Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

Time goes slowly. That’s good, I’m not in a speedy mode. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, I didn’t wear my watch. It must be very late, after midnight. I swallow the last sips from my water bottle. Even though I’ve been warned not to I’ll come back tomorrow, when the sun is up. I want to take more pictures of the birds to replace the ones I lost, so I’ll have negatives, not merely images in my computer, to show that Ollie was here. Otherwise, he won’t have existed as part of my life as forcefully. The memory of him, like a bad old print, will fade and fade until someday there will be nothing left.

  As I walk back to the canoe and begin untying the line I hear the whup-whup sound of helicopters approaching. The two long rows of lights on Roach’s landing strip come on in a staggered sequence. Four helicopters loom up in the nighttime sky, flying low over the timber line. Military-style airships, scary-looking machines of death and destruction. They touch down in orderly formation, one after the other. Even before the rotors stop the doors have opened and men are coming out. Bodyguards first, dressed like paratroopers but not in U.S. mufti, different-colored uniforms that I don’t recognize. They carry assault weapons. Serious-business expressions. After they come out and spot-check to see that the area’s secure, men in civilian garb emerge, a couple from each helicopter. I can’t make out any details in their appearance—they’re too far away—but I have a strong, immediate reaction: they remind me of the slain diplomat.

  They mill around on the runway, each group standing apart from the others.

  I’m aware, suddenly, that I haven’t drawn a breath in thirty seconds. Now I force myself to, inhale, then slowly exhale. Taking my camera out of the bag, I attach the longest lens I brought, 400 mm.

  As I’m beginning to focus on the action, a Range Rover, followed by three Chrysler minivans, approaches from the direction of Roach’s house. Roach gets out of the Range Rover. He’s dressed casually but elegantly, the picture of the country squire. Two of his bodyguards, the same two men who snatched me from my shack and brought me to his house, flank him. They, too, are armed with heavy-duty weapons. They’re dressed in lethal-looking black, the black of SWAT teams, of the SS—if the lights were off, they’d be invisible.

  Roach strolls over to the assemblage and greets each group in turn as they stand in the shadows of the behemoth helicopters. Everyone seems edgy except for Roach, who’s cool and collected.

  I take a quick exposure reading through my spot meter. The light coming off the runway is marginal, but I’m not going to save film now. I focus on the action and begin clicking away.

  Roach’s equanimity under what feels, even from this distance, like a lot of pressure, seems to be warming up the crowd. They start talking to one another, albeit stiffly. I’d like to be closer, but I don’t dare move from my position of hidden cover.

  After a few moments of seeing that each group becomes more comfortable with the other (my imprecise take on what’s happening, from my distant perspective and my knowledge of Roach’s iron-fist-in-silk-glove forcefulness), Roach leads the assemblage to the vehicles. He gets into his Range Rover, the others climb aboard the minivans, and the convoy heads toward his house, out of my line of sight. Their headlights are off, they drive in darkness.

  As soon as the cars drive away the runway lights go off, and the entire area goes dark again. Roach didn’t want anyone to see these men arrive here, or know that they’re here now. And no one does, I’m sure, except me.

  I hadn’t given conscious thought as to why I felt compelled to come out here tonight, particularly after what I’ve gone through today, but now I know it wasn’t only to see the birds. I was hoping (and dreading) that something like this would happen, something that would force the issue. I climb into my canoe and push off, angling the slender boat downstream, toward Roach’s property.

  It only takes me a few minutes to get to a place on Roach’s side of the stream where I can pull up to the bank, tie my canoe off, and carefully climb ashore, my camera bag slung over my shoulder. I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, but I can’t stop myself: I’ve gone too far down this path, too much pain and misery have happened for me to walk away from it now; particularly since I’ve stumbled, through no brilliance of my own, onto this explosive encounter.

  If I see anyone, hear anyone, feel anything moving, I’ll hightail it out of here faster than Halley’s Comet. I can get lost in this swamp like a cottonmouth.

  Clambering up the shallow embankment, I find myself a short distance away from the dark runway. The area is quiet—the big machines loom up in the darkness like huge sleeping bugs. Let sleeping bugs and dogs lie should be my motto, but it isn’t, not tonight.

  After satisfying myself that no one’s been left behind to keep watch of the airships, I turn away from the runway and look toward the house, which is about a half-mile away as the crow flies. It’s lit on the inside, but I’m too far away to see anything. Carefully, keeping low, listening intently for any out-of-place sounds, I start Indian-walking toward it, one foot quietly placed in front of the other.

  The ground under my feet is weeds and scrub grass until I’m about two hundred yards from the house, where the cultivated lawn begins, part of the acres of expanse I saw from inside Roach’s house the day I was his captive guest. I feel like the Tom Cruise character in Eyes Wide Shut, sneaking into a clandestine, sinister situation that he knows he shouldn’t be violating but drawn to it nonetheless by the excitement of what he might find there, and the insane, potentially fatal thrill of possible capture.

  I stop and wait. A hot summer wind is starting to come up. It feels good on my face, bracing.

  I don’t have the guts to get any closer. I’m drenched in my sweat as it is. I’m betting that the security—I’m sure there’s an alarm system—is clustered close to the house, that it doesn’t extend out this far. The man owns almost a hundred acres. He can’t cover it all. The house, the airfield, that’s what it would be concentrated on—I hope.

  A sound stops me. I freeze, look around, carefully check it out. The noise is that of footsteps crunching on dry grass. Armed guards, patrolling the grounds, midway between me and the house. I squat on my haunches and put a wet finger to the wind—it’s blowing in my direction. That’s a relief; if they have dogs—I don’t see any, but there could be some outside my line of vision—they’d smell me from this distance if I was upwind from them.

  Trying not to make a sound, I inch over to a clump of manicured bushes that form a horseshoe fringe around the inner gardens and hide behind them. Peering through an opening in the bushes, I look at the house.

  The floor-to-ceiling windows offer me a good view inside. Roach is standing at a table facing the new arrivals, who are seated in comfortable chairs, each small group separated slightly from the other. Roach is talking, the others are listening with intent expressions on their faces.

  I take my camera out of the bag, bring it to my eye, adjust the focus. The magnification of the long lens brings my subjects startlingly close. I begin snapping away, making sure I have at least one clear shot of each person in the room.

  I complete one cycle and start panning the room again, when I sense something—a subtle movement, borne by the wind. I lower the camera from my eye, trying to feel what it is, like a bird dog on point.

  What I intuit, in my churning gut, is that I’ve been found out. I can’t explain why I feel that—the men patrolling the area don’t seem to have taken notice of me, but I know it. Maybe there are body-heat detectors that I’ve tripped, space-age monitors tracking me from above. It doesn’t matter how I’ve been detected; all I do know is that I have to get the fuck out of here, now.

  Slowly, carefully, I begin inching away from the house, moving like a crab, crouched low to the ground, trying to steal glimpses over my shoulder to see if I’m being pursued.

  I’m not, not yet anyway. I rise up and start running. I can see, in the darkness, the helicopters looming up in front of me, and I’m running for the safety of the water as fast as I
can, my breath is coming hard and dry, it’s like I’m breathing inside a blast furnace, my chest is tightening, I feel that at any moment I’m going to be nailed, a deer in the headlights.

  The sound is deafening, a high, shrill, air-raid-siren shriek. A moment later, the perimeter around Roach’s house is lit up like the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

  My adrenaline rush kicks in. I’m sprinting full-out now. I hear the crack of a bullet being fired, then another. Instantly, I hit the ground hard, eating dirt, crawling on my hands and knees like a dog. The sharp vegetation tears at my face, body, rips my clothes. Somewhere behind me, I don’t know how close, no way I’m going to stop and look, shots are ringing in the night, loud enough to scare anything alive for miles around, as the sentries fire at anything moving—shadows, trees waving in the wind. I don’t see birds taking off, it’s too dark out, but I hear them, the rush of hundreds of pairs of wings as the birds take to the sky as if sucked up in the vortex of a tornado.

  It seems like forever before I get to the river. I slide on my ass down the embankment to the canoe, jump in, push off from the bank, and start paddling upstream against the current as hard and fast as I can.

  In the distance behind me, I can see, through the protective canopy of cypress branches, the lights going on back at Roach’s airstrip. Then the sound of helicopter engines firing up, the beating of the rotors, followed by the air-sucking whoosh as they take to the sky.

  I don’t stop for a heartbeat, I keep paddling like my life depends on it, which I’m sure it does. It’s a crazy maze in here—if you didn’t know this patch of water and lowland intimately you could get hopelessly lost. I know these waterways upside down and backward, I’ve been navigating them every day for months. So even though the sky is almost pitch-black, I know where I’m going. And my pursuers, if there are any, don’t. I’m counting on that.

  • • •

  It’s quiet and still when I get back to my dock. I pull the canoe onto dry ground, lash it onto the top of my Jeep, and drive back to my mother’s house, where I hurriedly store the canoe back in the garage.

  There’s only one thought in my mind: get out of here. I throw my PowerBook, cameras, and gun into the car. When I get to the road, which is the only connection between our property and Roach’s, aside from the water, I pause to check for traffic. Nothing is moving—no headlights approaching, no sounds of cars. Leaving my own lights off, I drive away from there as fast as I can.

  • • •

  I hang out in an all-night trucker’s diner until dawn, sitting in the last booth in the back, facing the door, drinking coffee to stay awake, my gun heavy in my pocket. At six-thirty I make a phone call, pay my bill, and leave, checking my rearview mirror with a nervous tic.

  Pierce Wilcox is waiting for me at the community college darkroom. He doesn’t ask why I called him so early, and I don’t volunteer any information. He opens one of the darkrooms for me, then leaves me alone.

  I develop the rolls. They come out all right—the light was marginal, but I get images, good enough to make identifications.

  Now I have to figure out who these men are, how they’re connected to Roach. And to find out how what I witnessed last night is linked to the murdered diplomat, Wallace’s killing, and my mother’s.

  It’s me,” I rasp into the telephone.

  I made this call knowing I could be setting myself up for an ambush. If Roach knows it was me out there last night—he could have pictures, his spy apparatus is far better than anything I can mount against him—and it filtered down to Buster, our longtime friendship might not be strong enough to withstand the pressures of his job, his career.

  “Fritz. I hear the concern in Buster’s voice. “How was the funeral? Not too brutal, I hope. I really feel bad I couldn’t come.”

  “We survived.” I can’t deal with small talk now, not even if it’s with the best of intentions. But he sounds genuine, not like he’s setting me up. “I need your help,” I say bluntly.

  Now there’s a hesitation. “Is it about what I think it’s about?” Even if he’s in the dark about what happened last night he still wants to keep as far away from anything having to do with Roach as possible; but I need help that Fred can’t provide, and Buster is the one person I know who might be able to give it to me quickly.

  “Yes.”

  Another pause before he continues. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I don’t want to get any deeper involved in what you’ve been doing.” He sounds nervous as hell. “You promised me you were going to stop chasing your tail about this.”

  “I was, but things have changed.”

  “Like how?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. But Buster . . .”

  “What?”

  “I need to know I can trust you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, sounding offended.

  “I’m sitting on a powder keg. Several of them. You’ll understand when I tell you what they are. But I don’t want to talk to you about any of it if you can’t keep what I tell you totally confidential.”

  He doesn’t respond immediately.

  “If for any reason you can’t agree to that,” I continue, “tell me, I’ll hang up, and this conversation never took place. But I have to be certain, a hundred percent. I know you wouldn’t want to betray a lifetime friendship, Buster,” I add pointedly, “but you might think you have to, after you hear what I tell you. I don’t want to come on like this, but I have to protect myself. So be straight with me.”

  There’s a pause. Then: “You’re safe with me, Fritz.”

  “When can we get together?”

  “When can you get here?”

  • • •

  Buster hustles me into his office, embraces me in a bear hug. “I love you, man. You try the hell out of my patience, but I love you.”

  “Thanks, Buster.” I’m gratified by his emotion toward me, but I’m not here to be soothed.

  “That’s a bitch about your mother,” he continues, shaking his head at the pointlessness of it. “Getting killed in a fire. An old lady should die in her own bed, surrounded by her loved ones.”

  “The fire didn’t kill her.”

  He gapes at me. “What?”

  “She was murdered. The fire was set afterward, to cover it.”

  He sits up in his black leather office chair. “That’s a heavy load, man. You know this for a fact?”

  “You mean do I have proof you could take into a courtroom?” I shake my head. “If I did, I’d have already gone to the police with it. But I know.”

  He shakes his head like he’s trying to shake off a nightmare that won’t go away. “Are you still beating this drum about Roach? Is that where this is going? You think he had a hand in killing your mother, for Christsakes? That’s cold, man.” He scowls. “This business with Roach is going to cause a shitpile of heartburn, no matter how it turns out.” He stares at me. “How do you know—whatever it is you say you do know?”

  “Those pictures I showed you that time? The dead diplomat?”

  “Yes?” he says warily.

  “There were others.” I pause. “Including one of him getting killed. In the act.”

  Buster groans like he’s been pole-axed between the eyes. “You fuck! Why the hell didn’t you tell me then?”

  “Because I didn’t ever think it would get this far.”

  “That’s lame, and you know it,” he says angrily. “You should’ve let me do the thinking, like I asked you to.”

  “Okay, I know, I knew, whatever,” I say ruefully. “But I didn’t.” I can’t deal with recriminations now, I’ve got plenty of time for that later. “The important thing is, some bastard broke into my place looking for those pictures, my mother showed up unexpectedly, looking for her wayward son who she’d never given up hope on, and she was killed. Then the fire was set as a diversion.”

  Buster rubs his hands together nervously. “Who knew they were there, those pictures of the Rus
sian being murdered?”

  “Nobody. But Roach had to have figured they were. I’ve been going over all this in my mind. He knew I was taking pictures of his place. He must have thought I had pictures of the murder.” I pause. “It all goes back to the very beginning. You remember those first pictures I showed you, the one with the diplomat, on Roach’s runway?”

  “Yes?” he says slowly, fearful of what other catastrophes I’m going to dump in his lap.

  “If you recall, there were two other men in the picture. One I don’t know, he’s unidentifiable. But the other, I found out his identity.”

  “Who?” he asks with trepidation.

  I lay down an ace. “Wallace. Roach’s murdered security man.”

  “Oh, shit!” he moans.

  “Everything comes back to Roach,” I tell him passionately. “Everything.”

  “Did he . . . did whoever broke in get the pictures?”

  I shake my head. “That’s the tragic, stupid irony of it. They weren’t even in my house.”

  “But somebody thought they were. You think Roach.”

  “Who else, for Godsakes?”

  Buster snaps out of his funk. “Who knows any of these pictures exist, anything you’ve taken at Roach’s place?”

  “You, for openers.”

  “That’s . . . true.” He gives me a twisted smile. “I knew when I told you to get rid of them that you wouldn’t. So—Do you think I could have done it?”

  “Don’t play the injured party, Buster,” I say irritably, “it doesn’t fit.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he says, only semi-sarcastically. “So who else?”

  “What about your senior partner, Roach’s old war buddy?”

  “Clements?” he responds in surprise. “Why in the world would you think that?”

  “Because earlier, when I came to you on this, you said you were going to talk to him and smooth things out for me.”

  He slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Fuck me. I’d clean forgotten about that.” He shakes his head. “I shined it on, because you promised me you were going to leave it alone, and I didn’t want to stir the pot if it wasn’t going to go any further.” He sighs. “I’m sorry, man. I haven’t been a hundred percent truthful with you, either.”