Azrael Page 2

  But not today. Today they were burying a baby.

  Clara Bloyd, age nine months, daughter of Tina Bloyd, typesetter. Sudden infant death syndrome. Crib death. Parents awoke to find perfectly healthy infants dead. Regina remembered it had been one of the first Worldwatch cover stories.

  Regina had decided enough was enough. Yes, a journalist should be inured to all sorts of suffering and tragedy, and yes, Regina was going to be a first-rate journalist in spite of her name and connections. But she was damned if she was going to spend a beautiful, cool, October Thursday, with the sky bright blue and the trees trying to make up in a week for a year of single-color drabness, listening to sermons and lamentations over a small white wooden box. She’d stay in the office instead. Go over circulation reports. Relay her mother’s instructions to writers and artists and researchers. Wait for late-breaking stories.

  Feel guilty.

  And petty, and cowardly, and like a phony. Mother was at the funeral. Jimmy was at the funeral. Regina’s brother seemed to like nothing about the family business except the people who worked for it. He probably thought of, supervised and carried out more community and charity work than any nineteen-year-old in the world, with the possible exception of European royalty. Regina loved him, but she didn’t understand him very well.

  She did understand that her mother and Jimmy were right about noblesse oblige. The way Old Man Symczyk had carried on, you might have thought it was a privilege for him to have his grandson die, if only as an occasion of proof of the respect in which he and his were held by the first family of the community.

  Regina felt guilty about that, too, and guilty at the thought that at the age of twenty-four, when most of her friends were already disillusioned or divorced, she was still worried about her right to avoid an unpleasant experience versus her obligation to help other people get over theirs. Maybe she should suggest a Lifestyles piece on it—the Me Decade Meets the Old Guilt.

  She was about half ready to start taking herself seriously when the phone on her mother’s desk buzzed.

  And kept buzzing. Her mother’s secretary should have picked up, but he was probably in the bathroom or something. Regina sighed, punched a button, and picked up the phone.

  “Petra Hudson’s office,” she said. She had always loved the idea of somebody’s office answering the phone. One of Regina’s small triumphs at the Kirkester Chronicle, the hometown paper her mother had given her to run the way other mothers give their children the wooden spoon to lick, was to forbid the practice of sending memos attributed to your desk. Some of the old-liners, the I-was-working-here-before-anybody’d-ever-heard-of-your-father crowd, had grown very protective of the authority of their desks, but Regina was in charge, Regina had made a decision and Regina had made it stick. Desks did not send memos, people did. If a newspaper couldn’t say what it meant, what good was it?

  Regina’s mother had watched the memo war with a sort of absent amusement. Petra Hudson could have settled the matter by fiat at any time, but Regina would be damned if she was going to ask, and Mother, to her credit, did not volunteer. It was one of the things Regina admired about her mother—she didn’t meddle.

  Regina admired a lot of things about her mother, and respected her, and even loved her, but it was a distant kind of love, communicated through the media of nannies’ reports and letters to and from boarding schools here and abroad, while Mother fought the good fight to keep the Hudson Group in Hudson hands after the death of James Hudson, Sr.

  Sometimes it seemed to Regina that she was not so much a daughter as she was a Chosen Successor. The feeling had been stronger over the last few years, since it had become obvious that Jimmy had no interest in the family business, but it had always been there. Why else had they named her Regina, for God’s sake, if they didn’t expect that someday she would reign?

  Thank God she loved the business.

  Now Regina sat (temporarily) on her mother’s throne, holding her mother’s electronic scepter to her ear.

  “Western Union calling,” a voice of indeterminate sex announced.

  Regina smiled. It was appropriate that somebody’s office should pick up the phone to find an entire corporation on the other end of the line.

  “We have a message for Ms. Hudson.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Ms. Hudson?”

  Regina wondered when Western Union had gotten so picky. “I’m Ms. Hudson,” she said truthfully. Her mother was going to be in no mood to chase down messages after she got home.

  “Deepest condolences for your loss,” the voice began.

  “What?” It took a split second for Regina to realize this was the beginning of the message, rather than some kind of gentle insult, but it was still bewildering. Petra Hudson hadn’t suffered any loss her daughter knew about.

  “Deepest condolences on your loss,” the voice said again. “It is well known how you feel about your family. Tragedy can strike at any time, but strength and wisdom can see us through. Best personal regards.”

  There was a silence. Regina doubted it was a pause for effect, since the whole thing had been read in the mechanical singsong of a court stenographer.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  “There is a signature.”

  “Okay,” Regina said. “Whose?”

  “It’s signed, Cronus.”

  There’d been some expression in the voice that time, and there could be no doubt that the pause had been intentional. Regina was losing her patience.

  “Cronus,” she said.

  “You heard me correctly,” the voice said. It was less Western Union-like all the time.

  “And who the hell,” she said, “is Cronus?”

  But even if she’d been expecting an answer, she wasn’t going to get one. The owner of the voice had hung up before she’d even gotten to “hell.”

  Chapter Two

  THE PEOPLE MAY HAVE come to the child’s funeral to mourn, but they stayed to gossip. Petra Hudson had good ears, better ears than the gossipers thought she did. They kept choking off their sentences or lowering their voices a split second too late. Petra heard the fragments of insult and insinuation all the way from the gravesite to the car.

  “... her ‘driver.’ Too democratic to say ‘chauffeur’ ...” This with a finger pointed through the crook of an elbow at Wes Charles, who held his cap in one gloved hand and his employer’s elbow in the other, helping her over the muddy spots.

  “... sleeping with him?” another voice said.

  “... never needed a driver before this year. Drove herself. Said she liked it that ...” Petra recognized that last voice, one of the photo editors on Worldwatch. She was ready to whirl on the man and fire him on the spot, but that would have been madness. A child had just been laid to rest here, an infant. A young mother was facing the greatest grief imaginable. This was no time to make a scene.

  And, she decided, there never would be a good time to fire the man. Not for gossiping about her, at least. It was, she reminded herself, a free country, and this was part of the price you paid for being the boss.

  They reached the car. Charles let go of her elbow and attended to the door. Petra Hudson sat on soft white leather and let her breath go with an undignified whoosh. She unpinned the hat and shook her hair loose, thick black hair that halfway through her fifties needed no touch-ups. Which was something else they gossiped about.

  When journalists wrote about Petra Hudson (and they frequently did, the only thing journalists like to write about more than crooked politicians being other journalists), two words never failed to appear—statuesque and handsome. She had no complaints, even when they managed to work in the information that the late James Hudson, Sr., had been a mere five feet five inches tall. As if there were something perverted about a small man marrying a large woman.

  To hell with them. James might have been attracted to her because she was big. She had, in fact, counted on that before she ever met him. But anyone who thought that was what th
eir marriage was based on was pathetically wrong.

  James Hudson had a small body, a moderate amount of capital, and a genius for the communications business. He took joy in it, and he shared every bit of that joy with his wife, so much so that when he died, she was able to take over and to build on his plans without missing a beat. Her happiness in the growth of the Hudson Group was doubled by the knowledge that she was carrying on for the man who’d changed her life.

  Had changed her life so profoundly, in fact, that until late February of this year, she had almost managed to put her old life from her memory.

  In February there had been a letter for her that reminded her of what her life had been before. That same day, she had the new security system put in at her home. She began to pressure her daughter subtly, relentlessly, but so far unsuccessfully, to give up her apartment in town and move back home. From the security company, she got the name of a very special employment agency, and they sent Weston Charles.

  Charles was an excellent driver—actually better than excellent, since he was a master of antiattack maneuvers. The employment agency had insisted on bringing her out to some deserted roads and having Charles demonstrate his skills. That, Petra was grateful, had been the only time he’d needed to use those particular skills, or his black-belt karate skills, or his world-class pistol marksmanship.

  With all that it was an undeserved bonus that he was such a nice man. He was polite without being subservient. Both her children liked him, and he them, and the dogs adored him. He was well educated and well spoken, and he had a sense of humor. He could even, in a pinch, cook. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that finding someone like Charles had made facing the threat worthwhile—nothing could do that. But he did make things easier to face.

  Charles blotted out a large percentage of the October sunlight as he got into the car. He was large enough to make the statuesque Petra Hudson seem petite. He had short, wavy blond hair and a florid complexion. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a nice smile. He never talked about himself, which was, of course, the quickest way to get anybody remotely connected with journalism fascinated with you. Aside from his name, age (forty), and previous employer (a European businessman who’d died of natural causes), Petra knew nothing about him. Except she liked him as a person and valued him as an employee.

  “Back to the office, Mrs. Hudson?” Charles asked.

  “Yes, Charles. Regina’s watching the office for me.” She tried to keep her irritation at her daughter’s refusal to come to the funeral from her voice.

  “Very good, Mrs. Hudson.”

  Petra Hudson opened a compartment and brought out a pile of computer printout, circulation reports from around the chain. There was a whole group of papers in eastern Kansas that wasn’t earning as well as it should, and she was going to find out why.

  But not now. She looked at the neat figures on the neat little stripes of pale green and paler green, and all she could see was the senseless death of a little baby. Nothing she told herself about journalistic toughness, or about being a “good soldier” (one of her husband’s favorite phrases), could get her mind off the tears and the sobbing from little Clara Bloyd’s mother and grandmother. Petra Hudson would have cried with them, but no one would allow her to be the kind of woman who wept. No one would believe it.

  Instead, she had to be the kind of woman who patted arms and said calm, soothing words, insisted she be notified if there was anything she could do.

  The kind of woman so smooth and in control that strangers had to wonder what (or who) she spent her passion on.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” she said.

  “About what, Mrs. Hudson?”

  “You must have heard. As we were leaving.”

  “Oh, that. Don’t concern yourself. At least on my account. There’s always talk like that.”

  “Really?” Petra was interested. This concerned her, and the part of her brain that was always working suggested that there might be a back-of-the-book article for the magazine in the life of someone like Charles.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Charles said. “Apparently, so many people can drive cars, they can’t conceive of someone doing it for a living, so a driver is always sized up for what other services he might be providing.”

  “Like body guarding.”

  “Most people’s imaginations run to other things. Even when the employer is so old the idea approaches science fiction.”

  “That must be embarrassing.”

  “You get used to it. Not that you have to.”

  “Have to what?”

  “Get used to it. I can make people stop if you’d like. At least in your hearing.”

  “No, Charles. That would make people believe it, wouldn’t it?”

  The driver chuckled. “I doubt it, ma’am. Lovely, successful woman like you could do a lot better than a beat-up old bodyguard.”

  Petra Hudson smiled for the first time all day. She was still smiling when she walked into the office.

  “Hello, Regina,” she said.

  “Hello, Mother. Where’s Jimmy?”

  “He went off with Mr. Polacek from the hospital. Something about a blood analysis machine or something. Any messages?”

  “Yes,” Regina said, and scowled.

  “What’s the matter, trouble with the computers again?”

  Regina shook her head, picked up a sheet of paper from the desk, and handed it to her mother as the older woman stepped around to reclaim her seat.

  She slipped on her glasses and read the words Regina had taken down.

  She went numb. It had to be wrong. Cronus. She read the note again.

  “Cronus,” she whispered.

  “Mom? What’s wrong? You’re white as a glass of milk. Mother?”

  Petra Hudson didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Her last thought before she fainted was that she was glad she’d sat down before she read the note.

  Chapter Three

  THE RECEPTIONIST SMILED BRIGHTLY. She looked maybe fifteen years old. That indicated a young dentist. Dentists had a tendency to hire receptionists when they set up their offices and keep them there till death did them part.

  “Have we done work for you before, Mr. ... ?”

  “Trotter,” he said. He was calling himself Trotter these days. It seemed appropriate, since he was no longer so wholeheartedly on the run. “Allan Trotter.”

  The receptionist smiled again, as though those were the most beautiful sounds she’d ever heard. It was a nice smile. A good advertisement for her boss.

  “No,” Trotter went on. “I just moved to Oregon a little while ago.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. It was the truth, but it wasn’t the answer to the question. As far as Trotter was concerned, there was nothing out here but scenery. Scenery was fine in its place—on postcards. Still, it wasn’t too far from Portland, which was a city, in spite of the fact that a snowcapped mountain was visible from every point in town.

  “It is lovely, isn’t it?” Trotter had found that Oregonians, especially new ones, behaved as if they planted every single pine tree personally. They were fairly normal otherwise.

  The receptionist told him to have a seat and handed him a clipboard with a green mimeographed form on it. It had all the same questions in all the same places as the other forms he’d filled out across the country. He answered them with all the same lies. Nobody was going to trace him through dental work, or health records, or drug allergies. Spies got sick (ex-spies, Trotter reminded himself), and spies lost fillings, but spies who went to the same doctor or the same dentist more than once were liable to wind up dead. Or even worse, back on a payroll in Washington.

  If Trotter stayed smart, he could stay fairly happy. As happy, at least, as it was possible for someone who’d been twisted from birth to fit snugly into a crooked world of lies and killing. Trotter’s father was the king of that jungle, and like most kings, he planned a dynasty. He perpetrated a son with the (temporary
) cooperation of a beautiful young woman who happened to be a particularly successful Soviet spy. The young woman eventually caught on to what the General (as he was then—he was the Congressman now) had in mind and, after a lot of trouble and effort, managed to beat her brains out against a metal bed frame.

  But the Congressman, as he usually did, had the last laugh, arriving in time to see his son delivered by cesarean section and delivered into his care. Into training and conditioning that honed a natural talent for the work that was so strong, the boy had been doing it for twelve years before he realized he hated it.

  The young man who called himself Allan Trotter had run, but his father had played him like a prize salmon, letting him run, then hauling him back when he needed him.

  Finally, with the aid of an FBI man named Fenton Rines, Trotter had been able to acquire enough leverage to force his father to leave him alone. Not that the old man gave up that easily. But Trotter could choose his operations now.

  He chose damned few. He had money, in the form of diamonds—portable, inflation-proof, and redeemable for cash anywhere in the world. He had a new name, a new identity, a new town every five months or so. Before he was Trotter, he’d been Bellman; before that, Dekker; and before that, Driscoll. And most important, he had a literal lifetime—his own lifetime—of training and experience in survival.

  The doctor would see him now. The receptionist pointed the way for him down a narrow hall. Trotter was pleased to see that he’d been right about the dentist’s age. The dentist was a tall blond guy who’d been born about the same time Trotter had. He filled Trotter’s mouth with cotton, then treated him to a monologue made up of equal parts of the wonders of modern dental surgery and the fortunes of the Portland Trail Blazers.

  When the drilling was done, the dentist told him he was about due for a cleaning and led him through into another office where Miss Petrello, the hygienist, was as delighted to see him as the receptionist had been. Miss Petrello was plump and pretty, with dark curly hair and black eyes her glasses made seem even larger than they were. She asked Trotter to sit in an astronaut-type couch built low to the floor, sat behind his right shoulder, grabbed an implement, and started to work.