by Terry Irving
Rick called after her. "Wait a minute. There was ‘B-Roll’ on Farr’s film?"
"Yup. They shot it before the interview."
Rick stood there and watched her go. Then he sat down, opened the drawer of the desk, pulled out the Bolex camera, and stared at it. If the crew had already shot cutaways and reverse shots with the primary camera, what was in the film Moten had given him?
After some thought, he stood up and yanked the heavy desk away from the wall. Reaching over, he carefully slid the small camera down so it stopped against the baseboard, making sure it couldn’t be seen from the floor, and then gently pushed the desk back into place. He shoved a random pile of newspapers and net bags over the gap, and then lit a cigarette, sat back down, and stared into space.
CHAPTER 12
"So, the dispatcher can’t figure out why the Dulles cops are laughing when they’re telling him that one of his guys crashed." Sam Watkins was holding forth. "So, he gets the van and goes out to pick him up. And he goes into the police station and he finds his guy sitting there with a blanket around him."
A heavyset black man with patches of lighter-colored skin spotting his face, Sam held up a finger for emphasis. "Only a blanket."
He coughed, lit a cigarette, and continued. "What happened, you see, is that he’d gone under this bridge by the Pan Am freight terminal where the wind is always blasting straight in from the side. When he came out from under the overpass, it caught that damn metal fairing bolted to the front forks, and that bike was gone. He was scooting right along, and when he went down, he popped off the bike to keep his leg from being chewed off, but then he went skidding and rolling along for damn near a hundred yards."
Sam pursed his lips and popped his eyes for comic effect. "He was one hundred percent naked. He’d scraped every scrap of clothes he had on right off. Boots, jeans, jacket, everything. He wasn’t really hurt, just scraped up, but the cops just fell out when they found him."
Rick laughed. Sam had been an ABN courier since 1963. According to him, he’d been hired the day before Kennedy was assassinated and ended up sleeping on top of desks in the bureau for two weeks before he got home again. Sometimes, Rick thought he’d learned more from listening to Sam’s rambling stories than in four years of college.
He pulled out a Winston, offered one to Sam, did his up-down trick with the Zippo, and lit both cigarettes.
"Hey, move over and make some room," said a voice over his shoulder. It was Kyle Matthews, the third courier currently assigned to ABN. Kyle was a skinny kid with a tattoo of a shamrock on his left arm and a sort of "twitchy" look – as if he were always playing an angle. He was just out of junior college or, Rick suspected, just flunked out of junior college. Kyle was OK to hang out with, but not someone you wanted to depend on.
"And exactly where do you expect us to make this room?" asked Sam in an arch tone. "I suppose you could sit in the ashtray. Or in one of the desk drawers."
"Well, you could start by taking all this crap," Kyle said, grabbing the pile of raingear and heavy coats that were sitting on the remaining chair, "and putting it carefully in the proper location." He dumped the wet mass into the middle of the hall, threw his own gear on the top of the pile, and sat down. "Now there’s plenty of room."
He opened a bag of Cheez Doodles and began to eat.
"How is it out there?" Rick asked.
"Completely shitty with a fifty percent chance of incredibly shitty," Kyle responded. "It’s stopped raining at the moment, but it’s right at the freezing point and the roads are slick as hell. I almost lost it just making the turn into the side entrance off Connecticut Avenue."
Sam intoned, "Another beautiful day in Paradise."
The courier phone rang.
"You, sir, are up." Sam gleefully pointed at Rick. "And with any luck, I won’t get another run before I can get out of here. For once, I might actually get home with my toes unfrozen."
Rick picked up the phone. "All-Night Couriers, We Go In Snow."
"I damn well hope so," said Casey Ross, "because you get to slalom your way out to Suitland for the weather film."
"Casey, don’t we have a car I can drive? I figure I’ve got about a fifty-fifty chance of making it back alive in this temperature."
"I already checked. We don’t. Just take it easy. It’s not like it’s worth your life." Ross laughed. "Of course, you have to make the local feed, so I guess you do need to take a reasonable amount of prudent chances. On the other hand, if you lose your life, we’ll miss the feed, so–"
"This must be the way you used to talk to guys you were sending out to hot zones in Vietnam. Glad you care so deeply."
"Empathy, my friend, is what has made me the award-winning journalist I am today. Bring the film right up when you get back." The phone line clicked off.
Rick hung up and began the long process of suiting up. In reality, the run wasn’t going to be that bad – a little cold, but there wasn’t any snow or ice… yet. If he had really thought he might die on the way, the weather film could sit in Suitland forever.
He mused, "Does anyone know if they feed that stuff down to the Weather Service, or do they drop the film from the satellite?"
Sam cocked his head and pretended to think for a moment. "I haven’t the slightest clue, old man. I just know that the entire nation is depending on you to bring them those pictures of fluffy clouds in time for the 5 o’clock news."
Kyle slid into the seat Rick had just vacated and picked up the paper. "Hey, look at this. This place in Virginia just blew apart. Cool."
Rick glanced at the paper. He recognized the trees behind the pile of rubble that his perfect memory told him had once been a brick Colonial. "Was the owner inside?"
"Ummm. Yeah." Kyle read a bit more. "Or at least they think so. Everything was pretty much vaporized, according to this. They say it was a gas leak."
Rick turned and headed for his bike, but his mind was on the events of the day before. Hadley and the crew had an accident, and now the guy they’d interviewed was a mist in the wind. And the film had gone missing. Had the can been incorrectly labeled on purpose? He felt a chill and imagined he heard the rustle of someone moving closer in the tall grass.
As he began to light his cigarette, Paul Smithson realized that he had two already burning – one in the ashtray on his desk and one in the ashtray on the credenza behind him. He looked at the one in his hand a moment and then went ahead and lit it, shaking out the match with a snap of irritation, and sat back in his deep leather chair, rubbing his forehead and sighing deeply.
He sure as hell hadn’t signed up for this.
He regarded the red plastic film can on his desk with a mixture of fear and hatred. Why couldn’t that goddamn film just stay lost? he thought.
After all, film that people actually wanted to find disappeared every day into the river of pictures that passed through the ABN bureau, so why did the one goddamn reel he never wanted to see again keep popping up?
It reminded him of his ex-wife.
That little hippie bitch was the real problem. Why couldn’t she have just given up like a rational person?
Everything had been simple, deniable, and easily explained even if it became known. The film was hidden in plain sight. He’d just gone down and taken it from where it sat in the crew room before the editor came to pick it up. Not that it mattered – the bureau chief could go anywhere – but no one had even seen him.
It had only taken a moment to step into the office across the hall and replace the markings on the head and tail ends, slap on the new label he’d prepared, and then go back into the crew room to put it in with the other old film cans that no one had ever picked up. God knows no one would ever have willingly screened through that boring damn hearing.
Now there it was, sitting on his desk like a fucking rattlesnake. And even worse, that dumb blonde had screened it, so he couldn’t just make it disappear again.
Damn her, I’d be doing her a favor by firing her. She should be
out having babies or getting laid or something. Not working overtime. Women just aren’t right for this kind of work.
He swung around to look out the window at the dreary winter street. It had all seemed so easy: a cushy job as a respectable member of the press after all those years of political warfare. His stomach no longer required a daily dosing of Pepto, and he’d kick the cigarettes anytime now, and, God, the money was so sweet. At this rate, it would only take a couple more years to pay off that little place near Key Biscayne – a proper reward after all those years of public service.
Damn it, he’d left politics behind him. They had no right to just call him up and expect him to jump like a fucking monkey just because they said "national security" like those were magic words. Hadn’t he ripped Hadley a new one after they called bitching about that story on the money getting laundered through that bank in the Bahamas? Hell, he’d made the prissy bastard do a public apology for that one.
The good old days were gone, and those bastards had to wise up. Sure, he’d gone along when a story just had to be spiked or his old boss wanted him to go after some liberal faggot on the Hill, but things had changed.
He spun around and jammed his cigarette into the ashtray. Damn it. He simply wasn’t going to do it. This was the news business and, goddamn it, this was real news. Hadley was dead, but he could hand it off to Mayweather. That grouchy son of a bitch would run with it.
Running his fingers through his hair, he stood up and grabbed the film can. The phone rang, and he picked it up. "Smithson."
At the sound of the voice on the line, he closed his eyes and felt helpless resignation wash over him. He sat down heavily. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and lifeless.
"Yes, sir. I do remember who gave me my first job. Don’t worry; it will all be taken care of."
CHAPTER 13
The Suitland Federal Center had been built like many things around Washington – during World War Two to house whatever needed to be housed. From what Rick could tell, they didn’t plan things back then. It was more that a branch of the military saw a piece of vacant land, grabbed it, and built something just in case they might need it. They seldom seemed to give any of it back.
He remembered that it was only a year or so ago that they had finally knocked down the "wartime emergency offices" that had covered both sides of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument with row after row of poorly built wooden shacks.
Suitland seemed to be where government departments were dumped when no one could think of a better place to put them: a Federal Records Center, Naval Intelligence, and the Census Bureau. One of the cameramen had told Rick that the Library of Congress even kept thousands of feet of old newsreel in hardened munitions bunkers out there. The reasoning being that since old film was essentially TNT on a reel, it was probably a bad idea to store it next to the Capitol with the books, documents, and other equally flammable cultural artifacts.
The Weather Service had also ended up in one of the drab concrete buildings that seemed to have been all anyone had built in the 1940s. On the bright side, wartime urgency meant that the government had built a road dedicated to military use from Washington to Suitland, or, more correctly, out to Andrews Air Base, which was right next door, and which had originally been meant for fighter pilots to get to their planes quickly in case of a German attack making its way across the Atlantic.
In the absence of any likelihood of Luftwaffe bombers suddenly appearing, Suitland Parkway was open to civilian traffic, but it remained one of the hidden roads used exclusively by people who lived and worked in Washington. Like Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park, or the Whitehurst Freeway around Georgetown, they were the secret ways you could slide right through crowded neighborhoods and past the stoplights where tourists waited in increasing frustration.
It was an easy cruise through downtown, past the gay dance clubs, warehouses, and battered housing projects of Southeast and over the Frederick Douglass Bridge. From runs to Frederick Douglass’s home, Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, and other places in Anacostia, Rick knew it had once been well-to-do suburban living for government workers, but that had been long ago. Now Anacostia was a nightly war zone between rival drug gangs – a place where innocent children were caught in the cross fire on a regular basis. He had read that the shooters called the children "mushrooms" because they just popped up everywhere and got in the way.
Rick was perfectly content to use the parkway to bypass Anacostia.
Once on the quiet, tree-lined four-lane road, the commuter traffic thinned out, and Rick opened up the BMW. He wasn’t really dancing – it was too slick for that – but he didn’t see any point in taking his time.
Suddenly, there was the thunder of a powerful engine only inches from his rear bumper. In the side mirrors, close-set headlights blazed. He felt a jolt, and the bike went crazy. The front pushed out of line and swerved wildly. Rick fought the handlebars and grabbed more throttle – speed would help straighten him out.
He risked a fast glance behind him. It was that Datsun he’d seen earlier, the glass-pack exhausts roaring and the two guys inside grinning. Grinning, damn it!
He heard a crunch from the rear fender, but no shock. They must have dropped back before they hit the tire. For a moment, the rear fender made dangerous noises. It was obviously cutting into the rubber. Then there was a backward jerk from the rear, and the noise stopped. Rick realized with a sense of relief that the end of the fender had folded under. At least it was off the tire.
Rick abandoned any ideas that this was just random road rage. The fact that he’d spotted them before meant these morons were clearly out to get him. He kicked down two gears and the engine screamed in protest. BMWs weren’t really made for speed, but now Rick was thankful that they were very well-designed for stability and durability. For a moment, he drew away from the sports car as the speedometer needle crept upward. He crouched down over the tank, continued to nail the throttle to the stop, and kicked back up to top gear.
He was coming up fast on two cars driving side by side – blocking both lanes. Rick split between them like they were standing still and smashed the side mirror of the car on the right with the end of his handlebar. Let’s see the Datsun do that, he thought.
The Datsun swerved right, passing the cars on the gravel verge, then smoked the tires as it fought its way back onto the parkway and straddled the centerline, catching up once again.
Rick shot a quick glance to his right. Too damn steep; he’d never make it. Without conscious thought, he locked his legs around the gas tank and whipped the bike down in as hard a left turn as he’d ever taken.
Time seemed to slow. Rick could feel the front tire bucking and slipping as he slammed across the grass median. Thankfully, the ground was still iron hard from last week’s hard freeze, or the front end would have rammed into mud and he would have flipped over for sure.
Behind him, the Datsun’s tires screeched as the driver slammed on the brakes and the sports car spun on the slick concrete.
Rick could see a car coming fast from the opposite direction, but it looked like he would get across the road in front of it, so he concentrated on trying to make out what was on the other side of the road. At first, it was just a solid wall of trees and bushes.
There. A hole in the wall. Some kind of path.
He went airborne for a few feet when he hit the curb of the southbound lanes, but he held the bike in alignment by shifting his weight with his butt, and as soon as he hit concrete again, he began struggling to turn toward that tiny empty space in the trees. The BMW’s inertia was immense, and he had to use all the strength in his shoulders and arms to muscle it out of what was a clear intention to shoot straight into an enormous tree trunk. He backed off the throttle, but was afraid he’d lose control if he hit the brakes, so he slammed down through the gears instead.
Time accelerated as he ripped across onto the gravel and then the grass. The oncoming driver flashed by his rear bump
er, and he saw a streak of red zip just behind him on his right, and heard a car horn voice fear and anger. He’d forgotten all about the oncoming car, but, luckily, he had been right about who would get there first.
For a long, terrifying second, he thought the bike would miss the path. Then his front wheel shot upward as the bike hit the clear slope. He threw his weight forward over the gas tank to keep the front down, and trees began whipping past. Still belly-down to the tank and peering just over the handlebars, he realized it must really be a footpath because he hadn’t hit a tree yet – a lot of branches, but not a tree.
Not yet.
Now he could use the rear brake, feathering it just on the edge of breaking into a skid. He fought to bring the heavy bike under control, which was a relative term. The BMW was never designed to be a dirt bike, and he stood up on the foot pegs as it bucked and banged beneath him.
He kicked through neutral to first gear and gave it some gas. The rear wheel threw up a fountain of dirt and leaves as he began to surge up the slope. A log across his path almost took him down, but he managed to bounce the front wheel up and power the rear wheel over it.
A final screen of bushes tore at his arms, and he was clear – alone in an open field.
He skidded to a stop and carefully put down the kickstand. Slowly, he swung off and turned around. The woods were dark and silent behind him, no headlights following him up through the trees. Around him were the quiet, carefully tended expanses of grass and the rows of small, dignified white headstones of a military cemetery. He walked over and read one of the stones.
Andrew H. Sturris, LCpl. US Marine Corps, World War II, Sept. 24 1921 July 16, 1943. Silently, he apologized to Lance Corporal Sturris and anyone else he might have disturbed, and then he dropped to the ground and just lay there – catching his breath.
After a while, he stood up and walked around the BMW to look at the damage. The rear fender was screwed, but the useless radio was still firmly attached. He pulled some branches out of the front end and marveled at how much damage that weird triangular front linkage could take.