Upon A Pale Horse (16 page)

They drove in silence for a few blocks, and then she slid her hand over his. “I’m sorry about your friend. And your brother. It completely sucks, and you have every right to be angry at the universe.”

“I’m not angry. Okay, that’s a lie. Maybe I am. Just a little.”

“If you’d hurry up and get to the hotel, I may have just what the doctor ordered to take your mind off that, mister angry man.” She squeezed his fingers, and suddenly the tension seemed to seep out of him.

“Thank God I met you. I guess I can thank serendipity for that.”

“No, you can thank the Four Seasons and Absolut vodka.” She gave him a sly smile. “Hey, doesn’t this thing go any faster?”

Jeffrey made it back to the hotel in record time.

He cleaned out the condo over that weekend, and by Sunday night his boxes had been delivered and the last of Keith’s hauled off. Jeffrey and Monica ate pizza and drank Chianti while he finished arranging his possessions to his liking, and after dinner they settled on the couch with a second bottle, the stereo playing in the background as he cuddled with her. When the CD finished, she touched one of the three guitars he kept in the living room with a bare foot and leaned her head back, kissing his neck.

“So do you play those?”

“I’ve been known to. Although not recently.”

“And you’re not going to serenade me? What kind of gyp is that?”

“You really want to hear me play? It sounds more like a cat in heat than music…”

“I don’t believe you. I bet you’re great.”

“Wow. And here I thought I was out of ways I could disappoint you.”

She swatted at him playfully. “Come on. Play something.”

He groaned, and then reached over and grabbed the Stratocaster. It was hopelessly out of tune, so he took a few moments to get it close, and then began picking a melody, the unamplified strings sounding twangy and hollow.

“That’s not as impressive as it would be if it was plugged in,” he admitted.

“Don’t you have an amplifier? Or can you hook it up through the stereo?”

“My brother had one. It’s in one of the closets. Are you feeling masochistic or something?”

“No more than usual. What – are you afraid you’ll wake the neighbors?”

“Not really. It’s just that playing an electric guitar alone, without a band or anything, is a lonely kind of thing. More for doing when nobody’s around.”

“Hogwash. Look at the White Stripes. Just a guitar and a female drummer. Hey, I can keep a beat.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“I’m serious. I think guitar players are super sexy. Rowrrr.”

“Let me get the amp.”

He returned a minute later toting a small Marshall combo tube amplifier and a cord. After plugging it in and connecting the guitar, he slipped a pick from the plastic holder Keith had affixed to the top of the amp and fiddled with the guitar knobs.

“Damn. It isn’t cooperating.”

“Are you sure you know how to play it?”

“Mockery will get you nowhere, my dear,” he declared, then unplugged the Strat and set it back on the stand, and grabbed the other guitar – a Les Paul junior.

A burst of distorted static flooded the room and he quickly turned down the amp’s master volume, then repeated his tuning experiment and turned the guitar up.

“Remember. You asked for it. I play for free, but I charge big bucks to stop.”

He strummed a few chords, and then began playing, working through a few minutes of Hendrix’s “Little Wing” before turning the guitar down and setting it aside.

“Wow, you really are good. At guitar, too…” she said, and then threw her arms around him and kissed him long and hard.

He came out of the bedroom later and shut down the amp, carried what remained of the wine into the kitchen, and turned off the lights, tired and content to be home at long last.

The next day was light, his big project put to bed except for some detail work, and he was able to get out of the office at a decent hour. Monica begged off coming over so she could do laundry, having spent every night with Jeffrey that week.

He changed into sweats and considered going to the gym he’d spied three blocks away, but managed to find some computer work to do instead, dealing with some of the remaining loose ends from his old firm. As the evening wore on, he began to get hungry, and he decided to try dinner at a small pub he’d passed one street over. The burger was passable and the draft beer convincingly semi-flat as only British pubs could serve it. After an hour watching soccer he didn’t care about, he made his way back to the condo for an early night by himself.

Once inside, his eye moved to the Strat, resting proudly on its stand in the corner, and he repeated his experiment with the amp. Nothing – none of the pickups seemed to work. He jiggled the jack, but all he got for his trouble was crackling.

Frustrated, he went to the kitchen and returned a few moments later with a small tool box. Grateful to have a project to occupy his time, he carefully loosened the strings, pulled the volume and tone knobs off the pots, and then set to work on the faceplate with a Phillips head screwdriver, careful not to strip the screws as he removed them.

When the last one was free, he slowly raised the plastic cover to see what the problem was – likely a broken connection by the pickup selector switch. He peered into the tangle of wires and immediately spotted the issue: The selector switch wires had been cut.

And there was a piece of paper folded up and stuffed into the wiring.

Jeffrey pulled it from the tangle and set the guitar down, and then unfolded the note. His eyes widened when he saw his brother’s handwriting – a message from the dead. It was short and to the point, and as he read it his pulse accelerated by twenty beats per minute.

Jeffrey. If you’re reading this, it means they got me. Sorry to lay this on you, but you’re the only one I can turn to.
Do not trust anyone
– this is deep shit, and the people who killed me are serious. Assume your phone, computer, car are bugged, as well as your apartment and your work. Again – do not trust anyone. Your life is at risk if you do. Go see Professor Samuel Norton in Virginia – Google him, but always use a public computer. Then get to Zurich. Everything’s in a box there at Soderbergh Bank on Bahnhoffstrasse. Box 291, Acct #42-1844. You’re on the account. Password is the account number followed by our first dog’s name. Good luck, and be careful, Jeffrey. You have to stop them – it’s literally the end of the world. Burn this after you read it – don’t write anything down, or you’re a dead man. Take this seriously – I don’t know how they got me, but my death should be all the proof you need. Good luck. You’re going to need it.

EIGHTEEN

Them

In spite of it being a moderate sixty-nine degrees in the condo, Jeffrey’s forehead broke into a sweat as he reread the missive, a deep sense of dread creeping through him at the obvious – that his brother had known he might be killed, that he knew who was trying to kill him. Part of him rejected the notion that Keith had been murdered, and then his world tilted when he recalled how his brother had died – with an entire jet full of people.

If someone had really killed him, they’d blown a jetliner out of the sky.

Jeffrey closed his eyes and confirmed that the account number, bank name, and the professor’s name appeared clearly in his memory. He stood, shifting the guitar onto the cushion next to him, and headed into the kitchen. He opened a drawer and found a lighter next to some black-out candles and woodenly lit the note as instructed, then dropped the flaming paper into the sink and watched it crinkle into gray ash. After running the water and rinsing the evidence down the garbage disposal, he returned to the guitar and spliced the wires back together with a twist of each one, not bothering to solder them, but instead reassembling the faceplate and securing it with the screws, his mind racing.

What Keith had suggested was impossible; and yet he was dead. In a time of heightened security and rampant paranoia, a plane had been incinerated as easily as Keith’s note, and nobody was the wiser. He’d followed the news on the investigation as recently as that morning at work, and the prevailing official theory was that a fuel tank had somehow received a stray electric charge and ignited, causing an instantaneous chain reaction and a massive explosion.

Except that he now had an assertion that the explanation was a farce. That the destruction was apparently deliberate, targeted, and that whoever had engineered it had seen no problem with killing hundreds in order to get one man.

His brother.

Who apparently either knew about, or had stumbled across, some kind of scheme that was so big it would change the world.

A chill ran up his spine as he processed the rest of the information – which implied that whoever had killed his brother not only had the power to mount a successful cover-up of the true cause of the plane explosion, but could apparently also mount surveillance on him – simply because he was Keith’s brother.

There weren’t too many organizations that could blow a jet to dust and get away with it, and that had the capacity to bug everything in Jeffrey’s universe. He could only think of one. The government. Which was unbelievable. The U.S. didn’t go around blowing up its citizens.

Did it?

If that speculation was correct, Jeffrey was being asked from the grave to take on the most powerful entity in the world. To stop…what, he didn’t even know. How he was expected to do it, he also didn’t know. But his brother had written the note, which meant that he’d believed it was possible – Keith was no idiot, and had been a strategic thinker in the purest sense of the word. So he’d seen some way to avert this supposed catastrophe, and had died trying. And had now passed the burden to Jeffrey.

He reattached the strings while he teetered on the brink of full-scale panic, outwardly calm but in reality skittering along a razor’s edge of delirium. In a blinding instant, he’d gone from being the luckiest man in the world to one of the damned, burdened with knowledge that was impossible…and yet which had to be true.

Jeffrey tried to slow his thoughts. Mechanically he tuned the guitar, mainly to occupy his hands so he wouldn’t run screaming from the room. He strummed a series of chords and then put the guitar back on the stand, the message’s implications still slamming into him as he tried to cope.

If he assumed it was actually true, he was screwed. Worse than screwed. His brother’s death was all the proof of that conclusion he needed. If they, whoever they specifically were, had been willing to kill Keith and the rest of the innocents, why would they stop at killing him too? Why hadn’t they already killed him, just to be safe?

The answer popped into his head with a certitude that rocked him. Because he didn’t know anything, and they didn’t want to arouse any more suspicion. Or alternatively, because they thought he might know something, but had no idea how much, or who else he might have told.

His brother’s words seemed like a taunt. Trust no one. Everything is bugged.

Which was insane. A lunatic’s conspiracy theory seeped in paranoia and delusion.

Except for the plane.