Chuck Logan - After the Rain

The world of his birth was no more: Beirut when it was the Paris of the Middle East. His family had mirrored the city’s pre-civil war cosmopolitanism; his father had been a Sunni Muslim who’d preferred Karl Marx to the Koran. His mother was a Maronite Christian. His father had also been a member of the Ba’ath Party, an agent for Syrian intelligence, and a businessman heavily invested in growing cannabis and poppies in the Bekaa Valley.

Smuggling ran in his blood.

In 1982, an Israeli air strike killed his young Palestinian wife and infant son. One month later, a sixteen-inch shell from the American battleship New Jersey , firing in support of the Lebanese Army, killed his parents, his brother, and his two sisters.

Seeking revenge, he volunteered for a suicide mission against the Americans. His superiors counseled patience. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his left-wing guerrilla group was advised by a KGB handler. The Russian interviewed him, and, seeing that he possessed intelligence and quality, suggested a long game: send him to America to live anonymously with his mother’s Christian family. Let him sleep among the Americans, become one of them, go to their schools, serve in their army.

So they sent him to the United States to ply his father’s trade. He would buy and sell and quietly learn the rhythms of smuggling across the Canadian border. Someday he would prove useful.

But that day never really came. The people who sent him had perished in the endless combat against the Israelis. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Mole was sentenced to prosper among the people he had sworn to kill. He remained faithful to his mission, going through the motions of his shadow life, running drugs, funneling money back to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. He got soft, he got married. He built a business. His two teenage sons were in high school. Christ-just yesterday he had taken them to soccer camp.

And then the knock at the door finally came. Not from his old group, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; not even from Hamas or Hezbollah. There was a new ascendant movement, inspired by the flyers of airplanes into tall American buildings. They were consolidating their fund raising. And asking favors. The dapper Saudi businessman named Rashid had impeccable knowledge of the Mole’s background. And he needed a ton of some unspecified material moved from Winnipeg across the border. No questions asked. And that’s how it began.

Now they were within hours of making it all work.

He believed Charon about the agents showing up in Langdon. And Charon wouldn’t leave until he got what he wanted. So an alternate plan was called for. Something…

The Mole squinted into the darkness. Made a decision. To keep the thing alive he’d have to take some risks. He’d have to divert them away from Charon.

He spun on his heel, walked back to the phone booth, and picked up the receiver.

Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!

The red label on the prescription bottle warned: “May cause DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL may INTENSIFY this effect. Use care when operating a car or other dangerous machinery.”

Broker took two of the white Vicodin pills, washed them down with bad roadside coffee, and stepped on the gas. If there was any dangerous machinery in the immediate area, it was him.

He was driving Milt Dane’s Ford Explorer pretty fast down a two-lane highway. A road sign flashed up, then disappeared: black rectangle framing a white silhouette of an Indian in profile with war bonnet; black number 5 centered in the white, the letter N in one corner and D in the other; WEST spelled out in the smaller panel over the sign.

He was headed west on North Dakota State Route 5, going mostly over 90 mph. Yet it seemed like he was standing still the last couple hours-ever since he pushed north of Fargo.

He’d forgotten that North Dakota was basically you and the sky.

After Fargo, the sky was no longer behind things, like the horizon. It became the main thing. It was too much. Along with too many clouds and too much flat for his north-woods instincts. The problem was-no cover. Broker was a man who understood the advantages of cover; he’d perfected an eye for the subtleties in human and geographic landscapes, for blind spots he could slip in and out of.

Looking around here, he saw no place to hide.

Talk about being too exposed. Christ. He caught himself hunching his shoulders, almost ducking behind the wheel. C’mon, un-cramp. Sit up straight, stretch.

Broker had reluctantly entered his later forties. He was tending toward lean and hungry this season, from compulsive exercise and a mild interest in Dr. Atkins’ diet. He’d cut his dark hair extra-short, almost military. He’d even trimmed some of the bushy ends off his eyebrows that grew in an almost solid monobrow. He had a fix to his gray eyes, a hollowness of cheek, and a flatness to his belly of a man who had taken vows, who was on a pilgrimage, who was in serious training.

There was some other stuff that affected his mood.

Like: a little over twenty-four hours ago he had been shot in the left hand. At the moment he was thinking, in a sweaty, feverish way, that taking a bullet was a mere nuisance, a distraction, compared to what was waiting for him down this highway. What was waiting for him was Nina Pryce. His wife.

He shook his head. People like him and Nina shouldn’t get married.

They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

And now she’d ditched their daughter with strangers in a motel in North Dakota. Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What are you up to?

He’d lost the sugar-beet fields when he climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now he passed through a haze of strong-smelling clover and was into serious wheat. The fields stretched out to the horizon like a deep green comforter quilted with chrome yellow patches of canola and spashes of iridescent blue flax.

There was so much sky, he thought he could see ten thousand miles, clear past summer into fall, all the way to the chill breath of the first frost. Gunmetal on oatmeal on concrete. And no blue. No sun. Far to the north he saw a curtain of rain, a shudder that could be lightning. But far away. Well into Manitoba.

No sun since Friday. Saturday it had started to rain in Minnesota. Saturday…He blinked sweat, refocused. Saturday, which was yesterday…

Not now. Think of something else. He’d had heavy rain as he drove across Minnesota. It tapered off just past Grand Forks. He’d switched off the metronome slap of the wipers and opened the windows. Now he was sweating from more than the muggy air.

Infection had set in in his left hand where the slug from the.38 had bit a chunk of meat from the heel of his palm. So Broker had been shot with an old-fashioned low-velocity full-metal-jacketed round. Through and through. Which was apt, because he tended to be an old-fashioned wood-and-steel kind of guy.

Another scar.

The bullet had missed the bones and ligaments and the big nerve. So the hand still worked. The wound had been treated at Lake View Emergency in Stillwater. Last night the bandage was crisp gauze and white adhesive. Now it was turning a wrinkled funky gray, coming loose, with a ragged cockade of stiff brown blood the size of a silver dollar in his palm. It throbbed like hell.

Broker had been doing a favor for a friend.

The friend was a sheriff. As it turned out, he knew too many sheriffs. And now he was on his way to meet another one.

Back in Minnesota, he’d agreed to a temporary stint as a special deputy to the Washington County Sheriff. The favor had resulted in a struggle for a gun and him getting shot. Yesterday, just before noon.

An hour before getting shot, at ten A.M. yesterday morning, Phil Broker had been sitting on the deck of Milt Dane’s river place sipping coffee. He had been house-sitting for Milt. Getting away to think. Rain clouds were rolling in to break a record heat wave.