He twisted the knob slowly and opened the door onto the third-floor
corridor.
it was empty. The nocturnal games had begun below; the players would
remain in the competitive arenas until the prizes had been won or lost
or forgotten in alcoholic oblivion. He had only to be alert for
stragglers, or the overanxious, like the pigeon on the second floor who
was being maneuvered with such precision by the child-woman mulatto. He
tried to recall at which door the man in the yellow shirt had stood. He
had been quite far down the hallway, but not at the end. Not by the
staircase; two-thirds of the way, perhaps. On the right; he had pulled
back his jacket with his right hand, revealing the yellow shirt. That
meant he was not inside a door on Alex’s left. Reversing the viewpoint,
he focused on three … no, four doors on his left that were possible.
Beginning with the second door from the suitcase, one-third the distance
to the elevators.
Which one?
McAuliff began walking noiselessly on the thick carpet down the
corridor, hugging the left wall. He paused before each door as he
passed, his head constantly turning, his eyes alert, his ears listening
for the sound of voices, the tinkling of glasses. For anything.
Nothing.
Silence. Everywhere.
He looked at the brass numbers-218, 216, 214, 212.
Even 2 1 0. Any farther would be incompatible with what he remembered.
He stopped at the halfway point and turned. Perhaps he knew enough.
Enough to tell Westmore Tallon. Alison had said that the tolerance
range for the electronic bugs was one hundred yards from first
positioning to the receiving equipment. This floor, this section of the
hotel, was well within that limit. Behind one of those doors was a tape
recorder activated by a man in front of a speaker or with earphones
clamped over his head.
Perhaps it was enough to report those numbers. Why should he look
further?
Yet he knew he would. Someone had seen fit to intrude on his life in a
way that filled him with revulsion. Few things caused him to react
violently, but one of them was the actual, intended invasion of his
privacy. And greed.
Greed, too, infuriated him. Individual, academic, corporate.
Someone named Craft-because of his greed-had instructed his minions to
invade Alex’s personal moments.
Alexander Tarquin McAuliff was a very angry man.
He started back toward the staircase, retracing his steps, close to the
wall, closer to each door, where he stopped and stood immobile.
Listening.
212,214,216,218 …
And back once again. It was a question of patience.
Behind one of those doors was a man in a yellow shirt. He wanted to
find that man.
He heard it.
Room 214.
it was a radio. Or a television set. Someone had turned up the volume
of a television set. He could not distinguish the words, but he could
hear the excitement behind the rapid bursts of dialogue from a clouded
speaker, too loud to avoid distortion.
Suddenly, there was the sound of a harsh, metallic crack of a door
latch. Inches away from McAuliff someone had pulled back the bolt and
was about to open the door.
Alex raced to the staircase. He could not avoid noise, he could only
reduce it as much as possible as he lurched into the dimly lit concrete
foyer. He whipped around, pushing the heavy steel door closed as fast
and as quietly as he could; he pressed the fingers of his left hand
around the edge, preventing the door from shutting completely, stopping
the sound of metal against metal at the last half second.
He peered through the crack. The man in the yellow shirt came out of
the room, his attention still within it. He was no more than fifty feet
away in the silent corridor-silent except for the sound on the
television set. He seemed angry, and before he closed the door he
looked inside and spoke harshly in a Southern drawl.
“Turn that fuckin’ thing down, you goddamn ape!”
The man in the yellow shirt then slammed the door and walked rapidly
toward the elevators. He remained at the end of the corridor, nervously
checking his watch, straightening his tie, rubbing his shoes over the
back of his trousers until a red light, accompanied by a soft, echoing
bell, signaled the approach of an elevator. McAuliff watched from the
stairwell two hundred feet away.
The elevator doors closed, and Alex walked out into the corridor. He
crossed to Room 214 and stood motionless for a few moments. It was a
decision he could abandon, he knew that. He could walk away, call
Tallon, tell him the room number, and that would be that.
But it would not be very satisfying. It would not be satisfying at all.
He had a better idea: he would take whoever was in that room to Tallon
himself. If Tallon didn’t like it, he could go to hell. The same for
Hammond. Since it was established that the electronic devices were
planted by a man named Craft, who was in no way connected with the
elusive Halidon, Arthur Craft could be taught a lesson.
Alex’s arrangements with Hammond did not include abuses from third and
fourth parties.
It seemed perfectly logical to get Craft out of the chess game. Craft
clouded the issues, confused the pursuit.
McAuliff had learned two physical facts about Arthur Craft: He was the
son of Craft the Elder and he was American. He was also an unpleasant
man. It would have to do.
He knocked on the door beneath the numerals 214.
“Yes, mon? Who is it, mon?” came the muffled reply from within.
Alex waited and knocked again. The voice inside came nearer the door.
“Who is it, please, mon?”
“Arthur Craft, you idiot!”
“Oh! Yes sir, Mr. Craft, mon!” The voice was clearly frightened. The
knob turned; the bolt had not been inserted.
The door had opened no more than three inches when McAuliff slammed his
shoulder against it with the full impact of his near two hundred pounds.
The door crashed against the medium-sized Jamaican inside, sending him
reeling into the center of the room. Alex gripped the edge of the
vibrating door and swung it back into place, the slam of the heavy wood
echoing throughout the corridor.
The Jamaican steadied himself, in his eyes a combination of fary and
fear. He whipped around to the room’s writing desk; there were boxed
speakers on each side. Between them was a pistol.
McAuliff lurched forward, his left hand aiming for the gun, his right
grabbing any part of the man it could reach.
Their hands met above the warm steel of the pistol; Alex gripped the
black man’s throat and dug his fingers into the man’s flesh.
The man shook loose; the gun went careening off the surface of the desk
onto the floor. McAuliff lashed out with the back of his fist at the
Jamaican man’s face, instantaneously opening his hand and yanking
forward, pulling the man’s head down by the hair. As the head went
down, Alex NOW brought his left knee crashing up into the man’s chest,
then into his face.
Voices from a millennium ago came back to him: Use your knees! Your
feet! Grab! Hold! Slash at the eyes! The blind can’t fight! Rupture!
it was over. The voices subsided. The man collapsed at his feet.
McAuliff stepped back. He was frightened; something had happened to
him. For a few terrifying seconds, he had been back in the Vietnam
jungle. He looked down at the motionless Jamaican beneath him. The
head was turned, flat against the carpet; blood was oozing from the pink
lips.
Thank God the man was breathing.
It was the gun. The goddamned gun! He had not expected a gun. A
fight, yes. His anger justified that. But he had thought of it as a
scuffle-intense, over quickly. He would confront, embarrass, forcibly
make whoever was monitoring the tapes go with him. To embarrass; to
teach an avaricious employer a lesson.
But not this.
This was deadly. This was the violence of survival.
The tapes. The voices. The excited voices kept coming out of the
speakers on the desk.
It was not a television set he had heard. The sounds were the sounds of
the Courtleigh Manor kitchen. Men shouting, other men responding
angrily; the commands of superiors, the whining complaints of
subordinates. All frantic, agitated … mostly unintelligible. They
must have driven those listening into a fury.
Then Alex saw the revolving reels of the tape deck. For some reason it
was on the floor, to the right of the desk. A small, compact Wollensak
recorder, spinning as if nothing had happened.
McAuliff grabbed the two speakers and crashed them repeatedly against
each other until the wood splintered and the cases cracked open. He
tore out the black shells and the wires and threw them across the room.
He crossed to the right of the desk and crushed his heel into the