Vitals (24 page)

Then we left the house, the ghost, twenty years of memories, my whole goddamned life, and I haven't been back since.

SAN DIEGO LOS ANGELES

"I wanted to thank you for confirming I'm an honest man," Banning said. Cousins rode shotgun and I sat in the backseat of Banning's beat up Plymouth with my boxes. The trunk was latched with baling wire and he thought it might spring open.

"I didn't state anything of the kind," I said.

We slowed in the commute heading north on 5. There was some chance we'd be pulled over at the San Onofre checkpoint, but we had to get to LA to meet some people Cousins knew and there's no quick way around la Migra. We were all white, I was no longer a suspect. We took the chance.

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They did pull us out of the line at the checkpoint. They searched the car and gave us the long stare. We were fugitives from something or somebody, they could see it in our eyes. Cousins talked pleasantly. They had nothing on us, so they let us go.

I hate the law.

I snoozed most of the way to LA. We were deep in Laurel Canyon when I awoke. Banning drove up a twisting private road to the ridgeline. Late in the afternoon, the tree-filled hollows were sunk in shadow. Quail darted across the cracked asphalt behind us. The air blew sweet with eucalyptus and sage.

Banning stopped the car before a heavy steel gate. Cousins got out and spoke a few words into a box on a long, curving pole.

"Our safe house," Cousins explained, climbing back in and slamming the car door. "This will take a minute. Lots of security to disarm."

I was alert after my long nap. Now seemed the time, before we had to deal with anyone new. I could not explain my behavior back in El Cajon. I wanted to apologize, but that wasn't appropriate, either. Maybe they were the ones who should apologize.

"What happened to me?" I asked.

Cousins looked over his shoulder. "Jail cuisine," he said. "Someone doped your food when you were in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They wanted you to kill Rudy and me. That's why they left the gun in your house."

It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, sitting in the backseat, even with the windows rolled down. "Thanks for warning me," I said.

"Did you get a phone call from someone you love?" Cousins asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Your dead wife?"

"Yeah..."

Cousins turned his focus on me like a teacher with a problem pupil. "I'm not sure who actually called, or who doped your food in the jail," he said. "We suspect there are a number of agents in California, and elsewhere, working to intimidate us or kill us."

"So why didn't I shoot you?"

"Do you remember, you answered once and got an empty line?"

"Yeah."

"That was me," Cousins said. "The night before, when I brought dinner and dessert, I sprayed some bacteria on your cheesecake, harmless, but infected by my own special phages. I hoped they would give you at least partial immunity against later attacks."

"Jesus H. Christ," I said. I folded my arms over my stomach and felt like curling up and pulling a blanket over my head.

"Ideally, I would have given them forty-eight hours," Cousins said, so matter-of-factly my fists clenched. I had to hold back from striking him. "By the time you were in jail, you were less than half-protected. When I learned you had been released, I phoned until I caught you at home. You were suggestible, but you weren't their zombie yet, so I turned the tables. I ran you, in a way--gave you a list of numbers and asked you to describe the colors each one evoked. Then I told you this would take priority over everything else."

"You called me first, made me jump through some hoops--and I forgot all about it?"

Cousins nodded. He didn't seem to find any of this very funny, or even unusual. I had to put a shine on this shit and make it pretty. "You vaccinated me against mind control. Is that it?"

"Mostly" Cousins said. "It still needs work."

"And that stopped me from shooting you?"

"It was a little dicey," Banning said with a sniff. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

"You did set me up. I was a guinea pig-"

"We're all guinea pigs," Cousins said. "It was for your own protection, and ours, too. We don't know what Silk is capable of, the size of

their operations now, but at one time they had thousands of agents around the world."

I rubbed the door handle, seriously considering just getting out and walking away. But Cousins threw his arm over the back of the seat. His eyes tracked my arm to the door, and he looked straight at me and shook his head.

I released my grip on the handle. "Tell me again, what we're doing here," I said.

"Let's wait till we get to the house," Cousins said. "Tammy's laying out dinner. Clean food."

"It's quite a story," Banning said.

The gate swung open. In the road ahead, a spiked caltrops rolled into its iron sheath.

"All clear," Cousins said with a sigh.

Up the long drive, over a cattle barricade with big green transformer boxes on either side, past video cameras mounted on tall steel poles, through a no-man's-land surrounded by barbed wire, Banning drove the old Plymouth as if it were a limousine carrying heads of state.

A dark, tubby, cheerful-looking fellow met us at the Spanish-style double door, under the deep overhang of the front porch. Cousins introduced me to Joseph Marquez, our host. He wore silk pajama bottoms over a tight potbelly, had a thick-pelted chest and arms, a flowing Maharishi beard, and long, curly, jet-black hair topped by a little embroidered yarmulke. He looked a lot like Jerry Garcia. His eyes were small, amber, and shrewd, and he had expressive lips and perfect teeth.

Marquez circled suspiciously. "You check him over?"

"He's okay," Cousins said. Marquez scowled and repeated my

name, enunciating every syllable, until I wanted to curse. Then he lifted his arms in the air and shook them like a preacher getting his daily revelation.

"Damn, I know you. I've read your books. Uncommon Graves, right? Shit, a veteran! The final member of the team. Munitions, all right. Cambodia? Special Forces?"

I stared around the room with a new sense of dread.

"Welcome to the inner sanctum! Everyone's safe here. Tammy's laying out a feast."

Marquez was a director and producer who hadn't made a movie in over fifteen years. Still, he had invested wisely. His beautiful house covered three acres of leveled ridgeline above Mulholland and looked out over Laurel Canyon.

I gathered quickly that Marquez had given Cousins some money and let him set up a laboratory in the basement. But there was something else in the mix. A squib in my eclair, as it were.

Tammy joined us in the limestone-walled foyer. She was young, in her late teens or early twenties, with chocolate skin, high forehead, pulled-back Titian hair, broad hips, a slight tummy, and ample breasts. I hadn't seen her like outside of Playboy. She wore silk pajama bottoms and a bikini top that hid nada, and she hugged us all with childlike innocence and asked if we preferred basmati or wild rice.

"We're having a curry," she explained, favoring Cousins with a smile. "Joe loves curry."

"Kills germs," Marquez said with a little-boy grin.

He enjoyed my expression as I watched Tammy depart.

"No movies in development," he said, "but there's a son and heir tucked inside that amazing incubator."

"Stop it," Tammy called back.

"She's half-French and half-Brazilian. I'm half-Irish and half Spanish, a . Wow, huh? A month and a half along. How about a tour?"

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"Maybe they'd like to clean up first," Tammy suggested from two rooms away.

"That'll be good," Cousins said.

I washed off the grime of our trip in a marble-walled shower bigger than my whole bathroom in El Cajon. Two rows of adjustable nozzles switched on as I turned, stinging hot needles of water causing such a good pain I had to groan out loud. I could have stayed in there for days.

As I switched off the water, I heard a knock on the bathroom door. Cousins tossed a small plastic bottle of pinkish cream over the top of the cloudy glass enclosure. I caught it after a slippery fumble.

"Rub this on your skin when you're done," he said.

"What is it?"

"Part of being immunized," he said. "Lanolin and my own special brew."

I sniffed the cream as I dried myself. Smelled like fresh bread. I rubbed it on my arms and calves, then on the back of my neck, wherever my skin felt dry and stretched. I got dressed and joined Cousins, Banning, and Marquez in the living room.

Tammy took our drink orders as we walked through the stainless steel, copper, and granite kitchen. Overflowing flagons of India Pale Ale were recommended. I did not disagree. I walked around in a daze, clutching my glass, shoulders slumped and wearing a stupid grin. A tornado had whisked me straight to Oz.

"You did special ops, right?" Marquez asked. He put his arm around my shoulders. I don't like being touched. My comfort zone is

about two meters for anyone but Janie. "So tell me," he said. "How would you get through all my defenses, you know, just to take me out?"

I clenched my jaw muscles and told him I'd think it over.

The house was a split-level ranch design with sweeping views on all sides--through bulletproof glass. In the den--bigger than my whole lot in El Cajon--Marquez dragged the sheet off a model of his estate and swore me to secrecy, not that it mattered, he said--he was adding stuff every month. "Need to keep a jump ahead."

Marquez was a certified California paranoid.

The only entrance from the front was through a narrow defile blocked by the steel gate and protected by three razor-wire fences, a staked moat, and a ten-foot-wide electrified barrier of ankle-breaking rolling pipes. Down the cliff behind the main lot, he had laid in steel beams and sprayed concrete to protect against landslides, then studded the concrete with trip wires and motion sensors. Later, he had dug an emergency elevator shaft to the bottom of the cliff, with its own power supply and an exit in the house below, which he also owned. "Having just one exit bugged me," he said. "What if they mounted a full-scale assault from the west? Couldn't sleep nights. So I purchased the lower house and made an escape route. I store my memorabilia down there."

Video cameras swept the grounds. Two full-time bodyguards patrolled, armed with Beretta semiautomatic weapons.

Marquez took us outside to show us his garden and the dogs. He bred Rottweilers as a sideline. Some of his favorites waited their chance in kennels in the backyard. We met them near the end of the tour. With Marquez present, they were happy puppies. "If I'm not here, they go for the throat," he said, grinning like a boy with a train set. "But they respect Tammy. They roll over for her, show their tummies. Smart dogs, right?"

Marquez turned shy as he took us back into the house and led us

through his hobby room. His manly center was Tammy, he explained, but this was his "boyish heartwood," the place where he buried a million regrets and found true peace. I have never seen so many plastic models in all my life. Walls and ceiling were covered with glittering steel-and-plastic cases. Airplanes everywhere, armor, aircraft carriers, dioramas of land and sea battles. And they were accurate, too. Among the aircraft I recognized Shithooks, Spads, Thuds, and Willy Fudds with all the right markings and colors, none of them bigger than my fist.

A few spaces were left open between the cases for framed posters, lobby cards, and photos from his movies. He had written and directed three: White Lion, about a software engineer who imagines he's Tarzan; Garbage Masters, a nasty suburban comedy; and his epic, The Big Stick, a historical fantasy about early German U-boats challenging Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet.

"Not one of them was a smash hit," he said proudly. "I kept my place in this fucking town by force of will alone. And all it ever gave me back was Tammy. All right." He smiled wickedly. "Fair exchange."

Seemed to me he had made a lot of money as well as Tammy. We sat down to dinner at a rosewood table as big as my kitchen, covered with heaping bowls of sumptuous food. Marquez passed around a lamb vindaloo that easily explained all the hair on his chest. Tammy carried a tray stacked with chutneys and sauces. I hadn't eaten so well in months.

"Rob says there have been adventures," Marquez said. "Tell me. We don't get out of the house often."

Cousins began. "First, I'd like to apologize to Ben. I didn't think they'd get to him so fast."

"Silk?" Marquez asked eagerly.

"Mr. Bridger spent some time in jail," Banning said.

"Jail!" Marquez crowed. "Wow. A setup?"

Cousins nodded. "Joe knows everything," Cousins said to me. "And so does Tammy." Tammy looked down at the table. From the way

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he said it, I suspected we would eventually focus on her, and I could see she wasn't looking forward to it.

"But Dr. Cousins turned the tables and immunized Mr. Bridger ahead of time," Banning said.

"As a precaution," Cousins added. "And, of course, to protect Mr. Bridger. He knows his history, and that's important."

"You didn't trust me," Banning said, eyes darting around the table. "You wanted confirmation from another source."

"Because you're a fucking wacko," Marquez said. Banning looked resigned and settled into his chair. He had been hit with this particular bladder many times.

"We needed confirmation," Cousins agreed. "Ben had the expertise."

"But that isn't all of it, right?" Marquez said, eyes glittering. "He understands deadly force. Explosives. He's our power guy."

"Not so fast," I said. "I know little or nothing about the rest of you."

"There's nothing fair about any of this," Cousins said.

Tammy nodded as if with special knowledge. Marquez reached over and put his arm around her. "Rudy could have used some immunizing ten years ago," he said. "Silk turned him into a bigoted Nazi."

"I wish you wouldn't use that phrase." Banning's lips worked as if trying to clean a scrap of food from his front teeth.

"They didn't really change you," Marquez said. "They just brought your hatred of Jews out in the open. If Jews are so inferior, how do you explain Golokhov?" The two men stared at each other, Marquez with the wide-eyed triumph of having scored a point.