Dream of a Falling Eagle m-14

by George C. Chesbro

  Again using my penlight, I searched through the desk drawers more carefully, found nothing but a collection of paper clips, rubber bands, and a dozen sharpened pencils of various colors that he apparently used to grade student papers. There were no filing cabinets. Except for whatever might be in his computer, Dr. Guy Fournier traveled light in the record-keeping department.

  The books and magazines on his desk, many of them marked in a dozen or more places, all looked like standard armament for a professor of comparative religion. I leaned back in the chair, played the thin pencil of light around the office, over the stacks of literature piled on the floor to the hundreds of books filling the bookcases. I wondered how he found anything when he was looking for it.

  Or how anybody else would find anything, assuming they were looking for something that could not be reduced to bytes of data and stored in a password-coded computer file. The place still looked more like a storage area than an office, but it also looked like an excellent place to hide something; burying it in plain sight, as it were.

  I got up, began working my way slowly through the stalagmites of literature on the floor. There were books and magazines in French and English on everything from anthropology to Zen Buddhism, and they were all covered with a film of dust that made it evident they had not been consulted in some time. The books in the bookcases appeared the same, all covering appropriate subjects in the professor's field of expertise, and all coated with dust. Or almost all. When I got to a section of shelves that were almost directly across the room from the desk, at a height that would be just about at Fournier's eye level, there were a number of books that looked as if they had recently been referenced, at least to the extent that they had not had time to collect a film of dust since their last outing. I selected one, a thick tome on Zoroastrianism, stretched up, and pulled it out. When I held it upside down by the edges of its binding and shook it, three photographs fell out and floated down to the floor.

  Well, now.

  I sat down on a pile of French professional journals and shined my penlight over the photos. All three were eight-by-tens, black-and-white, and appeared to have been taken with a telephoto lens. The shots were obviously of three different groups of pro-life activists demonstrating outside abortion clinics. The faces of the shouting men and women were appropriately twisted with emotion, their gestures eloquent, the messages on the placards they carried evocative. The clinics were not identified, but seemed to be in different parts of the country; there was the trunk of a palm tree visible behind a demonstrator in one photo, and another photo showed a group standing atop a snow bank. But the pictures had something else in common besides the fact that all three were of activists demonstrating outside abortion clinics. The same two men-young, white, the expressions on what otherwise would have been fresh, midwestern faces twisted with hate-appeared in all three of the photographs. Although it was unclear whether or not they knew each other, in all three shots the heads of the two men had been circled in red. I looked on the backs of the photos, but there was nothing there, nor on the front, to identify them. I stared at the faces for some time, trying to etch them into memory, then replaced them at random in the book- hoping Fournier wouldn't notice they weren't where they had been- and put the volume back on the shelf.

  The next book I took down seemed out of place in Fournier's large-if rarely used-professional library. It was a compendium of recent Supreme Court decisions with the complete texts of opinions rendered. As I leafed through the volume I could see that a number of sections had been marked with yellow highlighter; all of the marked sections were from the bitterly dissenting opinions of two justices, Mabel Roscowicz and Richard Weiner, both now deceased. Taped onto the back cover was another photograph, a formal group portrait of the Supreme Court justices in their robes. The heads of Richard Weiner and Mabel Roscowicz had been circled in red ink.

  The thrill of discovery was thoroughly dampened by a sudden chill and the wave of nausea that rippled through my stomach. I was staring at the text and photograph, wondering whether I should risk searching around through other offices for a copying machine, when the lights suddenly came on.

  I dropped the book and spun around, clawing for the Beretta in my shoulder holster, then froze when I saw Guy Fournier-unshaven, dressed in rumpled khakis, loafers with no socks, and a thin leather jacket over a pajama top-standing in the doorway, a Glock with some kind of custom-made silencer held steady with both hands and aimed directly at my chest. The thick, white hair crowning his triangular head was uncombed, but there was nothing sleepy about his piercing eyes. I'd completely missed his security apparatus; it wasn't some bell or siren rigged to the door or window, but must have been an alarm in his quarters that went off when his computer was turned on. A big tut-tut on me; but I needed those computer files, and by lingering I did find the marked photos of the pro-life activists and the two dead justices. In any case, that decision was now obviously moot.

  "What kind of voodoo shit is this?" I asked in a mild tone, nodding toward the gun in his hand. "Isn't that cheating?"

  "This is nine-millimeter voodoo shit," Fournier replied evenly in his resonant bass. "It's used for dealing with people who walk around as well armed as you do these days. Toss your gun away."

  "Where?"

  "Anywhere you like, as long as it's well beyond your reach. Use your thumb and index finger to remove it from the holster."

  I did as I was told, lifting the Beretta from my holster and tossing it to my right, in the general direction of his desk. The gun skipped across the tops of two stacks of magazines, then clattered to the floor.

  He continued, "Now the other one."

  "What other one?"

  "The Seecamp you carry in an ankle holster on your right leg. Again, use only your thumb and index finger to remove it."

  "Jesus," I said, bending over and pulling up my right pant leg, "you've been reading my mail. The company must have quite a dossier on me."

  "You and your brother. Do it, Frederickson. Then step away from the stacks to where I can see your whole body. Don't try to bandy words with me or attempt any other kind of distraction. I'm an excellent marksman, and if I even sense that you're going to try to move on me, I'll put a bullet through your heart."

  "Wouldn't that mess up your tidy little office here?"

  "I'll just throw out your corpse along with the bloody books and magazines. The office needs cleaning anyway."

  "Yeah, but how much fun would that be? I thought you specialized in heart removal."

  "You're trying to bandy words, Frederickson. I have warned you."

  I regarded the black bore of his Glock, which was steady and remained aimed directly at my chest. I took out the Seecamp, tossed it after the Beretta.

  "Now sit on the stack of magazines to your right. Both feet flat on the floor, hands on your knees."

  I sat.

  "How did you find out about me?"

  "Didn't you read in my dossier that I'm arguably the world's premier private investigator?"

  "I thought we had solved the problem of people being willing to talk to you and your brother."

  "Now there's a startling admission if ever I've heard one."

  "It doesn't make any difference. You'll eventually tell me who steered you toward me, and that person will pay with agony and death."

  "Wooaa. Tough talk for a company lackey. You can certainly kill me, but what you can't do is impress me. It doesn't take any balls to inform on your people, torture, and kill when you do what you do. Now, if you really had been what so many Haitians believed you to be, that would be a different matter. The immigrants and exiles here consider you a hero, but all you really are is one more chickenshit informer who's been on the CIA payroll for years."

  Shadows moved in his ebony eyes. He leaned against the door-jamb, blinked slowly as he regarded me. I stared back. Finally he said, "Informer? Hardly. It appears you don't know as much about me as I thought you did. I fear you don't appreciate my. . work."
>
  "So you're a full-fledged field operative, maybe a case officer. Big deal."

  He grunted. "We don't have titles in my department. My department doesn't have a name. We don't keep organizational charts."

  "You work for Ops."

  He raised his white eyebrows slightly. "Do I?"

  He most certainly did. But the idea of a kind of Shadow Ops within Ops, working off the chart, in a manner of speaking, and perhaps unbeknownst to even the director of Operations and the roster of case officers was not totally out of the question. They grew some pretty strange weeds at Langley. If my situation had not been so dour, I might have found the notion intriguing, as opposed to irrelevant to my present circumstances. I said, "Being a high-profile Catholic priest in Haiti must have cramped your style."

  "Not at all. My non-Church duties were purely administrative."

  "What did you administrate?"

  "Haiti. You could consider me the chairman of the board of the controlling entity. People like Papa and Baby Doc and the generals were essentially my CEOs, and the Ton-tons and Fraph their administrative assistants. The business really ran very smoothly for decades. Then, of course, things got out of hand. But we'll be back there, the same as we'll be back in Cuba after Castro dies."

  "With the Mafia providing your CEOs and administrative assistants."

  "Exactly. Now you're beginning to understand."

  "What do you call this department of yours among yourselves?"

  "We don't call it anything. You're a fool, Frederickson, just like this president. What the hell good do you think this silly report of yours is going to do? You can't touch us. They could fire everybody at Langley-every clerk, secretary, director, analyst, and field operative-and blow up the building, and it wouldn't matter to us. We can't be rooted out, only transplanted. We're not listed on any budget; we pay our own way. The CIA is our host body of choice, but there are others."

  "Interesting that you should compare yourself to a parasite."

  "Ugly, but curiously accurate. Ever try to kill a tapeworm, Frederickson?"

  "Hey, I'm giving it my best shot."

  "It was an exercise in futility, even before you ended up here as my guest. We're the people you're really after, and, until now, you didn't even know we existed. We're invulnerable. Only a handful of people buried deep within the agency make up our organization, and none of these individuals has ever been a political appointee or a director, not even a director of Operations. So you can reorganize the CIA any way you like, and it won't affect us. Put the CIA out of business, and we'll just pack up shop and move elsewhere. After all, we only have a dozen other intelligence agencies to choose from."

  "I should bite my tongue for saying this, Professor, but it sounds to me like you're whistling in a graveyard. I think you're full of shit. If you weren't worried about the report, you wouldn't have been sending out your boys of summer to butcher potential witnesses and informants."

  He shrugged. "Moving is inconvenient. We prefer that things remain as they are. Incidentally, I enjoyed your remark about whistling in a graveyard. Your dossier describes you as occasionally witty, and I'm glad I've had this opportunity to appreciate your wit firsthand."

  "Why the hell did you kill Thomas Dickens, Fournier? That didn't even make the halfwit mark. It made no sense at all."

  "You killed him, Frederickson. You killed him the moment you decided to try to use him to further the cause of people of your political persuasion."

  "I wasn't planning to use him for anything at all."

  "That's not the way I heard it. I received information that at some opportune time in the future you were going to use Mr. Dickens to try to severely embarrass a friend of ours. The act of plagiarism itself was, of course, very trivial, but the lapse in ethics could have been used not only to tarnish Mr. Kranes's personal reputation, but also to damage his credibility and thus his political career. That would not be trivial. He's very important to our plans, and we weren't going to sit around and wait for you to drop that shoe."

  "Your fucking information was wrong, Fournier!" I snapped. "That plagiarism business was strictly between Dickens and Kranes. I was just acting as a go-between. It was business, and the deal was done. Dickens never even asked the real name of the man who'd been stealing his poems, and I didn't tell him. You killed that man for nothing!"

  "It seems I was misinformed," Fournier replied in a flat, uninterested tone. "Pity."

  "And why that way?! For Christ's sake, couldn't you have just shot him?!"

  I wasn't sure the lean, white-haired killer was going to answer, but he obviously enjoyed hearing himself talk, and after a few moments of reflection, he said, "I will grant you that the method of execution was perhaps inappropriate, Frederickson."

  "Inappropriate?!"

  "It doesn't make any difference now, but it could have complicated matters. One has to use the tools at hand, and some tools are blunter and less flexible than others. You can't carve scrimshaw with a chainsaw."

  "What the fuck does that mean?!"

  He smiled thinly, but there was no humor reflected in the black pools of his eyes. "Be patient," he said softly. "I promise you an answer."

  Guy Fournier was making me very angry, and I couldn't afford to deal in any emotional currency, particularly not the very debilitating coin of anger. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out, then yawned. "Look, Professor, this has all been very interesting and informative, but I'm getting sleepy. I think I'll head home now."

  "I think not. I have a surprise for you."

  "I hate surprises. I don't mean to sound impatient, Fournier, but if you're not going to let me go home, tell me what the hell we're waiting for. What happens next?"

  "We are waiting for my associates to be brought to me. They don't live as close by, and their modes of travel are somewhat restricted. The sequence of events after that will depend on your attitude."

  "Right now I have a very bad attitude."

  "I know. That can be changed."

  "Now that would really surprise me."

  "You will be taken to my place of power."

  "'Place of power'? What the hell is that?"

  He cocked his head, and once again the corners of his mouth curled up ever so slightly. His eyes seemed to gleam a little brighter. "You might call it my personal house of worship."

  "It sounds kinky. I'll bet it isn't Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Don't tell me you actually believe your own voodoo bullshit."

  "'Believe' isn't the operative word, Frederickson. Voodoo isn't really a belief system, like Judaism or Christianity. It's not a religion at all-not for adepts. The fact that it is considered as such by so many people is precisely what makes it work for true practitioners."

  "True practitioners like yourself."

  "Yes."

  "So the fact that it's a belief system for hundreds of thousands of people means that it's not really a belief system for voodoo hotshots like you at the center of the web. Your students must have to take a lot of notes."

  "There isn't time for a complete lecture."

  "If voodoo isn't really a religion, what is it? I mean for true practitioners like yourself."

  "A means of gathering and exercising power, of course."

  "Then it's no different from any other religion-for its professional practitioners."

  "Well, yes. But the voodoo priest is not so much interested in making religious career choices in order to make a living as in focusing concentration and will."

  "You mean scaring the shit out of other people in order to get them to do what you want them to do."

  "Exactly. Voodoo does have that in common with organized religions. The difference is the lack of attending hypocrisy. The voodoo priest makes no claim to saving souls."

  "Far be it from me to defend organized religions, Fournier, but they don't serve up horror as the main course."

  "Your naivete surprises me, Frederickson. Your dossier would have led me to believe that you would appreciate the
horror of the Mass, where men, women, and children delight in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a crucified Christ."

  "Of course I appreciate the horror of the Mass, but in the end it's just folks drinking wine and eating biscuits while they gawk at a statue of a man nailed to a cross. It's not the real McCoy."

  "I am a voodoo master, Frederickson. You should feel honored to be. . attended by me."

  "Well, voodoo still sounds like a religion to me, and it makes my heart flutter to think that you-"

  I abruptly stopped speaking, my words clogging in my throat, when my heart really did begin to flutter. A man in a gray suit, gray turtleneck, and dirty sneakers had suddenly appeared next to Fournier in the doorway, and his appearance was startling. He was over six feet, but slightly stooped, as if there was something wrong with his spine. He was either bald or his head had been shaved, and his eyes were lifeless, vacantly staring into some abyss in front of him. He was black, undoubtedly Haitian, but his flesh was ashen, virtually matching the color of his suit. He was slack-jawed, and spittle ran out of both corners of his mouth. He moved forward and was followed into the room by two other men. They were slightly shorter, but were dressed in identical gray suits and turtlenecks, and sneakers. All were hairless, ashen-skinned, vacant-eyed, slack-jawed, and drooling. The three of them looked like nothing so much as extras in some old Boris Karloff movie. Fournier said something to them in a language I recognized as Creole. Then the three shuffled forward, slowly wending their way around the piles of books and magazines, spreading out until they formed a semicircle in front of me. They stopped when they were about six feet away.

  The voodoo master's chainsaw had arrived.

  "My associates," Fournier said quietly.

  Terror is the most debilitating emotion of all, and the sight of the three drooling, soulless men standing in front of me and staring into eternity thoroughly incapacitated me. My chest was constricted so tightly that I was having trouble catching a breath, and my back felt as if someone had pressed a slab of ice against it. If my hands had not been wrapped tightly around my knees, I knew they would be trembling. What had slouched into the room was apparently what Fournier had in mind for me, destroying my mind and will instead of carving out my heart, maybe to have me pad off and get his newspaper and slippers each morning. I preferred death the old-fashioned way, even if I had to earn it, but mostly I preferred me the way I was. My only chance of staying that way lay first in relaxing, as improbable as that goal seemed under the circumstances. Fournier apparently knew what I was thinking, sensed I wasn't too thrilled with developments, for he was now standing erect in the doorway, aiming his gun with both hands at my right kneecap. My first, panic-stricken reaction was to leap to my feet and start whaling away at the men in the gray suits, but that plan was contraindicated; I wouldn't be whaling, or standing, very long after a bullet had shattered my kneecap. A more practical plan of attack-or escape-was needed. Such a scheme was not immediately springing to mind, but maybe, just maybe, there might come a moment when a window of opportunity for survival might open for a single split second. If such a window did open, and if I was to be able to take advantage, I would need all my strength, reflexes, and quickness at peak operating efficiency, and at the moment I felt about as limber as a boulder.