Catacombs (28 page)

She had tried to tell them part of the truth, that the Catacombs were like a dusty corner in a dull museum, worth the labor of only the most painstaking archaeologists. She remembered very well what she had seen there. No one was paying the slightest attention. What would Jade think now if she told him the true location of the Catacombs? And if she was believed, would she then be expendable? Raun had awakened that morning feeling free, but her freedom, she realized, was conditional. What the government had granted could be snatched away. No, she needed to find a way to put the brakes to their scheme without jeopardizing her pardon. And that might take some time.

"When are we going?" she asked Jade.

"We need to be in and out of the Catacombs before the twenty-ninth of May."

"That's only two weeks!" Raun looked in dismay at the repetitive views of bleak plateau and dry mountain range–hundreds of square miles. The rates go up after the rainy season. She wondered what just one night in that hell would cost her, and swallowed hard.

"Look, I won't jump. That's final. If you can't get a helicopter to set us down, then-I want to forget the whole thing."

Jade
 
turned off the Betamax and turned on a lamp. He sat down and packed a corncob pipe with hairy-looking tobacco and got the pipe going. Lem Meztizo stood by the lamp minutely examining a twenty-dollar double-eagle gold piece on a gold chain he wore with a polished leather vest. Away from the range he wore his wealth with fancy pants and silk shirts: bejeweled charms and amulets and magic rings and lucky twenty-dollar gold pieces. After the coin he took out an antique railroader's pocket watch and listened to it chime. He killed time with the attentiveness of a surgeon.

Raun sensed channels of communication open between the waiting men that she was deaf and blind to. And the waiting grew on her soul like a callus.

"This isn't a matter of simple cowardice," Raun explained with a tightly drawn smile. "It goes deeper than that. It's–sheer terror, and it's in the bone."

Jade said mildly, "Nobody's missed you back at the clink. And your look-alike is probably getting bored in deadlock."

"I see. So that's how you handled it."

"Our safest bet is a twilight drop from a C-130 overflight. All the equipment we'll need–trail bikes, extra gasoline–can be parachuted in once you've picked our spot."

"I can't do it."

Jade whistled between his teeth. "Must be my lucky day," he said. "Except I know–"

He got up without another word and went to the telephone on his desk, a bulkier instrument than most she'd seen. She had no way of knowing that this was a secure line from the ranch to the NORAD communications center in Cheyenne Mountain, seventy-five miles away. Jade dialed a series of numbers, and hung up.

Thirty seconds later the phone rang, just once. He picked up the receiver and said, "We have a cancellation."

"Wait," Raun said.

Jade glanced at her. She had thought she was going to be okay, stiff upper lip, carry on regardless. But when she tried to smile, her face felt as if it might crack; then the tears came in a flood. She put a hand beside her nose and pressed her cheek hard, and the tears ran between her fingers.

"Give me–more time."

"Omit," Jade said over the phone, and hung up again.

Raun couldn't stop crying.

"I'm really tired. You wrecked me today. I ache all over, and I–I just can't think anymore."

His habitually intent expression seemed to soften, or maybe it was the blurring effect of her tears.

"You could use a good soak," Jade said. He looked almost cheerful. "If you just want to relax after your bath, I'll have dinner sent to your room. Then we'll see you bright and early."

T
he use of Jade's hot tub went a long way toward easing the soreness in Raun's body, too long unexercised: He seemed to have a therapist's knowledge of her anatomy, and throughout a day that had been torturous but (in
 
retrospect ) carefully planned, not one muscle had escaped his attention. Lem had taken care of the blisters earlier and, once she was out of the tub, he produced a small miracle named Lee, a Vietnamese woman skilled at massage. Then, in quick order, came a second miracle: a perfect dry martini which Raun enjoyed in small sips while Lee trod with diminutive feet the length of her bare back and legs. At first the massage hurt like fury and then it began to be enjoyable; then she passed into a state of bliss.

Lee and her husband Ken, who had Americanized his name from Kien, were from the time of the boats. Two of her children had died on the South China Sea, during a long starvation drift southward to Singapore; two others were now in college in the States, their tuition paid by Jade. It was a side of him Raun wouldn't have suspected.

Ken did the cooking on the ranch. He had been the
sous
chef at a fashionable Saigon restaurant before the Americans arrived. He had acquired a magical touch with the plain food of the American West: chicken, beef ribs and chili, a thickly textured bread. Stuffed but revived, Raun took her ease on the porch with Lem as the sun was setting, staining the sky the color of iodine. Jade had not appeared for dinner; she wondered where he was.

Up to a point Lem wasn't reluctant to talk about his employer. He confirmed what Raun already was convinced of: Jade had operated on the dark side of the CIA. Then, as a result of some crucial but unauthorized action he'd taken, a top CIA official had been murdered and another had disappeared. Lem wasn't sure, but apparently they'd been "moles," or Russian plants within The Company. Jade had resigned and returned home to the ranch.

"I hadn't seen him for, maybe it was eighteen months," Lem reflected. "Didn't hear a word. He'd been gone long stretches before, but I just began to think, maybe this time he's dead. Then he showed up. Matt's an initiate of the Black Wolf Society, that's an Indian thing, and I always have thought of him as half wolf anyway. But that half was near dead; burned out. He told me there'd been some trouble, and he looked to be expecting more, so I got ready for it but nothing ever happened. Later on he said he'd been in Russia, where he went to get himself arrested on purpose. He had to get next to a prisoner in one of those jails nobody ever gets out of alive. This one was called Lefortovo, I think, run by the KGB. He found out what he needed to know. Then he broke out of there and made his way to Finland all by himself. Soon as he got home, shitfire, the roof fell in at the CIA."

Raun gazed at the risen, nearly full moon. "How did he escape from an escape-proof prison?"

Lem said with a gold-edged smile, "You know that old expression, 'been there and back'? Matt's the only man I ever met it truly applied to."

"I don't understand."

Lem seemed on the verge of elaborating, but a luxury pickup truck with a lot of chrome on it and a loud radio was driving up to the house. He pushed off from the porch rail he'd been sitting on and sauntered over to greet the visitor, a runty Hopi Indian with a handsome haughty head and curly shoulder-length graying hair. He wore a buckskin jacket and baggy trousers, carried a large carpetbag with him.

"Hello, John Tovókinpi."

"Hello, Lem Meztizo."

"New set of wheels?"

"The truck belongs to my nephew, Ephraim Rohona. He said that I could borrow it as long as I used the low gear only, turned on all the flashing lights, and drove on the shoulder of the highway, not the highway itself. Then everyone would realize it was me, and stay far away. Have you seen Múte? He has sent for me."

"He's at the home pasture, updating the herd ledgers. He'll be along. This is Raun Hardie, a friend of ours."

John Tovókinpi looked closely at Raun for almost a full minute, without a trace of expression. Then he turned and said to Lem, as if he'd forgotten Raun was there, "She is better-looking than Taláwasohu, who I also admired for the purity of her voice. Do you suppose I could have my dinner now?"

"Right on in, John, Ken will fix you up."

"Who was that?" Raun asked, when the Indian was out of earshot.

"John's a Bow Clan sorcerer, one of three or four left among the Hopis, and there are only about five thousand Hopis left anymore. Too easy to push around, I guess, and they've always been fatalists, Matt says, not realists."

"What's he doing here?"

"Matt has his own way of preparing for things," Lem said evasively.

"He called Matt 'Múte.' What does it mean?"

"Swift runner."

"And who is Taláwasohu?"

"That was Nell's Indian name. Matt gave it to her. Means 'Star before the light of morning."

"That's beautiful," Raun said wistfully. "It's hard to believe he's ever led a normal life."

"He has here."

"And he was married."

"Well, that happened after he left The Company. Then he figured he could take on the responsibility. He was crazy about Nell. And I mean, she pitched in around here in spite of her background."

"What was that?"

"Family had money. Never worked up a sweat with their hands. Nell was a professional singer, concert type, had a good career going. Came out here and in no time she learned veterinary medicine. She was as good as if she had a degree. One of those with an instinct for it. She could spot a sick horse in the
remuda
before any of the hands knew something was wrong."

"She died in an avalanche? That's horrible."

"Matt's still taking it hard."

"Yet he gave me her clothes to wear."

"He grew up practical about things like that." Lem took out a pocketknife and sheared off a spot of ragged leather on one of his bootheels. "Well, I'm going on into town, haven't drunk the last three beers on my six-beer diet. You want to go along?"

"I'm having a very hard time keeping my chin off my chest. Bed for me."

"Night then."

"Lem, why does Matt want you to go along with us?"

Lem balanced a gold toothpick on the end of a forefinger, then put it in a corner of his mouth.

"Needs somebody he can depend on; knows his mind without him having to say a word. That's useful in a tight spot."

"And of course he doesn't trust me. Have you done any parachute jumping, Lem?"

'Nope," Lem admitted, with a doleful tilt of his rock-star-blond head.

"I don't think you like the idea any better than I do."

"I go where Matt wants me to go."

"Why?"

"John Tovókinpi says we used to be brothers in another life, and I sort of have to look after him this time around. Don't know if I believe that, but what I do know is that I have a lot of love for him."

With a casual wave of his hand, Lem swung down off the porch and left Raun to reflect upon another aspect of Matthew Jade: his ability to inspire the devotion of those few people who were close to him.

D
own by the home pasture, a quarter of a mile from the ranch house, Jade met with one of his hands, a towheaded twenty-six-year-old native of Pagosa Springs named Andy von Boecklin. Jade raised seed stock on his range, not market beef, and the home pasture was filling up with the heavies, pregnant cows who would remain in relative seclusion until they dropped their calves through the remainder of the spring and into summer.

Andy got down from Shoo-Bob, his venerable cutting horse, and took off his gloves.

"There's a couple of cases of hydrocele on the south range. Not too bad yet." From a distance, on the rapidly chilling night air, came the sounds of voices raised in hymn.

"Tell Lem. See anything of interest today?"

"Just those pilgrims camped on Red Cloud Mesa. Most of them white, but I saw a couple of black faces too. I don't see how they can go around dressed in burlap that way–I'd itch myself to death. And that food they're always cooking, I wouldn't want to put any of it in my mouth. What do they call themselves again?"

"Vassals of the Immaculate Light. They're okay. What else?"

"Trout fisherman. All by himself down along the Picket Wire in a camper truck. Ford. Arkansas plates."

"What's he like?"

"On the heavy side. Going bald. Kind of a droopy mustache. A real greenhorn."

'Why? What kind of fishing equipment does he have with him?"

"Lots of hefty-looking plugs. Gang hooks. More like he's after tuna than trout. Retired. Says he spends all of his time nowadays fishing. Didn't see any good fly rods. I told him, you won't catch none of our mountain trout with those Arkansas spincasters of yours. Hatchery trout, that's about all they got down that way, hell, they'll grab anything you throw in the water. Garbage. But he didn't believe me."

"Uh-huh. Better get up to the house and help yourself to ribs and some of that two-alarm chili before it's all gone."

"Now you're talkin'," Andy said.

R
aun went to her room but found herself in the predicament of being too tired to sleep soundly. The best she could manage was a restless doze.

At a quarter after one in the morning she was awakened by the sound of drumming from Matthew Jade's bedroom, an accompanying Indian chant. She sat on the side of her bed listening for several minutes, until curiosity got the best of her. Then she slipped on a flannel robe–it was cold outside and chilly in the house–and went down the hall to his bedroom.