Brother Termite (10 page)

Someone flung open the rear doors. They were in a barn. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through weathered slats. Reen took a breath and smelled the dry, prickly scent of hay, the earthy aroma of long-vanished horses.

A man dragged Reen out and unceremoniously dumped him on a pile of straw.

Reen sat quietly, watching the bars of sun slant through the gaps in the wood. He listened to the ticking sounds of the van’s engine, the quiet murmur of the kidnappers’ voices. Then a man threw a blanket over Reen’s legs and set a chilled can of Coca-Cola beside him.

After a brief hesitation Reen picked up the can and popped the top.

“Don’t give him that,” another man said, knocking the can out of Reen’s hands, spilling cold, sticky Coke over the front of his uniform. “I thought I told you not to bring any carbonated drinks.”

So they knew something about Cousins, Reen thought in disappointment as he watched the remainder of the Coca-Cola Classic being taken out of his reach,

The man came back with a bottle of orange juice, which Reen ignored.

“He wanted the Coke,” the first man said.

Reen watched as the second man poured the contents of the can into the hay. “Carbonation kills them. He was trying to commit suicide. If you have any more carbonated drinks, get rid of them now.” Then he called over his shoulder, “A helluva painful way to go, sir.”

Oh, but nothing was painful to a Cousin for very long. In that, Reen had the advantage over a human. He had seen humans die.

He looked at the kidnappers, wondering if they would end up screaming in hospital beds or bubbling their lives away in car crashes. Better to be a Cousin, he thought, and die without much pain. Better to be fragile and long-lived. The Sleep Master was a four-century Cousin; Reen himself had seen two centuries pass.

When Reen died, the Earth Community would never be the same. The Cousins were scattered in sparse knots across the galaxy, with not enough firstborns to send, as Reen himself was sent when Thural’s First Brother had died. No, the Community on Earth would not recover from the shock, and secondborn Tali would hold a precarious and uneasy dominion.

He waited for the men to begin the torture, but instead they sat down, took fried chicken from a cooler, and started to eat.

“You hungry, sir?” one of them called.

Reen turned his head away to stare at the back of the old barn and the shafts of dying sunlight. It was the last he would see of Earth, he figured, and the sight was a good one–not as good as the Rockies would have been, or Angela’s face, but under the circumstances the dust motes dancing like gold flakes in the sun were enough.

There were things left undone. For one, he wished he could keep Tali from Community rule. But the humans and Cousins would have to fend for themselves now. Reen had lived long enough to see his child born, ensuring some sort of continuation of his species. There was no sense at this late date in accepting any more pain than he had to; no point in struggling, as a human would, to persevere. After all the intrigue at the White House, his life had suddenly become very simple. Sighing, almost content, he sat back against the straw and watched the evening taper into night.

OUTSIDE
the barn, the sun set in shades of pink and violet. The dust motes gave one last glimmer before they turned to ash. The kidnappers lit a Coleman lantern, and by its acidic glow three played a card game while the fourth sat watch over Reen. At either six forty-five or seven forty-five by Oomal’s Rolex, Reen heard the sound of a car. Blinding white light blared through the boards at the front of the barn like the loud opening chord of a symphony.

One of the men threw the barn door open, and a BMW drove inside. Reen sat straighter.

The interrogator had arrived.

Shielding his eyes from the headlights, Reen watched as the car door opened and a figure emerged. Self-assured footsteps swished on the straw as they approached; the weighty sway of a full-length mink coat; the smooth curve of legs in nylon hose.

“Hi, Reen,” Marian Cole said.

Heartbroken, he turned away, putting her in that blank spot in his vision, the place where he wished he could now send her forever.

The straw rustled as she sat. “Not going to talk to me?”

He would have talked to her without this, and she knew it. But perhaps she wanted the witnesses Reen had never allowed her to have.

There would be no torture, Reen realized with a sinking sick sensation. Marian wouldn’t need it. She would simply ask him the questions over and over until love pried his lips ajar and he began to speak.

“Well, at least look at me, okay? It’s hard talking to your back.”

He couldn’t.

“Please,” she said softly.

Without wanting to, he whirled. “Why did you do this to me, Marian?”

The men by the Coleman lantern had turned to stare.

“Shhh, shhh.” Marian trailed cool fingertips across his mouth. “Don’t.”

With a furious jerk Reen turned his back on her again. “Is this what you meant by endings?”

She fumbled for his hand. He tried to snatch it away, but she held him tight. “Shhh. Don’t be afraid. Isn’t that what you used to say to me when I was the one who was helpless? God, Reen. Do I have to be a Cousin before you can trust me? Natalie was one of ours. Since I’ve been director, all your secretaries have been agents. And their only job is protection. I knew your Brother and Hopkins were going to make their move, and once Jonis was kidnapped, I knew they’d do it soon.” She tugged at his hand. “Come on, I want to talk to you in private.”

She pulled him, his reluctant feet stumbling, toward her car. Once in the backseat, she closed the door, fumbled in her purse, and took out a pack of cigarettes.

“I gave these up three years ago; did you know that?” She fished a Carlton out of its box with her fingernails and lit it. The warm glow from the lighter washed her face free of the small wrinkles around her eyes, making her seem, for an instant, magically young, Flicking the lighter closed, she took a drag. The enchantment ended. Age and worry claimed her face again.

“Natalie called just after she handed you off. That was the last we heard from her before she headed to the safe house. They must have gotten to her a little after that. We found the Mercedes. There was blood on the front seat. We don’t know yet if all of it came from the chauffeur.”

Chagrined, Reen mumbled, “I’m sorry about not trusting you. And no, you don’t have to be a Cousin for that. I trusted you before, but lately ...”

“Just listen.” She tapped the cigarette against the ashtray, dislodging a small column of ash. “Two hours ago a bomb exploded at Gate Six at Dulles. The Germans were killed instantly. Whoever arranged that meeting set you and Hassenbein up for murder.”

“Krupner told them,” Reen said. “He sent a fax–”

“Forget Krupner,” she said with such confidence that it gave Reen pause. “He works for the Germans. We’ve known that for a long time. Poor Hans wasn’t much of a spy. No, this was bigger than Krupner. The usual White House chauffeur was called by someone posing as the head of the serving staff and told not to come in today. Right now we’re looking for the police escort, but the cops who were assigned to you have vanished.” She took a deep breath. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

There were two deep furrows on either side of her mouth. Her lowered eyes were lusterless. Was it about Angela? His heart skipped a beat. No, that was impossible. None of the West Virginia Cousins would have told her anything about Angela. “What?”

She took another drag before replying. “This afternoon, just about the time the bomb went off at Dulles, the White House commuter fell into the Watergate Complex and exploded.” Leaning forward, she tapped the ash into the ashtray, “Nobody on the ship survived.” After a pause she asked, “Who was on board?”

“Thural,” he whispered. Cousin Thural, almost close enough to be Brother.

“I’m sorry.”

“And Tali,” he remembered. Odd how he had thought of the Cousin first and the Brother after.

“I ordered this made for you. Here.”

She pressed a hard rectangular piece of plastic into his hand. A nametag. He opened his fist and read the letters:

TALI

“No one knows who was on the ship so we’re going to a party. In separate cars, of course. I’m leaving in a few minutes to pick up Howard. Tali wasn’t invited, but if he shows up, the hostess won’t make a fuss. It’s very
in
to have a Cousin as a guest.”

His Cousin Brother was dead, and Reen was being asked to impersonate him. He wasn’t sure he could.

Marian reached over and unpinned his nametag. “Keep your ears open for anything anyone tells you. Act like Tali if you can. Pretend you have a rod up your ass. Don’t talk much, and when you do, don’t, for God’s sake, be your usual charming self.”

Taking Tali’s nametag from his open palm, she replaced his with his dead Brother’s.

He looked up at her. She was staring at him strangely, as though trying to memorize his face, as though picking out the tiny differences between his features and the cookie-cutter features of the others.

Warm human hands on his neck pulled him close. A kiss on his cheek.

“I got lipstick on you. Here.” She scrubbed her thumb over the spot her lips had touched.

Stunned, he lifted his hand to his face.

Her laugh was smooth cream with a bite of lemon sorrow in it. “Just like a kid, you know that? Sometimes you’re just like a little kid.”

Grabbing his hand, she took an unsteady breath, then reached across him and opened the door. He would have fallen out if she hadn’t still had hold of him. “A car’s here for you, and a chauffeur. Don’t speak to me at the party. Tali and I hated each other.”

He stumbled away, and she slammed the door. Her chauffeur jumped up, got behind the wheel, and backed the BMW out of the garage.

Reen watched the car pull onto the farm-to-market road. He stood there long after she was gone.

THE PARTY
was held in one of the larger houses on Georgetown’s Q Street. When Reen rang the bell, a butler answered and was obviously nonplussed to see a Cousin standing on the stoop.

His eyebrows rose. “Whom may I announce?”

“Tali,” Reen replied, feeling a pinprick of guilt for having momentarily snatched his Brother from an untidy grave.

The eyebrows rose another, seemingly impossible notch. “Tali, sir? And will that be all?” he asked with the air of a man accustomed to royalty.

“Second Brother and Conscience to White House Chief of Staff Reen.”

The brows lowered. “Very good, sir. Please come this way.” With a bow he ushered Reen into the marble foyer. There was another hesitation as the butler scrutinized Reen’s small body to see if he was hiding a coat.

From a wide, arched doorway to the right came the sounds of a Brahms sonata nearly drowned out by the strained gaiety of party conversation. Disconcerted by Reen’s lack of an evening wrap, the butler paused at the entrance, Reen just to his back.

“Tali,” the man announced. “Second Brother and ...” He cleared his throat and continued gamely, but as though suspecting he had it wrong, “Conscience to White House Chief of Staff Reen.”

The babble stopped. The pianist missed the next bar of music. In the back of the huge room, his bulk competing with the Steinway grand beside him, William Hopkins stood with Speaker Platt. The FBI director’s mouth was agape; a canapé was crushed in his startled fingers.

Reen trudged down the steps, wading into the pool of stunned guests.

“How nice to see you,” a woman corseted in a beaded dress exclaimed as she unfroze from her confusion and sailed across the carpet to greet him.

The hostess, Reen assumed, wishing Marian had thought to give him her name.

“And what a
surprise!”

Had Reen been there as himself, he would have inquired whether the surprise was pleasant or unpleasant, and had he any suspicion of the latter, he would have stayed only long enough to make his exit less obvious as an escape. But he was Tali now, and Tali never used social graces when rudeness would do just as well.

The woman approaching was tall and broad. Reen received a too-complete view of her décolletage.

“Yes,” he said sharply and swiveled away.

And found himself eye-to-eye with Hopkins, who had circled from the piano to make a flank attack. The usual smile was absent from the FBI director’s face. He was staring fixedly at the nametag on Reen’s chest.

“Mr. Hopkins,” Reen said. “Is there something you want?”

Hopkins gave him a flat smile. “No. Nothing,” he replied before gravitating back to the small Speaker of the House.

Reen stared hard at the director’s broad shoulders, his mind turning that smile over and over, as his hands might have toyed with an interesting objet d’art. Cousin ships had too many fail-safes for the crash of the commuter to be an accident. Sabotage, then. And if Hopkins had been behind it, he would know the Cousin at the party wasn’t Tali.

A passing waiter pushed an ornate silver platter into Reen’s face. Reen admired the orderly rows of canapés for a moment, then selected a shrimp on toast, the only food he recognized.

“What about that Gerber?” a voice asked from behind Reen.

Reen nearly dropped the shrimp. The questioner was a pudgy man, his black formal dinner jacket spread wide to either side of his ample belly, as though he were offering his gut up for sacrifice.

“Who are you?” Reen asked.

“Ralph Bitterman, CEO of Heinz,” the fat man said. “I remember when you guys undercut us and Beechnut out of the baby food business.”

“And?”

“Running it into the ground, I hear.” The man, Reen saw with dismay, was quite drunk. Bitterman pulled a stray guest into the conversation. “Say,” he said, gloating into the captured woman’s face, “did you hear Gerber’s going broke? The White House is supposed to hold a news conference about it tomorrow. “

A waiter lowered a tray of drinks into Reen’s view. Without thinking, Reen took one.

“Now why do you suppose the only baby food manufacturer still in existence is going broke?” the fat man from Heinz asked the woman.

Reen glanced at the stemmed glass and noticed it held champagne. He toyed with the idea of drinking it down and ending all his troubles quickly. No one had told him about a press conference.

“What about it, uh ...” Bitterman leaned over drunkenly to read the nametag. “Tali? Eighteen percent decline in the birthrate. Cousins buying up and ruining baby food manufacturers. Hey. There has to be a story there somewhere.”

Reen remembered Oomal’s metaphor about the elephant at the party. He looked numbly around the room to see if there was anyplace to hide.

“You going to answer me, or what?” Bitterman asked, switching from boisterous to pugnacious without any transition. He reached out and grabbed the front of Reen’s uniform. “Are you going to answer me?”

At the head of the stairs the butler cleared his throat. “Marian Cole-Franklin, director of the CIA,” he announced, “and husband, Dr. Howard Franklin, professor of biology, Georgetown University.”

As the hostess moved across the carpet to greet her new guests, she slid between Bitterman and Reen, adroitly plucking the CEO’s fist from Reen’s uniform. “How
nice,
Marian! And don’t you look
lovely!”

Foiled, Bitterman slunk away and was soon engulfed by the party. Marian stood with her husband at the top of the stairs. Howard’s handsome face was slack, his nervous laugh too shrill, his eyes glazed. He had been drinking again.

And Marian. Marian. The butler had taken her mink. Her dress was a filmy white thing that reminded Reen of lilies. The color in her cheeks was high, her mouth curled in welcome. She kissed the hostess’s cheek with vacuous duty as her gaze swept the crowd, resting on Reen for a moment in pique before it moved on,

Then Marian’s blue eyes widened on something pleasant a few yards to the right of Reen. Her arm rose in greeting. A bright smile spread her lips. “Director Billy. Get me a drink, will you?”

Reen watched her leave her husband and stride across to the fireplace, to the now-solitary Hopkins, who was either playing a part like Reen or was genuinely delighted to see her.

“Bourbon straight up?” he heard Hopkins murmur intimately as he ran a possessive hand down her bare back.

Resentfully Reen watched them disappear into the adjoining room. Vilishnikov appeared from the same open doorway, clutching a mixed drink with a cherry in it. Reen, relieved to catch sight of someone he knew, almost waved but stopped himself in time.

Vilishnikov set out toward him anyway. A few feet away he halted in surprise. “Oh, Tali,” he said. “I am thinking you were your Brother.” The head of the Joint Chiefs was wearing his dress uniform, and the weight of his medals seemed to make him list to one side.

“I was wishing to speak to Reen about Krupner.”

Reen was so startled that he almost took a sip of his champagne. When the drink waiter passed, he rid himself of the glass and picked up a tomato juice with a celery stick buried in its heart. “What about Krupner?”

“I am not, as you may be aware, happy at the Pentagon,” Vilishnikov said. “Such a bad commute. Perhaps now that he has disappeared, I may have his office?”

“Ask Reen.”

Vilishnikov, rebuffed by the sharp answer, lifted his chin and began searching the room for possible deliverance. Apparently he saw someone familiar because his smile widened. Intent as a heat-seeking missile, he made for the French doors.

At the Steinway the pianist thundered into a loud piece which Reen, whose musical knowledge began with Bach and ended with Beethoven, didn’t recognize. He admired the skill of the pianist, however, and there was something disturbingly familiar about the man’s face.

Reen caught a snippet of conversation next to him. “So nice to hear a composer play his own work,” a woman in pink said, touching the hostess’s arm.

“Yes,” the hostess murmured. “Rachmaninoff has always been one of my favorites. He does Pavarotti with lesser success, you know. Something about the vocalization.”

They wandered away toward the room with the bar.

Glancing around, Reen saw that Marian was back with her elegant gray-haired husband. The lids over his large brown eyes were at half-staff. “... that lard-assed Hopkins’s hands on you,” he growled. Suddenly he reached out to grab Marian’s arm. She pulled away, hissing something Reen couldn’t hear. She had a fixed half-smile on her face and her blue eyes were hot with embarrassment.

Howard’s voice, thick with self-deprecation, rose over the crowd: “No, I don’t think I’ve had enough. I never get enough. Poor Howard doesn’t get anything anymore.” He turned to a man beside him and brayed a laugh that turned heads. “She’s in love with a dickless gray alien.”

People froze. Marian’s tense smile disappeared, and for a moment she stood as Reen himself stood, alone and defenseless in the turmoil of the party.

Abruptly the embarrassed gathering shifted. One man in the crowd turned to another. “So,” he said, “what’s new over at Justice?”

Reen ducked and weaved his way through to the open bar. As he passed the piano, the pianist finished the piece, stood, and shot his sleeves. Their eyes met.

“Hi.” Rachmaninoff suddenly wasn’t as self-assured. The man seemed to have shrunk inside his formal attire. “I’m Jeremy Holt.” He offered his hand.

Reen regarded the hand dubiously. “Holt? I thought you were Russian.”

The refused hand jerked back to the safety of the suit and dallied around a pocket for a moment before deciding on a few simple twitches at the man’s side. “Oh, no,” the pianist said with an edgy squeak of a laugh. “I’m the President’s new medium.”

Reen took a step back to study the horn-rimmed glasses, the chamois-soft skin.

“I sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. He drops in on me every once in a while to see how I’m doing.”

“President Womack?” Reen asked.

“President Lincoln. I sort of met your Brother, but I was someone else at the time. I wanted to tell him that I’m available for funerals and weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

Reen looked at the business card Holt thrust into his hand and wondered how he could steer the conversation to the karma sellers without making the man suspicious.

Holt laughed again, his chortle going over the heads of the guests like a wayward fly ball. “You want a composer? A rock star? A dead president? I can be anybody you want. It’s because I have a go-between like Lizard. Lizard’s great. When he asks spirits to come through, they don’t refuse.”

“The karma sellers ...” Reen began.

But abruptly the hostess was there, taking Holt’s arm and propelling him away. Her voice trailed behind her like strong flowery perfume. “Marvelous, darling. For the rest of the evening, how about Van Cliburn?”

Abandoned, Reen meandered past the open bar and found a door that led into the refreshing chill of the backyard. Following a curved path through ornamental shrubbery, he came to a gazebo. There he sat and nursed his tomato juice. Earth’s moon, pale and wan, topped the roofs of the nearby houses.

So far the party had been useless, except for Hopkins’s odd smile and the news of the press conference. That information, Reen thought glumly, might have waited until the morning. A few hours from now he would have to return to the Cousin Place, and the Sleep Master was sure to sense the anxiety in him.

“Tali,” a voice whispered from the bushes.

Reen stood and looked around but saw nothing.

“Listen and don’t talk,” the voice said.

The bushes stirred in the night wind. The noise from the party was as faint as memory. Dead moonlight iced the flagstones, frosted the redwood railing and the evergreens.

The whisper was cold. “We fucked up getting your Brother today, but we’ll try again.”

There was a rustle of branches. A shadow separated itself from a tree trunk and, hidden by the night, left the garden.

The voice wasn’t Marian’s or Bill Hopkins’s. It didn’t belong to anyone Reen knew. He longed to run after the speaker, to ask how Tali could have betrayed him. He didn’t dare. Not now. Not when everything, in its own way, had been settled.

From the house came the bell-like tones of a Beethoven sonata. A broken fragment of cloud scurried over the moon. Reen put his hand over the nameplate and felt the sharp edges of the letters. Tali. Dead Cousin Brother. Tali, who had wanted Community rule so badly, he had been willing to do the human thing and kill to get it.

Reen sat down, upsetting his drink. Tomato juice spread like thick human blood over the gazebo’s planked floor. He would leave the party now and go to the Cousin Place where Thural and Tali were not and never would be again.

He rose unsteadily. As he exited the gazebo, he heard a man weeping. The sounds were labored, as though the man were trying to bring to the surface a grief that had long ago congealed.

A dark form sat on a bench, its face in its hands. Reen passed without being seen. The man on the bench was Howard.