The man in black clothing fired one more shot from his automatic—the bullet thunking into the wood floor just to the left of the podium—and then vaulted the balcony railing like a practiced acrobat. His raincoat belled out like the cape of Zorro as he fell, and he landed on his feet in the red-carpeted aisle fifteen feet below.
More people screamed.
“Stop him!” a man cried.
“Are you crazy? He’s got a gun!” another answered.
If he’d hoped to have a better shot from the ground floor, then he’d made the wrong move. But the man simply took one look at the stage, waved his gun threateningly at horrified nearby onlookers, and then slammed his body hard to the right, hitting the latch of a fire-exit door. There was the breath of night, the sound of cars passing by outside, and the faint flap of raincoat—and then the man in black was swallowed up by the lamp-touched darkness of trees and parking lots.
The door whooshed closed behind him, slamming hard.
From his cover behind the base of the podium, Scarborough managed to glimpse the man jumping from the balcony, like some modern day John Wilkes Booth. Unfortunately, the man did not break his leg, but escaped easily.
Scarborough could feel the panic about to break through the audience. He understood group psychology all too well—if people freaked, they’d start running for the other exit sign as though someone had yelled “Fire” at them. Swallowing his own initial and reflexive fear, aware that another killer might be just waiting for him to poke his head up to take another shot, he nonetheless took the risk. He stood, found the microphone, and began to speak to the audience, trying to calm them.
“Please! People, calm down,” he said above the tumult, making himself an easy target, but counting the lives of others as more important. “Stay in your seats!” he ordered. His authoritative baritone bellowed above the crowd, and the noise died down. Heads turned his way, as though expectant of an announcement of a hoax. Instead, he turned to the side of the stage and glared. “Haven’t we got any security around here? And a doctor. We need a doctor, a man’s been shot. Call an ambulance—now!”
His commanding tone quelled the rising panic in the crowd and they stayed in place. No one rushed for the exit. There were no fights, no trampling. They all seemed to wait for what Scarborough had to say next.
“This,” he said, wiping some blood from his face, “is real, but don’t panic. The man who fired the shots is gone.”
A pair of men moved from the side of the stage and knelt down over the fallen man. Another came out and said something to Scarborough, which he kept from the audience by muffling the mike under an armpit.
Scarborough nodded at the man. Then he spoke again to the audience. “The police are already pursuing the attacker, and we’ve got a rescue squad coming. I have been asked by the people in charge that you please stay in your seats for the time being, until proper authorities arrive to tell you what to do.”
He stared down at the fallen man. One of the stage hands dragged a length of canvas out, and covered the now-dead body and the spilled blood.
Scarborough turned back to the audience. “Ladies, gentlemen—friends,” he said, his eyes glistening a bit as realization set in, his voice choking with emotion. “I’ve received death threats before, but I never thought it would come to this. I am very sorry.”
The wail of a siren sounded outside.
Chapter 4
Everett Scarborough’s house was a big colonial off River Road in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by large oak and maple stands, and several cherry blossom trees. He’d bought it in the mid-sixties when he’d moved to Washington to take on the position as Chief Scientific Consultant for Project Blue Book, and had stayed on after the project had shut down. Washington was full of consulting positions for a bright and personable scientist like Dr. Everett Scarborough, and Scarborough lived well off these while he started to build his side-career as a writer of nonfiction articles and books. He and Phyllis had fallen in love with the sturdy brick house to the northwest of a city they found to have just the right mixture of cosmopolitan culture, interesting people, and attractive countryside. They decided that it was here that they would start a family.
It was very late that night of the shooting, when Scarborough pulled his Mercedes into his macadam driveway.
He had been treated at Holy Cross Hospital for superficial facial cuts, and several thick splinters had been extracted. He wore a bandage, and carried a packet containing adhesive tape, cotton, and a fresh bandage for tomorrow, along with a disinfectant. The hospital did not keep him long; the police, after questioning him, let him go. They would have preferred that he stay with a friend or at a hotel for the night, but Scarborough had assured them that he kept his place of residence highly secret, due to all the crank activity that buzzed around him. Still, the state police promised to notify the Montgomery County cops to keep a watch on the house.
Scarborough shut the door of his blue Mercedes, sighed, and looked up at his house, at the night lights glowing from the windows.
If only Phyllis were here. If only she were still alive and waiting for him, he wouldn’t feel so leaden and lonely inside now. His wife had died seven years before, and while Scarborough had been dating regularly for the past four, he’d only had one relationship that had lasted over six months. Plenty of women were attracted to him. He was a man of vast charm and appeal, perhaps even charisma. But when they actually got to know him, if they cared to make the relationship more permanent, they rapidly realized that they were competing with a ghost—the memory of his wife.
Generally, Everett Scarborough liked living alone. He had plenty of friends all over the Washington area, all over the world for that matter, and the Scarborough house often had guests, or dinner parties or just pals over for poker. Scarborough liked to control the influx of visitors, and preferred to have the option of being alone when he cared to be, so that he could finish a book, or write an article, or just immerse himself in his vast library and his record collection.
Tonight, though, he knew he didn’t really want company. He wanted Phyl.
As he walked up the stone pathway to the front door, he trod upon cherry blossoms that the front tree was just beginning to shed. The April season for them was very short, but they were so beautiful when they bloomed. Phyllis had them planted when they first moved in—she always associated Washington with cherry blossoms, she claimed, and wanted a couple trees for her very own, so she wouldn’t have to jostle with the tourists for looks around the Tidal Basin. Still, every year, Phyllis had to go visit them, tourists or no tourists, especially when their daughter Diane got old enough to appreciate them. Scarborough never cared much about the trees until Phyllis had died—and then suddenly they were very important to him.
Slotting the key into the lock, opening the front door, he immediately had an overwhelming urge for a drink. After the lecture tonight, and the horrible events afterwards, he was positively speeding with all the adrenaline pumping through his system. Now, although pure sadness and depression had slowed him down some, he still felt very ragged, very on edge. One of Scarborough’s vices was his fondness for good, twelve-year-old Scotch, and he could almost taste the wicked, bracing sting of a neat three-fingers’ worth as he opened his door.
As soon as he entered the house, he sensed that something was amiss.
There were no odd sounds, no odd smells—everything was in order. Clean, neat—maybe that was it. Yes, he decided, putting his briefcase down on a table near the staircase, remembering. Today was Mrs. Morgan’s cleaning day, and as he’d been over at the university since ten A.M. this morning, preparing for the lecture—the first of a planned nationwide series keyed to tie in with last month’s publication of Above Us Only Sky by Quigley Publishers—Scarborough had not run into her. The older woman, who’d been cleaning almost as long as he’d owned the house, had her own key with which to let herself in and out. The house felt different because it was all straightened up, vacuumed, duste
d, mopped. There was a touch of Pine Sol to the air, a taste of Lemon Pledge.
Besides, Scarborough was not a man who dwelt on unsubstantiated feelings. He believed that such human properties as intuition were merely primitive sub-neocortex forms of mental logic, developed as defense mechanisms in early primates. Any hunches and such that he experienced were quickly brought to light, examined with his trained mind, and then acted on, or discarded. He counted this feeling of wrongness inside his house now as the paranoid result of the evening’s events. He knew that if he didn’t get a grip, he’d be checking under his bed for boogeymen.
Scarborough laughed gently to himself. “Good evening, boogeymen, the wounded soldier is home!” he called out to the silence.
His voice echoed through an empty house. There was, of course, no answer.
He hung his jacket in the hall closet. Now, about that drink. His face still ached. The stinging was gone, but still, a good solid drink would numb the ache, and relax him. Maybe he’d even be able to sleep tonight, though that was an iffy prospect.
He went through his living room, into the porch that he’d converted into a study. The louvered windows still remained, which made the study very bright and cheerful during the day. As he switched on his light, the most prominent feature of the breezeway/study was immediately displayed: not his old IBM PC huddled in his corner, nor his desk, piled with papers—but a huge walnut bar that ran half the length of the brick wall, filled with Victorian bric-a-brac and mirrors, populated by six stools, a copper footrest-railing, and English-style taps connected to kegs of Bass Ale, Watney’s Red Barrel, and John Courage, the only British beers he could get in the United States in that form. This was the centerpiece of Scarborough’s social events, and had been dubbed by his poker buddies as “The Bar That ET Built,” since it was the result of an abundant royalty payment from his third UFO exposé bestseller, Cultural Profiteers and Alien Visitors, a study of how mass media affected the mythology of weird phenomena, with a large part devoted to the famous Steven Spielberg blockbuster movie, E.T.
Scarborough went behind the bar to where his spirits were neatly racked. He scanned his selection of Scotches, and selected a half-empty bottle of Dewar’s. From the overhead glass-rack, he pulled a long-stemmed glass. He uncapped the bottle and poured himself a liberal dollop, which he sipped slowly, savoring the woody aroma as though it were the finest of wines.
Like alcoholics say, thought Scarborough as the knot in his interior slowly untwisted, the thing about a drink was it worked every time.
He was about to go to his stereo and put on some Chopin, or something similarly restful, and stretch out on the divan across from the bar, when he heard the noise.
It sounded like someone moving around in the basement.
Adrenaline pumped again. He froze, his hand gripping the glass so hard he almost crushed it. He put the drink down and listened. The sound continued—someone was definitely in the basement. Then there was a clatter and crunch of something falling and scattering.
His heart racing, he went to the fireplace. He pulled open the bottom drawer, and moved aside a cloth concealing a loaded .38 revolver. He wasn’t a gun person by nature, but after his second searing indictment of UFO fanatics, he had started receiving hate mail, including death threats. As these threats were usually indirect, promising retribution from the skies in the form of death rays and disintegration, he did not take great notice. But since he’d had a family at the time, he thought that the logical thing to do was to get a gun—just in case. And make damn sure his place of residence was kept a secret.
But there was someone in his basement, and it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
He thought about calling the police, but then realized that they couldn’t get here quick enough. He’d have to deal with whoever it was downstairs himself. After watching that poor Tamowitz fellow get gunned down this evening, he almost welcomed the intrusion. It would be a way to deal with his frustration at being able to do nothing before. Now, he held hard cold metal in his hand; now he could deal with things.
Cautiously, he made his way into the foyer, not turning on the lights, treading on the rug and avoiding the side table with the fake flower arrangement by simple touch and memory. From the foyer, a flight of carpeted stairs led to the second floor. Beneath these stairs were the steps that led down to the basement, where Scarborough kept his library. He eased quietly through the darkness to the closed doorway, carefully turning the knob and looking down the steps.
There was a light on in his library.
He hadn’t left a light on, had he? He searched his memory. Mrs. Morgan generally never ventured down there, unless he specifically asked her to. The library was the one place he allowed his tendency to clutter full reign. This was also where he kept the bulk of his record and CD collection, and there were always new stacks of recordings waiting to be shelved, which he did not want the cleaning woman to tamper with.
There were no other noises. Had one of those stacks simply toppled over? A possibility, though unlikely. He had to check.
The basement steps were not carpeted, so he took them one by one with care and quiet. He kept his breathing controlled and silent. Holding the gun up, he clicked the safety off, and continued the descent.
His blood hammered in his ears, and he felt his heart thumping away with tension in his chest.
At the bottom of the steps, he paused.
Another sound. A squeak. It sounded like his Eames chair—he never got around to oiling it lately, and the damn leather monstrosity tended to squeal like a wounded cat when you swiveled. Scarborough hardly needed his training in logic to come to the conclusion that there was somebody sitting in his chair.
He took a deep breath, made the final step onto the landing, swinging around for a full view of the library, holding his .38 out in front of him. He barely noticed that his hand was shaking.
The entirety of the large basement room’s walls was lined with shelves, and upon these shelves were thousands and thousands of books. Old books, new books, paperbacks, magazines. More books and journals sat on the two coffee tables and the large Oriental rug on the floor. On the far wall was a fireplace, the room smelled of the un-cleaned flue and the charred wood still lingering on the grate, mixed with the tobacco smells from Scarborough’s pipe collection and his humidor, which lined the walnut mantel.
Scarborough immediately noted that the lights of his Fischer stereo system were on. A coiled wire stretched from a jack to behind the Eames chair, turned away from him. Scattered by the chair was a pile of his latest CD purchases. From the chair to the footstool stretched a pair of legs wrapped in jeans, shod in black Reeboks.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, after a heavy sigh and a shake of his head. He lowered the gun.
There was no answer. He noted the toes moving back and forth in rhythm with some unheard music. Scarborough put the safety back on the gun and placed it on a free space on a nearby shelf. Whatever she was doing here, it wouldn’t do for her to see him coming toward her holding a gun. Besides, the possibility of scaring her also played havoc with her image of him as an unshakeable stalwart man. He checked to see if his hands were still shaking. They were. Mentally, he ordered them to cease. After a few seconds, and a few more deep breaths, they did.
Scarborough went to the stereo amplifier and hit the power button to the off position.
The result was immediate. The Eames chair swiveled around, bearing the surprised blonde face of his daughter Diane, framed by a set of Koss headphones. She focused on her father, her shocked expression rapidly changing into a big, happy smile.
“Daddy!” she cried, taking her headphones off, getting up, and rushing to him. “Dad, you’re home.”
She was about to hug him, when she noticed the bandage.
“My God, what happened to you?”
“Tell you later.”
Scarborough wanted to hold her. He wanted to grab her and hold her a very long time. But instead,
as he did ever since she had reached puberty and filled out, he confined himself to a peck on her cheek. When she put her arms around him, and hugged him, he tensed up. She was too much like a young Phyllis. Besides, he simply wasn’t a physically warm man; he hadn’t been brought up that way by his parents. He let his daughter hug him for two seconds, and then he gently pried her away. “You’ve cut your hair,” he said. “I liked it long. But what are you doing here? I thought you weren’t going to be here till next Monday?”
“Change of plans.” She backed away from him, reaching out and touching the white bandage gently. “There’s something I have to talk to you about. Something very important. But that can wait. I want to know what happened to you! You’re home so late! I’m still on Midwest time, so I just thought I’d sit down here awhile and listen to your wonder box here.”
“What ... You’re into jazz and classical now?” he said, startled.
“Na...“ she said, pointing to a CD carrying-case, lying amidst a sprawl of Wise potato chips, onion dip and a half empty bottle of Classic Coke. “I brought my own.”
He went over to the CD player, and picked up the empty jewel-box. “Depeche Mode, huh? Sounds fashionable.”
“Electronic pop, Dad. Do you want to hear some?”
“No thanks, Diane. I just hope that my Fischer hasn’t been hopelessly offended by youthful garbage.” He smiled when he said it—they always playfully sparred about their different musical tastes. It was safe territory for a release of the many tensions between them.
“Well, if it can take the dying cat howls of Mingus and Coltrane, then it can probably bear up to D. Mode. Although, this is a very sonically full recording, Daddy dear. I just hope I didn’t blow any tubes or anything.” She picked up her Coke and sipped it.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 8