River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (3 page)

Every date after that had been marred by something. A pointless fight, Bethany’s unknowable sadness. He should have recognized it, should have pressed her more urgently. Maybe he could have headed this off in some way. As it was, the changing tide of her heart had carved a hole in his.

The hell with it, he decided at last. It was almost three in the morning. He had to go to work in a few hours, fighting Key Bridge traffic to get to McLean. If he was going to get any sleep, it had to be now. He tucked the Beretta back into its hidey-hole and headed upstairs.

His cell phone beeped when he was halfway up. By the time he reached it, on his nightstand next to an empty cup of water and a T. Jefferson Parker paperback thriller, it had stopped. He looked at the screen and saw that he had received a new text message.

Terrific. He sat down hard on the bed, shoulders slumping. This could only be more shitty news. Nobody texted at three a.m. to tell you that you had been promoted or won a trip to Tahiti.

His sigh was melodramatic, but he allowed himself that small theatrical touch as he read the screen:

Perry will be over to see you, if he hasnt already been there. Im so sorry, James. Honestly. I know you wont think so, and I wont blame you if you hate me for it. I had to tell him, had to be truthful with him so we can fix our marriage before its too late. Its over between us, James, and Im sorry and I wish I was brave enough to tell you in person, but Im not. Please dont contact me.

At least Bethany had written the message herself. She refused to use modern text-speak, which would have been more like, “I no u wont think so,” and, “b4 its 2 late.”

But the whole idea of breaking up via text message seemed more appropriate for a seventeen-year-old than for a professional woman closing in on thirty-five. Truly was just four years older, and it never would have occurred to him as an acceptable method. He guessed Bethany was more high-tech savvy than he would ever be.

Truly was distracting himself with nonsensical details to avoid dwelling on the real hurt that waited on the other side of them. He was self-aware enough to understand that it was a survival mechanism he needed right now. He felt like he had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler that was backing up to squash him again.

He put the phone down, climbed back under his covers and sat there with the light off, willing sleep to take him. It hadn’t then, and so he fought it now, in his office after lunch, feeling the cold smoothness of the window and watching the flutter of red leaves and wishing that his life belonged to someone else.

He actually drifted off, for a moment, his face against the glass, but the phone on his desk startled him and he lunged for it. Bethany! She knew the direct number to his desk. Not many other people did. He snatched up the receiver. “This is James Truly,” he said.

“James, it’s Millicent. Millicent Wong.”

His heart sank. “Hello, Millicent.”

“I detect a distinct drop in your level of enthusiasm,” she said. “I’ve disappointed you in some way?”

“I…I was expecting another call,” Truly said. “It has nothing to do with you, Millicent. I’m always happy to talk to you.”

“People keep saying that, and then I keep sharing bad news and changing their minds.”

“Maybe it’s time to try a new approach.”

“I would love to, James. But at the moment, I’m afraid, bad news is the only kind I have. Something has happened to Lawrence.”

He had been picturing Millicent. She was petite, with a luxurious head of rich black hair that, on her slender body, almost made her look top-heavy. She was no taller than five two, not counting the hair, which added another three or four inches. She often wore spike heels and gained another couple of inches that way. Still, she’d have to hold on to a couple of five-pound bags of sugar to push the scale over a hundred.

Now that mental image shifted. “Ingersoll?” he asked, envisioning the curly-haired, dour-faced man in his usual dark clothing.

“Yes, Lawrence Ingersoll,” Millicent said.

“What happened to him?”

“I’m hoping you can find out. Late last night, your time, I detected a serious occult anomaly. Disruptions of the ley lines—”

“Spare me the details, please,” Truly interrupted, knowing that she could go on about them at some length, but that she would lose him by the end of the first sentence. The fact that he had been put in charge of Moon Flash, the CIA’s officially nonexistent continuation of psychic research programs Grill Flame, Sun Streak and Star Gate—discontinued in 1996, as far as almost anyone outside the building knew—didn’t mean he understood such things. “What about Ingersoll?”

“Well, the disruption seemed to be centered not far from his home, so I asked him if he might be able to look into it. I never heard back from him, and when I tried to call him again, I got no response. Concerned, I went online and checked the
Mineral County Miner
, the newspaper in his town in Colorado. It said that there was a fire at his house last night. No one survived.”

“Christ,” Truly said. His bad day was getting worse. He could almost hear the air brakes of that metaphorical semi as it slowed for another run at him.

“Exactly,” Millicent said. “So I hoped you could investigate, see if he really died in the fire, and find out just what is going on there.”

“I’ll check it out,” Truly said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“One thing I’d like to make clear, James. To we practitioners of the occult arts, the immediate consequences of this sort of thing are inconvenient—and, obviously, sometimes dangerous. But the mystical energies around us can’t be divorced from the rest of life. There are vast areas of convergence, for instance, between ley lines and string theories of physics. Over the long term, this sort of disruption could affect…well, we just don’t know. Time? Weather? The very nature of reality as we understand it? If it continues, I fear that we’ll find out. But I’d really rather not.”

Truly didn’t know what to say. Doomsday scenarios were common enough in the intelligence game, but they were usually attached to the threat of Commies or Islamic fundamentalists or some other group with access to nuclear weapons. A mystical version was beyond his imagining.

Seeming to grasp this, Millicent kept her sigh brief and subdued. “Please let me know what you find out, James. Lawrence and I weren’t particularly close, but I like him. I would hate to not know.”

“I will,” Truly promised.

“At the same time, I shall be exploring some alternative angles on my end.”

He knew she meant paranormal angles, and he didn’t pursue it. Those were the kind she was qualified with, while he decidedly was not.

But he wouldn’t turn down the help.

* * *

In the next twenty-five minutes, Truly made four phone calls. The last one was to his boss, Ronald Loesser, whom he met shortly after in the atrium of the New Headquarters building (called that to distinguish it from the Old Headquarters building that had once been the main structure at the Langley campus, a compound Truly still had a hard time thinking of as the George Bush Center for Intelligence, named for the then-president and former Director of Central Intelligence in 1999), beneath the suspended U-2 plane model. Loesser hated to let Truly come to his office almost as much as he hated going into the nearly empty suite of offices dedicated to the Moon Flash project, so they usually met on neutral ground.

Truly wore a navy blue peacoat over his suit, and when he spotted Loesser, the older man not only had a leather barn coat on but he was clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and letting steam wash over his mouth and chin. He barely glanced toward Truly, then ticked his gaze outside and started walking. Truly adjusted his course and caught up with Loesser in the courtyard, where the man had taken a seat on a bench near the main section of the Kryptos sculpture. During warmer weather, there might be agency employees standing around the sculpture—a blue-green oxidized copper wall shaped like a piece of paper scrolling out of a printer, with a sequence of letters punched into it—trying to decipher the code it carried. This time of year, Truly and Loesser were alone, and the babbling fountain running beside the sculpture would help keep their conversation private from anyone who might wander by.

“What is it, Jim?” Loesser asked without preamble. He knew Truly never went by Jim, but he regularly pretended to forget. Just one more illustration of the way he felt about Truly. Loesser was an assistant to the director of the National Clandestine Service, or an assistant to that assistant; Truly could never be certain how many levels from the top his supervisor really was. Loesser would fire Truly in a hot minute if he thought he could, but he believed Truly to be protected by his father, former United States Senator Willard Carsten Truly. Truly did not share that belief, but Loesser’s conviction had worked out for him anyway. He had arranged for Truly to be given ownership of the Moon Flash project, which was as close to being fired as one could get while remaining on the agency’s payroll.

“One of our people has been killed.”

“An agency employee?”

“One of
my
people,” Truly amended. “A contract operative. Lawrence Ingersoll. Winston brought him in, after the first World Trade Center bombing.” Barry Winston had been Truly’s immediate predecessor in this post, until the day he ran a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car window and sat in his sealed garage listening to Sidney Bechet CDs until the car ran out of gas. His housekeeper found him two days later.

“One of Winston’s charlatans.” Loesser sipped his coffee, his hard gray eyes appraising Truly over the cup’s rim. His hair was short and silver, neatly combed, and he affected the air of an old-time parson who disapproved of virtually everything and everyone created since the end of World War II.

“They’re not all charlatans,” Truly began. At Loesser’s disapproving frown he stopped. “I don’t necessarily have a lot more faith in them than you do, Ron,” Truly said. In fact, although when he had accepted the job, he’d had no faith at all, he had since grown to respect their abilities more than he had expected. He would never admit that to Ron Loesser, though. “But you’ve assigned me to deal with them, and I’m doing that. Now one of them is dead. And it’s not just that. Another one told me she called him last night, to ask him to look into—I know what you’re going to say—a disruption in the ley lines. He agreed to check it out, and the next thing anybody knew his house burned down, with him inside. He didn’t even try to get out, and the arson investigator’s initial conclusion is that the fire began where he was sitting, although they couldn’t find any source of ignition or fuel there. It all sounds suspect to me.”

“He’s a U.S. citizen?” Loesser asked.

“Yes.”

“And there’s no definitive evidence of foul play? Have the locals completed their investigation? Probably not, if it all happened last night.”

“Of course they haven’t. I don’t know how big Creede, Colorado is, but it’s no major metropolis. It’s going to take them a while.”

“Then let them do what they have to do,” Loesser said. “No sense in you running off to Colorado. You’d just be in the way, and we don’t have any indication that this is any of the agency’s business. We don’t mess around with American citizens inside the U.S.”

He said that last part as if he were explaining something that Truly had never heard before. “But he works for us.”

“Part-time. He works for others, too, right? Or for himself? What’s to say this is at all related to what he does for us?”

“What Millicent Wong told me, for starters.” He left out her warnings of global catastrophe, which would just muddy the water even more.

“Unless Millicent Wong pays your salary, Jim, you ought to give more credence to what I tell you.” He crushed the empty cup and looked about for someplace to toss it. “Just wait and see.”

Ron Loesser rose from the bench and walked toward a freestanding trash can. He tossed his cup at it. The cup hit the rim and bounced away, but Loesser was already taking rapid strides toward the building. He didn’t look back, at his cup or at Truly.

Truly picked up the cup and dunked it into the can. He felt an obligation toward those who had worked for the agency, even if it wasn’t their primary occupation, even if no practical application had been found for their abilities. But given the way his day had begun, he didn’t mind being told not to put any effort into finding out what had happened to Lawrence Ingersoll. Just staying alert and coherent would take all the energy he had to offer.

Walking back toward his office he realized some of Loesser’s coffee had leaked onto his fingers. He shook a drop away, then sniffed his hand. Loesser took his coffee black, strong and rich. Suddenly a cup of coffee seemed like a good idea. Truly couldn’t drown himself in booze at work, and he wasn’t a hard-drinking guy under any circumstances, but a good jolt of caffeine might keep him going until it was time to head back to his empty home, and his now equally empty life, on the other side of the Potomac.

THREE

The Colorado River. The Conchos. The Crooked. The Cannonball. The Missouri, the Musselshell, the Madison. The Snake, Salt, Salmon, Secesh, St. Mary. The Canadian River. The Russian River. The American, the Frenchman, the Republican. Shoshone, Sheyenne, Gila, Mohawk, Flathead, Klamath, Kootenai, Pawnee. Eel, Snake, Swan, Bear, Beaverhead.