Authors: Eric Christopherson
Crack-Up (33 page)
I turned and headed for the door, realizing now that I couldn’t stay.
It was risky here too.
The room was too bright.
I could be recognized.
Maybe by this Jane.
I would have to spend the night elsewhere.
Someplace safe, absolutely safe.
Under a tree, perhaps, in
Arlington
National
Cemetery
, beside my old friend, Robert Todd Lincoln.
So what if it got a little wet, Robert Todd wouldn’t complain.
At the front door, another homeless drifter stepped in off the street, his face shrouded by a dripping, floppy hat and wet scarves that reached up to his earlobes.
He passed wide, watching me with fear and distrust in his eyes.
The eyes of my father
, I thought, and for a fleeting moment, I wished I had a mirror.
Chapter 33
The rain had ceased hours earlier, but my clothing was still drenched when I emerged from another night spent in Arlington National Cemetery, and blades of wet grass clung to me, head to foot.
In the adjacent park, beneath the towering Swiss Carillon, I sprawled out on a bench to dry in the sun.
When I felt dry enough, I brushed off the desiccating lawn lint from my clothing and hair and ducked into the restroom of the Burger King near the Rosslyn metro stop, where I drank some tap water from cupped hands and combed my hair with my fingers.
The hair still appeared matted after I was through.
My patchy beard seemed flecked with more gray than ever before.
Graybeard II.
I skipped breakfast, having money enough for only one more fast food meal.
But it was desperation, more than hunger, nagging me as I crossed the
Potomac River
by way of the
Key
Bridge
.
I had absolutely no idea what to do next.
I recalled something Hideo Mori had told me only a few days earlier.
“Buddha say, ‘Trotting dog find bone somewhere.’ ”
That’s me
, I told himself,
a trotting dog.
I’ll just keep moving, and I’ll find my bone.
Find it soon too
.
For Hideo had also said, and rightly so, “ ‘Crazy dog soon gets shot.’ ”
From the bridge, I climbed the cobblestone sidewalks of a neighborhood on a hill.
At the top was
Georgetown
University
.
I trailed a few summer school-enrolled undergrads into the main library just as it was opening for the day.
From a top floor window, seated in a wooden cubicle behind a stack of books, I located the roof of my own townhouse a quarter mile away.
I imagined my Sarah and my Ellie going about their day beneath that roof.
Duke too.
I didn’t dare come any closer to them, because of the police stake-out, but thought being this near to my dear ones might inspire me about what to do next.
But instead of inspiration came salty, dripping eye dew.
I wept for the future of my family, for my own, irretrievable life, and for a lost delusion, the sane delusion that I’d been fit for the life I’d led.
My tears I kept shirt-sleeving off my cheeks as I descended the stairwell.
Trotting dog find bone somewhere
.
Outside, I found the sky still clear and the sun turned punishing and the summer air already gaining its muggy,
water weight.
No longer able to ignore the rumble in my belly, I left the campus and strolled downhill toward M street.
I debated whether to spend the last of my money on food or panhandle or dumpster dive from behind one of the many restaurants below.
The latter option repulsed and revolted me, as you might imagine, but after a brief, intense argument with myself I settled on it, because it was the safest option.
I was, after all, mere blocks from my own residence.
I missed Sarah so much.
I felt an overpowering urge to hear her voice and to speak to her, and to say some of the things I had to say to her, though I didn’t actually know if she were at home.
I had a suspicion she might be staying with her parents in
California
, trying to avoid the media glare, especially for Ellie’s sake.
But I would call
California
if I had to.
I took out the cell phone I’d swiped from that female detective the other day in a
Baltimore
parking garage and turned it on.
I just had to talk to my wife.
But all I got, dialing my home number, was the answering machine.
I left a message for Sarah, saying simply that I loved her, and disconnected.
I suddenly remembered—as I’d begun having trouble keeping things straight by now—that I was supposed to call Keisha Fallon.
I’d asked her to do something for me.
I sat down in the shade, squatting on the stoop of someone’s brownstone, and punched in her cell phone number.
“They still haven’t fired us,” Keisha said of Helms Technology, “and so I was able to do what you asked me to do.”
“So what’ve you got?”
“A few question marks is all.
The biggest one is that, since mid November of last year, John Helms had been attending regular, bi-monthly meetings at the Pentagon.
The meetings were hosted by DARPA.”
That’s the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, by the way, the Pentagon’s research arm.
“The strange thing is, Helms Technology didn’t have any current contracts with DARPA.
They did in the past, but—”
“Who else was at these meetings?”
“According to our bodyguards, who were never allowed inside the meetings, but waited outside in the corridor, they were also attended by agency directors and deputy directors from the
What do you make of it, Argus?”
“I have no idea.
Who else from Helms Technology attended?”
“No one else.”
“Somebody over there must know something.”
“No doubt,” she said.
“But I’ll be damned if I know how to make them talk to me.
Or you.”
“It could be nothing.
John might’ve been trying to sell the entire
US
intelligence community on some new database software.
Something they could all use.”
“No chance,” Keisha said.
“I’ve contacted everyone who’d ever worked on John’s protection detail.
John was all about the technology.
None of us ever saw him make a sales pitch in his life.
In fact, he used to say, ‘That’s for the non-geniuses.’ ”
I thanked Keisha and hung up.
Before my thumb had time to cut the power, the phone rang.
I answered reflexively.
“Hello?”
“Ah, Mister Ward!
Detective Strecker here.”
My heart leapt against its bony cage.
I’d just made a huge rookie fugitive mistake—or the mistake of a fast disintegrating mind.
I’d forgotten all about the possibility the police were waiting to track my geographic location through the signal from Detective Strecker’s stolen phone.
“You there, sir?” she said with a delighted chuckle.
I cleared my throat.
Tried to sound calm.
“I’m here.”
Chapter 34
“We’ve been talking to your naked flight attendant,” Strecker continued.
“Ms. Elizabeth Hardtack.
And your fellow passengers on that corporate jet from
Austin
,
Texas
to
Washington
,
DC
.”
“You don’t say.
Tell me about it.”
“C’mon into the station, and I’ll tell you.”
“Sorry.
Not just yet.”
Trotting dog broke into a run.
“Then I guess I can’t tell you anything.”
“You owe me,” I said.
“True, but I don’t always pay my debts on time.
Are you okay, sir?
Sounds like you’re breathing kind of hard.”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
Her main purpose in calling me, we both knew, was to keep the phone signaling to the
“Alrighty, you win,” she said, “I’ll tell you what you want to hear.
But only if you’ll tell me what you make of it.”
“Fine.”
Quickly lathered in sweat, I scrambled down a woodsy slope, along a footpath.
Sirens pealed in the distance.
“There were three other passengers on that flight, as you know, and you were right about them.
We’ve got confessions across the board, thanks to some deputies from the Travis County Sheriff’s department.
They were all in on the gag.”
I said, “Tell me something I don’t know already.”
“They’re a strange bunch, considering the circumstances.
For starters, they don’t know each other, and they don’t actually work for Helms Technology.
None of them.
They were mailed fake ID badges to get aboard, and someone put their names and their flight itineraries into the corporate computer system so the IDs would work and the jet would stop in
Austin
to pick them up.”
“Who did that?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“The IDs.
Where were they mailed from?”
“From here,” she said.
“The District.”
“These passengers—who are they, if they’re not HT execs?”
“I’ll start with the silver-haired, older gentleman, who sat directly in front of you, he says.
He’s a retired architect from
Austin
.
Name’s Carl Withers.
The woman’s from Round Rock—that’s an
Austin
suburb.
Her name’s Tracy McCandless, and she works as an accountant for Dell computers.
And the Hispanic guy you talked to, who told you his name was Rob Ramos, is actually Jose Cardenas, and he’s a self-employed plumber from Flatonia.
That’s a little, hick town about an hour’s drive from
Austin
.
How the hell do they connect to you, Mister Ward?”
“They don’t.
I don’t know a soul in the entire state of
Texas
.
I don’t know any plumbers either—not even my own—and no architects.
What did they have to say?”
“Not much at first.
Usually, we had to destroy their alibis before they’d talk.”
“Alibis?”
“You know.
They’d say they really were HT execs.
Well, where did they work?
What building?
Who inside the company knew them?
And what did they do, exactly?
Their stories didn’t check out.
Plus, we discovered that two of the passengers—Jose and Tracy—had reserved separate commercial flights straight back to
Austin
.
They hadn’t left themselves time enough to leave
Reagan
National
Airport
, much less do anything else in DC.”
I reached the base of the slope, emerging where a busy, two-lane road ran parallel to the
Potomac River
.
“Why’d they get on that plane with me?”
“They all gave different reasons for getting on, sometimes more than one reason.
Bribed, blackmailed, threatened or conned.
Whoever did this had secrets on all of them.
Juicy secrets.”
“How’s that possible?” I said.
“You said they didn’t know each other.”
“We were hoping you’d tell us.”
“No such luck.
How were they contacted?”
“Jose Cardenas, by telephone, Tracy McCandless, by email, and Carl Withers, in person.”
“In person?”
“Yep.
Seems Carl gambles, and right now he’s in a bad situation, financially speaking, the kind where his bones could get broken, know what I mean?
And some flashy young White guy posing as a TV producer bumped into him on the street and told Carl he’d be just the guy to help pull off a stunt for reality TV.
Well, Carl gets a free jet ride, but the gag never gets revealed, and he never gets paid.”
The squealing sirens grew louder and more numerous.
Eighty or ninety yards ahead of me stood a boathouse.
Briskly, I walked toward it.
“What did the TV producer look like?”
“C’mon in and take a look at our sketch.”
“No thanks.
What about the telephone caller’s voice?”
“Male,” she said.
“Jose described it as tinny, with a foreign accent.
That’s all he’d say, ‘foreign.’
Now, Carl, on the other hand, swears the TV producer was a home grown Texan.”
“I’ve got to go now.”
“Wait!
Wait!
One thing more, Mister Ward, please.
Help me figure out who we’re dealing with here.
Who could’ve known about your disease?
Your martial arts skills?
Who might’ve also known about Jeremy Crane’s disease and Sally Anne Bilchik’s?
And who could’ve also brought the corporate jet passengers together?
How could anyone know such a diverse, geographically dispersed group of individuals?
Know their weaknesses, their desires, their innermost secrets?
Well enough to manipulate them?
How does any one person do that?
Unless he’s the devil himself?”
“Let me think about that,” I said.
I disconnected the call, but left the phone on.
A second later, I flung it into the bed of a commercial roofing truck as it passed by me on the road.
The boathouse I found filled with
Georgetown
University
students.
A clutch of them—perhaps a crew team—were busy cleaning equipment, while two lanky male undergrads prepared to launch a fiberglass sculling double.
Nylon book-bags lay in a single heap on the cement floor.
I swept one up and ducked behind a clothesline jammed with drying life preservers to sift through its contents.
I found a woman’s purse inside and removed all the cash.
Around fifty dollars.
I offered the pair of male undergrads with the sculling double twenty dollars each to row me a mile upstream to the Jefferson Memorial.
The one with the scraggly goatee and the off-center grin asked, “Why?”
“Traffic is murder right now,” I said, “and I’m late for an appointment.”
The pair exchanged shrugs, then agreed.
I paid them in advance, and we shoved off.
I sat oar-less in the center of the vessel, which was longer than a Cadillac, but slimmer than a car seat, an anorexic water craft.
My undergraduate oarsmen stroked and grunted in rhythm through the placid river, seemingly unfazed by the heat or by the light cross-headwinds, heaving us forward at a smart and steady clip.
From the middle of the
Potomac River
, we passed beneath the
Key
Bridge
.
Above, on the
Virginia
end of the bridge, I spotted two police cruisers forming a makeshift road blockade, and along the Georgetown bank, beyond the other end of the bridge, I could see the traffic along M street at a total standstill.
Despite the sirens, my two undergrads never once glanced up, or looked around, their rowing form perfect, controlled, mechanical.
My oarsmen beached their blade-like craft in a marshy area near a stand of reeds by the Jefferson Memorial.
I got my shoes wet and muddy alighting onto land.
I waved the undergrads goodbye.
Tourists eyed me with curiosity as I hailed a cab.
“The White House,” I told the cabbie, following an urge to disappear into the heart of the city.
The air conditioning felt like vaporized mercy.
As the cab blended into traffic,
I threw my head back, shut my eyes, and exhaled profoundly.
From inside the cab, strange music erupted, loud and harsh and discordant.
Woodwind instruments and bagpipes and violins played in short, staccato bursts.
Cymbals crashed like silvery thunder, and a high-pitched male chorus trilled a Zulu war chant.
My eyelids retracted like runaway window shades.
“Turn that infernal music down, would you!”
“What music?” said the cabbie.
“Radio’s broke.”
My heart bashed at its bony cage again.
The cab swerved making a sharp turn.
“Never mind,” I said.
The otherworldly music entombed me in dread and despair.
Time had run out for me.
Too soon.
Chapter 35
I haunted the White House for hours, thinking my situation over carefully, traipsing the broad, tourist-infested sidewalks at the building’s perimeter, peering through the black, wrought iron security fencing, spotting Secret Service personnel for sport, and recalling random events from the years that I myself had spent protecting the president and first family.
All the while, my mad, mind-manufactured music played on.
Now and then, I’d stop in my tracks and fight the urge to scream.
But the music wasn’t all that plagued me.
I’d promised myself, in the cemetery, that first night of my big escape from incarceration, that I’d turn myself over to the police once the hallucinations, or delusions, began.
I’d promised.
And it was time now.
And the right thing to do.
Soon I’d be a threat to others and to my own self.
I had to keep my word.
“Can’t somebody stop this infernal music!” I shouted.
The tourists scattered from my path like startled pigeons.
Near the northwest gate of the White House I sat down on the edge of a concrete traffic barricade disguised as a gigantic flower pot.
Hell’s orchestra played on, inside my head, so loudly now that I could think of little else.
The piano player was an angry great ape, I decided, jumping up and down on the keys.
The violinist used an electric lathe for a bow, sawing strings of steel bridge cables.
The percussion section’s deafening blasts went off with erratic regularity, like battlefield ordnance.
At times I’d have to shudder or wince or cover my ears in vain.
