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  Tucker took the lead as they followed the overgrown trail into the woods, Shirillo second and Harris bringing up the rear with his heavy artillery. The older man carried the Thompson snout forward, at the hip, like a wary infantryman going through a suspected enemy position. That was, in fact, pretty much the case.

  Although Tucker was aware of the woods around him and was on the lookout for Baglio's gunmen, the greatest part of his attention was on the problem of the botched robbery. In the past three years he had pulled off thirteen perfect operations, a couple of which were already legend in the business. Each job had its hitches, of course, but each had turned put right in the end. At twenty-eight he'd begun to build the kind of reputation among other freelancers that Clitus Felton had retired on. Reliable Mike Tucker. He liked the sound of that, even though the Tucker part of it was not his real name. It had been his alias for three years, and he felt that, given another five years of continued success, he wouldn't give a damn about any name except his assumed one; he would be Tucker then. Already, he was more concerned about upholding Tucker's reputation than about what was said against his real name and family. There was nothing to be proud of in his real name, nothing at all. Tucker, however, was a name to be reckoned with. A botched-up job Remember Tucker's first disaster, the Baglio robbery? After that, it was all downhill for him, right on to that job when he No. Not failure. He wouldn't permit it to remain a failure, because that would be playing right into his father's hands-not Tucker's father, of course; the real father. He refused. He would not provide anyone with a reference point for the beginning of his decline. Before he was finished he would have those damned suitcases, or three others exactly like them, filled with money.

  He looked at his watch as he walked along the rutted, unused track, was surprised to see that despite all that had happened this morning it was still only a few minutes past eleven o'clock. A great deal could be done yet today-if they were lucky enough to find their way off the mountain unobserved.

  Ten minutes after they abandoned the Mustang, the woods began to thin out around them. The trees were smaller, farther apart, the underbrush thicker. Tucker gave all of his attention to the landscape now; the planning could wait until later. The woods seemed deserted except for them, but Baglio might have men stationed along the perimeter. Whether they had a chance or not was all dependent on how many gunmen he kept in the mansion on the day of a cash transfer.

  Spread out side by side now, rather than strung out in one line, they slowly approached the edge of the trees, circumspect, increasingly certain that they were alone. At the edge of the forest, still in the darkness beneath the pines, they stopped and looked down the long manicured slope of a contoured hillside. The mansion rested at the bottom, a white flare in the middle of all that green grass.

  Sprawled on the ground at the edge of the woods, the three men watched the activity down at the Baglio mansion. On the long flagstone promenade that fronted the great house, two gunmen had taken up positions, one at either end, leaning against white wooden pillars from which they could survey the circular drive and both the east and west lawns. Tucker imagined that, in the back of the house which he could not see from here, other hoods had also settled in for the duration. Otherwise, the picture was serene, the windows of the house taking the bright sunlight and casting it back in doubled brilliance, a willow tree lazily waving whiplike branches, a bird crying somewhere close by.

  Tucker put down the binoculars and said, "The white Thunderbird parked in the driveway has MD plates."

  "A doctor for Bachman?" Shirillo asked.

  "Most likely."

  Harris said, "Then they got him out of the wreck, you think?"

  Tucker nodded. "And they aren't likely to send him to the local hospital, where someone might wonder how and where he got so banged up."

  "How bad do you think Bachman is?" Shirillo asked.

  "It has got to be more than a bruise or two."

  Harris seemed to be remembering the Chevy angled up onto the mangled Cadillac, and he grimaced sourly. "Why didn't they just kill him? Why go to the trouble of bringing a doctor in for him? This Baglio doesn't sound like any humanitarian, from what I've heard."

  Tucker brushed away a determined ant that had crept onto his coat sleeve, and he said, "Bachman must either be unconscious or in too much pain to talk coherently. Baglio sent for the doctor to help get Bachman back in shape so he can ask him a few pointed questions."

  "About the job," Harris said.

  "Yes," Tucker said. "About the job, about us."

  "Bachman won't say anything."

  "Bullshit," Shirillo said.

  Harris looked at the boy, his square face reddening again. He said, "I've worked with Merle Bachman half a dozen times before, and I can vouch for him."

  "If the police had him, I wouldn't be the least bit worried," Shirillo said. "I'm sure he's able to withstand any number of late-night question-and-answer sessions in the squad room with those boys, but I also know that no one is going to make it through much of Baglio's questioning. They'll sew him back together from the wreck, ask him a few questions, and break every bone in his body, one at a time, until he spills. They aren't as limited in their choice of techniques as the police are."

  Tucker picked up the glasses again, trained them on the front doors which opened on the promenade, followed two men as they came out of the house and walked toward the white Thunderbird. One was in a business suit and carried a black satchel, obviously the physician. The other man was tall, dark and distinguished, with full sideburns and a mane of gray-white hair. Twenty pounds too thick around the middle but otherwise in good condition, he might have been a Congressman or successful oilman. He had to be Baglio, and Shirillo confirmed that he was.

  "What's going on, friend?" Harris asked.

  Tucker said, "They're arguing, but not heatedly. I'd guess the doctor wants Bachman moved to a hospital, while Baglio disagrees. Right now he's probably telling the doc that he pays these exorbitant medical fees to be able to disregard his advice whenever it's convenient."

  A moment later the doctor got into the Thunderbird and drove away, with Baglio waving at him in a friendly fashion. A third person came out of the house then and stood beside Baglio: the rangy blonde who'd been driving the Cadillac which had cut off Bachman's escape route. She wore shorts and a halter, and everything about her was zaftig, so ripe she would already have begun to decline by the age of thirty, when many women were reaching the fullest bloom. Right now, though, at twenty-two or twenty-three she was perfect, and she knew it; that was clear in the way she carried herself, the conscious provocative tilt to her hips when she stood beside Baglio. Tucker watched her as, with her arm around the old man, she went back into the mansion.

  "You know the girl?" he asked Shirillo. "The one driving the Cadillac?"

  "No, but she's probably the latest in Baglio's string of women."

  "Lives in?"

  "His women usually do."

  Tucker watched the house, though no one moved down there and the guards had slumped back into attitudes of boredom. "Is there any way we can find out for certain how many people are in that place at night, besides Baglio and this woman?"

  Shirillo considered that for a moment and said, "I guess I could ask around, carefully, but I'm already sure that there's going to be at least four bodyguards. Outside of that, I just don't know."

  "Why does it matter?" Harris asked.

  Tucker brushed the ant off his sleeve again, flicked it gently away with his fingernail. "We're going to have to go into that house and get Bachman away from them."

  "Are you crazy?" Harris's face, for once, was not even pink but the color of a mild yellow cheese. All the lines showed in it now, and he looked as old and tired as he was. He reached out and touched the Thompson lying in the grass beside him, but that did not do any good this time.

  "Name me an alternative."

  Harris said, "We split and go quiet for a while."

  "That's go
od," Tucker said, a bit sarcastically. "That would be fine if these were the cops out looking for us. Cops have so damn much to do, they can't keep after you for long; no leads for a couple of months, and they put you in the back files and go on to something else. But these people, Pete, have the time and the resources. Baglio looks and sounds like the kind of man who could hold a grudge and nurture it. He's going to pump Bachman for our names, for Felton's name. He'll lean on Felton until he gets a mail-drop address for each of us. Then he just has to wait for us to pick up the mail."

  "When do we go in?" Shirillo asked. "Tonight?"

  "Tomorrow night, I think."

  Harris said, "You're both nuts! Bachman will have spilled it all by then, anyway."

  "Maybe not," Tucker said. "From the way the doctor was pushing Baglio, I'd guess Bachman's in a bad way right now. He's probably coked to the hairline and will be until tomorrow morning. Even if he comes out of it then, he won't be a good subject for interrogation. Especially not for Baglio's type of interrogation. What good is it to threaten a man with torture when he's already in too much pain to think straight?"

  "And if he isn't as racked up as you think?" Harris asked. "What if we go in there and find out Bachman's talked, that he's dead and ready for planting in the woods?"

  "Then we're no further behind than if we walk away now. Either way, Baglio will be after us then."

  "Tucker's right," Jimmy Shirillo said.

  Harris shook his burly head, some color back in his face now. "I just don't know. I'm used to operating on common sense. If a man takes a fall, you let him. That's his business; we all take the same risk."

  "With the cops, yes," Tucker said. "If Bachman was being held by the cops, I'd walk off." That was not entirely true, for there was still the money they hadn't gotten, the failure he had to erase from the record. "I know he wouldn't name any of us. But these aren't cops, Pete. With these boys, you have to throw out the old rules and adapt to the circumstances."

  Harris looked at the house, still dubious. "How can we do it?"

  "I'm working out a few angles right now," Tucker said, tapping the side of his head. "But I don't want to lay them out until I've thought everything through." He got up and brushed off his clothes. "Right now, we've got to get off this damn mountain before they shift the search away from the interior and back toward the macadam road."

  "Down at the highway, do we just hitchhike back to the city, friend?" Harris asked. "With a shotgun and a Thompson in hand?"

  "We can still use Shirillo's Corvette, as planned, though it'll have to seat three of us instead of two. It's parked in the picnic area three quarters of a mile from Baglio's lane. Shirillo can drive east, take the first exit, get on coming west again, take another exit after passing us, get on coming east again and pick us up at a prearranged spot along the berm."

  "That'll be fast enough," Shirillo said. "The exits are still pretty close together this near the city."

  "Let's hope you're right, friend," Harris said.

  Tucker was bothered by a sudden emergence of the "friend" tag on Harris's speech. The big man was not new to this business, and his nervousness was far more dangerous than that of the inexperienced apprentice, since its roots went deeper. Tucker knew that, when he was disturbed, the odd means of address punctuated a lot of Harris's conversation. That he should be this upset already, before much of anything had happened, was not a good sign. "Let's move ass, then," Tucker said. "I've got a hell of a lot of arrangements to make."

  The suitcase in which Harris carried the machine gun in its less conspicuous, fragmented form was in Shirillo's Corvette. If the job had gone well, Shirillo and Harris would have left the stolen Dodge for the sportscar and driven back to the city in that, while Tucker would have used the big car and disposed of it on some quiet residential street where it might not be noticed for a couple of days. Now, jammed in the tiny, low-slung machine, Shirillo and Harris in the seats, Tucker sitting sideways in the shallow storage compartment behind them, they suffered Harris's elbows as he broke the large weapon down and fitted the pieces into the Styrofoam cups that were firmly glued to the bottom of the suitcase. He took three times longer than usual to complete the chore, but at least he was calmed by it. When he was done he smiled at Tucker, patted the suitcase and said, "It's a beautiful tool, isn't it?"

  "Beautiful," Tucker agreed. "I see why you never got married and had children."

  Harris didn't catch the sarcasm but took that as a compliment for the gun.

  They dropped Harris in front of his hotel after he promised to stay low and keep to his room starting tomorrow morning when Tucker might be expected to phone.

  "I still don't see how we can get in there," he said.

  "I'll work it out," Tucker said.

  Harris closed the door and walked off, carrying the suitcase full of submachine gun as if it were only underwear and shirts.

  When Tucker got out of the Corvette in front of his Chatham Center hotel feeling as if he had been folded into someone's pocket, he left the shotgun with Shirillo, told him to wait for a telephone call and sent him home. He went upstairs to his room, showered, dressed, packed his single suitcase and checked out. He called the airport from the lobby, reserved a place on the earliest flight to New York, got a cab and left the city.

  At 4:36 that afternoon he landed at Kennedy, not at all happy to be home again, since it was a temporary failure that had driven him back.

  In the main airport lounge, which was static-filled by hundreds of chattering travelers, he took his suitcase into a telephone booth and drew the door shut. He dialed the office number of his family's banker on the off chance that the man might still be at work. President of the bank, he was still at his desk. Tucker licked dry lips, cleared his throat, wondered if there was any other way to handle this, decided there was not and identified himself, though not with the Tucker name.

  "Michael! What can I do for you?" Mr. Mellio asked. He was warm, sincere, concerned. Bullshit. In truth, he was an icy bastard and completely in the old man's tow. When he hung up in a couple of minutes, he would immediately dial Tucker's father and report, verbatim, what had been said. When you were a depositor of the position of the old man, bankers broke their professional codes and extended you certain extra services.

  "How long will you be in your office this afternoon, Mr. Mellio?"

  "I was just preparing to leave."

  "How early can you be there in the morning?"

  "A quarter past eight?"

  "Will you see me then?" Tucker asked.

  "What did you have in mind, Michael?"

  "I'd like to borrow against my inheritance." The statement was simple enough, though it was difficult to make. His father would be pleased to hear Mellio's report; Tucker's financial need, his first in more than three years, would make the old man's whole day.

  "Borrow?" Mellio asked, a banker who seemed never to have heard of such a thing. "Michael, need I remind you that by signing one small paper you may pick up your accrued allowances from the trust and-"

  "You needn't remind me," Tucker said sharply. "May I see you at a quarter past eight in the morning for a loan?"

  "Of course," Mellio said. "I'll leave word with the guards to admit you then."

  "Thank you, Mr. Mellio," Tucker said. He hung up. His forehead was dotted with perspiration, though he felt cold clear through. He wiped his face with a paper tissue, then opened the booth door, stepped out, picked up his suitcase and went outside to catch a taxi.

  The doorman at Tucker's building-Park Avenue in the eighties; he had a nine-room apartment complete with his own sauna; his father wondered most about his ability to maintain that-greeted him with a smile and his name, turned him over to the hallman inside, who inquired after the success of his business trip.

  "Well enough," Tucker said, though the words tasted bitter.

  He knew as soon as he entered his tenth-floor apartment that Elise was home, because the stereo system was carrying Rimski-Korsakov as in
terpreted by Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra, her favorite composer by her favorite orchestra. He controlled an urge to go looking for her and attended to important details first. At the wall safe in the living-room closet he put away the billfold that contained the Tucker papers, took out his own wallet and slipped that into his pocket. He closed the safe again and spun the dial. Then he went looking for Elise.

  On his way down the main hall, he stopped before the fragment of an early fifth-century Edo shield which had come into his possession only two months ago but which already seemed an integral part of the apartment. He and Elise had spent hours finding the right place for it and bracing it on the wall, and he had spent even longer examining it in detail, wishing that more than a ragged half of the beaten copper piece had survived. Of course, if the shield had come through the ages intact, it would have been far too valuable for him to afford it. As it was, he had paid close to forty thousand dollars for it and felt that the money was well spent. The oval shield, of well-worked copper trimmed in silver, inlaid with small pieces of hand-carved purest ivory, was the product of a nation of African dreamers who had lived on the east bank of the Niger River, constructing elaborate shields but rarely going to war, and it was exquisitely beautiful.

  Besides, the acquisition helped substantiate his cover as a freelance dealer in primitive art objects, a front which satisfied Elise and which his father found hard to crack. He really made little money from his dealing, but his records were a private matter between him and the IRS, and his father's investigators could never be sure what he cleared as an art dealer.

  He had paused before the shield as much to absorb some of its innate peace as to admire its beauty; now, having shifted out of the higher gear that his Tucker persona demanded, he felt in a better state of mind to meet Elise.

  She was sitting in a black leather chair in the den, a drink on the table beside her, a book open on her lap. Even in a comfortable old quilted housecoat a size too large for her, she radiated sensuality. She was a big girl, with a showgirl's body, an inch shorter than Tucker at five feet eight, with high round breasts, a narrow waist, slim but not boyish hips, and legs that went on forever. To date, however, her breaks in show business had been because of her face, not the body under it. She was a natural blonde with green eyes, a complexion as flawless as good china. Oddly enough, she was in demand for two kinds of television commercials: those that required a sexy, come-hither chickee to peer at the home audience and solicit men for cigars, beer and sportscars-and those that needed a stunning but innocent ingenue to push makeups, soda pop, junior fashions and shampoo. With different makeups and a change in hair styles, and with her not unimpressive acting ability, she could be two different ages and temperaments before a camera, in the same session.