Jericho's Fall (5 page)

“There’s no bullet,” Deputy Mundy told them after a three-minute inspection. “No bullet, no shell casing, no nothing. You should scrape it up like you did the other.”

Beck looked at the sisters. “A cat, day before yesterday,” Pamela conceded reluctantly, eyes downcast.

“And that’s it?” said Beck.

“Yes, ma’am. That’s it. Unless you want us to put out a bulletin for everybody in rural Colorado who owns a dog and a gun.”

“What about the man I saw at the bottom of the hill last night?”

“Anybody else see him?” The sisters shook their heads. “Well, then,” he said, as if that was the end of the matter.

Rebecca was not the sort to give up without a fight. “So what do you think we should do, Deputy? We’re up here alone.”

“Maybe you should get a gun,” said Mundy He inclined his head toward the stairs. “From what I hear, Mr. Ainsley’s got plenty of ’em.”

“Why do we need a gun?” she persisted. “Are we supposed to shoot the next stranger who comes on the property?”

“Better him than another dog,” said the deputy.

“Isn’t it your job to protect people?”

“Up here, ma’am, people pretty much take care of themselves.”

Sometimes one-upmanship requires a politic lie. “Back where I come from, we take care of each other.”

Mundy was fiddling with his belt. “Look. Here’s my card. If you have any more trouble, call me, okay?” Pointing. “That’s my cell on the back.”

They stood at the window, watching the deputy turn the cruiser around. “He likes you,” said Audrey.

Beck looked at her. “What?”

“Deputy Mundy. He likes you.” She surprised her sister with an unwanted poke in the ribs. “He never told us to get a gun. He just told you.” She touched Beck’s pocket. “And he never gave us his card, either. ‘Call me if you have any more trouble, cell’s on the back.’ He likes you.”

“Cell phones don’t even work here,” growled Rebecca. She handed the card to Pamela and stalked up to her room.

(iv)

The grandchildren’s suite was located above the kitchen, and connected through a bathroom to Jericho’s disordered study next door. Had Jericho been more ambulatory, this inconvenience might have bothered her. Under the circumstances, however, Beck in effect had two rooms to herself, except when Pamela wanted to use the computer. The house possessed no wireless modem: Jericho was too worried about someone listening in. The only way to get connected, therefore, was to log on to the clunky desktop machine, at least a decade old, and wait. As she was waiting now, sitting in Jericho’s comfortably cracked leather chair, checking her e-mail. Most of it was either spam or business, and neither kind excited her more than the other. She assured Pfister that she would meet him in Chicago as promised. Her flight left Denver around noon on Thursday, and she would arrive just in time for dinner, when she would brief him yet again for Friday’s meetings. Scrolling through the rest of her e-mails, she decided she did not need to meet any horny housewives in her area, and chose not to lend assistance to an exiled African prince who would transfer ten million dollars to her if she would first provide her bank-account information. She logged off.

When she got back to her room, her cell was vibrating. Annoyed, she snatched it up and, sure enough, heard static and the fax tone. She ended the call, then tried the phone, but again had no bars.

She stretched out on the window seat and dragged her leather briefcase over, because she wanted to finish the new Danticat, which she had been reading on the plane. She reached into the side pocket, where she always kept her fiction, and she pulled out not the novel but a printout of a memo she had left Pfister. She sat up again, delved into the middle, where she usually kept her work, and found the magazines she had bought in the airport. Confused now, she peeked into the outside pocket, where she always stuffed magazines, and there was the Danticat.

“A senior moment,” she muttered to the air, although she was only thirty-four. “Either that or I’m losing my mind.”

Because the other possibility was that, while Beck was out walking, somebody had rifled her briefcase, and stuffed the contents back all wrong.

And that was ridiculous.

(v)

Downstairs, the women took turns dealing with the trickle of visitors who came to the front door. Jericho’s sensors told them when a car entered the driveway, and the monitors in the security room behind the kitchen let them watch the forecourt, so they always knew in advance what sort of visitor was approaching. They kept hoping for Jimmy Lobb, the caretaker, but it always turned out to be a wily reporter or a nervous former associate or a sycophantish newcomer hoping for an endorsement for a book about what really happened on 9/11. Perhaps Jericho was less forgotten than Rebecca had thought. Thundershowers were promised for later in the day, and she hoped the rain would hold the visitors at bay.

When one o’clock came and Mr. Lobb still had not appeared, Pamela took Beck into the mudroom, grabbed a large garbage bag and a pair of shovels, and led her on a forced march down the hill, where, together, they removed the dog’s remains—made worse now by the tires of cars unable to swerve in time. As they tossed the squishy bag into the back of Jericho’s pickup, for later delivery to the county landfill, Beck noticed the padlocks on the garage.

“What are those for?”

“Ask Jericho.”

“How long have they been on there?”

The inquiry was evidently beneath Pamela’s dignity. She turned her back and strode imperiously up to the house.

Beck dawdled. The sky was darkening. All four garage bays were
padlocked. The locks were shining new. She tugged, but they never budged. She tried the side door, but it was bolted. The first freezing droplets spattered. She peered in the windows, but they had been covered with fabric on the inside.

Weird. Not a clever way to keep people out: a good set of bolt-cutters and a little stealth would have the doors open in no time.

Maybe he’s keeping something in
.

“Not your problem,” she announced, and ran up the hill as the droplets became a downpour.

An hour later, Rebecca brought Jericho his lunch. He was sitting in the chair, studying a thick brown file. “My will,” he said, setting it aside. “The lawyers are driving up from Denver to collect my revisions.” He chuckled. He seemed fairly bursting with energy. In the background, a soprano sang a challenging aria. The second act of
Don Giovanni
, Beck vaguely recalled: an opera Jericho dearly loved, and had twice taken her to see, including once at La Scala. “Don’t worry, my dear. You and the little girl are quite well provided for.”

She did not dignify this with a response.

“I want to apologize for my behavior last night,” said Jericho, cautiously slicing into some sort of soy patty. “I wasn’t myself.”

“I understand,” she murmured.

“You’ll have read the literature, I expect. You never go anywhere without prepping first, do you, my dear?” He coughed. “Yes. I imagine you’ve read up on dying, haven’t you? I seem to be suffering from rather a classic case of
timor mortis
, wouldn’t you say? Paranoid delusions involving the death of loved ones are not exactly uncommon, I believe. There’s this psychiatrist, Eisenstadt, who describes them as the brain’s frantic effort to reassure the dying individual that he’ll have his friends and family along on his journey.”

“You’re making that up.”

“The paranoid delusions?” He sipped his juice. “I have them, I assure you.”

“The literature.”

“Oh?”

“Eisenstadt, as I’m sure you know perfectly well, is the name of my therapist.”

Jericho pouted. “I had no idea you were consulting an expert on
timor mortis
. Tell me, my dear, are you ill? Anything I should be aware of?” A dreadful wink. “Planning to throw yourself over the cliff and keep me company when I’m gone?”

“Stop it.”

He nodded, and drank his juice. “Dak is coming today”

She remembered Dak, of course. Philip Agadakos had been Jericho’s friend, protégé, and aide-de-camp in the White House, at Defense, and at the Central Intelligence Agency—his tool, people said, in the dirtier jobs, although a few revisionist histories suggested that Dak had tried to restrain his boss from the worst of his potential excesses: suggestions, she suspected, planted by Dak and his supporters club. They had trained together at the Agency in the sixties, before Jericho had departed for his stint in the overt world, then begun his climb to the top. Bob Woodward’s book about their tangled careers had been titled
The A & A Boys
, a nickname from their early years. Jericho had very publicly hated it.

“That’s nice,” she said after a moment.

Jericho grinned nastily. “Yes. Nice. Very nice, the way old friends come to watch you die.”

“I thought the two of you were in regular touch.”

“You’ll have heard that from Sean, I expect. Oh, don’t look at me that way. I know about the two of you. Anno Domini, to be sure, but one is still not entirely without one’s contacts. Do you really think my son can have an extramarital affair without my learning of it?”

She was on her feet. “I am
not
having an affair with Sean!”

Hand on withered chest, clotted voice all wounded virtue: “Did I say you were?”

“You implied it!”

“Oh, sit down.” Back at his soy patty. “You look ridiculous, pretending you’re going to walk out on me. Sit.”

“No.”

But she did not bolt from the room. She stood there, watching him eat. Jericho had always had this ability to get under her skin with his clever pinpricks, teasing and teasing until she exploded. Sean was the same way. Rebecca saw him from time to time when she was in New York or he was in Washington; he was her principal source of news about the family. But whatever Jericho might think, the two of them were friends, nothing more; and if Sean, married and a father, occasionally hinted at a willingness to transform their friendship into something more intimate, Beck did her best to ignore his signals.

If Jericho was aware of her uneasiness, he offered no sign. He flipped the pages of his will, occasionally making a note with a red marker. There were hundreds of pages. She had never heard of a will that long, but she had never been that kind of rich.

“Sean thinks I’m a monster. Did you know that?” Another bite. “So does Cousin Maggie, for that matter.” The junior Senator from Vermont. “The two of them think people who do what I do—what I did—are the death of our nation. They think we’d be better off without our spies. Fancy that. The American idea destroyed by Jericho Ainsley” He peered at her over the rim of his glasses, putting on the donnishness she had once adored. “How do you stand on that one, actually? Am I a monster?”

“No,” she said, too shortly, not liking herself in this mood, and glad it was he who had broken the brief silence. She remembered that
Don Giovanni
was a tale of passion, betrayal, and murder.

“I am, though. A monster.” He seemed inordinately pleased. “I lived a monster, I’ll die a monster. America needs monsters. We’re the Morlocks. We stay underground, but we keep the machinery working. The rest of you get to pretend we don’t exist.” He coughed. “I’m a monster, and proud of it. Whereas you, my dear—”

She never found out whether an insult or a compliment was coming—he could do either in the same donnish tone—because, at that moment, the lights flickered, came back, went out. Both of them waited, staring at the ceiling.

The lights came on again.

“They’re just testing the system,” said Jericho. “No need to worry yet.”

“It’s the storm.”

He nodded vaguely. “Or an assault team getting ready.” He took up his papers again. “If they cut the mains, there’s a backup generator, but I suppose a proper team would shut that off, too, wouldn’t they?”

“Jericho—”

“Cousin Maggie was here last week, the bitch.” The golden eyes flashed with anger. Rebecca remembered how years ago, when his cousin was lieutenant governor of Vermont instead of a United States Senator, the mention of Margaret Ainsley’s name had moved him to near-violent furies. “Did the girls tell you? Only stayed a couple of hours. Probably wanted to make sure I’m really dying. Staff came along. By now I’m sure she has a poll in the field on whether to attend the funeral of a monster like me. Whether to eulogize me or just send flowers. See what the voters have to say. Dear Cousin Maggie’s running for the big chair next time. Her people will probably hit you up for money.”

Beck raised her hands in surrender. “I’m not going to get in the middle of your family quarrels, Jericho. You know that.”

“Of course I know. That’s not why you’re here.” A clever grin. “I need your help, my dear. I want to tell you where the guns are.”

“The guns?”

“I keep them in the basement. We’ll need a couple today. You, me, Pamela, I suppose. I don’t think Saint Audrey would take one. But the rest of us, I fear, must arm ourselves.” Beck was sitting again. She did not remember precisely when the hand had grabbed her wrist. His tone was conversational. “You see, my dear, Dak is coming to the house to make me tell him certain things. After that, he plans to kill me.”

CHAPTER 5
The Aide-de-Camp

(i)

Phil Agadakos arrived on the dot of four, just after a raggedy genius who, for a million dollars in small bills, was prepared to keep to himself his discovery of the secret code hidden in Jericho’s books, and a pair of furious activists in an indistinct cause who sprayed red paint on the side of the abbey van and tried to do the same to Pamela when she opened the door but wound up flat on their backs, angry faces full of Mace. Gibbering on the gravel, rubbing their eyes, they threatened to call the police. Pamela had Deputy Mundy’s card in the pocket of her fraying sweater. She handed the card to one of the writhing protesters.

No, said Audrey as the couple drove off down the drive. She did not want them arrested. The crumbling van looked better this way, defaced by a human hand rather than the random workings of road salt and acid rain.