Any Minute Now (36 page)

He sighted, blew the right front tire. Pain shot through his rehabbing shoulder, and he gritted his teeth. Funny. It hadn't bothered him at all until Whitman's ministrations had brought him back down to earth.

The truck groaned like a mortally wounded beast, sinking down into the soft ground. Flix was up and running as Dante began to climb out of the vehicle. Then the sky seemed to split open in a blinding, deafening flash, and whatever had been airborne was careening wildly downward to the earth.

*   *   *

“I shot him.”

“You should have killed the fucker,” Hemingway said.

Julie stared at him as if he had grown a second head. “Excuse me?”

“I told you that St. Vincent has been a pain in my ass for years now. I haven't had the leverage to shoehorn him out of NSA. It seems no one does—or no one has had the guts to try, including me.” Hemingway shook his head. “What does Directorate N do, anyway? No one knows, and that's just the way St. Vincent likes it, hiding in the shadows like a fucking vampire.”

“He must wield some fabulous ju-ju.”

“He does, my dear. But I very much doubt it stems from the usual suspects.”

Julie and her boss sat in a brown leatherette booth in a sleazy roadhouse bar off Route 270, northwest of the Beltway, past the periphery of D.C.'s action. A glorious juke burping colored lights was playing Sinatra and Fitzgerald while antediluvian barflies clung to their old-fashioneds or gin and tonics as if they were life preservers. A bartender with a pate as smooth and shiny as glass read a dog-eared copy of
The Odyssey
, never even bothering to lift his head when required to refill one of his customers' glasses.

“No,” Hemingway went on, “I'm certain Mr. St. Vincent's ju-ju, as you call it, comes from a nongovernmental source entirely.”

She had told him as much as she had dared about what had happened the night before. Leaving out any of the sexual context, which was no one's business but her own. He didn't question any of it, and why should he? She had done precisely what he had asked her to do: find out more about Sydny.

“It interests me that both St. Vincent and Whitman had a relationship with this woman,” Hemingway said now, paralleling her train of thought.

“Oh, I don't think St. Vincent knew her at all,” Julie said. “I heard him. He killed her because she and Whitman had a relationship that was a bit more than all-business.”

Hemingway sat back, his fingers drumming the table as he contemplated this news. “So her death was an object lesson.”

Something quailed inside Julie. But she had been there, and she knew. “That's a horrid way to look at it.”

“You don't know Luther St. Vincent.” Hemingway rose, crossed to the bar, and returned with a dirty martini for her, a bourbon and water for himself. When he had taken a first sip, watching her do the same, a tiny smile plucked at the corners of his lips. “So St. Vincent is finally moving against Whitman. I do believe that he's made a fatal mistake. Perhaps all I have to do now is to sit back and watch events unfold. This is good, Julie. Very good.” It was then he noticed her expression. “What? Is there something you aren't telling me?”

“I think it's the other way around.”

His eyes narrowed. “What d'you mean?”

She thought of Sydny, and of what Whit had taught her. Drawing herself up, she said, “I think you've lied to me from the beginning of this assignment.”

Under the guise of taking another hit of bourbon, Hemingway studied her. “You're different,” he said now. “Something's changed in you.”

“That's not an answer.”

“No, it's an observation. A mighty surprising one, I might add.” He sat his glass down, rolled it back and forth between fingers and thumb.

“You won't answer me, will you?”

“Not at your pay grade.” That scrutiny started up again. “You see, this is what I mean about how you've changed.”

“My eyes have been opened.”

“By whom?” Hemingway moved his drink out of the way, laced his fingers as he leaned forward. “Who opened your eyes, as you call it?”

Julie's smile was as enigmatic as the sphinx. “There isn't a pay grade in the world high enough for me to tell you.”

*   *   *

Whitman and Charlie lurched sideways, ducking their heads, then sprawling belly first onto the ground. They rolled away from the splintering rotors, and kept rolling to steer clear of the bulging fuselage that was being ripped asunder.

They fetched up against a boulder whose nearside had been split down a seam by the titanic explosion. What was left of the gunship was virtually unrecognizable, as was the ground behind it, furrowed as if by a colossal knife.

No one left alive, Charlie thought. The twin onslaughts of life and death had met head on, annihilating each other. There are no words to describe this, Charlie thought, and if there were I wouldn't want to know them. Years from now, if they made it out of this hellhole alive, she would be reliving the destruction over and over, trying vainly to figure out how she could have saved lives instead of taking them. Life wasn't fair, she knew that, of course she did, but the extent of its indifference was a cruelty beyond comprehension.

Suddenly her body went icy cold. Isn't that what the Time Out Of Mind—the time leading up to juvie—was about: cruelty beyond comprehension? Willfully, she would not remember; and yet, despite her best efforts, she would always remember.

A psychotic older sister who, in her break with reality, seduced their father, became pregnant, and flaunted that obscene pregnancy within the family, until their mother, driven to the edge of madness, took a carving knife and slit open her daughter's belly, killing both offending parties. Her father turned on his wife and would have strangled her had Charlie not intervened, bringing the bottom of a heavy iron skillet down on the crown of his head again and again, until it was as flat as the skillet itself. By that time, her mother was barely breathing. Charlie, a minor, entered the juvie system. While she was incarcerated, her mother died, whether by her own hand or not was never made clear to Charlie. No closure for her; none at all, just the swirl of dreadful memories that she had finally, painstakingly collected, locked away in a shadowed corner of her mind. All well and good until the times, such as this, when the lock popped open and the memories flew out like a jack-in-the-box in a horror film, reminding her that Time Out Of Mind still existed.

“What the fuck was in that thing?” Whitman was asking now. “It melted half the goddamn helo.”

“A dicyanoacetylene compound I formulated.” Charlie shook herself to keep her head on straight and her thoughts flowing coherently. The lockbox was back in its shadowed corner of her mind. “Essentially, it's acetylene in which I replaced a pair of hydrogen atoms with two separate cyanide groups. Burns hot like a sonuvabitch.”

They turned their attention to Flix, who had Dante by the collar of his shirt and was frog-marching him over to them.

“Too bad your cavalry sprung a leak,” Flix said with a dark glint in his eye. “Now you're never gonna be saved.”

“Lookee here,” Whitman said as he went through the papers Dante was carrying. He held up an open passport. “Check this out.” He showed the passport to Charlie.

“Edmond Dantès,” she said with a laugh. “Really?”

“The Count of Monte fucking Christo,” Whitman said. “In person.”

“I thought you were dead a long time gone.” Flix struck the back of Dante's head. “What I want to know is if you're not bringing new girls to el-Habib, just what the fuck are you doing here?”

 

40

“Ding dong, the witch is dead!” Trey Hartwell crowed the moment he entered the inner sanctum of the Well.

Albin White, who had been training Lucy, shot her a sideways look, and she silently vanished from the chamber. Then he turned on his fellow Alchemist. “What the hell d'you mean coming in here and blurting out—”

“Lindstrom is out of our lives for good.”

White, hands on hips, said, “Explain yourself.”

Hartwell told him about the car crash in which Lindstrom and Valerie had been killed.

White looked skeptical. “An accident?” He was all too aware of the schism inside the Alchemists over who would run Mobius and, specifically, Paulus Lindstrom. St. Vincent, always jealous, always fixated on power, had wanted to run it from inside Directorate N, but a cohort led by Hartwell felt that would cause eyebrows to be raised on Capitol Hill, where the House Appropriations Committee was continually sticking their collective noses into DARPA's business. The Alchemists could not afford that kind of scrutiny. Therefore, Hartwell and his cohort had recommended Omar Hemingway, who, though not under their direct control, was easily manipulated. Outwardly, White had stubbornly remained neutral, but privately he had agreed with Hartwell, which was why he had secretly plumped for Hemingway to be put in charge. It was essential that he keep up the appearance of being Switzerland in order to maintain everyone's trust, especially St. Vincent's. Ever since the girl, Lucy Orteño, had arrived, St. Vincent's decision-making had seemed to swing from erratic to inexplicable. This was a deep concern to every one of the Alchemists, but White more than the others.

“Yes,” Hartwell was saying now, “so far as anyone knows it was an accident.” Then he reared back. “Albin, you don't think—”

“Calm yourself,” White said. “I know you don't have the heart for wet work.”

Hartwell began to fidget. “Listen, Luther doesn't know. He's been out of circulation for a day.”

“Is he ill?”

Hartwell shrugged. “With Luther, who knows?” His fidgeting became more intense. “But I do know he's on his way here so when he arrives—”

“I'll break it to him, Trey.” He squeezed the other man's shoulder. “Now get on back to your shop. Your books must be missing you.”

Hartwell, missing the humor, nodded, and scuttled out of the Well.

*   *   *

Lucy stared into the waterfall, at the noxious carving in the rock face Albin believed to be the alchemical symbol for sulfur. She knew better. Down in the bayous it was the sigil for the chimera: snake, lion, goat. In the bayous, they believed in the chimera; some had even claimed to see it on the longest night of the year, when it would emerge from the netherworld where it crouched and schemed all year, to take its fill of human blood and flesh.

With a sick feeling at the core of her, she forced her gaze away from the triangle with its horrific curled tail, down into the
cenote
, black, ageless, bottomless. She inhaled deeply of the scents rising from its depths: blood, fear, and death.

With a shudder, she turned away, wandered out of the high chamber and along one of the narrow curving hallways, its ceiling so high it was obscured by shadows dense as storm clouds.

It wasn't long before she heard voices—male voices. She recognized Luther's, then Albin's raised in answer. She slid along the wall, pressing her body against it, making herself all but invisible. She inched her way to the edge of the open doorway. She could see only a narrow slice of the chamber. Neither man was visible, but she heard their voices as clearly as if she were standing beside them.

She had never been given any reason to believe a word Luther had said to her, and seeing how he had bundled her uncle into an ambulance outside the Bethesda Institute of Mary Immaculate had given her every reason to distrust him. She had been curious about his interest in her, about what he was in to. He was NSA, he'd shown her his ID, but this facility wasn't NSA. After being given the tour, she was sure it wasn't anything the feds knew of, let alone had built. And then there was the sign of the chimera she had glimpsed tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. No, Luther was into something so far underground even the NSA was unaware of it, just as they were unaware of the sigil, of the chimera. That was one reason this place was safe from prying eyes and inquisitive noses. Luther and the rest of them could do whatever they wanted here without fear of rebuke or reprisal.

“… Lindstrom gone,” Luther was saying, “the entire project falls apart.”

“You know that's not true,” Albin said in a resonant baritone. “As Hartwell has pointed out numerous times there's another direction to go in.”

“Events have overrun us,” Luther said. “We lack the time to—”

“What events? What aren't you telling us? And what the hell happened to you?”

“A bullet jumped up and bit me,” Luther snapped.

“As events overran you?”

The silence buzzed like a defective light fixture.

Albin cleared his throat. “Here's the bottom line, Luther. We're not shutting down Mobius just because your pet researcher is dead.”

“As I told you, we have no choice.” Luther's voice continued on its knife-edge. “At this late date, we're not going to go searching in the private sector for—”

“I agree, but there's another road we can take.”

“I don't follow you,” Luther said.

“I have summoned Preach.”

Within the terrible silence that now enveloped not only the chamber in which the two men stood, but the corridor outside, Lucy felt her legs begin to tremble, turn weak, and betray her. She felt herself kneeling on the stone, her mouth half-open, her eyes glazed over in inescapable memory.

She had lied to Albin about her trauma in Louisiana: though she had been in the church, she had never been raped by three men. No, she had been given drugs by the tall thin man with the shock of prematurely white hair and piercing blue eyes, the man known as Preach. Then he had taken her into his bed. She had gone willingly. Perhaps that willingness had been a factor of the drugs; she had no way of knowing. Initially she had not been raped; their first coupling had been transcendent. But then it had continued for eighteen straight hours. Although she was still unsure what precisely “it” was. Because at some point during those eighteen hours there had been what she had come to call “the Other Thing,” when she could bear to remember it at all, because there was no word in her experience to describe it. While his penis had plumbed her to her deepest depths, Preach had somehow reached down inside her, pried open her mind, and had read what was there as easily and intently as if he were reading a book. In fact, he called it “Bible studies,” when she had asked him what he was doing. She had lain on her back, naked, spread like a sea star, while he straddled her, his forehead, hot as flame, almost touching hers. She remembered the scratch of his beard against the skin of her chin and throat as he whispered what might have been prayers or curses, in a language unknown to her, possibly to anyone else.