Agents of Darkness

by Campbell Armstrong

  21

  Down Charlie Galloway went, the soles of his shoes failing to grip slick moss on the bed of the stream. The water was a mere three feet deep, but it soaked him to his chest when he lost his balance and he came out on the bank bedraggled and unhappy, remembering times when he’d gone swimming in the sea off the Ayrshire coast and returned to the sands where, wrapped inside a towel, lay a bottle of scotch. Nothing, nothing on God’s earth warmed a man like scotch.

  He lay among the reeds a few moments, feeling mud soak through the material of his trousers. He’d whiled away hours that afternoon hiding, skulking in a country inn five miles from New Hope, watching the door and drinking cranberry juice and soda and studying the array of liquor bottles on the bar shelf. A gantryful of dreams and wishes. He wished for some of that long-dead, seaside scotch now. Despite the heavy warmth of the oncoming night, his legs were chilled.

  When he’d left the inn he’d driven unmarked back roads, avoiding main highways where he could, finally parking his car four miles from the boundary of the Laforge estate and taking to woodlands through which he passed cautiously, drawing on reserves of stealth and cunning long inactive. Once, he’d seen a Range Rover parked in a clearing and he’d circled the vehicle at a safe distance, half-expecting, with a tension that made him ash-dry, to be apprehended. Half a mile on he’d heard voices through a thicket of trees, the words incomprehensible but the tone hard-edged, like the language of fishermen who have seen a large silvery catch elude their lines. He moved with fearful caution, bent, scrambling, pausing when he imagined a threat, holding his breath when a bird shuttled overhead or a branch rattled, hurrying when trees yielded to the exposure of meadowland.

  When he came to the edge of the Laforge property he’d waited a long time concealed in undergrowth, sickened by the smell of some freshly-dead rodent rotting nearby, before carefully scaling the stone wall at a place where the overhang of trees created a fine dark-green shroud.

  Onward, Charlie. Now he sat upright. The stench of mud was reminiscent of bad meat. He gazed toward the bridge which he’d failed to notice before. He ran wet fingertips over his face. Three mallard ducks, insubstantial in the fading light, floated in peaceful formation under the bridge. They ignored him with the aplomb of duchesses.

  He stood up, dripping. Clutching reeds for assistance, he slithered to the top of the slope, where he paused, drained. The smart thing now would be to turn and go back the way he’d come, all the way back, beyond Los Angeles, beyond this maddening continent, beyond beyond, back to Govan Cross and forget your whole American interlude, and years later, if you brought it to mind at all, it would be like poking around inside another man’s memories.

  But he was here in bloody Bucks County and he had business to finish. No matter what. Keep bloody going, Charlie.

  He made it to the top of the slope and moved toward a clump of trees, which afforded him concealment. Beneath the trees lay a meadow. Beyond, a house was located. A couple of windows were lit.

  Now he was puzzled by the apparent absence of security. He’d neither heard nor seen anything, no shadow, no flutter of a walkie-talkie device. The night that fell on the Laforge estate might have been entirely empty, and yet he had a sense of presences nearby, an awareness that the landscape concealed people. The men guarding Laforge – where were they? Where was the small army Clarence Wylie had said would be in place to protect Laforge from Teng? Hidden, of course, secreted in the innocuous shadows round the house, or in the barn beyond, or perhaps they sat, rifles in their laps, in the two parked vehicles some yards from the house. If they were good at what they did, they could be camouflaged anywhere – and yet that in itself was a source of puzzlement: if they were nearby, and watching, why had Charlie Galloway been allowed to pass unhindered?

  Luck, maybe. He hadn’t been seen. Hard to believe.

  No. Something was off-centre here. The night had an imbalance to it. He stepped lightly between the trees, trying to slow his rapid breathing. He experienced a sensation of imminent menace, something perceived in the corner of an eye but unregistered by the brain – a tightening of nerve, the heart seeming to recoil.

  The sudden chokehold made him gasp. He struggled, kicked back with his heels, then tried to bend and haul his assailant over his shoulder, but he didn’t have the strength for it. He was being snapped like some huge wishbone. Breathless, blacking out, he raised his face to the sky, imagining he saw in a deformed way streaks of blood race through the heavens. His larynx felt like a pebble on which he was doomed to choke. And then abruptly he was released and thrown forward on his knees, a doglike position he maintained for a long time because he didn’t have the energy to rise. Coughing and spluttering, fingering his neck, he had the odd sensation that his internal organs had risen to his mouth in raw conglomeration – kidney, liver, lungs.

  His gun had been taken from his waistband. He turned his face slowly to look at Teng.

  “I expected guards. Why do I find only you so far?” Teng asked in a whisper.

  Charlie couldn’t get his voice to work. It came from his mouth half-strangled, like the effort of a novice ventriloquist. “I suppose they’re hidden.”

  “Where?”

  Galloway rolled over on his back. His head ached and spots cavorted in front of his eyes. “I don’t know where … down there,” and he gestured feebly toward the house.

  Teng turned away briefly, gazing across the meadow.

  “They’ll wait until you get in close, Armando. Then they’ll blast the fuck out of you. You’ll be a bug on a windshield, my friend.” Galloway managed to sit upright. He was still probing his neck, dogged by the notion that it had been bent out of shape and lay at an unlikely angle to his shoulders. Night had finally fallen and the darkness that consumed the Laforge property seemed to have penetrated Charlie’s head to an equal extent.

  “I have no choice, Galloway,” Teng said.

  “Why is it so bloody important for you to get Laforge?”

  Teng looked sad, a man carrying an old sorrow like a pouch of stale tobacco whose dead scent hangs in all the folds of his clothes. He told his story in four, five sentences, impatiently and without emotion. Listening, absorbing a dark tale, a girl’s torture and death, experiencing her pain in Teng’s detached monotone, Charlie Galloway felt like a family historian entrusted with a burden. He was being made the keeper of bones, the curator of a place where petroglyphs that defied understanding were stored. He listened to Teng’s terse narrative and he was moved. In a stand of trees in a Pennsylvania night transfigured here and there by the glow of fireflies, he perceived the tragic way disparate lives became juxtaposed. Laforge and his prosperous estate in the rich heart of Bucks County, Teng’s girl in the impoverished Philippines. The Director-Designate of the CIA and a young Filipina tortured and killed. A misguided arm of the self-righteous United States government reaches out and creates crazed, bloody chaos, and as a result a young man travels many thousands of miles with only an arctic hatred to sustain him.

  The world, Charlie Galloway thought, was out of whack. People were dreadfully flawed. They inflicted pain on one another without thought. Take yourself, for instance. When love held out a hand, you slapped it drunkenly away. And when you did love it was with a drunkard’s kiss, a soak’s paw, and you woke fevered in a twisted bedsheet upon a bed from which your wife, your Karen, had vanished.

  “If you go across that meadow you’ll die,” he said.

  “Dying will be acceptable,” Teng answered, “if I get Laforge.”

  “You won’t get within spitting distance.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “And I don’t have any choice either, Armando. I have to stop you.”

  “With what?”

  With what indeed? A stick? A fallen branch? Galloway clenched his hands uselessly. Was this how it ended now, standing here, watching Teng walk the meadow to the house, to his death?

  Teng said, “Laforge doesn’t deserve your heroics. He doesn’t des
erve martyrs.”

  Galloway turned his face to the sky. “Laforge’s life means sweet fuck-all to me, Armando. I have no bloody intention of becoming a martyr for the CIA. I don’t want you to get killed. I want you alive.”

  “In your custody.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the long run, it doesn’t matter what you want.”

  No, Galloway thought. It really doesn’t matter. He couldn’t stop Teng. But he had to try. You might understand, Karen. Later, if they ship you my remains and you learn only half the truth, you might understand. Here Lies Galloway, Better Dead than Dead Drunk. In Loving Memory of Charles D Galloway, Who Took the Long Road to Sobriety. Kind but Misguided. He Never Meant to Hurt A Soul.

  Teng stepped away. “Stay where you are. Don’t follow me.”

  “Why? Will you shoot me? Can you afford to make all that noise, old son? Draw attention to yourself?”

  “Don’t do anything unwise.”

  Don’t do anything unwise. When had Charlie ever avoided that gauntlet? It was now or never or nothing. Victory or death. With the heightened recklessness that is the prerogative of the brave and the mad, he sucked in as much air as his enfeebled lungs could hold, tensed his muscles and lunged, throwing himself hopefully through space in the fashion of a rugby-player. He thought he heard the crowd roar in approval, imagined he’d made contact with Teng, arms round the Filipino’s waist, bringing him to the ground, pinning him victoriously.

  But all this went seriously wrong as a fantasy. Teng, deft, lithe, sidestepped, hammering the back of Galloway’s skull with the butt of a gun. A severe pain travelled like a fast subway directly to Charlie’s brain. He fell down, rolled a few feet, came to a stop against the trunk of a tree, experienced a drug-like moment of sheer silliness, stoned and cheerful, and then the subway gathered speed, rocketing through tunnels where lights intermittently glowed, passing platforms from which disappointed commuters gazed flatly at the fleeting express whose only passenger was Charles D Galloway. Somehow a postcard from Dan fluttered into Charlie’s hand and he read the sentence I always thoughT You’d Go far ONE day if only you tOOk the right train before he surrendered to the complete disarray of unconsciousness.

  How long did the blackness last?

  He wasn’t sure. When he opened his eyes Armando Teng was gone and the sky brilliant, streaked with nebulae. He struggled to rise, so jarred by pain he imagined his skullbone must have splintered from Teng’s blow. He remembered once, when he was perhaps seven or eight, falling from a stepladder and landing directly on his noggin and his father saying I hope that knocks some sense into ye, Charlie. But blows on his head seemingly never achieved that effect, neither thirty-four years ago nor now.

  He moved between the trees, down into the meadow, zigzagging, moaning quietly, as he went.

  “The phones don’t work,” Carolyn said. “I wonder why the service has been interrupted.”

  She made this announcement from the foot of the stairs, having tried the various extensions in the upper part of the house. Laforge went immediately to the receiver located by the living-room window and picked it up. He rattled the bar on the handset a few times. Nothing, no dial tone.

  “The phones always work,” Carolyn said. “They never just die like that.”

  “Perhaps somebody is repairing the line somewhere,” Laforge answered. He was thinking of how the electricity had flickered out before. He went across the room to where Carolyn stood. She was distracted. Her vagueness made her appear very delicate.

  “Do you think the security people have anything to do with this?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why, dear.”

  “You know, perhaps they have to put a tap on the line or something, and service is temporarily disconnected – oh, I don’t know.”

  “I can go out and ask.”

  “Would you? Please?”

  Laforge, curious about his wife’s apparent distress, wondering what had upset her customary calm – surely something more grievous than a failed telephone – went to the front door and opened it. He stepped out into the night, turning his face this way and that like a nocturnal creature measuring the air. He moved toward the place where the van and car were parked, passing the picnic table, hearing a racoon scurry away.

  He reached the car. It was empty. Perhaps the occupants had gone inside the van. Yes. That had to be it. They had gone in there to confer, some procedural matter, something like that.

  The cab of the van was empty. Laforge moved to the side door of the windowless vehicle and knocked. Ted Arganbright opened the door. Behind him were four monitors, darkened TV pictures of the estate relayed by cameras. Laforge saw his own face on one of the screens, his white skull flaring in the lit doorway of the van. He blinked, conscious of a table at Arganbright’s back, a jar of instant coffee, a container of non-dairy creamer, an open package of chocolate chip cookies, styrofoam cups – incongruous domestic items.

  “Our telephone has gone dead,” he said.

  Ted Arganbright smiled in his ingratiating way. “Nothing to be concerned about, sir. We’ve been patching our own lines into yours. That must have caused a glitch.”

  “That’s exactly what my wife thought,” Laforge said.

  “I apologise. I’ll have it seen to.”

  Laforge had the impression that Arganbright was alone in the van. But then he heard a slight cough, and the motion of a foot upon the floor, and he understood that at least one other person was in the van with Ted. He couldn’t see. The angle of door, Arganbright’s bulk – these obscured his view. Were all his guards in the van? Could that be possible? Perhaps a discussion of security tactics was going on.

  “You don’t have to worry about anything, sir,” Arganbright said.

  Laforge was somehow reluctant to terminate this conversation. He wanted Ted Arganbright in full view, tangible evidence of the security arrangements. He wanted to go inside the van and reassure himself that there were no more than two men in there, that the others were on patrol. Ted Arganbright didn’t move.

  “Everything is under control, sir,” he remarked.

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “We’re the best in the business. Keep that in mind.”

  “Where are the other guards at present?” Laforge asked.

  “We change shift, sir,” Arganbright replied, which didn’t really answer Laforge’s question. “We rotate.”

  “Change shift?” Laforge wasn’t sure he understood this, and yet it seemed so terribly simple. People worked x number of hours, then they went home. That’s all there was to it. Somehow he’d imagined that his security people would be a permanent presence. Nothing so commonplace as counting hours could possibly affect them. Apparently it did. He felt diminished by this knowledge, a prop kicked from under him.

  “Don’t look so apprehensive, sir,” Arganbright said, turning his face away and looking at the other man inside the van. “Vespa and myself have everything under control. Believe me.” He checked his watch. “The new detail is probably in position by now,” and he waved a hand around the estate. “You’re secure.”

  Laforge turned toward the house. The door of the van closed softly behind him. Despite Ted Arganbright’s reassurance, he felt abandoned to uncertainty. He moved a few paces back, paused. Night crowded him. He became immobile, standing between the two parked vehicles like a blind man whose dog has fled. Caneless, unsighted, his senses redundant. What noise was that? What did he hear? No wind, certainly. No breeze. The crackle of dry grass stalks. Perhaps it was a sound made by the security people in the darkness of the meadow. But why couldn’t he see them even though he narrowed his eyes and strained to look?

  He walked to the house quickly. What he’d do was go inside and lock the door. A simple precaution. But he was overreacting. He knew it. He’d been badly affected by those needless memories of Benguet. The uncertainty he felt, this intolerable sense of exposure – it all came down to those bleak recollections. He opened the door, closed it, t
urned the key.

  “You’re right,” he told Carolyn. “They’ve done something to the phones. They say normal service will be resumed soon. It’s nothing to worry about, dear. Just relax.”

  “Good. I’ll go up to my room and read.”

  Carolyn went toward the stairs. She was still thinking of Philadelphia. She was tempted. Would Byron be waiting for her at Penn Towers? Or might he have gone? Perhaps he’d been trying to ring through and hadn’t been able to. It was such a damned nuisance, this interference. But necessary, of course. Necessary to William. She climbed to the landing. She would wait until the phones were in working order again, then she’d call Philadelphia, and if Byron was still there she’d go.

  She opened the door of her bedroom. The window was wide. She couldn’t remember having left it like that. Huge furry moths that made her skin crawl flapped all around her head in panic. Some were the size of small birds. She couldn’t stay in the room with these monsters. She backed across the landing.

  The man was in shadow. When he stepped toward her she received a variety of impressions simultaneously, the frosty blue of his eyes, the high cheekbones, the gun in his pale brown hand. His intensity was such that he seemed to glow. Faint, she leaned against the wall for support. It crossed her mind, with more hope than confidence, that he was one of the security team who’d come indoors for some reason, but he didn’t look the part, he had desperation in him, and a determination she’d rarely seen before in any person, and besides the gun was levelled straight at her face, which no security person would ever do. What did this man want? How had he managed to get past the guards?