Any Minute Now (6 page)

His hand on her head directed her back to work.

Afterward, wiping her lips on the sheet, she languidly rose up. “You're Omar's lethal right arm.” The caterpillar curl of a smile inched across her lips. “Red Rover's being sent into the briar patch to come out with Br'er Rabbit.”

“A show trial.”

“A major triumph.”

In truth, Julie was tired of talking business, but she suspected King would drop her if she stopped feeding him intel on NSA policy as it pertained to Universal Security. The thought of spending nights alone was more than she could bear. Even these embers were better than an empty hearth.

Though she could feel him against her, his gaze was far away. A dull ache started up around her heart. She placed his hand on her breast, but it might have been a plastic cast for all the life and warmth it provided.

*   *   *

“I have not gotten better,” Charlie said. “I've gotten wiser.”

“So that's what's different about you,” Whitman replied.

She was curled up on her living room sofa, bare feet tucked under the Japanese robe she had changed into as soon as they had gotten home. Fierce-looking green and gold embroidered dragons chased one another over a frothy sea of blue silk. She held a glass of Pappy in one hand, the other lay flat against her thigh. She watched him out of the corners of her eyes, which, so far as Whitman was concerned, was a step in the right direction.

“I wonder,” she said in a voice scarcely above a murmur, “whether you've changed.”

“Everyone changes,” he said.

“Not everyone,” she said with a razor's edge to her voice.

“You promised to tell me,” he said, to take his mind off her mercurial shift in tone, “how you beat Milt.”

She stared down into her glass like the bar flies at The Right Cue. “You shouldn't have come back, Whit.”

“Why not?”

She glanced at him. “Because I'm not going to give you what you want.”

“You don't even know what it is.”

“Payback for the shot in the ribs I gave you when I kicked you out.”

He was astonished by her answer, and more than a little saddened. She still had the ability to break his heart, it seemed, even more than it was already broken. He decided to move on. “I'll settle for you telling me the secret of your pool win.”

“It's all in the pool cue,” she said matter-of-factly. He supposed that now she had plunged the knife in she felt free to speak openly. “I hand-turned it myself from African ebony and Hawaiian koa. This makes it beautiful and perfectly balanced, but that isn't the half of it. The core is made of a thin rod of tantalum.” She took another sip of her drink. “Do you know anything about tantalum, Whit?”

“Why would I?”

“Right, why would you. It's an exotic metal with some very interesting properties. The one relevant to this discussion is how readily and rapidly it conducts heat and an electric charge.”

Whitman considered the implications for a moment, before he said, “Where is it?”

As if watching a flower unfurl in slow motion, he saw her left hand open to reveal the tiny circular object stuck to the center of her palm.

“When it curls around the butt of my cue it comes in contact with a plate hidden just beneath the skin of wood.”

“The charge launches the ball.”

“And more. It guides the ball into the pocket.”

“Now that's just impossible.”

She smiled, as if to herself. “Pool balls are made of phenolic resin. There is something in the tantalum—a certain pentoxide, so I'm told by a chemist friend—that reacts with the resin.” She raised her left hand. “
Et voilà!”

“Why do you insist on inserting French phrases?”

“One of these days you should learn French,” she said in a perfectly neutral tone.

“One of these days you should learn to drink
añejo
.”

“French comes in handy in Southeast Asia,” she said, as if she had not heard him.

“It's arrogant and pretentious,” he said, “and it makes me feel…”

She sat up so abruptly the last of her whiskey almost slopped over the rim of her glass. “What, Whit? What does it make you feel?”

He looked away, then directly at her because this was the only way to do it without losing face. “I am tired of being in the subservient position.”

“Now you know how I felt.” Setting her glass down, she rose, strode quickly out of the room, down the hall. A moment later, he heard the bathroom door slam and lock.

He sat back on the sofa and sighed audibly. This wasn't how he imagined the reunion going, but then what did go the way you expected? He closed his eyes, but every time he did so, he saw Sandy's dead eyes staring up into the Pakistani night, felt the weight of him on his shoulder. Owls were nothing compared to Sandy's corpse.

Not that he hadn't dealt with his share of corpses, first along the border north of Hong Kong, in the New Territories, and then, more significantly, at the Well. But that was different; everything was different at the Well.

*   *   *

Whitman stirred, opening his eyes. He reached for her glass, took a sip of her whiskey, relinquishing his hold. It wasn't half bad; in fact, he thought with time he could grow to like it almost as much as she did. He glanced at his watch. How had twenty minutes flown by so fast? When he thought about the Well, it seemed to him that he stepped outside of time. An hour could easily go by without him noticing.

He rose and padded down the hall, stood in front of the bathroom door. He listened, thought he heard something, but couldn't be certain. He was about to rap on the door with his knuckles, then hesitated. “Charlie,” he called instead.

No reply, not even the sound of a body moving about.

“Charlie, come on out of there.” He leaned his forehead against the door. “Charlie, don't do this. Don't hide away. Don't—”

Without either warning or sound, the door opened inward, putting him momentarily off balance in every way possible. She had been crying, and was crying still, silent tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Charlie, for the love of—”

“Why?” she cried. “Why did you do that to me?”

He was appalled; he'd never seen her like this, emotionally naked and vulnerable. He felt the pieces of his broken heart start to stir. “I didn't mean—”

“Of course you meant it, Whit! You mean everything you do!”

Then she slapped him hard across the face. He took a step toward her, and she fell against him.

 

5

Squeak, squeal, slap-slap.
A female patient calling pitifully for an enema, followed by sniggers erupting from the nurses' station.
Slap-slap, squeal, squeak.

How in the world anyone slept in a hospital was anyone's guess, Flix Orteño thought as he lay flat on his back, listening to the workings of the floor. They were somehow magnified at night, when the acrid odor of disinfectant could not quite hold down the faintly nauseous-sweet stench of sickness. The sounds caromed around in his brain like pinballs, seeming, at length, surreal. He was on the verge of shouting out for a pair of earplugs, but could not bear the thought of the nurses laughing at him as well.

He stared up at the ceiling so fixedly that a certain crack began to metamorphose into a spider. He was about to close his eyes when he became aware of someone standing in the doorway. He turned his head, but the figure was in shadow, the hall light falling on its back.

“Hello, Felix.”

A male voice, one on the far edge of Orteño's recognition.

The man came into the room as silently as he had appeared in Flix's doorway. Orteño strained his ears but could no longer hear any sound emanating from the nurses' station; they all seemed to be elsewhere.

The man came up to the side of the bed, held out his right hand, then withdrew it. “Ah, I forgot. Sorry.”

Orteño pressed a button and the upper half of the bed rose until he was in a more or less sitting position. He could see the man now: a narrow, angular face with salt-and-pepper hair, a long, Roman nose, leading to lips that were as full as a woman's. He had long, bony-fingered hands. He seemed ill at ease. Flix wondered whether he also had an aversion to hospitals.

“St. Vincent,” the man said. His voice was oddly high, almost as squeaky as the trolley the candy stripers pushed back and forth down the hall during meal times. “Luther St. Vincent.”

“Never heard of you,” Orteño said.

“I'm gratified.” St. Vincent cleared his throat. “I didn't come in until I was certain you weren't sleeping. May I have a minute of your time?”

Orteño laughed shortly. “Where am I going?”

“Thank you.” St. Vincent pulled over a chair, turned it around, and sat on it backward, his arms folded casually over the back. “How are you feeling?”

“Who are you and why do you want to know?”

“To answer the second question first, you interest me.” He had a megawatt smile. His cheeks were pink, clean-shaven, and a bit shiny, as if whoever had given him the shave had applied moisturizer afterward. “As to who I am, I'm NSA.”

“Universal Security has no business with the NSA. How d'you know about me?”

“We both know that to be a lie. In any event, I'm in the business of knowing everything there is to know about persons of interest.”

“Huh! Well, I'll be as good as new in a couple of weeks' time.”

“Yes, but how about
now
, this very moment?”

Orteño had trained himself not to shrug. “I want to get out of here.”

“Of course you do. But I wonder if that's all you're feeling. Are you sure?” St. Vincent sucked in his cheeks as if drawing on an ice cream bar. “No anger, resentment, anything like that?”

“I don't follow.”

“Sure you do. I imagine you're pissed Sandy bought it. I imagine you're pissed the brief failed.”

Orteño's heart lurched in his chest. What the hell? he thought. His eyes narrowed. “What are you driving at?”

“Well, Felix—may I call you Felix?”

Flix nodded. It was not lost on Orteño that an NSA bigwig was treating him with courtesy extreme enough to be almost comical. He had never even met Omar Hemingway; that was Cutler's department. He was strictly a field op.

“Okay, then. You're from Texas, right? Is it true they grow 'em bigger and better in Texas?”

“I think you'd know that better than me.”

“Why would that be, Felix?”

Orteño regarded him for a moment as if he had grown another head. “That would be,” he said slowly and distinctly, “because you're Anglo and I'm Latino.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Felix.”

“I'm sorry the world works that way. It does in Texas, anyway.”

A minor quake must have erupted deep inside St. Vincent because his lips curled, producing a thin smile. “But we're not in Texas anymore, Toto.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” St. Vincent said, “I'd like you to work for me.”

“I already have a job, thanks.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Nothing about what I'm proposing would impact your current position in the least.”

“All due respect, that's fucking difficult to believe.”

St. Vincent chuckled. He lifted an arm briefly, waggled a forefinger. “I knew I had chosen the right person.”

“For what?”

“Oh, nothing much.” St. Vincent's voice was as nonchalant as a vacationer ordering a frozen daiquiri from a passing waiter.

He rose now, sauntered about the room, which was illuminated by the oblong of light spilling in from the area around the nurses' station, which was, Orteño noted, still as quiet as the grave. He paused in front of one of those meaningless prints seen in every mid-level hotel room in the Third World.

With hands clasped behind his back, he said, as if to himself, “I wonder who picks out these things? Some anonymous drone sitting in some dusty back office somewhere, paging through catalogs of this crap.” He grunted. “But he must have an eye for it, don't you think? I mean, not a single one of these prints ever looks out of place.”

He turned abruptly and addressed Orteño. “This is what I want you to do for me, Felix. Be this print on the wall—the print that blends in so completely that no one gives him a second thought or look. Think you can do that for me?”

The cold and squirmy thing in Orteño's stomach that had announced itself at St. Vincent's appearance began to move, and it wasn't from the crummy hospital food. “Eyes and ears, is that it?”

The sun seemed to shine on St. Vincent's face. “Precisely.”

“Report to you.”

“Me and me alone,” he nodded.

“What are you looking for?”

“Anything,” St. Vincent said. “Anything out of the ordinary.” He approached the bed again, but this time did not bother to sit. “Your last brief had a breach, Felix. A rather serious one, I'm afraid. Was it NSA or Universal Security Associates?” He bent forward slightly in order to emphasize what he said next. “We need to get this thing under control, pronto. Get me?”

“I do. But there's not enough money in the world.”

“I appreciate that, Felix, more than you know,” St. Vincent said mildly, “but there's a very bad apple hidden somewhere. You and I are going to make applesauce of it, get me?” He smiled. “In any event, money doesn't enter into this equation.”

“You're asking me to spy on my own people.”

“I'm asking you to help me ferret out a traitor.”

Flix's eyes narrowed. “Work for the NSA?”

“Does that matter? Since you already do, albeit indirectly.”

Flix laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

St. Vincent nodded. “Point taken. I'm head of Directorate N. You can look me up.”