by John Case
‘I am up,’ he said, glancing around the room. ‘I was just . . . sleeping. Now I’m up.’ He paused. ‘Why am I up?’
‘You have to come home.’
‘I am. I will. I’ll be there in the morning. I mean, the afternoon. Twoish.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you have to come back right away. Now!’
There was something in her voice – fear, excitement, a mixture of both. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, throwing the covers off and swinging his legs out of the bed.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. But I checked out the Web site –’
‘What Web site?’
‘The Temple’s.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘And it’s them!’ she said. ‘It’s the Temple.’
‘Of course it’s the Temple. It’s their Web site. What are you talking about?’
‘You’re a genius,’ Annie told him. ‘You were right. It was the Temple that took the bodies!’
‘That’s on their Web site?’
‘No! I mean, yes – in a way. The horse is on the Web site!’ Annie said.
‘What horse?’
‘The white horse – with the crazy look. It’s a part of their logo.’
‘You mean . . . the one in front of the Earth?’ Frank asked. ‘With the clouds and everything?’
‘Yes!’
He thought about it. ‘So what?’ he asked. ‘It’s a horse.’
‘It’s the same horse,’ Annie told him.
‘As what?’
‘The horse in Kopervik. There was a horse painted on the side of the church – a big horse – but it was graffiti. And it spooked us. And now, seeing the horse on their Web site – it’s like, their signature. They stole the bodies, and signed the church, “Kilroy was here”!’ She fell silent for a moment, and then: ‘Frank?’
‘What?’
‘Why would a . . . a religious group . . . want something like that? A virus. I mean –’.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘But we have to tell someone, right?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘Then . . . who?’
He thought about it, but there wasn’t any choice. ‘Gleason,’ he said. ‘We have to tell fucking Gleason.’
23
HE CHECKED OUT of the motel and drove to Washington that same morning, arriving a little after four A.M. Miraculously, he found a parking space just up the street from his apartment.
Letting himself in, he didn’t quite know what to do. He’d promised to pick up Annie first thing in the morning – at seven, and go with her to the FBI. Which meant he still had time to catch a couple of hours sleep.
In the alley behind the apartment he could hear the garbagemen knocking the cans around. Better to take a shower, he thought. Type out some notes, get the satellite pictures together. Make some coffee.
Five minutes later he was standing in the shower with the hot water needling the back of his neck. Then it hit him.
This isn’t garbage day. Garbage day is Thursday. This is Tuesday. And besides, the garbage guys came early, but not this early. He looked at the clock. Four-thirty.
He stood there a little longer, thinking about it, then shut the shower off. Stepping out, he pulled a towel around his waist and walked to the window in the kitchen – the one that looked out over the alley.
There were two men, and they were tossing garbage bags into the back of a U-Haul. Which is not the way the city did it. While the District’s government was in infamous disarray, Frank was sure it hadn’t come to this. Not yet, anyway. He peered at the men.
They were pulling the garbage bags out of the Dumpster that serviced his building and slinging them into the back of the truck. The Dumpster across the way remained full, as did others, farther up the alley. I wonder what they’re after, he thought, then flashed back to Kramer, standing outside the 7-Eleven, talking on the pay phone.
They’re stealing my garbage, he thought, and thought again. Nah. Couldn’t be. And yet . . . The other apartments in his building were occupied by a Charlotte Seltzer, a D.C. schoolteacher, and by Carlos Rubini, who worked at HUD. Neither of them seemed likely targets of trash stealers. And yet . . .
He opened the window and leaned out. ‘Hey!’ he called, ‘What are you doing?’
The two men froze, then slowly looked up. They seemed to confer for a moment, then walked calmly to the back of the truck, tossed the bags they were holding inside, and lowered the door with a squeal of metal. Slowly, they walked around to the front of the truck, got in, and drove off
Frank peered at the disappearing license plate, but it was too far away to read. Then the truck turned, and a moment later it was gone.
With a groan, Frank thought about what might be in his trash. Orange peels and Kleenex, drafts of stories, transcripts of interviews, empty milk cartons and moldy bread, to-do lists and tax forms . . . Jesus Christ, he really ought to get a shredder.
Neal Gleason’s office was in an area – you wouldn’t call it a ‘a neighborhood’ – known as Buzzard Point. Ever since Frank moved to the city, people had been talking about the area as the next likely spot for a miraculous urban renaissance. With the river as backdrop, and only minutes from the Capitol, the vision was of something like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor: a waterfront showcase, with a promenade along the sea, and behind it, apartments, hotels, restaurants, upscale shops.
But despite all the talk and architects’ models, Buzzard Point never seemed to change. The streets were full of potholes and so patched up that they had an almost homemade look. Between a handful of ugly concrete office buildings and scruffy vacant lots stood the occasional marginal enterprise. These shared a certain barricaded look that, as they say, ‘came with the territory.’
There were mom-and-pop grocery stores with metal gates to protect them at night, liquor stores where the clerks stood behind bulletproof Plexiglas, check-cashing services, bunkerlike barbershops, and hearing aid stores. At the gas stations, kids hustled to clean windshields or fill gas tanks for tips.
Frank was a little uptight about parking his car on the street, but as it turned out, there was no choice. The area didn’t get enough visitors to warrant a parking lot.
The building was one of those fifties rectangles with nothing to distinguish it but a banal parade of undersized windows on each floor. Inside was no better, with stained blue industrial carpeting and acoustic tile ceilings beginning to shred and sag. A duo of armed and uniformed men maintained security. One stood at the door and the other sat behind a fake wooden counter next to a turnstile. You had to walk past the first man and spend some time with the second before you were allowed to proceed to the bank of elevators beyond.
The man behind the counter telephoned Gleason’s office, made them sign their names on a clipboarded list, looked in Annie’s purse, examined Frank’s briefcase, and pried open the cap on the tube containing the satellite photos. He then laboriously wrote their names and that of Neal Gleason on rectangles of yellow cardboard, slipped those into plastic sleeves, and directed them to pin them to their clothing. A bulky woman got off one of the elevators beyond the turnstile, and they were permitted through. The woman escorted them upstairs, showing them into an anteroom furnished with a row of easy chairs upholstered in apricot plastic. Framed pastel prints of flowers adorned the walls.
They didn’t have to wait long. Gleason came out and without a word gestured that they should precede him into his office. The FBI man was in shirtsleeves, a gun in a shoulder rig clearly visible as he made his way around them to his desk. His eyes were a pale and startling blue. Baby blue, you’d have to say. Frank realized that he’d never before seen the man without his aviator shades.
‘So,’ Gleason said. ‘You wanted to talk to me? Talk.’
‘I know why you were in Hammerfest,’ Frank started, beginning to extract the satellite photos from the tube.
‘Hmmm,’ Gleason said. ‘Visual aids. Nice touch, but I don’t really have time for show-and-
tell. So why don’t we just stick to ‘tell’ and keep it short, okay?’
Frank had forgotten just how much of a prick Gleason was. ‘I wanted to make sure you understood that Dr. Adair told me nothing,’ he said. ‘I found out about the bodies from other sources.’
Gleason nodded, then made a little circle with the finger of his right hand, meaning that Frank should hurry up. So Frank gave him an abbreviated rap, finishing with the fact that, according to Annie, the horse painted on the side of the church in Kopervik was identical to the image on the Temple’s Web site.
Gleason applauded with big, wide, slow claps. ‘Fascinating,’ he said.
Annie shot Frank a puzzled look.
‘You don’t sound fascinated,’ Frank said.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure why you thought I’d be interested in this,’ Gleason said. ‘Let me make something clear to you. To both of you. The Bureau doesn’t have jurisdiction over graveyards in Norway. And even if we did, we’re not in the business of investigating religious groups.
‘But –’ Annie said. ‘You were there. You –’
‘I think what Dr. Adair is trying to say is that we know the Bureau is working the case, and we thought you –’
‘And I’m telling Dr. Adair that discussing this matter is a violation of the national security oath she signed, and I could have her indicted for that.’
‘What?’ Annie was outraged. Her cheeks were on fire, as if she’d come inside from ice-skating. ‘I didn’t tell him anything,’ she said. But what difference does that make, anyway? Don’t you get it? This group took the bodies and has the virus and –’
Gleason raised his voice and hardened it at the same time: ‘It’s none of your concern, Dr. Adair. And as for you, Mr. Daly, I really think it would be in your best interest to walk away from this one – or you’ll both wind up in the slammer.’
‘I think you’re forgetting something, Neal. I didn’t sign jack-shit.’
‘You don’t have to sign anything, smart-ass. We’ve got laws – including laws against treason.’
Gleason was just rattling his cage. He couldn’t be serious, not about treason. But two could play the threat game.
Frank’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Treason? Maybe there’s a bigger story here than I thought. I didn’t know we were at war. Or maybe you just misspoke. In which case, why don’t we look at the First Amendment issues? Because it seems to me, Neal, that ‘prior restraint’ hasn’t worked all that well. I mean, look at the Pentagon Papers –’
Gleason said, getting to his feet, ‘Thanks for your help.’ He nodded toward the door. ‘The interview’s over.’
‘Wait a second,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t understand. I mean, this is totally –’
‘I said: this interview is over.’
Annie got to her feet, her face still red. Frank returned the papers to his attaché case and refastened the cap on the photo tube. Then he stood up and, taking Annie by the arm, walked out.
They didn’t actually speak again until they were on the street. ‘Can they do that?’ Annie asked. ‘What does it mean?’
Frank looked at the sky. It was overcast, with clouds moving fast overhead. The surface of the river was metallic-gray. ‘It means they’re on the case, and they don’t want us in the middle of their investigation. That’s what it means.’
Annie thought about it. ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I mean, that they’re on the case?’
Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t find it all that reassuring.’
‘Why not? It’s the FBI! They’re good at this.’
‘I don’t think Richard Jewell would agree.’
She frowned. ‘Who?’
‘The security guard in Atlanta. Remember – the Olympics.’
‘Oh! Sure, but –’
‘They were so intent on setting the public’s mind at ease, that they wrecked this guy. Not to mention blowing any chance of finding out who really did it.’
‘But –’
‘Do you think they would have found the Unabomber if his family hadn’t turned him in?’
A fat drop of rain crashed to the sidewalk. Then another. And another.
‘I would have thought Mr. Gleason would at least want to know what we know,’ Annie said.
‘Don’t call him “Mr. Gleason.”’
‘Then what should I call him?’
Frank cocked an eye at her, then shook his head. ‘I’m probably not the best person to ask that question.’
Annie smiled. ‘I see your point,’ she said.
24
STERN WAS ANNIE’S idea.
He was a graduate student in the Religious Studies department at Georgetown, writing a doctoral thesis on new religions (or some such thing). They’d gone out together once or twice (‘Just for coffee or a movie,’ Annie said), and then lost track of each other for about two years. A couple of weeks ago she’d run into him at the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue, across from the Uptown Bakery. He was still working on his thesis, he said, and publishing ‘a more or less quarterly’ newsletter called Armageddon Watch. It was about cults and new religions, brainwashing, and the millennium. I’m an expert on wackos, he joked. Which made her want to say something funny about her own speciality, which was ‘bugs’ – but then it was her turn in line, and she didn’t know whether she wanted a cappuccino or a latte and –
Then he was gone.
‘I think he probably knows a lot about the Temple,’ Annie said. ‘It’s right up his alley.’
Frank agreed that they should approach him.
They found Stern in the book. He was living a long way from Georgetown, way out on Reservoir Road. Annie made the call, and Stern invited her to come over.
‘Do you mind if I bring a friend? We’re kind of working on something together.’
No, he said, he didn’t mind. And in fact Stern turned out to be a perfect host. After meeting them at the door of his shabby apartment house, he made them a pot of black tea, and encouraged Frank’s curiosity about the many books he had. These lay in piles, big and small, hunkering on every horizontal surface. They were on the floor, the tables, the windowsill, the radiators – everywhere except on bookshelves (of which there were none).
He was older than Frank had imagined – no kid, but a man in his very late twenties. He had watery blue eyes, and a thinning head of hair that was either too long or too short for whatever it was that it was supposed to be. He wore boots and jeans and a big flannel shirt, and smiled a lot.
Frank and Annie sipped their tea, sitting on the edge of a worn-out couch with a funky green slipcover. From a corner of the room the Five Blind Boys of Alabama sang Jesus’ praises through the black mesh of opposing Bose speakers.
‘Ben’s brilliant,’ Annie said, softening him up. ‘His thesis is fantastic.’
Stern chuckled. ‘“Fantastic” is right. It’s six hundred pages long, and I’m no closer to the end than I was when I began it, three years ago.’
Frank winced in sympathy. ‘I know the problem,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working on the same story for months.’
‘The thing is: the more you know, the more complicated it gets – so the end keeps receding. It’s like Zeno’s paradox,’ Ben said, ‘except it isn’t mathematics, it’s prose.’
‘Annie said you’re writing about cults.’
Stern listed from side to side, rolling his shoulders as he weighed the remarks. ‘I guess so. Cults, sects, new religions – what you call ’em depends on your point of view.’
‘So what’s your thesis?’
Stern shrugged. ‘“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”’
‘Unh-huh.’
Stern smiled. ‘It’s a comparative study – the Taborites and Mankind United.’
Frank shook his head. ‘Never heard of ’em.’
Stern shifted uncomfortably in his chair, as if he’d been caught reading a UFO magazine. ‘Well, it’s apples and oranges,’ he said. ‘I mean, they’re very di
fferent, but also . . . they’re also quite alike. The Taborites were a fifteenth century religious sect in Bohemia. They declared war on the priesthood, and preached a sort of proactive millenarianism.’
‘What’s that?’ Annie asked. ‘How do you –’
‘They thought it was up to them to usher in the millennium, rather than sitting around, waiting for it to happen.’
‘And how do you “usher in the millennium”?’ Frank asked.
‘You rid the world of sin. And that’s what they tried to do, using whatever tools they had at hand – the dagger, the pike, the catapult, the crossbow. Trust me: it’s a good thing they didn’t have the bomb.’
‘So they went around killing people?’ Annie asked.
Stern’s eyebrows shot up, and he fished a pack of Camels from the pocket of his shirt. Lighting one with a Zippo, he took a long drag, and said, ‘They killed sinners. Hey! They were agents of the millennium. It was their job, their duty, their religious duty, to massacre anyone who wasn’t a part of their own movement. Because that’s how you could tell if someone was a sinner. They didn’t belong. And so you killed them. And that’s how you cleansed the earth.’
‘Jesus,’ Frank said.
‘Exactly.’
With a mock frown, Stern leaned across the steamer trunk that served as a coffee table and grabbed Annie by the wrist. Speaking in a malevolent whisper, leavened only by a bizarre attempt to affect a Czech accent, the aging grad student muttered, ‘Accursed be he who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. No pity for Satan, No mercy for evil. So sayeth Jan the Pious.’
‘Wow,’ Annie said, withdrawing her arm and rubbing her wrist.
‘And the other guys?’ Frank asked.
Stern looked puzzled for a moment, and then said, ‘Oh – you mean Mankind United. They were . . . different.’
‘You said they were alike.’
‘Well, yeah. But they were five hundred years apart, plus – whatever the distance is, psychologically, from medieval Prague to Depression Santa Monica.’
‘I should think the distance was quite large,’ Frank said.
‘Me, too,’ Annie added.