“That don’t answer my question, Cap. One finger or two?”
“One.” Heath relented and watched Teare pour three times that into a glass for himself.
“Anyway,” the major said, “I don’t use ice. Happy juice ain’t really nothin’ without ice.”
Heath took a sip and felt the whiskey burn his insides all the way down. “That’s not how the Pentagon sees it.”
“Fuck ’em’s what I say. Hell, Cap, isn’t givin’ up sex good enough for them during our six-week shift? A man’s gotta have his booze. And that’s hundred-proof pure sour mash you’re drinkin’ there, Cap. Hot enough to scorch the insides of a corpse and make it fall from heaven. My daddy used to make this himself.”
“He hand you down the recipe?”
Teare winked. “I could put together a batch in the ’fridgeration system that would pop your eyes out.” The major sat down on his freshly made bed and gulped down half his glass. “Ya know, Cap, it’s funny. We got rules and regulations ’bout ever’thin’ in here. Shit, there must be three pages on the evils of booze alone. But there ain’t no words mentioned ’bout sex. Know why?”
Heath shook his head.
“’Cause, buddy boy, when the damn rule books were written, there weren’t any women in NORAD and I suppose the noble minds in DC didn’t pay much worry to cornholin’. But now there’s quite a few women in the loop and the rule book ain’t been changed one damn bit. Check the title page, though, Cap, and you’ll find that the thing is supposedly updated every month.”
“What are you getting at, Major?”
Christian Teare drained the rest of his whiskey and leaned his massive frame back. “What am I getting at? I’ll tell ya what I’m getting at. If those boys who send down our orders are behind in the rule book, what else might they be behind in? Hell, Cap, you think the Ruskies would make the same mistake?”
“I never thought about it much, Major.”
“Yeah, well I got this feelin’ the boys in Washington ain’t neither.”
Chapter Seventeen
When Janie walked into the kitchen at seven A.M., she found Bane placing a platter of steaming scrambled eggs on the table. A glass of fresh squeezed orange juice was waiting on her plate and Bane had gone back to buttering what looked like a whole loaf of toast.
“I don’t know about you but I’m starved,” he told her. He had relieved Harry just before five A.M.
“You get any sleep?”
“A wink here and there. You?”
“Like a log for a while. Got up around four and found Harry eating Fritos in the living room.”
“He likes junk food,” Bane said and brought over the basket of toast, helping himself immediately to a huge portion of eggs.
“He also left guns all over my apartment.”
“Harry likes to be careful. You never know where you’ll be when you need one.”
“One in the belt should be sufficient.”
“Not for Harry.”
Janie went to work on her eggs, hoping to swallow the tension between her and Josh down with them. But all the banner breakfasts in the world couldn’t change what had passed recently between them. Truth was she had stayed up most of the night searching for a way to make their relationship right again, and had come to the conclusion that Bane had learned to live without love well enough to prefer life that way. Their relationship had been merely an interlude between violent episodes in what he liked to call the Game. She knew that now, probably had all along, but she’d always clung to the hope that this time the interlude might last.
Bane, meanwhile, felt himself losing her and loathed the emptiness that brought on. He wanted, needed, even loved her. There was no room in his life — the Winter Man’s life — though, for love and dependence. It was an either/or situation and Bane had made his choice, survival having determined it. He told himself when this was over he would make it up to her, might have promised her as much if he’d really believed it. There were no words that might express what he was feeling because he didn’t know himself. There was only a certainty of task, a singularity of purpose — the icy cornerstones of the Winter Man.
“Isn’t it about time you brought all this to the attention of someone in the government?” Janie asked him.
“Possibly, except I have no way of knowing how deep it goes. Conceivably, all of COBRA’s actions could be under government direction.”
“What about your former boss?”
“Arthur Jorgenson? He’s a good man, definitely the first one I’ll go to when the time’s right. He never approved of men like Chilgers. I can’t believe he’d be in on this. Trouble is, I haven’t got enough to take to him yet. I want a strong case, Janie, proof positive.”
“That boy the King’s baby-sitting seems like pretty good proof to me.”
“Not enough to nail COBRA and that’s what I’m after.” Bane gobbled up a heap of the eggs on his plate, took a swallow of coffee. “Which reminds me, I need your computers again.”
Janie toyed with her plate. “I figured there was something else behind this breakfast….”
“We’ve got to find out what project of COBRA’s we’ve stumbled upon here. Whatever we’re onto, whatever Jake Del Gennio uncovered and Davey Phelps has become involved in, must be related to some project they’re working on, or to a weapon they’re developing. Maybe both.”
“If that’s the case, you can be damn sure the information won’t be present on my computer or Harry’s.”
“But the names of COBRA’s top research personnel will, and that might give us a clue. What kind of scientists have they been going after lately? Who has joined their payroll and where did they come from? What’s their specialty?”
Janie frowned. “With those kinds of questions, I can get you enough material to keep you reading all weekend. Trouble is I’m not sure if there’ll be anything worth your time.”
“It’ll be there,” he assured her. “We just have to find it.”
The pounding in Trench’s head had been reduced to a dull throb thanks to an hourly dose of Percodan. He wasn’t at his best to begin with and the drugs, along with the absence of the Twin Bears, had him feeling very uneasy indeed. He was due to make another report to Chilgers in a few minutes and he was damned if he knew what to say.
They had found him slumped in Davey Phelp’s apartment, just coming around. They helped revive him and watched as he made a thorough inspection of the damage.
Both Bears were dead, the one in the lobby of a shattered windpipe at the hands of Bane and the one in the apartment of a stomach ripped open by his own knife. Trench had seen what the boy was doing to the Bear, had seen it but still couldn’t make himself believe it.
He had reached the street last night only to learn that Bane and the boy had escaped from the area. The trail went cold from there. The Winter Man was obviously hiding the boy someplace where Trench would never think to look. A clue, even the exact answer, might be found in precise scrutiny of Bane’s file. But Trench had neither the time or the head for such reading. He would leave it for COBRA’s administrative personnel, and of course, they would miss it because only a fellow professional would know what minor bit of information was the key.
Not that it mattered. Trench wasn’t sure he wanted to find the Winter Man anyway because then he’d have to decide what to do. Bane could have killed him last night and didn’t, a blunder unbefitting a professional of his caliber. And yet Trench had to admit that if the roles had been reversed, he probably would have responded in the same manner. That bothered him because it revealed what he had always considered to be weakness. Now he wasn’t sure anymore. Doubt had entered in. Trench pushed these thoughts back, seeing them as a sign of hesitance and thus danger. He was too old to change, but similarly too old to stop change from happening.