Charles Frederick Ackerman walked down the long accordion tunnel past the smiling flight attendants, all poised to dart out and block the narrow aisles and offer assistance. The travelers were barely able to negotiate the cramped space with their burdens of carry-on luggage, let alone balance dwarf pillows or chemical-smelling blankets. They paid no more attention to him than to any of the others. If they’d had to describe him to a policeman, one of them might have been perceptive enough to have judged that his coat was a good piece of English tailoring but not new, and that he was no longer in his twenties but wasn’t yet wearing the strangely driven look that men acquire on their fiftieth birthdays. He was, at this stop on the crew’s route, invisible through protective coloration: eyes and hair a dull brown; maybe English, maybe American, maybe German, not thin enough to be French or elegant enough to be Italian. They looked at him only long enough to assure themselves that he wasn’t disabled and probably spoke enough English to do what he was supposed to without exaggerated gestures on their part.
He took his seat by the window and looked out at England with regret. But all the England he could see was a patch of lighted tarmac and part of a baggage rack. The ten years were already over. Michael Schaeffer had made his final appearance before this man had gotten onto the airplane.
He settled back in his seat and meditated on the time that would come now. He knew only the name in the wallet of the man who had been carrying the pistoclass="underline" Mario Talarese. That would be enough. As the rest of the passengers filled the seats around him, he tried to fathom the reasoning of the people who would send a pickup team of amateurs to find and dispose of a man like him.
Somebody should have given it more consideration. If they remembered the contract, they should have remembered who he was. In all the councils that were intended to keep these men’s pride and ambition and greed from interfering with the steady, predictable profits they shared, wasn’t there one calm old voice left to remind them that if they killed him it would gain them nothing, and if they failed they might bring back old trouble?
He had done everything he could to convince them that he had relinquished that life. Why hadn’t they just let him die? He knew the answer already: they had. There was nothing in it for the dozen old men who had the power and the right to decide things, and if they had decided, it wouldn’t have been two weasels with knives and a guy with a pistol designed to fit in a lady’s purse. The south of England would one day have filled up with quiet men who called themselves Mr. Brown or Mr. Williams, but each had return tickets to three American cities in other names. It couldn’t have been the old men.
It had to be that an eager small-time underboss had decided to do it on his own. He even knew who it was. If the one with the gun was named Talarese, the man who had sent him had to be Antonio Talarese. That knowledge gave him one small chance to stay alive, and even that would disappear unless he took it now. If the idea had been to pull off a sudden triumph a couple of thousand miles from home and collect on a ten-year-old contract, then it had to be a secret until it was accomplished. Talarese couldn’t have told anyone else that he had found the quarry, or he would have had rivals he couldn’t hope to compete with.
Ackerman had no choice now but to come back, and to do it as fast as he could. Because the minute Talarese told the rest of the world what he knew, it was over. Michael Schaeffer had not made the sort of preparations that would allow him to slip into another life in time. Ackerman had to get to New York before the news that Mario Talarese was lying behind a building in Brighton.
Ackerman leaned back in the padded seat as the huge airplane lumbered down the long runway, its wheels bumping over the cracks faster and faster until its engines screamed an octave higher and lifted it into the night. Talarese had made a terrible mistake to fail in his first try. When a man’s peace and confidence and the tranquility of his home were gone, there wasn’t much left.
* * *
The Honourable Margaret Holroyd sat on her bed and looked at the clock on the nightstand. The clock had a red digital readout and had been manufactured no more than a year ago of microchips shipped to Japan from a company outside San Francisco. The nightstand had been made in France in the sixteenth century out of a tree that had been young at the time when Charles Martel was gathering his troops near Tours to rid France of the baneful influence of Islam. Michael would be midway across the Atlantic by now. It was very likely that a mile from here the Filchings were awake too, sitting up thinking, trying to discern a way that they could accept the rest of their lives after what had happened to Peter and his friend Jimmy. Tomorrow the telephone would ring and one of them would tell her what they knew. She would have to feign—what?—surprise, shock, horror … No, the horror was real enough. She had no choice about that. What she wasn’t prepared for was lying to those poor, sad people.
She put on her robe and walked along the hallway to the back stairs, then down to the library, closed the door behind her and looked around at the familiar place. She wished her father were still alive, sneaking in late at night and sitting down at the old desk to pursue some perfectly dotty arcane study. He had been completely mad, of course. Even as a child she had known it, although her mother had behaved as though it were the furthest thing from her mind until she had known she was dying. Then she had sat Meg down and told her simply, “Take care of your father, if you can.” There had been no moment of doubt in either woman’s mind that Meg could. He had been beatific and peaceful much of the time, the way she imagined idiot savants must be.
She remembered the day he had let her have the run of this place. She was ten, and she had been at a birthday party for Gwendolyn Ap-Witting. She had told one of her stories to Gwendolyn, a scary story with ghosts that came up out of the ancient mounds between their estates. Gwendolyn had told a duller, less-sophisticated abridged version to her aunt Clara while she was upstairs fixing her hair. The aunt had come downstairs and made a public announcement that the other children were to believe nothing that Meg said, and followed it with a lecture about Jesus sending angels to make indelible black marks in their books whenever little girls told lies. The children had been more terrified by this than by the ghosts, and they had spent the rest of the long afternoon maintaining a distance of twelve feet from Meg. Their rudimentary religious training had convinced them that God had a history of striking down sinners in groups rather than singly. The criteria were vague; usually just falling into some broadly defined category like “the wicked” seemed to be enough, so self-preservation dictated that their status be unambiguous. Whenever she came near any of them, they would recoil and move away. As Gwendolyn opened her gifts in the drawing room surrounded by all the other children, Meg had hovered in the doorway, looking at all of them from an immense distance, as though she were one of the ghosts in her story, caught alone on the earth in daytime. When the driver had pulled up in front of the big manor house at four, little Margaret had appeared suddenly from behind a thick yew tree and clambered into the back seat as though the Rolls were the last steamer out of Krakatoa.
At home she had sat alone in the garden contemplating the wreckage of her life when she had noticed her father standing nearby, staring at her. Probably he could see she had been crying, although she had taken pains to hide the signs because they were not only a consequence but also evidence of her guilt. It was unusual that he paid any attention to her, and often she suspected that he was unaware of her existence for long periods. But now he was absorbed in his study of her, looking down at her with the same benevolent curiosity that he was devoting that year to his list of medicinal herbs mentioned in ancient texts but not identifiable among modern flora.