Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  Bull Latham broke through that silent wall of static in the Situation Room. “He gave us a few hints.”

  “And nobody thought to tell me?”

  “It was too late,” the Bull said. “You rushed off to Cactus without giving anyone advance notice. Colonel Oliver couldn’t even prepare the lift package.”

  “You’re a fine one, Bull. You left me there to sit in the dark.”

  Bull Latham, who wasn’t a cautious man, measured his words. “You were never in harm’s way, Mr. President—not really. Tollhouse was taunting us. He made us squirm, I’ll admit.”

  Isaac couldn’t contain his captain from Quantico, who bristled in her chair. “You cunts,” Sarah said, with both her elbows on the table, “you worthless cunts. You abandoned your own president. If Mr. Wildwater hadn’t gotten Colonel Oliver on the horn, it would have been business as usual, and you would have left every single one of us at Cactus to take the fall.”

  “Mr. President,” Tim rasped, rocketing out of his chair, “she can’t talk to us in that tone of voice. We have admirals and generals in this room—we’ll resign.”

  “I doubt that, Tim,” Isaac said with a touch of pure silk. “What think tank would hire a security wizard who can’t even protect his own commander in chief? Sit down and shut up.”

  There wasn’t even a thin stripe of mutiny in the Situation Room.

  “Did you pay Tollhouse any ransom money?” Isaac had to ask his mavens.

  “We did,” the Bull said, hesitating a bit. “We had to, boss. He’d turned the tables on us. Tollhouse had all the keys to the kingdom, and we had none. We couldn’t risk a battle royal on the mountain. You might have gotten hurt in the crossfire.”

  “So I was the hostage, huh? And you’re the president’s wise men. Did you ever stop to think that someone might have hired him to pull off that stunt? It’s not the first time he’s shown his bravura. Didn’t he shadow the Viet Cong and drag wounded grunts and jarheads out of enemy camps? That fucker has no fear. And suppose someone wanted to embarrass us and warn me at the same time. Wildwater would have been the perfect vehicle.”

  Isaac snapped Tim’s silver wand like a twig and walked out of the Situation Room.

  The general was a ghost rider, Isaac grasped. He’d lived among ghosts in that baggage car as a little boy until Mr. Frank plucked him out of the dark, a savior with spindly legs. He’d lived among ghosts at the clinic—“polios” who’d never walk again—while he rode the parallel bars until his muscles grew lithe and he taught himself to walk like an acrobat. He’d lived among ghosts at Shangri-La, the ghosts of war, and watched Mr. Frank’s face turn white as chalk under his old gray hat. He was a ghost rider in Nam, swirling around the enemy, carrying the wounded in a cradle across his shoulder. And he was a ghost rider at Cactus, walking in and out of his own gunfire. Isaac had misjudged him, seen him as a clever lunatic. But Mr. Wildwater was a man to be reckoned with. Ari had intuited this without ever recalling his presence at the Camp David Accords. The ghost rider danced within an invisible cloak.

  Isaac could push back against national security experts who had failed him so. He could push back against the Secret Service. He was going to Pine Mountain to meet with the ghost rider, and he didn’t want Warm Springs neutralized, turned into a risk-free zone. “There are always risks,” he told Matt Malloy.

  “But we’ll have to sweep the roads, Mr. President, and place sharpshooters on the mountain.”

  “And have every citizen in Georgia hate us? This is sacred ground. FDR would never have returned to politics without Warm Springs. It was his haven. He could be a polio among other polios here, not the president of the United States. You can’t have your sharpshooters, Matt, and Tollhouse might not let you into his camp. He’s the lord of the mountain in pine country. It’s his fiefdom, not yours. I’ll wear a bulletproof vest. And you can keep his camp under surveillance, but that’s my only concession. I don’t want to get into a turf war with him. I need to make the general purr, or he’ll never open up.”

  Matt was disturbed by Isaac’s intransigence. “And what if you walk into a trap?”

  “Come on, Matt. I’m a ghost rider like the general, living on borrowed time. He had a hundred chances to finish me off. But he kept me alive, and I want to know why. You’ll have to trust my instincts.”

  “And what if I remove myself from the detail?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Isaac said. “You’re as curious about the general as I am. Let’s be bravos, Matt. It can’t hurt.”

  And so the lift package was arranged by the colonel. Isaac could have flown to Atlanta on Air Force One. But his private quarters at the front of the plane reminded him too much of a five-star hotel. And he’d have to travel with the press and a whole retinue of retainers, like a little king. No, he preferred the colonel’s White Top. He’d have a tiny caravan of two Night Hawks, while Matt flew down to Warm Springs with his own retinue and swept whatever he could sweep.

  The Bull wanted in, and Isaac had a hard time fending him off.

  “We can’t risk having both footballs and both biscuits on the same hostile ground.”

  “What hostile ground?” the Bull asked.

  “Tollhouse’s camp could be the heart of darkness. He must have returned from Indian country like a crazy guy. How else could he have survived Nam? I looked at his record. He was a medic and an angel of death. I’ll meet with him on my own.”

  And so he left from the South Lawn in Colonel Oliver’s White Top with Sarah and his own Secret Service detail, minus Matt Malloy. Isaac’s heart was thumping with all the excitement of a man in love—in a windbreaker and a bulletproof vest. They had to hover over barren fields and refuel at three local facilities. The colonel wore his Beretta on this trip.

  They didn’t land at Roosevelt Memorial Airport and ride up the mountain in Isaac’s armored car. They rose above the pines in Marine One until the colonel finally spotted a tiny crack among the winter trees. Isaac couldn’t have caught that camouflaged airstrip. Still, he wasn’t utterly blind. He knew that they had come to the general’s own memorial to FDR—Shangri-La on another mountain. Isaac could recognize the rustic cabins, the water troughs, the outhouses, the tents, the old barracks, just as he had imagined them. There wasn’t a soul to greet him or make any hostile noises as they climbed out of the Night Hawks. But they could hear the purl of water from some mountain stream that wasn’t visible from this hump of ground—it was a sweet, intoxicating sound. Isaac felt hypnotized. He shut his eyes for a moment.

  And the general appeared out of the pines. He walked with a slight limp. He wasn’t wearing fatigues and a military cap. He had the same windbreaker as Isaac Sidel and a Baltimore Orioles cap with a torn bill. Isaac didn’t see any foot soldiers around, or Indian fighters. Tollhouse must have hid his army somewhere. He had deep fissures on his face and the skin was discolored—souvenirs from Nam. The Viet Cong must have set fire to their own rice fields, looking for a demonic angel with a medicine bag. And Mr. Wildwater must have come walking right out of these fires . . .

  Tollhouse welcomed Isaac’s war party. He winked at Stefan Oliver, but gave him no other sign of recognition. Isaac wouldn’t let the Secret Service near Tollhouse with a magnetometer. He looked under the torn bill of the general’s cap. Tollhouse didn’t avoid Isaac’s glance. There was nothing shifty or evasive about his pale blue eyes. At last, Isaac thought. He wouldn’t have to feint and fool around with this man.

  “It’s Shangri-La, isn’t it?” Isaac asked, his eyes wandering across the camp.

  “Congratulations, Mr. President. I had to reconstruct it from memory—I was still a boy when I visited Shangri-La, with a boy’s fascination for detail. I stayed with Mr. Frank at his own cottage. The Bear’s Den, he called it. I’d have been a deadbeat without him. My papa got rid of me with a railroad ticket, a ten-year-old boy in a wheelchair. I was never invited to Warm Springs, but Mr. Frank took me in, paid all my bills, settled accounts with my papa, had one
of the docs become my legal guardian . . .”

  The general was still that boy in the baggage car, still Roosevelt’s fellow invalid at Warm Springs, with magical visits to Shangri-La that had given him a taste of immortality. Shangri-La was his survival kit and shield.

  The Big Guy and his war party entered a cottage that was like a bear cave. It was lit with electrical torches. There was a small mountain of turkey sandwiches on a crooked table, with a huge canteen of coffee, and a supply of tin cups—a mercenary’s meal. But Tollhouse went off with Isaac into another room, which must have been his own quarters. It had a military cot and a reading lamp; there were no pictures on the walls, no clues of the general’s past. Its tiny window was covered with a black shade. Isaac and the general both sat on the cot in the room’s own diminishing twilight. The general’s burn marks had a queer glow, like the heat coming off a lantern.

  Isaac wasn’t offered any liquor or condiments. They sat like two monks with a flask of water and two tin cups.

  “I apologize, Mr. President. I should have stopped off at Aspen Lodge and said hello.”

  “In the middle of that razzia?”

  “It was nothing of the kind,” Tollhouse said. “A training exercise—a maneuver.”

  “But you frightened the whitetails and shot out my picture window.”

  “It couldn’t be helped. I had my own checklist.”

  “But that wasn’t your real mission. You were paid to kill me.”

  Tollhouse smiled, and the fissures leapt across his face. “Yes.”

  Isaac sucked in that last bit of twilight. “And you didn’t finish the job.”

  “I would have dishonored Mr. Frank.”

  “Why?” Isaac asked, as Tollhouse sat like a shimmering idol in that little lost land of shadows. “I have none of FDR’s aura. I’m a cop who arrived here by accident.”

  “Still,” Tollhouse said, “it would have been like fratricide.”

  Isaac laughed bitterly to himself. “General, are we brothers now?”

  “Mr. President, your own handlers failed you. They knew I have many clients, each one contradicting the other, and yet these handlers played Russian roulette with your life.”

  “Are you surprised? They haven’t walked through fire, like you have. They’re accountants and clerks.”

  “Not Bull Latham,” Tollhouse said.

  “Ah, the Bull’s a special case. He admires me and also wants my chair.”

  They sat in silence. But Tollhouse seemed to tear right into the dark, like a vivid wound. Isaac heard him sigh.

  “It’s not certain who hired me to wax you and wind your clock, Mr. President, and it will never be. My clients have lawyers, who have their own lawyers.”

  “Then you know about that bankers’ lottery in Basel?”

  “The lottery has a double bind,” Tollhouse said. “The longer you’re alive, the bigger the payoff. You’re like a whirling money ball. But I was going to wind your clock. I didn’t want another president sitting at Shangri-La.”

  Now Isaac had to wonder if this rescuer of jarheads and grunts had gone off his rocker. “Jesus, you piloted three presidents. You trained Colonel Oliver.”

  “And should I tell you how many times I went to bed swearing I would crash Marine One on my next lift package?”

  “We all dream of murder,” Isaac said. “That’s built into our fabric. Do ya know how many bad guys I had to whack to get where I am? I climbed right up the golden ladder. So tell me, general—whisper in my ear. Who’s my fucking savior?”

  “The tin man.”

  “Jesus,” Isaac said, “are we riding all the way back to The Wizard of Oz?”

  “No. Our tin man doesn’t come out of a children’s book. He and his associates have cornered the market in tungsten and tin. But I believe you’ve heard of him as a tattoo artist.”

  “Viktor and his besprizornye. The Sons of Rossiya.”

  “Not the besprizornye. They never had Viktor’s romantic streak. You’re poison to their interests, and they’d love to see you in your grave. But the tin man is another matter.”

  The general rolled up the sleeve of his windbreaker and revealed a tattoo of a dragon with many eyes and many tails and one shortened hind leg; the dragon belched a blue fire from its mouth; the “tat” was streaked in blue and red, with a dagger coiled around one of the dragon’s tails.

  “Viktor says my autobiography is engraved in the tat somewhere.”

  “It looks like the mark of an executioner—how can I meet the tin man? Does he use that Soviet gangster-politician, Pesh Olinov, as his calling card?”

  Pesh, it seems, wasn’t really in the picture, except as a bagman or delivery boy.

  Viktor depended on that Washington Cave Dweller, Renata Swallow, as his blind. That’s why Isaac had met her in Pesh’s hotel room. She hadn’t come to admire Pesh’s tattoo, but to leave instructions. Why was a blueblood like Renata involved with the besprizornye? Was she laundering money? Had the tin man become her private banker, or had her own fortunes crumbled? Was she in love with the tattoo artist? Isaac would never understand the irrationality of romance.

  The tin man had appeared suddenly one afternoon on Pine Mountain with a child’s wooden paint box and not a single bodyguard. He walked into Shangri-La right in the middle of maneuvers. Tollhouse’s mercs looked like ghouls in their black night-fighter paint. Viktor ignored their ferocious grimaces. He sat down with the general in this monk’s closet and removed his works from the paint box—the dyes, the nipples, the ointments, the electric needles. And he engraved the dragon, wiping off the blood and bleeding colors with alcohol dipped in cotton balls.

  “He had no uncertainty,” the general said. “None.”

  The tin man didn’t bargain or cajole.

  “But what did he look like?” Isaac asked with a beggar’s smile.

  “Ordinary. Without menace. He didn’t have the arrogance of a billionaire, but of a great artist. ‘Big Balls is not to be touched,’ Viktor said. That’s what he called you—not Mr. President, not Sidel . . .

  “But these were not my orders, I told him. And my orders were very specific—eliminate Sidel, and I would never have to work again. I could disband my army. ‘Your own people were persistent,’ I said. The price of tungsten was fluctuating because of a president who did not listen to the markets, who talked of redeeming the poor.

  “Viktor sipped a little water from a cup. ‘But it is my pleasure that he stays alive.’ So I listened. And I asked him about the dragon he had carved into my skin.

  “This dragon with many eyes was a werewolf, he said. Only a werewolf could have survived Vietnam the way I did—or a dragon high on drugs. I felt no pain. I walked through fields of fire. I was shot in the shoulder, ripped across the face with a knife. My legs were swollen with bruises and bites. The docs wanted to ship me home. ‘It’s Stateside for you, Colonel. A little hula dancin’ in Hawaii.’ But I went back into Indian country. Perhaps I was a werewolf.”

  The general took a swallow of water from his own tin cup and then he called Stefan Oliver into the room. He hugged his protégé.

  “You take care of this man, sonny. You check that White Top of yours every time you’re on a mission. Don’t trust your maintenance people.”

  “General Ray, I picked them myself.”

  The general rolled his eyes like a banjo player. “That’s the whole point. The closer they are to your ribs, the less you can rely on them. Didn’t I teach you that? They’ll come at Big Balls from every direction. A little girl with flowers for the president could be carrying a bomb.”

  “But we’re a long way from Nam. I’ve never seen a little girl wired up with a bomb.”

  The general rinsed his throat and hawked up some phlegm. “She doesn’t have to be a local. They could import her from Turkistan, build a mud shack for her ma and pa, and train her to be a martyr. You’re still living in an age of chivalry, but it’s gone, all gone. They’ll hack him to pieces the first chance t
hey get.”

  “But where the hell is this omnipotent gray army?”

  The general lit a torch, and his eyebrows twitched within a halo of gloom.

  “It includes all the fuckers who would profit from his death—the file clerks and double agents who want to land on the easy side of the dollar.”

  “General, how can I prepare a lift package when I can’t trust my own mechanics? We’d be stranded forever on the ground. POTUS couldn’t go anywhere and he couldn’t govern.”

  “I suspect that’s what they prefer—ultimate immobility.”

  Isaac felt caught in a maze, living in that tangled world inside Tollhouse’s head. He had to get out of the bear’s den. He rushed through the rooms and out into the winter air, with his own retainers and the general right behind him.

  There was a satanic gleam in Tollhouse’s pale eyes. “Mr. President,” he whispered, “it isn’t safe.”

  “Where’s your own gray army?” Isaac asked. “Where are those mercs who raced through Cactus with mischief on their minds?”

  “I hid them,” Tollhouse said, “hid them from you. There’s murder right behind your baggy pants.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, “I’m the master of mayhem now.”

  Isaac had asked too much from this poor general, who’d gambled his own blood and bones in Indian country. That romp through Cactus had been his very last maneuver. He was all alone on this mountain. His gray army had deserted him. And then Isaac saw why. Tollhouse hadn’t been wrong. Isaac had brought the angel of death with him. Bull Latham broke into this solitary camp with his ninjas from the Bureau and Matt Malloy.

  He must have arrived at Roosevelt Memorial on a transport filled with field agents of every stripe. The Bull had been feuding with Tollhouse all along, and had lied to Sidel. That meeting in the Situation Room was a managed affair.

  The Bull strode up to the general with his military aide right behind him, carrying the football. He didn’t even acknowledge his own commander in chief.