Nameless Night (26 page)

Gill paused for effect. “Adding to the mystery surrounding Commander Hope’s untimely disappearance . . .” And then he went on and on about the tragic end of the mission and the years and years of hypothesizing and conspiracy theories which followed, burying the media in a blizzard of election-year sound bites. Half a dozen hands were raised. Gill nodded in the manner of a parent with unruly children. “Naturally, my office has taken every available step to assure that the fingerprints are genuine and not part of some elaborate hoax.” The dull roar raised itself to a full-throated rumble. “The FBI crime laboratory assures us that the fingerprints were made sometime within the past sixty days.” He held up a hand.

“Apparently the age of the fingerprints can be determined by the amount of oil still clinging to the impressions.”

At this point, it sounded as if a small plane had landed in the room. “Furthermore . . .” He waited for the buzz to subside. “Furthermore . . . my office has obtained independent, firsthand cooperation as to when the prints were made and by whom.”

He pointed to the white-haired woman in the first row. “Barbara?”

“Do we take it, then, that you have Mr. Hope in custody?”

“You do not,” Gill answered quickly. “To my knowledge, Mr.

Hope has no present and no pending criminal charges against him. Once again, as far as we know . . .” He let it trail off. Wolf Blitzer from CNN was next.

“Do you know where Mr. Hope is at this time?”

“No . . . we do not.”

“Would you care to share this independent source with us?”

“Not at this time. As I said earlier, this is an ongoing . . .”

It went on and on. Kirsten hid a smirk behind her hand at the thought of tomorrow morning’s headline. hope is gone! JACOBSON THR EW A FIVEdollar tip on the bar. Bob followed suit, drawing a “thank you” nod from the bartender. As he shrugged himself into his coat, Jacobson cast a glance back over his shoulder. Bruce Gill was still answering questions on the plasma screen over the bar. He grabbed the brass door handle and stepped out into the street.

The air was fresh and warm. In the city, the cherry blossoms were beginning to bloom. Jacobson lingered just outside the pub while Bob held the door for an entering couple and then stepped out himself.

“Nice,” he said.

“The weather?” Jacobson asked with a wry grin.

“All of it,” Bob said.

They began walking down the street together, heading east toward the river.

“I can’t remember the guy’s name. I think he was a famous writer or something.” Jacobson tried to recall a name. “Anyway, this guy spent some time out in Hollywood, and when he came back he issued the famous pronouncement: ‘Nobody knows anything.’ ” “Golding or Goldman . . . something like that.”

Jacobson nodded. “I believe you’re right.”

“And you figure that’s where we are?”

“Exactly.”

“The Florida situation needs to disappear.”

“It’s already gone.”

“Really?”

“Our Mr. Howard has been accounted for.”

“Oh?”

“Mr. G took care of things.”

Bob stopped walking. “After what happened?”

“He’s still the best. He’s been doing wet work for fifteen years and never raised a ripple.” Before Bob could protest, Jacobson went on. “Not only is he as interested in his own security as we are in ours, but he actually welcomed the opportunity to clean up after . . . after the last unfortunate circumstance.”

“I hate loose ends.”

“Look at this as an opportunity to clean one up.”

“But . . .”

Jacobson stopped walking. “Look, Bob,” he said. “I don’t want to sound pontifical or anything . . .”

Bob averted his face and sighed. He felt blood rushing to his cheeks as he remembered how much he hated Jacobson’s little lectures.

“You know . . . I think that’s one of the hidden perils of success.”

“What’s that?”

“You forget how you got there.” He waved a hand in the air. “You forget about all the work and all the compromises it took, and after a while, you start feeling like you were destined to be where you are . . . like it was God’s will or something that you be an undersecretary in the Defense Department.”

“Is there a point here, Ron?”

“The point is, Bob . . . you and I are where we are today because of what we did back then and for no other reason. Because we chose to ignore an engineering report.” He sighed. “An overzealous engineering report.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Jacobson smiled. “Because of what we didn’t do, then,” he amended. Bob opened his mouth to speak, but Jacobson cut him off. “I try not to delude myself that I was appointed to the highest civilian post in the National Security Agency because I was the most viable candidate.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “The trees were full of people who were at least as qualified as we were.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Bob repeated.

“You must not be Catholic.”

“What’s that got to—” “The nuns back in grammar school spent a lot of time making sure we understood that omissive sins were the same as comissive sins.”

“I must have missed that lesson.”

“Point is . . .” He hesitated. “Point is, we suspected the tiles weren’t right. We had an engineering report to the effect that the tiles were a liability aaand . . .”—he stretched out the word—“. . . and we chose to ignore it.”

“Eight people died,” Bob whispered. “Eight people.”

Jacobson kept talking, louder now. “Accidents happen. Nobody was supposed to get killed.” He cut the air with his hand. “At most we expected to lose a few tiles. Lost tiles would have meant a halt to the program. Nobody ever imagined the shuttle was going to spread itself all over East Texas.”

“Ten people if you count Howard and Barber.”

“Eight, ten . . . it doesn’t matter, the point is, we were induced to look the other way.”

“Induced?”

“With promises of promotion . . . which . . .”

Jacobson was wagging a finger now. Bob wanted to break it off.

“. . . we have mined for everything it was worth. Ten years ago we were a couple of midlevel functionaries on a NASA project. These days we have everything . . . more money, more power, more perks than we could ever have imagined.” He swept his arm again. “And all because of that choice we made.”

Bob thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. His face was grim.

They reached the corner of Whitman and Bridge. Bob lived four blocks to the right. They stopped. Jacobson took up the thread.

“My friend is going to take care of Mr. Hope once and for all.”

“Is that necessary?”

“Unfortunately.”

“How so?”

“There’s another complication.”

“Oh?”

“Our Mr. Howard . . .”

“Late of Cocoa Beach.”

“The same.”

“What about him?”

“At the very end of his tenure . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . he claimed the woman had been keeping a diary.”

“Did he say where this item might be found?”

“He never got the chance. Apparently, he was quite distraught . . . babbling . . .”

“And?”

“Seems he made a move to escape and things got unfortunate from there.”

“And this diary hasn’t turned up.”

“It was not among the personal effects.”

“What about the wife?”

“The wife and daughters have gone missing. They left Florida on a Greyhound bus the day before Mr. Howard’s tenure came to an end.”

“A bus to . . . ?”

“Fayetteville, Arkansas.”

Bob waited. He remembered how much he hated Jacobson’s pregnant pauses.

“. . . where they never arrived,” Jacobson went on. “Several passengers agree that they never reboarded the bus after a rest stop in South Georgia. The trail goes cold from there. She must have had somebody waiting.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“Not in any meaningful way. If she knew anything earth-shattering, we would have heard about it by now.”

“Something like that would have a great deal of prurient value even if she didn’t know anything meaningful.”

“Yes . . . it would. And she didn’t.”

“And you’re thinking Mr. Hope might be in some way . . .”

“He was in the neighborhood.”

“Two birds with one stone.”

“Hopefully.”

Bob stretched his arms out to the side and rolled his neck.

“It may be time to institute your Walter Hybridge idea,” he said. Jacobson smiled. “There were only three of us in project management. Engineering reports came directly to us. Walter was one . . .”—he craned his neck as if inspecting the street—“and the other two are standing on this corner.”

“Unfortunate for Walter.”

“But good for us.”

“You’ll keep me posted?” Bob asked.

Jacobson chuckled. “From now on, you’ll be able to read about it in the papers.”

“Grim tragedy in Florida.”

“Hope is about to go missing again.”

“And Walter Hybridge’s papers?”

“A number of documents are about to surface. Documents that suggest Walter may have compromised himself.”

“Pity,” Bob muttered.

They shook hands and walked off in opposite directions.

35

They were gone. He felt it the minute he jumped the gate and saw the backyard. The yard darts were missing . . . so were the broke-back swings and the pool and every other scrap of crap that was lying around in the grass when he’d been here last night. The yard was immaculate, like some neater, cleaner family had moved into 432 Water Street overnight.

Randy took two tentative steps forward. The lanai came into view. What just last night had been a jumble of toys and trash was now clean and empty. His heart sank. His skin tingled as he crossed the lawn, let himself silently into the lanai, and mounted the back stairs. He pulled off his T-shirt and wrapped it around his hand as he tried the back door. Wasn’t even latched, let alone locked.

Randy pushed the door open and waited. The silence was cavernous. He climbed the trio of stairs and stood leaning against the kitchen counter waiting for his eyes to become adjusted to the darkness. His nose twitched. The place reeked of bleach. A couple of minutes and he could make out the walls, which was fortunate because walls were the only things left in the house. The furniture was gone. The carpets had been torn from the floors and carted off. Every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen was empty. He opened the door at the far end of the kitchen. The garage was empty of cars and everything else people keep in garages. Even the trash cans were empty, hosed out . . . clean as a whistle. He crept upstairs. Same deal. Nothing left at all. What had once been the master bedroom turned out to be the source of the bleach smell. So strong it made his eyes run. Dark blotches on the bedroom floor forced him to turn his eyes away. Randy’s mind raced. Had they fled? Or had the woman been right? Was the charade, whatever that was, simply over? He returned to the kitchen and let himself out.

He crossed the lawn to the shop building and walked to the side door. Same deal. The place had been completely cleaned out. His eyes dropped to the floor, where long moon shadows crisscrossed the concrete. The grate was in place.

He crossed quickly and dropped to one knee. Lacing his fingers through the metal grate, he pulled hard and immediately fell over backward. The grate weighed about a third of what it should. Must have been aluminum or something.

The black metal stairs led nearly straight down. At the bottom, he found himself standing on a concrete slab. Poured-concrete walls hugged his shoulders. The black metal door in front of his face gave the impression he was about to enter a bank vault. He said a silent prayer and grabbed the handle, hoping they were holed up inside, sitting back eating Ritz crackers, drinking bottled water, waiting for nuclear winter to end, but once again, his instincts already knew better.

The door opened on silent hinges. He felt around the edges until he found a light switch. He was about to flip it but changed his mind, first stepping all the way inside, then closing the door, before hitting the lights.

What he had imagined to be a single room was, in fact, three separate ten-by-ten spaces. The vestibule, where he presently stood, doubled as a pantry; the walls were shelves and filled floor to ceiling with nonperishable foodstuffs, pork and beans to powdered milk. To the left was a sleeping room. Six cots bolted to the walls. Every available empty space packed with supplies of some kind. A single overhead light cast deep shadows into the corners of each room. Tacked on the wall was a poster. air raid shelter, it read. Randy moved in close. In the lower right-hand corner, the poster was dated 1959.

Directly in front of his position sat a table and chairs. A small sink occupied the right-hand wall. A curtained alcove contained a chemical toilet. But it was the table that commanded his attention. She hadn’t bothered to hide it. It sat there on the table with an outdated can of green beans holding it down. Randy walked over to the table and sat. Coupla hundred pages anyway. Looked like she’d been writing a novel by hand. He removed the can and turned the manuscript to face him. He read the top of the first page. Sounded like a message in a bottle. I’ve been planning for this moment for years. If you’re reading this, we’ve gone, it began . Several cross-outs followed. One of the partially obliterated phrases had read, or at least we tried to leave. He took up reading where the corrections left off. My name is Isobel Howard. I have lived in this house for the past seven years with my daughters, Tracy and Nicole, and a man whose real name I do not know. Randy thought he might have heard a noise upstairs in the shop. He held his breath and waited. When the noise did not repeat itself, he scooped the manuscript under his arm and started for the door. That’s when the photograph fell to the floor facedown. Randy bent to retrieve it. On the back, written in a woman’s handwriting, Wes was all it said. He killed the lights.

36

Memory’s a funny thing. Everything transpires in the present tense. A second later, however, it’s past tense and, as such, becomes immediately subject to both visions and revisions. Amazing how that happens. How the past and the present get mixed together into a stew of sights and sounds upon which we selectively attach the title “reality” . . . meaning that which actually happened as opposed to that which we made up about it later, when “in reality” we have no means whatsoever of keeping the “real” and the “imagined” separate from each other. Fact is . . . human beings don’t possess a feedback mechanism for that sort of thing . . . we have no way of knowing for sure what actually happened in a given situation as opposed to how we later edited it to suit ourselves, because then and later are sharing the studio apartment of our minds with nothing but a nanosecond of time sitting between them on the futon of memory.