“Get back over here!”
“It’ll just take a minute. Are you coming?”
Perla cast a nervous glance back toward the road. “No! I’m not. Come back out before somebody shoots you.”
But Sarah had already turned toward the source of the vibrations. Having come this far, she couldn’t just leave without finding out what it was. She heard a soft scrabbling sound, and then Perla was standing next to her, muttering some unkind things about Sarah’s intellect.
They walked about a quarter of a mile, until the wart-like hill that had seemed small from a distance rose up in front of them. It was at least twelve feet tall, with steep sides, and was covered by grass. Situated as it was in the middle of this flat plain, it didn’t look like a natural formation.
“It’s coming from here,” Sarah said.
“The hill?” Perla poked at it with her tire iron.
Sarah stepped cautiously forward until she was close enough to put her hand against the steep side of the hill. “Underground,” she whispered. Then she spun around, eyes wide. Out of the corner of her eye she had seen movement, but not from Perla. “What was that?”
Perla raised her weapon and edged closer to Sarah. “If you’re kidding, you’d better knock it off.”
“Not kidding. There!” She pointed back the way they had come. “I thought I saw a person. But now he’s gone.”
Perla’s nostrils were flaring. “I didn’t see anything. You’re imagining it.” But she brandished her tire iron just the same.
Sarah’s heart was beating so hard that she could feel her pulse pounding in her neck. It was not her imagination; she had seen a man—just for an instant, and then he’d disappeared. “Somebody’s here,” she whispered.
“Big John?” Perla whispered back.
“I don’t think so.” The air shimmered on her right, and she turned her head just in time to see a man approaching her. He was wearing a light blue shirt that was almost the same color as the sky. As soon as she met his eyes, he vanished. Turning her head quickly, she saw another man to her left, wearing the same clothes. He vanished too, as soon as she looked his way. “Perla,” she whispered as softly as she could manage with her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest, “get away from me. Now.”
“What are you seeing?”
“You need to be far away from me. I’m going to hurt them.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Go!” Sarah shoved her as hard as she could. While Perla was still trying to catch her balance, Sarah turned and bolted.
Invisible hands grabbed her, but she wrenched free of them and ran. Heavy footsteps pursued her through the tall grass: three men, maybe four. Then they caught up with her, and they weren’t invisible anymore. All four of them were wearing blue shirts and jeans. She stopped running when they took hold of her arms. They were not big men, and she probably could have beaten up any one of them if it had been a fair fight. But there was nothing fair about this. They pushed her down until her face was in the dirt. Sarah took a deep breath and prepared to do her worst.
“I remember this one,” a man’s voice said. “He remembers.”
Sarah froze, holding her breath. The voice was familiar. She struggled to turn her head so she could see him, but someone had a grip on her hair and she couldn’t move.
“Does Ed know where you are? Is he here with you?” She heard the man sniff the air. He walked around her until she could see his feet. His shoes were made of black leather—once fine dress shoes, now scuffed and dusty.
Sarah coughed some dust out of her throat. The idea that she could have run into someone who knew Ed, out here in the middle of nowhere, was hard to fathom. “I can’t hear you,” she croaked. “Come closer.”
The man laughed derisively. “So you can shock me with your energy? Go on. Try it. You won’t hurt my Horsemen. You won’t hurt me. You will only hurt you.”
Sarah took in a deep breath and let loose with her power. The wave of pain hit her hard, making her feel like her brain was melting inside her skull. She cried out, inhaled dust from the ground, coughed and sputtered.
But the men still held her.
“Stand her up,” said the one with the leather shoes. She was pulled her to her feet and turned to face their leader. Through watery eyes she could barely see his face until she blinked away the dirt and tears. Then she could see him. He had silver hair, unkempt and dirty. He was quite old, perhaps as old as fifty, and his teeth were yellow. He wore a stained dress shirt and slacks that evidently hadn’t been changed in quite some time.
“Kajdas,” she whispered.
“No,” he said gleefully. “No, no, no. I only look like him. Kajdas is gone.”
32
Old Hickory
Ed had never spent much time inside expensive restaurants; he had never had enough money for such indulgences. The upper-crust socialites of D.C. threw their money around as if they had an infinite supply. They weren’t all that different from the upper-crust socialites of New York City, except that the New York crowd was concerned with social status while the D.C. people were after political influence. Or maybe these two things were one and the same. Around the bar and at the tables, politicians and lobbyists chatted, drank, and wooed one another like horny teenagers. The important business in Washington was not done at the Capitol or the White House. It all happened in smoky rooms like this one.
The restaurant was called Old Hickory. Located conveniently close to the White House and the lobbying firms of K Street, it was renowned not for its food or its atmosphere, but for the deals that were negotiated there. The interior was decorated in natural wood and muted colors, and a haze of tobacco smoke filled the air. A huge oil painting featured prominently on one wall, showing a regal-looking man with wild white hair brandishing his cane at another who held two pistols, one in each hand.
Ed saw Dr. Kissinger at the far end of the room, seated at a table with a woman who had to be twenty years his junior. The woman was blonde; Ed had never been attracted to blondes, but he had to admit that she was very pretty, with the grace and poise of a movie star.
“Good evening, Mr. Terwilliger,” Kissinger said. Ed glanced around nervously, fearful that Nosgrove might have spies who would recognize that name. Kissinger noticed his concern. “Would you prefer that I call you Bismuth? Very well, Bismuth. What do you think of the artwork?”
Ed looked up at the big painting. “Who are they?”
“The one with white hair is Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory, they called him. The man with the guns was named Richard Lawrence. He tried to shoot Jackson at the Capitol, but his gun didn’t fire. Then he pulled out another one, and that misfired too. So Jackson took out his cane and beat him into submission.”
Ed couldn’t help but be impressed.
“This is my good friend Candice,” Kissinger added. “We are just good friends.”
Candice stood and shook Ed’s hand, pulling his attention away from the painting. Her handshake was firm and confident. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Meet me too,” Ed said, suddenly tongue-tied. He always had trouble keeping his words straight around beautiful women.
Candice laughed. “I’m going to step out for a bit. Give you gentlemen a chance to chat.” She smiled pleasantly at Ed and walked away through the restaurant, drawing lascivious stares from every man she passed.
“Wonderful girl,” said Kissinger. “Do not get the wrong idea. We are not sleeping together.”
Ed tore his gaze away from the woman and sat down in the chair she had vacated. “She looks familiar. I think I’ve met her before.”
Kissinger waved this off. “Most likely not. She lives in Los Angeles and is just visiting. Ah, here are Mulberry and Milligrew. Sit, please. There are things we need to talk about.”
Ed turned his head and was startled to see that Danny and Milligrew were standing on either side of him, as if they had materialized out of thin air. “Sir,” Danny said as he sat down. Milli
grew took the last chair, glaring at Ed, who did his best to avoid looking at him.
“Hank told me that he has shown you his monkey,” said Kissinger.
Ed felt himself blushing. “His tattoo, you mean.”
“Yes. Milligrew is a monkey as well. The monkeys are helpers who do many things for me. They are perfectly loyal and absolutely secret.”
“So why are you talking about them in public?” said Ed. He didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, but it seemed a logical question.
“My office is bugged,” Kissinger said, “as is much of the White House. Everything that happens there is being recorded by the Secret Service, under orders from the President. He is recording all of his own conversations as well, for reasons unknown to me. I believe it is a foolish thing to do.”
Ed looked around at the other patrons in the restaurant. “How do you know they’re not listening here, too?”
The National Security Advisor shook his head curtly. “Restaurants are notoriously difficult to bug. Too much background noise, and one has difficulty predicting where the subject will be sitting. We can talk here.”
“Okay,” said Ed, still feeling uneasy.
“There were men following you tonight,” said Kissinger. “Two of them, wearing wigs and sunglasses.”
Milligrew chuckled. “Sunglasses at night,” he said. “They stuck out like a couple of sore thumbs.”
“My monkeys,” said Kissinger, “distracted them and threw them off your trail. They will not find you here.”
That sounded like Leonard and Watership. Ed was not convinced that they could be thrown off so easily.
“You must understand,” Kissinger continued, “that the people you’ve been working for are…” He traded a glance with Milligrew as he searched for the right word. “Evil.”
“I know they are,” he said, watching Kissinger’s head for any sign of the black smoke.
“The President’s men are corrupted,” Kissinger went on. “These Plumbers, as they call themselves—there is a dark presence among them, something not human. It controls them. I don’t expect you to understand, although Mulberry has told me you would not be surprised to hear this.”
Ed shot a glance at Danny, who shrugged. How much had Danny told these men about him? “I know a little about that evil,” he said.
“The darkness has reached even President Nixon,” said Kissinger. “It is poisoning him, little by little. His policies are now guided more by the darkness than by any rational process of thought. Always he is concerned with power, preserving it and increasing it. He cares more about the next election than he does about governing. Rewards for friends and punishment for enemies. A team of Plumbers to plug the leaks of secret information. Today his obsession is with destroying Daniel Ellsberg to punish him for the Pentagon Papers. Tomorrow he may decide to destroy someone else.”
“There was a file in your safe,” Ed said, hoping to guide the subject toward Novus. “I need to know about a project you were involved with, called―”
“Ah, yes,” Kissinger said. “Duck Hook. The Duck Hook plan is a monstrosity. The President is preparing a nuclear strike to break the will of Hanoi. Massive, devastating. And not just in Vietnam, but possibly in China as well. Nixon is mulling the dropping of bombs on Vietnamese sanctuaries inside of China, which would draw Peking into the war. It all started with a plan that I originated, a set of options, but Duck Hook has taken on a life of its own since then. The dark man in our midst has convinced the President that this strike is the best way to annihilate our Communist enemy. This is a destructive fantasy. In reality, it can only lead to war with China. It is in the realm of reality that I prefer to operate.”
Ed realized that he’d been shaking his head in disbelief while he listened. “I saw that paper. Duck Hook. Your writing was on it. ‘It must be brutal to be effective.’”
“I do not deny that I wrote that.”
“But why?”
“The options I was presenting had to be convincing. President Nixon asked for a decisive plan, and that is what I gave him.”
“No. I mean, why would he even consider using nukes? I thought we were already winning the war.”
“You’re supposed to think that. This is why the Pentagon Papers are so dangerous to President Nixon. They prove that we are not winning, and never have been. It was never Nixon’s intention to win. He has drawn out the war whenever possible, as his predecessor did before him.”
The waiter came to take their orders. Ed requested a steak with potatoes au gratin, at which Danny grimaced.
Kissinger continued speaking once the waiter was out of earshot. “Did you know that the CIA has found the North Vietnamese base of operations in the South?” Ed shook his head. “They found it long ago, just across the border in Cambodia. The military calls it COSVN, the Central Office for South Vietnam, and it was discovered almost two years ago. We know exactly where it is. It’s been moved from time to time. But it’s still operating.”
“I’ve seen it,” Danny said. “Milligrew and I were there.”
Kissinger nodded and sipped at his water. “The President has secretly been using COSVN as a sort of lever to control the war. When Hanoi is doing well, we storm their operations center and shut it down. Then we allow them to open it up again somewhere else, to let them gain some traction and keep the war going. All for the purpose of stretching out the war, making it more expensive for Hanoi’s Soviet backers to fight. To make them desperate. When the Soviets become desperate, they might consider their own brutal options—options they would not normally contemplate. And at that moment, when Moscow is on the verge of taking drastic measures, that is when the President intends to initiate Duck Hook.” He pounded his index finger on the desk, as if pressing a button. “Strategic nuclear weapons are detonated in Hanoi and southern China. China enters the war. Brezhnev is on the brink, desperate and frightened. What do you think happens next? World war—a nuclear World War, more devastating than anything we have seen.”
He fell silent. All the while, the other patrons in the restaurant were having their conversations, laughing at each other’s jokes. Oblivious.
“If you know about this,” said Ed, “why are you not doing anything to stop it?”
“What makes you think I’m not?” said Kissinger, gesturing dramatically with his hands. “I have spent decades getting myself into a position where I could do something. I have known about the dark man for years, and I’ve been working on putting myself close to him so I can determine who he is. This has not been easy.” He fixed Ed with a challenging gaze, in case Ed had been thinking it had been easy. “I have been forced to help the dark man, at times, in order to become trusted. I have helped him do things that will surely damn my soul. All the while, I have been using my resources to uncover his identity. And now I am close to finding him again.”
Ed frowned. “Again?”
“Yes.” Kissinger folded his large hands on top of the table. “I met him once before, when I was working with Nelson Rockefeller. This was in 1960, the first time Governor Rockefeller tried to run for president. There was an aide in the Governor’s office named Elmer Thornwood. I don’t even know if he was officially working for Rockefeller—no one knew exactly what he did. He was just there, always. What was striking about him was the way he was able to convince people to do things. Thornwood had a great influence on the Governor, and I remain convinced that many of Rockefeller’s major decisions as Governor were actually made by Mr. Thornwood. When Rockefeller decided to run for president, I believe it was Thornwood who pushed him to do it.”
Thornwood. The name was not one Ed had heard before. “Did you say his name was Elmer?”
“Elmer, yes. He had me fooled for a while. Then—forgive me, but this will sound rather unorthodox—I had a dream. I saw, one night, Elmer Thornwood standing over my bed. He had a black cloud above his head, black fangs, and great black wings coming out of his back. I awoke and understood that it was just a dream, but I knew from
that night that something was wrong with the man. The next day, when I went to warn the Governor, Thornwood was gone.”
“What did he look like?” Ed asked.
Kissinger took a moment to think about his answer. “I have no idea what he looked like. The moment he went away, I could no longer remember his face.”
Milligrew said, “There’s something unnatural about that.”
“And he just left?” said Ed. “Why?”
“A very odd man showed up at the Governor’s campaign office the same day that Thornwood disappeared,” said Kissinger. “He called himself Shiloh Jones. I’ll never forget that name. Shiloh Jones. He had eyes like a wild animal, like a caveman. Jones came asking about Thornwood. I had a strong impression that he and Thornwood were not friendly.”
Ed recalled hearing the name of Shiloh Jones once before. Mason had talked about him. “What did Jones say to you?”
“That Thornwood was…” Kissinger cleared his throat. “This will sound strange. He told me Thornwood was not human. Jones described him as a sort of monster. Something… not of this world.”
“It doesn’t sound so strange to me,” Ed said quietly.
“And when I thought about it, I could see that he was right. Whatever Thornwood was trying to do, he was certainly up to no good. I never saw either of those two men after that day, although I have hunted Elmer Thornwood these last ten years. Now I believe he has returned.”
Elmer. Ed looked at Danny, who was lost in thought, before returning his attention to Kissinger. “Sir,” he said with some hesitation, “why are you telling me this? You’ve got people like… like Mulberry and Milligrew. Your monkeys.”
“Mulberry told me you would understand all of this. He seems to think you may be uniquely positioned to help, and that you can be trusted. I have almost no one left who can be trusted.” He looked at Ed with narrowed eyes. “How long have you been working with Egil Krogh’s motley crew? The Plumbers?” He gave the last word a flavor that made it sound vulgar.
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 44
