The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (11 page)

BORN AGAIN

Assuming the UFO believers are right, and we are being infiltrated by a generally benign race of intelligent extraterrestrials, why have they come to Earth and what do they want of us?

In
“A Small Kindness,”
we saw the first meeting between Jeremy Keating and the alien Black Saint of the Third World, Kabete Rungawa.

Now we see the result of that meeting, and how it changes Keating’s life. Changes it? In a literal sense, it ends his life.

Which leads to the title of the story.

* * *

The restaurant’s sign,
out on the roadside, said
Gracious Country Dining.
There was no indication that just across the Leesburg Pike the gray unmarked headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency lay screened behind the beautifully wooded Virginia hills.

Jeremy Keating sat by force of old habit with his back to the wall. The restaurant was almost empty, and even if it had been bursting with customers, they would all have been agency people—almost. It was the
almost
that would have worried him in the old days.

Keating looked tense, expectant, a trimly built six-footer in his late thirties, hair still dark, stomach still flat, wearing the same kind of conservative bluish-gray three-piece suit that served almost as a uniform for agency men when they were safely home.

Only someone who had known him over the past five years would realize that the pain and the sullen, smoldering anger that had once lit his eyes were gone now. In their place was something else, equally intense but lacking the hate that had once fueled the flames within him. Keating himself did not fully understand what was happening to him. Part of what he felt now was excitement, a fluttering, almost giddy anticipation. But there was fear inside him, too, churning in his guts.

It had been easy to get into the agency; it would not be so easy getting out.

He was halfway finished with his fruit juice when Jason Lyle entered the quiet dining room and threaded his way through the empty tables toward Keating. Although he had never been a field agent, Lyle moved cautiously, walking on the balls of his feet, almost on tiptoe. Watching him, Keating thought that there must be just as many booby traps in the corridors of bureaucratic power as there are in the field. You don’t get to be section chief by bulling blindly into trouble.

Keating rose as Lyle came to his table and extended his hand. They exchanged meaningless greetings, smiling at each other and commenting on the unbelievably warm weather, predicted an early spring and lots of sunshine, a good sailing season.

When their waitress came, Lyle ordered a vodka martini; Keating asked for another glass of grapefruit juice. The last time Keating had seen Jason Lyle, the section chief had ordered him to commit a murder.
Terminate with extreme prejudice
was the term used. Keating had received such orders, and obeyed them willingly, half a dozen times over the previous four years. Until this last one, a few weeks ago.

Now Lyle sat across the small restaurant table, in this ersatz rustic dining room with its phony log walls and gingham tablecloths, and gave Keating the same measured smile he had used all those other times. But Lyle’s eyes were wary, probing, trying to see what had changed in Keating.

Lyle was handsome in a country-club, old-money way: thick silver hair impeccably coiffed, his chiseled features tanned and taut from years of tennis and sailing. He was vain enough to wear contact lenses instead of bifocals, and tough enough to order death for his own agents, once he thought they were dangerous to the organization—or to himself.

Keating listened to the banalities and let his gaze slide from Lyle to the nearby windows where the bright Virginia sunshine was pouring in. He knew that Lyle had carefully reviewed all the medical reports, all the debriefing sessions and psychiatric examinations that he had undergone in the past three weeks.

They had wrung his brain dry with their armory of drugs and electronics. But there was one fact Keating had kept from them, simply because they had never in their deepest probes thought to ask the question. One simple fact that had turned Keating’s life upside down: the man that he had been ordered to assassinate was not a human being. He had not been born on Earth.

Keating nodded at the right places in Lyle’s monologue and volunteered nothing. The waitress took their lunch order, went away, and came back eventually with their food.

Finally, as he picked up his fork and stared down at what the menu had promised as sliced Virginia ham, Lyle asked as casually as a snake gliding across a meadow:

“So tell me, Jeremy, just what happened out there in Athens?”

Keating knew that the answers he gave over this luncheon would determine whether he lived or died.

“I got a vision of a different world, Jason,” he answered honestly. “I’m through with killing. I want out.”

Lyle’s eyes flashed, whether at Keating’s use of his first name or his intended resignation or his mention of a vision, it was impossible to tell.

“It’s not that simple, you know,” he said.

“I know.” And Keating did. Lyle had to satisfy himself that this highly trained agent had not been turned around by the Russians. Or, worse still, by the fledgling World Government.

“Why?” Lyle asked mildly. “Why do you want to quit?”

Keating closed his eyes for a moment, trying to decide on the words he must use. Each syllable must be chosen with scrupulous care. His life hung in the balance.

But in that momentary darkness, alone with only his own inner vision, Keating saw the man he had been, the life he had led. The years as an ordinary Foreign Service officer, a very minor cog in the giant bureaucratic machinery of the Department of State, moving from one embassy to another every two years. He saw Joanna, young and loving and alive, laughing with him on the bank of the Seine, dancing with him on the roof garden of the hotel that steaming-hot Fourth of July in Delhi, smiling at him through her exhaustion as she lay in the hospital bed with their newborn son at her breast.

And he saw her being torn apart by the raging mob attacking the embassy at Tunis. While Qaddafi’s soldiers stood aside and watched, grinning. Saw his infant son screaming his life away as typhus swept the besieged embassy. Saw himself giving his own life, his body and mind and soul—gladly—to avenge their deaths. The training, where his anger and hatred had been honed to a cutting edge. The missions to track and kill the kind of men whom he blamed for the murder of his wife and child. Missions that always began in Lyle’s office, in the calm, climate-controlled sanctuary of the section chief, and his measured reptilian smile.

Keating opened his eyes. “You let them take me, that first mission, didn’t you?”

The admission was clear on Lyle’s surprised face. “What are you talking about?”

“My first mission for you, the job in Jakarta. You allowed them to find me, didn’t you? You tipped them off. Those interrogation sessions, that slimy little colonel of theirs with his razor—he was the final edge on my training, wasn’t he?”

“That’s crazy,” Lyle snapped. “We shot our way in there and saved your butt, didn’t we?”

Keating nodded. “At the proper moment.”

“That was years ago.”

But I still carry the scars,
Keating replied silently.
They still burn
.

Lyle fluttered a hand in the air, as if waving away the past. Leaning forward across the table slightly, he said in a lowered voice, “I need to know, Jeremy. What happened to you in Athens? Why do you suddenly want to quit?”

Keating did not close his eyes again. He had seen enough of the past, and the shame of it seethed inside him. “Let’s just say that I experienced a religious conversion.”

“A
what?”

“I’ve been reborn.” Keating smiled, realizing the aptness of it. “I have renounced my old life.”

For the first time in the years Keating had known the man, Lyle made no attempt to mask his feelings.

“Born again? Fat chance! I’ve heard a lot of strange stories in my time, but this one—”

“Is the truth.”

“Just tell me what happened to you in Athens,” Lyle insisted. “I’ve got to know. It’s important to both of us.”

“So that you can decide whether to terminate me?”

“We don’t do that,” Lyle snapped.

“No, of course not. But I just might happen to have a car accident, or take an overdose of something.”

Lyle glowered at him. “You hold a lot of very sensitive information inside your skull, Jeremy. We have to protect you.”

“And yourself. It wouldn’t look good on your record to have a trained assassin going over to the other side.”

The section chief actually smiled with relief, and Keating could see that Lyle was grateful that the subject had finally been brought out into the open.

“Have you, Jeremy?” he asked in a whisper. “Gone over?”

“Which side would I go to? The Russians? But we’re working under the table with them these days, aren’t we? Neither the Russians nor the Americans want the World Government running things. We’re both trying to bring the World Government down before it gets a firm control over us.”

“The World Government,” Lyle said slowly, testingly.

Keating shook his head. “If I admit to that, I’m a dead man, and we both know it. I’m not that foolish, Jason.”

Lyle said nothing, but looked unconvinced.

“There’s the Third World,” Keating went on. “They love the World Government, with its one-nation, one-vote system. They’re using the World Government to bleed the rich nations white; you told me that yourself. But then, the rich nations are almost all white to begin with, aren’t they?”

“This is no time for jokes!”

“A sense of humor helps, Jason. Believe me. But you can’t picture me working for a bunch of blacks and browns and yellows, can you? That’s so completely against your inner convictions that you can’t imagine a fellow WASP going over to the Third World.”

“Perhaps I can imagine it, at that,” Lyle said, with dawning apprehension lighting his eyes. “Your assignment was to terminate Rungawa.”

“Ah, yes,” Keating said. “Kabete Rungawa. The Black Saint of the Third World. The spiritual leader of the poor nations.”

Lyle almost spat. “That old bastard is as spiritual as . . .”

“As Gandhi,” Keating said, sudden steel in his voice. “And as powerful politically. That’s why you want him terminated.”

Lyle stared at Keating for long, silent moments before saying, “Rungawa.
He
turned you around! Jesus Christ, you fell for that black bastard’s mealy-mouthed propaganda line.”

“Yes, I did,” said Keating. “Not in the way you’re thinking, though. Rungawa is quite a person. He made me see that murdering him would be a horrible mistake. He opened my eyes.”

“You admit it?”

“Why not? It’s already in the debriefing reports, isn’t it?”

The glitter in Lyle’s cold blue eyes told Keating that it was.

“But here’s something that isn’t in the reports, Jason. Something so utterly fantastic that you won’t believe it.”

The section chief leaned forward in anticipation. Hearing secrets was his trade.

“Kabete Rungawa is an extraterrestrial.”

“What?”

“He looks human, but he’s actually from another world.”

Lyle’s mouth hung open for a second, then clicked shut. “Are you joking, Jeremy, or what?” he asked angrily.

“That’s what he told me,” Keating said.

“And you believed him?”

Keating felt a smile cross his lips as he recalled that cold, rainy night in front of the Parthenon. His mission had been to terminate Rungawa, and he had finally tracked the Black Saint to the Acropolis.

“He was very convincing,” Keating said softly. “Very convincing.”

Lyle looked down at his untouched lunch, then back into Keating’s eyes. “Jeremy, either you’re lying through your teeth or you’ve gone around the bend.”

“It’s the truth, Jason.”

“You want me to believe that you
think
it’s the truth.”

“Would I tell such a crazy story if it weren’t the truth?”

The section chief seemed to suddenly realize that he held a knife and fork in his hands. He attacked the Virginia ham vigorously as he said, “Yes, I think you might. A completely wild story might make us believe that you’ve flipped out, might convince us that you ought to be retired.”

“To a mental institution?”

“This isn’t Russia,” Lyle snapped. But then, looking up from his platter at Keating again, he added, “A good long rest might be what you need, though. You wouldn’t be the first field agent to suffer from burnout.”

“A permanent rest?” Keating asked.

Lyle turned his attention back to his food. “Just relax and eat your lunch. We’ll take care of you, Jeremy. The agency takes care of its own.”

Keating took the afternoon off and drove far out into the wooded Virginia hills, without any conscious destination, merely drove through the late March sunshine in his agency-furnished inconspicuous gray Ford. He did not have to be told that it was bugged; that anything said inside the car would be faithfully recorded back at headquarters. And there were tracking transmitters built into the car, naturally. Even if he drove it to Patagonia, satellite sensors would spot him as plainly as they count missile silos in Siberia.

And he knew, just as surely, that he expected a contact, a message, a set of instructions or some sort of help from the entity he had refrained from killing that rainy night atop the Acropolis.

How can I be so certain that he’ll help me? Keating asked himself as he drove. There’s no doubt in my mind that he is what he said he is: an extraterrestrial, a creature from another world, sent here to keep us from blowing ourselves to kingdom come with our nuclear toys. But will he help
me?
Am I important enough to his plans to be rescued? Does he know what Lyle is going to do to me? Does he give a damn?

No answers came out of the sky as Keating drove blindly toward Charlottesville. It was not until he turned onto Interstate 64 and saw the signs for Monticello that he realized where he was heading.