“Try to sleep. Everything’s fine.” He obediently closed his eyes. The story must be finished, he thought. Good night, Mama.
Amy pulled the blanket up to his chin and walked back to the others, feeling the wound in her side. Paul was sitting against a tree, trying to flick a cigarette into his mouth. Like a little boy again, she thought. A little boy who cut throats.
“How do you think Smith is?” she asked Gerd. “Will he come through?”
“There’s no way of knowing. He’s a strong man, but head wounds…” He shrugged. “I’d better look at you,” he said, getting to his feet. She held the blouse up across her breasts as he carefully inspected the wound. The blood had clotted in the gash, a brown groove in a patch of blue flesh. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
“Stiff. And it itches.”
“Good signs.” He went to the camper, got a roll of bandage, and replaced the dressing she’d lost in Locust Forks. “You’ll be okay in a few days.” He smiled at her.
“Thanks,” she said. His kindness was almost unbearable. “I’m going to wash my face.”
She walked off toward the stream, feeling close to despair. If Kuznetsky died, what could she do? Even with him they’d never have gotten this far without the two Germans. And what would she do with them? With Paul? They might reach the coast, they might reach Cuba, they might even reach Sweden. And then? At some point Paul and Gerd had to be silenced, had to be, or it was all for nothing. And she didn’t know if she could kill them.
“Where exactly are we headed?” Paul asked when she returned, his gaze fixed on the map that he’d spread out on the convertible’s hood. “Mon Louis,” she said, pointing it out and moving away. “It’s a small fishing port. French-speaking. There’s a shrimp boat waiting to take us to Cuba.”
“Hired?”
“Yes. No questions asked, a nice big fee.”
“When?”
“We’re supposed to sail at midnight.” She looked at her watch. “We should be leaving soon.”
“The U-boat’s been sighted by now, hasn’t it?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” she said coldly. “I expect it has.”
Sam Benton stood at the top of the path that led down to the rocky beach. It was a damn shame in some ways, a damn shame. They’d come for a battle and found nothing but one empty and broken crate and a dead man in a car. The Navy had gotten all the glory. Well, almost all of it — the Bureau had nabbed the big wheel in New York.
“It’s Markham all right,” Mitchell said, joining him. “Found a book under the front seat — Civil War battlefields, something like that — got his name inside the front.”
“That’s that then.”
“Well…”
Benton looked at his partner. “Well what?” he asked irritably.
“I don’t get it,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t add up.”
“It doesn’t add up,” Benton repeated sarcastically. “We’ve got this empty crate, we’ve got Markham’s body, we’ve matched the car left by the train with the one those kids saw here on Wednesday night. Markham hired the lodge. The German in New York, the guy who arranged the whole goddamn spree — he told us this was the pickup point…”
“He said the pickup was supposed to be at ten p.m.”
“So they got here early.”
“Why was it traveling on the surface? That doesn’t make sense. They’d be dead ducks.”
“How d’you know it was?”
“The sighting.”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“And why was it moving south when they got it?” Mitchell went on doggedly.
“Oh Christ, that doesn’t mean anything. It had seen our boats, and was making a run for it.”
Mitchell sighed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But why did they shoot Markham?”
The “probably” irritated Benton still further. “How should I know? They must have fallen out among themselves…”
“The moment they arrived?”
“Orders from Berlin, then. He knew too much. Christ, what does it matter now?”
“Yeah. Okay.” There must have been a reason. “We’d better unblock the highways,” he said. “And I’m hungry.”
Paul had seen the roadblock when he was still half a mile away, but there’d been no way to avoid it. In the mirror he could see the camper pulling up two cars behind him.
The state troopers finished with the truck in front and one of them waved him forward, a bored expression on his face. As the truck picked up speed Paul accelerated the convertible through the space between it and the troopers’ car. A burst of gunfire would have been nice, but he had only two hands and he wanted to stay on the road.
Looking back, he could see that gunfire hadn’t been necessary; the troopers were already pulling their car around and giving chase, the siren beginning to wail. He rammed his foot down, feeling an exhilaration as the wind swept past him.
The first thing was to get off the highway and clear it for the others, but at the moment he had a river on one side, railroad tracks and a forest on the other. And the troopers were slowly reducing the distance between them.
He was at the turnoff almost before he realized it, and the wheels screeched and squealed as he swung into the side road, bouncing across the inlaid tracks and climbing sharply upward through the trees. For a few seconds the pursuit vanished, then reappeared in his mirror about a hundred yards behind as the road straightened out. He could see the officer in the passenger seat talking into a radio. That was bad news.
For a mile ahead the road was straight and empty. Paul unfastened the door beside him so only the car’s motion kept it closed, checked the position of the tommy gun on the seat, then skidded the car to a halt with his door broadside on to the pursuit. Kicking the door open with his foot as he picked up the gun, he raked the oncoming car before the dust thrown up by his skid had begun to settle. Through it he saw the windshield explode into fragments, two heads thrown back, the car careening sideways off the road to glance off one tree and into another.
He walked across to the wreck, tommy gun at the ready, and stood there listening to the voice shouting, “Hal, what the fuck’s happening, come in…” Both men were dead. “Hal died in the war,” Paul murmured to himself and the trees.
He got back behind the wheel, leaned over and examined the map Amy had given him. The road he was on wasn’t marked, but with any luck it should join up with one that was.
After about ten minutes he reached an east — west highway and turned west. Almost immediately he passed a truck stop, a long one-story café with a dozen or so vehicles parked in the lot. He drove on until he was well out of sight, then pulled the convertible off the highway and drove it deep into the trees. There he examined the map again, measuring distances against the scale with the barrel of the Walther. He was about 120 miles from Mon Louis, which didn’t seem far. But then they’d been only ten miles from the Kremlin.
It was almost seven o’clock, and the sun was sinking fast. It would be worth waiting for dark, he decided. Paul sat there for half an hour and let his mind rest.
When the last glint of orange had gone from the sky, he put the map inside his shirt, the Walther in his jacket pocket, and with the tommy gun slung over his shoulder walked back to the highway. It was lighter outside the trees and he waited another ten minutes before making his way to the truck stop.
There were about twenty people inside, and the smell of frying meat made his mouth water. All those years ago the one thing he’d loved about America was the hamburgers. He flattened himself against the side wall and, reaching up on tiptoe, cut through the telephone line where it entered the café, then walked stealthily around the back to the parking lot on the far side. The car closest to the highway was another convertible, so he decided on the one parked next to it, a black Pontiac. The door wasn’t locked. He took off the brake and pushed it into motion with his shoulder, finding it easier as the slope took over. He jumped in, letting in the clutch a hundred yards or so down the highway.