Authors: Mortal Fear
Lenz is shaking his head.
“You can see the rest. Dad had to put up the farm as collateral. Carter was president; interest rates were twenty percent. When Dad finally told my mother how things stood, she didn’t hesitate to sign the papers. But it almost killed her. Her father had never believed in borrowing money, and she didn’t either. I mean
never
. Dad worked harder that year than he ever had in his life. He was nearly fifty then, and he was working hundred-hour weeks. Seventy-two-hour shifts in emergency rooms out of town. Seven months into it, he had a coronary. He survived, but the cash dried up. I worked, my mother worked, but it wasn’t any good. The people we leased to had their third bad year, and we lost the farm.”
“All of it?”
“We managed to keep the home place. Where my wife and I live now. Everything else the bank took. They put it up for auction, but somehow the bank president himself bought it for about half what it was worth. He was a smug, redneck son of a bitch named Crump. He
loved
taking that land. He was about sixty-five then.”
“How did this affect your mother?”
The memory of my mother in those years is something I would prefer to forget. “She became a ghost,” I say softly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A ghost of herself.”
Lenz nods silently.
“So you can imagine what happened when I arrived home from college four years later with my honors degree in finance and announced my intention to roam the country playing guitar. They weren’t exactly thrilled.”
“Yet you did it anyway.”
“Not immediately. For a couple of weeks I just moped around. Then I got mad. I saw that their whole view of the world had been warped and beaten down by bastards like Crump. And worse, that it was going to affect my whole life if I let it.”
“Did you confront Crump?”
“What good would that have done? I had no leverage, no power. I packed up my clothes, my textbooks, and my life savings—five grand—and took the Amtrak to Chicago. One of my professors wangled me a job at a company with seats on the Board of Trade. After a week of trading for the company, I started trading for myself. And I was
fearless
. I can’t explain it. I was trading like I played music, purely on instinct. Balls to the wall, sometimes risking everything on single trades. I’d have a stroke if I tried that now. I’m a system trader—I cover every conceivable angle before I make a move. But back then I was high on rage. Everything I’d ever learned had somehow been recalled and slaved to my anger. I was like Mr. Spock possessed by a pissed-off Captain Kirk. A fucking superman.”
My pulse races just remembering that rush.
“The market was different then too. Especially the S&P index. You could leverage your position to an unbelievable point. It was like showing up at the Indy 500 with a Ford Pinto, handing them your keys, and them saying, ‘Son, these Pinto keys qualify you to drive a Maserati for the duration of the race. Of course, if you wreck the car, you’ll have to pay for it, but we’ll worry about that when it happens. Please try not to kill yourself.’ And then they let you drive out onto the track.”
“And you won the race?”
“I kicked ass, Doctor. After five months, I resigned from the firm, and a twelve-hour train ride later I was back in the Delta. I went straight to the bank and asked to see Crump. I must have looked like shit on a stick after that train ride, but he didn’t bat an eye. He was past seventy by then.
“I told him I wanted to buy back our farm. Crump said the land wasn’t for sale. I told him I’d give him a good price. He told me not to let the door hit my ass on the way out. I knew what fair market value was, so I named a figure double that—four times what he’d paid for it. Crump said no sale. I was starting to lose my temper, but I didn’t show it. I told him he ought to be sensible, that everything had a price. He told me that wasn’t always the case.
“That stumped me. I’d been relying on his greed, and he’d made a statement that indicated I might have misjudged him. He was staring at me the way a hunter looks at a treed coon, and I decided then that my only chance was to go for broke. I told that son of a bitch I’d pay him four times market value for the farm—an
eight hundred percent profit
—but that the offer was good for only sixty minutes. I said I’d be back in one hour and if he wanted the money he’d better have the papers ready. I walked out to a cafe, had three slow cups of coffee, took a leak, and walked back to the bank.”
“And?”
“And Crump had his lawyer and two witnesses and the contract sitting there waiting for my signature. After I signed the papers, he told me I was the dumbest egg sucker that ever walked through his door. I said maybe I was, but that I had ten thousand bucks left and I’d have given him that and the shirt off my back for that land, and I hoped he died a damned lonely death.”
Lenz has turned his head to me. He is staring with new eyes. “Is that story true? It sounds like something from
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”
“An R-rated version, maybe. It’s true all right. Life doesn’t give you many chances like that.”
He nods. “Life didn’t give you that, Cole. You took it.”
“A barber drove me out to the farmhouse. Mom was in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cold cup of coffee. When I laid that deed down on the table in front of her, she stared at it for nearly a minute. Then she looked up and asked me if it was real. If it was
real
. When I told her it was, she broke into pieces. She just . . . it was too much. She was shaking and crying and trying to hug me, and right then . . . goddamn it, I knew what it felt like to be a man. You know? I finally understood that being a man means taking care of the people you love, no matter how you do it. Even if you have to die to do it.”
“How did your father take the news?”
“I guess relief was the main thing. For four years he’d lived knowing he’d failed my mother and would never be able to make it right. My getting back the land changed things for the better, but a lot of damage had already been done. Dad had spent four years thinking he was worth more dead than alive to the people he loved. Business-wise, his life insurance policy was about the only thing he’d done right. He figured dying was the only way he could take care of his own. He’d started drinking heavily. It wasn’t a perfect happy ending or anything.”
Lenz raises a finger and points to a turn in the road at the limit of his high beams. “But the best ending possible under the circumstances, in my view. You have my respect, Cole.”
The Mercedes takes the curve with the grace of a racing hound and glides toward a lighted gatehouse in the distance. “A lot of men go through life the way your father did.”
“Silent desperation, right?”
“Thoreau knew a thing or two.”
“Actually that’s James Taylor. Thoreau said
quiet
desperation.”
Lenz snorts. “My mistake.”
The Mercedes stops at the gate long enough for a uniformed marine to come to the window, check Lenz’s pass, and wave us through. Before we’ve driven fifty yards the rattle of gunfire rolls out of the darkness. I feel as though we’re moving through a ghostly skirmish in these historic Virginia woods, but it must be marines on night maneuvers. After we pass a second gate, a complex of lighted buildings much like a college campus appears. Lenz picks up his cellular and hits a speed-dial code, mutters into the phone, then hangs up and makes a sharp turn off the main drive.
“Hostage Rescue touches down in Dallas in twenty minutes,” he says. “They’ll be at the apartment in thirty-five, maximum. Strobekker’s still on-line.”
I shudder with the sudden exhilaration of impending action. “This is unbelievable.”
Lenz nods. “And we’re going to have a front-row seat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait.” He stops the Mercedes near the rear of a parked semitruck and looks at me. I hear a heavy metallic
ching,
then watch in amazement as the rear panel of the semitrailer rises into the roof and dim red light bleeds out around the silhouette of a man. I have only seen him once in my life, but every fiber of my instinct tells me that black shadow belongs to Daniel Baxter, chief of the Investigative Support Unit.
“We drove all this way to get to a
truck
?”
Lenz chuckles softly. “Don’t say that word anywhere near the people you’re about to meet. They call this vehicle Doctor Cop. For MDCP—Mobile Digital Command Post. You’re about to see interactive media like you never imagined, Cole. As close as the FBI ever gets to Hollywood.”
CHAPTER 18
The silhouette at the back of the truck does belong to Daniel Baxter. After shaking hands with me, he leads us into the strangest environment I have ever entered. The interior of Dr. Cop—the Mobile Digital Command Post—feels like a mobile home from some world’s fair exhibition fifty years in the future. It is long and narrow and stuffed to the ceiling with rack-mounted shock-cushioned computers, CRTs, satellite receivers, surveillance gear, and pale technicians with bona fide nerd packs in the pockets of their short-sleeve poly-cotton shirts.
A constant thrumming vibrates the floor of the command post. Soft radio chatter emanates from several sets of speakers, none of it in sync. I assume the nerds are somehow following all of this. Baxter leads us along a cramped walk space to a curved bank of video screens. Most are blank, but two show black-and-white views of what appears to be a detached apartment building much like the ones I lived in during college.
“Is that it?” Lenz asks.
Baxter nods. “Two apartments per unit. Strobekker is six seventy-two. Six seventy-three is empty, thank God.”
“Is that a live feed?” I ask.
He nods.
“The resolution’s unbelievable.”
“Digital video. We’re getting it encrypted over a secure channel.” Baxter points at a screen. “Notice the windows of the apartment? Covered with aluminum foil on the inside.”
“Bad sign,” says Lenz. “How long until HRT gets there?”
“Touchdown in five minutes at Love Field. Another ten, give or take, to get on site. The complex is about halfway between Love and Dallas–Fort Worth International, just one in a sea of complexes. Anonymous as you can get.”
“Anything I can do before Hostage Rescue goes in?”
Baxter shakes his head. “He’s using the only phone, so we can’t call and ask him to come out. I don’t think I would anyway. He might do the hostage.”
Lenz nods. “Mr. Cole and I need to speak privately. Any chance?”
I can’t believe Lenz is this persistent. Baxter motions for us to follow him through a narrow door at the end of the aisle. Beyond it is a dim room with six bunks shelved up the walls in groups of three and a microwave kitchenette between.
“I want you with me when they go in, Arthur,” Baxter says. “If our UNSUB is as smart as he’s been so far, he may catch on and barricade himself.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” says Lenz.
When the door closes after Baxter, the psychiatrist takes a seat on one of the bottom bunks, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lights one, which must be breaking about a dozen rules in this high-tech government vehicle. No alarm goes off. He blows smoke away from us and says, “You talked your way in. Let’s finish up.”
“Doctor, nothing I could tell you has anything to do with the EROS murders.”
“Then the sooner you tell me, the sooner you’ll be in the clear.”
My eyes remain on his face, but my mind is far away.
He takes another drag in silence, then gets up from the bed and squats before a small refrigerator. The opening door fills the room with sickly fluorescent light. “Eureka,” he says in a deadpan voice. “It seems that Daniel’s boys share your taste for orally administered carcinogens.”
Lenz holds a pink Tab can covered with icy condensation over his shoulder. I take it, pop the top, and suck down half its contents in four quick swallows. The peppery sting of caffeine-spiked carbonation burns my gums and throat and makes my eyes water. I feel twice as good as I did ten seconds ago. I want to tell Lenz that there is no secret, that I’ve never done anything to really be ashamed of, but of course that would be absurd. He knows there’s something there. He knows there’s always something.
“You still don’t understand what’s happening, do you?” he says, sitting back on the bed with a bottle of Evian.
“I know a woman’s life is at stake.”
His face is a gray outline behind gray smoke. “That’s not what I mean. Something’s eating you up inside, Cole. I’d say it’s been eating at you for a long time. You
need
to tell me this thing. Don’t you feel that?”
The maddening thing is that Lenz is right. I don’t especially want to tell
him,
but lately some part of me has been bursting to rid itself of this psychic weight.
“Relax,” he says. “I carry more secrets around in my head than any ten priests. There’s hardly room in there for sins like yours, between the rapes and the child abuse and the murders.”
“None of those give you leverage over me,” I point out, my voice brittle.
He smiles a little at that. “You think I don’t have leverage now?”
I shrug.
In that moment Lenz’s eyes look older than any I’ve ever seen. Older than the eyes of crooked black women in the Delta, older than the eyes of men who’ve survived combat. “It’s your wife’s sister,” he says softly. “Isn’t it.”
No feigned reaction will deceive those eyes. Fury at Miles boils like acid up into my chest.
“Don’t blame Turner,” Lenz says gently. “He doesn’t even know he knows. I think he’s half in love with the girl himself.”
I say nothing.
Lenz takes a drag from his cigarette. “I know you’re no murderer.” He laughs. “Your sense of guilt is far too well developed for that. What do you think? I’m fishing for information to ruin your marriage? To force you to work for me? Like the threat of arrest or ten years of tax audits wouldn’t be enough?”
He stands suddenly and pats me on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Cole. Let’s go watch some TV. One way or another, everything’s going to look a lot different in a few minutes.”