Dues of Mortality (3 page)

When
Isaac finally entered the office, Beaumont was standing behind his
desk, morosely hunched over with his palms suctioned to the blotter.
He'd abandoned the profanity, but was still shouting—probably
at some arrogant journalist just trying to rile him. His shaded dark
eyes were lasering the video on his desk-com and he wore a frown that
must have added twenty years to his already wind-burned face. His
course hair had a tangle or two in it, as always, and his full
figured nose, characteristic of his Lebanese decent, was gnarled at
the corners. A committed vegan, Beaumont's shabby suit fit so loosely
against his thin frame, he could always get a job standing in a
cornfield should he ever lose an election. But what Isaac noticed
most was how his corrugated brow was out-muscling the senator's
antique-style horn-rimmed glasses. It made Isaac want to double back
and reenter draped in Kevlar.

“
Don’t
call me here again,” Beaumont shouted at the machine. His fist
slammed against the panel, cutting off the call. When he noticed
Isaac, he straightened up, wriggling like he had a steak knife lodge
between his shoulder blades. “Goddamn reporters! They can’t
wait to hang me out on this! And where the hell have you been? I’ve
been fielding this shit by myself all morning!”

“
Sorry,
sir, I was on the phone with the Boston FBI trying to get an update.”

“
And?”

“
They
got a call a half hour ago from a claimer.” Isaac paused.
“PHANTOM.”

Beaumont
sighed impassively, like no other answer was possible. Nothing of
this scale had happened for almost a year. The bomb that exploded in
the security guard’s hands was just one of three such devices
strategically planted around the annex in University Park. The
combined blast pattern had devastated at least fifty percent of the
south wing, where they had just completed construction. It all seemed
to be done with the precision of a professional demolition job. Which
was a perfect match to the Modus Operandi of the so-called Patrons of
Humanity And Natural Tendency Of Mankind.

“
My
contact in the bureau says they’re going to be working overtime
on this one,” Isaac said.

“
Yeah,
I guess so,” Beaumont quipped, “especially considering
that PHANTOM is
supposed
to be history!”

Isaac
pulled his PDA from his pocket and began tapping.
“
I’ve
been coming up with some ideas on how to use this.”

He
had more to say but Beaumont raised a hand, cutting him off.

“
Do
you believe in what I’m doing, Isaac?” Beaumont asked,
straightly.

Isaac
blinked, unsure how to answer.

“
I
mean, do you believe I’m doing what’s right for this
country?”

“
Well,
sir, I...”

“
Because
I do,” Beaumont declared.

Isaac
hid his relief that the question was rhetorical. He was far too
uneasy about this one. Beaumont had spent the last two months griping
about the biotech firms gaining too much influence with higher
education. In fact, he specifically went on a tangent about Hudson
Labs and MIT. He hated that merger. Thank God, Isaac had convinced
him to largely sit on his opinion in public. It wasn’t so wide
a leap to imagine such a coincidence giving way to a juicy scandal or
even an investigation.

“
What
is it about our own destruction that fascinates us more than space
exploration or curing disease, or achieving
world
peace?
Did you
know we secretly piss away millions of tax dollars every year trying
to develop a weapon that creates artificial earthquakes? Earthquakes!
For fifty years, our kids went to bed every night wondering if they’d
wake up to their last minutes on earth, and now it’s like
nobody remembers. We say we love our world, but we can't stop looking
for more efficient ways to destroy it. For some stupid reason, we
just have to keep picking at it.” Beaumont snorted. “Guess
it’s true what they say about those who don’t know their
history.”

He
sauntered over to his office window with his fists tucked tightly
into his ribs. He then gloomily stared down at the cabals of various
protesters and news media people making their daily rounds, as it
were, on the capitol steps.

“
Bombs,
guns, tanks,” he said, “those are weapons
they
understand, weapons they'll rage
against. But threaten to slowly and methodically wipe out humanity
with a few well-constructed and well-placed strands of DNA and, they
don't know what the hell to say about that.”

Isaac
was speechless. Beaumont had become increasingly somber with every
word. “Perhaps you should pull back until the vote is over, not
give them any more reason to accuse you of instigating these maniacs'
actions through political rhetoric.”

“
It's
too late for that. Not to mention our 'independent' friends from
Maine and Vermont are vacillating like broken paint-mixers; if I stop
pushing now we'll lose them. Do you know how hard it is to increase
regulation on any industry, let alone one as prevalent as biotech?”
Beaumont exposed a fist and it trembled beneath his chin. “Those
biotech bastards have to be stopped,” he said, his teeth
encased behind narrowed lips.

He
turned from the window and looked at Isaac as if he’d just seen
him. “But these damn screwball terrorists are just as
dangerous,” he said. His eyes fell back to the crowd below.
“Jesus, why can’t we just stop picking at it?”

Cleveland, Ohio, August 25,
8:34 a.m.

Xavier
squeezed the gun’s handle as if he was trying to get juice from
it.
Just pull the damn
trigger,
he thought for the third time. He suddenly
recalled how he'd gotten the bruise beneath his eye. Certainly
twitching
his finger
was easier than walking on juiced up legs.

“
Elana,”
he
whispered and rocked the back of his head against the wall.
If
she were here, she'd know exactly what to say to him right now. She’d
blow his mind with some long-forgotten sliver of wisdom from
Shakespeare or Confucius and have him thinking what an idiot he was
for taking things so seriously.

But
Elana
wasn't
here.

She
wasn't here
and he was
.
What would her hotshot poets and philosophers have to say about that?
Where was the fucking justice?

He
peered deeper into the crosshatching of the gun's handle then traced
his lip with the barrel.
Ask
and ye shall receive
.

Xavier
closed his eyes and immediately saw the blood again. There was so
much blood. Buckets of it. Moses had stepped in it, tracked it all
over the floor like an absent-minded child who'd come in after
playing in the mud.
All we had
to do was get him on the god-damned truck
, Xavier thought.
He ground the gun's sight into his forehead. It broke the skin and a
spot of blood surfaced.

****

“
You have a big head,”
Elana said, after sliding into the transport’s passenger seat
while Xavier set himself behind the wheel.

“
That’s
the problem with women,” Xavier replied. “You always
mistake arrogance for confidence. Now me, I’m confident. I have
reason to be. I...”

“
That’s
not what I meant,” she said, in her “Oh, please”
voice. “I meant you have a huge cranium. For some reason, I
just noticed how big your noggin looked from the side. It’s a
miracle you can fit that helmet on it.”

“
Shut
up,” Xavier said rearing up.

Elana
laughed like a school girl who’d stolen her classmate’s
candy. “So much for that professed confidence.”

Xavier
laughed. Only Elana could get away with a shot like that
and
make him enjoy it. Shit, if it wasn't for her last name, they could
enjoy a lot of things together. Well, her last name and...now
this
.
He glanced in the rearview mirror as Derrick Moses turned his back in
pursuit of the barracks. Xavier had rolled up on the couple just as
Moses was partaking in a generous handful of Elana's heart-shaped
ass.
Of all the jerks in the
world
, he thought. Elana could have any man she wanted
with that cutesy smile and plain-face beauty; why in the hell...?

“
I
take it I wasn’t supposed to see him?” Xavier asked.

Elana
clamped her mouth, unsure whether to give anything away. Xavier was
astute, but maybe he was guessing.

“
He’s
just a friend,” she said, “like you.”

“
I
got plenty of friends. None of them would ever let me grab that much
ass. Well, maybe a couple.”

“
Did
my father assign you to spy on me?” Elana asked in a sudden
persecutory tone. “Is that what you were doing?”

“
No!
No, Elana, come on. You know I wouldn’t do that.” He was
sure to look her straight in the eye. “I wouldn’t.”

Elana
quickly cooled down. “My father doesn’t really want me
dating soldiers,” she sighed, “especially ones on the
same base. He doesn’t have anything against them. It’s
just that he thinks a soldier’s lifestyle is more than 'a woman
like me' should have to endure. At least that’s how he puts
it.”

“
He
doesn’t want you dating soldiers, or he doesn’t want you
dating
Moses?
He’s been written up a few
times, you know?”

“
His
name’s crossed Daddy’s desk once or twice, but he’s
not what you think.”

“
I
think
that you’re too great a
girl to end up bunk-mates with a guy like that.”

“
And
just what do you have against him, Xavier?”

“
Elana,
I just...”

Xavier
literally bit his tongue. He had almost said it. He had almost told
her that seeing Moses’s greasy branch-grippers on her body made
Xavier want to kill the guy. He averted his eyes, before he made
things worse.
“
Forget
I said anything. I was just voicing a little concern, you know, like
any brother would for his baby sister.”

Elana
blushed. “It’s all right, she said coyly. “I
understand.”

And
she did too. She “
understood”
that
men
—military
men in particular—could more easily lay waste to a small
village than express their feelings with any amount of affection.
Indeed, Elana
had
toyed with the notion of seeing Xavier's underwear drawer up close,
but he was just so...
perfectly
male
. He was
handsome,
rugged, athletic and worst of all, hopelessly aware of the trifecta.
Even his name was sexy: Xavier, pronounced with a Z sound at the
beginning instead of an isolated X, like X-ray or some pretentious
thing like that.
What
the hell could he
possibly need with me
?
she thought. If Elana had
one major flaw, then that was it: needing to be needed. Maybe she
could “work” on Xavier in a way he hadn’t
experienced before, but his type would quickly resent it. Resent
her.
No
.
Best to stick with someone whose rejection she could live with.

“
Let’s
go,” she said with a noncommittal smile. “I’ve got
classes in the morning.”

They
rode the short distance to the colonel’s house in a cranked out
silence. They then exited the transport and as Elana climbed the
front steps, she paused just shy of the door. At one point, Xavier
glimpsed his friend Max Porter getting a head start on patrol several
yards away. He quietly cursed the impending third degree.

“
Xavier,”
Elana said, and spun on her heels, confronting him, “Do you...”

“
Don’t
worry. I’m not stupid,” Xavier interrupted.

She
waited.

“
I
won’t tell your father anything. He’d just take it out on
me anyway.”

Elana
smiled graciously and then kissed Xavier's cheek with the gentlest
brush of her skin to his stubble.

It
electrified him.

She
let her eyes fall into his as they stood beneath the glow of the
porch light. With a few well-timed and deliberate twitches, Xavier
communicated for Elana to spare his heart and not start something
neither of them could finish. Fast on the uptake as usual, Elana just
delivered a womanly “Good night,” and went inside.

****

“
So what made you join up?”
Xavier asked.

“
Habit,”
Max Porter answered, sipping his ginger ale as they chilled at the
bar of the Brigade Tavern, off base. A drab little place with the
environs of any male-centric establishment. Xavier didn't much care
for it, but no place was perfect and it was better than lounging
around the barracks looking for something to do with your thumbs.