by James Grady
I said: “We’re sane enough to know we can die.”
We gave Jules and Yarrow pillows and made them lay on the living room floor.
Maybe the opposition agents in the car were a surveillance team. Maybe outside was where a snatch squad planned to net us. Maybe they’d use a ruse like we did to get inside, get Jules to open his door. If they opted for blitz door kicking—stun/flash grenades, charging armor plated SWAT troops with machineguns and shotguns and Extreme Force Authorized—then the best place to be was flat on the floor like a hostage who needed rescue or a conspirator who didn’t need another bullet.
“How long do we have to stay like this?” said Jules as he lay pressed to Yarrow.
“Past dawn!” said Zane as he tossed Hailey her coat. “But that’s just a guess.”
Jules said: “You don’t even know if somebody’s out there!”
“Somebody is always out there,” I said.
“Car pulls up across the street,” said Eric. “Front seat woman passenger gets out. Walks both sides of block. Gets back in. Sits and waits. Watches.”
“That could mean anything!” argued Yarrow. “They could be anybody!”
“Parked in front of a fire hydrant,” said Eric.
Russell said: “Cops. Catchers. Killers.”
“Or arrogant fools,” said Jules. “You could be wrong.”
Yarrow said: “You’re running from invisible enemies.”
“Welcome to the real world,” I told her.
On the roof, we ran like five mice. If we’d been like the pigeons we spooked who cooed and flapped off to safety in the night, we could have made silhouettes against the full moon like Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys.
“Vic,” said Hailey as we climbed over the firewall between Jules’s building and the next residential behemoth: “How long do you think Jules and Yarrow will lay there?”
“Long enough.”
Hailey smiled in the moonlight. “That’s nice.”
Zane said: “I hope you’re right about Jules stopping her from calling 911 as soon as the door closed behind us.”
We huddled in the shadows of a rooftop storage shed that smelled of tar.
Russell said: “If the team down below us are full service janitors…”
“Then it won’t matter if Jules and the Doc are laying down.”
Somewhere in the night streets below, a yellow taxi honked.
“Unintended consequences,” I said. “Proximity casualties.”
“We had to go there,” said Zane. “It was the necessary, the smart move.”
“Yeah. Look where it got everybody.”
Under that full moon we were part of New York’s indigo skyline. We saw the lights of the Chrysler building. The Empire State building. But no King Kong. No World Trade Center towers.
“Don’t worry them,” said Russell. “Wet won’t happen. We’re who they want.”
“Whoever ‘they’ are,” said Zane.
“Doesn’t matter,” I argued: “The CIA, our Castle Keepers, cops working blind on CIA strings or even just responding to a 911 call, outside conspiracy agents or inside renegades who’ve hijacked the legitimate hunt, a combo of all that.”
“Any way it plays out,” said Hailey. “caught is caught, dead is dead.”
Eric hammered open a roof door. We rode an elevator down, strolled out the front door like we belonged. We were one street over from Jules’s building, gambled that our hunters hadn’t yet scrambled enough troops for a full block coverage.
The first parking garage used an electronic key car gate and was too close to Jules’s. Second garage had easy in/out, but felt busy. Zane spotted the attendant in the booth at the third garage: “He’s some kind of out of it. Sleeping, on the nod, drunk.”
Russell and Eric slipped around him without his eyes opening. When they roared past him in a blue Dodge SUV twenty minutes later, the attendant’s lids never fluttered.
“Got it all,” Russell said as we piled inside. “CD player, no global positioning unit they can turn on to find us, seating for five, dust on the hood so I figure it’s not used every day and won’t be missed, and if we’re lucky, no secret theft-tracking system.”
We parked near our Chelsea hotel, left Hailey behind the wheel with Eric riding shotgun while us three hard guys risked the in-and-out, grabbed our GODS and matrices, went out through a fire door Russell short-circuited so the alarm wouldn’t ring, made it back to the SUV without getting killed or caught. Or maybe even seen.
Hailey climbed out and held the SUV door for me: “You drive. Big as this whale is, three men in the back seat still makes a crowd.”
“Rock us out of town, man,” said Russell in the back seat. “Get us gone.”
“No!” I said. “We can’t just go.”
“We sure as shit can’t stay!” said Zane.
“Think!” I argued. “They tracked us to that apartment. Doesn’t matter if they monitored the police radio traffic sending a cruiser to check out what a mourner called in or if we made some other slip or if they just got smart. They’ll get Jules and Yarrow to tell them we’re headed to D.C. They’ll get that info, doesn’t matter how.”
“Yeah,” said Hailey, “but it matters when.”
“When is now,” I said. “We’ve got to figure the regular route is blown. They know we’re going south to D.C. Toll booths, highway bottlenecks, a rolling box trap—they’ll be working on setting that up now, and they’re ahead of us.”
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” said Russell.
“But not like we planned,” I steered the SUV into traffic. “Or like they think.”
We drove away under Hot Zone Rules. Flank Man Russell watched the side streets out one rear seat window, Zane took the other. Hailey slid over the back seat to the cargo bay, rode staring through the red glow from our taillights as Rear Guard. Beside me in the front seat, Eric rode Slack, focused on all the cars streaming towards us in the opposite lane in case they’d organized Waterfall Surveillance with our stalkers circling a loop always coming at us and adjusting to the directions we turned by radio. As Wheel Man, I concentrated on keeping us a moving target.
We came into New York high over a bridge.
We gambled, went out low through a tunnel.
Rumbled through that long bright tube, refracted and reflected like the light caught and shot through Eric’s improvised telescope. If any hunters set an ambush for us in that tunnel, we’d all end up on the news, and that kind of high incident exposure meant keeping a cover story intact would be impossible. We paid the toll, knew the cameras snapped us going south, just like our hunters would expect.
But thirty seconds after leaving the tunnel, I whipped our SUV onto a curving off-the-route EXIT ramp.
“The Long Island Expressway,” said Zane. “The ‘L-I-E’.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” I hid us in the slipstream of a wooshing semi-truck. All we could see through our windshield was his cargo box’s back end. With luck, any cameras or Waterfall Watchers would have time to see would be his headlights.
Ten minutes later, Hailey reported no hungry yellow eyes stroking our trail. I eased off the truck and let that teamster hurtle towards midnight without us.
On the road again. The dark lonely highway. The everywhere night. The hum of tires on blacktop. The smells of some stranger’s car seats, a kid’s juice box, our sweat.
“What’s happening to us?” whispered Russell.
Out of my mouth popped: “Everything.”
“No man,” he said. “Seriously. Zane… He finally melts down so far he cools out. Me… I got it. I did it. All those years in the hospital… I feel…”
“Hollow,” said Zane. “Light.”
“Yeah,” said Russell. “You think our bootleg meds are working?”
“Dr. F said any med
s are just tools,” I said. “That we do the real work ourselves.”
“Or get it done to us,” said Hailey.
“There is that.”
Signs our minds couldn’t see just then flicked past the windshield.
Russell asked: “You think we’re still crazy?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Some things never change.”
“Thought you believed change was the only certain constant in life,” said Hailey.
“How crazy is that,” I said. “If I’m right, I’m on my way to wrong.”
“But where are we going?” said Russell.
Eric answered: “Washington, D.C.”
“Ultimately,” I said.
“Kyle Russo,” said Hailey. “A voice on the phone. Black letters on a white card.”
Russell asked her: “How do you feel? You and Eric?”
She sighed: “Feeling won’t matter soon for me.”
“So you’re the same,” said Zane. “And Eric… How you were at Jules’s… You’re still who you’ve been. But Victor’s starting to be funny.”
“I’ve always been funny!”
“Nah,” said Russell. “You just think you have. You’ve been too haunted, too much of a worrier, but now… You’re cutting loose.”
“Like this?” I flung both hands off the steering wheel.
As we hurtled 60 mph down the night highway.
“Whoa!” yelled Russell.
Zane lunged forward from the back seat.
But my hands beat him back to their grip on the wheel.
“You think that’s funny?” I demanded. “Funny ha-ha and not funny peculiar?”
In the rear view mirror, Zane frowned. Said: “Eric?”
Even an inferred command must be obeyed. From the passenger’s seat beside me, Eric said: “Vic held the steering wheel with his thighs.”
“Reminds me.” Hailey rummaged in her GODS. Snapped on a flashlight. Pages in the thick book Jules gave her rustled and turned. “Yeah, thought so. Russell, you know those white pills?”
“Yeah, I took one.”
“They’re birth control pills.”
“WHAT?”
I said: “Now you don’t need to worry when somebody says ‘fuck you.’”
“See!” yelled Zane. “Vic is getting funnier!”
“And I’m some kind of fucked!”
“Well…” I replied to Russell.
“If you’re fucked,” said Zane, “think about the teenage girl back at the school near that Starbucks who dumped her contraceptives on us for a few bucks.”
“Amateur crazies.” I sighed.
“What about us?” said Russell. “We’ve been pros, but now…”
“We still got our standing,” said Zane. “Dr. F claimed that no matter what trauma triggers shot us to crazy, we wouldn’t have gone down so deep if we hadn’t been pre-disposed to by broken genes or kid stuff.”
“So you need to already be insane to go crazy?” I said. “Seems too absurd.”
Our tires hummed over the road as the night flew past us.
Russell handed one of his CDs to Eric. Our engineer fed it into our stolen car. A pause, then Bruce Springsteen sang to us with his lone voice and acoustic guitar off his Nebraska album, pleaded to fate for the unseen state troopers not to stop him, to let him get away.
We’re all fugitives.
The road hummed our stolen car’s tires.
Eric rode in the glow of our dashboard lights.
“Hey,” I told him. “Back there in the city. At Jules’s. You were terrific.”
His blush radiated all the way to my driver’s seat.
“Coming up with that telescope…”
“Leonardo da Vinci,” he said. “Camera obscura.”
“What?”
“Been done before. Sort of. Him.”
“Oh, well, that makes all the difference in the world, and pardon me for thinking that coming up with something brilliant like that under the gun was special!” I felt his grin. “Here I am driving a stolen car carrying a crew of crazies, hellhounds on our trail, and sitting right beside me is Leonardo da Vinci.”
Hailey reached up from the back seat and patted Eric’s shoulder.
I smiled: “Some guys got nothing but luck.”
28
Oh-oh, thought Eric on that long ago and far away day when the wreck of his life began as they slammed him down in a chair and steel bracelets clamped his wrists with an electronic click! Bad enough when police goons stepped out of the blowing sand at the construction site and pulled him away from the other foreigners being loaded into a truck. Bad enough when they put him in a black hood. Whisked him away in a car. Rode him for hours. Bad enough when they hustled him black-hooded through a fortress that smelled of gun oil and concrete, rust and urine. Bad enough he stumbled in the black hood, heard shouts. Screams. Pistol shot. Bad enough when they pushed him down those stairs. But then they plopped him in a metal chair and clamped him to it with prepared high tech manacles. That, that was real bad.
“You are in the White Lion.” A man’s voice. English. Accent: Iraqi.
The black hood flew off Eric’s head. Searing light made him squint.
Glasses! thought Eric. Does he have my glasses?
He saw blurs. A prison room. No windows. Clamps trapped him in a metal chair facing a wooden desk that held a snake-necked lamp. Behind the desk perched the blur of a man in an olive uniform.
Eric shouted in Berlin-accented English: “I want to see my German consulate!”
WHAMANG!
Oh God oh God oh! Eric shuddered from the fire blast vibration that he knew had to be shock treatment through the chair, a jolt of electricity.
“August 17, 1990,” said the man behind the desk. “Yesterday, our glorious Saddam extended his protection to you guest workers from Kuwait and Britain, France and Germany. He provided your detention for our mutual safety from the crazy war mongering Americans. You were brought here. To Basra. To the White Lion. To me.”
“My name is—”
WHAMANG!
Drooling, Eric knew he was drooling. Didn’ get to tell him m’ cover name. Engineer, no wife, no kids—that’s true ’n’ truth is the heart of a good lie.
Guards dragged Eric down a corridor to a black steel door they swung open. They put Eric’s glasses on him. The walk-in closet he faced was a box of dizzy. Random bricks rose from the box floor that rose and fell like a wave. A man-sized metal shelf sloped out from one wall. Giant teardrops of red and blue and green smeared the walls.
“Checa,” said the desk man in a state security uniform. He had a mustache. “Our checa. Named for the Tsar’s secret police. The Soviets who advised rebels in Spain loved your modern art. Kandinsky and Klee. Miro. Pavlov. Our glorious leader admires Stalin, so certain research from the West’s past has been provided for us.”
“I’m Hans Wolfe. I’m a German citizen here on a privileged work visa.”
Guards shoved Eric into the checa cell. Slammed the door which jerked shut with a hollow metal bong. Eric heard the clack of an electronic lock.
Standing didn’t work. He saw nothing plumb. No horizon. Walls, ceiling and floor winged at him as skreeing planes. Eric tripped over a brick, fell onto the iron bed that sloped down from the wall. Eric rolled off it. The bent planes, wavy ground, explosions of color, strobing lights: he was trapped in a surrealist painting.
Later. Guards pulled him from his cell. Beat him with L-shaped police batons from the previous decade’s U.S. foreign aid program. They threw him in the checa. He soiled himself. They dragged him out. Knifed off his clothes. Fire hosed him. Dragged him naked to that chair.
Mustache Man sat behind the desk. “What are the three questions?”
“I don’t know!”
Electricity jolt
ed Eric so hard his glasses flew off his face.
Behind the desk, the blurred man waved his hand in the glow of the snake-necked lamp. “Passport. Visa. Streams of computer code. Data means nothing. What matters is what works. A machine must obey. Or, engineer, it is a failure. Failure is unacceptable.
“Three questions. First question. Who are you?”
A rolling blast of electricity battered Eric into unconsciousness.
He woke writhing. In the checa. Guards jabbed eyeglasses on his face and pushed it towards two wooden bowls. The first bowl held gruel Eric fingered into his mouth. He slurped the second bowl of scum water.
Torture shouldn’t have started right away, he knew. They should have waited until I argued my cover story so they could tear it—and me—apart.
Do the math, he told himself. Allied forces massing along the border of Kuwait and Iraq. Langley will know I got yanked from the group of Western engineers at the construction site for the enriched uranium plant. They know I’m missing. They’ll find out I’m here. Tanks will roll over the Iraqi border to rescue me.
But not soon enough.
The White Lion will chew me to death.
Three choices:
Blow cover—Heck, spill my guts to convince them I’m most valuable alive.
Die without breaking.
Or escape.
Not going to die. Not going to break. Not going to traitor.
A guard yelled in Iraqi. Swung his L-shaped truncheon down on Eric’s leg. The guard’s buddy slammed the naked prisoner with a wooden bucket. Grampa Claude back in Ohio liked Hank Williams song ’bout a hole in his bucket.
Guards took turns clubbing and kicking the prisoner. He pleaded in German, in English. The guards were careful not to break his glasses. They want me to see, he thought, then realized no: they need me to see this swirling box of colors and strobes. They want me locked in here, unable to lock here out of me.
They didn’t notice his eyes searching beyond their clubs and boots. Dangling on wires from the cantilevered ceiling were metal shapes, some smaller than his hand, others bigger than a basketball. Amidst the wires on the ceiling, Eric spotted a metal box.