Dean had no reason to consider the option at any length and shook his head. Kudrow slid the player back inside his jacket and flipped a switch on his armrest. The latches clicked. “Get out.”
Dean hesitated.
“Your new life begins tonight, Mr. Dean,” Kudrow said in a calm, yet firm voice. Reassuring, he thought with some satisfaction. “Your treachery has cost a great deal. Both in dollars and in some lives.” He noted that Dean actually flinched at that. It was a touching, but futile flash of humanity. “And that was from MAYFLY. If you had succeeded in giving your friends someone who might have broken KIWI, well…the consequences would be unimaginable.”
Silence held Dean. What could he say? Should he tell Kudrow that money had been his motivation. Money? Cash. A growing bundle stashed, of all places, in a shed behind his brother’s farmhouse in Iowa. Nothing he could say could change what he’d done. He was suddenly sorry beyond words, and fought to hold back the tears.
“So now, what happens?” Kudrow continued. “I’ll tell you. You and I will get out into the fresh air, and we will have a talk. You will tell me everything. Everything about what you’ve done, and what you are still to do. About this contact you are supposed to meet Saturday. About what you were going to tell her.”
A sniffle got past Dean’s resistance. He dragged his coat sleeve across his nose and nodded.
“And then, Mr. Dean, you will be gone.” The young, now read eyes, turned worried and locked on Kudrow’s. “A new identity, son. Your Japanese friends won’t be too happy with you for failing. And certain people on our side either, if things should get out.”
“No jail?” Dean asked weakly.
Kudrow shook his head in complete truth. “No jail.”
Dean could hardly believe it. He’d always expected that, if he were caught, it would mean a long time, if not life, in a solitary cell in a federal institution somewhere. Not a new start. He couldn’t finger his emotion right then. Relieved was closest he could come, but that was not strong enough. “I’ll turn the money over.”
“That goes without saying. Now…” Kudrow opened his door. “Shall we have our talk?”
Dean followed Kudrow to the clearing in front of the car. They stood facing each other, talking for almost an hour, the deputy director asking frequent questions and the youthful cryptographer answering every one to the best of his ability. Dean never became boastful of what he was able to accomplish, but the atmosphere was actually becoming cordial.
He was quite surprised, then, when Kudrow removed a pistol from the pocket of his overcoat and pointed it at him.
Kudrow said nothing at first, watching instead as Dean took a half step backward, and as utter shock hardened his expression. “I have to thank you for your cooperation,” Kudrow said, then lowered the pistol a bit and shot Dean in the left knee.
“SHIT! AHHHH!” Dean collapsed on his right side and pulled his shattered joint to his chest with both hands over the wound. Blood trickled between the fingers and spilled onto the ground.
“But I’ve never trusted the Hollywood depiction of moments like these. I’ve always figured that a person who has a gun pointed at them and knows they’re going to die would fight to survive. Rush their would-be executioner.” Dean pushed with his good leg, scooting his body toward the trees, frightened eyes wide and watching Kudrow follow. “I would.”
“Don’t, Mr. Kudrow!” Dean pleaded, a wave of pain twisting his face into a wincing mask of agony.
“I come here often to walk,” Kudrow told Dean. “There’s a crevice about a hundred feet into the woods. That way. A few shovels of dirt and some dead wood tossed in, and no one will find your body.” Kudrow pointed the pistol at Dean’s face, his finger on the trigger, feeling the steel, bringing another hand up to steady the weapon, breathing, breathing, breathing…
“There was no one following us,” Dean said through the pain, as if it were some timely, salient point to make.
Kudrow shook his head and squeezed the trigger four times.
When he was able to lower the pistol more than a minute later he was surprised, utterly astonished at how easy killing a man had been.
Five men sat around a poker table, cigar smoke wafting upward into a fan whose wasted motion only served to circulate the fumes for later inhalation. Each man held five cards, and each had chips before them, some in neat stacks, some in tilted and fallen piles. One man, the dealer at the moment, had far more chips than any other player. And he was smiling, teeth clenched on a stogie.
Two players folded, then a third after examining his hand long and hard. That left the dealer just one challenger.
“I’m waiting,” the dealer said jauntily. The others at the weekly game knew him as Mr. Pritchard.
The challenger, setting his cigar in a flat metal ash tray, tossed two blue chips into the pot as a door opened behind Mr. Pritchard. A young man entered and leaned close to Pritchard’s right ear. “There may be a situation developing.”
“In a minute, Sanders,” Pritchard said, and the young man retreated out of the room. “Is that a call?”
The challenger nodded and laid his hand on the table. Three queens and two fours stared into the whirling, smoke-shrouded fan blades. “And you?”
Pritchard’s smile never waned as he laid a pair of eights on the felt.
“That’s it?” the challenger said, shock turning to laughter an instant later. “You stupid son of a bitch.”
“Had you going, didn’t I?” Pritchard said as the challenger scooped up his winnings.
“You get joy in bluffing, don’t you, Pritchard?” one of the men asked.
Pritchard left his trash cards on the table and stood, blowing smoke toward the fan. “I’d rather have four aces. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.”
His cigar clamped firmly in one side of his jaw, Pritchard left the smoky room and found Sanders waiting in the hall. “Go ahead.”
“A situation may be developing,” Sanders repeated.
“You said that. Where? And what’s the involvement?”
“It’s coming from inside and it involves an extreme innocent,” Sanders elaborated.
Pritchard removed his cigar. “An extreme innocent?”
Sanders nodded. He knew what that characterization would mean to Mr. Pritchard, what weight it would carry.
“You’ll watch the situation closely and let me know,” Pritchard said.
“If we wait, sir, it may be too late,” Sanders said, every bit of seriousness he could manage thrown into his tone.
Pritchard, though, met him with his own brand of seriousness, a stare that had melted the toughest of men where they stood. “Nothing, Sanders, I repeat, nothing, is worth rushing into. Nothing.”
Sanders swallowed and accepted the dressing down with a deferring nod. “Yes, sir.”
The cigar found its way back between Pritchard’s surprisingly white teeth. “Extreme innocent, you say?”
“Yes.”
Pritchard considered that through two puffs. “In the morning, Sanders. Get the particulars to me. I’ll bring it up with the boys.”
A somewhat re-inflated Sanders nodded crisply. “Yes, sir.”
The young man hurried off down the hall. Pritchard watched him, admiring the eagerness, thanking whoever was up there that people like Sanders had chosen his side of the fence to play on. There were enough on the other side already.
Chapter Thirteen
Pebbles
Art Jefferson came into the kitchen Friday morning, eyes tired, wanting coffee and answers. The former was waiting for him on the counter, along with a granola bar for breakfast. In search of the latter he sat in the nook across from his wife, who stared out the window at dawn breaking over the garden.