Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

“I live in Arizona,” said Bob.

  “You went to college?” asked Frankie.

  “Yes, for two years” admitted Bob.

  “That explains a lot,” said Donald, and the entire group shook their heads, “Yes.”

  Bob glanced down the suburban street in both directions. In that decidedly laid back group of twenty or so he was the one individual on full alert. He knew Mondragon would not sit still for long now that he knew Bob was involved in the case. By Bob’s calculations, he expected that within two days of the confrontation on Market Street, Erin would have learned his nemesis’ identity, and therefore Mathers had telephoned his wife back in Phoenix and told her to take their daughter and go to her parents’ place in Utah and stay there until he called her again.

  Becky was furious with him, though she did as he said, and when Mondragon’s men got to the Phoenix apartment on the Twentieth they had found the place empty. Now he fully expected for Mondragon to make an attempt on his life, and Bob doubted he could linger among the tabloid men for much longer, as they were too obvious a group for Mondragon’s people to watch, since he had already been seen with them. As he looked down the street, he half expected to see a couple of the beefy men from Mondragon’s security detail headed in his direction.

  “The thing is,” Bob told the reporters, “somebody has to show the Colombians a photograph of Taylor here and of his friend Mondragon. Then show them some pictures of the dead men in Alabama, Washington, and Wisconsin. The Colombians will ID them, and a link between the convicted terrorists and Mondragon’s group will be established.”

  “I think I would have to cut some corners to do that,” said Donald Demming, which made the others laugh.

  “If you cut any more corners, you’d be grinding the circle down to nothing,” said a

  young woman at the back of the crowd.

  The group laughed again, and Donald laughed the loudest. “Don’t tell me this is a real story now,” the tabloid veteran said sarcastically, and his younger colleges grunted in agreement.

  “Aren’t you real reporters?” asked Bob, knowing full well that was not a question to pose to this group.

  “You’d turn this into another O.J. story,” said Frankie. “Once that one got real, after we had done all the grunt work, the boys and girls from the networks, the ones with the hair spray and the satellite feeds, pushed us out of the way and ran with the story every day from six in the morning to eleven at night.”

  “We did a bang-up job on O.J,” said Donald, reliving the pain of that old injury. “I was the one to find the store that sold him the knife. The first interview with the clerk was supposed to be mine; everything was set, then NBC steals my exclusive.”

  “I knew about Faye Resnick before the Dream Team did,” said a female reporter standing behind Frankie.

  “Treat this like it’s real, and Stone Phillips and Barbara Walters will be on this conspiracy business before you can say ‘bloody glove,’” said Frankie, and the others seconded him like an amen corner.

  Bob did not stay to catch the rest of their reminiscences. He thought he saw something move in the shadows farther down the street. Long before the others noticed he was missing, Bob had slipped into the darkness.

  XXC

  12/21/10 22:32 CST

  “When exactly did this happen?” asked the FBI agent of Terre Haute prison guard Lester McDougal.

  Corporal McDougal adjusted his position on the hardwood chair that was giving him a benumbing pain in his enormous backside. Alfonso Del Barca, currently an inmate on death row, had told Lester three days earlier he had seen a photograph of a California businessman Alfonso identified as the mysterious Charles Corello.

  “You see, sir,” said Lester, doubting he would ever be able to accommodate his large body to the small chair and suffering from the cold in the unheated room and frightened by the interrogation room’s one-way mirror, on the other side of which he sensed the presence of his boss, “I thought it was a joke.”

  “A joke?” said the belligerent FBI man, getting close to Lester’s face. “Eighty-four thousand one hundred and seven Americans are dead in the largest terrorist attack in world history, and you, Mr. McDougal, think it might be a joke!”

  “Maybe ‘joke’ was the wrong word,” said Lester. “I meant to say, these supermarket things, they’re so wild, so full of bullshit--pardon me--I mean, who takes them seriously. So this Mr. Henry Peppers from The World Wide Sensation, he sends me a copy of this week’s edition and a note that says, ‘Won’t you show this to one of the Colombians?’”

  “He sent you money, didn’t he, Mr. McDougal?” asked the FBI agent. “A thousand dollars?”

  The prison guard licked his lips, which were drying and cracking in the glare of the overhead lights. “Was that illegal?” he asked. “I didn’t know. Anyhow, this Alfonso sees the picture of this Mondragon character and starts swearing in Spanish: ‘Este es Corrello! Este es Corrello!’ That is Corello!”

  “I know what it means,” said the agent.

  “Alfonso tears this picture off the front page of The Sensation,” continued McDougal, “and he sticks it out the door of his cell so Claudio Munoz—that’s his cousin or something--over in the next cell, can see the picture. Sure enough Claudio goes nuts and starts shouting and raising hell like Alfonso did. I got Pete Sanchez, a guard on D Block, to come and ask him what they was saying. Turns out Claudio also identified the guy in the picture as one of the leaders of their group, the man they know as Charles Corello.”

  “Yes, now we’re getting somewhere,” said the agent. “It’s good that you’re co-operating now.”

  The agent sat himself down across the room from McDougal. He glanced at the one-way mirror, behind which he knew his superiors were sitting.

  “I brought the other pictures Peppers emailed me up to the cell,” McDougal went on, “and they identified that other California guy.”

  “John Taylor,” said the agent.

  “Yeah, that he was ‘the Russian;’ that’s what they called him,” explained the prison guard, “the Russian. I showed them some of the dead men. The ones killed in Wisconsin and Alabama. They said the Army man was somebody called Colonel Max. The other people were supposed to be East Germans and such.”

  “When did this happen?” asked the agent a second time.

  “I think two days ago,” said Lester, repeating the lie he had told moments earlier. “Maybe it could have been longer ago…”

  The answer took the agent out of his relaxed mood. Lester could see the muscles bunching in the man’s neck as he prepared to go back on the attack.

  “Maybe it was a week or so ago...” said Lester.

  “How long a period of time is an ‘or so?’” asked the agent through clinched teeth.

  “Five, six days ago... maybe a week,” said Lester, his words limping into the cold air between himself and the agent.

  Lester half expected the man to leap across the table and beat Lester’s fat face into the cement floor. The agent only sighed and went to the one-way glass. He leaned his forehead against the mirror and made a hand gesture to someone on the other side. Seconds later two other men in identical brown suits entered the room, one of them carrying a brand new copy of The Sensation that bore the headlines: KILLERS ID BOSSES.

  “Good enough, Hudson,” said the man with the paper to the interrogator. “One more question to you, Mr. McDougal. With whom among the guards did you share the money?”

  “Hey, it’s a prison,” said Lester, belatedly falling back into a defensive position. “How do you know someone else didn’t talk? Things leak out of here. It didn’t have to be one of us guards.”

  XXCI

  12/22/10 09:06 EST

  At nine o’clock sharp the president’s chief of staff had given each cabinet member a copy of the brief news summary, the contents of which were a mystery to none of them. No one had yet spoken a word. The Secretary of Defense, he of the elegant silver locks, pretended to read the document, d
espite having already read the story in The Post in his limousine on the way to work that morning.

  The Secretary of Interior tapped his nervous feet on the brightly colored carpet and hoped that no one asked him anything. He hated when these policy wonks got together to discuss the fate of the world, as they always made him feel so small just because he knew twenty thousand barn yard jokes and not a great deal else.

  The squat woman in charge of Health and Human Services held the paper in front of her but secretly was looking at a Tiffany lamp behind one of the Joint Chiefs; it looked, she opined, strident against the room’s periwinkle wall paper; a simple cream-colored paper would have made a more suitable background.

  The Chief Security Advisor, fearing that everyone else would try to blame him for this terrible turn of events, looked forlornly at a nineteenth century French chair standing next to one of the Oval Office’s many side doors that led to God knows what secret chamber, and he wished he were hidden somewhere in the nineteenth century with the chair’s makers.

  “None of you are fooling anyone,” declared the chief of staff, breaking the awful silence. “We know why we’re here.”

  “This is the end of the world,” declared the head of the FBI. “Thank God it didn’t come in the year of a presidential election!”

  The president himself was not present to hear this comment. Yesterday morning when the news broke of the Colombians identifying Mondragon and the other conspirators, the president had instructed his press secretary to treat the story as a joke, if anyone in the press asked about it; after all, this was a tabloid story. This morning, a gray wintry work day in the capital, the same story appeared in The Post, and the president had retired to his bedroom and locked the door, leaving his bulldog chief of staff to rally the troops in this dark hour.

  “Thank you for that perceptive comment, Dwayne,” sneered the chief of staff.

  “Did you see Hathaway on ‘The Today Show?’” asked the Secretary of State, referring to the Senate minority leader and de facto leader of the other party. “He looked like the damn Cheshire Cat. I swear to God: he was giggling like a school girl when he called for a hearing into how we blew the investigation.”

  The chief of staff thrust out his jaw and thought unutterable thoughts about both the Secretary of State and Senator Hathaway. The others observed his facial gesture and planned other ways to remain silent, except, that is, for the Secretary of Defense, he of the silvery locks and the calm, patrician manner.

  “It’s not the end of the world, Dwayne,” said the Secretary of DoD, “in fact, this is a tempest in a teapot.”

  “Really, Parnell?” asked the chief of staff, now focusing his hatred upon the famous silver mane and the Roman Caesar’s face that was underneath it. “I suppose the Second World War wasn’t all that bad either?”

  The Secretary of DoD presented the chief of staff with a copy of the papers Ronald Goodman had given him in the Pentagon basement.

  “Turns out,” said the secretary, stretching his arms as if he were lying back on a porch swing on a cloudless summer day, “someone at the DoD looked into this California connection to the dam bombings two years ago. We were diligent, thorough, eager to follow the evidence to wherever it took us. Sadly, our best efforts, as these documents make crystal clear, were squelched by one particular government official, an undersecretary in my department.”

  The chief of staff was making a pretence of looking through the papers, and he was

  unimpressed by the Secretary of DoD’s story.

  “That hardly gets us out of the woods, Parnell,” he said. “If our people screwed the pooch, then in the public’s eyes that proves we all screwed the pooch.”

  “You haven’t heard the best part,” said the Secretary of DoD, running a hand over the back of his silver mane. Everyone in the room inched forward to listen to him. Even the Secretary of the Interior pretended he was following this. “The guilty official is a holdover from the previous administration. We’re home free!”

  Somewhere there is a child rising from a wheelchair to walk once more or there is a blind man miraculously regaining his vision and looking up to see a golden harvest moon, or there is a homeless alcoholic in a Bowery mission finding his salvation and again able to dream of better days. Each of these may experience a degree of happiness, but they will never know the sublime joy that was then unleashed in the West Wing. Tears flowed from the chief of staff’s sky blue eyes, and he went to the Secretary of DoD to shake his hand and call him Old friend. The National Security Advisor at once stepped into a White House closet, fell to her knees, and gave thanks to the Lord with clasped hands. The squat Secretary of Health and Human Services jumped upon the conference table and did a jig while the Secretaries of Interior and Energy clapped along in five/four time.

  “Up yours, Hathaway!” shouted the chief of staff and felt like he would enjoy beating up a small man there and then.

  “When we get through with them, even Cogswell can have his eight years!” declared the Secretary of State, meaning that the photogenic but intellectually challenged Vice President Cogswell--at the moment attending the funeral of the richest man in Albania--had a shot at the presidency.

  The Director of Communications ran up the marble stairs to the presidential bedroom and slipped a note underneath the door. By ten o’clock that morning the commander-in-chief was downstairs drinking champagne and tasting but, out of deference to the administration’s anti-smoking program, not lighting up a contraband Cuban cigar.

  By twelve thirty-seven they were deep into lunch and a second crate of champagne; the Secretary of the Interior was singing cowboy songs, and the First Lady had been brought in to play the piano. By one in the afternoon the Secretary of Health and Human Services had cornered the elegant Secretary of DoD against the periwinkle wallpaper.

  “I love you, Parnell,” she breathed into his ear. “I’ve always loved you.”

  “I have told you before, Martha,” said the man of the hour, “that you should never drink this early in the day.”

  XCII

  12/23/10 01:54 PST

  John Taylor had dreamed the same nightmare for three nights in a row. The one image of the dream, the one that appeared without introduction and ended without conclusion, was John himself standing in the middle of a snowy field. He was holding something that resembled a traffic sign, and had to shift it from hand to hand on account of the bitter cold. When he could, John rubbed his bare palms together and told himself: “Only one hand cherishes the other. Only one hand cherishes the other.”

  When he awoke, he wrote that phrase on his night stand pad and wondered at its meaning.

  John tried to telephone his estranged son in Los Angeles three times that night and had each time gotten the answering machine’s message that ran: “Hello, this is John Taylor. I’m not here now. If you want to leave a message, wait for the beep. Except for my father. He can go fuck himself.”

  John Taylor left a message anyway.

  “Only one hand cherishes the other,” he said. “That means... it means only you can understand me, only I can love you. We are like two hands, Johnny, you and I.”

  He hung up each time knowing that the young man would not return his call.

  Mondragon rarely visited Taylor’s house any more. He continued to telephone nearly every day to boost John’s sagging spirits, although a conversation with Mondragon was not always uplifting. That old friend had called John at half past seven the previous morning to tell him there was a possibility that they might both be arrested soon.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Mondragon had said. “They know nothing. Because there is nothing to know. We haven’t done anything wrong. Did you know, John, your line is being bugged? Some ATF or FBI or whatever alphabet soup agency they send will take us somewhere, separately of course. They will take us somewhere downtown, maybe down state. Ask us some questions. We will deny everything, and as soon as we make our appearance in court, the judge will let us go. Don�
�t let them panic you, John. That’s the main thing. Deny everything. You’ve never been to South America. You never impersonated any Russian spy. This is a story some terrorists on death row have concocted. Oh, I should say the judge won’t just let us go; he’ll set bail. No problem. My lawyers have everything mapped out. I hope you aren’t drinking these days, John. I need you dry for this. When you’ve been drinking you tend to say foolish things. Things that aren’t true.”

  “Only one hand can cherish the other,” said John Taylor.

  “What’s that?” asked Mondragon. “You’re sitting there drinking right now, aren’t you?”

  “No,” said John, and set the open bottle of Scotch on the floor amid the dozens of empty bottles. “I’m not.”

  “You better not be,” said Mondragon. “Focus on the job at hand. Oh, by the way, because we may have to prepare a legal defense and not because we have anything to hide, don’t talk to me on this line ever again. I’ll find some other way to contact you.”

  He was gone then, leaving John Taylor holding the telephone and yearning to ask Mondragon what he thought the dream meant. Erin was so smart, thought Taylor, he would be able to tell him what the snowy field and the traffic sign represented. The two of them might sit down together over a cup of coffee sometime, then Mondragon could explain everything, and John could sleep again. In fact, sleep so deep and in such earnest he would lay down the sign and go to sleep in the snowy field itself, not caring if he ever again awoke.

  “One hand...” thought John as he lay on his bed, and he put his hands together; the warmth radiated between the palms and the fingers, comforting him for a moment.

  The phone rang again at a few minutes before two in the morning. John snatched up the receiver in hopes that it was once more Mondragon on the line to give him some more instruction.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  “Mondragon is going to kill you,” said a voice Taylor half-recognized.