Death Therapy td-6 Page 5

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mrs. Vance Withers did not tell the police everything. Yes, she awoke during the night to find her husband dead in bed. No face. It was horrible. No. She had heard nothing. Nothing.

  "You mean to tell us, lady, that somebody did that to your husband and you didn't hear a thing?"

  The detective sat on her new divan, his $75 suit on her $1,800 leather divan, and dared to speak gruffly to her as he pencilled things into a little notebook. He was only a sergeant or something.

  "Does your colonel know you speak like this to people?"

  "I'm a cop, lady, not a soldier."

  "Well, General Withers was a soldier," said Mrs. Withers icily. She had thrown on a flimsy pink something and now wished she had worn something heavier. Like a suit. And perhaps conducted the interview on the porch. She did not like the sergeant being so familiar. It was akin to disrespect for the departed General Vance Withers.

  Two white-clad attendants removed the general through the living room on a wheeled stretcher. A white sheet covered what was left of his head.

  "Yes, ma'am. We are aware the general was a soldier."

  "I sense a certain disrespect in your voice, Sergeant. There is insubordination in manner, you know."

  "Lady, I am not a soldier."

  "That should be apparent to anyone."

  "You are the only one, Mrs. Withers, who was with the general when that terrible thing happened. I'm afraid that makes you a suspect."

  "Don't be absurd. General Withers was a four-star general and a good candidate for five stars. Why should I kill him?"

  "Rank is not the only relationship, lady. Like sometimes there are other things between men and women, you know?"

  "You really aren't a soldier, are you?"

  "You still claim you heard nothing?"

  "That is correct," said Mrs. Vance Withers. She pulled her pink nightdress tighter around her shoulders. She was an attractive woman with the sexuality of incipient middle age, a last longing fling of a body no longer designed to bear children.

  Only—Mrs. Withers had a little secret. But she had no intention of sharing it with an enlisted man. So she listened to the grubby police corporal or whatever he called himself and remembered just a few hours before, thinking she heard something and turning in bed. And then she felt those delicious hands quiet her eyes gently, just the fingertips on her eyelids, and then the strong but velvet smooth hands awakened her body until, almost as if electrically shocked, she was alive with desire, throbbing, demanding, needing and then there was fulfilment as she had never dared dream fulfilment. Shrieking in sudden and complete ecstasy.

  "Vance. Vance. Vance."

  And the magnificent hands were still there, to keep her eyes gently shut and in blissful satisfaction. Complete, she returned to sleep, and awoke again only when she thought she felt Vance salivating on her shoulder.

  And she turned and her husband's pillow was a mass of blood. What she had felt was his blood.

  "Oh," she had said. "Oh, no. No."

  And then she phoned the police and here she was, somehow not totally distressed. Although Vance was destined for a fifth star. She just knew it. What a way to die, on the threshold of your fifth star. She grieved with her husband's memory,

  "I'm going to ask you again, Mrs. Withers. Your husband's head was literally taken off and you heard nothing? Not even a scream?"

  "No," she said. "I heard nothing. One cannot hear hands move."

  "How do you know it was hands?"

  Hmmm, she thought that was a mistake.

  "Well, lady," said the policeman, "don't think we think human hands could do that."

  Mrs. Withers shrugged. These enlisted men were so stupid really.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There were definite advantages to being the confidential secretary to a banker from the centuries-old house of Rapfenberg. The salary was good. There was a lot of travel. There was a sense of excitement and the feeling of being in on important things—even if, sometimes, they were a little too complicated to understand.

  It was a sweet job, especially for a twenty-four-year-old American girl who had originally come to Zurich to ski. Eileen Hamblin told herself that again as she tried to convince herself that the last three months had not really been so bad.

  There had been no travelling and that, she realized, was the source of her discomfort. She had been virtually chained to this awful desk for three months because Mr. Amadeus Rentzel had work to do in Zurich and that had, for the very first time, introduced in her the suspicion that banking might be dull. Just plain dull. Banking, she thought in a very un-Swiss-like manner, could be just a boring pain in the ass.

  If she had been a better secretary, she might have tried to learn something about banking, finance and monetary policy, so she could perhaps share in the excitement others seemed to find in them. Gold was gold and silver was silver. They were used for jewellery. But money was used to pay the rent. She could find no possible relationship between the paper currency she used at the grocery store and somebody's pile of gold buried in some fort somewhere.

  Mr. Rentzel had tried to explain, but it was useless. And now he no longer tried. And for the past three months, he had been different somehow, spending more time at his desk, always deep in charts on cash and reserves and gold flow.

  She remembered the day it had started, how he had come out of his office and said "Gold stocks are dropping on the New York Stock Exchange."

  "That's nice," she said.

  "Nice?" he said. "It's awful."

  "Is there anything we can do about it?"

  "Not a damn thing," he said, disappearing back into his office.

  From that day on, her first job every day was to begin checking gold prices on major stock exchanges around the world. In the last month, they had been going up and so had Mr. Rentzel's spirits.

  Suddenly Mr. Rentzel became extremely popular. Formerly, he would travel all over the world—with Eileen—to see clients. But now the clients were coming to him. A regular United Nations in the last month. Orientals. Russians, even.

  There was another one today. His card had read "Mister Jones." Eileen had allowed herself a very small, very controlled smile. The man had an accent like Ludwig Von Drake, and if he were Mr. Jones, she was Jacqueline Onassis.

  The man known as Mr. Jones was inside Mr. Rentzel's office now, nervously fingering the catches on a black leather attaché case, which was fastened to his arm with an old-fashioned pair of handcuffs.

  "I am glad your nation has decided to bid," Rentzel told the man.

  Rentzel was tall and sandy haired and looked younger than his fifty years. He wore conservative clothing, not because he liked it, but because a banker could wear nothing else. He was a very good banker.

  The man he addressed—Mr. Jones of the business card—was a small, fat man with a bald head and thick, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He watched Rentzel without speaking, with slightly less animation than that shown by a subway rider reading an overhead advertisement.

  "Of course, the bombing demonstration at St. Louis was very impressive, was it not?" Rentzel said.

  Jones grunted into the silence. Then there was more silence. Then Jones said, "I have the money here."

  "In dollars?"

  "Yes."

  "And you understand the rules?"

  "Please repeat them," Jones said and reached for a pen in the inside pocket of his ill-fitting blue serge suit.

  Rentzel raised a hand in a traffic-stopping gesture. "Please. Nothing in writing." Jones slowly withdrew his empty hand while Rentzel walked around the desk and sat in his chair, facing Jones across the wide expanse of walnut.

  Without waiting, he began to talk. "Your two million dollars will be held by me as a good-faith deposit on behalf of your country. The bidding will be conducted seven days from today in the New York offices of the Villebrook Equity Associates."

  "I have never heard of them," Jones said.

  "That is the proo
f of their quality," Rentzel said with a smile. "They are bankers, not public relations men for themselves. At any rate, the bidding will be conducted there by me. Each nation will be allowed one bid and one bid only. The minimum price is, as you know, one billion dollars. In gold. The highest bid over one billion dollars wins."

  "One billion dollars," Jones said. "It is an awesome figure."

  "What is for sale is also awesome," Rentzel said. "Control of the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world." He went on. "By the way, you should know the competition. Besides your own country, I expect bids from Russia and China, Italy, France and Great Britain. And oh, from Switzerland too."

  "You Swiss always were adventurers," Jones said with a chuckle.

  "And you Germans always were fascinated by the possibility of controlling others. Oh, the bids must be in writing and sealed. All unsuccessful bidders will have their good-faith deposits returned to them by me. I will, of course, give you a receipt for it now."

  "It must be interesting to be able to sell a government," Jones said. "Interesting, that is, for the person doing it. It would seem the only person who could do it would be the President," he added somewhat clumsily.

  "Who is doing it is unimportant," Rentzel said. "The fact is that my client can do it. The incident with the nuclear weapon on St. Louis showed that. Tomorrow, there will be another incident. It will involve the Central Intelligence Agency. When you hear of it, you will recognize it. The power to accomplish such things will be yours if you are the successful bidder."

  "But one billion dollars in gold? Do you realize how much gold that is?"

  "In the neighbourhood of one thousand tons," Rentzel said. "Don't worry. In Switzerland, we have the facilities for storing it. And the trust of our client."

  "We may not bid," Jones said sullenly, simply out of dislike for this man who knew all the answers.

  "It would be your loss," Rentzel said. "The other nations plan to. One can tell by the fact that gold mining stocks are moving up in value on their stock exchanges."

  He smiled. Jones knew that Rentzel had seen the price of gold stocks climbing in Germany too. Rentzel realized that Germany was already beginning to stockpile the gold needed to back up their bid.

  "Well, we shall see," he said lamely.

  With his left hand, he quickly unlocked the handcuff on his wrist and placed the attaché case on the desk before Rentzel. "Do you wish to…?"

  "No, that's not necessary," Rentzel said. "In matters like this, we make no mistakes."

  He rose and shook hands with Mr. Jones, who quickly left. Rentzel opened the briefcase and looked at the neat piles of thousand dollar bills. Two million dollars.

  With the nonchalance of the professional banker, he left the briefcase open on his desk and stepped into the outer office. Jones had gone. His secretary was cleaning her nails.

  She looked up, and was disappointed when he said, "Pay close attention to mining stock prices in Paris and in London." Then he smiled, and said, "And make us reservations for a flight to New York Sunday night."

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked back into his office. He could not see the huge smile that illuminated her face.

  Great, she thought. New York. Banking could really be fun, after all.

  On the other hand, she could not see the smile on Rentzel's face. The CIA incident, he thought. After that, all the countries will get in line to bid.

  CHAPTER NINE

  "Good evening, Burton," sang Dr. Lithia Forrester.

  An athletic man, on the verge of going to pot, stood in the doorway in sandals, slacks and open-necked shirt. He had a deep tan, even through his receding hairline.

  His eyebrows narrowed and two dark, puffing bags under his watery blue eyes stood like pedestals beneath statues to the great god tension. He picked at his temple.

  "Uh, yeah. Good evening."

  "Won't you come in?"

  "Of course, I'm going to come in, Dr. Forrester. What do you think I'm here for?"

  Dr. Forrester smiled warmly and shut the door behind Burton Barrett, an operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, recuperating from the rigors of the quiet, thankless pressure of working one's ass off in a void. Reporting to people he did not know. Having other people he did not know report to him. Situation reports which came from places he did not know and went to other places he did not know. This for fifteen years—then he had snapped. And now he was being mended at the Human Awareness Laboratories. Prize patient number one.

  "Won't you sit down, Burton?"

  "No, Dr. Forrester, I'm going to stand on my head, thank you. I like standing on my head."

  Lithia Forrester sat down behind her desk and crossed her legs. Burton Barrett plumped himself down into a deep leather couch, not looking at Doctor Forrester but staring up, out into the sky. He did not focus on the stars or even the glimmering reflection of the inside lights on the dome. His was a concentrated not-staring, and what he specifically was not staring at was Lithia Forrester.

  "Well, this is it, as if you give a shit," he said.

  "You're rather hostile tonight, Burton. Any special reason?"

  "No, just run of the mill hostile. You know, in the morning you're hungry and in the evening, you're hostile."

  "Is it something to do with a need, Burton?"

  "Need? I don't have needs. I'm Burton Barrett from the Main Line and I'm a wasp and I'm rich and I'm handsome and therefore I don't have needs and feelings. I have no sympathies, no loves, no emotions. Just strengths and greed and, of course, controls." Burton Barrett whistled nervously and softly after he said this. He drummed on the couch.

  "Needs?" he repeated. "No, I don't have needs. Burton Barrett has no needs. Burton Barrett has no friends. Burton Barrett needs no friends. Sexy Burton Barrett is in the Central Intelligence Agency. That's sexy, right?"

  "No, that's not sexy, Burton. You know that. And I know it."

  "I have such a sexy job, it took me weeks to be relieved of duty, then cleared to come here to you."

  "That's not unusual for your line of work."

  "Have you ever spent hours discussing your possible emotional problems with an FBI agent? An FBI agent named Bannon? And then waiting for him to check me out and then to recommend a psychologist I mean, that's something—Bannon! Or am I not allowed to be prejudiced against the Irish? I forget who you're allowed to be prejudiced against. It keeps changing."

  "We're not dealing with what's bothering you, Burton."

  "This is my last day, as you know."

  "Yes, I know."

  "I'm not cured."

  "Well, cured is a very relative term."

  "That helps me a lot."

  "You'll be able to come back regularly. At least once a week."

  "Once a week is not enough, Dr. Forrester."

  "We must do the best we can with what we have."

  Burton Barrett clenched his fists. "Oh, dammit, Lithia, I love you. I love you. And don't give me that crap about it being normal to love your therapist. I've been in therapy before and I never, never loved Dr. Filbenstein."

  "Let's deal with your needs for love. Dr. Filbenstein is a man. You're heterosexual. I'm a woman."

  "No tiddypoo? Really, Lithia, you're really a woman. I dream about you. Do you know I dream about having you?"

  "Let's talk about your love needs. When was the first time you felt your needs were not being met?"

  Burton Barrett stretched back onto the couch and closed his eyes. Back he went to the nurse, his mother, his father. His red wagon. He liked his red wagon.

  It was a good wagon. You could get a good head-start with a foot push. You could whack it into the fat maid's balloon legs. The maid's legs were like pier pilings. Her name was Flo. She would scream and yell.

  Burton Barrett was told never to ram the wagon into the maid again. So he did.

  Then he was told if he did that again, his wagon would be taken away. So he did, and it was.

>   And Burton Barrett cried and wouldn't eat lunch and promised if he ever got his wagon back again, he would never ever ram the maid with it again. Never. He promised.

  So he got his wagon back and rammed the maid again. She hit him and was fired. He felt bad about that. And he did not complain when the wagon was taken from him, for good that time.

  "Why did you ram her with your wagon?" Lithia Forrester asked.

  "I don't know. Why do people climb mountains? Because she was there. Anyway, what does my wagon have to do with it? I'm going back to my shitty job in a shitty office in a shitty city and dammit, Lithia, I love you. And that's my problem."

  "You love me because I represent something to you."

  "You represent, Lithia, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

  "Was your mother beautiful?"

  "No. She was my mother."

  "That doesn't preclude her being beautiful."

  "In my family it does. We all marry ugly women. Me too. If it weren't for my affair with that artist in New York, I'd go nuts."

  "Do you think going to bed with me would help you, Burton?"

  Burton Barrett sat up on the couch as though goosed with a cattle prod. He looked over at Dr. Lithia Forrester. She was smiling. Her lips were moist.

  "Do you mean it?"

  "Do you think I mean it?"

  "I don't know. You said it."

  "What I said was, do you think it would help?"

  "Yes," said Burton Barrett, very honestly.

  Dr. Lithia Forrester nodded.

  "Then we're going to make love?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Dammit, Lithia, why do you keep coming back with these stupid cutesy answers that don't say anything. If anyone else were that smartass with me, outside, I'd smash them in the face. I really would. Right in the face. Now, let's deal with my aggressions. Well, sweetie, fuck my aggressions. Deal with this."

  And with that, Burton Barrett, regional director for the intelligence network of the most powerful nation on earth, unzipped his fly.