The Lie (2 page)

“Yes.”

“Why did you save just them? What made my parents so special?”

“Because they killed two of my men and almost killed me. Because no one else ever made me look that stupid, and I didn’t want
to forget it.”

Kate stared at him. He might be telling the truth. Some of the tightness went out of her chest and her breathing.

“All right. You can get out of bed and open the safe.”

“I’m naked.”

“I’ll try not to get too excited,” Kate said.

He did not smile. Moving with care, Walters got out of bed, lifted the mirror off the wall, and worked the exposed safe’s
dial until Kate heard a click.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’ll take it from here. Now just get back into bed and put your hands on your head.”

Kate watched as he followed her instructions.

“You too,” she told his wife. “Hands on your head.”

“Are you also going to shoot
me
?” asked Peggy Walters. “Or just my husband?”

Kate Dinneson stood up and looked at the woman. “Right now I’m not shooting anyone,” she said, and was half turning toward
the safe even as she realized that the woman’s hands were still not on her head. One hand lay at her side, while the other
remained where it had been all along. Somewhere beneath the sheet.

Kate saw the slight narrowing of Peggy Walters’s eyes and the sudden look of terror on her face. When Kate saw her expression
she was terrified too.

The terror made her move, sent her diving off to the left an instant before a gun exploded under the sheet and its bullet
whistled past her ear.

Kate landed on her shoulder and rolled, not holding still for the second shot, which ricocheted off the tile floor. She spun
about until she was able to lift her gun and get off a couple of shots of her own, just barely glimpsing the woman’s face
over the barrel, seeing her eyes widen now as she sat up in bed, holding her suddenly visible pistol with both hands until
her face and eyes seemed to dissolve in a red haze.

Then her husband appeared in her place, his naked body riding the air in a flat-out leap, his hands reaching for Kate’s automatic.
His mouth was wide open, yelling something Kate could not understand.

She squeezed off just one shot, all she had time for, as Peter Walters’s full weight took her squarely in the chest. Kate
fought for breath and they lay there like exhausted lovers.

Straining, Kate worked herself free. Walters’s unseeing eyes were open. Bright arterial blood spurted from a hole in the left
side of his chest.

My one shot
.

Kate looked across the bed and saw Peggy Walters lying on her back, her face a scarlet mask. Still in one hand was the pistol
that had started it all. Kate struggled up from the floor, took the woman’s wrist, and felt for a pulse that was no longer
there.

I didn’t want it this way
.

She held her forehead for a moment, trying to calm herself. Then she went to the safe that she had turned toward only moments
before and pulled open the steel door.

An automatic lay right in front. The safety was off and it was ready to be fired. At least she had been right about that.
As for the alleged photographs, they were probably nothing but a ploy to let Walters or his wife grab the gun, whirl, and
blow her away.

Kate Dinneson looked anyway, foraging through half a dozen envelopes until she finally opened one and found herself staring
at pictures of her mother and father.

Surprise
.

There were, indeed, two pictures. They were both enlargements, taken from good negatives, so that the details were clear and
without distortion.

How young they were, Kate thought, and saw them dashing side by side, machine pistols blazing during what would soon turn
out to be the final seconds of their lives. She saw their sun-bronzed skin, and their white teeth bared in grins that were
not really grins at all, but frightening grimaces in the face of certain death.

Kate wondered what they were thinking during these last seconds before all thinking stopped. Or had they reached the point
where they were functioning purely on instinct?

I wish I could talk to you
, she told them.
I wish I had been older when you were with me. I wish I had known you better
.

What she knew now was that Peter Walters had been telling the truth. He had not shot her mother and father in cold blood while
they were coming out to surrender, unarmed, with their hands over their heads.

Why had Walters’s wife made that crazy move with her gun and gotten them both killed?

Had she perhaps not known about the pictures and thought her husband was just bluffing? Or had she expected that she and Walters
would be shot anyway, so what was there to lose?

Too bad.

Because this slight, masked young woman knew very well by now that if she had not been driven to it, she would never have
shot anyone at all here tonight.

Kate Dinneson lifted the ski mask from her sweated face and took a long, hard look at what she had done.

She felt a chill, and an emptiness, and the total silence of the house. With all her long-held dreams of vengeance, these
two were the first human lives she had ever been responsible for taking.

It was very different from fantasy.

Dear God, yes.

Have you ever seen pieces of children?
Walters had asked.

Well, no. She hadn’t. Nor did she ever want or intend
to. Whatever her parents had believed and done had nothing to do with her. They had lived and died marching to their own particular
drummer. She was still straining to hear the first, faint beat of hers.

There was nothing more for her here, but Kate could not bring herself to leave. As though tangled in the shrouds of those
she had killed, she seemed to lack the will to tear loose. What else did she want from them? Absolution? If it was a joke,
she was not laughing. All she did was replace the pictures, lock the safe, and cover it with the mirror.

In the end, Kate Dinneson turned on her tiny light and began drifting through the house like a restless spirit. She went downstairs
and walked the rooms of the newly dead. Chancing on a collection of family photographs, she stopped to punish herself with
them. Along with happily smiling pictures of Peggy and Peter Walters were shots of an unsmiling, dark-haired little boy. More
pictures followed of the same boy grown older. And older still. Until he evolved into a tall, lean, striking young man with
dark, deep-set eyes and a haunting stare. He still had the same determined solemnity, as if not even the camera could coax
him into the faintest of smiles.

On a wall beside the photographs hung a strongly brushed oil painting of the same young man. It evidently was a self-portrait
since he was shown holding a palette and brushes. Scrawled in English across the bottom of the canvas was an inscription:
For Mom and Dad—with love—Paulie
.

I’ve orphaned him
, Kate realized.

So he was an artist, as his father apparently had been.

A large, skylighted studio offered plenty of evidence. Canvases were scattered everywhere. Inasmuch as it was Peter Walters’s
studio, almost all the paintings were his. But a few were signed by his son, Paulie. Once Kate noticed the first of these,
the others stabbed at her.

How many of this Paulie’s paintings were there? Three? Five? Seven? It didn’t matter. The message remained the same.

Life was better than death, and peace was better than war
.

Yet death watched. So if you had a moment of joy, it was
better to conceal it. When your heart beat loudly with hope, you kept that as quiet as possible also.

Curiously, although they were all war paintings, not a single dead body was visible in any of them. Yet it made a rare kind
of sense. War was over for the dead. It existed only in the faces of the living, which was where Paulie Walters had looked
for it—in the eyes and mouths of those in trouble, in the way flesh acted in grief and pain and shock. He had looked for it
too, in the wounded reaching for each other, or giving comfort with the terrible tenderness people can show in the darkest
places. He had found it even in those odd moments of laughter, in the rare joy that is the underside of the deepest anguish.

Kate was stunned.

How had someone so young learned so much?

No wonder he looked so solemn.

Kate Dinneson went back and stood once more in front of Paulie Walters’s unsmiling self-portrait. For several long moments
she felt herself at the absolute center of his thoughts.

I’m sorry about what I did to you here tonight
, Kate told him.
If I could change it, I would
.

She finally left his parents’ house shortly before dawn.

P
AULIE
W
ALTERS WAS FOLLOWING
a Serbian army staff car through mountains that had once been part of greater Yugoslavia, but whose current ownership was
much less certain. He had been tailing the car for almost three hours, ever since it had left the military barracks in Banja
Luka at two-thirty that morning. He was waiting for it to make its first rest stop.

Only one road ran through this part of the mountains, which allowed Paulie to maintain a good, safe tailing distance of close
to two kilometers. Also, he had the added advantage of knowing exactly where the staff car was going. This in itself let him
feel relaxed enough to watch the sky beginning to lighten in the east.

It was beautiful country even in the dark, with a deep blue haze over the summits, and the shadows falling to purple between
some of the lower pine-covered slopes. Normally, Paulie Walters would have been enjoying the purity of the air while imagining
how he would paint what he saw. He called it mind-painting, something his father had taught him when he was five years old.
But right now his thoughts were on more pressing things.

At best, the operation was risky, delicately balanced. Orders had come straight from the top out of Langley, Virginia, and
once Tommy Cortlandt himself was involved, Paulie never argued or tried to second-guess him. In a line of work where trust
and honesty were in depressingly short supply, he had never known the director to disappoint. Still, given a
choice, this was one job Paulie would have been just as happy to pass on.

His orders were to either set a man free of those holding him or, failing that, to kill him. Perhaps worst of all, the man
in question, Stefan Tutsikov, was one of the few out here in this Balkan charnel house who was on the side of the angels.

Even Cortlandt had been sympathetic. “I don’t like having to stick you with this one,” the director had told him. “But I know
of no one else I’d trust it to, or who could do it as well.”

Unabashed flattery. Yet Paulie had felt himself respond like Pavlov’s dog. Tommy Cortlandt’s face had offered more than his
words. It always did. That marvelous face, with its ice-blue eyes and the look of a born conspirator.

Paulie Walters had never met Stefan Tutsikov, and he had seen him only a few times from a distance. He thought of him now
sitting in that Serbian staff car with four armed guards, and he wondered what he was thinking. All things considered, Paulie
knew his chances of getting Tutsikov away from his guards alive were depressingly small.

Unfortunate.

Unlike most of the other political leaders in the area, Stefan Tutsikov was neither foolish, angry, self-serving, nor simply
bent on age-old ethnic revenge and murder. That covert American support had been behind him had nothing to do with how Paulie
felt. The man was just good. To abandon him to the certain torture and death that awaited him in Belgrade would be a lot crueler
to Tutsikov and far more deadly to those he would surely betray under electric prodding than any bullets Paulie might have
to pump into him.

The pink glow of dawn was spreading over the mountains as Paulie Walters rounded a curve and saw the staff car’s brake lights
brighten in the distance at one of the irregularly spaced rest stops along the road. It consisted of a low, rustic building
with washrooms and a few scattered picnic tables and benches. Drawing closer, Paulie saw three huge trailer trucks lined up
in the parking area: he assumed the drivers were asleep in their cabs.

Reaching under the passenger seat, he lifted out the blue-steel machine pistol he favored when the odds were this much against
him.

He slowed as he made his approach on a long descending grade. The pines stood tall and dark on both sides; the sky was cloudless
and getting lighter and redder above.

All four guards got out of the car and entered the building with their prisoner. Pretty stupid as far as good security went,
thought Paulie, but that much better for him. Tutsikov had walked in with his hands behind his back, so he was handcuffed.

Cutting off the motor, Paulie rolled the last hundred meters and quietly came up alongside the staff car. He heard voices
and laughter from inside the rest room. He glanced off to the right where the three tractor-trailers were parked. Nothing
moved.

Setting the machine gun on full automatic, Paulie draped the sling around his neck and got out of the car. He took a sheathed
hunting knife from his belt and ripped open two of the staff car’s tires. Then he entered the rest room.

A pale white light froze the guards and their captive into a tableau.

Three of the guards stood at the urinals, their backs to Paulie. The fourth guard and Stefan Tutsikov were off to one side,
with the guard busy unlocking his prisoner’s handcuffs.

“Nobody move.” Paulie Walters spoke more than rudimentary Serbo-Croatian.

They turned to look at him. One of the soldiers at the urinals was smoking a cigarette and it dropped from his mouth. They
all wore holstered sidearms. The only naked gun was in Paulie’s hands. He saw that Tutsikov was free of his handcuffs.

“Come over here beside me,” he told him. “The rest of you, facedown on the floor.”