by Sam Winston
It wasn’t a place meant to be entered. The circuit took him an hour and change and he saw no way in or out. No sign of people having come and gone. Running along one side of the complex was a series of loading docks, but they were welded shut. Not just locked or rusted over but welded. The place was a tomb, a pyramid meant to bury something forever and ever, a grave or maybe a prison. There wasn’t so much as a roofmounted camera to keep an eye on things out here. He began to see why no one had noticed his fire last night or his movement across the cleared zone this morning, why no one had come out to warn him off or bring him in. There was no warning off because there was no entry. There was only this vast and complex relic of an earlier age, maintained and expanded and sealed up into a monolith.
Birds circled over it, coming and going by way of entry points well beyond his vision. The walls were many stories tall and unscalable, at least without the ropes and tackle that he’d set out with from Washington and lost in Greensboro. On the other hand he hadn’t imagined he’d need to break in. Nobody had imagined that. He looked up at the high blank walls and thought of the wrecked helicopter he’d seen dangling from the forest canopy a hundred miles back. That was probably as close as Black Rose had ever gotten. He cursed his luck and considered how little those people in Washington really knew. How it was all guesswork even if it was professional guesswork, and how nobody’d thought he’d find nothing here but a blank wall shutting out the world.
Still sewn into his pack was everything they’d given him for negotiating with Marlowe. Paper scrip and electronic credits. A promise from Carmichael written down in a letter, saying that whatever Marlowe wanted he’d deliver. Money being no object. He stood in the shadow of those high walls with the birds circling overhead and he thought that Marlowe not only wouldn’t want money, he probably wouldn’t want anything at all. He wondered how you’d negotiate with a man like that. If you could. How you’d negotiate with a man who’d already rejected everything.
He kept walking. He found himself in front of the old visitor entrance with the birds and came around again toward the welded-shut loading docks. Climbed up tried a couple that he hadn’t tried before. Regular man-sized doors alongside every second one of them but they were locked tight and their windows were boarded over from the inside. Little square windows with chicken wire and glass but not much glass anymore. Wood hammered up from the inside instead. The last of the doors was the main one. It had a little shingled roof over it to keep off the weather but the shingles had mostly blown off and the tarpaper underneath them was tearing loose in sheets and the whole business didn’t look as if it kept off much. Alongside the door was a scanner, mounted at neck height the way they always were. There must have been a specification for that. Something architects used or contractors anyway. Another thing you could count on in a world that people had made regular.
He climbed the concrete steps to this last door and plucked little crumbles of safety glass from the tiny window and rapped on the wood nailed up behind it. Taking the pistol from his belt and using it to hammer on the wood and then hammering on the metal door itself. Gonging with the butt of the pistol. As if anyone who might hear would go to the trouble of answering or the further trouble of letting him in.
After a while he slung the pistol and turned away. Disgusted. Picturing the car he was after inside there someplace and wondering how he’d make it home if he never got to it. Hoping now that he was back in motion that Carmichael would hold onto Liz and Penny until he returned, and hoping on the other hand that he’d send them safely home to Connecticut just as soon as he could. Either one would be fine. Now that he was a free man in the world again.
He punched at the scanner for good measure and the scanner lit up. A little blue light pulsing beneath a film of dirt. It still had power and it still worked. He didn’t know which impressed him more. He stood there marveling at the blue light until it stopped pulsing and then he pushed at the face of the scanner again and the blue light pulsed some more. A little low-pitched electronic hum coming from somewhere now that he noticed it. Nothing else, though. No audible alarm or bright flashing lights or anything else. He imagined a readout on a screen somewhere in the belly of the factory blinking away to mark his intrusion, and the thought came as a relief. He might get inside after all. He stood there waiting on the concrete stoop and the sun went higher and the edge of the building’s shadow crept nearer and nearer across the blasted earth and he punched at the scanner from time to time to keep it going and he stood there waiting on the concrete apron. He wet a fingertip and wiped the film of dirt from the blue light and nothing changed.
Then he remembered. He dug in his pack and found the lighter. The old man’s Zippo. He worked the bottom cover off and dug one finger into the wet cotton wadding for that old Black Rose brand. The little gleaming square with a metal prong mounted on each side. He found it and clamped it between his teeth and slid the cover back onto the lighter and put the lighter away. Then he swept the brand past that pulsing blue light, and all hell broke loose. A klaxon barking from somewhere behind the wall. Footsteps inside running. What sounded like an army but was probably six or eight men, heavy boots pounding almost in unison and probably heavy armament to go with them.
Weller stood at the door and wished that the little square window with the chicken wire weren’t blocked with wood. He was blind this way and he didn’t care for it. He stepped back and nearly stumbled from the stoop but didn’t quite. Caught his balance at the last second and backed down the steps nice and slow. No surprises or as few as possible. Staying clear of the door and keeping his distance from it for all the good that might do.
The klaxon choked itself off and the sound of the boots came closer, rapid and purposeful but certainly not panicked. Not by any means. People running but not running away. Running toward. They stopped just behind the door and everything went silent. A throat cleared. Some clicking from inside and a reciprocal blinking on the scanner. A key turning in a stubborn lock. Weller thought if they had wanted to see him before they opened up they could have done something about the wood covering the little window, but apparently they didn’t. Apparently it didn’t matter to them. To them it was all or nothing. Another key turning in another lock and metal falling on concrete and the clanking of heavy chains drawn through their own loops. Then the door opened.
An old man pushed it with one hand and leveled an automatic weapon with the other. The weapon large and well-oiled and heavy as death. The kind of thing that ought to stand on a tripod and here he was aiming it with one hand. The old man looked as if he’d been put together out of alligator hide a long time ago. As if he might have taken such an alligator himself with his own bare hands. Skinned it alive if he’d had to.
“Well, shit,” he said. Frowning underneath the drooping gray mustache of a gunslinger. “You’re not Patterson.” But he didn’t lower the weapon. It had a laser sight and the red dot of it hung steady on Weller’s forehead. Cooly burning there.
“I guess you shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up, major.” The next soldier back. A woman, hard as the rest of them, reaching out to hold the door open with one hand. She was younger than the major by far, but then all of them were younger. “Patterson’s dead,” she said.
The major looked disappointed. “I suppose he’s dead enough if this fellow got his brand.” Taking his eye from the scope to look hard at Weller. Sizing him up and finding him wanting. This poor wayfaring stranger, footsore and heartsore and looking it. He shook his head and put his eye to the scope again and moved the red dot from Weller’s forehead to the little gleaming brand that he held, saying, “How about you toss that up in the air just as far as you can throw it.”
Weller did, and at the top of its arc the old man aimed lazily up and squeezed the trigger just once. A burst. Nothing up there anymore but vapor.
“So much for Patterson,” he said. “Another man gone.” Lowering the weapon and looking Weller in the eye. “Now hand over that popgun and get indoor
s.”
Weller didn’t even think he’d noticed. But he took the .38 from its rope sling, and held it out by the barrel, and came on ahead.
* * *
He hadn’t been given such hands-off treatment since PharmAgra back in New York. There at One Police Plaza with everybody wearing hazmat suits and that sealed-up glass room with the air being drawn out of it. Nobody here touched him either. Not a single one of those hard soldiers was hard enough for that. The major saw to it but he didn’t really have to. Weller being hustled at gunpoint through long narrow corridors and across big echoing spaces, untouched and untouchable, like he was made of poison. In a warren of rooms that he took for the brig, one of the soldiers broke off and ordered him into a little concrete booth with showerheads on the wall and a drain in the floor and told him to strip naked and put everything in a plastic bag. The serious young woman who’d stood behind the major. She took the bag through a sliding glass panel and turned a valve that Weller couldn’t see and the valve creaked and she kept on turning it until some kind of noxious chemical began to spray from one of the showerheads. There was no hiding from it in the little booth. The soldier could see him through the glass panel and she was going to keep the spray on for as long as it took. The chemical smelled like insecticide and it stung Weller’s bare skin and it stung a hundred times more in all of the places where he’d scraped or cut himself over the last few weeks. Which was most places. Including that little incision on his throat that he thought had healed up completely. Even now the throb of it stirred his memory and made him think of his daughter. He cried out in his pain and in his sorrow, audible through the glass panel, and the soldier very nearly took pity upon him.
Plain water came next, from a different showerhead, and the soldier slid the panel open an inch to push through a washrag and a sliver of soap. The water heated up. The drain was slow. Weller shivered and scrubbed himself clean of the insecticide as best he could, standing in a pool of chemicals and soapsuds and his own running filth. The mixture still stinging his feet for they were blistered and broken and bursting with the early stages of jungle rot. Bleeding and suppurating and turning the water a rusty orange.
“Sorry about the drain,” the soldier said when she’d cut the water and opened up the panel to push him a towel. “I can’t remember the last time anybody really used this thing.”
* * *
A young medic wrapped a sheet around him and took him away. He sat him on a table and bathed his feet in alcohol and bandaged them. Said he ought to have a course of penicillin, but it would require approval from higher up. He’d see what he could do. Penicillin didn’t grow on trees.
He had Weller lie down on the table and started up a saline drip, the old kind with a graduated glass bottle and a rubber tube. He said Weller was lucky to have made it here. Lucky to have made it here from wherever it was he’d started, given the dangers out there in the world. But in any event he was safe now. Safe and sound. “I guess you could tell us all a story or two,” he said.
“I guess I could,” said Weller. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was.
For the next hour the medic studied him like a specimen. Poked him all over. Looked into every single orifice as if he expected to find something treacherous lurking inside of him, dying to get out and ruin everything they’d built here. He worked from an old Black Rose field manual that had been passed down from one generation to the next. The highest medical authority they had. He laughed to himself about the jungle rot because it was something you found in the field manual but not in real life. In real life you saw pregnancies. There wasn’t anything about pregnancy in the Black Rose manual, as Weller could imagine. As for jungle rot, the manual said you could lose bone. You could lose the whole leg. He held the book up to the light and paged through. Checking the index and going back and reading closely to refresh his memory. His finger underlining. Yes. It was a combination of sanitation and nutrition. What you ate played a big part. No doubt whatever Weller had found to sustain himself out there in the world hadn’t done him any favors.
“Then again,” he said, “Food was the least of your troubles. You’ve seen things that would give all of us nightmares.”
“I suppose.”
“Marlowe still goes out there sometimes, you know.”
“Marlowe.” Raising his head.
“He goes out all by himself.” Shaking his head. “Out there where you’ve been. He’s the fellow who runs this place.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“And he still does solo recon. A week at a time. Sometimes longer.” Stricken by Marlowe’s courage and selflessness. “Out there among them.”
“Among who?”
The medic said Weller didn’t have to pretend on his account.
* * *
He fell asleep on the table with the saline dripping into his arm, and when he woke up the major was there. The one who’d done the trick shooting. Time had passed but Weller didn’t know how much. His belongings were on the chair in a sack, everything studied and sorted and his clothes put through the laundry. An old pair of boots from somebody’s closet standing on the floor below them at least two sizes too big. The major had a tray in his hand with a plate of food and a cup of coffee. A .44 in a black Kevlar holster slung diagonally across his chest. He set the tray down and pulled the needle from Weller’s arm like he was unhooking a fish and had Weller sit up. Told him his name was Oates. Standing there with a long face, watching Weller get dressed, saying he’d been disappointed when his team had filled him in on the Black Rose gear they’d found in his pack. The satellite phone. A knife and a compass and those rotten boots he’d been wearing. Not to mention the .38 special. He shook his head and consulted a list of Weller’s belongings on a slip of paper and said in other words they’d pretty well established his bona fides, hadn’t they? He said if Weller didn’t mind, he sure would appreciate hearing whatever story Black Rose had cooked up to explain why he was down here in the first place, instead of up in Washington where he belonged.
Weller said there wasn’t any cooked-up story.
Oates said fine. He said have it your way. He said the only other time they’d sent a scout down here he’d come complete with a nice cooked-up story, was all. He’d been a raggedy-looking individual like Weller and he’d seemed as if he’d lost his way and the story he told was just as pretty and sorrowful as it could be. But it hadn’t smelled right, and in the end it had done him more harm than good.
Weller said he didn’t have any story. Thinking about Penny and deciding that it would be best not to mention her just yet.
Oates said fine. That was all right with him. The last Black Rose scout should have saved his breath and maybe Weller had more brains than he did. Maybe he wouldn’t try getting smart like that last one had.
Weller said getting smart how.
Oates said never mind that. He said if Weller didn’t have a cooked-up story or had decided not to tell it, then why didn’t he just skip right to the facts and save everybody time?
Weller touched the breast pocket of his coveralls, the pocket where he kept the picture. Whoever had done his laundry must have taken it out and cataloged it and put it back once his clothes were clean. He touched the place near his heart where he kept it and the touch itself was a kind of apology for not seeing fit to mention Penny. Reaching for the tray with his other hand. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, not even looking at Oates, determined not to have a story if Oates didn’t want to hear one. “I just came to see about a car.”
Oates laughed out loud.
Weller took that for a good sign, and he started working on the plate of food.
Oates quit laughing. “If it weren’t for all that Black Rose gear, I might almost believe you.”
“That old junk?” Weller didn’t even look up. Talking with his mouth full. “I took it from your friend Patterson.”
“Patterson was no friend of mine.”
“You knew him.”
“I sure di
d. We served together in Afghanistan. Afghanistan or Iraq, one or the other.”
“I can’t help you there.” Looking over the rims of his thick glasses instead of through the pale shroud they’d become over this rough passage. “I get those two mixed up myself.”
“Of course you would,” said Oates. “You weren’t even a gleam in your old man’s eye back then.”
Weller nodded. “I appreciate what you fellows did, though.” Sitting there looking ruined. Unshaven and bone-thin. His bandaged feet bleeding through in patches and his fingernails black and broken. Those great thick lenses that magnified his eyes and magnified the weariness in them.
Oates thought about it all. How hard the journey had been on the poor bastard. How he’d lacked rations or anything else in the way of food out here a million miles from nowhere. How those eyeglasses he wore were anything but a prop. He thought for a minute and then he asked, “You came for a car, huh?” Because you couldn’t get into Black Rose with vision that lousy. No way.
Weller nodded.
“We’re not exactly in the car business down here.”
“I can see that.” Smiling up. “I was hoping I might change your mind.”
“Right, right. All that money sewn into your pack. That chip full of credits.”
“You noticed.”
“We notice everything. Like how you don’t seem like the kind of individual who’d be walking around that much money in your pocket. Burning a hole.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time,” said Oates. Leaning against the wall. “Let’s start with Patterson.”
