Asterisk (30 page)

The helicopter was still.

Waiting? Waiting for what?

Instructions?

Thorne ran in the direction of the highway. It was as if the mundane constructions fabricated in Detroit offered him now a thin thread to safety, to the known. He looked back again. The malevolent light in the chopper was lit.
He's on the highway: do we pursue?
He was beset by the illusion that there was nobody inside the thing, that it was programmed, remote-controlled, that the appearance of traffic on the highway had fucked its circuits. Kill me in the desert, he thought, and there's nothing to explain. Kill me on the highway and that's a whole new ball game.

He reached the edge of the road.

The helicopter was still hanging in a state of suspension a half mile behind him. He had a sudden urge to turn around, to gesticulate, taunt the goddamn thing. But he didn't. He looked down the darkened highway, hearing from behind the distant slashing of blades.

There was more traffic coming from the south. South, north, it didn't matter to Thorne; all that mattered was getting away from this place before the powers that coordinated the movements, the killing impulses, of the chopper decided a death on a public highway was something that could be hushed up any old time.

A truck was looming up: he watched the headlights grow. He moved into the highway and raised his arms, his face caught in the full beam of the lamps. He thought: The United States has in its possession a flying saucer; a UFO.

Asterisk.

From the corner of his eye he was conscious of the light in the chopper going out and a sudden dark covering the grounds of Escalante.

8

Saturday, April 8

It was raining in Washington; rain clouds covered the whole way from Tidewater up to Baltimore, massive gray banks that lay in the sky like swollen Zeppelins going nowhere. There was no sun: it was the kind of day that suggested there might never be a sun again. From the window of the conservatory Dilbeck watched the rain fall across the telescope. He laid his face against the glass, conscious of Sharpe standing at his back, conscious of his daughter moving around upstairs, shifting furniture in her bedroom in one of her frequent urges to change her environment. He put his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket; he heard Sharpe clear his throat and he turned around to face him.

“You were saying something about the young man leading a charmed life, I think,” Dilbeck said.

“Yeah,” Sharpe said.

“I admit he's been more than lucky,” Dilbeck said. He had a throbbing pain in the center of his skull; six aspirin had done nothing to diminish it. He looked at one of the trestle tables on which lay the flimsies of the reports that Sharpe had brought him. More than lucky, he thought. One could say that again. The young man had contrived to get inside Escalante and then out again—which indicated that, beyond luck, a certain amount of pussyfooting was going on out there. Later, he thought. Later I will deal with the matter of this delicacy of conduct. And Thorne—after all, there was one box from which even Houdini himself had found it impossible to escape. The last box of all.

Sources indicated that he had caught a plane from Flagstaff sometime before midnight; in Denver he had apparently waited for several hours before catching another flight for Washington. The problem was, Dilbeck thought, that although they could keep track of his movements because of his credit card activity, the reports were always several hours behind now; they were running late, just too late. Now if he were back in D.C., then he was lying low. Sooner or later, he would naturally try to contact the girl; that much was obvious. It was going to be a waiting game.

“You've got a couple of men keeping the girl under watch?” Dilbeck asked.

“Yes—”

“Good men, I mean?”

Sharpe shifted his weight, one foot to the other. How shabby he looked, Dilbeck thought; jaded, washed out, his skin like the texture of an old dollar bill.

“Good men,” Sharpe said, his voice quiet.

Dilbeck looked back toward his telescope. The reports indicated that the young man had seen Asterisk. Too bad. Too damn bad. Still, he had presumably satisfied his curiosity even if it left the huge question of what he intended to do with his knowledge. The telescope seemed forlorn to him, rainwashed, like an item of an ancient technology recently excavated, whose function has defeated all expert scrutiny. If I were Thorne, he thought, what would I do with it? Try to go public? He whistled something tuneless between his teeth a moment. And then he thought of Edward Hollander: the bird had flown, the nest was empty, but nevertheless … ah, poor Ted. Poor old Ted. Wherever he was, he was not quite beyond the revenging claw. Not quite. All that was needed now was to keep the wires quiet for a long time, to confuse, to let nothing out. Make the Russians dangle, let them hang.

Hollander & Thorne: he had come to think of this pair as the bastard offspring of some ungodly mismatch. Or a firm of undertakers. Nine lives of the cat. Where was Thorne now?

“Can I make a suggestion?” Sharpe asked.

“Go ahead—”

“Bring the girl in—”

“Then what?”

“We keep an eye on her until we turn Thorne up—”

Dilbeck smiled patronizingly, rubbed his head, tried to locate the pain center. He stared at Sharpe who, doglike, was waiting to see if his suggestion was to receive approbation. Dull, Dilbeck thought. No imagination. None.

“I don't think so, Sharpe,” he said. “If the girl is left at liberty, then Thorne will try to contact her. If, on the other hand, we lock her up somewhere, where's the lever we have to bring Thorne into the open? What advantages do we gain?”

Sharpe looked at the floor.

“Well,” said Dilbeck. “I must admit I admire his tenacity. I thought he was simply stubborn and foolish, with a sprinkling of integrity, but he's turned out to be a somewhat more formidable opponent than I'd first imagined.”

Sharpe coughed lightly, raising a handkerchief to his mouth. After a moment, he said, “We're still trying to piece together the amount of information Hollander had in his possession. We don't know yet. We haven't touched the base on that one.”

“Keep at it,” Dilbeck said. “I think I need to take a short nap. Call me if anything turns up. Okay?”

Sharpe went to the door. He looked out into the rain as if he were afraid of stepping outside, catching pneumonia, and dying. Dilbeck stared at his plants.

“It will work out in the end, Sharpe,” Dilbeck said. “It always does.”

Sharpe opened the door, turning up the collar of his raincoat. Watching the door close behind him, Dilbeck reflected on the paucity of truly imaginative men; he reflected on what he considered to be a famine. Ah, well, he thought. You do the best with what you've got. Even if it isn't always enough.

Hollander had wakened in an unfamiliar white room; there were flowers on the window ledge and between their colorful foliage, bars of deep-blue sky. He experienced a brief amnesia. He looked down at his bandaged chest and remembered slowly, remembered the turbulent flight over the ocean and how the small plane had rocked back and forth, the long raking gashes of an electric storm sizzling in the Atlantic darkness. Then nothing. Nothing until now. He sat upright, feeling a sharp pain in his ribs.

The room in which he lay was small and bright. A crucifix hung on one wall, a tiny elaborate Jesus bemoaning his fate, though whether the look of misery was attributable to the pain of nails or to the subsequent idolatry and iconography, Hollander wasn't sure. There was a bedside radio which he switched on. A sonorous voice was speaking in rapid Spanish. Havana, he thought. Havana. He turned the radio off. He struggled with his pillow, propping it up behind him.

The door of the room opened and a nurse came in, a slender dark-haired young girl in white costume, white shoes; everything, even her smile, was white, as if she were seeking some camouflage against the walls of the room.

He looked at her and asked if she spoke English.

Smiling still, she shook her head. Her smile was wonderful. She checked his pulse. Her fingers were warm. He felt the relief of his return to humanity, to consciousness. She poured some brown medicine into a spoon and lifted it to his lips. It tasted ghastly and he made a face as he swallowed it. She laughed. She took his temperature by placing a thermometer under his arm. When she was finished, she went out.

He tried to turn over on his side, but the pain was too great. The brown liquid, whatever it was, had begun to make him feel a little drowsy. Morphine extract? he wondered. The subtle drug. He closed his eyes and when he opened them some time later Brinkerhoff was sitting beside the bed.

“How are you?”

Hollander's mouth was dry. Brinkerhoff helped him swallow some water.

“I guess this isn't Moscow, huh?”

“Not yet,” Brinkerhoff said. He was silent. He watched Hollander as if he were trying to figure something out.

“When do we make the next leg of the trip?” Hollander asked.

“In a day or so. When you're better.”

“The pain's still rough—”

“Of course,” Brinkerhoff said. “The surgeon, a very fine one I might add, and a Russian into the bargain, took a bullet out that was lodged very close to your left lung. I think you've been fortunate, Hollander.”

Hollander looked at the window, the yellow sunlight on the flowers. I'm alive, he thought. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm alive. Then he turned his face to the Russian. Fortunate, he thought. Lucky to be alive. And yet something wasn't quite right.

Something was awkward; there was an uneasiness.

“Is there a problem?” he asked. “Is there a problem about going on to Moscow?”

“Should there be?” Brinkerhoff said. He smiled in a vague way and made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

“No, I can't think of one,” Hollander said. Why then, why this sensation of unease? Imagining things, he thought. Imagining things. That's all. A little morphine goes to your brain and no mistake.

“I think you should sleep for a while,” the Russian said, “You'll need your strength.”

“If you say so,” Hollander said. He closed his eyes, he heard Brinkerhoff go from the room, he heard the sounds of footsteps fade in the corridor. From outside there was the noise of some kids screaming. Kids, he thought. My kids. Don't think. Let it slide. Don't think about them. Gone. He began to drift into a hypnagogic state, neither fully asleep nor wide awake, but beyond pain. Well beyond pain. He was floating downstream now, floating through the tributaries of himself, and it wasn't a bad feeling at all.

2

The Flophouse of the August Moon, Thorne thought. A bed at $2.50 a night and one free bowl of cornflakes in the morning wasn't such a bad deal when you were in that condition of being a beggar who is unable also to be a chooser. It was a large, square dormitory with cubicles and high, narrow windows. The graffiti cut deep into the wooden partition of his own cubicle were like a testimony to the passing sadnesses and sorrows of the men who had come and gone before him.
Dave from Denver Passing Through, Only Got One Good Shoe, Where Can I go And What Can I do?
Or:
Anybody who knows where Hank Schimmel can be found please call at the Greyhound station in New Orleans and ask for Benny at the shoeshine stand
.

He had bought an overcoat, used, at a Salvation Army thrift store for three dollars; it was shabby, but it covered the tears in his suit. His shoes were scuffed, he hadn't shaved in days, he looked every inch a bona fide denizen of the flophouse. When he had arrived in the early morning, bussing in from the airport to the horror of the early commuters who saw the kind of face that should not belong in any America of the suburban consciousness, he had come upstairs at once to the cubicle and had tried for a few hours to sleep; but even though his fatigue had begun to feel like a heavy sack he was doomed to carry on his shoulders, sleep evaded him, he drifted from one shallow darkness to another, scouring the shoals of sleep but achieving only a brief satisfaction. His mind was working as if adrenaline, not blood, were running in the veins. A decision, he kept thinking. One way or another. A decision. But even more than his need for a scheme he wanted to see Marcia.

His first priority.

Marcia.

Closing his eyes brought back pictures of the long desert night, the ghostly yellow flares, the helicopter, the truck ride to Flagstaff, the lights.

Closing his eyes also brought back Asterisk.

For a moment he was convinced he had hallucinated the sight, some nightmare projection of his own that had happened to assume the shape of a monstrous disk, but he knew better, knew he had seen it, knew it was real and no yellow-red chimera shining behind glass.

It stunned him; it made him strangely afraid.

He had never subscribed to the idea of flying saucers; he had considered those who had reportedly seen them to be victims of their own fancy, extreme cases given to the wishful thinking that the human species wasn't alone in the universe—

But now—

Asterisk. He had seen it. He had seen it.

He lay on the bed in the cubicle a long time, thinking, remembering. Strange lights. Unexplained sightings both in darkness and in daylight. People who swore they had seen UFOs, others who claimed—like George Adamski—they had actually taken trips on the things. Were they telling the truth? He didn't know, he knew only what he had seen at Escalante; and he thought of the huge disk rotating across space, a bridge between star systems, intergalactic flight. Inhabited? Remote-controlled? The answer wasn't immediately important because the implication in either case was the same. Out there somewhere there was intelligent life. There was a life form more advanced than man.

Why did that frighten him?

The thought that suddenly the planet was vulnerable? The idea that if hostility came from space there was nothing, nothing, anybody on the planet earth could do about it? Or was it simply the notion of invisible observers drifting over the surface of earth, sometimes concealed in cloud cover, sometimes not, alien eyes watching, noticing, reporting? For what purpose? Whatever, he thought: it makes our lives seem insignificant in some way—planetary islands in the far constellations, oases in the star clusters of the night sky. A sense of your own limitations, your awful inferiority, the plain terror that comes from realizing your technology compared to theirs is as an abacus to a computer. No comparison, none. You floated in space, no longer alone, but suddenly vulnerable.