by Mark Russell
'You're dismissed, private,' Turner barked. He read the hurt expression on the young man's face, saw his clenched jaw and tightening shoulders. 'Don't worry, son, there won't be any negative comments on your performance report. I just want to be left alone!'
Unnerved by the violent outburst, Allister snatched up his bag and saluted perfunctorily before shuffling toward the back of the van.
'And take that with you,' Turner snapped. Allister turned and grabbed the small tin ashtray with a vice-like grip, not wanting to spill its ashy mound of butts. He climbed out of the van and eased its back door shut.
Turner dropped on to the vacated stool. He put on the headphones and listened in on the conversation inside the apartment.
Goldman and his guests had finished the main meal. Seated about the living room table, they sipped their drinks with the languid repose of well-fed diners. A candelabrum with burning candles stood in the middle of the table. Its wavering gold light highlighting a bottle of Australian Riesling and a green bottle of French champagne. Haslow and the Cuban sisters were without complaint as they chitchatted and sipped their white alcohol drinks. Goldman was relieved the main meal had been eaten without a hitch.
Earlier on, he'd bought two pre-ordered casseroles from Belle Laurant, a rustic Mediterranean-style restaurant in Fells Point. The casseroles were filled with clam, crab, calamari, prawn and lobster meats; along with green vegetables, cheese, cream, and a smattering of herbs and spices. Goldman had heated the casseroles, along with sticks of fresh French bread, in his two-tier gas oven. He'd done the honours, however, of making a large bowl of green salad garnished with herb and olive oil dressing. Of course he'd also made the pre-dinner quacamolie dip, this last complemented with gluten-free crackers.
Goldman didn't care if his guests were satisfied with the offering or not. Preparing the meal had been all he could do to stop from getting in his Saab and driving non-stop to Canada, or failing that driving non-stop to Mexico. Anywhere in fact. After learning the truth about his father's murder, he'd wanted to white-line himself from any further pain and confusion the day might bring. He'd even thought about catching the first available flight to Australia. Just up and leaving. A thought he hadn't entirely divorced. It was an appealing out to his less than satisfactory life in North America.
His homeland shone like a South Pacific haven awaiting his return. He remembered a simpler and fairer life there. But was aware of the tricks nostalgia played on the mind. Nothing remained the same. The juggernaut of time made sure of that. Anyhow, for better or worse, he was seated with his chattering guests, doing his best not to be broken by the day's events, which weighed down on him like the stone blocks of a collapsed wall.
He could see it was no ordinary night for Manuela, either. She couldn't keep from sidelong glances at Haslow, nor from lingering moments of direct eye-contact. She seemed attracted to the older chemist. Well good for her, Goldman thought. Undoubtedly the night's champagne had helped bring about some of the magic, judging by the rosy glow masking Manuela's cheeks.
He'd heard about Manuela's solitary lifestyle from Belize, who was certainly prone to complaint in that regard. Once during a visit to the sisters' Highlandtown row-house, he'd looked in on Manuela's room. He remembered the blank walls, minimal furnishings and cluttered book shelves. The bare-bulb room spoke of her humdrum existence in a new land, her tomes' spines of her dislike for Castro's Fidelistas and Marxist doctrine in general. In any case, Manuela's eyes sparkled with uncustomary verve as she sat at the table and listened in on the English-spoken conversation about her ...
'... well, it's not unreasonable' – Haslow toyed with his drink – 'to put aside some MPA for yourself. I mean, you did make it, after all. Of course, it goes without saying that it's illegal to smuggle classified drugs out of a military base.' He looked up at Goldman and chuckled wryly. 'Woe to you should you be caught.' The older chemist was of such cheer from drink and the night's company he seemed to have relinquished the patriarchal role he generally assumed while in the laboratory. Goldman couldn't believe the transformation, which was akin to an old snake shedding its skin. It seemed socializing with the fairer sex had proved the perfect prescription for Haslow's ongoing moodiness since his divorce.
'Jeez Rod ... I thought you would've been more upset by it.'
'It'd take more than that to upset me.' Warmed by liquor, Haslow glanced at Manuela and winked.
She smiled demurely and turned aside. Again Goldman sensed a growing attraction between the unlikely couple.
Haslow gulped down the last of his scotch. 'You know' – he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand – 'I once stole some Silverwood product myself, though it was years ago before you started working there.'
'Really?' Goldman was amazed by the disclosure.
Outside, General Turner hunched forward in the surveillance van and pressed the headphones against his ears. He was grateful for his padded parka and rubber-soled hiking boots as he sat in the cramped confines of the unheated van. He shut his eyes to better concentrate on the tinny-voice conversation inside the apartment.
'I suppose I may as well tell you now I've dragged it out of the closet.' Haslow collected his thoughts and ran a finger round the rim of his glass, before pouring himself a hearty measure of scotch. Manuela jumped up with a swirl of yellow frock and headed for the kitchen. She returned and dropped ice cubes into Haslow's glass. Her and Haslow's world was growing by the hour, a secret society of two.
'Well,' the older chemist said, plainly buoyed by Manuela's attention, 'I made this psychoactive compound back in '76. It was rightly called an intelligence-enhancer. The US Army was keen to equate recent advances in Europe. What I made was similar, though molecularly different for copyright reasons, to a drug marketed by a Swedish company to combat Alzheimer's disease. A powerful nootropic that stimulates brain cell metabolism by increasing the brain's use of oxygen and glucose; thereby stepping up cerebral protein synthesis – '
'Rod, please!' Goldman cut in. 'There are ladies present.'
'Who are getting very bored,' Belize declared, with a sharp rap of knuckles on the tabletop. Goldman could see she was in a fine mood. The night wasn't going her way at all. It was far too lame, by half. Most likely she'd done some coke before driving over, and most likely would duck into the bathroom to recharge her batteries. A Gitanes cigarette and a gratuitous line of white powder would be high on her priorities. Belize finished the last of the champagne straight from the bottle, as if hardly caring for her company, and gladly protesting their commonplaceness.
Haslow turned to her and said in a curt voice, 'If you can bear with me.'
The raven-haired Latino arched an eyebrow and made a faint snort. She turned aside and fidgeted with the empty champagne bottle – an army of one ready for battle.
Undeterred, Haslow turned to the better audience of Goldman and Manuela. 'Kathy Bosco, an anthropologist friend of mine, was studying a Brazilian Stone Age tribe who'd been misplaced from their natural habitat by rubber tappers and loggers.'
'An eloquent description for being turfed from the rain forest.' Goldman drained the last of his Riesling.
'Well Kathy and I met in Baltimore one night,' Haslow said. 'We discussed work. My copying of the Swedish nootropic, her frustrated attempts to get the small tribe she was studying to build huts and grow crops on the government pacification camp they'd been forced onto. Anyhow I told her about the intelligence-improving qualities of the drug I'd made.
'Well, one thing led to another. I gave her the drug's formula and she got a batch of it made in Mexico City. Needless to say' – Haslow paused, and his eyes sparkled with pride – 'after daily doses of the drug had been put in their food, her tribe grew to meet the demands of their enforced encampment. They built sturdy shelters from wood and corrugated iron. In fact, her tribe's crop production surged ahead of other tribes' on government camps. Incredibly these natives also developed a proclivity for Rubik's Cube.
'Rightly or wron
gly, Kathy never told authorities or the tribe itself about her “experiment”. All in all, it was an incredible juxtaposition of stone age people and modern biochemistry.'
Bingo! Turner looked reassuringly at the rotating spools of BASF magnetic tape on the surveillance van's recording unit. He now had dirt on Haslow as well. A dark grin spread across his face. He folded his arms and rocked back and forth on the van's stool, the better to keep warm.
Haslow drained his drink and looked at his woebegone workmate. 'So why do I get the feeling you're about to tell me something that'll make my exploits with Kathy seem like ... small potatoes indeed.'
'Yeah, you're right about that, mate,' Goldman said with downcast eyes. He brushed aside a coppery strand of hair and looked up at Haslow from across the dish-littered table, wanting to confess all he'd learned about his father's death. Hot candle wax dripped from the candelabrum, solidifying into pellets on the table cloth. Pearly mounds denoting the night's passage.
But the atmosphere at the table was far from harmonious. Belize's dark mood was worsening by the minute, and Goldman knew he had, by and large, contributed to it. She'd tried to lift his spirits earlier but he hadn't opened up to her, and basically had kept her at arm's length. A recipe for disaster, he knew. Still he'd only now got his thoughts in order. But was it the right time to discuss his father's murder? Probably not. All the same he needed to unload the burdensome matter from his chest. He sensed a tempting of fate, particularly with Belize. He had a strong feeling the night was far from over. Yes, the day was nothing if not strenuous.
Belize let go of the empty champagne bottle. It teetered on the tabletop, a glass plaything in the hands of gravity. 'Hey, I want to party,' she said with an imperious voice. 'You know, have a good time.' She glowered at Goldman. 'I didn't drag my sister along just to sit around like ... enough is enough, I just might go home, or better yet go to a nightclub!'
'Come on, Belize.' Goldman augmented his plea with an appealing smile. 'Look, there's something I have to tell Rod. It won't take long. The night's still young.' He winked at her and rubbed her ankle under the table with his foot, appealing to the intimate bond between them, to the good times they'd shared in the past.
Belize, though, wasn't having any of it. She popped up and headed for the bathroom, her determined face framed by sweeping hair.
Goldman stared at her retreating back and was at a loss for words. Wanting to break the ice, Manuela got up from the table in a more gracious manner. 'Sorry about her,' she said, in an accented voice tinged with embarrassment. She straightened her frock and collected the finished plates of food. She smiled at Haslow before carrying the hexagon-shaped plates into the kitchen.
Alone at the table, Goldman and Haslow fell into conversation. Recounting the afternoon's events, Goldman soon arrived at the crux of the matter. '... and I used Turner's password to get into this collection of digitally stored recordings.'
The warmth of Haslow's scotch was doing little to stave off a growing sense of alarm. The older chemist looked considerably more troubled by the minute. And who could blame him? Goldman was grateful not to be at his workplace as he recounted his unlawful doings in the computer room. He was grateful to be tucked away in the suburbs, a good distance from Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He took what ease he could from the sea of civilians about him, but such perceived company did little to assuage his troubled mind.
'... well, to cut a long story short, I discovered my father wasn't murdered by chance. It was a professional hit.'
Haslow looked up from his tawny spirit, from the melted ice in his glass. 'You're saying your father was deliberately killed that night? Come on ... '
'Sure. It's all on tape. I've even got a copy of it.'
'You've got a copy of the tape?'
'Damn right I have. I recorded it in the computer room this afternoon. Hang on to your drink and I'll go get it.’
SEVENTEEN
General Turner ripped off his headphones and unclipped the microphone from the panel in front of him. He pressed the transmit button. 'Unit One, this is Sea View One. Do you copy? Over.'
Unit One responded all most at once.
'Initiate plan,' the general commanded. 'Meet me in the back of the agency van in subject's street. I repeat, come immediately to the black Chevrolet van in subject's street. Out.'
Unit One acknowledged the general's transmission and signed off. Turner replaced the microphone and clenched his jaw as he sat on the van's stool. He felt a familiar concoction of tension and nerves. Another high-risk covert operation was at hand, and in the middle of suburbia no less. Still he was confident Goldman wouldn't prove more difficult than any of the other unfortunates who'd got in the general's way.
Turner had mentally arrived at this point several times in recent hours. And he'd always arrived at it on the premise Goldman had only heard Tape 64 – let alone have a copy of the tape he was prepared to play to anyone who would hear him out. Goldman had become a serious threat. A cindering twig that could flare into a damaging brushfire on the general's political landscape. The general had no choice but to act quickly and decisively, as he had on occasion in the past ...
Vietnam,1968. Turner was part of a UN and US Army platoon inspecting the war-torn land between the seventeenth and eighteenth parallels. The strip had been classified a Demilitarized Zone: the first forthright step toward any kind of peace in the South-East Asian conflict.
From out of nowhere, renegade North Vietnamese fighters opened fire on the platoon. Automatic gunfire took down several men and the platoon was forced to split up. Further gunfire exploded from the jungle on the edge of the clearing and the splintered platoon responded in kind from scattered positions.
Turner and four UN personnel, two of them inspectors, ended up in a crude ditch with only moderate foliage for cover. A badly wounded UN soldier bawled loudly from a bullet lodged in his lower back. 'P-please, shut him up,' one of the inspectors implored. 'He'll get us all killed.' Turner heard no murmurs of disapproval from the other men in the ditch.
The warring voices of the VC fighters drew louder in the dust-laden air. Weaponless, Turner braced himself and crawled over to the wounded soldier, taking in the uneasy faces about him. The man shook and screeched from undying pain – and would surely draw the attention of the renegade fighters emerging from the jungle. Turner drew the wounded soldier's double-edged combat knife, then demanded the combat knife of the other UN soldier in the ditch.
After brief meditation, and with a fluency that belied the brutality of the act, he drove the two knives deep into the wounded man. One blade went through his lower heart, the other through his thyroid cartilage. With his heart and vocal chords nullified as such, the only further sounds that came from the dying soldier were those of deflation: hissing and gurgling.
The renegade faction of the NVA battled it out with the rest of the split-up platoon, eventually killing the western combatants. The jungle fighters moved unwittingly past Roswell's huddled group and maintained a steady southern advance. Those in the ditch who'd witnessed Turner's unlawful killing of the soldier never reported it because they knew Turner had saved their lives. They also knew he wasn't the kind of man to get on the wrong side of ...
Now, Turner realized Haslow had heard enough to be a threat. The older chemist would probably tell all he knew to police should anything untoward happen to Goldman, or should Goldman disappear anytime in the near future. In fact Haslow could tell anyone about what he had learned. Turner stroked his chin and gazed at the shadowed floor of the van. He wanted to finish the matter tonight. Indeed a base part of him craved that blood be spilled, that any loose ends be mercilessly extirpated. After all he was a time-starved professional with bigger fish to fry. Grander concerns awaited his immediate attention.
He had an important NSC logistics meeting the following afternoon with Republican hardliner and lawyer Frank G. Carlocotti at the lawyer's ranch near Santa Barbara; and an equally important Los Angeles meeting the following d
ay with hardliner Richard V. Forrest; and on Tuesday he had to be in the Capitol to face a Senate Inquiry into the astronomical costs of the army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle. As always, he had much on his plate.
Turner tapped his boot on the floor of the van and waited impatiently for Unit One's arrival.
Belize Cheraz studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She looked good. Hell, she looked hot. She licked cocaine residue from off a strip of aluminum foil, then hawked bits of powder down her throat. An unsettling sensation spread through her lower belly. This wasn't the sensual pulse she normally experienced when the drug took hold. The pleasurable tingling that sometimes made her think she could get it on with the first cute guy who came along. Indeed sometimes back home in Cuba she'd followed her narcotic-induced cravings, in crowded Havana clubs, or after she'd finished the last set of the night at Tropicana and a hot guy from the audience would come up and buy her a drink because he wanted a chance with the sexy singer in the sequined gown who'd danced provocatively on stage, all the while singing in a husky voice which spoke of steamy nights in hotel rooms overlooking the cobbled streets of Old Havana. Yes, sometimes she'd got down and dirty without wasting time on preliminary chitchat; but that was before she met the finance minister, the love of her life, before she'd gone to jail, before she'd been forced to re-evaluate her hedonistic lifestyle.
Now, her crotch simmered like an acidic bulb. God help any hombre who tried to put it on me, she seethed. I'd bite his head off. She didn't know why she felt so bad, but her company wasn't any help. What with Scott acting like a miserable street bum, and her bookworm sister and that jerk-off Rod hardly worthy of her precious Friday night time.
She felt bored.
With a mean streak working its way into her. Something was wrong with the night. The air was thick and oppressive. She remembered a pop song she used to hear on the radio in Cuba, some twangy line about a bad moon rising. That's what it felt like now, like a malevolent satellite had come into play, its spectral light seeping into the pores of her skin. She was desperate for something to happen. Something big and out of the ordinary would suit just fine.