“Why kill the animals?” Zoor asked. “They’ve been shot, all of them. Why do this? It doesn’t make sense!”
Oomal rushed back to Howard’s office, Reen at his heels, pleading silently for them to leave now.
Oomal rounded the doorway at a dead run and began frantically flipping through papers. He jerked open a credenza drawer, sending it tumbling, spilling accordioned computer printouts and staplers and rolls of masking tape. The heavy drawer hit the floor with a crash.
“You had to take her into your confidence, didn’t you? Goddamn it, Reen.” Oomal booted Howard’s computer.
The expression in his eyes was wild, savage, nearly human. “It crashed! See? They left in a hurry, but Howard had time to run a viral program to wipe the hard drive clean! They knew we’d come.”
“Oomal?” Zoor called. “I found something.”
In the empty hall, sticky red footprints tracked messily on the shiny linoleum, across a threshold, and over the beige carpet in the next room. It might have been a conference room anywhere but for the crimson prints on its carpet, and Zoor and the Helpers standing there. Twelve plush aqua chairs were placed equidistantly on either side of an oak table. Charts and graphs lined the walls, and in one corner stood a television hooked to a VCR.
Oomal halted at Reen’s shoulder. He was breathing hard. “Onset of Death,” he read from the top of the nearest graph. “Goddamn her.”
He lunged to the television, turned it on, and hit the VCR’s PLAY button.
Snow. A long minute of snow. Then on the screen Hans Krupner was peering directly at them, his face distorted by the fish-eye lens. His eyes too round, too wide, and his balding head Cousin-bulbous.
His voice was distorted, too, garbled by terror and by the echoes in the bare room. “Marian? Marian? I know you are angry with me, yes?”
What sort of room was it? Tiny, windowless, more like a closet. The walls were seamless gray metal. At the bottom of the television screen was a series of red numbers: 00:00:00.
Like a digital clock set to time a race.
Krupner turned. Two paces, and he was at the back wall. “Gott,” he whispered.
Two agitated steps. He was pleading into the camera again. “Please. What was so important about the fax, Marian? You are the one who told me to feed the German ministry information. You remember, yes? So they would not become suspicious I was a double agent? And I was fired! I could not help that I was fired! Sent back to Germany. And the ministry wanted something. A little something, Marian. It was just a small item I found. Something amusing. Nothing of importance. You were the one who said–”
A loud clang. At the left of the screen, a door opened. Two men with sticks herded a Loving Helper into the room.
“Zoor! Get the Helpers out of here!”
Oomal’s curt order jerked Reen’s attention from the TV.
“Take them down the hall. Quick!”
On the screen the abandoned Helper shrieked its loneliness.
It charged the open door, the men. Its Brothers must have been just beyond, close enough to smell them. Nothing but longing could have made it that desperate.
A prod from a stick. A bacon-fat sizzle. A short-circuit zzzt as voltage hit flesh. The Helper squealed, staggered backward, turning in frantic circles to escape the pain.
Eyeing the Helper, the men backed out. The door closed with clanging finality. Krupner sat down in a corner, hugged his legs, and eyed the Helper, too.
Pain now forgotten, the Loving Helper stopped spinning. It faced the door expectantly, as if it were a compass needle and its unseen Brothers magnetic north.
00:00:01
The red numerals began clicking off tenths of seconds, time unrolling with dizzy speed.
00:02:39
Something was wrong with the Helper. It scratched urgently at its throat.
00:04:21
A spasm sent arms and legs flailing.
Krupner got to his feet, clamping hands over the bottom of his face. He was breathing in hard, jerky pants. Above the cage of his fingers, his eyes were demented, luminous, as if terror were burning him inside-out.
00:06:03
Blood leaked from the edges of the Helper’s eyes. A mad chatter from the television speaker, the sound of the Helper’s claws against the metal floor.
00:08:42
The Helper’s mouth bubbled blood. The feet twitched, then were still.
00:10:31
And Krupner was alive. He was sitting in a corner, body tucked into a small ball.
Reen jumped at the abruptness of the white-noise hiss as the picture changed to snow.
With a blow of his fist Oomal turned off the television. “Goddamn her.”
Reen caught his arm. “Let’s go now, Oomal.”
Oomal shook off the warning claw. Reen pursued him from the conference room, past a confused Zoor, past the animal cages. Oomal slipped on the bloody tiles and fell. He heaved himself upright, uniform wet, hands and cheeks a gelatinous crimson. One savage push on an adjoining olive-green door. It swung open.
And the Helpers with Zoor began to shriek.
“Come see, Cousin Brother,” Oomal said. “Come see what Marian was up to.”
An immaculate white room. White tile walls, white tile floor. At the center two steel tables. Krupner and the Helper lay on those cold hard beds, their skulls and their chests open.
For all its uncompromising neatness the room had a cluttered look, of things left in haste. A bone saw, still bloody, lay on a table next to Krupner. A scalpel sat forgotten atop the Helper’s ruptured chest.
There was a humming in Reen’s ears as he watched Oomal walk to a bank of steel cabinets. As he saw him slide open a drawer, saw him peer in.
It was a pleasant room, really. All steel-gray and white. The ordered squares of the tiles and the larger squares of the cabinets all fitted perfectly. Like fractals. Even the autopsy Ys and the clean-edged openings into the skulls had been done with a meticulous hand. Not at all like the ruin of Jeff Womack’s head. Or Hopkins’s.
Oomal drew back with a gasp, as though something in the drawer had bitten him. His bloody footprints disturbed the pattern of the floor. His bloody palm prints disturbed the pristine surface of the cabinets.
He began pulling out drawers, one after the other. “Damn her!” he shouted. “They’re all in here! The room’s full of dead Cousins and Helpers!”
The place was so quiet, so antiseptic that Oomal’s loud carelessness annoyed Reen. He walked out, his boots making sucking noises in the animals’ blood.
Oomal caught up with Reen in the hall near Howard’s office.
“Where do you think you’re going, Cousin Brother? Are you afraid to see what she’s done?”
Reen looked away from the red on the linoleum. The wall was soothing and white, like blank beginnings. Like the potential of paper before it is written on. Like the untrampled snow of West Virginia.
A fierce tug on his arm. “Marian! Marian was the kidnapper!”
Reen’s eyes shifted. Zoor was standing at the end of the corridor, the Loving Helpers around him.
“Oomal,” Zoor said. “They’re still nervous. Something down this way, I think. You’d better come see.”
Oomal nearly pulled Reen off his feet. He dragged him, stumbling, behind.
Images in flashes. A door open to a littered office. A paper shredder adrift in a snowfall of confetti. A pressure door. A sign: WARNING–TOXIC GAS. A border of yellow and black stripes, pleasing, systematic stripes, but just the wrong colors.
And a smell, too. Stale sleep. Spice with a hint of decay.
Oomal spun Reen around to face a quiet blue room. Nest blue. In a padded corner two Loving Helpers and a Cousin lay tangled.
“That’s how she kept them alive!”
Reen wanted to tell Oomal
to shut up, that he would wake the sleepers. So serene, the Helpers and the Cousin, their arms around one another.
Zoor saying, “I left the Helpers by Howard’s office. What was it? What made them nervous?”
The three lying so still. A broad dark stripe down the Cousin’s head. A splash of brown on the floor, like a check mark or a bird in flight.
“Something must have happened,” Oomal was saying. “The agents dropped everything and got out quick. They couldn’t take the Helpers and the Cousin, so they shot them, like they shot the animals.”
A smudge on a wall like a flower, petals opening. Reen pulled his sleeve from Oomal’ s grasp and walked toward the exit sign.
“Brother!”
Reen’s pace quickened. He started to trot. Wrenching open the door, he hurried up the stairs. By the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time, and when he reached the lobby, he was running.
“Reen!”
Panting, taking air in huge gulping whoops as he ran clumsily past the reception area, toward the sunlight. His legs knew no rhythm, only haste and direction. He burst through the glass and steel entrance and ran across the cement of the porte cochere. Thrashed through a border of flowers. Shouts of concern behind him.
The ship, round and cool and silent, waited on a grassy hummock. He stumbled, tripped, sprawled facedown in the smell of loam, fallen leaves, and the quiet natural death of autumn.
Boots stopped near him. “Brother?” Oomal whispered.
Reen didn’t answer. And Oomal waited as blue shadows barred the lawn, as daylight faded to gray, as the first stars began to peer from the violet sky.
Finally Oomal said, “You trusted her too much.”
Reen somehow managed to get back on his feet. He dusted his hands. “Don’t you think I know?” he said.
“WE HAVE TO find her,” Oomal said as they walked to the ship. “And we’ll use the Loving Helpers this time. It looks as though the CIA perfected that toxin they were working on but didn’t have the time to put it into production. Still, we have to make sure.”
Reen kept pace with him, his eyes on the grass at his feet. “There’s a farm in Virginia,” he said. “Fly up Chain Bridge Road to Wolf Trap. I think I might be able to find it again.”
In the smoky dusk, lights were going on in houses, and each looked as warm and friendly as home. Marian could have been hiding in any one of them.
The ship flew on in the cold, dim evening.
“Now where?” Oomal asked when they reached Wolf Trap.
“North, I think.”
They circled the area for a long time, over dozens of dilapidated barns, hundreds of solitary farmhouses, but nothing looked familiar. They went to Camp Peary, but the CIA farm was deserted.
Oomal gave up around midnight and flew back to the White House. When they landed, he motioned Zoor and the Loving Helpers out, to sit alone in the ship with Reen.
“From the notes I found,” Oomal said into the dark silence between them, “the wild animals were a dead end. That’s when they started experimenting directly on Cousins. I don’t know how this toxin works, Reen, but you saw that it’s effective and fast. Tali wants to find Marian, and he’s bound to search Langley. When he discovers what the CIA was working on, the Community will panic. They’ll order the viruses used.”
Ahead, the portico lights bathed a solitary marine guard.
After a moment, Reen reached into his pocket and took out the tape recorder. When Oomal saw the recorder, he cocked his head in mute question.
“Oomal?” Reen asked. “How much is Tali’s life worth? Ten humans? A thousand? Thirty billion?”
“I don’t understand.”
Reen hit the REWIND button, then PLAY. He heard Oomal’s gasp at Tali’s voice, Oomal’s low moan when he realized what Hopkins was saying.
“God, Reen,” Oomal said when the tape was finished. “Poor Tali. Murder. Blackmail. I thought I’d become too human. I thought you had. But Tali ... Christ. None of us is really a Cousin anymore.”
“You’ll be First.”
“Tomorrow.” Oomal, in his anger, sounded so much like Tali that it startled Reen. “Tomorrow I’ll go to Andrews and present this to the Sleep Master.”
The White House lawn was dark, with only the fountain lit. Reen could imagine the Old Ones walking there, searching, trying to find where Reen and his Brothers had so carelessly misplaced the Cousin legacy.
“If you know where Marian is, Reen, tell me.”
“If I knew, I would.”
Oomal climbed out of the ship, Reen following. At the top of the grand staircase, Reen paused.
“Aren’t you coming to sleep?” Oomal asked.
“In a moment.”
“About what we saw at Langley ... you’re not going to do anything stupid?”
Reen gave his Brother a lopsided smile. “Haven’t I always?”
Oomal gazed longingly down the hall toward the promise of sleep. “Look, what happened wasn’t your fault. You may have trusted Marian too much, but Tali also trusted Hopkins. It’s hard for us to understand human deception. I see it all the time, and even I don’t understand it. Suppliers and their lies about the freshness of their produce. Salesmen making overblown claims. They look you right in the eye and lie. It’s not–”
“Go ahead and sleep, Oomal. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Reen watched his Brother turn and make his reluctant way to Jeff Womack’s old bedroom. When Oomal was safely inside, Reen went downstairs.
In the pantry one of the staff was sleeping in a chair, his head on the table. At the entrance to the colonnade a dull-eyed Secret Serviceman sat at his desk, watching a bank of monitors.
The White House was as dead as Langley had been.
Reen paused at the entrance to the Green Room. In that plush, silent chamber someone was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, his back to Reen.
Reen entered. It was Jeremy Holt, staring into the cold hearth. The medium looked up. “Oh, hello.”
“Who are you tonight?” Reen asked. “Kennedy? Van Cliburn? Rachmaninoff?”
“No,” Jeremy said with a shy shrug, as if ducking a blow. “It’s just me this time.”
“Then why are you sitting in here?” It wasn’t a place for the medium. It was Jeff’s room. Jeff’s chair.
“I got lost,” the man said miserably. Reen sighed and sat down.
“It’s a big place, isn’t it? The White House, I mean.” Jeremy’s glasses magnified his pond-brown eyes. “When President Kennedy’s here, he knows his way around, but he never bothers to tell me. Do you know where I’m supposed to sleep?”
“The Lincoln bedroom.”
“Yes, I know that,” he said, regarding a Remington oil without interest. “I know I’m supposed to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. But I’m not in myself much anymore, and I forget where it is. I went to where I thought it was, but that was a big room with a piano in it.”
“The East Room. You needed to go up a floor.”
“Oh.”
Jeremy was a small man, Reen realized with a stab of pity. A little soul who was easily misplaced. “I’m going upstairs. I’ll show you where it is.”
The man’s face brightened. “Thanks. I’m very tired.”
“Just don’t come in this room again.”
“Is it the laughter?” Jeremy asked.
Halfway to his feet, Reen froze.
“I hear laughter in here sometimes.”
“Yes,” Reen said. “It’s because of the laughter.”
They trudged up the steps in silence. At the door to the Lincoln bedroom, Reen said good night.
Jeff Womack’s old bedroom smelled of sleep, and in the blue glow from the lamp Reen could see the pea-podded lumps of the Cousins. On the bed he found a sheet laid out for him, and he wrapped himself in it tig
htly. He fell asleep more easily than he thought possible.
He awoke before dawn and inched himself out of the sheet. Quietly, in order not to wake the others, he crept from the room and into the study next door.
The air was moist and cold on the Truman balcony. Across the Potomac the lights of Arlington shimmered. The sun, just below the eastern terminator, had turned the sky a bruised purple.
“Reen,” a voice said.
He turned. The speaker was hidden in shadow, but he knew the voice.
“I was hoping you’d wake up,” Marian said. “I kept thinking of you. Is that the way you used to wake me?”
Sunrise began to paint the tip of the Washington Monument lavender.
“I went to Langley,” he said.
A yellow flame in a corner of the balcony. The gentle glow cupped Marian’s cheek. She lit her cigarette and with a click extinguished the lighter.
That face. He had seen it softened in sleep, contorted with fear. He had seen it grow old. Forty-seven years, and he had never really known her.
“You planted the bomb at Dulles,” he said.
She tilted her head and blew a thread of smoke at the ceiling. “Yes.”
“You kidnapped Cousins and Helpers, and Howard experimented on them.”
She pulled her leather jacket tighter against the moist dawn chill. “Yes.”
Reen looked across the lawn. The tops of the tallest trees had netted the morning and were ablaze.
“You told me too much,” she said quietly. “You handed me all that responsibility. What did you expect me to do? Did you think only Cousins loved their own? Did you think that just because we’re not as good as you, you could destroy us and we wouldn’t care?”
“No. No. I never thought that,” he whispered.
“King Leopold in the Congo.” Her voice was wry and amused. “That’s how you acted. Sometimes you were such a condescending bastard, Reen. You had to love everybody, and I was only good at loving one thing.” She looked out pensively at the tender apricot sunrise. “But it came down to genocide, didn’t it? Secrets and genocide. If I wanted to live with myself, I had to stop you before the birthrate went any lower.”
Brother Termite Page 20
