by Tom Clancy
It was cold out, but Howard had put a little space heater in the garage, which had room for two cars but only held one, and there was an old couch and a couple of end tables with ashtrays on them there, too. He cranked the heater up and handed Kent a sealed, clear-plastic tube with a fat cigar, maybe twelve or fourteen centimeters long, inside. Kent broke the seal, and there was a whoosh of escaping gas.
“Inert gas to keep it from going stale,” Howard said. “Helium or argon, something like that. Better than vacuum, so they say.”
The aroma of the tobacco filled his nostrils.
“Hermoso Number Four,” Howard said. “Hand-rolled from Havana. Got them from a British diplomat who buys in quantity.”
“Thanks.”
Howard produced a cutter they both used, then a wooden match, scratching it and allowing it to burn for a second before he lit Kent’s cigar, then his own.
The two men stood there for a moment, puffing. The blue-gray smoke filled the air, wreathing their heads in the fragrant odor.
“It’s a nice house,” Kent offered. “Big yard.”
“We have to hire a gardener, come spring, to take care of it.”
“Tyrone can’t mow the lawn?”
Howard smiled. “When he comes home from Geneva. That exchange-student thing runs until June. If I wait until then to cut the grass, it’ll be knee-deep and full of weeds. I ain’t disposed to do it anyhow. I did enough of that as a boy. Easier on my back to hire somebody.”
“Civilian consulting pays pretty well,” Kent observed.
“Oh, boy, yes, it does. You want to chuck your jarhead job and get in the pool, the water is just fine. I can point you to some folks’d love to have an old warhorse like you educating them. Make two or three times what you make now.”
Kent smiled at his friend. “If I had a wife and teenaged son, I might find that appealing, but I don’t need a house, and I don’t spend the money I make now. How much room you figure an old Marine requires?”
Howard took another long drag from his cigar. He blew the smoke out in a big ring toward the ceiling. “You might get married again. Have some little ones running around to call you Daddy.”
Kent laughed, nearly choking on the smoke as he did. “Yeah, right. Have somebody to push my wheelchair around when he gets out of grade school?”
“You think you’ll make it that long, doing stuff like this?” Howard waved the cigar.
Both men chuckled.
“Nadine met this nice lady at church, just moved into the area. A widow, few years older than you, but a very nice personality, she says . . .”
Kent laughed yet again. “Tell your wife I don’t need any help in that department.”
Howard must have caught something in his tone. “Really? You dating somebody?”
“Not exactly. I am seeing a woman, but it’s more of a . . . professional relationship.”
Howard blinked.
Kent let him worry about that for a couple of seconds. Then he grinned. “It’s not what you’re thinking, John. She’s a guitar teacher. I’m learning how to play the thing—after a fashion.”
“No kidding?”
“Well, if you heard me fumbling at it, you’d think it was a joke, but I am taking lessons. Twice a week.”
“That’s not exactly the same as painting the town red, Abe.”
“At my age, partying tends to be a little more reserved. Sitting in a nice, sturdy chair strumming a guitar is about my speed.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Come back and see me in fifteen years and say that. Assuming I’m still around.”
“I will. Assuming I’m still around. You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Howard leaned over the couch.
“You got a fridge out here?”
“Just a little one,” he said.
Kent shook his head.
Howard produced two bottles of beer. “How’s the thing going on the Army base attacks?”
Kent took one of the bottles, raised it in salute, and swigged from it. “How is it a civilian consultant knows about such things?”
It was a rhetorical question. The old-boy network worked as well in the military as it did anywhere else. Howard had retired a general in the Army—well, technically, the National Guard, which had been running Net Force before the DoD took it over—but you didn’t get to that rank without knowing a lot of people you could swap information with, to your benefit and theirs.
When Howard didn’t respond, Kent said, “Gridley is on their trail. He’s like the Royal Canadian Mounties—he always gets his man. Far as I can tell, anyhow.”
Howard drank from his own beer. He held his bottle up. “To our men in uniform, including yourself.”
“Hear, hear.”
They drank. “So, tell me about this guitar teacher.”
“Not much to tell. She’s about fifty. Divorced, plays well, teaches well. Says she has a cat.”
“Anything romantic?”
Kent shrugged. “She’s nice to look at.”
“But you’re interested?”
“I said I was old, not that I was dead.”
“Gonna make a move?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Howard toked on his cigar, letting his silence speak to that.
Kent took a couple puffs of his stogie. He had checked out Jen’s ex—at least he was pretty sure he had the right guy. There couldn’t be that many cello players named “Armand” who had recordings out and had just gotten married recently to a much younger woman. Or maybe there could and they didn’t have a presence on the net. He’d known a guy once, Ted McCall, who wrote a book about, of all things, barbed wire. Apparently there were thousands of different kinds produced over the years, and a bunch of folks snipped off foot-and-a-half pieces and mounted them on boards and collected them. Paid real money for some rare kinds. McCall had quite a collection, so he’d written a book about how to identify the various kinds. He’d called it Twist and Shout: Putting a Name to Unusual Varieties of Barbed Wire.
One day, ole Ted had logged onto the Internet site that sold his book and tapped in his name to see how sales were doing. Up popped the title Barbed Wire Varieties, by Ted McCall. Look at that, he’d thought, the stupid sons of bitches had gotten his title wrong! He’d clicked on the link to see what else they’d screwed up, and found himself looking at a picture of somebody who wasn’t him. Seemed there was another Ted McCall who had written an entirely different book on the same subject. McCall wasn’t that uncommon a name, but what were the chances that there would be another man with the same name who was also a collector of fence wire and who had written a book on it? It boggled his mind.
So it was possible that there were two Armands—or even more—who fit the bill, but it was highly unlikely. The closer the match, the more likely it was that this guy, this Armand, was Jen’s ex. So Kent had read all about him. There were some indications that Armand was “somewhat difficult” to work with, and something of a perfectionist, and that went with Jen’s description of him.
Why had Kent bothered if he wasn’t interested in Jen? He wasn’t sure about the answer to that one.
12
Greenville, South Carolina
“I’m glad we decided to drive,” Thorn said.
“Good thing I know how,” Marissa said. They were in her SUV, a small and sporty Honda, with enough weight to make the ride comfortable, on the highway between Charlotte and Greenville.
“Just because I don’t need a car doesn’t mean I never learned how. Having a chauffeur lets me get a lot of work done while I’m in transit.”
“So would taking the bus or a train,” she said.
“What, and ride with you rabble?”
She laughed. “I’m glad to see you loosening up, sweetie. I’d sure hate to have my grandparents think you were a stick-in-the-mud. Bad enough you are so melaninly challenged.”
“I’ll work on my tan,” he said.
>
“Even with your Native American blood, you’re always gonna look like a pale pink sock mixed into a load of new blue jeans, at least around my family.”
He chuckled.
“You travel much by car before you got so rich and started taking private jets to buy your hamburgers?”
Thorn smiled. “Oh, yeah. You want the condensed version? Or the full-length travelogue?”
“Tell all, Tommy. We have a ways yet to go to Grandma’s house.”
“Okay. When I was young and heading toward the height of my stupidity—this was the summer I turned thirteen, so I was still a couple years away—my grandfather took me on a road trip. Though our people were mostly from around Spokane, we had some distant cousins and great-aunts and -uncles who were Choctaw, and Grampa allowed as how I should meet them.
“I don’t know if you know the history. Along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, the Choctaw got rounded up and sent along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, as part of the white man’s land grab. My distant relatives somehow managed to escape into the swamps along the way, down in Louisiana. There, they hid out and pretended to be black Dutch or something. Nobody ever came looking for them, people left them alone, and most of them became farmers or fishers. Nobody got rich, but nobody died cooped up on a dust-bowl rez in Oklahoma.
“Anyway, my grandfather decided it was time to go and introduce me to them. So he loaded up his old Chevy pickup truck, and off we went.”
Thorn smiled again at the memories that floated up.
“It was a long trip. About twenty-five hundred miles each way. My grandfather didn’t have much use for the Interstate system, so we took state highways wherever possible, sometimes county roads. Went through Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas on the way to Louisiana, and added in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon on the way back to Spokane.
“My grandfather did a lot of knocking around as a young man. We’d be tooling along at sixty in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and all of a sudden he’d pull over. We’d get out, and he’d talk about the place: ‘These are the Smoky Hills. That over there, that’s Pawnee Rock. The Spanish came here, the French. The Americans didn’t show up until 1806. The wind always blows.’
“We’d stretch, pee, hop back in the old truck, and hit the road again. Hot and sunny, pouring rain and thunder-storms, saw a tornado once. We made stops like that all across the country. We’d pull into a country store, buy a loaf of bread and some cheese and lunch meat, make sandwiches, have an apple, drink a soft drink, like that. At night, we’d crawl into sleeping bags, either in the back of the truck or on the ground. Look at the stars, and my grandfather would tell me stories. Places he’d been. People he’d known. Bars he’d gotten drunk in.”
The memory was fine and green in Thorn’s head. He smiled.
“There was a long and rich history here long before white men sailed the Atlantic. My grandfather knew some of it, and told it to me. I missed a lot, being full of myself, but some I remember.”
Marissa nodded. “The white men were hauling my people here belowdecks in chains back when they were slaughtering your kin,” she said. “Come Judgment Day, a lot of them will have a lot to answer for.”
Thorn nodded in return. “Bad times for a lot of people.
“Um. Anyway, I didn’t really understand how big this country is until I spent a couple weeks driving across it. Passing through the little towns, the long stretches of nothing between them. We stopped at Cherokee trading posts in Oklahoma; stopped at bars in Texas; we camped on the prairies, in the woods, fields, once in an old one-room schoolhouse that had been boarded up for years. One of the highlights of my life, that trip.”
“You loved your grandfather.”
“Oh, yeah. We didn’t talk about such things, being men and all, but he was always there for me. I miss him.”
“I’m sorry. I’m happy my grandparents are still around.”
“You didn’t tell them I saw those pictures of them on your wall, did you?”
She laughed. “Tommy, they know you and I sleep together, being as how they taught me that when it was time to get married I needed to be sure things worked in that arena before I tied the knot. So they’ll know you’ve spent the night at my place, and they know I’ve got those paintings on my walls.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” The paintings in question were of her grandparents, Amos and Ruth, as young adults, and her grandmother was altogether undressed in the one of her. Quite the looker as a young woman.
“Granny’s in pretty good shape for a woman heading toward eighty” she said. “Maybe if you ask, she’ll take off her clothes and let you see how well she’s aged.”
“Jesus, Marissa!”
She laughed. “Still a little bit of stick-in-the-mud there, sweetie. We’ll have to work on that.”
Circle S Ranch
Oatmeal, South Dakota
Jay guessed he must have been an Old West pioneer in some previous incarnation—either that, or he was more of a romantic than he liked to believe—because of his hand-built scenarios, several of his favorites were cowboy sequences.
In this one, Jay was a wrangler who was going to watch other wranglers ride bucking broncos. Yeah, sure, it was yee-haw kinda stuff, but information flows and datasets could be snorers, and anything that made them more interesting to parse was to the good.
But as he was climbing up onto the split-rail wooden fence to sit and watch, he glanced over at the weathered barn and saw Siddhartha Gautama, aka the Buddha, in a saffron robe, leaning against the faded wooden barn, smiling.
Jay laughed. Saji. She was the only one who had unrestricted access to his scenarios. Even Thorn had to knock. . . .
He climbed back down from the fence and ambled toward the thin and smiling figure. Buddha was sometimes depicted as a laughing fat man—the Hotai—but historically speaking, Siddhartha had been an ascetic at one point, barely eating enough to survive. Even after finding the Middle Way, the man who became the Realized Buddha had never given in to dietary excess. Jay knew this because Saji had taught him the rudiments of the philosophy and its history, even though he had not exactly embraced it. . . .
He strolled up to Saji in her Buddha form. “Hey, Buddy. How’s it goin’?”
“ ‘Buddy.’You make that same bad joke every time. And you’re a terrible cowboy—way too much corn pone in that accent.”
“Ouch. You got a mean streak, O holy one. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. We’re almost out of milk, and I wanted you to stop and pick some up on the way home.”
“Sure, no problem. And, uh, I’ll get the right kind, this time.”
“You better. Otherwise, it’ll be you up all night trying to calm the boy down.”
He laughed.
Buddha smiled enigmatically and then, like the Cheshire Cat, vanished, leaving only the smile, which faded shortly thereafter.
Jay shook his head, and headed back toward the corral. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be programmers. . . .
Pinehurst, Georgia
Ruth was, as Thorn’s grandfather used to say, a pistol. After she hugged Marissa, she did the same for Thorn, and long past seventy-five or not, she had strength in her grip. She leaned back and looked closely at his face. “Good bone structure,” she said. “Must be more Indian than honky in you.”
Thorn laughed. “My mother’s doing,” he said. “The white man in our family woodpile was earlier.”
Ruth laughed, a loud, raucous rumble from deep down. “He doesn’t seem like such a tight ass to me.”
Marissa grinned, real big, and Thorn shook his head. “Well, I see where Marissa gets it from.”
“Come on in, you lettin’ the heat out. Amos has gone to take Sheila for her PT; he should be back in half an hour or so.” She closed the door behind him.
The house was a lot warmer than the blustery, raw Georgia morning outside, a big woodstove installed in front of the fireplace prov
iding a radiant heat. “I just put biscuits in the oven. Stick your stuff in the bedroom and come on back down, I’ll fix you some breakfast. You look like a man who could use a few pounds, and Lord knows you won’t gain any weight from Marissa’s cooking. I hope she warned you.”
“Yes, ma’am, she allowed as how she wasn’t much of a cook.”
“I tried to teach the child, but she was always more interested in climbing trees and beatin’ up on the boys. Go on upstairs, let me go fetch some eggs.”
Ruth hurried away.
The house was fairly large, and probably well over a hundred years old. It was a big living room, a high ceiling with wainscotting, and had a dark blue couch eight feet long facing the woodstove. There was an overstuffed chair and a couple of end tables, and a coffee table, the latter three of which looked like cherry, matte-finished and waxed or oiled rather than shiny. A matching cabinet stood in one corner, and the door was ajar enough to see a fair-sized TV screen behind it. Must be a satellite dish out here somewhere; it was a long way from town for cable.
One entire wall was nearly all taken up by bookshelves, floor to ceiling, fifteen feet wide, at least, filled to overflowing with mostly hardbacks and a few paperbacks.
The house immediately felt like a home—lived in, comfortable, full of life.
There was a hall with a room off to the left, and the kitchen straight ahead. It was clean, the painted and wall-papered walls looked fairly fresh, and the smell from the kitchen was great—biscuits baking. His own grandmother had been big on cooking breakfast, but Thorn had fallen out of the habit of eating much in the morning years ago.
As they headed up the stairs, Thorn asked, “Who is Sheila?”
“The dog. She’s got a bad hip. My grampa takes her in a couple times a week for PT.”
“The dog?”
“You didn’t have pets on the rez, Tommy?”
“Yeah, sure, but we didn’t have any doggy therapist, only a vet who mostly took care of horses and cows. Who would put out that kind of money on a dog?”
“Here’s another big gap in your education.”