The Day Before Midnight (28 page)

“My babies, my babies,” the woman was screaming, “Oh, God, don’t hurt my babies.”

“Go after him,” wheezed Delta Three. “I don’t think I can move anymore.”

Uckley was all right. He’d been hit three times in the first burst, but the Kevlar, combined with the subsonic velocities of the silenced 9-millimeter ammunition of the Uzi, had saved him. He felt as though he’d had the shit beat out of him, which, in effect, he had, for the vests, which will stop a pistol bullet, won’t absorb its impact entirely, and the strikes had been like well-delivered punches to the midriff. Delta Three, on the other hand, was much unluckier. One of the bullets had hit him high in the leg. He was bleeding badly, even though he’d been able to fire a magazine, hitting the big one once as he ran up the steps and completely taking out the
small one at the landing where he’d stood firing randomly into the room.

“You okay?” asked Uckley. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go after the vanished big guy.

“Go after him, goddammit,” said Delta Three, busy trying to get a tourniquet around his leg. “Go, go
now
, man. I’ll be okay.”

Uckley knelt, thumbed the cylinder free on the now empty Smith, and ejected the shells. Then he dropped a speedloader into the cylinder, the six slugs held in a metal disk. He spun the release knob on the device, depositing the six 125-grain Federal Magnums in their chambers. He snapped the cylinder shut, shucked off the rain slicker.

“Here,” wheezed the Delta operative. “Take this too.” He held out what appeared to be some kind of customized .45 automatic, with a fancy wraparound rubber grip. Uckley took the new gun, wedging it into his belt in the small of his back. It was cocked and locked.

Breathing hard, he said, “Okay, I’ll go get him.”

He lurched by, but Delta Three grabbed him.

“Be careful, Uckley. There’s kids in there.”

Beth Hummel saw one of them with a big pistol like a cowboy dip gingerly through the door and peer around, his eyes wide with excitement. She could hear his ragged breathing. He seemed to pause, gather himself up. Nimbly he dashed past her, stooped to the man on the floor, satisfied himself that he was dead, kicked his rifle away, then ducked back.

“Are you hit?” he whispered hoarsely.

“My children! God, please, my chil—”

“Are you hit?”

“No. I—I don’t think so. My children are upstairs. Please don’t let them get hurt.”

“Listen, you crawl to the door and out. There’s medical personnel outside.”

“My children. Please—”

“Your kids will be all right. I’m FBI, Special Agent. I can handle this.” But she didn’t think he could. He seemed
very young and frightened. She watched him go to the foot of the stairs.

“Uckley!” The call came from outside.

The man paused. “Yes?”

“The guy’s dead in the kitchen, but so’s Delta Two; Delta One is hit. You’re on your own.”

“Check,” said Uckley. “Get the goddamn state cops here.”

She had the terrible sense of a man not wanting to do what he had to do but doing it anyway. With the gun as a kind of magic device, as if he could draw his strength and power from it, he threw himself up the first flight of steps to the landing, whirled up the second flight, pointing with his big silver gun.

Oh, Jesus, she thought, oh, Jesus, let my babies be all right.

Uckley reached the top of the stairway and looked very quickly down the hall. Using the two-handed grip, he thrust the Smith in front of him, searching for a target. He just saw doorways, some opened, some closed, all more or less dark.

They told you never, absolutely
never
, go down a hall or room to room against an armed man. Wait for backup. Always wait for backup, the guy has such an advantage over you, he can hear you coming, he can drop you anytime. Action
always
beats reaction.

But Uckley didn’t have much choice, he figured. The whole thing had teetered out of control in that first crazy second of gunfire, and now the only thing was to stay alive and not to kill anybody wrong. He didn’t really think he had the grit for this. This was supposed to be a Delta thing, all these special operators, and where were they? Out on the porch.

“Hey!” he called. “This is Special Agent James Uckley of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The house is surrounded. Give yourself up.” He heard his voice bang around the empty walls of the old house.

He thumbed back the hammer on the Smith.

Herman was hardly conscious. He kept slipping in and
out, as if the gears weren’t holding in his mind. He cowered in the lee of the doorway in Jack and Beth Hummel’s bedroom. He was trying to keep a tight grip on the pistol, a Czech CZ-75, with his weak left hand. His right was useless; the bullet had smashed into the shoulder. He was sitting in a pool of blood. His head ached; he was very sad but not especially frightened.

“Give yourself up,” the call came again.

Now, that was a laugh. He knew what he had to do. It was very simple what you did in enemy territory to save yourself the horror of interrogation and the danger of compromising yourself. You always knew.

But Herman thought, why not one more? After so many, why not one more, why not this blundering policeman who shot my men. He edged his way up until he was on his feet. He cocked the CZ. All right, he thought, all right, Mr. Policeman.

He slid to the doorway. He thought he could make out the man at the end of the hall, low. How many others would there be? There’d be hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. So many. But just one more for now. Then he heard cars pull up in front of the house, sirens blaring. Red and blue light pulsed through the windows.

He lifted the pistol with the weak hand at what might have been the man but might also, in his blurry eyesight, have been a shadow. He fired.

Uckley panicked as the bullet came plowing his way. It smashed against the wall behind him, showering him with dust. Two more shots came and he drew back. Then he plunged forward, firing wildly, insanely, six fast blasts with the Smith until he’d reached a doorway across the hall. He got out a speed loader, popped open his cylinder, ejected six shells, set the nose of the new rounds in their chamber, twisted it to free them, then snapped the cylinder shut. He got out the .45 from his belt and thumbed off what he took to be the oversize safety. It was a new gun to him; he wasn’t especially sure how it worked, and so it scared him. He peeked down the hall, saw only darkness.

“Mommy,” somebody called. “Mommy, help me.”

Oh, shit, Uckley thought. Then in his peripheral vision something flashed and he flinched, ducked back, aware from the buck and the blast that he’d fired the .45, one reflex shot (it had been so easy).

It was the mother. She’d come up the steps. He hadn’t heard her, it wasn’t his fault! He’d told her to get out. He looked at her. She’d sat down against the wall, her legs weirdly akimbo. Her head hung forward in a way no living person’s would hang. There was a lot of blood on her.

Oh, no, goddammit, goddammit, oh, shit, I shot the woman!

He stared at her, ashamed and disgusted. The gunsmoke reached his nose, acrid and dense.

I told you not to come up, he felt himself screaming. I didn’t hear you!
I didn’t hear you!

Footsteps clambered at him.

Uckley spun, dropped to a knee, found the target picture and—

It was a child on churning legs, just a small shape in the darkness, screaming “Mommy” and coming at him.

“Get back,” he shouted, because behind the child now he saw another shape from another dark doorway, leaning out with a pistol.

Uckley dived.

He hit the little girl.

“Get down, get down, get down,” he screamed, louder than she did. He hit his head on the wall, a stunning blow. His weapons dropped away. He felt the girl squirming under him. He heard footsteps.

The man stood over him.

The little girl was screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, my mommy is dead!”

Uckley held her tight to him.

He looked up.

The man, bleeding badly, stood over him. He was a heavy blond guy with a crew cut and a thick face.

“Let the kid go, for Christ’s sake, let the kid go,” Uckley begged.

The man turned and walked away. Uckley said to the girl, “Run downstairs.
Run
, now!”

He picked up the pieces, and with a gun in both hands he started down the hall.

Then he heard the shot.

“If you’ve spoken to Peter,” said Megan Wilder, “then you know our relationship became spectacularly deranged at the end. I’m not sure even yet if he did it to me or I did it to him or, out of some kind of crab nebulae of neurotic energy, we did it to each other.” She laughed ironically at the lunacy of it.

The three agents watched her without cracking so much as a snicker. She thought of them as the Three Dumb Men. They just sat there, their faces slack and dull, listening. They hadn’t even taken their coats off, and it was tropical inside the studio.

Megan bent forward, trying to find a new angle into her construction. She saw now that she had committed a fundamental design error at the very beginning. She had found the circuit board to a personal computer and loved
it:
it was so intricate, so cunning, so full of texture and meaning; and she had put it exactly in the center of the piece. Then she had painted it hot pink with a spray can. It was an inescapable fact. It was the absolute, the total, the implacable. But that was all wrong, she saw now. Then you could not
discover
the image, and meet it on your terms. Rather, it hit you in the face: it was like an ugly truth that would not go away, so obvious and pitiful that it dared you to recognize it, and made you aware of your cowardice for the fact that you could not.

“This,” she said to the Three Dumb Men, pointing to it, “this has to go. It’s too
clever.”

She pried the board off the backing, ripping her finger on a staple in the process. She began to bleed. She chucked the thing away, and it hit with a clatter in the far reaches of the room. Only the pink-edged silhouette was left where the board had been pulled out, and small specks of furry pink light, where the spray paint had penetrated. She liked it; it
was much better that way, suggestive and elliptical rather than pontificating.

Almost at once she began to feel better about the piece. Maybe she had solved it after all; maybe there was an end to the equation in sight.

“You see, he lied. I lied too. In the end I lied more than he did. In the end all I did was lie. But Peter lied first and he lied worst. Worse, he was a coward. He didn’t tell me because he
couldn’t
tell me. He knew I would hold it against him, what he did. And he was right, I would have, and maybe I would have left him. But I didn’t really and truly know until I was in love with him and we were married and the
gestalt
had just gotten too complicated and there were no easy answers.”

She paused. “He didn’t tell me, you see, because in his heart of hearts, way, way, down, Peter is
ashamed.
That’s the key to him.”

The Three Dumb Men just looked at her, with their long, glum, midwestern faces, like Grant Wood’s gothic Americans.

“So here I am, married to this bombthinker with an IQ of several thousand, whom I love so desperately I think I may die from it. But he always had his mistress. That bitch. He’d never give her up, he was so selfish. To have him, I had to have
her.
Oh, these brilliant men, I tell you, they can be real motherfuckers. So I—”

“You mean this Maggie Berlin?” one of them interrupted.

She laughed. The idiot!

“No, no, Maggie was just another screwed-up defense genius. No, it was the other bitch. I always thought of her as a woman, you see, and I still think there was sex under it all. He laughed at me, and maybe Freud is both wrong and dead, but I think there was sex under it always, all the time, ever since the start, ever since Harvard, when he couldn’t get laid and his roommate was the big stud for peace. No,
her.
The bomb. He could never leave her alone. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was his Circe, his Alice Through the Looking Glass, his Ginger Lynn. He really did love her, in his way. And so she hurt me and so I chose to hurt him
through
her. That’s the pathology of it. Surely it’s transparent. I mean, you must see stuff like this all the time?”

The Three Dumb Men were silent.

“Well, that’s context, at any rate. It enables you to understand why I was vulnerable to Ari Gottlieb.”

She bent to the piece again. She began to regret having so summarily dismissed the computer circuit board. It occurred to her that she ought to retrieve it. But she knew to do so would be to stamp herself as an idiot forever in these men’s minds. She looked at her watch. Time was flying, wasn’t it? Getting close to five. We’re all getting older until one day, poof, Peter’s Ginger Lynn goes down on her knees, opens her mouth, and sucks off the world—the ultimate blowjob. She laughed, a little more crazily than she had intended. She felt a little like crying.

“So, anyway, Peter is the flavor of the month in Washington circles because his let’s-nuke-the-Russians number is just the tune Reagan and his chums want to hear. It’s got a good beat and they can dance to it. They give it an eighty. And suddenly he’s Mr. Bomb, he has this terrible committee job, and it’s eating up his time and he’s
loving it.
I admit
it
I couldn’t handle it. And who should show up then but Ari Gottlieb. I guess if I had to design the PJM, I’d design Ari. That’s Perfect Jewish Male. I mean, he was like Alan Bates in
An Unmarried Woman
, just too good to be true. He was incredibly good-looking but not in a pretty or an offputting way. In a kind way, somehow. He never raised his voice. When he laughed—oh, listen to me, I sound like I’m in a musical—when he laughed, he really made you feel like it was you and he alone in the most brilliant private joke ever told. I liked the way his skin crinkled right by his eyes, into two little deltas, like flint arrowheads. It had a nice texture to it. He was very gentle, very confident. He wasn’t afraid. Peter was rigid with fear and guilt, but Ari was without fear. When he saw you, Jesus, how he lit up! His gift was for
focus.
He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, there was nobody else. I met him at an opening two years back.”