Bombshell (20 page)

“Uh, yes.” He did not recognize the young woman. He hesitated. “I'm sorry, but do we know each other? From the office, maybe?”

“Señor Winters,” she repeated, pushing her sunglasses from her eyes to the curve of her brow, to fix strands of her platinum blonde hair out of her face. She regarded the suitcase on the porch. “You're about to leave, for the Low Carbon Symposium in D.C., right?”

“Ah, you're my taxi?” He doubted it, even as he said it. He noticed the New Mexico license plate at the rear of the car. “No, you're from . . . ”

“I'm from the university,” she grinned, opening his gate, and glancing along the quiet street.

He looked at his watch. “I do have a flight to catch.”

“This won't take a minute. You plan to reopen uranium mining in the Grants belt, don't you?”

He smiled, noticing the moleskin pocketbook in her left hand. “Well, not me personally,” he said. “The Winters Corporation does hold a mining license for several Region IV deposits, however. You can visit the website. It's not a secret.” Kip Winters pulled on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. He intended the gesture as dismissive.

“Good,” the young woman said. “Let me make a note of that.” She began to reach inside her jacket for a pen.

“You're not interviewing me right now, are you?”

“No. I'm not.”

The pistol was silent. Kip Winters threw strange angles as the bullets entered his body—elbows rising, head thrown back, spine arching then folding in on himself. Cash remembered a Robert Longo picture as warm jets sprayed from the exit wounds in his back. The final bullet entered his throat and cast him upward before he flopped like a high jumper on his luxuriant lawn. Stepping toward him, she studied the gentle twitching that passed along his body in waves. Slowly, she knelt down beside him.
His eyes struggled to fix on her. Blood washed over his larynx as he tried to speak, distant radio squelches.

“Who?” His right hand lifted slightly from the lawn.

Cash smiled, exhilarated.

Suddenly, the quivering right hand flashed toward her, grabbing at her hair, and Kip Winters held the platinum wig in his weakening fist.

She spat: “I'm Jean
fucking
Harlow. Who did you think? You leech.”

Cash's mind raced: Harlow's last movie,
Saratoga
, the
USS Saratoga
disintegrating in the poisoned seawater off the Bikini atoll; Harlow's corpse replaced by a stand-in during production; the dummy ship used for atomic target practice. She snatched the blond disguise as Kip Winters began to emit a hideous rattle. Walking back to the car, she looked back over her shoulder to regard the gore on the grass beside Winters's body. “
Remember Lot's wife
,” she sang to herself, wiping the scarlet warpaint from her lips with the back of her hand. There were women like Jean Harlow that men wanted her to be, and then there were women like Valerie Solanas who she wanted to be. She took Kip Winters by both wrists and dragged him toward the low-rider. Her hallucination of her father's ghost as she crossed the Pontchartrain Causeway had been an anticipation of this. With the corpse of Kip Winters on the passenger side, she gunned the car out of Savannah with its mint juleps, lynchings, and arboretums of tuberose.

ROBERT DRESNER'S PRIVATE LATE-AFTERNOON FLIGHT FROM
Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque to Washington, D.C., diverted to Atlanta, where he was to pick up another rental car to drive to Macon to make subtle inquiries of a woman named Virginia Jones. Jones had called local police to report that a customized car with New Mexico plates had blown from the forecourt of the EZ-Rest Motel, and its driver, whom she said was named Kimberly Wells, had not paid her final bill. The car, she reported, was damaged along one side and at the front as though it had been in an accident of some kind. It matched the description of an Impala registered to Molly Pinkerton that was missing from the address in Madrid, New Mexico. He reclined his seat and sipped his martini, watching the brunette flight attendant retreating slowly down the aisle. He thought: I'd like to fuck you in the ass. Apart from the flight crew, he was alone on the jet. Beside him, hard copies of Spicer's photographs shifted slightly on the tan leather upholstery beneath the air-conditioning. He stared down at the green belt following the river through Albuquerque's south valley before the plane banked and rose over the Sandia Mountains. He wanted the alcohol to temper his frustrations with the ghost chase, but it merely amplified his sexual tension. With the loss of Spicer, his temporary usurpation by Royce, and now the death of the transsexual on his interrogation table, he sucked on the lip of his martini tasting only a profound desolation. The Voice was right: He had fucked up, and that moment was now elongating into a frustrating period of failure. He sought to assure himself that he could be forgiven for misjudging the tolerance of the sixty-five-year-old to waterboarding, given her cosmetic ambiguities. He needed to reassert himself, somehow, to drag some confidence from the cold pit of his guts. The agency stewardess returned, and as she leaned closer to address him, he greedily inhaled her perfume. There was a call for him, she said. There was a
secure telephone in the armrest of his seat. He thanked her and followed her legs as she returned to her space beyond the bulkhead. The phone was wired in, and he unraveled a length of spiral cable before answering. He felt an intense aching in his testicles. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

“Robert . . . ” Dresner found himself mouthing along with the address.

“I believe that the trail is heating up.”

“Yes. By now you will have details from the agency aggregators on incidents that indicate eastward movement, correct?”

“Right. In Louisiana we have a security guard at the Waterford nuke plant killed, apparently, with a slingshot that was then used to sabotage facilities and private property; another guard seriously injured by a dark gray low-rider that had tried to gatecrash Browns Ferry, aiming at the containment building; and I'm factoring in the dead cop at Pantex. We have the name Varyushka Cash, and something of a description from Royce's inquiries. On April 3, traffic police on I-25 north of Albuquerque stopped her, but the local on the scene didn't detect that the license was forged; finally we have drone footage from White Sands. Let's see, what else?” He shifted in his seat, feeling sweat under his thighs.

The Voice said: “Kip Winters is missing.”

“Who is Kip Winters?” He sensed immediately that he had again said the wrong thing.

“Robert . . . ,” The Voice began, and Dresner perceived a wheeze of mechanical irritation. “Kip Winters is one of the luminous sons of the nuclear industry. His father, Evelyn Winters, owns a dozen plants, including areas
where our girl has been. Admittedly, we're just putting that together after his family agreed to inform local authorities in Savannah of his disappearance. He didn't make a flight to D.C. he was scheduled for, bound for a low carbon symposium where he was to meet his elder brother and his father.”

“That's not so incredible.”

“Except that in Savannah his wife reported something like bloodstains all over their front lawn and across the sidewalk. First cop on the scene reported strands of blond hair stuck in the blood on the sidewalk.”

“What color is his wife's hair? Are we sure . . . ?”

“The hair sample was from a theatrical wig.”

“Abduction.” The irony was not lost on the commander of the Cross Spikes Club. “So, she does intend more than bad publicity stunts.”

“She was either lucky or well-informed. An hour later and Kip Winters would have been safely on a flight to D.C. for a symposium. The other Winters homes have private security. She exploited their only vulnerability, the glamour-boy.”

“Should I still talk to, uh . . . Virginia Jones about this ‘Kimberly Wells' report?”

“Negative. When you get to Atlanta, drive straight to Savannah.”

He cursed through gritted teeth as he watched the clouds passing below the plane. What the fuck am I supposed to do in Savannah? Go stare at the bloodstains on the lawn and wait for her to show up again? She'll be gone. “Is there a ransom note, or anything else?” he asked resignedly.

“Only what you have. Out.”

Dresner set the telephone back into its recess before buzzing the stewardess for another drink. He felt humiliated. Was he being punished for Spicer's death, for all of these deaths? He pulled his own phone from his jacket pocket and scrolled through the lurid accumulation of data, as Kip Winters's abduction, his rendition to one of the black sites of Varyushka Cash's deformed mind, pulled him back south against his expectations. Investigations of the Madrid house continued invisibly. The house was off the grid and strangely vacant of sentimental effects. The only utility they had discovered was the telephone, attached to the name of Molly Pinkerton, her landlord. For too long, they had been working under the assumption that the Trinity bomber was male. He sought to excise the details down in his mind. He returned to two images: One was of the banner, an orange background with the black silhouette of a seven-headed cobra, that Spicer had photographed at her house; the other was the large poster of a sullen-faced woman that hung over the bed there. From the word SCUM, and the books in the room, they recognized the woman as Valerie Solanas, the militant who had shot Andy Warhol. The cobra banner he had recognized as the flag of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the West Coast terrorists who abducted and brainwashed Patty Hearst in the 1970s. What the hell does that mean? he wondered. He thought of the deranged radical feminist literature on the night table and junk bookshelves. From the typescripts, the obsession with Valerie Solanas, the strange love affair, pulsed with dedications, plots, and erotic fixations. All that Robert Dresner could recall was that Solanas was insane, but a somewhat reluctant would-be assassin.

There were no photographs of her yet, except for the obscure Polaroid from Trinity, an image of an eye and hank of black hair, nothing of the sort in her sparse miners' cabin, nor at the transsexual's house. That was strange. Perhaps there had been, but she had erased them from the world. He
wondered if these might have been incinerated in the pyre where they discovered Spicer's charred remnants. From the account given to the Macon police of this Kimberley Wells alias by the receptionist, Virginia Jones, they had garnered the fact that the young woman who absconded from her motel had hair that was streaked between blood red and burnt orange. She did not seem to possess a Social Security number, or a driver's license, and she had no prior record of criminality. According to the Trinity manuscript, she was an alien from a dead zone of Eastern Europe. As an alien, she could be made to disappear, so long as her image and her reputation did not gain currency. Without the notoriety she appeared to seek, she would not be missed. Like the region she had come from, she was a dangerous, blank space on the map. Beside him on the leather aircraft seat were evidence bags containing the canister of the Los Alamos rocket, the photograph of a radiation-burnt hand, and steel ball bearings gathered from amid the smashed glass of the New Orleans nuclear plant called Waterford, which belonged to the Winters Corporation. The steel ball bearings reminded him of plutonium pits, things symbolic of her enemy. She had graduated beyond the symbolic. But the typewritten page discovered at the Trinity site made sinister allusions to New York, and Chernobyl, and the suspect's birthday. It was not over. The hand must close itself about her. Robert Dresner and the Cross Spikes Club had plucked dozens of the nameless from the tarmac of America. He had rolled like a dog through carrion in the psychosis of enhanced interrogation. He was a kidnapper for national security, and he had killed for a good night's sleep. Yet, as he awaited the close of his forty-first year, he was weary, becoming cynical, and given to rare but increasingly frequent errors of judgment. Was his fiancée to blame for these? Was it the proximity of the end of his career, he wondered, and the approach of married normalcy that was forcing him, unconsciously, to fuck things up? He buzzed for the flight attendant again.

APRIL 14, 2011. MOLLY'S IMPALA BURNED BESIDE THE WATER.
The Hancock Landing Road had taken Cash to the slippery brown banks of the Savannah River, the dirty border separating Georgia from South Carolina. Between the trees, she could see the enormous twin cooling towers of the Vogtle nuclear plant. As dusk approached, the region was deserted. The only other structure was a small farm two miles away from which she resolved she would later steal a new vehicle. Cash reminded herself that people who live in rural locations tended to leave their keys inside their cars. She had drenched Molly's car in gasoline from a spare canister and thrown a match into the luxuriant velvet interior, watching the flames consume the gunmetal paintwork. The depleted gas tank coughed and exploded with a soft percussion that pushed against her; the remaining headlight cracked and shattered, the windshield crashed back across the melting dashboard, tires burst, and metal began slowly to curl and deform, exposing a deep black skeleton. Sitting in the car was the slowly combusting corpse of Kip Winters, sections of his body melting away like a waxwork.