Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  Took some of them longer than others to grasp what was wanted of them. But as was their nature, once they understood the request, they cheerfully acquiesced.

  Took a full five minutes before everybody but Helen and Ken were shuttled upstairs. When Helen cast a glance up the stairwell, she saw Paul Hardy standing at the railing looking down at her. A kind of raw electric energy ran between the two of them. She quickly looked away. “Again,” said gray suit. “How many computers in the building?”

  She held out the legal pad. “I want your names and—”

  He cut her off. “It’s up to you,” he said. “We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. You choose.”

  Ken moved up close to her elbow. She could feel Paul’s gaze raking her from above and desperately wanted to look up. She steeled herself. “Where’s your warrant? I want to see a warrant.”

  “We don’t need a warrant. This is a matter of national security.”

  The words sent a shiver down her spine. She looked back over her shoulder at Ken, whose anger had turned to confusion. “How could anything…how could these people have anything to do with…” she sputtered.

  “How many computers?” he asked again, his full lips articulating each and every syllable. When she again failed to answer, he sighed and pointed at the weight lifter. “Toss every room,” he said. “Bring anything you find down here.”

  Helen reached out and put a hand on his sleeve. “No…no…” she said.

  “Well?”

  “Four. Three in the TV room and one in my apartment.” She slapped her sides in frustration. “How could any of these people have anything to do with a matter of national security? I just don’t understand. It’s absurd.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to save yourself the aggravation of having us take your computers with us.” He held out a sheet of computer paper. Helen took it in her hand and read it. Three words. Her knees turned to jelly. It felt as if her spine had been removed. Ken darted forward and threw an arm around her waist, preventing her from sliding to the floor. She brought a hand to her throat and took several deep breaths.

  Gray suit stepped in close again. “Do I take it from your demeanor that you know who was doing this casting of nets on the Net?” Again he smiled at his own wordplay.

  “I…it was me. I was—” she stopped. Gray suit turned his head one way and then the other, looking at her like the old RCA dog. Indignation rose in her throat.

  “What right do you have to be looking at what I do on my own personal computer? What gives you the right to invade my privacy—”

  “Tut-tut,” he interrupted. “Really,” he scoffed. “You really must disabuse yourself of this personal privacy fetish. It’s so retro.” He held up a beautifully manicured finger. “First of all, our forefathers never mentioned the word.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Nowhere in the Constitution does the word privacy appear.”

  Helen opened her mouth to speak, but he wasn’t finished. “Secondly, in the age of international terrorism…”—he drew brackets in the air with his forefingers—“you know…post-9/11…well, in that world personal privacy turns out to be the price of security and….”—he wagged an amused finger her way—“and you would be amazed how many of your fellow citizens are delighted to make the exchange.”

  “You listen to me—” Helen began.

  He put his face right in hers. “And thirdly…you need to divest yourself of the notion that you have rights here.” His breath smelled of licorice and stale coffee. “I can take this house apart piece by piece and leave it lying on the ground.” He gestured toward Ken. “I can hold the two of you for as long as I please…”—he made a gesture of dismissal—“without a warrant, without habeas corpus, without having to explain it to a living soul.”

  He flicked the piece of paper in her hand. “Would you care to explain this?”

  “It’s just a name,” she said. She started to say it. “Wesley Al—”

  He put a finger to her lips. “No,” he said again and then laughed in her face. “You haven’t been listening, have you?” He smiled and then directed himself to the weight lifter. “Bring her. Bring her computer. Check with the staff as to what they’ll need in order to continue in her absence…then—”

  Ken stepped in. “What absence? She’s not going anywhere with you. I’m calling my attorney. You just—” and one of the assistants had him by the elbow and was dragging him backward. Ken pulled his elbow free. Another agent grabbed his other arm. “You fascist bastards are not going to—”

  And then one of the agents had Ken in a chokehold and was pulling him to the floor. Ken hacked and gagged and clawed at the forearm as he was brought to his knees, mouth agape, eyes bulging from his head.

  Helen moved his way, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” as she tried to step around the weight lifter to get to Ken. She was a step slow. The big guy took a slide to the left and let her run into his chest. Helen bounced off and took a step backward.

  It was her worst nightmare. The knock on the door. The Kafka moment where you were accused of something and nobody would tell you what it was. The system gone wild in a universe gone mad. Maybe that’s why her resolve slipped. Why she lost it for a second and looked up, the heavenward glance as much to confirm the reality of the moment for herself as it was to see whether Paul was taking it all in. He was. His eyes met hers. She stretched her lips and mimed a single syllable word. “RUN,” she mouthed.

  The good news was that Paul picked it up on the first try. The bad news was that the gorilla picked up on it, too. As King Kong made a dash for the stairs, with a pair of agents hard on his heels, Paul bolted off down the hall and out of sight.

  8

  Like most grand houses of its era, the Jensen Mansion had a set of what were known as “service stairs,” a narrow zigzag of treads and risers at the extreme back of the house, running from basement to attic, a contrivance designed to provide the staff easy access to all floors and at the same time to keep the hired help out of the public sphere as much as possible, particularly inasmuch as both Winnie Jensen and Harriet Garrison had preferred to maintain the illusion of running the mammoth house on their own, gracefully as it were, without ever so much as breaking a sweat.

  Paul had the urge to lock himself in his room and pull the covers over his head, but got sane on the fly and sprinted for the door at the end of the hall, a door that was always locked from the inside…always…except he’d left it open last night when he’d come down the back stairs from Helen Willis’s room. He said a silent prayer, grabbed the knob, and turned. The metal fire door opened, and Paul stepped inside. He slid the bolt closed and waited, listening as the voices began to work their way in his direction, rattling doorknobs, demanding people open their doors, screaming questions and directions as they checked the ten rooms lining the second-floor hallway.

  Like a fox harried by hounds, his instincts sent him to ground, propelling him down the narrow stairway toward…toward…whatever. He had no idea what lay below. No idea if there was an exit. For all he knew the stairs went all the way to hell.

  What he knew for sure was that whatever was happening here had something to do with the name Wesley Allen Howard, the sound track to his recent tropical dreams. He’d heard what Ms. Willis had said. Seen the little man put a finger on her lips as if to suggest the words themselves were somehow criminal.

  Three switchbacks down, he came to a small landing. The air was thick and filled with dust. Felt to Paul like nobody’d stood in that spot for a long time. Like the air had waited too long and had lost its vitality. A rusted metal plate on the inside of the door read: ONE. He reached for the knob.

  A floor above, somebody pounded on the fire door in frustration. He heard someone shouting for a key, then came another booming kick on the door. Paul allowed himself a thin smile. The state had installed the doors when they’d renovated the house. They were heavy and made of steel, intended as fire barriers in an otherwise wood-frame structure, and,
as state law mandated, were kept locked at all times.

  He eased the first-floor fire door open a crack. Voices…voices raised in anger…filled with indignation…punctuated here and there by the guttural sounds of struggle. He applied his eye to the crack and found he was inside the little room just outside the kitchen, the one Ms. Willis used as an office.

  In grander times, the room had been a walk-in pantry, a central point along the service stairs where the day-to-day demands of the household could be met with great dispatch. These days it was a jumble of paper and files and cardboard boxes, wedged in and around the antique secretary Ms. Willis used for a desk. The room was nearly black.

  Paul waited, hoping his eyes would adjust. Took a full minute for the edges of the clutter to become visible. Sounds of strife filtered through the door.

  Paul crept forward, placing his feet carefully among the clutter. The closer he came to the door, the louder the sounds of struggle became. He could pick out Ms. Willis’s strained voice from among the chorus of voices, some speaking, some screaming, coming from the direction of the foyer.

  Above the din, someone was shouting, “Where’s the key?” over and over.

  He cracked the door. A rusted hinge groaned as the door swung open a quarter inch, but he needn’t have worried, the river of noise flowing from the front of the house washed the sound away. He was looking directly up the hall toward the foyer, where Ms. Willis lay facedown on the floor, her hands manacled behind her back. The little man in the gray suit knelt at her side. He put his face right up to hers. “Don’t make us get a crew in here,” he was saying. “We’ll tear this place apart if we have to.”

  Helen Willis turned her face away. “Go to hell,” she said.

  Paul couldn’t see Ken Suzuki but he could hear his voice ranting about his rights…something about “due process” and “probable cause.”

  “I should think you’d have more regard for the peace and well-being of your…”—he searched for a word—“your charges,” he finally decided upon.

  This time she didn’t even bother to tell him where he could go. She tried to sit up, but a restraining hand from her antagonist prevented her from doing so. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me,” she shouted.

  Gray suit laughed at her righteous indignation and stood up. He dusted off his palms. The gorilla stepped into the picture. He bounced a set of keys up and down in his hand, then picked them up by the big brass ring and waved them in the air.

  “The desk in her room,” he said.

  “Get Abrams and Taylor out of the backyard,” the small man ordered. “Two men on each floor. One in the stairwell, one out on the hallway. Flush him out and then bring him to me. We’ll take all three of them with us.”

  Paul’s body went cold and stiff. His sanctuary was about to become a trap. He watched in horror as another pair of agents arrived in the foyer. The big guy barked orders. Paul eased the door closed and began to back out of the office when his elbow caught one of the piles of cardboard boxes, sending a box thumping to the floor at his feet. A wave of running feet rolled his way.

  Throwing discretion to the winds, Paul turned and ran, forgetting that he was under the stairs, forgetting the angle above his head. On his second stride, within easy reaching distance of the fire door, he blasted his forehead into the bottom of the stairs, dropping to his knees, nearly rendering himself unconscious. A muffled cry escaped. He felt vomit rising in his throat. His vision swam. He held his head in his hands and rocked back and forth. The palm trees came again and the beach with the yellow sand, and this time blurry figures, one in the foreground, the other in the distance. They seemed to be beckoning to each other. The voices grew louder and drew closer.

  He groaned and massaged his forehead with both hands. His vision pixilated. The beach scene disappeared. Only blackness filled his head. His eyeballs felt as if they would burst from the sockets and fall onto his shoes. A great roar filled his ears. His head throbbed with a pain such as he had never experienced. He held his breath and scrambled deeper into the office on his hands and knees.

  His mantle of darkness disappeared as the outer door was jerked open.

  “Get him,” someone barked.

  Paul had thrust the top half of his body into the stairway when somebody made a dive at him. His pursuer landed mostly on the floor but managed to get his fingers entwined in Paul’s belt. Instinctively, Paul kicked like a mule. A hollow thump was followed by a grunt and a slackening of the grip at his waist.

  Paul crawled forward. As he crossed the threshold, he heard the sound of angry voices, felt fingers tearing at the pocket of his jeans, felt the pocket begin to give way and then rip off altogether, sending him rocketing into the landing, where he braced his back against the wall, put both feet on the door, and pushed as hard as he dared.

  The effort made his head feel as if it would surely explode. The arm in the crack of the door stiffened. He heard a cry of pain from the other side of the door. He gritted his teeth, bowed his back, and pushed harder. The cry from the other side of the door rose in pitch like a skyrocket, reaching a crescendo as the forearm snapped with a dry crack.

  The sound of splintering bone and the howl of agony that followed caused Paul to ease off just enough for the awkwardly dangling arm to be pulled back through the crack in the door. The door banged shut. The screams took on a deeper sound, almost like a chant, as Paul dove forward and shot the bolt. Again, his consciousness threatened to desert him. He groaned in pain. The loud booming brought him around.

  Somebody was kicking the door hard now, using both feet, he imagined, shaking the whole house as they sought in vain to batter the metal fire door into submission.

  Paul scrambled to his feet and ran up the narrow staircase. His head throbbed as he burst through the second-floor fire door and ran headlong down the hall, mouth agape, in full flight without having the slightest idea where he was headed. He could hear the sound of feet on the central stairway. He skidded to a stop, and, for a second, resigned himself to fate. He was about to be apprehended and taken into custody…and for what?…for dreaming a name…for dreaming of a beach and palm trees swaying in the wind?

  Shirley’s door swung open. She sat in her wheelchair wearing a blue bathrobe. “Here,” she said in a voice not unlike the sound of tearing sheet metal.

  Paul ducked through the door; Shirley bumped it closed with her wheelchair, reached out, and shot the bolt. The hall was filled with noise.

  “Under the bed,” she squawked.

  Without thinking, Paul did what he always did, which was whatever she told him to do. He dropped to his knees with his head threatening to burst at the seams; he lay on his stomach and wiggled all the way back against the wall, where he could hear the sounds of his pursuers now. Terror ran through his body like an electric surge.

  “They’re—” he stammered.

  “Shhhhhh.” Shirley shushed.

  He could hear her rustling about, see the wheels of her chair as she rolled around the room, with the voices coming closer now, until he heard the snap of the lock and the sound of the door swinging open.

  A pair of shiny black shoes appeared in the doorway. Paul held his breath waiting for the shoes to move his way, but they didn’t. They never moved from the doorway.

  “Uh…uh…” a deep voice stammered. “No…uh…I’m sorry. I’ll be…sorry.” The voice seemed to fade into the distance. The shoes disappeared. The door closed. Paul could hear raised voices coming from the hall. The door opened again. Four black shoes this time. “I told you,” a new voice admonished. “We’ve got to…” it went on. “Ooooh…” The voice sounded as if its owner had swallowed something that refused to go down. “Sorry…uh…we’ll be…” The door closed.

  “Better hurry out of here now,” Shirley said.

  To anyone outside the room, Shirley’s voice must have sounded as it were some industrial noise. Not to Paul, who, once again, did as bidden, crawling out from beneath the bed and pushing h
imself to his feet among the collection of dust bunnies he’d swept out from under the bed with his body.

  Shirley sat in her chair facing the door, her back turned to Paul. She’d dropped her bathrobe and was sitting there naked to the waist. From the rear, her skin was translucent and hung in folds and pleats from her ruined body, her twisted skeleton clearly visible through the skin, like some ancient mummy. From the front…from the front, Paul could only imagine.

  She twisted her head and gave Paul what, in Shirley, passed for a smile.

  “You shoulda seen their faces,” she squawked.

  “You didn’t have to…” Paul began.

  She jerked a thumb at the window. “Not all of ’em are gonna be that squeamish,” she said. “You better go out there. That’s as good as it’s gonna get.” She winked at him. “Good luck.”

  Paul pushed open the window and looked down. The back porch roof was about ten feet below. He squeezed through the opening, one foot and then the other. Then turned around and held the windowsill for a moment before casting his fate to the winds and letting go.

  9

  Must have been pure adrenaline kept him glued to that spot on the roof, because just about the time he allowed himself a deep breath and figured he didn’t hear anybody in hot pursuit, he began to slide off. Slowly at first, hands scratching and stretching for a hold, then gaining momentum as he surfed across the slate, felt his feet poke into thin air, and then, with a shout stillborn in his throat, he entered free fall for maybe a second and a half before crashing down onto the back stairs, driving the air from his lungs and sending a hot iron of pain shooting up his left leg. And then bang…he somersaulted backward into nothingness…until the beach and the palms and the sand and the two guys appeared in his head and he could see that it wasn’t a Frisbee being tossed back and forth as he’d imagined but a radio-controlled airplane swooping and diving overhead and…or was the plane flying on its own and the remote control box was…no…couldn’t be…that was crazy.