Ken Grimwood (33 page)

casualties stand at seventeen dead, twenty-six wounded. President Reagan has ordered new air strikes against rebel bases in the Mountains east of Tabriz, where the Ayatollah Khomeini is believed to be—"

"Turn the damned thing off," Jeff told Russell Hedges.

" … the revolutionary high command. Here in the United States, the death toll from last week's terrorist bombing at Madison Square Garden has now reached six hundred and eighty-two, and a communique from the so-called November Squad threatens continued attacks on American soil until all U.S. forces are withdrawn from the Middle East. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko has declared his nation's 'sympathy with the freedom fighters of the Islamic Jihad,' and Gromyko says the presence of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Arabian Sea is 'tantamount to—' "

Jeff leaned forward, snapped off the television set. Hedges shrugged, popped a peppermint Life Saver in his mouth, and fiddled with a pencil, holding it the way he had always held his once-ubiquitous cigarettes.

"What about the Soviet buildup in Afghanistan?" Hedges asked. "Are they planning a confrontation with our forces in Iran?"

"I don't know," Jeff said sullenly.

"How strong are Khomeini's followers? Can we keep the shah in power, at least until next year's elections?"

"I don't fucking know!" Jeff exploded. "How could I? Reagan wasn't even president before, not in 1979; this was Jimmy Carter's mess to deal with, and we never sent troops to Iran. Everything's changed. I don't know what the hell's going to happen now."

"Surely you must have some idea whether—"

"I don't. I have no idea at all." He looked at Pamela, who sat glaring at Hedges. Her face was drawn, pale; in these few years it had lost its feminine roundness, become almost as angular as Jeff's own. He took her hand, pulled her to her feet. "We're going for a walk," he told Hedges.

"I still have some more questions."

"Stuff your questions. I'm all out of answers."

Hedges sucked at the Life Saver, regarded Jeff with those cold blue eyes. "All right," he said. "We'll talk more over dinner."

Jeff started to tell him yet again that it wouldn't do any good, that the world was off on a strange and undefined new course now, about which neither he nor Pamela could offer any advice, but he knew the protestation would be pointless. Hedges still assumed they had some sort of psychic ability, that they could predict future events based on any set of current circumstances. As their foreknowledge had begun to dissipate in the face of drastically altered world events, he'd silently but clearly blamed them for withholding information. Even the sodium pentothal and polygraph sessions they'd been subjected to yielded little useful data these days, but they'd stopped objecting to the drug interrogations; maybe, they thought, as the value of their answers declined they'd be left alone, perhaps someday even be released from this lengthy "protective custody." That was an unlikely hope, they both knew, though they still clung to it; it was better than the alternative, which was to accept the obvious truth that they were here to stay until they died again.

The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore. A clutch of boats trolled among the marker buoys, working the rich Chesapeake Bay oyster beds. Jeff and Pamela took what comfort they could from the deceptive serenity of the familiar scene and did their best to ignore the pairs of dark-suited men who kept pace a steady twenty yards ahead of and behind them.

"Why don't we lie to him?" Pamela asked. "Tell him there'll be a war if we maintain our military presence in Iran. Christ, for all we know there may be one."

Jeff stooped to pick up a slender stick of driftwood. "They'd see through it, particularly when they put us on the pentothal."

"We could still try."

"But who knows what effect a lie like that would have? Reagan might even decide to launch a preemptive strike. We could end up starting a war that may still be avoided."

Pamela shuddered. "Stuart McCowan must be happy," she said bitterly, "wherever he is."

"We did what we thought was right. No one could have predicted this sort of outcome. And it hasn't been all bad; we've saved a lot of lives, too."

"You can't put human life on a balance sheet like that!"

"No, but—"

"They won't even do anything about the storms and the plane crashes anymore," she said with disgust, kicking at a clump of sand. "They want everybody, particularly the Soviets, to think we just disappeared, so they keep on letting all those people die … needlessly!"

"Just as they've always died before."

She spun toward him, her face full of a rage he had never seen in her. "That doesn't cut it, Jeff! We were supposed to be making the world a better, safer place this time—but all we really cared about was ourselves, finding out how much longer our own precious little lives were going to be extended; and we haven't even been able to do that."

"It's still possible that the scientists will come up with a—"

"I don't give a shit! When I look at the news, all the death we've caused by what we've told Hedges: the terrorist attacks, the military actions, maybe even a full-scale war corning … When I see that, I wish—I wish I'd never made that goddamned movie, I wish you'd never come to Los Angeles and found me!

Jeff tossed the stick of driftwood away, looked at her in pained disbelief. "You don't mean that," he said.

"Yes I do! I'm sorry I ever met you!"

"Pamela, please—"

Her hands were shaking, her face was red with anger. "I'm not talking to Hedges anymore. I don't want to talk to you anymore, either. I'm moving into one of the rooms on the third floor. You can tell them any fucking thing you like; go ahead, get us in a war, blow the whole damned planet up!"

She turned and ran, slipped awkwardly in the sand and found her footing again, dashed toward the house that was their prison. One of the teams of guards raced after her, the other closed in on either side of Jeff. He watched her go, watched the men escort her back inside the house; Hedges was at the door, and Jeff could hear her shouting at him, but a gust of summer wind from off the bay swallowed up her words, drowned out the meaning of her cries.

He awoke in a current of cold, synthetic-smelling air. Sharp, thin rays of brilliant sunlight sliced through half-closed slats of vene-tian blinds on the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely furnished bedroom. A portable stereo sat silent on the floor in front of the bed, and an old cassette recorder and microphone with a WIOD logo lay cushioned on a pile of clothes on the dresser.

Jeff heard a distant chime over the hum of the air conditioner, recognized it as a doorbell; whoever it was would go away if he ignored it. He glanced at the book in his hands:
The Algiers Motel Incident,
by John Hersey. Jeff tossed it aside, swung his feet off the bed, and went to the window. He lifted one of the white slats of the blinds, peered out, and saw a tall stand of royal palms; beyond them there was nothing but flat marshland, all the way to the horizon.

The doorbell rang again, and then he heard the approaching whine of a jet, saw it glide past a few hundred yards behind the palm trees. Landing at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Jeff realized.

This was his apartment in Dania, a mile from the beach and too close to the airport, but it had been the first place he could really call his own, his first wholly private living quarters as an adult. He'd been working at his first full-time news job, in Miami, beginning his career.

He took a deep breath of the stale, chilled air, sat back down on the rumpled bed. He'd died on schedule, at six minutes past one on October eighteenth, 1988; there'd been no all-out war, not yet, though the world had been—

The doorbell sounded again, a long ring this time, insistent. Goddamn it, why wouldn't they just go away? It stopped, then rang immediately a fourth time. Jeff pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of denim cut-offs from the heap of clothes on the dresser, stalked angrily from the room to get rid of whoever was at the door. As he walked into the living room a motionless wall of sweltering, humid air hit him; must be something wrong with the air conditioner in here, that was why he'd been in the bedroom in the middle of the day. Even the broad-leafed fern in the corner was limp, yielding to the force of the claustrophobic heat. Jeff pulled open the door just as the bell began its urgent chime once more. Linda stood there, smiling, the golden streaks in her waves of russet hair highlighted by the sun behind her. His wife, once-wife, his wife-not-yet: Linda, beaming with the undisguised extravagance of her fresh-born love for him, and in her outstretched hand a bunch of daisies. All the daisies in the world, it seemed, and on that sweetly unforgotten face shone all the ardent bliss and generosity of youth.

Jeff felt his eyes brim with tears, but he couldn't look away from her, couldn't even bring himself to blink for fear of losing one precious instant of this vision that had lived in his memory for so many decades and now stood recreated in all its loving radiance before him. So long, it had been so goddamned long …

"Aren't you gonna ask me in?" she asked, her girlish voice at once coy and inviting.

"Ahh … sure. Yes, I'm sorry, come on in. This is … wonderful. The flowers are great. Thank you. So unexpected."

"Have you got something to put them in? God, it's hotter in here than it is outside!"

"The air conditioner's broken, I—Just a minute, let me see if I can find something for the flowers." He glanced distractedly around the room, trying to remember if he'd owned a vase. "Maybe in the kitchen?"

Linda said helpfully. "Yeah, that's a good idea, let me just check in there. You want a beer, a Coke?"

"Some ice water would be fine." She followed him to the cramped little kitchen, dug out a vase for the daisies as he poured her a tall glass of water from a pitcher he found in the refrigerator. "Thanks," she said, fanning herself with her open hand as Jeff took the flowers. "Could we open some windows or something?"

"The air conditioner's working fine in my room; why don't we go in there?"

"O.K. Better put the flowers in there, too. They'll wilt in this heat."

In the bedroom he set the daisies on a nightstand, watched her pirouette before the vents of the air conditioner, her bare skin in the backless sundress gleaming with jewels of perspiration. "Oooh, this feels nice!" she said, raising her slim arms above her head, her small, firm breasts rising beneath the thin white dress as she did so.

They'd done exactly this before, Jeff recalled: found the vase for the flowers, come into his room to stay cool, she'd twirled and posed in just that way … how long ago? Lifetimes gone, worlds past.

Her wide brown eyes, the liquid warmth in them as she looked at him: Jesus, no one had looked at him that way for years. Pamela had secluded herself on the top floor of the government house in Maryland as she'd threatened, had coolly averted her gaze from him on the rare occasions when she'd joined the rest of them for dinner. The eyes Jeff best remembered from the past nine years were the dangerous blue orbs of Russell Hedges, staring at him with increasing malice as the world slid into its hellish morass of terrorist attacks and border skirmishes and U.S.-Soviet confrontations of which Jeff knew nothing, could predict nothing.

What would become of that drastically altered world now, Jeff wondered, if it continued on its own divergent time line, followed the course he and Pamela had, with all good intentions, inadvertently set for it? A state of martial law had existed in the United States for three years already, in the aftermath of the November Squad's destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the massacre at the United Nations Building. The 1988 presidential election had been indefinitely postponed because of the newly imposed restrictions on large public gatherings, and the heads of the three major intelligence agencies were effectively in control of the country "for the duration of the emergency."

It had seemed likely that a fascist American state was in the making, which of course had been the goal of the international terrorist underground from the beginning. Its members had wanted nothing more than to bring on a genuinely oppressive regime in the United States, one that even ordinary citizens might consider fighting to overthrow. Unless, of course, the militantly anticommunist CIA/NSA/FBI troika that ran the interim government first decided to bring on the worldwide nuclear conflict that had been threatening to erupt since the late seventies.

Linda stood with her naked silken back against the cool rush of air, her eyes closed and one hand holding her hair high on her head to expose her slender neck to the soothing flow. The shafts of light from the blinds showed the stretch of her dancer's legs through the sun-sheer white dress.

Pamela had been right to turn on him, Jeff thought with anguish; right to denounce them both for what they'd set in motion, however unwittingly or altruistically. In making themselves known to the world and in dealing with the government in exchange for the paltry information they had received, they had sown the seeds of a vicious whirlwind that some other world must now reap. It remained to be seen whether she—or either of them, for that matter—would ever be able to forgive themselves for the brutal global violence they had wrought in the name of benevolence and understanding … And it would be years, perhaps a decade or more, before he would even have the opportunity to try to talk to her again, to attempt some reconciliation of their personal estrangement and to come to terms with the tragic totality of their failure to improve mankind's lot. That world was lost, as surely as Pamela was now lost to him for unknown years to come, perhaps forever.

"Tickle me," Linda said in her sweet, clear voice, and for a moment Jeff didn't know what she meant.

Then he remembered the delicate touch she once had relished, the slow, gentle trailing of his fingertips across her skin, so lightly it was almost not a touch at all. He took a daisy from the bunch that she had given him, used its feathery petals to trace an imaginary line from her ear along her neck and shoulder, down her right arm, and then back up her left.