The man shook his head emphatically, but the other one whispered in his ear, eyes fearfully glued to Greenaway all the while. The speaker shook his head and moved his hands in a suppressing gesture. Greenaway reached into his breast map pocket, fished out two green cards and held them up before the astonished wetbacks.
"Do you gentlemen really love this country? I can arrange it so you don't have to hide anymore. You can apply for citizenship. Legally. I just want to know what you know. The United States takes good care of its friends, but friendship has to be earned, yes?"
The men conferred a bit longer, then the speaker said, "We were told not to say," he said, eyes downcast.
"Where you're from, you should know better than anyone else how the United States treats its enemies." He held the cards out, certified and processed by the INS for just such an eventuality. The other operatives empowered to hand them out called them Get Into America Free Cards.
"Men in trucks come," he said, "they come and they put barrels into the ground." He waved his hands around to take in the whole junkyard.
For a single, glittering instant, Lt. Col. Greenaway felt as he had the last time he'd seen combat, a tiny engagement in Lebanon that'd made no papers and which all nations involved had agreed to keep secret. His hands became a hundred hands, his brain subdivided into a thousand chambers, each parsing a step in his survival and the enemy's demise. It took fierce self-discipline not to give in to that illusion of omnipotence, to do everything at once and leave it to someone else to apologize. Greenaway hadn't risen to the rank he held, the highest an officer could reach while attached to Delta Force, which he dearly loved, for want of self-discipline. The enemy was here.
"Where are they now?" Both of them shook their heads like they were covered in hornets. "When were they here last?"
"They come every month, sometimes twice. Maceo and me, we let them in and then we go down to the gas station until they go away."
Sibley's clammy hand on Greenaway's shoulder. He fought the urge to seize it, twist it off and beat its owner dead with it. "A word, Colonel?"
Greenaway took a very deep breath and turned on the CIA man.
"I've just got off the phone with a congressional aide," Sibley said. He looked sicker than usual. "This place is off-limits." Greenaway took hold of Sibley's shoulder now, bore down on it and drove the man halfway to his knees under the force of his full weight as he leaned into the man's sweaty pink raisin of an ear and hissed, "It's here, fuckhead. It's HERE."
Sibley staggered out from under the Colonel and backed away a few more paces, stumbled over the gutted chassis of a Datsun hatchback. He smiled. "There's nothing here, Lieutenant Colonel, nothing we're looking for. The aide works for the Representative of this district. About ten years ago, when he was the assemblyman for this hellhole, took a series of sizable donations in return for letting a waste disposal company—"
Greenaway looked at the ground beneath his feet, at the oily sheen on the gravel. "Shit," he said. "We're standing on a toxic waste dump?"
Sibley nodded. "Those trucks. Up until about four years ago, they were filling an open pit with barrels of PCBs. The company stopped paying him, but they own him down to his soul, so they still dump here. I suggest we exfil out of here posthaste."
Greenaway turned and walked away to cover the doubt spreading across his face like ink in a clear pool. Sibley was as hot to get them out as he'd been to get them in, and this sudden revelation of toxic waste… Despite its legendary hubris, the CIA did know everything, just too late to use it effectively, and this smacked of classic CIA infobackup. But Greenaway had seen too many notes passed in secret, too many radical about-faces, in the last week not to wonder.
He barked his LT over and ordered him to pull the search team out, but only after collecting samples of sand from each quadrant of the yard. "Do it smoothly, without Sibley or his freak on a leash seeing." The LT snapped a salute and went to make it so. Greenaway met Sibley and the Salvadorans at the gate. Sibley was shifting from foot to foot as if the toxic soil was eating through the soles of his burnished wingtip shoes. Greenaway ignored him and buttonholed the two laborers, handed them the green cards. They looked them over in wonder, eyes twinkling.
"Welcome to the United States, gentlemen. Always remember who your friends are. And get a real job. This place'll make you ill." They nodded, practically bowed, but Greenaway was already getting back on the helicopter. Watching his men slipping on board and the ground dropping away beneath them, he put on his headset, and almost immediately it chirped in his ear.
"Greenaway. Speak"
"Special Agent Hunt, here," the voice warbled through waves of distortion and whipping wind at the other end. "We've recovered a pickup truck from the bottom of an arroyo out in—" muffled, "Where are we?" then back in Greenaway's ear, "—two miles north of SR 190, three and a quarter miles west of Darwin, in Death Valley. It was driven in, then buried. We would've missed it, but for the flare it made on the thermals this morning."
"And?"
"And it's registered to a Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch, US Army Special Forces Fifth Group, retired. You may or may not've seen the report. He burned down his store and shot two of the local law in Furnace Creek."
"Ah, yes." From what little of Storch's tale of woe and misdirected wrath had trickled down to him, Greenaway saw a prime candidate for a cutout in the China Lake heist. Perhaps he participated, then flipped out. Or was following orders, creating a public spectacle to hamper the covert search operation. Probably, this Storch had outlived his usefulness. "Storch's body in the truck?"
"No, it's clean, except for—well, somebody took a piss in there, but we saw no signs of foul play. We're gonna tow it out and run the wreck to LA for labwork."
"Move nothing. I'll be right there," Greenaway snapped, and cut off Hunt, switched over to the pilot's channel and gave him the orders. Even if this came to nothing, Greenaway didn't trust any eyes but his own to see what there was to see. The FBI was good, but they were investigators, trained to solve crimes. This was no crime, Greenaway knew, though he alone seemed to recognize it for what it was. This was war. And, God willing, it would be his war.
The two Salvadoran laborers watched the helicopter dust off and claw its way back over the northwestern horizon, retreated back into the yard and shackled the gate, and tore up their green cards. "Can you believe that motherfucker? One fucking green card each."
The other chuckled. "You gave in too cheap, Medina. He would've let us send for our whole village if you could've come up with a better story."
"D'you get all that?" Medina said into his shirt pocket. "I think we'll be secure through the terminal phase, but we're gonna have to stay at condition yellow up here for the duration. That Delta prick smelled rats."
21
He lay on the bed of the room in the Rambler's Rest only after stripping off the covers, which were saturated with some sort of stainguard and the residue of a fabric softener that gave him a rash. The rust-red carpet was matted with dust, and the beige curtains were mottled with vague M-shaped patterns that might've been either images of seagulls or greasy lip-prints.
The TV blurped and blathered in the corner, showing an entertainment program with celebrities he'd never seen before, all of them either inviting the camera into the most intimate corners of their lives or fleeing like gunshy game animals. He supposed people watched such shows to jump into another's skin, to live for a while inside someone beautiful and refreshingly shallow, someone who had the world's admiration, and the world's shoulder to cry on when they didn't get their way. Storch tried to feel like a normal person watching TV, tried desperately not to identify with the hunted ones. He switched it off. The knob came off in his hand.
He paced the room, too chafed by the sick city-heat to wear clothes, unable to turn on the air conditioner or relax on any of the chemically treated furniture. Whose shoulder could he cry on? Calling his father was a dubious prospect on normal days. Even in his lucid periods,
when he knew who his son was and could speak in his own words and not just quotes from Revelations, he offered little solace. As the only surviving relative of a fugitive cop-killer, his father would be under surveillance, and any calls to the Norwalk asylum would probably be traced. Who could he call in his time of crisis?
Suddenly his mind clicked, and a plug was pulled in the floor of his skull, and all the molten confusion drained away to reveal a plan. Not a plan, actually, but a course of action. He got the phonebook out from under the Gideon Bible and the Dianetics in the end table and looked through the San Jose white pages business listings. There it was: Radiant Dawn Terminal Crisis Intervention Line.
His hands shaking, he punched the number, listened intently to the string of warbling rings. Four, five—perhaps it was an old phone book, perhaps they'd shut down—six rings, then: "You have reached the Radiant Dawn Terminal Crisis Intervention Line. All calls are recorded." Storch's bad hand hovered over the cutoff button.
"This is Heather. How may I help you?"
Any act he might've tried to put on to draw the lady out fell out of his mind when he heard her voice. So warm, so hypersensitive, so attuned to suffering, that he didn't want to lie to her, because if he told her the truth, she would understand, would help him see how to make it better. "I—I never called one of these things before…"
"That's okay. I'm here to listen, and help you understand what you're going through. Why don't you start by telling me your name?"
"I don't want to tell you my name," he snapped, and bit it back too late. Why didn't he come up with a name? Why couldn't he lie to her?
"Okay then, just tell me what you feel."
"I'm feeling real angry and kind of sick, and I've had a lot of things go…really, really wrong, and I just wish I could figure out what's real and what isn't, and who's doing this to me, if it's somebody, and get them to stop. D'you understand what that's like?"
"Indeed I do. A lot of people feel that way when they're facing a terminal illness. When there's no other hope left, we try to find a scapegoat to focus our anger, something tangible we can grasp for to try to make it stop. The sad truth is that it can't be beaten or bargained with or begged off. But there's a happy truth too, sir. Do you want to know what that is?"
Storch's voice surprised him when he heard it say, "Tell me the happy truth." He could feel a strange choking sensation deep in his throat that told him he was about to sob.
"The happy truth is that when you learn to embrace your fate, what you see as an ending can be a new beginning. Now, sir, I can tell from the sound of your voice that you've gone about as far as you can with the way things are right now. If you want to take a positive step towards embracing change, you've got to come to someone who truly understands. Do you know where our center is located?"
He replied sleepily, "It—I think it's in the book—"
"Yes, that's right. When you feel the time is right, I'd like to see you. My name is Heather, and I'll be here when you're ready. Now, if you're ready to tell me your name…"
The door shook in its frame with a furious pounding, and it was like a fist on a windshield rousing a man sleeping in an idling car full of carbon monoxide. The phone dropped from his ear and Storch was behind the door with the sentry's gun clutched in his hands.
"Who's there?"
"Zane Ezekiel Storch. Open the door, please," a deep, humorless basso voice, a cop's voice, shouted. Storch peered through a crack in the blinds, saw no flashing lights, no SWAT commandos braced by the window. Looking through the peephole, he saw only a dim pink mass that might've been chewing gum.
"Okay," he called back, opening the door and throwing it wide, lunged forward and snatched the visitor by the collar, yanked him into the room and threw him to the ground at Storch's feet. His gun jabbed into the pale, sweaty face of Ely Buggs.
"Shit, Zane, what are you doing still in the States? You got something against Mexicans?"
"Buggs, what are you doing here?"
"I mean, Jesus, man, you're headed in the wrong direction, you know? Canada's nicer, but they'll turn your ass in. They only get to pretend to be a sovereign nation at all because we don't want the Quebecois problem."
Storch's grip on Buggs's neck tightened, but it was no use. He needed information, and threatening Buggs with death was like menacing a spider monkey with a restraining order. He only started to make less sense.
How Buggs had found him was obvious. He made fake driver's licenses and social security cards for everybody in Thermopylae, including three sets for Storch. He'd run some kind of name-search program that scooped credit inquiries, and flagged "Dan Gundersen," the name he'd used to book the room.
"Why are you here, Buggs?" I thought you were going back east, to your computer job."
"Shit, man, I couldn't go back there, Americans are hardly even the same species, anymore. East and west coasters hate each other, can scarcely communicate, and you can tell one from another on sight. They even secrete conflicting pheromones, man. A few more generations, they won't even be able to interbreed if they want to…"
"What are you doing here, Buggs? If you wanted to talk, you could have called. Who sent you?"
Buggs laughed that maddeningly disarming patented Ely Buggs laugh. "Shit, commando, ease up. You owe me a week's pay. And besides, I don't think you're trying to leave the country at all."
"Which concerns you not at all, Buggs."
"You're working for those guys, aren't you? Those militia guys with the arsenal under your store. You're doing some dastardly shit for them, aren't you?"
Ely Buggs was an amoral freak who visited corporal punishment on fools, but he was good people, and Storch believed he was nothing if not a good judge of character. Besides, everyone else he knew was dead, insane, or somehow involved in a conspiracy to frame him for murder, if not all of the above. Storch let him go. Buggs flopped into one of the folding chairs beside the door and rubbed at his neck. Storch got a good look at him. His skin was still peeling from months of sunburn, but he'd put on weight. He wore a heinous Hawaiian shirt with lurid scenes of tiki gods and volcano virgin sacrifices, equally obnoxious plaid flannel pajama bottoms and bulky black orthopedic wrist braces on his bony pink arms. Storch remembered how Ely'd bitched about having carpal tunnel syndrome, some candy-ass injury computer geeks had invented. "Are you with them, or what?" he finally asked.
"I'm not working for anybody. I'm just looking for a man."
"Let me help you."
Buggs steered a big silver Ford Econoline van up the northbound 101. The flat brown grid of San Jose gave way to the standoffish suburban enclave of Los Altos, then to wild rolling hills. Suddenly, the unending ranks of commuter traffic looked ridiculous and unreal, and it became difficult to imagine that there was a city at either end of the road. Storch watched Buggs's bracered hands, watched the faces in the other cars, tried to nod in time to his manic spiel.
When he explained it, it all made a perfect Ely Buggs brand of sense. Cut loose from his job in Thermopylae and fresh out of his medication, Buggs's obsessive-compulsive mannerisms had begun to fester. One of these, it seemed, was an overwhelming urge to send postcards. He'd buy batches of them whenever he moved to a new place, address them to everyone he could think of, making sure they knew where he was now, that he was alive and safe, and anything else that was bothering him at the time. The rest he sent to total strangers, to people and businesses from whom he'd gotten cards months or years before. They'd simply say "Sorry to bother you," or "In the event of my death please forward this to the Federal Bureau of Investigation" or something like that. When he got his new job, he'd had to send one to Storch, and commenced to tracing him. He handed the postcard to Storch now. On the front was a picture of a mortician's workroom, where a dour clinician was embalming a famous movie cowboy's dead horse. "Greetings From Sunny Colma, California."
After Thermopylae, Buggs hitched his way to the Bay Area and Palo Alto, where he hit a bank to pick up some cash. Storch kn
ew enough about Buggs to know what kind of bank he meant. Either through computer chicanery or some freak genetic misfire, Ely Buggs was a most eagerly sought after donor of blood and sperm, and could probably make a living off that alone.
"You won't believe the place where I'm working now. This is their van. They're—"
"A funeral home."
"Better. You know, man, if I've learned one thing about the world it's this: intelligence is a finite pool of energy, unevenly distributed among individuals of every sapient species on the planet. Every population expansion stretches it a little thinner. I think we first began to exhaust the pool in 1914. It's dangerously close to a backlash now, I think. I mean, when you look at the signs, I mean, acephalic babies being born in Texas, you know what that means? No fucking brains at all, Zane, they stop at the eyebrows."
"I'm not in the mood, right now, Buggs."
"And you'd think the government would be doing something about it, right? Well, sure they are. They've got a crash program to eugenically engineer supergeniuses, so they can stockpile intelligence, even as they're accelerating the meltdown. Wait and see if I'm wrong, in about five years, we're all going to go feral and live in the trees."
"Are you done?"
"See if I'm wrong, that's all."
They rolled through the hills, past clusters of housing developments that seemed to have been assembled by robots or lowered out of the sky or assembled by giant hornets; past vague hints of towns hiding behind mountains or stands of evergreens, hermit towns where time flowed at an agreed-upon rate, if at all, like Thermopylae for ultimate insiders. The builders of these interim towns must have felt real fear of the land they'd been forced to occupy, to have built so timidly. With the high western hills eating up the sun and the dusk drawing over the highway with an air of final abandonment, Storch, who was hitching a ride into a necropolis with a sociopath, began to see fear. He did not feel it eating him, but he sensed it skulking inside his mind, yet outside his heart.
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