Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

Tillman closed his eyes and pulled up the rough woolen army...

“I know you don’t owe the federal government anything. But you owe me.”

Gideon let that sink in before he continued. “You know what I did for you. You could be dead now. Or still in prison.”

Tillman had twenty pounds on Gideon, but lying in his bed he looked smaller, diminished somehow. He squinted back up at Gideon with one open eye.

“What does Kate think about this?”

“This has nothing to do with her.” Gideon heard his own voice sounding a little too insistent.

“She know you’re here?”

“Of course she knows. She says hello.”

“If I were you, bro, I’d be back in that nice house cozied up next to my very fine woman.”

“After we check this out.”

“All right. Whatever. I’ll go poke around in the morning. But then we’re square.” He turned over, face to the wall. “Now can I go to sleep?”

Gideon went to his car and came back with a duffel bag filled with mil spec communications equipment he’d cadged off Nancy Clement.

By the time he’d unpacked the equipment, Tillman was already snoring.

10f IIII d‡

POCATELLO, IDAHO

How close are we?” Wilmot asked.

Collier stood with Wilmot on the balcony overlooking the twenty-thousand-acre Wilmot property. In the distance the Bitterroot Mountains rose out of the snowy white expanse of forest. A thin blue ribbon of river wound through the valley between them. A small plume of steam rising in the distance was the only indication of the existence of the cassava processing factory.

“Close,” Collier said.

They stood silently for a while. Below them the now unused paddocks sprawled down toward the barns, which had once been full of beautiful horses. Collier sensed it was an emotional moment for Wilmot.

“I worked very hard to build this place,” Wilmot said. “It’s not easy to leave it behind.”

“You’ll be leaving a legacy that’s a lot bigger than all this,” Collier said.

Before Wilmot could respond, there was a noise from the treeline below. A hundred yards away, a figure burst out of the white woods, running furiously toward the house. It was one of the Congolese women. Amalie, the troublemaker, who’d been bothering him about Christiane.

“S’il vous plaît!” the woman yelled as she continued to charge through the snow toward the house. “S’il vous plaît!”

Wilmot took Collier’s arm in one of his powerful paws, gave it a painful squeeze. “Go down there and handle this, John,” he said. “It’s time.”

“Yes, sir!”

Collier walked briskly back into the house. As he did, he passed Evan wheeling himself in the opposite direction. He sprinted as soon as he got out of Evan’s view. By the time he reached the ground floor of the house, he could hear banging on the front door. He ran through the kitchen, pausing at the refrigerator to pull a small red cardboard box out of the butter tray, which he stuffed in the pocket of his parka.

Then he threw open the front door, where he found Amalie standing on the front porch. Her eyes widened, as though she had expected someone other than Collier to be standing there.

“Bonjour, ca va?” Collier said, smiling. “My goodness, what seems to be the problem?”

Evan had rolled his motorized wheelchair as close to the railing as possible. He was feeling very sore, now that he had been off the painkillers for a while. The pain was sharp and crisp, like the air. But in an odd way it didn’t feel all that objectionable.

“What the hell is going on, Dad?” he asked. “Who’s that?”

Down below them John Collier was leading a thin, pretty black woman toward the stables.

Evan’s father looked intently into Evan’s face. “You look different today,” he said. “How come?”

Evan didn’t tell his father he had stopped taking his pills. He needed to focus, to se clñ€†e things without the haze of the drugs. If his father was involved in something, Evan didn’t want to raise his suspicions.

“Seriously,” he said. “Who is that woman? What are you and John doing in the woods?”

“John’s an extraordinary young man,” Wilmot said. “Brilliant, actually. He’s been developing a new method of alternative energy production—ethanol from wood pulp. You know how much wood pulp waste we produce here. I thought I’d bring him out here, fund his little project, see where it went.”

“So he’s running some kind of factory out there in the woods?”

Wilmot nodded. “Labor’s a little tight around here right now. A bunch of Congolese women showed up in Coeur d’Alene last year, escaping from the genocide in eastern Congo. I hired them to help John out.”

“I was wondering,” Evan said. “When I found John here . . . well, I found it odd that you hired him to take care of me.”

“He’s your friend, isn’t he?” Wilmot said sharply. “You’ve known him since he was this high.” Evan’s father held his hand two feet off the ground.

Evan didn’t say anything. John was pleasant enough to Evan, and was always scrupulous in his duties. But Evan understood people. He was pretty sure John Collier resented him as much as ever.

Wilmot put his arm around Evan. It felt nice. He knew his father loved him . . . but he wasn’t an effusive or emotional guy. “You’re going to get cold out here, son.”

“I’m fine. Feels good, actually.”

His father squeezed his shoulder. He seemed uncharacteristically meditative. Ordinarily he was in constant motion, always doing something, directing somebody, driving forward, pressing on.

“Let’s get you back inside before you catch a cold,” he said, stepping behind the wheelchair and pushing it back inside without waiting for Evan’s consent.

For months there had been whispered conversations between Collier and his father, sudden changes in their demeanor when he rolled into a room. Somewhere in the back of his doped-up brain, he’d been dimly aware of their strange behavior, but now that he was feeling clearheaded, he felt like he was being whacked in the face with it. Now, as his father pushed him back into the warmth of the house, Evan felt more sure than ever that something was wrong. Why would his father hire a bunch of African women who didn’t speak English to work at an experimental ethanol plant in the middle of the Idaho woods when there were plenty of local out-of-work loggers who would gladly do hard work for shit pay?

Although it had wrecked his body, Evan remained proud of his service to his country. But Evan’s sacrifice had changed his father, turned him from an outspoken isolationist into someone whose quiet anger ran deeper than Evan could fathom. Now, Evan was determined to find out what he and Collier were up to.

Keeping his sudden resolve to himself, Evan pushed the joystick, steering the wheelchair away from his father. “See you later, Dad.”

“Where is Christiane?” Amalie demandeh tñ€†d. “You say everything is fine but you won’t show me Christiane!”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll take you to her. Will you calm down if I promise to take you to her?” He shepherded Amalie down the semicircular driveway in front of the massive Wilmot house. He had been planning to deal with her in the barn. But he could see that wasn’t going to work. She was still too agitated.

“Let’s get in the car,” he said, placing a hand on her arm.

She yanked her arm free of his hand and glared at him.

“Do you want me to take you, or not?”

After a moment, she nodded tensely and walked to Collier’s F-150.

Collier sighed loudly and looked back over his shoulder. He wanted to make sure that he didn’t do anything Mr. Wilmot would disapprove of.

Evan and Wilmot were still up on the balcony, looking down at him.

The sight of Wilmot with his arm around Evan’s shoulder was like a knife twisting in his gut. Collier was not the sort of person to spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. But he couldn’t help thinking about the time he’d left this place.

It had been an ugly thing. And only Wilmot knew the whole story.

John Collier had been born right here on the property. His mother had been Evan’s babysitter and housekeeper.

It was never clear who Collier’s father was. His mother wouldn’t say. And she’d died before he wormed the truth out of her. As a kid, Collier had occasionally fantasized that Wilmot himself was his father. But the older he got, the less plausible that seemed. Where Dale Wilmot was big and strong and rawboned and square jawed, Collier was small and delicate and thin, with fine, almost elfin features, and red hair. Since Collier’s mother was none of these things, it could only be that he’d gotten these qualities from his father.

Still, growing up fatherless on the estate, he couldn’t help but look toward Wilmot as a father figure. There had been no other candidate—unless you included Arne Szellenborg, the Wilmot family butler/gardener/whatever, who was queer as a three-dollar bill and had a barely hidden drinking problem.

Wilmot had intermittently recognized Collier’s talents—rewarding him with a watch or a BB gun when he won the spelling bee or the science fair. But Wilmot’s attention to Collier had always been offhanded, a bone thrown to the help.

And so John Collier had grown up in the shadow of Evan.

Evan, the golden boy. Evan, the perfect son. Evan, in whom Dale Wilmot had clearly placed all his hope for the future.

And Evan, the son of a bitch, was worthy of those hopes. Where Wilmot was handsome in a slightly brutal way, Evan was downright beautiful, his features chiseled and fine boned. Where Wilmot had earned a football scholarship at U of I based on his relentlessness and competitive spirit (and possibly on his cruelty), Evan had won trophy after trophy on pure grace, on an ability to run distances without tiring, on a gift for sensing holes in the defensive line and snaking through for impossible eight– and ten– and fifteen-yard gains. Where Wilmot saw men as Andñ€†tools he could pluck from a box and manipulate, Evan had a genuine interest in people. He was a leader because people wanted him to like them, not because he calculated the advantage he might gain from them. It was only in school that Collier could offer Evan any competition at all. In every class, Evan Wilmot was first and John Collier was second. Except science and math, where it was the other way around.

Three weeks before Evan’s eighteenth birthday, he had won the state dressage championships down in Nampa in his age range. And so, for his birthday, Wilmot had given his son a $75,000 horse.

Collier’s birthday, as it happened, fell only two days later. Wilmot got him a $500 gift certificate to Radio Shack.

The disparity had chafed at Collier. Every day he’d gotten out of bed, looked out the window of the little house where he and his mom lived. He’d hear the sound of his mother hacking and coughing as she cleared her lungs with a first cigarette, and look out the window at the ring where Evan was already busy working with his horse. Rising up behind the paddock was the Wilmot house. Like everything that touched Wilmot, it was a reflection of the man himself. At first glance the house looked like any other large pseudo-rustic post-and-beam house that you might find throughout the western mountains of the United States. It was only after a certain amount of comparison between the building and its foreground that you realized just how massive it was. It had a sort of sham humility that was not supposed to fool you but to give off the message: “See, I’m just like you. Normal, no frills, salt-of-the-earth, jeans-and-work boots. Except vastly superior to you in every aspect.”

Collier watched Evan canter and then gallop, practicing jump after jump. Collier was allowed to ride the horses on occasion, so he knew just how beautifully Evan rode. It was early, not yet hot, but Evan had already taken his shirt off. A thin sheen of sweat covered his perfectly proportioned torso.

After a moment Collier saw a figure appear on the balcony of the Wilmot home. It was Dale Wilmot himself, wearing a bathrobe. He stared down at his son for a long time. Evan couldn’t see his face. But he didn’t need to. It was evident in every motion of Wilmot’s body—a sense of pride and accomplishment. This is mine. My land, my house, my timber, my view . . . my perfect son.

The rage spilled through Collier like a fountain of acid. No matter what he did, no matter what he achieved, no matter where he went in life, there would never be a father who would look at him the way Wilmot looked at Evan. Never.

Collier had a chemistry lab set up in the garage. He had started it in elementary school and over the years accumulated a decent supply of beakers and test tubes, pipettes, jars of chemicals, a small centrifuge, a Bunsen burner, and an autoclave. If he wasn’t working on schoolwork, he was performing chemistry experiments. Always an unhappy child, Collier found something in the lab that approached joy. The sense of power as the chemicals coalesced and changed. The exactitude, care, and precision that was so unlike the messiness of life. All of the giggling phoniness of the girls, the cruelty of the PE coaches, the idiocy of the school administrators, the stupidity of the boys—all of them playing by rules he couldn’t fathom. His childhood had been one misery after another.

But he understood the chemicals. If it was possible, he even loved them. The drip-drip of titration, the sensitivity to temperature and pressure, the dance of catalyst, ofñ€† reactant, and reagent, the beauty of the arrows that said this plus this yields this.

After watching Evan ride the horse for nearly an hour, Collier went into the garage and worked for six hours straight. To produce what he produced—without causing an explosion, without poisoning himself on the waste gases, without ruining the batch and producing some placid beaker of worthless sludge—required total concentration.

In the end, the chemistry worked perfectly. But everything else had fallen apart.

He concocted a poison to put in the horse’s feed bag. He’d practiced on other animals over the years, but this one was specifically designed to cause the horse a maximum of pain. The dose, too, had been precisely calculated. Just enough to kill the horse. But not enough to do it quickly.

He had soaked the oats in the poison, then put the feed bag in the stall. The horse had sniffed at the bag, and for a moment Collier had thought the horse wouldn’t eat it, that something about the odorless chemical would alert the sensitive nose of the horse.

But then the horse had begun eating, crunching away on the oats until they were gone. Minutes later the horse fell and began to twitch and scream.

As the horse writhed on the ground, he felt a power coursing through him and settling in his loins. He found himself standing there, mesmerized by his handiwork, thrilling with his newfound strength. The horse kicked and thrashed while Collier smiled, swelling with pride.

And then, he’d heard a noise. Turning around, he saw Wilmot standing silently in the doorway, a look of horror on his face. Collier’s eyes flicked toward the beaker of colorless liquid on the gatepost, then to the horse, then to Wilmot, then to the beaker again.

Collier froze, expecting Wilmot to leap into the stall, maybe start beating the crap out of him. Instead the man spoke in a quiet, measured voice that only seemed to underscore his rage.

“Get your things,” he said. “And get the hell out of here.”

Collier ran as fast as he could out the barn’s double-wide entrance.

His mother was sewing a torn garment when he stumbled back into the house. “What the hell did you go and do now?”

By way of answer, he had gone into the garage, locked the door, and smashed every beaker and pipette and test tube while his mother howled at him through the door. “What the hell’s wrong with you, you disgraceful little snot?”

Afterward, he’d shoved past her, packed his few belongings in an old army rucksack that he’d bought the previous summer down at the Army Navy down in Coeur d’Alene. He’d saved twenty-seven hundred bucks from his job at the Pack ’n Save. Enough to set him up down in Boise for a while.

That had been six years ago. In the meantime, he found his way to West Virginia, where he met Verhoven and began using his considerable chemistry talents to cook meth for him. He hadn’t seen Mr. Wilmot or Evan until the day Wilmot walked in unannounced at Verhoven’s packing store where Collier worked during the day in the back office handling the ordering and accounting. Evan had been hurt, Wilmot explained, and he needed Collier back at the house. Collier’s mother was dead, and hispasñ€† own life numb and meaningless, but Wilmot’s arrival was like a second chance, a new lease on the family he’d always wished he’d had.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Poisoning the horse had been the height of stupidity. What...

He should have poisoned Evan.

Amalie sat in the Jeep, listening to the whirring of the heater. It seemed like Mr. Collier had pinched her. But now, looking back, she realized there had been something in Mr. Collier’s hand when he opened the door to the car, something that had stung her on the hip. For some reason, though, she was feeling a little confused. So she sat and waited patiently as Mr. Collier slammed the door and circled around to the driver’s side.

He started the Jeep and began to drive.

As the trees passed outside, it became very warm inside. With the warmth she began to relax. I’ve been so tense, she thought to herself. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been tense.

But for all her worrying, nothing really bad had actually happened. Sure, Christiane had gotten sick. But people got the Konzo at home, too. It was one of those things that just happened. And now she was being treated by an American doctor. Back in Kama, there were no doctors at all. You had to take the boat forty kilometers downriver to see a doctor.

Soon Amalie began to feel a deep calm running through her, a sort of peace that she had only felt a few times in her life. She realized that she was very tired. She’d been working too hard, hadn’t she? So tired.

She could feel the sleep coming from a great distance, like a downpour on the horizon, the first blessed rain after the long dry season. She imagined flashes of lightning amid the dark boiling clouds, great winds whipping and tearing at the trees.

And then the black storm washed over her. And with it, came peace.

11

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

I prefer to work in a chair,” Lorene Verhoven said. “Maybe I’m lazy, I don’t know, but I get tired feet when I stand for too long.”

Ervin Mixon was himself sitting in a chair. Unlike Lorene Verhoven, he was secured at his wrists, feet, neck, and chest by black duct tape. His mouth, too, was covered by duct tape so he was unable to speak. The chair sat in a dark concrete bunker of a room. He was familiar with the room. It was the place where Jim Verhoven’s people cooked their meth—a cheerless but carefully built space that had been designed by John Collier. Forty feet belowground, you could yell until your throat bled and nobody would ever hear you.

He had been here for several hours, entirely alone. Until Lorene showed up.

“Jim gave me this chair. It’s made by Steelcase, and you can roll around on it.” Lorene demonstrated, pushing off with her feet and propelling herself across the polished concrete floor. “Isn’t this fun?”

“Fuck you,” Ervin tried to say. But his mouth was covered by the same duct tape that secured him to the chair so it came out, &# roooo t‡8220;Mmmm-mwoooo.”

“Oh, Ervin,” she said. “Do you have to? You know, I was raised in an atmosphere of constant profanity. But Jim took me away from that. I haven’t cursed in eight years. Not once. Jim showed me how much better you feel when you stop swearing. You should try it.”

She rolled the chair back toward him, step by step, until finally she was sitting face-to-face with Ervin, their knees nearly touching. She was dressed, as usual, in a crisp white cotton blouse, buttoned to the neck, and a black sheath skirt that Ervin might have found sexy under other circumstances. Over the blouse, she wore an incongruous tan vest, apparently homemade, which was covered with numerous oddly shaped little pockets.

“I was always good at art,” she said. “After I got together with Jim, I discovered my talent for taxidermy. My favorite thing? Squirrels. They’re so small. The work requires real devotion. Precision. The face especially. The eyes. The lips. The skin is just paper thin.”

Ervin felt sick, terrified. He was afraid he might vomit inside the tape and choke to death. He needed a hit. But it was more than that. As much as Jim Verhoven scared Ervin Mixon, it was his wife who truly terrified him. Although he’d never seen her do anything especially evil, there was a cruel violence in her eyes, those two different colors like a schizo-psychopath, shining too brightly as she came near.

“I made this vest myself, Ervin,” she continued. “It’s for my taxidermy tools. Each tool that I use has its own little pocket. It saves so much time to know exactly where each and every tool is.” She began pulling out tools. “Rasp. Needle. Thread. Various little rotary grinder attachments for my Dremel. Caping knife. Smaller caping knife. Even smaller.” She pulled out a tiny curved knife. “I had this one custom made by a knife maker in Arkansas. It’s an eyelid knife. That’s the hardest part, the eyelids of a squirrel. I love squirrels. Their little teeth?” She curled back her upper lip and mimicked a squirrel munching on a nut.

Then she rolled her chair around to his side, bringing the tiny little knife close to Ervin Mixon’s face. He could smell her, a clean soapy scent. Ervin’s heart began to pound with terror.

“Don’t move,” she said softly, pressing one finger delicately against his cheekbone. “Wouldn’t want you to get cut inadvertently.” Then, with a small noise like the opening of a zipper, she cut a slit in the tape from one side of his mouth to the other. The cut was so perfect that he didn’t even feel the knife. He gasped with relief.

“See?” she said. “Didn’t spill a single drop of blood.”