13
Late that morning Rainbird came in, rolling his wagon of cleaning products, mops, sponges, and rags. His white orderly’s uniform flapped softly around him.
“Hi, Charlie,” he said.
Charlie was on the sofa, looking at a picture book. She glanced up, her face pale and unsmiling in that first moment… cautious. The skin seemed stretched too tightly over her cheekbones. Then she smiled. But it was not, Rainbird thought, her usual smile.
“Hello, John.”
“You don’t look so great this morning, Charlie, you should forgive me for sayin.”
“I didn’t sleep very well.”
“Oh yeah?” He knew she hadn’t. That fool Hockstetter was almost foaming at the mouth because she’d popped the temperature five or six degrees in her sleep. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is it your dad?”
“I guess so.” She closed her book and stood up. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while. I just don’t feel like talking or anything.”
“Sure. Gotcha.”
He watched her go, and when the bedroom door had clicked shut, he went into the kitchen to fill his floorbucket. Something about the way she had looked at him. The smile. He didn’t like it. She’d had a bad night, yes, okay. Everyone has them from time to time, and the next morning you snap at your wife or stare right through the paper or whatever. Sure. But… something inside had begun to jangle an alarm. It had been weeks since she had looked at him that way. She hadn’t come to him this morning, eager and glad to see him, and he didn’t like that, either. She had kept her own space today. It disturbed him. Maybe it was just the aftermath of a bad night, and maybe the bad dreams of the night before had just been caused by something she ate, but it disturbed him all the same.
And there was something else nibbling at him: Cap had been down to see her late yesterday afternoon. He had never done that before.
Rainbird set down his bucket and hooked the mop squeegee over its rim. He dunked the mop, wrung it out, and began to mop the floor in long, slow strokes. His mauled face was calm and at rest.
Have you been putting a knife in my back, Cap? Figure you’ve got enough? Or maybe you just went chickenshit on me.
If that last was true, then he had badly misjudged Cap. Hockstetter was one thing. Hockstetter’s experience with Senate committees and subcommittees was almost zilch; a piddle here and a piddle there. Corroborative stuff: He could allow himself the luxury of indulging his fear. Cap couldn’t. Cap would know there was no such thing as sufficient evidence, especially when you were dealing with something as potentially explosive (pun certainly intended) as Charlie McGee. And it wasn’t just funding Cap would be asking for; when he got before that closed session, the most dread and mystic of all bureaucratic phrases would fall from his lips: long-term funding. And in the background, lurking unspoken but potent, the implication of eugenics. Rainbird guessed that in the end, Cap would find it impossible to avoid having a group of senators down here to watch Charlie perform. Maybe they should be allowed to bring their kids, Rainbird thought, mopping and rinsing. Better than the trained dolphins at Sea World.
Cap would know he needed all the help he could get.
So why had he come to see her last night? Why was he rocking the boat?
Rainbird squeezed his mop and watched dirty gray water run back into the bucket. He looked through the open kitchen door at the closed door of Charlie’s bedroom. She had shut him out and he didn’t like that.
It made him very, very nervous.
14
On that early October Monday night, a moderate windstorm came up from the Deep South, sending black clouds flying raggedly across a full moon that lolled pregnantly just above the horizon. The first leaves fell, rattling across the neatly manicured lawns and grounds for the indefatigable corps of groundskeepers to remove in the morning. Some of them swirled into the duckpond, where they floated like small boats. Autumn had come to Virginia again.
In his quarters, Andy was watching TV and still getting over his headache. The numb spots on his face had diminished in size but had not disappeared. He could only hope he would be ready by Wednesday afternoon. If things worked as he had planned, he could keep the number of times he would have to actively push to a bare minimum. If Charlie had got his note, and if she was able to meet him at the stables across the way… then she would become his push, his lever, his weapon. Who was going to argue with him when he had the equivalent of a nuclear rifle in his possession?
Cap was at home in Longmont Hills. As on the night Rainbird had visited him, he had a snifter of brandy, and music was coming from the stereo at low volume. Chopin tonight. Cap was sitting on the couch. Across the room, leaning below a pair of van Gogh prints, was his old and scuffed golf bag. He had fetched it from the basement, where a rickrack of sports equipment had built up over the twelve years he had lived here with Georgia, while not on assignment somewhere else in the world. He had brought the golf bag into the living room because he couldn’t seem to get golf off his mind lately. Golf, or snakes.
He had brought the golf bag up meaning to take out each of the irons and his two putters and look them over, touch them, see if that wouldn’t ease his mind. And then one of the irons had seemed to… well, it was funny (ridiculous, in fact), but one of the irons had seemed to move. As if it wasn’t a golf club at all but a snake, a poison snake that had crawled in there-
Cap dropped the bag against the wall and scuttled away. Half a glass of brandy had stopped the minute shakes in his hands. By the time he finished the glass, he might be able to tell himself they had never trembled at all.
He started the glass on its way to his mouth and then halted. There it was again! Movement… or just a trick of his eyes?
Trick of his eyes, most definitely. There were no snakes in his damned golf bag. Just clubs he hadn’t been using enough lately. Too busy. And he was a pretty good golfer, too. No Nicklaus or Tom Watson, hell no, but he could keep it on the course. Not always slicing, like Puck. Cap didn’t like to slice the ball, because then you were in the rough, the tall grass, and sometimes there were-
Get hold of yourself. Just get hold of yourself. Is you still the Captain or is you ain’t?
The trembling was back in his fingers again. What had done this? What in God’s name had done this? Sometimes it seemed that there was an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one-something, perhaps, that someone had said and he just… couldn’t remember. But at other times
(like now Jesus Christ like now) it felt as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It felt as if his brain was being pulled apart like warm tafy by these alien thoughts he couldn’t get rid of.
(is you the Captain or is you ain’t?)
Cap suddenly threw his brandy glass into the fireplace, where it shattered like a bomb. A strangled sound-a sob-escaped his tight throat like something rotten that had to be sicked up whatever the miserable cost. Then he made himself cross the room (and he went at a drunken, stiltlike lurch), grab the strap of his golf bag (again something seemed to move and shift in there… to shiffffft… and hissssss) and slip it over his shoulder. He hauled it back into the shadow-draped cavern of the cellar, going on nothing but guts, drops of sweat perched huge and clear on his forehead. His face was frozen in a grimace of fear and determination.
Nothing there but golf clubs, nothing there but golf clubs, his mind chanted over and over again, and at every step of the way he expected something long and brown, something with beady black eyes and small sharp fangs dripping poison, to slither out of the bag and jab twin hypos of death into his neck.