Dean Koontz - Dragonfly

“And where do I come in?”

Finishing his brandy, West said, “We need someone to run the day-to-day affairs of The Committee. Someone who is dedicated to this country, someone who hates, as we do, the Communist conspiracy. We need a man who is intelligent, as brilliant a man as we can find. He must be willing to take big risks. He must be ruthless. And he must be a man who has no public identity, because we want to build him an identity as one of the foremost liberal thinkers of his day.”

“Liberal?” Rice said, perplexed.

“Camouflage,” West said. “He'll be a double agent, so to speak.”

“But I've written this book—”

“As yet unpublished.”

“You mean — destroy it?”

“Do you mind?”

“I guess not. But the articles in Scott's magazines—”

“For all practical purposes, no one reads them. And certainly, no one remembers who wrote them. Scott will burn all unsold issues that contain your articles. Most people who subscribe to the magazines probably throw their copies away. And even if someone runs across one of the essays after you've been established as a liberal theorist, you can blush and say it was the work of a younger and less sensible Andy Rice. Easy.”

“May I have more brandy?”

“Help yourself.”

They were silent for a few minutes.

Then Rice said, “I'm interested.”

“I knew you would be.”

“But you risked so much! You told me all of this without being sure I'd want to get involved. You told me you set up Kennedy's assassination and—”

“No risk,” West said. “If you'd been appalled, if you hadn't wanted to be a part of The Committee, we'd have killed you.”

Rice shivered. “I see.”

West poured himself another brandy. “Well! Shall we get down to specifics?”

His heart hammering, Andrew Rice nodded, sipped his brandy, and listened to A.W. West reshape his life

.

“Mr. Rice?”

Startled, Rice bit his fingers as they were shoving a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie into his mouth. He grunted with pain. He looked up, but there was no one else in his office.

“Mr. Rice?”

Miss Priestly.

The intercom.

He pushed the button. “What is it?”

“The list just arrived, sir.”

“List?”

“The list of federal marshals you asked me to get from the Justice Department, Mr. Rice.”

“Oh, yes. Bring it in, please.”

She brought it in, and after she had gone he picked up the white telephone and dialed Miss Rockwalt in the CIA file room out in Virginia. He said, “This is the Spokesman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I've got a list of names for you. Pencil handy?”

“Go ahead.”

“They're all federal marshals assigned to the Washington area.” He read off eighty names. “I want an address for each man. I want to know if he lives alone or with someone. I want his age, physical description, everything that you can get. You can call me at the usual number. I'll be here until seven o'clock this evening.”

“It may take longer than that, sir,” Miss Rockwalt said.

“Then I'll wait here until you've called.”

“No later than nine.”

“Every minute counts, Miss Rockwalt.”

He hung up.

He ate another cookie.

He looked at his watch.

Was David Canning dead by now?

After McAlister had gone, David Canning spread drop-cloths around the schefflera, mixed up a quart of Malathion solution, protected his eyes with ski goggles, and sprayed the tree to prevent a recurrence of the mealybugs. One pint of solution remained, and he poured that into the potting soil to kill any insect eggs that might be there.

While the insecticide dripped slowly from the sharp tips of the schefflera leaves, Canning sat at the kitchen table and wrote a note to the cleaning woman who came in twice a week. If he had to be gone more than seven or eight days, she would have to know how to mist and water the plant. He didn't want to come home and find it yellowed, spotted, and wilted.

In a strange way he felt responsible for the tree. His was more than the sense of responsibility that a man should have for any living thing. This was specific. It was personal. Indeed, there was something almost paternal about it; Mike had observed as much when he had come to visit his father two weeks after Canning had moved into the apartment.

“You act as if it's a child,” Mike had said, amused.

“There's more to plants than most people realize. I swear that sometimes the damned tree seems— aware, conscious. In its own way.”

“You've been reading books. Talk to your plants. Play some classical music for them. That kind of thing.”

“I know it sounds crazy—”

“I'm not criticizing. I'm just surprised. I didn't know they taught you reverence for life in the CIA.”

“Please, Mike.”

“Sorry. I'll keep my opinions to myself.”

“I never had to accept the prevailing philosophy of the agency in order to work there.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it.'

“Sure. Okay. Can we talk about something else?”

The way Canning saw it, he had bought the tree and brought it here, and he was the one trying to make it flourish inside of four walls and under a roof where, it had never been meant to grow. He had a duty to make every effort to keep it in good health, in return for the beauty that it added to his world and the peace of mind it gave him. He had an unspoken covenant with the tree, and his promise was his self-respect.

Or was he kidding himself? Was his caring for the tree merely an attempt, unconsciously motivated, to atone in some small way for having been a failure as a husband and father? Was he trying to make up for having destroyed his marriage and for having ruined his own children? Was he desperately trying to convince himself that he was not a cold, burnt-out, emotionless son of a bitch?

Don't be so hard on yourself, he thought.

Was it your fault, he asked himself, that Irene became a frigid, nagging bitch? To make her want him again, he paid her every imaginable form of tribute: praise, respect, love, romance, patience, tenderness, gifts and gifts and more gifts. He was a good lover; his own satisfaction mattered less to him than did hers. But because they did not enjoy a natural and mutual lust, because he always had to finesse her into bed with carefully thought-out game plans, his love soon became cynical, his respect feigned, and his praise as hollow as the chambers of the heart.

But to pretend that sex was their only failure was not fair to Irene. They had drifted apart both in and out of the bedroom — and they had become strangers to their children, as, well. Yet, as his father had taught him, and as he had learned from the examples provided by his father's friends, he had given his family all of the important things: a good home in a fine neighborhood, a swimming pool in the backyard, a nice school for the kids, allowances for the kids and money for their clarinet lessons and ballet school and baseball camp, the security of a substantial bank account, new cars, membership in a country club, an expensive vacation every year… If he had provided all of this and yet the four of them were strangers who merely boarded under one roof, then he had not fully understood his father and had gone wrong somewhere, somehow.

But what was the answer? Could it be explained by the usual pop sociology and pop psychology? Had he provided all the material comforts and then failed to give them love? Had he not managed to communicate to Irene and the children the things he felt in his heart? Had he and Irene been trapped by conventional man-woman roles that stifled their relationship? Had he been a male chauvinist pig without wanting to be, without knowing that he was? Had he walked along the generation gap, his kids on one side and he on the other, without understanding that it was a vast canyon and not just a gully? Running missions for the agency, he had been away from home for one and two months at a tune, six months out of twelve. Mike and Terri were adults by the time he received the White House assignment. Should he have been with them more time than he had been when they were young, to serve as an example and as a source of authority? Should he have been home every night to comfort Irene, to share the triumphs and defeats and irritations of daily life? Had his prolonged absences — and perhaps even the sometimes ugly nature of his job — been the cause of the alienation within his family? And if that were true, then wasn't he responsible, after all, for the withering of Irene's desire?