The Day Before Midnight

1600

“I don’t know,” said Delta Three. “I hate to go in blind. It’s against everything they teach us.” He was looking through binoculars from well back in the room of a house on Main Street, in Burkittsville, at the front of Jack Hummel’s place some two hundred yards down the road.

“We don’t have time for a recon,” said Jim Uckley. “Listen, it’s even possible there’s no one in there except the mother and her two sick little girls.”

“Then what happens,” said Delta Three, “if I get a peripheral cue, turn and fire and blow away a child? It’s no good, Mr. Uckley. I’m not going to risk civilians like that. I couldn’t live with myself if—”

Some Delta! thought Uckley.

“Look, man,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of time. We got to help those guys on the mountain. We’ve got to improvise something.”

“I’m not going in without a floorplan, sure information on how many guys there are and a good idea of where they are in the house and where these children might be. And I’m not going in without multiple simultaneous entries. You’re too fat a target. I don’t mind taking chances. I was hit twice in Vietnam, in fact. But goddammit, I’m not going in and risk kids’ lives.”

Delta Three was a sanctimonious Southerner in his late thirties with the righteous jaw set of a zealot. He was raw-boned and tough, a master sergeant. Uckley hated him. The other three Deltas — he didn’t have time to learn their names so he’d simply christened them Deltas One through Four — seemed like decent kids. But goddamn this adult!

“Officer,” Uckley called to the Burkittsville cop who was with them in the house. “Any chance you could, uh, get us a floorplan or something. So we knew—”

“No,” said the cop. “That house is one hundred years old and they didn’t make floorplans in those days, they just built ’em and built ’em a damn sight better ’n they do now.”

Great. Another zealot who loved to express his opinions. The cop was about fifty-five and plainly pissed off that all this government beef had come gunslinging into his town. But in a phase four emergency, federal officers called the shots, and he’d buy the idea that young Uckley was calling these.

“Neighbors,” said Delta Four. “They’d have been in the house, right? Maybe you could round one up and get some kind of a drawing or diagram. Then we’d at least have some idea.”

The cop chewed this one over. Finally, he allowed that Kathy Reed lived next door.

“Call her,” said Uckley. “Tell her it’s an emergency, ask her to walk down the street to us.”

“That’s good,” said Delta Four. “Maybe we can rock and roll after all.”

In a few minutes, Kathy Reed, her twin boys, Mick and Sam, and a scroungy mutt that turned out to be named Theo showed up. Kathy was in her housedress still and looked as though a few days had passed since she’d last washed her hair.

“Bruce is away,” she began to explain, “I’m sorry about the way I look, but it’s so hard to—”

“Mrs. Reed?” Uckley asked. “I’m James Uckley, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. These men here with me are a special assault team from the Army’s Delta Group.”

He watched her mouth lengthen, then form the perfect rictus of an O. She was a woman who at one time or other might have been attractive but had been ground to a nub by the trenchwork of motherhood. She swallowed, her eyes going big, then said, “Is this about the mountain. There’s something going on on the mountain, right?”

“Yes, this does have to do with the mountain. Now, what I wanted to ask you about was your neighbor, Mrs. Hummel.”

“Beth? Is Beth in trouble?”

“Well, that’s what I want you to tell me. Did you talk to her today?”

“Yes, sir. About an hour ago.”

“And how did she seem?”

“Uh, the same.”

“The same?”

“It was just Beth, that’s all. I was the scared one. Because I thought there was gas or an atom bomb on the mountain. She said she’d drive us out of here if there was an evacuation. Bruce has the car. He travels a lot.”

“Did she invite you in?”

“Uh, no.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Well, we have coffee nearly every morning. Beth’s my best friend. She’s everybody’s best friend. I guess it was.”

“Was she nervous? Unsettled?”

“Come to think of it, yes, I suppose she was.”

“What about her kids?”

“What about them?”

“Did she say anything about them being sick?”

“Sick! What have they got? Sam was with Poo all yesterday. That means Sam will be coming down with it. Did she tell you they were sick?”

“They’re not in school. She called in.”

“That’s peculiar. I know she would have said something about it. But she didn’t mention it.”

“Mrs. Reed, I’d like you to talk to the sergeant here. I want you to draw us a diagram of Mrs. Hummel’s house. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go down there and knock on the door and see what I can see.”

“Be careful,” said Delta Three.

“Oh, I will,” said Uckley.

The knock on the door surprised them. Herman looked at his men, then at the lady and her children. Goddamn! Who could this be?

“All right,” he said. “As before. Remember, no fancy stuff, lady. These men here are with your children. You don’t want anything happening, do you understand?”

Beth Hummel nodded gravely.

“Don’t hurt my children.”

“Nobody gets hurt,” said Herman.

He knelt at the foot of the cellar steps, crouching in the darkness. His silenced Uzi covered the entrance. He watched the lady walk to the door, peek out, then open it.

“Mrs. Hummel?”

“Yes.”

Herman could see a bland young man in a sports coat and tie under a bland black raincoat. He looked to be about thirty.

“Hi, my name’s Jim Uckley, I’m with Ridgley Refrigeration, we’re putting in the plant out in Keedysville. Listen, I had an appointment with your husband today at two and he wasn’t there. I was just wondering if—”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Uckley. Jack’s in Middletown. There was a breakdown in the high school heating system. The main duct split and he had to go weld it up. I’m real sorry if he missed his appointment, but sometimes these emergencies come up and—”

“Oh, listen, that’s all right. I understand. Would it be all right if I came in and—”

Herman put his hand on the Uzi trigger and drew the weapon to his shoulder. Let this man come in and he’d squeeze off a three-round burst.

“Mr. Uckley, have you had the flu this year? It’s horrible stuff. Would you believe that both my girls are down with it. Why, Bean’s been vomiting for two days. It’s a horrible thing. And the house is a disaster. You can imagine, with two sick children, how terrible it is.”

“Well, ma’am, I sure don’t want to add to your difficulties. Maybe you could tell your husband I’ll call him in the morning. It’s a pretty big job we have in mind, and we’d like to talk to him soon as we can.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Uckley. I’ll see that he gets the message.”

She closed the door.

Herman slithered to the window, peeked over the edge, and watched the young man mosey down the walk and climb into a little blue car and drive away. He raced to the back of the house and followed the car after it had turned up the block and headed on down to Route 17 and out of town. All right, maybe it’s just a man about a job, he thought as he lost track of the car.

“Yep, they’re there, you bet, I could almost smell ’em,” said Uckley.

“How many?” asked Delta Three.

“I couldn’t exactly ask,” said Uckley, who was feeling somewhat heroic in regard to his exploit. “So what have you got?”

“Three-bedroom house, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry downstairs. Stairs up front from the living room and out back from the dining room. Tough to crack with five guys.”

“Hmmm,” said Uckley. He was basically an accountant. He had an M.B.A. from Northwestern and had heard that five years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Embezzlement Division looked great on a resume, especially if you wanted to go into tax accountancy, where the bucks were. He was engaged to a girl named Sally and had been born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. He had begun the day going over the books of Mid-Maryland Federal Savings, where the vice-president had fled with over $48,000 in bank funds, looted from a variety of accounts over the past several weeks. The man had left with his twenty-three-year-old secretary, leaving behind a forty-two-year-old wife and three children.

“Tough to crack especially when we don’t know how many there are or where they are.”

“Is it best to infiltrate slowly or hit ’em with a rush?” Uckley asked.

“The Israelis like to go in fast, low, and hard. GSG-9 will wait until the cows come home, inserting their operators a lick at a time.”

“That’s a tough place to rush,” said Uckley. “You could stage from Mrs. Reed’s place next door, but nothing on the other side.” He looked at his watch. Time was really flying. It would be dark soon.

“So, who’s got an idea?”

They just looked at each other.

What am I doing here, Uckley thought. He wished he could concentrate a little bit better.

“Look, what about this?” said Delta Three. “We set off a smoke grenade in Mrs. Reed’s house, call the fire department. Say, you and me ride in on the truck, rush up the lawn. Except we hit the Hummel place instead. We’re in raincoats. Meanwhile Rick and Gil move in on the place from behind; they go through that back door, into the kitchen. We go in, yelling Tire, fire, you have to evacuate.’ We’ve got our pieces under our raincoats. Then we take ’em out.”

It was better than anything Uckley could come up with.

Megan Wilder took the tin can and put it in a vise. She spun the handle, watched the tin crumple. The can imploded and ruptured, achieving various interesting configurations of destruction as she drew the jaws of the vise closer and closer. It finally became a fully formed blossom of catastrophe, the light glinting in fascinating patterns off its tortured sides.

Quickly she spun the handle the other way, plucked the crippled thing from the vise’s grip, and took it over to a table. There she had several dozen other crumpled cans.

She stared at them. Some had collapsed neatly; there was something bland and banal in their demise. Others, like this one, had a curious inner vitality and force; they fought the jaws with every last shred of resilience. And when they died reluctantly, they died most spectacularly, forming orchids of broken metal. Of the dozens there were perhaps less than five that really touched her, that spoke to her, including the last one. She took them all to another part of the room.

Megan Wilder specialized in what she called “constructions” or, sometimes, “destructions,” depending on her mood and her honesty. Their form attempted to push out the boundaries of art; they would not fit into conventional categories. They were not quite sculptures, because although they occupied space and had plastic form, they had at the same time not escaped entirely from the tyranny of the frame and the organizing impulse of two dimensions. They were meant, in short, to be viewed only from one angle, and although certain influential critics had denounced this as cowardice to the tyranny of convention, she could not force herself to abandon it.

But neither, of course, were they paintings, although they depended for their impact on color as it defines form. For she implanted the twisted tin buds with other shapes that took her fancy — beer bottles, for example, the insides of burnt-out calculators, filaments from light bulbs, this, that, and the other thing, the detritus of American society — and stapled them inside rough frames and shelves that she had constructed herself, against a plasterboard backing. When by accident she found harmony, she destroyed it. She was interested in disharmony, the radical lack of symmetry and structure that somehow especially pleased her since Ari had left. Anyway, when she got these items arranged just so, she painted them. Not flat black like Nevelson’s bleak little masterpieces, but comic-book colors, hot pink, Popsicle orange, sunburst yellow, mashed-banana yellow, a rainbow, a riot of flat, harsh, hot colors. There were critics who also despised this. Color is dead, they had decreed, and it irked them that she hadn’t read their position papers. They could really be nasty, too, particularly one faggot on Art News.

It didn’t matter. Megan was really beyond other people now. After all the years and all the pain, she’d finally fought her way to her own private place. She’d finally found her own voice. It felt authentic and passionate. It satisfied her.

The work was going so well now, it was a shame it had to end. In fact, the imminence of its end gave it all a certain perishability and poignance that made her almost cry, something no man had ever been able to do, short of punching her, and both Peter and Ari had punched her. You could forgive Peter, he was an asshole genius with an IQ of about 900 and an emotional age of about eleven, but Ari had been different; she had expected so much more.

Thus when the knock came and she became aware of the shapes of men in suits moving around the studio, up on its roof, out back in the frozen garden, it did not surprise her, but merely filled her with regret. It had to happen sooner or later and it was happening sooner. What seemed to her tragic was that she’d never see the series of constructions played out unimpinged upon, untainted by the inevitable scandal.

“It’s open,” she called.

There were three of them, Gentiles, strong-looking older men without irony or outrage in their eyes. They identified themselves as something or other from the FBI; she immediately forgot their names and ranks. Their blankness surprised her. She didn’t see the need for it. People could be so cruel. They said she ought to call a lawyer. She didn’t feel like it. She just wanted to go on working, she was so close to being finished.

“Do you have a lawyer, Ms. Wilder?”

“I have an agent,” she said.

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I suppose I have a lawyer. My father would be able to call him, I suppose.”

“I hope you’ll cooperate with us, Ms. Wilder. Time is very important, and your cooperation would help you enormously later.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said.

“Ms. Wilder, we don’t have a lot of time. Time is of the essence.”

Original line, she thought. Where do they get these guys? You’d think they’d at least go to the trouble to find someone that she could relate to. But then she understood that in the whole apparatus there was nobody she could relate to; by the very act of joining the apparatus, such a man would forever lose purchase on the possibility of relating to her.

“Here’s the deal. You let me work for a little while longer. Turn on your little tape machines or whatever. You let me work, and as I work I’ll answer any question you want. Is that fair?”

“I take it you understand you’re in grave trouble.”

“I guess I always have been,” she said.

She was a beautiful woman, with a high, aristocratic face, a strong nose, and piercingly intelligent eyes. She had a supple body under jeans and a paint-spattered smock. She wore black high-topped Reeboks and round, owlish glasses. Her hair, black and lustrous, was drawn back tightly into a surprisingly girlish ponytail.

“We have information that suggests—”

“Let me just start where you want to end up. Won’t that save some time?”

“Yes,” the older man said.

She took a deep breath.

“Well, I did it. Yes. Whatever he says I did, I did it.”

“You gave foreign agents certain materials which—”

She laughed, involuntarily. “Foreign agents” sounded so forties.

“Materials?” she said. “I gave them everything.”

They just looked at her.

“I had a little camera. Called a Minox, very cute. Later, sometimes, I’d just haul the stuff to the library and make Xerox copies of it. He made it so easy. He was so sloppy. The stuff was everywhere, he just left it lying around. He must have been in love with me or something.”

Then she looked at them hard.

“But the joke’s on him. And you. I gave it to a guy who’s on our side. He’s just another Jew. He’s an Israeli. The Israelis are our side. So you can do to me what you did to Jonathan Pollard, and it doesn’t matter. Throw me in prison and send the key to the dead-letter bin, What do you think of that?”

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” said the oldest of the men.

“Do you have ten hours and a bottle of very cold white wine?”

“We have ten minutes and a thermos of very hot coffee.”

“Then I guess I’d better hurry,” she said, and began to explain.

The shattered unit collapsed in the snow reminded Dick Puller of his own A-detachment after the fight at Anh Tran in July of ‘65. When the 82d had finally fought its way through, the survivors of the thirty-eight-day siege by the NVA in division strength just watched them come, numb and flat. He knew the feeling: the sense that your bones have melted, the way your brain fills with white fog and your joints are stiff and slow; and another thing, too, like persistent background music that will not go away — the terrible guilt you feel at the whimsy of the battle and all the good people who’ve died in spaces you’ve just moved out of or are about to move into. He shook his head. At the end, they’d depressed the 105s point-blank and fired canisters of fleschette into the NVA waves that had come at them as the perimeter shrank so small you couldn’t even call in Tac Air. Dick shivered. Fuck if that hadn’t been a fight. That was the fight to end all fights, a month of taking frontals and watching them burn away your best people until you were left with a shell of your team and less than a third of your brave, tough little Nungs. In the end we won. But won what, and why? He could still taste the bitterness.

Bravo, having straggled down the mountain, had made a stab at reforming just at its base, where the forest met the meadow and where the road began its switchbacks up to the summit. Dick rode in with the first medevac chopper and with several of the Delta officers to debrief the survivors.

Now he walked among them. The boys sat singly in the snow, having found one another and then collapsed in a loose circle, their olive drab uniforms dark blots against the blinding whiteness that surrounded them. Many were wounded though many were not. Some had weapons, some did not. Some cried. Some laughed hysterically; some merely stared at Dick with furious, dark hostility. Some chattered helplessly with the cold, their lips blue, their faces drawn and slack. They looked exhausted or sick. Their young faces had the shock of nihilism. Their gear was all fouled up, their pouches open, their straps tangled, their boots unbloused. Not many had helmets.

He knelt by a boy, one of the few who still had his weapon. He didn’t have his helmet, but he had his weapon.

“Pretty tough up there, Specialist?”

The boy’s eyes swung to him at an idiot’s cadence. The boy just looked at him like a jerk. What, twenty-two? In ’Nam they were younger, even, in their teens. Dick, then a captain, had even had a seventeen-year-old; the gooks had caught him coming in off an ambush patrol and he’d died screaming in his own guts out beyond the wire.

“Son, I’m talking to you,” Dick said in a stronger voice.

“Huh? Oh, sorry, uh, sir.”

“They hit you pretty bad?”

“They had us cold. Just cut us up.”

“Did you do much damage?”

“Sir?”

“I said, did you hurt them?”

The question had no meaning.

Dick seized the M-16 from the boy’s limp hands, brought it to his nose, pulled the charging handle under the sight assembly. The ejector port snapped open; Dick sniffed the breech. It smelled of clean oil but not powder. He could see an immaculate cartridge sitting in the chamber.

“You didn’t see any targets?”

The boy looked at him, ashamed.

“I–I was too scared to think about that,” he said.

“I see,” said Dick. “Well, you’ve got a few hours to pull yourself together. Then tonight you go back. Tonight we all go back.”

The boy looked at him.

“I don’t want to go back,” he said baldly.

“Neither do I,” said Dick, “but I don’t see anyone else here, do you?”

“No, sir.”

Dick stood, winked at the kid, earning a little smile.

“I’ll try to do better tonight, sir,” the kid said.

“You don’t have to do better, you just have to be there.”

He could see the other Delta officers moving through the collection of dazed men while the Delta medics worked to patch the walking wounded.

Finally, Skazy came over to him.

“It’s not good,” he said.

“Anybody get close enough to get a peep under the canvas?”

“Nobody got within a hundred yards of their position.”

“So who are we fighting, Major? What’s your reading?”

“Whoever he is, he’s very good. He read the terrain, so he knew exactly the point of attack. He put his automatics in the center of the line and he must have linked belts. The volume of fire was terrific. The kids seem to agree there were two heavy guns hosing them down, plus lots of small arms. Lots of fire, so ammo must not be a problem. But that guy up there, he’s been in a fight or two in his time. He knows his business. I’ll bet we find he’s Forces. I mean, this is straight ’Nam, your basic A-team scenario, defending a tight hilltop perimeter against superior numbers way, way out in Indian country. That’s Forces work.”

“I was in a few fights like that,” Dick said.

“I was too,” said Skazy. “As long as his ammo holds out, he’s going to be a motherfucker to kill.”

“Did Bravo do any damage?”

“Evidently someone covered the withdrawal with some fire from one of the M-60s and some of the men think he may have hit people.”

Dick shook his head sadly.

“Where’s, the CO?”

“Over there. Young guy, first lieutenant. Named Dill. The real CO, that Captain Barnard, he didn’t make it off the hill.”

Dick found Dill sitting by himself smoking a cigarette, staring out into the distance in the bright sun.

“Lieutenant?”

Dill looked up slowly at him.

“Yes, sir?”

“Lieutenant, when you’re talking to me, you’ll be on your goddamned feet, if you please. Stand up.”

Dill rose to the unpleasantness in Puller’s voice with the look of a martyr.

“Excuse me, but, sir, we’ve just been through—”

“Lieutenant, you let me do the talking, all right? You just nod your head when I say so.” The young National Guard officer blinked. “This is pathetic. This is disgraceful. Get these people together. Get them out of the open. Do you have security teams out?”

“No, sir, I thought—”

“What happens if the people on the hill send an assault squad down here? They could set up an LMG about four hundred meters up the slope and dust every man here. Or maybe there’s another enemy unit in the vicinity, and they’re going to come out of the trees firing full automatic.”

Dill, a thick-set, athletic-looking man who nevertheless had something of the surly melancholic about him, simply responded by falling into a deeper glumness.

Finally, he said, “We got killed up there while you guys sat down here and did crosswords. That’s not fair. That’s just not fair. I want to know who’s up there and why we have to die to get them and what is—”

“There’s a madman with an ICBM and a launching pad. Lieutenant, if we don’t get up there, all this, everything you see, everything you’ve ever dreamed or hoped for and loved or cherished, it’s all gone in a few seconds. Do you understand?”

“Who?” was all the stunned officer could say.

“We’ll know when we kill him.”

“He’s one of you, isn’t he?” the officer said. “He’s some kind of Delta guy or Green Beret. He’s one of your little club, isn’t he?”

Dick had no answer to this charge.

“Get your men organized, and get them under shelter. Form them up into their squads and platoons, and take roll. Get them fed. You’ve got to make them a unit again, Lieutenant, because we go back tonight. If you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody that can.”

The lieutenant looked at him, sighed, and went to look for his sergeants.

It had to be Delta Three, goddammit, thought Uckley. He knew he had to say something and that time was slipping away. But Delta Three wouldn’t sit still. He was exceedingly agitated and kept repeating himself to the firemen, who milled in jittery excitement around the big red truck in the Burkittsville Volunteer Fire Department.

“You guys go to the house on the right. Only to the right. The one with the smoke coming out of it. Don’t worry about the smoke; it’s just a chemical device in a pail or a pot or something up on the second floor. Get in there, and take cover; we think there’s going to be some shooting next door. No matter what you hear, you keep your heads down, is that understood?”

The firemen nodded and giggled excitedly among themselves. They were amateurs, too, volunteers, townspeople, and this was shaping up like a great adventure to them.

Finally, Delta Three came back, breathing hard. Uckley was aware that he ought to have been more assertive, but Delta Three had one of those flinty, righteous personalities that assumed its own perfection as a basic operating principle.

“You set, sir?” he asked.

Uckley thought he was set. He had on a black fireman’s slicker and helmet, remembering that when he was a kid he wanted to grow up and be a fireman; he had an ax; he also had his own Smith&Wesson 686.357 Magnum, which he had bought used from a retiring agent and hadn’t fired in eleven months. Delta Three meanwhile took the moment to do a fast check on his own weapons for the upcoming close encounter, an accurized Colt.45 automatic for backup and a H&K MP-5 with the thirty-round mag and the collapsing skeleton stock, which had been jammed shut, hanging on a sling under his slick and shiny coat. Both men had Kevlar bulletproof vests on also.

“Delta Three?”

The soldier didn’t look at him. He was still checking gear. It was getting so close to Co time. He had two smoke grenades on his belt and two stun grenades and two teargas grenades. He had a gas mask in a case. He had a fighting knife.

“The boots,” he said to Uckley. “You think we ought to change our boots?”

The man looked down to point out that he had on Corcoran jump boots.

How could he be thinking about shoes at a time like this?

“I don’t think there’s time,” said Uckley, who was wearing black Florsheim wingtips.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Things are going to happen damned fast.”

“Delta Three?”

The man finally looked at him.

“I just want to make one thing clear to you. They made it very clear to me, it has to be clear to you.”

Delta Three’s eyes were guileless and blue. They were somehow Baptist eyes, Uckley thought. They wouldn’t know sophistication or irony or cynicism; they’d know only duty, honor, country. They’d know mission.

“This is a prisoner mission. Not a hostage-freeing mission, a prisoner-taking mission. We’ve got to stick by our priorities. D-do you understand that?”

Delta Three just looked at him.

“You have to understand what’s important here,” said Uckley, not quite believing it himself.

“She’s smoking!” came the call from one of the firemen at the binoculars. “Boy, she’s really smoking.”

The men climbed aboard the fire engine.

“Whoo-ceeeeee!” some idiot yelled.

Teagarden thought: I am in a jam.

“Sister Phuong?”

“Yes,” came the voice back to him in the dark.

“I think I’d like to rest.”

“Yes.”

He sat down, considering.

He could tell from his dancing beam that the tunnel grew smaller still ahead and began to curl and meander. It looked like an intestine. Teagarden was having trouble breathing. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and his legs working. He was aware that exceedingly weird things were going on inside his head. He’d never really thought of the dark before, not of this kind of dark anyhow.

It wasn’t night. Teagarden had fought in the night. The night was not a problem. Because in the night there was space. You could put your hand out and feel the air. You could look up and see the sky, however indistinctly. The night had textures to it, striations in the darkness. One could befriend and ultimately seduce the night, turn it for you.

But not this. It was absolute. It had no gradations, no subtleties, no nuances. It seemed as leached of meaning as of color. It was too stark. He didn’t really think he could go on.

Yet he couldn’t really go back. Teagarden was Delta, top of the pyramid. Delta culture, surprisingly informal in a lot of ways, was also unforgiving in others. It had its own Bushido. The guys got to wear shaggy hair and blue jeans and sweatshirts as long as they kept their rounds in the 9-zone on the range, could crack an occupied 747 in less than thirty seconds, could fieldstrip an AK-47 blindfolded. But there were lots of guys — Berets, Rangers, FBI SWAT, SEALS, Air Commandos — who had those skills. So what Delta had was this other thing, this, uh, spirit: if you were Delta, you never said no. You just went. It really came down to that one thing: if you were Delta, you never said no. That was an absolute as binding as the dark. When it came time to go, you put aside the bullshit, threw your life into the hot frying pan of fate, and you went.

I cannot go, thought Teagarden.

I am thirty-seven years old, a Green Beret, a ’Nam veteran, the holder of several medals, by all credentials one of the bravest professional soldiers in the world. I cannot go.

He began to cry. He hated himself. He wanted to die. He bit his lip, hoping for blood. Searing pain flashed from the wound. He hated himself. He was weak and worthless. There seemed to be no escape at all.

Teagarden pulled his.45 from the holster. There was a shell in the chamber and the piece was cocked and locked. He thumbed the safety down; it unlocked with a little snik! that sounded like a door slamming in the dark. He put the muzzle in his mouth. It had an oily taste, and was big, enshrouded as it was in its slide housing. With his thumb he found the trigger.

“Brother Teagarden.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Brother Teagarden, don’t do it,” she said in Vietnamese. “Go back to the big tunnel. Wait there. I’ll go as far as I can, and if I find something, I’ll come back. Then well call them. We won’t tell them. Nobody will ever have to know.”

“You’re so brave, Sister,” he said. “I’m not brave. Not down here.”

“Brother, nobody will know.”

“I will know.”

“Learn to forgive yourself. That is the lesson of the tunnels. Forgive yourself.”

He couldn’t see her at all. He could almost sense her, though, her heat, her nearness, her living flesh. Next to it he felt a little stupid. The pistol grew heavy. He put it down. He locked it and put it into his holster.

“I’ll just go back a little ways, okay? I just can’t go any farther, Sister Phuong.”

“It’s all right, Brother Teagarden,” said Phuong.

Turning, she went deeper into the tunnel.

“Mommy,” said Poo Hummel, “Mrs. Reed’s house is on fire!”

Herman turned, went to the window. Yes, black smoke poured from the upper floors of the old house next door. He watched it gush and float up to the sky. Then he heard sirens.

Herman licked his lips. He didn’t like this at all. First a man in a sports coat, now this.

“Herman, is Mrs. Reed going to die?” asked Poo.

“No, I don’t think so, little girl.”

“Will the firemen come and save Mrs. Reed?”

“I’m sure the firemen will come,” said Beth Hummel.

They were all gathered in the living room of the Hummel house. Herman looked out the window again. He could see just smoke, and otherwise nothing.

“Does the lady smoke?” Herman wanted to know.

Beth looked away. Then she said, “No, she quit last year.”

Herman nodded. His two men looked at him.

“Get your weapons out,” he said. “I think we’re going to be hit. You go to the kitchen—”

“Oh, God—” said Beth, “Oh, God, the girls, don’t hurt the girls, I tell you, please—”

Bean began to cry. She was older than her sister and may have just understood it all that much better. She didn’t like the guns, because they made people dead on television.

“Herman, I’m scared,” said Poo. “I don’t want to be dead.”

“Please let us go,” said Beth Hummel. “We didn’t do anything to you. We never did anything to anybody.”

Herman looked at the woman and her two terrified children. He tried to think what to do. He hadn’t come all this way to make war on children and women. Little Poo came across the room to him and put her arms out, and Herman swept her up.

“Don’t go away, Herman. Please don’t go away. Don’t let the firemen make you dead.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to Herman,” he said. “You and your sister, you go upstairs, you stay in your rooms no matter what. No matter what!” he finished savagely. “Now, run. Run, Poo. Take care of your sister.”

Poo scrambled up the stairs, pulling Bean along. The younger one was the stronger one.

“You, lady, you’re grown-up. You gotta take your risks with the rest of us.”

“Who are you? What is this?”

“Here they are,” said the man at the window. He had an FAL, not a house-to-house weapon, with an utterly worthless Trilux night sight. “Should I fire?”

“No, no,” said Herman. “Maybe they are just firemen. Get up on the stair landing, get ready to jump in either direction, depending on which way they come. You”—he pointed to the other—“you get to the rear, in the kitchen. If they come—”

The man cocked his weapon, a Sterling sub-machine gun, in answer.

“Get to the door, lady,” Herman ordered, his voice taut and ugly. He pressed the silenced Uzi against her back. Then he slid the bolt back, locking it. As he held it tightly he felt the safety in the grip yield to the pressure in his palm.

Peering through the window, he saw the firemen racing to unlimber hoses, and others heading into the Reed house with axes and oxygen masks on.

Two firemen in heavy slickers broke from the truck and headed toward the Hummel house.

He could hear them yelling, “Anybody in there? You’ve got to get out!” They were knocking on the door.

Uckley’s heart was pumping like crazy; his knees felt like jelly, loose and slippery. He didn’t see how they’d support him on the run to the house. It bounded in his vision as he and Delta Three careened toward it, though, of course, he was the one doing the actual bounding. Delta Three had a slight lead as they clambered up the porch steps and made it to the door. He saw Delta Three’s slicker open and billow like a cape as the muzzle of the sub-machine gun came out.

“Anybody in there? Goddammit, you’ve got to get out, the flames may spread!” Delta Three screamed, pounding on the door.

Nothing happened for just a second. Delta Three leaned into the door, dropped his ax, his eyes shooting toward Uckley. Uckley now had the Smith in his hand, though he was surprised to find it there, not having remembered reaching for it.

“Mark your target,” muttered Delta Three under his breath, then paused for just a second to hit the speaker button on his belt and talk into the radio mike he had pinned to his collar. “Delta units, this is Delta Three, green light, green light, green light!” the words increasing with energy and urgency.

Delta Three kicked in the door.

Herman heard a burst of gunfire from the kitchen, things breaking, men screaming, everything mixing together in a welter of confusion. “Attack, attack,” yelled the man in the kitchen, firing again. Herman pulled Mrs. Hummel to him and back as the door before him burst open and the two firemen who were police agents plunged through the door. Though the gunfire rose from the kitchen, he stared for just a second at the bulging eyes and distended faces of the men opposite them. Then he fired, the gun pumping with that terrible noiseless stutter of the silencer, its shells cascading out. He put a burst into them, knocking them back, pushed the woman forward at them, spun, and ran for the steps. A bullet came after him, hit him high in the arm and pushed him down, bloodying his lip. He screamed, spun to see the wretched woman in the crossfire, crawling, her face wild with terror. He fired again, watching the bullets rip up the room. The man upstairs came to the landing to give covering fire, his big FAL jacking out heavy 308s that exploded chairs and set curtains aflame. But Herman could see nothing to fire at, had no idea where the shot had come from that had hit him. He pushed his way up the stairs, slipped once, felt the blood on his arm, and then the pain erupted, freed from its sheath of shock. He’d been hit before, but not like this, in the bone; the pain was awesome, huge, enveloping. He tried to switch the Uzi to his good hand as the blast of covering fire gave him the time, but now he saw shapes in the window. They were firing fast, and the man above him pitched forward and slammed down the steps. Herman turned, dropping his Uzi, and clambered up, clawing for his pistol.

“My babies, my babies,” the woman was screaming, “Oh, God, don’t hurt my babies.”

“Go after him,” wheezed Delta Three. “I don’t think I can move anymore.”

Uckley was all right. He’d been hit three times in the first burst, but the Kevlar, combined with the subsonic velocities of the silenced 9-millimeter ammunition of the Uzi, had saved him. He felt as though he’d had the shit beat out of him, which, in effect, he had, for the vests, which will stop a pistol bullet, won’t absorb its impact entirely, and the strikes had been like well-delivered punches to the midriff. Delta Three, on the other hand, was much unluckier. One of the bullets had hit him high in the leg. He was bleeding badly, even though he’d been able to fire a magazine, hitting the big one once as he ran up the steps and completely taking out the small one at the landing where he’d stood firing randomly into the room.

“You okay?” asked Uckley. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go after the vanished big guy.

“Go after him, goddammit,” said Delta Three, busy trying to get a tourniquet around his leg. “Go, go now, man. I’ll be okay.”

Uckley knelt, thumbed the cylinder free on the now empty Smith, and ejected the shells. Then he dropped a speedloader into the cylinder, the six slugs held in a metal disk. He spun the release knob on the device, depositing the six 125-grain Federal Magnums in their chambers. He snapped the cylinder shut, shucked off the rain slicker.

“Here,” wheezed the Delta operative. “Take this too.” He held out what appeared to be some kind of customized.45 automatic, with a fancy wraparound rubber grip. Uckley took the new gun, wedging it into his belt in the small of his back. It was cocked and locked.

Breathing hard, he said, “Okay, I’ll go get him.”

He lurched by, but Delta Three grabbed him.

“Be careful, Uckley. There’s kids in there.”

Beth Hummel saw one of them with a big pistol like a cowboy dip gingerly through the door and peer around, his eyes wide with excitement. She could hear his ragged breathing. He seemed to pause, gather himself up. Nimbly he dashed past her, stooped to the man on the floor, satisfied himself that he was dead, kicked his rifle away, then ducked back.

“Are you hit?” he whispered hoarsely.

“My children! God, please, my chil—”

“Are you hit?”

“No. I–I don’t think so. My children are upstairs. Please don’t let them get hurt.”

“Listen, you crawl to the door and out. There’s medical personnel outside.”

“My children. Please—”

“Your kids will be all right. I’m FBI, Special Agent. I can handle this.” But she didn’t think he could. He seemed very young and frightened. She watched him go to the foot of the stairs.

“Uckley!” The call came from outside.

The man paused. “Yes?”

“The guy’s dead in the kitchen, but so’s Delta Two; Delta One is hit. You’re on your own.”

“Check,” said Uckley. “Get the goddamn state cops here.”

She had the terrible sense of a man not wanting to do what he had to do but doing it anyway. With the gun as a kind of magic device, as if he could draw his strength and power from it, he threw himself up the first flight of steps to the landing, whirled up the second flight, pointing with his big silver gun.

Oh, Jesus, she thought, oh, Jesus, let my babies be all right.

Uckley reached the top of the stairway and looked very quickly down the hall. Using the two-handed grip, he thrust the Smith in front of him, searching for a target. He just saw doorways, some opened, some closed, all more or less dark.

They told you never, absolutely never, go down a hall or room to room against an armed man. Wait for backup. Always wait for backup, the guy has such an advantage over you, he can hear you coming, he can drop you anytime. Action always beats reaction.

But Uckley didn’t have much choice, he figured. The whole thing had teetered out of control in that first crazy second of gunfire, and now the only thing was to stay alive and not to kill anybody wrong. He didn’t really think he had the grit for this. This was supposed to be a Delta thing, all these special operators, and where were they? Out on the porch.

“Hey!” he called. “This is Special Agent James Uckley of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The house is surrounded. Give yourself up.” He heard his voice bang around the empty walls of the old house.

He thumbed back the hammer on the Smith.

Herman was hardly conscious. He kept slipping in and out, as if the gears weren’t holding in his mind. He cowered in the lee of the doorway in Jack and Beth Hummel’s bedroom. He was trying to keep a tight grip on the pistol, a Czech CZ-75, with his weak left hand. His right was useless; the bullet had smashed into the shoulder. He was sitting in a pool of blood. His head ached; he was very sad but not especially frightened.

“Give yourself up,” the call came again.

Now, that was a laugh. He knew what he had to do. It was very simple what you did in enemy territory to save yourself the horror of interrogation and the danger of compromising yourself. You always knew.

But Herman thought, why not one more? After so many, why not one more, why not this blundering policeman who shot my men. He edged his way up until he was on his feet. He cocked the CZ. All right, he thought, all right, Mr. Policeman.

He slid to the doorway. He thought he could make out the man at the end of the hall, low. How many others would there be? There’d be hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. So many. But just one more for now. Then he heard cars pull up in front of the house, sirens blaring. Red and blue light pulsed through the windows.

He lifted the pistol with the weak hand at what might have been the man but might also, in his blurry eyesight, have been a shadow. He fired.

Uckley panicked as the bullet came plowing his way. It smashed against the wall behind him, showering him with dust. Two more shots came and he drew back. Then he plunged forward, firing wildly, insanely, six fast blasts with the Smith until he’d reached a doorway across the hall. He got out a speed loader, popped open his cylinder, ejected six shells, set the nose of the new rounds in their chamber, twisted it to free them, then snapped the cylinder shut. He got out the.45 from his belt and thumbed off what he took to be the oversize safety. It was a new gun to him; he wasn’t especially sure how it worked, and so it scared him. He peeked down the hall, saw only darkness.

“Mommy,” somebody called. “Mommy, help me.”

Oh, shit, Uckley thought. Then in his peripheral vision something flashed and he flinched, ducked back, aware from the buck and the blast that he’d fired the.45, one reflex shot (it had been so easy).

It was the mother. She’d come up the steps. He hadn’t heard her, it wasn’t his fault! He’d told her to get out. He looked at her. She’d sat down against the wall, her legs weirdly akimbo. Her head hung forward in a way no living person’s would hang. There was a lot of blood on her.

Oh, no, goddammit, goddammit, oh, shit, I shot the woman!

He stared at her, ashamed and disgusted. The gunsmoke reached his nose, acrid and dense.

I told you not to come up, he felt himself screaming. I didn’t hear you! I didn’t hear you!

Footsteps clambered at him.

Uckley spun, dropped to a knee, found the target picture and—

It was a child on churning legs, just a small shape in the darkness, screaming “Mommy” and coming at him.

“Get back,” he shouted, because behind the child now he saw another shape from another dark doorway, leaning out with a pistol.

Uckley dived.

He hit the little girl.

“Get down, get down, get down,” he screamed, louder than she did. He hit his head on the wall, a stunning blow. His weapons dropped away. He felt the girl squirming under him. He heard footsteps.

The man stood over him.

The little girl was screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, my mommy is dead!”

Uckley held her tight to him.

He looked up.

The man, bleeding badly, stood over him. He was a heavy blond guy with a crew cut and a thick face.

“Let the kid go, for Christ’s sake, let the kid go,” Uckley begged.

The man turned and walked away. Uckley said to the girl, “Run downstairs. Run, now!”

He picked up the pieces, and with a gun in both hands he started down the hall.

Then he heard the shot.

“If you’ve spoken to Peter,” said Megan Wilder, “then you know our relationship became spectacularly deranged at the end. I’m not sure even yet if he did it to me or I did it to him or, out of some kind of crab nebulae of neurotic energy, we did it to each other.” She laughed ironically at the lunacy of it.

The three agents watched her without cracking so much as a snicker. She thought of them as the Three Dumb Men. They just sat there, their faces slack and dull, listening. They hadn’t even taken their coats off, and it was tropical inside the studio.

Megan bent forward, trying to find a new angle into her construction. She saw now that she had committed a fundamental design error at the very beginning. She had found the circuit board to a personal computer and loved it: it was so intricate, so cunning, so full of texture and meaning; and she had put it exactly in the center of the piece. Then she had painted it hot pink with a spray can. It was an inescapable fact. It was the absolute, the total, the implacable. But that was all wrong, she saw now. Then you could not discover the image, and meet it on your terms. Rather, it hit you in the face: it was like an ugly truth that would not go away, so obvious and pitiful that it dared you to recognize it, and made you aware of your cowardice for the fact that you could not.

“This,” she said to the Three Dumb Men, pointing to it, “this has to go. It’s too clever.”

She pried the board off the backing, ripping her finger on a staple in the process. She began to bleed. She chucked the thing away, and it hit with a clatter in the far reaches of the room. Only the pink-edged silhouette was left where the board had been pulled out, and small specks of furry pink light, where the spray paint had penetrated. She liked it; it was much better that way, suggestive and elliptical rather than pontificating.

Almost at once she began to feel better about the piece. Maybe she had solved it after all; maybe there was an end to the equation in sight.

“You see, he lied. I lied too. In the end I lied more than he did. In the end all I did was lie. But Peter lied first and he lied worst. Worse, he was a coward. He didn’t tell me because he couldn’t tell me. He knew I would hold it against him, what he did. And he was right, I would have, and maybe I would have left him. But I didn’t really and truly know until I was in love with him and we were married and the gestalt had just gotten too complicated and there were no easy answers.”

She paused. “He didn’t tell me, you see, because in his heart of hearts, way, way, down, Peter is ashamed. That’s the key to him.”

The Three Dumb Men just looked at her, with their long, glum, midwestern faces, like Grant Wood’s gothic Americans.

“So here I am, married to this bombthinker with an IQ of several thousand, whom I love so desperately I think I may die from it. But he always had his mistress. That bitch. He’d never give her up, he was so selfish. To have him, I had to have her. Oh, these brilliant men, I tell you, they can be real motherfuckers. So I—”

“You mean this Maggie Berlin?” one of them interrupted.

She laughed. The idiot!

“No, no, Maggie was just another screwed-up defense genius. No, it was the other bitch. I always thought of her as a woman, you see, and I still think there was sex under it all. He laughed at me, and maybe Freud is both wrong and dead, but I think there was sex under it always, all the time, ever since the start, ever since Harvard, when he couldn’t get laid and his roommate was the big stud for peace. No, her. The bomb. He could never leave her alone. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was his Circe, his Alice Through the Looking Glass, his Ginger Lynn. He really did love her, in his way. And so she hurt me and so I chose to hurt him through her. That’s the pathology of it. Surely it’s transparent. I mean, you must see stuff like this all the time?”

The Three Dumb Men were silent.

“Well, that’s context, at any rate. It enables you to understand why I was vulnerable to Ari Gottlieb.”

She bent to the piece again. She began to regret having so summarily dismissed the computer circuit board. It occurred to her that she ought to retrieve it. But she knew to do so would be to stamp herself as an idiot forever in these men’s minds. She looked at her watch. Time was flying, wasn’t it? Getting close to five. We’re all getting older until one day, poof, Peter’s Ginger Lynn goes down on her knees, opens her mouth, and sucks off the world — the ultimate blowjob. She laughed, a little more crazily than she had intended. She felt a little like crying.

“So, anyway, Peter is the flavor of the month in Washington circles because his let’s-nuke-the-Russians number is just the tune Reagan and his chums want to hear. It’s got a good beat and they can dance to it. They give it an eighty. And suddenly he’s Mr. Bomb, he has this terrible committee job, and it’s eating up his time and he’s loving it. I admit it I couldn’t handle it. And who should show up then but Ari Gottlieb. I guess if I had to design the PJM, I’d design Ari. That’s Perfect Jewish Male. I mean, he was like Alan Bates in An Unmarried Woman, just too good to be true. He was incredibly good-looking but not in a pretty or an offputting way. In a kind way, somehow. He never raised his voice. When he laughed — oh, listen to me, I sound like I’m in a musical — when he laughed, he really made you feel like it was you and he alone in the most brilliant private joke ever told. I liked the way his skin crinkled right by his eyes, into two little deltas, like flint arrowheads. It had a nice texture to it. He was very gentle, very confident. He wasn’t afraid. Peter was rigid with fear and guilt, but Ari was without fear. When he saw you, Jesus, how he lit up! His gift was for focus. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, there was nobody else. I met him at an opening two years back.”

“Date please.”

“Who remembers dates?”

“Could it have been January?”

“No. The weather was warm. It was very warm, I remember, because Ari and I had a Coke from one of those hot dog wagons on the street outside the Corcoran and — no, no, yes, it was January. It was a surprisingly warm January day. Peter was locked up. It had really gotten crazy with the group, Congress had just done something about putting the MXs in old silos or something and—”

“January eleven?”

“Maybe.”

She hated them. She just looked at them.

“Anyway, it was my idea. It wasn’t Ari’s idea. It was my idea. He was an Israeli citizen. He’d been in their Airborne troops or something, which I heard was a big thing over there. He knew people in the embassy. I just wanted to — to hurt Peter.”

“Was he interested?”

“No. Not at first. He thought it was foolish. Israel doesn’t have big missiles, Israel doesn’t care about big missiles, that’s what he said. But I said the information was valuable. Israel could use it somehow, they were clever. Jews are always clever.”

“And so he relented?”

“Finally. You see, for me it gave me a chance to do something. And it wasn’t like giving it to the Communists. It was to people on our side. To other Jews.”

“Yes.”

“And he went to them, and they said yes, they’d look at it, and finally he said this man wanted to meet me and talk to me, but it wouldn’t do to be seen at the embassy, could I go up to New York and meet him at the consulate. The Israeli consulate.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, and so I did. I met an Israeli intelligence officer at the Israeli consulate and it was very nice. He was a brilliant, commanding man, very considerate, very charming. He said he didn’t want me to get into trouble, did I know what I was doing, was I sure, blah blah blah. He pointed out that Jonathan Pollard had been arrested and that our government was making ugly noise about prosecuting him to the max, and that if I got caught, maybe there wasn’t much they’d be able to do about it.”

“And—”

“And I didn’t care. I was sure. And so I started doing it. It was easy.” She felt so smug when she said it. She’d had a great deal of curiosity about this moment. Would she turn her confession into what Peter used to call one of her “productions”? Well, yes, she had.

She felt the eyes of the Three Dumb Men upon her.

“After all,” she said, “it was only the Israelis. I mean, they are our friends, the last time I looked at the Washington Post.”

“Mrs. Thiokol — do you mind if I call you that?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Mrs. Thiokol, could you tell me a little about Ari Gottlieb? I mean, I don’t suppose you have any pictures.”

“Yes, I have three of his pictures. Abstract impressionism. He was not very good, that’s the fun — oh, you mean, his photograph. No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Could you tell us about him?”

“He was just everything I wanted. Except he had one flaw.”

“What was that.”

“It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help it.”

“What was it?”

“He wasn’t Peter Thiokol.”

She continued. “If anything, he was too perfect. Ari was beautiful and loving and never moody and very sexy. And dull.”

“He left you?”

“After an odd weekend in an inn in Virginia a while ago. Very strange.”

“How strange?”

“I can’t say. I slept through it all. I passed out after too much champagne. He was very offended. He left the next day. He had to go back to Israel. To his wife.”

“When was this?”

“Two weeks or so. I don’t really remember. Who remembers dates?”

“And so you’re alone.”

“I was alone even when I was married.”

“Tell me about this Israeli intelligence officer.”

“Oh, you know. Very clever man, very warm. Charming. Mysterious. I could tell he was a legend, even there in the consulate. They all looked at him. He was a special man. I remember after it was over, we went out on Seventy-third Street and he helped me get a taxi. You felt safe with him. And he—”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Thiokol?” It was, she saw, the youngest of the Three Dumb Men. He was slightly more tentative than the others and he could see his interruption irritated her.

“Yes?”

“You said Seventy-third Street.”

“Yes.”

“I used to be in our New York bureau. You mean Eighty-fourth Street.”

She was confused to sense no softness in his position.

“All right, I got the address mixed up. Who remembers addresses? And what dif — No, I’m sorry, it was Seventy-third Street! I’m not going to let you bully me. It was between Madison and Park. A lovely old brownstone. The Star of David on the flag, all the pictures of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, all the bustle, all the workers, all the—”

But she could feel him staring at her.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I know the building very well. It’s a brownstone all right, but it’s at Eighty-fourth, between Madison and Fifth, near the museum. I worked there, I used to go into that building regularly. We had a cooperating deal with Mossad for security.”

“I–I mean—”

And then she could think of nothing to say.

“Are you sure it was Seventy-third Street?”

She nodded dumbly.

“You see,” he said, “it would be pretty easy to do. Rent the house. For one morning you hang out the flag. You hang some pictures. Some people rush around, looking busy. An hour after you’ve gone, they’ve cleared out. That’s all.”

She felt a hole open: it was dark and huge. She was falling. No one was there to catch her.

Peter! she thought. God, Peter!

And then she said, “They fooled me. They just fooled me”.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid they did,” said one of the Three Dumb Men.

She began, very softly, to weep.

“Oh, Peter,” she wept, “oh, Jesus, what have I done?”