Extreme Denial

by David Morrell

  “Then you don’t want to go? I hear the Santa Fe Opera is one of the best.”

  Decker finally realized what she was talking about. “You’re asking me to go to the opera with you?”

  Beth chuckled. “You weren’t this slow yesterday.”

  “What opera is it?”

  “Tosca.”

  “Well, in that case,” Decker said. “Since it’s Puccini. If it was Wagner, I wouldn’t go.”

  “Smart guy.”

  Decker made himself look amused while he turned a corner and checked his rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Maybe I’m wrong about that man watching me.

  Like hell.

  7

  The opera house was a five-minute drive north of town, to the left, off the highway to Taos. Decker followed a string of cars along an upward-winding road, their lights on as sunset began to fade.

  “What a beautiful setting.” Beth glanced at the low, shadowy piñon-covered hills on both sides of the car. She was even more impressed after they reached the top of a bluff, parked the car in twilight, and strolled to the amphitheater built down into the far side of the bluff. She was intrigued by the appearance of the people around her. “I can’t tell if I’m underdressed or overdressed.” She herself wore a lace shawl over a thin-strapped black dress that was highlighted by a pearl necklace. “Some of these people are wearing tuxedos and evening gowns. But some of them look like they’re on a camping expedition. They’ve got hiking boots, jeans, wool shirts. That woman over there is carrying a knap-sack and a parka. I’m having a reality problem. Are we all going to the same place?”

  Decker, who wore a sport coat and slacks, chuckled. “The amphitheater has open sides as well as an open roof. Once the sun is down, the desert gets cool, sometimes as low as forty-five. If a wind picks up, that lady in the evening dress is going to wish she had the parka you mentioned. During intermission, there’ll be a lot of people buying blankets from the concession booth. That’s why I brought this lap robe I’ve got tucked under my arm. We might need it.”

  They surrendered their tickets, crossed a welcoming open courtyard, and followed the ticket taker’s directions, mingling with a crowd that went up stairs to a row of wide wooden doors that led to various sections of the upper tier of seats.

  “This door is ours,” Decker said. He gestured for Beth to go ahead of him, and as she did, he took advantage of that natural-seeming moment to glance back over his shoulder, scanning the courtyard below to discover if he was still under surveillance. It was a reversion to old habits, he realized with some bitterness. Why did he allow himself to care? The surveillance was pointless. What possible compromising activity would his former employer think he was up to at the opera? His precaution told him nothing; there was no evidence of anyone below who showed more interest in him than in getting into the opera house.

  Careful not to reveal his preoccupation, Decker sat with Beth to the right on an upper tier. They didn’t have the best seats in the house, he noted, but they certainly couldn’t complain. For one thing, their section of the amphitheater wasn’t open to the sky, so while they had a partial view of the stars through the open space above the middle seats, their seats in the back didn’t expose them as much to the cool night air.

  “That opening in the middle of the roof,” Beth said. “What happens when it rains? Does the performance stop?”

  “No. The singers are protected.”

  “But what about the audience in the middle seats?”

  “They get wet.”

  “Stranger and stranger.”

  “There’s more. Next year, you’ll have to go to the opening of the opera season in early July. The audience has a tailgate party in the parking lot.”

  “Tailgate party? You mean like at football games?”

  “Except in this case, they drink champagne and wear tuxedos.”

  Beth burst out laughing. Her amusement was contagious. Decker was pleased to discover that the surveillance on him was forgotten, that he was laughing with her.

  The lights dimmed. Tosca began. It was a good performance. The first act—about a political prisoner hiding in a church—was appropriately threatening and moody, and if no one could equal Maria Callas’s legendary performances of the title role, the evening’s soprano gave it an excellent try. When the first act ended, Decker applauded enthusiastically.

  But as he glanced toward the lower level, toward a refreshment area to the left of the middle seats, he suddenly froze. “What’s the matter?” Beth asked.

  Decker didn’t respond. He kept peering toward the refreshment area.

  “Steve?”

  Feeling pressure behind his ears, Decker finally answered. “What makes you think something’s the matter?”

  “The look on your face. It’s like you saw a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost. A business associate who broke an agreement.” Decker had seen the man who had been watching him earlier in the day. The man, wearing a nondescript sport coat, stood near the refreshment area down there, ignoring the activity around him, staring up in Decker’s direction. He wants to see if I remain up here or go back through those doors and outside, Decker thought. If I leave, he’s probably got a lapel mike that allows him to tell a partner with an earphone that I’m headed in the other man’s direction. “Forget him. I won’t let him spoil our evening,” Decker said. “Come on, would you like some hot chocolate?”

  They went back to the doors through which they had entered, walked along a balcony, and descended stairs to the crowded courtyard. Surrounded by people, Decker couldn’t determine who else might be watching him as he guided her around the left side of the opera house and toward the refreshment area, where he had seen the man.

  But the man wasn’t there any longer.

  8

  Throughout the intermission, Decker managed to make small talk, finally escorting Beth back to their seats. She gave no indication that she suspected his tension. When Tosca’s second act began, the burden of not spoiling Beth’s evening was temporarily removed from him, and now he could concentrate his full attention on what the hell was happening.

  He thought that from one point of view, the situation made sense—the Agency was still concerned about his outraged reaction to the disastrous Rome operation, and they wanted to make sure he hadn’t vented his emotions by finding a way to betray them, selling information about secret operations. One indication of whether he was being paid for information would be how hard he worked as a real estate broker and whether he spent more money than was commensurate with his income level.

  Fine, Decker thought. I expected a review. But surely they would have done it sooner, and surely they could have done it from a distance simply by monitoring my real estate transactions, my stock-and-bond accounts, and what I’ve got in the bank. Why, after more than a year, are they watching me so closely? At the opera, for God sake.

  In the dark, Decker squinted toward the intricately decorated 1800 Italian set, so absorbed in his thoughts that he barely heard Puccini’s brooding music. Unable to resist the impulse, Decker turned his head and focused on the shadowy refreshment area to the left of the middle seats, where he had last seen the man who was watching him.

  His back muscles became rigid. The man was down in that area again, and there wasn’t any way to misinterpret the man’s intentions, not when he ignored the opera and peered up in Decker’s direction. Evidently the man assumed that he had not been spotted and that the shadows he stood among were sufficient protection for him to continue to keep from being seen. The man didn’t realize that the lights from the stage spilled in his direction.

  What Decker next reacted to sent a shock of alarm through his nervous system. Not a ghost, but it might as well have been, so startling was another man’s appearance, so unexpected, so impossible. The second man had emerged from shadows and stopped next to the first man, discussing something with him. Decker told himself that he had to be mist
aken, that it was merely an illusion created by the distance. Just because the man seemed to be in his early thirties, had short blond hair, was somewhat overweight, and had beefy shoulders and rugged square features didn’t mean anything. Lots of men looked like that. Decker had met any number of former college football players who—

  The blond man gestured forcefully with his right hand to emphasize something he said to the other man, and Decker’s stomach contracted as he became absolutely convinced that his suspicion was correct. The blond man down there was the same man who had been responsible for the deaths of twenty-three Americans in Rome, who had been the reason Decker resigned from the Agency. The operative in charge of putting Decker under surveillance was Brian McKittrick.

  “Excuse me,” Decker told Beth. “I need to use the rest room.” He edged past a man and woman sitting next to him. Then he was out of the row, up the stairs, through the doors in back.

  On the deserted balcony, he immediately broke into a run. At the same time, he studied the moonlit area below him, but if a member of the surveillance team was in the courtyard, Decker didn’t see him. There wasn’t time to be thorough. Decker was too busy scrambling down the stairs and charging toward the dimly lit left side of the opera house, the direction in which he had seen McKittrick disappear.

  The anger he had felt in Rome again flooded through him. He wanted to get his hands on McKittrick, to slam him against a wall and demand to know what was going on. As he raced along the side of the opera house, anguished music throbbed into the high-desert night. Decker hoped that it obscured the scrape of his hurried footsteps on concrete steps. At once caution controlled him. Wary, he slowed, staying close to the wall, stalking past the rest rooms, studying the shadows near the refreshment stand, the last place he had seen McKittrick.

  No one was there. How could I have missed them? he thought. If they came along the side of the opera house, we would have bumped into one another. Unless they had seats in the amphitheater, Decker told himself. Or unless they heard me coming and hid. Where? In a rest room? Behind the refreshment stand? Behind the wall that separates this area from the desert?

  Despite the music swelling from the amphitheater, he heard the sound of movement behind night-obscured piñon trees on the opposite side of the wall. Are McKittrick and the other man watching me from out there? For the first time, Decker felt vulnerable. He crouched so that the low wall gave him cover.

  He thought about vaulting the wall to pursue the noises. As quickly, he told himself that in the greater darkness behind the wall, he’d be putting himself at a tactical disadvantage, the noise of his own footsteps warning McKittrick that he was coming. The only other course of action was to race back along the sidewalk next to the amphitheater and wait in front for McKittrick and his partner to come out from the desert. Or maybe they’ll just go to the parking lot and drive to town. Or maybe those noises you heard were just a wild dog’s paws on the ground. And maybe, damn it, I ought to quit asking myself questions and demand that somebody give me some answers.

  9

  “Decker, have you any idea what time it is?” his former superior complained. The man’s voice was thick from having been wakened. “Couldn’t this have waited until the morning instead of—”

  “Answer me,” Decker insisted. He was using a pay phone in a shadowy corner of the deserted courtyard in front of the opera house. “Why am I under surveillance?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why are your people watching me?” Decker clutched the phone so hard that his knuckles ached. Intense music swelled from the theater and echoed toward him.

  “Whatever’s going on, it has nothing to do with me.” His former superior’s name was Edward. Decker remembered the sixty-three-year-old man’s sagging cheeks that always turned red when he was under tension. “Where are you?”

  “You know exactly where I am.”

  “Still in Santa Fe? Well, if you are in fact being watched—”

  “Do you think I could possibly make a mistake about something like that?” Despite the emotion in his words, Decker strained to keep his voice from projecting across the courtyard, hoping that a crescendo of angry singing concealed his own anger.

  “You’re overreacting,” Edward said wearily over the phone. “It’s probably only a routine follow-up.”

  “Routine?” Decker studied the deserted courtyard to make sure no one was coming toward him. “You think it’s routine that the jerk I worked with thirteen months ago is in charge of the surveillance team?”

  “Thirteen months ago? You’re talking about...?”

  “Are you going to make me be specific over the phone?” Decker asked. “I told you then, and I’m telling you now— I will not leak information.”

  “The man you worked with before you resigned—he's the one watching you?”

  “You actually sound surprised.”

  “Listen to me.” Edward’s aging, raspy voice became louder, as if he was speaking closer to the phone. “You have to understand something. I don’t work there anymore.”

  “What?” Now it was Decker’s turn to sound surprised. “I took early retirement six months ago.”

  Decker’s forehead throbbed.

  “My heart condition got worse. I’m out of the loop,” Edward said.

  Decker straightened as he saw movement on the theater’s balcony. His chest tight, he watched someone walk along it and stop at the steps down to the courtyard.

  “I’m being absolutely candid with you,” Edward said on the phone. “If the man you worked with last year is watching you, I don’t know who ordered him to do it or why.”

  “Tell them I want it stopped!” Decker said. On the balcony, the person—it was Beth—frowned in his direction. Hugging her shawl, she descended the stairs. The music intensified.

  “I don’t have any influence with them anymore,” Edward said.

  Beth reached the bottom of the courtyard and began to cross toward him.

  “Just make sure you tell them to stop.”

  Decker broke the connection as Beth reached him.

  “I got worried about you.” A cool breeze tugged at Beth’s hair and made her shiver. She tightened her shawl around her. “When you didn’t come back ...”

  “I’m sorry. It was business. The last thing I wanted was to leave you alone up there.”

  Beth studied him, puzzled.

  From the theater, the singing reached a peak of anguish and desperation. Beth turned toward it. “I think that’s where Scarpia promises Tosca that if she sleeps with him, her lover won’t be executed.”

  Decker’s mouth felt dry, as if he had tasted ashes, because he had lied. “Or maybe it’s where Tosca stabs Scarpia to death.”

  “So do you want to stay and hear the rest, or go home?” Beth sounded sad.

  “Go home? God no. I came to enjoy myself with you.”

  “Good,” Beth said. “I’m glad.”

  As they started back toward the theater, the music reached an absolute peak. Abrupt silence was broken by applause. Doors opened. The audience started coming out for another intermission.

  “Would you like more hot chocolate?” Decker asked.

  “Actually, right now I could use some wine.”

  “I’ll join you.”

  10

  Decker escorted Beth through her shadowy gate, into the flower-filled courtyard, pausing beneath the portal and the light that Beth had left on above her front door. She continued to hug her shawl tightly around her. Decker couldn’t tell if that was from nervousness.

  “You weren’t kidding about how cool it can get at night, even in July.” Beth inhaled deeply, savoring something. “What’s that scent in the air? It smells almost like sage.”

  “It’s probably from the chamisa bushes that line your drive-way. They’re related to sagebrush.”

  Beth nodded, and Decker was certain now that she was indeed nervous. “Well.” She held out her hand. “Thank you for a wond
erful evening.”

  “My pleasure.” Decker shook hands with her. “And again, I apologize for leaving you alone.”

  Beth shrugged. “I wasn’t offended. Actually, I’m used to it. It’s the sort of thing my husband did. He was always interrupting social evenings to take business calls or make them.”

  “I’m sorry if I brought back painful memories.”

  “It’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it.” Beth glanced down, then up. “This was a big step for me. Last night and tonight are the first times since Ray died ...” She hesitated. “... that I’ve gone out with another man.”

  “I understand.”

  “I often wondered if I’d be able to make myself go through with it,” Beth said. “Not just the awkwardness of dating again after having been married for ten years, but even more ...” She hesitated again. “The fear that I’d be disloyal to Ray.”

  “Even though he’s gone,” Decker said.

  Beth nodded.

  “Emotional ghosts,” Decker said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And?” Decker asked. “How do you feel now?”

  “You mean, aside from having flashbacks to being a nervous teenager on the doorstep saying good night to her first date?” Beth chuckled. “I think...” She sobered. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “I’m glad I did it.” Beth took a long breath. “No regrets. I meant what I said. Thank you for a wonderful evening.” She looked pleased with herself. “Hey, I was even adult enough to do the asking, to invite you to go out with me.”

  Decker laughed. “I enjoyed being asked. If you’d let me, I’d like to return the favor.”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “Soon.”

  “Soon,” Decker echoed, knowing that she meant she needed a little distance.

  Beth pulled a key from a small purse and put it into the lock. In the foothills, coyotes howled. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  11

  Wary, Decker checked for surveillance as he went home. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. In the days to come, he remained vigilant in his search for anyone watching him, but his efforts achieved no results. McKittrick and his team were no longer in evidence. Perhaps Edward had relayed Decker’s message. The surveillance had been called off.