Any Minute Now (19 page)

“I believe you, Lucy.” His voice softened like butter on the dinner table. “I believe you would kill them.”

An example, Lucy thought, of people believing what they want to believe. And she should know. There was a time when she was at war with those she had left behind, with those skunks and weasels around her. More significantly, she had been at war with herself. In her experience people fell into drugs because they were weak or unhappy, or both. That was why they could rarely get out of that hole: it felt too good in the place where the pain of the real world faded away.

That had not been Lucy's problem. She had had no problem. Her aim was to push herself as far as she could go, right to the edge of death, if need be. It was only in the fiercest crucible that absolute truth would emerge. She had gone there. Now she was someone else, some other Lucy who had none of the former's hate and bitterness. She was no longer at war with herself, only with the people, like St. Vincent, bound and determined to use her for their own ends.

The state police finding her, forcing her to dry out, and here, the so-called shrinks, putting her on yet another drug cocktail to take the place of the one that had taken her apart, all that wasn't a mistake on her part. It had been time for her to return from the back of beyond. To her dismay, she had discovered that she could not do it herself. She needed help. Hence the police.

Being taken apart had revealed to her all her flaws, weaknesses, strengths, and beauty. She finally could embrace that beauty and not be afraid of it—afraid of where it might lead her, afraid of the false flattery that might force her down dark and twisted alleys. She had already visited those terrible places, and she had survived, though, it was true, in pieces. But she was whole now—better than whole, because now she could see in others her own strengths, flaws, and weaknesses. She could play off the strengths, work the flaws and weaknesses like “A Lil Mexican,” as Mookey Baby rapped in such fine fashion.

She smiled at St. Vincent—the precise kind of smile she intuited he wanted from her. It was a form of restrained seduction—a come closer, but not too close, smile. He wouldn't want that; not yet, anyway. He was a man of great rectitude, a man who believed absolutely in what he did. He believed himself invulnerable to corruption, but it was clear to her that he had a great capacity for self-deception. His foundation, which he thought rock solid, was full of cracks; he was already thoroughly corrupted—his almost religious fervor had blinded him to the fact.

“It seems ages since I was taken seriously, Mr. St. Vincent,” she said in her little girl voice.

“I take you seriously,” St. Vincent said. “And it's fine if you call me Luther.”

“You won't take offense.”

He laughed. Lucy felt warm inside, like melting taffy. She had a strong suspicion that when you made a man like Luther St. Vincent laugh, you were inside his defenses.

*   *   *

Monroe should have been home with his wife and five children. Instead, he was seated in a central pew of his church, listening to the footsteps of God. The soft echoes of God's presence fell all around him like a velvet rain. It was Monroe's habit to come to church when he was distressed or overwhelmed by the minutia of life, not so much to pray, but to listen. It seemed to him that church was the only place where he was capable of listening these days.

The decision to reopen the Well weighed heavily on his mind. It was the right decision—he knew that as fact. Nevertheless, the Well was not a place one went to without trepidation. Even he, its creator, its guiding light, could not escape its dreadful spell. Now, here, in the presence of God, he needed to summon the strength required to once again crack open the doors to the underworld. Here, in church, he allowed his mind to drift.

Monroe came from a background that was as unusual as it was humble. His great-grandfather murdered first the black overseer on the plantation where he was a slave, then the white master himself. The slave was hanged from a tree, without a trial or the benefit of legal defense, but at least he got to spit in the overseer's face, for the betrayal, a much worse crime than the master's ignorance. Those were the days.

Monroe, whose real name was Albin White, a name he savored, had seen a photo of his great-grandfather's master, posed stiffly in a starched cream-colored suit and looking for all the world like a caricature of a ruthless plantation owner. Albin knew his name, Grayson Withers, and had years ago gone to find his great-grandson, Jordan, who still resided in Georgia. The plantation had long ago been trashed beyond recognition by Union troops, but the great-grandson had replicated the whitewashed manor house on a three-acre parcel of the former plantation he had carved off for himself. He was a developer, building cheaply made McMansions and selling them for exorbitant amounts to the newly wealthy. In other words, by fucking over the locals, he was approximately replicating more than just his forebear's palatial residence.

Albin White went about his business. He watched the plantation house for a week, noting the comings and goings of everyone in the household: his target, the man's wife, his two boys, aged eleven and thirteen. At a stable several miles away, he hired a horse from a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair and piercing blue eyes. He rode at night onto the plantation grounds. The moon was full and what clouds raced overhead were thin and lacy. He rode the horse slowly until he came to the place where he imagined the lynching of his great-grandfather had taken place. A massive oak rose above his head. There was a branch, thick and gnarled as the trunk, that, as a human arm might point to something on the horizon, extended parallel to the ground. Looking up, he saw the rope being slung over that branch, the noose being slipped over his great-grandfather's head to settle around his neck, the knot drawn tight so that when his feet jerked off the ground, his neck would break.

The horse snorted and pranced nervously, as if disturbed by White's thoughts. He stayed like that, his hands on the pommel of the Western saddle, while he listened to the night birds. Grassy weeds twitched about the horse's fetlocks. The saddle creaked as he shifted slightly. The cold moonlight fell on him like an affirmation of memory.

To the east of the house was a three-car garage, the only visible modern touch. The great-grandson had a car fetish. Vehicles that cost three hundred thousand dollars should not be kept out in the open.

White was inside when, at precisely ten p.m. on the eighth night of his silent vigil, the door was remotely raised and the sleek black Lamborghini eased into its slot, beside the 1939 Bugatti Type 64 and the fire-engine-red Ferrari F40 that looked like it could take off at any moment. He was standing in the shadows, a length of stout rope wound around his left shoulder, a silenced handgun in his right hand. His plan was to waylay his target, take Jordan Withers out to the oak tree, and string him up.

But he never did. He watched, still as a sentinel, as the great-grandson of his great-grandfather's oppressor climbed out of the car. For a moment, as Jordan stood, admiring his prize and those parked just beyond, a tableau was formed that White was to remember for the rest of his life. Part of him longed to take action; another part knew that he would not. Frankly, he was afraid of the dark part of himself that longed for revenge, that would contemplate taking a life. It was repugnant, but if it was, how could he even consider it? Did he dare? He knew he had it in him, which was what frightened him the most. In the end, he crept out of the garage, through the hedges, past the trees, and to the edge of what was left of the plantation. He stopped there, panting, though he had not run. Turning back, he unfastened his belt, pulled down his pants, and, squatting, defecated on Jordan Withers's lawn. Such a poor, paltry act, but it was all he was capable of. Then he left. Like a dog, he thought, with its tail between its legs. The bitter taste of ashes was in his mouth.

On the flight back to D.C., White looked down at the passing landscape and wondered what his great-grandfather would have made of the view. Beyond the old man's ken, he imagined—as would have been the news story that arrived in his mail three days later, meticulously clipped from a local Georgia paper. It concerned the odd demise of Jordan Withers, choked to death when his unmade tie caught in the steering column of his Ferrari F40 as it sped down the local highway. “It was almost like poor Jordan was hanged,” police captain Art Miller was quoted as saying, at the scene of the accident.

White had read the story three times, each time with a deeper sense of incredulity. An accident? He didn't think so. What then? He turned over the envelope, read the return address. Looking it up, he discovered it was off a rural road just north of New Orleans. He booked the next flight out.

The evening of the same day he came face to face with Preach—for the second time, it turned out. The shock of white hair and the piercing blue eyes were unmistakable, even backlit by firelight.

“Thank you,” he had said. “I wish I could have done that.”

“All it takes is time,” Preach had replied, turning away toward the firelight. “Come with me.”

Now, the echoes falling softly around him, his thoughts returned to the Well and the restocking of its personnel. Though he needed only a few, recruiting hadn't been an easy task when he had first conceived of the Well; in this day and age, when a person could obliterate secrets at an upload speed of 20 Mbps, finding the right people would be doubly difficult. Although, he could see the backs of the heads of two or three of the men who had worked under him in the Well, and he would approach them.

There was one particular thing that made his job even harder now: the one person he wanted most back at the Well was the one person he would never get to return—Gregory Whitman.

 

17

Being on the ground in Pakistan, as they had been two weeks before, gave Whitman an eerie feeling, as if he were experiencing this in a nightmare regurgitation of their ill-starred first encounter at Seiran el-Habib's villa, doomed by betrayal before it even began.

As they began their trek in the middle of the night, Whitman felt like he'd stuck his head into a sea of wasps, as if whatever God existed had turned His back on this blighted sector of Western Pakistan.

Flix had plowed on ahead, working his equipment without respite to seek out and disrupt any enemy communications. He was bound and determined to have this second mission succeed on every level. “Nothing less is gonna make my day,” he'd told Whitman as they had exited the jet.

Whitman, night goggles on, felt Charlie come up beside him. Even through his body armor he could sense she had something on her mind.

“Not now, Charlie,” he said to forestall her.

Which was when she grabbed his elbow, spun him around to face her.

“Yes, now. There are things we need to say to each other.”

“We couldn't have done this on the flight over?”

“You wouldn't have paid attention.”

Well, she was right on that score, he thought with no little annoyance—at himself as well as at her.

“Let's not get too far behind Flix,” he said, and they continued on over the terrain illuminated in luminous green and black.

“It's this place,” Charlie said.

A little chill, like a spark of electricity, flashed through him. “What about it?”

“It smells … It stinks of evil, of unnatural death.” Something creaked, a bone perhaps, as she turned her neck. “It reminds me of … someplace else.”

Of course, she was right again. He smelled it, too, with his sorcerer's nose. That sensation of wasps all around him had only come from one other place.

“Whit,” she said all at once, “why did you take me there?”

It was no longer the accusation that had begun each of their more and more acrimonious clashes, until the moment he had walked out the door of her apartment, bleeding from ten thousand cuts, feeling flayed to the bone, aching where she had clocked him. It was simply a question; one he wasn't prepared to answer.

“To this day you can't speak its name.”

“And nor should you,” she said. “But that's beside the point. Answer me, Whit. I begged you not to take me, but you insisted. ‘It will be our little secret,' you said. And you took me. It was a form of violation, an abduction. And now we
both
carry with us the burden of what happened there.”

“That wasn't supposed to—”

“Oh, but it was, Whit. Down there your eyes were alight with a kind of demonic energy.”

“Let's not get melodramatic, Charlie.”

“Oh, don't even,” she warned him. “I'd never seen that kind of energy in you before.”

“There's only one kind of energy, Charlie.”

“No, there isn't. This was a dark energy; a sorcerer's energy.”

He recalled Cutler saying almost the same thing to him.

“I hope to Christ I never see it again,” Charlie said.

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Sure you do. You just don't want to admit it, even to yourself.” She shook her head. “You're so pathetic, Whit. That place had you hooked heart and soul.
That's
why you took me there. You wanted me to be a part of that … that horror. That secret had made its home in your belly. Like a tapeworm it was taking you piece by piece from me.”

He looked away from her, toward the next rise of hills beyond which Seiran el-Habib slept in the central keep of his fortress-villa, surrounded by his well-armed cadre.

“The truly dreadful part, Whit, was that you couldn't see it, let alone admit what a hold the place had on you.”

“It was called the Well,” he said with more force than he had intended. “The Well.”

*   *   *

Valerie was waiting in the parking lot across from the DARPA building when Lindstrom exited at noon. He looked agitated, shaken even, an observation that was borne out when he almost walked past her car. She slid down the window, called softly to him. He was leaning forward as if pressing into a frightful headwind, though, in fact, there was barely a breeze. He looked at her with the eyes of a deer caught in a vehicle's headlights. She called his name again, more urgently this time, and his vision cleared. He blinked heavily, then a smile broke out across his face.