Dreamcatcher (46 page)

Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna fastidiously by one corner, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. “Cold.”

Owen rose. “I'll get you a fresh—”

“No. Sit down. We need to talk.”

Owen sat.

“We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn't we?”

“I wouldn't say—”

“No, I know you wouldn't, but I know what went on and so do you. When the situation's hot, tempers also get hot. But we're past that now. We
have
to be past it because I'm the OIC and you're my second and we've still got this job to finish. Can we work together to do that?”

“Yes, sir.” Fuck, there it was again. “Boss, I mean.”

Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.

“I lost control just now.” Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. “I was going along, drawing the usual caricature—two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve—and I just . . . whew! I just lost it. You think I'm crazy, don't you?”

Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-God telepathy, and Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him.

“Yes, sir. A little, sir.”

Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I've been doing this for a long time—men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It's a thin line, that famous thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has
there been a cleanup job like this one . . . assuming, that is, the story of Hercules neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for your understanding. If we understand each other, we'll get through this, the hardest job we've ever had, all right. If we don't . . .” Kurtz shrugged. “If we don't, I'll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?”

Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile's mouth, at the croc's sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel—heat of the moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose's foot in the heat of the moment. And what had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe the crocodile had tired of the bird's tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws. Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz's mind, and either way it behooved him to be very careful. Careful and ready to fly.

Kurtz reached into his coverall again and brought out a tarnished pocket-watch. “This was my grandfather's and it works just fine,” he said. “Because it winds up, I think—no electricity. My wristwatch, on the other hand, is still FUBAR.”

“Mine too.”

Kurtz's lips twitched in a smile. “See Perlmutter when you have a chance, and feel you have the stomach
for him. Among his many other chores and activities, he found time to take delivery of three hundred wind-up Timexes this afternoon. Just before the snow shut down our air-ops, this was. Pearly's damned efficient. I just wish to Christ he'd get over the idea that he's living in a movie.”

“He may have made strides in that direction tonight, boss.”

“Perhaps he has at that.”

Kurtz meditated. Underhill waited.

“Laddie-buck, we should be drinking the whiskey. It's a bit of an Irish deathwatch we're having tonight.”

“Is it?”

“Aye. Me beloved phooka is about to keel over dead.”

Owen raised his eyebrows.

“Yes. At which point its magical cloak of invisibility will be whisked away. Then it will become just another dead horse for folks to beat. Primarily politicians, who are best at that sort of thing.”

“I don't follow you.”

Kurtz took another look at the tarnished pocket-watch, which he'd probably picked up in a pawnshop . . . or looted off a corpse. Underhill wouldn't have doubted either.

“It's seven o'clock. In just about forty hours, the President is going to speak before the UN General Assembly. More people are going to see and hear that speech than any previous speech in the history of the human race. It's going to be part of the biggest
story
in the history of the human race . . . and the biggest spin-job since God the Father Almighty created the cosmos and set the planets going round and round with the tip of his finger.”

“What's the spin?”

“It's a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best lies, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year. That's true. He will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have known about our pals from the void since the late nineteen-forties. We also know that Russian fighters destroyed a grayboy ship over Siberia in 1974 . . . although to this day the Russkies don't know we know. That one was probably a drone, a test-shot. There have been a lot of those. The grays have handled their early contacts with a care which strongly suggests that we scare them quite a lot.”

Owen listened with a sick fascination he hoped didn't show on his face or at the top level of his thoughts, where Kurtz might still have access.

From his inner pocket, Kurtz now brought out a dented box of Marlboro cigarettes. He offered the pack to Owen, who first shook his head, then took
one of the remaining four fags. Kurtz took another, then lit them up.

“I'm getting the truth and the spin mixed in together,” Kurtz said after he'd taken a deep drag and exhaled. “That may not be the most profitable way to get on. Let's stick to the spin, shall we?”

Owen said nothing. He smoked rarely these days and the first drag made him feel light-headed, but the taste was wonderful.

“The President will say that the United States government quarantined the crash site and the area around it for three reasons. The first was purely logistical: because of the Jefferson Tract's remote location and low population, we
could
quarantine it. If the grayboys had come down in Brooklyn, or even on Long Island, that would not have been the case. The second reason is that we are not clear on the aliens' intentions. The third reason, and ultimately the most persuasive, is that the aliens carry with them an infectious substance which the on-scene personnel calls ‘Ripley fungus.' While the alien visitors have assured us passionately that they are not infectious, they have brought a
highly
infectious substance with them. The President will also tell a horrified world that the
fungus
may in fact be the controlling intelligence, the grayboys just a growth medium. He will show videotape of a grayboy literally exploding
into
the Ripley fungus. The footage has been slightly doctored to improve visibility, but is basically true.”

You're lying,
Owen thought.
The footage is entirely fake from beginning to end, as fake as that
Alien Autopsy
shit.
And why are you lying? Because you can. It's as simple as that, isn't it? Because to you, a lie comes more naturally than the truth.

“Okay, I'm lying,” Kurtz said, never missing a beat. He gave Owen a quick gleaming look before dropping his gaze to his cigarette again. “But the facts are true and verifiable. Some of them
do
explode and turn into red dandelion fluff. The fluff is Ripley. You inhale enough of it and in a period of time we can't yet predict—it could be an hour or two days—your lungs and brain are Ripley salad. You look like a walking patch of poison sumac. And then you die.

“There will be no mention of our little venture earlier today. According to the President's version, the ship, which had apparently been badly damaged in the crash, was either blown up by its crew or blew up on its own. All the grayboys were killed. The Ripley, after some initial spread, is also dying, apparently because it does very poorly in the cold. The Russians corroborate that, by the way. There has been a fairly large kill-off of animals, which also carry the infection.”

“And the human population of Jefferson Tract?”

“POTUS is going to say that about three hundred people—seventy or so locals and about two hundred and thirty hunters—are currently being monitored for the Ripley fungus. He will say that while some appear to have been infected, they also appear to be beating the infection with the help of such standard antibiotics as Ceftin and Augmentin.”

“And now this word from our sponsor,” Owen said. Kurtz laughed, delighted.

“At a later time, it's going to be announced that the Ripley seems a little more antibiotic-resistant than was first believed, and that a number of patients have died. The names we give out will be those of people who have in fact
already
died, either as a result of the Ripley or those gruesome fucking implants. Do you know what the men are calling the implants?”

“Yeah, shit-weasels. Will the President mention them?”

“No way. The guys in charge believe the shit-weasels are just a little too upsetting for John Q. Public. As would be, of course, the facts concerning our solution to the problem here at Gosselin's Store, that rustic beauty-spot.”

“The
final
solution, you could call it,” Owen said. He had smoked his cigarette all the way down to the filter, and now crushed it out on the rim of his empty coffee cup.

Kurtz's eyes rose to Owen's and met them unflinchingly. “Yes, you could call it that. We're going to wipe out approximately three hundred and fifty people—mostly men, there's that, but I can't say the cleansing won't include at least a few women and children. The upside, of course, is that we will be insuring the human race against a pandemic and, very possibly, subjugation. Not an inconsiderable upside.”

Owen's thought—
I'm sure Hitler would like the spin
—was unstoppable, but he covered it as well as he could and got no sense that Kurtz had heard it or sensed it. Impossible to tell for sure, of course; Kurtz was sly.

“How many are we holding now?” Kurtz asked.

“About seventy. And twice that number on the way from Kineo; they'll be here around nine, if the weather doesn't get any worse.” It was supposed to, but not until after midnight.

Kurtz was nodding. “Uh-huh. Plus I'm going to say fifty more from up north, seventy or so from St. Cap's and those little places down south . . . and our guys. Don't forget them. The masks seem to work, but we've already picked up four cases of Ripley in the medical debriefings. The men, of course, don't know.”

“Don't they?”

“Let me rephrase that,” Kurtz said. “Based on their behavior, I have no
reason
to believe the men know. All right?”

Owen shrugged.

“The
story,
” Kurtz resumed, “will be that the detainees are being flown to a top-secret medical installation, a kind of Area 51, where they will undergo further examination, and, if necessary, long-term treatment. There will never be another official statement concerning them—not if all goes according to plan—but there will be time-release leaks over the next two years: encroaching infection despite best medical efforts to stop it . . . madness . . . grotesque physical changes better left undescribed . . . and finally, death comes as a mercy. Far from being outraged, the public will be relieved.”

“While in reality . . . ?”

He wanted to hear Kurtz say it, but he should
have known better. There were no bugs here (except, maybe, for the ones hiding between Kurtz's ears), but the boss's caution was ingrained. He raised one hand, made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, and dropped his thumb three times. His eyes never left Owen's as he did this.
Crocodile's eyes,
Owen thought.

“All of them?” Owen asked. “The ones who aren't showing Ripley-Positive as well as those who are? And where does that leave us? The soldiers who also show Negative?”

“The laddies who are okay now are going to stay okay,” Kurtz said. “Those showing Ripley were all careless. One of them . . . well, there's a little girl out there, about four years old, cute as the devil. You almost expect her to start tap-dancing across the barn floor and singing ‘On the Good Ship
Lollipop.
'”

Kurtz obviously thought he was being witty, and Owen supposed that in a way he was, but Owen himself was overcome by a wave of intense horror.
There's a four-year-old out there,
he thought.
Just four years old, how about that.

“She's cute, and she's hot,” Kurtz was saying. “Visible Ripley on the inside of one wrist, growing at her hairline, growing in the corner of one eye. Classic spots. Anyway, this soldier gave her a candybar, just like she was some starving Kosovar rug-muncher, and she gave him a kiss. Sweet as pie, a real Kodak moment, only now he's got a lipstick print that ain't lipstick growing on his cheek.” Kurtz grimaced. “He had himself a little tiny shaving cut, barely visible, but there goes your ballgame. Similar stuff with the others. The rules don't
change, Owen; carelessness gets you killed. You may go along lucky for awhile, but in the end it never fails. Carelessness gets you killed. Most of our guys, I'm delighted to say, will walk away from this. We're going to face scheduled medical exams for the rest of our lives, not to mention the occasional surprise exam, but look at the upside—they're gonna catch your ass-cancer
wicked
early.”