Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  A plane droned overhead, and gazing up she saw a contrail but no helicopter blades on the rooftop. She couldn’t hear Django barking, either, and that was what she was listening for. Would Rafael have checked in when he couldn’t reach her by phone? Would he have used his spare key to tend to the dog? With an apocalypse in its opening overture, she felt that having robbed the dog of his freedom to run from it, she was at least responsible for not consigning him to starvation. Maybe that was a little out of balance with so many human lives at stake, but for her it was a simple emotional imperative. There might not be much she could do for the city, but she could at least rescue the dog again.

  And yet, another voice was vying for space in her head beneath the platinum wig she’d picked up along with a clean pair of jeans walking through Copley Place Mall before hailing the cab: Bullshit, there’s nothing you can do for the city. You may be the only one who can do something, if you don’t get caught here. Is that what you’re doing? Trying to get caught so you don’t have to shoulder the burden and deal with the pressure?

  “Fuck it, why save myself if I can’t even save a dog?”

  “You talking to me?” the cabbie said, swinging an arm over the seatback.

  “No.” She handed him a crumpled twenty. “Give me a five-minute head start and then drive up to the courtyard and I’ll hop back in, okay?”

  “Why don’t I just drop you there and wait for you?”

  “Just do it like I said.” Then she was out of the car, forcing herself to walk, not run. They had to be inside the building if they were here. Most of them, anyway. Whoever was watching the street would probably radio the ones inside to announce her arrival.

  She approached the door, keeping pace with a silver SUV, hoping it wasn’t the vehicle of the recon guy, and then using it as cover to duck into the weedy courtyard. She’d left her army bag in the cab—it was too much of a giveaway—and now she reached into her jacket pocket and found what she needed, the one tool she’d transferred.

  It was fast work, and no doubt sloppy, but she was coming back out of the courtyard right in time for the cab; and before anyone knew where the blonde had gone, or that her cab wasn’t just leaving but picking her up again, she was in the backseat, lying low, and telling the old man to get her out of there, not too fast.

  Her fingers trembled with adrenaline as she dialed the prepaid cell phone. She could so easily imagine Rafael looking at the unfamiliar number and deciding to blow it off. Just when she thought he would, he answered, his voice uncertain.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Just listen, I’m okay. I need you to take care of the dog for me. His leash is hanging on a hook in the kitchen. Take him to do his business in the courtyard. Use my headlamp; it’s on the same hook as the leash. Walk him before you put him in your car. I don’t know how long he’s been crated. Then take him to your place and feed him. The bag of food is in the cabinet by the fridge. Can you do that for me, Raf?

  “Becca, where are you? Are you in trouble? Some spooks took me in for questioning about you and I was freaking out, but I told them you would never hurt anyone. They weren’t even cops, they were like…I don’t know. What’s goin’ on, Becca? What kinda mess are you in?”

  “I can’t talk. Promise me you will do exactly what I asked, please.”

  “Okay, I promise, I’ll get the dog. My landlord will wig if he sees him, though. Then we’ll both be living on the street.”

  “Walk him first, Raf. He likes to pee in the same spot every time. It’ll comfort him.” And with that she hung up before he could ask any more questions and forget the particulars of the favor she’d asked of him.

  * * *

  Rafael let himself in with the key Becca had given him when she’d needed him to water her plants over the week she’d spent on a road trip in May. He’d been wondering when she was going to ask for it back but hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t really want to know if she trusted him that completely, or if she’d simply forgotten he had it. He was surprised when it worked. He figured the men in black would have changed the lock. When it did work, he hesitated, expecting to be grabbed as soon as he entered. But looking around the entryway, he saw no one and decided to take the elevator instead of the stairs. It was a cage-type, and he figured at least he’d have a better chance of seeing the agents through the grate when it reached Becca’s floor. If they wanted to grab him, they were going to grab him and there would be little he could do about it. It was the anticipation that made him crazy. The feeling that he was being watched. He just wanted to have out with it and confront them. But maybe the spooks had bigger fish to fry now that the shit was hitting the fan. He’d seen some of that on the news, but the broadcasts felt choppy and censored. Seeing national network reporters standing in front of Boston landmarks wasn’t all that strange anymore; there’d certainly been plenty of that during Hurricane Sonia. But they seemed to have an especially anxious vibe this time, as if there were men with guns and national-security orders just outside the frame, watching to make sure no tongues slipped.

  In light of all that, maybe the girl who saw it first was no longer a high priority, and her dog sitter even less of one.

  Besides, they had already dragged him in for questioning, and let him loose. It hadn’t been too hard to convince them he knew nothing, because it was mostly true. Still, they’d made him sit long enough to get tired and careless in his answers, had called him a vandal and threatened to deport him. When it brought them no closer to finding Becca, they’d let him go. Even gave him his knife back, the one Becca didn’t know about that he kept in his boot. It had been the source of the most tension in his interrogation until the polygraph spelled out for them in tight little scribbles what he’d been swearing all along: that he couldn’t say where Becca was because he hadn’t heard from her, and he didn’t have the slightest affiliation to the brineheads of the Starry Wisdom Church.

  “We get it: you’re not a brinehead, just a chucklehead. Whaddaya need a nine-inch knife for?” The agent had slapped the sheathed blade against the table, making Rafael jump. His untouched water cup sloshed a dollop over the side.

  Rafael glowered at the Irish prick. “Me and Becca explore some of the same places skinhead junkies hang out. Maybe you’re familiar with their position on mixed race couples?”

  “So you’re a couple, you and Becca Philips?”

  In retrospect, he realized he must have shaken his head with enough dejected disappointment to clarify his role in her life for them.

  The elevator shuddered to a clanging stop, and the cage bounced a little under his feet. He pulled the gate open and stepped into the hallway where Becca’s photos lined the eggshell-white wall, including a candid black-and-white portrait of him, now indecipherable in the dark with the high windows all black above. He would have preferred to be running this errand in daylight, but there was less of that with each passing week. He felt for the other key on the ring and turned it in the door of Becca’s apartment. A near-perfect silence was broken by Django’s growls and barks, and Rafael breathed a sigh of relief at the assault on his ears. At least the mangy mutt was still here and healthy enough to give an intruder hell.

  He switched on the lights and made his way across the broad wooden floor to the crate. Before he’d covered half the distance, the barking had ceased, replaced with whining and the thumping of the dog’s tail.

  “Hey buddy,” he said in a soothing tone meant partly to calm his own nerves. “You remember me, huh? ‘Fraid I ain’t got any jerky for you this time, but I am here to feed you.”

  A quick look around the room only made him aware of every object an agent could hide behind: the futon, the bamboo screens and tapestries Becca used as room partitions, the bathroom door. But Django hadn’t barked until Rafael entered the apartment, so if anyone was lurking here, they’d kept quiet long enough for the dog to forget their presence, and that didn’t seem likely. Django probably had a good enough sniffer to keep track of anyone within a good thirty ya
rds.

  Rafael began to relax. He knelt and unlatched the crate door, and Django bounded out, tail swatting Rafael’s calves as he circled, snuffling and whining. Rafael let the dog lick at his chin while he scratched the back of its head. “Okay, buddy, it’s okay. Fique tranquilo. Your mama will be back soon. I hope. But I’m taking you to my place till then.”

  Django followed Rafael to the kitchen where he found the bag of kibble in the cupboard under the counter and fed the dog a handful. He rolled the bag tight and took the leash from the coat hook where it was draped. Becca’s headlamp fell off onto the floor. He’d almost forgotten it.

  The courtyard hadn’t looked pitch black, and he was pretty well accustomed to finding his way in dark places, even without the flashlight he’d left in his kit at home. But then he noticed a strand of Becca’s long, brown hair caught in the elastic band of the headlamp, and he thought of how the sweat from her brow was in the band, collected on explorations they had taken together. He slipped it over his head and slipped the dog collar over Django’s. With the leash in one hand and the bag of kibble in the other, he left the apartment, locking the door behind him.

  He felt a wave of relief tinged with guilt when he reached the elevator. He hadn’t searched the apartment to inventory any damage the police had done or to take anything else Becca might need, something she might not mention on the phone. While he’d been in there, he’d felt a strong urge to get what she’d asked for and get out quick. Before what? It seemed a little absurd that the people who had already grilled him about her and turned the place upside down would now put the heat on him again when all he’d taken was her dog. But what about the other side? If the government was interested in her possible connection to a terror cult, might not the cultists also be looking for her?

  He almost went back in while he still could, just to see if he’d missed anything she might want him to find, but something in his gut told him he’d been lucky so far and shouldn’t push it.

  Django whined at the elevator gate, and that decided him. He pulled it open and stepped in with the dog at his heels.

  Outside, the air was colder than when he’d entered. His breath fogged in front of him, a white cloud in the beam of the headlamp when he turned it on. A few flickering stars shone through the thin gauze of cloud. A sliver of moon hung like horns over the squat buildings to the east. Django was tugging at the leash, sniffing at the sidewalk and pulling him toward the courtyard.

  Light spilled over his boots from an approaching car, and he trotted along behind the dog, letting the leash pull him into the shadows before the car came nearer.

  Weeds brushed his jeans. Broken glass crunched underfoot. The pale beam from the headlamp splashed over the brick wall in front of him, contracting from a flood to a small spotlight as he approached it.

  Django lifted his leg on a mound of crab grass, then sniffed along the wall until he found a brick he liked and hosed that down as well. Rafael swiveled his head to aim the light into the far corner of the courtyard, but the shadows were too deep there and the weak light too far away to illuminate that most likely hiding place. He knew his nerves were getting the better of him, knew that if anyone were hiding here, Django would have already launched into one of his territorial barking fits.

  What if Becca is hiding in here somewhere?

  The thought made his heart skip, but the dog would have smelled her, too, and would have dragged him over to her, whining.

  Django was at his side now, staring up expectantly, like he wanted another handful of kibble for having finished his business, the second urine stain sinking into the porous brick wall behind him, fading from black to gray, and steaming in the pallid light.

  “Don’t have to poop, huh?” Rafael asked. “Guess that figures if you haven’t been fed yet.” He rubbed the dog between the ears and recalled the time Becca had shown him the piss stains in the UV light at the asylum.

  He reached up to the headlamp, not daring to hope, and put his finger on the button, then paused, turning to look back at the passage to the street. No silhouettes there, and the building across the way was dark. He wondered if there were agents behind those dark windows with zoom lenses or night-vision goggles. He sighed, turned back to the wall, shielding it with his body, and clicked the headlamp from white to ultraviolet.

  Becca’s neat, slanting handwriting glowed across three bricks:

  Pick me up at X1 at 10:00. Bring Django. Ditch your phone.

  It took him a minute to figure it out, but X1 had to be the site of their first expedition together. He wondered if she organized the photo files that way. The men looking for her would have been through those files by now, and if they had already found this bit of neon graffiti with their own forensic flashlights, they might be picking her up right now. But he thought she wouldn’t have bothered using a code if it was one she’d used before. This message was meant to be something only he would understand. He covered the light with his hand, switched it off, and looked over his shoulder.

  “C’mon, Django,” he said with a tug on the leash, “Time to go rescue the nice lady who rescued you.”

  Chapter 17

  Nina Rothkopf was on the edge of her seat when the phone rang. In her left hand she held a glass of Pinot, in her right the TV remote. She kept forgetting she was holding the glass, but then her onyx bracelet would chime against the stem and recall it to mind and she would take a sip, only dimly aware of the way the light from the TV tinted the pale gold liquid with a chlorinated hue. The second floor of the brownstone was dark, as she’d also neglected to turn on the lights when the daylight had drained from the windows.

  The object of her fixation was a 36” flat screen in a mahogany armoire. On a normal night, its doors might never be opened. She liked the cabinet more than the technology it housed and preferred reading to television. She watched movies and news occasionally and certainly could have afforded a bigger screen if she’d wanted one, but she’d been happy to surrender the big wall-mounted unit in the divorce, happy to buy a smaller one and stow it behind dark-wood panels. The idea of orienting an entire room of her home around a shrine to the idiot lantern repulsed her. But tonight, she was kneeling at the altar, tonight she was riveted to the word from on high: the apocalyptic sermons of the sages of cable news.

  She was so entranced that at first she didn’t hear the phone ringing. If the intrusion had been sirens, her ears would have been tuned to them, and she might have gone to the window to peek through the curtains. She had stood at the window after pouring the wine and had watched the black armored cars rumbling down Beacon Street at dusk.

  According to the talking heads, there had been another terror event, this one at Copley Square, and again few details were being relayed, but that hadn’t kept the commentators from filling hours with guarded speculation and dire predictions. If anything, the lack of specific details made the coverage more compelling. Nina understood the psychological dynamics of this better than most viewers, but the rational knowledge that she was being strung along with mystery, suspense, and omission hadn’t kept her from falling under its spell.

  Her phone sat on the end table at her elbow. Earlier she’d found a photo on Twitter, posted by a bystander at Copley. Apparently the horrors this person had witnessed defied description in a series of 140 character tweets, but the photo had depicted bloodstains on the concrete skirt of the Hancock Tower. It had been taken through a shattered widow on the third floor, and the profile of the tweeter indicated that he worked there. The tweet before the photo post read:

  Bullet just took out a window on our floor and hit the ceiling. No one hurt. Looks like police in combat gear down there. #CopleyTerror

  The tweets following the photo suggested that the intrepid phone reporter on the scene had photographed the bloodstain only after watching how it had come to be there:

  Something just impaled somebody. Body lifted off the ground. too slow to be gunfire that burst the chest. #Copleyterror #holyfuckingshit

>   There is something INVISIBLE down there killing. Ppl in blk robes just dispeared. #CopleyTerror

  Nina had searched the hash tag #CopleyTerror, but it hadn’t caught on yet, and returning to the feed of @Benjamins_Boston she had found the tweets deleted and the photo purged.

  After that she called her daughter and made her promise not to leave her apartment. It was tempting to try to drive to her, but Nina reminded herself that impulsive action tended to make things worse. They would weather the storm in known locations, and things would look different in the morning.

  The wine might have helped calm her nerves if she could remember to drink it, but most of what she had swallowed since setting the phone down was a distillation of disinformation and doublespeak issuing in harmony from all available channels. She was well acquainted with the dialect from her failed marriage. But a few facts for civilians were repeated like a drumbeat: The MBTA was in lockdown. Copley Square was off limits. Highways were not closed yet, but roadblock checkpoints were being erected. Citizens were urged to shelter in place and avoid all nonessential travel.

  Nina realized that her gaze had wandered from the television screen and settled on one of the carved ebony tribal masks mounted on the wall beside the armoire. She wondered what agency lurked behind the mask of the media in Boston tonight.

  Her marimba ringtone finally caught her attention, and she turned to the little rectangle of light beside her. Setting the wine glass down and picking the phone up, she didn’t recognize the number. Probably a patient. It was a wonder they weren’t all placing emergency calls to her tonight. Most of them were paranoid on a good day.

  “Nina? It’s Becca Philips.”