Then the cabin door flew open, and Alisha came stumbling out.
"Don"t shoot!" she yelled. "I"m not armed or anything!" She was wailing, and holding her arm. It looked like she"d been winged.
"Everybody else out of the cabin!" I called. My voice sounded firm enough, from what I could hear of it. "Out of the cabin now!"
Spike had come forward and was yelling Bel"s name.
There was no answer.
"Go find her," I ordered, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I took a slow-burn flare out of my pocket, stuck it in the ground, and lit it, moving away immediately. Spike was moving towards the side of the cabin. A man appeared at the cabin door. It was Jeremiah Provost. He had his hands up. Now that the flare was lighting up the scene, I saw he had blood on his white shirt. But it was a smear, nothing more, and I guessed it to be not his blood but Alisha"s.
369.
"lie on the ground, Alisha," I ordered. "Why don"t you joi her, Provost?"
"Who are you?" He wasn"t moving. "What do you want?
There was a sudden pistol shot, and Spike slumped to the ground. I moved towards him, then realised my mistake. ]
half-turned in time to see Alisha drawing a gun from beneath her. I shot her in the head with the Colt. One shol was all it took.
Then I turned again, and saw Kline stepping over Spike"s body. He had his pistol pointed at my head. I ducked down, firing as I did so. His body fell forwards and landed on the ground. From behind him stepped Bel. Wisps of smoke were rising from the barrel of her pistol. The back of his head wa matted with blood where she"d hit him.
She collapsed to her hands and knees and threw up on thi ground.
"Are there any of them left, Bel?"
She managed to shake her head. I turned the Colt to Provost. He"d come down the cabin steps and was kneeling over Alisha.
"Why?" he said, repeating the word over and over again. I left him there and checked the cabin. It was empty. The back window Kline had climbed out of stood wide open. Smells of forest and cordite were mixed in the air. I walked back out, and found Bel sitting on the ground next to Spike. She was stroking his forehead.
"He"s alive," she said. "Should we move him?"
"We may have to."
I took a look. There was warm sticky blood all over his chest. He"d taken a clean hit in the front and out the back. If he"d been a little further away, the bullet might have stuck or burst open inside him. I didn"t know whether he"d live.
"You got a stretcher here?" I said to Provost. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes, and mouthed the word "Why?
"I"ll tell you why. Because she had a gun. Why did she have a gun? Because she wasn"t a Disciple of Love, she was 370.
working for Kline, the way Nathan was. Did you know Nathan was Kline"s brother? Did you know he was Nathan Kline? No?" Provost shook his head. "It"s in the files in your own office. How come your beloved Alisha didn"t tell you?
Work it out for yourself, but first tell me if you"ve got a first aid kit and a f.u.c.king stretcher!"
He stared at me. "No stretcher," he said. "There"s first aid stuff in the office."
I turned to Bel. "Go fetch it." Spike was breathing in short painful gasps, but he was breathing. I went over to him again. His eyes were closed in concentration. He was concentrating on sticking around.
"Spike," I said, "remember, you can"t afford to die. I suppose I better tell you the truth, Spike. There aren"t any guns in heaven."
He almost smiled, but he was concentrating too hard.
I went back to Provost and stood over him.
"Time to talk," I said.
"Talk? We could have talked without this."
"Not my choice, Provost, Kline"s choice. Your man"s choice."
"My man?" He spoke like his mouth was full of bile. "Kline wasn"t my man."
"Then who was he?"
"He used to work for the NSC. Have you heard of them?"
"A bit."
"They retired him after an accident. I was the accident."
"I don"t understand."
"You will." He stood up. "You really think Alisha was working for Kline?"
"It doesn"t mean she didn"t love you."
He glowered at me. "Don"t patronise me, Mr West. Kline told me about you. He said you were coming after me. He failed to specify why."
"Questions, that"s all."
He turned away from me and sat on the cabin steps, 37i holding his head in his hands. "Fire away," he said without,! looking up. I Fire away? I hardly knew where to begin. Bel had! returned with the first aid kit and was starting to staunchSpike"s bleeding. I walked over to the steps and stood in fronts! of Provost. I"d taken Sam Clancy"s recording walkman fromi my pocket, and switched it on. I "A woman was killed in London," I said. "Her name wasi Eleanor Ricks. She was a journalist, investigating theDisciples of Love."
"I don"t know anything about it."
"You didn"t sanction her killing?"
"No."
"Then Kline acted alone."
Now he looked up at me. "You killed her?"
"Yes."
"Then answer me a question. Why would Kline need toj pay someone to do the job when he had his own hiredarmy?" "
It was a good question. So good, in fact, that I didn"t have an answer ...
"I don"t know," I said. "You tell me."
Provost smiled. "I can"t tell you. I can only tell you what Kline told me. He doesn"t know why you"ve been snooping around. He didn"t order any a.s.sa.s.sination, and he, too, was wondering who did. When you started asking questions, you became a threat."
"He"s had journalists killed, hasn"t he? He had Sam Clancy shot."
"Kline didn"t have much of a conscience, if that"s what you"re saying."
"But what was he trying to protect? Why was he shielding you?"
"Money, Mr West, what else? Oh, I don"t mean I was paying him. I mean he paid me, and he"s been paying for 372.
that mistake ever since." He glanced down at Kline"s body.
"He paid most dearly tonight."
"I still don"t get it."
"Kline worked for a part of the NSC involved with funding the Nicaraguan Contras. This was back in the mid-80s. He managed to wheedle ten million dollars out of ... I don"t know, the Sultan of somewhere, some Middle Eastern country. At this time, I had a little money. Elderly relatives kept dying. I got bored attending so many funerals. I liked to keep my money my own business, so I held an account in Switzerland."
"Go on."
"It was quite a coup for Kline, getting so much money for the Contras, but he didn"t exactly know what to do with it.
Someone at the NSC, I"m not saying it was Colonel Oliver North, suggested holding it in a bank account until it could be disposed of as intended."
"A Swiss bank account?"
"The NSC held just such an account. Only the G.o.ds of fate and irony stepped in. Kline copied the details of the account down wrongly. I can"t recall now exactly why I decided to check the state of my account, but I telephoned Switzerland one Thursday morning their time, and was told the exact amount I had on deposit. It seemed larger than I remembered, about ten million larger. I asked my account manager how much notice I had to make of a large withdrawal."
Provost stopped there.
"You took out the whole ten mil?"
"No, in the end I merely transferred it to a new account."
"Christ."
It was Kline"s mistake. He was sent to reason with me no matter how discreet Swiss banks are, the NSC has ways fracking people down. We came to a compromise. I handed back half the money. The other half I kept."
"And he went along with that?"
He didn"t have much choice."
373.
"He could have killed you."
Provost smiled. The NSC weren"t mentioned in my will, Mr West. He still wouldn"t have gotten the money. Besides which, his superiors were furious with him. They couldn"t possibly sanction something so messy."
"So they booted him out?"
"No, they booted him into the shadows. His remit was to make sure no one ever got to learn about the whole thing."
"And that meant stopping reporters from snooping tool deeply?"
"Exactly."
"Which is why Eleanor Ricks had to be stopped."
He shook his head. "I"ve already told you, Kline denied iAnd he went on denying it."
Then it doesn"t make sense."
"Maybe someone else hired your services."
"Yes, but I"ve ..."
He saw what I was thinking. "You"ve come all this waand killed all these people, and you"re no further forward I nodded. My mind was reeling. I"d got most of m hearing back, but it didn"t matter, I could hardly take any ( it in.
"Two digits, that"s what did it," Provost was saying. "Klin wasn"t much of a typist. He transposed two of the digits oij the account number. And in doing so, the NSC paid for thi Disciples of Love. That, Mr West, is why they had to keep iquiet. They"d funded a religious cult, and the interest their money is still funding it."
"Where"s the proof?"
"Oh, I have proof."
"Where?" I wasn"t sure I believed him, not completely There had to be something more. He looked to be havind trouble with his memory, so I tickled his chin with the Colt]
"Remember what I do for a living, Provost."
"How can I forget? There are papers in my wall safe, copies with my lawyer."
374.
Maybe it was the word "lawyer" that did it. I almost felt something click in my head.
"You"re going to open your safe for me."
"It"s not here, it"s in my home in Seattle."
"Fine, we"ll go there."
"I want to stay here. The combination"s easy to find. I can never remember it myself, so I keep it written on a pad beside the telephone. It"s marked as an Australian telephone number."
I knew I had to see it for myself. I had to hold some proof of his story in my hands. Even then, it wouldn"t be enough.
I"d come through all this, and dragged Bel and Spike with me, and still there was no answer, not that Provost could provide.
A shot rang out. I spun round with the Colt. The guard had crawled from where Spike must have left him. There was blood all down his front. I didn"t make things much worse by snuffing out what life he had left. I"d robbed him of a few minutes, that was all.