Chant

by George C. Chesbro

  The black-clad figure was standing in the middle of the road, pointing up at him.

  It was no dream, Curry thought as a scream built in the back of his throat. There was a man down there pointing at him, suddenly running across the road. Coming up at him.

  “Mayday,” Curry croaked into his walkie-talkie. “The guy’s here, and he’s coming up after me. All of you had better get the fuck over here, and fast. Use the sirens.”

  Curry released the call button, waited for a response. There was nothing but static.

  “Mayday, goddam it! Anybody there?! I need help!”

  Silence.

  Without understanding how, Deputy Sheriff Mark Curry suddenly and with absolute certainty knew that all the others—the other deputies, the four Hmong murderers, and the man with a limp—were dead. The black-clad figure had saved him for last. He would not see his family again. He was going to die this night, probably horribly, in a manner he could not even imagine.

  Curry tore the binoculars from around his neck, dropped his rifle and walkie-talkie, and started to run down the opposite side of the hill, deeper into the forest.

  All Mark Curry wanted—and he had never wanted anything more in his life—was to get home, to see and be with his wife and daughters.

  Oblivious to the tree branches whipping across and cutting his face, the young deputy dashed through the night forest, terror weighing him down like a lead shroud. He ran as in a childhood nightmare, the loam of the forest floor slowing him down, making him feel as if he were trying to run through quicksand.

  Suddenly the black-clad figure materialized out of the night, directly in front of him. Unable to stop or dodge to one side, Curry ran directly into an extended palm that felt as hard as the edge of a baseball bat. Curry bounced back a step, sat down hard.

  Gasping for breath, too terrified even to scream, Curry clawed for the revolver in his holster. As he drew out the gun, a foot—a blur in the leaf-dappled moonlight—lashed out and kicked the weapon away into the night.

  He was not going to die without a fight, the young deputy thought as he scrambled to his feet. He reared back on his heels, swung a roundhouse right at the black-hooded head. The man easily ducked under the blow, and then Curry felt something—not a blow, but the light grazing of the man’s instep—against his groin followed by a light slap on his left cheek. Then a slap on his right cheek.

  All three strikes had landed before Curry had even been able to draw his fist back.

  The deputy tried to get his hands up to defend himself, but could only cover his head and stagger backwards as the figure—a swirling blur of hands, elbows, and feet—“attacked” him, tapping or slapping virtually every part of his body. Curry knew he’d been “killed” at least a dozen times before one blow, delivered with slightly greater force than the others, sat him down again. This time Curry stayed where he was, head down, mouth open, chest heaving. He knew that if this man wanted to kill him, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—he could do about it.

  The man in black squatted down beside him and casually rested his forearms on his knees. Curry looked up. In the moonlight that filtered down through the trees, he found himself looking into eyes the color of weathered iron girders.

  “Do I have your attention?” the man asked easily, his manner softened by a wry smile that revealed even, white teeth.

  Curry laughed, even as tears—of relief, release, and remembered terror—welled in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. “Oh, yeah, mister, you have my attention.”

  “Good. Now stop worrying. You’re not going to die tonight, unless you trip on the way home and break your neck. I have a few things I want to say to you.”

  “I’m listening, mister.”

  Deputy Sheriff Mark Curry followed the stiff-backed butler through wide hallways marked by arched, cathedral ceilings, oak paneling, and expensive art works.

  There had been a time when Curry thought he would have given almost anything for an invitation to Wilbur Baldauf’s mansion; he was the only member of the sheriff’s patrol who had never received such an invitation. Now he was the only member of the sheriff’s patrol left alive, and he could not remember why he had ever wanted to come here; the rooms of this great house smelled of blood and echoed with screams. It was a museum of corruption erected on a foundation of human suffering.

  Curry was escorted into a huge library filled with leather-bound books he suspected had never been read; in alcoves around the perimeter of the library were pieces of sculpture he suspected had never been appreciated. There were rich tapestries hanging on the walls, thick, brocaded curtains drawn across windows on the east side. The room smelled of lemon oil and cigar smoke.

  Wilbur Baldauf, flushed and perspiring heavily, sat behind a massive mahogany desk at the far end of the room. The red-headed man called Colonel Fox, wearing the same rumpled clothing he’d had on when Curry had found him, was slumped forward in a straight-backed chair, and did not look up as Curry walked briskly forward, stopping in front of Baldauf. By the slope of Fox’s shoulders, the deputy knew he was looking at a man who had been defeated—crushed and humiliated.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Baldauf asked in a low, threatening tone.

  “At home with my family,” Curry answered evenly.

  “I’ve been calling—!”

  “I took the phone off the hook.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are, Curry?! Half of the law-enforcement personnel in this county have been murdered, and you decide to take the day off?! Where the hell’s your uniform?!”

  Curry took his shield from his pocket and casually tossed it on the desk in front of Baldauf, scratching the highly polished surface. Stunned, Wilbur Baldauf stared at the scratch as if he could not believe such a thing could have happened.

  “I was planning on going down to the courthouse to hand that in to whoever’s in charge now,” the young, blond-haired man said. “Then I decided I may as well give it to you, since you’re the one who really runs things in this county. I’d give you my service revolver, but I lost it in the woods someplace. Anyone who wants it can go look for it.”

  “Curry, you can’t leave now.”

  “Watch me.”

  “You’re a goddamn coward!”

  “Anything you say, Mr. Baldauf.”

  “Curry—!”

  “And don’t give me any bullshit about deserting the people of the county when they need me, because it’s not the people of the county this man is after; it’s you and your family. You’ve been using the sheriff’s patrol like your private guard service; against this man, that’s like trying to put out a forest fire with water pistols. You have a lot of blood on your hands, Baldauf, and I’m not just talking about the Hmong. You should have called in the state police and FBI after this man killed your son. If you had, the others might still be alive—even if they don’t deserve to be.”

  Baldauf half rose from his chair. His face was the color of bone. “I should kill you for talking to me like that.” His voice was a guttural rasp.

  “Try, Baldauf,” Curry answered quietly. “I look around the county, and I don’t see any Baldauf muscle left. That means you’ll have to try and kill me yourself. I do believe I’d enjoy that.”

  Baldauf sat back down, looked away. “You desert the county now, Curry, and you’ll never work again in the state.”

  “My family and I are leaving Mordan County this evening, Mr. Baldauf. How far your power extends beyond this county is something, I suppose, I’ll discover soon enough. I have a suspicion it doesn’t extend that far.”

  Baldauf’s tortured voice was barely audible. “Curry, I’m warning you—”

  “Shut up, Baldauf,” Mark Curry said casually, then watched the other man snap back in his seat as if he’d been slapped. “I assume you were calling me because you wanted to hear what happened up on the mountain last night I’ll be happy to tell you.”

  “Why aren’t you dead?!”

  “If you want t
o hear what I have to say, Baldauf, shut your mouth and listen. I won’t repeat myself.”

  For a moment it appeared that Baldauf would pound his fists on the desk, instead, he folded them and bowed his head.

  “John Sinclair taught me the meaning of terror,” Curry continued quietly. He paused, jerked his thumb in the direction of the red-headed man slumped in the chair “Him, too You won’t understand what I’m talking about, Baldauf, but Sinclair showed this man and me our deaths. Few men are privileged to have such a vision and survive. It changes you. The reason Fox and I are alive, apparently, is because we never did anything to hurt the Hmong.”

  “I’ll show that bastard—!”

  “I said to shut up!” Curry waited, then continued when Baldauf remained silent “He showed me what it was like to be trapped in a nightmare and not be able to wake up. It seems the Hmong suffer from something called bangangut, which is precisely that—a nightmare that continues indefinitely, until finally the man or woman dies of a heart attack. The person literally dies of terror. I was allowed to wake up, to live, and I knew then that I could never again be part of an organization, like yours, that exists through terror.”

  Curry shuddered, then took a deep breath and began to pace back and forth across the width of the library. “He caught me in the forest,” the young man continued quietly. “He could have killed me before I even knew he was there, but he chose not to. He talked to me about certain things, and he gave me a message to deliver. Then he disappeared. I found the other deputies dead at their positions. Inside the mill, the Hmong were dead, hanging by their necks from ropes strung over support girders in the ceiling. Fox here was hanging upside down over an acid vat. I got him down and drove him back here.”

  The man in the straight-backed chair spoke for the first time. “I never saw him,” he mumbled without looking up. “Never heard a thing.”

  Curry stopped pacing, laughed softly. “Fox, I’ve got a message for you—just in case you didn’t get the point last night. The man you’ve been hunting for years is no longer amused. He chose to humiliate instead of kill you because he appreciates the fact that you were just doing your job. Now he suggests that you resign your commission, because next time he’ll take it personally. If he sees you again, he’ll kill you.”

  “I assume you have a message for me, Curry,” Baldauf said quietly.

  “I certainly do. He said that you’re stupid, and you’re starting to bore him. He said that if you don’t realize by now how easy it would be for him to trash everything you own before killing you and your relatives, you never will. So that’s what he’s going to do next—kill you, unless you meet his demands. You know what they are. You have until noon tomorrow to make the arrangements, or at least put the legal machinery in motion. You’ll signal your willingness to do this by lowering the flag over City Hall to half-staff. He’ll be in touch after he sees that the flag has been lowered.”

  Now Baldauf slowly looked up. His color had returned, and his tone was even. “I have until noon tomorrow?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “All right, Curry,” Baldauf said, waving his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “You’ve delivered your message, now get out—out of my house, and out of the county.”

  “You’re not going to do it, are you?” Curry asked, obviously puzzled.

  “Get out, Curry.”

  “My God, Baldauf. Sinclair’s right; you are stupid.”

  Wilbur Baldauf slowly rose from his chair, leaned forward on his desk and narrowed his lids. “If I’m not dead by noon tomorrow, sonny, and you’re still around, you’re the one who’ll wish he was dead. This is still my county, and I have a dozen men to replace every man who’s been killed.”

  “You still don’t understand,” Curry said. Then, shaking his head, he turned and walked out of the library.

  Chant sighed deeply as he watched Baldauf out of the corner of his eye. Baldauf’s reaction—or lack of one—puzzled him, and he realized that he had underestimated the other man’s will to resist. Each step he’d taken had been carefully thought out and calibrated to steadily increase the pressure on Baldauf, to isolate and terrorize him.

  But Wilbur Baldauf seemed more distracted now than terrified, Chant thought as he saw the other man glance impatiently at his watch.

  It meant, Chant thought, that the other man still had a bridge to hope, one which he had failed to identify. He had planned to “kill” Colonel Fox that night in order to completely isolate Baldauf. Now Chant decided that he would have to change his plans If he wished to achieve all of his goals, he was going to have to find Baldauf’s last bridge, and destroy it.

  “I don’t know what happened last night,” Chant said in a voice that quavered just slightly. “One minute I was sitting there with my shotgun, and then something hit me on the back of the neck. When I woke up, I was hanging by my ankles over that vat—and the others were hanging all around me. Dead.” He paused, continued carefully. “I think it’s long past time that I called in my team.”

  That got Baldauf’s attention. The fat man, who had been staring at the telephone, glanced over at Chant, and the blood drained from his face. “You will call in nobody, asshole!” he snapped, pointing a thick index finger at Chant’s forehead. “You’re worried about your own ass, so get the fuck out of here! Go back to Washington, or wherever you came from!”

  “I can’t do that, Baldauf,” Chant replied weakly, pulling himself up in the chair “I have to see this through to the end Besides, I was thinking of you. You have until noon tomorrow to meet his demands, or he’s going to kill you. Unless, together, we can find a way to finally stop him I don’t want to be responsible for your death. I believe you have some kind of plan …?”

  “I’ll take care of myself, Fox!” Baldauf said in a voice that still hummed with tension and anger. “This game isn’t over yet.”

  “It may be over at noon tomorrow, Baldauf … one way or another.”

  “That’s my concern, mister! Up to now, it’s all your moves we’ve been making. Now I’ve got a move of my own.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “That’s my business!”

  Suddenly the telephone rang. Baldauf snatched up the receiver. “Yeah?!”

  Chant strained to hear the voice on the other end of the line, but had to content himself with listening to Baldauf’s half of the conversation.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Baldauf grunted. “I don’t care if he looks like a fucking Martian; if he says his name is Mr. Smith, you call him Mr. Smith.… alone, yeah … no, I don’t want anyone to know he’s here. Put him up at the best suite at the airport hotel. I’ll pick him up personally.… Yeah … I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  Baldauf hung up the telephone, and his lips curled back in a grim smile of satisfaction. He came around the desk, walked across the library. He paused in the doorway and, apparently almost as an afterthought, turned back to Chant. “You’re finished, Fox. Pack your bags, because I want you out of here in an hour; if you’re not out by then, some people will come to throw you out. If you want to hang around the county, that’s your business, but you stay away from me. Be warned; if I hear about you calling anyone in, I’ll save Sinclair the trouble of killing you. That’s most definitely a threat.”

  Then Baldauf walked quickly from the room.

  TEN

  Vietnam, 1971

  He could have avoided the two Ranger bodyguards if he’d wanted to, but—gambling that orders had not been issued to shoot him on sight—he chose to be captured, reasoning that the best way to assure that he got past the other guards and in to see Maheu was to go in as the bureau chief’s prisoner.

  The Rangers picked him up just across the border, a half mile from the secret CIA communications center where Chant was certain Maheu was waiting. After they had stopped him of his rifle and knife, the men tested his fighting skills—or believed that they did. Chant fought hand-to-hand against them just hard enough to convince t
he men that he had been truly defeated, then allowed them to drag him along the trail to a small clearing. Half a dozen men, some in uniform and others in civilian clothes, stood watching as the Rangers dragged Chant across the clearing and into a small cabin at the end.

  “What the hell do you think you’re up to, Sinclair?” Maheu said as Chant, bleeding from the nose and mouth, was thrown across a scratched, metal desk. “For the last three days we’ve heard reports of you being sighted coming out of there, heading here. You haven’t exactly kept a low profile. That’s most unlike you.”

  “I wanted to make sure you’d be here to meet me,” Chant said thickly as he wiped blood off his mouth, then pushed himself off the top of the desk and stood erect, swaying slightly. The Rangers flanked him closely, each holding a knife to his ribs.

  Maheu grunted, shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy pants. “You know you were set up, don’t you?” he asked softly.

  “Of course You tampered with Greg’s radio so that it couldn’t receive You sent him off to meet with me, then tipped off the Pathet Lao as to where we’d be. That was a bit much, even for you. You must have been really running scared.”

  “I’m sorry, Sinclair,” the swarthy, husky man said with a shrug. “I really am. I never much cared for you or your buddy, King, but I never would have done something like that unless I’d been forced into a corner. I was.”

  “Because you considered both Greg and me security risks.”

  “Only in this particular instance.”

  “But it was a big instance You feared a breach of security with Operation Cooked Goose, and that was something you just couldn’t live with. So Greg and I had to die.”

  Maheu raised his eyebrows slightly. “I didn’t realize King actually knew the code name. He’d been sticking his nose into a lot of places he wasn’t authorized to stick it into, Sinclair.”

  “He probably thought it was an unbelievably bad idea. I know I do.”