Crack-Up (30 page)

“They all paid too?”

“Possibly.
 
But how expensive.
 
Unless . . . the passengers were all part of this conspiracy to have me kill John Helms.”

“Hard to believe,” Hideo said.
 
“Too many people.”

“Maybe you’re right.
 
Yes, I think it’s far more likely they were paid off too.
 
One way or another.”

“Why do this?” Hideo said.
 
“Why silly joke on airplane?
 
Your pills already switched.”

“I don’t know yet.
 
Perhaps it was only to speed along the disintegration of my mind.”

Hideo put his chopsticks down on the table, the eating tips resting atop their holder, which was a sliver of gray porcelain like a flat, polished stone.
 
He lit a cigarette.

“Mister Argus, I so sorry, but I think maybe your time is running out now.
 
I think maybe your disease is back.
 
You imagine things that not really happen.”

“What are you saying, Hideo?
 
You think I simply imagined my conversation with the flight attendant and her husband?”

“I think so.
 
Or you remember wrong.”

“But you know about the lab tests, the dummy pills.”

“What you told me before, I believe.”

“What about Bernard Alan Simpson?
 
You met him, you heard him with your own ears.”

“Yes, that too I believe.
 
But now, I think, you under too much strain.
 
You—How you say?—‘breaking up.’ ”

“ ‘Cracking up?’
 
No, I’m not.
 
Not yet.”

“How you know?
 
Dreamers not know they dream until morning.”

“I’m fine, I tell you, fine.
 
I’ve only gone three days without my meds.
 
Three days, Hideo.
 
This really happened.
 
All of it.”
 
With a tight fist, I pounded once on the table, wobbling all the little porcelain bowls.

Hideo shrugged.
 
“More tea?”

I nudged my cup and saucer forward.
 
Hideo’s face couldn’t have been less expressive if he’d been wearing a surgical mask.

What secret thoughts does he keep
? I wondered.
 
Can I still trust him?
 
Why did I ever trust him?
 
What is his game, anyway?
 
And what should I do about him now
?

At this point in my story, I recognize only in retrospect, paranoia had indeed begun its creep back inside my un-medicated mind.
 
When, exactly, this process had begun is hard to pinpoint.
 
You see, paranoia begins like a gain of five pounds on a man who favors elastic waistbands.
 
You don’t notice it at first.

Early the next morning, Hideo dropped me off in front of the Rosslyn metro stop.
 
It bustled with rain-drenched commuters.
 
I slithered through a fast-moving maze of umbrellas and wet slickers until I reached the row of pay phones by the escalators.

With a quarter, I dialed my home phone number, and when the answering machine kicked on, I waited, wondering if someone would pick up, and listening with a strange fascination to my own voice, recorded in a much, much happier time.

I needed to speak to Sarah desperately, to hear her voice live, to tell her something of what I’d learned, and not to worry too much.
 
I knew the phone would be tapped and I wasn’t sure how long it would take the cops to pinpoint the physical location of my own telephone.
 
But I didn’t care.
 
I had to risk it.

No one picked up.
 
Are they still gone, Sarah and Ellie?
 
Still in
Annapolis
?
 
Or staying with relatives now?
 
Ditching the media circus I’ve caused them to suffer?
 
The cruelty of cold shoulders in the neighborhood?
 
Or is Sarah simply not answering the telephone
?

I hung up and dialed Sarah’s cell phone number.
 
No answer there either.
 
So I dialed home again and left a brief message after the tone, telling my wife and daughter that I was okay and that I loved them very much.
 
Then I left the metro station.

I hailed a cab and rode to Foggy Bottom, where I waited for a store I knew called
Spy Supply
to open its doors for business.
 
The store carried an odd assortment of espionage-related items, including the nanny-cam I’d purchased the year before to monitor Ellie’s babysitters in secret.

Hiding from the rain beneath a green storefront awning, I stood a couple yards away from a row of newspaper display stands and was pleased to find myself no longer headline news.

When the store opened, I hurried to the back, passing up the chance to purchase night-vision goggles, lead-filled gloves, bullet-proof umbrellas, parabolic microphones, and spray cans that turned envelopes briefly transparent.
 
I paid cash for a palm-size, digital voice recorder.

Then I hopped on the metro.
 
I rode the trains to
Reagan
National
Airport
, proceeding to the Southeast Airlines terminal.
 
I dropped, still drenching, into a seat near a gift shop and waited for the first returning flight from
Philadelphia
to arrive.
 
I pulled out my new voice recorder, hit the record button, and spoke into it.

“It’s 10:55 AM, Thursday, June 22nd, and this is Argus Ward speaking.
 
That’s right, I’m you, Argus, and I’m not paranoid yet, though I’ll be damned if I know how to prove that to you.
 
Maybe you’ll be able to tell by the sound of my voice, or by remembering when you recorded this.
 
Anyway, everything I’m about to say is true, absolutely true.
 
So listen very closely . . .”

I proceeded with a detailed chronology of recent events, the ones which had so swiftly destroyed my life forever, beginning with the naked flight attendant and moving forward to the current hour.
 
I laid out what I knew for sure, what I thought I knew, what I suspected, and what I’d ruled out.
 
I told myself who to trust—and how much—and who not to trust.

I did this because I knew that paranoia and mental confusion would arrive before the hallucinations started, which was when I planned to surrender myself.
 
This record would be useful to me then.
 
Later, when no longer a fugitive, and mentally well again, I intended for the recording to help me distinguish between the truth of things and any paranoid fantasies.
 
And I could share the recording with the cops too.
 
By then they would have reason to listen to me.

The plane returning from
Philadelphia
landed on time.
 
When the flight crew emerged, I dropped the voice recorder into my breast pocket—leaving it on
Record
—and approached the slender, blonde woman I’d been waiting for.
 
“The next voice you hear,” I whispered into the machine, “will be that of Elizabeth Hardtack, the naked flight attendant.
 
Play this for Hideo as well as the cops.
 
Then they’ll believe you.”

Elizabeth
eyed me approaching and, with a quick word, broke away from a fellow flight attendant.
 
Her self-assured bearing, I noticed, had survived a coal-black shiner and a cut and swollen upper lip.

“Your poor face,” I said.
 
“I’ll have a talk with Ned.”

“Just stay out of my life, would you please.”

She wouldn’t stop for me, or even slow her gait, so I pulled up beside her and, shoulder to shoulder, we strode through the busy terminal at a busy clip.

“How much were you paid to strip naked on the airplane?”

“I told you already.
 
Eighteen thousand.”

“So you did.
 
Did you talk to Harlan Grazer?”

“Yes,” she said.
 
“By telephone.
 
He’s a real person, a real executive.
 
He’s been with Reagan National for years.
 
He’d never heard of me.
 
Didn’t know anything about any practical joke.”

“Do you believe him?”

“How should I know?”

“How were you paid off?”

“The money was wired into my checking account.
 
Half before, half afterward.”

“So that money could’ve come from almost anywhere,” I said.
 
“What about the emails?
 
Were they all from the same address?”

“Yes, I think so.
 
Harlan’s corporate email address.”

“Someone took control of his computer,” I said.
 
“Remotely, probably.
 
And then bounced email through his account.
 
Why didn’t you at least phone this Harlan before signing on for something so—”

“I thought about it,” she said, “but then the first payment arrived on time.”

I left Elizabeth Hardtack wanting to know who inside Helms Technology had assigned her to work the
Bangkok
flight, wanting to find and interrogate the passenger who’d introduced himself to me as Rob Ramos, and do the same with the two other HT executives who’d boarded the corporate jet in
Austin
,
Texas
.
 
But I couldn’t do it myself, and Keisha working alone would take far too long.
 
I was a fugitive, after all, with a clock ticking on my sanity.

It was then I decided to bring the police into play, to put their manpower to good use by sharing what I’d learned since my escape.
 
In the meantime, I planned to remain a fugitive, to continue with my own investigation while the cops began theirs.
 
I thought I was being prudent, later that same day, contacting the police through my defense attorney.

“You’re un-medicated,” Les Cravey said to me over the telephone.
 
“Aren’t you, Argus?”

That was all he had to say to me after hearing all about my three paranoids murder conspiracy theory as well as Bernard Alan Simpson.
 
I hadn’t even mentioned Elizabeth Hardtack yet—or all the suspect passengers on Flight Bump and Grind.

“If you don’t believe me,” I said, “give Bernard a call.
 
Here’s his number at the furniture store, he doesn’t want to be contacted at home . . .”

I provided the number, then repeated it.
 
I spoke loudly because my pay phone connection gave off static and there was a high volume of buzzing from the steady stream of passersby licking at my back where I stood in a hall, just inside the Smithsonian’s
Natural
History
Museum
.

Les said, “You’ve got to turn yourself in, Argus.
 
Before it’s too late.
 
Before you end up doing something else—”

“Tell the police to contact Bernard at his furniture store too, not at home.
 
That’s important.”

“Whatever you say.”

I noticed a pair of uniformed Capitol Policemen approaching in bright yellow slickers, for it was still raining outside.
 
I turned my head away from them, only to find another pair of cops approaching from the opposite direction along the corridor.
 
The second pair suddenly began jogging toward me.