Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) (9 page)

“Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

T
hough the president’s cold had advanced to bronchitis over the weekend, he remained in the Oval Office that Monday afternoon, impervious to the fever and chills wracking his body. At that moment, little else mattered but the call he’d just taken from CIA Director Don Bragg. The Israeli Mossad, with the aid of enhanced satellite imaging, had positively identified known terrorists operating at an old mining site in the Ural Mountains of Russia. American undercover operatives immediately dispatched to a local village had confirmed unusual military-type transports to and from the site over several months. None of the locals would yield more information than that, their fears worn clearly on their faces.

It was readily apparent to the agents on the ground, however, that something was being manufactured or at least assembled deep inside the mountain. Though the area appeared to be swept clean of evidence, it had taken only one empty canister carelessly discarded in a nearby ravine—and the identity of one on-site terrorist—to ignite a firestorm in the bunkers of Israeli intelligence.

The terrorist was a Palestinian associated with Volynski’s forces and possessing a near-legendary proficiency in escaping one Mossad dragnet after another. But it wasn’t the terrorist that troubled Noland most. It was the lab report on the residue inside the canister. That report, now spread before Noland, was accompanied by a hastily supplied brief on the deadly nerve agent sarin. Odorless, colorless, delivered through warheads and other explosive devices, capable of death to thousands throughout the bomb site, outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Sarin was a weapon of mass destruction now in the hands of a terrorist once complicit in Ivan Volynski’s attempt to annihilate Israel and launch serial domestic assaults on the United States. Most notably, though, satellite surveillance had detected a surge of activity at the Urals camp beginning last Thursday—the day Russian President Dimitri Gorev was assassinated.

Noland lifted his weary eyes from the reports and tracked a splinter of sunlight from the windows behind his desk to a spot on the presidential seal woven into the carpet before him. “What’s happening?” he murmured to himself. “Who are these people and where are they shipping their poison?” His eyes lingered on the seal, reading
E pluribus unum
on the scroll tucked in the eagle’s beak.
Out of many, one.
He alone held the nation’s highest office. A mere human, sweating off a fever of 101 degrees while trying to compose a proper response to one or more weapons of mass destruction possibly inbound to the land of the free.

Could the Israelis be wrong about this? Overreacting? But they weren’t known to be. They were, however, often unwilling to share intelligence. Why now? What else did they know?

The buzzer on his phone sounded. “Yes,” he answered.

“Sir,” his secretary began, “a diplomatic pouch has arrived from the Russian Embassy with an envelope inside tagged with instructions to deliver it only to you. It was marked
urgent.”

Noland rested one elbow against the desk and rested his pounding head in his hand. “It was also marked
personal
, sir,” she added.

“Bring it in, please,” he told her, still thumbing through pages on the lethal effects of sarin on the human body. “I assume security has already swept it.”

“Of course, sir. It’s clean.”

“Very well.” He hung up and slumped back in his chair, resisting the urge to retire to the residence and the soft sheets of his four-poster bed. His wife would bring him chicken soup with his antibiotics and encourage him to forget, for just a while, that he was
Out of many, one.

Rona Arant walked at her usual time-is-of-the-essence pace across the room and stood before the president, who leaned forward in his chair. “This one’s a bit different, sir. Rather awkward writing.” She extended the sealed, legal-size envelope to Noland’s waiting hand. He noted the expensive, heavy-stock vanilla linen and glanced up at her. “Was anything else in the pouch?”

“No sir.”

Noland stared at the unofficial-looking block handwriting on front of the envelope and wondered what diplomatic officer had let something like that slip by. “A courier made a special trip for this?” he asked.

“It seems that way, sir.”

He nodded distractedly and sat back against the soft cushion of his chair, every muscle in his body crying out for analgesic relief. “Thank you, Rona. That’s all. Oh, and would you bring me a couple of ibuprofen, please?”

“Right away, sir.” She quickly returned to her station outside his door.

Noland looked back at the elegant, if oddly addressed, envelope.
Of personal interest to the President of the United States.
When he pulled the single, folded sheet of matching paper from the envelope, something fell out and landed in his lap. An old photograph. Noland picked it up, stared at the black-and-white image, and suddenly lurched forward. His hand trembled slightly as he locked on his father’s stern face. He was seated on a park bench. In the distance were the Kremlin towers. Close beside F. Reginald Noland III, the late U.S. State Department’s keeper of national secrets, was a small boy the president didn’t recognize. Not at first. But something inside him began to stir. Yes, of course. It had to be. But who sent the photo?

He looked back at the single page, at the few words written in the same block handwriting …
Our papa and me.

Below that was a date written in the same hand. Yesterday’s date.

T
ally Greyson had slipped undetected through the porous membrane around the Anhinga Bay Spiritualist Camp too many times. Tonight, there would be no soft-footed retreat from the place she’d come to watch, from those who’d already claimed her mother and persistently cast their unearthly tentacles for the daughter. Once again, though, Tally would elude their security guards whose labored breath she could hear behind her, their feet thrashing against a tangled mat of dead palm fronds, their voices demanding that she stop.

How many had given chase? Two? Three? It didn’t matter. She’d just cleared the palm thicket rimming the bay. Now, her sneakered feet had found their rhythm against a tidal shore which, a couple of hours earlier, had been under water. She glanced up at a moon as elusive as she was, and in its reluctant light, sprinted like an Olympian beyond the sound of her pursuers, hugging the curve of the bay until she rounded the far point and pumped hard toward home.

Not until she turned off the beach and crossed into a blind of palmetto bushes did Tally stop to look back and listen for advancing footfalls. Except for the gentle slosh of bay surf, the night was silent again. The path ahead was as familiar to her as all the other escape routes from the camp. She plunged down the sandy ruts twisting through a dense tropical woodland that was forbidding enough by day, with its rumored rattler nests. “Only a lunatic would go there at night,” her friend Denise had declared. But Tally had found The Bog, as it was known locally, benign compared to what lurked inside the pleasantly landscaped reaches of the camp. Besides, she’d never encountered anything remotely resembling a snake pit in the cool, seaside glade she now navigated with ease, until it abruptly ended at the asphalt road to her house.

Before stepping into the glare of streetlights, she removed the hooded, tissue-thin black shell she’d worn to the camp that night, wadded it tightly, and shoved most of it inside the back pocket of her jeans, should any out-of-breath, sandy-shoed security guards be searching the streets for her. The one they’d chased could have been a
him
for all they knew. Tally’s long brown hair had been tucked inside the hood, pulled snug around her face. Though she was twenty, her lean, straight-sided figure betrayed no womanly profile, especially in the charcoal haze of night.

Though she longed to bolt for the sanctum of her bedroom, Tally restrained herself to a casual stride, taking a full twenty minutes to reach the other half of Anhinga Bay. That’s how this small Florida town in the north Keys was divided—into two halves that equaled far more than the whole of anything normal. Anhinga Bay was like a split atom whose fission rumbled along the fault line through town, a line separating the fenced colony of practicing mediums, seers, healers, and psychic readers … and everybody else. It had been that way since the 1800s.

The Greyson home—or
manor
, as Tally’s mother preferred—wasn’t hard for anyone to find. Situated on nearly an acre, not only was it the largest house in Anhinga Bay but it was the only one outside the camp draped with dozens of Bagua mirrors meant to deflect negative forces circulating about the property, or so Mona Greyson had explained to her only child, then sixteen. But the protective shield hadn’t stopped there. Tally had watched in horror as her mother hung a boxful of Turkish evil eyes, nazars, top to bottom on a helpless fig tree near the street. “They’re talismans, dear,” her mother had said of the glassy concentric-circled “eyes” of blue and green. “They’re meant to repel The Evil Eye by looking into it head-on.”

Tally had sprung at that. “I didn’t realize we were having a problem with that. In fact, I don’t know anybody who ever has. Why do we have to be so … abnormal? And what happens if that ole evil eye gets crossed on its way down the driveway and can’t make eye contact with your stupid tree. I guess we’re doomed then, right?” She hadn’t waited around for the full onslaught of her mother’s scolding. Like always, she’d dashed for her room under the eaves of the soaring Victorian house.

It hadn’t always been this way. They’d laughed easily with each other through Tally’s childhood and early teens, relishing life in the Georgia mountains and exploring their natural wonders. They’d hiked the hills, camped beside creeks in the parks, and returned home with plans already made for their next excursion. Because Tally’s dad was often away for extended periods of time, favoring the corporate-jet lifestyle of his CEO status, mother and daughter grew into a tight team, together fighting off the abandonment and finding comfort in each other. Even when her dad died of a sudden heart attack in Hong Kong, little changed in the way Tally and her mom lived their lives in the old Georgia farmhouse. But all of that had changed when Mona went to a spiritual retreat one weekend and encountered her first medium. From there, it was a swift slide into the occult.

Now, in the wash of streetlights, Tally could see the breeze-tossed eyes of the fig tree just ahead. She hated their mocking, their fraudulent stares. The only thing they deflected was her, every time she returned home.

Tally crossed the street and cut through the pines scattered down one side of the manicured grounds, her mother’s valiant attempt to create her version of heaven on earth. As she cleared the tree line, the moon slipped from behind a bank of clouds, illuminating the gray stucco house. As often happened, Tally was struck anew by its grandeur, at the steep, asymmetrical roof that rambled over a promenade of gables, porches, and bays trimmed in gingerbread molding. In the five years they’d lived in the house, she’d never grown accustomed to its lavish form and scale. But it was the tower rising three stories on one side that had held the greatest allure. She’d wasted no time claiming the top room with its 360-degree view and privacy—sweet isolation from Mona Greyson’s growing madness.

Inside the house, Tally could see that her mother had left lights on here and there. Of course, she hadn’t known where her daughter slipped off to after dinner. She rarely knew. Tally no longer felt the need to give notice of her goings and comings. It was a sad fact that weighed heavily on her as she crossed in front of the carport and climbed the steps to the kitchen door.

There would probably be a slice of cake or pie left out for her. “Back home in Georgia,” as Tally often said, mother and daughter used to bake together for whole days in the big country kitchen with the potbellied stove. Perhaps Mona’s current baking habit was an attempt to salvage something from a better time with her daughter.

The house would be empty. Tally had just seen her mother’s car parked inside the camp. This time it was the Thursday-night class on healing, something for which Mona Greyson believed she was gifted. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays there were other classes, séances, gatherings, or volunteer services to keep her mother engaged in the work of the spirit world, but not Tally’s. As her mother sank deeper into the occult, Tally understood that she truly lived alone.

Bypassing the peach cobbler on the counter, Tally grabbed a bag of chips and a can of root beer from the pantry and started up the stairs. A rapid ascent up three flights of steps four or five times a day had produced the strong legs Tally needed to flee trouble.

She opened the door at the top of the tower, closed it behind her, and plopped in the middle of her bed with her unhealthy snack. Since she’d returned home, her diet was just one more irritant that sent her mother into fits of admonishment. “Not good for me?” Tally had responded once. “When you sit out there at night in the woods with a bunch of crazy psychics waiting for some dead person to show up?”

Tally picked up the phone and speed-dialed her best, probably only, friend in this town. Denise Northcutt and her mother had arrived at the Greyson home with casserole in hand the day Tally and her mother moved in. The Northcutts lived just two doors down in a modest coquina-rock house surrounded by royal palms and lots of boys, all of them Denise’s brothers. Her dad was the associate principal at the regional high school and a deacon at the local Baptist church.

Denise picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Tally. Tell me you didn’t go there tonight.”

“To the loony farm? Sure did.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing you want to hear about.”

“Did they chase you again?”

“Of course they did. They must think it’s the same thrill-seeking boy they’ve chased off before.”

Denise laughed at that, then shifted to another topic. “Tally, when are you going back to school?”