55

They were parked in a black Dodge van with privacy glass and Virginia tags, in front of an overgrown lot on the nearest side street intersecting the main thoroughfare where the shopping mall was located. They'd driven all night, the wheelman good, but of a more garrulous nature than some. She'd excused herself and crashed in the back. She was a lady who had to grab her Zs while she could.

Watchers always wonder if they have watchers, and not without good cause. Watching watchers is part of the game in what is often disdainfully regarded as the intelligence community. That's what they did, people like the man and woman in the muddy black van. The spook version of internal affairs, crossed with what the former Soviet citizenry had once termed Smersh, was their adoptive parent company.

If they in turn had been observed, their watchers would have seen a rather dirty Dodge van with out-of-state plates pull up and an attractive, slim, thirty-something woman in slacks get out and stretch. Vacationers, probably, in the area visiting relatives. She walked to the corner of the video store and looked around, as if waiting for a friend, changed her mind apparently, and returned to the vehicle. A watcher would have observed nothing more.

The van stayed put, and inside, the glow of the OMEGASTAR mobile locator/tracker stayed locked onto their target, who at the moment was less than two hundred feet away. It was a judgment call. Doing somebody in a crowded shopping center wasn't out of the question but there was a lot to factor in.

They were still there when the target came out in his limping waddle, loaded with clothing purchases it looked like, and walked out into the busy parking lot.

Here is what they saw: They saw him chat with some old friends, stand around chewing the fat, looking as if he'd misplaced his ride, then suddenly wave as he spotted the car. They saw him walk up to the vehicle, laugh about his momentary mental lapse with the driver, toss an enormous duffel bag in the back seat, get in the car, and pull out. From a few hundred feet away it appeared the person who'd been in the driver's seat had moved over and the target had driven away. For some reason the other person's head was no longer visible above the seat.

Nobody could do fakes like Bunkowski. He had all the actor's skills, from mimicry to observational brilliance, but his physical presence and organic sense of how to move in order to manipulate, confuse, boggle, and convince, was second to none. It was as if a great stage actor with the gifts of a young Brando, Olivier, or, more accurately, Jackie Gleason, had decided to become a serial killer, Think of the ways they could mislead, bewitch, and persuade with their communication capabilities turned on full. Chaingang could make a person feel as if he alone in all the world could help him in his fumbling, clownish moment of need. As with Gleason, the physical package only added to the power of the act, especially when he assumed an underdog's helpless persona. The rubbery face, the baby-fat guileless smile, the disarming moves—he was an actor's actor.

Had the watchers been nearer they might have heard bits and pieces of conversation floating their way on the scented, wet Bayou City pollution. “—visited my son. He's stationed at Fort Sill.” Why, what a coincidence, he might have replied. I just got back from Oklahoma too! as his mindscreen began to spin a scenario that would be impossible to move away from. They could have heard how easily he inserted himself into a life, created a plausible chain of events that bumped against the other person's experience, listened to him scrandle a frace of doublespiel that could, if you were unlucky, leave you very surprised and dead.

Even as he dealt with the dopey-looking middle-aged man sitting at the wheel of the Plymouth, obviously waiting for his better half to emerge from a store, he felt the dual pulls typical of his brief moments of human interfacing. He hated the monkey people but every time he heard them speak or peered into their nothing lives he found the fragments totally fascinating. After all, that part of him that had remained human identified with the species of which he had once been born.

“Hah doo. I was wonderin’ canna canna ansellation?” Forget the sense of it, it wasn't communication intended for the vic he was about to hurt, it was for onlookers, the watchers whose proximity to his awareness was a sharp burr. To an observer, the tone and openness and body language completely masked his intent. The watchers would not observe his head inside the car, the Breath of Death in some poor man's face, and, as he recoiled, the snap of the neck as giant paws took the victim below the line of sight. “You slide on over there, podna,” the beast might ad-lib, smiling, as he wedged his girth behind the wheel.

There was never a sense of threat, nothing observable. How the hell were the watchers supposed to know what was going on? It was only when they saw one head instead of two that they realized what they'd witnessed. Damn! The big fucker was so slick. They'd have to tranq the rogue elephant elsewhere. The money was exceptionally good, but it was stressful work.

They settled back and let the Plymouth vanish from sight, then the wheelman turned on the ignition and they followed the signal from the target's locator, pulling the Dodge van back onto the blacktop road, and hoping they wouldn't have to drive through much more water.