After the Rain Read online

  He told them it was a real long shot. They’d be going into a very fragile intelligence matrix. He concurred with Nina’s plan, given the target, to lead with D-girls. He advised them to plan their approach carefully. He bid farewell saying, “This meeting never happened.” Then he packed his briefcase and departed.

  Fragile intelligence matrix.

  That meant a small town where everybody knows everybody and strangers stick way out.

  The information on Ace Shuster was already spitting out of the fax machine.

  Wonderful. He killed a guy in a bar fight. Although, even in the official record, the incident looked like self-defense. But Shuster was convicted and did a year on a manslaughter rap at the state farm.

  Then—Jesus—the FBI had pictures of him in the spectators gallery at Waco. This raised the specter of anti-Semitic American militias finding common cause with Al Qaeda.

  No subsequent arrests. No known militia affiliations.

  Shuster’s father had been investigated repeatedly as a major player in the liquor traffic along the border, but the charges never stuck. He wasn’t breaking any North Dakota laws.

  The Colonel had put together a fast synopsis after a consult with Shuster’s former probation officer. Shuster had served his time, went back into the community, and caused no real trouble. He’d had his conviction reduced. Probation described him as an underemployed heavy-machinery operator, and real smart. But the brains went wasted, because he tended to brood and drink. The drinking was probably self-medication for moderate depression. He’d dabbled in sports, smuggling, and women. Possibly peripherally involved with the biker gangs who ran the smuggling on the Canadian side of the border. No solid evidence linked him to the looming meth traffic. Remember, he was smart. He could be mixed up in almost anything out in all that empty country. Potentially a very dangerous guy, but not so’s you notice it right off.

  A ladies’ man.

  Nina had looked out the window toward Ann Arbor, where Kit was staying with her mother’s sister, and came up with the idea.

  “It could work if it’s bold enough,” Holly said.

  Bold enough…The gloves were off. They were in the serious black on this one.

  “You still sure you want in?” Holly said.

  The serious black. Lie, cheat, steal.

  “We’re not carrying copies of the Geneva Convention in our kit,” Holly said.

  Jane, the sharp tack, cracked wise. “There’s killing in combat and then there’s murder. You ain’t talkin’ about combat.”

  “Correct. I ain’t necessarily talkin’ about combat. And there’s other things you might have to do.”

  “Things?” Jane had said.

  “What, I gotta draw you a picture?” Holly said pointedly to the two women.

  So Nina told Jane, “He means like whatever it takes. Like you might have to suck some smuggler’s dick. Not your favorite thing, Jane.”

  Jane came back fast. “Just as long as it ain’t Holly’s.”

  D-girls. Nothing but hardcore. Behind the bravado they were all picturing Paula Zahn on CNN going zombie-cottonmouthed, trying to get her words out while in the background a nuclear plume mushroomed over downtown Chicago, or Kansas City, or…

  Fuck it.

  Nothing else mattered. Mission first.

  But the way the plan worked, Jane drew a pass. Jane was in the motel in town probably reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to Kit. Nina got the duty and now here she was in a smuggler’s bed, listening to him putter around in his living room just beyond the closed but unlocked door. Jesus, his place was clean. Did that mean he was clean? What if he was a bareback kind of cowboy who didn’t want to use condoms?

  What was the statistical probability of contracting AIDS from unsafe sex in remotest North Dakota, anyway? Better or worse odds than being the first dummy rolling out of a Black Hawk on a hot mountain LZ in Afghanistan?

  Numbers. Odds. Probabilities…

  Nina slid between the clean sheets.

  Downstairs she heard the dolly scurry across the floor. A one-man ant colony, Gordy went back and forth, loading the crates of whiskey. The rhythm of the work, the rolling dolly wheels, the thud of the cases being hefted in place drummed like a harsh lullaby.

  Exhausted from the alcohol, Nina’s mind wandered.

  The mission.

  Her first job was to survive insertion. Boy, there’s an example of military lingo falling flat on its ass.

  Think about other things.

  Like her ex-husband…no, that wasn’t right, they were just separated. Her estranged husband. Better.

  It occurred to Nina that her asshole estranged husband would be right at home in these shadows. He’d lived this life for years on end working the margins, hiding out. A lot of people thought he’d done it too long. Not much for small talk, Broker. Not real great social skills at a cocktail party. Good with Kit, though.

  And no one was better in the fog.

  It was Broker who had taught her about compartments. The necessity to keep various parts of your life scrupulously segregated. And right now she had her daughter in one box and her husband in another. So she just cracked the door on Broker’s cubbyhole, because if she wasn’t careful all this stuff would come rushing out.

  Stuff she didn’t need right now.

  Emotional stuff.

  She realized she was holding on to her discipline like a chin-up bar. Hanging by it. White-knuckling it. Below her the rest of the night waited.

  In order to function she had to sleep.

  But sleep would leave her vulnerable.

  She had to let go and drop into the darkness.

  She had duty-trained herself to do so many things—among them, to drop into a fundamental animal sleep almost at will. She had learned how to sleep standing up, to catnap, to meditate.

  So she relaxed her grip on the strange day, finger by finger, and started to slide down into the blackness. Sinking, she caught a fleeting notion of Broker and how he’d handle the news that Kit was left hanging in some motel room in North Dakota.

  So, Broker, how many women did you sleep with in the line of duty?

  But then she had to smile. He wasn’t gonna like it the way she reeled him into this one. Uh-uh. Boy, was he gonna be pissed.

  And that’s exactly how they needed him.

  Chapter Nine

  The rotary phone in the booth at Camp’s Corner still worked long after the golf course failed and the gas station and store closed. People drove out of their way to show their kids this dinosaur from the days before wireless. The county had originally asked the phone company to keep the line open so farmers working during spring planting and the fall harvest could make calls in an emergency. Which was good, because the man pacing back and forth next to the booth was facing a crisis.

  Close to midnight and the city lights of Langdon, miles to the north, pushed a dome faintly against the sky. Overhead, a sickle moon wedged between the clouds. Lots and lots of mosquitoes swarmed around.

  He was torn over the decision he had to make as he swatted at the bugs. Across the road, a spooky thread of moonlight outlined the Aztec dimensions of the Nekoma radar pyramid. He hugged himself, shivered in the muggy seventy-nine degrees, and looked up. Jeez. It was creepy out here, suspended between the ruins of the Cold War and this slender Muslim moon.

  As he paced, he put his right hand, palm open, over his heart, like when you sing the national anthem. Except he was searching for his sluggish heartbeat. He suspected that a catastrophic illness lurked inside him, coiled up, something part diabetes and part cancer, that lapped sugar from his blood the way a dog laps water.

  Sometimes he saw things.

  Shapes jerked at the corners of his vision. He caught fleeting glimpses of movement he thought were people darting away through doorways.

  At first he thought he might have paranormal powers. Lately he had come to believe that it was a sign his death was near. If this were the case, he reasoned, the
closer he came to it the better he could see into the world that existed just the other side of death. Since his body and its functions repelled him, the idea of leaving it was a kind of comfort.

  He had entered “out of body experience” in his computer’s search engine one day and found his way to research papers about NDEs—near death experiences. The more he read about it, the more he surmised that the shapes he detected were presences transiting a zone between the sputtering energy of life ending and the total void of nothingness.

  Near Death Experience.

  The subject intrigued him and he’d investigated the sensation of what it might feel like with the help of a drug called ketamine. Abusers of the compound called it “going in the K-hole”; the dreamy scary sensation of leaving the body.

  He had always suspected, and now he knew it for sure.

  He was different.

  It was time. Charon picked up the phone, inserted coins, and dialed the number. The Mole picked up on the other end but didn’t say hello. Charon pressed the receiver closer to his ear and could feel the building anxiety—the whole attack plan hung in the balance. Finally Charon broke the silence: “It’s me.”

  “Where the hell are you?” the Mole asked.

  “Still in town. You know, Rashid must have told them something, ’cause I think they’re here.”

  “Shit. How many?”

  “Three. Two women and an older guy.”

  “I repeat. Why are you still there?”

  Charon took a deep breath, steeled himself, and made his demand: “One of the women—I think she’s my pick. I mean, she came all this way to meet me.”

  Only by a great act of will did the Mole resist shouting a string of obscenities. This was absurd—jeopardizing the operation because of a woman? So many things could still go wrong, and now this.

  “But she could be an agent, for Christ’s sake,” he said incredulously.

  “It’s got to be her. And that’s that.”

  The Mole heard the finality in Charon’s voice and took a deep breath of his own to calm himself. After all, he had unleashed Charon. Why be surprised when he tried to flex his new muscles? So the Mole held his temper and savored the element of risk. Almost like a stab from his youth. He said, in a level, measured voice, “We’ll get her for you, but we have to do it fast.”

  After the Mole hung up, he was back on the phone in an instant, making a call of his own: “First, you should both be at the target, I don’t care about the rain business. Second, Rashid talked, and now we may have agents snooping around in Langdon. And our friend’s next girl-toy selection could be one of them. He’s going to blow the operation if we don’t get him in line. You have to go back in and get him out. Now.”

  The Mole hung up the pay phone and then, finally, he swore—in English, and then in Arabic. How was he suppose to get the job done with these homicidal clowns for help? Shaking his head, he walked across the deserted parking lot. Security dictated that he use an unfrequented location where he could observe anyone who might be following him. So he chose this abandoned truck stop on the interstate. The gas and diesel pumps had been pulled out. They’d scrawled CLOSED in soapy letters on the empty diner windows. But the pay phones still worked.

  He leaned against the hood of his car and studied the sky, wanting the clouds to clear. Wanting this thing to be over. His hand drifted to the open neck of his shirt. Before this all started, he used to wear gold chains around his neck. Kept the top two buttons open so the gold gleamed, nestled in his thick chest hair. Now, instead of the gold, he fingered a small silver religious medallion. His Christian mother had given it to him as a child.

  Saint Charbel, in the lore of the Lebanese Maronite Church, had performed miracles after his death. The Mole himself had been practically dead for decades; exiled to this wilderness. Now, like Saint Charbel, years after his death he was about to perform a miracle.

  The world of his birth was no more: Beirut when it was the Paris of the Middle East. His family had mirrored the city’s pre–civil war cosmopolitanism; his father had been a Sunni Muslim who’d preferred Karl Marx to the Koran. His mother was a Maronite Christian. His father had also been a member of the Ba’ath Party, an agent for Syrian intelligence, and a businessman heavily invested in growing cannabis and poppies in the Bekáa Valley.

  Smuggling ran in his blood.

  In 1982, an Israeli air strike killed his young Palestinian wife and infant son. One month later, a sixteen-inch shell from the American battleship New Jersey, firing in support of the Lebanese Army, killed his parents, his brother, and his two sisters.

  Seeking revenge, he volunteered for a suicide mission against the Americans. His superiors counseled patience. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his left-wing guerrilla group was advised by a KGB handler. The Russian interviewed him, and, seeing that he possessed intelligence and quality, suggested a long game: send him to America to live anonymously with his mother’s Christian family. Let him sleep among the Americans, become one of them, go to their schools, serve in their army.

  So they sent him to the United States to ply his father’s trade. He would buy and sell and quietly learn the rhythms of smuggling across the Canadian border. Someday he would prove useful.

  But that day never really came. The people who sent him had perished in the endless combat against the Israelis. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Mole was sentenced to prosper among the people he had sworn to kill. He remained faithful to his mission, going through the motions of his shadow life, running drugs, funneling money back to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. He got soft, he got married. He built a business. His two teenage sons were in high school. Christ—just yesterday he had taken them to soccer camp.

  And then the knock at the door finally came. Not from his old group, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; not even from Hamas or Hezbollah. There was a new ascendant movement, inspired by the flyers of airplanes into tall American buildings. They were consolidating their fund raising. And asking favors. The dapper Saudi businessman named Rashid had impeccable knowledge of the Mole’s background. And he needed a ton of some unspecified material moved from Winnipeg across the border. No questions asked. And that’s how it began.

  Now they were within hours of making it all work.

  He believed Charon about the agents showing up in Langdon. And Charon wouldn’t leave until he got what he wanted. So an alternate plan was called for. Something…

  The Mole squinted into the darkness. Made a decision. To keep the thing alive he’d have to take some risks. He’d have to divert them away from Charon.

  He spun on his heel, walked back to the phone booth, and picked up the receiver.

  Chapter Ten

  Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!

  The red label on the prescription bottle warned: “May cause DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL may INTENSIFY this effect. Use care when operating a car or other dangerous machinery.”

  Broker took two of the white Vicodin pills, washed them down with bad roadside coffee, and stepped on the gas. If there was any dangerous machinery in the immediate area, it was him.

  He was driving Milt Dane’s Ford Explorer pretty fast down a two-lane highway. A road sign flashed up, then disappeared: black rectangle framing a white silhouette of an Indian in profile with war bonnet; black number 5 centered in the white, the letter N in one corner and D in the other; WEST spelled out in the smaller panel over the sign.

  He was headed west on North Dakota State Route 5, going mostly over 90 mph. Yet it seemed like he was standing still the last couple hours—ever since he pushed north of Fargo.

  He’d forgotten that North Dakota was basically you and the sky.

  After Fargo, the sky was no longer behind things, like the horizon. It became the main thing. It was too much. Along with too many clouds and too much flat for his north-woods instincts. The problem was—no cover. Broker was a man who understood the advantages of cover; he’d perfected an eye for the subtleties
in human and geographic landscapes, for blind spots he could slip in and out of.

  Looking around here, he saw no place to hide.

  Talk about being too exposed. Christ. He caught himself hunching his shoulders, almost ducking behind the wheel. C’mon, un-cramp. Sit up straight, stretch.

  Broker had reluctantly entered his later forties. He was tending toward lean and hungry this season, from compulsive exercise and a mild interest in Dr. Atkins’ diet. He’d cut his dark hair extra-short, almost military. He’d even trimmed some of the bushy ends off his eyebrows that grew in an almost solid monobrow. He had a fix to his gray eyes, a hollowness of cheek, and a flatness to his belly of a man who had taken vows, who was on a pilgrimage, who was in serious training.

  There was some other stuff that affected his mood.

  Like: a little over twenty-four hours ago he had been shot in the left hand. At the moment he was thinking, in a sweaty, feverish way, that taking a bullet was a mere nuisance, a distraction, compared to what was waiting for him down this highway. What was waiting for him was Nina Pryce. His wife.

  He shook his head. People like him and Nina shouldn’t get married.

  They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

  And now she’d ditched their daughter with strangers in a motel in North Dakota. Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What are you up to?

  He’d lost the sugar-beet fields when he climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now he passed through a haze of strong-smelling clover and was into serious wheat. The fields stretched out to the horizon like a deep green comforter quilted with chrome yellow patches of canola and spashes of iridescent blue flax.

  There was so much sky, he thought he could see ten thousand miles, clear past summer into fall, all the way to the chill breath of the first frost. Gunmetal on oatmeal on concrete. And no blue. No sun. Far to the north he saw a curtain of rain, a shudder that could be lightning. But far away. Well into Manitoba.