Catacombs (12 page)

Gibby looked pasty behind his birthmark. He took a fast step back, stepped on a round rock, and almost fell.

"Matthew, God's sake! What do you think you're doing?"

"Takes a lot to get you out from behind your desk, Gibby. How long were you rattling around up there looking for me? It may be that I won't like your reasons."

"I told them. Told them you were impossible! I'm already on record I'm totally against this!"

"Against what?"

Gibby pointed a shaking finger at the shale ridge.

"We saw you come down that hill. The pilot told us how reckless it was. You're still taking wild chances, trying to get yourself killed at every opportunity."

"You calling me a misfit again, Gibby?" Jade said with a thin-lipped smile. He had the pleasure of seeing Gibby's complexion turn a shade paler in the slanting sun. But he wasn't particularly in the mood for comedy. He glanced at the men in the helicopter. They looked worried, and should have been.

Jade straightened, pointed the rifle away from the CIA man.

"I've always known what I was doing, Gibby. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be standing here now scaring the shit out of you."

Gibby looked irritably at his watch. "Never mind. This is no time for old grievances–"

"I kind of thought that's why you're up here."

"I'm here," Gibby said unhappily, running a hand through his windblown hair, "because the president wants to see you."

"This must be my lucky day," Jade said. "Except I know damn well it isn't. What about?"

"He'll explain. But there's no time–"

"Where is Boomer? In Washington?"

"No, the Coast. He–"

"Uh-uh. Forget it."

Gibby shaded his eyes and stared, perplexed, at Jade.

"He told me you'd say that."

"Did he tell you I get seasick on a waterbed?"

"Everybody knows that," Gibby said impatiently. "It's part of your jacket." He couldn't resist a sneer. "I thought you would have licked that problem by now, with your devotion to Eastern disciplines."

"I had Hopi shaman teachers. But we all need our weaknesses to remind us we're human, Gibby."

"The president told me if you were going to be stubborn, then I should remind you he carries an overdue bill in his pocket. He wants you to remember–" Gibby's tongue pressed between his teeth as he tried to get the message straight. "'Many long legs."

For a few moments, Jade looked puzzled. Then he sat down cross-legged in the grass, holding his rifle by the barrel. He laughed and laughed.

"Okay," he said, wiping a tear trickle from one eye. "Have that spare ranger you brought along take my horses down to the ranch. And let's go see what Boomer has on his mind."

THE MARITIME WHITE HOUSE

Channel Islands National

Monument, California

May 6

The sea off the cliffs of Anacapa was placid, as a Navy helicopter carrying Jade, John Guy Gibson, and his security man circled a schooner in a small cove on the channel side of the rocky island. From a height of four hundred feet Jade could see, without binoculars, a school of Pacific gray whales migrating north in the gold caldron of sunset. The Navy destroyer that accompanied the president on his frequent holidays under sail had anchored outside the reef, and an antisubmarine helicopter was on picket duty above the Santa Barbara Channel.

The pilot set the pontoon-equipped helicopter down close to the president's seventy-six-foot, outrageously expensive, teak-and-mahogany schooner, called the Hondo. The three men went aboard.

A tape deck programmed with Herbie Mann and Chuck Mangione competed with the din of a rookery: The shoreline teemed with seals. There were cormorants and sea gulls overhead, and a tame brown pelican on the mizzen spreader. The shadowed water was clear enough for Jade to see, a dozen feet down, greenish-brown kelp forests slowly stirred by some current undetectable on the surface. Wet suits and scuba gear were drying on the decks, along with a basket of pink and orange sea anemones.

The president was yelling something: a greeting, an insult. Boomer looked thin and hectic in a golf shirt and raspberry slacks. Jade noted the other two men taking their ease under a Bimini awning in the stern. Familiar faces. He temporarily forgot his uneasiness at being afloat.

"Matt, how you feel today, buddy?" Boomer waved a hand at the cove. "Like glass, huh? But I've got a bucket ready for you. Gibby, you want to get in on the pool? My money says Matt lasts ten minutes before he whups his guts." Boomer looked Jade over with a faint insolent grin. He didn't bother to get up to shake hands; they had known each other too long for even that much formality.

"Janey and the kids okay?" Jade asked.

"Yeah. They ask about you. I tell them you're still holed up licking wounds. What do you want to drink?"

"Nothing. I just want to get off your damn boat."

Boomer grinned again. He was forty-seven, a year and a half older than Jade. At a glance Boomer looked very fit. He was baked the color of a clay flower pot.

His eyes were still a bright and fulminating blue, but his hair was down to a thinning half inch of fuzz, burned by aggravation, by the internal volcano that powered him. Jade also noticed the slight bitter twist to his mouth, becoming more pronounced the longer he served a wobbling and demoralized nation as its Chief Executive.

Boomer introduced him to the other men: Morgan Atterbury, the secretary of defense, and Stephen Gage, the president's national-security advisor. Jade hadn't followed the Washington scene too closely since his friend's election, but he knew that Atterbury, formerly CEO for a major West Coast electronics firm, had been doing a good job in the world's toughest bureaucracy. Gage was a Rhodes scholar and award-winning author. He was a big, overweight, bearded man with cold eyes and a barely civil manner. Boomer said that two thirds of his body was ego, and the rest was very thin skin. He had muscled nearly everyone else aside to sit at Boomer's right hand when the tough decisions were made. Apparently Gage had a lot to offer; Boomer was on the defensive these days, but he was no dummy.

Boomer had come out of nowhere with plenty of the family's oil money behind him but only the governorship of Oklahoma as a political base, to win his party's nomination as a compromise candidate. Then he nabbed a close election, which the incumbent president managed to kick away through overconfidence.

Boomer, deficient in vital areas of political expertise, had learned fast in three years. He was brash, scrappy, tireless. He knew how to use the media to advantage, and he was increasingly well liked overseas. His best efforts to pull the country out of a disastrous slump probably would not show results for another two years. In the meantime he was catching hell for the mismanagement of previous administrations. "I suppose," Boomer said, taking in Gibson's long-suffering expression, "that you and Gibby had the chance to get reacquainted on the way out."

"Like old times," Jade agreed. They had stayed as far away from each other as they could in the Gulfstream jet, which belonged to The Company; Gibby, a collector of Chinese porcelains, had spent most of his time leafing through auction catalogues.

The CIA man cleared his throat and smiled gamely. "May I know about 'many long legs'?" he asked. Boomer frowned at Jade. "Should we tell him?"

"I hate to think of the man-hours he'll waste trying to find out."

"My family and Matt's go way back," Boomer explained. "Before we got oil rich and started putting on airs, our respective granddaddies swapped worthless mineral rights and wind-broke horses and good-time ladies. Their drinking was a scandal and they raised all sorts of hell together. When Matt and I got acquainted, we resolved to carry on in the glorious tradition. We saw each other during the summer, when my folks shipped me out to the Colorado ranch for seasoning. Well, boys go through definite stages of development. The first pony, the first bare-knuckle fight, first trophy head; by age sixteen I was a certified cocksman at Choate. But Matt, he was younger and hadn't had any yet. So that summer when we got together I promised to fix him up."

"For a certified cocksman, you should have been able to do better than Minnie Long Legs," Jade complained.

"She was a part-Paiute Indian girl," Boomer said to Gibby. "So skinny you could shave with one of her shinbones. But Minnie could get it on; and she'd come at the top of her voice."

"She also had a husband. But you didn't tell me about him."

"I figured all I had to do was keep a lookout. Then I got sort of involved with that little horse bum from Colorado Springs: Daisy, or Jonquil, or something like that. So Minnie's old man, he was about thirty, I think, his name was Pinky Bob Steers, he came home pissed from the Crudup Cafe and heard Minnie go off like a cyclone siren: Matt had generous proportions, even when he was a kid. Pinky Bob didn't need to inquire as to why she was screeching thataway. He got his ax from the woodshed and went charging in and came back out dragging Matt by the hair. All Matt had on was his shirt. Minnie lit out for the tall timber while Pinky Bob stood at the grinding wheel making the sparks fly from his ax. Matt was kind of an interesting pale-green color. Since Pinky Bob was taking all that time to make his ax good and sharp, I figured I had a chance to negotiate. Hey, Matt, should I tell Gibby what your balls cost me?"

"Why not? A little more humiliation won't make any difference."

"Let's see. I gave Pinky Bob five dollars cash, my car radio, a pretty good spare tire, two cans of Marvel Mystery Oil, the Pendleton shirt off my back, and what was left of that quart of Southern Comfort we'd been nipping at for three days."

"Too bad we can't buy the Russians that cheap," Gage said with a rumble of laughter.

"It's not a bad analogy. Pinky Bob knew just what his wife and his dignity were worth. He had a sense of proportion. But we've lost ours. I think we've spent about three hundred fifty billion dollars since I came into office and God knows what the Russians have spent, and what do we have to show for it? For the last twenty years we've been sliding downhill into a depression trying to support an unproductive bureaucracy that can wage war but can't do one damn thing to protect the country." Boomer grimaced and finished his gin and lime. He stared at Jade. "Well, maybe we have a chance to do something about that now."

Gibby looked at his watch and said with a stiff smile, "Because we're running so late at this point, and time apparently is a critical factor in our planning, shouldn't we get to work?"

Boomer nodded, and got up to lead the way below. "We'd better have this conversation in the main salon, so the goddam Russians can't hear every word."

"They around?" Jade said.

Boomer made a motion of submarines gliding beneath the waves.

Morgan said, "One of ours has been playing tag with one of theirs all day." He pointed toward the ocean. "And their trawlers have ears that can hear the coins drop in a pay phone in Wichita."

"Maybe you should confine your weekend vacations to Camp David," Jade said to Boomer as they went below. The midships salon had seven feet of headroom, practical, built-in furnishings, carpeting, indirect lighting on the red-toned mahogany, and oil paintings by Boomer's eighty-one-year-old mother, an authentic American primitive. There was a good-sized galley and dining room abaft.

"The hell with that. The Big Bear can't scare me off my own boat. Anyway, we're secure here. Grab a seat, Matt. Gibby, show him the goody."

Jade had a glimpse of extensive communications equipment in a forward compartment before the salon was closed off by one of the Secret Service men who made up the Hondo's crew. Gibby unlocked a cabinet. He took out a plush jeweler's case and a high-powered magnifying glass and handed both to Jade.

Inside the case was the bloodstone which Morgan Atterbury had brought back from Tanzania. Jade pondered it impassively for a few moments, then lifted the stone to see what it looked like beneath the full-spectrum light angled over his shoulder. Finally he held the bloodstone beneath the magnifying glass to bring out the inscriptions. There seemed to be hundreds.

He smiled in bewilderment and looked up. The others were watching with the mesmerized expressions of men in the presence of something of immense value. Gibby broke the silence by leafing through the pages of a thick loose-leaf notebook, bound in gold leather, on a table in front of him.

"How much does it weigh?" Jade asked.

"Forty-eight point six carats," Gibby said, having looked it up. "And it's very nearly flawless. We have an appraisal, a GIA certificate of authenticity."

Jade looked through the magnifying glass again and studied the etchings on one facet.