, thought better of that, got a flashlight from a drawer by the sink, and went to search the dead men. Being careful not to get blood on his clothes, Canning first attended to the agent who was sprawled on the kitchen floor. He found a wallet full of papers and credit cards in the name of Damon Hillary. There was also a thin plastic case which was full of business cards for Intermountain Incorporated. Intermountain was an agency front. He went into the bedroom and dragged the other man out of the closet. This one, he discovered, was named Louis Hobartson and was also an employee of Intermountain.
In the bathroom he washed the blood off his hands. He used a wad of tissues to wipe smears of blood from the wallets, flushed the tissues down the commode. He checked himself in the mirror to be certain that his suit hadn't been soiled.
He looked at his watch: three-fifteen.
In the bedroom again, he neatly laid back the covers on the bed, lifted the mattress, and slipped both wallets far back on top of the box springs. He dropped the mattress, pulled the bedclothes in place, and smoothed out the wrinkles. Now, if the Commiteemen retrieved their men before he had time to tell McAlister to come after them, Hillary and Hobartson would not disappear without a trace.
He took his suitcases out of the closet and carried them back into the living room.
He took his raincoat from the front closet and struggled into it on his way to the living-room windows. Parting the velvet drapes half an inch, he saw that the LTD was still parked across the street, the driver still looking this way. Canning glanced at his wrist-watch: three-eighteen. When he looked at the street again, a taxi was just angling in beside the curb downstairs. The cabbie gave three long signals with the horn.
Canning left the apartment, locked up, carried his bags downstairs. At the foyer door he hesitated, then opened it, pushed through, and hurried to the cab. Without getting out in the rain, the cabbie had thrown open the rear door. It was a high-roof, British-style taxi; therefore, Canning didn't have to lift his suitcases in ahead of him. He stepped in, cases in hand, and sat down, wondering if the man in the LTD would be crazy enough to try to shoot him right out here on the street.
Reaching over the front seat, the cabbie pulled the door shut for him. “The dispatcher said National Airport.”
“That's right. I have a four o'clock flight.”
“You cut it close.”
“Nice tip if we make it.”
“Oh, there's no chance we'll miss.”
As they pulled away from the curb, Canning saw the LTD fall in behind them.
That's all right, he thought. The bastard can't drive and shoot at the same time.
To make a successful hit in a public place like an air terminal, you had to have at least two men: one to do the shooting and one to either cause a distraction or drive the getaway car. This man in the LTD could do nothing but follow him, see which flight he boarded, and report back to the boss.
Canning realized, however, that The Committee would probably soon learn the Otley identity and his entire itinerary. Within an hour after they left Washington, agents in California — perhaps the same ones who had murdered the Berlinsons — would be outlining a plan to kill him when he changed planes in Los Angeles.
At four-ten the jet lifted off, and by four-twenty it was above the storm. From his window seat Canning watched the city, the countryside, and then the clouds fall away from him.
“Suppose you'd been a German during the Second World War, someone who had the opportunity to get close to Hitler with a gun. Would you have shot him?”
“Gee, Dad, I thought you didn't want to talk about this sort of thing any more.”
“Would you have shot Hitler?”
“This is stupid. Hitler was dead before I was born.”
“Would you have shot him?”
“Would you have shot Genghis Khan?”
“You have two possible answers, Mike. Say yes, and you'd be admitting that given the right conditions, you could kill a man. Say no, and you'd be implying that you have no duty to protect the lives of innocent people whom you might have saved.”
“I don't get your point.”
“Of course you do.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“The right thing would have been to kill Hitler and save the millions of people who died because of him. Yet, in shooting him, you'd still be a murderer. In other words, a moral act is often a compromise between the ideal and the practical.”
Mike said nothing.
“It seems to me that morality and expediency are two sides of the same coin, a very thick coin that more often than not lands with both faces showing.”
“Do you feel very moral when you kill?”
“We're not talking about me or—”
“Oh, this is still 'theoretical,' is it?”
“Mike—”
“Hitler was one of a kind, Dad. A man as dangerous and crazy as he was, a man who needs killing as badly as he needed it, comes along once in a century. You're trying to take a unique case like Hitler and generalize from it.”
“But he wasn't unique. The world's full of Hitlers— but few of them ever make it to the top.”
“Thanks to men like you, I suppose.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you feel heroic when you kill one of your little Hitlers?”
“No.”
“I'll bet you do.”
“I'm… surprised. Shocked. I'm just beginning to see how much you … hate me.”
“I don't hate you, Dad. I just don't feel much of anything at all where you're concerned, not anything, not one way or the other.”
An hour into the flight, Canning gave his forged State Department credentials to a stewardess and requested that she pass them along to the pilot. “I'd like to speak with him when he has a few minutes to spare.”
Five minutes later the stewardess returned. “He'll see you now, Mr. Otley.”
Canning followed her up front to the serving galley. The galley — now that the flight attendants were dispensing before-dinner drinks from a bar cart in the aisle — was reasonably quiet.
The pilot was a tall, paunchy, balding man who said his name was Giffords. He returned Canning's papers, and they shook hands. “What can I do for you, Mr. Otley?”
“If I read the departures board correctly back at National, this flight goes all the way to Honolulu.”
“That's right,” Giffords said. “We let off a few passengers in L.A., take on a few others, and refuel.”
“How long is the layover?”
“One hour.”
“Are you booked solid for Honolulu?”
“We're usually overbooked. And there's a waiting list for the cancellations. We hardly ever have an empty seat on the Hawaiian run.”