Scott Nicholson - Chronic fear

Or protecting a secret.

“Why are you bothering us, then? I can’t even cook a pot of coffee, and Wendy’s an artist, not a brain surgeon.” He ignored her glower. “You ought to be watching the Morgans. Her husband was tied up with CRO Pharmaceuticals.”

“They are…under observation by the CIA,” Gundersson said. “But other elements in the capital believe you two are hiding out because you know something.”

“What about you, Secret Agent Gundersson? What do you believe?”

“Off the record, the CIA is not happy about getting our nuts snipped in the aftermath of Nine/Eleven. There was enough blame to go around for everybody, but the competition really got rolling at that point and it’s harder than ever to know who you can trust.”

“Tell me about it,” Roland said. “Put J. Edgar Hoover in a skirt and he still comes out Hitler. As far as I’m concerned, the government is doing what the terrorists couldn’t: destroying this country from the inside. Best thing that could happen to protect our freedom is a big fucking asteroid blazing down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“I respect your libertarian principles, and I even share some of them, but I’ve sworn loyalty to the United States,” Gundersson said. “It may be a mess, but it’s the best mess in the history of human civilization.”

“And you can fix the mess by getting answers from us.”

“More importantly, I can help you,” Gundersson said, glancing at Wendy to exploit Roland’s protective streak. “Both of you. Give me what you know, and the official word goes around that you know nothing.”

“Why should we believe that anybody trusts the official word?”

“Because it will be one of those secrets that people are allowed to discover. You know, the secret that nobody’s supposed to know but it’s hiding right there in plain sight.”

“Boy, DC is an even bigger clusterfuck than I figured. The only way they’ll accept the truth is if you disguise it as a lie.”

Wendy was dabbing violet paint around the gash in the canvas, using it as a foundational feature. She worked with savage strokes, using bold straight lines with a geometric precision. “Secret messages,” she said, her back to them, not pausing in her work. “All you have to do is add more layers, change things around. Illusion is your friend.”

“No, honey,” Roland said. “Illusion is your lover. Reality is your husband.”

She turned, letting the brush splash acrylic on the rough pine planks. Roland looked at the Rorschach pattern on the porch and decided it was Sebastian Briggs kneeling between his wife’s naked thighs.

Then again, he read that image into everything.

What a bargain. Wendy gets lost in Halcyon while Seethe makes me obsess over every memory. God, if ever you feel the need to let me accept the things I cannot change…

Gundersson cleared his throat to break the tension in the air, but the clumsy guttural noise only heightened it. “Mr. Doyle, I doubt aiding the government inspires you, but you have my personal guarantee that you’ll come to no harm. I am under orders to protect you until this situation is all clear.”

“And just when would that be? It looks like the only way to clear it would be to find your precious drugs and then kill us both.”

“There are powerful elements-”

Roland swept the. 38 into his hand and banged its butt on the table. “I’m a powerful goddamned element. I can take care of us.”

“No offense, Mr. Doyle, but I saw you shoot at the fox yesterday. Four rounds at twenty paces and you didn’t come close.”

Roland’s gaze dropped to the gun. “It was beautiful. I couldn’t…”

“What makes you think your aim would be better if the fox is shooting back?”

“He’s no killer,” Wendy said, storming her painting, applying a second swollen breast. “A woman knows.”

Keep on loving the illusion, honey. That’s all you get of me anyway.

“One question,” Roland said to Gundersson. “If it wasn’t the CIA that sent the e-mails, then who did?”

“National Clandestine Service. One of those new federal agencies gone a little rogue. The great bait-and-switch was that they were created to monitor overseas threats, but we all know how that goes, right?”

“The enemy within,” Roland said. “That’s the one that gets you.”

He pulled Gundersson’s gun out of his waistband, where it had been digging into his skin. He slid it across the table. “Your move.”

Gundersson left the gun lying there between them. “Tell me what you know.”

Roland sighed. The truth-at least, the truth as Seethe remembered it-had haunted him like those shadowy figures in Wendy’s paintings. Maybe if he exorcised it, he could sleep at night without lying next to his wife and imagining squeezing her throat until the images went away.

“I’ll tell you both what I remember,” Roland said. “But I’m not sure I know anything.”

Wallace Forsyth entered the abandoned youth correctional facility an hour before dusk, using the gravel service road he’d scouted earlier in the day.

In better economic times, the center might have been renovated into a different type of institution. But Butner already housed two prisons, and the town’s population wasn’t big enough to support an extra school. Apparently the guards and nurses weren’t breeding fast enough to expand the tax base.

As it was, the center had taken on a seedy, neglected look despite only recently being mothballed. Forsyth welcomed the seclusion. Mark Morgan was removed from the influence of CRO’s bottomless pockets and deaf to whispers of money, and therefore he was unpredictable. Forsyth hadn’t survived so long in Washington by doing business with unpredictable people.

Scagnelli’s rental sedan was parked beside a holly hedge that a warden had once planted to imitate the landscaping of a real residence. The little house was of the same brick and small, white-framed windows as the main barracks, the kitchen, and the wing where young offenders likely sat through group therapy while plotting to smuggle in drugs or alcohol or sexually abuse their weaker peers. Forsyth was willing to bet that 90 percent of the hooligans had since graduated to the federal or state penitentiaries down the road.

Forsyth pulled his car beside Scagnelli’s. Despite having no official government employment at the moment, he was sure he could talk his way past any local cops that suspected trespassing. Given the small size of the town and its high inmate population, and the fact that inmates with nowhere to go often stayed where the jail doors had last opened to eject them, the police were probably understaffed and overworked, too busy to worry about decaying state property.

Forsyth had one call to make before he confronted Mark. He reached Burchfield on the third ring.

“They’re asking about you at the arts gala,” Burchfield said, with a string quartet and laughter in the background. “Apparently you’re considered a great friend of the Winston-Salem Community Arts Project.”

“They’ve been hitting the moonshine jug, then,” Forsyth said. “But since you ain’t announced your running mate yet, the media doesn’t give a pig whistle about my whereabouts.”

“You wouldn’t believe what I’m doing right now.”

“Drinking lemonade and grinning like a turtle eating saw briars?”

“I have my hand up a puppet’s ass, and I’m making it dance.”

“Good practice for handling your secretary of state.”

“I can only hold this grin and this puppet for so long before this lovely lady at the podium demands a speech.”

“Give ’em the old ‘Arts are the foundation of a good community’ line. They might conveniently forget to look at your voting record.”