After the Rain (7 page)

The rotary phone
in the booth at Camp’s Corner still worked long after the golf course failed and the gas station and store closed. People drove out of their way to show their kids this dinosaur from the days before wireless. The county had originally asked the phone company to keep the line open so farmers working during spring planting and the fall harvest could make calls in an emergency. Which was good, because the man pacing back and forth next to the booth was facing a crisis.

Close to midnight and the city lights of Langdon, miles to the north, pushed a dome faintly against the sky. Overhead, a sickle moon wedged between the clouds. Lots and lots of mosquitoes swarmed around.

He was torn over the decision he had to make as he swatted at the bugs. Across the road, a spooky thread of moonlight outlined the Aztec dimensions of the Nekoma radar pyramid. He hugged himself, shivered in the muggy seventy-nine degrees, and looked up. Jeez. It was creepy out here, suspended between the ruins of the Cold War and this slender Muslim moon.

As he paced, he put his right hand, palm open, over his heart, like
when you sing the national anthem. Except he was searching for his sluggish heartbeat. He suspected that a catastrophic illness lurked inside him, coiled up, something part diabetes and part cancer, that lapped sugar from his blood the way a dog laps water.

Sometimes he saw things.

Shapes jerked at the corners of his vision. He caught fleeting glimpses of movement he thought were people darting away through doorways.

At first he thought he might have paranormal powers. Lately he had come to believe that it was a sign his death was near. If this were the case, he reasoned, the closer he came to it the better he could see into the world that existed just the other side of death. Since his body and its functions repelled him, the idea of leaving it was a kind of comfort.

He had entered “out of body experience” in his computer’s search engine one day and found his way to research papers about NDEs—near death experiences. The more he read about it, the more he surmised that the shapes he detected were presences transiting a zone between the sputtering energy of life ending and the total void of nothingness.

Near Death Experience.

The subject intrigued him and he’d investigated the sensation of what it might feel like with the help of a drug called ketamine. Abusers of the compound called it “going in the K-hole”; the dreamy scary sensation of leaving the body.

He had always suspected, and now he knew it for sure.

He was different.

It was time. Charon picked up the phone, inserted coins, and dialed the number. The Mole picked up on the other end but didn’t say hello. Charon pressed the receiver closer to his ear and could feel the building anxiety—the whole attack plan hung in the balance. Finally Charon broke the silence: “It’s me.”

“Where the hell are you?” the Mole asked.

“Still in town. You know, Rashid must have told them something, ’cause I think they’re here.”

“Shit. How many?”

“Three. Two women and an older guy.”

“I repeat. Why are
you
still there?”

Charon took a deep breath, steeled himself, and made his demand: “One of the women—I think she’s my pick. I mean, she came all this way to meet me.”

Only by a great act of will did the Mole resist shouting a string of obscenities. This was absurd—jeopardizing the operation because of a woman? So many things could still go wrong, and now this.

“But she could be an agent, for Christ’s sake,” he said incredulously.

“It’s got to be her. And that’s that.”

The Mole heard the finality in Charon’s voice and took a deep breath of his own to calm himself. After all, he had unleashed Charon. Why be surprised when he tried to flex his new muscles? So the Mole held his temper and savored the element of risk. Almost like a stab from his youth. He said, in a level, measured voice, “We’ll get her for you, but we have to do it fast.”

After the Mole hung up, he was back on the phone in an instant, making a call of his own: “First, you should both be at the target, I don’t care about the rain business. Second, Rashid talked, and now we may have agents snooping around in Langdon. And our friend’s next girl-toy selection could be one of them. He’s going to blow the operation if we don’t get him in line. You have to go back in and get him out. Now.”

The Mole hung up the pay phone and then, finally, he swore—in English, and then in Arabic. How was he suppose to get the job done with these homicidal clowns for help? Shaking his head, he
walked across the deserted parking lot. Security dictated that he use an unfrequented location where he could observe anyone who might be following him. So he chose this abandoned truck stop on the interstate. The gas and diesel pumps had been pulled out. They’d scrawled
CLOSED
in soapy letters on the empty diner windows. But the pay phones still worked.

He leaned against the hood of his car and studied the sky, wanting the clouds to clear. Wanting this thing to be over. His hand drifted to the open neck of his shirt. Before this all started, he used to wear gold chains around his neck. Kept the top two buttons open so the gold gleamed, nestled in his thick chest hair. Now, instead of the gold, he fingered a small silver religious medallion. His Christian mother had given it to him as a child.

Saint Charbel, in the lore of the Lebanese Maronite Church, had performed miracles after his death. The Mole himself had been practically dead for decades; exiled to this wilderness. Now, like Saint Charbel, years after his death he was about to perform a miracle.

The world of his birth was no more: Beirut when it was the Paris of the Middle East. His family had mirrored the city’s pre–civil war cosmopolitanism; his father had been a Sunni Muslim who’d preferred Karl Marx to the Koran. His mother was a Maronite Christian. His father had also been a member of the Ba’ath Party, an agent for Syrian intelligence, and a businessman heavily invested in growing cannabis and poppies in the Bekáa Valley.

Smuggling ran in his blood.

In 1982, an Israeli air strike killed his young Palestinian wife and infant son. One month later, a sixteen-inch shell from the American battleship
New Jersey
, firing in support of the Lebanese Army, killed his parents, his brother, and his two sisters.

Seeking revenge, he volunteered for a suicide mission against the Americans. His superiors counseled patience. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his left-wing guerrilla group was advised by a KGB handler. The Russian interviewed him, and,
seeing that he possessed intelligence and quality, suggested a long game: send him to America to live anonymously with his mother’s Christian family. Let him sleep among the Americans, become one of them, go to their schools, serve in their army.

So they sent him to the United States to ply his father’s trade. He would buy and sell and quietly learn the rhythms of smuggling across the Canadian border. Someday he would prove useful.

But that day never really came. The people who sent him had perished in the endless combat against the Israelis. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Mole was sentenced to prosper among the people he had sworn to kill. He remained faithful to his mission, going through the motions of his shadow life, running drugs, funneling money back to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. He got soft, he got married. He built a business. His two teenage sons were in high school. Christ—just yesterday he had taken them to soccer camp.

And then the knock at the door finally came. Not from his old group, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; not even from Hamas or Hezbollah. There was a new ascendant movement, inspired by the flyers of airplanes into tall American buildings. They were consolidating their fund raising. And asking favors. The dapper Saudi businessman named Rashid had impeccable knowledge of the Mole’s background. And he needed a ton of some unspecified material moved from Winnipeg across the border. No questions asked. And that’s how it began.

Now they were within hours of making it all work.

He believed Charon about the agents showing up in Langdon. And Charon wouldn’t leave until he got what he wanted. So an alternate plan was called for. Something…

The Mole squinted into the darkness. Made a decision. To keep the thing alive he’d have to take some risks. He’d have to divert them away from Charon.

He spun on his heel, walked back to the phone booth, and picked up the receiver.

Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!

The red label on the prescription bottle warned: “May cause
DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL
may
INTENSIFY
this effect. Use care when operating a car or other dangerous machinery.”

Broker took two of the white Vicodin pills, washed them down with bad roadside coffee, and stepped on the gas. If there was any dangerous machinery in the immediate area, it was him.

He was driving Milt Dane’s Ford Explorer pretty fast down a two-lane highway. A road sign flashed up, then disappeared: black rectangle framing a white silhouette of an Indian in profile with war bonnet; black number 5 centered in the white, the letter N in one corner and D in the other;
WEST
spelled out in the smaller panel over the sign.

He was headed west on North Dakota State Route 5, going mostly over 90 mph. Yet it seemed like he was standing still the last couple hours—ever since he pushed north of Fargo.

He’d forgotten that North Dakota was basically you and the sky.

After Fargo, the sky was no longer behind things, like the horizon. It became the main thing. It was too much. Along with too
many clouds and too much flat for his north-woods instincts. The problem was—no cover. Broker was a man who understood the advantages of cover; he’d perfected an eye for the subtleties in human and geographic landscapes, for blind spots he could slip in and out of.

Looking around here, he saw no place to hide.

Talk about being too exposed. Christ. He caught himself hunching his shoulders, almost ducking behind the wheel.
C’mon, un-cramp. Sit up straight, stretch.

Broker had reluctantly entered his later forties. He was tending toward lean and hungry this season, from compulsive exercise and a mild interest in Dr. Atkins’ diet. He’d cut his dark hair extra-short, almost military. He’d even trimmed some of the bushy ends off his eyebrows that grew in an almost solid monobrow. He had a fix to his gray eyes, a hollowness of cheek, and a flatness to his belly of a man who had taken vows, who was on a pilgrimage, who was in serious training.

There was some other stuff that affected his mood.

Like: a little over twenty-four hours ago he had been shot in the left hand. At the moment he was thinking, in a sweaty, feverish way, that taking a bullet was a mere nuisance, a distraction, compared to what was waiting for him down this highway. What was waiting for him was Nina Pryce. His wife.

He shook his head. People like him and Nina shouldn’t get married.

They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

And now she’d ditched their daughter with strangers in a motel in North Dakota.
Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What are you up to?

He’d lost the sugar-beet fields when he climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now he passed through a haze of strong-smelling clover and was into serious wheat. The fields stretched out to the
horizon like a deep green comforter quilted with chrome yellow patches of canola and spashes of iridescent blue flax.

There was so much sky, he thought he could see ten thousand miles, clear past summer into fall, all the way to the chill breath of the first frost. Gunmetal on oatmeal on concrete. And no blue. No sun. Far to the north he saw a curtain of rain, a shudder that could be lightning. But far away. Well into Manitoba.

No sun since Friday. Saturday it had started to rain in Minnesota. Saturday…He blinked sweat, refocused. Saturday, which was yesterday…

Not now. Think of something else.
He’d had heavy rain as he drove across Minnesota. It tapered off just past Grand Forks. He’d switched off the metronome slap of the wipers and opened the windows. Now he was sweating from more than the muggy air.

Infection had set in in his left hand where the slug from the .38 had bit a chunk of meat from the heel of his palm. So Broker had been shot with an old-fashioned low-velocity full-metal-jacketed round. Through and through. Which was apt, because he tended to be an old-fashioned wood-and-steel kind of guy.

Another scar.

The bullet had missed the bones and ligaments and the big nerve. So the hand still worked. The wound had been treated at Lake View Emergency in Stillwater. Last night the bandage was crisp gauze and white adhesive. Now it was turning a wrinkled funky gray, coming loose, with a ragged cockade of stiff brown blood the size of a silver dollar in his palm. It throbbed like hell.

Broker had been doing a favor for a friend.

The friend was a sheriff. As it turned out, he knew too many sheriffs. And now he was on his way to meet another one.

Back in Minnesota, he’d agreed to a temporary stint as a special deputy to the Washington County Sheriff. The favor had resulted in a struggle for a gun and him getting shot. Yesterday, just before noon.

An hour before getting shot, at ten
A.M.
yesterday morning, Phil Broker had been sitting on the deck of Milt Dane’s river place sipping coffee. He had been house-sitting for Milt. Getting away to think. Rain clouds were rolling in to break a record heat wave.

That’s when another sheriff called. This one was his neighbor, Tom Jeffords, up in Cook County, where Broker owned a small resort on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Jeff had been called by the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, in Langdon, North Dakota. It seems that Karson Pryce Broker, Broker’s seven-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in four months, had popped up in a motel room in Langdon.

Minus her mother.

A woman named Jane had complained to the cops that Nina Pryce had abandoned the child. Then, before he could contact this Jane person, some real life had intervened and Broker got shot. So he called Jane from an emergency room. Vague on details, Jane said she’d stay with Kit until Broker showed up to claim her.

Immediately, the red flags started popping up.

Jane’s voice came across with a relentless high-voltage undercurrent, the kind of energy that thrived on fatigue and crisis. A voice with a trained meter and cadence that she couldn’t quite disguise.

The last address Broker had for his estranged wife, Major Nina Pryce, U.S. Army—who had informal custody of their daughter—was in Lucca, Italy.

Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!
What could be so damn important that she dangled Kit out there like a loose end? It was time to confront the thing straight on.

He hooked his injured hand in the wheel and used his good right hand to pry open his cell phone and thumb in the cell number for this Jane person.

“This is Jane,” answered the efficient voice.

“This is Broker. I have a fire mission. Can you copy. Over.”

Silence on the connection. Then she said, “Very funny.”

“Tell me one thing. Are you guys wearing uniforms?”

Broker listened to Jane’s second loud silence. Then he said, “My guess is you’re not wearing uniforms. So who are you, Jane?”

“I’m a friend of Nina’s.”

“Uh-huh. So where’s Nina?”

“Concerning that, ah, it’s better if you should talk to me first.”

“Not the cops who came looking for me?”

“I think it’d be best to talk to me first.” She was letting him fill in the blanks.

“Where’s Kit?” Broker could guess. The connection was good. He heard kids laughing and the sound of bodies splashing in water.

“She’s in the community pool here in town. You want to talk to her?”

“Sure.”

Broker counted to ten and then his daughter’s strong direct voice came on the connection. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hiya, hon, whatcha doing?”

“Auntie Jane is teaching me to dive.”

“Great. How’s your mom?”

“Ah…” There was a pause, in which Broker imagined Jane giving his daughter stage directions. “Ah, Mom’s working.”

“Great, hon, I’ll be there in about an hour.”

“Bye.”

Jane came back on. “She’s good. We just got here, so we’ll hang for a while. She’s looking forward to seeing you. The pool’s in the park two blocks north of the highway. You can’t miss it.”

“So, Jane. What’s up?”

“See you soon, Broker. And like I said, come here first.”

Like he’d just received an order.

Right. Pissed, Broker immediately punched in the number for the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, got dispatch, and left a message that he’d be there within the hour. The dispatcher informed him
that Sheriff Norman Wales would be in his office and was looking forward to meeting him.

Hmmmmmmm.

A lazy herd of buffalo grazed behind an insubstantial barbed-wire fence. An unmarked but heavily fenced and abandoned-looking concrete structure bristled with antennae. The vast green rug of wheat. The endless clouds. Broker slumped behind the wheel.

So this was what his rodeo marriage came down to.

In the past, he and Nina had tried to work things out in a friendly manner. No lawyers involved. Ever since Kit had been born her father lived in Minnesota and her mother deployed all over the world. For the first four and a half years of her life she had stayed mostly with her dad.

About the time Kit started kindergarten, the battle lines were drawn. Nina wanting Broker to migrate to Europe and play “officer’s spouse” to her career. Broker wanting the family under one roof in the States, which would require Nina to give up the Army.

Standoff.

In the interim, Kit wound up traveling back and forth.

That arrangement was about to end.

Broker had been around. He was a trained, competent man who could be utterly unsentimental in action. But all his experience failed when he pictured his marriage reduced to pieces of human machinery that had stopped working.

They didn’t pack instructions on how to take a marriage apart.

His saliva dried up, his tear ducts started, and the muscles curled inward in his belly. Painful work, breaking a marriage apart and packing it into two separate boxes. Tearing a seven-year-old in half…

He pretty much knew what ripping a marriage in half sounded like. It sounded like Kit crying.

But goddammit, it was lawyer time. His kid wasn’t going to be raised by strangers in Army day care all over Europe anymore.

Or mysteriously pop up in North Dakota motel rooms.

It was time for Nina to choose. She could be a mother or she could persist in her Joan of Arc soldier fantasy.

She couldn’t do both.

But…

All the little hairs on the back of his neck had stayed at full alert since Jeff called. Because Nina wasn’t just your ordinary insanely driven, ambitious soldier gal clawing for recognition…

His cell phone rang. Thinking it was Jane again, he fumbled at it one-handed and barked, “Now what?”

“Phillip?”

He sagged and caught his breath. Only his mother called him that. “Hi, Mom.”

“Do you know more yet? About Kit?”

“I just talked to her. She sounded fine. I’m almost there. I guess Nina got called away quick…”

“It’s not her fault. She really can’t help it.” Irene Broker said. “Nina’s a triple fire sign and—”

“Yeah, Mom. You already told me.” Mom had a Merlinesque faith in astrology and believed that Nina was in thrall to her heroic stars.

“Her basic energy comes from Sun in Aries. Her inner feelings come from Moon in Sagittarius. And her behavior is anchored in Mars in Leo.”

Aries, Mars. He didn’t need a starbook to plot that trajectory. Plus she had the Scots bloodline. Well,
fuck
Nina and the meteor she rode in on. He pictured her going naked into battle, like her ancestors, with her pubes dipped in blue woad.

“C’mon, Mom, give me a break,” he said. Sun in Aries. Right. He looked up to where the sun should be and saw only gray woolly clouds.

“Well, are you going to drive Kit back? Because if you’re not for some reason,” she said presciently, knowing her son and the kind of work he still sometimes performed, “your dad is talking to Doc Harris about flying in and picking her up.”

“That’d be good to follow up, Mom.”

“I thought so. Now, just don’t get ahead of yourself. And give her a chance to explain. You know, practice your listening.”

“I will.”

“Good. Well, keep us posted.”

“Right, Mom.”

“And, Phillip, remember to listen.”
Said it like she used to say “Make your bed. Wear a hat. Don’t talk back to your father”
—the tone of her voice reducing him to about twelve years old.

“Goodbye, Mom.”

Broker ended the call and stared at the moody cloud cover. Calm down. Think. Listen. Okay.

Nina was not dishonest. She just omitted virtually everything about her last assignment to a classified military unit popularly known as the Delta Force. But ever since 9/11, communication with Nina had been increasingly spotty.

Broker was not dishonest either. But he also left a lot of things out. When people met Broker casually, he’d angle around direct answers. A sketch emerged of him suggesting a background involving a successful landscaping business in the St. Croix Valley to the east of the Twin Cities. Then he’d drop a few hints how he’d got out of landscaping and put his money in a little resort up on Lake Superior before the real estate up there went through the roof. This was the truth, up to a point; but the landscaping gig was a cover. In fact, Broker had left the St. Paul cops and joined the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen years ago. Then he proceeded to clock the longest run of deep undercover work in the history of Minnesota law enforcement.

Then, about eight years ago, Nina Pryce had launched a genteel
bayonet charge into his life. She had an agenda. She had a skull and crossbones tattooed on her shoulder. She had a map to buried gold in her hip pocket.

Broker followed her to Vietnam, where they found several tons of Imperial gold ingots on a beach on the South China Sea.

They came home quietly rich, pregnant, and eventually married. More than two tons of the gold found its way into a bank account in Hong Kong. Broker lived on credit cards linked to that account.

Five years ago he’d helped the FBI penetrate the Russian Mafia. An informal arrangement evolved. The Feds let him keep his loot as a kind of open-ended retainer.