Ark

by Charles McCarry

  She took the pistol from my hand and showed me how to load it and unload it.

  “Now you,” she said.

  I loaded and unloaded the weapon several times. It had a nice balance. It smelled like a gun.

  Clementine handed me an extra clip. “Wipe the magazine clean with a tissue or cloth before you load it into the weapon. Keep a round in the chamber,” she said. “Failure to do this could cost you your life, as the man who is stalking you really doesn’t sound like the sort who would give you time to pump a round into the chamber. A single extra bullet can make all the difference, especially if you’re hunting rhino, as you appear to be doing. Carry the weapon with you at all times.”

  She pulled a small shoulder bag out of her own mammoth drawstring purse. “Use this bag as a holster. Carry nothing else in it except the pistol and the extra magazine. You don’t want to fumble for it.”

  “Isn’t carrying a handgun illegal in New York?”

  “Not to worry. If the target appears, do not hesitate. Do not engage in conversation. Draw your weapon and fire all ten rounds into his chest. Shoot as fast as you can. Then let the magazine drop, thus, reload, and shoot him in the head, twice. Can you do that?”

  She handed me the gun. I went through the drill several times.

  “Well done,” Clementine said. “Practice until it’s second nature.”

  She handed me yet another cell phone.

  “Touch zero plus one for Henry, zero plus two for me,” she said. “I’ll call you on this phone every hour. Remember, fire a full magazine into the torso, then two rounds into the head. That will leave you a reserve of seven rounds in case you need them. If you’re outside this apartment, do not drop the weapon like Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Your fingerprints and DNA will be all over it. Put it into your purse and quietly walk away. Do not run. If you’re here, hold on to the pistol in case you haven’t quite killed the rotter. Call me immediately. Do not, I repeat, do not call the police.”

  Her jaw jutted. She looked quite grim, but then that’s the way she usually looked.

  I said, “You sound as if you think I’m actually going to get to shoot him.”

  “I do hope you will,” said Clementine. “I should think it would be quite therapeutic.”

  As soon as Clementine left, I ran to the computer. I laid the pistol beside the keyboard and wrote far into the afternoon, feeling neither hunger nor thirst. That was therapy. My mind was entirely within the story. As she had promised, Clementine called every hour, on the half hour. Time flew, but I was aware of my surroundings. I was alert. Bear could have walked into the room and I would have fired ten rounds into his chest and two in his skull and gone on writing.

  Around five, Adam called on one of my throwaway phones. I had a paragraph to finish, so I didn’t pick up. A moment later, the phone vibrated again, skittering across the polished mahogany surface of the computer table. I looked at the caller ID. Adam again. But it was the wrong phone. I had never given him the number for this particular one.

  I dialed his number. He answered halfway through the first ring.

  He said, “Are you OK?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You looked like you thought I was going to throw you out the window when I told you about the guy who was hanging around your door.”

  “Really?”

  “You know you did. And then you go into the bathroom and I hear you vomiting and making a phone call. And the next thing I know, you rush by me without a word and you’re out the door.”

  I said, “So why didn’t you run after me, calling my name?”

  Adam said, “Because I was stark naked. By the time I got dressed and got downstairs, you were gone. I went to your apartment and buzzed you. No answer. I’m downstairs now. Let me in, please.”

  “I’m not there.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Hiding out.”

  “What do you mean, hiding out?”

  I said, “How did you get this number?”

  “I looked up the received calls on my phone and called every number I didn’t recognize. You were twelfth on the list.”

  This was a lie. I had never used this phone to call Adam.

  But he was the one who said, “What is this?”

  He was annoyed. So was I. What was he doing, buzzing my apartment, hanging around downstairs, calling attention to himself, to my doorway, to my absence? Bear was no idiot. He’d read the signs. If I told Adam where I was, Bear would grab him and get the truth out of him and fifteen minutes later be ripping the door off its hinges.

  As Adam walked down the street with the phone at his ear, I could hear horns, sirens, loud voices speaking English and a dozen foreign languages, his breathing.

  He said, “Meet me.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “That guy you saw, the big guy hanging around the doorway?”

  “Yeah. What about him?”

  “What day of the week was it when you saw him?”

  “Saturday night, Sunday morning really. Around one in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s helpful.”

  “I’m so glad. Meet me now. Right away. Quick.”

  “No chance.”

  Adam hung up.

  2

  THE NEXT MORNING AS THE sun came up, Henry’s favorite hour of the day, he and Clementine came to see me. He must have flown back to New York from wherever he had been in order to be by my side. I felt like a fool, but a happy fool. Once again the topic was my safety. Clementine had sent a team of her chaps to Texas to keep an eye on Bear. The chaps reported that he had reserved a seat on a flight from Dallas to New York. He would be arriving at JFK on Friday night. Today was Wednesday. Clementine was sure that her chaps would contain him. They would fly on the same plane with him from Dallas, follow him into the city, and keep him under close surveillance every minute, no matter where he was. I wished I had her confidence in the possibility of managing good outcomes.

  “It’s our good luck,” she said, “that our man must be the most conspicuous stalker on record.”

  “You’ll need all the luck you can get,” I said.

  Clementine said, “I understand that your Mr. Mulligan is a formidable bloke, but I assure you that our people can deal with him. You’ll be all right.”

  “What about Henry?”

  “What about him?” Clementine asked.

  “Bear knows what he looks like.”

  “But not where he can be found.”

  “Not yet.”

  Clementine gave me a look of reproof. It was clear that she wanted to say more to me, to teach me the realities, and would do so as soon as we were alone. But before she could say more, we heard a low, muffled sound, like the whoosh of a high-speed train through a tunnel. The noise grew louder. Henry leaped to his feet and ran toward the windows. The building shook itself like a wet dog. The floor rose and fell. Henry stumbled. I ran after him, fearing that the windows would shatter and he would stumble out. I took hold of him. He put his arms around me and squeezed. I had never before felt his body. He was more muscular than I had imagined. I had a strong impulse to kiss him. Over his shoulder, through the windows, I saw tall buildings swaying, shuddering, whipping back and forth—enormous structures that weighed hundreds of thousands of tons. A plume of water was slung from an ancient wooden tank on top of a nearby smaller building. The tank fell apart, staves flying in all directions. Behind me, pictures leaped off the wall. Sculptures and lamps and chairs tipped over. Books spewed out of bookcases. I knew perfectly well that this was an earthquake. But in New York?

  And then it stopped. The buildings ceased quivering. They looked almost human, somehow shrunken and chastened, as if they were living things that had been in an accident and did not yet know how badly they had been injured, or whether perhaps they were dead and did not yet know it. Henry and I remained as we were, wrapped in each other’s arms. We smiled apologetically into each other’s faces and stepped apart. The al
arm system rang and rang, because the pictures had fallen off the wall, the sculptures had tumbled off their stands, and the quake had somehow unlocked the doors.

  Henry said, “That was interesting.”

  3

  MUCH LATER, WE LEARNED THAT the Manhattan earthquake registered 5.8 on the Richter scale—not catastrophic, but not trivial, either. On Tuesday, the day before the quake, New York was the most purposeful city in the world. By Thursday, it was the most aimless. The earthquake took out the power grid. The great steel pylons that carried power to the city fell over in a tangle of live high-voltage cables. Few knew this for sure because, in the absence of electricity, there was no radio, no television, and after batteries went dead, little or no Internet. Cell phones fell silent at about the same time. Darkness descended. Computers went down. Cash registers were inoperable. Bank records were inaccessible. ATMs did not work. You couldn’t use a credit card or cash a check. There was no place to go and no way to get there except by walking. The pace of life was reduced from the cultural equivalent of Mach 1 to four miles an hour. No one had anything important to do. In a community where busyness was everything, this caused a collective mood swing. The entire population was depressed.

  Everything was closed. There was no point in going to work because elevators weren’t running. Even if you climbed a hundred flights of stairs in the dark and reached your cubicle, you would still be in the dark. The city had not been destroyed, but the damage was bad enough. Some older buildings shed fragments of stone and concrete. Gargoyles leaped from churches. A few steeples fell over. Many smaller buildings and houses in poor neighborhoods collapsed. A tsunami swept up the Hudson and East Rivers, capsizing ferries and yachts and tugboats at their moorings and flooding streets. Parked cars were swept away. The subways were flooded. So were the Holland, Lincoln, and Midtown Tunnels. Plumbing and wiring was damaged in thousands of buildings. The death toll was small—fewer than a hundred perished, mostly unfortunate souls who drowned in their sleep when rooftop water tanks collapsed.

  Traffic came to a stop. There were so many pedestrians clogging the streets and avenues that it was impossible for vehicles to move. Drivers who insisted on trying to weave through the crowd found themselves upside down in overturned automobiles, smelling the gasoline that leaked from the tank. A black market in food and stolen goods organized itself overnight. I lived on what I had on hand—granola, eggs and cheese, bags of salad, bottled water, and my cache of Chef Boyardee.

  There were aftershocks. Because our dwellings had generators, Henry and all his people could still recharge their cell phones and computers, so we remained in touch. Henry felt I was living too high above the ground and should move into his house. Melissa and her kids were already in residence. He had invited Clementine to join us. She was on her way to me. She would escort me to his place.

  She arrived soon afterward, dressed for whatever might come in whipcord breeches, the usual sturdy boots, and despite the warmth of the day, a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Her great swollen reticule dangled from her left shoulder. Somewhere within it, I supposed, was a Heckler and Koch firearm in a larger caliber than I could manage, along with other tools of her trade—certainly a Taser and a blackjack and cans of pepper spray and teargas. No doubt a team of chaps accompanied us, hidden in the crowd.

  As we marched up Fifth Avenue, Clementine’s eyes examined every face in the crowd. In no case did she like what she saw. I was fascinated by the overnight conversion of the bustling, self-important citizens of the city into a herd of bewildered mammals, shuffling along with glazed eyes as if the crowd were a single beast thinking a single thought.

  When we reached Henry’s house, he showed us a large computer map that pinpointed every earthquake, every volcanic eruption, every movement of the poles, every anomaly in the magnetic field over the past several years and compared these to the normal frequency of such phenomena. Clearly, natural disasters were happening much more often and with far more destructive results than before.

  “Why has nobody else noticed?” I asked.

  “A lot of scientists think something is going on,” Henry said. “The Pentagon is sure of it.”

  “Then why doesn’t somebody sound the alarm?”

  “They’re afraid of panic.”

  “Go for a walk and take a look. These people aren’t panicked. They’re stunned.”

  “It’s a local event.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “All right, there’s another reason,” Henry said. “No one wants to be the mad scientist crying that the end is near. What if it’s not?”

  “What if it is?”

  “All the more reason to keep it quiet.”

  Henry made an impatient little gesture, a flick of the fingers, and an almost undetectable grimace. He wanted to talk about something else.

  “What’s your feeling about Bear?” he asked.

  “My feeling hasn’t changed,” I said. “Neither has Bear. He’s a maniac. He’ll keep the promise he made to me in Hsi-tau if he can. But I think you may be the one with something to worry about.”

  “You think he wants to kill me, too?”

  “He wants an eye for an eye. You ruined him; he’ll ruin you.”

  “How?”

  “The media, Henry, how else? He wants to take away your anonymity. Smash your mystique. Drive you into the open where ten thousand guns can shoot at you.”

  Now I had Henry’s attention. He said, “How exactly would he do that? What does he know?”

  “Quite a lot,” I replied. “Think about it. He knows you spend a lot of time in Hsi-tau, that you have a very photogenic yurt compound there, that mysterious circle of unmarked booster rockets probably belongs to you, that you have influential Chinese friends including a general in the Chinese intelligence service, that you have access to one of the most closely guarded parts of one of the most secretive countries in the world. He knows that I hang out with you. You can be sure he knows a whole lot more than that.”

  “So what would he do with all this knowledge to make trouble for me?”

  “Imagine what a journalist could do with it—the secret yurt compound in the Little Gobi Desert, the ferocious chow chow attack dogs, the sinister general, the temptress. Bear probably has pictures of the chows, along with shots of the yurts, of the rockets, maybe even of you.”

  “He’s never photographed me.”

  “Maybe not personally. But he has all those grad students clinging to the cliff at the dig. What kid would go to the Gobi Desert without a camera that has a zoom lens?”

  “All very plausible. Wouldn’t murdering you or me affect his credibility?”

  “He thinks he’ll get away with it—he’s sure of it, in fact, because he’s crazy. And what’s to say he wouldn’t? In my case, he got away with it the last time. Serial killers get away with their crimes all the time. Who would suspect that you were the corpse when nobody knows what you look like? Anyway, he can make the same case against you whether he’s a murder suspect or not.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “This is America, Henry. No one is more likely to be believed than a psychopath. And it isn’t as if he’s a street person. He’s a household name among football fans. He’s a highly respected paleontologist who has dug up new kinds of dinosaurs and written books about them.”

  “Everything you say might very well happen, except his murdering you, which I promise you is never going to happen,” Henry said. “If he moves against me, we’ll have to find a way to cope with it.”

  I wished I were as confident of my chances of survival as Henry appeared to be. He was shrugging Bear off. He thought he was invulnerable. He had weightier things to think about than sudden death.

  “Henry,” I said. “Please don’t brush me off on this. Give me another moment.”

  Like the soul of politesse he was, he said, “Go ahead.”

  “Suppose Bear makes a wild guess and suggests that you’re engaged in some sup
er-secret plan to launch a massive privately financed mission into space?” I asked. “Capitalism goes interplanetary. The solar system is about to be ruined just like Earth has been despoiled. Suppose Bear suggests that you are doing this behind the back of the American people, but with the collaboration of the sinister government of the People’s Republic of China?”

  Henry said, “Go on.”

  “Imagine the results. The White House would unleash the CIA and the FBI and the IRS and the Justice Department on you. You’d be followed day and night, photographed, wiretapped. Satellites would photograph everything you own and everyone you know. Congress would hold hearings. You’d be subpoenaed. Your choice would be to show up on Capitol Hill and be slapped around on television and the Internet by a bunch of dimwitted egomaniacs, or flee the country, or launch yourself into space.”

  Henry’s eyes smiled. “Is there a sunny side of the street?” he asked.

  “The uproar might conceivably turn out to be a good cover story. It might even solve the cover story problem we’ve been trying to deal with. It would divert attention from the fact that what you’re really planning is the rescue of humanity and the reason for the rescue. That would probably require your telling a white lie or two.”

  “For example?”

  “Like, you’re mounting an expedition to survey the moons of Jupiter or the asteroid belt for mining opportunities,” I said. “That would be believed—‘Greedy trillionaire looks for more treasure at the end of the rainbow.’”

  “I’m not that crazy.”

  “You wouldn’t have to actually tell the lie. Just plant the suspicion. The paranoia industry will do the rest. Result: In trying to do you harm, Bear will have done you a favor.”

  Henry smiled quite brightly and for a moment, locking eyes with me. He was the first to look away. That had never happened before. Was it the advice or the hug that broke the pattern?

  4