The Cyclops Conspiracy (3 page)

A cardboard shipper wrapped in black plastic sat open on the polished oak table beside the map, its contents—two simple pages—resting beside it. An overhead lamp illuminated the documents in the otherwise-dark cabin. Zanns continued, “Pettigrew’s death, though necessary, has put a crimp in our plans. Now that he is gone, we have no one on whom we can hang the blame. Fortunately, someone to take his place has fallen into our laps.”

“Who?” Fairing shifted nervously in his tall swivel chair. He drummed the armrest with his fingers and expelled a breath.

Zanns explained about her earlier encounter with Jason Rodgers. “He has no idea at the moment, but he will soon be joining our team at the Colonial.”

“He hasn’t been offered a position with us yet, Mother,” Fairing observed.

“Oh, he will be. And when he accepts, Jason Rodgers will provide us with the needed diversion in the aftermath of our decisive blow.”

Zanns studied her bastard son.
He’s holding something back
, she thought
.

“How will you frame Rodgers? We had a plan for Pettigrew. There is no time to develop a new one now,” said Sam.

“You’re wrong. I’ve devised one as we sailed. It will be crude, but it can work,” she said. “Come, and we’ll review what our colleague from the north has sent us.” Zanns turned back to the table.

She lifted the first document, an eight-by-ten, hand-drawn map. The package had been delivered by a mole Zanns’s team had recruited years ago with Hammon’s help. Without the information provided in the packages, their mission would not have been possible.

“This is the seating chart,” she said. “Note the positions of our targets. Your shots will be taken while Torpedo is at the podium. Thunderbolt will be seated—here. After he has introduced his father.” Her index finger tapped the penciled
X
. Zanns glanced at Kader, her unflappable—and also bastard—daughter.

Kader leaned over the drawing. “I will eliminate Thunderbolt. Sam will kill Torpedo, correct? Two shots, two kills!”

“Yes,” replied Zanns. She picked up the second page, a typed list of names. “This is the agenda for the event. The numbers beside each name represent the length of time they are expected to speak. This will give us an idea of when Torpedo will be in place.”

Fairing leaned in, placing his face inside the cone of light. A bead of sweat had formed above his upper lip. “And Cyclops will be ready? These shots are difficult enough. Without Cyclops, they’re impossible.”

“Cooper assures me it will be ready,” said Zanns.

“This would be an excellent chance to inflict maximum casualties—” said Kader.

“The mission is Torpedo and Thunderbolt. Do not forget that!” interrupted Zanns.

Fairing cleared his throat and dabbed the sweat from his lip with a napkin.

Zanns crossed her arms in front of her chest. “What is it, child?”

Fairing and Kader exchanged nervous glances.

“What are you not telling me?” insisted Zanns. She was answered with silence. Zanns leaned on the table, placing her weight on her knuckles, which whitened under the burden. Suddenly, her hand sliced through the air and connected with Fairing’s cheek. “Now! Sam!”

Fairing did not flinch. His eyes remained locked on the shiny wood in front of him. “Thomas Pettigrew kept a box of files,” he whispered.

“And you learned of these files when you tortured him? Before he was killed?”

Fairing dipped his head in a slow, single nod.

“Why did you not mention this before?”

“We didn’t think it important. After all, the man is dead.” Fairing lifted his eyes once again, pleading with his mother.

“What is in these files?”

Kader jumped to her brother’s aid. “He had a sketch”—she pulled up the sleeve of her sweater, revealing a small, quarter-sized tattoo on her left forearm—“of this.”

“He saw our tattoo? He knew about the Simoon?”

“He saw the tattoo,” said Fairing. “He did not know what it meant, nor anything of our true plans. We’re done with Pettigrew. It’s over.”

“It is not a good idea to pursue the matter, Mother,” added Jasmine, braving her mother’s icy stare. “It might draw additional scrutiny. The box is of no value with Pettigrew dead. There are only weeks left before we complete our task.”

“I want no loose ends. Oliver will go there when the time is right, find the box, and remove it. Then we will have—as they say in American baseball—all our bases covered. There must be no connection to our organization.” She turned to Fairing. “And nothing is over until I say it is.”

Zanns sucked in a lungful of air and expelled it. She waved away the remnants of her frustration with a flick of her wrist. It was time to plan for the coming days. “Both of you will increase your trips to the Camp. You must continue to hone your skills,” she said. Her children were top shots. But the difficulty of this mission would challenge even their skills. “Oliver will shuttle you down to the site, alternating your visits
so you are not out of town together. We must not draw attention.” She motioned toward the papers. “Have you memorized these?” she asked.

They nodded in unison. Zanns folded the documents and placed them in her pants pocket.

“Don’t you want me to burn those, Mother?” Jasmine offered. “We always destroy the documents.”

“Not this time. These will be useful later for what I have planned for Jason Rodgers.”

Christine plunged her hands into the scalding water. The pain felt good. It reminded her she was still alive. She had been numb for the last week, the last few years in fact. The last seven days seemed like seven decades.

The last guest had departed thirty minutes ago. Mrs. Liggieri had wanted to stay and help her tidy up, but Christine, needing the solitude, had practically shoved her out the door.

It had been the most challenging week in her life. Her relationship with her father had been strained, distant for some time. But his death still turned her world upside down and shook it violently. She had driven to the morgue in a trancelike fugue to identify the body. The attendant had peeled back the plastic sheet just long enough for her to nod. The bluish-white face, striped with lacerations, eyes closed. The mangy shock of white hair. Yes, it was him. Then, the attendant pulled the sheet back up and Thomas Pettigrew, the living, breathing man, was gone. Thomas Pettigrew, the father, had vanished years ago.

The meeting with the pastor about the service, the readings, and the eulogy was full of slow, painful jabs. She’d been asked if she wanted
to say a few words at the funeral. She’d declined. They had not been close. She wouldn’t know what to say. Christine spent the entire funeral service with her head bowed, unable to make eye contact with anyone. Hands patted her shoulder, gentle voices offered condolences. The pastor’s voice was nothing more than background noise.

She hadn’t experienced grief this excruciating in over a decade. It was not so much that her father was gone. No, the grief was over lost opportunities. She would never make him a doting grandfather. He would never give her away on her wedding day. He would never marvel at the success she was gaining in her career. She’d always held out a sliver of hope that their relationship would be repaired. But even that had vanished. Her tears were splattered reminders of the forever-lost milestones of her life. The only torment she’d felt that even came close to this had been over her doomed relationship with Jason.

What remained was to deal with the microscopic pittance of her father’s estate. His bank statements showed a little more than a thousand dollars in his checking account. Even less in savings. He’d had no retirement plan that she could find. The only real asset was the decaying house. All his money had been sunk into his foolish, quixotic quests.

She was his sole heir, his only offspring and only living relative. Her mother was dead, eaten away by cancer. Daddy’s only brother, Clyde, had died years ago, after being shot in a holdup. He’d never married nor had children. Christine brushed a tear from her cheek with a forearm as soap dripped from her hands. She puffed a cleansing sigh that was only partially effective. Her chest lightened, but the relief was measured in milligrams.

Like most people, her father had had a public face. The one non-family saw. He had served on the board of the Boys and Girls Club for eight years, on that of the Arts Commission for five, and had consulted for the Peninsula Agency on Aging for three. Elected president of the Peninsula Pharmacists Association, he’d negotiated with and convinced state legislators to fund the recruitment of pharmacists to the area. As the president of the Virginia Pharmacists Association, Pettigrew had lobbied hard for the benefit of pharmacists throughout the state. He’d helped kill detrimental legislation and pushed beneficial bills. They were going to honor him with a lifetime achievement award of some kind at Lily Zanns’s mansion soon. They wanted Christine to attend. She’d declined.

The private face, his naked face, was different. The real Thomas Pettigrew was a deluded man whose peccadilloes, which had reared their heads in the last ten years, were disguised and glossed over by those closest to him. Christine and her mother, naturally, had protected the public image, speaking of his shortcomings only in hushed whispers. On her deathbed, Christine’s mother had pleaded with her to make amends with her father.

Pettigrew’s unhealthy obsession crept from its cave in the years after he’d shunned his political and professional duties. After Jason had left, Christine had often listened to him like a parent listening to a child’s rants about monsters under the bed. She’d had a hard time taking him seriously. Americans never landed on the moon; Kennedy had been killed by a constantly changing consortium of killers that wavered depending on which week it was or what web site he’d come across; the Zionists were responsible for 9/11. Thomas had saved mountains of documents about alien encounters in Roswell, New Mexico, and many others.

Thomas believed lunatic conspiracies polluted every level of political life. His crusade was to tilt at the windmills, exposing the festering flesh of corruption. That he should die due to drunk driving had shocked her initially. Alcohol had been forbidden in their house growing up. But considering his other failings, perhaps that end was not that far-fetched. Though it didn’t seem to fit, perhaps he’d simply managed to hide it from her.

His singular obsession had slowly chiseled a wide chasm between them. It had ruined his business and personal finances and ultimately resulted in the sale of the Colonial to Lily Zanns, the self-made millionaire.
She had swooped in, saving the enterprise and allowing Daddy to keep his job. Christine held a soft spot in her heart for the woman.

She scrubbed a plate with the sponge, gliding it absent-mindedly over the ceramic disk. She rinsed it in the adjacent sink and placed it on the drying rack. No dishwasher tonight. The manual labor, however slight, was therapeutic.

Then, without warning, Jason’s face appeared in her mind. He had surfaced at the funeral like a prodigal son to pay his respects. She wondered if she’d invited him back to the house out of courtesy, or something deeper. Jason had mentioned that they might talk about the reason he’d left. It was what she had wanted for all these years, wasn’t it? To know what had happened. To know the reason he’d bolted so unexpectedly. A cold shiver enveloped her.

The old, deep wounds he had inflicted still hurt. As she rinsed a pot in the cold water, the memories resurfaced. Their love affair had been wild, passionate, and all-consuming.

Over the years, she had made him into an evil monster in her mind. His absence and the lack of closure caused her to fill in the blanks with malicious and heinous motives. They lived in the same area, and she often wondered why they never ran into each other, even by accident. It was as if Jason had vanished. Christine had learned to hate him. Then, with time, the hate had softened to contempt and was followed, more recently, by reluctant acceptance. She had almost gotten past the pain when he’d showed at the funeral, and she surprised herself and invited him to her father’s place.

He’d managed to salvage some honor, saving her in the dining room from her swelling sadness. For a fleeting instant, Christine had glimpsed the Jason Rodgers she’d once known. The caring, affectionate young man with whom she’d fallen in love.

One word described Jason in those days: fun. When he wasn’t working for Daddy or managing his fledgling nest egg of investments, they enjoyed day-trips and weekend jaunts around Virginia, North Carolina, and DC. He tolerated her corny jokes and playfulness with
aplomb and patience. During the drives, they discussed every topic: politics, sex, the thorny issues of male-female relationships, or situations that arose in the pharmacy. Christine expressed her thoughts and feelings, and he’d never made her feel stupid or insignificant.

To this day, that year had been the best of her life.

Then it had all changed in a white-hot flash. First, it was the hushed, closed-door meetings with men in suits in Daddy’s tiny office. She never remembered another time when Daddy had closed his door. In the days that followed, both Jason and Daddy became withdrawn and irritable, walking around with shocked, stunned expressions like refugees from a war-torn country, casting a black pall over the Colonial. Christine caught snippets of conversation. Something serious had happened. And it involved her boyfriend. Her questions were sharply rebuffed. “I can’t talk about it, honey,” her father would say, his voice trailing off impatiently.

Jason’s said, “It’s bad. Don’t ask me again!” She reluctantly complied. But not knowing ate at her. She worried for and about him. Sleep became a memory.

The last afternoon they were together was burned into her mind. It’d been a sunny Thursday afternoon. Jason hadn’t worked in three days. She hadn’t laid eyes on him in those seventy-two hours, and he wouldn’t return her calls. Technically, they were still dating, but connected only by the thinnest of tendrils. He called and said they needed to talk. A spark of hope surged in her as she waited for him to pick her up. He looked worn and tattered. Puffy circles darkened his eyes. The fun, the spontaneity, the passion—the life—had been sucked out of him.