by Paul Moomaw
A slight exaggeration, Hesse knew, but not much of one.
The guard tossed the bottle. Hesse ducked violently, then stood panting while the bottle rolled to a stop in the dirt.
“Aw, hey, man, it’s safe. You think I’d touch the shit if it wasn’t?” The guard stepped over to the bottle, picked it up, and held it out to Hesse again.
“Nick, take it,” Hesse said. He stepped back again, willing the adrenaline in his body to subside. He felt his ears burning for the second time in a day. He had shown fear, and the guard had seen it. Nick, he knew, had seen it as well, and was smiling at him.
Go ahead and grin while you can, monkey, Hesse thought. He shoved his fist into the palm of his other hand, and twisted it until the friction began to hurt.
Nick and the guard loaded the remaining bottles into Hesse’s van, working silently while Hesse looked on. The last bottle transferred, the guard turned back to Hesse.
“The key,” he said, and held out his hand.
“How long before someone realizes this much plutonium is missing?” Hesse asked.
“Shit, they may never notice. I had the load to myself for an hour. You think this is a lot? You should see the shipment I took it from.”
“How long?”
“At the earliest, when they unload at the other end and check the shipping papers. Say three, four days. But even then they’ll probably just shrug, file a report, and the report will go to some paper pusher who’ll use it to wrap a fish. You got to remember that twenty six hundred guys lost their jobs when they killed off the N Reactor. That’s murder to little towns like Richland. You think anybody around here gives a shit about government property any more?”
Hesse pulled the key from his pocket, handed it to the guard. “First Interstate Bank in Kennewick,” he said. “You’ll find it’s all there.”
“Fifty grand?”
Hesse nodded. “In very spendable denominations.”
“Shit, man, I don’t care if it’s all pennies.” The guard turned to go.
“Wait.” Hesse pulled a slender plastic box from his jacket. “I promised you a little extra something.” He handed the box to the guard.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
The guard popped the lid. “Jesus, is this what it looks like?”
“Try a little and see.”
“Hey, don’t mind if I do.” The guard reached into the box with thumb and forefinger and retrieved a pinch of white powder. He dusted the back of his hand with it, then held the hand to his nose and sniffed deeply.
“No shit,” he said, a pleased grin on his face. “I can feel it already.”
“Be careful. It’s very pure, very strong.”
“Right.” The guard spread another pinch on his hand, snorted it up, then snapped the lid closed.
“Hey, man,” Nick said. “Gimme a little.”
Hesse pushed him away. “No! Don’t be greedy. This man has worked hard for us. He deserves absolutely everything he’s getting.” He marched back to the government van, slid the side door shut, and climbed behind the wheel.
“Get in,” he snapped. Nick slouched to the passenger side and slid in.
“A little snort of that stuff wouldn’t have hurt,” he said as Hesse turned the van around and headed back the way they had come.
“A little snort would have killed you,” Hesse replied. “That wasn’t just cocaine. It’s mixed in with a toxin. That’s why I wanted to be sure he tried some while I watched.” He saw me afraid, and I wanted to see him start to die. “In half an hour, he’ll start feeling sick. In another hour he’ll be delirious, then comatose. By breakfast he’ll be dead.”
“They’ll find the stuff.”
“Exactly. And eventually they’ll discover the safe deposit box, filled with Monopoly money.” Hesse tossed his head back and laughed. Nick shifted in his seat and looked out the window into the dark, not responding.
Chapter 2
Adam Pray stared out the window and wondered what was wrong with him. Ordinarily the vision of the Seattle skyline wrapped around Elliott Bay, with the etched silhouette, on a rare, golden October afternoon, of the Olympic Mountains to the west, would soothe him, make him glad again that he had bought this three-storied aerie high on the side of Queen Anne Hill.
Today, the view just irritated him. He stared sourly at the Columbia Center, which reared, thick, tall, and glassy black, above the city. A port city is a woman, he thought, a harbor, a womb, a safe, soft place to come home to. The tower of black glass was out of place—too big, too tall, like some massive, arrogant, post-technological phallus.
“Darth Vader’s penis,” Pray muttered. He laughed. “Christ, when I start talking profound, I know I’m bored.”
He glared at what he could see of himself in the window. A trick of light made his slate blue eyes leap out from the otherwise hazy reflection, like the cover of some Stephen King novel.
He pressed his hands against the window and raked his long fingers across the glass, curling and uncurling them like blunted claws. “Artistic fingers,” his mother would call them, to which his father would reply that probably meant Pray would never do an honest day’s work.
Pray turned from the window and stared restlessly around the room. It was usually his favorite place—a lair for seductions, a refuge when he needed to be alone; with a fireplace that worked, a built in bar if he felt like getting a little drunk, a good stereo system to listen to while he did, and the octagonal table from Mexico, created with hammer marks to make it look old, and now truly old and beat up after twenty years of following its owner around.
This day, the room also failed him. He went to the bar and poured himself an inch of brandy. He could afford better now, but he stuck stubbornly to Christian Brothers, right out of the jug, as if to demonstrate to himself that sudden wealth had not spoiled him. Then he threw himself into a leather beanbag chair almost as old as the table. He felt like a caged . . . A caged what?
A caged playboy, that’s what I am.” He rolled the snifter between his hands, then took a slow swallow. He wondered if his aunt Nora, his old man’s even older sister, had really done him a favor by leaving her entire estate to him. “To my only brother’s only son, Adam,” the probate lawyer had read to them in his dark, stuffy Virginia office, “All my worldly goods. And to my beloved brother, my best wishes, but not a penny, because he wouldn’t begin to know how to enjoy it.”
Pray’s father had looked at him, then turned away and nodded, as if to say “I always knew it.” Pray’s mother, for whom the real world dimmed next to the Old South that glittered inside her head, had been ecstatic. She had clung to his lanky, six-foot frame, beaming at him, stretching up to tousle his black, curly hair, tracing the outline of the small scar that curled from the corner of his eye onto his cheek. The scar was a souvenir from a childhood fight with his older brother Julian. His mother always claimed it made him look just that more dashing, like a Heidelberg student. She hadn’t said a word as they left the lawyer’s office, but Pray had known that somewhere behind those never-quite-in-focus eyes lurked a conviction that he, her golden son, would build her dream for her, the one her practical, dour, career FBI husband hardly even knew about—complete with plantation, happy black slaves, and a tall, cool mint julep on the verandah every evening.
Something bright green and yellow caught Pray’s eye. It lay on the carpet under the Mexican table. Pray picked it up. It was an earring, made for pierced ears, a gold post with a long, fuzzy feather dangling from it. One of Harriet’s, he supposed. He made a mental note to take it to her when they met for lunch in two days. He made another note as well, one to scratch Harriet from his list of female companions. This was the third time she had left something of hers behind. First it had been a scarf, dropped at the base of the fireplace mantel; then a necklace of glass beads, down stairs in his bedroom. Now the earring. She was marking her turf, Pray knew, like a wolf; and that meant it was time for her to go.
&nb
sp; He leaned forward in the beanbag and dropped the earring on the octagonal table, then stretched a little farther and picked up a photograph that lay on the same table.
It was a picture of a boat, made of jade, white jade, nephrite, the kind the Chinese call mutton fat. A dragon boat, carved with walls so thin that the light that came from some source outside the photograph’s frame pierced it, made it glow. Windows carved into the hull revealed a complement of tiny passengers, caught for eternity on some celestial voyage, carved from a slightly greener shade of nephrite. The dragon’s head, at the prow of the craft, grinned sublimely. It had one eye closed, as if it were winking. The other eye, which stared at Pray from the photograph, was a glowing ruby.
The picture had come with a note from Josef Ruhm. The wrinkled old dealer in jade had lured Pray to his Fourth and Pike Building showroom in downtown Seattle more than once, and the results of those trips filled the room Pray sat in now, nestled into corners and crannies.
“I want you to have first refusal on this very special piece,” the note said. “Second and third refusal too. It is meant for you.”
Pray gazed raptly at the dragon boat. He knew he was going to have it, had to have it, even if he had to hock his soul to get it. He might have to, he mused. Aunt Nora’s money had left him comfortably fixed, but there were limits, and the dragon boat in the picture had to carry a price that would make anyone wince.
But he would have it. The thought helped his mood. He poured himself another inch of brandy and put on a record, an orchestral piece by Eric Satie, an odd little thing, filled with car horns and typewriter bells that fit his own, fragmented mood. Then he slumped into the beanbag again and looked around the room, wondering where to display the dragon boat when it arrived. Maybe on the mantel, he thought, then shook his head. It would disappear against the pale granite of the fireplace stones. He got up and cleared a space on one of the shelves, stepped back, and tried to picture the boat there.
“No, it will need more light,” he muttered, sipping at the brandy.
The telephone rang, jarring him momentarily from his reverie. He brushed at the sound with his hand, as if it were a fly buzzing at him. Probably Harriet, he thought, or the functional equivalent. He picked up the photo of the dragon boat and held it before him. “Maybe a little table of its own,” he said. “Right by the window, where it will catch the light.” The thought of natural light, with shifting moods for the boat to reflect, pleased him. His mood jumped another notch.
The phone continued to ring. Somebody who knows my habits, he thought. He got up reluctantly to answer it, then detoured to the bar, where he poured a little more brandy into the snifter. Finally, he walked to the telephone and picked it up.
“You win,” he said.”
“Adam, old man. This is Larry. Larry Biven.” The voice managed to sound enthusiastic and detached at the same time. “I thought you probably were there. Hoped you would be, anyway. How’s retirement?”
“It’s wonderful. I’m eating only at the best restaurants, drinking only the best whiskey, and screwing only the most interesting women. You should swing by Seattle some day; I’ll give you a taste of the idle life. In the meantime, what do you really want?”
“I’ll be five sixths of the way to Seattle next week,” Biven said, ignoring the gibe. “You remember Harry Lerner?”
“More or less.” Pray managed to attach a piece of a face to the name. Lerner had been a trainer at the Farm when Pray had passed through—a by-the-numbers accountant type who had always seemed to Pray a little out of place teaching mayhem to CIA recruits.
“He’s going into retirement, too—not as luxurious as yours, of course, but then he’s too old for the fast lane. Anyway, he’s hanging it up, and settling down in Idaho. Bought himself a shack on the lake at Coeur d’Alene. We thought it would be great fun to give him a sort of combined retirement and housewarming party. Last weekend in October. Bring a change of clothes.”
“I haven’t said I’ll come.”
“Sure you will. Just let me know your arrival time, and I’ll meet you at the airport. I’m going over a day early to help set things up.”
“Why don’t I believe that all you want is to invite me to a party for somebody I barely know?”
“Honest to God, Adam. I just got worried you might be getting bored, sitting out there in the rain at the edge of the world.” Biven didn’t sound a bit sincere, Pray thought, but then he never did, even when he was.
“That’s it?”
“Absolutely. Would I lie to you, Adam?”
“You bet.”
Biven’s laughter still rang in Pray’s ear as he hung up.
“He’s got a job, sure as hell,” Pray said to the air. He knew Biven, knew he never made casual calls, never indulged in pleasure without mixing in at least a tinge of business. Pray drained the brandy and practically skipped back to the bar, where he put the snifter down with a grin. A job meant an end to boredom.
“Might even help pay for you, too,” he said, picking up the photograph of the dragon boat. He carried it with him to the tall corner window and stood, sipping brandy and looking at the sunset. What a beautiful city Seattle is, he thought.
Chapter 3
The guard named Leonard stood waiting outside the Yakima Barrier gate house. Hesse pulled up, and Leonard leaned through the window on the passenger side. Nick drew away and stared at the ceiling of the van with a frown.
“Everything cool?” Leonard asked.
“Everything’s marvelous,” Hesse replied.
“What’d I tell you? A piece of cake.” Leonard slid the side door of the van open, and climbed in. He settled himself among the bottles.
Nick turned and stared at Leonard. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“He’s coming with us,” Hesse said.
“Why?”
“He will help you transfer the plutonium to your van. Then he goes with you to Priest Lake.”
“Who needs him?”
“I do. And at any rate, his payment will be waiting for him there, just as yours will be.”
Nick made a face. “You really don’t trust me, do you?”
“I’ve already told you that. Now shut up.”
At the Dodge van, Hesse waited in his own vehicle while the other two men transferred the steel bottles, then called Nick over.
“Get in for a moment,” he said. “Leonard, you can wait in the Dodge. I have some last minute instructions for Nick.” He watched Leonard climb into the other van, then turned to Nick.
“Let’s make sure you’re clear. You will drive to the campground at the north end of Priest Lake, wait for the airplane, and help load it. The pilot’s name is Rafael. He will have your payment. And he is my man. When he speaks to you, it’s as if I spoke to you. Do you understand?”
“Nick nodded impatiently. “Right. Right. I’m not stupid.”
“Make sure there’s no repeat of tonight’s asinine performance. You have all the time in the world to get there; the plane won’t arrive until dawn. Stick to the back roads. No speeding. No vehicular combat with people who irritate you. Is that clear?”
“Come on, man. Anyway, you got your spy riding with me.”
“Ah, yes. Leonard.” Hesse reached into his pocket and pulled out a Browning .380 pistol, an old one, the bluing worn from its blunt muzzle. He held it out. “When you get to Priest Lake and load the plutonium onto the plane, you will get your payment, and Leonard will receive his. After that, I don’t really care what happens. Do you understand what I mean?”
Nick’s eyes widened, and the beginning of a smile was visible in the glow of the dash lights. “Is that a suggestion?”
“He’s a Jew.”
Nick put the pistol in his pocket and opened the door of the van.
“A pleasure doing business with you.”
“You have no idea,” Hesse replied. “And you never will, cretin,” he murmured as Nick walked to the other van.
* * *
Two hours later, Hesse pulled into a parking lot in the town of Yakima. A midnight blue BMW 735i stood alone at the darkened outer edge of the lot, away from the light. A man and woman emerged from it as Hesse approached in the van. He pulled to a stop beside the other car and stepped out into the parking lot.
“Here is your vehicle, Mr. Dorn,” he said as the other man approached. “I will have my keys back, now.”
“They’re in your car.” The man turned and looked admiringly at the BMW. “I almost hoped you wouldn’t bring the van back.”
“But I did, as you see. You’re sure there will be no questions? No concerns about excess mileage?”
“No problem. They never check. And anyway, I have Rebecca with me. They expect a little extra when you take your wife. Privilege of rank, you know.”
“I thought the Green Party was strictly egalitarian.”
“When I’m wearing my Green hat, I’m an egalitarian. When I’m being a federal bureaucrat, I take what I can get.”
“I’m sure you do, Hesse thought. “Speaking of what you can get,” he said, and reached into his jacket, “Here is my donation to the party. I trust they will use it wisely.” He held a packet out to Dorn.
“Do I ever get to know just why you needed a government van so badly?”
Hesse shook his head as Dorn took the packet. “It isn’t your concern, just as it isn’t mine what your party does with that money. I assumed, by the way, that you might have some personal expenses to cover, so I thought currency would be simpler for you than a check.” He watched the touch of greed that came into Dorn’s eyes. It relaxed him. He disliked idealists. Greed, avarice, corruption, those were known quantities. He had learned them at his father’s knee, like stations of the Cross.