Puppets (23 page)

30

B
ACK AT CARLA'S MOTHER'S house, Mo did a few chores, sweeping away the dust bunnies, cleaning the dishes. It had been hard to drop Rebecca off. Now his thoughts flipped back and forth between two very different worlds. The dark, dire shit, this luminous, soaring feeling. He felt as if he were dividing into two separate halves, light and dark, hopeful and hopeless. But whatever else, he sensed that Rebecca was right about keeping priorities: You couldn't let the bad things screw up what mattered in your life. Especially in the current situation, when he felt increasingly manipulated by circumstances: Flannery, the Big Willie thing, the puppeteer, Biedermann, the job in general. If you weren't careful, they could take over your thoughts, your life, your future. So you had to cut their strings, consciously rebel against their control, by sticking to your priorities. By staying human.

When he took the trash out to the cans behind the house, he stopped at the back fence to breathe the air, look over the dark neighborhood. The yards back here were broad and sheltered by heavy oaks and felt a little wild—he startled a raccoon, which went scuttling under the gate and into the pitch-black of the alley. Mo leaned on the pickets, inhaling the humid air. Muggy, but cooler than in the house. Mostly the neighborhood was quiet aside from the thumping bass of a car stereo on the next street over. That and a dog barking a couple of blocks away, mindless and regular as a machine. It was only May 30, and the weather forecasters were already talking about a dry summer, global warming, El Nino disrupting climate patterns. If Detta was going to sell this place or even rent it out long term, she'd better invest in air-conditioning.

Bowling: hard to say how it had gone. You could see where Rachel would be a tough nut to crack. Maybe he should read a book on adolescent psychology, pick up a few tips. A smart kid, like her mother in some ways, obviously determined to raise some hell of her own. But she had softened up a bit toward the end, goofing with him as they ate burgers in the Star Bowl's grill. He could see where it might be fun to have a kid around. And then there was the moment when Rachel had gone off to the bathroom, and he and Rebecca had slipped into discussing the Pinocchio case, the Biedermann problem.

Rachel had come back and probably overheard a little of it and had asked, "What are you guys talking about?"

"Ah, we were talking about Erik, actually," Mo had said. "Erik Biedermann.", "Who's 'Erik'?" Rachel had asked peevishly.

And Mo suddenly had felt the importance of this evening to Rebecca: Whatever she had felt about Biedermann, she had never introduced him to her daughter. Oh, man. That felt very good.

Yeah, it had been good to see Rebecca with her daughter. Thinking back now, he realized that the mom thing, the nurturer role, was a big part of what made her so attractive. Sexy, yes, funny, smart, but definitely somebody with her feet on the ground. Somebody connected to something more important than just herself and her career and so on. Unlike too many of the people Mo knew.

He didn't know how he'd done with Rachel, but the outing had distracted him nicely for the better part of four hours. A little relief. But now, with the night deepening around him, it all began to return. Programmed killers. Sick rituals of torment. Mudda Raymon's rasping voice:
All de puppets.
Secret government weapons projects. Worst of all, the indecision about whom to trust, where to go from here. In a way, seeing Rachel and Rebecca together had upped the stakes, because it pointed out what was really at risk: She had a family, it wasn't just about one person. So whatever he did, he couldn't put Rebecca in danger. Had to shield her from some of this. But how? Probably the best bet would be for him to quit the State Police, have her stop her consulting work with the FBI. Of course, somebody, Biedermann, might correctly see their quitting as an indication they were onto the big picture, and feel compelled to do something about them anyway.

His thoughts went around and around until they exhausted him and it was time to knock off for the day. He went back inside, slung the Glock in its holster over the chair next to the bed, went in to take a shower. He started warm and soapy just to get the day's sweat off and then gradually cranked the cold and lingered until his bloodstream cooled. He toweled himself off, feeling better, not so oppressed.

He had cut the lights and put a T-shirt over the clock radio and was lying in the pitch-dark bedroom when a small noise registered in his mind. The big house always made ticks and thumps as it cooled down at night, and sometimes there were mice in the walls, little scurryings that came and went. But this was a creak, the whispered complaint of wood as weight came to bear on it. He tilted his head to hear it better and heard nothing for a long moment. He had just convinced himself that he was just jittery when he heard it again, the squeak of boards moving against each other. A floorboard. Immediately the air in the house seemed different: inhabited, watchful.

His eyes still hadn't adapted to the dark. All he could see was the black of the room, obscured by the misty phosphene fizz in his eyeballs. Moving very slowly so as not to make any noise in the bedding, he groped for the chair. The Glock hanging there. His fingers found the nylon webbing of the strap, followed it down to the holster. Which was empty.

"Don't get excited," a voice said.

It was Biedermann. In a flash Mo felt a wave of heat move over him as he realized how stupid he'd been, how he'd let his guard down. How hugely he'd underestimated Biedermann. How stupid to have lingered in the shower for so long, deaf and blind. Someone could have come through the front door with a battering ram, and he'd never have known it.

Biedermann snapped on the ceiling light. The big man stood in the doorway, with Mo's Glock in his two hands. When Mo's eyes adapted, he could see that Biedermann was wearing a dark gray turtleneck, black jeans, black gloves, and an expression of high focus. The guy had steady nerves and knew his way around guns: The steel circle of the barrel wavered none at all from its aim at Mo's left eyeball.

"Sit up," Biedermann ordered.

Mo pulled himself up, trying not to be obvious about his drift to the left side of the bed, where he kept the little Ruger .22 under the edge of the mattress. "How're you going to do it, Biedermann? Try to make it look like suicide? Or are we going to do the puppet thing?"

"We'll see how it goes. Right now we're going to talk." Biedermann took a step closer, into the center of the room, wary as a wildcat.

"Why're you here?"

"You really think I don't monitor my staff better than that? Rebecca going over my calendar on Thursday was pretty obvious. She came back into the conference room looking like she'd seen a ghost, and I know we ain't got 'em in the twenty-fifth-floor restrooms. I also know her well enough to know she didn't think that up herself. Some people are naturally devious. Rebecca isn't one of them."

Mo made a
what're you gonna do?
gesture and dropped his hands helplessly onto the bed. The left hand he let fall right at the edge of the mattress. Six inches from the other gun. He'd flip off the bed, away from Biedermann. Grab the Ruger as he fell, come around the end shooting.

Biedermann said, "Tell me what you put together. What you think you know."

That was good, Mo was thinking, Biedermann's urge to yammer, to explain. Distract him even an iota, gain just enough time to roll, drop, lunge, fire.

"That you headed a black-ops hit team in Vietnam. That you're a trained, conditioned killer, you were a guinea pig in a secret medical project. That you're doing something here, you're pulling strings to keep doing it, you've positioned yourself perfectly to cover your tracks."

Biedermann's eyes were unreadable. "Jeez, pretty good. At some point I'd like to hear how you came to know all this. But keep going."

Now Mo's hand trailed just over the edge of the mattress, four inches from the gun. Had to roll and make the grab in one movement. "That you're a fucking mutant. Kind of an android, built to kill. That you like to tie people up."

"I do believe you're trying to provoke me!" Biedermann said, astonished and a little amused. "But before we go any further, don't bother with the little Ruger. Because I collected that, too, while you were in the shower. I figured you'd be the kind of guy would keep an extra nearby."

Mo felt the breath go out of him. Suddenly he didn't have a plan. Biedermann was ten feet away, had the guns, was bigger and probably had a lot more hand-to-hand training.
Life's a bitch and then you die,
Mo thought, part of him just feeling
who gives a fuck?
The urge to walk, get out, was deeper than just the job, he realized. Just shuffle off the mortal coil, cut every last string, enough bullshit is enough.

"What else, Detective?" Biedermann prodded.

"Why're we bothering with this? Go ahead, do your thing. Or is making me talk part of the thrill, the control thing? Is that it?"

"On the off chance that it's part of the thrill, why don't you go ahead. Tell me
why
I do all this nasty stuff."

"Because your brain has been altered, and now you're a machine that's just a little broken. You're a good actor, but you're one of the guinea pigs who didn't 'successfully reintegrate' into normal society."

Biedermann shook his head, looking a little insulted. "Rebecca.

Tsk. Jeez, Bee, thanks for your high opinion of me. So you two are getting something going. Good for you both—you slipped that one past me. Jeez, I'm a little jealous. She's quite a gal."

"Let's get this over with. I'm going to get up now, and if you don't shoot me, you'll just have to fight me." Mo moved to the side of the bed, swung his feet over, waiting for Biedermann's shot.

But Biedermann surprised him again. He flipped the Glock around in his hand, tossed it onto the bed. Mo looked at it there, its weight denting the bedding, easily within reach.

"Go ahead," Biedermann said. "You can have it. But we've still got a lot to talk about."

Mo snatched up the gun. Biedermann watched him, then looked behind him and drew Mo's desk chair closer. He sat in it, leaning forward with forearms on his knees.

"I don't usually make late-night visits like this," Biedermann said. "Kind of dangerous with a guy like you. But you've been finding things out and it's time we talked. My office is not the right place to tell all, under the circumstances. You want to hear what's going on? You can point the gun at me for a while, even things up, if it'll make you feel better."

Mo thought about it and decided he didn't need to. He set it down on the bedside table, began to put on some clothes. "Okay. So tell me what's going on."

"What I'm going to tell you has gotta stay secret. I've got two, no, three, choices here, and I'm trying to do the right thing. One choice is to tell you, bring you in, use your smarts. Another is to bust your ass in some way, maybe crank up interest in the Big Willie thing, get you thrown out so your credibility goes to shit and you're out of my hair."

"What's the third choice?"

"Kill you," Biedermann told him. He said it without any anger or pretense, and Mo had to believe it really was an option he'd considered. "Secrecy is kind of important here."

Mo pulled on his pants and a T-shirt and sat on the bed as Biedermann explained. The big house was dark around the one room, the ceiling light oppressive, the air stuffy and congested.

"You're right, I ran some teams in Vietnam and Cambodia. Not much of a secret with all that press last year, is it? You're right—Rebecca's right—it's about an experimental army psych program. The program was intended to make specialized fighting men for particular missions through alterations in their neuropsychological makeup. But I wasn't one of them."

"Who were these guys?"

"Some were convicts who cut a deal to get out in exchange for their participation, most were just draftees. But you don't just take ordinary guys and turn them into human cruise missiles. These were guys whose background suggested they would make good material. The medical boys looked for histories of childhood abuse, violent tendencies, juvenile arrest records for crimes like arson or cruelty to animals. Sometimes guys with preexisting neurological conditions that made them, that, uh, disinhibited certain social functions."

Mo felt his anger flare, the monstrosity of the whole thing. "And if they didn't happen to have the right neurological conditions, you
created
those conditions, you surgically—"

Biedermann held up his hand. "I did nothing of the sort, you dumb shit! Don't you get it? I was the fucking
janitorl"
He had some heat of his own here, Mo saw. "Who do you think my unit went after in Cambodia? Yeah, we killed Americans. It wasn't any fun, believe me. But the program, the experiment, went blooey. Their neuropsych alterations induced psychoses nobody anticipated. These were guys whose
signal
was breaking up, you know what I'm saying? Guys who knew how to kill just about anybody anywhere, who weren't afraid to get killed themselves while doing their job, but who were not responding to their controllers anymore. Who were dangerous as hell and could easily turn on their handlers, and also,
also,
could not be risked in the wild. And, yeah, I admit it, guys who could expose a very unpalatable government secret, one that could affect public opinion about the war. Yeah, it was a big mess,
and I was
in charge of the goddamned cleanup crew. I still am."