"You know the name of them?" asked Remo, putting the water aside for when he might really want it, like after a thirty-day trek in the Sahara.
"Not really. I don't pay any attention to that. I don't know what kick some men get out of hopping around in pajamas."
"You prefer men hopping around without pajamas?"
Lynette giggled. "Well, maybe not hopping," she said. She raised the glass to her mouth and looked over the top of it at Remo. "What makes you think Hawley killed those bankers?"
"He told me," said Remo.
"Just like that? He told you? 'I killed the bankers and stole their money?'"
"Almost," Remo said. "He kind of bragged about the different strokes used on them. He talked too much about it not to have done it."
"Did you tell him you knew?"
"Yes."
"And then what?"
"He said he was going on a trip."
"Somehow I don't believe you," she said. "If Hawley knew you knew, then I think he would have smacked you around, too."
"Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe I look like another guy who hops around wearing pajamas."
Lynette shook her head. "No, no. Definitely not. You're not the pajama type."
"How did you know he did the killings?" asked Remo.
"He told me." Remo waited for her to fill in the blanks, but she said nothing more.
"Have another drink," said Remo.
Lynette Bardwell did. And another. And another. That was before the steak (well done and stringy), the baked potato (burned to a crisp), and the asparagus tips (not tips but spears).
She did not seem to mind. She ate doggedly through it, reveling in the dim lights and the canned music by two hundred and two violins, and she had yet another drink and leaned on Remo heavily as she lurched with him toward her car.
"Suppose Hawley's home?" said Remo. "Maybe I should stop near your house and you can drive home yourself?"
"He won't be," she said with some confidence. "Home, James."
She snored a little bit. She woke up near her house, sat upright, and snapped her fingers. "I just remembered," she said thickly.
"What?"
"There's a guy Hawley practices with. Another karate freak."
"What's his name?"
"Fred Westerly."
"Where do I find him? I'd like to know more about all this karate stuff."
"He's a cop. I remember now. A policeman. A lieutenant or something. I think he's in the training school. Hawley mentioned him once. Yeah. Jersey City. He trains cops in Jersey City."
"Fred Westerly, huh?"
"Thass right," Lynette said, and her head dropped onto Remo's shoulder and she was asleep again.
Getting out of the car, she lurched heavily against Remo's left shoulder, forcing him to grit his teeth against the explosions of pain that sounded inside his skull. Biting hard on his lip, he sleepwalked her upstairs to the bedroom in the Bardwell's tiny frame Cape Cod on the edge of town.
She put up no resistance as Remo undressed her and put her under the covers. Before he left, Remo did a thing to the nerves under her left armpit and whispered in her ear, "Dream of me. I'm going to be back."
She smiled in her sleep.
As he walked away from the house, Remo saw a small light click on in the upstairs bathroom.
CHAPTER SIX
Captain Lee Enright Leahy of the U.S. Submarine Darter had made this trip before. Five times in five years and each time he understood it less. Because of the destination, he couldn't embark from Japan. Russia and North Korea got copy on any ships leaving through the Sea of Japan and especially submarines, and anyone making port at Taiwan or the Ryukyu Islands might as well forget it. You could add China, too. So much for normal secrecy for normal trips.
For this trip, you had to start evasive action at San Diego, spreading the word you were heading for Australia, letting crew wives know their husband's next port was Darwin. You crossed the Pacific practically at flank speed, entering the East China Sea submerged between Miyako and Naha Islands. Then you headed north into the East China Sea, risked the China coast within a hundred miles of Shanghai, and kept on the China side as you entered the Yellow Sea, because if the Chinese did get copy on you, there would be a delay, hopefully, before they would inform North Korea. At latitude thirty-eight and longitude one twenty-four, you veered north by northeast into the West Korean Bay and then, in that infernal joint where North Korea and Communist China meet, you let out a team of SEALS (Sea Air Land) boys, the descendants of frogmen, Rangers, OSS, and every other whacko group that the military was forced to use on missions on which they would not send the sane.
And all this to deliver a tiny purse of gold to an old woman who would meet them on the coast, just outside the village of Sinanju, at three A.M. every November 12.
What puzzled Captain Leahy was that the bag contained less than $10,000 in gold, and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver and risked millions plus an international incident. He had wondered why the CIA (he was sure it was the CIA) couldn't find a safer and cheaper contact route, or at least deliver three years' gold at once, thus eliminating two risky trips.
So when the Darter turned north into the East China Sea, only to surface later that evening, Captain Leahy thought he would visit with the passenger. This time they had a passenger who was not only bringing the gold, but clumsy bolts of cloth, boxes of jewels, a clumsily framed, autographed picture of an insignificant soap opera actor, and three outsized lacquered trunks. How they were ever going to fit into the rubber rafts, he didn't know. But he was grateful that he had gotten away with refusing to surface and carry electronic gear that would pick up, of all things, television shows that some idiot in the Pentagon was thinking of beaming to the Pacific just for the Darter.
At that suggestion, Leahy had popped his apple.
"Dammit. There are safer and saner ways to transmit information than through television," he had said.
"It's not exactly information," said the admiral who coordinated CIA-Navy relations.
"Well, what is it?"
"Television shows."
"You mean newscasts or something?"
"Not exactly. The shows listed are, minus commercials, twenty-one minutes and fifteen seconds of As the Planet Revolves, thirteen minutes and ten seconds, minus commercials of The Young and the Raw, twenty-four minutes and forty-five seconds, minus commercials, The Edge of Life. Total transmission time would be under an hour."
"I'm supposed to surface between China and North Korea, with Russia looking on, to pick up soap operas? What's happened to you people?"
"We got the commercials knocked out," said the admiral. "With commercials, it would go an hour and fifteen minutes."