Jericho Iteration

14

(Friday, 8:00 A.M.)

I awakened to the faint sound of church bells striking eight times as if tolling from a distant country steeple, although neither of the two churches within a block of the house had bells.

The sound came from the ceiling; Marianne had programmed the house to wake me at this time, just as she had instructed it to start brewing coffee in the kitchen. Although I could have used another hour of sleep, I was grateful that she hadn’t selected another noise from the alarm menu; if she had wanted to be a real bitch, she could have jolted me with an eight-gun salute, or worse.

Nonetheless, I lay on the rattan couch for a couple of minutes, curled up in a lambswool blanket, caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. I heard the shower running in the upstairs bathroom, smelled the dark aroma of hot coffee brewing in the kitchen, heard songbirds just outside the windows. Everything was warm and comfortable and orderly, much as it had once been a long time ago when I had lived in this house …

Then my mind’s eye flashed to John, the way I had seen him as he lay on the porch floor at Clancy’s with cops and paramedics standing all around him. Dead, with a hole burned through his forehead … and I knew that, if I didn’t find out why, I could never find any peace again, and all my mornings would be haunted for the rest of my life.

The buzz of the telephone interrupted my train of thought. I almost got off the couch until I remembered that I had taken the handset and put it on the floor next to the couch before I had turned in for the night. Marianne was still in the shower, so I picked it up and thumbed the button. “Hello … um, Rosen residence,” I said self-consciously.

“Where the hell are you?”

Bailey. The son of a bitch had an innate talent for rude awakenings. “Well, Pearl,” I said as I sat up on the couch, “if you called here, then you must already know where I am.”

“Process of elimination. If you’re not in your apartment, then you must be somewhere else.”

“Hey, give the man a kewpie doll-”

“Don’t gimme no shit, Rosen. We just found out John’s been killed and that you were seen at Clancy’s with the cops, and when I go upstairs to get you, I find the place ransacked. Word on the street is that a couple of ERA tanks were here last night. Now what the fuck’s going on?”

“Earl-”

“This is a helluva time for you to go shacking up with your old lady. Now you tell me what the …”

I sighed as I peered out the living room window. There were no cars parked on the street in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. “Look, Earl-”

“I ain’t looking at anything, Rosen, except for a pink slip with your name written on it unless you tell me right now what the-”

“Earl, shut the fuck up.”

That did the trick, at least for a moment. I took a deep breath. “I know what’s going on,” I continued, “but this phone isn’t plugged in, y’know what I mean?”

There was silence from the other end of the line. Pearl had a bad temper, and he sometimes ate more brains than he seemed to carry between his ears, but he knew how to take a hint. He knew that anyone with a two-bit scanner could eavesdrop on a conversation carried out on a cordless phone. Even if my neighbors didn’t indulge in such skulduggery, there was no guarantee that the police or ERA would not.

“I know what’s going on,” I repeated. “We can’t talk about it right now, but a big load of shit hit the fan last night. John’s getting killed is only part of it.”

I heard a slow exhalation. “Are you serious?”

“Like a heart attack,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “Have you heard from Sandy Tiernan yet?”

“Yeah. She’s pretty shook. She called me at around six, said that she got the call from some guy at homicide-”

“Mike Farrentino?”

“Yeah, that’s him, and when I phoned his office, he said that he’d seen you last night at Clancy’s.” His tone of voice had changed from belligerence to confusion. “What’s the scoop here, Ger?”

“I’ll tell you when I get downtown,” I said. “I’ll be there soon as I can swing a ride. But for right now …”

I hesitated, trying to think of a way I could phrase the notion that had just occurred to me. “Umm … you think you could call an exterminator this morning?”

“Huh? An exterminator?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed at the knot left in the back of my neck from sleeping on the narrow couch. I could no longer hear running water from the upstairs bathroom. “Those roaches up in the loft are getting pretty hairy, pal. Might have crawled downstairs into the office. I think you should check it out real soon.”

Another long silence, then: “Yeah, I think so too. Maybe it’s time to call Orkin, see if they can send someone down here this morning.”

Bailey had gotten the hint. Cockroaches in the loft, bugs in the office: he knew what I was talking about. If anyone was indeed eavesdropping on our conversation, it would be painfully obvious what we were discussing, but it was better that he was forewarned of the threat before he made any more phone calls or put anything sensitive into the office computers.

The only misunderstanding between us was that he thought I was hinting at the feds or the police as being the prime suspects. I wasn’t so sure if ERA or the SLPD were the only ones we had to worry about. Somebody out there was capable of hacking into even encrypted PTs like Joker; they had put the voodoo on me with that faux Jamie phone call last night. Until I had a clue as to who they were, I wasn’t taking any chances.

“Good deal,” I said. “I’ll get downtown as soon as I can.”

I clicked off, pushed away the blanket, and swung my legs off the couch. No time for sweet rolls and coffee; all I wanted to do now was get dressed and get out of here. I was reaching for where I had dumped my trousers on the floor when I heard the familiar creak of the stairs.

I looked up to see Marianne sitting on the landing, wearing her robe again, her hair pulled up in a damp towel. No telling how long she had been there, listening to my side of the conversation.

“Hi,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

Lame question. She didn’t bother to answer. Mari simply stared at me, her chin cupped in her hands. “You’re going to want a ride downtown, right?”

I hesitated, then slowly nodded my head. It was a long walk from here to the nearest MetroLink station, and despite last night’s promise to call a cab first thing in the morning, she knew I didn’t have enough cash on me to cover the fare all the way down to Soulard.

She briefly closed her eyes. “And you’re going to want money, too, right?”

“Hey, I didn’t say-”

“I can spare you fifty dollars,” she replied, “and if you’ll let me get dressed, I can get you down to the paper in about a half-hour. Okay?”

I nodded again. We gazed at each other for a few moments, each of us remembering all the shit we had put the other through during our years as a couple. Moving in together for the first time. Burned breakfasts, forgotten dinners. Underwear on the floor, unpaid bills. Two or three lost jobs, bouts of morning sickness announcing the arrival of a child neither of us had planned on raising but decided to have anyway. Engagement and marriage. Death and insecurity. Separation on its way to becoming formalized as a divorce.

An old TV commercial had a punch line that had enraged feminists: my wife … I think I’ll keep her. Mari should have written a comeback: my husband … I think I’ll ditch him.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’ll be great.”

Marianne stood up, absently running her hand down the front of her robe so that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her thighs. “Sure,” she said. “If it’ll get you out of here, I’d be happy to do it.”

“Mari-”

“Whatever you’re mixed up in,” she said, “I hope it works out … but I don’t want to get involved. You’ve done enough to me already.”

Then she trod upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door.

Marianne dropped me off in front of the newspaper office; I was almost as glad to be rid of her as she was of me.

The trip downtown had been taken without any words spoken between us; only the morning news on NPR had broken the cold silence in her car. U.S. Army troops were still being airlifted to the Oregon border as Cascadia continued its Mexican standoff with the White House, and the crew of the Endeavour had succeeded in rendezvousing with Sentinel 1 and linking the final module to the antimissile satellite. And some lady in Atlanta was attracting massive crowds to her house after she claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in a pot roast.

Whoopee. I would rather have been in Birmingham, Seattle, outer space … anywhere, in fact, but St. Louis.

Everyone stared as I entered the newsroom, but no one said anything to me as I walked straight to Bailey’s office. Not surprisingly, he had already taken the cover off his IBM and was peering into its electronic guts with a penlight; Pearl was nothing if not paranoid.

“Close the door and sit down,” he said without glancing up from his work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

I shut the door and found a chair that wasn’t buried beneath galley proofs and contact sheets. He patiently continued to poke through the breadboards and chips until he was satisfied, then he slid the cover shut and turned around in his swivel chair to gaze at me.

“Look, Earl,” I began, “I’m really sorry about-”

“Y’know what this is?” He picked up a large, flat case that lay atop the usual paperwork heaped on his desk. It had a pair of headphones jacked into one end, and one side was covered with knobs and digital meters; a slender spiral cord led to a long, needle-tipped wand. “Of course you know what it is,” he went on, “because you must have known I had one when I called you.”

“It’s an electronic surveillance detector,” I said. “You showed it to me once. Remember?”

“That’s right,” he replied, nodding his head. “Mr. Orkin Man himself. It can scan everything we use in this office and locate virtually any RF or VLF signal imaginable. Infinity bugs, hook-switch bypasses, modem or fax machine taps … you name it, this sucker can sniff it out. Put me back three grand, but hey, I’ve always considered it to be worth the dough. A little extra insurance, if you want to think of it that way.”

He carefully placed the instrument back on his desk. “If you meant to scare the bejeezus out of me, you succeeded. As soon as I got off the phone with you, I had everyone drop whatever they were doing while Jah and I went through the place. We switched on every computer, every light, picked up each phone, and turned on all the faxes … not a goddamn thing here went untouched, and that includes your apartment and the lab downstairs. I even had Jah run antivirus tests through all the computers and PTs … at least, the ones the feds didn’t steal from your place last night. And you know what we found?”

He raised his right hand, circling his thumb and forefinger. “Nada. Nyet. Zippity-doo-dah. Not so much as a loose wire. Now, either the feds have managed to put some pretty godlike equipment in here, or you’re an anatomical wonder … someone who can talk on the phone with his head shoved straight up his butt.”

I remained silent throughout all this. He needed to have a good rant right now, and I was unlucky enough to be the target. When he was done, he stared at me from across the desk, his hands folded together over his stomach. He finally let out his breath and kneaded his eyelids with his fingertips.

“The only reason why I haven’t thrown your ass out into the street,” he said very calmly, “is because you must be onto something. Or at least John must have been onto something, because some bastard took the time and effort to kill him. And I think you must have stumbled into it, because your door got kicked down last night and the feds carted off everything that could be plugged in. So now I’m stuck with a smart reporter who’s dead and a dumb reporter who doesn’t know how to call his editor when the shit’s coming down-”

“Pearl,” I began, “look-”

All at once, Bailey surged to his feet, grabbed a pile of paper at random, and hurled it at me so fast I didn’t have time to duck the printouts and photostats as they slapped me in the face.

“Fuck you, Rosen!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “I wanna know what’s going on!”

The paper rain cascaded down around me, falling into my lap and onto the floor. It was dead quiet outside the cubicle-every person in the office must have heard the explosion-but that wasn’t what I noticed. For the first time, I saw that Pearl’s eyes were puffy and red-rimmed.

The son of a bitch had been hit hard by the news of John’s murder. He was taking it out on me, and maybe he was right to do so because, God help me, I hadn’t wept a single tear since the moment Farrentino had called to ask if I could come down to the bar and identify his body.

If Pearl felt like a jerk for going on a futile bug hunt, then I now felt much the same way for not giving myself the time to realize that my best friend was dead. Yet, by the same token, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of wallowing in my own grief. There was something happening out there, at this very moment, of which John’s death was only a small and incidental part.

I didn’t know what was happening either, but it was time to stop being a victim of circumstance.

“Sit down, Earl,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

And I told him all of it, except a couple of the juicy parts.

There was no reason for him to know everything that had occurred during my encounter with Colonel Barris at the stadium … in particular, my signed agreement against revealing the details of Ruby Fulcrum. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping facts from my editor; I was concerned about his safety. If things went bad, I didn’t want ERA troops to come knocking at his door. There was no reason why they wouldn’t anyway, but neither did it make any sense to have Pearl mixed up in this shit more than necessary.

And, although I related the story of the strange IM I had received through Joker just before the riot at the Muny, I didn’t tell him about the phone call I had received in my apartment just before the ERA raid. I didn’t want him to think I had gone around the bend, even if I could explain how I might have heard my own voice and Jamie’s over the phone. When Pearl asked me why I hadn’t returned to my apartment after I was released from ERA custody, I told him I was too frightened to go back to my place but had simply fled to my ex’s house in Webster instead.

Everything else came out, though, and when I was through he simply gazed at me, his fingers knitted together above his lap. After a few moments he picked up his phone and pushed a couple of buttons. “Craig? This is Dad … yeah, come up right away, I want you to do something for me.”

He put the phone back on its cradle and stood up. “When he gets here, I want to give him Joker so he can run some tests on it. The bastards might have messed with it somehow, and I don’t want you running around with a Trojan horse in your PT.”

The same thought had already occurred to me, so I pulled Joker out of my pocket. “I take it this means I’m not fired yet,” I said as I typed in the “chickenlegs” password.

“I don’t fire people, Gerry. I just make ’em quit.” Pearl walked around his desk and opened the door. “Now let’s go upstairs and see if that disk is still where you hid it.”

We met Jah outside Pearl’s office. He took Joker and went back downstairs to the photo lab, then Pearl and I climbed the stairs to the third floor.

My apartment was much as I had last seen it. The door was ajar; the desktop computer and the phone were still AWOL; along with the manuscript of my novel. I imagined some ERA officer at the stadium diligently reading the novel, trying to find hidden references within its pages. It would probably be the only audience the book would ever find; I hoped he liked the sex scenes, at least.

“I can’t tell whether this place has been ransacked or not,” Pearl murmured as he looked at my habitual mess.

“It’s a do-it-yourself job.” I walked into the bathroom, knelt on the tile floor, and peered beneath the toilet tank. The thin plastic case had gone undiscovered; it was still taped beneath the porcelain pony. I peeled away the tape and let the mini-disk drop into my hand, then held it up for Pearl to see. “We’re lucky,” I said.

“No luck to it,” he muttered. “They just didn’t have a containment suit at hand.” Pearl took the plastic case from my hand and gazed at it thoughtfully. “All that, to find what’s on this thing.”

He gave it back to me. “Give it to Jah and let him take a look at it,” he said quietly, folding his arms together. “He might be able to make something out of this sucker. Meanwhile, we’re going downstairs and see if we can get a line on those people from Tiptree.”

“Okay. Right …” Suddenly, I felt exhausted. For the last two days I had been punted from one side of the city to the other, and I didn’t have any real clues as to what was going on. I gazed at the unmade bed near the broken window. Only about twelve hours earlier I had been lying there dead asleep, more or less innocent of all that had been occurring just beyond my range of vision. And now …

“I’m like you,” Pearl said. “I don’t buy this story about one of their scientists going schizo and shooting people. If there’s some other reason why John was killed, then we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah …”

He looked down at the floor, absently kicking aside an old beer bottle. “You’re assigned to this story, Gerry. I want to find out who killed one of our reporters, what he was trying to find out when he was killed, and why someone is shooting people in the street. You’re relieved of all other editorial responsibilities until then, understand?”

I nodded. “You want me to bring down the guy who killed John.”

He gave me a sharp glance. “Listen, kid: the worst thing a reporter can do is go out on story carrying a vendetta. I know John was your best friend, but you’ve got to put that behind you right now. You’ve got to-”

“Yeah, right. Remain objective.”

Pearl shook his head. “No. Objectivity is what you do when you’re writing the story itself. Keeping your head is what you do before that. If this is some sort of conspiracy, then the people who are involved are way ahead of you. They’ve got their tracks covered. Your only advantage right now is that they assume you’re stupid. Don’t give them a chance to think otherwise …”

He grinned. “At least until you come up from behind and take a bite out of their ass.”

I looked up at him. In that moment our eyes met, and we were for that instant completely simpatico. All talk of journalistic objectivity aside, there was only one thing we both wanted.

“C’mon,” Pearl said as he turned to walk toward the door. “Let’s go to work.”