Free The Summer Soldier by Nicholas Guild

flashlight
and then walked around to where the other man was standing. He
squatted down and let his light rest on the tiny glass globe that
housed the gas filter. The globe was only about a third full, with
the gas line just at the bottom of the filter.
    “Well, there’s your problem. You aren’t
getting any juice. You’ve probably got a bad pump.” He used one of
the wrenches to loosen the induction line, and then went around to
turn the key over. “Is anything coming out?”
    Hornbeck shook his head sadly.
    Guinness came around again to retighten the
line, going on all the time about how a friend of his had had a lot
of trouble with the fuel pump on his Jaguar, and trying all the
time not to think about the .25 caliber automatic that Hornbeck
doubtless had his thumb on. It wasn’t easy.
    “Let’s see what the pump looks like,” he said
brightly.
    Guinness unscrewed the little panel in the
right wall of the Jag’s trunk, telling Hornbeck to turn the key
just to see if the pump wouldn’t click on. It didn’t, and as he
flashed his light over it, Guinness could see a particle of sawdust
in one of the lines. That car wasn’t going anywhere.
    They fiddled with it for some time. Guinness
banged on the pump with one of his wrenches while Hornbeck worked
the key, and gradually Hornbeck began to defrost. He became more
talkative. He was beginning, without even being aware of it, to
trust the helpful young Yank who seemed to be having such a good
time tinkering with his fuel system. It was a mistake, the mistake
Guinness had been counting on.
    “Here, come have a look at this,” Guinness
called out excitedly from the front of the car. “Look at that, that
right there. No, a little further down. That’s it, right there. See
it?”
    A week later, staring out of the same tea
shop window at what might have been the same rain, Major Byron J.
Down, who had by then dropped his alias and come at least partially
clean, found it hard to keep a rein on his enthusiasm.
    “It was lovely,” he said, his voice low but
fervent as he vigorously stirred sugar into what might have been
the same cup of tea. “You dropped him like a poled ox. The other
side’s Number One iceman for the whole of the British Isles, a man
with twelve confirmed hits on his ticket, knocked over by a
twenty-three year old college boy. Son, you’re a natural, a born
killer. You have found your true vocation, your true self.”
    Guinness wondered if he perhaps wasn’t being
put on. No, the guy was serious. It was scary.
    “You might have told me who the hell he
was.”
    “I might have, but would you have tried it if
you had known?” After a moment of silence, Down turned up his open
palms and smiled. “My point precisely. I’m sorry, son, but we were
in a hole. We needed to get rid of Hornbeck; he was giving all the
nancies in the Foreign Office palpitations, and he was making our
organization look bad. We couldn’t use any of our own
men—Hornbeck’s been around and would have spotted them in a minute.
It was a job for the gifted and lucky amateur.”
    There were, of course, still quite a few
things that Down wasn’t being entirely candid about, things
Guinness would eventually figure out for himself, after he had
gotten to know more about how The Business was run.
    Such as the fact that Down probably hadn’t
expected him to survive, that he had probably had in mind some sort
of sacrifice play. Probably he had hoped to nail Hornbeck in a nice
legal way for murder, his murder.
    Down knew too much. It was almost as if there
had been a tail on Guinness while Guinness was tailing Hornbeck.
Had they been there, watching the whole show from a comfortable
distance, hoping to rush in and catch Hornbeck with his hands
covered in Guinness’s fresh gore?
    Well, this didn’t seem a business where you
could afford to resent such things. And, in any case, it hadn’t
worked out that way.
    Guinness had stood up slowly while Hornbeck
was still stooped over,