Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (16 page)

Interception

The Illuminatus Tower, London

Midnight

“My apologies for calling you so late, Mr. Raines.”

“Nonsense, Michael. What is it? What do you see?”

The muscular Asian in the pinstriped Saville Row suit looked carefully at the screen before him. “A copy of one of our files was sent a few moments ago through the Internet to an email address at the Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology. The complete Hradek file, sir, unencrypted.”

“Not encrypted? Then, not transferred to one of our people.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“The origin?”

“I— I’m still working on that, sir. I’m—”

“No need to apologize, Michael. Clean it up as soon as possible. Use the teams already in play. I believe Mr. Thiel and Mr. Krest are in that area tonight, if they haven’t gone to Paris already.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sleep well, Michael. Tomorrow, the world will be a new place.”

Erasure

Bless his heart, the little man was still at work.

Erma approved of Doctor Gale. She’d gotten on as a temp cleaner in the library back when Dr. Gale had been something of a temp himself, fresh at MIT, lecturing on the Dibner Fellowship Program. In the early days he was one of Charles Townes’ favorites, and he had the old man’s gift of a gracious gesture. They’d both started full time at The Tech, and she’d cleaned his small office ever since.

She preferred nights. The doctor always emptied his wastebasket himself; the worst she faced in his office was the occasional spilled coffee, not counting the candy bar wrappers left almost every night for 3 years by a student under Gale’s wing, but that was several years ago.

The lights were left on in the hall as a matter of course. But wasn’t that a light under Dr. Gale’s door? Not much of one, just the washed-out, dishwater light from a monitor. Erma was close enough to hear someone a work on the keyboard. They’d be bound to give him an office, if he didn’t spend so much time off campus.

As quietly as she could, Erma retreated to the teacher’s lounge to pour a cup of coffee. He liked one sugar and no cream. The coffee’s heat was reaching through the Styrofoam and her plastic gloves—she hated the clammy things, but regulations at The Tech were practically from the mouth of God--by the time she returned to his office, but the typing continued, unabated.

“’Toiling upward in the gloom,’ Doct--” But the two men in the office didn’t belong there, didn’t belong anywhere in Erma’s world, and as they both turned--the older, bearded one before the computer and the younger, blond,
angry
boy. “What are you doing in Dr. Gale’s office?” She demanded hotly. The older man, who she now saw wore tight dark gloves as he typed, simply shrugged, while the youngster, also in black, practically bared his fangs as he flowed at her from an open filing cabinet.

Her breath suddenly catching in her throat, Erma hastily stepped back, jerking the coffee at him, and ran for the exit. Their dark clothes, the dead look in the younger one’s face, this was worse than no good, this never happened on campus, never—

She was five feet from her janitor’s cart when the sharp, cold pressure hit the back of her neck. Reflexively her hand went there, brushing something small and hot from her skin even as spots of frost swirled around her. No,
within
her. The door was only five steps away, then three, then one. Erma shuffled to a stop, her momentum carrying her into the doorjamb next to the fire alarm. What was wrong with her eyes? How could it be this cold?

Her arms didn’t move where she wanted them. She managed to twist around, actually falling at an angle, fingers, legs, face shaking uncontrollably. “What did you do to me? What is this?” She croaked at the young man in black, standing a few feet away. She tried to say more, but her throat was slack, shapeless. She didn’t even have the strength to work her mouth, or blink away the rushing cold, the insensibility of it all. This wasn’t right. She had a family to get back to, her Paul at home in bed, waiting for her, ingredients for a roast in the kitchen. In the . . . kitchen. Where?

Erma found herself trying to pray, but it was suddenly pointless, as if her soul were frostbitten through. Sensation ended, free will danced like a spark in the wind, and vanished. All sense of meaning, simply . . . not.

Eyes unseeing, Erma nevertheless felt the young man drawing near. She felt like she should envy him his life, his warmth, but there was simply nothing left to feel anymore. She knew he watched her die, and then even that thought wavered like a quick candle and was gone.

Nimble

Forge, Idaho

7 AM

Mercedes came awake with a feeling of epiphany, quickly, surrounded by the laughter of children. Echoes bounced around the bedroom at the peak of the house, and fell like the sunlight coming through the open window. “Wake up, Aunt Mercedes, wake up!” they shouted, running around the edge of the bed. “You’re going to miss the plane!”

“Who’s kids are these?” Mercedes yelled, and threw the covers over their heads. “Help, somebody, save me! I’m being attacked by Oompa-Loompas!”

Diane’s youngest three laughed uproariously and squirmed out from under the blanket. Each under the age of ten, they had their mother’s straight brown hair. “Mom says you’re going home today,” said the oldest, Gretchen.

“Why do you have to go today?” asked Marla.

Mercedes kissed her nose. “Some birds need me back in California.”

“Birds.” Chris had a mischievous look to him. Mercedes swore he inherited it from his Aunt Irene. “Birds need you?”

Mercedes thought a moment. “These are birds that people think are disappearing. I’m going to take their picture as their babies hatch, sometime in the next few days.”

Gretchen, excited, caught on immediately. “They’re going extinct?”

“That’s what some people think.”

Marla didn’t get it. “But you’ll take their picture and then they won’t stink?”

Chris leaned into his little sister. “Ex-tinct, Marla. Not smelly.”

Now Marla nodded. “Like Dad said you’d be if he caught you riding your bike in the house again.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, coming away with a handful of eggs. “Mama says you have to eat a big breakfast before you go.”

Gretchen broke in. “Aunt Irene already ate four eggs and six pancakes!”

That was in character. Mercedes nodded. “She’s got to keep up her strength,” she agreed. “Her kids are going to want to play when we get back to L.A.”

“And she’s got a tough job,” added Gretchen. “California is full of criminals she has to catch.”

Chris sat on the wide windowsill. “Aunt Irene said you help her sometimes by taking pictures where bad guys do things.” He mimed clicking a camera.

“When she needs me to, honey.”

Something else occurred to Chris. “I thought you’re going to stay and go swimming with us in the lake,” he said.

Gretchen pushed her brother in the arm. “Not yet, Chris. The water’s not warm enough yet.”

Mercedes nodded solemnly. “Gretchen’s right. The lake won’t be warm enough to swim in for at least another month. It’s because of all the melting snow.”

Chris frowned and pulled at the covers. “We know
that
,” he said. “Maybe you can come back when it’s warm enough. Aunt Irene’s coming back this summer, and she’s bringing everybody back!”

Marla and Gretchen spoke together. “Can you come too, Aunt Mercedes?”

“Yeah, come on! Vacation’s just getting started!”

She laughed. “I’m not even going to make it out of this bed if you guys don’t give me some privacy! Shoo! I’ve got to get dressed! Aunt Irene’s going to eat all my pancakes!”

That got them out of the room. Mercedes laughed. Irene’s kids in Orange were the same, always wanting her to stay. She liked being the fun aunt, Mercedes had to admit. It was the best way she knew to get rid of all the sweets in her house and the loose dollar bills in her wallet.

She loved her cousins' kids.

Mercedes stretched and collected her things from the adjoining bathroom. Jasmine still overgrew the arbor beneath the bedroom window. Mercedes breathed as deeply as she could, then yanked the sheets and blankets from the bed and dropped them on the floor. Pillowcases next, then she got dressed herself, pulling on jeans and a green-blue shirt the color of her eyes.

Mercedes sat on the bed and wiggled her toes on the windowsill. Everything beyond the window burned brilliant green. In a winterbound place like Forge, springtime must seem like a miracle. Everything grew again, everything could breathe. She loved this place.

Ever since she’d been a little girl Mercedes had felt a funny kind of expectation when the calendar swung ‘round to spring; an odd, implacable epiphany, a hint that something wonderful was about to happen. She’d lost that feeling for a while after her parents died, and during the last year or so with Bryce. But this year—she grinned. She wasn’t too old, after all, to feel that everything was going to turn out better than she had reason to expect.

She placed a hand on the wall and leaned out the window, wondering if the new growth on the trees covered the view of the swimming pool.

“You going to jump?” said a voice behind her.

Mercedes turned, faster than she intended. It was Irene at the threshold, still in her robe.

“What did you say?”

“Thought you were pining away for your squandered vacation,” her cousin said, “The kids are trying to convince me to abduct you when we all come back in August.”

“I might try to convince you myself.” Mercedes handed Irene her duffel bag. “They all promised me they’d know how to swim by then.”

Irene found her cousin’s hair brush in the duffel and dropped the bag. “You should come then, if you can get away.” She began brushing her hair. “Forge is really pretty in late summer.”

Mercedes looked out and down at the jasmine draping the arbor below. “Yeah. I remember.”

*

She and Irene made a clean getaway right after the kids left for their morning lessons at the pool. Diane let her sister drive, and Irene piloted them through Forge’s back streets at a leisurely pace; they had more than two hours before the plane left from the airport in Lewiston.

Once she made it to the car, Mercedes activated her phone, hesitated, and thumbed the key to check her messages. In the seat next to her, Irene was looking guardedly at her own phone. They’d made a pact together, a solemn vacation vow, not to listen to their voicemail while on vacation—was this an admission, then, that vacation was really over? Mercedes listened to her neighbor, Sylfa, report on the health of her indoor plants. Lord, it was too mundane.

“Want to hear my life?” Mercedes asked her cousins, and plugged the phone into the car’s speaker system. The next message voice on the phone was low and smoky. “Yeah, Mercy, hello. I just got the loft laid out, we’re all stocked up here for a
thing
on the 15th. Want to stop by and chew some meat and cheese?” Mercedes’ cousins made appreciative sounds, but quietly, so they could listen to the voice. “Don’t worry about bringing anything, see, there’s a guy I want you to meet. He owns a couple of vineyards up in Sonoma. Let me know.”

“That one sounds good,” said Diane.

“Sure, that’s all I need,” Mercedes said. “Brian tries to set me up with these guys all the time, these sensitive 21st century-types. It’s always a guy with a winery, or a health club chain, or some kind of working farm. He’s hoping I marry rich again so he can freeload off us.”

“What about this guy? Brian? He’s got kind of a sexy voice.”

Mercedes smiled, biting her lip. “Here’s the thing: Brian’s gay.” The other two women blinked, in unison. “I’m his guy test,” Mercedes added, “if they can go out with me and ‘not have their ignition turn over’, he says, then they must be for him.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Irene spoke up. “Is this the one that dresses funny?”

“Like a picnic table.”

“Gotcha.”

The next few messages were similarly short. One was from a reedy-voiced woman asking Mercedes’ advice on whether or not she should volunteer her blind dog for experimental vision surgery. The next was from a comedienne friend saying that she was moving back to San Francisco. “At least there, people think I’m funny. Check this out: “ You have to love the carpool lane. One of the best things about California, get somebody in the car with you and blaze past traffic. But what about hearses? Do hearses get to drive in the carpool lane? I mean, it’s not like the guy in back is really in a hurry to get anywhere, is it?’ So what do you think, is that funny? ‘” Mercedes clicked off that with a smile.

A few business calls made it through to Mercedes’ private line, both from her assistant, Marty. She jotted the details in a little spiral notebook before instructing her phone to save them to her home computer. “It’s not real until you write it down,” she said to her cousins.

“You’d make a great homicide detective, Merce,” Irene said, and Mercedes waited five whole seconds before her two cousins broke up, laughing.

Mercedes shook her head and looked across at Irene. “I still think you’re crazy for going on vacation without Barry and the kids.”

“Oh, we do this every year,” she replied. “He gets a few days in Las Vegas with his high school buddies, I get a few weeks of peace and quiet by myself. I’m glad you could come up with me.”

Now it was Mercedes turn to laugh. “A few days in Vegas equals two weeks in Idaho? That’s about right.”

“Separate vacations can be good,” said Diane. “’Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, and all that. That’s the way a man’s brain works, right?”

Irene smirked. “Sure gives Barry what he’s missing.”

A few moments later in the car, Irene spoke up. “Maybe it’s not really the guys' fault that they’ve got such one-track minds. Maybe we just need to get them out of their element, you know, get them out of their comfort zone and see how they deal. Some guys completely change when you give them a good whack in the head.” She pulled the wheel, and the car jumped out onto the town’s main drag.

Mercedes couldn’t resist. “So where do you take Barry to ‘whack him’?”

Her cousin’s smile showed her teeth. “Hawaii. There’s this place on the Big Island called Punalu’u. They have black sand beaches there, big, glossy dunes underneath the palm trees, and it feels so good to lie on. The sand’s softer, like baby powder, and pitch black.” Her voice started to drift. “At night, when there’s no lights but the stars, you feel like you’re floating up in the sky, way up there, and it’s like there’s just two of you in the whole universe.”

“Okay, still driving here, Irene!” Diane giggled as Irene blinked back toward reality, shaking her head as if she’d been stunned. She flushed.

“Must be some place,” Mercedes said.

Irene kept her mouth shut, smiling tightly at the road ahead. From the back seat, Diane spoke in
sotto voce
, “You know, all her kids’ middle names are Hawaiian.” Laughter
popped
from Mercedes, and Diane smiled broadly at the other two women. “Yup. Get a guy on a beach in Hawaii. A vacation like that sticks with you a while.”

Mercedes noticed that Irene was driving faster now, concentrating more fully on the road. There was a man who loved her at the other end.

They passed the park and the long road to the pool, and a few seconds later the library. It was the only building Mercedes could see with a new addition; everything else looked remarkably as she remembered.

“It really hasn’t changed much, has it?” she said.

“Not as much as you’d think,” Irene said. “The best parts are the same.”

A beat. “He still comes around here,” Diane added, offhand.

After a moment, Mercedes cleared her throat. “I bet.” She folded her hands softly, precisely in her lap. There was a clearing on the hill high above them, where two towering bull pines stood. “’Home town boy makes good’, right? They give him the keys to the city?”

“Nothing like that. He’s really low-key; just wants to hang out. What’s funny is, he’s given a lot of money to the town—rebuilt the pool, donated computers to the schools, that sort of thing—but he didn’t want anybody to know. All these checks coming in to the building and planning committee and the school district offices signed by ‘Fletcher Z. Engstrom,’ I mean, come on. The town’s only so big.” Irene guided the car over the bridge and turned onto the highway. “So when he comes around, everybody keeps mum, plays like they don’t know. Unspoken agreement.”

“You’re kidding. Fletcher Engstrom? Same as the writer?”

“A lot of people here think he
is
the writer.”

Irene spoke up. “Back in high school he used that name to write letters to the editor of the paper. He thinks he’s pulling a fast one on the whole town, and we all let him.”

Mercedes folded her hands again. “I wonder what his angle is.”

Irene glanced over. “Huh?”

“Don’t you think he’s doing it for a reason?”

“Sure,” Diane replied. “He wants to help out.”

“Ahh, I don’t know.”

Irene frowned. Before she could speak, Mercedes added, “Come on, we both know people in the business. I work with a lot of these Hollywood types, I live close to some of them.” She knew she wasn’t saying what her cousins wanted to hear, but she went on. “Bryce has a lot of friends in the business; everybody’s on some kind of wheel-and-deal. There are some decent people, too, but when it comes down to it, they all make money off the . . . weird ideas people have about them. If he’s become anything like some of the guys I’ve met, he’ll milk this somehow, when he needs it—he’ll use his charity involvement to kick up good press as soon as he makes a movie that sinks. I’ve seen it before. I’ve made pictures of it happening before.”