The CIA chief’s body crumpled back onto the pavement.
But somehow, the left arm and hand still clung tightly to the package with those incriminating letters…
Scarborough, suddenly weary beyond words, lowered his gun.
“Drop your weapon!” called out a loud, commanding voice.
Almost gratefully, Everett Scarborough let go of the automatic. He held his hands out to show he was now harmless. Two policemen rushed up and he felt himself being dragged to his feet. His hands were put behind him and metal cuffs were clamped onto his wrist. He grimaced with the pain in his ankle, but he somehow found the strength to stand.
“You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right...” A black officer said, Mirandizing him.
A wave of intense relief flooded Everett Scarborough. Another policeman ran up to the fallen form of Brian Richards, lying in a widening pool of blood.
“He’s dead.”
Dead.
There the man was, dead, holding Scarborough’s vindication in his hand. Scarborough thought he should feel more, but he could not. He could only feel relief that it was over, that finally he could rest for a while.
Truly rest.
“Identification.”
“Ignore what’s in my wallet,” he said. “My name’s Scarborough. Doctor Everett Scarborough. I demand to call my lawyer...”
And then he realized, could he trust his own lawyer?
He laughed.
Could he trust anybody?
He laughed again and each expulsion of breath threatened to tum into tears, a breakdown, something far beyond his control…
“Geez. This guy’s nuts!” said one cop to another.
“Get him to the car,” said the blue uniform kneeling by Brian Richard’s dead body. “Get him downtown. This dead guy’s CIA!”
“This one’s going to turn into a stinker, all right. Get him out of here before the goddamned press shows up!”
Scarborough felt himself being hustled along toward the car waiting for them, its lights flashing, at the service road.
Despite the fact that he had just killed Brian Richards, he felt a profound sense of incompletion. Something was wrong; he felt with every bit of the intuition that he had always denied even existed. Something was very wrong.
Onlookers stood along the road, keeping a wary distance.
Scarborough kept his eyes straight ahead.
No. He wouldn’t accept this feeling.
Richards was dead now. The evidence was there held in his hands, and the truth of this whole business would come out in the investigation. True, he had killed the man—but it had been in self-defense.
And this time he had plenty of witnesses to back up that fact.
Then he had a thought. Diane... Camden... Where were they...? He looked up, scanning the crowd.
The blow hit him with a stunning suddenness.
One moment he was in midstride, the next he felt as though something had blown half his chest away.
He looked down and saw a ragged hole of flesh, dripping blood and torn shirt . . .
“I’ve been shot!” he said.
And unconsciousness suddenly flooded him like a benediction before he even hit the ground.
Chapter 42
It seemed as though he’d woken up many times and then passed out again before the moment came that he woke up into something resembling the taste and smell and texture of reality.
Taste: blood in a dry mouth.
Smell: antiseptics, with a trace of bedpan.
Texture: flat, one-dimensional, in thin starched white sheets, uncomfortable.
A hospital, Everett Scarborough thought. I’m waking up in a hospital.
He caught a glimpse of a male nurse. “Water,” he called, and tried to move without a whole lot of success. “I’m very... thirsty.”
The male nurse swung around. “Sure. Just a second...”
The male nurse stepped out into the hall, and Scarborough caught his voice saying, “He’s awake,” before the reality fell into pieces and he passed out again.
When he woke up again, there was a glass of water waiting for him.
Holding it was Marsha Manning.
She was smiling, but there was also concern in her face, and she looked a little haggard, Scarborough thought, a little peaked.
“Ev. It’s going to be all right, Ev. Thank God you’re awake...”
“What... what happened?” He couldn’t seem to remember much. Something about chasing someone across the grass. Policemen. A patrol car. Onlookers.
Chasing someone. . . The anger flooded back in him, the intense need to catch this shapeless form in front of him.
“You don’t remember...?” said Marsha. “But you remember me. You remember me, don’t you, Ev?”
“Yes, of course, Marsha... I remember... you... And...” His mind seemed suddenly confronted by a vast emptiness, a spacious chasm into which he felt about to fall. He grasped for physicality, for sensation, for need, and he found again that his mouth was quite dry.
“Thirsty,” he managed.
She had a glass of water for him and she slowly fed him swallows. It went down cool but totally tasteless—it didn’t even taste like water, it tasted like nothing. “You’ve been unconscious for a few days, Ev. Everything will be all right. The doctor says you’ll be all right, but you’ll need time...”
“Diane,” he said, and slipped back into the cottony land of unawareness.
Only this time he dreamed.
Again the grassy expanse of the Mall. Again the chase. Again, running ahead of him the formless blob. The closer he got, the more it came to appear to be a man. A man in a suit and tie, faceless. He seemed to chase the man forever, eternally stranded between the street and the towering white monolith of the Washington Monument. Noises seemed to warble around him, slowly coalescing into barely intelligible words.
“...White Book...”
“...Black Book...”
“...The Others...”
“...First Contact...”
“…You can trust no one…”
“…Nothing is as it seems…”
All jumbled into an echoed tape-loop of overdubbed voices. And swimming ahead of him, there in a mist of mystery, the answer to it all—running from him. His tormentor. His torturer. The man responsible for all the pain hurled upon him. And finally, after great aching strides, he seemed close enough. With one huge effort, Everett Scarborough hurled himself through the air, arms outstretched and grasping desperately for the Pursued.
His arms connected. The tackle was made. The man in the suit went down soundlessly in a heap. Scarborough crawled over him and dragged him over to face him, fist raised to strike him, ready to face this Nameless One’s identity finally…
And staring back at him from the top of the suited man was a triangularly shaped head. Almond eyes. Pointed chin. Grey shark-like skin. An alien.
“That’s really not necessary, Dr. Scarborough,” said the alien. “Do not attempt to adjust your television picture. We’re in control of this transmission.”
The creature opened its mouth and began to laugh.
Scarborough hammered his fist down into the head, and the face exploded into a cloud of dust, like a powder-puff mushroom. The scene around him dissolved again, sinking into a blankness beyond understanding.
Into which, eventually, a match was struck.
Scarborough smelled tobacco smoke and he saw a flame, which was quickly extinguished.
“I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no smoking up here,” said a voice. Everett Scarborough opened his eyes to see that standing before him, smoking one of his trademark Camel cigarettes, was Jake Camden.
“God. Sorry. I didn’t see the sign.” said Jake, puffing like mad on the cigarette before he buried it in the cup. He was talking to a matronly looking nurse leaning in through the door. “Just waiting here for this guy to wake up. Getting antsy, that’s all.”
“Just remember the rules or you’ll be asked to leave,” said the nurse, and then she was gone.
“I am awake,” Scarborough found himself saying. “Jake... What’s going on?”
He was thirsty again, he knew that, but somehow his thirst for information seemed much greater now.
Jake Camden wheeled around, grinning. He still had a bandage on and his face was still a little mottled from the bruises; the sling around his arm was still there and it looked as though the whole top of his shoulder was swathed in bandages now. But the swelling around his eye had gone down considerably. Time had definitely passed since the last time he’d seen him. Which was... when?
And then it rushed back to Scarborough. At the top of the Natural History Museum steps... The man he’d been chasing... Like in his dreams... It had been Richards... Brian Richards.
“Scarby!” said Jake, interrupting his memory. “Hey, man! You finally decided to wake up! Marsha said it might take a while, but I didn’t know I’d have to pace the floor. I’ve been nudging you from time to time while no one was looking, though they said to let you wake up naturally. But, man, I got to talk to you!”
“Where... What... Diane!”
“Uh... Diane’s coming along in a little while. She’ll be okay, they say. Marsha, too... She wanted to be here, but she had to take care of some things.”
Scarborough sat up in bed. He was suddenly aware of several things. He seemed attached to things. Tubes were going up his nose: oxygen. Apparently turned off for the moment. A tube was connected to a faint throb at the juncture of forearm and biceps: a plasma drip.
And as he moved it seemed as if someone jabbed him directly in his chest. He gasped and fell back in bed.
“Hey, don’t try anything too stressful, fella—I got winged myself and I know... it hurts.” Jake indicated his left shoulder.
“Shot...? I was shot?”
“Big time.”
Scarborough remembered then.
He remembered the agony exploding in his chest as he headed for that police car...
“Shot... But who?”
“No one knows, man. I have my suspicions, though.”
“What... what happened?”
“You got him, Scarb. You nailed the bastard. And you nailed him holding the evidence. Which works out well for all concerned, I guess.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, man. Before anyone else comes, I just need to know. Now that it’s all over—I’m still in the project, right? I can do a book, a movie, whatever?”
He still felt groggy. “Jake, there are more important things...”
“I know, I know... I just need to be reassured...”
“I promised you’d be included.”
“We never signed anything. “
“Jake, you saved my life. We’re friends ... now ...”
Jake slapped a fist into a palm. “Hot damn! I knew you wouldn’t fail me, Scarb! We’ve got offers coming out of our ears. Book offers, movie offers... I’m working on an article right now... for the New York Times! I’m already making space in my new digs for my Pulitzer Prize.”
“New digs?”
“Yeah, I got an apartment in Bethesda. Gotta be close to you if we’re going to work on all this.”
“Jake, I don’t even know where I am now!”
“Oh. You’re in Bethesda Naval Hospital, Scarb. Sorry. Cause of the good security. Don’t worry. No one’s going to shoot you here!”
“That’s nice to know.”
“No, and we’re all free and clear now. You’re not a wanted man and you can go back to your house. Your life is your own now.”
Scarborough took a deep breath. It hurt his ribs. “Thank God.” Why, then, did he not feel truly relieved? Why, then, was all this still bothering him...?
Because, of course, he told himself, of the empty blanks in it all.
“And we’re going to be rich! I mean, we can start up our own movie production company just like Schroeder had... We can do anything, Scarborough...”
“Look, Jake,” he said, somehow managing to be articulate despite the fog in his head. “I’m happy for you, I really am, you seem very pleased, but I need to get some questions answered here, and you’re not doing a very good job of it. First of all, what happened to you on the way down from Massachusetts? That was a brilliant move, copying and then expressing those letters down... But then you just disappeared. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened. I ran into Emily Elliot, that’s what happened.”
“Emily Elliot?” Scarborough drew a blank. “You’re going to have to help me out a little more than that, Jake.”
“You know, the chick that tried to waylay me in Tucson.”
“The one in partnership with Schroeder?”
“That’s the one!”
“The one you think tried to wipe you out on the way to the cabin at Mount Lemmon?”
“None other. I’m pretty sure she works for Cranston and Company.”
“And she tried to get those papers back.”
“She didn’t just try, she did get them back. I got on a train in New Haven. Cranston’s agents must have tailed me down there, because they notified her I was on that train, and she got on in New York.”
“And beat you up.”
“You bet. We were about to both go off the train, but she pulled this fancy move and prevented the dive. Beat me up pretty bad. Would have killed me if a conductor hadn’t opened the door on a routine run. She grabs the papers and takes off, and the conductor found me. I don’t know how she got off the train. Maybe she didn’t, maybe she did. A pretty amazing gal. But I was pretty badly banged up and they put me in a hospital in Trenton. Passed out, too; didn’t wake up till noon the next day... So who do you think comes waltzing in with special papers authorizing my release? None other than Emily Elliot.”
“Go on.”
“You bet. ‘You’re very clever, Mr. Camden, sending those letters off to Scarborough,’ she says. I’m just sitting there, scared out of my mind, thinking, geez, what’s next? How’d she find out?”
“Then she says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to harm you. I’m here to help you. Change of plans on our part. You just do what we say, and you might live, Mr. Camden.’ I told her to go fuck herself. She said that it wouldn’t just save my life, it might well save your life and Diane’s life.”
“And Marsha?”
“They said they’d notified people to go and pick you and Marsha up for your own protection... But that you’d already gone.”
“Own protection? I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I at first, but I glommed on pretty fast. Apparently old Cranston and company figured the cat was out of the bag on White Book and Black Book. But the only one left to link him and his anonymous compatriots to the whole thing in those letters was Brian Richards... Everybody else was dead.”
“And Richards knew that as well... which was why he wanted to get away.”
“You bet. That’s what I figure, anyway. So I started getting interested in this, and said, ‘Well, that sounds pretty good to me, too!’ A good compromise! Richards for my buddies’ welfare. To say nothing of my own life! And the chance to do this story!”
“What did they say to do?”
“She got me a ticket on a Metro line from Philadelphia. A ticket and an automatic. When I got there, I was to call a phone number. I got there and called. A voice said, ‘Take a taxi to the steps of the National History Museum.’ I did, and lo and behold there you and Diane were in deep shit with Richards. I just did what I figured I had to do.”
“Thanks, Jake. I’ll always owe you. But it looks as though they wanted to set me up...”
“To kill Richards, yes...”
“And more, to kill Richards holding the evidence!”
“You bet.” Camden pulled something from the back pocket of his jeans. It was a folded up piece of newspaper. “And in so doing cut the final link between them and th
e whole affair. Actual proof, anyway. What’s more they wanted maximum publicity, maximum drama, for the incident. Did you know that four tourists took video cam tapes of most of the chase and the fight? Here, take a look at this.”
Scarborough unfolded the article. It was from the Washington Post. He read the headline:
“UFO Skeptic Vindicated. Dramatic End to Manhunt Exposes Bizarre Operation.”
Scarborough scanned the article:
... Richards, CIA field administrator, implicated...
...involved also, Dr. Julia Cunningham, Air Force Officer Walter Dolan... both recently deceased...
…Congress orders extensive investigation...
…Investigative reporter Jake Camden and Air Force Lieutenant Marsha Manning help clear Dr. Everett Scarborough...
…Scarborough’s missing daughter, Diane, found after being held captive by outlaw government branch.
Bits and pieces of the truth. Some blatant erroneous facts. But nothing, true or false, about anything like the Publishers/Colleagues, and also nothing about aliens actually trying to contact world leaders.
And nothing about who had shot him after he caught and killed Brian Richards.
Scarborough pointed this out to Camden.
“Yeah. Don’t that beat all. Police ballistics figure you were shot by a high-power rifle from a long distance. A building on the north side of the Mall, they know that much.”
“But who shot me?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out, Scarb. That Elliot chick… or whatever her real name is... seems a likely suspect.”
“But why? You and Marsha know everything I know...”
“It’s got me in the dark, too... But you gotta admit it makes for a great mystery-ending for an article, book on the subject... or maybe even a miniseries on TV! One that’s open to becoming a whole long-running dramatic series...” Camden’s eyes almost misted over with pleasure. “Can’t you just see it?”
“We’re talking about a near-fatal wound, man!”
“Hey, I got shot too, remember! And saved your skin!” Camden indicated his bandage. “Anyway, who’s to say whoever shot you really wanted to kill you? Maybe it was kind of, like, a statement. You know, ‘We can do this whenever we please, so watch out what you say!’”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 111