by Farris, John
"We may be together a few years, then. I hope you play chess. What's your name, by the way?"
He smiled thinly. "Sorry. I don't care to be reminded who he was?" The Assassin went from dour to homespun twinkly in a heartbeat. Rance Jool was back. "Chess? I play a mean game, mama. Fact is I do expect young Eden to be, on a plane wingin' to your side in forty-eight hours. She's not that fir away, is she?"
"Don't ask," Betts said. "Deduce."
Betts had the cottage to herself. First thing she thought of was a telephone. There were two jacks, kitchen and bedroom, but no phones.
She tried to remember yesterday. Waiting in the airport lounge with the Tubners, Rome-bound, and her personal escort from the Blackwelder Organization. Had they reported Betts missing? Not to Eden. Only Vaughn Blackwelder himself could make contact with Eden, through Tom Sherard, and Blackwelder was in Pakistan, either just starting up to, or coming down from, the summit of K2.
Hours passed. Several times she went as far as the edge of the patio. The birdhouses were empty this time of the year, leaking a little straw from abandoned nests. Temptation became an ache. Step off. Do it. He had to be running a bluff. The microwave oven in the kitchen could set off explosives in her collar. So walk. Keep walking. Down the private road to the state blacktop, flag a ride. Sensors. All around the house. So James Bond of him. Break an invisible beam, go blooey.
What were the odds that he was lying? Mind games.
He doesn't want you to die, Betts. You're his link to Eden. That whole business he'd tried to articulate at breakfast, Betts drinking the strong Jamaican coffee until she was wired. He sounded loonier at each bend he careened around. Impact Sector. Psychics a danger to national security. Killed Eden once, she came back to life. How did she do that, Betts?
Her neck itched beneath the collar. And no cigarettes, no cigarettes.
Sooner or later he'll kill you anyway. What are you waiting for, Betts? He'll be back soon.
Indecision made her feel weak. Light-headed. She sat down in one of the rocking chairs, dozed in spite of the collar holding her head erect.
Hours passed. The light changed. She saw two coyotes in the fallow pasture. Hawks in the sky.
Dark at six-thirty. He wasn't back but she cooked for him again, baby back ribs from the freezer, corn on the cob. She should be poisoning his food, but there wasn't anything around the house to discreetly do the job. Comet cleanser and dishwasher detergent in the kitchen, only aspirin in the bathroom medicine cabinet.
At ten-thirty she turned off the stove and let the food go cold.
He didn't come back that night.
Betts was angry the next day, after a restless night of dreams snaking through the fog at the cottage windows, entering her mind like phantoms. Angry at herself because she'd failed his test of her nerve. Angry at the Assassin because he'd peeled her naked, peeled away her sense of rightness about herself. Controlling her with that detonator the size of half a deck of playing cards that he had left on the range counter in the kitchen, so casually, tiny red light aglow. Daring her to touch it in his absence, open it like a letter from a dreaded source, and remove the button-size battery. Before long she found it necessary to hide the detonator beneath the tented pages of a magazine. Dying might have been preferable to this humiliation. But knowing how easily she could die only made her think of Eden, how desperately she wanted to see her baby again.
Daylight all but gone when at last Betts heard his truck. She trembled, almost as if it were a relief to have him back.
The Assassin pulled the truck into the garage, clomped into the kitchen, threw her a look but wasn't surprised to see her there, dropped his creased rancher's straw on the counter, and sat hunched on a stool. The cast had come off his arm. Hands dangled between his legs. Still in character.
"Howdy."
"Oh, drop it."
"So fir you done jes' fine, Betts. Bet you was tempted to try a getaway, though. Couldn't make up your mind if ol' Rance was funnin' you."
She didn't give him the satisfaction.
"Coffee's not on?" he said, looking around. "You cook anything?"
"You can chow down on microwaved from now on," Betts said. "I'm through."
He sucked at his false teeth with a jaundiced grin. "Then how's about we send that E-mail now? Know you must a been thinken' on it."
"I won't."
He nodded. Lips compressed. He studied her, remoteness in his eyes. She was afraid of that look, and leaned against a wall, aware of faintness. Still unable to bend his gaze away from her soul.
The Assassin got up and beckoned.
"Somethin to show you in the garage."
He didn't wait for her. When at last she followed with a heaviness in her lungs that felt like drowning he had unlocked and raised the hard top from the pickup bed. He motioned again. Betts came closer and saw the child lying fully clothed on her side on a sheepskin that looked new. Eyes closed; face pale, dried spittle on her chin. She was shoeless and looked to be about ten years old. There was a small diamond stud in one earlobe. She was thoroughly knocked out but breathing, which was more than Betts could manage for a few moments.
"Ohhh. God!"
"Name's Saffron Pike. No need to know where I got her. She can go back there; say the word." His voice fell out of character. "Or never show up again on this earth. That is the choice you get to make, Betts."
"What did you do to her?"
"On my honor, she's unharmed. Do you think I'm some sort of twisted pervert? No trauma was involved. Saffie merely went to sleep. She will remain asleep for at least another three hours. But, Betts. Make no mistake. The clock is ticking."
There was a hammer hanging on a pegboard nearby. Betts reached it and went after him, flailing. He took one hard blow on his shoulder before twisting the hammer from her fist. Betts was slung half the width of the garage, banged her head.
When she looked up he was putting the top back on the bed of the pickup truck.
"There are many young girls" he said, hearing Betts groan. "How many do you want on your conscience?"
Chapter 9
NAIROBI, KENYA
OCTOBER 14
1230 HOURS ZULU
"You're Eden Waring, aren't you?"
Eden had known it was coming, having deliberately invited him into her space. A space that had come to seem an enormous empty room in a museum where she was frozen like an exhibit. She was tired of feeling shy about him. At her suggestion, following their return from the near-disastrous excursion to Amboseli, she and Lincoln Grayle had driven down from Shungwaya for lunch at the Thorn Tree Café, symbolic of "Old Nairobi"—although the city, a metropolis amid parkland, was as aggressively modern as Pittsburgh or Frankfurt.
The Thorn Tree was a sidewalk café at the Stanley, a much-renovated Edwardian-style hotel in the city's center, where the long bar had been a hangout for famous white hunters and safari guides before the strict ban on hunting in Kenya instantly dissipated their aura of myth and dangerous glamour. Now they were surrounded at lunch by young grad students pursuing obscure careers in paleontology or ethno botany, by well-off adventurers, Arab wheeler-dealers, prosperous Kikuyu farmers and tea growers enjoying a day in town, and officials of UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Program that was based in Nairobi.
Across the small table from him she leaned back slightly and let the sunlight into her eyes, which after a moment closed. She lifted her face slightly with eyes still closed and smiled a bit regretfully.
"I have a good memory for faces. Yours was everywhere after that plane crash in California. You seemed just to disappear, afterward. I was curious. Obsessed, for a while."
She lowered her head, opened her eyes.
"But not now?"
"I'm good at illusions, probably the best. Psychologies of concealment, a trickster's lures. I thought, There can't be any secrets she may not know. And I thought, How terrible for her."
Eden looked around at other tables. Hearing conversations, laught
er. Voices, music in the streets. Taxis, buses, crowded ramshackle matatus, a busy, noisy place in heavy gasoline heat, the sun deceptively merciless. Her eyes came back to him.
"There are no secrets to tell. It's not like shuffling a deck of cards and always knowing where the ace of diamonds is. I have no tricks. And no illusions, at least not anymore." She drank some of her Tusker beer that was rapidly warming. Froth on her upper lip; she nonchalantly licked it off and he smiled at that.
Eden said "An anthropologist friend of Tom's has been studying one of the East African tribes, the Amba, I think, for many years. Wizards are very real to the Amba, although they've never seen one. Have no idea what they look or sound like. A wizard could be someone's brother, or wife. Imagine that degree of paranoia. The Amba are certain only that wizards exist, that they rule every aspect of a man's life; they are the cause of all that's miserable about the human condition."
"How do they appease these wizards?"
"They don't. They can't. Wizards exist only to cast evil spells, to deny, torture, destroy. So the Amba live in fear and torment, one village making war on another suspected of harboring a vicious, though invisible, wizard. The social structure of an entire tribe is in chaos because of their unshakable belief. But in chaos—the anthropologist learned—there's also an eerie kind of togetherness. No Amba escapes the doom of his beliefs."
Her gaze shifted, because his smile seemed forbearing.
"These beliefs aren't peculiar to the Amba, by the way. Other tribes, the pathological religions, all have their versions. That man in the nice-looking suit and blue-striped shirt over there, the one with the cell phone, he could be a professor at Nairobi University. Educated at Harvard or the Sorbonne. But in the dark of his heart, at crunch time for the spirit—he's still bewitched.
"I'm not god, devil, shaman, or wizard. But there are many people willing to believe I'm one. Because it's a superstitious world, that wouldn't be good for my health."
"I was thinking of calling a press conference. But I've been on the cover of People magazine. Come to think of it, so have you."
"Is a relationship sneaking up on us?"
"That was yesterday. And here we are. Phase two. I knew who you were right away, of course. So I thought, Get it out of the way first. You didn't walk out. Trust may come, or not, still you're talking to me."
"Do you find that interesting?" she said. A faint smile.
"Everything about you interests me. The way your left eye turns in a little. Melancholy. The more you talk, though, the less depressed you seem."
"I'm not up to a relationship. I had one. He was spying on me, for the FBI. I don't know what happened to him. In the end I may have mattered more to him than they did, so I'm pretty sure he's dead."
He let that go by with a sympathetic look, and waited. Their salads arrived, chilled glass plates on pewter. She looked at hers without hunger, looked at his face.
"Sorry," she said.
"Are you wanted by the FBI?"
"Probably. I'm not about to call up and ask them. FBI, CIA, MORG, if they still exist—I, I mean we, did them some damage—all government agencies who are in the 'secrets' business"— her mouth twisted wryly—"consider psychics a threat to their existence. It's a tribal thing, as I tried to explain." He nodded. "Although the CIA and the Russians and the Chinese, I was told, have tried for years to cultivate a few of us like a cash crop. But extrasensory perception is and always will be one of the mysteries of time and space." Absorbed now, seeming eager to talk, she began also, mechanically, to eat. "The key word is perception. I'm a prophetic dreamer, nothing unique about that. Happens to all sorts of people, millions of times a night, I'm sure. I receive images cast as dreams that, like all dreams, need interpretation. In my walking-around life I don't creep into people's minds." A quick shake of her head, sunlight on the bridge of her nose, lighting ardent depths in her eyes. "Who would want to? I do have flashes of intuition. I'm able to exchange thoughts with other adepts; I'm learning to do that. And sometimes—when I'm under great stress—I can call on an energy I don't have a name for. Then improbable or miraculous things happen. But it's a faculty I can't control."
"Flashes of intuition? Anything about me, so far?"
"You don't have any fear," she declared.
"What makes you think that?"
"This morning at Amboseli, when it looked as if that elephant was going to crush the combi, you—weren't afraid."
"How do you know?"
"You were thinking how you could use it, stage an elephant attack as part of one of your TV specials."
He sat back in his cane chair.
"That might have crossed my mind," he said with a grin. "Seriously. Why didn't he go ahead and finish us off, he seemed that angry. Karloff, was that the elephant's name?"
"Bertie stopped him. Calmed him down."
"Oh, Bertie. So she is—"
"She's good with animals," Eden said quickly. "That's all. Count yourself lucky she was there with you."
There was a kink of muscle in Eden's jaw, as if she were forcing away pain or some other distress. She trembled.
"Are you malarial?" he asked, concerned.
"No, nothing like that. I'm good about taking my prophylactics. In Africa you had better be. Would you excuse me, I need to—"
He was on his feet as she left the table. Walking quickly away, onset of menses, perhaps. A cramp. He took a deep appreciative breath, eyes and heart filled with her shape and style, the fine edge of a lingering emotion cutting him deeper than he was prepared for. As he was sitting down, moving his cane chair at more of an angle to the street, another young woman slipped into his field of vision. She startled him. But already, briefly glimpsed, she was disappearing, obscured by throngs on both sides of the wide avenue, the slow passage of a bus. A white female, the image of Eden Waring, even to the cut of her cedar-red hair and the beaded Masai headband high on her tanned forehead. The green of her sleeveless dress seemed exactly the shade Eden was wearing.
Then she reappeared farther down the sidewalk, hesitated, turning her face toward the hotel as if in response to his astonishment. Where she stood a draft of cold air from the doorway of a shop thinned the vaporous haze from a bus's exhaust; he saw her clearly. Those eyebrows like the red of wasps with their little tapered stingers at each end, rising abruptly above the natural arch of each brow. And that cinched it, although he had seen Eden disappear into the hotel only a few seconds ago. He glanced that way to be sure.
Doubles were a part of his business as a magician. He was amazed that Eden had gone to this trouble to stage her sly, jesting illusion for him. Anyway, he liked it. A very different, intriguing young woman.
When he looked across the street again, the double was gone. Show over. He applauded silently, smiling to himself. More than a little curious about the double's identity.
"Who were your parents?" Lincoln Grayle asked Eden, on the way to Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Grayle and other members of his entourage were flying in a chartered Learjet to Victoria Falls, where they would complete the last segment for his upcoming television special.
"I never knew them."
"I thought you might bear a strong resemblance to your mother."
She gave him a look, unreadable behind the dark lenses of her smart Italian sunglasses.
"From photos I've seen of her, I suppose I do."
"And your sister?"
Another look. "One of us was all God made."
"Then you have a double in Nairobi. I had a glimpse of her today, walking past the hotel."
He was waiting for her to laugh, reveal her joke on him. Instead he saw Eden's hands, in fingerless ostrich-leather driving gloves, tighten on the steering wheel. No hint of amusement in her face.
"Oh, her. Yes, I've noticed her too. Actually I'm a lot better-looking." Finally her lip curled, a reluctant half smile. "She has a bad complexion. Her eyes are too close together."
On the ramp for departing passengers she pulled into a spa
ce behind a minibus discharging a British Airways crew. It was a busy time of day, jumbo jets arriving from and leaving for cities on three continents, a rage of thunder in the sky. The ramp trembled beneath a load of traffic.
They looked at each other, not sure how to end it. Then Eden slipped off her glasses and leaned toward him with a smile. They kissed.
"I don't think we'll be seeing each other again," Eden said.
"I think we must," he said.
She turned her face aside, politely, at the offer of a second kiss.
"Kwaheri," Eden said. "Good-bye" sounded less final in Swahili. And just a touch romantic.
Chapter 10
E-MAIL LETTER FROM PINKY TUBNER TO HER SON AND DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
OCTOBER 14
Hi, Gary and Gloria! Back in Rome after two days on the Amalfi Coast. October is busy but not the high season there, August being the big month when the hotels are jam-packed with people who come back year after year. So we were able to reserve this gorgeous room at Le Sireneuse in Positano, which is like a dream at night, the lights twinkling up and down this steep cliff by the sea. Our room was all in white with brown accents, Gloria (I took lots of pictures, never fear), and the bath even had a whirlpool tub! Which I could certainly use after the drive down from Rome. Let me tell you how happy I was that Frank decided not to rent a car but hired a car and driver instead, a driver used to the road down there. I have never been so scared! Roller coasters are tame compared to the Amalfi Coast road. It is one steep blind curve after another. The road is barely wide enough for two cars abreast! And then there are the buses and trucks coming at you with horns blatting, I had rope burns from my rosary. You know Frank—wise-cracking all the way. Grabbing me by the shoulder and going, Oooops! That was close! But I could tell his heart was in his mouth at least part of the time.
Making matters worse, you know that volcano they have down there, Vesuvius? It was smoking. First time in years, the driver said. Just what we needed, after that send-off at San Francisco Airport, glass pieces in my hair and throwing up big time from the rotten-meat stench in the lounge. I've told you guys enough about that already. But it was a bad omen for the start of our trip and of course I was petrified during most of the flight to Rome, until a couple of martinis knocked me out. So getting back to our excursion to Amalfi, there's a volcano acting as if it's going to explode at any time! Two bad omens. I was convinced I was going to die in a crack-up before we ever got to see His Holiness.
