“You have not then talked with his highness, my son?” asked the archbishop mildly. “You know far more of military matters than do I, alas. Surely your words would weigh much more heavily upon his decisions than would mine own.”
“The royal ass won’t listen to me!” Timoteo burst out. “Your grace, in spite of all I’ve told King Tamhas, he still insists that he will meet King Brian on the field at his border and there defeat him in open battle. With what, pray tell, your grace? My company, the Afriquans, his fancy, combed, and curried bodyguard squadron, and the artillerists at the fortress are all the field troops he has left, by all that’s holy! And the artillerists are standing rock-firm on the last jot and tittle of their damned contract and refusing to serve guns or to fight anyplace save in that fortress or on the city walls. By the four-and-twenty balls of the Twelve Apostles, now, I—”
“Duce di Bolgia!” The little man had come upright in his armchair, his pale eyes blazing with fire, his previously mild voice now cracking like a whiplash. “Soldiers are infamous blasphemers, but you will never do such again in my hearing! Do 1 make myself clear? You might also think of the good of your soul when you are out of my hearing.
“As regards the military situation, 1 can understand your predicament. King Tamhas is not only stubborn and overly prideful, but stupid, as well, and that is a bad combination in any man of rank or station, but calamitous in a ruling monarch, as you have seen. Yes, I shall speak with him and his equally stubborn and stupid advisers—bad blood in all of the
Fitzgeralds; I think it comes from too much inbreeding—but I think my successes will be no more than were yours.
“Meanwhile, please order Sir Marc to ready his fastest vessel for sea. I shall send a message to his eminence D’Este urging that you and your force be withdrawn from Munster because the situation has become untenable. 1 and my staff and household will begin to make ready to depart with you, so please make allowances to carry us on one of your ships, my son.
“Also, knowing the king as I have come to know him, it might be wise to gather all of your force and the Afriquan horse back into the city, close to the ships and the fortress, lest King Tamhas decide to make military slaves of you all.”
Rupen’s very first mission for the Central Intelligence Agency was also very nearly his last trip of any kind for anyone. In the end, he had to use the PPK, the spring knife, and the special pen, not to even mention several grenades and an ancient Thompson that almost literally fell into his hands. But what he fought and killed for was his own life and that of Mineo, not—as they all clearly believed—for the group of whom he had overseen delivery of the consignment of modern weapons. Those people left a very bad taste in his mouth, and he very much regretted that there had not been a way for him to allow the government troops to mete out to them the deaths that they so richly deserved. He, along with most Americans, had always considered that country and its government to be allies and friends of long standing, and he could not imagine why an American agency would be arming fanatics to destabilize or bring down that government. Questions along that line directed at the CIA types, however, brought invariably the same answers, which all boiled down to their contention that he had no need to know and would be best advised to keep his mouth shut if that was all he could think of to ask.
He went back to arms dealing and hoped to God that he never again would hear of the CIA or any other clandestine organization of his own or of anyone else’s government, for it was far too easy to get killed playing the games that those types customarily played. Of course, the arms markets were not what they had been eight or nine years before, when he first had entered them. For one thing, those few World War II and earlier cartridge weapons that were still around and occasionally offered to him and other buyers were generally in sad shape or worse, having been through war after war after insurrection and uprising, mostly fought out in damp or dusty places by simple people whose idea of weapons maintenance most often came down to keeping the bayonet sharp, while trusting in God or Allah or Buddha or Krishna to keep the firearm functional, regardless of filthy actions, fouled bores, and total absence of lubrication.
It now was a red-letter day when Rupen received word that somewhere in some dark corner or sub-basement of an armory, in a forgotten warehouse or a deserted military depot, or in a long-sealed cave on a Pacific atoll, fine weapons in decent condition had been turned up and were for sale to the highest bidder.
Most of his work, these days, had to do with matching buyer with seller in complicated deals involving jet planes, tanks, artillery pieces, helicopters, military wheeled transport of all kinds, rockets, and even the occasional small warship. Rupen was tired unto death with trotting hither and yon all over the world. It was a young man’s profession, and Rupen was forty-three years old.
He was vacationing in the ancient and beautiful city of Syracuse, Sicily, when he made his decision to wait a few weeks, tie up a few loose ends in Europe, then go back to Virginia for Christmas and announce his immediate resignation to Kogh and Bagrat.
The week or two here and there was just not enough, besides which, he rarely got all of those short respites from business; he was just too well known, and customers or their agents followed him and pestered him wherever he tried to hide for a few days. He was also tired unto death of spending his every waking or sleeping minute of life with a pistol either holstered on him or within easy reach, like some movie-version spy. Not that he had not at times had pressing need of his personal armaments, for not everyone liked him, not by any means. He was an American, after all, and Americans were becoming less and less popular around the world that their generosity had virtually rebuilt from the ruins of World War 11. He moved and worked strictly as an apolitical businessman, which factor made him automatically suspect in the eyes of the more extreme factions of both left-wing and right-wing governments and movements. There were also the sore losers, sometime customers who had come out second best despite infusions of modern armaments and equipment and who found it much more satisfying to blame the arms and the persons who had gotten them those arms than to place the onus on bankrupt ideologies and ill-led or mutinous troops. A subgenre of this species was the ones who felt that they had lost because they had not been in receipt of arms either through lack of cash, lack of credit, or both, and who felt strongly that there must be one more death for their cause: Rupen Ademian’s.
Which was one reason that Rupen vacationed so often in Sicily or Naples—he felt safe in those places. His original contacts with the Honored Society had been through Seraphino Mineo, back in 1960. Against the advice of many well-meaning people, he since had consistently refused to do any business with or for them and, oddly enough, thereby gained the sincere respect of the upper echelons. They had not only refused numerous contracts ro kill him, but had seen to it that he received detailed information on those who had sought to employ them to assassinate him, often complete with color photos, make and color and year of auto, and passport numbers.
When he made his usual daily call to Virginia, a sobbing operator put him through directly to Kogh, rather than to Bagrat. “Kogh, what the hell are you doing up there? Has something happened 1 should know about?”
“Fucking-A-right, it has!” His brother’s agitated voice crackled over the undersea cables. “About an hour ago, JFK was shot in Dallas, Texas. It was on TV, for Chrissakes. A sniper got him in the head—nobody knows whether he’s dead or alive, now. Honest, Rupen, he was shot right on TV!”
“Who would—” began Rupen, but Kogh cut him off, brusquely.
“Hell, 1 don’t know. There’s all kinda rumors, though. Some say the Cubans, some say the Russkis or hide-out SS or American Nazis or beatniks or the John Birch Society, even. Anyhow, 1 was thinking it might be a damn good idea for you to get back here as fast as you can get on a plane. If you can’t get on a commercial flight, hire a plane of your own. We’ll pay for it. Just get back Stateside, Rupen. God alone knows what’s gonna happen next.”