Ravenous Dusk (67 page)

Great grapes of sweat bloomed and splattered on the USA Today spread out on his lap. At the bottom of the front page, squashed into less than four column inches by flooding in Missouri and the latest sordid slime on the current President: EXPLOSION AT ARMY'S 'GERM WARFARE' BASE KILLS 14;
Pentagon Spokesman Assures No Threat Of Outbreaks
. There was nothing at all about Idaho.

People who know the kinds of things you know don't just take leaves of absence. They're found on toilets with their service pistols in their hands, stomachs stuffed with sleeping pills. Or in a plane crash…
The antifederalist literature he researched every day was full of scenarios– Senator John Tower, Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey, White House crony Vince Foster…

But what do you know, Martin? What threat do you pose?
He knew more than most of the world. He looked around at all the lowing cattle, his fellow travelers, stumbling past or lingering in the tidepools of newsstands, Starbucks kiosks, sports bars, glassed-in smoking sections like cancer saunas.

Cancer…

He knew about Storch.

He knew about RADIANT.

He knew about Keogh.

He knew about them. He was one of them. It was not a question of loyalty, of doctrine. Could a drone even dream of defecting from the hive?

He got up and went to a pay phone.

Assistant Director Wyler was in conference with a group of Quantico instructors, but Mrs. McNulty patched him right through. It was not a good sign.

"Martin? Why are you still in Idaho?"

He looked around. The terminal was like the whirling drum of a washing machine. He put on his glasses. It swam into focus. It might have been LA or DC, but everyone was ten years behind in dress and twenty pounds overweight. No one watched him from across the concourse. Who doesn't look suspicious, sitting alone in an airport? "It's a family emergency, sir. My Mother—"

"Is Beatrice alright?"

"She—I think it's a nervous breakdown in the offing, sir." Go ahead and ask, sir: Hers or yours?

The Assistant Director let out a sigh of relief that soured in a disappointed groan. "You have duties, Martin, I shouldn't have to remind you. This is a critical time. This is a classified investigation. Please try to employ your formidable powers of empathy to understand the dilemma you're causing. Your mother is a dear old friend, and she was a fine asset to the Bureau, as was your father. But we cannot spare you at this time. Your tasks cannot be duplicated without compromising the investigation."

Tell him
, this is the investigation. I had this dream that I got a phone tip, and then I got this doctored photograph, and there was a monster…

"I'll be back on a plane tonight, sir. I'm still collating and researching, and I can get back on it after I take care of the…situation at home." He took a deep breath. He hated himself for calling it that. "I appreciate the situation I've placed the Bureau in, and—and the investigation, but I've concluded that a short visit now will forestall the need for a more dire, and protracted, stay, later." He pushed sincerity and reasoned concern into his voice, and hoped Mules couldn't detect lies over the phone. "I'm all she has, sir. I'm so earnestly concerned for her, that I fear it might have an adverse effect on my work."

Wyler noisily cupped his hand over the phone. Cundieffe heard burbling video and hushed, electronically filtered voices. The Cave Institute. "How much have you told her, Martin?"

Cundieffe swallowed hard, his desiccated windpipe slamming shut on all the lies that sprang to mind, all the questions he needed answered. "N—nothing whatsoever, sir," he stammered. "She understands operational security." His voice cracked. His vision melted and ran again as tears sprang from his eyes. Through them, he could see the others listening, probing into his head through the line. Lie-detector drills stabbed his brain. No matter how hard he tried, he could not picture Mother. "You've got to know that, sir. She knows nothing."

"You have twenty four hours," Wyler said. "Give your mother my best wishes for a speedy recovery."

Few environments are as much of a shock to the system as the metropolitan Los Angeles climate. Cundieffe stepped out of the arrival terminal at LAX an hour after sunset and gasped at the perverse, dirty steam-bath warmth. His lungs felt as if he were trying to breathe soup. The overcast sky was fading from gray to murky red as a million grids of lights came on in an unbroken blanket sprawling from Anaheim to Oxnard.

Watching from the window of his business-class seat on the plane, he'd marveled at the shapeless, circuit-board city-scape, which seemed to have grown since the last time he'd flown in. New York and Chicago had reaching spires, skyscraper claws, to assert that it was a city, with foci and axes and flow, while the ever-expanding neon abomination of Las Vegas still looked like a single pinpoint explosion of cold fire on the violet desert floor. From the air, Los Angeles was undeniably a disease on the land, a colossal, sprawling silicon cancer. It seemed to have no borders, eating and absorbing its suburbs and adjoining counties, even gnawing its way around the benighted barriers of Camp Pendleton to the south and the Cleveland National Forest to the north. In another few years, it would engulf muted San Diego and the ragtag glitter of Tijuana, explode into the dusty agriscape of the Central Valley, throw out fingers of landfill peninsulas into the Pacific and straddle the horizon, infinite in all directions. Even before he breathed its air, he had a wilting sense that his city had forgotten him. His LA survival skills had likewise faded away, and he was only one more tourist trying not to get killed.

He shed his bulky overcoat, draped it over his briefcase and hailed a cab. It took an hour to get up the 405 to Santa Monica, even though the savvy Somali driver muscled his way into the deserted carpool lane and scooted past miles of gridlock. Half the time was spent in sight of his exit and the monolithic Federal Building where, until this year, he'd begun and built the foundations of his career. Though it seemed to impose even on the taller glass skyscrapers of the banks to the east of it, it seemed stunted to him now, like an old elementary school. The corridors in which he served now extended even further underground than the drab tower reached into the smoggy sky.

He paid the driver and stood before his Mother's house for a long minute before he really saw the place. A brief, half-hearted rain had sprinkled the city only a few hours before. The oils and particulates had been washed off everything, giving the sidewalks and lawns and parked cars a preternaturally bright, raw appearance, while the gutters sported queasy oil-slick rainbows. The windows and porch light were dark, the front door closed. Hers was the only house on the block without a blue cathode nightlight peering out its front picture window.

Cundieffe shivered.

His mother worked on the fifth floor of FBI Headquarters for thirty years. She might know something, but what? Enough for them to monitor her phone conversations, and if she breathed a word of what she knew—?

The curtains of the Melnitzes' family room picture window parted, and Old Man Melnitz peered out at him. Only then did he realize how suspicious he looked. Standing on the walk in front of the house he grew up in, like a burglar casing a job. He strode up the walk, calling too loudly, "Mother?"

He let himself in with his key, dropped his coat and briefcase in the atrium. The air was cold. Mother almost never turned on the heater. Heat sucks up dollars and breeds germs, she'd say, but she always baked something around dinner time, even if she only gave it away to the neighbors or the agents at the Federal Building. She had geriatric diabetes, and never cheated, though she said she enjoyed baking for its own sake. Cundieffe always believed his Mother was cheating on the heat, because she always sat in the kitchen, reading or chatting on the phone, while the banana bread or the brown betty or the cookies baked. He went through the dining room, even colder there, and found the kitchen empty and colder still. The back door stood open. Through it, he saw that the fading yard needed a fresh coat of green paint. He noted that the hibiscus and the orange tree were both coming along nicely, both already sprouting buds in the confused climate of the city. He resisted the impulse to search their leaves for whiteflies.

Mother was not here. He should go to the garage and look for the Mustang. He should not be touching anything. He should be calling the police, he should be talking to Thom Tussey, LA's kidnapping specialist. He was especially fond of Mother's Louisiana crunch cake, and was an excellent judge, since he hailed from Baton Rouge. He could be counted on to exercise discretion.

Wishful thinking. If they got to her, she'd be here, it would look like a suicide, a coronary, complications from a flu virus…

He stepped out onto the back porch. Through the dusty garage window, he could see Mother's aquamarine '68 Mustang. When the old Pontiac had gone to meet its wrecker, Mother hadn't let Father buy her a grandmother's car, because she'd never be anybody's grandmother. At the time, Cundieffe had thought his Mom was making some kind of joke.

The porch glider creaked. He looked down and stumbled off the porch when he saw Mother lying on her back on the glider, her sturdy hairstyle mortally denting the chintz cushion. Her hands were clasped under her formidable bosom as if they'd been arranged that way, or as if she'd succumbed to a wound that lay beneath them. Her glasses hung from their gold chain around her neck. She wore a smart navy blue wool skirt and sweater set that might've been forty years old, but looked newer than Cundieffe's sweat-rumpled suit. She looked peaceful. The unjaundiced eye would see natural causes. There would be no autopsy.

The moment froze and its gravity sucked Cundieffe into it so hard and fast his soul swirled down it in a monofilial string of atoms. Cundieffe had never thought about it, but he'd always unconsciously supposed the soul would be a light thing, and it astounded him how very heavy a soul could be. Cut free of the tether of Mother, he should have floated free of his old life and rose up into the hierarchy of the Mules. No doubt that was what they planned, but they underestimated her importance, and now he might never move again.

"Heavens, I must be dreaming."

Cundieffe staggered drunkenly and looked as if he'd just been doused with ice water. He spun around once before he turned back to Mother, who squinted at him and smiled.

Her eyelashes fluttered, her hands fumbled and found her glasses, and she was smiling at him. Not dead. Only napping.

"It's me, Mother. What are you doing out here, asleep? You looked like—" How stupid it was rushed him and he had to sit down. Mother got up just soon enough for him to fall onto the glider and lay down in her place. He shook so badly, she gave him a worried glance as she went into the kitchen.

He heard her rummaging in the refrigerator, now taking down glasses from the cupboard. "I must've dozed off when I sat down after I got home, about an hour ago. I've been golfing with the former Deputy Assistant Director's widow, Maryalice Laughton. I don't suppose you know of her? She's living out here now, and she practically staged a
coup d'etat
over the Ladies Auxiliary of the local Society chapter, drove Mrs. Stickney out in tears over some scandal about the charity benefit arrangements. She's run me ragged on the links every Wednesday and Saturday for the last six weeks, but I had to do something to take up the slack from not cleaning up after you. Mouth like a stevedore, that Laughton woman, and she sure likes the sound of herself. Anyhow…"

He listened to her talking as she got together a light snack. He chewed his thumbnail, which was an awful habit he was glad Mother couldn't see, but if he didn't do it, he'd probably be sucking his thumb, so there you are. She hadn't remarked upon or even seemed to notice his bruised face and bandaged hand, his broken glasses with black duck-tape on the bridge.

At length, he got up and went into the kitchen, where Mother had laid out oatmeal raisin cookies and milk. "I could make hot chocolate, if you'd prefer, but you look like your nerves have had enough jangling for one day." She circled around behind him and maneuvered him into a chair at the counter. "Martin, you didn't desert your post and fly out here to get an answer to your silly question, did you?"

He stuffed a whole cookie in his mouth to forestall an excuse. The cookie dissolved on his tongue, vanilla extract working its comforting magic on his misfiring brain, and he wanted to tell her everything about everything. "Did you read the newspaper this morning?" he asked, but chopped her off with a stuttering, "Don't, it doesn't matter. I spoke to Assistant Director Wyler before I left Washington, Mother. I'm just here for the evening." He flushed his mouth with milk and took another cookie, but he nibbled at this one, let the moment soothe him out of all memory.

"Are they giving my little man important work to do?"

"Oh, no shortage of that. AD Wyler says they're going to need me at Headquarters indefinitely, what with the new Division forming."

She nodded vacantly, a brave half-smile on her face. She touched his arm, laying more weight on him than she probably realized. "I'm proud, Martin. Father would be proud, too. I only wish he could see you, now." She pinched his arm hard. "Now, what the devil are you doing here, and what was that business on the telephone, the other morning?"

He brayed submission and meekly shook his arm free. Studying his shoes, he said, "Mother, I can't tell you very much, but there's a man, the one I asked you about. I have it on good authority—" A reliable source, ha! "—that is, I believe you might know something, or have something, maybe something of Dad's…"