The Devil's bed

chapter
forty-two

In the quiet of the church, Bo heard the blower kick on, and a cool draft touched the back of his neck. It was not as cold as the muzzle of the gun Moses held there.

“You declined their offer?” Bo asked.

“If offer it was. They didn’t need me. They had my prints all over the weaponry. If in fact they wanted me to pull the trigger and put the round into her, it would have been the last thing I ever did. So I took my leave.”

“Just like that?”

“When I was stronger, they exchanged my handcuffs for a strait-jacket. A mistake. It was a Posey,” he said. “Posey makes four kinds. The one they chose is the simplest to escape. The weakness is the buckles. You work them against any sharp, hard edge, the frame of a cot for example, and you can knock them loose pretty quickly. Took me three minutes. Houdini could do it in less time and while he was hanging upside down. Now there was a genius.”

Moses resettled himself in the pew behind Bo. The kiss of the gun barrel ended, but Bo knew the weapon was still trained on him.

“You continue to have resources,” Bo noted.

“An elementary piece of any stratagem. Always have a backup cache somewhere,” Moses said. “What I’ve been wondering since I read about your crime spree in the papers is what’s the connection. I’d guess the people who framed you are the same ones who nabbed me.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I hate a puzzle with missing pieces. Who are these people, Thorsen? Why do they want the First Lady dead?”

“Why do you want the First Lady dead?”

“I have a pretty good reason. And I think you know it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“About you knowing?”

“About the good reason. About what really happened that night on the bluff at Wildwood twenty years ago. What you think went down didn’t. It wasn’t Tom Jorgenson with Kate. It was his brother, Roland. All this time you’ve hated the wrong man.”

“Of course you’re lying. Your job is to save her.”

“Think about it for a minute. Two brothers very similar in build and appearance. One, a man committed to peace. The other, an artist with an unconventional lifestyle. One, a father. The other, an uncle who’d been generally distant. Think about the strength of the man you fought. A politician or a worker in iron? Ask yourself who was more likely to have been with Kate that night.”

The blower shut off and the church lapsed again into a deep silence. Moses didn’t speak. The figures in the stained glass windows were dark images now, barely discernible as human.

Bo said, “It was incest no matter how you cut it, but Tom Jorgenson wasn’t guilty. The guilty one is dead.”

“Why didn’t she tell me this herself?”

“You never gave her a chance. I was there. Every time she tried to explain, you cut her off. You didn’t want to hear. But you know what? I also think you didn’t really want her dead.”

“Didn’t want her dead? I should have killed her years ago, and her father.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought I’d found a family in the Company. I thought I’d found a place I belonged. Until I spent time on the Devil’s Bed. That pretty well cleared my thinking. I knew what I had to do.”

“What was that? Kill everyone who ever lied to you? If you’re like most of us, it would be a long list.”

“I didn’t care about everyone.”

“Only those you’d hoped would be family? I talked with Father Cannon. I know about Wildwood.”

Moses didn’t argue, but neither did he agree.

“But when you had the chance to kill Kate,” Bo said, “you offered her her life. After all your careful planning, why did you even hesitate? You know what I think? I think in that moment when you had her on her knees, you understood that she wasn’t the real monster, that all those years ago she was just a scared kid involved in something way over her head. It was her father who needed killing. Except that it wasn’t. The man you really wanted dead killed himself a long time ago.”

“How is it you know her personal history?” Moses asked.

“She told me.”

“She could have lied.”

“When you had the gun barrel to her forehead and looked into her eyes on the bluff, were they the eyes of a woman who was lying?”

For a long time, Moses said nothing. Bo could hear the man breathing at his back, could feel the warm breath breaking against his neck.

“Why did they frame you?” Moses asked.

“Because they tried to kill me and couldn’t. They want me dead because I know who they are,” Bo said.

“And that would be?”

“NOMan.”

“NOMan?”

“National Operations Management. It’s a federal government agency, established as an information conduit. Ostensibly. I’m pretty sure that all along it was meant for something else.”

Bo explained what he knew about the organization. When he’d finished, Moses laughed quietly.

“Ever read theOdyssey, Thorsen?”

Bo heard a door open in the far recesses of the church. The pew behind Bo creaked.

“It’s just Otter,” Bo said quickly.

“Bo?” It was Otter’s voice preceding him.

Bo spoke quietly over his shoulder. “Look, Moses, we can work this out together. We both have a stake in what happens.”

Moses didn’t reply. Otter stepped into the dim illumination from the light above the altar, and he looked around. A few moments passed before he saw Bo.

“Sorry that took so long. What are you doing there all alone? Praying?”

Bo slowly turned and looked behind him. Moses was gone.

Otter came down the aisle, carrying a white bag that smelled of the hot gyros inside it.

“I’ve got to go, Otter.”

“Why?”

“Moses was here.”

“The dead guy?”

“He’s not dead.”

Otter’s eyes jumped around the darkened church. “How’d he find you?”

“Because he’s a goddamn genius. He may get it in his head to call the police. Until I figure all this out, I can’t take a chance on getting picked up.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not like I haven’t been on the streets before.”

“This sucks, Spider-Man. What can I do to help?”

“You’ve already done enough.”

Otter handed him the bag of food. “Wait here.” He was gone a few minutes. When he came back he carried a rolled blanket tied with a rope that was looped in such a way that it created a sling to make the bedroll easier to carry over his shoulder.

“It’s a good blanket,” Otter said. “Kept me warm a lot of nights when I didn’t have a roof over my head. And here.” Otter shoved a handful of money at him. “Only forty-seven dollars. It won’t get you to Mexico, but it’ll keep you fed for a few days.”

“I can’t-”

“Take it, Spider-Man. I’ve got food, and a paycheck’s on the way. You’ve got to keep yourself together until things get cleared up. God knows when that’ll be.”

Bo had always been the one offering help. It had been a long time since he’d needed any himself. He found it hard being on the other side of charity, having something as simple as an old blanket and spare change mean so much.

“Thanks.”

“No thanks necessary. Just be careful, okay?”

Bo retrieved his Sig from the church pew and stuffed it into the bedroll. Otter’s final offering was a strong hug, then Bo took his leave.

He walked the streets as the dark of night hardened around him. Clouds rolled in from the west and blotted out the stars. He stopped once, at a convenience store to buy toothpaste and a toothbrush, and to use the phone. Directory assistance was unable to help him. Lorna Channing’s telephone number was unlisted. Bo tried the White House using the code name Peter Parker, but he got nowhere.

When he reached the river, he followed the east bank of the Mississippi, walking along a jogging path that finally ended in the broken concrete of old docks and landings no longer used and fallen into disrepair. Behind him, the towers of the downtown district spiked toward a sky domed with an overcast that reflected the glitter and glare of the city. Ahead of him, high above the river, a row of lit globes slanted down from Cherokee Heights like a broken string of pearls. The High Bridge. Bo passed under the girders and made his way to the place where once, long ago, the old bus had sat on blocks and sheltered his street family. The bus was gone, but the site was still a deserted stretch of riverbank guarded by cottonwoods and cushioned by tall grass. Bo rolled out the blanket and sat down. A muddy smell flowed up from the river, thick as the water itself. He was in a place where eons before, glacial flooding had carved a deep chasm in the layers of sandstone. The houses atop the Heights were set back too far to be seen from the river, and the bluff beneath them was invisible in the dark. The great bridge seemed to connect with nothing at all. Bo recalled that only a couple of days before he’d been on top of the bridge, poised to plunge to his death, to ride into eternity on the current of the black water below.

His body hurt. His feet ached because the shoes Otter had given him were too small. His head was packed with facts and conjectures that whirled round and round and sucked all his thinking into a confusing maelstrom. He tried to sort a few things out.

He was certain now what NOMan’s goal was.

The assassination of the First Lady.

The murder of Kate.

It was possible that with Moses now truly at large and with Bo complicating things, they may have decided to call off the operation, but he knew that these were people accustomed to manipulating events on an enormous scale. The network of NOMan was so tightly woven into the mundane fabric of the legitimate system that it was almost invisible. They’d been operating so long and so effectively that by now they may have considered themselves invulnerable and were still determined to proceed with the killing.

But how? And where? And when?

He contemplated the wisdom of calling the field office in Minneapolis and telling them everything he knew and everything he suspected. Several considerations held him back. In the first place, there was the time a call like that would take. They’d have him located in a matter of moments, and they’d descend on him with extreme prejudice. If they took him into custody, NOMan would know exactly where he was. Bo wasn’t eager to become a stationary target for an organization that may well have infiltrated the Secret Service in the way it had other agencies. He could easily be killed before he had a chance to state his case. He’d end up just one more incident discussed by conspiracy theorists on the Internet.

He considered spilling the whole story to the newspapers. Again, no guarantee his allegations would make it into print. He had no proof of anything. If Tom Jorgenson didn’t offer supporting testimony and if NOMan called off the hit and nothing happened, he’d be labeled loonier than ever.

The most hopeful strategy would be to anticipate their move and intercept them. This ran contrary to all his training and to the protective doctrine of the Secret Service, which was to cover the protectee and evacuate. But evacuate where? Under assault by an organization as ubiquitous, invisible, and determined as NOMan, was any place safe?

Bo was exhausted. He lay back on the blanket, looked up at the empty night sky, and thought about Kate. He wondered what she must think of him now. Probably, she was thinking he was insane and she was lucky that he hadn’t gone berserk when they’d been alone together.

The sound of thunder came from far away, but Bo didn’t see any lightning. A few drops hit him in the face. Great. On top of everything else, it was going to rain.