River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He wore it now.

  At five foot ten and one eighty-five, Truly was in reasonable shape. He knew he didn’t look like much of a threat, with his neat brown hair, round-cheeked baby face and wide, liquid blue eyes. Especially dressed in green plaid cotton pajamas. At least it was winter, so he wasn’t wearing his summer-weight silk Bugs Bunny boxers. Bethany’s husband edged two-fifteen and six-four, with reach to match, and none of it appeared to be the kind of useless weight that Truly wished, especially at this moment, had been hidden in those photographs.

  That and the tenor of the pounding—not a polite knock but an insistent barrage—made Truly believe that Bethany’s husband (Perry, he remembered, a name he had always associated with wimpy little stamp collector types, a prejudice he would have to revisit) had come with a different sort of pounding in mind. Truly backed away from the door a couple of steps and threw the big man a friendly, confused grin. “Help you?”

  “You’re Truly.”

  “That’s right. And you are…?” He didn’t want to let on that he had already figured it out. He’d take any advantage he could get, however slight.

  “I would think you’d want to know what the husband of the chick you’re fucking looks like, if only so you could avoid me at the supermarket.”

  “Look, it’s late,” Truly said, trying to sound gracious but a little peeved. That last part, at least, was real. “Maybe you had a little too much to drink or something, made a mistake, but I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Truly, because it won’t work. Bethany told me everything. How else would I have found you?”

  It was, Truly had to admit, an excellent question. If he hadn’t just been snatched from a sound sleep, he might have thought of it himself. How had Perry Gardner found him? Only Bethany’s betrayal could explain it. He made a halfhearted beckoning gesture. “All right,” he said. “Come on in and we’ll see if we can’t straighten this out.”

  Somehow Perry squeezed through the doorway, banging the door shut behind him. He smelled like he had opened a whiskey barrel with his teeth. “There’s nothing to straighten out except you,” he said, advancing on Truly with his massive hands bunched into fists. “You don’t fucking fuck other men’s wives.”

  “I know that,” Truly said, “believe me.” At some point he’d have to stop playing innocent and focus on defending himself. He was awake now, and he could take the guy. Bethany had said Perry was a sports nut and a college jock, but he worked in an office at the Treasury Department. He was a middle management type, not a man who found himself in physical altercations very often. Besides, the booze that had jacked up his nerves enough for him to approach Truly would also hamper his reflexes.

  Then again, it had been years since Truly had been in a real fight. He was trained, and he kept fit, running a couple of miles a week, working out in the Langley gym. But he wasn’t a big man or an especially strong one. And his training was largely of the lethal variety. If Perry didn’t back off, Truly might not be able to stop him without killing him.

  “Look, you want some coffee or something?” Truly asked, still hoping to defuse Perry’s anger. “I think we should sit down and talk about this.” He started for the couch.

  Perry surprised him by throwing a punch instead of another threat. Truly tried to dodge it, but he was hemmed in between the couch and a coffee table. The huge fist caught him in the ribs. The breath huffed out of him and he staggered back, raising an arm to block the next punch. He took this one on his left forearm and tried to catch Perry’s arm but missed. With another idea coming to mind, Truly feigned a stumble that landed him on top of the couch.

  “Get up, you punk-ass motherfucker,” Perry said. He waited at a reasonable distance, apparently willing to give Truly a chance to gain his footing before continuing to pummel him.

  Instead of rising, Truly reached under the couch and drew out an M9 Beretta pistol he’d cached there. He thumbed off the safety, pointed it at Perry and motioned for him to back up. Perry’s eyes went wide when he saw the weapon. Truly had no idea if Perry knew he was an operations officer at the CIA. The guy might think he was a cop or a criminal or just a well-armed citizen. “Dude…”

  “I don’t want any trouble, Perry,” Truly said. “Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you since you showed up.”

  “Then put away that gun,” Perry suggested. Truly gave that idea exactly half a second of consideration before deciding against it.

  “I don’t think so. Seems like the first time you’ve been willing to listen.”

  “I don’t want to get shot,” Perry said. “But you’re fucking my Bethany.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to admit to that, do you?” Truly settled back on the couch, a brown and gold monstrosity that he’d been meaning to throw out or donate for about a dozen years now. He kept the nine-mil aimed at Perry. “But just to be conversational, let’s say I was. Hypothetically, of course. Two points come to mind. First, she must have wanted me to, so the discussion you really should be having is with her. And second, now that I’ve met you, surely you don’t think I’m stupid enough to ever do it again. You’re a walking tank, pal, and I won’t always have this nine on me.” He was dissembling. He was usually armed, just not with the particular weapon he kept hidden under his couch. Then again, in his trade dissembling was a way of life.

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “I know it’s got to hurt, Perry. Trust me, I never would have intentionally done anything to cause you pain. I’m still not saying it’s true—that’s something you’re going to have to work out with Bethany—but if it is, it was intended to be something you would never know about.”

  Perry nodded, understanding that Truly’s was, in the proper spirit of Washington, D.C., a nonconfessional confession. He looked like he wanted to go a few more rounds, but the barrel of a gun resembled a gaping tunnel when it was pointed right at you. “Maybe you’re right,” Perry said after several long moments. “I guess we have some stuff to work out. Me and Bethany, I mean.”

  “I guess you do.”

  After a couple more minutes—during which Perry fumbled about like a naked man who had unexpectedly found himself inside a convent with no memory of how he had come to be there, lost, embarrassed, and deeply troubled—he went back out into the cold night. Truly stayed on the couch, his weapon in his hands, not trusting that Perry was really gone until he heard the car start up and drive away. He sat for another ten minutes or so, wondering why Bethany would have told Perry anything about their affair, much less give her husband his name and home address. Things had been fine between them, or so he had believed.

  There were two points of view to any relationship, of course. And when one person thought everything was jim-dandy because he was able to see his girlfriend a couple of evenings a week, getting laid and enjoying nice but not painfully long dinners, once every month or two even spending the night together in a hotel someplace like Front Royal or Lexington or Baltimore’s harbor area, maybe the other was tired of lying to her spouse, or wanted to be able to spend holidays with him without thinking of the lover left behind, or to be able to hold her man’s hand in public without worrying about who might see them. Bethany had seemed subdued on their last couple of evenings together, reticent, which she had attributed to pressures at work, but which might also have been a sign—if only Truly had been able to read it—of growing discontent.

  Their last really good date, he realized, had been to see Shawn Colvin at Wolf Trap Farm Park, at the end of summer. They had arrived before sunset, and sat on the lawn with a picnic basket and a nice Merlot. The sky had turned gold and then indigo, and stars popped out one by one like musicians walking onstage until they flooded the sky. Colvin’s voice had washed across them like honey. She sang about joy and heartbreak, triumph and despair, and he and Bethany had snuggled closely together against the cooling night air.

  Every date after that had been marred by something. A pointless fight,
Bethany’s unknowable sadness. He should have recognized it, should have pressed her more urgently. Maybe he could have headed this off in some way. As it was, the changing tide of her heart had carved a hole in his.

  The hell with it, he decided at last. It was almost three in the morning. He had to go to work in a few hours, fighting Key Bridge traffic to get to McLean. If he was going to get any sleep, it had to be now. He tucked the Beretta back into its hidey-hole and headed upstairs.

  His cell phone beeped when he was halfway up. By the time he reached it, on his nightstand next to an empty cup of water and a T. Jefferson Parker paperback thriller, it had stopped. He looked at the screen and saw that he had received a new text message.

  Terrific. He sat down hard on the bed, shoulders slumping. This could only be more shitty news. Nobody texted at three a.m. to tell you that you had been promoted or won a trip to Tahiti.

  His sigh was melodramatic, but he allowed himself that small theatrical touch as he read the screen:

  Perry will be over to see you, if he hasnt already been there. Im so sorry, James. Honestly. I know you wont think so, and I wont blame you if you hate me for it. I had to tell him, had to be truthful with him so we can fix our marriage before its too late. Its over between us, James, and Im sorry and I wish I was brave enough to tell you in person, but Im not. Please dont contact me.

  At least Bethany had written the message herself. She refused to use modern text-speak, which would have been more like, “I no u wont think so,” and, “b4 its 2 late.”

  But the whole idea of breaking up via text message seemed more appropriate for a seventeen-year-old than for a professional woman closing in on thirty-five. Truly was just four years older, and it never would have occurred to him as an acceptable method. He guessed Bethany was more high-tech savvy than he would ever be.

  Truly was distracting himself with nonsensical details to avoid dwelling on the real hurt that waited on the other side of them. He was self-aware enough to understand that it was a survival mechanism he needed right now. He felt like he had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler that was backing up to squash him again.

  He put the phone down, climbed back under his covers and sat there with the light off, willing sleep to take him. It hadn’t then, and so he fought it now, in his office after lunch, feeling the cold smoothness of the window and watching the flutter of red leaves and wishing that his life belonged to someone else.

  He actually drifted off, for a moment, his face against the glass, but the phone on his desk startled him and he lunged for it. Bethany! She knew the direct number to his desk. Not many other people did. He snatched up the receiver. “This is James Truly,” he said.

  “James, it’s Millicent. Millicent Wong.”

  His heart sank. “Hello, Millicent.”

  “I detect a distinct drop in your level of enthusiasm,” she said. “I’ve disappointed you in some way?”

  “I…I was expecting another call,” Truly said. “It has nothing to do with you, Millicent. I’m always happy to talk to you.”

  “People keep saying that, and then I keep sharing bad news and changing their minds.”

  “Maybe it’s time to try a new approach.”

  “I would love to, James. But at the moment, I’m afraid, bad news is the only kind I have. Something has happened to Lawrence.”

  He had been picturing Millicent. She was petite, with a luxurious head of rich black hair that, on her slender body, almost made her look top-heavy. She was no taller than five two, not counting the hair, which added another three or four inches. She often wore spike heels and gained another couple of inches that way. Still, she’d have to hold on to a couple of five-pound bags of sugar to push the scale over a hundred.

  Now that mental image shifted. “Ingersoll?” he asked, envisioning the curly-haired, dour-faced man in his usual dark clothing.

  “Yes, Lawrence Ingersoll,” Millicent said.

  “What happened to him?”

  “I’m hoping you can find out. Late last night, your time, I detected a serious occult anomaly. Disruptions of the ley lines—”

  “Spare me the details, please,” Truly interrupted, knowing that she could go on about them at some length, but that she would lose him by the end of the first sentence. The fact that he had been put in charge of Moon Flash, the CIA’s officially nonexistent continuation of psychic research programs Grill Flame, Sun Streak and Star Gate—discontinued in 1996, as far as almost anyone outside the building knew—didn’t mean he understood such things. “What about Ingersoll?”

  “Well, the disruption seemed to be centered not far from his home, so I asked him if he might be able to look into it. I never heard back from him, and when I tried to call him again, I got no response. Concerned, I went online and checked the Mineral County Miner, the newspaper in his town in Colorado. It said that there was a fire at his house last night. No one survived.”

  “Christ,” Truly said. His bad day was getting worse. He could almost hear the air brakes of that metaphorical semi as it slowed for another run at him.

  “Exactly,” Millicent said. “So I hoped you could investigate, see if he really died in the fire, and find out just what is going on there.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Truly said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “One thing I’d like to make clear, James. To we practitioners of the occult arts, the immediate consequences of this sort of thing are inconvenient—and, obviously, sometimes dangerous. But the mystical energies around us can’t be divorced from the rest of life. There are vast areas of convergence, for instance, between ley lines and string theories of physics. Over the long term, this sort of disruption could affect…well, we just don’t know. Time? Weather? The very nature of reality as we understand it? If it continues, I fear that we’ll find out. But I’d really rather not.”

  Truly didn’t know what to say. Doomsday scenarios were common enough in the intelligence game, but they were usually attached to the threat of Commies or Islamic fundamentalists or some other group with access to nuclear weapons. A mystical version was beyond his imagining.

  Seeming to grasp this, Millicent kept her sigh brief and subdued. “Please let me know what you find out, James. Lawrence and I weren’t particularly close, but I like him. I would hate to not know.”

  “I will,” Truly promised.

  “At the same time, I shall be exploring some alternative angles on my end.”

  He knew she meant paranormal angles, and he didn’t pursue it. Those were the kind she was qualified with, while he decidedly was not.

  But he wouldn’t turn down the help.

  * * *

  In the next twenty-five minutes, Truly made four phone calls. The last one was to his boss, Ronald Loesser, whom he met shortly after in the atrium of the New Headquarters building (called that to distinguish it from the Old Headquarters building that had once been the main structure at the Langley campus, a compound Truly still had a hard time thinking of as the George Bush Center for Intelligence, named for the then-president and former Director of Central Intelligence in 1999), beneath the suspended U-2 plane model. Loesser hated to let Truly come to his office almost as much as he hated going into the nearly empty suite of offices dedicated to the Moon Flash project, so they usually met on neutral ground.

  Truly wore a navy blue peacoat over his suit, and when he spotted Loesser, the older man not only had a leather barn coat on but he was clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and letting steam wash over his mouth and chin. He barely glanced toward Truly, then ticked his gaze outside and started walking. Truly adjusted his course and caught up with Loesser in the courtyard, where the man had taken a seat on a bench near the main section of the Kryptos sculpture. During warmer weather, there might be agency employees standing around the sculpture—a blue-green oxidized copper wall shaped like a piece of paper scrolling out of a printer, with a sequence of letters punched into it—trying to decipher the code it carried. This time of year, Truly and Loesser were alo
ne, and the babbling fountain running beside the sculpture would help keep their conversation private from anyone who might wander by.

  “What is it, Jim?” Loesser asked without preamble. He knew Truly never went by Jim, but he regularly pretended to forget. Just one more illustration of the way he felt about Truly. Loesser was an assistant to the director of the National Clandestine Service, or an assistant to that assistant; Truly could never be certain how many levels from the top his supervisor really was. Loesser would fire Truly in a hot minute if he thought he could, but he believed Truly to be protected by his father, former United States Senator Willard Carsten Truly. Truly did not share that belief, but Loesser’s conviction had worked out for him anyway. He had arranged for Truly to be given ownership of the Moon Flash project, which was as close to being fired as one could get while remaining on the agency’s payroll.

  “One of our people has been killed.”

  “An agency employee?”

  “One of my people,” Truly amended. “A contract operative. Lawrence Ingersoll. Winston brought him in, after the first World Trade Center bombing.” Barry Winston had been Truly’s immediate predecessor in this post, until the day he ran a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car window and sat in his sealed garage listening to Sidney Bechet CDs until the car ran out of gas. His housekeeper found him two days later.

  “One of Winston’s charlatans.” Loesser sipped his coffee, his hard gray eyes appraising Truly over the cup’s rim. His hair was short and silver, neatly combed, and he affected the air of an old-time parson who disapproved of virtually everything and everyone created since the end of World War II.

  “They’re not all charlatans,” Truly began. At Loesser’s disapproving frown he stopped. “I don’t necessarily have a lot more faith in them than you do, Ron,” Truly said. In fact, although when he had accepted the job, he’d had no faith at all, he had since grown to respect their abilities more than he had expected. He would never admit that to Ron Loesser, though. “But you’ve assigned me to deal with them, and I’m doing that. Now one of them is dead. And it’s not just that. Another one told me she called him last night, to ask him to look into—I know what you’re going to say—a disruption in the ley lines. He agreed to check it out, and the next thing anybody knew his house burned down, with him inside. He didn’t even try to get out, and the arson investigator’s initial conclusion is that the fire began where he was sitting, although they couldn’t find any source of ignition or fuel there. It all sounds suspect to me.”