by Tom Clancy
“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 providing 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.
Th
ere 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.”
They reached the top of the stairs, and Marissa led the way into a bedroom with a large window that allowed in a fair amount of light—or would if it wasn’t so gray and overcast as it was today. The bed was a double, with a brass headboard shaped like a big letter H with a second crosspiece, and there was a heavy patchwork quilt covering it. It was somewhat cooler than downstairs, and Thorn reckoned that the woodstove was the primary, if not the only, source of heat. Close the door here and it was apt to get pretty chilly on a winter’s evening.
“The little bathroom is at the end of the hall, and there’s a space heater in it—it gets cold. You can shower there, but the tub is in the big bathroom downstairs.”
“Nice.”
“This used to be my room. Fortunately, my grandparents didn’t make it into a museum after I grew up, so you don’t see the Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, and Tom Cruise posters I had up when I was fourteen.”
“Tom Cruise?”
“Even then I had a weakness for cute white boys.”
Thorn chuckled. “So, you were talking about Shelia?”
“Anybody who says, ‘It’s just a dog.’ has never really gotten to know one. My grandparents have owned—or been owned by—Sheila for ten years. She’s family. Before that, they had others: Titus, Laramie, and Winslow are the ones I remember.”
“I never had a dog as a kid,” he said. “Too many cousins in and out of our house, wasn’t enough room to keep a hamster.”
“People love their companion animals. They feed some of ’em better than a lot of people in this country eat. They take them to the vet when they get sick or hurt, give them medicine, have surgery done. Pretty much anything you can do to a person with a surgical scalpel, somebody has done to a pet—they fix torn tendons or broken bones, take out tumors, even replace bad hips. X-rays, MRIs, whatever tests you need. I knew a man once spent six hundred dollars on treatments for a budgie for a broken wing. Bird cost him thirty dollars originally.”
“Jesus.”
“So if your dog tears up his hind leg running through the field, you can get it repaired by a top surgeon who specializes in doggy orthopedics, and then you can take him to someplace like Canine Peak Performance, where a vet who does rehab will put him in a tank full of water with a treadmill in it and strengthen the muscles without putting as much weight on the injury as it would walking around your neighborhood. That’s what Sheila is doing.”
“Really?”
“It’s a coming thing. Been around for years, started out for rehab on show animals, or dogs entered in athletic competitions—catching Frisbees or agility competitions and the like—and once people started seeing how well it worked, they started bringing in the regular critters who were just ordinary door-blockers, like Sheila.”
“I had no idea.” Thorn shook his head. “And there is one of these places out here in the Georgia boonies?”
“My second cousin runs it,” she said. “She got trained in it out in Raleigh Hills, Oregon, by a woman vet named Helfer, who had flyball dogs. Cousin Louella has enough customers so she keeps busy, even out here.”
“I guess I need to get out more.”
“That’s for sure, Tommy. You are woefully lacking in general knowledge about the world. All those years as a computer geek. I’ll shape you up, though, don’t worry.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
They heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Thorn moved to the window and looked out. An old, dark green Ford pickup truck arrived. A tall and fit-looking black man alighted, reached back into the truck, and collected a large, short-haired, black and tan dog. Thorn didn’t recognize the variety. The man—that would be Marissa’s grandfather, Amos—squatted and set the dog gently onto the ground. She wagged her tail and headed for the front door, favoring her right rear leg.
Marissa said, “Let’s go down and let you meet Grampa and Sheila. If the dog bites you, you and I will have to rethink our relationship.”
Thorn grinned. For a second, Marissa kept her face serious. Just when he was getting worried that she was serious, she cracked a smile. “You’re funny,” he said.
“I am. Try and keep up. Nobody likes a slow white boy, even if you are cute.”
13
New Orleans, Louisiana
Lewis had elected to meet the potential buyer, Mishari Aziz, in New Orleans this time. It was much cooler here than in Miami, downright chilly, temperature maybe forty, with gray skies and a turn-your-head-around wind blowing. Even in the cold, the place smelled damp. When her plane had come in for a landing the first time, a couple days earlier, she’d halfway expected to look down at the swamps surrounding the airport and see dinosaurs lumbering around.
Assuming, of course, that they all hadn’t drowned in the most recent flood. New Orleans was still right in the middle of Hurricane Alley, and a deluge was always lurking to fill the bowl that was the city.
No dinosaurs down there today, either—if you didn’t count Aziz and his hidebound antifemale attitude.
She drove her rented car to the FedEx place at the airport and collected the package she had sent to herself before leaving the District. Back in the rental car, she tore open the box and removed her little gun—an S&W Chief snub-nose in .38 Special. Packing a gun for air travel was still possible, of course, but you had to declare it, and several of the airlines would put a big tag on the suitcase with “GUN” to identify it, and she didn’t need that connection. Plus, there were thieves at the baggage carousel who hung around waiting for such tidbits. People who thought their checked luggage was safe on an airliner were wrong.
She slipped the revolver into her jacket pocket, then fished out the Walther .380 PPK, which she had gift-wrapped to look like a birthday present.
She hadn’t seen Carruth yet, but he was supposed to have gotten to the airport three hours before she arrived, and he was no doubt following her. Playing it cute by staying hidden, but that was the point.
She pulled a cell phone from her belt and thumbed the button for the programmed number.
“At your service, ma’am,” Carruth said.
“Where are you?”
“Other end of the FedEx lot, in the white van with the magnetic sign on the door.”
She looked. Saw the van. The sign on the passenger door said SPEEDY COURIER SERVICE.
“All right, let’s do it.”
“I’m on my way. Give me forty-five minutes’ head start so I can get set up.”
“Go,” she said.
She tried to sound calm, but the truth was, she was nervous. This was where the rubber would meet the road. Up to now, Aziz had been playing it cautious, maybe not as sure of her as to believe she really could deliver the goods. The more he became convinced of that, the more dangerous the game became.
And while it shouldn’t matter, she had embarrassed him in Miami by losing the surveillance team he’d sicced on her. A reasonable, rational man in the game would accept that and move on; of course, a reasonable, rational man wouldn’t want to do what Aziz wanted.
There was a chance that once he believed she could give him the keys to the armory he lusted after, he would think he could just take them instead of paying for them.
&n
bsp; She didn’t know how smart he really was and, unfortunately, the only way to find out was to put herself in a somewhat risky position. She didn’t trust the man as far as she could walk on water, but at least she could keep the risk minimal.
Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. She grinned at the memory. Her father had told her that—but failed to pay attention to his own advice, in the end. Still, as these things went, she had done just about everything she could to set it up properly. She had scouted the location, made the arrangements, gone over it in her head a dozen times. No battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy, of course, but she was willing to bet she was better prepared than Aziz, who would have been informed of the specific meeting place only about the time Carruth got there.
The meeting was set for Woldenberg Riverfront Park, a twenty-acre green space right on the Mississippi River, near the French Market. There would be tourists there, even in this cold weather—there was something called “The Moonwalk,” which let you hike right down to the edge of the river. You could see the big bridge from there, and the Toulouse Street Wharf. There was an old riverboat ferry moored just up the river. Very public.
New Orleans was not a good town to drive in, at least not down in the French Quarter, that part having been built long before big automobiles were the normal means of transportation. Narrow streets and a lot of traffic made for slow going, and if you had to leave in a hurry, you might find yourself in trouble. Plus there were cameras on every other corner these days—the barely controlled riot that was Mardi Gras came every year, and being able to keep an eye on things, with a filmed record to go along with that, made the local police happier.
There weren’t any cameras where she was to meet Aziz, at least not any official ones. She had checked there, the day before yesterday.