“Marvelous.”
“Back to the original question,” Klinger said. “When do I eliminate him?”
“Tonight. Within the hour, if possible.”
“Why not back in Greenwich?”
“I don’t want to bury him on the estate. That’s taking too great a chance.”
“What will we do with the body?” “Bury it here. In the woods.” The helicopter touched ground. The pilot shut off the engines.
Overhead, the rotors coughed and slowed down. A welcome silence gradually replaced the racket they had made.
Klinger said, “You intend for him to just-disappear off the face of the earth?”
“That’s correct.”
“His vacation ends on the fifth of next month. That’s when he’s due back at the Brockert Institute. He’s a punctual man. The morning of the fifth, when he doesn’t show up, there’s going to be some commotion. They’ll come looking for him.”
“They won’t come looking in Black River. There’s nothing at all to connect Ogden with this place. He’s supposed to be vacationing in Miami.”
“There’s going to be a very quiet and very big manhunt,” Klinger said. “Pentagon security people, the FBI . . .”
Unbuckling his seat belt, Dawson said, “And there’s nothing to connect him with you or with me. Eventually they’ll decide that he went over to the other side, defected.”
Maybe.
“Definitely.”
Dawson opened his door.
“Do I take the chopper back to town?” Klinger asked.
“No. He might hear you coming and suspect what you’re there for. Take a car or a jeep from here. And you’d better walk the last few hundred yards.”
“All right.”
“And Ernst?”
“Yes?”
In the amber cabin light, Dawson’s five-hundred-dollars-apiece capped teeth gleamed in a broad and dangerous smile. There seemed to be light behind his eyes. His nostrils were flared: a wolf on the trail of a blood scent. “Ernst, don’t worry so much.”
“Can’t help but.”
“We’re destined to survive this night, to win this battle and all of those battles that will come after it,” Dawson said with solemn conviction.
“I wish I could be as confident of that as you are.”
“But you should be. We’re blessed, my friend. This entire enterprise is blessed, you see. Don’t you ever forget that, Ernst.” He smiled again.
“I won’t forget,” Klinger said.
But he was reassured more by the weight of the revolver at his ankle than by Dawson’s words.
Straining to hear any sound other than their own footsteps, Paul and Sam left the church by the rear door and crossed the open fields to the riverbank.
The high grass was heavy with rain. Within twenty yards, Paul’s shoes and socks were wet through to his skin. The legs of his jeans were soaked almost to the knees.
Sam located a footpath that traversed the bank of the river at a forty-five-degree angle. Every groove and depression in the earth had been transformed into a puddle. The way was exceedingly muddy and slick. They slipped and slid and waved their arms to keep their balance.
At the bottom of the path, they came onto a two-foot-wide rocky shelf. On the right the river rolled and gurgled, filling the darkness with syrupy sound: a wide ebony strip which, at this hour of the night, looked like crude oil rather than water. On their left the bank of the river rose up eight or nine feet; and in some places the exposed roots of willow trees and oaks and maples overlaid the earthen wall.
Without benefit of a flashlight, Sam led Paul westward, toward the mountains. His snowy hair was a ghostly, luminescent sign for Paul to follow. The older man stumbled occasionally; but he was for the most part sure-footed, and he never cursed when he misstepped. He was surprisingly quiet, as if the skills and talents of an experienced warrior suddenly had come back to him after all these years.
This is war, Paul reminded himself. We’re on our way to kill a man. The enemy. Several men
The warm, heavy air was redolent with the odor of damp moss and with the stale fumes of the plants that were decomposing in the muck at the water’s edge.
Eventually, Sam found a series of wind- and water-chiseled ledges, steps that took them up from the river again. They came out in an apple orchard on the slopes at the extreme west end of town.