Mount Dragon (28 page)

The front had gathered its energy in the Gulf of Mexico, then moved northwestward, striking the Mexican coastline of Tamaulipas State. Once over land, the front was forced to rise above the Sierra Madre Oriental, where the moist air of the higher altitudes condensed in great thunderheads over the mountains. Vast quantities of rain fell as the front moved westward. By the time it descended on the Chihuahua desert, all moisture had been wrung from it. The front veered northward, moving laterally through the basin and range provinces of northern Mexico. At six o'clock in the morning it entered the Jornada del Muerto desert.

The front was now bone dry. No clouds or rain marked its arrival. All that remained of the Gulf storm was an enormous energy differential between the hundred-degree air mass over the desert and the sixty-five-degree air mass of the front.

All this energy manifested itself in wind.

As it moved into the Jornada, the front became visible as a mile-high wall of orange dust. It bore down across the land with the speed of an express train, carrying shredded tumbleweeds, clay, dry silt, and powdered salt picked up from playas to the south. At a height of four feet above the ground, the wind also included twigs, coarse sand, pieces of dry cactus, and bark stripped from trees. At a height of six inches, the wind was full of cutting shards of gravel, small stones, and pieces of wood.

Such desert storms, though rare enough to occur only once every few years, had the power to sandblast a car windshield opaque, strip the paint off a curved surface, blow roofs off trailer homes, and run horses into barbed-wire fences.

The storm reached the middle Jornada desert and Mount Dragon at seven o'clock in the morning, fifty minutes after Gilbert Teece, senior OSHA investigator, had driven off in a Hummer with his fat briefcase, heading for Radium Springs.

Scopes sat at his pianoforte, fingers motionless on the black rosewood keys. He appeared to be in deep thought. Lying beside the hand-shaped lid prop was a tabloid newspaper, torn and mangled, as if angry hands had crumpled it, then smoothed it again. The paper was open to an article entitled “Harvard Doc Accuses Gene Firm of Horror Accident.”

Suddenly, Scopes stood up, walked into the circle of light, and flounced down on the couch. He pulled the keyboard onto his lap and typed a brief series of instructions, initiating a videoconference call. Before him, the enormous screen winked into focus. A swirl of computer code ran up along one edge, then gave way to the huge, grainy image of a man's face. His thick neck lapped over a collar at least two sizes too tight. He was staring into the camera with the bare-toothed grimace of a man unused to smiling.

“
Guten tag
,” said Scopes in halting German.

“Perhaps you would be more comfortable speaking in English, Mr. Scopes?” the man on the screen asked, tilting his head ingratiatingly.

“
Nein
,” Scopes continued in bad German. “I want to practice the German. Speak slowly and clearly. Repeat twice.”

“Very good,” the man said.

“Twice.”

“
Sehr gut, sehr gut
,” the man said.

“Now, Herr Saltzmann, our friend tells me you have clear access to the old Nazi files at Leipzig.”

“Das ist richtig. Das ist richtig.”

“This is where the Lodz Ghetto files currently reside, is it not?”

“
Ja. Ja
.”

“Excellent. I have a small problem, an—how does one say it?—an
archival
problem. The kind of problem you specialize in. I pay very well, Herr Saltzmann. One hundred thousand Deutschmarks.”

The smile broadened.

Scopes continued to talk in pidgin German, outlining his problem. The man on the screen listened intently, the smile slowly fading from his face.

Later, when the screen was blank once again, a soft chime, almost inaudible, sounded from one of the devices on the end table.

Scopes, who was still sitting on the decrepit sofa, keyboard in lap, leaned toward the end table and pressed a button. “Yes?”

“Your lunch is ready.”

“Very well.”

Spencer Fairley entered, the foam slippers on his feet in ludicrous contrast to the somber gray suit. He made no noise as he crossed the carpet and set a pizza and a can of Coca-Cola on the far end table.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Fairley asked.

“Did you read the
Herald
this morning?”

Fairley shook his head. “I'm a
Globe
reader,” he said.

“Of course you are,” said Scopes. “You should try the
Herald
once in a while. It's much more lively than the
Globe
.”

“No, thank you,” said Fairley.

“It's over there,” Scopes said, pointing to the pianoforte.

Fairley went over and returned, holding the rumpled tabloid. “Unpleasant piece of journalism,” he said, scanning the page.

Scopes grinned. “Nah. It's perfect. The crazy son of a bitch has put the knife to his own throat. All I need to do is give his arm a little nudge.”

He pulled a rumpled computer printout from his shirt pocket. “Here's my charity list for the week. It's short, only one item: a million to the Holocaust Memorial Fund.”

Fairley looked up. “Levine's organization?”

“Of course. I want it done publicly, but in a quiet, dignified way.”

“May I ask…?” Fairley raised an eyebrow.

“…Why?” Scopes finished the sentence. “Because, Spencer, you old Brahmin, it's a worthy cause. And between you and me, they're shortly going to lose their most effective fundraiser.”

Fairley nodded.

“Besides, if you thought about it, you would realize there are also strategic reasons to free Levine's pet charity from excessive dependence on him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Fairley, look, my jacket has a hole in the elbow. Would you like to go shopping with me again?”

A look of extreme distaste passed quickly across Fairley's face, then disappeared again. “No, thank you, sir,” he said firmly.

Scopes waited until the door hissed shut. Then he laid the keyboard aside and lifted a slice of pizza from the box. It was almost cold, exactly the way he liked it. His eyes closed in enjoyment as his teeth met in the gooey interior of the pizza crust.

“
Auf wiedersehen
, Charles,” he mumbled.

Carson emerged from the administration building at five o'clock and stopped in amazement. All around him, the buildings of Mount Dragon stood in the dim aftermath of the dust storm, dark shapes emerging from an orange pall. The landscape was deathly still. Carson breathed in gingerly, testing the air. It was arid, like brick dust, and strangely cold. As he stepped forward, his boot sank an inch into powdery dirt.

He'd gone to work very early that morning, before sunup, eager to get the analysis of X-FLU II out of the way. He worked diligently, almost forgetting the windstorm raging above the silent underground fastness of the Fever Tank. De Vaca arrived an hour later. She had beaten the storm, too, but just barely; her muttered curses, and the dirt-streaked face that scowled back at him through the visor, attested to that.

This must be what the surface of the moon looks like
, he thought as he stood outside the administration building.
Or the end of the world
. He had seen plenty of storms on the ranch, but nothing like this. Dust lay everywhere, coating the white buildings, glazing the windows. Small drifts of sand had accumulated in long fins behind every post and vertical rise. It was an eerie, twilit, monochromatic world.

Carson started toward the residency compound, unable to see more than fifty feet ahead in the thick air. Then, hesitating a moment, he turned and headed instead for the horse corral. He wondered how Roscoe had fared. In a bad storm, he had known horses to go crazy in their stalls, sometimes breaking a leg.

The horses were safe, covered with dust and looking irritated but otherwise unhurt. Roscoe nickered a greeting and Carson stroked his neck, wishing he had brought a carrot or a sugar cube. He looked the animal over quickly, then stood back with relief.

A sound from outside the paddocks, muffled and deadened by the dust, reached his ears. Glancing up, he saw a shadow looming out of the pall of dust.
Good God
, he thought,
there's something alive out there, something very large
. The shadow vanished, then reappeared. Carson heard the rattle of the perimeter gate. It was coming in.

He stared through the open door of the barn as the ghostly figure of a man on horseback materialized out of the dust. The man's head hung low on his shoulders, and the horse shuffled on trembling legs, exhausted to the point of collapse.

It was Nye.

Carson withdrew into the dim spaces of the barn and ducked into an empty stall. The last thing he wanted was another unpleasant encounter.

He heard the gate swing shut, then the sound of boots slowly crossing the sawdust floor of the barn. Squatting down, Carson peered through a knothole in the frame of the stall.

The security director was saturated, head to toe, in dun-colored dust. Only his black eyes and crusted mouth broke through the monotony of the powdery coat.

Nye stopped in front of the tack area and slowly untied his rifle boot and saddlebags, hanging them on a rack. He uncinched the saddle, jerked it off the horse, and set it on a carrier, slinging the saddle blankets on top. Every movement raised small mushroom clouds of gray dust.

Nye led the horse toward its stall, out of Carson's view. Carson could hear him brushing the horse down, murmuring soothing words. He heard the snip of a bale being cut, the thump of hay thrown into the stall and a hose filling the water bucket. In a few moments, Nye reappeared. Turning his back to Carson, he pulled out a heavy tack box from one corner of the barn and unlocked it. Then, moving to his saddle bags, he unbuckled one side and extracted what looked like two squares of clear stiff plastic, sandwiching a ragged—and completely unauthorized—piece of paper. Placing them on the floor of the tack area, Nye removed what looked like a wax pencil from the saddlebags, bent over the paper, and began making notations on the covering plastic. Carson pressed his eye to the crack, straining for a better view. The piece of paper looked old and well worn, and he could see a large, handwritten phrase across its upper border:
Al despertar la hora el áquila del sol se levanta en una aguja del fuego
, “At dawn the eagle of the sun stands on a needle of fire.” Beyond that he could make out nothing.

Suddenly, Nye sat up, alert. He looked around, craning his neck as if searching for the source of some noise. Carson shrank into the shadows at the back of the stall. He heard a shuffling sound, the click of a lock, the heavy clumping of feet. He peered out again to see the security director leave the barn, a gray apparition vanishing into the mist.

After a few moments, Carson got up and, eyeing the tack box curiously for a moment, moved over to the stall that held Muerto, Nye's horse. It stood spraddle-legged, a string of brown saliva hanging from its mouth. He reached down and felt the tendons. Some heat, but no serious inflammation. The corona was hot but the hooves were still good, and the horse's eye was clear. Whatever Nye had been doing, he had pushed the animal almost to its limit, maybe even as much as a hundred miles in the last twelve hours. The animal was still sound; there was no permanent damage and the horse would be back in form in a day or two. Nye had known when to quit. And he had a magnificent horse. A zero branded into its right jaw and a freeze brand high on its neck indicated it was registered with both the American Paint Horse Association and the American Quarter Horse Association. He patted its flank admiringly.

“You're one expensive piece of horseflesh,” he said.

Carson left the stall and moved to the barn entrance, peering out into the dust that hung like smoke in the oppressive air. Nye was long gone. Closing the barn door quietly, Carson headed quickly for his room, trying to make sense of a man who would risk his life in a savage dust storm. Or a security director who would risk his job carrying around a piece of paper topped by a meaningless Spanish phrase at a place where paper was forbidden.