He rose, rinsed a towel in cold water and pressed it to his face. With some sad element of the dream still dogging him, he gathered his few belongings. He walked to his parked car, scanning the parking-lot as he moved. A score of cars lay under a film of sunlight, all of them – so far as Teng could tell – empty. He got inside his Chevy, rolled down the windows. How stale the air was inside the car. Unbreathable. He spread the map on the passenger seat and drove out of the lot.
He thought it strange how little apprehension he felt. There was no nervousness in him. It was as if he’d done the killing already and was remembering it the way it had been. So powerful was this sense that even the road seemed very familiar. The houses he passed, the small tourist shops here and there, the fruit and vegetable stands, a tavern that stood crooked against the skyline, a motorcycle repair garage, he’d absorbed all this before. And in a sense he had. He’d slain Laforge time after time in his mind.
He looked in his rearview mirror. The traffic behind him was sparse on the blacktop highway. A cement-mixer. A pick-up truck. Behind that a couple of private cars. Teng glanced at the map, seeing the red-inked arrows pointing south, noticing how close he was coming to the exclamation point that marked his destination, six miles, perhaps seven.
His calm abandoned him briefly. The inside of his mouth was dry, his heart palpitated, a pressure built in his chest. At a stop light he braked, breathed deeply, tried to relax. Five miles now. Maybe less. He looked down at the picture of William Laforge that lay on top of the map; man and map became indivisible a moment. The light turned green and Teng drove forward, looking for the next turn the inked arrows indicated – a narrow road cutting through high trees on either side, shaded, sunlight locked out.
Stone walls imprisoned woods and fields. Here and there fine old houses were visible through trees at the end of long driveways. Teng looked in his rearview mirror. He saw nothing. The road was narrow, the canopy of trees more dense, creating a premature twilight at ground level. According to his instructions, a left turn was coming up very soon. He slowed, careful not to miss it. The road was called Valley Mill and badly signposted, perhaps deliberately so, to discourage riff-raff from coming this way.
Teng made the turn. He drove a half mile, then parked the Chevy off the road, in a narrow lane dense with ancient mossy trees. He spread the map on his knees and traced the route with a fingertip. Laforge’s property, consuming perhaps a hundred acres (for one man!) was three-quarters of a mile from his present location. He’d walk the rest of the way. If it looked safe, if he saw no impediment and sensed no peril, he’d do what he’d come to do. If not, he’d withdraw and consider his options, formulate a plan of approach. He was calm again, lucid.
He put Laforge’s picture in his back pocket. The map he folded and stuffed under his shirt. In his right hand he carried the leather pouch that had the gun. He walked two hundred yards or so, impressed by the silence that began with true twilight. A darkening blue filled the spaces between the trees. Quiet, serenity. Even the heat gently slackened its grip on the day.
Armando Teng listened. From beyond the stone wall to his right came the quiet sound of slow-running water, a stream rolling over pebbles.
The man known as Jack McTell who, from a suitably discreet distance, had followed Teng from the motel, used his car telephone to contact Ted Arganbright. He announced the presence of Teng in the vicinity, and Arganbright thanked him for the information. McTell continued to drive in the direction of New Hope. He’d dine in the area somewhere before returning to Philadelphia. He had absolutely no idea who Teng was, nor would it ever have occurred to him to ask, to say to Arganbright, Hey, what’s going down, because McTell had long ago learned the elementary principle that you never asked anyone anything in the Office of Security unless you had permission to do so. A vicious little circle: to get permission to ask, you had to ask permission. This paradox wasn’t Jack McTell’s concern. His empty stomach was a more immediate problem. He’d done his job and now he was clocking out and thinking that a delightful meal at the Lambertville Station, across the Delaware River from New Hope, might be just the ticket.
The rock music had become very loud and repetitive, banging against the dwindling light of day like a broken shutter in a wind. William Laforge, who had been taking congratulatory phone-calls most of the afternoon from friends and enemies pretending to be friends, heard it vibrate through the old house. When he could stand it no longer he left his small office and, passing the closed door of Carolyn’s room, went downstairs to the living-room where Nick lay on the rug by the fireplace, his eyes shut, his arms limp at his sides, his fingers tapping in time to the music. How could he look so relaxed in this din? Music shook lampshades. Porcelain figurines shuddered on shelves.
Laforge turned the volume down. “I can hardly hear myself think,” he said.
Nick Laforge looked at his father with an expression he’d begun to use increasingly of late, a kind of exaggerated sympathy that was pure sarcasm. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your state of mind, Pops,” he said, and he smiled innocently.
Laforge wondered why he could never fashion a truce between himself and his son. The barricades were so firmly in place they seemed impregnable. What did one do with a son? What was a child for? That odd half-yearning, that desire to understand the boy, touched him unexpectedly – and as he turned to look at Nicholas, he was seized by an urge to hold the boy, prompted in part by the sudden recollection that Tom Railsback had a teenage daughter, a child he’d never seen (what was her name? Ivy? Holly? Cherry?). He wondered about her now, and her grief, and who was looking after her. Was she alone? Had her mother returned to take her away? Tom’s marriage had been a dreadful mess.
“What’s it feel like?” Nick asked.
“What does what feel like?”
“The hype. The attention. The chance of the big job.” Nick made quote marks with his fingers round the word big. “You’ll be America’s chief spook, Pops.”
“I see it as an opportunity to serve my country at the highest level,” Laforge remarked. There was gratitude in his voice, and pride.
“Fuck me,” Nicholas said.
“Save that kind of language for your friends, Nicholas.”
“You sound pompous, that’s all.”
Pompous! Laforge restrained the tiny fury he felt. “I wasn’t aware of it,” he said in a controlled manner.
“To serve my country at the highest level,” Nicholas said. “You really don’t hear yourself?”
“Is there something wrong with the idea of serving the United States?”
“It depends how you go about it, I guess. Your way, you really wanna know, I find shitty.”
Laforge had no wish to prolong a conversation that would ultimately only underline the differences between father and son. If you pressed him beyond his customary sullenness, Nicholas would tell you the United States was run by an illicit affiliation of government, organised crime, and law enforcement agencies, a backscratching system in which all these parts were interlocked to their mutual benefit. All were beyond the reach of the courts. Ergo, those who served in government tacitly or otherwise approved of a stinking, self-perpetuating system. When Ronald Reagan had once referred to the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’, Nick had thrown a sneaker at the television and shouted, “You got the wrong country, dickhead dinosaur!”
Nick believed there were vast conspiracies, which he apparently found all over the place. The Rand Corporation, the Trilateral Commission, the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service – all these organisations were in one another’s pockets, shaping America as they saw fit.
How does it all work? Laforge had asked, trying to sound concerned but coming across as patronising. What are the mechanics of this enormous conspiracy, Nick? Do hundreds of people get together in some secret place and plan everything?
They go underground, they have these deep caves in Colorado and Wyoming, the boy had answered with such obvious sincerity Laforge w
as appalled and just a little scared by what the young man so unquestioningly believed.
Do they also have a flying saucer and the bodies of dead aliens they’re keeping from the US public, Nick?
The boy said yes, they did. He’d read it in a newsletter, one of those xeroxed pamphlets that came to him in the mail from Boulder or Butte, issued by fellow-travellers in the realms of conspiracy fantasy. The UFO Conspiracy was one of the big ones. Laforge tried to see America through his son’s eyes and what he perceived was a cavernous place in whose empty spaces could be heard the echoes of madmen whispering. His own faith in America was so strong, so demanding, he couldn’t begin to understand an opposing point of view, especially one like his son’s, which was out of control, twisted, a portrait in black.
Laforge had tried at the time to defuse Nicholas’s infatuation with conspiracy theories, saying that while minor intrigues undeniably went on, and connivances took place at all levels of society, vast conspiracies of the kind to which he subscribed were practically impossible. How many men could keep a secret for years and years? It was against human nature.
Whatever, Nick had said. It was his favourite word with which to end a conversation. Whatever. A full stop. Sometimes a retreat. At other times an expression of pity. Whatever, Pops. Whatever whatever.
Now Nick rose from the rug and stretched his arms. Laforge looked at him, wondering how long it would take for the boy to attain that age of reason wherein one saw things with the clarity of disinterest and put aside such easy notions as conspiracies. America worked. That’s what the boy had to learn. It worked like no other country in the world because inherent in its structure was a system of balances. No despot could rise to supreme power. No dictator could take control. By the same token, no organisations could conspire together in massive plots and unbounded schemes to shape the nation, an idea that belonged in the hinterlands of lunacy, that interior region where the John Birch Society collided with Charlie Manson.
Laforge said, “I don’t feel like arguing today, Nick.”
“Why should you? This is a big day for you. Let all be calm. Let serenity prevail. I’m all for that.”
The boy even managed to weave sarcasm into his cordiality. The telephone rang in Carolyn’s room, and Laforge raised his face, staring up at her closed door. He wondered who was calling.
“Okay with you if I play my music again?” Nicholas asked.
“Quietly,” said Laforge. “Very quietly.”
He watched his son go to the CD player and insert a disc. At the same moment Laforge turned on a small fringed lamp on the coffee table. It glowed rather forlornly in the twilight that had filled the room with the consistency of a bluish gas.
Then it went out, dead.
“CD’s not working,” Nick said, fidgeting with the machine.
With an unexpected sense of alarm, Laforge gazed at the unlit lamp. “Perhaps there’s a power cut.”
“Hey, maybe you forgot to pay the utility bill, Pops.”
Nick had no sooner spoken than the lamp came back on and the little red digital lights on the stereo console glowed.
“Just a minor power failure,” Laforge said, thinking of darkness thickening over the property – but what did he have to be afraid of? A simple lightbulb goes out. Why should some minor power alteration trouble him? Perhaps it reminded him again of the fragility of things, the thin skein separating security from uncertainty. He realised now he’d been anxious about nightfall all day long. He thought of the gun upstairs in his drawer. The idea consoled him.
“When you’re Director of the CIA, I bet they put in some kind of emergency back-up generator for you,” Nick remarked. “One of the perks.”
“I seriously doubt it.”
The phone-call was from Truskett. Carolyn’s head ached and she was tense. William’s uneasy mood had affected her. Why was he so out of sorts? Possibly there had been too much excitement, the visit to the White House, the long confidential chat with the President, the phone-calls that kept coming on his private line from various Washington power-brokers and well-wishers – William was accustomed to a quieter kind of life. This attention jarred his system. Besides, there had to be an anti-climax factor too. You wait years for a job you think you deserve and finally it comes your way – there had to be a let-down. The morning after syndrome. Flat champagne. Even so, she had seen a look in William’s eyes unknown to her. A haunted quality, a depression; she didn’t know what.
She tried to concentrate on what Truskett was saying. He sounded breathless, hurried.
“Meet me,” he said. “I want you to come and meet me.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“But why? Why the urgency?”
“You need to get out of the house.”
“You’re horny, aren’t you? It’s in your voice.”
“Where you’re concerned it’s a permanent condition. Come as you are. Don’t even get dressed up. Just meet me.”
“You expect me to come to Washington at this time of day?”
“I’m in Philly.”
“Whatever for?”
“A crazed urge to see you. Sheer lust. I’m blinded by it. Goddamit. Just come.”
Carolyn turned on her back. She raised her knees. She imagined Truskett between her thighs and she was moist. Dear Byron. He had made her climax last night. “Why are you in Philly? Tell me the truth.”
“I told you. To see you. Come to me. Get out of that boring old house. I’ll meet you anywhere you like. I’m in the Penn Towers on the University of Penn campus. If you don’t want to meet there, pick a place. I’ll be there.”
“You sound like an adolescent boy, Byron.”
“Just say you’ll come.”
“I don’t know …” She thought of Byron’s mouth lost in the tangle of her pubic hair. She closed her eyes. “I would have to think of a wonderful excuse.”
“You’re creative.”
“It would still take me at least two hours to get there,” she said.
“I happen to know it’s forty-five minutes by car from your house to here. An hour tops.”
“I’d want to shower, get dressed –”
“No. Now. You must come now.”
“Oh, you exasperate me.” I shouldn’t go, she thought. I want him. But I should not go.
“Listen. Hang up the telephone, Carolyn. Leave the house. Do it now.”
“I just don’t understand your urgency.”
“Carolyn.”
The line went dead in the middle of whatever Byron Truskett intended to say. Irritated, Carolyn put the receiver down. She waited for it to ring again. If she knew Truskett he would dial her back immediately. She waited. And waited. Perhaps he imagined she would call him. After ten minutes or so she gave in. She picked up the receiver, intending to call information for the number of the Penn Towers, but the line was dead in her hand. She tapped the reset button several times. Nothing changed.
A dead telephone had a menacing quality. Were you to cry aloud for any reason, the only person to hear you would be yourself. She sat up, smoothed her dress down over her knees and thought she’d check the other receivers in the house. Perhaps hers was the only phone not working.
After he quickly climbed the wall, Teng waded the stream because he considered the old bridge a few yards away a risk. Timbers had decayed and the structure was certain to creak beneath his weight, announcing his presence to anyone nearby. When he came up on the other bank, he slid, half-crouching, through rushes that snapped back whiplike and damp-smelling at his face. The bank rose, the rushes thinned, the incline led to a stand of trees. Teng, surrounded by quiet twilight, enveloped by a stillness he could feel press in upon him, moved swiftly to the cover of the trees. Before him lay a large meadow, here and there a small summer flower, a daisy, a dandelion. On the other side of the meadow was a house, one window lit.
Teng lay flat. He didn’t like the meadow. He would be exposed if he should cross it. What other way might th
ere be to the house? Darkness was beginning to gather in folds, like a drape drawn slowly between the trees. A butterfly came up out of the grass and winged against his cheek so lightly he hardly felt it. He watched it go, red-winged, yellowy, almost luminous at the close of twilight. A joyful flutter of colour and life. Why did this gladden him? He wasn’t concentrating, he’d begun to drift, and drift could be lethal.
He looked to his left. The meadow ended in a white fence around a paddock. No cover. To his right the grassland gave way to a small area that had been cultivated for some agricultural purpose. A crop grew against wooden stakes. He wasn’t sure what. Flowers had been planted along the edge of this cultivated plot, but they were wilting for want of moisture. Bleached of colour, they suggested the resignation to death of patients in a terminal ward. Petals were folded like dried white hands.
Nothing moved in this landscape. No sentries patrolled, no guards waited. Straight ahead, Teng thought. Straight across the meadow to the house. Waiting, listening, cautious even though the property seemed defenceless, he stared at the light in the window for such a long time that it began to dance and disappear. And then the house itself moved, as if its foundations, like the bridge straddling the creek, had begun to decay. Another trick of the eye. But he thought: There’s decay all over here, the dying flowers, the dry earth, the rancid smell released by the reeds he’d disturbed. In what other kind of place could Laforge live? Wherever, he would bring death with him, death and rot, all windows drawn down, all air sucked out of the house, blinds nailed to wood, glass painted black, shutters drilled to brick – it would always be dark and awful where Laforge lived and breathed.
Teng moved slightly. Then he was still.
Phlott.
The sound came up from the creek, something over and above the regular rhythmic utterance made by water flowing slowly across pebbles. Perhaps a bird had landed, a night forager, an owl seizing a mouse from the water’s edge. Teng listened. The sound came again. A man untuned to the murmurings of the landscape might have let the noise pass without question. But not Teng. He pressed himself flat to the ground and turned his face toward the creek and waited to see what might emerge at the top of the slope. Now, as twilight thickened, he had to strain to see. He aimed his gun toward the rise. If anyone had forded the creek and was climbing the bank, he would emerge a mere twenty or thirty feet from the place where Teng lay – gun in hand, tense, prepared, ready to kill, ready even to die.
Agents of Darkness Page 40
