Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  52

  Kirsten Kane lost her grip on the cardboard box. It fell to the ground, spilling some of its contents. The framed copy of her Georgetown Law degree landed faceup on the front steps of her apartment building. She squatted and began to stuff the memorabilia back into the bursting box. Amazing how much crap one collects in nine years, she thought to herself.

  “Let me help you there,” said a voice.

  “I’ve got it,” she said, too engrossed in her own thoughts to pay any real attention to the would-be good Samaritan. She had replaced everything in the box when the voice spoke again.

  “Looks like somebody’s reinventing herself.”

  And then she knew. She left the box on the sidewalk and straightened up.

  “You quit or he fire you?” Randy asked.

  “I quit before he could fire me.”

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Weird. I haven’t been unemployed since I was a sophomore in high school.”

  He nodded. “I know what you mean. I keep feeling like I ought to be doing something, except I don’t have any idea what it is I should be doing.”

  “I’m going to take my time,” she said. “I’m not in any hurry to move on to whatever comes next.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  “You going to continue your quest to find out who you are?”

  “I already know.”

  “Really?”

  “I used to think that once I knew my name and my past history, I’d know who I was.” He laughed a bitter laugh. “Turns out to be too corny for words. Turns out…it’s not about having a name or a history…turns out who I am is inside of me, not something out there in the great beyond somewhere.” He waved a huge hand in the air.

  “That’s not corny.”

  “Sounds like the last line of a bad movie.”

  “It does not.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No. I think it’s great you found yourself.”

  An uneasy silence settled over the street. He seemed to be having an internal discussion with himself. She reached for the box.

  “I had an idea,” he said.

  She straightened up. “About what?”

  “Reinvention.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was thinking Rome.”

  “Rome?”

  “I was thinking it might be just the place to…you know, just the place to take stock before, you know…before moving on.”

  “I’ve never been to Rome.”

  “So why don’t you come along?” he said.

  Her jaw moved a couple of times before words came out of her mouth. “You mean like…you and me…like…in Rome?”

  “Yeah. Like that.”

  “That’s crazy. You and I hardly—” The rest of the sentence stuck in her throat. “I’d have to think it over,” she said finally.

  “There you go being sensible again.”

  She grinned. “It’s in the blood, I guess.”

  “Okay,” he said, picking up the box and handing it to her. “Take care now.”

  “You, too.”

  He turned and walked up the sidewalk. She watched him go. He reached the corner of Franklin and Densmore and started to cross the street.

  “Hey,” she called.

  He turned.

  “I thought it over,” she called.

  He smiled and wandered back her way. “I’ve got a spot of business to take care of before we can go.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “A week or so,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  53

  Jacobson wasn’t hard to spot, standing resolute and rigid on the street corner, exactly where he was supposed to be, diagonally across the street from the park. The guy had the prominent government official look down pat, not a bit like the kind of riffraff who would hire a hit man to kill an esteemed colleague.

  The question was whether or not Randy looked enough like Jacobson’s hit man to set things in motion. If not, the jig was going to be up before it ever began and Jacobson was probably going to be able to slide back behind his curtain of deniability.

  Randy stood with his back to the thick concrete railing. He stretched and checked the street…a groaning garbage truck and two people walking dogs. The rest of the city was still asleep. The fake mustache felt like a caterpillar crawling on his lip. He wore a black Barcelino cabbie’s cap and a pair of oversize sunglasses, from behind which he took Jacobson in, before removing the cap and running his fingers through his new ginger-colored hair in their prearranged signal.

  Jacobson nodded back. The message was: “He’s there.”

  They were on.

  Randy watched as Jacobson turned and walked through the revolving doors. Randy held his ground for long enough to see the guy seat himself in the window of the second-floor coffee shop. The aluminum attaché case by his feet gleamed like a silver beacon.

  Randy bumped himself off the banister and started down the stairs into the park.

  BOB WAS MIFFED. These clandestine little meetings needed to stop. Not only was this get-together on short notice, but they were meeting in the same place they’d met once before, down beneath the stairway in Conroy Park, back against the retaining wall where he’d have to force his way through the shrubs, probably ruin his coat.

  Jacobson was going to hear about this in no uncertain terms. This matter was supposed to be handled by now. Just as they’d planned, Walter Hybridge was taking the heat. His family was already issuing tearful denials on television. It was a done deal. What could possibly merit a meeting first thing on a Monday morning?

  He leaned back against the wall. Above his head, the traffic rushed and roared as the city came to life. He wondered how many people were still suffering the lingering effects of St. Patrick’s Day, still a bit green around the gills as they made their way back to their normal workaday worlds.

  To make matters worse, Jacobson was late. Bob checked his watch again, sighed and stamped his feet to keep warm. That’s when he caught sight of the feet sliding along the edge of the stone staircase, moving his way. Had to be Jacobson…and about damn time, too. A single large rhododendron bush separated them now.

  Bob readied his verbal salvo. He opened his mouth as the hand pushed the bush aside and he stepped into the narrow clearing at the back of the flower bed. His body began to vibrate. He felt as if he must be emitting a humming noise. It wasn’t Jacobson but a white-haired man in a trench coat, with a well-trimmed mustache and bright blue eyes. The man felt his panic and held up a restraining hand.

  He pulled a leather case from his pocket. “FBI,” he said.

  Bob looked to his right. Another figure approached. Vaguely familiar. Bigger. Younger. Wearing a black wool cap.

  “There’s nowhere to run,” the white-haired man said.

  “Do you have any idea—” Bob began.

  “Please.”

  “Has it suddenly become a federal crime to stand in a public park in broad daylight? What exactly do you imagine you’re…”

  The FBI agent was waving a photograph of what was obviously a dead body. Bob recognized the corpse. His stomach churned. He looked away.

  “Do you know this man?”

  “Never seen him before in my life. Now if you will…”

  The FBI agent gestured toward the photo. “Ronald Jacobson hired this man to kill you.”

  Bob felt his knees weaken. The contents of his stomach flipped over and threatened to spew from his lips. “No one was supposed to get hurt,” he forced out.

  The other two men looked at him as if he were speaking in tongues.

  “The tiles…” he stammered. “We were just trying to…” Bob looked from one man to the other. “We just wanted to stop the program for a while, don’t you understand?” Neither man seemed to have heard. “It wasn’t personal,” Bob insisted. “It was about money. About appropriations…” he tried. When the men appeared not to comprehend, he went on. “The generals wante
d the space program stopped for a while so they could use the money for the war.” He looked for understanding. Finding none, he segued, “We are at war, you know,” he tried. The righteous indignation fell flat.

  “Which generals?” the younger man asked.

  Bob Reese began to stammer. “I wasn’t the one who—” He stopped himself. Sirens began to fill his ears. Above his throbbing head vehicles screeched to a halt. More sirens, whooping their way, closer, louder, groaning to silence, and then the sound of voices followed by the slap of feet running down the stairs in the seconds before the sound of something metal, something on wheels bouncing his way.

  “Mr. Reese,” Agent Moody said. “We’re going to go through a little charade here for Mr. Jacobson’s benefit.”

  “I…I don’t understand…I…”

  Another pair of agents pushed their way through the shrubbery.

  Agent Moody gestured toward the pair of younger men. “Please go with these gentlemen,” he said.

  “It wasn’t personal,” Bob muttered. “We just wanted to…”

  They took Bob Reese by the elbows and led him away. Randy and the FBI agent followed them out into the park. A cadre of agents was keeping gawkers at a distance as the ambulance attendants carried the gurney back up the stairs to the waiting aid car. Even up close, the bloodstains on the sheet looked real.

  Agent Moody looked over at Randy.

  “Go,” he said.

  RANDY RECITED THE directions in his head as he walked along Beacon Avenue. Three blocks north. Left on Cavanaugh. Halfway down the block…just past the Gnu Deli Delhi, left into the alley, all the way down the end.

  He checked his watch: 5:57 A.M. This part of the city was strictly business. Housing was virtually nonexistent. Nobody was on the street as he stopped at the mouth of the alley. Somewhere in the distance the roar of a truck rumbled to his ears. He took a deep breath and made it a point not to look over his shoulder.

  The alley was long and dark, running, without interruption, for an entire city block. A collection of overflowing Dumpsters jutted out from the right-hand side of the alley. He kept as far left as he could, trying to keep his feet out of the stinking refuse and broken glass as he worked his way across the rough stones.

  Halfway down the alley, Randy could make out a jagged silhouette standing at the far end. He hesitated as the figure stepped away from the bricks, into the center of the narrow confines.

  He kept his hands in his pockets as he moved along. To his right the scurrying of rat feet made his skin crawl. He kept moving. The figure bent at the waist and set the attaché case on the ground.

  “I had hoped we would never have occasion to meet,” the figure said. “Nothing personal, I’m sure you understand.”

  “Everything’s personal,” Randy said.

  The guy kept his right hand in his pocket as he gestured with his head toward the case. “As promised.”

  Randy stood still. Something about the guy set his nerves to jangling. Beneath the layer of bureaucratic blubber, Randy could sense something…something…He squatted and groped for the case’s handle, keeping his eyes glued on the dark shape and wondering where in hell Moody and the rest of the FBI were. The deal was done. Money was changing hands. They were supposed to be appearing about now. The roar of the truck drew ever nearer.

  Without willing himself to do so, Randy found himself looking back over his shoulder, back the way he’d come, back in the direction the cavalry was supposed to be riding to his rescue just about now. Big mistake. Damn near his last.

  Jacobson was quick. He had the silenced automatic out of his pocket in a flash.

  All Randy could do was raise the case in front of his face. The slug came out of the barrel as nothing more than a loud hiss, a lead comet tearing through the metal, coming out the far side so close to Randy’s face he felt as if he’d been branded on the cheek in the second before he threw the case at the guy and began to reel backward like a Friday-night drunk, flailing his arms as he sought to regain his balance. The guy blocked the case with his forearm and raised the gun again.

  Randy dove behind the nearest trash bin as another hiss gouged a furrow in the brick closest to his face. He used every bit of his strength to propel the oversize metal container in a half circle, forcing the rank, rusted wheels across the littered surface until he thought his shoulder would surely break from the socket, staying low, angling the Dumpster across the alley sideways, filling the entire space with a ton and a half of metal-clad garbage. He cradled his aching shoulder, scrambled to his feet, and ran.

  Ran toward the street in the seconds before the mouth of the alley filled with the diesel roar and the bright lights of the garbage truck whose groaning bulk filled the alley, leaving only inches to spare on either side. He heard a curse from inside the truck and then another as the red-hot buzz of another slug tore past his ear and smashed itself against the grille.

  He ran. It was all he could do. He was still forty yards from the truck when the driver pulled himself out the window, climbed quickly to the roof of the cab, and scrambled over the length of the truck before dropping out of sight as another bullet smashed one of the headlights.

  Unsure his aching legs could jump high enough to get up on the hood of the truck, Randy, in the time-honored manner of the pursued, went to ground, diving under the front bumper of the garbage truck, crawling beneath the roaring collection of pipes and engines and mufflers, using his elbows to walk himself forward faster than he would have believed possible.

  Despite the throb of the exhaust and the scrape of moving parts, Randy could hear the slap of feet coming up the alley behind him, could sense the moment when his pursuer went high, scratching and crawling his way over the hood and up onto the roof and the top of the truck, moving much faster on his feet than Randy could manage on his bleeding elbows.

  Whatever advantage Randy might have gained was gone. They arrived at the back of the truck in the same instant. As Randy flipped over onto his back and began to pull himself to his feet, his pursuer jumped down into the yawning mouth of the trash compartment. He was close enough for Randy to see the beads of sweat covering his face. The guy pointed the gun at Randy’s face and smiled.

  Trying desperately to get to his feet, Randy reached for the nearest piece of metal, sending the hydraulic compactor platform snapping upward with the speed of a freight train, crushing Jacobson’s legs like matchsticks. The guy screamed like nothing Randy had ever heard before as Randy pulled himself to his knees, still using the handle to pull himself upright, the truck groaning and shaking as the compactor drum rose in the air like a massive metal moon.

  The gun clattered to the ground. Jacobson was howling at the moon and shaking back and forth like a branch in the wind. Randy glanced over his shoulder in time to see Moody and his FBI minions arrive at the mouth of the alley. He grabbed the handle again. “Which generals?”

  Jacobson mumbled something. Randy pulled the handle. In his peripheral vision he could see Moody holding his agents back. The crushing power of the truck pulled a full-fledged scream from Jacobson’s lungs.

  “Which generals?” Randy yelled again.

  “Samuels,” Jacobson said in a high-pitched voice.

  “Who else?”

  Randy made a fake reach for the handle.

  “Crane…Crane.”

  Randy tweaked the handle. Jacobson went back to baying at the moon.

  “Who else?”

  Randy eased off on the power.

  “That was it. Swear to God,” Jacobson wheezed. “Swear to God.”

  Moody was at Randy’s shoulder now, pulling his hand from the handle and leading him out to the mouth of the alley.

  “You recognize the names?” Randy asked.

  Moody’s expression said he wished he hadn’t. “Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said. “Both of them.”

  54

  The late afternoon sun wore a smog halo as it splashed its last orange rays onto the ancient buildings. The worn pav
ing stones of the Via Minerva seemed to glow from within. Behind the couple, the ancient dome of the Pantheon rose in the air like a brick-and-marble mountain.

  Kirsten slid the front page of the International Herald Tribune across the table. “Seems you’ve caused quite a stink,” she said.

  He winced and pretended to ignore the page, sipping at his coffee until he couldn’t stand it anymore and then sneaking a peek at the lead story about how a pair of resignations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff were being scrutinized by a Senate subcommittee whose charge it was determine the extent of possible military involvement in an alleged effort to undermine the space program.

  While embattled NSA deputy director Ronald W. Jacobson was refusing to testify on advice of council, former undersecretary of defense Robert Reese was cooperating with the congressional investigation and was expected to testify in open session early next week. Recent allegations regarding the Venture tragedy…

  He pushed the paper back across the table. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” he said.

  Kirsten spread her arms and stretched. A yawn escaped from her mouth. She covered it with the back of her hand and apologized.

  He smiled. “Sounds like somebody could use a nap,”

  She gave him a wolfish grin. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  He squinted into the setting sun. “Let’s head back,” he said.

  By way of agreement, she yawned again.

  Paul…Randy…Adrian…Gavin. He wasn’t sure what to call himself these days. He threw a ten-euro note on the table and rose to his feet.

  A sudden break in the traffic along the Via del Cestan revealed the army of feral cats who made their home in and around the Pantheon, skittering from sunshine to shadow and back in search of whatever tidbits they could find, constantly in motion like a fast-running river of fur winding in and around the foundations.

  They strolled arm in arm along the narrow streets until they arrived at the Hotel Coronet, where they had been staying for nearly a month. As they mounted the three steps to the vestibule, a flash of yellow in his peripheral vision pulled his eyes back along the route they’d just traveled.