Alternities (45 page)

“Provisionally, Mr. President. You might want to withhold final judgment on that for a little while yet.”

“Don’t be cute with me, Albert. What’s going on?”

“Mr. President, we have a problem with Rathole—”

“You know my answer on that. Fix it.”

“We’ve lost some personnel. We’re in danger of exposure. We’re going to have to pull back and go slow.”

“Stop right there,” Robinson said. “You’re telling me things I don’t want to hear.”

“We’ve lost a mole and an iceman. There’s a good chance that they’re in the hands of the Blue intelligence community.”

“So what’s the danger?” Robinson demanded irritably. “They aren’t going to talk, are they? Or are you telling me they went over the wall?”

“I’m not greatly concerned about them talking,” Tackett patiently explained. “I am concerned about having our whole operation come into focus under their microscope. We can’t take the scrutiny, Mr. President.”

“I thought the secret of these operations was that our agents were untraceable. Even if these traitors are talking, who’s going to believe them? Look for them in the sanitoriums, not the prisons.”

“We are going to try to get them back,” Tackett said, his own irritation on the rise. “But as I said, these two men are not the issue. What matters is that they’ve sensitized the immune system. We brush up against it again anywhere in the near term and we’re likely to get clobbered. And the first priority has to be protecting the gate house.”

“Near term—what does that mean? A week? A month?”

“Six months at the inside. Mr. President, this new alternity we’re opening up—it’s got excellent potential. The delay could be a blessing if it puts us in a better place.”

“Wheels are turning, Albert. I can’t wait six months.”

“This particular wheel is about to fall off the wagon, sir.”

Robinson said crossly, “You told me you’d be there for me, Albert. You told me I could count on you. You need more security over there, borrow some grunts and goons from one of the services.”

Tackett sighed. “You don’t understand. We could have ten thousand soldiers there. It doesn’t matter. Once they find us, the operation is dead.”

“Then make sure they don’t find you,” Robinson said curtly. “But hold that goddamned door open.” And then the line went dead.

Tackett slammed the receiver down into the cradle. “Son of a bitch,” he growled. “Bret! Get in here.”

Several seconds later, the deputy director ambled into the office with a bemused smile on his face. “No sale, I take it.”

“The President was adamant. He wouldn’t agree to any change or delay in Rathole.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes. Bret, I’m trying to think if we ever talked about a contingency plan for abandoning a gate house and destroying it once we’re gone.”

“Burning the bridges behind us? No.”

“Maybe we ought to.”

Monaghan squinted in Tackett’s direction. “I don’t think we even know what would happen to the gate if we did.”

“Then we ought to try to find out,” he said. Elbows propped on the armrests and hands steepled in front of his mouth, Tackett rocked slowly in his chair. “We’ll have to do what we can do keep the lid on. If worse comes to worst, we may have to abandon the gate house. And I don’t intend to see us leave it intact for them to play with.”

By Wallace’s count, he had been a prisoner for nine days.

The word arrest had never been used, and in some ways he felt almost like a guest. His hosts had gone to some trouble to make him at least physically comfortable, moving him late in the second day from the little room with the air mattress and chemical toilet to what looked like it might have been an executive office. The room had been stripped to the walls, but they had provided a real bed that did not go flat in the middle of the night, and there was a connected bathroom with a tiny shower stall.

In other ways, Wallace was beginning to feel like a specimen. After the third day, Bayshore stopped coming, and those who replaced him stopped trying to question him. But they kept coming, someone every day, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. For each different person there was a different pretext—more photographs, blood samples, throat scrapings, a hair cutting. Today it had been a dentist to look at his teeth.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes they would spend with him, superficially friendly but saying nothing except what was required by the task that had brought them there. And then they would go, leaving him alone again. All the interruptions in a day added up to less than an hour. The rest of the time he was alone.

It seemed as if they were hoping that isolation would drive him to open up to them, to be so desperate for company that he would blurt out something they would find valuable or interesting. He already looked up hopefully at the sound of the door opening. One day—not soon, but one day—he might be restless enough in his captivity for it to happen.

Filling the idle time was a continuing burden. He exercised. He masturbated. He napped. He pried the buttons out of the mattress and invented games to play with them. He painted toothpaste pictures on the vanity mirror. He pulled up one corner of the carpet and started unraveling the pile from the backing. And always, he wondered what was happening beyond the walls.

It was clear that they still did not know what to make of him. He understood that he was in limbo, that once a decision was made he would be taken somewhere else, perhaps to be discarded, perhaps to be leaned on. He was eager for that decision, even for real prison, so long as it would give the Section a breath of a chance to find him. Which is why when the door opened and Bayshore entered, Wallace could not help but feel cheered.

“Hello, Ray,” his visitor said. “I hope you’ve been doing all right here.”

“I’m okay so long as I have something destructive to do,” Wallace said, with a nod toward the tangle of rug yarn in the corner.

“Glad we were able to accommodate,” Bayshore said with a lazy smile. “I need you to come with me for a little while, Ray.”

“Now?”

“Please.”

No guards fell in to escort them. The two of them walked alone together, down a corridor, across a small lounge, into an elevator. Along the way there were people, voices, laughter, and Wallace was nearly overwhelmed by that which he hadn’t thought he had been missing.

The quiet of Bayshore’s office presented itself as a refuge. But after the sterility of Wallace’s cell suite, even the ordinary accoutrements of the room presented themselves as an almost painful sensory richness.

“Have a seat, Ray,” Bayshore invited.

Still disoriented, Wallace felt for a chair and lowered himself into it.

“You’ve managed to stay pretty calm about being here, Ray,” Bayshore said. “Most of us figure you’ve been trying to wait it out until your friends find you.”

“I’m still not going to tell you anything.”

“I understand, Ray. I brought you up here because I have something to tell you. Someone came looking for you a couple of days ago.”

Wallace tried and failed to look disinterested. “So?”

With an almost casual motion, Bayshore retrieved a photograph from a stack of papers to his right and slid it across the desk. It was a head-and-shoulders mug shot of Donald Arens. Despite the implication, Wallace’s spirits lifted. “Ugly fellow.”

“To answer the question you won’t ask, no, he’s not here. Mr. Arens is in the Indianapolis city jail, under arrest for simple assault, sexual assault, forced entry, and weapons violations.”

“Why do I care?”

“You’re not the poker player you think you are, Ray. I have no doubt that you know him. And I know it’ll be no surprise to you that he comes up as a nonperson, just like you.”

“I guess your records aren’t as complete as you thought.”

“Aren’t you curious to know why your friend’s in jail?”

“He’s not my friend—”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, Ray. Don’t deny the obvious.”

“Don’t insult mine,” Wallace snapped. “I’m not stupid. I know why he’s in jail.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. Sucker bait. Now that you know who came after me, you want to see who comes for him.”

“True enough. But I was talking about how we came to pick him up.”

“You run things here. You can make up any reason you want. I don’t even know why you picked me up.”

“Don’t you?” Bayshore asked lightly, but did not wait for an answer. “We had a vol housesitting for Shan and her place wired, just in case someone started to wonder where you’d gotten to,” Bayshore said, reaching for the intercom. “Myra, would you ask Donna to come in?”

A moment later the door opened, and a short round-bodied woman entered. Her right eye was shadowed by purple bruises, and a string of tiny black stitches closed a long gash across her cheek. “Ray, this is Donna. She was in Shan’s apartment when your friend showed up.”

Wallace squirmed and avoided the woman’s gaze. “So you say.”

“Your friend thought Donna was Shan, and that she knew where you were. When she told him the truth—that she wasn’t, and she didn’t—he started to work her over. Thanks to the wire, we got someone there before it got any worse.”

This time Wallace could find nothing to say.

Bayshore dug in a desk drawer. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you know Arens. I’m assuming it means that you know his voice.” He set a small cart player on the surface between them and pressed the play button.

The recording was almost too clear to be credible as a remote recording off a wire. But there was no doubt that it was Arens’ voice. Wallace listened to the encounter with ever-growing discomfort. At the sound of a shot and an animal cry of pain, he started. “What was that?”

“Your friend shooting the cat.”

“He killed Pharaoh?”

“Is that a surprise?” Bayshore asked.

“It’s stupid,” Wallace muttered. “He didn’t have to do that.”

Talking, he had lost the thread of what was happening in the faraway room captured on the cartridge. “Could you play that part back?” he said suddenly.

Bayshore wordlessly complied. It was Arens’ voice, calm and cold.

“Don’t do that again,” the recorded Arens said. “I’ve got no reason not to kill you, too.”

He wanted to ask to hear it again, wanted a reason to deny or disbelieve it. Glancing sideways, he saw that Donna’s face was pale, that she was struggling not to cry. “Is that you? Is that real?” he asked.

She nodded, and the tears broke through, tears of shame and humiliation, of a painful memory relived.

“Thank you, Donna,” Bayshore said gently. “You can go.” He waited until the door closed behind her, then turned his gaze on Wallace. “What’s it mean, Ray?”

The words did not come easily. “I… I should have—” He stopped, swallowed, and started again. “Rayne,” he said, his eyes downcast but his voice a little stronger. “My name is Rayne. R-a-y-n-e.”

Bayshore nodded, but said nothing.

“They told me to sit tight. They’d take care of it.” He looked up and met Bayshore’s eyes. “You shouldn’t have done that to Donna. You shouldn’t have made her hear that.”

“You had to know she was real,” Bayshore said simply.

“Yeah,” Wallace said, and shook his head. “I can’t believe he killed Pharaoh. Isn’t that the height? He comes to kill me and I’m getting exercised about the cat.”

“Do you want to tell me what this is all about, Rayne?”

Wallace bit his lip, then nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I do.” He hesitated. “I don’t know where to start.”

Bayshore reached for the machine on the desk and touched the controls. “Why don’t you tell me about the record. Start there.”

Sipping coffee from a huge ceramic mug, Bayshore listened patiently for almost an hour, the cart player dutifully capturing every word. It took that long to sketch even a skeletal explanation of the record, of Shan, of Wallace/Wallach.

Even as he offered them, Wallace felt his explanations to be painfully disjointed and full of digressions which were themselves incomplete. And he seemed to be talking more about himself than about anything Bayshore would be concerned with. But Bayshore did not seem to mind. He made no effort to steer Wallace toward or away from any subject, contenting himself with occasional questions highlighting or clarifying something Wallace had already said.

“Is any of this helping?” Wallace asked finally. “Is any of it making sense? For that matter, do you
believe
any of it?”

“The picture is coming together—slowly,” Bayshore admitted. “But I do believe you. Would you mind if I asked someone else to join us?”

“Are you going to make me repeat it all?”

“No. Just put a bookmark in your brain until I get back.”

In five minutes, he returned with a white-haired black man and a matronly woman. After introductions—the man was something that sounded like “ethnologist,” the woman a counterterrorism specialist—they settled into empty seats to listen.

By the end of the afternoon, there were a total of nine people in the room, two sitting crosslegged on the floor. They were an attentive audience, and he told them everything he thought they could want to know. He had few names to give them, and only three addresses—the gate house, the satellite station, and his apartment. But he detailed the organization of the station, the financial and operational structure, the roles of the analyst, the iceman, the mole.

From time to time, he saw flickers of doubt and skepticism on some of their faces, a raised eyebrow, a sidewise glance, a curled lip. But he was not challenged or questioned, not interrogated at all. They wanted to hear his story, and he told it as well as he could.

The one exception, the time he seemed to disappoint them was at the end, when the counterterrorism expert asked about O’Neill.

“Gregory O’Neill is the Secretary of Defense,” Wallace said. “I can’t think why the Guard would kill his counterpart.”

“But you would if there was a reason.”

Wallace shrugged. “It’s something an iceman could do.”

“Someone like Arens.”

“Yeah.”

“What about you?” the woman pressed. “Would you have done it if there was a reason?”