Fanatics

by William Bell

  Working on the Hawk was a little like cabinetmaking. It took my mind away. It required some knowledge and skill, asking me to think and remember. I puttered away in the shade of the ancient maple that stood beside the driveway, entertained by rustling leaves and the conversations of robins and sparrows.

  I drained and replaced the crankcase oil, then spent half an hour or so adjusting and lubricating the chain, the clutch, and the brake cables. I wiped the bike down from front to back, taking extra time to polish the aluminum frame and swing arm. A motorcycle was like any machine-it liked to be clean, lubricated, and properly adjusted-but more so, because it operated outdoors in all weather, under conditions like yesterday’s, with dirt and dust and a certain amount of abuse.

  Some people liked hard saddlebags on a motorcycle, but I preferred my old black leather bags with their chrome-plated lockable buckles. I polished them once in a while and cleaned them out with every oil change. Fetching the portable vacuum cleaner from its rack on the kitchen wall, I opened the right-side bag, half-surprised at what I found there. With everything that had been going on lately I had forgotten the bagged cellphone I had tossed inside in a panic to get away from the paintball camp.

  I set it on the saddle beside my coffee and finished what I was doing. Up in my room, I took the phone from the bag and looked it over. It was a common, slightly upscale model you’d see anywhere. It was Internet-capable, but a quick look for emails or a search engine history proved that function had been unused. The call list contained a lot of city exchange numbers, but there were no photos stored in the unit.

  What to do? Arriving at a decision took less than a second. I rejected calling a random number from the list and reporting that I’d found the cell. How would I explain my snooping around the paintball camp, trespassing, and discovering the phone? No, the phone would share the same fate as the GPS and end up in a garbage bin.

  It was then that I remembered I hadn’t erased the photos I’d snapped out at the camp from my own cell. I turned it on and activated the camera and reviewed the few images I had of the camo-boys in the clearing. There was something about the picture of the leader that intrigued me.

  I hooked the phone to my laptop and uploaded the pictures. On the bigger screen the details were much clearer. I focused on the leader, standing in the clearing, the cabin off his left shoulder, the tents to the side, his paintball gun hanging from a strap diagonally across his chest.

  “Wait a minute,” I heard myself say.

  I looked closely. I wasn’t an expert, but I could see that was no paintball marker. It was a machine pistol. A real gun. A lethal-and illegal-weapon.

  I sat back in my chair, thinking, wondering what I had stumbled into out there in the bush. Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Mom was back after her run.

  “Anybody home?” she called out.

  And then, like the pins and tails of a dovetail joint slipping into place, interlocking smoothly, a plan came together in my devious little mind.

  III

  BY THE TIME MOM padded into the kitchen on bare feet, a towel at her neck, I was placing her omelette on a plate beside a slab of toast. She poured a coffee and sat down. I slipped her plate in front of her and sat opposite, steeling myself for the conversation ahead.

  “You’re not eating?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I ate earlier.”

  “Umm.”

  “Dad’s off giving a music lesson?” I asked.

  Mom eyed me with suspicion. “You know he is.”

  “Yeah, true. Guess I forgot. Temporarily.”

  I lost the offensive after that. I was up against a pro. A pro journalist and-what’s even more intimidating-a pro mother.

  She carved a wedge out of her omelette and chewed it slowly. “So,” she said, “what is it? You smashed up the car?”

  “What? Smashed the-?”

  “Emptied our bank account and sent the money to the Cayman Islands?”

  “I-”

  “You were arrested for peddling drugs to the kids down at the skateboard park?”

  “Mom, I-”

  “Because if this carefully staged intimate mother-and-son tête-à-tête is about me going to Herat…”

  She raised her eyebrows inquiringly, her eyes boring into mine, then broke contact, pushed another bite of omelette into her mouth, and chewed silently.

  “Mom, how could you? I just thought… no, it’s nothing to do with Herat. Not directly. Maybe marginally.”

  “Very articulate,” she said, spooning blueberry jam onto her toast.

  “What I mean is-” I tried again, but she cut me off.

  “Not that I’m complaining about this wonderful breakfast and the rare opportunity to share it with my eldest son-”

  “Mom, I’m your only son.”

  “But I get the sense that there’s an ulterior motive at work here. An agenda.”

  She popped a bit of toast into her mouth.

  “There may be… there is. Sort of. An agenda, I mean. But not about Herat.”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “At least, not directly.”

  “Umm-hmm. You’re beginning to repeat yourself.”

  “Mom, just let me talk, okay? You’re making me nervous.”

  Mom leaned back in her chair, hooking one arm over the back. “I’m all ears.”

  “I think you’re going to like this.”

  “No sales pitch, okay? Just spit it out.”

  “But first you have to promise to keep what I’m about to tell you secret.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Listen,” I tried again, “you’re a reporter-er, journalist. I’ve got information that I know will interest you, but I have to be a whatchamacallit-an unidentified anonymous reliable source.”

  “Fine. I promise.”

  She wasn’t taking me seriously, but she would in a few minutes if I could lay out my information temptingly and clearly. Gaining confidence as I went along, I described finding the GPS on the shore. I reminded her about the drowned man we had read about in the morning paper a couple of days before. I told her about my visit to the hunt camp or whatever it was. The paintball splatters on the cabin. I fed her the facts without speculating. I knew she’d put it all together in a fraction of the time I had taken. And I kept something back-the two aces up my sleeve.

  When I was done, I watched her face. She would have been a good poker player. Her features gave away nothing-another reason she was a killer interviewer. But I was her son. I’d been looking into that face since my cradle days. I paid attention to her eyes.

  And I knew I had her.

  “Let’s go into my study,” she said.

  IV

  I GOT THE FULL-BORE professional interview. Mom opened her pad, leaned forward, and fired questions like nails, fixing times, places, facts, with no invitations to guess or suggest hypotheses. She took notes in her personal shorthand, which nobody else could decipher.

  “Let’s talk about these men you saw,” she said after we’d exhausted the basics. “You said there were ten.”

  “Yup.”

  “About ten or exactly ten?”

  “Exactly. I counted them.”

  “All dressed alike?”

  I nodded. “And the clothing seemed, if not new, certainly not well used.”

  “And they spoke a language you couldn’t identify. So we can rule out French, German, Italian-most of the European languages. Any others?”

  “Latin.”

  She almost smiled, but the poker face slipped back into place. “Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, let’s leave it at that. Now, don’t take this the wrong way but… skin colour?”

  “Dark, but not black. Brownish.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yup.”

  “Age?”

  “The leader thirty-ish, or a little under. The others in their early twenties, a couple not even that old.”


  “Teenagers. Maybe minors.”

  I nodded.

  She closed her pad. “Well, this looks like it’s worth a couple of hours’ investigation.”

  That wasn’t quite the reaction I was hoping for, but I still had my aces.

  “Speaking of Latin…” I began.

  Mom nodded, and this time she allowed a smile. “Go on.”

  “You’ve heard of quid pro quo?”

  “Of course. Something for something. You want something in return.”

  “Yup.”

  “Let me guess. I turn down the Herat assignment and work on this instead.”

  I nodded. “The assignment you haven’t agreed to accept, yet. Or have you?”

  Mom shook her head slowly.

  “So it’s not like you’re cancelling a commitment.”

  “Maybe not, but let’s be realistic. You don’t have much.”

  “What I’ve given you is promising, though. Admit it.”

  “Yes, it is. But it isn’t enough. It may all come to nothing.”

  I reached into my pocket, then placed my cellphone on the desk beside her notepad.

  “I have pictures. One of them shows the leader. And you’ll see it’s not a paintball gun hanging around his neck. I checked it out on the net. It’s definitely a machine pistol.”

  Her eyes widened, then immediately returned to normal. “But I don’t get the pictures unless I take your deal.”

  “You don’t get anything. I clam up.”

  Mom looked over my head. A shadow crossed her face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to decide if this is a dirty trick,” she said sadly.

  “It is a dirty trick. And I hate what I’m doing. But I have no choice.”

  She threw down her ballpoint and watched it bounce off the desk.

  “Mom,” I pleaded. “Listen, will you? This isn’t about Dad and me telling you what to do. He doesn’t even know about this, and I’ll never tell him no matter what you decide. Dad and I know how brave you are, Mom. More than the two of us put together. And we know you’re committed to showing the world what’s going on in the places you go to-especially what’s happening to the women. It’s your vocation. Mine is designing furniture. Dad’s is… well, old stuff. And you and me. If something happened to you, people would admire you. But Dad and I would have to live the rest of our lives in a different world, without you in it.”

  She moved her gaze to the kitchen doorway.

  “Do you know what I’m afraid of, Mom? I’m terrified that if you go there and get killed, I’ll spend the rest of my life hating you. So, yes, I’m bribing you.”

  Slowly I took the cellphone, still in the sealed plastic bag, from my pocket and laid it beside my own. Mom’s eyes fixed on it.

  For a few minutes, we sat as if someone had sprinkled fairy dust on us and frozen us in time. Mom thought her thoughts; I prepared myself to make the final pitch.

  “See, Mom, I think your confidential source-me-stumbled on some kind of para-military group, or a militia, or whatever it’s called. I think I discovered their training camp. I’ve got a few photos. I’ve got a cellphone here that one of the soldier boys kept hidden from the others. I’ll bet it’s full of phone numbers and email addresses and other stuff that a renowned journalist could easily track down and use to flesh out a story. And you’ve got a whatchamacallit-an exclusive.”

  She turned her face toward me. I focused on her eyes. They had softened. She leaned back in her chair, linked her fingers behind her head, and gazed up at the ceiling, puffing her cheeks and letting the air out slowly.

  “My own son,” she said.

  “Don’t try the guilt thing on me, Mom. I’m too old for that. Besides, Dad’s better at it than you.”

  She tried not to, but she smiled.

  “And you’re better at it than both of us,” she said.

  V

  MOM AND I SPENT the next hour discussing the implications of what I had told her. With her experience, she mentally hunted down what she called “ramifications” like a fox after chickens.

  “The phone’s a bit of a problem,” she said. “If these guys are up to something deeply illegal, especially activity that touches on national security, then it’s evidence and our possession of it is a crime-even for a journalist. Withholding information is a crime. We could both end up in jail.”

  “But we don’t need the phone or GPS after today.”

  “Explain,” she demanded.

  “I copied the GPS files onto my laptop and my own GPS before I junked it. Do you have software that will copy the data card in the phone I found?”

  “No, but I can get it.”

  “Okay. Problem solved. Download the data card onto your computer. I’ll take the phone back where I found it and leave it there.”

  I would rather have stuck my hand into a blender than go back to the camp, but I had to persuade her.

  “No, that’s too dangerous, especially if you’re right about the machine pistol.”

  “Not really,” I argued, not quite honestly. “I can go out there, and if there’s anyone around I’ll take off and try another day. If there isn’t, I’ll replace the phone.” Recalling some of the crime movies I’d seen, I added, “After wiping it clean of prints, of course. And remember, those guys probably don’t even know about the phone. It had been hidden.”

  “All this assumes that the GPS belonged to the drowned man, and that the phone was his, too.”

  “True. But it’s a solid assumption. Whoever owned the GPS made a lot of visits to the place where the phone was stashed.”

  “In any case, I need to have a long gab with Mabel Ayers, a lawyer I’ve worked with in the past. She’s up on all the national security implications for journalists. I may need to protect myself, and you. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let me download your pictures, then I’ll erase them from your phone and give it back to you. The mystery phone stays here. Okay?”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “And let’s keep this between the two of us for now.”

  “The two of us?” I repeated, meaning I shouldn’t even mention it to Dad.

  “Yup.”

  As I was leaving her study, she called me back.

  “Thanks, Garnet,” she said.

  When I walked outside I felt like I was floating.

  Two

  I

  I TOOK ONE LOOK out the window the next morning and groaned.

  The sun was off somewhere in a sulk. Drizzle seeped from the sullen grey sky and dripped off the limp leaves of trees and bushes. It was the kind of day that made me grumpy and tempted me to crawl back under the blankets.

  But I forced myself through my morning rituals. Dad was out somewhere and Mom had been self-exiled behind her office door since yesterday afternoon, researching, writing, making calls, and recording interviews-a good sign that what I thought of as the “paintball gang” story had pushed Herat off her agenda. While I was making toast, she called me into her office.

  “I’ve finished with the phone,” she said, nodding to the cell, back in its plastic bag. “I’d like you to take it to your workshop and leave it there.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Do you have a place where you can lock it up?”

  “Yeah. Well, I can improvise something.”

  “And for the next little while,” she added mysteriously, tucking her hair behind her ear in a transparent effort at nonchalance, “you should leave your laptop there as well, okay? Keep them away from here.”

  “Um, sure. What’s this all about?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  After breakfast I drove through wet streets toward Raphaella’s house, wondering what-if anything-was waiting for us in the Corbizzi library. I couldn’t shake off a sense of foreboding as gloomy as the sky over my head. I hoped the rain that began to lash the windshield wasn’t an omen.

  When she climbed into the van, Raphaella’s forced smile did little to brigh
ten my mood.

  “Lovely day,” she muttered, shoving her pack between the seats. “How did things go with your mom?”

  I had updated Raphaella on my trip to paintball heaven and shared my plan to tempt Mom with the story.

  “So far, so good. I think she’s hooked.”

  Raphaella nodded. We drove in silence to Wicklow Point and exchanged a worried glance as the estate gates closed behind us. I parked by the coach house. The grounds looked as if some bad-tempered sprite had crept around during the night, draining the colour from leaves, lake, and grass. Even the flower beds looked bleached. The mansion’s dagger-shaped upper windows reflected the grey light, like blank eyes squinting at nothing. I went inside the shop and put the phone in my toolbox and spun the dial on the combination lock.

  Mrs. Stoppini opened the kitchen door to us and I saw my second strained smile of the day. Her haggard features and more-than-customarily pale skin suggested that she had had a rough night.

  “Good morning, Miss Skye, Mr. Havelock. You’ll take tea before you begin your day’s work.”

  The kitchen was warm and fragrant, a welcome contrast to the outside. I smelled biscuits baking in the oven and there was a stockpot on the stove giving off a savoury aroma. A cup of tea around the kitchen table sounded good to me. Before long Raphaella and I were spreading butter on hot steaming biscuits and sipping strong tea.

  “How are you feeling today, Mrs. Stoppini?” I enquired.

  The protruding eyes widened. Her teacup clunked into its saucer. “Why do you ask?”

  Raphaella’s hand on my knee under the table stopped me from answering.

  “It’s just that you look a little tired,” she replied for me. “It must be difficult at times, running a big house like this alone.”

  “To tell the truth, Miss Skye, my sleep has not been very restful of late,” she said, dropping her eyes as if she’d just confessed to a crime.

  “This weather…” Raphaella suggested.

  But our hostess sidestepped the invitation to explain further.