Brother Termite (20 page)

AT THE
Fairfax County SPCA a well-dressed woman filled out forms at a counter while on the other side stood a lanky young man with a beard and ponytail. The building stank of disinfectant. A cacophony of muffled yips and meows came from behind double doors.

Run,
Reen thought suddenly.
We should run as far and as fast as we can. Because what we find out here won’t be about Tali and Hopkins at all but about something else. Something I don’t want to know.

The two people looked up as the Cousins entered.

“The director, please,” Oomal said.

The young man behind the counter indolently scratched his cheek. “You don’t want to adopt, do you? I mean, I don’t know that we could clear that.”

The woman wore an expensive fake fur, and she was eyeing Reen analytically and somewhat contemptuously, as if Reen were a mangy prospective pet.

“We want to speak with the director.” Oomal snapped his finger on his claw. “Now.”

Suddenly the double doors burst open, and a petite young woman in an apron came through, holding the collar of a golden retriever. When the dog saw the Cousins, he staggered back a few feet in astonishment and then, perhaps considering some aspect of canine integrity, lunged forward. The dog had a bark that made the walls tremble.

The girl held on. “Down!” she shouted. The dog paid her no heed.

Reen, the closest to the dog, shrank from the yellow snapping teeth, the frantic scrabbling of claws on linoleum, and the harsh panting as the animal strained against its collar.

“Harry,” the girl said in exasperation.

Harry opened a swing latch in the counter and sauntered out to the dog.

“Door to the right,” he said over his shoulder.

Oomal and Zoor fled through the steel doorway, Reen not far behind.

On a dusty cabinet in the main office of the SPCA a phone was ringing. The two typists in the room paid no attention to it.

“The director?” Oomal asked.

A typist looked up from her ancient Selectric, a myopic editor’s frown on her face. “Go on back,” she said, jerking her head in that direction.

The Cousins made their way past a mountain of dog food that sandbagged one side of the room. To the left of the Purina was an unassuming door, the kind that might lead to a bathroom or mop closet. Behind it was a scarred metal desk and a pile of manila folders paperweighted by a slumbering calico cat. And behind the folders was an impressive battleship of a woman, who said, “What the hell do you want?” in a voice not unlike the retriever’s.

Awakened, the cat gave the Cousins a sleepy double take, then leaped off the folders, scattering the top two inches of the stack onto the threadbare carpet. The cat vanished, a streak of white, black, and russet, into a dark back room.

That’s how I should run,
Reen thought.
I should run as though all the nightmares humans ever dreamed were at my heels.

Oomal took the only available chair, a cheap steel and plastic thing. “Somebody’s been threatening you. They’ve been taking animals.”

The woman blinked. “Lots of animals. Hundreds of animals. You going to get the bastards?”

“Who are they?” Oomal asked.

“Russians,” the woman said. She leaned back in her chair and laced her hands across a generous belly. “Germans. A few Latin Americans.”

Reen asked, “How can you be so sure?”

She gave him a sour smile. “Got a master’s in linguistics. They speak English well enough, but I can tag ‘em. I can always tag ‘em.”

“They still come around?” Oomal asked.

“Not for a couple of days. So you know who they are?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“They’re doing experiments on the animals, aren’t they?”

“I think so.”

“Castration’s too good,” she said by way of suggestion. The Cousins left. In the secretarial area the phone was still ringing, but the dog and the fake-furred woman had disappeared from the lobby. Under the stares of the girl and the pony tailed man, the Cousins exited and made their way to the ship.

“So you know who’s been taking the animals?” Reen asked his Brother.

The ship’s door spread open in welcome. Zoor took a wordless seat in the back. Reen sat next to Oomal.

“The CIA,” Oomal said.

Apprehension crawled, dainty-footed and insectile, up Reen’s spine. “How can you be sure?”

“Because,” Oomal said as the ship lifted into clear, bright air, “when the consolidation hit, the CIA merged with the KGB, North Korean intelligence, and every thug in every crappy little police state south of the American border. I know who’s been taking those animals because I know the FBI is xenophobic. The FBI has stayed as all-American as goddamned apple pie.”

Reen remembered Hopkins’s accusation of Marian at the last NSC meeting.
Start investigating at Langley.
Too bad that Reen had not believed him until it was too late.

Twenty-eight of the Community, both Loving Helpers and Cousins, had been kidnapped–and it all started the same time the confiscation of animals at the SPCA began.

CIA HEADQUARTERS,
tucked
between parks on the west and the Potomac on the north, looked more imposing from the ground than from the air. In fact, flying in low from the northwest, Reen could hardly see the massive installation until the ship was nearly on top of it.

As they approached, Zoor said, “There’s nobody in the guardhouse.”

“I know.” Oomal’s voice was tense.

Reen studied the rolling tree-studded lawn of the complex. No one moved on the walkways. No one was outside to catch the last gleam of the Indian summer sun.

And the parking lot was empty.

Oomal settled the ship on the lawn. “Get the Loving Helpers, Zoomer.”

The Cousins and Helpers climbed out and walked through the porte cochere to the huge brick building. The lobby was brightly lit. No guard sat at the station; no receptionist sat at the desk. The building was so silent that Reen could hear the whisper of air through heating ducts and the far, faint hum of a PC.

The corridor was a deserted river of beige carpet banded by sun slanting from western windows. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a phone was ringing. Ringing. In the SPCA, the ringing had been part of the din. Here, it was a hammer tapping against brittle silence.

The three halted before a red
EXIT
sign. The phone rang again.

“Let’s not get on the elevators. No telling what traps they’ve set up.” Oomal opened the steel door, and they entered the stairwell.

As Reen mounted the first step, Oomal snagged his sleeve. Reen turned and saw a look of determined, fearful intensity, as though Oomal were an exorcist about to enter a haunted house. “Downstairs.”

Oomal was right. Downstairs. When humans wanted to hide something, they went to basements. They went to ground.

No one spoke. The only sound in the stairwell was the slippery, soft steps of booted feet, the feathery echoes of breathing. At the bottom, in a pool of shadows, Zoor fumbled for the knob.

“Do you hear something?” Oomal asked, holding out his hand to stop them.

Reen froze. In the dim light he could see Zoor’s eyes move back and forth as though searching by sight for the noise.

“No,” Reen said at last. He grasped the knob and opened the door into fluorescent brilliance.

The fourth level of the basement was a rabbit warren of offices, all empty. A door to the right was open, and on its painted steel surface were the words
CLEAN ROOM
. Reen walked inside. The telexes were silent, their power lights off. On a small table sat a red phone, its receiver a foot or so away. A persistent waa-waa came from the speaker, the Chesapeake Bay Bell reminder that the phone was off the hook.

Reen heard Oomal’s faint “Reen? Come here.”

Someone had slipped a tumbler into a door marked
RESTRICTED
, and it was standing ajar. Past the security-card access was a long linoleum hall where Oomal stood. Reen made his way down the corridor to his Brother and looked at an office plaque. At first the name didn’t register. Nothing registered. Not the implications of it, not his Brother standing next to him. Then Reen’s head started to pound.

DR. HOWARD FRANKLIN, PROJECT SUPERVISOR

“He was working for the CIA, too,” Oomal said. “Working for them the whole time, and she never told you. Now you know who was important to her and why, Cousin Brother. Now you see–”

A muffled cry. “Zoor?” Oomal called.

“Here, Cousin! Here! It’s ...”

Oomal hurried toward Zoor’s voice, Reen lagging behind. The corridor led to a huge room that held the earthy stench of a zoo. Under the stench was a cloying odor, sweet and at the same time metallic.

This room, like the SPCA, must once have rung with barks and plaintive questioning meows. Now it was silent. Dead animals lay in their screen cages, forlorn bits of bloodied fluff. A thick crimson sea, just beginning to congeal to black, ran down the sloping floor to a center drain. The Helpers, oblivious, stood in the pool of blood, amidst the carnage. Zoor, his face anguished, was trying to call them to higher, cleaner ground.

“Why kill the animals?” Zoor asked. “They’ve been shot, all of them. Why do this? It doesn’t make sense!”

Oomal rushed back to Howard’s office, Reen at his heels, pleading silently for them to leave now.

Oomal rounded the doorway at a dead run and began frantically flipping through papers. He jerked open a credenza drawer, sending it tumbling, spilling accordioned computer printouts and staplers and rolls of masking tape. The heavy drawer hit the floor with a crash.

“You had to take her into your confidence, didn’t you? Goddamn it, Reen.” Oomal booted Howard’s computer.

The expression in his eyes was wild, savage, nearly human. “It crashed! See? They left in a hurry, but Howard had time to run a viral program to wipe the hard drive clean! They knew we’d come.”

“Oomal?” Zoor called. “I found something.”

In the empty hall, sticky red footprints tracked messily on the shiny linoleum, across a threshold, and over the beige carpet in the next room. It might have been a conference room anywhere but for the crimson prints on its carpet, and Zoor and the Helpers standing there. Twelve plush aqua chairs were placed equidistantly on either side of an oak table. Charts and graphs lined the walls, and in one corner stood a television hooked to a VCR.

Oomal halted at Reen’s shoulder. He was breathing hard. “Onset of Death,” he read from the top of the nearest graph. “Goddamn her.”

He lunged to the television, turned it on, and hit the VCR’s
PLAY
button.

Snow. A long minute of snow. Then on the screen Hans Krupner was peering directly at them, his face distorted by the fish-eye lens. His eyes too round, too wide, and his balding head Cousin-bulbous.

His voice was distorted, too, garbled by terror and by the echoes in the bare room. “Marian? Marian? I know you are angry with me, yes?”

What sort of room was it? Tiny, windowless, more like a closet. The walls were seamless gray metal. At the bottom of the television screen was a series of red numbers: 00:00:00.

Like a digital clock set to time a race.

Krupner turned. Two paces, and he was at the back wall.
“Gott,”
he whispered.

Two agitated steps. He was pleading into the camera again. “Please. What was so important about the fax, Marian? You are the one who told me to feed the German ministry information. You remember, yes? So they would not become suspicious I was a double agent? And I was fired! I could not help that I was fired! Sent back to Germany. And the ministry wanted something. A little something, Marian. It was just a small item I found. Something amusing. Nothing of importance. You were the one who said–”

A loud clang. At the left of the screen, a door opened. Two men with sticks herded a Loving Helper into the room.

“Zoor! Get the Helpers out of here!”

Oomal’s curt order jerked Reen’s attention from the TV.

“Take them down the hall. Quick!”

On the screen the abandoned Helper shrieked its loneliness.

It charged the open door, the men. Its Brothers must have been just beyond, close enough to smell them. Nothing but longing could have made it that desperate.

A prod from a stick. A bacon-fat sizzle. A short-circuit
zzzt
as voltage hit flesh. The Helper squealed, staggered backward, turning in frantic circles to escape the pain.

Eyeing the Helper, the men backed out. The door closed with clanging finality. Krupner sat down in a corner, hugged his legs, and eyed the Helper, too.

Pain now forgotten, the Loving Helper stopped spinning. It faced the door expectantly, as if it were a compass needle and its unseen Brothers magnetic north.

00:00:01

The red numerals began clicking off tenths of seconds, time unrolling with dizzy speed.

00:02:39

Something was wrong with the Helper. It scratched urgently at its throat.

00:04:21

A spasm sent arms and legs flailing.

Krupner got to his feet, clamping hands over the bottom of his face. He was breathing in hard, jerky pants. Above the cage of his fingers, his eyes were demented, luminous, as if terror were burning him inside-out.

00:06:03

Blood leaked from the edges of the Helper’s eyes. A mad chatter from the television speaker, the sound of the Helper’s claws against the metal floor.

00:08:42

The Helper’s mouth bubbled blood. The feet twitched, then were still.

00:10:31

And Krupner was alive. He was sitting in a corner, body tucked into a small ball.

Reen jumped at the abruptness of the white-noise hiss as the picture changed to snow.

With a blow of his fist Oomal turned off the television. “Goddamn her.”

Reen caught his arm. “Let’s go now, Oomal.”

Oomal shook off the warning claw. Reen pursued him from the conference room, past a confused Zoor, past the animal cages. Oomal slipped on the bloody tiles and fell. He heaved himself upright, uniform wet, hands and cheeks a gelatinous crimson. One savage push on an adjoining olive-green door. It swung open.

And the Helpers with Zoor began to shriek.

“Come see, Cousin Brother,” Oomal said. “Come see what Marian was up to.”

An immaculate white room. White tile walls, white tile floor. At the center two steel tables. Krupner and the Helper lay on those cold hard beds, their skulls and their chests open.

For all its uncompromising neatness the room had a cluttered look, of things left in haste. A bone saw, still bloody, lay on a table next to Krupner. A scalpel sat forgotten atop the Helper’s ruptured chest.

There was a humming in Reen’s ears as he watched Oomal walk to a bank of steel cabinets. As he saw him slide open a drawer, saw him peer in.

It was a pleasant room, really. All steel-gray and white. The ordered squares of the tiles and the larger squares of the cabinets all fitted perfectly. Like fractals. Even the autopsy Ys and the clean-edged openings into the skulls had been done with a meticulous hand. Not at all like the ruin of Jeff Womack’s head. Or Hopkins’s.

Oomal drew back with a gasp, as though something in the drawer had bitten him. His bloody footprints disturbed the pattern of the floor. His bloody palm prints disturbed the pristine surface of the cabinets.

He began pulling out drawers, one after the other. “Damn her!” he shouted. “They’re all in here! The room’s full of dead Cousins and Helpers!”

The place was so quiet, so antiseptic that Oomal’s loud carelessness annoyed Reen. He walked out, his boots making sucking noises in the animals’ blood.

Oomal caught up with Reen in the hall near Howard’s office.

“Where do you think you’re going, Cousin Brother? Are you afraid to see what she’s done?”

Reen looked away from the red on the linoleum. The wall was soothing and white, like blank beginnings. Like the potential of paper before it is written on. Like the untrampled snow of West Virginia.

A fierce tug on his arm. “Marian! Marian was the kidnapper!”

Reen’s eyes shifted. Zoor was standing at the end of the corridor, the Loving Helpers around him.

“Oomal,” Zoor said. “They’re still nervous. Something down this way, I think. You’d better come see.”

Oomal nearly pulled Reen off his feet. He dragged him, stumbling, behind.

Images in flashes. A door open to a littered office. A paper shredder adrift in a snowfall of confetti. A pressure door. A sign:
WARNING–TOXIC GAS
. A border of yellow and black stripes, pleasing, systematic stripes, but just the wrong colors.

And a smell, too. Stale sleep. Spice with a hint of decay.

Oomal spun Reen around to face a quiet blue room. Nest blue. In a padded corner two Loving Helpers and a Cousin lay tangled.

“That’s how she kept them alive!”

Reen wanted to tell Oomal to shut up, that he would wake the sleepers. So serene, the Helpers and the Cousin, their arms around one another.

Zoor saying, “I left the Helpers by Howard’s office. What was it? What made them nervous?”

The three lying so still. A broad dark stripe down the Cousin’s head. A splash of brown on the floor, like a check mark or a bird in flight.

“Something must have happened,” Oomal was saying. “The agents dropped everything and got out quick. They couldn’t take the Helpers and the Cousin, so they shot them, like they shot the animals.”

A smudge on a wall like a flower, petals opening. Reen pulled his sleeve from Oomal’ s grasp and walked toward the exit sign.

“Brother!”

Reen’s pace quickened. He started to trot. Wrenching open the door, he hurried up the stairs. By the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time, and when he reached the lobby, he was running.

“Reen!”

Panting, taking air in huge gulping whoops as he ran clumsily past the reception area, toward the sunlight. His legs knew no rhythm, only haste and direction. He burst through the glass and steel entrance and ran across the cement of the porte cochere. Thrashed through a border of flowers. Shouts of concern behind him.