Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

49

OUTSKIRTS OF WASHINGTON, DC

Friday, 14 July 2006. 11:36 p.m.

Ever since he had started hunting terrorists, Orville Watson had taken a series of basic precautions: making sure he had telephone numbers, addresses and postal codes under different names, then buying a house through an unnamed foreign association that only a genius would have been able to trace to him. An emergency hideout in case things got ugly.

Of course, a safe house only you know of has its problems. For a start, if you want to stock it with supplies then you have to do so on your own. Orville took care of that. Once every three weeks he would take to the house cans, meat for the freezer, and a stack of DVDs of the latest films. He’d then get rid of anything that was out of date, lock up the place and leave.

It was paranoid behaviour… no question about it. The only mistake Orville had ever made, other than letting himself be followed by Nazim, was that the last time he’d been there he’d forgotten the bag of Hershey bars. It was an unwise addiction, not only because of the 330 calories per bar, but because an emergency order to Amazon might let the terrorists know that you were inside the house they were watching.

But Orville hadn’t been able to help himself. He could’ve done without food, water, internet access, his collection of sexy photos, his books or his music. But when he’d entered the house in the early hours of Wednesday morning, thrown the fireman’s coat into the garbage bin and looked into the cupboard where he stored his chocolate and saw that it was empty, his heart had sunk. He couldn’t go three or four months without chocolate, having been totally hooked ever since his parents’ divorce.

I could’ve had a worse addiction, he thought, trying to calm himself. Heroin, crack, voting Republican.

Orville had never tried heroin in his life, but not even the overwhelming craziness of that drug couldn’t compare to the uncontrollable rush he felt when he heard the sound of foil crackling as he unwrapped his chocolate.

If Orville were to go all Freudian, he might have decided that this was because the last thing the Watson family had done together before the divorce was to spend the Christmas of 1993 at his uncle’s house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As a special treat his parents took Orville to the Hershey factory, which was only fourteen miles from Harrisburg. Orville grew weak at the knees when they first entered the building and absorbed the aroma of the chocolate. He was even given some Hershey bars with his name on them.

But now Orville was even more worried by another sound: that of breaking glass, if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him.

He carefully pushed aside a small pile of chocolate wrappers and got out of bed. He had resisted touching the chocolate for three hours, a personal record, but now that he’d finally given in to his addiction, he planned to go all out. And again, if he’d gone all Freudian about it, he would have worked out that he had eaten seventeen chocolates, one for each member of his company who had died in Monday’s attack.

But Orville didn’t believe in Sigmund Freud and his head trips. For a case of broken glass, he believed in Smith amp; Wesson. That’s why he kept a.38 Special next to his bed.

It can’t be. The alarm is on.

He picked up the gun and an object that sat next to it on the night table. It looked like a key chain, but it was a simple remote control with two buttons. The first set off a silent alarm at the police station. The second set off a siren throughout the estate.

‘It’s so loud it could wake up Nixon and get him tap dancing,’ the man installing the alarm had said.

‘Nixon’s buried in California.’

‘Now you know how powerful it is.’

Orville pressed both buttons, not wanting to take any chances. On hearing no siren, he wanted to beat the shit out of the cretin who had installed the system and sworn that it was impossible to disconnect.

Shit, shit, shit, Orville swore to himself, clutching the gun. What the hell do I do now? The plan was to get here and be safe. What about the mobile…?

It was on the night table on top of an old copy of Vanity Fair.

His breathing became shallow and he began to sweat. When he’d heard the breaking glass – probably in the kitchen – he’d been sitting in his bed, in the dark, playing The Sims on his laptop and sucking on the chocolate still stuck to the wrappers. He hadn’t even realised that the air-conditioning had stopped a few minutes earlier.

They probably cut the electricity at the same time as the supposedly foolproof alarm system. Fourteen thousand bucks. Son of a bitch!

Now, as his fear and the sticky Washington summer drenched him in sweat, his grasp on the gun became slippery and each step he took felt precarious. There was no doubt that Orville had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

He crossed the dressing room and looked out into the hallway of the top floor. Nobody there. There was no way to get down to the first floor other than the stairs, but Orville had a plan. At the end of the hall, on the opposite side to the stairs, there was a small window, and outside a rather puny cherry tree that refused to bloom. No matter. The branches were thick and near enough to the window to allow someone as nonathletic as Orville to try to descend that way.

He got down on all fours and tucked the gun into the tight elastic band of his shorts, then made his large body crawl the ten feet across the rug to the window. Another noise from the floor below confirmed that someone really had broken into the house.

Opening the window, he gritted his teeth the way thousands of people do each day when they are attempting not to make any noise. Fortunately, their lives don’t depend on it; unfortunately, his most certainly did. He could already hear footsteps coming up the stairs.

Abandoning all caution, Orville stood up, opened the window, and leaned out. The branches were roughly five feet away, and Orville had to stretch right out even for his fingers to graze one of the thicker ones.

That’s not going to work.

Without thinking twice, he put one foot on the window sill, pushed off and made a leap that not even the kindest person watching could have termed graceful. His fingers managed to grab hold of the branch, but in jumping the gun slipped into his shorts, and after a brief, cold contact with what he called ‘little Timmy’, it slipped down his leg and fell into the garden.

Fuck! What else can go wrong?

At that moment the branch broke.

Orville’s full weight landed on his rear end, making quite a bit of noise. More than thirty per cent of the cloth of his shorts didn’t survive the fall, as he later realised when he saw the bleeding cuts on his behind. But at that particular moment he didn’t notice them because his only concern was to get that same behind as far away as possible from the house, so he headed for the gate of his property, some sixty-five feet down the hill. He didn’t have the keys to the gate, but he’d chew his way through it if necessary. Halfway down the hill, the fear attacking him inside was replaced by a sense of accomplishment.

Two impossible escapes in one week. Suck on that, Batman.

He couldn’t believe it, but the gate was open. Reaching his arms forward in the dark, Orville headed for the exit.

Suddenly, from the shadows of the wall surrounding the property a dark form emerged and crashed against his face. Orville felt the full force of the blow, and heard a horrible crunching sound as his nose broke. Whimpering and grabbing at his face, Orville fell to the ground.

A figure came running down the path from the house and placed a pistol at the back of his neck. The move was unnecessary since Orville had already passed out. Standing next to his body was Nazim, nervously holding the shovel with which he had hit Orville after assuming the classic stance of a batter facing a pitcher. It had been a perfect swing. Nazim had been a good hitter when he played baseball at school, and in an absurd sort of way he thought that his coach would have been proud to see him make such a fantastic swing in the dark.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ said Kharouf, between gasps. ‘The broken glass works every time. They run like scared little rabbits wherever you want them to go. Come on, put that down and help me get him into the house.’