Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Uh-huh. And what happens if I don’t sign?”

The colonel smiled and said nothing. Farrentino stared at me, his face dark and utterly serious. Huygens pulled his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms across his chest, and studied me like an alley cat contemplating a small mouse it had just cornered. McLaughlin simply waited for me to add two and two together.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, it’s how to take a hint.

Now I knew the reasons why they had arrested me without charges, hustled me in here in handcuffs, and allowed me to see a group of prisoners being herded down to underground cells beneath the stadium. They had wanted to show me the true value of my life. These men could make me disappear without so much as a ripple if I refused to play their game. It was like the old saw about some guy asking his lawyer what his negotiating position should be. “Bending over,” the lawyer says.

It was midnight, and if I didn’t say or do the right thing, I’d never see the sun again.

After a moment, Barris picked up a pen from his desk and, without saying a word, held it out to me. I hesitated, then took the pen from his hand, laid the document flat on his desk, and signed on the dotted line at the bottom of the third page. I wonder if Faust had felt the same way.

“You’ve done the right thing, Gerry,” Huygens said. “For once you’re playing with the right team.”

“Yeah,” I whispered under my breath. “Call me when we make the playoffs.”

McLaughlin probably heard me, but he didn’t say anything. When I was through signing my pact with the devil, Barris accepted it from me. He studied my signature for a second, then slipped it into the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Thank you, Mr. Rosen,” he said as he cupped his hands together. “You may not believe it now, but you have done the right thing. For this your country is grateful.”

McLaughlin reached across the desk to pick up the glass snowball; he shook it a couple of times, then held it upright in his hand as he watched the tiny blizzard swirl around the miniature Gateway Arch.

“And now,” he said, “it’s time to tell you about Ruby Fulcrum.”

(Friday, 12:52 A.M.)

When the meeting was over, Mike Farrentino escorted me out of the Stadium Club. We didn’t say anything to each other while we rode the elevator down to the ground level, and once we had cleared the guarded front foyer I turned to walk away from the stadium.

“Hey, Rosen!” he called out. “Wait up a minute!”

I turned back around, hands shoved in the pockets of my jacket, and waited for him to walk over to me. “Need a lift back to your place?” he asked. “I got my car parked over here.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll hoof it. It’s not far.” Nor was a ride necessary. Barris had assured me that I now had safe conduct on the streets after curfew, so long as I played by his rules. He had given me a laminated plastic card before I left and told me to carry it on my person at all times; it was printed with the ERA logo, and Barris told me if I was stopped or questioned by an ERA patrol, I was to show them the card. Sort of like getting a hall pass from the principal.

The plaza was almost empty now, save for a few troopers manning the barricades. Most of the LAVs I had seen earlier had vanished, presumably off patrolling various parts of the city. The downtown area somehow looked very peaceful: no traffic on the streets, no city noises, only the faint twitter of night birds in the branches of the elm trees, abruptly broken by the low moan of an Apache coming in for a landing within the stadium walls.

Farrentino looked up at the chopper as it flew low overhead. “How much of that do you believe?” he asked in a soft voice, casting a glance at the ERA soldier standing guard near the Stadium Club entrance. “I mean, how much of that was bullshit or what?”

I hesitated. I had my opinions, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to trust them to a cop. “I don’t know, Lieutenant,” I said carefully. “You’re the one who’s been investigating this mess, so you tell me.”

“Mike,” he said. “My friends call me Mike-”

“And so I’m your friend now, huh, Mike?” I looked him straight in the eye. “Most of my friends wouldn’t have my door kicked down and have me dragged off in the middle of the night.”

“Whoa, fella. Chill off.” He held his hands up defensively. “The colonel ordered the raid, not me. I simply reported that the evidence bag had been tampered with and that the disk was missing and that you were the most likely suspect. He was the one who sent in the goon squad …”

“Yeah, sure, Mike. Have a nice night.” I started to turn away again, but then he grabbed me by the arm. Before I could do anything, he pulled something out of his raincoat pocket and held it out to me.

It was Joker. “I got it out of the impoundment room when I went to take a leak,” he explained. “You should be getting the rest of your junk back sometime tomorrow.”

I took Joker from his hand and studied it. The PT didn’t look as if it had been tampered with-even the mini-disk was still in drive-but I couldn’t be sure until I had Jah run it through a full diagnostic. “Thanks,” I said as I slipped the little ’puter in my jacket pocket. “I’ll catch you later-”

“Look, Gerry,” he said, his voice almost a whisper now, “I know you don’t believe this, but …”

He hesitated. “Things aren’t always what they seem, y’know what I mean? I don’t think Barris and McLaughlin gave either of us the full lowdown. In fact, I don’t think this Payson-Smith character is the mad scientist they made him out to be.”

“Yeah?” The night was getting cold; I zipped up the front of my jacket. “And what do you think is the full lowdown?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is, I smell a rat.” He paused, looking over his shoulder again. “You may not believe this,” he went on, “but truth is, not everyone in authority is crazy about ERA. We might have a lot of problems in St. Louis right now, but we don’t need tanks and helicopters to get them fixed.” He shrugged. “They’re only making things worse …”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “but that still doesn’t make me trust you. So far as I can tell, you’re just a big swinging dick with a badge.”

Farrentino turned red, but he nodded his head. “I understand that, but let me tell you … there’s some bigger swinging dicks out there who are getting out of line, and I don’t trust them any more than you trust me.”

I looked into his face and saw only honesty. He was no longer a homicide detective and I was no longer a reporter; we were now only two men who had seen a lot of crazy shit go down in recent months and were scared by what was happening to our hometown. I’ve never been the greatest fan of the SLPD as a whole, but I knew that there were individual cops who did care about their line of work, who weren’t just playing out old cop-show fantasies of busting heads and breaking down doors. Mike Farrentino might be one of these guys.

And besides, I had a weird hunch I wanted to follow up on …

“You say you got a car parked around here?” I asked. He nodded. “Want to give me a lift out to Webster?”

He glanced at his watch and shrugged. “Sure. I’m off the clock and it’s on my way home. Why Webster?”

“I want to drop in on my ex,” I said as I began to follow him toward the unmarked Chrysler four-door parked on the street just beyond the barricades. “Give her a big surprise when I show up at one o’clock in the morning in a cop car.”

The drive out to Webster Groves didn’t take long. Farrentino hopped on I-44 at the Poplar Street Bridge, and traffic in the westbound lanes was very sparse, mostly interstate trucks on their way to Springfield or Oklahoma or Texas. A light rain had begun to fall, and the car was filled with the sound of the windshield wipers and the ethereal murmur of voices from the police scanner mounted beneath the dash.