Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (38 page)

           
Not far along the road from the
command post the fence angled away into the woods, and Joshua strolled along
with it. There was almost a path bordering the fence on the outside, the result
of heavy traffic a few years ago by the construction crews that had built the
thing. The path was now somewhat overgrown, with tree branches intruding into
the space every twenty feet or so.

           
Joshua made his slow way along this
path, ducking leafy limbs as necessary, and every time he looked around there
were at least two olive-drab-uniformed guardsmen in sight, rifles slung on
backs. They paid no particular attention to Joshua, apart from marking his
presence; the highly visible laminated ID clipped to his jacket lapel was bona
fide enough, so long as he didn’t do anything stupid like try to climb the
fence.

           
A rock. On the ground, just to the
left of the path; the fence was to his right. Joshua picked it up, and it was
just hand size. His fist closed halfway around it, fingers splayed over the
cool and fairly smooth rounded surface. It felt good in the hand, it felt good
swinging at the end of his arm as he walked. Comforting; his pet rock.

           
He was a good twenty minutes from
the road, maybe a third of the way around the outer boundary of the plant, when
he saw, just ahead, partway up a clear slope, seated on the trunk of a fallen
tree, a single guardsman; a young guy, maybe twenty- two, pale pimply skin and
pale scraggly moustache tucked away beneath the helmet. Joshua veered away from
the fence toward this person, who continued to sit there, watching him
approach. Joshua noticed the guardsman’s eyes take in the flapping laminated
ID.

           
When he got close enough, Joshua
grinned and said, “Hi. How you doin?”

           
“Fine,” said the guardsman.

           
“I thought you guys were supposed to
work in pairs,” Joshua said. “Where’s your partner?”

           
Gesturing over his shoulder, the
guardsman said, “Way down by that stream back there, taking a crap. He’s one of
your self-conscious dudes.”

           
“Well, that’s fine,” Joshua said,
and smashed the kid in the face with the rock.

           
The kid went backward off the tree
trunk and Joshua went after him, raising the rock high, bringing it down twice
more before the kid stopped moving. Then it was the work of a moment to yank
the rifle off the limp body, roll it over, peel off its wool jacket.

           
Leaving the rock behind, carrying
the rifle and the jacket, Joshua moved quickly but without undue haste toward
the fence. He tossed the rifle over, then swarmed up the chain-link, fingers
and toes sure and fast. At the top were three spirals of razor wire. Joshua
flipped the guardsman’s uniform jacket over these, then scrambled rapidly
upward—the sharp razor wire sliced right through the wool cloth and into his
knees and forearms, but he hardly noticed—and launched himself over the top and
into the air. His stomach dropped first, and then he did, landing on all fours,
jolted but unhurt.

           
(There were also electronic sensors
in the fence, that would now tell the security people back at the command
post—and whoever might be looking at the right instrument panel in the plant’s
control section as well—that it had been breached, but Joshua hardly cared. He
was in; it was already done.)

           
Hands and knees smarted from the
fall, and the razor cuts on his limbs stung, but he ignored all that. Leaping
lighdy to his feet, he picked up the rifle, held it at a loose port arms angled
across his chest, and started to walk.

           
The land inside the fence was
manicured, but cleverly, to give the illusion of unspoiled woodland glade.
Joshua strode as though through a park, quickly out of sight of the fence,
moving steadily up the gradual slope.

           
(Deep down inside, repressed, hardly
noticeable, Joshua felt absolute terror. What am I doing? What have I done?
What’s happening to me? But these adrenaline flutters of fear were almost
completely overpowered, like a weak radio signal buried beneath a more powerful
one, overpowered by glorious feelings of pride and pleasure in his own quick
sure competence, the skill and swiftness and determination with which he moved.
But
why
? What am I doing?
Why?
Ah, but the why didn’t matter; the
dexterity, the adroitness, was all.)

           
His red-rimmed eyes surveyed the
scene with satisfaction. What a beautiful world. Where else in the universe are
there such greens? He strode up the gradual hill, feeling the young strength in
his body, delighting in it, but before he reached the crest, from where he
would surely be able to see the plant’s buildings, a man stepped out from
behind a quince bush ahead of him and said, “That’s as far as you go.”

           
“I don’t think so,” Joshua said, and
swung the rifle down to fire from the hip, quickly, effortlessly, as though
with the deftness of long practice, only to hear the
click
of emptiness.

           
The damn guardsmen! They patrol with
unloaded weapons
? What kind of
stupidity is this? The
Boy Scouts
are
better prepared!

           
(Who is that man? Why do I hate him
so? Why am I so afraid? Why am I
not
afraid? How can I stop these arms, these legs, this brain? Oh, please, please,
please, how can I
stop))

           
The man in Joshua’s path was large
and burly, with heavy shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore lace-up woodsman’s
boots, thick dark corduroy trousers, a dark flannel shirt. He seemed to be
unarmed.

           
(How did he get in here, inside the
fence? Is he one of the terrorists? What’s happening? Why do I hate him? Oh,
please, please, let me drop to my knees in front of him and beg for mercy. Heal
me. Cure me. Save me.)

           
Joshua stepped quickly forward,
reversing the rifle, grabbing it two-handed by the barrel, swinging it back and
then around, fast and hard and vicious, aimed at the man’s head. But the man
ducked below the swing, his left hand coming up, fingers snapping like a bear
trap onto the rifle butt, yanking it away as he crouched low, knees bent, and
pivoted all the way around in a tight low circle, like a stunt dancer on ice.

           
The rifle was torn from Joshua’s
grip, the front sight gouging flesh from both palms, and now the man had it and
was straightening, his jaw set, expression grim. Without a second’s hesitation,
Joshua spun to his right and ran, leaping over rocks and roots like a deer,
ducking below tree branches, swiveling this way and that through the shrubbery
like the finest running back in football history.

           
Was the creature following? Joshua
didn’t waste time looking back. He ran and ran, angling to his left, uphill,
toward the plant.

           
A clearer section, the grass longer
than the groundsmen normally kept it, the crest of the ridge just ahead. Joshua
dashed toward that height, and a sudden blow in the middle of his back, a hard
powerful hit as though from a battering ram, drove him forward and down, to
skid painfully on the grassy ground, and lie there for an instant, breathless,
stunned.

           
Many aches and pains crowded his
body, demanding attention, but he had no time. Not for the racked wheezing of
his lungs, not for the cuts and bruises, not for the grinding ache in his back
as though bones had been broken, not for the sting of tears in his red-rimmed
eyes. He rolled over, struggling upward, and saw
it,
the man, loping this way up the grade.

           
(What did he hit me with? What is he
doing? What am
I
doing? Oh, let me
out of this!)

           
“You won’t stop me!” Joshua cried,
his voice harsh and hoarse and rasping in his strained throat. “You can stop
this
thing, but you won’t stop me!”

           
“A thousand times I’ll stop you,”
the man said, coming to a stop, standing over Joshua, staring down at him with
hate and contempt. “And a thousand times I’ll give you a little lesson.”

           
The worst pain of his life seared
through Joshua, burning him, cauterizing him, arching his back, twisting his
fingers into claws. He tried to scream, but
something
was scrambling up his esophagus, through his throat, across his trembling
tongue, out ' past his stretched and grimacing lips. And out his straining
ears, out his flaring nostrils, out his staring eyes.

           
Joshua dropped back onto the ground
like a rag doll abandoned in mid-play. He was waking from a nightmare; or
into
a nightmare. His head lolled to the
right, his bleary unfocused eyes saw the rabbit bounding away through the
grass, saw it leap high and suddenly burst into flame, saw it fall to earth a
charred lump, a smoking coal.

           
He forced his neck muscles to work,
he turned his head till he stared upward. The man still stood there, huge and
dark against the morning sky, head turning back and forth, looking for
something more, something more.

           
“Help.” His voice was a croak, it
was scarcely a voice at all. “Help me.”

           
The man looked down, as though
surprised to see him there. “Yes, of course,” he said, with great gendeness,
and came down to one knee. He leaned forward, eyes soothing, arm outstretched.
His large warm comforting hand moved downward over Joshua’s face, and Joshua
Hardwick exhaled his last breath.

           
Susan awoke again this morning in
Andy's arms, and again this morning it was the most blissful possible way she
could imagine to come awake. Especially this morning. Of all times, this
morning.

           
This was the day after her FBI
interview. Identification of only two of the band of insane terrorists who had
taken over the Green Meadow Nuclear Power Plant upstate had so faj been made,
but one of them was Grigor! Susan hadn’t been able to believe it at first—not
humorous, sensible, calm, inoffensive Grigor—and even when she’d come to accept
it she hadn’t realized what it meant for
her.
She hadn’t thought about the fact that she was, after all, the person who had
brought Grigor to the
United States
.

           
Yesterday morning, she and Andy had
been eating their minimal breakfasts together—coffee, orange juice, English
muffins— and watching a special report on
Today
about the siege at the nuclear plant, when the doorbell rang. Well, no; Andy
had been watching the report, with that intense interest he sometimes displayed
and which she found so impressive, as though he were some incredibly vast
energy system harnessed just for her, and she had been ignoring the television
set to gaze around instead in quiet satisfaction at how pleasant and
appropriate Andy’s possessions looked in her apartment—they’d been living
together less than a week, and she was not at all used to it yet—and that was
when the doorbell rang.

           
They frowned at one another, in
surprise; nobody
ever
rang the bell
this early in the morning. She said, half whispered, “Who could it be?”

           
“I’ll bet you,” Andy said, nodding
at the TV set, “it has something to do with Grigor.”

           
So she was already half-prepared
when she asked who it was through the intercom and the nasally distorted voice
said, “FBI, Miss Carrigan.”

           
Two of them came up, one white and
one black, both male, both about thirty-five, both smooth and affectless, as
though they’d perfected their characterizations by watching fictional FBI men
on television. They showed identification, and asked both Susan and Andy to do
the same, the black one copying down their driver’s license numbers into a
small notebook while the white one verified Andy’s guess that the subject of
their visit was Grigor Basmyonov.

           
Susan briefly described how she’d
happened to meet Grigor, and how she’d happened to describe his case to her
doctor cousin, and at first they seemed satisfied, but then they asked her if
she could come down to the FBI office to make a statement. “But I have a job,”
she protested, feeling the first flutters of panic. “I should be leaving right
now.”

           
“That’s all right,” the black one
said. “Any time today. How about
four o’clock
?”

           
So that was agreed, and they told
her which office to go to in the building, which they said was at 26 Federal
Plaza, an address that meant nothing at all to Susan (nor would it have to any
other New Yorker). It turned out to be one of those made-up addresses, and to
actually be a building on Broadway, downtown, between Thomas and Worth streets.

           
After they left, Susan said, “You
don’t think they think I’m one of them, do you? Andy?”

           
“Of course not,” Andy assured her.
“They just want to know everything they can find out about Grigor, that’s all.
Maybe something you tell them can help them negotiate with him.”

          
“Poor Grigor,” Susan said, thinking
again how she’d abandoned him since meeting Andy. “And poor me.”

           
“It won’t be bad,” he said, stroking
her arm, encouraging her. “You’ll just tell them the truth, and that’ll be the
end of it.”

          
“I’ll hate every second I’m down
there.”

           
“I’ll be with you in spirit,” he
said, and grinned. “If that helps.”

           
“It does,” she told him.

*
 
*
 
*

           
And it did.

           
At work, Susan explained the
situation—her co-workers already knew about her connection with the doomed
Russian fire fighter, but hadn’t made the link with the terrorist in the
nuclear plant—and at four o’clock she kept her appointment.

           
Those two hours with the FBI
agents—not the original pair but three new ones, two of them women, but all
with that same impersonality—were grueling and frightening and bewildering, and
left her with a terrible case of the shakes. It soon became obvious they didn’t
actually suspect her of anything, didn’t believe she was part of some vast
conspiracy to bring Grigor Basmyonov to America just so he could run a hijacked
nuclear power plant, but they couldn’t help their
manner,
which kept signaling Susan that she was guilty, she was in
their power, her only hope was to confess all and throw herself on their
nonexistent mercy.

           
They asked a million questions, many
of them repetitive, and when at last they were finished she was as drained and
limp as vegetables that have been used for soup stock. She left 26 Federal
Plaza like a shell-shock victim, and there was Andy! Waiting for her, on the
sidewalk, on the real world’s Broadway.

           
“How long have you
been
here?” she asked, delighted and
unbelieving and warmed and restored by the sight of him.

           
He shrugged it off. “Not long.” But
he must have been there for a
long
time, to be sure he hadn’t already missed her.

           
She let it go, accepting the gesture
for the loving kindness it was, and let him lead her through a restorative
evening of a good dinner out, a movie—a comedy this time, called
Mysterious Ways
—and lovely love back in
the apartment.

           
The word “love” had not passed
between them yet. Susan was afraid to say it, afraid it might scare him away,
and maybe he too was uncertain how to move the relationship to a deeper level.
But that was all right, they had time. All the time in the world.

           
Waking this morning when the radio
alarm started playing its golden oldies—“All things must pass a-way”—finding
herself still in his arms, she smiled as she snuggled closer to his chest,
their combined warmth in her nose like the aroma of the nest: home. Her eyes
closed again. She floated with him in warm space.

           
He stirred. Sleepily, he mumbled, “Time
to get up.”

           
Oh, well; yes. Moving around,
freeing herself from the covers, she rose up onto one elbow and smiled at his
grizzly face. His eyes were still half-closed. “Still here, I see,” she said.

           
His smile was as lazy as she felt.
“I don’t disappear that easily,” he said, and tousled her hair.