Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  Abbott had been searching his memories of drug lore. “They say joakers can break the habit if they survive a cold-turkey withdrawal. That why you’re here?”

  Chen stared at him, her face a mask of shadow. Rafa shifted uncomfortably, aware of the inevitable answer. A breeze played fitfully with the curling smoke.

  “Every attack causes residual damage to the liver and kidneys, not to mention the nervous system. Joak itself is poisonous anyway. If you’re going to break the cycle you have to do it early. A lot earlier than I did.”

  “When are you due?” Rafa asked quietly.

  “They’re coming every three weeks now. I’m only good for a few more days.”

  “Bring anything with you?”

  Chen shook her head with feigned nonchalance, her eyes averted. “Naw. I may be brain-dead next week, but I’m going out free.”

  Rafa poked his spear point into the flames. Abbott studied his bandaged fingers. Chen observed their discomfort and smiled sardonically.

  “Not much of a happily ever after, is it?”

  Neither man answered. After a moment Chen turned away from the fire and began gathering tufts of grass and dried leaves to form a crude bed at the edges of the blackness.

  26

  The fire was dying down into featureless night, textured only by a distant chorus of burbling croaks and the shadowy triangle of human forms. Abbott had been covered with a reflective blanket hours ago, and now he closed his eyes in a weary bid for slumber. Chen completed her preparations, sank to the ground with a sigh, and remained motionless.

  Rafa gazed through the shimmering heat distortions above the embers, lost in thought. He felt strangely ashamed. Since the decision to enlist, he’d been so caught up in self-pity that he’d never noticed others wrestling their own demons in lonely, no-win battles.

  Sure, he’d pitched in to help Fazio. But that had been out of self-righteous indignation more than any deep-felt sympathy. He hadn’t given a second thought to the big man’s condition since finishing the job.

  And he’d turned back to fight the crabbies. But it had been a gesture of defiance as much as loyalty. In fact, every waking thought on this mission had bent through the same narrow prism of selfishness that he’d been resenting in others. Out of my way. Leave me alone. Quit complaining. You don’t know how good you’ve got it. Mind your own business. Shut up and listen to my sob story. It was a tiresome, unimaginative litany, and he was disgusted to catch himself reciting it.

  Not that he could simply take it on the chin and pretend it didn’t matter. He felt lousy and believed he had the right. But somehow he’d let himself stop caring about how anybody else felt. Hearing Abbott and Chen was a sobering slap in the face, and atrophied muscles of empathy and compassion began to stir.

  Chen yawned. When he glanced over, Rafa saw that she was watching him with tired but wide-open eyes. Abbott looked asleep, though it was hard to tell in the dimness.

  “I’m still waiting for the Orosco epic,” she whispered.

  Rafa shrugged. “Afraid I’m not much of a bard. Why don’t you catch some shut-eye and I’ll take first watch.”

  Chen rose up on her elbow and glared at him. “We spilled our guts.”

  “I just don’t feel much like talking.”

  “I can see that. You never do.” Her tone was flat and annoyed.

  Rafa kicked at the coals with a boot.

  “It’s ironic,” Chen whispered as she lay back and stared at the leafy overhang. “I spend years bored out of my mind, listening to strange men babble ad nauseum on my pillow. Then when I actually run across somebody decent with something interesting to say, mum’s the word.”

  Rafa sighed. “Convicted murderer, actually.”

  Chen looked at him narrowly. “Convicted, I’ll believe.”

  “Okay, then. Convicted. Same difference for some people.” He waited for more questions, but when none came, he plunged ahead. “FBI arrested me about five months ago for gunning down an agent. Trial was over pretty quick. Plenty of evidence. As soon as I was sentenced I volunteered as a viking. It was better than life in prison.”

  “I suppose you’re not guilty?”

  “No.” It was not an emphatic shout or an angry denial. Just a flat, simple statement of fact with the ring of truth. Rafa made no attempt to elaborate.

  “Man, you’re a tough one!” Chen hissed. “Do I have to pry this out of you?”

  Rafa looked up, frustrated at her vehemence. “What else is there to say?”

  “What else? You haven’t even started! What was the crime? How’d they decide you were a suspect? What was your life before they picked you up? Where did you live? You have any family? How’d they take it?”

  “Not very well. It wasn’t a pretty picture they painted at the trial.”

  “Go on.”

  “The victim was an FBI agent, Samantha Oberling. I knew her well, once upon a time, but we hadn’t talked in years. She was gunned down one night in an alley. They said I’d been having an affair, trying to influence her to cover up some illicit money laundering scheme. And when that didn’t work I killed her. They had all kinds of evidence. Offshore bank accounts in my name, deleted email, phone records, DNA from my skin cells on her sheets, case notes showing she was aware of my activities but had delayed reporting at my urging. Not to mention the fact that I had her blood on some of my clothes.”

  “And?”

  “And it was all fabricated.”

  “What do you mean? You can’t pull that kind of stuff out of thin air.”

  “Somebody did. Somebody with lots of money and connections.”

  “Who?”

  Rafa looked at Chen for a long time as if locked in some internal debate. Finally he placed his spear on the ground and hugged his knees to his chest.

  “Who indeed? There’s the rub. It might have been that Oberling got close to somebody who actually did most of those things and fate just made me a convenient scapegoat at the last minute. Or maybe there are deeper motives involved. I’ve wrestled with that one like you would not believe.”

  “Why?”

  Rafa shrugged again. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. I worked with Oberling some, years before. We graduated from the academy together.”

  “Academy?”

  “FBI.”

  Chen was incredulous. “You’re a fed?”

  “Was. Back when I was young and reckless and unattached. I was David Rosales back then. Worked out of Miami. Almost seven years ago.”

  “And?”

  “And we were both pretty cocky. I got onto a corruption case with all sorts of juicy scandal in far-reaching echelons of government. Some of it even touched the bureau itself: bribery, conspiracy, layers and layers of cover-up—you name it. Pretty heady stuff for rookies.

  “My partner had already been on the case for a while when we were paired up. After I got familiar with the details I started to wonder if he’d looked the other way on some clues. Something was fishy. I told my boss.

  “He assigned me to act crooked and report back. At first that sounded exciting, but when I had some success and began to realize the scope of the plot, I was terrified. I trusted my direct superior, but how about the people he reported to? I was in way, way over my head, and by then I knew too much for either the good guys or the bad guys to let me go.

  “Meanwhile, Oberling was working from the outside with her partner. When I heard she was about to bust a couple politicians, I turned in my own list and crossed my fingers. It wasn’t complete; there were some faces I’d seen, people I’d met, that I didn’t know well enough to identify. But she’d never get convictions unless I backed her play.

  “The press had a field day when indictments began to fly. Oberling and her partner got sound bites on national news. In a couple trials I was the mysterious star witness that the DA hauled onto the stand to put nails in the defense’s coffin.”

  There was a faraway, trancelike quality in Rafa’s expression now.


  “We were out celebrating a conviction at a night club. Dancing. I was teaching Oberling the cha-cha. When we went back to our table the waiter walked up and handed me a phone instead of a champagne bottle. It was the Phoenix PD. Guess someone didn’t like double agents; my dad and brother, Raul, had been found strangled in Raul’s apartment.”

  Chen looked pale. Rafa sucked in his breath tremulously and went on.

  “I was so angry I could hardly think. Even when I was biting my fingernails under cover, I only worried about retaliation against me. I thought my family was out of it. I was ready to bust into jail, find the creeps we’d been prosecuting, and take another eye for an eye until Samantha asked about Mamá. That scared some sense into me. She’d been down in Mexico, visiting her sister, so whoever came after the family didn’t get to her. I called to tell her what happened...”

  Rafa’s voice broke. His head hung motionless, the only sound the crackling of the fire. Finally he went on.

  “We agreed to meet in Phoenix. I booked a ticket from the restaurant and just about collided with the fire trucks as I rushed home to pack. But when I got there, the whole condo had been torched. A couple of my neighbors were headed to the hospital in ambulances. My place burned to the ground.

  “On the road to the shuttleport it really hit home that I was helpless. It was sweet to nail the scumbags, and I wanted revenge so bad it was killing me, but there was no way I could afford tit-for-tat. I knew too many innocent people. And obviously somebody had escaped the roundup and was out to get me.

  “My mom was all that was left family-wise, but Oberling had a whole quiver of little brothers and these wonderful, fat, freckled parents who’d fed me Thanksgiving dinner once. I couldn’t drag her in. And Mrs. Sandoval next door, who used to pinch my cheeks and try to set me up with her daughter and talk for hours about Havana—she was going to be lying in a burn unit for weeks.

  “My mom and I stayed in a hotel long enough to watch the funeral on closed-circuit television. Then we checked into the witness protection program and moved to L.A.”

  Chen’s eyes were fixed on Rafa’s rigid features. “You think somehow they tracked you down and set you up?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. Still don’t. The night of the murder I ran into Oberling on the street. Literally. It was the last thing I expected. She was supposed to be clear across the country.

  “I was out on a cool-down run with the team. She was hailing a cab and caught my eye as I went past. I swerved and tripped and just about fell flat on my face, I was so surprised.

  “It took her a moment longer. Then we were laughing and clapping each other on the back and catching up on each other’s lives. She was careful not to ask too much about the new me, but I showed her a picture of Julie and the girls anyway. Samantha said she was thinking about getting engaged, told me how her folks had found a miracle diet and gotten skinny. She thought it was funny that I was a boring old professor.

  “I asked what she was doing in L.A. She said she’d been transferred short-term a few months earlier to work on an interesting case. No details, just that she was close to a bust. We walked for a couple blocks.

  “And that was really all. I said maybe I’d figure out a way to get in touch and she said she didn’t think it was safe and we said goodbye. I had to catch up with my runners, so I jogged off down the street and she took a shortcut back toward the main beltway.

  “I was only a minute away when I heard the shots.”

  “And you ran back?”

  “I found her lying in a puddle of dirty water and motor oil and garbage only a few steps from the street. She was already dead.” Now Rafa’s voice was soft with sadness, and he blinked fiercely.

  “What did you do?”

  Rafa shook his head angrily. “Like a fool I ran away. When I was an agent I used to laugh at the stupidity of some of our suspects. But I was no better. After I checked her pulse it suddenly occurred to me that maybe our meeting wasn’t a coincidence, and someone had checked off another item on a preplanned agenda of revenge. And I was terrified for my wife and daughters.”

  “I dashed home in a frenzy with blood on my sweats, looking like a wild man. I heard the sirens behind me as I left. All I could think about was fire trucks and the wire cuts on my brother’s neck.

  “When I saw that they were okay my mind went numb with relief. I hardly even mumbled an answer when my wife asked about the blood. Then I went off to think and take a shower.

  “By the time the police showed up I realized that I might be jumping to conclusions. Why would an enemy kill my old partner if they could go after my wife and kids? Surely we had met by accident. Probably the target of Oberling’s current investigation had simply killed her to cover his trail.

  “I was afraid of anybody connecting me to Samantha. It would endanger the whole life I’d built if they started asking why and how we’d met and whether we knew each other—no matter how I might swear them to secrecy. I told Julie a cock-and-bull story about stopping to help at a car accident and did my best to forget the whole thing. I didn’t even send a card or flowers to Oberling’s parents, though I could have tracked them down easily enough.

  “Of course it was the worst possible thing. Flight is evidence of guilt, and it gave the murderer plenty of opportunity to implicate the sap who’d run away from the body. Maybe he’d been planning to, all along. Maybe he even followed me home, who knows?

  “With some basic information about me, it would have been easy to borrow a towel from my locker at school and rub it on Samantha’s bed to get the DNA traces. And I’m sure it wasn’t difficult to open bank accounts in my name, transfer lots of money in and out, hire some hot-shot computer whiz to fake emails and tamper with phone records.

  “When the bureau knocked on the door, they were interrogating, not investigating. For a few minutes I debated telling them everything. But I knew it would be a mistake. They were playing their cards pretty close to the chest, but I could tell they wanted to give me enough rope to hang myself on evidence they already had.

  “Even if I had told the whole truth, even if they’d take a coincidental meeting seriously, and even if my connection to the bureau impressed them enough to rethink the evidence, it would take time to prove my past. Time when I’d be in custody and they’d be asking careless questions and the bureau would be leaking information like a sieve and my family would be unprotected.

  “So I clammed up and let my lawyer argue the case on its merits and prayed like crazy that I was doing the right thing.”

  “And you lost.”

  “I lost.”

  “Think you guessed right?”

  “About what?”

  “Why you were framed.”

  “I was on pins and needles about that during the trial. If I wasn’t just a convenient fall-guy, my family was in danger. I begged Julie to stay away and maybe take the kids on vacation. I couldn’t tell her why, though. Not without scaring her to death and possibly blowing her cover even more.

  “I guess she took it as another sign of guilt. The first day my wife didn’t show up at the trial I nearly had a heart attack. Had my lawyer call her mom. She said Julie had finally accepted that I was guilty, and I actually cried with relief that nothing more sinister had happened.”

  Rafa lapsed into silence, and for once Chen did not prod him further. Through the slant of tree trunks rings glittered gold and remote in the cooling air. Behind them, a pair of meteors flared into brilliance near the horizon and then snuffed out again.

  “Tell me about your daughters,” Chen said at last. “How many?”

  Rafa smiled hopelessly. “Two. Twins, in fact. They’re going to be in kindergarten soon. Probably won’t remember me much when they grow up. Maybe when Julie remarries they’ll call somebody else Dad.”

  “Talk about a fatalist! I thought I was bad. You’re not dead yet!” There was a pitiful heartiness in Chen’s tone that deceived neither of them.

  “Doesn’t matter if I s
urvive or not. This mission will pay the mortgage, and college tuition in a few years, and maybe buy a wedding dress or two. Or three. But my checks will come as child support. Julie filed for divorce before I left. It’s final in a couple weeks.”

  Chen’s eyes were filling with tears now, and the bitter set of her mouth had long since dissolved. “Oh,” she whispered softly.

  Rafa climbed to his feet and walked toward the edge of the trees, swinging his spear like a blind man’s cane through the darkness in front. After a moment the trunks thinned and vanished, and he waded out into the grass, gazing up at the lonely stars.

  Things were quiet for so long that he felt certain the others had dropped off to sleep. The galactic cloud rotated sedately across the sky, its speckled blue and red and white contrasting against the gently waving sea of black all around.

  Leaves rustled behind him with the breeze.

  The plodding thunder of a hexapod herd on the move surged and faded in the distance. A yip echoed faintly to the north.

  Where was Julie now? He could almost taste her hair, feel the softness as fingertips caressed the nape of her neck. How long since he’d even held her hand?

  The faint touch on his shoulder nearly stopped his heart. Instantly he was whirling into a crouch, his survival knife flashing in the starlight.

  Chen stepped back in alarm and let out a little gasp.

  For a moment they eyed each other silently. Then Rafa sheathed the weapon with an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

  “You weren’t really here at all, were you?” Chen’s posture relaxed as she moved closer.

  “Guess not.”

  “What is she like?”

  “Julie?”

  Chen nodded awkwardly.

  Rafa opened his mouth, then closed it again. When Chen continued to wait expectantly, he shrugged. “I can’t say.”

  Chen looked puzzled.

  “It’s not the sort of topic that lends itself to a few choice adjectives. At least, not any I know about.”

  “You angry?”

  “No.” There was a long pause, so long that Chen wondered if it was all the response she was going to get. But finally he shrugged his shoulders and continued, his voice extremely low. “Of course I’m angry. Wouldn’t you be?”