Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  To the west there were mountains which, according to his map, were known as the Vulture Mountains. He imagined gulleys, and dry washes containing bleached bones, birds of prey moving in the cool of shadow and silences, great quiet wings drifting.

  Birds of prey, he thought.

  The birds of Escalante.

  He squinted into the weakening light of the sun.

  Before dark, he thought. I want to be there before night comes.

  3

  Sharpe took Drucker’s call, listened to the man a moment, and then said: “What’s it supposed to mean?”

  “I only pass on the messages,” Drucker said.

  “It sounds like a code, doesn’t it?”

  “I only pass on the messages,” Drucker said again.

  “Let me write the goddamn thing down.” Sharpe took out his pen and asked Drucker to repeat the words.

  Drucker did so.

  Sharpe stared at the words for a while, willing them to yield some kind of sense. When he had tried to stoke his tired brain into activity, when the message seemed finally meaningless, he picked up his receiver and dialed Dilbeck’s number.

  Dilbeck said: “Unless this is important, Sharpe, I don’t want to know. I just had a hard time with my colleagues concerning our Flying Dutchman and—”

  Sharpe cut in: “We intercepted a telegram that was sent to Thorne’s girl.”

  “Telegrams aren’t uncommon,” Dilbeck said, a yawn in his voice.

  “This one’s weird,” Sharpe said. “I’ll read it to you.”

  Sharpe read it. There was a short silence.

  “It came out of Dallas,” Sharpe said.

  “Dallas?”

  “Fourteen hundred central time.”

  Sharpe could hear the sound of a pencil or pen being tapped on a wooden surface.

  “Thorne’s dead, isn’t he?” Dilbeck asked finally.

  “Yes,” Sharpe said.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Sharpe listened to the cut in the line. Thorne’s dead. Why did that have such an ominous sound? He rested his face in the palms of his hands, thinking of Thorne, of Drucker in the field—Drucker who was one of the best interceptive technicians Tech Serv had ever had, Drucker who was so far to the right of the spectrum that he thought the senator from Wisconsin America’s only twentieth-century saint—he thought until everything became something of a congealed jumble in his mind. Failure had such an empty ring to it, like the sound of a hollow silver dollar falling on wood.

  The afternoon sun was going down and hung low now in the western desert. It was a flare finally burning out. On the edge of Escalante, he slowed the Pinto. It was barely a town; he passed a bar called Lucky’s a hardware store, a grocery, a few scattered houses, a couple of trailers with TV antennae appended to them. A girl on a swing watched him pass. She raised her hand in a quick shy greeting, smiled, then let the hand fall. Thorne drove through the place. There were a couple of jets in the darkening sky, hardly more than points of red light from which scarlet vapor trails hung in various stages of disintegration. Smoke signals, Thorne thought. He stopped the car, spread his map out on the seat, ran his finger over the name of Escalante. Six, seven miles out into the desert there was the mapmaker’s symbol for a military reservation, a curious red hieroglyph. A military reservation: it could cover a multitude of sins. He drove the Pinto off the road and into the desert, stopped once more in the kind of terrain this small car hadn’t been engineered to withstand, and consulted the map again. Six miles maybe. He drove on slowly, avoiding rocks, pitfalls, while the suspension system of the car whined underneath him.

  The landscape became more hostile.

  He had to steer the car upward through a dry wash and push it in second gear over a slope that was crumbling beneath the tires. It was no place in which to be stuck. He made it over the incline and then went cautiously down the other side. The Pinto stalled, he started it again, it stalled a second time. He switched the ignition off and sat for a time looking through his window and thought: You’re a couple of miles from a road, from the threads that link one fraction of the civilized world with another, and suddenly everything’s different. The sun was dropping behind the mountains. He turned the key in the ignition, the car started, and he maneuvered it the rest of the way down the slope. At the bottom there was a path of sorts. He could see tire treads in the scrub, flattened cholla, and—as he turned the car onto the path—a sign that said: U.S. MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT: ESCALANTE BOMBING & GUNNERY RANGE. UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL FORBIDDEN BEYOND THIS POINT. Bombing and gunnery, he thought; and something else besides. He drove on past the sign.

  He had the car at ten miles an hour. The path was rutted and broken, crumbling and dry, and some kind of irrigation ditch ran on either side of it. They might be waiting for me, he thought. They might be expecting me.

  Unless.

  Unless I’m already dead.

  Not only unauthorized, but dead into the bargain.

  He passed coils of barbed wire and a second sign that repeated the first. Waiting, he thought. Waiting for me to show.

  Then what?

  Then he knew the answer to that very well.

  Dilbeck saw her come out of the building, walk down the steps, and cross a stretch of grass. He got out of his car and went toward her. Lovely girl, he thought. The long black hair, the knowing look in the eyes, a perfect mouth. She walked with a long stride, self-assured, comfortable with herself, even slightly arrogant.

  He intercepted her. When she saw him the expression on her face became one of fear, her eyes turned cold and distant, her skin suddenly pale.

  “Miss Emerson?” He took off his soft hat and held it an inch above his skull.

  She stopped, saying nothing.

  “I hate to interrupt you,” he said. He watched her put her hands in the pockets of her black velvet pants. There was a book beneath her arm; the title had the word Lamp in it, he couldn’t see the rest of it.

  “Well, you are interrupting me,” she said.

  He put his hat back on. He smiled at her.

  “Look, I don’t think I’ve got anything very much to say to you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is—”

  She turned and began to move away.

  He put out his hand, gripped her by the arm.

  “That hurts,” she said.

  “I am sorry,” he said. Such a lovely girl, he thought. Perhaps it would have been better all around to have had her killed. Perhaps. “You see, the gravity of this particular situation shouldn’t be underestimated, Miss Emerson.”

  “Let go of my arm, okay?”

  He took his hand away. “I think perhaps you don’t see the seriousness very clearly. A matter of national security is involved—”

  “What else?” she said.

  “Don’t make it tough on me.” He watched a group of students come from a building, walking slowly, books beneath their arms, walking with the casual detachment of the young; so sure, so very sure of themselves.

  “Okay,” she said. “Suppose you tell me what you want?”

  “I wonder if you’ve heard from John Thorne.”

  “Do you think I’d tell you if I had?”

  The defiance of it; Dilbeck felt a slight glow of approval about her. He liked her spirit.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “I would hope so, but I doubt it. Do you know where he is?”

  She smiled, her confidence apparently growing.

  He let her savor her moment and then he said: “Why does Thorne call himself the Philistine?”

  She crumpled, momentarily she looked as if she had been struck, but she recovered with the composure of an actress. “You’re mistaken,” she said, her voice a little hoarse.

  “Let’s not beat about the bush,” he said. “You know and I know that he sent you a telegram from Dallas today. We read it probably before you did, Miss Emerson. Let’s not beat about the bush, eh?”

  She was silent. She bit her lower lip hard. Fine, large white teeth.
/>   “Why does he call himself the Philistine?”

  She looked up at the sky, blinking against the light, and then she stared down at the ground. Dilbeck watched her.

  She said nothing.

  He looked at his wristwatch. Then he said, “Well. I think you’ve told me what I need to know.”

  “How? I haven’t told you a damn thing!”

  “Just by your reaction, Miss Emerson. That’s all. You see, I wasn’t sure it was from Thorne before, but I’m pretty sure now. Thank you.”

  She permitted a small flicker of anger to alter her features. It lasted a moment, then passed. “Pig,” she said. “Pig.”

  “The Philistine,” Dilbeck said. “It’s an intriguing nickname. If we had more time then maybe you could explain the reason for it to me.”

  He raised his hat once more.

  “Goodbye.”

  He walked in the direction of his car, conscious of her standing motionless, motionless and shocked, behind him.

  He got inside his car, saw her image reflected in the mirror, then drove away. He drove until he came to a callbox, went inside, dialed Sharpe’s priority number.

  “One of your people has fucked up again,” he said. “Thorne is still alive.”

  Sharpe was silent for a long time.

  Dilbeck said, “I want you to pull out all the stops, Sharpe. Understand? I want every available item of information analyzed. I want you to follow through on the fact that we know he was in Dallas. And I want you to work on the assumption that he is on his way to Phoenix. Have you got that?”

  “Yes,” Sharpe said quietly.

  Dilbeck hung up. He yawned, seeing his own image in the mirror inside the box. His bones, even his bones, felt weary, as if in the hollow cylinders of his skeleton the marrow were beginning to melt.

  Sharpe started to make telephone calls to the various field offices that might help him in this matter. He was having a hard time keeping himself in control. He was having a very hard time. Sweat soaked his shirt, the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet. He got through to Dallas. He asked for a check. Within ten minutes he had it. He got the Phoenix number and asked for another check.

  Thorne, he kept thinking.

  John Thorne. You couldn’t go on living a charmed life, sonny.

  Within twenty minutes of making his calls he had pieced together a picture of John Thorne’s movements. He called Dilbeck back. When he was through talking with Dilbeck, he dialed the number of Tarkington’s motel.

  Tarkington answered, sounding cheerful.

  “I am sorry to trouble you,” Sharpe said. “But I’d like you to come in to the office.”

  “What? Now?”

  “I don’t think it can wait, Tarkie. I don’t think it can wait.”

  When he had hung up he went to a map that was pinned to the wall. He began looking at the most unlikely places. Yeah, he thought. Why not? Turner, out in Ashkhabad, was badly in need of replacement. Why not?

  Ashkhabad sounded very fine.

  “Laphroaig,” the congressman said. He handed the glass to Dilbeck, who sniffed the drink before sampling it.

  “Very fine,” Dilbeck said.

  He looked around the kitchen. It was the first time he had been in Leach’s apartment and he was surprised a little by the absence of life signs. It was as if nobody lived here.

  “The goddamn bungling is staggering,” Leach said.

  “Indeed,” Dilbeck said.

  Dilbeck was silent. He watched Leach move around on his cane. He grunted, wheezed, as he moved; he was coming apart at the seams in that final process of disintegration that life can no longer stall. A few more months, Dilbeck thought. Another funeral to attend.

  “We know that John Thorne booked a flight from Richmond, Virginia, this morning. The same John Thorne reputed to be a corpse.”

  “Bungling,” Leach said again.

  “However, Thorne has something of a cash-flow problem apparently, because he’s traveling everywhere with credit cards, which makes it no great problem to keep track of him,” Dilbeck said.

  Leach drained his glass and set it down.

  “He rented a car from Avid at Phoenix,” Dilbeck said. “The rest is elementary.”

  “Escalante,” Leach said.

  “Of course.” Dilbeck looked into his glass.

  “What a reckless young idiot,” the congressman said, lifting the bottle of malt whiskey as if to pour himself another drink, then setting it down again. “What will happen to him at Escalante?”

  “It’s already taken care of, Congressman.”

  “And that will be the last of him?”

  “As you say.”

  Leach sat down, propping his walking stick against the wall. “Old Ben Thorne was a stubborn old fart. A good man, but dynamite wouldn’t shift him if his mind was made up.”

  “Like father, like son,” Dilbeck said.

  “I guess.”

  Both men were silent in a manner that suggested a moment of rumination, the passage of a memory, something shared.

  “First Hollander, then Thorne,” Leach said.

  “Two different problems, I fear.”

  “Yes,” Leach said. “I wonder if Asterisk is worth anything now.”

  “It remains to be seen,” Dilbeck said. “It remains to be seen.”

  It was almost dark when he saw the perimeter fence. He drove the Pinto toward it. Now, he thought. Now. He turned the engine off, sat for a moment, trying to keep control, trying to hold together the delicate balances of himself. A failure of nerve—and it would fall apart like a house of dominoes. He got out of the car, slammed the door and, as he did so, he heard the click of an automatic weapon from behind the fence. There was a uniformed guard pressed against the wire. He had an M-16 clutched to his side, leveled directly at Thorne.

  From behind he heard the sound of a motor. He turned, saw a jeep come up alongside him. The driver wore the helmet and armband of an MP. Thorne did not move; he had the feeling that if he moved he would be shot. I’m sorry, he might say. I’m sorry, I just lost my way in the dark, didn’t know this was Uncle Sam’s property, ha ha, you know how it is, fellas.

  The MP got down from the jeep.

  He looked at Thorne. In his hand he held an automatic pistol which, in the dying light, did not look remotely real to Thorne.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing?” the MP asked. He made a gesture with the pistol. Thorne stared at the gun, mesmerized; it would blow me away, he thought. He made to reach into his jacket for his wallet. The MP waved the gun again.

  “Keep still,” he said.

  “I only wanted—”

  “Just keep still,” the MP said. He frisked Thorne, took out the wallet, flipped it open.

  “My clearance is—”

  “Very fancy,” the MP said, looking now at Thorne’s pass and the WHITE HOUSE PERSONNEL stamp. He could feel himself sink, a sensation of falling, his nerves beginning to snap like rubber bands drawn to their extremities. No, control, control, the only way.

  “So what brings you all the way out here?” the MP asked.

  “I can’t discuss that with you,” Thorne said. Good, excellent, the voice was firm. He was pleased with himself. “I have to see the officer in charge.”

  Inside, he thought. Once inside you can play this by ear because there’s no way of taking into account contingencies, possibilities. I must get inside.

  “Can’t discuss it with me?” the MP said. He looked in the direction of the guard beyond the wire fence. “Chuck, you got any instructions concerning this guy?”

  The guard did not answer immediately.

  “No,” he said eventually. “None.”

  They weren’t expecting me, Thorne thought. Have I been written off in Washington? Account closed? Dead? He waited.

  There was a long silence, then the MP said to the guard: “Get the captain on the phone, Chuck. You better clear this with him.” He looked at Thorne again. “We get instructions concernin
g these things,” he said, shrugged his shoulders.

  Thorne watched the guard go to a telephone that had been installed inside the fence. The guard picked up the receiver, pressed a button, and spoke in a low voice. Thorne stared at the low white headquarters, the two or three outbuildings, white stone turned gray in the twilight. He tried to hear the guard’s voice, but he caught nothing. Control, he told himself again. He looked back at the MP, who was still holding his gun in the manner of a man who would not care if he were instructed to fire it. Thorne shut his eyes briefly. The air was still warm, but he could feel the edges of a chill that would come in with the desert night.

  The guard put the receiver down.

  Thorne waited.

  He heard the guard come back, the fall of his boots on concrete, then the slight noise of his weapon touching the wire fence.

  Now.

  The guard coughed.

  “You get the captain?” the MP asked.

  “Yeah,” the guard said. “He’ll see Thorne.”

  No, Thorne thought. This easy. This simple.

  He heard the gate in the fence open.

  “Go ahead,” the MP said.

  Thorne went through the gate, aware of the MP at his back. Aware of the gun. He glanced at the guard, a man with red hair and freckles, a small-town boy by the look of him, something clumsy in the way he held the gun and how he stood, as if he were unaccustomed to this.

  “Go on,” the MP said. “Chuck, you lead.”

  They crossed the concrete. They passed the outbuildings. Thorne saw a jeep, a black car, more piles of barbed wire. Why was it this easy? Why? He was scared. He could feel the nerves again; it was as if telephones were ringing insanely inside his head. I took a wrong turning, fellas. If you could just point the way back to the highway.

  A door was opened. He followed the guard into a dimly lit corridor. A few weak light bulbs, an empty desk, walls of white-painted brick. More signs. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. NUMBER TWO CLEARANCE NEEDED. They went down the corridor. Thorne sensed something about to collapse within himself. A string snapping. A cord breaking. Hold, just hold. The fear, what did you do with the fear?