Agents of Darkness Read online

  Truskett said, “So to speak, Hugo. A security detachment –”

  The word ‘security’ appeared to act on Fletcher like a convulsant. With a sudden chopping motion of his hand through the burnished air, he forced Truskett to leave his sentence unfinished. Fletcher gazed from the porthole in a manic way. Sun, glittering on water, made him blink rapidly. “This place give you an impression of isolation, Senator?”

  “I’d say that.”

  “You casually parked your car. Strolled right up on the dock. Stepped on board. Just you and me and the lake and some trees, right?” Fletcher turned from the porthole. “Right?”

  “Right,” Truskett said.

  “Wrong wrong wrong. Oh, very wrong.” Fletcher broke open a new beer. “There are four men concealed out there. You wouldn’t notice one of them, Truskett. They’re hidden in trees. They’re on the other shore. They’re lying in reeds. They have one function.”

  “To protect you.”

  “You’re a quick study.”

  “I didn’t see them,” Truskett said.

  “Damn right you didn’t,” Fletcher said. “You noticed one of them, I’d have his ass.”

  Truskett looked suitably impressed, although he was anxious to be gone from this place. He wasn’t happy in nautical situations.

  Fletcher said, “Security! I know security, Senator! I can give it or I can take it away. I can order it in place or I can disperse it.”

  “Dispersal is what I have in mind,” Truskett said.

  “Doubtless.” Fletcher waved the hand that held the beer. “You don’t have to spell it out any further, Senator. No names. That’s not how I play marbles. You think careful is just a word, don’t you? You say things like Oh, be careful or Let’s do this in a careful way, don’t you? Horseshit. To some of us, Senator, careful’s a way of life. Careful’s a goddam religion. You don’t bandy it round. You handle it like goosefeathers.”

  Truskett was quiet for a time, pondering Fletcher’s relationship with reality.

  “I know the identity of the candidate,” Fletcher said. “I know he has a cadre in place. It can be rendered ineffective, at least for a short time.”

  “Can this be achieved without, let’s say, difficult questions rearing their ugly little heads later?”

  Fletcher said, “Anything can be achieved, Senator. Nothing is impossible in my line of business. I have networks you wouldn’t begin to understand. You wouldn’t want to.”

  The Senator felt the boat shiver just a little, knocked against the pier by some mild chop. “About this foreigner who has entered the country …” he said.

  “You want him to have a clear run at his target, correct?” Fletcher asked, although it wasn’t exactly a question. “You don’t want him impeded. You don’t want a manhunt. He should be allowed to complete his task here. Right?”

  “I see that as the general goal.”

  “Easy,” Fletcher said in a casual way.

  “I’m glad you think so, Hugo.”

  “In fact, Senator, I already set a few things in motion just after you called.” Fletcher was quiet a moment, looking dourly satisfied with himself. “We’re quits. Account settled. Okay?”

  “As you say.” Truskett stood up. He had one more request to make. “The woman …” He was briefly uneasy. He thought he saw a tiny smirk on Fletcher’s green-tinted face, and he didn’t like it. “I don’t want her hurt in any way. Not in any way.”

  “She’ll be safe,” Fletcher said. “I assure you.”

  “Thank you, Hugo.” Carolyn’s image drifted before Truskett. He wondered if obsession had a cure.

  “One final thing, Senator. The assassin. Disposal after completion?”

  Truskett made a brief affirmative gesture of the head: the execution order. How simple. What scant involvement he felt.

  Fletcher said, “I wouldn’t want any misunderstandings. Loose ends. I like things tightly wrapped.”

  “Yes,” said Truskett. “I can see that.”

  The Senator made his way out of the cabin and stood, a little unsteady, on the deck. He looked across the lake. He saw no sign of life, no evidence of the men Fletcher said were hidden in the landscape. The world seemed quite empty, save for himself and Hugo.

  “Jerry Slotten’s a dear friend of mine, Senator. I’ve always thought he was the best candidate for the job,” Fletcher remarked.

  Byron Truskett clambered up to the jetty. A sliver of wood punctured his thumb. Pressing the throbbing thumb against his lower teeth, he looked back down into the boat and said, “He’s the only candidate now, Hugo.”

  Because it was dark in the back of the van, Teng had no notion of time or distance. He’d lain down among some packing material and tried to sleep, but what he kept coming back to was the sight of the girl’s face in the window of the house in Dallas. He had brought sorrow to her; he’d scarred her because of sins her father had committed. What justice was there in that? You didn’t seek revenge against the innocent, the relatives of the guilty, those who survived. The argument for vengeance was inevitably flawed. The terrorist who blew the plane out of the sky killed hundreds to get one man, and those hundreds swelled to thousands when you considered the way grief spread like water disturbed by a seabird’s claw, a small ring, a larger one, then others larger still. A great pool of suffering – and for what principle? What point?

  He closed his eyes. He forced the joints of his fingers into the sides of his head until there was pain. He pushed so hard it seemed the skin would surely be pierced. He felt the rage of his blood, his pulses driven. How could he deliver himself from grief? from guilt? A child’s face in a window. Was anything worth that expression of terror and loss?

  He felt like a blinded animal inside a sweltering trap. Somewhere on the outskirts of Dallas – Teng recalled a sign that said Balch Springs – Johnny Ko had driven his pick-up into a garage and both men had transferred to this large furniture van. Ko, who was driving, had instructed Teng to get in the back, where it smelled of cardboard. Empty crates and boxes slithered here and there. Plastic packing pods spilled from sacks and attached themselves by static to Teng’s clothing and the hairs on the backs of his hands. It was as if lifeless white leeches clung to him. He turned on his side, drew a flattened cardboard box beneath his head, but comfort was out of the question. The van rocked, swayed, sending reverberations through his bones.

  He sat upright, jammed himself in a corner, fought against the depression that assaulted him. To detach yourself was the only way. To remain disinterested. He thought of the dark swarming with police cars. He envisaged Galloway, strangely dogged even in his inebriation, as if some corner of him were always sharp and sober, some inviolate place in his brain forever absorbing information. Where was Galloway now? Looking for me, Teng thought. But what did Galloway know? Had he learned of the connection between Costain in faraway Manila, Railsback in Dallas, and Laforge? Suddenly it didn’t matter what Galloway knew or didn’t know. Teng would finish what he’d begun, without opening the awful door that allowed emotions to gatecrash, he’d go through events the way Baltazar had planned them. He didn’t exist except as an agent of vengeance. What did the expression on a young girl’s face matter? What concern was it of his to realise that for the rest of her life the girl would carry in her memory the echoes of two shotgun blasts?

  The van shuddered over what felt like a series of metal rails, and Teng was thrown to the side, rattling his head upon bare metal. Pain flashed briefly; small meteorites sparked in the blackness. He moaned, rubbed his skull gently, changed his position. He tried to imagine himself elsewhere, but it was hard at first to force his mind beyond some vague images of Baguio, a mist rolling on dark green hills, and a few poorly developed pictures of Manila. Then they became clearer, like Polaroid photographs flooding slowly with colour.

  Years ago, in the company of Joe Baltazar, he’d walked through the sombre, overwhelming streets of Intramuros, the Spanish walled city within Manila, a place smelling of aged sto
ne and death, holy relics locked in glass cases, crannies out of which enormous wooden saints regarded you with the benevolence the pious keep for the profane. He remembered gazing from an open window into a courtyard below and seeing barefoot kids beg coins from a middle-aged American couple, the man in a plaid jacket, the woman in bermuda shorts and orange chiffon scarf. The more the Americans refused, the harder the kids persisted. A conflict of wills, Teng had thought at the time. Now he saw it as a collision of economic cultures, the needy interacting with the fortunate, the hungry with the providers, the tugging of small brown hands on seersucker sleeves and a silk blouse, the shrugs of the American couple as they tried to liberate themselves from an uncomfortable situation. As the new overlords, they’d come to see the relics left behind by the previous colonists of the Philippines, not to be waylaid by two tiny brown goddam nuisances. The kids pursued the Americans all the way across the courtyard until finally the woman relented and opened her purse, drawing out a handful of coins and bestowing them on the boys even as she kept moving away. Her husband harangued her. Don’t encourage them, honey. That’s the last thing you want to do. Neither American understood a simple fact: begging was no longer a stigma in Manila, it had become a tourist industry, like weaving, leather shoes, handbags.

  Remembering Manila disturbed him. He had the unwelcome instinct that it would be a long time before he saw the city again. The return trip was something that hadn’t been discussed with Joe Baltazar. Teng assumed Joe had made arrangements to get him home, if not to Manila – where his situation might by now be thoroughly compromised – then to some other part of the archipelago, Northern Luzon, perhaps, or Palawan, even Mindoro. Uncertainty possessed him. Momentarily he experienced a panic growing out of the notion that Joe Baltazar hadn’t made plans for his return, that he’d be abandoned here in America. And then what?

  No. Baltazar wouldn’t desert him.

  He wondered what Joe was doing now. Waiting, living anonymously, with worried impatience, in some narrow room at a pension house in Manila, newspapers scattered on the floor beside a small electric hot-plate on which he brewed coffee, a fan that turned slowly in a window. Waiting for the end. For the completion. For the guilty to be dead and buried.

  The van stopped. Teng heard the door of the cab slam shut. Then Johnny Ko unlocked the rear of the vehicle and told Teng to come out. The place where Ko had parked was brown and still, a wilderness in the slatted early daylight, a flat stretch of dry earth, here and there a feeble shrub casting insubstantial shadows. How far had they come from the expansive conurbation that was Dallas? Teng wondered.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “We wait,” Ko said.

  “For what?”

  “The airplane.”

  “I knew nothing about a plane,” Teng said. But why should he be surprised by any of Baltazar’s arrangements now?

  Ko gazed up at the sky. In silhouette, there was nothing oriental about his features. He might have been a drugstore cowboy with his wide-brimmed stetson. Teng wondered about the depths of Ko’s assimilation into a culture he’d been obliged to learn. Had it come to him easily? Perhaps America was something you absorbed, a medication, a bromide; the faster you absorbed it, the faster it worked. You toiled hard, and you dreamed, and if your goals were prosperity and comfort you had a good chance to achieve them.

  Prosperity and comfort. Teng thought these words rang like two unfamiliar bells in the distance. But people like Ko and James Honculada and Freddie Joaquin obviously understood the sweet little melody they played. They knew the bells. They knew the tune. They’d heard the music of America – at the cost of forgetting the simpler native songs of their upbringing.

  “Why are you helping me?” Teng asked. “You like America. You said so. You make money here. You’re happy. So why are you running this risk?”

  Ko tugged on the brim of his hat, a gesture he might have learned from a western movie. “It’s not so hard to figure. I don’t owe nothing to the guy you killed. What difference did he make to my life? He didn’t come in my shop and buy stuff, did he? Joe Baltazar, now, he’s a friend. He asks me for some of my time, I give it. Joe’s enemies are mine too. I look at the situation, I don’t see any real scary risk in it for me, if you want the truth, so I help out. There’s no mystery, kaibigan.”

  Teng silently watched the sun rise on the flat landscape. Already the day’s warmth was evident. He stretched his arms. He was hungry, but he knew the sensation would go away if he didn’t think about it. He had been hungry before in his life when Teresita hadn’t been able to afford basic foodstuffs like rice or fish. Hunger clawed for a while, then receded.

  He gazed into the sky, saw nothing. He didn’t come in my shop and buy stuff. This line echoed in Teng’s head, a distillation of a philosophy he found hard to understand. Railsback wasn’t a good customer, therefore his death was of no importance to Ko. Capitalism. America. The Dollar.

  “Look,” Ko said.

  Teng stared into the cloudless span of sky. The plane was barely a fleck, like a flaw in your retina. The sound of the twin engines was low and rasping, growing louder the more the small craft dropped in the sky and came down, mosquito-like and frail, toward the place where Ko had parked the van. Teng thought of a kite as he observed the aircraft shudder through a layer of clear turbulence – paper stretched between wood struts, played out on a length of string and the wind’s whim. Grey-skinned, a faded number on the fuselage, the plane kept descending, and when it hit the ground some quarter of a mile away it raised devils of dust that were instantly scissored by the propellers and dispelled in fantastic patterns.

  “Your plane,” Ko said.

  The craft skidded slightly to one side, then rolled to a halt a hundred yards from the van. Small shrubs blew sideways in the breeze, disturbed in their tenacious somnolence.

  Teng, whose life had become filled with entrances and departures, took Ko’s extended hand in his own and shook it a moment.

  “So,” Ko said. “I don’t know where you’re going next, but good luck.”

  Teng walked toward the small plane. The propellers were still now. Sun glistened against the fuselage which Teng saw had been patched here and there with fibreglass. At one time or another this slight craft had been in some kind of collision. It wasn’t an idea Teng intended to entertain for long. He thought of heights and far horizons, propellers beating air, the upward rocketing of turbulence. Flying wasn’t his favourite means of transport. He stopped, turned to look back. Johnny Ko was already inside the van and wheeling it around in a storm of brown dust. Brown dust and farewell.

  Weary, feeling depression force itself back into his head, Teng climbed up into the cockpit on the passenger side. He glanced at the pilot even as he reached for his seat-belt buckle in the manner of the obedient passenger who knows his very life depends on the flying skills of a complete stranger. The pilot, a straw-haired man, an Anglo, said nothing. Teng looked out of the window, imagining that the expression on his face might, to an imaginative onlooker, bear some slight resemblance to that of Railsback’s daughter, frozen behind the pane of glass in the house in Dallas.

  At seven-twenty a.m. Pacific time, Clarence Wylie stood in Eric Vanderwolf’s living-room, where he’d been summoned by a phone-call just before dawn. Retired, Clarence was under no obligation to comply, but some old nerve in him seemingly still responded to Vanderwolf’s edicts, a conditioned response he hadn’t yet expurgated. Vanderwolf wore striped pyjamas and a robe the colour of burgundy. His slate-veined feet were bare inside his leather slippers. He walked up and down the enormous den of his large house whose windows had what avaricious realtors called ‘spectacular’ views of Los Angeles. Little of spectacle could presently be seen. Already a tide of malodorous smog was rolling complacently across the city.

  Clarence Wylie listened to the slap-slap made by Vanderwolf’s leather slippers and gazed at the illustrations that adorned this panelled, masculine room. Western oils, cowboys on frozen horses p
erched on the snowy banks of an icy creek, badmen with Pancho Villa moustaches. These paintings had titles like Man and Beast Defeated by Winter or Wranglers Working at Sunset. They were photographic and sentimental, and not to Clarence Wylie’s taste.

  A child cried in some recess of the huge house. Vanderwolf said, “My youngest. Twelve. She has nightmares.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “She dreams she’s being attacked by sea-horses, of all things. What I did was to put an aquarium in the kid’s room,” Vanderwolf said. “I filled it with sea-horses. You don’t face your fears, you don’t overcome them. I keep the aquarium next to her bed. It’s lit all night long so she can see it. She can hear the pump running constantly. Those sea-horses are always right there.”

  “I see,” said Clarence Wylie, though he really didn’t. “Why did you call me down here at this time of day, Eric?”

  Vanderwolf turned from the window, his hands clasped behind his back. “Don’t trifle with me, Clarence. You know better than that.”

  “I still don’t follow,” Clarence said.

  Vanderwolf’s great white brows came together in a fierce lock and the shallow scar that creased his right cheek deepened to a small trough as he scrutinised Wylie. “I was under the impression you’d retired, Clarence. I was under the impression you’d given up the right to use office facilities.”

  Wylie suddenly knew where this was leading, and he didn’t like it. Obviously he’d been reported by one of the anonymous courtiers in the Vanderwolf palace. How could he have deceived himself into dreaming he’d walk away clean? He tried to remind himself that he’d left the Bureau, he was no longer Vanderwolf’s minion. He’d taken his pension and quit. Vanderwolf had no hold over him, not now. But some ghost of a grip remained, and it made him apprehensive.

  “So what makes a retired agent ransack the data bank, Clarence? Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Didn’t you stop to consider the fact sooner or later I know everything that goes on in my own territory? What the hell does a retired agent want with privileged information, for Christ’s sake?”