The automobile approached at incredible speed. Whoever was driving was racing back to find someone.
Was it to find him?
Or Leila Osterman?
Or was it to reach Cardone, who had no dying father in Philadelphia. Or Tremayne, who wasn’t on his way to the motel at Kennedy Airport.
Tanner got up and kept going, his leg about to collapse under him, the pistol gripped tightly in his hand.
He rounded a bend in the road and there it was. A single sagging street lamp lit the crumbling station house. The old stucco depot was boarded up, giant weed drooping ominously from the cracks in the rotted wood. Small ugly leaves grew out of the foundation.
There was no wind, no rain, no sound but the rhythmic drip of water from thousands of branches and leaves—the last exhausted effects of the storm.
He stood on the outskirts of the decayed, overgrown parking area trying to decide where to position himself. It was nearly two o’clock and a secluded place had to be found. The station house itself! Perhaps he could get inside. He started across the gravel and weeds.
A blinding light flashed in his eyes; his reflexes lurched him forward. He rolled over on his wounded shoulder, yet felt no pain. A powerful searchlight had pierced the dimness of the depot grounds, and gunshots echoed throughout the deserted area. Bullets thumped into the earth around him and whistled over his head. He kept rolling, over and over, knowing that one of the bullets had hit his left arm.
He reached the edge of the sunken gravel and raised his pistol toward the blinding light. He fired rapidly in the direction of the enemy. The searchlight exploded; a scream followed. Tanner kept pulling the trigger until the clip was empty. He tried to reach into his pocket with his left hand for a second clip and found he couldn’t move his arm.
There was silence again. He put down the pistol and awkwardly extracted another clip with his right hand. He twisted the pistol on its back and with his teeth holding the hot barrel, pushed the fresh clip into the chamber, burning his lips as he did so.
He waited for his enemy to move. To make any sound at all. Nothing stirred.
Slowly he rose, his left arm now completely immobile. He held the pistol in front of him, ready to pull the trigger at the slightest movement in the grass.
None came.
Tanner backed his way towards the door of the depot, holding his weapon up, probing the ground carefully with his feet so that no unexpected obstacle would cause him to fall. He reached the boarded-up door, knowing he couldn’t possibly break it down if it was nailed shut. Most of his body was inoperative. He had little strength left.
Still, he pushed his back against the door and the heavy wood gave slightly, creaking loudly as it did so. Tanner turned his head just enough to see that the opening was no more than three or four inches. The ancient hinges were caked with rust. He slammed his right shoulder against the edge of the door and it gave way, plunging Tanner into the darkness, onto the rotted floor of the station.
He lay where he was for several seconds. The station house door was three-quarters open, the upper section snapped away from its hinges. The street lamp fifty yards away provided a dull wash of illumination. Broken and missing boards from the roof were a second, inadequate source of light.
Suddenly Tanner heard a creaking behind him. The unmistakable sound of a footstep on the rotted floor. He tried to turn around, tried to rise. He was too late. Something crashed into the base of his skull. He felt himself grow dizzy, but he saw the foot. A foot encased in bandages.
As he collapsed on the rotted floor, blackness sweeping over him, he looked upward into a face.
Tanner knew he had found Omega.
It was Laurence Fassett.
29
He couldn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. Five minutes? An hour? There was no way to tell. He couldn’t see his watch, he couldn’t move his left arm. His face was against the rough splintered floor of the crumbling station house. He could feel the blood slowly trickling from his wounded arm; his head ached.
Fassett!
The manipulator.
Omega.
As he lay there, isolated fragments of past conversations raced through his mind.
«… we should get together … our wives should get together …»
But Laurence Fassett’s wife had been killed in East Berlin. Murdered in East Berlin. That fact had been his most moving entreaty.
And there was something else. Something to do with a Woodward broadcast … The broadcast about the C.I.A. a year ago.
«… I was in the States then. I saw that one.»
But he wasn’t «in the States» then. In Washington Fassett had said he’d been on the Albanian border a year ago. «… forty-five days of haggling.» In the field. It was why he’d contacted John Tanner, the solid, clean news director of Standard Mutual, a resident of the target, Chasm of Leather.
There were other contradictions—none as obvious, but they were there. They wouldn’t do him any good now. His life was about to end in the ruins of the Lassiter depot.
He moved his head and saw Fassett standing above him.
«We’ve got a great deal to thank you for. If you are as good a shot as I think you are you’ve created the perfect martyr out there. A dead hero. If he’s only wounded, he’ll soon be dead at any rate… Oh, he’s the other part of us, but even he’d recognize the perfect contribution of his sacrifice… You see, I didn’t lie to you. We are fanatics. We have to be.»
«What now?»
«We wait for the others. One or two are bound to show up. Then it’ll be over. Their lives and yours, I’m afraid. And Washington will have its Omega. Then, perhaps, a field agent named Fassett will be given another commendation. If they’re not careful, they’ll make me Director of Operations one day.»
«You’re a traitor.» Tanner found something in the dark shadows by his right hand. It was a loose piece of flooring about two feet long, an inch or so wide. He awkwardly, painfully, sat up, pulling the plank to his side.
«Not by my lights. A defector, perhaps. Not a traitor. Let’s not go into that. You wouldn’t understand or appreciate the viewpoint. Let’s just say in my opinion you’re the traitor. All of you. Look around you …»
Tanner lashed out with the piece of wood and crashed it with all his might across the bandaged foot in front of him. Blood erupted instantly, spreading through the gauze. Tanner flung himself upward into Fassett’s groin, trying desperately to reach the hand with the gun. Fassett screamed in anguish. Tanner found the agent’s wrist with his right hand, his left arm immobile, serving only as a limping tentacle. He drove Fassett back against the wall and ground his heel into Fassett’s wounded foot, stamping it over and over again.
Tanner wrenched the gun free and it fell to the floor, sliding towards the open door and the dim shaft of light. Fassett’s screams shattered the stillness of the station house as he slumped against the wall.
John lunged for the pistol, picked it up and held it tightly in his hand. He got up, every part of his body in pain, the blood flowing now out of his arm.
Fassett was barely conscious, gasping in agony. Tanner wanted this man alive, wanted Omega alive. But he thought of the basement, of Ali and the children, and so he took careful aim and fired twice, once into the mass of blood and flesh which was Fassett’s wound, once into the knee cap of the leg.
He lurched back toward the doorway, supporting himself in the frame. Painfully, he looked at his watch: two-thirty-seven. Seven minutes after Omega’s appointed time.