I wondered at the enormousness of my stupidity in having sent him off to bed. "You're perfectly safe," he had said. Perhaps it was just a poor choice of words, indicating that he was there to protect me from myself, my mind, my imagination that had run wild today.
Or had it? I had never completely believed that, and with almost autonomous calm, I floated slowly over to the window to stare at the pond. The moon shone on the surface, sending orange ripples across it though nothing else moved. It was picture perfect, except something looked off center that made me want to back away without reason. It was more an instinctive thing—the same instinct that had me shooting pictures of strange men and a water park in Griffith's Landing. I found myself moving closer to the glass, even putting my hand out to it, to stare without swaying. Water doesn't move when there's no wind. When I last looked, it was mirrorlike—
A round object broke the surface of the water. A pair of shoulders. I jumped back and threw a hand over my mouth. My next instinct was to keep from screaming again and disrupting the sleep of four sick people over a hallucination.
I saw an arm reach up off the phantom in the water, and I ripped myself away, running into the corridor. I stopped an inch from Scott's door, my chest cluttered with so many emotions that I could barely make out the doorknob. But the strongest impulse was suddenly not to bother him. He wasn't my father, and when we all stopped to remember it, he wasn't a nurse either. I was entirely my old self at the moment and could have dove under his blanket, my head in his chest, and refused to ever come out. But I fought it, blindly making my way to the stairs and taking them down with fumbling steps. If I didn't see what this was for myself, Aleese would sit on my chest all night tonight and taunt me.
I expected to find Mr. Montu on the couch, but he was gone. The front door was wide open. I stared into the pitch black of the dining room, knowing Marg lay two rooms beyond it, and to that spot in the parlor where I'd stood with Mrs. Starn, telling her that if I saw a ghost I would laugh at it. That had not turned out to be true, but with the door wide open and a missing Hodji—
"...if one of us got picked up by a ShadowStrike operative—God forbid, but they're close by somewhere—"
My fears of terrorists in this world grew worse than my fears of ghosts, and the question suddenly changed. Are they drowning Mr. Montu in the pond? I only took one step toward the dining room before I stopped again, staring into the darkness. Is someone there? I heard breathing ... rustling. Marg? Or have they carried her off, too?
My instincts broke for the outside, like an animal's, where I could more easily get to an escape route, and I ran, for the first time in months, toward the trail to Henry's cabin, knowing all the while I would never make it that far in the dark of night.
I passed the little trail that forked off to the pond, but I'd only taken a step past the fork when I froze, hearing voices. Shadows of men in a huddle came up the trail. The moon illuminated similarities to some of the men on the boardwalk—dark hair, dark eyes. The whites of their eyes flashed in the moonlight. They had seen me.
My ICU scene flashed through me from when I couldn't move, couldn't run, couldn't even breathe on my own. I dropped into a dead faint on the ground, only I never passed out. I hoped to use one of the most basic instincts known to man—playing dead.
Footsteps approached, and I heard the ancient languages used by Aleese during her morphine madness. She was standing by my feet, plain as day, shaking her head and saying, "You're such a rabbit. How is it you're mine? Get! Up!"
But it was too late. A man approached dripping water, cold, icy water drops ... his face horrifying, even though his eyes are kind as he lifts my head.
"Oh, Miss Cora! It is damp out here! Why you makes to come out from your bed?"
And then Mr. Montu's voice. "You sons of bitches. I'm beating both your asses."
"Don't listen to his filthy talk," the creature said, rubbing my hair like it was gold. He had trouble breathing. "He speaks dirty, like the American cowboy. You don't know who I am, do you?"
FORTY-THREE
SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
MIDNIGHT
PORCH
THE SIGHT OF HODJI CARRYING CORA across the grass sent me flying off the front porch. I was not even sure I had heard her get up. I wasn't exactly awake until I was halfway down the stairs. The sight of the two guys who followed Hodji left me frozen at the bottom step, my brain in some godforsaken scramble mode.
"Cora's hallucination," Hodji spat out and moved quickly past with her. Marg was in her bathrobe, holding the door.
I'm slow. I thought two guys in Griffith's Landing had kissed the monkeys, by the looks of them. But then, no one who'd been infected from Griffith's Landing would be smiling. These two guys were laughing.
The first guy stopped in front of me. "You're Scott."
"Right."
"I'm Tyler." Before I could drop dead, his scabby face lit up with excitement. "We are in so much trouble." He giggled wickedly.
National lie. Historic lie. I could only imagine the incredible tale behind this.
The Kid was more sober. His huge eyes rolled down to my feet then back up to my eyes. "I speaks to you when you make the sleep. At St. Ann's. Um, hi, um ... I get excited and my English not much very good."
I thought the better of shaking their crusty hands but couldn't help the rest. I threw my arms around their thick jackets and wet hair and hugged them like I'd known them my whole life.
"I'm dreaming this," I said, and my voice broke.
Hodji must have laid Cora on the couch, and I heard him say to Marg, "They're on the porch. Please make sure they're alive... because I get to kill them later."
"Oh ... no dream." Shahzad breathed, pulling back from me. "Nightmare."
I collared them both with a laugh that bounced off the moon and brought them inside. Marg kept telling everyone to hush, not to wake Rain and Owen.
She leaned over Cora, stethoscope in her ears, saying, "...only me in the dining room tying my robe. This house is perfectly safe, for the hundredth time—"
Hodji lowered himself onto the loveseat and threw his head back. He rubbed his bruised face until I nudged Marg, thinking maybe she should look at him and I could take Cora. But when he took his hand from his face, he looked surprisingly alert, and his report was alarmed but calm, considering.
"They went seventeen hours without eating. They've been sleeping in a car. And today they ate junk food. They went swimming in the pond to bathe village-style, only now they stink."
My overly keen sense of smell detected pond scum.
"What kind of junk food?" Marg asked, as the stethoscope flew back into her pocket. She ordered organic food for us. When no one answered, she left the room.
Tyler crept over to the chair out of Hodji's reach, but Shahzad didn't look so afraid of the guy. He plopped down beside him on the loveseat.
"Draw the drapes," Shahzad said at nobody. "And shut the door, so he can makes to yell." Tyler leaped up to shut the door.
"Just shut up! Give me some silence," Hodji said, and at the same time groped for the Kid's scabby hand and pulled it into his lap. He stared at the ceiling, huffing.
But his silence was interrupted by a knock at the door Tyler had just closed. I opened it. Rain stared in. "Who's yelling? Is Daddy okay?"
"He's not even back yet," I said, watching her eyes bug. "Go help Marg."
She wasn't as slow as I was. "Oh. My. God. The TV news thinks—aren't you dead? What's all over your skin?"
"Go. Carry some plates. They need food." I shut the door in her babble to get her moving.
With all the curtains drawn, Tyler edged up beside me. His eyes locked with Cora's and his grin spread slowly again.
"The famous, the photographed, the one-and-only Cora Holman. The goddess. Be still my heart." He laid a speckled hand across his chest, and considering he looked like hell and smelled worse, it was a riot. I kept from laughing, though, in deference to Hodji
's heart attack in progress.
Tyler approached her cautiously, glancing back at me. "Can she see me now? She doesn't think I'm a spook, right? Hodji told us about the spook thing in the basement. Mostly in Punjabi, but I got the gist of it." He turned back to Cora. "I'm sorry we broke in on you today. We had to get to the computer we saw them bring in here. We needed printouts and an IP address. We were trying to be so quiet about our thieving. Problem? Everything dangerous that I do... makes me laugh."
From yet another high-pitched giggle that exited him into the drapes, I knew the tularemia hadn't affected his vocal cords. Cora tried to sit up, and he fumbled with the pillows behind her, proposing matrimony, confessing to sleeping with her Newsweek photo under his pillow. I finally tugged his jacket, since she looked freaked out, and let my familiar face catch her eye.
I asked all the questions. Did you fall? Hit your head? Any bruises?
No, no, no. Her legs had just given way. She was fine.
"How'd you morons get the pass code to the basement?" Hodji asked the ceiling. "I can't wait to hear this one."
"It works on a computer chip. We're hackers." Tyler shrugged. "You want my secrets? Henceforth, they come with an invoice."
I finally decided to start with the obvious. "Uh, you guys. Your funeral is being televised. Can I ask ... what's going on?"
"Don't!" Hodji held up a warning finger at Tyler's grin. "I'll tell."
He leaned forward, staring deadpan at the floor. Shahzad edged away from him, his eyes rolling in some sort of nervous horror.
"I knew you guys weren't dead the minute I got to the burning house. With my face in five pieces, I still thought to check the garage. Your mom's Audi." He jerked his head at Tyler.
Tyler brought the keys out of his jacket pocket, waggling them for me and Cora, but tensely, like he might have to jump back farther at any moment.
"Firemen must have thought the police impounded it when she was arrested. No one asked. I flipped my creds on the fire chief, telling him word had to go out that you were dead, in the name of national security. He did his duty, even brought out a couple of body bags on stretchers for the TV crew. I can't imagine what the hell was in them. Your mom's bone china, maybe?"
"You finally saw it my way," Tyler said.
"You forced my hand! My life is a shambles, thanks to the two of you," Hodji insisted. "I had to lie to my squad, say I had ID'ed the bodies—after I flashed creds on the coroner, too. The only way I would lie to my squad was if I resigned. They may accept that resignation yet. Wait until Alan gets back here and sees the likes of you."
"Hodji, VaporStrike was on his way to the house," Shahzad interjected, his English suddenly becoming clear as he unwound. "We had no choice."
"You could have contacted someone after you escaped the house!" Hodji insisted.
"On what? Our cell phones burned," Shahzad said.
"How about a phone booth?"
"Oh. And we would shock Americans with our most charming appearance. Tyler's car have the dark glass windows. My only option is to make for you today's e-mail." Shahzad inched away from him again. "Forgive us for waiting so long. We had no intelligence to offer until this afternoon. Plus, we were angry with you—"
"You had. No intelligence. To offer." Hodji slumped backwards to stare at them incredulously. "I want you two to understand something. You are not intelligence vats. If you had any idea of the grief you laid on the New York squad ... Mine wasn't the only resignation offered. I think there were four, total. Including Miss Susan—"
Shahzad flinched. Obviously, this agent was important to him.
"God knows they need every agent right now. I haven't slept, conjuring up all sorts of nightmares. The downstairs of the house didn't burn so badly. All your medication was right there on the counter, and your asthma canister was in the middle of the kitchen floor, Shahzad, black as pitch. As far as I knew, you had the clothes on your back, no money, no medicine—"
"We get more medication very quickly," Shahzad said, unlacing his fingers finally to pat Hodji's shoulder. "You should not worry about us."
Hodji's incredulous gaze turned to him. "What'd you do, hack into the CVS computer system and rewrite your own prescriptions?"
"Mm, not CVS. They have big, bad firewall ... nasty firewall."
Hodji held up a hand like he didn't want to hear any more.
The door opened. Marg and Rain came in carrying plates. Rain must have woken Owen with this piece of juicy news, and he carried a pitcher of water, his eyes swollen but alert.
"Hi!" Tyler grinned at them, obviously loving this. "What's up?"
"'Sup?" my brother responded, and laughed in a way I hadn't heard him do in months.
Tyler took a plate Marg handed to him, dropped down to sit on the floor, and landed the plate on the coffee table. He bit into a drumstick, rolling his eyes heavenward and staring at Rain while he chewed. "So. This is the famed 'yellow-haired female.' That is totally what my roommate calls you." He gestured with the drumstick. "I was just making a big deal of Cora before you came in here. See, Shahzad comes from a country where if you stare at a woman's ankle, your parents will smack you. And no girl has ever taken any interest in me, obviously. Let's just say"—he turned to me with a smirk and a cheek full of chicken meat—"we're infatuated with your womenfolk."
"Tyler, do you ever shut up?" Hodji asked. Shahzad was turning quickly to stone, which got me biting my lip. "I was in the middle of a lecture."
"Hodji, you won't be mad anymore. Honestly. When can we tell you what we got today?" Tyler giggled.
Hodji shot up straight. "Never, that's when. It all goes down the toilet, and I don't care what it is. You're two boys. You're not two computer chips."
"Boys, schmoys," Tyler griped back defensively. "Hamdani is not a boy. I'm not a boy. You want us to act our ages? Really? What's your pleasure? You want us to ... snap each other with towels in some locker room and talk about what great movie we saw on Friday night? You want us to slip Scott, here, a few bills so he can get us a little buzz down at the liquor store? You want us to go out cruising in my mom's Audi? It's a convertible! Hey. Maybe we can get in a drag race and a fistfight. Maybe we can get laid in the back seat—"
"Oh ... he makes to speak dirty before the women." Shahzad stuck his fingers in his ears and squinted his eyes totally shut, though he never stopped chewing his food.
Hodji drowned them out. "I want you to ... read the classics! Go to Princeton!"
"Maybe we'll get around to it when we're done doing what we need to do now." Tyler gestured at Shahzad with his drumstick again. "We're graduates of the School of Double Dealings and Internet Hard Knocks. I feel good. For once. So lay off, maybe."
Hodji pulled his cell phone absently out of his pocket again, staring at it for calls missed, I supposed. His own son had not called, I took it, by the way he tossed the thing onto the couch. Spoiled. Parents can wind up dead, and then you got nothing, and in the vast majority of cases, something is better than nothing. I looked over at my brother, who was watching Tyler totally, like maybe he finally understood something.
Shahzad took his fingers out of his ears, and hearing nothing from Tyler, took another chomp from Marg's organic drumstick. They ate like I've never seen people eat. Marg went to get them seconds of macaroni and cheese.
I sat down beyond Cora's feet and asked a question. I couldn't help it. "That e-mail this afternoon was from you? About fires on an island?"
"Fires of Magog, yes," Shahzad said. "That message was an e-mail signature my father used to send off to Hodji in Karachi. If dangerous extremists come and we want more security before scripting them? That was one of several e-mails we make. I knew he would know it, would know we were close by."
"It sure fits the situation," I noted incredulously.
"Yeah. I thought of that. That's what made me laugh the first time." Tyler went off in high-pitched giggles again, looking apologetically at Cora.
Hodji tried one more time. "Scott. Te
ll these boys they need to go to college and put all this on hold, and ... act normal."
Since my own history of "normal" was a lot like what Tyler had jokingly described, I finally said, "I think you love them. Hence, I think you're playing typical parent. But not much in this room right now is typical." I kicked Tyler in the back with my foot—not too hard, but to keep him from rolling out some inappropriate victory laugh. He didn't.
But he still took advantage. "Okay, Hodji. If you don't want to hear what we have, I'll just tell Scott. Okay?"
Apparently, he really wanted Hodji to hear, because he got up and left his food to pull me up again and look me in the eye. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Scott. Pulling the drapes was just a formality. VaporStrike is in Texas tonight. Omar sneaked across the border this morning, and VaporStrike is picking him up—in a blue Camry rental car in back of the Burger King in Amarillo, Texas, at 2 a.m. Scott. How do you like them apples?"
My eyes drifted to Hodji, whose jaw was somewhere low enough that I was afraid he'd drool. In one fluid movement he picked his cell phone off the couch and hit three numbers.
Rain piped up finally. "Who's Omar? Wait. Maybe I shouldn't ask."
"Yeah, maybe you shouldn't." Tyler giggled.
Hodji held out the cell phone like he himself didn't want any part of it. Tyler took the phone and walked out into the corridor. I could only hear, "James Imperial? Hey. It's a blast from your past," before he closed the door.
Hodji turned to Shahzad with a gesture of confusion. "You can go with him, too, talk to the big guns. I'm out of the game. I don't want in. If something like this can happen to the two of you—thanks to bureaucratic nonsense—I'm not playing."
Shahzad looked alarmed. "Does James Imperial know that we're alive?"
"He does now."
Even I flinched, putting myself in Imperial's shoes. He'd probably spilled a massive obituary to Dateline today.
Shahzad breathed in awe. "Hodji. He will surely have your badge."
"I gave him my badge. I'm going to go work as a farm hand in Egypt. I don't even want to buy a farm. Too much responsibility. Do I look bothered right now? By James Imperial?" He actually looked pretty calm beneath his swelling.