by James Grady
“What are the intersects on that wall?” asked Zane.
“We all got the Castle,” answered Russell. “And the CIA, though Hailey, Eric and I have Directorate of Operations, Zane’s got it as a detached duty from the Army, and Victor’s got it with both D.O. and the Counter-Terrorism Center.”
“Dr. F worked for the Agency,” I said, “plus he’d just been upped to the National Security Council. Remember the story he told about getting lost in the White House?”
Hailey said: “The key intersects are Dr. F, Nurse Death and Kyle Russo.”
“Use her real name or we’ll forget it,” said Zane: “Porter, Nan Porter.”
“Outside of Maine,” I said, “the intersect zone is Washington.”
“So we’ve been going the right direction,” said Russell.
“Understanding geography doesn’t mean you know where you are,” I said.
“Right now,” said Russell, “we’re getting high in a shitty New York hotel room and hellhounds are on our trail.”
“But why?” asked Hailey.
“Because we’re escaped lunatics,” I told her.
“Being escaped fugitives is enough reason for the good guys to chase us,” she said. “But why are the bad guys after us? That why is the same why kill Dr. F.”
“Murder is not just who and how,” agreed Zane. He nodded to the wall of colored cards. “There’s no why up there.”
“Just us,” said Russell.
“Realistically,” said Zane, “it’s—”
I interrupted him: “‘Realistically?’ You sure we’re capable of that?”
Zane continued: “Whatever, the hit on Dr. F was either an inside or an outside job. And since Nurse Death worked as a puppet, it’s a team job, not a solo gig.”
Russell said: “So it’s either an internal CIA coup or an external anti-CIA conspiracy.”
“Could it be something else?” I asked.
Zane answered: “Call me crazy—”
“You’re crazy!” blurted Eric.
“—but I can’t see what else it could be,” finished Zane.
“Me either,” I said. “But I feel like there’s something more or less up there.”
“Makes my head hurt,” said Hailey.
“Already got ’nough pain,” said Eric.
“Copy that,” said Russell. “Anybody feel any better since we popped those pills?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve stopped feeling worse.”
We stared at the wall. Found no more answers or questions that helped. Zane and Eric peeled our index cards off the wall in case someone came into our rooms while we were gone. We stayed in the hotel, waited for the sun to sink lower, waited for afternoon to crowd the streets.
When my watch said 4:37, I told them: “Now.”
24
We stood in the glowing center of a smudged ivory tunnel. Darkness loomed at each end. Our shoes crunched grit on the platform above steel tracks. Stale air trapped down there with us smelled of metal and cement. We were stones in a subterranean river of a thousand flowing strangers. We were Low Profile. We were Not Being Noticed. We were safe as long as no one realized we were fugitive imposters in the world of the sane.
Came a clatter, a roar, a woosh as a comet raced past us from the tunnel’s black hole. Metal brakes squealed as the subway train screeched to a stop. Car doors jumped open and the five o’clock rush swept us on board.
Hailey and Eric scored a seat. Russell, Zane and I jostled for a place to stand.
New Yorkers crammed themselves everywhere. Construction workers. Computer jockeys. Sales girls with tumbles of curls and tired make-up. Two nuns. Businessmen in tie-loosened suits. A Brooklyn beauty wearing fuck me high heels and a fuck you glare. A shoe mashed my foot. “Lo siento,” said a Puerto Rican woman. A pale punk in a hooded sweatshirt practiced his gangsta stare as his earphones vibrated rap music. A transit cop slouched at the rear of our car, but his gaze floated over the crowd and he didn’t reach for the radio mike clipped on his shoulder.
Subway car doors slammed shut. The train lunged forward.
Russell whispered in my ear: “Check Zane!”
That soldier who’d dangled in the inferno jungle now white-knuckle clung to a subway strap. Close-cropped snow hair melted above his slick forehead. The bootleg meds he’d taken were either useless or incendiary. Either way…
“Hang in there, man!” I whispered to him. “Stay invisible.”
“Hot! Victor—hot! Hell!”
“No, just a trip uptown.”
Swooping to a stop jostled everyone forward, snapped us back. Doors popped open. Eight million more people crammed into the car. Nobody got off. The doors banged shut. We jerked forward. Body heat swelled inside our rocketing train.
Last time Zane got this hot was when the Castle’s boiler wouldn’t shut off. He flashbacked to the jungle and trashed the Day Room before a Keeper grabbed a dart gun.
“You’re OK,” I told him. His eyes glowed like pits of fire. Lie: “We’re close.”
“Close, here, we’re here. Can’t stand it. Won’t.”
“Ah, Zane,” I whispered: “Do you have the gun?”
The hurtling subway car bounced those eyes and gaped his mouth. “’Xactly.”
“Oh good,” I lied. “That’s good. Keep it safe, keep it out of sight, keep it good.”
We clattered into a station. Screeched to a stop. More people got off than got on. The press of the crowd eased. Open doors let cool air into our car. For a minute. Doors clunked shut and sealed in the heat as we rocketed down the tunnel.
“Victor,” whispered Zane from a bad place.
“It’s OK.”
“Not gonna take it. Can’t take it. Won’t make it. Got to do, do something.”
Innocent strangers/proximity casualties rode our car. So did a cop.
The train clattered. The train roared. Swayed from side to side as it hurtled forward into the darkness. And the suffocating heat… The heat swelled.
A cool human voice knifed through that sweltering air:
“Ttttr-rump pump pum. Ttttrr-rump pump pum…”
Russell, rock ’n’ roll Russell, holding on to the steamy subway car’s ceiling pole as he leaned toward where Zane clung to this universe. Russell hummed and buzzed his tongue like a snare drum: “Ttttr-rump pump pum pum, pum pum pum pum.”
Mister Slick 20 feet further up aisle nudged his buddy: “Yo, what the Hell?”
The Puerto Rican woman saw nothing. Being blind was one of a hundred ways the train car of witnesses suddenly focused on Zane who clung to his subway strap in the sweltering jungle canopy, on Russell who filled the car with an oldie-goldie song about paratroopers falling from the sky.
Sitting ten feet from me was a gray-haired man who wore a leather jacket and a face that shone with camaraderie as on cue, he gave Russell’s aria its bugle: “Ta dah-dah da.”
Shake, rattle and roll, the subway train roared through the darkness carrying fill for body bags and one song. Opposite ends of the car, opposite ends of two decades from forty, two strangers to each other and to us all lifted their voices alongside Russell and the bugler went: “Ta dah-dah da.”
Zane contorted with a soundless scream. Instead of hanging from a jungle tree, he was hanging on to a subway strap in suffocating heat. But he couldn’t ignite to berserk without burning all of us. He refused to be such a traitor. He clung to the strap in that hot roaring train like he held on to his lifetime of pain. He held on and trembled as a subway choir sang The Ballad Of The Green Berets, swept him up in sentiment he’d sought when all he’d known was being young. The train hurtled through the dark tunnel and the song. He clung to the strap. Held on until the train blasted out of the dark to the next station stop as the tunnel angels sang of silver wings for America’s best and finally he let go of
his pain in a wash of sobbing tears that he’d never, no never before, cried.
’Xactly.
25
Outside, the sky bled. Taxis jammed the streets. Armies of the evening tramped the sidewalks. As far as we could tell, none of those marchers were on-our-trail hunters.
As far as we could tell.
And as far as we could tell from our Recon Stage One, no surveillance teams were watching the upper West Side apartment building we’d detoured from Maine to hit now in Stage Two. The building was 20 floors of units whose windows glowed out to the coming night. Our target was a sixth floor apartment. We rode the elevator summoned for us by the doorman who’d bought Hailey’s bold con that we were there for ‘the’ dinner party.
Once we decided that the building was free of surveillance, we’d hoped the apartment would be empty, a burglary waiting our arrival, but when we stepped out of the elevator, at our open target door stood an old man who looked like a mustache-less Albert Einstein in a black suit. He beckoned: “You’re just in time.”
Eric rushed to obey the old man’s summons.
The old man lunged for him.
Russell surged to rescue our guy. Zane’s right hand swept under his coat. Hailey pivoted to watch our rear. I crouched with all the closed apartment doors in my vision.
The old man threw himself around Eric in a hug, so Eric hugged him back.
“I’m so glad you came!” The old man leaned away from Eric and beckoned us closer. “I’m Leon’s father, Jules Friedman. Thanks for being here.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it.” I peered into the apartment linked to our dead shrink. Bookshelves lined the foyer. People mingled in the dining room.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to tell me your names,” said our psychiatrist’s father.
Eric blurted: “Hailey, Russell, Zane, Victor. I’m Eric.”
Too late for my lie, I thought.
Jules Friedman said: “And you knew my son… How?”
“From work,” Russell said, putting himself between obedient Eric and the father’s questions. Hailey diverted Eric into the apartment.
“Ahh,” said Jules.
“Yes,” said Russell.
“Your two people who showed up at my high school to… to tell me about Leon, they never met him.” Jules turned his misted bloodshot eyes to me. “Can you imagine having to tell some stranger that his child is dead? How terrible that must be.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Like a falling child, he wrapped me into a hug. Collected himself and leaned away. “After they left, I didn’t think anyone from… from his work would show up.”
Zane said: “He was special to us.”
“He was special to everybody,” said the mourning father. “Come in.”
He led Russell into the apartment logged in his son’s laptop under HOME and I realized this was not where Dr. F ‘lived’ but where he felt safe. Where he’d come from and no doubt where he told himself he could always return.
Zane and I stood in the hall. He’d walked here holding his coat open to fresh air.
“You sure you’re OK?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Zane. “Or no. Now it’s all… different. I feel… light.”
“All we have to do is stay calm. Low profile. Keep cover. Be cool.”
He smiled. “I’m not exactly worried about temperature anymore.”
“Should we abort? Is this Recon smart? Is it safe?”
“Beats me.” He went into the apartment.
Where Russell yelled: “What a fuckload of food!”
I stepped into the apartment and closed the door.
Found my comrades in a crowded dining room. An abstract print from a museum shop dominated one wall. Opposite it, someone had tacked a white bed sheet above the mantle where a silver-haired woman in a navy Armani suit now positioned a cylindrical glass vase of red roses. Sandwiches, cold broccoli and carrot sticks covered the dining table. Warm smells rose from a beef brisket and a butchered turkey.
Our murdered shrink’s mourning father gave me a grateful smile.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Friedman—”
“Please: Jules.”
“Jules. Did… What did our people tell you about Leon’s death?”
“A dark highway. Like always, him working too hard. Tired. Driving back from seeing patients at that Army base by the border. Black ice. Lost control. A one car wreck. Fast—they said, promised it was fast, that he had to… to be dead before… before the fire.”
That haunting lie made him look away. Whisper: “What else is there to say?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “Except that he was a good man.”
Russell swooped over to us, a plastic glass of red wine in one hand while his other waved a turkey drumstick. “Great food!”
“Thank you,” said Jules. “The corner deli, they knew Leon since he was a boy. And the sandwiches: the industrial cooking class at the high school where I teach…”
Jules curled into a twisted man in a shiny black suit in a room where he’d eaten 10,000 happy meals, curled in on himself and trembled, not daring to shut his eyes.
The silver-haired woman in dark Armani now stood near Zane. She took a white envelope out of her purse and put it with others in a basket on the sideboard.
Russell aimed the turkey leg at the sheet tacked above the mantle: “What’s that?”
“I covered all the mirrors,” answered Jules.
“Wild.” Russell left us for the wine table.
The silver-haired woman flowed into the space made by Russell’s departure. She woman embraced Jules: “I’m so sorry!”
“Thanks.” Jules gestured towards me. “Victor, right? Forty years teaching high school history, you learn to learn names quick. This is Dr. Clark, she was Leon’s mentor at Harvard—don’t deny it! And I saw that envelope go in the basket.”
“Whatever I can do to help.” Her voice purred like a cat.
“Right now, you can help by excusing me.” He left the room.
Her bright blue eyes zeroed in on me. “You were a friend of Leon’s?”
“Not as much as I would have liked. You teach at Harvard, Dr. Clark?”
“Please, it’s Yarrow. After two decades, sentimentality brought me back to this city. I just opened a practice here, though I still lecture and keep my eye on research.”
“Practice? You’re a…”
“Psychiatrist.” She laid a paw on my arm. Her claws circled my bones.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “How’s he doing?”
“Jules?” I licked my lips. “Doing better than a lot of people—I mean, than a lot of people would. If they were, you know, doing. Whatever. Not than anybody is doing—”
“Yes, I know. One never knows what to do at times like this.”
Make her talk! Don’t you talk! “You met Leon at Harvard?”
“I knew the family. We went to school together. Well, Jules and I did. I admit I thought it was absurd—graduating Harvard to teach public high school in Harlem! But that’s who he is. If he believes, he does. I never knew how much I admired that until, well, until after he’d met Marisse when I was doing my residence at the psychotic ward in Bellevue. There’s no eye opener like time in a mental hospital!”
“Really.”
“Seems like yesterday.” Yarrow clung to me. “That asylum brought me to Leon.”
Nearby, Eric stood behind two men so deep in their conversation they didn’t notice him even when one of them turned to the mantle, slid aside a hammer, a packet of tacks and a wire loop to set his glass of red wine beside a vase of red roses.
As Yarrow told me: “I remember when Jules first had me over to this apartment. For dinner. To meet Marisse. Two old college friends… And I saw her. Saw her pregnant with Leon. All of a sudd
en I realized… what a great man Jules is—was—is, I mean. Better watch it. Think I’d know better. Those tricky Freudian slips.”
“Tricky.”
“Marisse was the most honest, magic person. You simply had to love her. Two years she’s been gone. Now poor Jules is truly all alone. Myself, I’ve been divorced for a year, a nice man but… Enough of me. What was it you said you do?”
“What?”
“What you do,” purred Doc Yarrow. She squeezed my arm. “Who you are.”
Martial arts schooled me on how to break a grip on my arm. Hit her with my free hand: a palm strike to her temple, a knuckle jab to her windpipe, smash her forearm with my hammer fist. Jerk away through her grip’s weak spot, the thumb-finger contact. Grab/peel her little finger and snap it back. Pull to unbalance her, then T’ai Chi push/pop her away. Pin her gripping hand to my arm with my other palm, drop the elbow of the arm she held to point my “trapped” fingers up, then saw the sword edge of that hand against her trapped forearm and slam her to her knees with Qinna’s Small Silk Tie-Up.
“Excuse me,” I told Yarrow, “my friends… need help.”
I wriggled between strangers in the crowded room and made it to Zane.
Jules called out: “Please, everyone! Could we all start into the living room?”
“We’ve got to get out of this place!” I whispered to Zane as the crowd surged.
“We haven’t gotten anything here but food,” he said, brisket sandwich in hand.
“Speak for yourself. And watch what you say: that old lady is a psychiatrist!”
“And you’re crazy. You’ve got a lot in common.”
“If she spots us for who we are…”
“You worry too much. What’s the worst that could happen? Besides,” he said, nodding to the subject of his concern, “it’s not her or you we should be worried about.”
Russell stood at the dining room door downing another Merlot.
Jules called from the other room: “Everyone! Please! In here.”
Russell headed towards that voice. I hurried after him to the living room.
Night filled the windows of that room where couches, chairs and tables had been pushed aside to create an empty space of rug ringed by a circle of metal folding chairs.
