Brainfire (36 page)

“Yeah,” Alexander said. That first cigarette: Christ, it was a killer.

“You asked Captain Ettinger about a character called Rayner, right? John Rayner? Is that right?”

Come to the point, Alexander thought. How did these small-town stiffs contrive to beat around so many bushes? It was one thing to impress them with fake FBI credentials—they looked at you like you were Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., coming down for the big kill—but it was quite another to have to deal with them.

“What's the story?” he asked.

“Some guy called Ferguson Fox called in a complaint at midnight—”

“Midnight?” Alexander picked up his watch. “Well, you guys are really on the ball. I mean, that's only just over seven hours ago. I'm impressed.”

There was a heavy silence on the line.

“I don't think your inquiry was circulated, Inspector,” the cop said. “It was only when I came on duty and saw the complaint that I put the things together.”

Give yourself a medal, Alexander thought. “What did you put together, Scully?”

“Okay. This Fox called in a complaint about your man Rayner. Seems Rayner was at his house with a woman—a friend of this Fox character's. Anyhow, Fox has the feeling that his friend, the woman, is in some kind of trouble with your man. He called in. He was worried about her.”

There was a precision here that Alexander loved. It was the geometrical exactitude of a fog.
Some kind of trouble
, he thought. Feelings. Goddam.

“Your people check it out?” Alexander asked.

“Uh-huh. As soon as I looked at it I called the number you left the captain.”

“Address?” Chip Alexander found the stub of a pencil and a sheet of Holiday Inn notepaper and wrote the address down.

“Seems Rayner and the woman left some time before the guy decided he was worried enough to call,” Scully said.

“Does your Fox know where they went?”

“I guess I don't know for sure,” the cop said.

“Thanks for everything.” Alexander put the receiver back, crushed out his cigarette, blinked into the bedside lamp. He shoved his sheets aside and, groaning in the fashion of one who would prefer to stay in bed, stepped out; he drew the draperies and looked out across the gray tide. There was the relic of some faint mist along the shoreline.

Sunlight, he thought. The new day begins. He pulled on his clothes and left the room. He knocked on the door of the adjoining room. After a moment his young colleague appeared. Dressed, shaved, keen as mustard, Alexander thought. With that kind of eagerness you had to be convinced that behind everything you did there lay some holy purpose. Maybe he was young enough to learn otherwise.

“News of our friend,” Alexander said. “Gimme a minute to grab my shoes.”

The young colleague, whose name was Love, followed Alexander back into his room. Like a shadow, Alexander thought. Like some fucking extra extension of yourself, a limb you don't need, an additional orifice somewhere on your body. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to lace his shoes. He watched Love, fretting with impatience, stride to the window, where he tapped upon the glass with his fingertips. Love turned and looked at him, and Alexander wondered if there was a hint of accusation in the expression. Maybe he blames me for failing to give the order in the coffee shop of the Ramada. Maybe that's what's bugging the hell out of him. Gunned-up and nothing to shoot. Why didn't I just give him his damn signal?

He was irritated more than a little by what he thought of as his own softness; it was like finding a shadow on your lung in an X-ray when you had assumed your body was in excellent health. John Rayner, for God's sake. Was he supposed to go through the pantomime that climaxed in Rayner's death? And the appearance of the woman—well, he could always say he'd been knocked off his stride by the way she had steered John out of the coffee shop. When you had a chit for one corpse, you didn't want to bring home two. Nobody liked that very much. Besides, Rayner was to be hospitalized; he was to be killed only in
a situation of extremity
.

One chance, John, he thought. I can't give you another one.

6.

Rayner used a credit card to hire a car from a company called Tidewater Rent-a-Car, Inc. It had taken him and Isobel almost an hour to walk from the motel, by way of back streets of quiet houses, alleys, lanes, to the office of the car rental firm, which didn't open its doors for business until eight. They had been obliged to linger in the street for several minutes before the clerk, a young woman with a painted-on face that made her appear years older than she was, unlocked the door. She immediately went into a sales performance as if her voice issued from a looped tape at the back of her throat. Rayner interrupted: it didn't matter whether the car was a subcompact, a compact, whether it was foreign or American. He settled in the end for a Pinto. The young woman walked with them across the parking lot and handed him the keys. He wondered if the car had the exploding-gas-tank option but he didn't ask.

He drove out of the lot, listening to Isobel's directions. The car was sluggish. How could he drive this damn thing to Washington in time? Work it out. From Richmond, on a good day, a day without traffic jams and accidents, it was two hours to Washington; from Virginia Beach to Richmond, if he went through Newport News, it was—what?—a hundred miles at the outside. But then he had to hope for a clear run through the Hampton Roads area; he had to hope there wouldn't be a snarl-up of weekend traffic, of station wagons stuffed with kids, moms and dads transporting their broods to sight-seeing tours of the Pentagon, the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society, or whatever other treats lay in the capital. He had to hope. And even as he thought about it he was assailed by a sense of having let reason slip, of some mental dislocation: a tightrope snapping in the mind. What I should do, he thought, is get out of this damn car and turn myself over for that period in the West Virginia facility. What I should do is let them take me.

“Turn here,” Isobel said.

He went right, remembering now the street where the Foxes lived. It was quiet and hushed and almost indifferent in its silence; gleaming cars sat behind thick trees in a state of camouflage. He stopped the motor and took the ignition key out and looked at Isobel. She was biting a fingernail.

“What now?” she asked.

He stared through the trees, trying to see the house.

Madness, he thought.
Please, Mr. Fox, it's a matter of great national importance that I take your daughter for a car ride. It's a matter, as they say, of life and death
.

“John.”

He felt her touch his wrist. He looked at her.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “That's all I want to know.”

He looked along the street. Thick trees—you could hardly see the houses.

“I need the kid,” he said. “I need to take her with me.” And he was conscious of a vaguely desperate quality in his voice, as if what he was really saying was
Why won't you fucking believe me? Why
?

“It's a kidnap now?” Isobel asked.

“Whatever you want to call it. I ask her to come, I hope she accepts.”

Isobel was shaking her head. Suddenly he was angry with her for her incredulity, her lack of faith, the strange distances in her.

“For Christ's sake,” he said. “You don't have to come along. I can drop you any goddam place you like—”

“John—”

“Say the word. Get out of the car. I don't give a shit.” It sounded, even to him, absurdly petulant, childish. He slammed his hand against the dash. What right do I have to ask her to believe in my deluded suspicions? Maybe they're all correct. Maybe I've just goddam gone and broken down and need to be tucked away in the funny place. Maybe this is what paranoia is like: shadowy hills and murky valleys in your brain, weird convictions, dizzy suspicions. Why should she believe any of it? Maybe she was just like Sally in her way—seeing Rayner as someone to be comforted, someone to be patronized.

He opened his door and stepped out. Time, he thought. There just isn't time for this goddam nonsense now. I need the kid, that's all there is to it. I need the girl. He watched Isobel shove her door open; she slammed it hard and stared at him across the roof of the small car.

“John,” she said, “I'll ask her to come. But I doubt if I'll get past her father. I doubt that really.”

He saw her move toward the trees and he followed after her into the shadows and over the lawn. The house looked squat, like something crouching, something ready to jump. He caught her up, holding her wrist, making her turn to face him. How do I look to her now? He wondered. Desperate? Deranged? Gone?

“I said I'd ask,” she said. “I didn't promise she would come.”

“I didn't ask for a promise,” he answered. “It's gone past all that. It's beyond that.”

“Jesus, John, what do you want me to do? Wrap her up in a goddam bag?
Steal
her? What do you expect of me?” She pulled her arm away and looked at him defiantly. “If you want my private opinion, I think you're living in a dream. If you want my help out of it, fine. Fine. But don't push me, John. Don't push me.”

Isobel turned away from him and went toward the house. A door was opened even before she had reached the porch. Fox stood there in shadow. All this sunlight, Rayner thought. How could you subscribe to the belief that all the things that had happened the previous night were true? Sunlight made it ordinary, changed it around, deprived it of its need for darkness. He followed Isobel up onto the porch. Fox was smiling. Why was he looking like that? Rayner wondered. That tight smug little smile—what in the name of God did that mean? Fox stepped out of shadow, his face dappled by patterns of moving leaves. Maybe he expected us, Rayner thought. Maybe the kid told him, through the psychic grapevine, that we were arriving.

“Isobel,” Fox was saying, holding her hand in a slack handshake. “And Mr. Rayner. Well, well. An early visit. Come in. Come on in.”

Effusive, oleaginous: it was scum floating on water—all the pretty rainbow colors that were pure poison to drink. Rayner entered the gloom of the house. Uneasy, anxious, hearing the girl play her flute in another room. It stopped. He could hear her footsteps now.

Fox was asking about coffee. Did they want coffee? Tea? Jasmine tea? Maybe a glass of ginseng liquid? Why the menu? Rayner asked himself. The good host, the charm; the cold eyes made huge by the glasses. Fox rubbed his hands together and smiled in the manner of someone who has won a lottery with a single ticket he has forgotten buying. It's wrong, Rayner thought. How wrong can it get?

They were in the front room now. The kid's footsteps had stopped someplace in the house. The silences were like drafts of wind. Rayner listened: the staircase creaked. He looked toward a doorway. A shadow moved in the space and Fox turned his head in that direction, as if he expected to see someone appear.

“Where's Fiona?” Isobel asked.

“Upstairs, I think,” Fox said. “Do you want to see her?”

“We'd like to take her with us for a time,” Isobel said.

“Oh?” Fox didn't seem unduly surprised. Maybe, Rayner thought, he gets requests like that all the time. We need your daughter to do one of her performances, Mr. Fox. May we borrow her?

“Where are you going?” Fox asked.

“A drive.” Isobel shrugged casually.

“Where?”

“Oh.” Isobel looked uncomfortable; a terrible liar, Rayner thought. “No place in particular, I guess.”

“You want her company, is that it?” Fox glanced at Rayner; it was shifty in its way, almost suggestive, as if the man suspected Isobel of procuring the girl for Rayner. Rayner looked at the open doorway again. The shadow was gone.

“We want her company,” Isobel said. “That's right.”

“I'll call her. See what she feels like.” He went to the open door and disappeared inside another room. Rayner could hear him calling the kid's name. “Fiona.” It didn't ring true somehow, as if he were calling for somebody he knew to be absent. It was counterfeit, a bad coin. Rayner looked at Isobel a moment. Paranoia: it grows and it grows like some weed of the mind. Finally you get a jungle. A father calls his daughter and you think it sounds off. Control, he thought. Bloody control.

He heard the flute again. A single piercing note. Isobel smiled at him in a thin way; she might have been smiling at a stranger, a new acquaintance. And then there was the sound of footsteps rushing down the stairway, and the girl, flute in hand, appeared in the door. Behind her, looming up, shadowy, was another figure that Rayner assumed mistakenly to be Fox. But it wasn't. It wasn't Fox.

“You're through, John. This time you're washed up.”

Rayner saw Chip Alexander in the doorway and, at his back, the young friend, the colleague. The girl ran across the room and stopped, almost skidding to a halt, at Rayner's side. A trap, and you walk straight into it. He closed his eyes a second, wondering about betrayal, treachery, wondering what prompted it or whether it was something that had always been in the scheme of things, wondering even if Isobel had in some way brought this situation about, betrayed him—

“All washed up, John.”

Rayner looked at the girl. What was she trying to tell him? Something. Something, for sure. A message he couldn't read. He watched Chip Alexander step inside the room.

“I'll say this, John. It was convenient of you to stop by because I was sure as hell getting fed up with the dance.”

Rayner stood motionless. You come this far and it ends like a whisper; but maybe there wasn't anyplace farther to go, maybe it was meant to be as inconclusive as a dream. What was he meant to do? Tell Chip Alexander that the President was going to be killed—
perhaps
. Show me a little hard evidence, John. Show me something I can hold in the palm of my hand. But show me.