“How could she be? She was the general’s wife, the mistress of the manor, wasn’t she? Isn’t she?”
“She was used—”
“I was laughed at, always laughed at, Mr. Delta!” cried Rachel Swayne, gripping the arms of her chair. “When they weren’t leering or drooling. How’d you like to be the special piece of meat passed out like a special dessert to very special people when the dinner and the drinks are over?”
“I don’t think I’d like it at all. I might even refuse.”
“I couldn’t! He made me do it!”
“Nobody can make anybody do anything like that.”
“Sure, they can, Mr. Delta,” said the general’s wife, leaning forward, her large breasts pressing the sheer fabric of her blouse, her long hair partially obscuring her aging but still sensual soft-featured face. “Try an uneducated grammar school dropout from the coal basins in West Virginia when the companies shut down the mines and nobody had no food—excuse me, any food. You take what you got and you run with it and that’s what I did. I got laid from Aliquippa to Hawaii, but I got there and I learned a trade. That’s where I met the Big Boy and I married him, but I didn’t have no illusions from day one. ’Specially when he got back from ’Nam, y’know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure I do, Rachel.”
“You don’t have to explain nothin’ kiddo!” roared Flannagan.
“No, I wanna, Eddie! I’m sick of the whole shit, okay?”
“You watch your tongue!”
“The point is, I don’t know nothin’, Mr. Delta. But I can figure things, y’know what I mean?”
“Stop it, Rachel!” cried the dead general’s aide.
“Fuck off, Eddie! You’re not too bright either. This Mr. Delta could be our way out. … Back to the islands, right?”
“Absolutely right, Mrs. Swayne.”
“You know what this place is—?”
“Shut up!” yelled Flannagan, awkwardly plodding forward, stopped by the sudden ear-shattering explosion of Bourne’s gun, the bullet searing into the floor between the sergeant’s legs.
The woman screamed. When she stopped, Jason continued: “What is this place, Mrs. Swayne?”
“Hold it,” the master sergeant again interrupted, but his objection was not shouted now; instead, it was a plea, a strong man’s plea. He looked at the general’s wife and then back at Jason. “Listen, Bourne or Delta or whoever you are, Rachel’s right. You could be our way out—there’s nothing left for us over here—so what have you got to offer?”
“For what?”
“Say we tell you what we know about this place … and I tell you where you can start looking for a lot more. How can you help us? How can we get out of here and back to the Pac Islands without being hassled, our names and faces all over the papers?”
“That’s a tall order, Sergeant.”
“Goddamn it, she didn’t kill him—we didn’t kill him, you said so yourself!”
“Agreed, and I couldn’t care less whether you did or not, whether you were responsible or not. I’ve got other priorities.”
“Like getting ‘caught up with some old comrades’ or whatever the hell it was?”
“That’s right, I’m owed.”
“I still can’t figure you—”
“You don’t have to.”
“You were dead!” broke in the perplexed Flannagan, the words rushing out. “Delta One from the illegals was Bourne, and Bourne was dead and Langley proved it to us! But you’re not dead—”
“I was taken, Sergeant! That’s all you have to know—that and the fact that I’m working alone. I’ve got a few debts I can call in, but I’m strictly solo. I need information and I need it quickly!”
Flannagan shook his head in bewilderment. “Well … maybe I can help you there,” he said quietly, tentatively, “better than anyone else would. I was given a special assignment, so I had to learn things, things someone like me wouldn’t normally be told.”
“That sounds like the opening notes of a con song, Sergeant. What was your special assignment?”
“Nursemaid. Two years ago Norman began to fall apart. I controlled him, and if I couldn’t I was given a number to call in New York.”
“Said number being part of the help you can give me.”
“That and a few license-plate ID’s I wrote down just in case—”
“In case,” completed Bourne, “someone decided your nursemaid’s services were no longer required.”
“Something like that. Those pricks never liked us—Norman didn’t see it but I did.”
“Us? You and Rachel and Swayne?”
“The uniform. They look down their rich civilian noses at us like we’re necessary garbage, and they’re right about the necessary. They needed Norman. With their eyes they spat on him, but they needed him.”
The soldier boys couldn’t run with it. Albert Armbruster, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Medusa—the civilian inheritors.
“When you say you wrote down the license-plate numbers, I assume that means you weren’t part of the meetings that took place—take place—here on a fairly regular basis. That is, you didn’t mingle with the guests; you weren’t one of them.”
“Are you crazy?” screeched Rachel Swayne, in her own succinct way answering Jason’s question. “Whenever there was a real meeting and not a lousy drunken dinner party, Norm told me to stay upstairs, or if I wanted to, go over to Eddie’s and watch television. Eddie couldn’t leave the cabin. We weren’t good enough for his big fancy asshole friends! It’s been that way for years. … Like I said, he threw us together.”
“I’m beginning to understand—at least, I think I am. But you got the license numbers, Sergeant. How did you do that? I gather you were confined to quarters.”
“I didn’t get ’em, my guards did. I called it a confidential security procedure. No one argued.”
“I see. You said Swayne began to fall apart a couple of years ago. How? In what way?”
“Like tonight. Whenever something out of the ordinary happened, he’d freeze; he didn’t want to make decisions. If it even smacked of Snake Lady, he wanted to bury his head in the sand until it went away.”
“What about tonight? I saw you two arguing … it seemed to me the sergeant was giving the general his marching orders.”
“You’re damn right I was. Norman was in a panic—over you, over the man they called Cobra who was bringing out this heavy business about Saigon twenty years ago. He wanted me to be with him when you got here, and I told him no way. I said I wasn’t nuts and I’d have to be nuts to do that.”
“Why? Why would it be nuts for an aide to be with his superior officer?”
“For the same reason noncoms aren’t called into situation rooms where the stars and the stripers are figuring out strategy. We’re on different levels; it isn’t done.”
“Which is another way of saying there are limits to what you should know.”
“You got it.”
“But you were part of that Saigon twenty years ago, part of Snake Lady—hell, Sergeant, you were Medusa, you are Medusa.”
“Nickels and dimes’ worth, Delta. I sweep up and they take care of me, but I’m only a sweeper in a uniform. When my time comes to turn in that uniform, I go quietly into a nice distant retirement with my mouth shut, or I go out in a body bag. It’s all very clear. I’m expendable.”
Bourne watched the master sergeant closely as he spoke, noting Flannagan’s brief glances at the general’s wife, as if he expected to be applauded or, conversely, to be told with a look to shut up. Either the huge military aide was telling the truth or he was a very convincing actor. “Then it strikes me,” said Jason finally, “that this is a logical time to move up your retirement. I can do that, Sergeant. You can fade quietly with your mouth shut and with whatever rewards you’re given for sweeping up. A devoted general’s aide with over thirty years’ service opts for retirement when his friend and superior tragically takes his own life. No one will question you. … That’s my offer.”
Flannagan again looked at Rachel Swayne; she nodded sharply once, then stared at Bourne. “What’s the guarantee that we can pack up our stuff and get out?” asked the woman.
“Isn’t there a little matter of Sergeant Flannagan’s discharge and his army pension?”
“I made Norman sign those papers eighteen months ago,” broke in the aide. “I was posted permanently to his office at the Pentagon and billeted to his residence. I just have to fill in the date, sign my own name, and list a general delivery address, which Rachel and I already figured out.”
“That’s all?”
“What’s left is maybe three or four phone calls. Norman’s lawyer, who’ll wrap up everything here; the kennels for the dogs;. the Pentagon assigned-vehicle dispatcher—and a last call to New York. Then it’s Dulles Airport.”
“You must have thought about this for a long time, for years—”
“Nothing but, Mr. Delta,” confirmed the general’s wife, interrupting. “Like they say, we paid our dues.”