The Furies

AMBRA VOLPE

A slight change in engine note on the 747, and Ambra Volpe is awake. She puts her seat upright, fastens her belt, and adjusts her watch and mind to Sunday afternoon. The big aircraft starts to bump, and streaks of cloud drift past the window.

The reflection that looks back from her compact mirror has a wide, slightly sensual mouth, shoulder-length black hair, and olive complexion. She has made the most of her dark skin with a simple gold necklace and hoop earrings. She might be Italian, which is hardly surprising as her parents are second-generation Italians, her father a retired gardener with the city council. The old ones live in the Meadows, a Nottingham district known for its drugs, guns, and bargain-basement house prices. The "Meadows taxi" — a steady stream of police cars between the district and the St. Anne's HQ — runs past the front window of her parents' mid-terraced council flat. She hasn't seen them in a year, misses them. She looks down at Los Angeles, sprawling endlessly below like some megalopolis out of a science-fiction movie, wisps of cloud below her seeming to rise up and and drift past more rapidly as the big aircraft approaches the ground. The long journey, first across the Atlantic and then across the States, has left her weary. But she still has that tingling excitement. Not the gut-fierce fright of the Pakistan job, where things had gone terribly wrong, but still …

Ambra's future was decreed by her mother at an early age: Leave school at sixteen, run Uncle Dino's café, and bring in money as quickly as possible. Don't get pregnant, not until you've married a nice Catholic boy, then give your parents lots of grandchildren. But by age twelve Ambra was already aware of a world beyond the Meadows; by fourteen she was sick of the Saturday-night gang warfare and the drunks urinating on their doorstep. Into puberty, Mama began to introduce, by subtle means, a string of nice Catholic boys, all of them cloned from a farm in Dullsville. At her sixteenth birthday party, faced with yet another dim-wit introduced by her beaming mother, something clicked inside Ambra. There had to be something better than this! She knew she'd reached a point in her life where she faced a choice: go down, or go up. She chose to go up. Three years at a "posh" school, with noisy financial support from Uncle Dino, yielded a string of casual boyfriends and top-grade A-levels. Another three gave her a First in modern languages, a mountain of student debt, a six-month placement in Kiev, and a glorious, short-lived affair with a Ukrainian businessman.

For a joke — or was it a dare? — she sent her CV to PO Box 1301, the MI6 recruiting address, after a celebratory night out with some university friends. To her surprise an application form arrived a couple of days later, and then a phone call inviting her to an address in Carlton House Terrace, which turned out to be something like a small cottage, the devil to find. Hoops of interviews followed, along with prolonged, discreet questioning of her bewildered family. Ambra decided that the joke had gone far enough. She disappeared into China, intending to teach English, but instead ended up modeling. The job paid more but she soon felt that it should have come with a health warning: Modeling can rot your brain. Back in the UK after three months, she again moved in with Mum and Dad in her old room. But by now the gap between them had grown as wide as the Atlantic, and she felt their cramped little world closing in on her once more. And then, out of the blue, there was another telephone call …

The clunk of landing gear snaps Ambra out of her daydream, back into the real world. She runs light lipstick over her mouth and returns the disapproving glance from the old woman next to her with a wide smile.

On the ground, she waits impatiently at the carousel for her overnight bag, sweaty and tired but anxious to get going on the assignment. A tall, black-haired man in his thirties at the far end of the customs hall; well built but with the beginnings of a paunch. Watchful, in the way of policemen everywhere. That, and the Armani suit and the flat-top hair. She collects her bag and walks straight up to him. "Mr. Caddon, I presume?"

Caddon leads her briskly away from the long customs queues to a side door, doesn't offer to take her bag. His tone says that he is in no mood for pleasantries. "I'm taking you straight to Wilshire Boulevard. We'll brief you there. Frankly I'm not quite clear how you can help us, Ms. Volpe. Consensus here is that this is an in-house job."

"And I'm the token Brit?" Caddon doesn't reply, and Ambra adds, "What about the letter to the prime minister?"

"It's screwball stuff, Ms. Volpe, you know that."

"But the screwball knows all about your UFO, Mr. Caddon."

Biologically, Ambra thinks, she is somewhere around two in the morning, but her mind is in such a feverish state that she knows she wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. Her head and nose are stuffy, a nuisance she puts down to the sudden, unaccustomed change in temperature and humidity. And she has a briefing to assimilate. Caddon leads the way through busy corridors to his office, where a third man is waiting.

"Ambra, meet the brains of the outfit, Tony Spada. Tony, this is Mizz Ambra Volpe, the liaison officer from British intelligence."

Spada and Ambra shake hands. Caddon's partner is a small, slightly hunched, and wrinkled man with, like Ambra, Italian features. She risks a personal remark, immediately regrets it as over-familiar. "You look like Inspector Columbo, Mr. Spada."

Spada grins. "Hey, I have two eyes and no cigar."

The pleasantries over, Caddon plunges straight into it. "A couple of dozen eyewitnesses saw a spinning disk weaving in the sky like a Frisbee about two o'clock in the morning. The geniuses downstairs triangulated and gave us a trajectory." The map on the screen shows a wavy yellow line starting in hill country east of Superstition Mountain and moving almost north toward Fossil Creek.

"How are Homeland Security keeping it out of the public domain?"

Caddon waves at a press release on his desk. "They've put out some crap about a military exercise, closed off the reservation, squawked out cell phones, and so on. A local TV network has picked up on the crashed UFO, but who believes stories like that?"

"But Mr. Caddon, there are delivery vans, school buses …"

"… and ninety corpses with families beginning to wonder why their folks haven't come home, not to mention a highway closed down. The bubble will burst tonight. It's bound to."

"Why are they keeping it quiet?"

"Maybe the device was being delivered somewhere and there are bad guys waiting for it who don't know it's gone pear-shaped. Look, we can't have more than an hour or two of silence left, but it might give us an edge."

"The London letter says you don't have an edge."

Spada says, "Here we are with a major terrorist act on American soil and what are we doing about it? Trying to hush it up."

"What about the apex of the flight path?"

"Coming to it, Ms. Volpe. Aforesaid triangulation led us to search the area around Apache Junction, Apache Trail — an old raiding route — Goldfield ghost town, et cetera. We finally homed in on this."

Now the map has gone and a camera is panning slowly across a desiccated, cactus-covered foreground. It stops at a low, blackened structure of girders over a disused shaft. "This is near a one-horse town called Globe, which is surrounded with old copper mines. We think the device was stored down this one, hauled up, and fired."

"Your evidence?"

"Fresh scrapings up the shaft side. And this." The camera is panning some more. "A block and tackle from a pickup truck, with a hundred yards of chain. And here are the people who hauled it up."

An indoor scene, a mortuary. Four bodies, two of them young men, the other two looking like sausages someone had forgotten about on a barbecue. "The recognizable guys are Mexicans, probably illegal immigrants. The blowtorched ones are Caucasians, not yet identified. The Mexicans were shot in the back, running, with a single handgun, a nine-millimeter Luger, 115-grain bullets, lead hollow-point. Our guess is they were hired to lift the bomb out of the shaft, and then killed."

"And the cremated pair?"

"They were standing up, a few yards from the device. Somehow they ended up under its exhaust flame." A few gruesome close-ups follow. "We're trying to reconstruct their faces, but as you can imagine we're not hopeful about getting anything useful. There was nothing to identify the bodies, no wallets or the like, but we have the teeth."

Now the movie is showing a car, its paintwork scorched and blistered. "A white Pontiac," Caddon confirms. "A Hertz car rented at LA airport in a fictitious name. The man on desk duty at the time remembers nothing about the customer."

"You say it flew. What was the means of propulsion?"

"Hold on. There." The movie shows the beginnings of an assembled jigsaw, laid out on the floor of an aircraft hangar.

Ambra thinks she recognizes something. "Are these venturi tubes?"

"Venturi tubes? How do you know about venturi tubes?" Caddon asks, surprised. "The Girl Scouts teach you?"

"I had business in an arms bazaar some time ago." She doesn't expand on that.

Caddon looks at her with something like respect. "Four venturi tubes," he confirms. "Preliminary X-ray fluorescence says it's high-tensile steel, very strong. Armaments quality. They're doing a detailed analysis now, and we should have the results tomorrow. But there are no combustion chambers. The device was powered by some sort of solid fuel. We're still analyzing the black residue on the tubes."

"Simple assembly, then," Ambra says. "A glorified skyrocket. Could amateurs have built this? Schoolboys even?"

"They'd have to be damned smart, Ms. Volpe. Now, here's something interesting." The camera is panning over scraps of metal, most of the markings illegible; underneath they are labeled:

"That's all we have so far but they're still coming in. We can't make sense of them. And we have this" — the Third Reich symbol appears on the screen — "and now here we're three miles downwind from the crash site."

A row of wooden buildings. Authentic Indian pottery stacked on a veranda, a shop window displaying silver jewelry, brightly patterned rugs, and a little varnished rocking horse. A man lying curled up on the veranda, apparently asleep. "The spores drifted through this cluster of houses on Highway 87." The camera pans slowly over an empty road and pauses at a car park, where a couple of pickup trucks and half a dozen motorbikes are gleaming in the morning sun. Two men are lying facedown. An elderly woman is sitting with her back to a Chrysler, white-haired and openmouthed, staring unblinkingly into the sun. An old man is hanging half out of the car. "Now we're going inside the diner."

Into Katie's Diner — THE BEST ITALIAN COOKING IN ARIZONA. An American flag pinned to the wall, and under it, in red crayon: THESE COLORS DON'T RUN. Another crayoned notice: THIS ESTABLISHMENT HAS THE APPROVAL OF THE FRIDAY NITE CAR CLUB. Left through the double door and into the diner itself. Ambra feels herself tensing up in anticipation.

Sixties vinyl glued to the walls; Elvis leaning against a pink Chevrolet, all wings and chrome, the photo curling away from the wall.

And an overweight man in leather gear with shoulder-length gray hair, his head resting against the table. The camera zooms in: red eyes from a Dracula movie, black tongue, grotesquely swollen and sticking out of his mouth. Blood from ears, eyes, and nose making little congealed rivulets and merging into a pool, gluing his hair to the table. Flies crawling, drinking greedily, their proboscises dipped in the sticky liquid.

"The mechanism of death? I was told anthrax."

"The bacterial spores thereof. They're silent, invisible, and odorless."

"I thought it needed a high dosage to be fatal."

"Yeah. You have to breathe in about ten thousand of them. They produce a toxin in the bloodstream. Mortality's about ninety percent."

Spada says, "It starts off like flu. Symptoms usually don't appear for about twenty-four hours, and it kills you a few days later. But these people died within minutes, Ambra, it's got us bamboozled. I can call you Ambra? Ms. Volpe seems formal but maybe you Brits like it that way?"

"Ambra will do fine. You were saying."

"I was saying it's got us bamboozled. Maybe the spores had some genetic mutation."

"What else do you have?" Ambra feels her stuffed-up sinuses gradually developing into a full-blown headache.

"Nothing."

"Mr. Caddon, we need a solution by Saturday. Are you telling me you have nothing?"

Caddon manages a sour grin. "Like you said, Ambra, you Brits have something. A screwball letter saying Arrividerci, London."

VIRGIL RABBIT AND THE DENTIST: FBI BUILDING, 1830

"Nothing."

Pepperoni pizza, Ambra notices, is the dish of choice in the FBI war room. Outside, it is hot and sticky, and the air conditioner at the window isn't really coping. A couple of electric fans are circulating stale air and pizza scent around in an endless, pointless flow. She is sitting next to Tony Spada.

The man who has just delivered this one-word report is an unshaven FBI agent from Phoenix. He has shoulder-length, unkempt hair spilling down over an olive-green rain jacket, and he looks as if he has come straight from a redneck survivalist camp. To judge by his bleary eyes and slurred speech, he hasn't slept for a couple of days, a fact that draws no sympathy whatever from the equally exhausted team listening to him. He flicks through a few sheets of paper, facing his audience crammed into the stuffy little office.

"That's it?" Caddon asks. "Nothing?"

The Phoenix agent shrugs. "We have an old idiot, guy who calls himself Virtual Reality …"

"Are you serious?"

"His original name was Virgil Rabbit."

"If my name was Virgil Rabbit, I'd change it, too," Spada declares. "But not to Virtual Reality."

The man from Phoenix continues: "He's a preacher, or was. Ministered to a small community in the Catalina foothills. Spent five years in Phoenix FCI for digging up cadavers and mutilating them. First he buries them wearing his preacher's hat, then after a few weeks he digs them up wearing his grave robber's hat."

"Whatever turns you on," Caddon says. "What reason did this Virtual Rabbit give for his behavior?"

"Virtual Reality or Virgil Rabbit, not Virtual Rabbit. He gave none. He got out last fall, by the way, now living in uptown Phoenix."

One of the older men on the team gives the Phoenix man a puzzled look. "So how does this Virgil Reality connect with anthrax?"

"Take a look at this." Mr. Phoenix bites into a slice of pizza and presses a button on a remote control. A handful of photographs come up on screen, showing first a white-haired, skeletally thin man in face-on and profile. He has the vacant, enthusiastic eyes of the deranged. Then a succession of photographs of a hut, its interior so squalid that Ambra can almost smell it. The Phoenix man supplies a running commentary: "The state police raided his property with a little help from Fort Detrick personnel in bioprotection suits. Found a handful of anthrax spores on site." The photograph shows a test tube, half filled with what looks like milk, clamped on a stand. A succession of stills takes them down steps to a heavily locked door. On the other side of the door, four corpses are laid out on camp beds. They are partially decomposed, desiccated, half-grinning with lips pulled back from their teeth, and their chests and stomachs are opened up — "standard Y-cut" — Ambra stares, horrified, while her pizza wonders whether to go down or up. She glances surreptitiously around; the FBI agents are happily continuing to munch theirs. And then, mercifully, the slide show is throwing up a sequence of crudely typed sheets. "They found this in the guy's cabin. A do-it-yourself manual on extracting anthrax bacilli from cadavers. He typed it up himself."

"Did he now?" Caddon says thoughtfully.

Mr. Phoenix shakes his head regretfully. "I only just got the Fort Detrick report on the spores. The ones this guy was growing are different from the ones collected in Fossil Creek. Didn't know you got more than one kind of anthrax spore."

"What are you saying?"

"He's just a harmless lunatic."

Ambra wonders about the FBI definition of harmless. "What about your militias?"

Mr. Phoenix gives the British visitor a tolerant smile. "We take them seriously, which is why we've had most of them under surveillance for quite a while. Some real hate merchants in there, but mostly they're just grown-up boys acting out their make-believe, sinking a few beers and having a good time on weekends."

Spada reassures her. "They're mostly just glorified Boy Scouts."

"With guns," Ambra says. There is an awkward silence, and she adds, "Somebody pulled that device up the shaft."

"The pickup truck was stolen from a builder's yard in Coolidge, Arizona, four days ago. No CCTV cameras, no nothing."

"Anything else?"

"Nothing. We're checking the dental records of the burned-out guys."

Caddon sighs, and the Phoenix man adds, "Neal, be sensible here. Our banjo-playing militias could only produce test-tube quantities of anthrax. The crashed UFO had a ton of the stuff. That's industrial scale. The militia trail is dead before it starts."

"What's the alternative? A Nazi flying saucer?"

Mr. Phoenix sighs. "Okay, that's even worse. That's comic book stuff."

Caddon says, "So." He crosses to the whiteboard and writes:

The Phoenix agent says, "So where do hillbillies get their hands on a ton of anthrax? Where does anyone get their hands on that?"

Spada says, "Maybe they have a secret factory." There is an outburst of derisory laughter.

Ambra was there a year ago, on the trail of potential suicide bombers who had entered the UK via the Channel Tunnel and then just disappeared. There is that horrible, disturbing moment when you suddenly realize that the trail has dried up …

THE YELLOW BOXSTER: FBI BUILDING, 2000

"Douse the lights, Tony boy." Caddon presses a button on the video recorder. Spada obliges, then moves over to sit next to Ambra in the small, darkened office. He may have no cigar but, close up, he smells of cigar smoke; it irresistibly strengthens the resemblance to Inspector Columbo in Ambra's mind. The rest of the team have cleared off and Ambra is being given the last of her briefing. She is dizzy with exhaustion, and the threatened headache has finally arrived and planted itself solidly on top of her skull.

The movie shows the inside of a shop. Gift baskets, racks of sweaters, cowboy hats piled high, glass cases showing jewelry, scenes of the Old West around the walls. "This is from the store across the road from Katie's Diner. It's the parking lot at the diner I want you to look at."

An elderly couple in the shop appear, moving erratically from item to item. At the counter, someone wraps up a sweater and takes their money, all in jerky movements like an old movie. "There. The car pulling in."

"A white Pontiac," says Spada unnecessarily.

Two men are stepping out of the Pontiac. Frustratingly, the camera is angled so that only their legs are visible. Over the next few minutes, their legs appear and disappear from view. Caddon says, "They're waiting for someone. And here he comes." A bright yellow Porsche turns in and stops. Another pair of legs. The three pairs of legs stand together and then disappear in the direction of the diner in funny, jerky walks.

"I'll speed it on a bit, they were in the diner for about an hour." Caddon presses a button on a remote control. "Here."

"Are those the same legs?"

"Uh-huh, and they're going into the same cars." The Pontiac and the yellow sports car take off in opposite directions.

"I couldn't make out the plates," says Spada.

"Signal processing could. The Pontiac is our phony LA rental."

Ambra feels a surge of excitement. Within the last hour, one of the corpses at the UFO launch site has been recognized as the man who had hired the Pontiac. He's a dentist. He spends his weekends with a white supremacist outfit called the Phoenix Storks. They shoot up a few beer cans with Schwarzenegger armaments at weekends, then it's home in time to put the kids to bed and watch TV. Harmless fantasists, they'd told her. Maybe the chase is on again? Maybe. "And the flash car?"

"A Porsche Boxster, with a California plate ending in 07. Now we ask ourselves, how many canary-yellow Porsche Boxsters are there in California with license plates ending in 07? Answer, seven." Caddon counts with his fingers. "A restaurant owner, a grocery chain owner, an interior decorator, an eye surgeon, two rich widows, and a Hollywood musician."

"No drug dealers?"

"The top pushers go for Maseratis and Ferraris hereabouts, Ms. Volpe. But yeah, they're all high-society California respectability. No closet Nazis, no al-Qaeda connections, no nothing. However, one of them paid for the meal in Katie's Diner with a credit card."

"The musician?"

"Hey, Ambra, how did you get that?"

"Telepathy. And the name on your folder. I've seen it somewhere."

"His name is Alekos Demos." Caddon skims down the papers he has brought with him. "A freeborn American, with no criminal track record, not even a traffic violation. Model citizen. So naturally we don't hold any data on him."

"Naturally," says Spada, settling back for the spiel.

Caddon reads some more. "He's aged fifty-two, 180 pounds, five feet four inches, with mild heart trouble." Caddon starts to pace up and down, as if he is lecturing. "An only child of Greek parents who arrived from Greece in 1947. Seems they had a rough time under the occupation, most of their family was butchered. Studied accounting in England for a couple of years, thereby avoiding 'Nam. Returned to Berkeley, dropped out of a master's, played the clubs with a pop group called the Stoats, started composing music around then. Now big in the movie business. Owns homes in Spain and Morocco but his main residence is in Burbank. Hangs around gay bars in LA. At the moment he's in his La Jolla pad with one of his boys and I don't mean a son. No known political affiliations. And here he is in all his glory."

The screen throws up a picture taken at some party. Demos is grinning hugely at some young man. The musician is heavily wrinkled, with shoulder-length bleached hair and a hooked nose that makes him look like a lecherous Indian chief. Stubby fingers hold an over-large cigar.

"We'll take him first thing tomorrow, Tony. Just remember this is a respectable citizen, and the meeting at Strawberry may be totally innocent or related to his sexual proclivities, which comes to the same thing."

"In other words be tactful," Spada says.

"Or he'll have your nuts. He and the governor are old pals."

Ambra asks, "What about me? Do I go shopping or what?"

Caddon pulls a jacket from the back of a chair. "That's up to you, Ms. Volpe. Frankly, I can't find a use for you."