by Tom Clancy
Now that that was over, he could relax and let the Hammer swing him along.
Gonna be a good night, yessir, he could tell.
Let’s move it, Thor!
21
Newport Beach, California
The Newport Beach Community Presbyterian Church (USA) was not as ostentatious as, say, the Crystal Palace, but certainly it was L.A.: in your face enough so it wouldn’t pass for a church most other places. Philosophically, God’s frozen people tended to have conservative views on politics, conservative views on social issues, and of course, conservative views on religion. They were very liberal on converting the heathen, though, and never let a chance to start up an overseas mission pass by unmolested. An old running joke in the church was, the Presbyterians had offered to completely fund the Red Cross and CARE, provided those organizations would let them pack a dehydrated minister in with each big shipment of blood or food. They were mostly Republicans, Drayne figured out back when he was still going to church, mostly white and old Republicans, at that. His family had been members since Grandpa Drayne, a deacon of his church back home in Atlanta, had moved out here eighty years ago. The synods were different, but California and Georgia weren’t that far apart as far as the basics were concerned.
The building itself had a lot of glass, giving it a light and airy look, and the air conditioning unit out back, roaring to keep the assembled cool, was the size of a half-ton pickup truck. Drayne figured the reason the Baptists always preached about hellfire was because in those un-air-conditioned Southern churches, the congregation could relate to the concept. If the AC went out during a mild spring hot spell in a Presbyterian church, services would be canceled for fear the assembly would all die of heat stroke.
The place sure didn’t seem somber enough for a funeral, and most of the mourners were wearing anything but black. Looked like a flock of parakeets, all the pastel colors. What could you expect? It was L.A., wasn’t it?
Drayne’s father had been a deacon at one time, though his FBI travel had cut into that, but last Drayne knew, the old man still attended church every Sunday down in Arizona. If he wasn’t a true believer, he sure gave that impression.
Drayne himself had skipped every Sunday when his father hadn’t been around to make him go, and hadn’t been inside a church except for a couple of weddings since he’d left home for college. Oh, and that once when he made a major chemical sale to somebody who thought a Catholic church in Berkeley would be a safe place to do a dope deal. Turned out the buyer was wrong. He got busted after a fender-bender accident leaving the parking lot.
Drayne had managed to dig up a dark suit, a white shirt, and a plain tie that were all five or six years old, unworn for almost that long, knowing that if he came in a T-shirt and shorts, his father would probably pull his gun and shoot him. And even though he was retired, the old man always carried a piece when he went out, a habit he couldn’t let go of. He’d still be protecting the republic when he was in a wheelchair and blind.
Despite the fact he was pushing seventy, the old man still looked pretty healthy. His hair was white, and his fair skin, pale most of his life, was now a ruddy color that was almost a tan, from spending more time out of doors in the Arizona sunshine. Drayne knew he looked just like a younger version of his father. The family resemblance had always been strong, even though he had refused to believe it for a long time. Then one day he’d caught sight of himself in a rest room mirror as he was washing his hands, and lo! there was the face of his father staring out at him. Assuming he lived so long, the old man was what Drayne was gonna look like at his age.
Amazing, that.
His father stood outside the church, looking at his watch, waiting for Drayne. He wore a black suit, probably one of a dozen black or dark gray ones he owned, and since he hadn’t gotten fat after he retired, it still fit. A better fit than the suit Drayne himself had on.
“Robert,” his father said.
“Dad.”
“Let’s go inside. We’ll sit with Edwina.”
People were still filing in. The service wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes. Drayne knew that his father would be early, and that he expected everybody in the family to be early, and so it was.
Drayne offered condolences to his aunt and uncle and cousins. Irene, the girl who had showed him hers while he showed her his when they’d been nine, had grown up to be a good-looking woman, though she was married with three kids of her own now, and a little on the hefty side. Sheila, the middle girl, wore dark-rimmed glasses and a black dress with long sleeves, and had also gotten a little chunky. But Maggie, the youngest, who’d been a little geeky-looking girl with thick glasses, was now a beautiful redhead of twenty-five who, he had heard, taught aerobics somewhere in the Valley, and looked as fit and as tight as a violin string.
“Hey, Maggie. I thought you wore glasses. I don’t see any contacts. You have the laser surgery?”
“No, I’m on the NightMove system. You wear these hard contact lenses to bed, and when you wake up, you can go without glasses or contacts all day.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, it’s called Ortho-K. Been around for a while, but they finally got it pretty much perfected. You can go sixteen, eighteen hours, and in my case, I have twenty/ twenty without glasses.”
“Great. Hey, I’m sorry about Creepy.”
“Thanks, it’s such a shock. Can’t believe he’s really dead.” She leaned over and kissed him on the edge of the mouth.
Definitely a cousin worth kissing, Maggie. If it hadn’t been her brother’s funeral, he would have thought about hitting on her, though the family would have howled at that. Shoot, he wasn’t going to marry her or have kids, what did it matter if they were cousins? He’d seen the way she looked at him, she’d be up for it.
His father said, “How are things at work, Robert?”
He came away from his mild sexual fantasy. “Fine. I’m up for a promotion. They are considering me for head of Polymers. Be worth another ten thousand a year.”
“Congratulations.”
“How is Arizona? The dog okay?’
“Fine. The dog is fine.”
That pretty much exhausted everything Drayne and his father usually said to each other. But sitting here waiting for some preacher, who at best probably had not seen Creepy in ten years, to talk about what a wonderful boy he had been and God’s plans and all, Drayne felt an urge to poke at his father. He said, “You hear about what happened at HQ in L.A.?” There was no need to identify HQ, that was all it had ever been called in their family.
“I heard.”
Drayne wanted to grin, but of course, that would have been inappropriate in this place at this time.
“Sounds like something you’d pull,” his father continued.
For a second, Drayne felt a cold splash of terror. “What?”
“I haven’t forgotten the incident in your English class.” His tone was stem, disapproving.
He felt a sense of relief, and at the same time, of irritation. Jesus Christ! The old man was still pissed off about that? Drayne hadn’t thought about it in years.
It had been nothing. He’d made a little stink bomb, one with a kitchen match and a cheap ballpoint pen, the kind of things kids did. You took the ink cartridge out, put the match inside the body of the pen, and rigged a bobby pin in the spring, then screwed the thing back together. The bobby pin stuck out where the ballpoint tip had been, so when you pulled it back and let it go, it thumped into the head of the match, lighting it. But since the flame didn’t have anywhere to go, it flared up and down the pen’s barrel and vaporized some of the cheap plastic before it went out. The result was a short blast of godawful smelly smoke; that was it.
Drayne had been fourteen, in the eighth grade, when he’d dropped one of the pen stink bombs into the garbage can next to the English teacher’s desk when she hadn’t been looking. It had been a hoot, that stinking smoke belching from the trash, but some goody-goody had seen him do it and ra
tted on him. He’d gotten two days off to consider the heinousness of his crime, and the old man had taken his belt to him when he found out. And never let him forget it.
“I’m not fourteen anymore, Dad. That was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t say you did it. I said it sounded like the kind of childish prank you used to do.”
Drayne didn’t say anything, but it pissed him off that the old man was still throwing up ancient history in his face. Even though he had done the FBI prank, that shouldn’t have been the first thing out of the old man’s mouth.
“Nobody got hurt, did they?” Drayne finally said.
His father had been thinking about it. He came back fast: “But they could have been. People unwittingly exposed to drugs are at risk. Somebody could have been injured. What if some of the agents or staff had been allergic to the drug? On medication that it might have interacted with? What if there had been some kind of emergency needing a prompt response? A fire in the building, maybe a bank robbery or a kidnapping, and they had been unable to respond properly? The idiot who thought it was funny to chemically assault an office of federal agents didn’t think about those things, you may be sure. It was an irresponsible, criminal act, and he’ll be caught and punished for it. I hope they lock him up and lose the key.”
Drayne gritted his teeth. It would be a bad idea to say anything. Just let it go. What did you expect? The old man was gonna express admiration for the cleverness of the stone job? C’mon, Bobby, you know how he is. Now is the time for all good men to shut the fuck up.
But he couldn’t help himself. Drayne said, “Maybe not. From the reports, it didn’t sound as if they had any leads. Maybe the guy was too smart for them.”
The old man turned to look at Drayne, blinking at him as he might at seeing a dog turd dropped into a church social punch bowl. “If he had been smart, he would have known better than to assault agents of the FBI. They’ll get him.” He paused a second. “Do you admire this criminal, Robert? Is that what you are saying? Didn’t you learn anything from your upbringing?”
Drayne flushed but finally realized it was time to keep silent. He just shook his head.
Yeah, Dad, I learned plenty. Much more than you will ever know.
But then the minister arrived, a guy who looked to be about a hundred years old, and it was time to get down to the business of burying Creepy.
Malibu, California
Tad was still up, though about to crash, watching the morning bunnies and studs jog along the beach. The early fog had mostly burned off by nine or ten A.M., showing the brilliant blue hiding behind the gray.
Man, he was wasted. As the chemicals of the Hammer faded and lost their grip on him, he felt a bone-deep weariness begin to claim him. This was gonna be a hard one to recover from, he knew. Best thing to do would be to take a shitload of downers and sleep for as long as he could, twenty-four, thirty-six hours, let his body get as much enforced rest as he could. Couple of the long-lasting phenobarb suppositories, some Triavil, maybe some Valium mixed in, to keep the muscles relaxed. Some Butazoladin for the joints, Decadron for the inflammation, Vicodin and little snort of heroin for pain, Zantac for his stomach, maybe even a little Haldol, just for the hell of it.
Bobby, off at his cousin’s funeral, wasn’t gonna be too happy with him when he found out about Tad busting up the gym. Probably they wouldn’t want to be seen hanging together for a while, in case ole Steve the bodybuilder ran into them somewhere and made the connection. Tad didn’t think the gym rats knew he was tight with Bobby, he was pretty sure they didn’t know, but book it, they weren’t gonna forget him after last night.
It would probably be in the papers and on the tube, about the gym, but Bobby wasn’t plugged into the news, only what he caught on the radio when he was out driving, so maybe he wouldn’t hear about it until Tad had a chance to break it to him, put a little spin on it.
He managed a grin, even though his face was sore from the drug rictus he’d worn for most of the night. Yeah, spin, right. How much spin could you put on trashing a place and beating the crap out of folks because you had suddenly gotten horny?
Well, at least there weren’t any public recordings of the Zee-ster and Bobby floating around, Tad knew that. That was the important thing. Maybe Bobby was right. Maybe they should jet over to the islands and mellow out for a few weeks, come back when things settled down. Way he felt right now, the idea of swinging the Hammer again any time soon didn’t really appeal. Of course, if he lived through the recovery and got to feeling better, the desire would come back pretty quick. It always did.
Being able to do what he had done last night when he looked like a male version of Olive Oyl? That was a big fucking draw.
Hell, after he’d left the gym, he’d lost interest in sex, but he had driven up to the Hollywood sign, hopped the fence, and climbed up to the top of the big H. Sat there watching the city for a while, climbed down, and driven to Griffith Park, where he’d roamed for hours, just enjoying the green. Hadn’t gotten home until after Bobby left, which was a good thing, ’cause he’d probably have told him about the gym, being fearless at the time.
No, better he learns about it in a couple, three days, back when I’m straight again and it’s all past tense. Bobby could go to World or Gold’s or one of the other upscale places to work out, it was no big loss.
“Time to get the doc-in-a-box out, Tad m’man,” he said aloud. “And settle down for long nap.”
22
Quantico, Virginia
Michaels put a pair of dollar coins into the soft drink machine and pushed the button marked Coke. Change clattered into the return as the plastic bottle hit the bottom slot and rolled into view. He had pretty much given up drinking fizzy sugar water, but now and then he indulged. His father had liked the stuff; he drank three or four a day.
It brought back old, pleasant memories from his childhood to sit and sip one.
He took the Coke out, fed the change back into the machine, added another dollar coin, and looked at Jay Gridley.
“Club soda,” Jay said.
Michaels pushed the button. Three bucks for two soft drinks. What a racket.
“So you can’t come up with any history on Frick and Frack other than they were at a conference at the same time twenty years ago as teenagers?”
Jay took his bottled drink and popped the cap off, then swigged from it. “Nope. I know there’s something there, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“Well, don’t kill yourself looking. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway. Better you should concentrate on the drug thing. We find what they want, they are off our back. Any leads there?”
“Nothing to speak of. The local cops and the DEA are all over Zeigler’s place like white on rice. He had to get the drug from somewhere, and they figure if they backtrack him enough, they might find something.”
“You don’t?” Michaels drank some of the Coke. Okay, so it was bad for you, but sometimes you just had to indulge. He didn’t smoke, or drink more than the occasional beer or glass of wine. He ate pretty well; he worked out every day. A bottle of Coke now and then ought not to kill him.
Famous last words.
Jay said, “Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Guy like that, big-time movie star, he probably didn’t play golf with his connection. I’d be real surprised if he had a listing in his address book under Dope Dealer.”
Michaels shrugged. “So how do we run the dealer? Wait for somebody else to go berserk and backtrack them?”
“Don’t have to wait,” Jay said. “Apparently some guy walked into a gym in Santa Monica last night and laid waste to the place. Threw some guys bigger ’n Hercules around like rag dolls when they objected to him feeling up the woman working the desk, who apparently was pretty well-built herself. Knocked doors down, punched holes in the walls, like that.”
“The police have him?”
“Nope, he got away. We got the description — he sounds like a beatnik from what the witnesses said
— and we have the police sketch.”
Jay grinned, and Michaels joined him. Police sketches all seemed to look alike, and not very much like any of the guys they were supposed to represent. Plug a saint into an ID kit, he’d come out looking like a thug.
“According to the reports, after he got working, this guy went to the security cam setup, tore up the recording device, and made off with the disk drive medium.”
Michaels considered that for a few seconds. “So he was not so stoned he couldn’t think about covering his ass.”
“Maybe. Or maybe there was something on the disk he wanted, though it probably wasn’t him. According to the complaint, all the people involved swear they would have remembered this guy if he’d ever been in their place. Guy was built like a toothpick, bodybuilders notice such things. That he was the proverbial ninety-seven-pound weakling made his rampage all that much more amazing. The bodybuilders couldn’t believe it. Got to be our friend Mr. Purple Cap responsible… or a major number-busting coincidence.”
“So what good does this do us?”
“Well, we know that three of the dealer’s customers live in or around L.A. The rich woman, the dead movie star, and the live beatnik. I’m thinking maybe our dealer might like the sunny lifestyle. The shelf life of this mojo drug is pretty short, it rots in a day or so, and for the Zee-ster to get stuff himself, then to the rich girl, and for her to have time enough to use it? I’m thinking maybe the guy who supplied Zeigler is not halfway around the world. FedEx, or even a paid courier, are limited by the speed of a jet. The farther away he is, the narrower the window when the drug will still work.”
Michaels nodded. “Okay. So hypothetically speaking, maybe he lives within spitting distance of SoCal. Does that help us much?”
“Narrows down the search. I can start checking chemical companies, drug supply houses, running lists of convicted dealers, like that. And maybe the cops will turn up something on the late Mr. Zeigler’s travels.”