“This guy Noie Barnum is the Holy Grail. We want him, Krill and his people want him, Al Qaeda wants him, Temple Dowling wants him, and now Josef Sholokoff wants him.”
“Why would a Russian porn dealer risk his immigration status by going into espionage?”
“Josef Sholokoff has been spreading drug and porn addiction around the country since he arrived in Brighton Beach. Why should doing business with third-world bedbugs bother him?”
“You said I was in the way.”
“Guys like you are not team players. You’re a hardhead, you don’t chug pud, and you cause major amounts of trouble. Government agencies might say otherwise, but they don’t care for guys like you.”
“What difference should that make to me?”
“They won’t have your back, bud.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I’m at a driving range. I wish I’d done more of this a long time ago.”
“When do you retire?”
“Three months, more or less. Yeah, about three months.”
“You’re retiring but you’re not sure when?”
“I’m terminal.”
Hackberry leaned forward on his desk. Before he could speak, Riser cut him off. “I used to smoke three packs a day. Five years ago I quit and thought I’d gotten a free pass. I went in for a blister on my nose last week, and the doc said it was already in my liver and pancreas and had reached the brain.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan.”
“There’s something I never told you about my history with the Bureau. You remember right after 9/11 when a planeload of bin Laden’s relatives was allowed to leave the country without being detained, except for the fifteen minutes we were allowed to interview them on the tarmac? I was one of the agents who went on board the plane. I should have resigned in protest then. But I didn’t. I’ve always regretted that. Take this for a fact. When you get to the end of the track, you don’t regret the things you did. You regret the things you didn’t do. You’re a good man, Hack. But good men are usually admired in retrospect, after they’re safely dead.”
After he had hung up, Hackberry sat for a long time in his chair, the right side of his face numb, a sound like an electrical short humming in his ear.
CHAPTER NINE
ANTON LING WOKE in the darkness to the flicker of dry lightning and a rumble of thunder that shook the walls of her house in the same way that the reverberations of aerial bombs could travel through the earth and cause a house to rattle miles away. She went to the kitchen and sat at the table in the dark and drank a glass of warm milk and tried not to think about the images reawakened in her unconscious by the thunder and the yellow ignition in the clouds.
The night was unseasonably cold, the sky churning with clouds that looked filled with soot. She thought she heard a coyote’s wail inside the wind, or perhaps the shriek of a rusty hinge twisting violently back on itself. An empty apple basket bounced crazily past the water tank in the backyard. The tank was overflowing, the blades of the windmill ginning, the stanchions vibrating with tension. Had she been so absentminded that she had forgotten to notch down the shutoff chain on the crankshaft?
She put on a canvas coat and went outside and was immediately struck by the severity of the wind and a smell that was like creosote and wet sulfur and the stench off a smokestack in a rendering plant. She hooked the chain on the windmill and realized the doors were slamming on all her sheds, a loose section of the tin roof on the barn clanging against the joists, as though things were coming apart and indeed the center could not hold. Was the odor coming from across the border, where industry did as it wished? The clouds were black and billowing and lighted from the inside, like giant curds of smoke rising from wet straw set ablaze by a chemical starter.
When would she be freed of her dreams and the sensations and shards of memory that followed her into the day and fouled her blood and made her wonder if her entire mission wasn’t that of a hypocrite? Why could she not accept the fact that amnesia did not necessarily accompany absolution?
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Pray for the maimed and the dead and ask nothing more from life than another sunrise, and maybe along the way do a good deed or two. She couldn’t change the past. Why did she have to revisit the same slide show over and over?
Gasoline and diesel, drums of it, with Tide detergent poured into the mix so that the liquid adhered to every surface it touched, a homemade form of napalm dropped end over end from a few hundred feet while tiny figures below raced from their huts into the trees or sometimes rolled burning in the rice paddies to smother the fire on their skin.
From a great distance, she had witnessed the B-52 raids in Cambodia and had heard the thump of the bombs and had felt the explosions through the soles of her shoes and had seen the surface of rice paddies wrinkle, but the tremolo that spread invisibly through the floor of a rain forest was little different from the vibration of a subway train passing under the streets of a metropolitan city. The fifty-gallon drums filled with diesel or gasoline or both were different; they were up close and personal, their effect unforgettable. She had helped slide them off the tailgate of a Chinook, had cupped her hands around their hard rims, had watched them suddenly detach themselves from the plane and drop as heavily as woodstoves through the air into a landscape of elephant grass and tropical trees and fields of poppies that bloomed pink and red against a backdrop of blue mountains. Then she had seen them explode in a village that was a resupply depot for the Pathet Lao, but also a home to people who ate monkeys and dogs and harvested rice with their hands, and who knew nothing of the global powers that had decided to use their country as a battlefield.
She went back inside the house and hung her canvas coat on a peg and checked the locks on the doors, then sat down on the side of her bed, her head bent forward, the images and sounds from her dream gradually disappearing. The wind gusted under the house, causing the floor and the walls to creak and a tin cup to topple into the kitchen sink. She got up from the bed to pull the curtain on the window just as a net of lightning bloomed in the clouds. By the corner of the old bunkhouse, she saw a shadow. No, it was more than a shadow. It not only moved; light reflected off it. She stared into the darkness, waiting for the electricity to jump in the clouds again. Instead, drops of rain began to patter on the roof and in the dust around the windmill and in the nubbed-down grass near the barn, and all she could see through her bedroom window was darkness and the sheen of rain on the bunkhouse and an empty dark space where she thought she had seen the outline of a man.
She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and reached inside it and groped under a pile of folded clothes for an object she hadn’t touched or even thought about in many months. She went into the kitchen and pulled open a drawer, and from a collection of screwdrivers and hammers and pliers and duct tape and wrenches and scattered nails, she removed a flashlight. Then she put on a baseball cap and unlocked the back door and went outside, this time without her coat.
She moved the beam of the flashlight along the side of the bunkhouse and the stucco cottage, then shone it on the railed horse lot and through the open door of the barn, the light sweeping against the stalls and wood posts inside. She crossed the yard and looked inside the bunkhouse, then inside the cottage. She searched behind the bu
nkhouse and worked her way back to the corner where she thought she had seen the figure.
The rain was ticking on her cap and her shoulders, spotting her clothes and running down the back of her neck. She walked toward the barn, the flashlight beam spearing the darkness and bouncing off the tools and dust-covered tack inside. She took a deep breath, oxygenating her blood, and stepped through the door into the heady odor of horse sweat and decayed manure and pounded-down clay that was green with mold.