by Jude Hardin
“Isn’t that what Homeland Security and the Secret Service are for?”
“They put on a good show for the media. Most of the real work is done behind the scenes. By us.”
“What’s the name of your organization?” I said. I couldn’t wait to hear what she came up with.
“You know the old cliché? I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you? Normally, that adage would apply. But you’re a very special case, Mr. Colt, and that’s why I feel comfortable passing this information on to you. But you can never, ever tell another living soul what I’m about to tell you now. You don’t even want to know what will happen to you and your family if you breach this confidence. Understand?”
I nodded, fascinated by the level of detail in her fantasy. She leaned over and whispered the fabricated name of the bogus organization into my ear. The name itself—the Circle—confirmed my suspicions: Kaliope Pendergrass was a level-one nutjob. She was batshit crazy, and she was playing all this nonsense to the hilt.
“OK,” I said. “So what do you want? I’m starting to get the impression you didn’t come in here for a guitar lesson.”
“I need your help,” she said. “I don’t know where else to turn.”
“What kind of help?”
“I inspected a government contractor the other day, and I came across a document outlining the exact time, date, and place that the president will be killed. The president, Mr. Colt. The document also named the individual responsible for the assassination. The vampire, if you will.”
“Yeah? Anybody I know?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s me, Mr. Colt. The assassin is me.”
She pulled out a knife and cut the cable tie binding my wrists. I sat up and rubbed the areas where the nylon strap had dug into my skin.
“You need help,” I said. “But not the kind I can give you. My wife’s a nurse. She can guide you toward the resources you need to—”
“I’m not mentally ill. I really am an inspector for the Department of Defense, and I really am a vampire hunter.”
“Prove it.”
She pulled a folding leather case the size of a wallet out of her bag and handed it to me. I opened it. There was a driver’s license on one side, and a laminated Department of Defense identification card on the other.
“Convinced?” she said.
“Who’s Diana Dawkins?”
“It’s the name most of the world knows me by. In fact, it’s the name you’ll be using from now on. You can call me Di.”
Just when I was getting used to Kally.
I handed the wallet back. “Looks official enough, I guess. But just because you work for the DOD doesn’t mean you’re not insane. What about the other organization? The super-duper secret double-naught spy outfit that tracks down terrorists and assassins? The one I’m not allowed to mention?”
“Take your left shoe off,” she said.
This had gone far enough. I stood and reached into my pocket for my cell phone.
“I’m calling the cops,” I said. “If you want to skedaddle before they get here, go right ahead. I won’t try to detain you, but I don’t have time for this bullshit.”
She pulled a pistol out of her bag. She aimed it at my chest, and I heard the safety click off. My stomach tightened and my heart started hammering in my ears. Crazy people with guns tend to make me nervous.
“Put the phone back in the pocket,” she said. “Have a seat.”
I put the phone back in the pocket and sat on the other stool, facing her. Once again, she instructed me to take my left shoe off. I took it off.
“Now what?” I said.
“The sock too.”
I took the sock off, tossed it aside.
“There you go,” I said. “It’s a pretty nice foot, as far as feet go. Size twelve D. Now what else can I do for you this morning?”
She pulled a black and chrome disk out of her bag. It was about the size of a drink coaster. She thumbed the catch on one end, and it opened like a clamshell. It looked like an ordinary makeup compact, except an eerie blue light radiated from the powder reservoir. She handed it to me.
“Take the mirror and look between your fourth and fifth toes.”
She had the gun, and she was totally off her rocker, so I figured I better do what she said. I spread my pinky toe away from the one next to it and used the mirror to look at the space between them. There was a crimson dot about the size of a pinhead located toward the underside of my foot, where only a contortionist could have seen it without a mirror.
“I never noticed it before,” I said.
“You can only see it with the special light.”
“What is it?”
“Let me have the light back,” she said.
I returned the faux makeup compact. Di took her left shoe off. She spread her toes, revealing an identical mark in the same anatomical location.
“We call it the blood tattoo,” she said. “It’s our way of positively identifying fellow members of the organization. Among other things.”
“I’m not a member of anything,” I said. “How in the hell did someone tattoo my foot without me knowing about it?”
“You’re a potential recruit. There’s a microchip under the mark, but yours hasn’t been activated yet. It probably never will be. We have hundreds of potential recruits all over the world, and most of them will live to be a ripe old age without ever knowing.”
“But how in the—”
“A few years ago, you were instrumental in bringing down a band of neo-Nazis called the Harvest Angels, the militant branch of a religious cult called the Chain of Light. The cult’s leader, Reverend Lucius Strychar, was a vampire.”
“He was out to kill the president?”
“He was an enemy of the United States. As was the leader of the Harvest Angels cell you came up against a couple of years later in Tennessee. The one they called Brother John. The Florida surgeon who has been working on your hand is one of us. He’s responsible for your tattoo, and the microchip beneath it. Like I said, it can only be seen with the special light. It’s a precise combination of frequencies developed by one of our laser specialists. The odds of anyone duplicating it exactly are about the same as randomly picking a predetermined star out of the sky.”
“Now that I know it’s there, what’s stopping me from ripping that chip out of my foot and selling this story to the New York Times or someone?”
“Nothing but your desire to keep living,” she said. “And your belief in protecting the American way of life. And, of course, what I mentioned earlier—that bad things will happen to your family if you ever share any information about the organization.”
After considering what she’d shown me, and everything she’d said, I decided she might not be nutso after all. At any rate, I felt violated. Unbeknownst to me, a surgeon had implanted an electronic device into my body and had marked it with a tiny tattoo that resembled a drop of blood. A tattoo that could only be seen under the glow of a special light. Maybe the conspiracy theorists had it right. Maybe Big Brother was watching all of us.
I didn’t want anything to do with Kaliope Pendergrass, or Diana Dawkins, or whoever this strange young lady decided to be five minutes from now, and I didn’t want anything to do with any secret government organization. I just wanted to run my little studio and teach my students and have a cocktail or two every night. I didn’t want any trouble, but it seemed to have followed me once again.
“So what do you and your organization want from me?” I said.
“The organization doesn’t know I contacted you. This is just me. Actually, I took a huge risk by coming here and talking to you. They would kill me if they knew. But like I said, I didn’t know where else to turn.”
“Why me?”
“You were on my list of potential recruits, and after looking at a dozen or so profiles you seemed like the most logical choice. You’ve been off the radar for a while, for one thing. You don’t have an employer to worry about,
and you’ve done some really good investigative work in the past. Someone is setting me up, Mr. Colt. They’re trying to frame me, and I don’t know who I can trust. I don’t know how many people are in on it, maybe people in my own organization.”
“Call me Nicholas,” I said. “Tell me more about the document you found.”
“It was jammed into a book of schematics, a set of road maps for the electronics on a speaker system. The system is being designed for a new stealth fighter jet by a company called Aero-Fleck Audio. The schematics, and the pages detailing the assassination, were in a safe at the company I was inspecting. There it was, all in black and white. Who, what, when, where, and how. It was written in code, and I didn’t have time to decipher all of it, but the who was definitely one Diana Dawkins.”
“You couldn’t make a copy?”
“No. The document safe is in a small room, and there’s nothing else in there. A guard is always posted outside the door while I’m doing the inspection. I’m searched on the way in, and on the way out. I couldn’t make a copy, but I have a very good memory. And I have extensive training in cryptology. I know exactly what most of the document said.”
“When is this assassination attempt supposed to take place?” I said.
“Friday, April twenty-seventh. Less than two weeks. The president is scheduled to deliver a commencement speech at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and from there his motorcade will travel to Jacksonville. The assassination attempt will take place somewhere along the president’s route, which will be determined immediately before departure.”
Brittney, my adopted daughter, was currently finishing up her sophomore year at UF. I remembered her mentioning that the president was going to be on campus. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time.
“Why don’t you just tell the president to stay home that day?” I said. “If he doesn’t come to Florida, then there won’t be an assassination attempt in Florida. They can’t blame you for something that didn’t happen.”
“The danger level is very high whenever he leaves the White House. That’s one of the reasons why my organization exists. We can’t tell him to stay home every day, and that’s practically what it would amount to. Anyway, it’s imperative that I find out who is trying to set me up. Don’t worry. Nothing is really going to happen to the president. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll have my eye on the motorcade the whole time.”
“I saw a television show about the president’s armored limousine one time,” I said. “From the way they talked, it sounded as though the vehicle is practically impenetrable.”
“They call it the Beast. It looks pretty much like an ordinary limo, but the body and chassis are encased in ballistic steel plate. The glass used for the windows is six inches thick. The tires are reinforced with Kevlar, and equipped with what they call run-flat inserts—polycarbonate inner wheels that allow the vehicle to keep moving regardless of air pressure. There’s an explosion-resistant fuel tank that’s lined with special foam and coated with a self-sealing resin. Even the floor mats are woven from Kevlar. You’re right. For all practical purposes, the car is indestructible.”
“So how is anyone supposed to assassinate the president through all that?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she said.
“Someone obviously wanted you to find the document,” I said. “They planted it there knowing—”
“That’s the thing. Nobody knew about the inspection beforehand. We always come unannounced, and there are several inspectors in the rotation. There’s no way anyone could have known it was going to be me on that day.”
“How many people have access to the safe?”
“Supposedly, only five. The internal Contractor Program Security Officer, the project manager, two of the engineers, and the CEO of the company. They’re the only people with the combination, and the only people allowed to take documents in and out of the room.”
“So those are the people you would need to look at first,” I said.
“Right. And I need to get back into Aero-Fleck, under the guise of a repeat inspection, but I can’t do it myself. Protocol dictates that a different DOD employee must conduct any official visits following a discrepancy.”
“And I’m guessing that’s where I come in.”
“Are you agreeing to work with me on this?” she said. “Because if you are, this is what I can do for you.”
She pulled out a pen and a Post-it pad. She wrote something down, peeled off one of the sticky notes, passed it over to me. There was a dollar sign followed by a three and five zeros. She was offering me three hundred thousand dollars to help her nail the culprits in what might turn out to be the most cunning and elaborate conspiracy in history. Three hundred grand.
It was tempting. I could expand my business with that kind of money. Maybe lease the vacant space where the video-rental store had been. Maybe start selling guitars and other instruments. Maybe contract some people to offer piano lessons and drum lessons and trumpet lessons. Bassoon lessons, if there was a demand for it. Any instrument you could think of. That’s the kind of place I aspired to own. That’s why I named my business Nicholas Colt’s Conservatory of Music. I had big plans.
“Any chance of getting some of that money up front?” I said.
“Not going to happen. This is a work-for-hire situation, same as if I were contracting you to put a new roof on my house. If we’re successful, you will get paid. You’ll just have to trust me on that. I know it’s a gamble on your part, but that’s the way it has to be.”
I took a prolonged look at the Post-It, and then I looked Di directly in the eyes.
“What if I say no?” I said.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic pill bottle. She held it up for me to see. The bottle was translucent yellow, and there was a single capsule resting inside. She gave it a rattle.
“It’s called Memorase,” she said. “Quite remarkable. It’s a chemical compound created by extracting a specific enzyme from the pituitary gland of a specific animal. The formula itself is a closely guarded secret. Even I don’t know the animal or the enzyme that’s used to produce it. All I know is that it works. If you swallow this, you’ll fall asleep for a while. When you wake up, you won’t remember anything about me or the conversation we’ve had. This meeting, and the twenty-four hours or so preceding it, will be a complete blank.”
“What if I refuse to take the pill?”
“I have a shot I can give you instead. Same drug, but of course the shot goes directly into your bloodstream. Some people have experienced really nasty side effects from the injection. Believe me, you’re better off taking the pill.”
I took a deep breath. “Can I have some time to think it over?” I said.
“No. There’s no time to spare. I have to know now. And Mr. Colt, let me make a few things perfectly clear. One: There might be some casualties before this is all over. Some people might have to die. In fact, it’s practically a guarantee. Two: Once you commit, there’s no turning back. You’ll be in it for the duration of the job. And last but not least: If everything goes well, I might call on you again from time to time.”
“Why can’t I think it over? Why can’t I take the pill tomorrow if I want to?”
“It only works on short-term memory. Tomorrow will be too late. I need a yes or no immediately.”
It was a lot of money, enough to get me where I wanted to go. Enough to open a big-time music store. My dream store. Opportunity was knocking, and at fifty-one years old I didn’t know how many more chances might come my way. If any. And, as much as I tried to deny it, I sometimes missed working as an investigator. Solving puzzles, saving innocent lives, defeating evil. It was in my blood.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Weeks later, after everything was over, I found Juliet’s private journal hidden in a private place. Normally, I wouldn’t have been ferreting around in her dresser drawers, or under her car seats, or in her purse, but by that time I f
eared I would never be able to talk to her again.
I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, if anything, but I knew I needed to hear her voice—even if only through her words on the page. When I found the diary, I felt as though I had to open it.
It was written in Tagalog, the official language of the Philippines, so I paid a college student who’d been taking some guitar lessons to translate it for me. Rey Panganiban was studying photography and drama at the University of North Florida, and he wanted to move to Hollywood someday and write and direct films. I guess he figured some skill on a musical instrument couldn’t hurt. It took him a week to translate the journal. He typed it, printed it out and punched holes in the paper and bound it all together with brass fasteners between two pieces of card stock. The way they put screenplays together, he said. Instead of trying to translate it word-for-word, he said, which would have been difficult for me to understand, he constructed what amounted to a narrative in English. A story, more or less, using Juliet’s rambling scrawl as an outline. He did a good job. I paid him five hundred dollars. I skimmed over a bunch of entries until I found one Juliet had penned the day I met Diana.
SUNDAY, APRIL 15
Nicholas has been acting strange, almost as if he knows. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know anything. This morning we were making breakfast together, kidding around, behaving for the first time in a long time as though we were actually enjoying each other’s company. Then, out of the blue, he got a phone call and had to leave. He said it was a new student. He said he would be making two hundred dollars for a one-hour lesson. I got angry, wondering if anything he’d said was true. I wondered if it was really a new student, or if it was something else. Another woman. He certainly hasn’t been paying much attention to me for a while. We make love maybe once a month, if I’m lucky. He says he’s tired all the time.