Stuart had come home to stay through the trial before he went to prison. Clothing of his still hung in the closet. In a little drawer in the bedside table, I found a nine-millimeter automatic with a full clip and a cartridge in the chamber. An empty clip and a box of ammunition lay beside it. I left it where it was, thinking I might need it.
He had also left a good infotel set. Eager for news, I found financial channels, sports channels, foreign channels, too many channels. Most of them were interactive, begging me to click for footnotes, video clips, references, data I didn’t want, more than enough to keep me at the monitor through my long days there following reports on the Starker case and wondering which to believe.
The stated sources were commonly “backgrounders” from nameless “high officials.” Most of them evoked indignant denials from actual high officials, but they kept me puzzled and appalled. Lydia had been a cunning terrorist, so one story ran, the head of a secret cell. Searching her apartment, the FBI had found papers confirming the existence of her underground gang, which called itself Shadow Hand.
The first mission of her cell had been to eliminate Alden Kirk, who had learned too much about the group. A typed note signed Shadow King read Congrats on K. disposal. The other known member was Kirk’s half-brother, Clayton Barstow. Authorities believed that he had infiltrated the group and killed Lydia to avenge Kirk’s death.
Director Garlesh had refused to comment on the story, but Barstow was a fugitive now, on the most-wanted list. The FBI was circulating his description and a photo Pepperlake had taken when he joined the Freeman staff. The Bureau wanted him not only for the Starker murder but for what he might know about the Shadow gang. If captured, he was expected to testify in return for a plea bargain to save his life.
Those were strange days. Beth went to her college job. McAdam spent the mornings in his gardens, most of the afternoons at work on his history of slavery. I stayed in my room, alone with the infonet, jumping in startlement at every unexpected sound, trying to make some sense of the stories and my predicament.
Staring day after day of contradictory news reports and sage comments on the unrest in middle America, I tried and failed to make sense of what I heard. I left the monitor for the bathroom, for coffee I didn’t want, or to pace the room like a rat in a trap. I skimmed McAdam’s books about Kentucky pioneers and African slavers till I was sick of history. I thought of Marion and Tim, longing for something like Rob’s cryptophones, for any way to have word reach them safely.
Beth and her father gave me a few hours of relief when they were at home for meals. Her desperate tension was only half concealed, but he seemed philosophical.
“Don’t sweat it.” He made mint juleps before dinner, generous with the bourbon. “We’ve placed our bets. All we can do is wait for the draw.”
Waiting was hard. I was numb from the shock and pain of Lydia’s death, and haunted with the riddles of it. Who had slaughtered her? How had she really known who killed Alden? Was that knowledge, or some suspicion of it, the trouble she had hinted at, and the reason she died? I pondered those confusing speculations on the infonet and pressed Beth and her father for clues they were never able to give me.
“The world’s an ugly mess,” he muttered one evening over his julep. “I call myself a historian. I ought to understand our crisis better than I do, but I try to blame it on a shift of paradigms due to the information revolution.”
I asked what he meant.
“When something baffles me, I go back to basics.” He contemplated his julep, took a solemn sip, and nodded in appreciation before he went on. “Quoting myself, I like to say we’re all bom naked screaming individuals with no concerns except ourselves, but trapped in the eternal human dilemma. The species is gregarious. We can’t survive outside the social group, the family, the tribe, the nation—or often now the corporation or the street gang or the outlaw militia.
“That’s the new paradigm. In our information age, the group has gone global, and we individuals have to fight multiplied pressures and controls. The American worker has to compete with a hungry peasant in China. A master terrorist can work his puppets to plant a car bomb anywhere. Our own bureaucrats have shut Roy’s company down because they’re blind to change.”
I had to ask if his new paradigm had murdered my brother or Lydia.
“Who knows?” He shrugged and thought about it. “The old war goes on, the private self against society, but information science is a brand new weapon in the hands of restless insurgents against the past. We’re herd animals. Instinct drives us to follow our leaders, now the new electronic overlords. The old power kings are all in danger from any malcontent who can grasp the information blade.” “So what?” Beth frowned. “What do you expect?”
“All your brother feared.” With a glance at me, he raised his glass as if to toast Alden’s memory. “New power brokers will be springing up everywhere, driven by a thousand conflicting interests and agendas, attacking every old authority. It could mean—” He paused to shake his head. “Revolution.”
“Revolution?” Her voice quickened. “Here?”
“Everywhere. We’re global now.” He gestured at the wall. “An alarming word when you recall the Bastille or Red October, but our own American Revolution was rather civilized. This new one will be quite a different game. I hope not so bloody.”
“You expect disorder?”
“Tm afraid. We have the information dagger, forged by men like Roy but lost beyond control. We have those who will use it, and those who would kill to stop its use. The old order is in terror of the new. I’d expect disorder in between.” He looked at me. “Your brother’s killers, and Lydia’s, might be found among those electronic rebels, if you knew where to look.”
But of course I didn’t know.
Trying, perhaps, to ease our strain, he talked about his history of slavery, The first volume, on slavery in the Old World, was finished and ready for the printer. The second, on the slave trade, had gone to his editors. He was spending his afternoons on the third, slavery in America.
“On a damn computer,” he muttered. “Because I can’t find anybody able to take dictation.”
Orinda had served the juleps with straws, the glasses cradled in bowls of ice. He sucked at his, with an appreciative nod for her, and turned to me.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life on the project. It has changed me. I believed in human progress, back when I began. I thought we’d put the worst of our history behind us. I was wrong.” Moodily, he shook his head. “When you know the absolute inhumanity of the slave hunters, the slave ships, the slave markets, the slave drivers—” His face twisted. “It haunts me. It has soured my view of humankind. I know too much history to expect anything better to come.”
The hunch of his lean old shoulders was almost a shudder, but after a brief silence he gave Beth an affectionate nod.
“Being younger, my kids have brighter view7s. Beth wrote a thesis on American utopias. Rob has always dreamed of some new gadget that would transform our unhappy Earth to an instant paradise. Stuart would lead a new revolution if he could.”
He paused to peer sharply at me.
“Your brother Alden fell somewhere in between, neither a crazy optimist nor the pessimist I’ve become. He saw terror growing, but wrote his book to spur us toward escape. His death seems to show some coming social breakdown nearer and more dreadful than anything Stuart could hope to stop. As for myself—”
He sighed and pulled again on the julep.
“In spite of Rob and all his new technologies, I can’t help expecting a future darker than the past.”
He left to guide a tour of Civil War battlegrounds. Beth went to her classes. Orinda and I were alone when they were gone. She cleaned the house and made lunch for me. We ate at the kitchen table, sitting together when I insisted. As we got to know each other, she talked about her life. The earliest ancestors she knew about had come over the Cumberlands with old Calvin McAdam. Two generations later, one had l
earned to read and write and then gone to Harvard with his owner as a McAdam house boy.
The plantation had been divided, she said, back before the War between the States. Josh and Marcus were McAdam twins. Josh had freed his slaves before Fort Sumter, and fought for the Union. Marcus left his wife to care for an infant son and went to join the Rebs; he died in Pickett’s charge. Orinda’s folks were still on the plantation, working for Josh’s widow, when he got home from Appomatox to put his world back together.
“I’m the last of my people,” she said. “The last here where we belong.”
She drank hot black tea at lunch, and I shared it with her.
“A bad time for blacks.” She offered lemon or sugar. “I guess there never was a good time for us, but in a way I think it’s harder now. Except maybe for the fat cat Uncle Toms. I had a son named
Luke. Drafted to Viet Nam and come home crazy with drugs. In jail and out the rest of his life. Finally died of an overdose.
“He left a girl and a boy. The girl got to be a whore in Lexington. Sent me a thousand dollars once. Ten stiff new hundred-dollar bills. They made me vomit when I thought how she got them. My letters after that all came back. A pencil scrawl on the back of the last one saidDead of Aids.
“Jake was her brother. Two years younger. He come to live with me when Luke and his woman split. A good kid then. I loved him and tried to do my best, but he went bad in spite of me, just like his Daddy done. A lifer now in the Frankfort pen. It all goes to show your brother was right.”
She saw my surprise.
“He was here for dinner. Talked to me. Asked about blacks here in the county, and wrote his name in the book for me. He seen our troubles.” Her voice took on a bitter edge. “Did you watch the militia march?”
I nodded. “What about it?”
“If you never noticed, they’s all white. They never say a word about us, but I know what they think. Law and order!” She sniffed. “They carry their guns and talk about law and order. It’s their law. White law—if you don’t mind.”
She waited for my headshake.
“Stuart.” She shook her head. “I’ve known him since he was born. I used to trot him on my knee and sing songs he liked. He was always after me when he got a little older, begging me to tell about the old McAdams back when they were the big men in the county. He was nice to me, mostly, but now—”
Lips pursed, she paused.
“He’s head of them Kentucky Rifles. They load their guns and wait for trouble. Ready for black trouble, in some bad time when the anger breaks out. Maybe when blacks with no jobs and no money but drug money riot in the streets. Stuart and his Rifles are all set to move then, and show the world what they mean with their precious law and order. They want to wash down the streets with our black blood.”
Somberly, she frowned at me.
“Mr. Barstow, I’m afraid of Stuart now.”
A strange time, but not always dark. Beth made it wonderful. No longer hostile, she was now a warm and thoughtful companion who helped me deal with Lydia’s death. Though I had to hide by day, at night I could walk outside in the big back yard, protected by a high cinderblock wall and brush and trees on the slopes beyond it.
Sometimes she walked with me. When my eyes had adjusted to the dark I could see her lean grace and the clean oval of her face. The night air carried the mild scent she wore. Sometimes she caught my arm when I might have stumbled over something in the dark. I felt her warmth, came to love her touch and her voice and just being with her. Sometimes we talked. I told her about my concern for Marion and Tim, and for little Angela, whose eyes had filled with tears when I kissed her good-bye.
“I know they must feel sick about you,” she said. “I wish we could let them know you’re safe, but that’s a risk we just can’t take.”
Sometimes she spoke of herself.
“When I was a girl I used to feel trapped here in the old house and with all the generations of past McAdams. I wanted to get away. I loved to draw. Teachers said I had talent. I used to dream I could be an artist with a studio in New York or Paris.”
“You could have been,” I said. “I saw the portraits in your office.”
“Some talent.” Her shoulder had touched me in the dark; I felt her shrug. “Not enough. Out of high school, I went to Lexington to major in art. At the end of the first semester, my major professor set me straight about genius and talent. I felt terribly hurt, till I realized that he was saving me from a wasted life. I’ve always loved history the way my father does. I’ve been happy here, teaching it.
“Until this—”
She stopped and walked on in silence.
No longer enemies, we were strangers still, exploring each other with a mix of caution and delight. We walked a lot in silence, never quite certain what to ask or how to answer. We were silent, hand in hand, on that night when it was her turn to stumble. I caught her, held her closer than I meant to. She was electric in my arms, her mouth searching suddenly for mine. We needed no words till she moved to catch her breath and lead me back to the house.
I drew her toward my door.
“Not yet.” Her whisper was hushed and breathless. “Not here. Not now.” She tried to laugh. “It’s no moment for romance. Not when the game can end any minute.”
She caught my body hard against her, kissed me again, briefly but fiercely, and ran for her door.
I lay a long time that night. Thinking of her, thinking sadly of Lydia. Feeling almost safe, I’d locked the outside door and finally gone to sleep. I don’t know what woke me. I sat up in bed knowing I was not alone. A cruel glare blinded me. Dazing pain exploded at the back of my skull. Rough hands seized my arms. Before I could get breath to yell for help, a hard palm sealed my mouth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I WOKE SLOWLY from an endless, dreadful dream in which I was running naked through a bitter blizzard, bloodhounds behind me. I lay somewhere in the dark, shivering, pain drumming in my head. Listening, I heard wind in trees and a cricket chirping. Nothing else.
A surge of pain knocked me back when I tried to sit up. Nausea wrenched me. I vomited twice and lay there a long time, weak and trembling and miserably cold. The trees were dense black barriers around me, but a strip of sky overhead was lit with the stars of Orion, which Alden had taught me to recognize.
Fumbling with numb fingers, I found the hair on the back of my head sodden and damp with blood. I was still in the thin pajamas Stuart McAdam had left in his room. Drying blood had stuck them to my chest. Fallen leaves rustled under me when I tried to huddle against an icy wind.
In want of any shelter, I tried to stand. Pain exploded in my head, and I had to sink back. Crouching on all fours, I was sick again. I wiped my mouth on the pajama sleeve and squatted there a long time, numbed and aching, hopeless. Somehow I must have slept, because the treetops overhead were suddenly blazing with yellow sunlight.
The pounding in my head no longer quite so hard, I pushed to sit up. Something like a pebble turned under my palm: a large oak acorn, when I looked. It lay with two others around the leaves stained with blood from my head. I gathered them up and stared at them stupidly. Three acorns.
Acorn Three?
Peering around, I found the muddy ruts of a narrow, unpaved road walled ’with dense underbrush. Taller trees towered out of it here and there, but I saw no oaks. I recalled the acorn fragments left in the debris of the letter bomb, and the three acorns left in the blood around Lydia Stalker’s head. Had they been a terrorist signature? Had Acorn Three planted a mole in the bureau? Botman, perhaps? Had he betrayed me to hide the way he betrayed my brother? I knew too little even to guess.
Too weak and sick to wonder, I reeled to my feet and limped to the road. It wound crookedly down a slope through rubble hills the strip-miners had left. I had no notion where it might lead, or what to do if it took me anywhere. Rocks and clods hurt my bare feet, and the mere act of walking took all my will.
I blundered on, too cold to stop movin
g, till a horn honked close behind me. My first thought was to dive into the underbrush and hide, but I had no strength for that, no time. I stumbled out of the ruts. A red pickup truck lurched to a stop beside me, the bed piled with hay. A black-stubbled man leaned out of the window, spat his cud of tobacco on the ground at my feet.
“Who the hell?” he shouted at me. “Who the hell are you?”
“Fred Rafton, from Baltimore.” I groped for some believable lie. “Can you give me a lift?”
He spat again, squinting at me searchingly.
“What happened to you?”
“I was robbed.” Desperate invention. “I had to stop for a truck parked across both lanes in an underpass. Two men ran up behind me. Dragged me out of the car, beat me up, took my clothes. Finally dumped me back there in the woods.”
“Rough customers.” He reached for his telephone. “I’ll call the cops.”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sick and freezing. Can’t you get help for me first?”
Shrewd eyes narrowed under thick black brows, he studied me again.
“Look at me,” I begged him. “You can see the fix I’m in.” “What do you do?”
“I’m an accountant for a tax attorney back in Baltimore.” “Have you got money?”
“Not on me. They took my wallet, everything. I do have a bank account, a couple thousand in it, when I get back home.”
“You are in sad shape.” He leaned abruptly to open the pickup door. “Get in. I’ll drive you to my place and let you wash up.” His hard gray eyes measured me. “Near enough my size. I’ve got something you can wear. Pay me when you can.”
I scrambled inside. He turned the heater up, and I huddled gratefully into its warmth. He drove on down the bumpy road, winding through the wilderness grown up since the strip-miners stopped. The radio was reporting a fire in Me Adam. I caught a few words.
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