Northern Exposure

By Michael Kilian

A diplomat hounded by the KGB and the CIA fights to prevent a Canadian civil war

Pulling over on the California highway, 2 men argue with each other in French. They open their car’s trunk and haul out 2 victims: a drunk man and a screaming woman. With 2 shotgun blasts, the couple is dead, and the killers drive back to Canada—the country their actions have just pushed to the brink of chaos.
 
Standing in the men’s way is Dennis Showers, a rising star in the US State Department who has recently been posted in Ottawa. His mind is not on his career. Showers is instead obsessed with his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Felicity, who has fallen in with an environmental terrorist group bent on taking down the Canadian government. As Showers hunts for her, the CIA and KGB track his every move in a deadly dance that could push Canada into civil war—and drag the whole world toward nuclear Armageddon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504019231

Michael Kilian

Michael Kilian (1939-2005) was born in Toledo, Ohio, and was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and Westchester, New York. He was a longtime columnist for the Chicago Tribune in Washington, DC, and also wrote the Harrison Raines Civil War Mysteries. In 1993, with the help of illustrator Dick Locher, Kilian began writing the comic strip Dick Tracy. Kilian is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Book preview

1

The two young men in the rusting old Buick spoke little in the darkness, their faces barely outlined in the dashboard lights. The driver, bouncing the big car up the rutted mountain road uncomfortably fast, was particularly grim. He wanted this done with; this grimy business had become the only profession left to him, but he was not really happy in it. His companion, three years his junior but his functional superior, seemed unhappy only about the rough ride; blasé about what was to come, if not actually looking forward to it. He gripped the top of the dashboard, enduring their jarring, jouncing progress up the slope with clenched teeth and occasional profanity, uttered in French, but with the sangfroid, as he must view it, of a veteran going into battle.

Down to their left, far, far down the mountain slope, was California Highway One, and just beyond, the cliffs that fell to the breaking surf of the Pacific Ocean. Far behind them now, its lights occasionally flickering in the rearview mirror, was the faded little town of Davenport, a one-time whale-watching resort with a small organic-food restaurant, a lonely, usually fogbound Coast Guard station, and a defunct cement plant. The two men in the ramshackle Buick had little to fear from witnesses.

There was a thump from the rear of the car.

"Merde," said the other.

I did not tie her well enough, said his driver. Maybe they are suffocating back there.

Only a few minutes more, said the other. "Bientôt."

After a steep turn, they were there, too soon for the driver. He pulled the car to a grinding stop in a clearing that suddenly appeared on their right, then killed the engine and sat behind the wheel a moment, breathing in sighs. There was another thump from the trunk.

"Pour la Patrie," said the other.

"Bien," said the driver. He sighed again and opened the door.

From the back seat, the other man pulled forth a pump shotgun, and hurried to the rear, demanding the keys from the driver and opening the trunk. The woman, bound and gagged, sat straight up, her dark hair a wild tangle, her eyes both angry and terrified. The man, utterly drunk, was snoring. Lifting and pulling them out one by one, the young men dragged each up the trail. They could hear the Pacific waves breaking distantly against the rocks.

They set the drunken man up against a tree. He briefly opened his bleary eyes, but it was a pointless residual function. An instant later, the youth fired his shotgun directly at the man’s head.

Now the woman, he said, pulling the slide on the shotgun. The ejected shell fell with a ping onto the ground. The new shell rammed home with a decisive click. They had left the woman kneeling, watching everything, her eyes bulging.

Her clothes, said the driver. "N’oublie pas le script."

More than the script, said the other. It is not enough to look like the others. It must be like the others.

Alain, no.

"Mais oui. Certainement."

"Merde."

"Regarde."

The younger man set down his shotgun and stepped in front of the woman, unbuckling his belt and slipping off his trousers. Then he knelt and pulled off her skirt and underwear. She began thrashing about, but he quieted her by striking her twice in the jaw. He flung himself onto her, and into her, and in a very short time was done.

A rape, he said, standing, and pulling up his trousers. When he picked up his shotgun, the driver looked away. He could hear her faint, muffled scream just before the explosive gunshot.

"Eh, voilà," said the younger man, amidst the echoes and trailing smoke.

"Maintenant, let’s go."

No, no, no. In the trunk. Get her purse.

The driver did so. The younger man dumped the contents onto the ground by her body, then dropped it into the dirt.

Now, said the driver.

No, Maurice. One more thing. You forget.

He put the shotgun to the dead woman’s face and fired two times, quickly. Two other rapid shots did the same to the man.

Now, said the driver. "Plus vite!"

"Plus vite," said the other.

In two hours, they were north of San Francisco and speeding toward Canada.

2

Felicity Stuart. Showers opened his eyes to the nighttime gloom of his living room, then said her name again, this time aloud. His voice sounded absurdly loud in the nearly absolute silence. Felicity Stuart.

He sat up, running his hands over his eyes and face, little dispelling the alcoholic fog. Was he drunk? Affirmative. Dennis Tobias Showers, the supremely cool and competent master diplomat who had not been drunk in years, who never indulged himself beyond two or three glasses of wine at embassy receptions, was smashed, bombed, stinko. He had sat up drinking gin into the night, finally falling asleep fully dressed on his living room couch. In the dim light, he could see a half-full glass on the teakwood coffee table in front of him. He took a sip, tasting warm gin slightly diluted with melted ice.

Why drunk? Unhappiness. Why unhappiness? At forty, he was considered one of the fastest-rising stars in the American foreign service. In a short time, he was going to be posted to the extremely important job of deputy chief of mission at the United States embassy in Ottawa. The next promotion would certainly be to ambassadorial rank. Showers had money. He and Marie-Claire lived beyond their income, but their income was substantial, manifest ostentatiously enough in this Georgetown house and their blue Mercedes sedan. His wife had been described in Dossier magazine as one of the beauties of Washington. Though her features were a trifle Gallic, Showers agreed. She was the daughter of a baron—a Belgian baron, to be sure, but a nobleman, nevertheless. The Dennis Showers who had fled his family’s home in New York’s Westchester County at the age of eighteen—with only a hundred dollars in his pocket and no prospect even of a job in the New York City to which he was bound—had traveled far indeed.

Unhappiness. Felicity Stuart.

Showers clicked on a lamp, looking immediately to the French-style telephone on the antique desk by the window. That was the telephone in his dream, all right. The same white and gold phone. His. In the dream, it had rung many times before he had stirred from his stupor and stumbled over to it. In the dream, he had heard a voice that was only vaguely familiar, a woman saying his name, and then her own. Felicity. Felicity Stuart. She kept saying it and he kept repeating it in the interrogative, almost mindlessly. Then her voice became urgent. She said she was in serious trouble and needed his help. Felicity Stuart was reaching out to him across nearly twenty years, and his only response was to repeat her name again and again. She told him she was calling from far away, and said again that she needed his help. At once there was silence and the dream was ended, leaving him to this reeling, rude awakening on his couch.

It was not a dream. It could not have been.

He sipped the warm gin, afraid to try to stand yet. He was disgusted with himself for his drunken condition. Showers intensely disliked being other than himself, the self that it had taken him twenty years to become.

His head was beginning to ache. He had an extraordinary number of important things to attend to in the day that would arrive shortly. Showers was presently assigned as a desk officer in the State Department’s Northern Europe section, having served consecutive tours as a political-affairs specialist in Belgium and France. This Washington post was a transitory one, a place to rest before taking on the new duties in Canada. But lately they had been keeping him annoyingly busy, both the Seventh Floor at State and the White House, in preparation for the forthcoming summit in Bonn. The only thing pleasing about the high-level attention he was receiving was that it irritated Arthur Jordine, his immediate superior. Jordine had done him more than a little dirty. Showers had found out from the Seventh Floor that Jordine had tried to block his posting to Ottawa.

Jordine. A second reason for unhappiness. Showers leaned back and sipped more gin, closing his eyes. It was early June, well in advance of the tropical sog that envelops the capital in mid and late summer, but the air outside was as still and stagnant as in August. The only sound he could hear was the faint humming of the refrigerator in the distant kitchen.

The sudden ringing of the telephone was explosive, shattering, startling him so that he spilled some of the gin. Could it be Felicity Stuart calling again, hoping to find him more sober? With a trembling hand, he set down his glass and went clumsily to the phone.

Hello?

Allo, Dennis? It is Marie-Claire. His wife spoke the liquid, musical French of the Belgians, and the accent carried over into her English. It was one of the nicest things about her.

Where in hell are you?

Still in New York. I said to you that I might stay over.

He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex Marie-Claire had given him after her father had been particularly generous to them one Christmas. It’s almost five in the morning, he said. Why bother calling now?

"Do not be so bellicose, mon cher. I tried you twice before but there was no answer."

I went to a reception at the Irish embassy.

He had. It was a very nice party. It was where he had started his serious drinking.

I called again quite late, but I am not sure that I connected with our number. The man who answered was incoherent, then he hung up. Was that you?

It was me, said Showers, remembering none of it. I was asleep.

"Bien. So, Dennis. I am in New York. I will take an early shuttle in the morning, and be home in time for luncheon."

What hotel are you in? The Plaza?

"Non. I am with friends. The Cellinis, from the United Nations? You remember?"

Showers had never heard of them. He wondered if any such people really existed, wondered with whom she might actually be staying, whether she was in New York at all. He imagined her sitting on the edge of a bed with soft, fluffy pillows and bedcover, wearing a frilly borrowed robe and looking out through windows at the East River. He imagined her again, sitting completely naked, her blonde hair long and loose, and her tanned, tawny body held and stroked by another man, a man running his finger along the crevice of her buttocks as she spoke, waiting impatiently for the conversation to end. At times he hated Marie-Claire.

Would you like me to pick you up at National? he said, meanly and intentionally prolonging this.

"Non, non, Dennis. You have so much to do. I will take a taxi. Now, it is so late. I must go back to sleep. I love you, mon cher. I will see you in the evening. Au revoir."

Good-bye.

She hung up before he did. Unhappiness. Another reason was Marie-Claire.

He went to the nearest bathroom, washed his hands and face in the marble basin, then stared bleakly at the view of himself presented by the mirrored wall. His white shirt and gray flannels looked like dirty laundry. His striped guards’ tie was stained, wrinkled, and pulled askew. Though freshly washed, his face was red and puffy, his hazel eyes quite bloodshot, his jaw covered with stubble, his graying sandy hair in matted disarray. Showers was always dressed and groomed just so, as perfect and patrician as his carefully cultivated speech and manners. Showers was much the archetypical State Department man. At the moment he looked like some degenerate Southern congressman.

It was too late to go to bed, too early to do anything else. He decided to make a night of it, and have another drink. He went to the kitchen and, using fresh ice and a clean glass, made himself a wonderfully large martini.

Unhappiness. Marie-Claire. He had known for a long time that she was cheating on him, but had presumed she did so idly, in the cultural fashion of continental Europe and diplomatic Washington. What he was coming to fear was that she was doing it compulsively and recklessly, wantonly and ruthlessly. He had come to feel uneasy talking to any man they knew well, having no idea whether Marie-Claire had not long before been sitting on his face.

Showers was an oddity in his profession. He was reflexively monogamous, in Marie-Claire’s terms, chaste. He had lost his virginity early and easily, and been something of a ladies’ man for a number of years. But, since taking his vows with Marie-Claire at the cathedral in Lille, he had not slept with another woman. There had been a high-born lady in Mexico City once, but that had involved little more than some groping in a formal garden, with no consummation. Marie-Claire’s sexual conduct was the opposite.

Losing his virginity. Felicity Stuart. That had never been a dream, though the memory of it was now quite dreamlike, the reality of that night as far removed from him as the planet Saturn or the Kalahari. Yet he could recall Felicity’s soft, small, slender body so well, with such exactitude—the cool feel of her, the tenderness of her small breasts, the revelations of an appendicitis scar and a mole visible in the moonlight. He had expected her to cry afterward, as he had been told girls did, but she had not. As it later dawned upon him, it had not been her virginity that was lost that long-ago night.

Felicity Stuart had just now telephoned him. She had reached out to him not from the past, through the mist of some dream, but from a place quite real and in the present, however distant. A hundred times in his life he had thought of calling Felicity, of somehow finding her and reaching out to her, but always presumed it to be an impossibility. Now she had found him, and he had been dead drunk.

He swore loudly, at himself and at his luck, then took his drink and went down the long hall to his study at the rear of the house. After a lengthy search, he unearthed his high school senior yearbook and, from the rear of a desk drawer, an old dog-eared photograph. Felicity was wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark sweater, sitting crosslegged on a lawn before an old white house, smiling with those so memorably perfect teeth. She looked about seventeen at the time. That would have been in 1959. Not everyone in Braddock High School agreed with him in those days of bosom worship, but Showers had thought Felicity an extraordinary beauty, the quintessence of a type, of WASP New England, three centuries of it. She was the best-groomed person he had ever known, immaculate auburn hair curling neatly at the base of her neck, skin always clean and flawless and tight against the delicate bones of her face, bright green eyes full of intelligence and health. She had a small, perfect nose; thin, curving lips; those beautiful teeth; and a small, delicately pointed chin. Her slender body was well suited for the conservative plaid skirts, demure blouses, and the cashmere sweaters she favored. Felicity seldom wore any jewelry except for an old family ring which he had never seen her without. He had asked to have it once, but she had refused him.

Showers drank some more, and opened the musty old yearbook. To his chagrin, not having looked at it in some ten years, he was surprised to find it full of pictures of children, including himself. Maturity back then was simply a matter of a driver’s license, drinking and smoking, losing one’s virginity. He had fancied himself a sort of Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald character at the time, yet there, in the photo above his name, was this mere boy.

He turned the pages. There were many pictures of Felicity. She had been a varsity cheerleader and thus an aristocrat in that juvenile American society. More grudgingly, Showers had been accepted into that peerage himself, as one of the rich kids from the village of Braddock Wells and as editor of the high school newspaper. Yet he and Felicity were essentially loners, too moody, bookish, driven, and self-absorbed to be fully a part of that world of proms and pep rallies, ritual and caste. He often thought she had become a cheerleader solely for the purpose of proving that she could, for she otherwise conducted herself as superior to such adolescent silliness.

Turning more pages, he came upon the only photograph that showed the two of them together. French Club, a passing interest of his then that now was paying enormous dividends; a passion for her. For all those three centuries of Yankee ancestors, she had some French in her, and some Celtic Scots, enough to lead her to a fascination with Catholicism that resulted ultimately in her conversion. When they had first met, she had been reading best-selling romances and the mordant likes of Thomas Hardy. Her French classes introduced her to Molière, de Maupassant, Balzac, and Voltaire, and thereafter she had read little else. She had planned after college to become a translator at the United Nations. It occurred to Showers that she probably would have done very well in the foreign service, although a woman had slim prospect of that in the 1950s.

How well had she done? What had she done? Felicity and Showers had grown up on the margin between the middle and upper classes, a wide margin in that high-blown region of New York’s Westchester County, but an uncomfortable situation for both of them. Felicity’s parents had divorced when she was ten years old, and her home was with her mother, who lived in the rural countryside just outside the town of Braddock Heights, near the border with Putnam County. Felicity’s father had been a doctor, her mother an artist, both descended from soldiers in the American revolution. But alone, her mother could provide her with little. She might have been a debutante, or gone to Vassar. Her mother could only do her best, and that meant public high school and then a state teachers’ college. There was no system of public colleges and universities other than that in those days. Lacking tuition for anything better, she had had no other choice.

A school teacher. In her last letter to him, she had referred to, my middle-classness.

Showers’ father had come to Westchester County an extremely successful advertising executive, taking one of the nicer homes and thirty-five acres of land just outside Braddock Wells. By the time Showers was a sophomore in high school, his father was an unemployed advertising executive. By the time of Showers’ graduation, his father was bankrupt and ruined. A few weeks later, he deserted the family. Showers deserted it himself a short while after, unable to bear another hysterical binge on the part of his mother, a former actress. He felt no guilt in doing so. When his father had in desperation sold their last car, a Lincoln convertible, for grocery money, his mother had stormed about the house swearing and shrieking for days, then spent the money on new clothes.

Showers had fled to New York City, putting his family out of his mind. He found a place to stay in the apartment of a friend and took a job in a Fifth Avenue bookstore, enrolling in night courses at the New School, waiting desperately and hungrily for opportunity to redress the myriad wrongs that had been visited upon him. An opportunity came, to his amazement, just two years later, in the form of a wealthy middle-aged woman who sat next to him in one of Rudolph Arnheim’s celebrated psychology courses. She took him home to meet her husband, a high-ranking member of the United States delegation to the United Nations. The next year, when the husband was posted to Bonn as ambassador, Showers went along, and was given a job. A congressionally approved waiver forgiving his lack of a college degree made him a foreign service officer five years later. Five years after that, the waiver was only an irrelevant footnote in his dossier.

Showers and Felicity had drifted apart after high school graduation. Curiously, though his family’s fortunes were a shambles and he had little money to himself, Showers had quickly ascended from that margin between the classes, returning from the city to Westchester to live off wealthy friends on weekends and during summers, traveling with them to the Hamptons, Newport, Cape Cod, and the women’s college circuit of Massachusetts and Connecticut. He remembered triumphs, kissing Polly Winston at Nauset Beach, dancing with the extraordinary Jill Paisley at a lawn party in Bedford Village, sleeping with Wilhelmina von Letzendorf on the beach at Southampton.

Felicity had merely prepared for life as a New York State high school French teacher, slipping downward from the margin. He had seen her briefly on a summer afternoon on the Braddock Wells village green. Her summer job that year was taking care of the children of the family that lived in the biggest house on the green. They had walked, for a very long time, and talked, and held each other. He neglected to kiss her. It was the last time he saw her. Once in Bonn, he had written her, and they then carried on a correspondence for many months, but the letters had stopped. He could not remember why. Her mother died. Perhaps it was because of that.

He kept leafing through the yearbook. Here was a picture of the class mother’s boy who had gone to West Point and been killed in Vietnam. Here was Sandra Pope, the cheerleader who had been queen of the class, a girl with so many activities beneath her name in the yearbook that they looked like medals on a general. She had married a lawyer and moved to Scarsdale. Here was another cheerleader, a waif of a girl. He had been told by someone he had run into at an airport bar that she had been murdered. Why had he heard nothing of Felicity? Where was Felicity Stuart? He was going to become an ambassador. He was listed in Who’s Who in America. He was the success she had always told him he would be. What was the point if she didn’t know?

He leaned back against the moist leather of his desk chair, chiding himself for the silliness of that thought. There should be nothing more irrelevant to an adult life—especially his adult life—than high school. But it wasn’t silly. His senior year in high school was the point at which his life had come utterly apart, and it had taken him years and years to put it back together again. The mending could never be complete unless he could somehow reach back to that time and find someone to declare it so. If not Felicity, who? Sandra Pope, the cheerleader now in Scarsdale?

Showers closed the book and set it back upon the desk. There was another means of reaching into the past: the souvenir trunk he kept in the basement. He was sure there was at least one letter there. He always kept at least one letter from everyone.

It took a long time to find it, stuck in a corner at the bottom beneath a shelf of his own youthful writings. He closed the lid of the trunk and sat upon it, drinking again as he unfolded the old, stiff paper. It was typewritten, like nearly all her letters, though she had a beautiful hand.

Dear Toby, it began. All his life, Showers wanted to be called Toby, but no one ever did, not his parents or any friend; not his wife. Only Felicity. She called him Toby and nothing else and he never called her by her first name, Hope, which she despised. Except once, when they had had a fight.

I must say it was a great surprise to hear from you, after all these weeks. I didn’t know if I would answer it. What’s the point? But, whotthehell, I can’t just let a silence pass between us cause you are not here …

She went on, commencing to ramble, telling him that her grandparents had moved into a big new house on a hilltop in Connecticut, that the room she had there had a view of fifteen miles, that she was supposed to be studying for a French test, that she wanted to go to Europe, if not to graduate school, that she hadn’t seen any of her classmates and didn’t expect she ever would again, and that she still enjoyed the same pleasures in life, namely drinking, men, smoking, Balzac, and any kind of hell-raising …

Felicity apparently had been drinking as she typed, indeed, may have been drinking for some time before she started. By the next page, the letter degenerated into something approximating Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitable.

You, my friend should be honored with this peice of verbage cause my letter writins very odd, that is I usually lose most of the people by my dwindling correspondence. They either come to the conclusion that I am dead and gone or married. At least I’ve escaped both of those so far and life is pretty good at times. I am not the same product of the old crowd as I am sure you aren’t either. I only now realize how much of what I do is related to my middle classness and deliberate lack of tradition. If you understand that you are pretty good. The trouble is we often don’t know where we belong …

He finished his drink, staring into the empty glass a moment, then read on.

Don’t be so damn ambitious, Toby my dear friend. Don’t let them maek you what you don’ want to be. Put that behind you it is over and doesn’t matter, not to you not to me. You have goodness in you Toby. noblesse and all of that. When you didn’t have your pretensions up you were the kindest person I ever knew. You write about what you want to do in th foreign service, all those important things. Do what you think should be done Toby Toby. Do the good thing. Don’t let them twist you Toby. I

Can you tell, by the way I am not drunk whilecomposing this cause for one reason it is much to early in the day and I am sobered up from the night before I think.

Cela n’importe peu. In case you cant’ recall your French that well write to me and I’ll oblige with a free translation.

It’s been fun and allthat sort of rot. Alas the fleeting years float by. Well (such a bourgeoise type of farewell) here at last is the end to the trivialities and particulars.

Love?!

Hope Felicity Stuart.

She had then written the name Felicity by hand. She had underscored the word love.

Showers leaned forward, the letter dangling from his long fingers, feeling the damp of the cellar. The words seemed so immediate; Felicity, so very present. Yet it might as well have been a letter from a ghost, from the grave, from another century.

He yawned. Still holding the letter, he came stumbling up the stairs into a kitchen that was filling with early-morning light. Though exceedingly unhappy, he smiled. He would make this egregious self-indulgence complete. He would have one more, one last, martini. He would take it out onto the patio. He would sit and remember everything he possibly could about Felicity, and then he would stop this nonsense and put her forever from his mind. She would not call again. And if she did, it would not really matter. He was going to be a middle-aged man, and must concern himself with the things of middle age. Hope Facility Stuart belonged in his yearbook, the appropriate repository for first loves.

He sipped and swallowed his gin with exquisite slowness, closing his eyes as he remembered a dark night once when he and Felicity had been in the back seat of a speeding car.

The sun was shining. Showers had fallen asleep in a patio chair, and according to his watch it was nearly eight in the morning. Hearing someone nearby, he rubbed his eyes open and looked over the low hedge that divided his patio from that of the Restons next door. Alixe Reston, the daughter, was there, performing her morning exercises in shorts and a sweat shirt with Georgetown University on the front. She was a tall, big-boned young woman with a trim, long-legged athletic figure, a big girl, but at the same time very soft and feminine, with long, light brown hair and the most extraordinary large brown eyes. She was twenty-five. At times she seemed five years younger than that; other times, that much older.

Alixe was staying alone in her parents’ house that summer, while they vacationed at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. She had just received her master’s degree from Georgetown, and, having at last exhausted the possibilities of higher learning, was using the summer to decide what to do next.

Her father had asked Showers to keep a neighborly eye on her. He had been doing that for several years, indulging in such fantasies as taking her to the Delaware shore and walking with her, the golden girl of the beach, along the surf, savoring the envy. Another had her sharing his youth, twenty-five when he was twenty-five, the two of them meeting in some chance encounter, a party in New York. They were a harmless pursuit, these fantasies, improper but permissible, another sign of middle-age, certainly his only infidelities to his wife.

The year he was twenty-five he had been in Germany. It was that year that he had last heard from Felicity Stuart.

Alixe was touching her toes, her long hair falling almost to the ground with each graceful bend. Showers suddenly felt extremely embarrassed. Alixe’s father was a former cabinet officer and now senior partner of a major Washington law firm, a man of much consequence and respectability. And here sat Dennis Showers, a filthy unshaven mess wearing yesterday’s clothes and swilling gin at eight in the morning, just a few feet from the man’s daughter. Neighborly eye indeed.

She paused, resting, her hands on her hips. Good morning, Mr. Showers, she said cheerily.

Good morning, Alixe, he said, wondering if she had seen his martini glass. Of course she had. It sat in the center of the glass-topped patio table like a museum exhibit.

She began another exercise, swiveling her hips from right to left.

You’re having an interesting morning, I see, she said, smiling.

Well, yes I am.

Is there anything I can help you with, Mr. Showers?

Sure. You can help me find a middle-aged ex-cheerleader I once knew in Westchester County, New York. I have a craving for pompons. No, thank you, Alixe. My morning is interesting enough as it is.

She laughed, and finished her exercise. Is Mrs. Showers home?

Not yet.

Alixe smiled again, shaking her hair back from her face. Bye, she said. Have an interesting day.

When she was gone, Showers shakily stood up, finished the drink, and hurried inside. At the very least, he would have to start with a long shower.

As he walked through the living room he glanced at the white French telephone. Felicity Stuart had said she was in trouble.

3

There was a radio playing in the dark, dank basement apartment near the Old City section of Montreal. The music was a French Canadian folk song, played on a violin, piano, and guitar. Some of those working at the table in the rear room sang along with the tune, a happy lark of a melody. They were making bombs, gelignite bombs, small enough to fit into a briefcase or lunchbox. Four had been completed, and, with unconnected leads hanging, set in a wooden box packed with wadding. There was explosive enough left for another three bombs. After that, there was no more explosive, which made Leon