Conspiracy (38 page)

On the flight from Bangkok to LA—first class, arranged by Rubens despite his earlier comment—Dean thought of Qui. He remembered her face and voice, the easy way she had, how even when addressing him very formally and keeping him at a distance, she seemed intimate, more than a friend.

He tried but could not explain to himself what the attraction was. It wasn't physical, he didn't think; Qui was past the age where she might be called pretty, and in any event he hadn't felt sexually aroused by her. If he had represented an alternate future to her—what she must have meant when they said good-bye in the bar—she must have represented something different to him. But what exactly that was wouldn't fit into a neat equation.

“I see what my future might have been. Now, I no longer have to mourn for it.”

Dean thought back to the mountain lion, to his shot then, and to the mission with Longbow. Every moment held a fork or a bridge in the road—a different direction based on
a decision you made, often without knowing it. Some of the possibilities lived on, like ghosts haunting a future they couldn't have, or a past they'd come to regret.

Then Dean thought of Lia, longed to hold her, and drifted off to sleep.

 

“
THE SENATOR IS
in LA, not Albany,” the secretary told Chief Ball. “I'm sorry.”

“Give me that number then.”

“I'm afraid—”

“Just give me the general number for the campaign there. No, wait,” said Ball. “Give me Jimmy Fingers' cell phone.”

“Mr. Fahey does not give out his cell phone number.”

“Baloney. Every stinkin'politician on the East Coast has it.”

“Sir, if you care to leave a number, I'm sure that Mr. Fahey will call you back when they return east.”

“That's too long to wait.” Ball turned around from the phone, glancing down the long, narrow barroom. He was being paranoid, he knew, but he was afraid someone was tracing the call and would send the police here any moment.

Ridiculous.

But if it
did
happen, what would he do?

“That's the best I can do,” said the secretary. “It's almost five and we're on our way out. Do you want to leave your name and a message or not?”

“Not,” said Ball. He hung up, then got the number for the LA campaign office from information. When he called it, he tried a different tack.

“This is Christopher Ball. I do security for the senator back east in New York. I need to talk to either him or James Fahey. If Jimmy's around, he'd be fine. I'm not sure where they are and I happen to be in the field at the moment, without my Rolodex. Can you get me in touch with them?”

The volunteer who'd answered put Ball on hold. He came back in a few minutes with Jimmy Fingers' cell phone number.

Ball punched it in quickly, afraid that he would forget it. Waiting for the number to connect, he glanced down at the silver coiled wire holding the receiver to the phone. It reminded him of the wire he'd used to kill Rauci.

“This is Jimmy. Who is this?”

“Jimmy, this is Christopher Ball.”

“Chris Ball—hello, Chief,” said Jimmy Fingers. His voice boomed over the phone. “What can we do for you?”

“I have to talk to the senator about something.”

“Gee, that's going to be rough today, Chief. Problem is, these damn campaign people have him double-booked, wall-to-wall, the whole time we're out here. Dumbest thing I've ever seen, but that's national politics, I guess. They don't do it like we do it at home.”

Ball recognized the aw-shucks tactic; it was standard operating procedure when Jimmy Fingers didn't want McSweeney to talk to someone.

“Listen, Jimmy, I need to talk to him. It's about a personal matter that involves both of us.”

“Well, listen, Chief, you tell me and I'll pass it along.”

“No. I
want
to talk to him.”

“A lot of people want to talk to him right now.” Jimmy Fingers' voice was starting to get an edge. “Let me help you out.”

“This is personal, damn it.” Ball felt the back of his neck getting hot.

“You have something I can deal with, you let me know,” answered Jimmy Fingers. The phone went dead.

“You can't hang up on me. Jimmy. Jimmy!”

But Jimmy Fingers had hung up. Ball's anger wrenched out of control, his body wet with it. He slammed the phone back onto the receiver and slapped open the door to the phone booth.

There were only two other people in the bar besides the bartender; both were looking in the other direction, doing their best to avoid Ball's gaze. He made his hands into fists and
rubbed his fingers with his thumbs, trying to control his emotions. He walked to the bar, pulled out a stool, and sat down.

“Just a Budweiser, please,” he said softly.

The bartender came right over with it. Ball slid a five-dollar bill onto the bar, then took a long sip from the beer.

He felt as if the ground beneath him had given way. He couldn't stop himself from falling.

“Bad day?” asked the bartender gently.

“Bad lifetime,” snapped Ball, taking a sip of his beer. He couldn't quite understand why all of this was happening. A few months ago he'd been completely in control, never thinking at all about Vietnam, about the money, his days selling drugs as John Hart, his life before all that. Now it was all he thought about.

He shouldn't have killed Rauci. She wasn't that smart.

Maybe not, but sooner or later she would have figured it out. Sooner or later someone was going to go back far enough, back beyond Vietnam, and find out who he really was. A DNA test would do it. And then everything would unravel.

Ball's fingers were trembling.

Could you lose everything like that, in a flash, by
one
wrong decision?

It wasn't even a question. Here he was, falling.

Ball took another sip of beer.

McSweeney had clearly decided to cut him off. Jimmy Fingers wouldn't dare to do that on his own. Ball thought back to the last time he'd spoken to the senator, to his onetime captain.

“We have to do something about Gordon.”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

Mmmm-hmmmm . . .
that was all McSweeney had said. Ball knew exactly what it meant, but no one else would.

Pretty clever. Maybe McSweeney had set the whole thing in motion.

Of course he had. Ball and Gordon were the only connection to McSweeney and the money. Now it was just him.

His word against a senator's—against a man who would be President of the United States? Who would people believe?

Especially if they found out about Rauci. Who would trust the word of a murderer?

Ball stared at the pockmarks in the copper-topped bar. McSweeney was a genius. He'd set the whole thing up beautifully. Twice—once at the start, and now.

If it hadn't been for him, Ball's life would have been perfect. He could have come home as the man he was, Robert Tolong—Marine Sergeant Robert Tolong. A good, solid record, killing enemy guerillas who had to be killed.

“An audacious record.”

McSweeney had said that, the first time he broached the idea.

“An audacious record, and yet you have nothing to show for it. You deserve more.”

If it hadn't been for that conversation, Robert Tolong would have rotated home in a few weeks. He would have knocked around for a month, maybe two, then gone into the state troopers, like he planned. Become a police chief in Georgia, just like in New York, but without ever having to look over his shoulder.

McSweeney had stolen that from Tolong. And now the son of a bitch was going to be President of the United States.

“You OK?” asked the bartender.

“I'm getting there.” Ball forced a smile. “What are you gonna do, right?”

“Laid off?”

“Nah, nothing like that. Friend screwed me, that's all.”

“Over a woman?”

“A woman was involved.”

“Bitch.”

“I don't really feel like talking,” said Ball sharply.

The bartender backed away. Ball tried to smile apologetically, but it was a halfhearted attempt. He picked up his beer, his hands trembling even more than before.

He was falling down a hole. He'd felt like this before, in Nam, when he'd killed the real Christopher Ball, the man whose identity he'd adopted, abandoned, and then adopted again.

God, he'd forgotten that. Buried it. He saw Ball's face again, the stunned look in his eyes.

Like Amanda Rauci's.

He'd almost killed himself that night. That was the way he felt now.

“It's all right, Sarge. I owed you one for that time you got the gook on the highway, remember?”

Ball turned to his right. The real Ball sat next to him on the stool, dressed in his class A uniform. He smelled of Old Spice aftershave.

“You had to kill me, too.”

Amanda Rauci was on his left.

Ball turned around. The entire bar was filled with the people he'd killed—gooks, drug dealers, the
federales.
They were all in their best clothes, as if attending a wedding or a reception. Or a funeral.

I'm in hell, Ball realized. McSweeney put me here.

The bastard is going to pay.

“I think you already paid,” said the bartender. He pointed at the beer glass, now three-quarters empty. “You need a refill?”

“I gotta go,” said Ball, getting up from the stool and forcing himself to walk through the crowd of well-dressed ghosts.

 

JASON RICHARDS HAD
been a corporal in Vietnam at the time Sergeant Tolong had been killed, and was a member of the unit sent out to locate and recover the body. More than thirty-five years had passed, but his anger and frustration were still so palpable that Hernes Jackson had to hold his phone away from his ear as Richards recounted what had happened that day.

“We should've gone out right away. That was the first screwup,” said Richards. An air-conditioning installer, Richards had just come home for dinner when Jackson tracked him down by phone in Oklahoma. “They kept us at the base three or four days while they figured out what to do.”

“Was that normal?” asked Jackson.

“What the hell was normal?” Richards took a sip of something—beer, Jackson guessed. “But waiting three or four days—wasn't a good thing, right?”

“Unless there was a reason.”

“No reason except incompetence, general incompetence.”

Richards had more complaints about the mission, which was led by a nugget lieutenant—“the newest one at the base.” The intelligence was terrible, they were airlifted fifteen miles from where the grave was supposed to be, and the man who'd buried Tolong wasn't with them.

“Wasn't he hurt, too?” asked Jackson.

“Nah. He came through without a scratch. Maybe he lost his nerve. He was in Da Nang—he could have come out with us easy. From what I heard, he just sat in a bunker for the
next month, until it was time for him to rotate back to the States.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Nah. Wait. Maybe Gordy or something.”

“Gordon?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Reginald Gordon?” asked Jackson.

“Maybe. Reggie? I don't know. Gordy, though. Definitely. How the hell do you leave your buddy? How do you do that?”

Richards continued to lace away at the mission, which was eventually cut short by a VC ambush. According to Richards, the ambush consisted of a few rounds in the distance; as soon as the lieutenant heard them, he called for an evacuation.

“Worst operation I was ever on in the Marines,” said Richards. “Maybe the Army did crap that way, but we didn't. And you know who I blame? Captain Gideon McSweeney. He sent us out. He handpicked that sucker of a lieutenant and got the worst guys to go. It was his fault. You know who he is, right?”

“Senator McSweeney?”

“That's right. Running for President. He screwed up when he picked the mission.”

“Was McSweeney a poor leader?” asked Jackson.

“No. Actually, he was pretty damn good. Usually, he was. I'll vote for him. I heard a lot of good stories about him, especially when he was a lieutenant. Had balls. But this time, I don't know. He didn't even push it when we came back empty-handed. To a man, we would have gone back out in the field. We were proud to be Marines, you know what I'm saying? We were proud. And we did a crap job here.”

“So he didn't push?”

“No. I mean, probably there was a colonel above him telling him to lay off and everything, but Tolong was one of his guys. He should've. You want to believe that your CO is going to come for you; you know what I mean? If he's a Marine, he ought to.”

“How well did you know Tolong?” asked Jackson.

“I didn't. This is just stuff I heard about him. You know, they'd been around, those guys. I was what, maybe ten days in-country? I'd just gotten there.”

“Were Tolong and McSweeney friends?”

“Friends? I don't know, but I kind of doubt it, you know? Even then, especially then, officers and enlisted, they didn't really mix in a friend kind of way. Sometimes. But Tolong was in the villages program,” added Richards, using a slang term for the combined pacification program Jackson had come across earlier. “And McSweeney ran the Corps part of it. From what I know, Tolong was a troubleshooter. The guy was pretty amazing—he'd been a sniper, but he was better than most of those guys. They used him to assassinate people.”

“That's not in his personnel records.”

Richards laughed, and took a long swig of whatever he was drinking. “There's gonna be a lot of stuff missing from those records, Mr. Jackson, if you know what I mean.”

 

WHILE AMANDA RAUCI'S
car was towed to a nearby state troopers' barracks to await an FBI forensic team, Lia drove back over to Pine Plains to see if the police chief had returned. The drive took about twenty minutes, on a twisting but scenic road. The bucolic surroundings seemed to make crime and intrigue impossible, the kind of countryside people would flee to so they could raise their children. An old farmhouse loomed over a rock wall at the edge of a curve about halfway to the village. It was a beautiful old house, freshly painted.