The Company of the Dead (48 page)

“According to you, it is.”

“I guess so. I didn’t really mean it that way. I’m talking about some kind of resonance, like an echo.”

Lightholler had been to Flanders. He’d walked the barricades of Paris and stood among the ruins of the De Gaulle Line, where the preserved monuments of French and German tanks still faced each other across the Seine. Was there a patch of earth that
hadn’t
been contested in the history of the world?

“Let’s get you fixed up. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

Kennedy sat cross-legged on the gravel while Lightholler crouched down before him to examine the wound.

“Wait a second.” Kennedy scrambled to his feet. He walked over to the sedan and returned carrying a cloth bag. He rummaged around inside and produced a bottle.

Lightholler checked the label. Sour mash. “Antiseptic,” he said. “Good idea.”

Kennedy reached into the bag again and withdrew two cups. He winked and said, “Anaesthetic.”

“
Not
a good idea.”

Kennedy poured a small amount in each cup. He offered one to Lightholler. He raised his own and held Lightholler’s gaze. “To absent friends.”

Lightholler nodded and downed the shot.

Kennedy refilled their glasses.

“We don’t know for sure,” Lightholler offered gently.

“They ain’t here,” Kennedy said mournfully. “Enemies of the state.” He gave a dry laugh. “Dead in defence of the South. This stinks to high heaven. Stinks of Webster.”

Lightholler gave him a perplexed look.

Kennedy took another mouthful before placing his cup next to Lightholler’s. “The director of the CBI, Glen Webster. It’s his style. Maybe they’re dead, maybe they’re not, but either way, he got them. And that story about dying for the South. Redemption? That’s just him twisting the knife.”

“Why?”

“It’s clever. It shows results for the Bureau, and it pisses me off, big time.” Kennedy shook his head. “There’s been no love lost between us, as far back as I can remember, but this...”

“You’ve betrayed every ideal you ever stood for. What were you expecting?”

Kennedy frowned. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“As far as they’re concerned,” Lightholler added hastily, “that’s
exactly
what you’ve done.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hands. “They all think you sold them out. You told me so yourself.”

“Maybe, but all of this ... the accusations, the murder charges. That’s been in the works for a while. It’s proactive—almost as if Webster had just been waiting for the right opportunity to bring me down again.”

“Again?”

Kennedy picked up his cup and swished the liquor, watching the dark fluid swirl. He made a low sound in his throat. “He’s always been small time.”

Lightholler dribbled some of the liquor onto his sleeve and pressed it against the wound. Kennedy growled but didn’t move. Positioning himself to keep out of his own shadow, Lightholler picked up the kit and locked a suture into a clamp.

“Might need four or five stitches.”

“Great.”

He chose a pair of forceps and focused on the injury, seeking where the tissue was puckered up.

Kennedy said, “Those guys...”

Lightholler pulled back.

Kennedy’s eyes shone brightly. His smile was enigmatic. “Morgan. Hardas.”

“I never really got to know them,” Lightholler murmured.

“You weren’t exactly catching them at their best.”

“We can do this later, if you want.”

“Let’s get it over with. I’d hate to think we wasted all that liquor.”

Lightholler began working on the wound. Kennedy winced each time the needle broke skin, but kept still enough to permit a reasonable closure.

“Didn’t know my own strength,” Lightholler muttered at one stage, but Kennedy was someplace else. There was the occasional snatch of birdsong from the adjacent woods and a light wind was rising. The sky’s edge went from pearl grey to a fine pink haze.

“There,” Lightholler said finally. “It’s done.”

Kennedy brought his fingers up to touch the repair. Lightholler brushed the hand away.

“Later,” he said. “Give it some time.”

“Is it worthy of Michelangelo?”

Lightholler twisted his head as if inspecting a painting. “More like Picasso, but it’ll have to do.”

He helped Kennedy to his feet and they walked over to the sedan. Lightholler drove.

Kennedy’s dark mood appeared to have passed for the moment. Lightholler tried to picture Hardas and Morgan, but there wasn’t much he could dredge up to endear either of them to him. Hardas had played the thug for the majority of their brief acquaintance—drawing a gun on him at the Lone Star hadn’t helped matters. As for Morgan, he was just a fearful intellectual who enjoyed the sound of his voice a little too much; someone who’d bitten off more than he could chew.

Lightholler had called it back in New York City: they were amateurs. Yet he wondered how much they might have seen and endured since hooking up with the major’s holy cause. The answer came with a bludgeoning finality.

They died for it.

Kennedy had talked about travelling through time. The journal spoke of secret installations and of a black and silver orb, a metal crab in a coiled lair of tubes and wiring. Another world where great wars spanned the globe and rockets journeyed to the Moon and Mars and beyond. A world where a Kennedy
had
become president—yet he still died in Dallas in ’63.

So much different and so much the same. Lost in his musing, he hadn’t realised he had spoken his question aloud.

“How do we know what?” Kennedy replied. He reached for his brow but stopped short, catching Lightholler’s glare.

“How do we know things will be any better if we succeed?”

“How do you mean?”

“Assuming everything you’ve told me is true,” he said, “what makes you so sure that the other world—Wells’ world—is any better, or more justified in existing, than our own?”

“There’s no guarantee, John, but there’s one thing I’m sure of. In his journal he states that he operated on a man from his future. Our world, real or not, will be gone within the year.”

“Gone.” The entire weight of the word sank down on him. “Because of this war?”

“Most likely.”

Lightholler couldn’t help himself.
One man may start a war; it takes a few good men to stop one.
“And this war started because...?”

Perhaps Kennedy hadn’t noticed the provocation. His reply was distant and softly voiced. “I’ve wondered about that myself.” But when he turned to look at Lightholler, his expression revealed a doleful acquiescence. “What’s done is done.”

“We wouldn’t be going to Nevada in the first place if you really believed that.”

“You’re right.” Kennedy nodded slowly. “Thing is, I don’t know how to fix this. I wouldn’t know where to start. Maybe the future’s not carved in stone, but it’s out there. Do we go back a week and stop the Brandenburgs? Two years, and destroy the journal? Three, and stall Camelot? I don’t know. Go back a hundred years and deal with Wells. Nip it in the bud. Clean the slate. That’s all that makes sense to me.”

“I’ve read most of the journal, Joseph. Wells might have been misguided and he might have been insane. He might have contemplated murder, but that doesn’t make him a criminal.”

“Do you think Stalin thought of himself as a criminal, or Sorel, or Attila the Hun for that matter? Judge his actions and their consequences—not his intentions—the way you’ve judged mine. This is all wrong. I know it and you know it. Otherwise
you
wouldn’t be here.”

Was that why he had stuck by Kennedy’s side? He glanced up at his reflection in the rear-view mirror and rapidly looked away without quite understanding what had perturbed him.

“Something got stuck here,” Kennedy continued. “A record-player needle in the final groove, going round and round in circles, but never moving on.
There
, they had what we’ve only just discovered. That and much more.
They
had their final conflict more than fifty years ago and it ended in atomics. We chose to
start
ours with them.
They
moved forward. The journal is patchy, it’s the work of a madman, it describes some dark, dark times, but it’s still progress.”

“Is that sort of progress a good thing?”

“It sure beats oblivion.”

“If it was so good, why did Wells do what he did? Why did he seek to destroy
his
future?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Why bother questioning his motives when we don’t know his methods? We just have to stop him.”

“You don’t know what he did?”

“You’ve read the journal, John.” Kennedy’s reply was matter of fact.

“Most of it. I’ve read most of it.”

“The journal ends on the day of the sinking. It ends with a one-word entry. He never mentions how he actually planned to intervene. He had long-term plans for the world. The
Titanic
was just the first phase. He was just flexing his muscles.”

Lightholler hit the brakes. He swung the sedan off the road and let it idle. He looked over at Kennedy and started laughing without amusement.

“
Jesus
, Joseph, how do you expect us to stop him then?”

“I have a few ideas.”

“You know, this cryptic shit of yours is starting to wear a little thin at the edges.”

“I’m hoping we get the luxury of arguing the finer points of our mission, but for now, how about we get to Nevada first?”

“I always thought we were going to try and stop Wells on the ship. Isn’t that why you dragged me into all of this?”

Kennedy’s look was one of laboured patience, the sort he might give a child. Then he read something in Lightholler’s eyes. “John, the ship is our
last
chance. We were—” He caught himself. “We
are
going to try and intercept him in the desert. But the accuracy of the machine may be unpredictable, especially on a complete insertion.”

“A what?”

“Doc will explain that to you. For now all you need to know is that the
Titanic
has always been a contingency plan. Wells lay low after arriving in 1911. If we don’t catch him in the desert, we can be sure of finding him on the ship.”

“So I’m just part of your contingency plan.”

“No, you’re my last hope,” Kennedy replied solemnly.

“But why
me
?” He was surprised at the plaintive tone of his question. “There must be lots of guys who fit the bill.”

“You were on the shortlist of suitable candidates.”

“Suitable for
what
? Killing yakuza? Providing first aid? Hijacking an ocean liner?”

“Something along those lines,” Kennedy replied. He was smiling.

“I just don’t get it.”

“I had five guys in mind, John, all reasonably experienced, reasonably talented ... qualified in one way or another. They just weren’t
hungry
enough.”

“Hungry?”

Kennedy shot him a piercing look. “You’ve been waiting to do something like this your whole life.”

“When did you become the psychologist?”

“Tell me I’m wrong, John.”

“You’re more than that. You’re completely insane.”

“And you’re an empty, dissatisfied shit trying to escape your ancestor’s coat-tails.”

“I think you’re describing yourself,” Lightholler murmured.

“So, you finally get it then?”

“I get it.”

Lightholler looked away. He put the sedan in gear and brought them back onto the road. All he had seen and done ... for the sake of contingency. For the sake of friendship?

He asked, “How am I doing so far?”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

Lightholler heard the gentle laughter in Kennedy’s voice and kept his eyes on the highway.

They crossed the Mississippi some time after dawn and abandoned the sedan by a watering hole near the aptly named town of Mud Lake. They washed in a frigid stream. Kennedy stood in the water beating his arms against his chest for warmth while Lightholler’s sturdy, pale body cut through the sparkling blue.

Surfacing for a lungful of air, Lightholler said, “Tell me, which one of us is Tom Sawyer?”

They retrieved their clothing and the satchel from the sedan, then walked back into town, arguing briefly along the way over which car to steal. Lightholler favoured a battered black Austin; Kennedy suggested a lighter colour, saying it would be less conspicuous and better protection against the heat of the day. They settled on a cream-coloured Blitzen with Louisiana plates.

They switched plates at the next town and drove west.

Arkansas unfolded in hills and valleys, in forests of oak and pine, laced by the languorous tresses of the slow, wide river. They ate in a diner across the road from a train station and watched as negroes rolled crates along the platform and loaded them into the long grey freight car of a Confed Pacific.

Kennedy thumbed through a discarded newspaper, held the headline up for Lightholler to read.
N
ASHVILLE
R
EDOUBT
. J
APANESE
A
SSAULT
H
ALTED
.

The kicker called it a “Night of Infamy”. President Clancy was convening Congress that afternoon. Kennedy scanned the paper for his name and found nothing. He interpreted the mild euphoria he felt as a result of poor sleep, but that assumption took little away from his satisfaction.

They got back into the car and headed west again. He nodded off mid-afternoon and woke to find they were just outside Little Rock. He offered to take the wheel at the next gas station, but Lightholler shrugged off the suggestion.

The Ozarks grew out of the horizon, a purple fringe, gold-tinged in the early afternoon sun. They switched at Benton after he told Lightholler they were about an hour from Morning Star. Lightholler was asleep before they hit the highway.

He turned on the radio and trawled for a local station. Between the evangelists and easy listening he caught a traffic report. A trailer truck had jackknifed on Route 70. There was oil on the road and a trapped passenger. Delays were expected.