by James Reich
8
APRIL 7, 2011. ROBERT DRESNER ASSEMBLED HIS CROSS SPIKES operatives at Kirtland Air Force Base, after flying into Albuquerque: agents Spicer, Gordon, Royce, Jones, and Green. Green, who wore a baseball cap with the logo of an imaginary janitorial business, drove the blacked-out van. Apart from the driver’s baseball cap, the men were dressed in black. The fabric of their clothes was designed to resist rips, and to leave almost zero fibers to forensics should any provincial force come to investigate a disappearance. Green was single. So, Dresner reflected, were the other men. It was only he that had made that particular compromise in anticipation of leaving Cross Spikes and the agency at the height of his powers, cool, hard, and unblemished. Agent Spicer, he imagined, would replace him. Gordon, the buzz-cut blond leaning against the metal hull of the van, was retarded by a minor imbalance of conscience over thuggish efficiency. In Royce, the coincidence of intellectual and frat-jock was almost perfect for the agency. However, in quiet moments, when he evaluated him, he found the closeness of Royce’s ambitions to his own faintly troubling. Jones was ruthless and clean, but the timbre of his voice shifted noticeably under excessive stress. Spicer would kill his mother for a dime and fuck her corpse for his country. He was loyal, ambitious, and dispassionate in a manner that reminded Robert Dresner of himself. The Cross Spikes Club regarded Dresner as an icon of the agency. The current configuration had been together for a decade, but he had been its leader for another decade before that, since his twenties. He commanded their absolute respect and loyalty.
“What we know, from the manifesto at the original scene, is that the terrorist is a self-identified alien, a non-citizen, probably a Communist, about twenty-five, an anti-nuclear militant. We’re going to pluck him off the dirt, okay?” Dresner explained, as Green negotiated downtown Albuquerque and turned onto Central Avenue; neon signs flickered against the windshield: retrofitted 1950s diners with silver ray-gun gothic dorsal fins, pinup art inking the tattoo parlor windows, ugly 7-Elevens, the vast yellow signage of the Adult Video Megastore. He noted that all of the cars had reversed into the parking lot there, because as an impoverished state, New Mexico only required one license plate on the rear of the vehicle, so that from the street the half-dozen patrons were anonymous. The motels had been held in suspension, locked into the past for sixty years. This was a section of old Route 66. As they passed between an art deco cinema and what appeared to be a queer warehouse bar, Dresner advised: “Make the most of this colorful scene. Everything else in New Mexico is just brown.” He stared at the nightlife through the two-way mirrored glass of the van. Three girls with Bettie Page haircuts, red shoes, and spray-on black denims crossed the avenue when the lights changed. “Albuquerque might be trapped in a rockabilly dream, but holy shit the girls here are actually kind of good-looking.”
They drove Highway 25 toward Santa Fe, where they would exit for Madrid. Moonlight glossed the flat tops of the mesas as the road climbed through reservation lands, toward the city lights and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, cigarette billboards and casino lightbulbs, a speedway stadium, a dead dog in the periphery of the headlights. Robert Dresner resumed briefing his team en route:
“The Voice is increasingly convinced that there is a common denominator between the wildfires at Los Alamos, last year. We don’t have much to work with because most of the traffic cameras in New Mexico are just movie props glued to the signals. However, during the wildfire period, there were persistent suggestions that the arsonist likely came from one of the decrepit outlaw villages to the south of the blaze. Those places tend to crawl with dopers and would-be radicals, so ‘no shit, Sherlock,’ right? But some of our nubile youth at Langley have been combing what footage we have and there is a denominator, or what appears to be one. What we have is black motorcycle clocked speeding close to Radium Springs, not far from White Sands and Trinity, and witnessed cruising by the Oppenheimer House and loitering along Bikini Road and Eniwetok Drive. Same bike showed up at the junction of 599 and 14, heading south. If we had the plate this would be a piece of cake, but this state being a shithole, we do not. There are two towns further down there, but the bikers tend to congregate in the one named Madrid, truly a ghost town. This is a photograph of the motorcycle.” The team passed it around, holding it up to the light in the van. “The image quality is shitty. It may be a Sportster or knockoff design. It’s too hard to tell from this. But we’re going to look for a potential match in Madrid and scope the house. This is a copy of the photograph of the target that he left at Trinity with the manifesto. You can at least see black hair under some kind of cap, but not much else. If the owner looks like good meat, then we’ll take him. We have about an hour until target. It’s a small town, so stealth is of the utmost. And remember that cleanliness is next to viciousness. So, in short: We have no name, but we have plotted an approximate habitation. Find the bike. With luck, we get this cunt in the van, and get out of here.”
The van was tuned to be almost silent. They drove into Madrid and passed slowly in front of the Coalmine Tavern. Royce leaned close to the driver-side window, pressing upon Green’s shoulder. “Those look like touring bikes. Not ours.” Turning off their headlights, Green turned his baseball cap around and blinked several times, adjusting his eyes to the moonlight that shone on the remnants of snowfall. They left the main street and the vehicle stalked along the rough dirt roads behind the façade shown to the tourists.
“Look at these shacks,” Green complained. “Are you sure this is New Mexico?”
The men in the van laughed. Dresner noticed that Spicer remained unmoved.
“Keep driving, Green.”
Most of the shacks and cabins were in darkness because the Tavern was still open. Dresner gestured Green toward to a pair of homes separated by a decaying wall. “There!” The van stopped. “All of you, masks on. That’s the motorcycle.” He pointed to a black shape leaning close to a small house.
Spicer whispered: “There’s a desk lamp turned on inside, and a shadow. Someone’s home.”
“Deploy. We’ll get a look at him.”
Green remained at the wheel.
Dresner and the others kept low behind the wall.
“Front door opens onto the kitchen.”
Jones asked: “What is that banner on the wall? It’s hard to make out in this light.”
“S.L.A.: Symbionese Liberation Army. Communists. Christ, Jones.” Dresner hissed with frustration. Dresner regarded the yellow points of light glimmering from the hard edges of what appeared to be a typewriter on a small table. A black shape obscured the lamp. “There. There’s our man. Wearing a cap.”
Robert Dresner moved silently to the door and knocked.
Molly Pinkerton opened Cash’s front door, holding a book in her left hand.
Before she could react, the Cross Spikes gang fell upon her, taping her mouth, casting a thick black hood over her head, and binding her wrists with ratcheting plastic bracelets. The book fell into the gray slush in front of the cabin and Jones kicked it into the kitchen before Spicer rushed inside, slamming the door behind him. With Green waiting in the van, Robert Dresner, Royce, Jones, and Gordon dragged the heavy figure across the carbon-streaked snow. Throwing the figure into the vehicle, Dresner said: “When we take the gag away from your mouth, shut the fuck up. No one will hear you. No one will believe anything that you say.”
Molly lay hooded and bound on the floor of the soundproof van. Boots and fists smashed her without rhythm, remorse, or commitment, a routine like a jaded street gang looking for an easy mark for their exercise and the release of sexual tension. Muted knuckles pounded the body. At Dresner’s command, Agent Green gunned the van out of the dirt road and back to the drag, moving south toward Kirtland AFB. From there a black flight would take Dresner and the suspect to a blank space on the map, a place of profound alienation and violence. Struggling beneath the driven blows, through the suffocating fabric of the black hood, Molly heard furious voices.
“That’s right,
you eat it, Comrade Motherfucker!”
“This is just a hazing, Trotsky. You get really fucked up later.”
Something crushed the fingers of her right hand, the pain sending her broken fingers into uncontrollable shaking. She could feel the blood damming under her fingernails, forcing for a crack to jet forth.
“Remember,” the voice came close to Molly’s ear, “no one will believe anything you say, and if I have to knock your face into the back of your skull and dump you on the road, I will.”
They pulled the hood off.
Dresner shone a brilliant flashlight into Molly’s eyes.
This is wrong. This is wrong!
Blond hair spilled out of the trucker cap that fell from her bleeding scalp. Still uncertain of what he was seeing, Dresner grabbed a hank of Molly’s hair, pulling it toward his nose and inhaling. “Change your hair color recently?” he barked, but the absence of new chemicals told him that this hair had not been bleached in some time. It was also too long. Dresner thumbed at her lips, trying to wipe the lipstick away. Suddenly, he realized that the broken mouth had been tattooed red. He rolled the barely conscious form over. The figure was tall and heavy, over six feet. A cold jag of nausea passed through Robert Dresner. How could he have lost the fact that the suspect was barely five-six? He felt an acceleration of his panic. Didn’t he tell his crew that the target was slightly built? He shone the light on the torso, and pushed at the silicon in the chest with his black-gloved fingers. “What’s your name?” he demanded. There was no answer, only an agonized murmur. From a kit hanging close to him, he retrieved smelling salts. “Identify yourself!” Dresner let go of Molly’s hair and slapped her across the face, the crack of nasal cartilage lost beneath the sound of leather on skin. The face, he thought, was masculine, like a drag act that had gone too far. The idea repulsed him. By now his anger was the smoke around the fact that he had made mistakes. Even as he reached for the knot of Adam’s apple in the freak’s throat, a distant station of Robert Dresner’s consciousness conspired against him: You’re losing it, Robert. I know you want out, but you’re getting flabby in your processes. It was a cold, metallic voice. In fury, he ripped Molly’s jeans from her beaten legs. His gloved hand ripped at her underwear, revealing hairless reconstructed genitalia, pale scars pulsing under the flashlight as the motion of the vehicle pitched her over. “Is that real?” Dresner gagged, shining his light on Molly’s crotch.
Lying on the floor of the van, Molly rolled to face him, confronting only his black balaclava. Blood ran from her mouth, and sweat shone on the taut muscles and sinews of her arms. “That,” she said, “is a Swiss-made vagina, and it runs like clockwork.” The dissonance of the deep yet tender voice and the sex organs and breast implants, the tattoos, and powerful musculature, caused the rendition team to hesitate and fall back on the benches that ran along the interior of the blacked-out van. “I fought in Vietnam to get this far,” she said, “and if I had a moment with each of you, you might regret it. What are you, the fucking heavy metal wing of the Ku Klux Klan?”
“Was that your motorcycle outside the house?”
“No.” Molly sensed from the snaking of the van that they were traveling south, along Highway 14, in the direction of Albuquerque. She had to maintain her wits and her bearings, despite the violence and humiliations. Another of the dark figures leaned toward her.
“Was that your house?”
“I’m a burglar, assholes. I had broken in when you interrupted.”
“But you answered the door.”
“Is it more of a crime to be a nonchalant burglar? Am I under arrest, or just under your jackboots?” Molly struggled to her knees, to relieve the pain in her arms that had been locked behind her back. She wanted her abductors to talk more, so that she might be more precise about their general East Coast accents.
“You’re transparent, liar.”
Royce brandished the wallet that he had pulled from Molly’s jeans. “Pinkerton.”
Dresner took the driver’s license. “Molly Pinkerton. Ah, it says you’re the neighbor. It’s a nice picture of you. You don’t look, what, sixty-five. Who’s your friend, Molly Pinkerton? Are you sure you want to take a beating for him? If we take you back, will we find him at the bar instead?”
“Are we going to the mother ship?”
“Fuck you.” Dresner spoke resignedly.
For some minutes, they rode in silence. Molly’s blood ran along the floor.
In the fighting he had lost track of the positions of his men. About him, he saw only a trinity of thugs in black masks. It was too dark to perceive the color of their eyes. Yet, each seemed to betray a silent dismay, and he understood that each of the solemn killers would be calculating and quantifying his failure. Now they possessed and had brutalized an aging transsexual who resembled nothing of the suspect. Dresner tried to plot the fallout of this mistake, but ahead of him was only a blizzard of confusion.
“All right, stop right here.” Dresner punched the back of the driver’s seat.
Royce was incredulous: “That’s it?”
“My call,” Dresner snapped, overcompensating.
The plastic bonds at Molly’s wrists were severed and the scraps retrieved.
“Get out. And if we have to see you again, it will be so much worse.” Dresner’s own words struck him as childish, part of some lost Oklahoma ritual he had buried.
Molly was shoved out of the vehicle and her clothes were strewn from the rear doors as the van disappeared into the darkness of the unlit highway.
Slamming the doors, Dresner addressed his team. “Okay, you know what to do next. Run the name, the license, et cetera.” He sounded exhausted. “Get the hair samples from the hood, and swabs of the spit and the blood. Run them.”
As the van drove on, Dresner’s phone vibrated. Trembling, he snatched it from his pocket. He was breathing hard. A text message was scrolling across the screen. PATROLMAN FOUND DEAD IN BURNING CAR NR PANTEX NUCLEAR FACILITY NR AMARILLO, TX. ISSUES. SUSPECTED HOMICIDE. SUICIDE UNLIKELY. Electronic warnings bored into Robert Dresner’s skull. He thought as fast as he could, assembling the nexus, trying to salvage what he could of the situation:
Los Alamos National Labs and the Pantex Plant were both militarized locations under the National Nuclear Security Administration wing of the Department of Energy. Hoping that this faint inspiration would assuage his guilt, he dialed for his director. The Voice answered:
“Robert. You have something? Did you locate the motorcycle?”
“Perhaps.” Dresner swallowed with difficulty. He didn’t want to disclose the ragged details of the bad rendition. What he required was some sliver of reassurance. “I mean, we located the motorcycle, but not the owner. There was someone there, and we’re going to check hi—her out. I think she was a neighbor of our man. Spicer is working the suspect’s house over. But this dead cop at Pantex—maybe this was a day trip, a recon gone wrong. I’m speculating.”
“Your speculations are our business, Robert.”
“Well, Pantex is another NNSA site, like Los Alamos. This might be coincidence, but I think we should put a call through to the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque before a pattern develops. I can send someone down there. Actually, we’re only about forty minutes away. I’ll call Spicer and tell him to get out and lie low for a couple of hours, and I can get down there and deal with this personally. And there’s a chance our man is on his way there, right now.”
The Voice said: “Where are the next closest NNSA sites, after that?”
“Not sure. Missouri or Nevada, probably.”
“It’s what we have. I appreciate your call, Robert.”
Robert Dresner instructed Green to get the team to the Sandia Labs. Then he tried to call Spicer. There was no answer. “Spicer can’t have a signal in that ghost town,” he muttered. Despite the lack of communication, he was confident that Spicer would finish his forensic and recon and get out of the house in good time.
In the moonlight, wracked fro
m her beatings, Molly had gathered the ragged remnants of her clothes that had been cut from her and scattered across the asphalt and red dirt shoulder of Highway 14 from the rear of the jet-black, unmarked van that had abducted her. The road had twisted upward into the hills. It was difficult to see exactly where she was, but she knew that if she could continue to stagger downward, then she would reach Madrid. The emptiness of the Turquoise Trail hummed about her. Far away, she heard the weird cackle of coyotes ripping flesh from bone; painful memories of the night she was busted for hustling hormone shots . . .
