No stairs or steps or paths lead down into the quarry. How has the rock been retrieved? He idly speculates on this oddity, initiating a query about the queer quarry, smiling broadly at the potential of this gaping, grand invitation. What a mass monkey grave this would make!
By nightfall he is on the other side of the black hole, snug and warm in Frank and Lucille Stahly's farmhouse. He has the heat cranked up, a big bowl of chips and Mrs. West's Party Dip in his lap, and his muddy boots rest on Lucille's coffee table, waiting for them to return home.
He'd slipped the cheap lock in about eight seconds, found the small farmhouse empty, dirty dishes in the sink and on the breakfast table, and the bed unmade. Within a half hour or so he knew what there was to know about the people who lived here, and was waiting patiently for the party to get under way.
Darkness had fallen early and he'd enjoyed his quiet vigil, eating the entire contents of the Stahly's fridge, drinking some wine he'd found, and resting his bones. He amused himself reading, in his mind, “Eating One's Dead: Susu and the Southern Massim."
It was nearly seven-thirty when he heard the pickup truck crunch along the gravel driveway. He was on his feet, moving through the darkened house, standing against the wall behind the kitchen door and away from the windows, frozen motionless, willing his vital signs to a halt, his killing chain dangling from his right hand. Waiting silently.
“They pulled three truckloads out when melons were going for nine cents, and then, see, the early winter set ‘em back—and so they started givin’ ‘em away by the truckful, and trying to wholesale ‘em out to these roadside vendors."
“If everybody had knowed about it, they would have come out and got some. They shoulda’ told the folks in town.” A woman's loud voice.
“John said he was (something) that'd been shipped too early to turn sweet."
“That's right."
The sound of the door unlocking.
“He asked me if we wanted a bag of broccoli. They had about ten bags that was damaged coming off a truck from Mem—” He took the man down with the first chain-snap, catching him across the left temple and forehead, killing him instantly, reluctantly almost. He could listen to monkey talk for hours sometimes, fascinated as he was by the extremely prosaic nature of their endless blabbing about melons and broccoli and damaged veggies. He hated them for their ways but was intrigued by their mundane, weak lives and superficial thought patterns, because, deep down, he was one of them.
The man was ordinary in appearance. The woman, ample-bosomed and rather big-boned, was an attractive lady in her fifties. She immediately began to fight him, and he was surprised and amused, a barking cough of laughter escaping as he subdued her as gently as he could, opting to knock her out with his frying-pan-size fist.
“Stop!” the woman screamed, regaining consciousness, feeling great weight on her, the nakedness and stench of her attacker adding to the blind horror. A stocking bit into her mouth.
“Now, now, Lucille,” a deep basso profundo rumbled hotly in her ear, “it's going to be all right.” She felt as if her back were breaking. The monster was in her and she almost passed out trying to fight him. Her wrists and ankles were bound to objects she could not see, blindfolded as she was and spread on the living room floor, tethered to the stove and other pieces of heavy furniture.
The heaviest furniture of all was on top of her, on her back, one hand cupping her breast, another squeezing her right hip, stabbing into her from behind.
“Oh, Lucille,” he rumbled, as she gagged with nausea and fear, “You're a live one."
23
SOUTH OF WATERTON
“What time did Big Boy check into this location?” the civilian at the monitor screen asked. Big Boy was their in-house name for Chaingang Bunkowski.
“Just a second. Let me get the log.” The warrant officer took a clipboard down and read it for a few moments, then read the time to the man in front of the screen. “Seventeen twenty-two thirty. Yesterday."
“Occupants arrived when...?"
“Nineteen twenty-eight."
“Jesus. The bastard's still in there with ‘em.” He made a note on a manifest in front of him and keyed a switch on his console. Then cut the switch and double-checked his code-pad. Big Boy was “Friendly” on the one-time voice pad. He opened his microphone again and gave the radio call sign for the disposal team:
“White Tracker to Natural Athlete, you copy?"
“Read you, White Tracker. Over."
“Friendly's got an overnighter in North Sector Four. Check your directory under four hundred and eleven Yankee. Please confirm. Over.” There was a pause while Natural Athlete asked White Tracker to wait one, and they looked up the skinny on a location in North Sector Four, and then ran down the “grids” in the Yankee quadrant. Their directory confirmed the location of the residential listing under the name Stahly, Frank, at four-one-one Yankee.
“Natural Athlete calling White Tracker. We confirm—that is a rog."
“Okay. We'll let you know when Friendly is outta there, and you guys can be standing by with the meat wagon, you copy? Over."
“We copy. Over."
“Ten-four. Y'all have fun now. This is White Tracker out.” Christ. He wouldn't have their job for anything. Uncle Sugar didn't have that much money.
The man who was occasionally Christopher Sinclair sat behind a metal desk in his office within the Control Center. Names meant nothing in his line of work. He was one thing in the Clandestine Services interagency directory, another thing where he got his personal mail. His own name—that had been buried long ago. The names he used were worknames. Part of the business he was in. They meant about as much as did titles. His happened to be “chief of section,” which—in this situation—meant chief scapegoat.
The project had begun for him during the COUNTRYSAFE operation, which had been, in his view as well as his boss's, an unmitigated disaster. That had been far away in another time and place, and his name had been Robert Newman back in those halcyon Vietnam days.
There were forces within the service as well as within the embassy that conspired to mitigate, not to mention distort, the failure that was to be officially perceived as a success. He'd been called upon to draft a CYA memo, a cover-your-ass document that would—in carefully drafted and oblique language—present the debacle's best face.
“We are not the KGB,” he had written, contending that while we could mount a small commando mission, call in a well-placed air strike, bring a carrier into the South China Sea, or mine the Gulf of Tonkin, we could obtain from neither the military or private sector “expendable assets who have proven to be highly adept at sensitive assassinations."
When push came to shove, we had no expertise at hiring cold-blooded killers who excelled at their special craft. “Uncle Sam is not,” he was pleased to observe, “in the murder business."
There were those operations that demanded the services of such monstrous horrors as the legendary Chaingang Bunkowski, around whom the COUNTRYDAY operation had been structured. Serious and vital hits, among them being the most delicate and important missions entrusted to the Action Unit, demanded pro-level wet work of the highest degree of skill. The elite military units and the usual roster of “cowboys” simply would not do.
But COUNTRYSAFE, a different (but related) ill-conceived, covertly mounted op originating in the secret swamps of the intelligence community, had not lived up to its name. If anything, it had put the country in the gravest peril.
During the blizzard of cables and CYA memoranda in the wake of the op, a man doing R & D in one of the service's Midwest shops, a Dr. Norman, happened to access certain correspondence from workname Robert Newman, née Christopher Sinclair, to his superiors. Norman knew a like mind when he encountered it, and an alliance was formed during those Southeast Asian War years that would stand the test of time. Both of them, to be sure, were Chaingang Bunkowski believers.