The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey

Author:Robert Lindsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

32

Chris held the shiny automatic in his lap and wondered if he would have the guts to do it. Was this the way to end the nightmare, to kill Daulton? He had no regrets about his motive for the thrust against the insanities of the superpowers; he had acted, he told himself, on behalf of all the people who could no longer speak for themselves of the insanities—the victims of Ypres, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh and all the other graveyards of battle—but his protest had assumed a shape he had not imagined, and it had gone on too long.

He now wanted to survive.

He thought of Daulton’s heroin-induced half-threat to blackmail his father and smiled bitterly to himself: his father would either shoot Daulton on the spot or handcuff him and get on the telephone to the FBI. No, he knew blackmail wasn’t a problem; but if Daulton went to his father, Chris knew his own life would be ruined.

Daulton had evidence that linked Chris indisputably to spying for the Russians; somewhere, there were copies of the documents. Daulton had said he wanted to sell them a second time to the Chinese; as long as they existed, they would implicate Chris in espionage. Where were they? Daulton had said some were at his house, but others might be cached somewhere in Mexico. One evening after work Chris drove to Palos Verdes and slowed as he passed Daulton’s house, weighing a plan to break in and ransack his room. But as he guided the Volkswagen past the sprawling house set back behind a big lawn, Chris realized there was no way he could pull it off; he remembered Daulton had told him his family had recently installed a burglar alarm connected to the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department.

The only way to end it without being caught, Chris decided, was to murder Daulton.

The best place for it, he thought, would be in the desert—a couple of shots from the automatic and the scavengers of the desert would take care of his body very efficiently. He looked down at the gun and outlined in his mind, step by step, how he would lure Daulton to the Mojave with a suggestion for an early-morning trapping expedition. He even rehearsed mentally the words he would say: “Come on, it’s been a long time; let’s go check out the old haunts.” He heard the shots and saw Daulton fall.

And then another vision flashed into his mind: he remembered the sight of Monsignor McCarthy saying Mass in the center of the altar at St. John Fisher, and the two of them, Daulton and himself, kneeling on each side of him.

The gray-haired priest genuflected, and his voice—a soft alloy of Ireland and Boston—resonated between the freshly painted walls of the new church:

Dominus vobiscum. The Lord be with you.

And then he could hear their response in the Latin colloquy, two boyish voices, almost like distant chimes, replying as one:

Et cum spiritu tuo. And with your spirit.

Chris recalled

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.