Chapter 22
It was late at night when the helicopter touched down, swirling up dust, landing neatly between the netless basketball hoops.
You shouldn’t have called them, the man said to himself. You should have just kept your damn mouth shut and full of booze. But he knew, in his heart of hearts, that they would have found out sooner or later.
Sooner, he had a chance for grace.
Later, he was a dead man.
Clyde Evans watched nervously as the government agents in their grey suits and ties disembarked. He was surprised to see a woman, wearing a lab coat, exit last. But not as surprised as he was when he realized that the man leading the group was the head of the whole operation. Brian Richards.
The man walked toward him, the wind from the copter blades flapping the ends of his coat.
“Evans,” said Richards. “First, what did they see?”
Desperately wanting a drink, the man swallowed dryly. “I don’t know for sure. Two of them must have been exploring out back—the ones that got me from behind when I was trying to scare the other one off.”
“Okay. What did you tell them?”
“That I was the caretaker, of course. Hired by a lawyer from Tipville.”
“Describe the trespassers.”
Evans described them, and Richards nodded.
“Now, how the hell did they get past you?”
“Um—I was taking a nap.”
“The alarm didn’t wake you? The hidden surveillance cameras didn’t alert you?”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? Hey I reported in, didn’t I?” Evans pulled out the money they’d given him. “They took my gun and they were going to use it on me. They thought they were bribing me.”
Richards took the money, examined it, then threw it in the man’s face. “When they busted you out of the Agency, man, it was me, me, who picked your ass out of the garbage can and gave you a job.” He grabbed Evans by the collar.
An agent came out, shaking his head. “Whew. This place reeks of whiskey.”
“I thought we kicked you of that nasty habit,” said Richards.
“God, it’s just so boring! It’s hell! I thought a little drink now and then wouldn’t do any harm.”
Richards pushed him back contemptuously. “I’m afraid that we’re going to have to relieve you of duty here, Evans. We’ve lost our need for third-rate groundskeepers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get in the helicopter. We’ll send your things along after you. You’re going to dry out in a security arrangement for a time, and then we’ll decide what to do with you.”
Evans’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, sir.”
Another agent rejoined the group, flicking off his flashlight.
“Looks like someone’s been in one of the barns, all right.”
“Damn!” said Richards. “Scarborough, of all people—Fucking Sherlock Scarborough! Damn!”
The woman stepped forward. “Don’t worry too much. They’re pretty well cleaned out.”
“Yes, but it’s not exactly animal farm in there. It’s pretty obvious they weren’t being used as barns!”
Evans started to trudge toward the copter. “Wait a minute, Mr. Evans,” said the woman in the lab coat. She pulled Richards off to the side and they talked in whispers.
Evans couldn’t hear them, and he didn’t want to hear them. He hunkered back in the shadows, miserable beyond words. Dry him out—he’d get the DTs again. He couldn’t stand the thought, so he just turned his mind off. Maybe he could just sneak back in while the two talked. Sneak a bottle. One more drink ... one more drink for the road. Already his hands were shaking.
Suddenly, he realized that Richards was regarding him with a peculiar expression. Richard—Mr. Fucking Sleaze-lA, some of the agents used to call him back in the old days. There was a hint of a smile on his face. “Yes, it’s a thought,” Richards was saying to the woman, whom Evans did not know. “You think it would help him?”
“Without a doubt,” said the woman. “I’ve got him on a different chemical mix, and he seems to have calmed down a bit. But he needs some kind of release.”
Richards nodded. He turned and yelled back at the copter, whose rotors were only slowly spinning now. “Mr. Justine. Would you come out for a minute, please?”
A short-haired man wearing a plain grey suit like the others stepped from the plane, walking toward them just a little unsteadily. “Yes, sir.”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Justine?”
“Much better, sir.”
Richards smiled at the woman. “I like it—he’s getting a ‘sir’ drug now? Not feeling so cocky anymore, huh? A little under the weather. Maybe you need a nice long rest, Justine! Maybe we should retire you for a while!”
“I’m fucking okay, Richards, you torturing bastard!” The short-haired man Richards had called Justine said.
“That’s the attitude I like to hear.” Richards walked to Evans and put a hand on the man’s back. “We’re pretty much your family, aren’t we, Mr. Evans?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I hate to do this, Evans, but we just don’t need you anymore. Tell you what, though. In the way of a going-away present, we’ll forgo the gold watch. Instead, you’ve got a thirty-second head start on Mr. Justine here. Oh, by the way, Mr. Justine is the division mechanic.” Richards stepped away. “Good-bye, Evans. You’ve got half a minute from—now!”
“What...?” Fear and confusion gripped him.
“Twenty-eight seconds, Evans.” Richards turned to Justine. “Mr. Justine, I do hope you’re up to it.”
Justine’s face was stone. “Sure thing.”
“Jesus!” said Evans, more prayerfully than blasphemously. “You can’t do this. This is the U.S. government! We obey the law! We have rights! We’re not savages!”
“As John Stuart Mill said, Mr. Evans: ‘The greater good for the greater number.’ But somebody has to be the judge of what’s best for everybody. What’s best for our nation, now, I fear, is that you be put out of the picture. Fifteen seconds.”
Evans turned and ran. He didn’t think about what he was doing or where he was going, he just ran as hard as he could. His pulse pounded in his ear and the air whisked by his sweating face. He saw the fence up ahead, and then the open gate. If he could just get through the gate, maybe he had a chance.
He was only a matter of yards away from the fence when the flashlight beam struck him. With a whine, he jerked away from it, heading for the gate. The beam found him again. Something hard and stinging struck him in the shoulder, and, almost as an afterthought, he heard the sound of a gun. He was hurled straight onto the mesh of barbed wire, and the sharp, rusty ends gouged at his face and chest, clinging at his clothes and puncturing his skin, pinning him in place. He hung on the wire, crucified and whimpering.
“You will forget about what you saw,” said the man named Justine, coming up behind him. “You will forget about the UFOs. Or you will pay the price.”
What was the guy talking about? “Sure!” Evans spat through his pain. “Just get me off here, let me go! I won’t say anything to anybody about this place ... or about UFOs!” He added hastily.
Footsteps. Evans sensed the man was very near. “Stop it!” the man growled to him in a tortured voice. “What’s wrong with you, Justine? Get a fucking grip!”
There was a period of silence, and, for a moment, Evans thought that maybe the man was going to lift him off of the wire, tell him that this was all just a new form of punishment, and that he’d be sent along for detainment, detoxification, and then reassignment.
But then the bullets tore through his head and chest, and Evans’s final neurological activity was nerve spasms.
When Justine came back, he was smiling a private little smile.
“Feel better?” asked Richards.
“Much.”
“Okay. Sit in the copter till we’re ready to go; take it easy. I’ll get the other two guys to take care of the body.”
“Yeah—Richards.”
“That’s the old Woodrow Justine we all know and love.” Richards watched as the hit man stepped jauntily into the helicopter cabin. He took Cunningham by the arm, and led her toward the farmhouse. “Just a quick word, Julia,” he said. He looked over and saw Jenkins and Marshall carrying Evans’s corpse toward one of the barns. When he judged they were out of earshot, he said, “Okay. He still seems operative. But it looks like we’re going to have to ask a great deal of him in the very near future. Should I call up another agent?”
Cunningham looked at him, her Nordic features cold, her eyes piercing. “As I assured you, Mr. Justine performed this evening. He will perform, on-call, in the future. He is the best.”
“I dunno, Julia. He’s getting awfully twitchy.”
“Justine is my creation, Mr. Richards,” the woman said in tones of ice. “If not for me, he’d be in some prison for the criminally insane by now.”
“Well, what’s all this Men in Black stuff? God, talk about karmic backlash!” A moth beat its wings against the back porch’s light-casing.
“Mr. Justine merely suffered a traumatic experience. Coupled with a need for adjustment in his medication, the experience in Takoma Park affected him adversely. You should have had him sent to me immediately. As it is, credit his intelligence and instinct for survival that put him on the jet to Iowa so quickly.”
“You haven’t answered my question. This Men in Black stuff—you’re saying he picked it up from the Klinghoffer crazy who shot him up with a hypo-ful of water?”
“It follows, doesn’t it? You did read the clean-up report on Klinghoffer, didn’t you?”
“I’m a busy man.”
“The guy was obsessed with saucer lore. I mean, you should have spotted it from the assassination attempt on Scarborough! Dressed in black...”
“I don’t credit any of that stuff.” The gossamer insect against the lamp fluttered down onto the concrete. Richards stepped on it, smearing the moth like a chalk mark.
Dr. Cunningham looked away. “And the guy apparently drove an old model Pontiac. A black Pontiac. Woodrow Justine was injected with more than water. He was injected with very
strong suggestions. These are potent archetypes we’re dealing with. Acid occasionally spills on the chemist’s toes, Mr. Richards.”
Richards shook his head and leaned against the building, taking out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Dr. Cunningham who looked at him as though he were holding a handful of shit. “That’s right, you don’t smoke. I don’t much anymore myself. Just once in a while.” He shrugged and lit up, blowing the smoke away from his associate. “Well, I’m the executive branch of this operation, Cunningham. I do my job and I do it well ... I’m pretty well-versed in the UFO facts by now, natch—” He chuckled ruefully. “Too much for my personal taste. But I pretty much ignore the apocryphal nonsense.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s all part of the fabric. The Men in Black phenomenon is a little-known but significant side effect of the UFO mythos.” Like a pedagogue speaking to a recalcitrant student, she spoke tersely. “Sometimes, witnesses of Unidentified Flying Objects are visited very soon after by men dressed in black who claim to be from the CIA or FBI or some other government agency; they warn the individual to be quiet about what they witnessed, and often threaten them. These men are notoriously weird and awkward, often they have dark skin and Asiatic features—men who don’t seem much familiar with the American language—or sometimes speak it too precisely, as if it were a second language. These figures merely harass—they do not actually carry out their threats of violence. All of which causes the theorists to assume that they are mere wraiths of the imagination. “
“Men in Black. Like Satan or demons or something ... only modern.”
“Excellent, Mr. Richards. Which is exactly my mythic point. The collective unconscious may ride around in jets and sports cars, but it still has its dark phantoms. They are just clothed in trench coats.” She smiled at him without humor. “Curious how they’re often CIA agents, eh?”
“I do my job, and I do it well, Ms. Cunningham. Just like you. And we both reap the rewards. I’m in no mood for the casting of aspersions. And though I can’t speak for you, I serve a cause I believe in, my country!” He looked at her defiantly and blew smoke in her face.
She coughed. “You needn’t parade your patriotism. I wave the same flag. Let’s get back to the matter at hand. Justine. He’s clearly somehow been affected by these stories—on some subconscious level. But I have spoken to him, and adjusted his drugs. He is back in control now, I can assure you. I stake my reputation on it.”
Richards grunted. “Good. I’ll remember that.” He looked around at the grounds and the barns. “We might need this place in the future again—we’ve got to contain Scarborough’s investigation. But without hurting the bastard, and without giving anything away. A tricky business.”
“This has been a delicate operation from the very beginning.”
“Yes, but we’ve made some mistakes. It’s that MacKenzie guy—we didn’t realize that he’d kept the originals of his reports on Blue Book. That’s how they got this address.”
“Well, count your blessings. They didn’t catch us flagrante delicto.”
“Yes, but what other addresses are in that man’s files? Scarborough’s files were dealt with years ago. Now we’ve got to take out MacKenzie, before the two of them turn up the other bases.”
“It’s dumb luck they found this one. Besides, that’s one of the reasons we took it out of service temporarily. Questionable security background.”
“I don’t know, Julia. Scarborough isn’t dumb. He’s stubborn and he seemed to adore the blinders we’ve had on him all these years. But I think they’re starting to chafe. If I had my way, we’d just terminate the jerk. But of course, the Publishers—”
“The Publishers know what they’re doing, Mr. Richards. We are but lowly Editors, taking joy in the creativity expressed in our careers.” She smiled for the first time. “And of course, we get paid more than your average editor.”
The other agents were walking toward them from the barn. “You two will stay here,” Richards ordered. “Relief will be arriving tomorrow, and the body will be dealt with then.”
“Yes, sir,” they said.
“Oh, and get rid of all that whiskey—without drinking it yourselves. “
They smiled. “Yes, sir. I think we’ve learned our lesson here, sir,” said one.
They went into the farmhouse, and Richards and Cunningham turned and began walking back to the waiting copter.
“I can’t take out Scarborough, but it’s open season on the people around him, if necessary. That’s why we need Justine. He’s going to be my man in this.”
“Count on him, Mr. Richards.”
“Good. When we get back, we’ll call the Pentagon.” He ducked under the slowly turning blades, even though they were far above his head. “We’re going to need MacKenzie’s address, Or rather, Woodrow Justine will need it.”