Puppets (28 page)

Mo finished, "I'm sure Bushnell does know something about an affair, that he had just then put together who his dead wife's lover was. I think he realized it's the mysterious Monday-afternoon client. I tried to push him, but he wouldn't give me any more. I'm not sure how to follow up, but it's definitely something we'll work on."

Rebecca gave an appreciative whistle. "I don't think most people realize how much practical psychology goes into police work."

Mo shrugged. "There's something else we should talk about."

"Which is—?"

"That the puppet-maker and his puppets are only one danger to us. Maybe they're not even the worst."

"What are you talking about?"

"Biedermann. Zelek. No, listen to me, Rebecca. Yeah, they want to protect the public, but more important, they want to keep a lid on the whole problem. We've stumbled onto it, I think Biedermann was serious when he said he'd kill me if that's what it took to keep me quiet. Probably he has license to do so, some national security authorization. Ordinarily I'd say, yeah, he's the guy we go to with this. But I'm thinking, what if Biedermann or Zelek get too worried about us, start feeling too exposed—"

"Oh, come on! You're being paranoid. They'd never . . . do that!" But she didn't look like she believed herself. He just looked at her, let her think it out. Suddenly she was afraid again, he saw.

She gave it another moment, looking down at her hands, putting her chin in one palm, moving around with a fatigued restlessness.

The city outside the windows was dark, and the contrast with the brightness in here gave Mo the sense of being on a island. No, more a sense of defensive enclosure. A sense of siege.

Rebecca fidgeted around a little more, then looked at him seriously. "Funny how the thrill of the chase kind of cools when you're the one being chased, huh?"

35

A
N HOUR LATER, Mo reluctantly got up to leave. They kissed each other good-bye. Their first kiss, a solid one. Rebecca was the right height to fit perfectly into his arms, her mouth was sweet, her body an electric contact he felt all the way to his heels. Stunned, he made a brainless, blundering exit, into the sterility of the hallway. The elevator door had just slid open in the lobby when he realized,
Not a chance. Forget about it.
This wasn't working, he couldn't be away from her tonight. He couldn't let her be alone tonight.

When he knocked softly on her door, it opened immediately as if she'd been leaning against it since he'd left. She pulled him inside and the moment the door closed she came against him. Neither said anything until she broke away and started to lead him back into the living room.

"You sure you like police guys?" he asked quietly.

"Are you kidding?" she whispered. "I'm
wild
about police guys." Then she frowned a little. "Some of them, anyway." Then she smiled. "Well. This one, anyway."

When they came into living room, she turned to him again, very serious now, intimacy was serious stuff and he liked that she took it that way. He stood at arm's length from her and touched her face with his fingers, he'd been wanting to touch her face, strong-boned, honest face, good nose with character, red lips accustomed to smiling, the small sorrow in the brow above the watchful eyes now so serious. And she just stood in the charged half-lit air of her home, letting him do that, letting that be the starting place.

After a while his hand followed a strand of her yellow hair down and accidentally grazed her breast, and the gentle return pressure electrified him. She saw his breathing change, her sober eyes seeing him so clearly, and without saying anything she put an arm around his waist and steered him back into her dark bedroom. She lit a candle. She shivered as she undressed, not from cold. She turned to smile shyly, letting him see all of her,
This is me. This is who I am.
Everything about her was sweet, solid: good rhythms to her limbs and the curves of her strong thighs and the rounded fall of her breasts, and when he drew her close, she smelled like a summer field.

A long time, shy at first and later completely unabashed. At the end she finished just before he did, with a broad smile and a wave that ran up her body until she bent in an endless backward arch. The only words she said were a moment later when she felt him going over the edge, she whispered, "There," speaking of his pleasure, approving and encouraging, "there. Please, yes," welcoming him. And some half-dreaming time later, Mo lay still braided together with her, and the only thing he could consciously think was Mark Twain's story about Adam and Eve, how when Eve died, Adam wrote on her tombstone,
Wheresoever she was,
there
was Eden.
Because this had to be as close to heaven as you could get down here.

Later still, he lay on her bed, half-drowsing and watching her. She had pulled on a T-shirt and some pajama bottoms and was tidying up her bedroom. Just putting things where they were supposed to go, getting clothes ready for tomorrow. He liked watching her. When she was finally done, she dropped her pants again, and when they were around one ankle, she flipped them up with her foot and caught them without bending. Funny. A nice way of moving, graceful and unselfconscious.

This was not how he'd have wanted to begin with her. The pressure, the fear, the sense of foreboding. He'd rather have met her in a night class, say, had talks with her at the cafeteria, then surprised her with flowers. He'd have time to say the chivalrous things that came to him whenever he looked at her—you walked around with all this heraldry in you, the great longings searching for the right recipient, demanding expression. They'd go dancing at that Puerto Bdcan place in the Village, what was it called, she'd look great dancing to salsa and she certainly had the spice in her. They'd walk around in SoHo, he'd impress her by talking knowledgeably about architecture. They'd watch movies together and hold hands in the dark. They'd make love without scary shit buzzing around in their heads. They'd talk about serious things they wanted.
All my life. This
feeling. I always hoped. What really matters.

Now Rebecca was in the bathroom, humming a melancholy tune to herself. Her bedroom was pretty. She had more pictures of Rachel in here and some kid and teenage stuff that must be for when Rachel spent the night. On the bureau, Rebecca had set aside a couple of CDs Rache had forgotten on Sunday, she needed them for something tomorrow,
Remind me to take them with me in the morning, Mo.
He liked that she included him in that. As if they'd been together for a longer time. There was something
valiant
about her, he decided, this woman who had done everything wrong for her first twenty years or so and who had shown so much steel when she decided to pull herself together. Single, professional, but not a climber. Dead honest about herself. Completely committed to her daughter. For all her poise and expertise, she was definitely a mother, the way she handled Rachel. There was definitely a family feel to her apartment. To her. That was nice, the family thing.

Jesus,
Mo thought,
what's happening to me?

He lay back on her pillow, still looking over the room, sorting it out. Her pillows smelled good. Family—yeah, it was something to do with that. Rachel's eyes gazed at him, here a seven-year-old, there a ten- or twelve-year-old. Fifteen-year-olds were a pain in the ass, she'd been pretty tough on Sunday. But he'd like to try again, it would be nice if they hit it off. Maybe the kid would like seeing her mother with a guy like him.

What kind of guy was that? Like she said, a guy who chases killers, who has to look at scary, ugly things? A guy who walks around pissed off half the time, who hates his job and lives in the back three rooms of somebody else's house?

Noj not that guy. Which guy then?

The guy who really loves your mother,
he silently told Rachel's photo.
That's worth something, isn't it?

That thought sort of shocked him and he just coasted with it, felt around the edges of it, for a long time.

He woke up as the bed sagged. She was kneeling and pulling at the bedclothes. "Come on, sleepyhead," she said. "You've got to get under the covers. I can't get in when you're lying on them. Come on, Mo."

He grunted and sat up blearily. The bedside light was dimmed down. Rebecca had scrubbed her face and her skin shone. She was wearing just the T-shirt, and her bare legs were beautiful as she knelt facing him. She pushed at him until he got off the bed. When she'd pulled back the spread, he fell into the sheets again and let gravity pull him into the mattress.

She cut the light and they lay there in the darkness.

"This is nice," she said after a while.

Mo rolled to face her and laid his arm along her side, the warm, breathing curve of her ribs. He couldn't see her face in the dark, but he knew she was there, just inches away, because he felt the gentle puff of her exhalations against his cheeks. Her breath smelled like toothpaste.

Yes, this was very nice. To have someone to hold on to, some animal company in the dark. To just hold your partner, make sure she's all right, everything's all right. He hoped that by starting off on this weird foot, their time together spent working on such horrible things, they weren't ruining it for later. Setting themselves up for problems. That would be tragic.

"We'll work it out," she said softly. "Don't worry." Sometimes it was like she was reading his mind.

36

M
R. SMITH WAS WORKING out on the rowing machine in a gym he favored, a blue-collar dive on the third floor of a rundown building. It was handy to have a place in town to work up a sweat, especially one where no one from the office was likely to show up. Today he was driving himself hard, yanking the cable so that the wheel screamed. Already his sweatshirt was soaked, and a couple of guys on the stationary bikes were eyeing him with curiosity or maybe envy. It was always good to stay in top shape, but more importantly he found he did his best thinking when his heart was maxing out at around 180. All that oxygen flooding his system.

One of the most revered strategies in warfare was to pit your adversaries against each other. There was a tidy elegance to the equation, Mr. Smith felt, but in this case it was probably simply a necessity. Number Four was making great progress but was by no means ready. That left only Number Three to operate as a remote agent to neutralize Mo Ford and Rebecca Ingalls. And if it backfired, if they managed to. kill Three instead, that was all right, too. There were only two options for Three: significant conditioning reinforcement, or simple elimination. Or both. The worst-case scenario would be that Three would both fail in his mission and get caught alive, offering clever psychologists or detectives clues to his recent past.

So: If he retasked Three, he'd want to make sure that no one walked away from the encounter alive.

Not that it was always advisable to kill your opponents. Quite the contrary, it was always better to use them if possible. In counterintelligence work it was sometimes useful to tolerate an enemy mole in your midst, feeding him misinformation and observing him to learn about your enemy's intentions. In this situation, too, you could learn a lot from enemies and lever them in creative ways. That had been the original intent with Rebecca Ingalls, when she first began to deduce what Ronald Parker really was: Listen to her, use her as an ear to anticipate developments.

When he'd retasked Ronald Parker, Number Two, to go to her apartment, it was not with the intent to kill her. No, the goal had been simply to install the listening devices. And fortunately, he had indeed done so before getting his wires crossed, starting the ritual with his hostess, and getting his dumb ass caught.

Not to malign poor Ronald. He had done well—a lot better than Number Three, who was a genuine disaster, both scientifically and logistically. Mr. Smith had thought about that a lot, the mistakes he'd made with Number Three. It was important to learn from your mistakes. The silver lining here was that as a result of errors made with Three, Number Four would be the best of the lot. When he was ready.
Boom, screee, whingggg.
The rowing machine was practically shaking loose from the floor.

Mr. Smith thanked God he'd trained himself broadly in various technologies, something the overspecialized lemmings of the younger generation had forgotten the importance of. He'd built the surveillance devices himself. The bugs were nothing special, but the relay was quite clever, a solar-rechargeable sender in a box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Ronald had attached the relay to the building wall just outside one of her windows and had placed three bugs before losing his mission-specific programming. The bugs in her outlets sent a weak signal to the relay, which amplified it and sent it onward to the receiver in Mr. Smith's Manhattan apartment, only a few blocks south of hers. The tape recorder there was signal activated, turning itself on only when the relay picked up sound from the apartment. It had recorded her conversations for him to listen to after work or when he came back from Westchester.

After Ronald Parker was apprehended, there hadn't been much to review for four months. With the killer caught, the investigation closing down, her personal relationship inside the investigation ended, she'd distanced herself from the case, didn't talk much about it at home. Mainly when he checked the tapes, he'd hear her phone calls and weekend interactions with her daughter, which did little more than make him angry and miserable, remind him of everything that was denied him. But with Three coming online, the probability that Rebecca would be part of a new task force, he'd known the surveillance setup would come in handy again.

And so it had. That she was now screwing the lead investigator from the State Police was a blessing, overhearing their conversations was invaluable. Priceless. Especially given the progress they'd made.

Geppetto,
that was cute.
Hey, kids, trust me, this ain't a cartoon. This
ain't a fairy tale.

The two of them made a rather formidable team, the way they brought together very different talents and experience. Their thoughts seemed to sync. But the worst aspect of their collaboration was that they were both independent thinkers and independent actors. They were both moved by their beliefs and values, not easily deflected. In a way, it would be a shame to kill them.

Mr. Smith realized he'd picked up the tempo of his rowing, and now he deliberately checked himself. His shirt was soaked, the grip was getting slippery. The interest of the other people was more noticeable now as they watched this mature gentleman really killing the ergometer. Better to fade back into the woodwork. He slowed to a warm-down tempo and watched their eyes drift back to the overhead televisions. After another three minutes he called it quits. Best to save some energy for tonight's operation anyway.

It was nine-thirty, full dark out, but Number Three wasn't home. Typical. Three had inherited the house along with enough money never to have to work a day in his life, so he didn't have a job schedule that would allow Mr. Smith to reliably intercept him. On the bright side, though, the neighborhood adjoining the Sleepy Hollow Country Club was heavily wooded, the house surrounded by high hedges. Away from prying eyes. Mr. Smith cruised past the house to verify that all the lights were out, then turned back and pulled into the driveway. He cut the headlights and drove in the dark over the lawn to the back of the two-car garage. Neighbors couldn't see the car there, and Three wouldn't see it when he came in. You'd be able to see it from the rear-facing house windows, but Three would never have that chance.

The next step was breaking into the garage. Fortunately, the houses here had been constructed before the era when high-tech security systems were routinely built in. And Number Three, ne'er-do-well, fast-and-loose playboy, styled himself as too tough and negligent to worry about security. The back door of the garage opened easily with a locksmith's pick, and Mr. Smith slipped into the pitch-black interior. He used a penlight to look around the room, finding it just as he'd seen it last: the dusty Bentley in far bay, the empty bay Three used for his Porsche Boxster. The long workbench. The stairwell to the second floor that was once a groundsman's apartment. He positioned himself at the bottorh of the stairs and killed his penlight. Now it was just a matter of waiting. Another skill that too few people thought to master nowadays. To their misfortunes. A whole nation of softies, of slackers. People who gave so much away almost deserved what happened to them.

This was good. Got the old reflexes working again. The dark of the garage was charged with the thrill of anticipation. It might be tough to subdue Three at first, he was a big boy, but Mr. Smith had no doubt the conditioning would kick in the moment he had the upper hand. The trick would be the first twenty seconds. If it all went south in a major way, he'd just kill the little prick.

Back in the early days of the Vietnam field trials, Mr. Smith had made a commitment to understand the real conditions under which some of his subjects would have to work. Few of the other psych modelers had such a hands-on approach. They'd spent too much time sheltered in universities and hospitals and labs, they didn't like to put themselves in danger. But Mr. Smith had decided that the success of the conditioning depended upon
specificity
—and this required the psych staff to know the environment, the landscape, the stresses, the physical challenges. So he had volunteered for missions in the jungle. In enemy territory, you learned things thoroughly and fast, or you didn't survive. He intended to survive. So he worked to master his body and his fear, the art of patience, the craft of killing, the science of silence. On his second mission, he'd killed his first human being, a Vietcong guard at the outskirts of a village. It was night, and the killing had to be done silently, so he had used a knife and felt the hot wash of blood bathe his forearm as he held the guard from behind. The Vietnamese were little people but very strong, and this one had struggled until he had no blood left. Later he killed others who died more easily, but that first one was a lesson he wouldn't forget: Never underestimate the power of a person fighting for his life. It was almost supernatural.

Mr. Smith didn't mind killing. He had seen what the Cong regularly did to U.S. servicemen, and he hated them at a visceral level. His commanding officers knew this about him, and it should have given him more credibility when he began to question the direction the program was taking, some of the assignments. They couldn't doubt his commitment or patriotism. But the brass ignored him anyway, saw his doubts as "going soft." Plus it was all so convoluted, Army Intelligence working with the DIA and CIA and private scientific contractors, the fog of deniability necessary in case an edge of the project should get exposed. You never knew who your real boss was, where the center of the operation lay, whom to persuade or threaten. Everybody was the puppet of some other puppet. At some point he'd realized no one really had control of this thing.

Mr. Smith felt the sweat coming onto his temples and the small of his back. This was not productive. You couldn't let the past come back and throw you off-balance. You had to just wait, empty-headed, ready to act and react. Three could return at any moment. Unless, of course, he was off somewhere doing what was rapidly degenerating into a garden-variety act of psychosexual pathology. He was killing just women now, and he was raping them. For Three, it had turned into something like going out on a goddamned
date.
Sick fart.

A wash of headlights panned through the garage's front window, sending a jolt of high-octane adrenaline through Mr. Smith's body. He listened for the sound of a car coming up the drive but heard nothing. The lights went on by. After another minute he heard the distant chunk of a car door slamming. Just some neighbor. He commanded himself to be calm, consciously slowed his metabolism.

The pisser was that at first Three had seemed like the perfect acquisition. Physically, just the right type: big, athletic, good with his hands. Mentally, an underachiever but very bright. The only child of an older couple, thus limited family connections to interfere. Prep school in Massachusetts, so no close friendships locally. Best of all, he had demonstrated sadistic behavior and impulse-control problems throughout his youth, culminating in his arrest for a violent rape during his senior year in college, which put him in prison for six years.

Mr. Smith had acquired his subjects by scanning back issues of local newspapers, ten or fifteen years old, for the police blotter columns, and noting the names of juvenile arrests. Then he'd track prospects through the psych-treatment or juvenile-justice systems, pilfering files or hacking computers at private and public facilities, looking for evaluations that would identify individuals with the right proclivities. Then locating and observing them in their adult lives, choosing the best. It helped to have a skilled investigative staff at his disposal, who could be duped into doing some of the background work without knowing the real goal.

Number Three's parents had died while he was in prison, leaving him this house and enough money to live on without having to work.
Perfect,
Mr. Smith had thought when he'd chosen Three. Between prep school, college, and prison, the neighbors were used to his long absences from this house, so no one would notice the months spent in conditioning at Mr. Smith's lab. No job meant no co-workers to become curious about his absence on days that killings took place, no paper trail that could prove his whereabouts on any given day.

Yes, Three should have been perfect. But Mr. Smith faulted himself for overlooking the obvious: Impulse-control disorders cut both ways. They gave you a subject capable of violent acts but also one capable of throwing off programming. The sexual nature of his native sociopathology, the resilience of his narcissism. The rich kid's the-world-owes-me attitude of arrogance and disobedience.

Mr. Smith had nobody to blame but himself. He had made the stupidest of mistakes. You wanted sociopathic tendencies that you could amplify and channel, but you didn't want native compulsions so strong they could override programming—that was one of the big mistakes the program had made in Vietnam. Sure enough, Number Three had screwed up on the very first kill, taking that cleaning woman to the old power station, leaving all kinds of loose ends. The little bastard should never have hired a cleaning person in the first place, allowing outside eyes into his home.