The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (22 page)

    "You came here for this?" Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.

    "No, babe. I just followed the trail and here we are. And it's good. You'll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We've been living in a cage, but that's over now."

    "My god, I loved you." Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda's chin and thumbed the hammer just as she'd seen it done. Her entire body shook. "You thought I'd just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never-Never Land without a word? Are you out of your fucking mind?"

    "Give it a minute," Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. "One minute. Let it work its magic. You'll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie." She reached for the revolver and it barked and twisted in Lorna's hands.

    Lorna didn't weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She made her way outside and sat on the porch. She could smell everything and strange thoughts rushed through her mind.

    There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who'd oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.

***

    Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses-an adult male and an adult female-in the van. The cause of death was blunt force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She'd died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who'd also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman's estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he'd hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn't help his case.

    Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the Chief Medical Examiner who'd overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies, even the one in the cabin. The examiner said she'd been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she'd never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.

THE SIPHON

    lancaster graduated from college in 1973 and landed a position in the sales department of a well known Wichita company that manufactured camping gear. He hated the outdoors but was naturally manipulative, an expert at affecting sincerity and bright-eyed chumminess of variable intensity. Despite this charm that wowed the socks off clients, he never made much headway with management or co-workers, two species immunized against snake oil and artifice.

    Around Halloween of 1989, he accepted a job as a field representative with another Wichita firm called Roache Enterprises. His farewell party was attended by four department associates, a supervisor, and a custodian. The supervisor brought a single layer white cake and somebody spiked the punch with bourbon. His boss projected an old staff picture on the slide panel-Lancaster isolated in the foreground, his expression a surprised snarl, uncomfortably reminiscent of the candid shot of an infamous serial killer who'd been electrocuted by the state of Florida earlier that year. Lancaster was better looking, much smoother, were such a thing possible.

    The conference room was brown and yellow, the tables and chairs yellow, bleached by fluorescent strips. Later that institutional light would seep into Lancaster's dreams. The hum of the lights. The cake, a rib bone scalloped to the marrow. The lights. The hum. He dreamed of the two women he'd loved and left when he was young and reckless, before he'd matured and steadied, before he'd learned to maintain his great control. He dreamed how their pleas and imprecations were abruptly stilled, how their faces became empty as the buzzing moon.

    He would awaken from such nightmares and grope for the special wooden box in its secret place in the dresser. The box represented that window into a brief, agonized segment of his early post college years; the red blur he refused to examine except in moments of dire want. A small lacquered coffer, dead black with a silver clasp. Dead black and cool to the touch, always cool as if stored in refrigerator rather than a drawer. Lancaster needed the box, its contents, needed them with a fevered intensity because they fulfilled the hunger at his core, because the switch that had originally been thrown to motivate and necessitate his acquisition of these trophies clicked off as arbitrarily as it had been clicked on and with it his will to pursue, to physically enact his desires. Thus he'd sift through the box of treasures, move his lips in wordless naming of each precious trinket until his mind quieted. Until the humming of the fly in the mantle of the light ceased. Until the humming of the moon ceased and he could sleep again.

***

    Roache Enterprises was founded in 1963 during the height of the Cold War when it manufactured guidance control systems for cruise missiles. Modern era Roache retained 170,000 full-time employees around the globe. The company dealt in electronics; plastics; chemical engineering; asphalt; irrigation systems; sugar, rubber, and cotton plantations; data mining; modular housing; and a confounding array of other endeavors. The Roache Brothers were five billionaires who'd retreated to South America compounds and the French Riviera. The public hadn't seen them-except for annual state of the corporation recorded video addresses-in twenty years. A board of regents ran the show from headquarters in France, India, Scotland, England, and of course, Kansas.

    Lancaster spent months abroad, jetting between continents. He'd married once, a union only a mayfly might've envied, which had resulted in a daughter, Nancy, now an adult living in Topeka whom he saw on Christmas and sometimes Easter. The rest of his family was scattered: Father dead, mother living in a trailer park in Tennessee, and two sisters in Washington State whom he had no real contact with since college.

    Incapable of love, its intricacies and necessities a mystery to him, he was fortunately content with the life of a gentleman bachelor and disappeared into the wider world. His job was generally one of information gathering and occasional diplomacy-a blackmailer or flatterer, depending upon the assignment. Charlatans were kings in the corporate culture of Roache, a culture that was the antithesis of the blue collar aesthetic of his former company. Lancaster excelled in this niche and Roache rewarded him accordingly. He possessed apartments in Delhi and Edinburgh, and standing reservations at luxury hotels in places such as Denmark, Paris, and New York. He'd come a long way since peddling camp stoves and sleeping bags.

    The National Security Agency reached out to Lancaster in 1991 while he vacationed at White Sands Beach, Hawaii. He was invited aboard a yacht owned by the friend of the friend of a former client who did business with Roache Enterprises on a piecemeal basis. The yacht-owner was named Harold Hoyte. Hoyte and his wife Blanche, a ripe and sensual ex B-movie actress who'd starred under an assumed name in a couple of Russ Meyer's films, owned an import business; this provided cover for their activities as senior operatives of the Agency, the bulk of which revolved around recruitment and handling.

    They had dinner with two other couples on the deck of the
Ramses
, followed by wine and pills and hideously affected slow-dancing to Harold Hoyte's expansive collection of disco. Harold went ashore, ostensibly to locate a couple of fellow revelers who'd gotten lost on the way to the party, and Blanche promptly led Lancaster into the master suite and seduced him to KC and the Sunshine Band on a king-size bed washed in the refracted shimmer of a glitter ball.

    Harold Hoyte made a pitch for Lancaster to join the NSA in the wee hours of the morning as they shared the last joint and the dregs of the scotch. Lancaster declined. A double life simply wasn't his style. He told Hoyte he had a good thing going with Roache and who needed a poisoned umbrella tip jammed in one's ass, anyway?

    Harold Hoyte smiled and said, no harm no foul. If he changed his mind…And an unlabeled video cassette of Lancaster fucking Mrs. Hoyte with theatrical flourishes soon arrived at the front desk of his hotel. That a duplicate might anonymously find its way to the Roache corporate offices was implicit. Roache was protective of its business associations large and small. They wouldn't take kindly to Lancaster's salacious escapades with the wife of a client, considering the ruin such an affair could bring to a lucrative contract were Mr. Hoyte to muster and bluster mock outrage at being cuckolded by a company representative. The Hoytes had caught him in the old honey trap. He didn't feel too angry-it was their field of expertise. Besides, spying might agree with him.

    Three weeks later, he was officially an asset of the NSA. He soon learned several colleagues at Roache Enterprises moonlighted for the government. The company had eyes everywhere the US needed them. It added a new and unpredictable wrinkle to Lancaster's routine, although the life of an occasional spy didn't prove particularly thrilling. Certainly it resembled nothing of bestselling potboilers or action flicks. Mostly it came down to taking a few pictures, following strangers for a day or two, and occasionally smuggling a memory stick or something as low-tech as a handwritten code across international borders.

    The upside was it motivated him to get into shape and take Judo for a while-weren't spies supposed to know Judo in case of a scrape? He'd watched the original
Manchurian Candidate
eight times; the version where Sinatra got into a knockdown drag-out fight with a foreign agent. To be on the safe side, he also bought a.38 automatic and got accurate with it at the range. He went unarmed abroad because of travel restrictions, but carried it almost everywhere while in the States. He continued to carry until his enthusiasm cooled and he stuck the gun in a shoebox and forgot it. Around then he also stopped attending Judo classes.

    One night in the wake of 9/11 and the untimely deaths of forty-seven Roache employees who'd staffed an office in the North Tower, he got together for drinks with another asset high up the food chain at corporate. They were drunk when Lancaster asked him what he thought of running errands for the Agency. The exec shook his head, eyes bleary from too many bourbons. "Not what I expected. Pretty fucking boring, you ask me. I guess I'm kind of taken aback by all the satanists."

***

    The Aughts passed.

    Following a six month lull of contact with the NSA, Lancaster received a call from his current handler, Tyrone Clack. Clack took over for the Hoytes when they sailed on toward retirement and their golden years back in 2003. All communications occurred via phone-Lancaster had never even seen a photo of the agent. Clack informed him that the Agency was interested in acquiring intelligence on a naturalized citizen named Dr. Lucas Christou. The good doctor, who'd been born in Athens and transplanted to the US during adolescence, was a retired chair of the anthropology department of some tiny school near Kansas City called Ossian University. He'd become reclusive since then, seldom appearing in public, content to withdraw from society to an isolated estate.

    Christou had emerged from his hermitage and would be hosting a foreign national named Rawat, a minor industrialist entering the US on business with Roache. All that was required of Lancaster was to take the doctor's measure, get to know him a bit, soften him up for possible future developments. No further explanation for the agency's interest was forthcoming and Lancaster didn't press. None of it titillated him anymore. He'd do as requested and hear nary a peep afterward. A typical, menial task. A mindless task, in fact.

    Considering his superstar status as a professional schmoozer, the scheme didn't prove difficult. He returned to Wichita and manipulated events until a big cheese at corporate asked him pretty please to entertain a small party that had come to town for a tour of a cluster of empty corporate properties outside the city. Strip mall-style office buildings that had been hastily built then left in quasi abandonment.

    The guests included the potential client, Mr. Rawat and his American companion Kara, and a bodyguard named Dedrick; the Cooks, a moneyed New York couple who'd previously partnered on land deals with Mr. Rawat; and, of course, Dr. Christou.

    All of this was explained by Vicky Diamond, an administrative assistant to the Big Cheese himself. Ms. Diamond was a shark; Lancaster noted this first thing. Youngish, but not really, dark hair, dark eyes, plenty of makeup to confuse the issue, a casual-chic dresser. Lancaster thought she smiled so much because she liked to show her teeth. She handed him dossiers on the principles-Mr. Rawat and the Cooks-and suggested an itinerary. He appreciated how she put her fingerprints on the project without over-committing. Should things progress smoothly, she'd get much of the credit. If the sales pitch tanked, Lancaster would find himself on the hook. He liked her already.