Overfall

Twenty

Jeremiah Fuller sat in his living room with his eldest daughter, her husband, Marmy, and his two grandchildren. Stacy made a pitcher of iced tea while he checked the steak on the grill and came back inside.

“Okay, Dad,” his daughter said, “it’s clear that your disease has taken a turn for the better. Can you give us a clue what they did to force the remission?”

“Who cares what they did?”

“Well, do you even know?”

“Actually I don’t. It’s part of the program. They don’t tell you exactly what they are doing. That’s why they do it in the far corners of the earth.”

“That seems unethical to me.”

“But look at the results. I need the pills in my dresser drawer or I get awfully jumpy, but that’s the only downside.”

“I just can’t believe it. Before this you could barely remember that you went to the store for milk. Now you can memorize a dozen digits. More than any of us.”

“Ain’t it grand?” he said, and excused himself to the bathroom.

Life was good. He was in love with his wife for the third time and all his kids were more or less flying straight and level. Entering the master bathroom, he saw that the window was up an inch. Funny, this time of the year, with the cold weather, Tracy didn’t normally leave the windows ajar. He closed it.

He urinated, still a little worried about the slow flow. “If it’s not your brain, it’s your prostate,” he muttered.

In the mirror he checked his teeth, found the piece of meat that had been bothering him, wet his toothbrush, and gave a quick brush. He winced-something seemed to have stung his gums. He looked closely at the brush and saw a tiny wire. As he did so, his chest felt a terrible compression, his vision blurred, he swayed on his feet, and he knew that he was falling and that he would die.

There was an extraordinary brilliance and exhilarating warmth. In the brightness he called out to God.

Four men were dead, one of them a close friend. Instead of sitting depressed and drunk or mourning, Sam took a cab down to Greenwich Village and walked into Babbo, a restaurant known for its out-of-the-ordinary cuisine. Sam was after the Brandiso, a delicious white fish cooked with fins and head, then deboned to order.

The place was a relatively simple, long hall-like affair, white-walled and with upstairs and downstairs dining. It was described as Italian Nouveau cuisine-Italian for those who liked Italian, and Nouveau for those who enjoyed perfectly looped lines of avocado paste on bone-white china impeccably designed with a colorful arrangement of vegetables and greens that even included a flower.

Sam knew that a Babbo care package would help Anna find her equilibrium. He had persuaded Lenia, an assistant chef, to put together all the makings of a Brandiso dinner that Sam would bake at Anna’s.

With the loss of these good men, he didn’t care if he ever ate again, much less whether it was gourmet fare, but he knew it was expedient that they keep living in every sense. Anna might not understand at first, but soon she would feel the same.

Sam allowed Lenia to include some cream sauce for a side of pasta and a marvelous mushroom salad. He listened carefully as she explained the presentation, although he had no intention of following directions when it came to that. It was ghastly enough to think of flavors and appetites or anything of warmth and comfort in this time of mourning. But the fellowship of those who were fighters was imbued with an unwritten rule that allowed remembrances but no funerals. The mourning would be private; this dinner was to be a celebration of the life lived and a commitment between the survivors to keep on living.

As he waited for Lenia to finish he called Anna.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.” Then she was silent.

“Anna?”

“I’m sad. And I’m worried about Jason. We need to do something right away.”

“We will.”

When Lenia emerged, she paused a moment to look at him. Taking the bag, he kissed Lenia on the cheek, gave her a hug.

“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And come and see me when I can cook for you.”

It was when he walked onto the street, the cars beating the air into a steady whir, their lights tracing white lines and red bubbles in the night, that he realized he was struggling to answer a question that he only barely understood. As the cabdriver made a blur of the electric light marquees of New York up Seventh Avenue and through the incredible bustle of Times Square and onto Broadway, he gave up the pondering and decided to act.

He called Paul.

“Remember what we heard about six months ago-that Wes King believed someone had gotten to his software codes?”

“Yeah, but we figured we couldn’t tie it… you know, just a coincidence.”

“I was tired. Now I’m not. I want to dig it out.”

“But we’ve got everyone, every resource, dedicated to figuring out DuShane Chellis and Samir Aziz… and how to extract Jason.”

“While you are doing that, in spare moments, I want any connections between Suzanne’s case and this one. Anything.”

“Got it.”

“How are we doing on Jason?”

“Good. The Canadians are on board.”

“Did Harvard get the transmission from Weissman?”

“They got a lot. Some of it is encrypted. Quite a bit actually. They’re working on it. You can call Carl at home tonight.” He gave Sam the number.

They talked as Sam rode up Broadway to the Upper West Side. By the time he arrived at Anna’s block, he was satisfied that all the minds at work in his office were focused on the right issues.

Inside Anna’s building a security man, dressed in blue blazer and gray slacks, greeted him as he approached the counter. Another armed security guard wearing a side arm and crisp blue uniform sat in the corner.

“Whom will you be visiting this evening?”

“Anna Wade.”

“And you would be Sam with no last name?”

“That would be me.”

“I was told you won’t be showing us any ID,” the man said with a tone of disapproval. “But you might tell us Anna’s favorite flower.”

“Herb’s lilies.”

“Go on up.”

Engrossed now in how exactly he would conduct the next couple of hours, he floated in his mind while his feet took him without thought to her door. Amidst all the death he began to think about being close

… making love. He imagined seducing Anna over dinner. Shohei would approve, of that there was no doubt.

The man in the hall in front of her door, a contract private investigator, looked like he could wrestle alligators. The man knocked for Sam, and Anna opened the door.

“You feel afraid,” Sam said.

“Kind of shaken up. They were good people and now they are dead because of complications in my life. But still I want to get Jason, to act, before something else happens.”

Sam carried his package into the kitchen and put it on the counter. “It’s easy to jump off a cliff. It takes more effort and planning to climb one. We gotta climb the cliff and it will take preparation.”

“What do we do?”

“We’re already doing it. I’ve got a team assembled to get Jason out of Canada. We’re doing surveillance to see how much soldier power they have around him. We’re lining up the psychiatrist, a guy in Seattle. There’s a whole lot to this and we’re going full speed, but if we just roll on in there without preparation we may tip them off, fail, and lose Jason.”

“I guess you have a point. It’s hard to wait.”

“Right now we’re going to make ourselves eat, breathe, drink in Shohei’s honor.”

“You say that so easily.”

Sam removed the baguettes along with the mushroom salad. “Knives?”

“In there,” she said. She sighed, seeming to resign herself to Sam’s plan, and got out some olive and garlic hummus to go with the bread.

“Let me tell you what we’ve found out.”

“Okay,” she said as if willing to wait but not convinced.

“Pots and pans?”

“There.”

“Let’s start with the therapist Grace has Jason seeing. Dr. Galbraith. We found that he went to Harvard, apparently has no publications, at least of note, has practiced for twenty years, is considered an expert in memory loss, has seen a number of celebrities, and has been credited with some remarkable cures. We found several associations with public figures including a couple of press releases where he was named and quoted. Two of the stories concerned people I know and want to talk with because they were said to have made remarkable improvement. One of them was in bad shape.”

“Were these clients of yours?”

Sam smiled. And set about getting the fish on a greased baking pan.

“Confidential, right?”

“I’m interested in talking with a guy named Jeremiah Fuller. Apparently Galbraith was Fuller’s doctor, and Fuller suddenly got his memory-building capacity back in the midst of a nasty bout with some sort of memory-wasting disease. We’ll see.”

“I can’t relate that to my brother.”

“Neither can I. But we’ll look into Jeremiah Fuller nonetheless. As for Grace Technologies, Interpol is interested in them. I think that’s because of a link to this arms dealer, Samir Aziz. We

think Aziz sent the two gunmen on the roof-we think they were after the CD-ROM.”

Sam told her what they knew and she listened intently. With the fish baking in the oven, he put some water in a pot and set a colander over the water.

“Why would an arms dealer be associated with DuShane Chellis?”

“Computers are the foundation of all modern weapons systems.”

“And Jason’s work would be relevant if it makes the computers smaller.”

“Or the rockets more accurate. Small and accurate are important in weapons.”

It was too soon to cook the pasta or put on the vegetables. The fish would take twenty-five minutes.

“We still haven’t talked about my terms.”

“Well, obviously I still want to hire you.”

“You aren’t exactly a team player,” he said, watching for her reaction.

“I’ll work on it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve had the same agent since nearly the time I started acting.”

“My dog loved me and forsook all others.”

“Now you’re being a smart-ass. Do you know what we’re arguing about?”

“Not a clue.”

“Well,” she said, “how do I hire you? Do we do some secret society thing?”

“You have to have a sponsor-and don’t give me a hard time.”

“Sounds like AA.”

“It isn’t. It’s practical and it’s my system.”

“Okay, well, that’s Peter, right?”

“Right. And it’s a minimum fee of five hundred thousand dollars, but that counts toward my twenty-thousand-per-day fee. That covers my time and basic staff time at five staff man-hours per day. More than that and it’s two-hundred-dollars-an-hour staff time. The good news, I suppose, is that my fee drops to five thousand per day after I have put in sixty days.”

“What about the days you’re not working exclusively on my case?”

“I prorate, but you’re my only case at the moment.”

“So how much, in the end, does it really cost?”

“It usually runs six or seven hundred thousand a month if we’re working steady and I’m not using a lot of independent contractors and staff. My average fee per case for all cases has been one-point-four million. Cheap compared to what you get for a movie.”

“I’d like to ask how often you do pro bono, but I’m afraid you’re gonna bring up that we don’t do free movies.”

“Or even give refunds on the bad ones.”

“Ooh, you’re nasty tonight,” she said.

“I do maybe a free job a year or several little ones. Poor people don’t usually have particularly complex problems.”

“All right. You aren’t cheap, but okay.”

“Well, that’s not all. You have to agree to my contract.”

“What’s that?”

Sam put on the vegetables and peeked at the fish.

“Let’s sit on the couch. You should be comfortable when you hear this.” Sam took the two glasses of wine and Anna carried the bread and cheese. They sat close.

Sam explained the contract at some length, watching Anna’s brow get tighter and tighter. Finally she summarized:

“I have to shut up about you forever, unless I get your permission to offer your services to a friend or an acquaintance, and to ensure that I don’t make any untoward disclosures I have to post a deposit of one million dollars in stocks or bonds in Switzerland. My heirs get the stocks and bonds and all earned income and appreciation upon my death, and so I lose the use of my money unless you give consent for its removal.”

“Hey, if you fall on hard times I can be reasonable.”

“You get to know all about me while you attempt to tell me nothing about yourself. Notice I said attempt. If we have a legal dispute, it is decided by arbitration in the Cayman Islands. And if a court says that is not enforceable, we have arbitration in Las Vegas, Nevada, in front of a list of arbitrators all of whom, no doubt, know and love you, and if that’s not enforceable, it’s arbitration in front of the American Arbitration Association. Who’s working for who here?”

Sam shrugged. He knew words would not help.

“And grown people do this?”

“Apparently you’re going to do it.”

“Okay. When will we actually go get Jason?”

“We leave for California first thing tomorrow while my team makes the final arrangements. For now we relax and have some dinner.”

“But when will I see my brother?”

“I can’t promise, but perhaps the day after tomorrow. I want to stop and see a psychiatrist on the way.”

“The guy you’ve chosen for Jason, right?”

“Yes. Before you ask who, we’re still deciding which one right now.”

“You probably think I’m heartless. Your good friend died and I’m talking only about my issues.”

“Jason’s alive and we can do something. Shohei is dead and we can do nothing for him.”

“Have you cried?”

“No.”

“Does that concern you?”

“People who don’t cry usually aren’t concerned that they don’t cry.”

“Have you had this happen before? When your son died?”

“That was much different. That was a piece of me gone, so it was like mourning myself.”

“Anybody else?”

“A woman I loved. I was at the funeral. I stood off to the side away from the crowd mostly. A few people I knew hugged me. I think I examined my feelings more than I felt them, although I certainly felt a great deal. How many people have you had die besides your father and Jimmy?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

Sam poured a second glass of wine for Anna, refilled his own glass, and gave her the last piece of bread. He had gobbled six pieces to her one. “When Shohei and I went to memorial parties or funerals I never saw him cry. Out of respect for the dead he would go on living, eat the food, and drink the wine.”

“Is that supposed to make this easier for you?”

“Shohei was a professional. He lived with the risks. John Weissman didn’t.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“I can. I do.”

Anna put her hand over his.

For a while they talked of Shohei. Anna recited the events of their day together, the way he had smiled, why she had become fond of him so quickly. Then Sam talked of his first meeting with Shohei, their cases together, and tried to recite a few of Shohei’s jokes, which were legion, all the while struggling to distill the dry sense of humor and the unbeatable confidence of the man.

“When we were together,” Sam explained, “I felt a special energy, like we could do anything. I wish now we had hugged each other at least once.”

“You never did?”

“Never. We usually nodded our greeting. That was us. Cool to the end.”

They returned to the kitchen and Sam cooked the pasta.

“Dinner is about ready,” Sam said. While they waited Sam placed a call to Carl Fielding.

“A big portion of the file is encrypted,” Fielding said. “Ask Anna if she would know how to finish a sentence that begins ‘Receive for yourself…’ ”

Sam asked her.

“… the same sun that shines on your brother, the same blue sky that colors his river.”

“Any commas?”

“One after brother,” Anna answered.

“I’ll try it,” Carl said and was gone.

“Jason would know that I would know that Nutka painted it on a piece of wood.”

“Intriguing-all these codes,” Sam said.

“What did the police say? They sure were fast with me.”

“I used some pull. They know they don’t have the whole story. I told them it was international and that they needed to trust me. They used to trust me for a lot more than this when they wanted my help. I also told them that Weissman’s killer could be related to Grace or Samir Aziz. They have no more desire to reveal your involvement in this thing than we do. I had to promise to tell them anything I discover in that regard the minute I discover it.”

“What in God’s name happened to the helicopter?”

“Well, of course it’s not official yet. But a fuel line was put together badly after maintenance. It came apart and starved the engine of fuel.”

Sam prepared the pasta and pulled out the fish. “That can’t be a coincidence,” she said. “Right now they’re saying it is just that. We may never know.”

Out of nowhere Anna said, Tell me about the psychologist Spring.”

“You haven’t admitted you know she’s my mother.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Tell me about your mother.”

“I wish she would put what she knows in a book. And I wish people could hold the book and sense the woman when they read her words. She is the best person I know. She is strong and principled and intelligent in her compassion. I feel humbled when she talks.”

“Wow. That’s quite an endorsement for a mom.”

“She is quite a woman. But to learn what she is saying, you have to struggle because her words have to be used if you want to find their meaning. They are like bones, you have to add the meat.”

As he put the dinner on the table, Anna nodded, not quite understanding.

“She is a Talth and the daughter of a Spirit Walker.”

“What exactly is a Talth and a Spirit Walker?”

“Are we all done snooping around, calling Josh, or anybody else?”

“We are all done with that.”

“Talths and Spirit Walkers can be the same or different. Kind of like a priest and a monk can be the same and different.”

“Okay.”

“A Talth can be male or female and they are a ceremonial and a spiritual leader. In our tribe they are thought to be the keepers of the secrets to harmony of the soul. They know the sacred places and teach the young people. Today not many young people are listening. Spirit Walkers, like my grandfather, are thought to have mystical powers; they are usually loners, but can be married, and they wander a lot. They dream. For them the wilderness is a place of plenty. By the way, I don’t necessarily buy into the mystical powers part. I think maybe there are comprehensible reasons why it all works. Then again, you wonder.

“There is a story handed down among my tribe that life on earth was started by Wah-pec-wah-mow, which would mean something like Earthmaker in a literal translation, but we would say God or Great Spirit, and that Wah-pec-wah-mow began humankind through a race of spirit beings that held the secret to inner strength and harmony of soul. Spirit Walkers are thought to be their spiritual descendants. Sort of like a Catholic would say that the pope is the spiritual heir of the apostles.”

“I’d like to know more about Spring.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Whatever you’ll tell me. Let’s start with her legal name.”

“Key-atch-ker,” he said quickly. “Try to remember that.”

“One more time.”

“Key-atch-ker. It’s actually Yurok, not my tribal language, because she was named by a Yurok Talth, and to honor the woman who named her she left it in Yurok. She took the name later in life-Spring, the time of new beginnings. It’s also part of the culture of my tribe.”

“What is your tribe?”

“We’ll get there. We have to get to know each other first. Every year my tribe and some others have a sort of new-beginnings ceremony where they renew themselves and everything in the earth.”

“And what do you believe?”

“Well, as to people, I guess I more or less made my living on the premise that people don’t change. That’s if you want to play the odds.”

“Tough outlook, don’t you think? I got the impression you were trying to change.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m trying to beat the odds. What about you?”

“Lately I think the odds are beating me.”