The Program

by Stephen White

  THE WHALES THAT joined me on the surface after my conversation with Andrea were two of the feeling whales that I knew intimately. These beasts were the responsibility whale and the inadequacy whale. When they visited me, they tended to swim together.

  Why were they visiting then?

  To remind me, I think, that I had been part of the effort that had led an executioner to Khalid’s cellblock door. Yes, inadvertently. Yes, without malice. But the hooded man was lurking outside Khalid’s bars, nonetheless. And now I feared that I was going to prove unable to stop that executioner from carrying out his awful duties.

  His lawful duties.

  How did that knowledge feel? Well, if I looked into a mirror at that moment, I thought I would see my reflection twice.

  I would be the man in chinos with the silenced .22.

  I would also, once again, be the woman on Bourbon Street in the pretty suit. You know, the woman with the scream caught in her throat.

  I CHECKED AND double-checked the locks on the doors and flicked off the downstairs lights one by one. Upstairs, I found that Landon was sleeping sideways on her bed, more on top of her covers than under them. I rearranged her and pulled the blanket up to her chest. Her favorite stuffed bear never left the crook of her arm. I kissed her hair and then her shoulder and then once more her hair. I whispered, “I love you, baby. Good night.”

  Out loud, I said, “Goodnight noises, everywhere.”

  My bedroom at the front of the house was dark. I left the lights off as I walked to the window and peered through a slit in the drapes. I wasn’t gazing at the view of the mountains or scanning for constellations in the night sky. I was searching the parking lot and the adjacent streets for a big white Ford Expedition with a sleepy federal marshal in the front seat.

  I didn’t see Ron Kriciak but didn’t think for a moment that not seeing him meant that he wasn’t there.

  After keeping the vigil for a few moments I retraced my steps to Landon’s room. She had already kicked off her covers. I replaced them, this time only up to her waist. I was her mommy; it was my role to keep her warm.

  And safe.

  I really, really wanted to believe that the marshals could protect me from Ernesto Castro. Deep in my heart, though, I knew the only one who could protect me from a renegade marshal was me.

  I wondered who Khalid was counting on to protect him from Florida’s infamous electric chair. I bet it wasn’t me or Andrea or Dave. I bet it wasn’t Jack Tarpin or Mickey Redondo.

  I wondered if Khalid had given up hope or if he even knew what hope was.

  I was, I thought, beginning to empathize, to begin to know what it felt like to have your appeals dwindle toward zero.

  chapter

  six

  DOGSEC

  1

  Barb Turner didn’t like collecting data. She was an action person. A doer. It’s why teaching fifth grade in Galveston had turned out not to be her thing. Oh, the part with the kids in the classroom had been okay. Mostly she could keep them moving, doing. But the dealing with the parents part? And the jousting with the administrators part?

  She’d always ended up feeling like killing somebody.

  So she decided to honor all the unsolicited advice she was receiving from her friends. To a woman, her best friends told her to find a passion and just follow her heart.

  BARB ALMOST MISSED Peyton’s arrival at work that day.

  Barb had begun staking out the restaurant entrance at eight o’clock in the morning, just in case. A half dozen different women had temporarily piqued Barb’s interest in the next three hours, but none of them had been a disguised Kirsten Lord. Barb had actually focused her camera on Peyton as she was walking down Thirteenth toward the Boulderado but rejected her as a Kirsten Lord wannabe before something, some intuitive something, caused Barb to swing the camera back in the woman’s direction. Barb refocused her lens, recapturing the image of a lanky woman in a floral sundress who was taking long purposeful strides in the direction of the entrance to the Boulderado Hotel.

  Barb tightened the zoom. Maybe, she thought. She snapped off one picture. Dark hair. Short hair. Maybe, she thought again as she narrowed the zoom further and snapped off another shot. Glasses—those are new. She whispered, “Come on honey, please take off your sunglasses. Give me a look I can send off to Prowler. Come on, come on.”

  As if on cue, Peyton did remove her sunglasses. She folded them and stuffed them into a case and put the case in her purse. She removed another pair of glasses, frameless with clear lenses, and adjusted them onto her face just as she began to climb the flagstone steps that led up to the hotel entrance.

  Barb managed two more quick images. Click, click. In the age of digital imaging, there was no distracting whirr as film advanced. “Gotcha, Miss Kirsten,” Barb Turner said, as she lowered the camera. “I think I gotcha, babe.” She inhaled deeply and exhaled through tightly pursed lips. “Next time no shutter, I’m afraid. Next time, love, I think I’ll be pulling a trigger.”

  FROM ACROSS THIRTEENTH, Carl Luppo watched the woman’s lips moving as she lowered the camera and placed it beside her on the seat. The woman was sitting on the passenger side of a dark blue Dodge that was parked across Thirteenth Street from the entrance to the hotel. Carl had already reached the obvious conclusion that the woman had been photographing Peyton.

  Now, he wanted to know why.

  BARB NEEDED HER computer to send the digital images from her camera over the Internet to Prowler. She figured she had at least a few hours to get the download accomplished and get back to the hotel in time to follow Peyton home.

  Barb started her car and took Pine back to Broadway and then Broadway toward Arapahoe. Within five minutes her car was back in the parking lot of the Foot of the Mountain Motel.

  Carl Luppo arrived in the same vicinity about fifteen seconds later.

  He was troubled.

  BARB PULLED HER car right in front of her cabin and carried her camera inside. She removed the diskette from her camera, loaded it into her PC, and checked the quality of the images on her screen—good, not great—before transmitting the files to Prowler. She added an e-mail message promising to send the target’s home address and some photos of the spelling-bee kid by the end of the day.

  When she changed careers, Barb Turner actually had a much easier time dealing with the new computer technology than she did with her weapons.

  From the very beginning she found that ironic.

  • • •

  CARL LUPPO HAD pulled his car to a stop in the parking lot at nearby Eben Fine Park and was hanging out on a big rock on the banks of Boulder Creek waiting for the woman in the motel to make her next move. He read the paper while he waited.

  Carl Luppo killed a lot of time before he watched Barb Turner get back in her car midafternoon.

  By then, Carl Luppo had left his perch on the rock by the creek and was sitting on the front seat of his own car, listening to a Rockies broadcast from Florida on the radio. The local team was losing six to one in the second inning. He wondered how it was possible that one baseball team could give up so many runs.

  And he was still troubled by the woman in the cabin at the Foot of the Mountain Motel.

  BARB HEADED BRIEFLY west on Arapahoe before curving over to Canyon and backtracking east. Carl followed her car. His visor was down. He was wearing shades and a weird round Orvis hat that almost covered his wide forehead. He guessed that the woman would be going back to the Boulderado to wait for Peyton, so he wasn’t surprised when she turned from Canyon to Thirteenth and continued down the road toward the hotel.

  Barb took the only open parking place opposite the hotel. Carl was getting accustomed to downtown Boulder’s parking dilemmas and had already decided on an alternative plan. He drove past the woman’s car, crossed Spruce, and then turned right on Pine and began driving back and forth between Spruce and Pine on the numbered streets east of the hotel. It took him almost five minutes before he spotted Peyton’s car. She�
��d parked it half a block west of where she’d parked the day before.

  AT THE END of the day, Barb Turner followed Kirsten Lord/Peyton Francis from her job at the hotel restaurant to her town house in east Boulder. Barb took a calculated risk, pausing long enough outside her prey’s town house to snap a couple of digital shots of the exterior and, luckily, a couple of the kid. The girl actually came out of the house as though she was hitting her mark. Right on cue, just like her mother had removed her sunglasses earlier in the day as though she could hear Barb’s plea.

  The final photographs taken, Barb spent the time driving back across town to the Foot of the Mountain Motel, making initial plans for the hit. Prowler had already told her that there would be a limited window of time to accomplish the work. What he’d said was, “She needs to be done at the same time as the others.” Barb didn’t know who the others were and she didn’t really care. Didn’t know who was doing the other work. She preferred not to know, as a matter of fact.

  What she did care about was whether or not she was going to be instructed to do the kid. She’d never done a kid and didn’t really want to start now. The girl was just about the right age so that she could have been one of Barb’s students in her classroom in Texas.

  Once safely back in her cabin at the motel, Barb checked her e-mail and got the message she had expected from Prowler. “The bird you spotted there is the same one we’ve been looking for here. Await instructions.”

  She moved the diskette with the four new images from her camera to her laptop, checked the pictures for quality, and sent them on to Prowler in Atlanta along with an encrypted e-mail containing Peyton’s Boulder street address and a simple question, “What do you want done with the other inhabitant of the nest?”

  Barb had a new DVD with her. Wild Wild West. She ordered pizza from a company called Blackjack because she liked the name, got two cans of Sprite from the garish machine by the motel office, and settled onto her bed with her laptop and its DVD player resting on her thighs.

  She just loved Will Smith.

  2

  The next day was Tuesday. Once again I stopped at the bank on the Mall on the way to work. While I was driving across town I kept checking my mirrors and didn’t think anyone had followed me. At the bank I withdrew four thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds, the largest amount I had pulled out yet. I stuffed the thick wad of money into the pocket of my chefs pants and kept it there through my entire shift at the restaurant. When I added it to my stash at home at the end of the day, I would have almost eleven thousand dollars in cash stuffed inside The Cider House Rules. The mutilation of his book aside, I thought John Irving would be pleased.

  During my hours at the restaurant I beat egg whites until my forearms ached. I julienned squash until the little sticks I was cutting were as uniform as little Nazi soldiers. I peeled and seeded two flats of tomatoes, and parboiled and hulled ten pounds of fava beans. I enjoyed a much-needed lesson in stock reduction and learned how to render duck fat.

  When the day was done I thought my legs hurt less than they had the day before. I called it progress.

  I half expected Carl Luppo to be waiting for me as I strolled back to my car to go home midafternoon after work. I was leaving early to take Landon to a qualifying bee at her school. Carl wasn’t there waiting for me. I was aware of being both relieved and just the slightest bit disappointed. I was beginning to appreciate having him at my back and in his absence I felt a little twinge of vulnerability, as though my guardian angel had taken the afternoon off.

  I tried to be vigilant while I was driving back to my town house, and my mirrors told me that Ron Kriciak hadn’t followed me home. I was acutely aware that I was no longer viewing Ron as my advocate. Despite Carl’s warnings, though, Ron hadn’t yet crossed the line and become my adversary. But whatever responsibility I’d allowed Ron to assume for guaranteeing my safety and my daughter’s safety in Boulder had once again become my own.

  As Carl had said the very first time I’d met him, the jury was out on Ron Kriciak.

  VIV HAD SOMEPLACE to be and rushed away as soon as I got home. Landon pounced on me the moment her babysitter was out the door. She wanted to go to the park and play soccer after the spelling bee.

  “You promised,” she told me.

  I didn’t remember promising. But I didn’t remember not promising, either. I cursed Robert under my breath. Kicking soccer balls with our daughter was definitely supposed to be one of his things. I said, “Sure, babe, if we’re done on time we’ll come back here after the bee and change our clothes—then we can go to the park. Maybe we’ll go out and get some dinner after.”

  “Can we get sushi?”

  Robert’s idea. Introducing our daughter to sushi. Raw fish is not my thing. I said, “I’ll think about it. I was thinking maybe McDonald’s.”

  She said, “Oh,” and I felt guilty. I didn’t even know where to get sushi in Boulder. I guessed I could find someplace decent downtown near the Mall. Maybe that place that used to be the New York Deli. But then, I didn’t eat raw fish. How would I know decent?

  Ten minutes later we were driving to the school for the spelling bee.

  The district qualifying bee was being held at a school not too far from our house. Assuming I’d get lost, I allowed ten minutes to make the five-minute drive. I used the time with Landon to retrace some ground we’d covered when I’d agreed to sign her up for the spelling competition.

  I said, “Babe? You know this is the last bee for now, don’t you? No matter how well you do, we can’t risk having you appear at the district finals.”

  “I know,” she said. “Because of the TV cameras, right?” The tone she attached to those two words conveyed the fact that not only did she know, but that she didn’t particularly want to be reminded, and that she still thought the whole darn thing was unfair. It was hard to disagree with her. In her so there voice, she added, “But I’m going to qualify anyway. Just so you know.”

  “And I’ll be proud of you. Even though you can’t go any farther. Just so you know.”

  “Tell me again—how many qualify, Mom?”

  “Only three kids from this bee, babe.”

  “Piece of cake,” she said. “The kid who comes in fourth is really going to owe me when I back out.”

  I smiled. When we arrived at the school, I drove around the perimeter twice, checking for men sitting in cars looking as though they didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Finally, I pulled into the parking lot.

  “You looking for the bad man?” Landon asked.

  The perspicacity of her question deflated me like a punch in the gut. I briefly considered lying to her, but I didn’t. I nodded. “Yes, babe. I’ve always got an eye out for him,” I said.

  “Then I’ll keep an eye out for him, too,” she said, and she peered intently out the windshield.

  I started to cry when she said that and quickly pulled into a parking space and climbed out of the car, hoping she wouldn’t notice my tears.

  We followed two other mothers and daughters into the school and down some sterile hallways into a small, equally sterile theater. Landon said, “See you later,” and scurried away to join the other children on the raised stage. I moved a folding chair to the side of the room so I could watch the audience when I wasn’t watching the kids on stage. I checked the room carefully for news cameras.

  As was often the case at spelling bees, the first three rounds served to winnow the contestants. After only thirty minutes the twenty-six kids on stage had been reduced to eight. Landon was one of the eight. I smiled as she aced synergy.

  My smile vanished as a solitary man entered the back of the theater. He was about my age, a stocky guy with short, wispy blond hair and small frameless glasses that seemed to magnify his blue eyes. He was wearing a navy blazer. When he paused near the door and crossed his arms, I thought I spotted a bulge below his left arm, toward his back.

  My heart jumped as I factored in the bulge, and I temporarily lost track of the
competition on stage. The man took a seat near the rear of the small theater and spent at least a minute scanning the audience, his eyes, it seemed, resting momentarily on every parent in attendance but me.

  I refocused my attention on the stage. Six kids remained. Landon was the smallest of the four remaining girls. She was on deck. My eyes jumped from her to the man in the blazer and back as though I were watching a tennis match, not a spelling bee. The boy in front of Landon flubbed diminutive. A mother groaned.

  Landon’s name was called and she approached the microphone.

  Her word was lissome. Or maybe lithesome. Tough draw. I wasn’t sure how to spell it.

  As my daughter leaned too close to the microphone and repeated the word and said the letter “l,” the blond man stood and stepped into the aisle.

  I stood, too, and began to edge closer to the stage so I could be in place to insert myself between the man and my daughter.

  Just then an ear-shattering ringing filled the theater, a sound so fierce and sharp that it hurt to be in its vicinity. The two adults on stage jumped immediately toward the children participating in the bee. A woman standing near me took me by the elbow and pointed me toward the doorway at the back of the theater. I yanked my arm free and tried to find the blond man in the blazer.

  He was almost to the steps that led up to the stage.

  I tried to get to Landon but when I turned I ran smack into the woman who had been urging me out the door. We both went flying. She fell with a grunt so loud that I could hear it above the cacophonous ringing. I feared she was hurt, but my compassion for her would have to wait. I scrambled to my feet. I couldn’t spot Landon, but the blond man was all the way up on stage.

  Someone was yelling, “Please, parents. Parents, please. It’s the fire alarm. Single file out the back door. Please.”

  Yeah, right. I sniffed the air for smoke, sensed nothing suspicious. I’d already decided that the alarm was a ruse. Something the blond man had manufactured to create confusion.