Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  Out again in the bullpen, after returning the eyedrops with thanks, Joshua was about to look at the thick stack of message memos already making a leaning tower on his desk when the new Anglo Dutch press rep introduced herself. “Hi, Karen Levine,” she said. She was thin, early thirties, ash-blond hair, clear level eyes, no-nonsense manner, hard bony handclasp. “I want you to know, from the get-go,” she said, “you’re the guy in charge. I’m just here to help out if I can, if any questions come up involving Anglo Dutch.”

  “Thanks, Karen,” Joshua said, with his brightest and falsest smile, knowing he would have no more than two weeks of this one. “I appreciate all the help I can get,” he told her, as he told them all. “Glad to have you aboard.”

  The fact was, Anglo Dutch had learned from Exxon’s experience with the Valdez. Never keep your information officer around long enough to establish any kind of personal rapport with the media; that way indiscretions and uncomfortable leakage lie. Every two weeks, whip into the slot another trim slim thirty-four-year-old, bland and smooth and bright, male or female (makes no difference), who will give the company line a nearly human face; but before that face becomes completely human get it out of there, and start with a new one.

  It had worked for Exxon in Alaska, and it was working for Anglo Dutch at Green Meadow, and why not? Everybody likes to talk with a handsome person; so what if they aren’t saying anything?

  Something about the encounter with A-D’s latest clone left Joshua too disheartened to look at his message mountain. cTm going to walk the perimeter, Grace,” he told his secretary, a fiftyish civil service employee in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long before the closing of any local roads.

  She gave him a disapproving look. “What should I say to callers?”

  “Hello,” Joshua suggested, and left the trailer.

  The primary official presence was centered here at what had been the main gate back when ingress and egress were possibilities at Green Meadow, but guards of one sort or another, mosdy state troopers and national guardsmen, were spotted all around the rim of what the more military among them persisted in calling “the facility”; as though anything about this were easy.

  The citizen soldiers of the National Guard—mosdy not the accountants and supermarket managers of song and story, but unskilled laborers who were grateful for the extra money they got being guardsmen (but not thrilled at having been called to active duty)—were positioned back in the woods, in pairs and trios, within sight of every inch of fence. Idiots of various kinds kept trying to climb that fence—younger reporters, thrill-seekers, wannabe heroes, drunks (after dark), and jerks generally—so it had to be watched. There was no point having a group of nervous terrorists destroy themselves and several hundred thousand worthier people simply because two dumb kids, for instance, were playing dare-ya.

  Still, Joshua thought, as he walked away from the command post along the fence, it would be nice to get in there. Interesting. And almost his job, really, to know what was going on. Not that he would try to be a hero, rescue anybody or stop anything that was going on at the plant, nothing like that. Just observe.

  Not far along the road from the command post the fence angled away into the woods, and Joshua strolled along with it. There was almost a path bordering the fence on the outside, the result of heavy traffic a few years ago by the construction crews that had built the thing. The path was now somewhat overgrown, with tree branches intruding into the space every twenty feet or so.

  Joshua made his slow way along this path, ducking leafy limbs as necessary, and every time he looked around there were at least two olive-drab-uniformed guardsmen in sight, rifles slung on backs. They paid no particular attention to Joshua, apart from marking his presence; the highly visible laminated ID clipped to his jacket lapel was bona fide enough, so long as he didn’t do anything stupid like try to climb the fence.

  A rock. On the ground, just to the left of the path; the fence was to his right. Joshua picked it up, and it was just hand size. His fist closed halfway around it, fingers splayed over the cool and fairly smooth rounded surface. It felt good in the hand, it felt good swinging at the end of his arm as he walked. Comforting; his pet rock.

  He was a good twenty minutes from the road, maybe a third of the way around the outer boundary of the plant, when he saw, just ahead, partway up a clear slope, seated on the trunk of a fallen tree, a single guardsman; a young guy, maybe twenty- two, pale pimply skin and pale scraggly moustache tucked away beneath the helmet. Joshua veered away from the fence toward this person, who continued to sit there, watching him approach. Joshua noticed the guardsman’s eyes take in the flapping laminated ID.

  When he got close enough, Joshua grinned and said, “Hi. How you doin?”

  “Fine,” said the guardsman.

  “I thought you guys were supposed to work in pairs,” Joshua said. “Where’s your partner?”

  Gesturing over his shoulder, the guardsman said, “Way down by that stream back there, taking a crap. He’s one of your self-conscious dudes.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Joshua said, and smashed the kid in the face with the rock.

  The kid went backward off the tree trunk and Joshua went after him, raising the rock high, bringing it down twice more before the kid stopped moving. Then it was the work of a moment to yank the rifle off the limp body, roll it over, peel off its wool jacket.

  Leaving the rock behind, carrying the rifle and the jacket, Joshua moved quickly but without undue haste toward the fence. He tossed the rifle over, then swarmed up the chain-link, fingers and toes sure and fast. At the top were three spirals of razor wire. Joshua flipped the guardsman’s uniform jacket over these, then scrambled rapidly upward—the sharp razor wire sliced right through the wool cloth and into his knees and forearms, but he hardly noticed—and launched himself over the top and into the air. His stomach dropped first, and then he did, landing on all fours, jolted but unhurt.

  (There were also electronic sensors in the fence, that would now tell the security people back at the command post—and whoever might be looking at the right instrument panel in the plant’s control section as well—that it had been breached, but Joshua hardly cared. He was in; it was already done.)

  Hands and knees smarted from the fall, and the razor cuts on his limbs stung, but he ignored all that. Leaping lighdy to his feet, he picked up the rifle, held it at a loose port arms angled across his chest, and started to walk.

  The land inside the fence was manicured, but cleverly, to give the illusion of unspoiled woodland glade. Joshua strode as though through a park, quickly out of sight of the fence, moving steadily up the gradual slope.

  (Deep down inside, repressed, hardly noticeable, Joshua felt absolute terror. What am I doing? What have I done? What’s happening to me? But these adrenaline flutters of fear were almost completely overpowered, like a weak radio signal buried beneath a more powerful one, overpowered by glorious feelings of pride and pleasure in his own quick sure competence, the skill and swiftness and determination with which he moved. But why? What am I doing? Why? Ah, but the why didn’t matter; the dexterity, the adroitness, was all.)

  His red-rimmed eyes surveyed the scene with satisfaction. What a beautiful world. Where else in the universe are there such greens? He strode up the gradual hill, feeling the young strength in his body, delighting in it, but before he reached the crest, from where he would surely be able to see the plant’s buildings, a man stepped out from behind a quince bush ahead of him and said, “That’s as far as you go.”

  “I don’t think so,” Joshua said, and swung the rifle down to fire from the hip, quickly, effortlessly, as though with the deftness of long practice, only to hear the click of emptiness.

  The damn guardsmen! They patrol with unloaded weapons? What kind of stupidity is this? The Boy Scouts are better prepared!

  (Who is that man? Why do I hate him so? Why am I so afraid? Why am I not afraid? How can I stop these arms, these legs, this brain? Oh, p
lease, please, please, how can I stop))

  The man in Joshua’s path was large and burly, with heavy shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore lace-up woodsman’s boots, thick dark corduroy trousers, a dark flannel shirt. He seemed to be unarmed.

  (How did he get in here, inside the fence? Is he one of the terrorists? What’s happening? Why do I hate him? Oh, please, please, let me drop to my knees in front of him and beg for mercy. Heal me. Cure me. Save me.)

  Joshua stepped quickly forward, reversing the rifle, grabbing it two-handed by the barrel, swinging it back and then around, fast and hard and vicious, aimed at the man’s head. But the man ducked below the swing, his left hand coming up, fingers snapping like a bear trap onto the rifle butt, yanking it away as he crouched low, knees bent, and pivoted all the way around in a tight low circle, like a stunt dancer on ice.

  The rifle was torn from Joshua’s grip, the front sight gouging flesh from both palms, and now the man had it and was straightening, his jaw set, expression grim. Without a second’s hesitation, Joshua spun to his right and ran, leaping over rocks and roots like a deer, ducking below tree branches, swiveling this way and that through the shrubbery like the finest running back in football history.

  Was the creature following? Joshua didn’t waste time looking back. He ran and ran, angling to his left, uphill, toward the plant.

  A clearer section, the grass longer than the groundsmen normally kept it, the crest of the ridge just ahead. Joshua dashed toward that height, and a sudden blow in the middle of his back, a hard powerful hit as though from a battering ram, drove him forward and down, to skid painfully on the grassy ground, and lie there for an instant, breathless, stunned.

  Many aches and pains crowded his body, demanding attention, but he had no time. Not for the racked wheezing of his lungs, not for the cuts and bruises, not for the grinding ache in his back as though bones had been broken, not for the sting of tears in his red-rimmed eyes. He rolled over, struggling upward, and saw it, the man, loping this way up the grade.

  (What did he hit me with? What is he doing? What am I doing? Oh, let me out of this!)

  “You won’t stop me!” Joshua cried, his voice harsh and hoarse and rasping in his strained throat. “You can stop this thing, but you won’t stop me!”

  “A thousand times I’ll stop you,” the man said, coming to a stop, standing over Joshua, staring down at him with hate and contempt. “And a thousand times I’ll give you a little lesson.”

  The worst pain of his life seared through Joshua, burning him, cauterizing him, arching his back, twisting his fingers into claws. He tried to scream, but something was scrambling up his esophagus, through his throat, across his trembling tongue, out ' past his stretched and grimacing lips. And out his straining ears, out his flaring nostrils, out his staring eyes.

  Joshua dropped back onto the ground like a rag doll abandoned in mid-play. He was waking from a nightmare; or into a nightmare. His head lolled to the right, his bleary unfocused eyes saw the rabbit bounding away through the grass, saw it leap high and suddenly burst into flame, saw it fall to earth a charred lump, a smoking coal.

  He forced his neck muscles to work, he turned his head till he stared upward. The man still stood there, huge and dark against the morning sky, head turning back and forth, looking for something more, something more.

  “Help.” His voice was a croak, it was scarcely a voice at all. “Help me.”

  The man looked down, as though surprised to see him there. “Yes, of course,” he said, with great gendeness, and came down to one knee. He leaned forward, eyes soothing, arm outstretched. His large warm comforting hand moved downward over Joshua’s face, and Joshua Hardwick exhaled his last breath.

  39

  Susan awoke again this morning in Andy's arms, and again this morning it was the most blissful possible way she could imagine to come awake. Especially this morning. Of all times, this morning.

  This was the day after her FBI interview. Identification of only two of the band of insane terrorists who had taken over the Green Meadow Nuclear Power Plant upstate had so faj been made, but one of them was Grigor! Susan hadn’t been able to believe it at first—not humorous, sensible, calm, inoffensive Grigor—and even when she’d come to accept it she hadn’t realized what it meant for her. She hadn’t thought about the fact that she was, after all, the person who had brought Grigor to the United States.

  Yesterday morning, she and Andy had been eating their minimal breakfasts together—coffee, orange juice, English muffins— and watching a special report on Today about the siege at the nuclear plant, when the doorbell rang. Well, no; Andy had been watching the report, with that intense interest he sometimes displayed and which she found so impressive, as though he were some incredibly vast energy system harnessed just for her, and she had been ignoring the television set to gaze around instead in quiet satisfaction at how pleasant and appropriate Andy’s possessions looked in her apartment—they’d been living together less than a week, and she was not at all used to it yet—and that was when the doorbell rang.

  They frowned at one another, in surprise; nobody ever rang the bell this early in the morning. She said, half whispered, “Who could it be?”

  “I’ll bet you,” Andy said, nodding at the TV set, “it has something to do with Grigor.”

  So she was already half-prepared when she asked who it was through the intercom and the nasally distorted voice said, “FBI, Miss Carrigan.”

  Two of them came up, one white and one black, both male, both about thirty-five, both smooth and affectless, as though they’d perfected their characterizations by watching fictional FBI men on television. They showed identification, and asked both Susan and Andy to do the same, the black one copying down their driver’s license numbers into a small notebook while the white one verified Andy’s guess that the subject of their visit was Grigor Basmyonov.

  Susan briefly described how she’d happened to meet Grigor, and how she’d happened to describe his case to her doctor cousin, and at first they seemed satisfied, but then they asked her if she could come down to the FBI office to make a statement. “But I have a job,” she protested, feeling the first flutters of panic. “I should be leaving right now.”

  “That’s all right,” the black one said. “Any time today. How about four o’clock?”

  So that was agreed, and they told her which office to go to in the building, which they said was at 26 Federal Plaza, an address that meant nothing at all to Susan (nor would it have to any other New Yorker). It turned out to be one of those made-up addresses, and to actually be a building on Broadway, downtown, between Thomas and Worth streets.

  After they left, Susan said, “You don’t think they think I’m one of them, do you? Andy?”

  “Of course not,” Andy assured her. “They just want to know everything they can find out about Grigor, that’s all. Maybe something you tell them can help them negotiate with him.”

  “Poor Grigor,” Susan said, thinking again how she’d abandoned him since meeting Andy. “And poor me.”

  “It won’t be bad,” he said, stroking her arm, encouraging her. “You’ll just tell them the truth, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “I’ll hate every second I’m down there.”

  “I’ll be with you in spirit,” he said, and grinned. “If that helps.”

  “It does,” she told him.

  * * *

  And it did.

  At work, Susan explained the situation—her co-workers already knew about her connection with the doomed Russian fire fighter, but hadn’t made the link with the terrorist in the nuclear plant—and at four o’clock she kept her appointment.

  Those two hours with the FBI agents—not the original pair but three new ones, two of them women, but all with that same impersonality—were grueling and frightening and bewildering, and left her with a terrible case of the shakes. It soon became obvious they didn’t actually suspect her of anything, didn’t believe she was part of some vast conspira
cy to bring Grigor Basmyonov to America just so he could run a hijacked nuclear power plant, but they couldn’t help their manner, which kept signaling Susan that she was guilty, she was in their power, her only hope was to confess all and throw herself on their nonexistent mercy.

  They asked a million questions, many of them repetitive, and when at last they were finished she was as drained and limp as vegetables that have been used for soup stock. She left 26 Federal Plaza like a shell-shock victim, and there was Andy! Waiting for her, on the sidewalk, on the real world’s Broadway.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, delighted and unbelieving and warmed and restored by the sight of him.

  He shrugged it off. “Not long.” But he must have been there for a long time, to be sure he hadn’t already missed her.

  She let it go, accepting the gesture for the loving kindness it was, and let him lead her through a restorative evening of a good dinner out, a movie—a comedy this time, called Mysterious Ways—and lovely love back in the apartment.

  The word “love” had not passed between them yet. Susan was afraid to say it, afraid it might scare him away, and maybe he too was uncertain how to move the relationship to a deeper level. But that was all right, they had time. All the time in the world.

  Waking this morning when the radio alarm started playing its golden oldies—“All things must pass a-way”—finding herself still in his arms, she smiled as she snuggled closer to his chest, their combined warmth in her nose like the aroma of the nest: home. Her eyes closed again. She floated with him in warm space.

  He stirred. Sleepily, he mumbled, “Time to get up.”

  Oh, well; yes. Moving around, freeing herself from the covers, she rose up onto one elbow and smiled at his grizzly face. His eyes were still half-closed. “Still here, I see,” she said.

  His smile was as lazy as she felt. “I don’t disappear that easily,” he said, and tousled her hair.