Torture and murder to some degree acceptable …
A great despair touched him. What if they found out, the Senators who would pass judgement on him, who would cast their votes for or against him, what if they learned of his presence in La Trinidad that night? They would see it as an impassive disregard of human life, an act of brutality by omission, cold-hearted negligence. They would call him psychotic, a monster. They would not be persuaded that what took him to La Trinidad that night was a sense of duty, a devotion to seeing wrongs righted, and America’s enemies … exorcised. I did what I had to do in the national interest, gentlemen. He wasn’t even able to convince himself that this was the reason anyway, as if what lay enclosed inside him were a black impenetrable emotion, beyond understanding, a complex configuration. There was a part of himself that he did not know and might never know. He shut his eyes and thought: I am not a monster. I want to feel. I do not know how.
Carolyn entered the kitchen, singing some tuneless ditty. She stopped when she saw him standing against the refrigerator. She came close, placing her hands on his hips, pressing her thighs against his, as if even now, after all the dry years between them, she thought a fusion possible. Laforge remembered Costain saying I shot the girl because she could identify me and these words echoed inside him and he was ferried back to his office in Manila, the room that overlooked Roxas Boulevard on one side and the Bay on the other, and Costain and Railsback were seated around the conference table and out on the ruined, lovely, rust-coloured Bay the air was implausibly dense with smoke from the stack of a steamer. He heard himself tell Costain It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it, we can handle it, unfortunate things happen in a war, and that’s what this is, Eugene, a small war we’re helping to contain …
He’d carried it off very well, he thought. He’d managed to look shocked by the turn of events. He managed to look quietly horrified while remaining eminently practical. Leave it to me, I’ll deal with it …
Carolyn poured some coffee into a mug on which was inscribed, in delicate floral fashion, her name. “Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“Truskett.”
“What did he want?”
“To congratulate me.”
“How thoughtful of him.” She sat down at the table. Steam rose over the lip of the mug. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing him again.”
“I imagined as much.”
“He has a reckless streak,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. But I sometimes have the distinct feeling he would throw everything over if I asked him. Wife, career – the whole thing. I don’t need to encourage this kamikaze side to his character, William. He needs stability more than anything else. Miriam is probably the one to give it to him.”
She looked into her coffee then raised her face and turned it toward her husband, who thought her beauty had a wistful quality he rarely saw. He walked to the table and, standing behind her, laid his hands on her bare shoulders. The bond between them was at that second strong and uplifting, as if they had just transacted an especially lucrative business deal on behalf of Laforge & Laforge, Incorporated, which was true enough – but there was more, an intimacy beyond the corporate superstructure of their marriage, that special closeness which defies definition.
Then he saw at the juncture of her neck and shoulder a red-blue contusion, a love-bite, Truskett’s mark – and he made a connection he didn’t intend, wondering how many marks had blemished the body of the girl Gene Costain had shot dead, what discolourations had been left by passion of a different order.
He dropped his arms to his side, turned to the window. Both car and van glowed in the noonday furnace as if they were about to explode.
The pilot of the twin-engine plane gave Teng no name, barely addressed him except with an occasional grunt, and even when he landed to refuel at a field near Frankfort, Kentucky, said only that he wanted a cup of coffee, without inviting Teng to share one. Teng wandered round the edge of the field. A leaden quality affected his limbs and his eyes ached from the brightness of the sun, which had seemed to trap the plane in a lozenge of intense light and hold it aloft. Toylike, it had floated, puttered, droned, as Teng slipped in and out of shallow sleep, dreaming sometimes of rain and typhoons.
At the Kentucky airfield he went inside the men’s room, washed his face and hands, and wondered about the pilot, who was presumably a mercenary Baltazar had arranged, perhaps a man accustomed to transporting illegal cargo without asking questions. The mute arrangement suited Teng admirably. He had no urge to speak. He wanted no company. When the plane took off from Frankfort he looked at the clock and realised he’d been flying a little over three and a half hours.
Below him lay arid fields, desolate hills, great forest tracts where here and there smoke from picnics or barbecues drifted in an indolent manner skyward, farmlands, meadows, cattle and horses, hamlets, villages, towns – all America, it seemed, had unfolded beneath him, and he had a sense not only of its vastness but its variety. He saw the blue swimming-pools of suburban houses, the flat discs of reservoirs, here and there the meandering line of a river forging its way through greenery, isolated farms located amidst mazelike dirt roads.
Cramped, harnessed into his seat, he pondered this diversity – rich and poor, rural and urban, black and white, desperate and complacent. What did these people so far below him, so busy with their lives, care about American misadventures on the Pacific rim? What did it matter to the farmer in that Kentucky field that Americans were despised in the foreign lands they conquered with their New World amalgam of naiveté and cunning, generosity and self-interest?
Teng studied the pilot’s firm hands on the controls. He looked at the meaningless little dials and gauges, the pilot’s dirty fingernails. He felt an inner drift. Vaporous clouds streaked past, but then the sky was monotonously blue again all the way to Pennsylvania, where the great conglomeration that was Philadelphia sullied it with acids and smoke, an artificial mist engulfing the small plane. But then the air cleared and the craft started a gradual descent about forty miles beyond Philadelphia, down toward green countryside and white houses and clustered villages. In the distance Teng saw the broad, greenish Delaware River crossed here and there by bridges. And still the craft dropped, landing finally at Central Bucks Airport on the edge of Doylestown, a harsh landing, a skip and a bump, a second skip, a second bump.
When the pilot had brought the plane to a halt he turned to Teng. He took from his pocket a car key. He said, “It’s a 1984 Chevy. Black. New Jersey plates. 7DCD 655. You’ll find it parked in the lot. Look in the glove compartment. That’s it. That’s all I got to tell you.”
Teng closed his hand around the key, unbuckled his seat-belt, opened the door, jumped down. Light-headed, giddy from many hours of flying, he went to look for the car. The plane had already begun to move again, rolling away from him, taxiing back to the position for take-off.
Teng walked through the heat to the parking-lot. He found the Chevy, unlocked it, tossed his overnight bag on the back seat. Then he opened the glove compartment. Inside, wrapped in a leather pouch, was an automatic pistol. There was also an envelope, which Teng unsealed. It contained a detailed map of the vicinity, with arrows drawn carefully in red ink. His route. An arrow larger than the others indicated his destination; an exclamation point had been inscribed beside it. On the margin of the map was written the address in capital letters, and stapled to the very edge was a coloured photograph of the man called Laforge. He had smooth features, a face reminiscent, Teng thought, of a priest, a man to whom you might unburden yourself, if absolution was what you sought. Teng gazed at the white hair neatly combed, the perfect set of the mouth, the firm jawline. Here was a man who took some pride in his appearance.
What you couldn’t see in the picture was cruelty. But how could you photograph evil?
Teng felt revulsion. He removed the photograph from the map and put it down on the passenger seat. He spread the map open over the picture and studied it, the thin veins of
country roads, the yellow geometric shapes that designated towns, the red triangles that were libraries, the blue stars where courthouses stood; a map of considerable detail, almost intimate in the way it revealed the contours of Bucks County. He looked at the red-inked directional arrows and saw how they ended in the bold exclamation point on the edge of a town called New Hope. New Hope was also the name of a district of Manila. Bagong Pag-Asa. New Hope.
His route, his weapon, his victim. What else did he need for revenge but the courage to go through with it?
He inserted the key in the ignition and turned it. The car at once came to life. Teng’s hands were locked a little too tightly on the wheel. He hadn’t driven in a long time, maybe a year, fifteen months, when he’d been employed as a taxi driver by the Blue Cab company that serviced the Philippine Plaza Hotel in Manila. He listened a moment to the engine, studied the dash. The Chevy was automatic, unlike the troublesome cab he’d driven.
Nervously he put the vehicle in reverse and backed out of the lot, concentrating so hard on the act of driving that he failed entirely to notice the grey car about a mile behind him as he headed out of Doylestown.
All airports in the vicinity had been placed under surveillance by order of Hugo Fletcher. All bus depots, railroad stations, car rental offices – wherever Teng appeared, Fletcher needed to be sure he was spotted, followed, and logged. The man in the unremarkable car, a dogged time-server named McTell, used his car phone to call the Philadelphia office of the FBI with the news that Teng had shown up and was heading east on Mechanicsville Road. Twenty minutes later McTell called again to relay the information that Teng had checked into a room at a motel, looking – as McTell phrased it – ‘a very tired guy’.
It was Teng’s intention to spend a few hours in the motel, shower, refresh himself, and then when it was twilight and some of the heat had gone out of the day, to leave for New Hope, where he’d observe Laforge’s property before deciding the best plan of action. What kind of security did Laforge have? How many men? Were there dogs? He needed to know what lay ahead of him.
He slid the chain on the door, drew the curtains and lay on the bed, eyes open, following the scar of a crack in the ceiling. In one hand he held the gun loosely, getting the feel of it, aiming it idly at the crack as though it were a vein in Laforge’s head. He imagined pulling the trigger once, twice, three times, emptying the chamber into Laforge’s face, leaving him disfigured in death as Marissa had been left.
20
Under an extravagant sun Charlie Galloway drove a rented Nissan along Interstate 95, which skipped the edge of Philadelphia and followed the western bank of the Delaware River, passing a massive cluster of ships in the Naval Yard, power stations pumping grimly away, abandoned warehouses reminiscent of toothless crones lamenting a tragedy so old nobody can quite remember it exactly. He had the feeling the air was dead and if he rolled down his window he’d smell camphor or embalming fluid or something equally noxious.
A vast poster loomed over him, throwing a great velvet shadow. GOLDEN CRADLE. UNPLANNED PREGNANCY? LET US HELP. His head was filled with visions of unhappy girls knocked up by boys who had promised, in the spur of passion, marriage and dignity and two cars in the garage. By a stroke of the irony that lightens all our lives, a nunnery lurked beyond the poster, an ancient ivy-covered building in whose sunny grounds a couple of black-garbed nuns strolled arm-in-arm. Brides of Christ here, unclaimed brides over there. The juxtaposition pleased him.
Close to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Galloway put his foot down hard on the gas-pedal. In a few minutes Philly was gone and countryside zoomed in, and Charlie Galloway came off the Interstate at the exit for New Hope.
The English had left an indelible mark on this part of the world. There was yearning here, a longing for a society different from America’s own, a sense of Ye Olde This and That, expensive enclaves of large houses, developments called Hunter’s Crossing or Fox Hollow. If you listened hard enough you might imagine the yap of unleashed hounds, horses crashing through thickets in pursuit of a sorry fox. Englishness permeated this landscape. Did they partake of afternoon tea in these large houses? Scones? Sherry at twilight? I say.
Galloway came to the town of New Hope. If he’d entertained the notion that this place might raise his spirits he was mistaken. It wasn’t a town in which he felt inclined to get out of the car. A settlement of exaggerated quaintness, history in formaldehyde, its sidewalks were mobbed with tourists, ice-cream suckers, purchasers of maps and prints, used books, browsers peering through windows in which whole zoos of soft animals existed in gingham, glass-eyed, hand-stitched horror, bears and cows and pigs, funny-faced dolls, mutant offspring of long-forgotten Cabbage Patch kids, that made you want to throw up because your system couldn’t ingest this much cuteness in one go.
He drove on. New Hope wasn’t his kind of town after all.
Away from the centre, the cosy yielded to the banal, the quaint to the hyper-ordinary: supermarket, gasoline station, dime store, pharmacy, the kind of functional hard-edged buildings you saw anywhere in America. He could handle this. Pick-up trucks, baseball hats, plaid shirts, blue jeans, this was unpretentious, simpler than the main drag of the town, with its claim on history and the tourist dollar.
He saw a Holiday Inn and was delighted by its familiarity, by the simplicity that, when you got down through the crap, was perhaps the true heart of America. What pleased him most was the stark purity of place, a functional motel at the edge of a functional highway, nothing hidden, no shadows, no undercurrents. He parked his car, went inside the lobby, helped himself to a free map of the area and studied it for a while over a cup of coffee which shook in his maddeningly unsteady hand. Would a day come when he’d be still? When pulses and quivers wouldn’t rack him as they did?
After considerable scrutiny he found the poorly marked road that led to the Laforge property, folded the map, finished his coffee. He walked round the lobby, gazed from the window at the highway shimmering in heat, then went to the pay telephone and dialled Clarence Wylie’s number.
“This is your wandering Scot keeping in touch, as promised,” Charlie said.
Clarence Wylie was muted in a fashion Galloway found disquieting. Clarence usually answered his telephone in a hearty manner, a bark. “Charlie, listen. Vanderwolf called me in.”
“And?”
“He knew I’d been digging, he knew I was feeding the stuff to you. I’m rusty, Charlie. I underestimated the bastard’s omniscience. A few years ago I would’ve known better.”
“Does he know where I am?”
“Generally speaking. And he doesn’t want you getting near Teng. He wants you out of the picture. Tell Charlie to come home. That’s his message to you. You could be in trouble. I get the impression he used a capital T. It doesn’t sound like a picnic in the park. He wants Teng before you. That’s what it’s all about. You might manage to get in the way of the great machine. He doesn’t like that idea.”
“He believes I could steal the Bureau’s thunder?” Galloway observed a black truck screaming along the highway, squandering in its passage a pall of noxious smoke.
“That’s what he says anyway.”
“And you’re not convinced.”
“I don’t know what to make of it. I really don’t. I get the feeling he’s keeping something back. But what? On the one hand, it’s hard to buy the idea that Vanderwolf would worry about one lone cop. No disrespect, Charlie. But I can’t see him losing sleep over you. On the other, what else could be worrying him? I can’t read his mind. I’ve been through the alternatives, and they’re pretty damn slim. He doesn’t want you up there in Bucks County – why? Because there’s something you’re not meant to know? Like what? Has Washington warned him about something? Is Teng important to somebody? You figure it. I’m tired.”
Charlie said nothing. He thought of bevelled mirrors wherein reflections were distorted. He thought of the FBI, a gallery of such mirrors, where distortions passed as reality and perve
rsions of language masqueraded as truths. Masked prestidigitators in grey suits and button-down shirts claimed to keep America safe. Safe from what? Charlie Galloway wondered. Errant Scottish boozers?
“I assume agents are looking for me,” he said.
“You can be sure they’ll have their eyes open,” Clarence said. “In your shoes, I’d take Vanderwolf’s advice. I’d pack it in, Charlie. I’d come home.”
“Fuck Vanderwolf.”
“I hear bravado, Charlie.”
“You hear determination.”
“Listen to me. Get the next flight back. Leave it alone. Why don’t you work out your life some other way, Charlie? Walk away from Teng. It’s a bad situation.”
Galloway didn’t respond to Clarence. He couldn’t.
He’d come all the way across the continent on a drunkard’s prayer, ill-considered, unplanned, a compulsion. But when you were a drunk only the compulsion mattered. Only the grand picture, not the details. He couldn’t walk away from Teng, who had become his redeemer, the other half of his survival equation. Without Teng, how could Charlie Galloway be complete?
He hung up with no goodbye. He gazed out at the highway. If agents were indeed looking for him, then his only plan was to find an obscure place and wait for dark, because he understood that Armando, like all assassins a night creature, would make no move against William Laforge until the sun had gone down.
When Armando Teng woke in his motel room he checked the time at once. It was almost seven o’clock. He’d meant merely to rest but sleep had overwhelmed him. He’d dreamed of the young girl in Railsback’s house in Dallas, the face in the window, the beautiful soft open mouth. In this strange slowed-down dream he’d stepped inside the house, whose rooms were galleries rising up and up into clouds, and he’d clutched the weeping girl, holding her, comforting her, speaking very quietly to her in a language of dreams she couldn’t understand. She changed, became Marissa, but the dream disintegrated in vapour.
Agents of Darkness Page 39