Dream of a Falling Eagle

Epilogue

My God," Mary Tree said, lifting her head off Garth's shoulder and looking over at me. "Harper and I can't leave you two alone for more than a day, can we? Garth almost breaks his neck falling off a horse, of all things, and then both of you wind up almost getting your hearts cut out in some voodoo temple!"

Almost was, of course, the delicious operative word. Other good news was that I hadn't drooled, awake or asleep, for almost a week, and my headache had finally disappeared after the fourth day. I took these as hopeful signs that Mongo the Magnificent was not going to end as Robby the Zombie. In fact, all things considered, I was feeling pretty good.

Garth's wife, the folksinger Mary Tree, had canceled three concerts in Norway and Sweden to fly back to New York when news of what had happened, and the Fredericksons' involvement in events, had hit the news services around the world. And Harper Rhys-Whitney, who was now officially my fiancee, had returned from her latest snake-hunting expedition in the Amazon rain forest and was sitting at my side on the sofa in my apartment. Garth and Mary lounged in easy chairs across from us, and Francisco and his lover, Tony, sat in straight-backed chairs on either side of them. Tony, Francisco's "type," turned out to be a wiry, very soft-spoken principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. We had invited Francisco to bring Tony and join us for drinks before we went our separate ways- Garth and Mary back to Europe to resume her tour, and Harper and I off to Tahiti. The dancer kept glancing shyly and admiringly at Francisco, who appeared very pleased with himself.

"Robby," Harper said seriously, reaching over and squeezing my hand, "do you really think it was the CIA that killed Kranes?"

I gazed into Harper's impossibly maroon eyes, then glanced at Garth, who grunted and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. He said, "You can bet your pet python and the snake farm on it, Harper."

"Dr. Frederickson-"

"Don't call me 'Dr. Frederickson,' Tony. And don't call me 'Robert' or 'Robby,' because only my mother and Harper do that, probably because they know I hate it, and only Francisco can't seem to escape the need to call me 'sir.' My name's Mongo."

"Mongo," the dancer said, "there's something I don't understand. If those people in the CIA already had two assassins on the convention floor, why put a third sniper up in the ceiling beams?"

I shrugged. "We'll probably never know for certain, because the sniper, not surprisingly, wasn't caught, and it isn't very likely that the responsible parties will be forthcoming. But there seem to be two possibilities. The first is that they planned all along to have a sniper up there as backup just in case their Right-to-Life patsies got cold feet or missed. The killings could still be blamed on them and their radical associates, since they would be caught with guns on the convention floor. Then the shooter opted to kill Kranes when Kranes suddenly appeared on the convention floor, and it looked like the jig was up and they were going to be exposed. Kranes was killed to cover their tracks, so he couldn't testify about who he'd talked to, and what he'd heard that caused him to come to New York and the convention in the first place."

Garth explained the second possibility. "Or the sniper was sent in at the last moment specifically to kill Kranes in the event he did what he did. They had time. Kranes announced his resignation in Washington before hopping on the shuttle to New York. The CIA knew their former choice for president could suddenly end up causing them big-time trouble. He was a man who could single-handedly destroy the entire agency if he took a mind to it."

Tony frowned. "But how could they get a man armed with a rifle and silencer into the hall past the kind of security they had there?"

I laughed. "Tony, there are some things the CIA does very well. Remember that they managed to place two shooters in a state delegation with front-row seats, didn't they?"

Mary ran a hand back through her waist-length, silver-streaked blond hair and fixed me with her sea blue eyes. "Mongo, what's going to happen now?"

I smiled. "You and Garth are flying off to Europe, and Harper and I are going to Tahiti."

"Stop it! You know what I mean. What's going to happen?"

"The truth?"

"Of course."

Garth said, "Nothing's going to happen. All the people we know of who had any connection to the conspiracy are dead-including Taylor Mackintosh, who the paper says got drunk and fell off the balcony of his twentieth-floor apartment in Trump Tower. Cowboys one, Indians zero-as usual. We lost this one."

There were a few moments of silence, and then Harper asked, "Is it true, Mongo? The CIA is going to get away with this and the agency will stay the same?"

"I'm not quite as much a pessimist as my brother," I replied, wincing slightly, "but I'm afraid he's probably right. It depends on how far out of the sky the American eagle has fallen, and the old bird has been looking a little sickly. Americans have always been good at denial, and the country's politics of late have only made them better at it."

"But the commission's report will be out, and everything that's happened to the two of you will be in it."

"Sure," I said, and shrugged. "But, outside of the company's money-laundering operations in Haiti, we can't prove anything. That means our discussion of the murders of the two justices and the conspiracy to assassinate the president and vice president will be anecdotal, included in an appendix so that it won't taint the hard data we do have. The report won't be out for months, and by then we'll almost certainly have a right-wing president who's unlikely to act on most of the recommendations the commission will probably make. The CIA and right-wing politicians are already mounting a counterattack, claiming the company had nothing to do with any of this. They're also cobbling together a story that the attempted assassinations were part of a left-wing conspiracy to discredit conservative causes and destroy the CIA. That's all you'll be hearing on talk radio."

Francisco snorted angrily-probably the most emotion I'd ever seen the man display. "How can they claim that when two of their assassins were antiabortion fanatics?"

"It's easy," Garth replied. "They just claim it-and keep on claiming it. They'll say the Right-to-Life shooters were dupes. Like Mongo says, all you're going to be hearing on talk radio and reading in the right-wing press for months is how this was all part of a radical left-wing conspiracy. By the time the report is actually published, most of what's in it will have been leaked, considered old hat, and probably discredited by a majority of Americans. How could people have believed all the things that got us the crop of no-brain right-wing politicians we have in office now? People believe what they want to believe, Francisco, and they're not going to want to believe you, Mongo, and me. Right now Americans want a kind of chicken-fried, good-old-boy fascist government that's safe for business and the wealthy and dangerous to women and children. That's the bad news. The good news is that we don't give a shit. Right, Mongo?"

I smiled thinly. "Right."

Mary looked at her husband, said, "I don't believe neither of you care what happens to this country. You two are the most American Americans I've ever met."

Garth merely shrugged.

It was a lovely compliment, even if it wasn't entirely true. Garth had once been thoroughly American, in the sense that Mary meant, but his poisoning had changed a lot of things in him, opened up spooky depths in his soul I still did not think his wife fully understood, and it was probably just as well. I considered Garth more Intergalactic than American. As for myself, I had always felt intensely American, but in recent years it had begun to occur to me that the America I felt so much a part of was actually a myth. It had always been just a dream, and for too many people a nightmare, with some other, less magisterial, bird masquerading as an eagle. Vietnam had destroyed the illusion. I could have remarked that Garth and I had acted as we had for our own very personal reasons, with the murder of Moby Dickens at the top of the list and patriotism at the bottom, but I didn't. I didn't want to spoil the moment, or the compliment.

Harper put her hand on my knee-her touch instantly making me wish we were already in Tahiti, or anyplace else, for that matter, where we were alone. "Robby, what about Guy Fournier? Was he really part of some secret, secret organization in the CIA?"

"That's another thing I don't think we'll ever know for certain one way or another. The Operations Directorate is secretive to begin with, a world within itself. I suppose some kind of 'Shadow Ops' within Ops is a possibility, but I personally think he was bullshitting us. He was a man who loved to talk-a good thing, that, or otherwise Garth and I would be dead. A lot of psychopaths and sociopaths are like