CHAPTER EIGHT
“A Favor”
Sunday night.
Yee chose the restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton, The Brigadoon, for its anonymity. The intel meeting had gone well although she could feel the disdain rolling off Brubaker and MacCauley like cold off a glacier. The military mindset always wanted a military solution. Which was why terrorism existed--to deny the military solution.
Brubaker had lost his only son in the Gulf War, which conferred on him a certain moral dimension. He had also been black ops. He was not one of those men who jumped from desk to desk until they reached the top. MacCauley saw Red Chinese under his bed. Panny was a good soldier and had no dog in this fight. Lubitch was in over his head.
Yee had issued a memorandum last winter containing disinformation that eventually turned up on Wikileaks. Somewhere in the complicated cortex where NSA, FBI, CIA, and Homeland met there was a leak. Yee had taken it upon herself to track it down. The next couple of days would be interesting.
She was seated in the back in a corner banquette sipping Merlot when she saw the maitre’ d escorting Stella Darling her way. An overweight tourist seated with his wife and two fidgety kids could not prevent his eyes from tracking Darling across the floor.
Tall and shapely in a gray Ralph Lauren skirted suit that complemented her figure and cover girl all American perfection, she wore her honey blond hair in a pageboy and carried an old-fashioned Gladstone by its strap over one shoulder. Darling never carried a purse. It was all in the Gladstone, including, Yee had heard, a .38 revolver. A gift from her daddy.
Yee rose to her full five one to greet the criminal defense attorney. “Thank you for coming, Stella.”
Darling took her hand warmly. “Of course.”
They both slid onto the red leather bench. A pale young man in black vest and white shirt appeared to take their drink orders. Yee ordered another Merlot. Darling ordered a Grey Goose vodka straight up with a twist. Darling’s dark and puffy eyes were the only indication of the strain she was under. Darling pulled out a contact lens lubricant and dumped an ounce in each eye.
“These contacts.”
“Don’t wear them, dear. Eyeglasses look good on you.”
Darling chuckled ruefully. “I know. Sam always insisted I wear contacts. ‘Girls who wear glasses don’t often get passes,’ he told me. It’s an old habit. I’ve been thinking of having my eyes lasered, but too many people tell me horror stories.”
The waiter came with their drinks and discreetly withdrew. It was eight-thirty in the evening, the earliest Darling could get away after spending all day shepherding her client through the psychological evaluation procedure. It didn’t help that Lester Durant was kept chained and shackled.
Yee held up her glass. “To Sam.”
“To Sam.” They clinked. Yee sipped. Darling drained half the glass.
She set it down and fixed her slightly bloodshot blue eyes on the NSA honcho. “How can I help?”
“We’d like you to bring Otto White in.”
Darling blinked several times. “For what?”
“To head up a team to find and neutralize whatever it is that killed the Senator, and has killed at least twelve others of whom we know. I’m talking about spontaneous human combustion.”
Darling lowered her voice although nobody was around and they were speaking directly to one another. “There have been others?”
“This is top secret, Stella.”
Darling flashed a nervous grin. “Why Otto?”
“He was a smoke jumper in college. He was a volunteer fire fighter for the Poudre Canyon district before he joined the Army where he was a military policeman and became a certified arson investigator. He has extensive counter-espionage experience but most importantly he has something we call the X-factor, the ability to do the totally unexpected and get results.”
Darling smiled ruefully. “That’s for sure. We were at St. Exupery one night and there’s a foreign couple eating a table away. They looked Middle Eastern. Waiter brings their meal, Otto gets up, goes over, grabs the white linen tablecloth and yanks it out from under the dishes. Of course, not being a magician everything on the table went with it. Then he turns to the freaked out couple and says, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought I could pull it off.’
“I had to pay for their meal and the broken dishes. ‘What the hell?!’ I said to him as soon as we got out of there. Tells me the man was an Al Qaeda agent and they were listening in on us.”
Yee’s small black eyes sparkled. “I never heard that.”
“I had to pay the staff a couple hundred to shut them up.”
“You don’t happen to know the name of the unfortunate diners he interrupted?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Did he ever regard you with suspicion?”
Stella looked surprised. “Me? Never. That’s one thing about Otto. ‘An elephant’s faithful one hundred per cent.’ An old-fashioned Boy Scout. It killed me to break it off with him, but what could I do? He was hallucinating ninja out of the woodwork. Every time we met he dumped my purse upside down on the table.”
Yee glanced at the Gladstone. “That thing?”
“Sam gave it to me. I call it my purse.”
“This incident at St. Xupe. Was this before he was hospitalized?”
“Right before.”
“You never visited him. Why was that?”
A crease marred Stella’s forehead as she realized NSA would have access to the hospital’s visitors logs. A tingle of paranoia zipped down her spine. Were they tracking her?
“I was afraid it was me who was causing him to act crazy. Otto never does anything halfway. When he fell in love with me it was more
Othello
than
Love’s Labors Lost
. I wanted him to get over me. I still do. I have no idea what would happen if I suddenly showed up out of nowhere. And believe me, it is nowhere. It might throw him into an emotional tailspin.”
Yee trained her lasers on Stella. “It’s the President who’s asking. Will you go get him? Ask him to come in?”
Stella inhaled deeply and let it out. It had been over two years. “Of course.”
Yee blinked revealing nothing. She smiled. “I knew we could count on you. When’s the memorial service?”
“It’s not a service, it’s a wake, and don’t come if you don’t like drunk Irishmen. It’s Saturday at two at Chiklis, upstairs in the private dining room.”
Yee signaled the waiter, caught his eye, and made a little writing motion with her hand in her palm. She turned back to Stella. “I’ll bring a bottle of Irish Mist.”
***
CHAPTER NINE
“Vision Quest”
Monday.
Wiry juniper covered the ledge like steel wool, gin aroma stirring dark memories of Otto’s youth. He smelled sage and water from the creek below. Otto hunkered just below the rim, right arm over Steve’s neck snugging the big dog close. Steve was part Alsatian, maybe some border collie and otter. Otto held a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He set them carefully on the rock shelf and looked sixty meters across the canyon to a ledge, ten meters above the gushing stream coming off the mountain. It was there, three weeks ago, he’d spotted Max.
He called the cougar Max out of respect. After maximum effort and Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen.
At least he thought it was a cougar. A flash of tawny fur and gone. Splintered bones and tufts of fur lay at the base of the ledge against the shadowed rock.
Steve growled deep in his throat, a soft electric vibration. Otto ruffled the dog’s fur and whispered, “Whassup, homie? We gonna get lucky? Is Max coming back?”
Just give me some kind of sign, girl, oh my baby, show me that you care. Show me that you’re mine girl, well all right…
played over and over in his head
.
In his gut he knew what he was really looking for: proof of the divine. Otto refused to believe that man was nothing more than a collection of molecules spewed forth from a random universe, as his father had said.
They’d been six hours on the mountain, including the hike from the trailhead. Three hours in the hot sun. An occasional breeze off the mountain brought the cool promise of fall. Otto had brought plenty of water and they could always dip into the stream but that would spook the cat.
Otto had embarked on this vision quest after meditating for sixteen hours. The quest had led him and Steve to Mt. Smithback in the Never Summer Range. As befits a vision seeker, he hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours and had brought no food save for several Ralston Purina dog burgers for Steve. He felt light-headed but clear. He could see for a hundred miles over the snow-capped peaks to the ever-rising mountains to the southwest. At 11,000 feet they were just below the tree line.
“Here, kitty kitty,” Otto crooned into Steve’s ear. Steve jerked his muzzle skyward and growled, the hair on his back forming a dorsal ridge. Otto looked up. An aerial battle was in progress: four ravens dive-bombing a bald eagle.
The eagle banked and came in for a landing on Max’s plateau jutting out over the canyon above the gushing stream. The ravens followed and took up position at the four points of the compass. The eagle extended its wings in a show of force. It was big--possibly seven feet. It advanced on one of the ravens like George St. Pierre throwing a feint and the raven darted back. The eagle turned facing each of the ravens in turn, giving each a little scare when suddenly, the raven behind the eagle exploded as the eagle’s mate hurled into it at 150 mph, feathers flying in all directions.
Every ace needed a wingman.
As the mate hit, the first eagle rose in a widening gyre, the remaining ravens scrambling airborne and trying to flee. They never stood a chance. The male eagle executed a perfect Immelmann and struck the second raven like a dum-dum bullet. The raven fell in pieces to the earth, feathers trailing. The eagle’s mate effortlessly grabbed big air, went into a barrel roll and hit the third raven like a bunker buster. The lone remaining raven was hell bent for leather to the east but the male eagle zeroed in like a sidewinder missile and took it out in a little black explosion.
The female settled to the plateau and began to eat the first raven she’d killed.
Otto was thunderstruck. He instinctively touched the tiny cross tattooed above his sternum. Clearly God or the Great Spirit or Buddha or Gaia or maybe even John Denver had something important in mind, to bring him this far and show him this sign. Steve too seemed mesmerized by the aerial display and looked longingly after the departed birds, tongue lolling.
Otto trained his binocs on the eagle and watched her feed. Her mate soon joined her.
That’s how you do it, he thought. You eat your fucking enemies.
Steve whined quizzically, rose and headed back the way they’d come barking furiously. Otto turned and looked. There was nothing that shouldn’t have been there. The land lay the same, untouched by any human presence. There were no other people within a three-klick radius, possibly larger. There were no trails here in the Roosevelt National Forest and the casual hiker could soon find himself in trouble.
Steve stopped barking, looked back over his shoulder grinning and trotted down the mountain.
Otto was hungry enough to eat a raven. Maybe that’s what the message was. Go home and eat. He rose to his feet.
“All right, Steve. All right!”
***
CHAPTER TEN
“Crystal”
Monday afternoon.
Stella flew United to Denver, arriving at one-fifteen in the afternoon. Upon deplaning, she paused in the reception lounge to phone her stepmother, Crystal. Sam and Martha, Stella’s mother, had divorced twenty-four years ago. Martha had remarried an automobile salesman. Martha and her husband died in a fiery car wreck while driving through Tennessee fifteen years ago. The bitter irony preyed upon Stella’s mood.
“Hello, dear,” Crystal said. “I am so looking forward to your visit. I’m only sorry it took a tragedy for us to get together.”
Yeah. Right.
“I should be there in two hours, Crystal.”
“Wonderful. We’ll have dinner.”
Stella blanched at the prospect. Crystal could barely follow the directions on a package of frozen food. She was probably already hitting the Chard. Hitting it hard.
Stella called her boyfriend Gabe Winner. She got his voice mail.
“Hey Detonator. I just hit Denver and I’m about to beard the beast in her den. Give me a call when you get a chance.”
After retrieving her luggage from the carousel Stella took the shuttle to Avis, passing the dreadful blue demon horse whose upraised hooves and blazing red eyes greeted visitors to the airport. Did no one consider the message it sent? It was like an upside-down cross or something. It was called “Mustang.”
Stella rented a Mustang.. She took the E-470 tollway to Interstate 25 and headed north past familiar landmarks: Furniture Row, RV World, the motocross field, Johnson’s Corners. She turned west on Harmony, amazed at how the once barren landscape between the Interstate and College had filled with strip malls. They all subscribed to the same architectural school, semi-industrial support members, gently curving roofs, earth tones.
Harmony turned into 38E climbing the Front Range. Stella passed numerous cyclists, most clad in bespoke cycling clothes with streamlined helmets and camel backs, churning up the heart-breaking slope. As the road rose Stella could see all of Fort Collins stretching to the eastern plains.
She turned west at the top and then north on 23, a spectacular drive along the eastern edge of the seven mile long Horsetooth Reservoir. The res was filled to bursting for the first time in twelve years at this late date. The winter had deposited an epic snow pack and snow still clung to the mountains and canyons. It was eighty degrees outside and Stella kept the AC on. She turned left onto an impossibly steep concrete drive with a closed metal gate. A sign said, “PRIVATE DRIVE.”
Stella lowered the window and punched a code into the keypad. The metal gate rolled smoothly out of the way. Holding the Mustang in first gear Stella drove up the steep drive, took a hairpin right at the top and pulled into the sloping concrete driveway of her ancestral home, a freaky-deaky new age design that looked like a lumberyard trying to take flight with spectacular views of the reservoir and the city below. As a child, Stella would huddle in her bed in winter fearing that the wind would tear their house off the ridge and fling it at Kansas.
The garage lay in shadow as the sun lowered in the west. Stella retrieved her Gladstone and the rolling suitcase from the trunk and dragged them up the winding flagstone stair to the front door that lay beneath an arched cutout. The house was sheathed in weather-resistant recycled barn siding and was on four levels, stepping up to the ridge, then down again toward the lake. It had a metal roof.
Stella tried the door. It was unlocked. She pulled her suitcase into the large foyer with its Spanish tile floor and softly burbling fountain, a water nymph in a lily pad. Cooking smells permeated the house.
“Crystal! I’m here!” she sang out.
A moment later the staccato sound of high heels approached from the hallway. Crystal appeared looking slightly flushed and glassy-eyed. She came up to Stella, hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks. Stella smelled Chard.
“I’m so glad you’re here, dear. The radio and TV people have been hounding me non-stop.”
Stella doubted that was the case.
“How are you, Crystal?”
Crystal waved a hand. “Oh you know me. I’ll get through. Come down to the living room. Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Have you got anything stronger?”
“You know where the bar is, dear. Just leave your suitcase there. Your old room is waiting.”
Stella planned to do her duty by her stepmother before heading to Otto’s place in the morning. He had taken her there once, before he started building. Told her his plans, where he planned to get the raw materials, how he would put them together. A home craftsman’s dream. She hoped she could find it again.
There was no way to contact Otto. He had no telephone, no internet. Certainly no television or even a radio. Although he was conversant with all those tools he chose to live like a nineteenth century mountain man.
Stella hit the half bath off the kitchen, washed her hands and went through the kitchen to the dining area. There were three place settings on the oak dining table. She went down two steps to the sunken living room looking west at the sun, a blazing orange ball sinking toward the jagged rocks of Horsetooth Mountain laying down a flickering stripe on the surface of the deep lake.
Stella went to the wet bar hidden behind an Oriental screen. She poured herself several fingers of Macallan, dropped in three ice cubes from the stainless steel Maytag and joined Crystal on the Italian leather sofa facing the sunset.
Crystal held up her glass of wine. “Well here’s to the senator, kiddo, he was quite a guy.”
They clinked and drank. They suffered an awkward silence. Both spoke at once.
“Crystal,”
“Dear--”
Crystal giggled with nervousness. “You go ahead.”
“Did you speak to Sam recently? Did he seem troubled about anything? Did he give any hint that something was about to happen?”
“No. As you know, we spoke once a week. If anything, he seemed more exuberant, more, you should excuse the expression, full of himself than ever. I feel sorry for that doxie he was banging.”
“You don’t know that.”
Crystal sighed dramatically. “Oh dear. You’re his daughter. Of course you believe him.”
Stella sought a sharp retort then realized, what’s the use? Crystal could no more help being Crystal than she could stop being Stella.
“Are you really going with that movie star?” Crystal said.
“Gabe is a very dear friend.”
“When I go to King’s Super, the women bring me the tabloids. There was even a photo of you two in
Us
! I’d love to meet him, wouldn’t that be fun?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ve been seeing somebody too and I took the liberty of asking him to join us for dinner.”
“You’re kidding,” Stella said.
“Why no, dear.”
The doorbell rang.
***