Any Minute Now (7 page)

“And Directorate N is…?”

“Counterintelligence,” St. Vincent said a bit too quickly. “What d'you say? Are you prepared to come to the defense of your country?”

“I do that on every brief my team undertakes.”

“Of course. I didn't mean to underplay your current role in America's foreign policy. I'm merely asking you to take one more step.”

Flix chewed this over for a while. “What you're proposing … if along the way my friends get hurt…?” He let his words fade out. Then he shook his head. “No.”

“Yes, I understand. USA is rather a closed shop, to say the least. A man like you, loyal to the bone, I imagined you'd turn me down. That, in itself, is good to know. A man venal enough to betray his fellows will easily betray his new master.”

Orteño bristled visibly. “I don't have masters.”

St. Vincent said nothing, seeming lost in contemplation. Then, appearing to start out of it, he said, “But you do have a sister.”

Orteño stiffened.

“Her name is Marilena, yes.”

It wasn't a question. Orteño didn't say a word; he was scarcely able to draw a breath.

“And Marilena has a son, Leo. He was nineteen two days ago. I know how close-knit Latino families tend to be. Yours is no different.” St. Vincent sucked in his cheeks again. “I must remember to send him a present.”

“You're not—” Orteño fairly choked on his words. “Are you threatening my nephew?”

“Good god, man, no. What do you take me for?” St. Vincent tapped his lips with a forefinger as if just now struck by a thought. “It's only that … well, Marilena had another child, didn't she?”

Orteño swallowed. His mouth was suddenly dry. With his good arm, he reached for the plastic pitcher of iced water, but St. Vincent beat him to it.

“Here, allow me.” St. Vincent filled a plastic cup, handed it to Orteño, watched him circumspectly while he drained it. When he was finished, he continued. “No disparagement meant, but this child—her name is Lucy—she was two years Leo's elder, is that right?” He waited for a response, but when none was forthcoming, he went on. “According to the records I've seen, Lucy ran away from home when she was fifteen.”

Just like my grandmother, Flix thought.

“That was, what? six, seven years ago.”

“Six years, nine months, seventeen days,” Orteño said dully. The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach was expanding. Almost a year of trying to find her had left him eager to join up with Whitman, get the hell out of the country, work off his frustration.

“Naturally Marilena tried to find her. So did you, as a matter of fact.”

“Lucy's gone, lost to us,” Orteño said. “We've all but forgotten her.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” St. Vincent stood as he had when contemplating the print, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. “I doubt that very much. After all, family is family, am I right?”

Again, Flix refused to answer what was obviously a rhetorical question.

St. Vincent cleared his throat. “In any event, the good news is that Lucy has been found.”

Orteño's heart began to pound. This was not at all what he had expected. “She has? Where? Where is she? When can she be brought back to us?”

“Not so fast, Felix. There are, um, complications. She's been charged with possession of narcotics with intent to sell. In the state where she was picked up, that's a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence if she's convicted, and believe me when I tell you that she will be.”

“What?” As fast as elation had come upon him, it was plowed under by dread. He felt as if he were choking. “They can't—”

“I'm afraid they can, Felix.” An artfully arranged expression of sorrow and pity arrived on St. Vincent's face dead on schedule. “And they surely will.”

“Don't tell me. You know both the state police chief and the chief prosecutor well.”

“True enough.” St. Vincent studied his nails, which were as perfect and shiny as a runway model's. “But I'm also very well connected in the FBI. I can send in the feds and, well, you're a smart guy, you know the rest.”

There was nothing more to say, so St. Vincent simply checked out the monitors Orteño was attached to. He had made his pitch. The rest was up to the patient.

Orteño put his head back on the pillow. He became aware that he was sweating. He hated sweating; he almost never did, unless he was sufficiently ill to warrant it. He closed his eyes, as if to blot out the man standing beside his bed. He remembered with vivid clarity his sister's almost unimaginable loss. How she had been inconsolable, how, had it not been for him, she would have slipped into a deep depression, a downward spiral from which there might very well have been no returning. He had gotten her into counseling, then to a meds psychiatrist, and slowly but surely she had righted the ship. But always in the back of her mind was the loss of her beloved Lucy. He imagined now how the news would hit Marilena. The joy that would suffuse her face, her entire being. Then he imagined keeping the news from her, keeping Lucy from her, Lucy in jail, and he knew that he couldn't allow any of that to happen.

He opened his eyes. St. Vincent was still there, but now his gaze had fallen upon Orteño. “The reunion,” he said in a thick voice. “When?”

“As soon as you agree to my proposal.”

“How will I contact you?”

St. Vincent produced a mobile phone. “This is only for us. It has no GPS, so it cannot be tracked. It also possesses the latest DARPA encryption, whether we speak or text each other. It's absolutely secure. My private number is built in.”

St. Vincent held out his left hand—the hand of the devil, it was thought, in medieval times, and still today in areas of rural Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Flix had no choice; he took it.

 

6

Whitman felt Charlie's heart beating wildly in her breast. Her breath was hot on the side of his neck. His arms came around her and he kissed her wet cheek.

“Don't,” she said, almost choking on her emotions. “It's too soon, too soon.”

He just held her then, feeling the involuntary trembling slowly subside, feeling, too, the gathering of her formidable inner strength as she fought to pull herself together.

Her arms fell away from him. “Step away, Whit,” she whispered. “Step away from me.” There was no edge to her voice now.

He retreated over the threshold, out into the hall, and, for a split instant, was uncomfortably reminded of Bill AT&T's short journey from Charlie's apartment into the hallway of, he believed, oblivion. Had Bill been simply a time-stamp, a coping mechanism, the latest in a line of males Charlie had been seeing over the last three years? He'd never know, and he'd never ask. The answer might easily be too painful for both of them.

Now that there was a respectful distance between them, now that she had recovered from her small equilibrium break, she said, “If you were considering saying you're sorry, don't. There is no excuse for what you did. It was unconscionable.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Something behind her eyes flared, something dark, dangerous, feral. “You should never have come back.”

He spread his hands wide in a gesture of peace, or at least compromise. “But here I am. There's been a death in the family, and now I need you, Charlie.”

“I don't give a crap what you need. I only—”

Her voice faded out as her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She began to collapse, and Whitman was there to keep her from cracking the back of her skull on the bathroom's tile floor.

Her hands were as white and bloodless as a corpse's. No, he thought, no, no, no. Laying her down gently, he put two fingers against her carotid artery. No pulse; none at all.

Time was of the essence, he knew. Quickly now, he stepped over her, opened the cabinet beneath the sink, hauled out the old-fashioned physician's bag. From inside, he took out a disposable syringe, two small vials filled with clear fluid, and a larger bottle of alcohol. He swabbed the rubber tops of the vials. Ripping open the syringe packaging, he plunged the needle into the vial of prednisone, filled the syringe halfway. He did the same with the vial of Imuran, until the syringe was full. Flicking his finger against its side, he got rid of any remaining air, then he plunged the needle into Charlie's arm, injecting her with the serum cocktail. Throwing the empty syringe aside, he gathered her in his arms, rocking her gently, murmuring to her.

“Come on, Charlie, come on, snap out of it, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” until it became a kind of chant or invocation, if not a prayer. He remembered taking her to the hospital for the coronary arteriogram and magnetic resonance angiography that, days later, confirmed that she had Takayasu's disease, an autoimmune inflammation of the arteries that caused terrible headaches, chest pain, high blood pressure, no pulse, and, in extreme cases, burst blood vessels, stroke, retinal damage, and paralysis, all from the impaired blood supply to various organs. Takayasu's could be controlled with the medications he had injected into her, but since its cause was unknown, it could not be cured.

He remembered standing in the rain with her after the tests. She'd appeared unperturbed, and he'd wondered how that could possibly be. And yet she had taken the diagnosis with the same frosty equanimity. So much so that, as they had left the medical building, he'd asked her if she had heard what the doctor said.

“Every word,” she had said. “Let's get something to eat. I'm starving.”

Now in the bathroom, in his arms, Charlie awoke. Her chest heaved once, twice, three times, as if he had just pulled her out of a rip current in which she had almost drowned. Her eyes stared up at him, a deep umber in the light.

“My hands,” she said in a reedy whisper.

“Pink as the sands of Bermuda. How is your vision?”

“I'm looking at you, kid.” The ghost of a smile infused her face, flickering on and off like a faulty fluorescent tube.

“So all clear.”

“I guess there was a good reason for you coming back after all.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then, as if shaking off the last coils of a bad dream, opened them and said, “Get me to my feet. I dislike this position; it reminds me of how things used to be.”

Her arrow struck his armor and ricocheted harmlessly away. Almost. He unfolded his legs. Grasping one hand, he helped her up. She stood, one hand in his, the other on the edge of the porcelain sink. She looked at his left arm, grasped the curled dragon holding something in its mouth, tattooed on the inside of his elbow. Once upon a time, she had named it Violet, for the color of its furled wings. Now, she let it go, turned away, as if she found it repellent.

In the mirror, she could see that her cheeks were pink again. The blood had, indeed, rushed back to her extremities; the attack had been a mild one.

“Let's get something to eat.” Her voice almost back to normal. “I'm starving.”

*   *   *

Across the street from the DARPA facility in Arlington, Virginia, was a baseball field. It was part of a public park that included a pond, which was home to a family of ducks, a couple of swans, and, on occasion, served as a stopover for geese, who seemed to love the air more than they did the ground.

It was Dr. Paulus Lindstrom's habit to play ball with his team members in the very early mornings before reporting for work. The field—indeed, the entire park—was empty of human life then, which was just the way Lindstrom wanted it. Animals were another matter. He loved to watch the ducks swimming in circles and the swans paddling along without a care in the world. In some ways, he envied them. Then it would be his turn at bat. He approached the plate with an accelerated pulse and a firm belief something would happen. Sometimes he was right, and he hit the ball over Murphy's head. Other times, his mighty swing produced nothing more than a dribble. He never whiffed, though.

So far as Lindstrom could see, the pickup innings served as a mirror for his work on SUBNETS at DARPA. Sometimes there were breakthroughs, at other times false leads, or even paths that led to dead ends, but every breakthrough, no matter how small, led him closer to his ultimate goal.

Lindstrom had long ago reconciled himself to working on advance-stage weaponry. It didn't take much for him. He was on the milder side of the Asperger's spectrum. On the whole, he had no use for mankind, which, in his opinion, was using up natural resources in the most wanton, ignorant manner. It was mankind's fate, he firmly believed, to die off and be replaced by … what exactly? Lindstrom didn't know, but he strongly suspected it would be robots. The Singularity was almost upon mankind—the latest estimation as early as 2045—the moment when robots equaled and then surpassed humans in intelligence.

What would happen then? Renaissance or Armageddon?

He was brought out of his reverie; someone was calling his name. He looked toward the street and saw Valerie Revere, King Cutler's assistant. She was watching him from the sidewalk, her fingers curled through the cyclone fence that demarked the ball field.

His thin lips curled into a semblance of a smile. He adored secrets; especially the one he shared with Valerie.

Calling a halt to the game, he waited until his people had collected their gear, crossed the street, and entered the secure DARPA building before he approached her.

“Morning,” he said. “You're up early.” That was for anyone who might be listening, though he saw no one in the vicinity, no suspicious-looking vans that might house surveillance, both human and electronic. Still, you never knew; it paid to take every precaution.

“Do you have time for a walk?” she asked.

He made a show of checking his watch. “Sure,” he nodded. He gathered up his glove and ball, stuffed them into a nylon backpack, which he slung over his shoulder. As he emerged from the park, he pulled the bill of his Nationals cap lower on his forehead. They crossed two streets to the parking lot catty-corner to the ball field.