Fire Will Fall (43 page)

"No, you don't," she argued in a whisper that was somehow right in my face. "It is still a good world, Bubba. I swear it is. I promise it is."

I was sort of back to where I was on the porch the other morning, wondering how to choose between my love of locker-room humor and my future in the seminary. It seemed like I hung in some cosmic balance between choosing Rain and her love of life versus giving up on this world and simply moving on. The nurses at St. Ann's had confessed we could do that. Attitude is everything, they said. This world can be weak and dirty, and yet, some people were so great and strong. I knew Rain had her points, somehow, that she was seeing things that I wasn't, because her strength was all over me, and I was absorbing it slowly and coming out of my spiral while she kissed tears off my face. She was lying square on top of me.

I thought it would kill my hips, but it felt really good. I whispered, "Um. We're swapping bodily fluids."

She sighed impatiently and whispered, "Screw it." That kiss that skid and took off again Saturday totally landed. And felt awesome.

I just relaxed.

SCOTT EBERMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
6:46
A.M.
DINING ROOM

I
HEARD HODJI TRYING TO BE QUIET
on his way down from the third floor around six forty-five, heard Shahzad's mild voice and Hodji shushing him, and that got me into the shower quickly.

Heading downstairs, I noticed no cars outside in the parking area where Mike and Alan always parked, but heard more than a couple of voices floating out of the dining room. When I went in, fourteen people were there, all the familiar faces from Trinity Falls and some others. They'd hidden their cars, maybe feeling the place might be watched.

Roger O'Hare greeted me, then Angela Bonterri, an agent who had been especially nice to us during our first week at St. Ann's. The agents were drinking coffee all around, and I took a mug, though I hadn't quite become an addict in paramedic school. James Imperial was beside the coffee urn talking to Shahzad and an agent he addressed as Susan, and I gathered that this was Shahzad's Miss Susan, an agent he had worked with on Long Island.

"Can I apologize to you now, or are you never speaking to me again?" Susan said to Shahzad while I reached for a mug.

"Please, you mustn't remember firing me. You mustn't remember any of that from March," Shahzad said uneasily. "I speak to you ... much."

I had thrown on a T-shirt and jeans, not expecting this crowd, and I looked more like Shahzad than like the agents. I noted Tyler over in the corner, in some gangsta T-shirt to his knees, telling another agent, "I'm
giving
USIC my CellScan program. No charge. Just ... watch my ass henceforth. That's all I ask." And the agent grimaced, hand over his eyes.

It seemed apologies were running all over the place for things I wasn't privy to, but I gathered some of these agents had been stony toward them over being minors.

Mr. Steckerman asked Marg to take trays up to Rain and Owen, because it was a highly unusual day and they wanted to meet in the dining room with this many people. No one mentioned Cora. I actually sneaked up there while Marg took trays to Rain and Owen, and for once it was me standing outside her door feeling silly. I couldn't hear a sound, and when Marg came to deliver her breakfast, too, she asked me not to come in with her. She didn't say why, and there was a lot going on downstairs. I just headed down again.

The agents found chairs on some invisible cue that I realized was James Imperial taking a seat at the head of the table. All sixteen seats were taken.

"Good news to report all around," Imperial said, holding up his coffee cup.

"First, VaporStrike is in custody. Captured last night at a rest stop two miles outside Amarillo, Texas, in a blue Camry rental car."

He turned his mug slowly to Tyler as the agents applauded. Tyler made something akin to a Buddhist bow.

"That is a big load off our minds," Imperial continued. "The bad news? Omar never showed. He must have smelled trouble. We're hoping someone in this room can find him."

He looked warily at Shahzad, who shrugged nervously at Hodji. I got the feeling he didn't like being the focal point of a roomful of important people.

"As for Henry Calloway, his real name is Ovid Contescu. Born in Romania, raised primarily in a Russian orphanage, educated in Hamburg, then the University of Pennsylvania. Three years of his life between Hamburg and Penn are utterly missing, which means he was probably trained as a terrorist, and his money comes from backers in Kuwait. This is the worst kind of terrorist, our absolute worst nightmare. Because he's been here awhile, he has managed to infiltrate upstanding American institutions the way anyone else would. As an active member of the historical society for two years, biding his time, he was able to write the grant for this place, knowing that it would give him easy access to medical records that would help them in the back end. Alan? Report?"

Mr. Steckerman said, "Mike and I, and Hodji, quote, 'took a walk' past his cabin last night, but we didn't infiltrate or act interested, as it could be hot-wired. It could be Omar's lab. We want to do an ASAP raid but have no idea when he'll be there. He's not at the college or at home or the cabin right now. We'll nail him, no fears."

Imperial nodded. "He's a spy; he's not a thug. At least not in the essential sense of the word. But we need to consider him extremely dangerous, especially given the nature of what he was up to. The four patients in this house were 'swans,' in accordance with some code words he dreamed up for discussing his research. From Shahzad and Tyler's chatter and Marg's input, we believe he gave orders to Ibrahim Kansi to plant the corpse of the infected goat somewhere the kids might touch it. They wanted to see what their new strain of tularemia would do if a human made a flesh contact, and since they were watching the kids anyway, it fit their, um, fun and games. Unfortunately, they never got to find out. The point of impact was sucked completely clean by a snake kit."

I realized he was nodding at me. I shuffled in the chair, much like Shahzad had wanted to. I didn't need applause; I needed their asses caught.

"And earlier that morning Contescu, under the auspices of a visit to meet Cora Holman, laced Owen's orange juice with a clotting drug used primarily for hemophiliacs that brought on a severe headache."

Chairs moved back and forth defensively around the table, and I swallowed swill, wondering what I'd gotten myself into. It required so much self-control that my opinion of Alan catapulted into the stratosphere. All I could picture was Contescu's stones served up to him in an orange juice glass.

Imperial went on quickly. "And then, the very idea that he would try to befriend an innocent teenage girl, right under Alan's nose, reflects that he is long of nerve. We need him caught. Today."

Helpless to do much for Cora, I turned my wrath to Hodji, staring at him across the table. He had the guy in the house until ten thirty last night, losing three rounds of chess, while I sat by Cora, scared someone would walk up our nonsqueaking stairs and ... who knows? Attempt a kidnapping? I'd just felt like it was the place I should be. I thought my instincts had been dead-on, and maybe they were. But Hodji must have noted the look of challenge in my eyes. He sent a challenging look back at me before cutting a smile.

"Didn't you ever hear the expression 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer'?"

"Oh," I said, for lack of anything better.

"I suspect everyone, especially when they show up with vats of liquid beverages to serve to people who drank poisoned water. Something about that didn't sit well with me, shell of a man that I am."

I shot up straight in the chair remembering something about lemonade.

"Don't worry," Marg put in. "I told him she'd already had her daily allotment of citrus and that I'd give it to her tomorrow. It's with the CDC. We'll see what's in it."

I hadn't noticed Marg here before.

"Are you..." I paused before realizing everyone at the table was looking at me.

She reached in her jacket pocket and flashed me creds and a second license. "Firearms," she said. "I'm one of the two agents not photographed by the media in these parts, so I had to keep my creds hushed, even from you guys. It was killing me Saturday. I actually ran out of the house because I got a good view of some movement out behind the pond from a second-story window. I'm sure now it was a ShadowStrike operative waiting to photograph it if Owen or Rain touched the corpse of the Professor. I couldn't find the guy, couldn't find the site where Rain got hurt, though I'd heard her scream ... Very frustrating. Anyway. I've been CIA for twelve years."

I kissed two of my fingers lightly and flipped them at her. She grabbed her cheek like it had landed, apology accepted.
Nurses needed in Intelligence.
I wondered if maybe I wouldn't have to forget about going to medical school if I became an agent. I would always love medicine, and at the moment, I wanted to design a cocktail specifically for Ovid "Henry" Contescu.

"And finally," Imperial said, standing up again, "there's the business of our two young v-spies and how sorry we all are that things had to reach such a state of desperation before something could be done about it. My father owned a grocery store in Des Moines for fifty-three years. He saved every last nickel so that I could go to college, and when that degree got me a government job, he said he was sorry—he never wanted me working for a place with more than two dozen employees. He said it would wear me down. He said policies begin to take precedence over people, common sense drifts away to the wind because it has to, and human dignity falls by the wayside. These were all things I didn't exactly comprehend. I'd thought he would have been proud, and I guess I always held it against him that he wasn't. Until this weekend. I had to draft a new policy amendment for our manual for classified clericals. I was up all Saturday night doing it. I made sure it was forty-some pages long, and with all the convoluted, bureaucratic speak and worthless nonsense I threw in there, the paper pushers passed it on through yesterday, failing to realize I never included an age limitation."

There was so much snickering that he added quickly, "And that is classified to this table, Level Nine." Alan had told me that classified in USIC goes no higher than Level Four.

"Any opposed?"

The room was silent.

"All in favor?" Every hand went up.

"So, let's go find Contescu and friends before it's too late."

SCOTT EBERMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
11:30
A.M.
KELLERTON HOUSE

I
KNEW ALAN SAID
I wouldn't get top billing on any job, but it was a little hard to watch all the agents taking off to Griffith's Landing to look for hoods or to Astor College to look for Henry while I got stuck waiting with Hodji for a security crew to show up and hot-wire the Kellerton House like the president was staying here. It was especially hard because I had access to the basement and could hear the two other CCs typing away and talking to each other in the inner office.

"Anything interesting?" I gave my back a rest and sat in with them at one point.

Tyler shook his head. "Omar probably figured out that VaporStrike is in custody, and he's a chickenshit when it comes to his own safety. He's probably hiding out in the stall of some bathroom, like the Amarillo, Texas, Burger King, with his feet up on the toilet, afraid to move. Hey." He nudged Shahzad at a terminal beside him. "IM Amarillo. Tell them to check the stalls of all fast-food restaurants, and get down on their knees."

Shahzad searched his face. "You wants me to do this?"

Tyler cackled and looked at me with triumph. "Do you see what I have to endure? He can't tell a joke from a jelly jar. Hey, but it's not such a bad idea."

While tormenting Shahzad, he clattered out the IM he'd just spoken of, probably to some agent he was connected to in Amarillo. He had those fast fingers of hackers, so that he could type as fast as he spoke and tell a different joke at the same time.

"Was that meant to be funny?" I asked.

"I'm not sure yet. I'm bored. And very keyed up." He drummed his fingers on the keypad and cast a glance at Shahzad. "So. How's Cora?"

"She's down. That's our word for bedridden. She had some howler around four thirty this morning—that's our word for nightmare. We all have them. I charged in there to shake her, and Marg was sleeping on the cot in her room, though she swears it's not medicinal. I dunno. Cora's either whipping herself totally, or she is heartbroken over the guy. Marg wouldn't let me stick around to see. Cora is, let's say, an ocean of secrets. We're working on it."

Tyler drummed his speckled fingers on the edge of the keypad. "We call your womenfolk the princesses."

I laughed. "Rain's just a good old, down-home girl." I stopped. "Cora, though ... You're probably not far from the truth there."

Tyler wasn't stupid. "Okay. So, you're in love with her. Aren't you, um, kind of in a rough spot?" He spat out a couple of bars from a hip-hop song, "U Can't Touch This."

He wasn't demure either.

"I'm not in love with her," I argued. "But it's taking all I have to steer clear."

"Why not go? Offer some, ya know, words of wisdom and comfort."

"Because I'm the wrong person," I said. "I'm ... that 'other guy with feelings for her.' Anything I say lacks credibility. I tried really hard last night, but she'll think I'm gloating. She's got self-esteem issues, big-time. We're working on that, too."

"She probably feels like a fool," Tyler said, having gotten a joking reply from the agent in Amarillo, something about how they already have video cams in every fast-food toilet in Amarillo. He sent the reply, "Ew," and went on. "Which is ridiculous. The guy's a very charming cutthroat who's probably got her IQ times two. How's she supposed to resist him? I know what she's going through, though."