Mad Dogs (38 page)

“Who goes with who?” said Russell.

“I'll take Cari in the Caddy,” I answered instantaneously. Thought, then: “We should split the sane fugitives up, a witness with credibility in each car.”

“Eric and I need to stay together,” said Hailey. “We'll ride with you.”

“Director Lang,” said Zane. “You get to ride with the boys. And you get shotgun. Russell, you popped it, you drive it.”

“Wild!”

“What about you?” Lang asked the white-haired whacko.

“I'll be behind you all the way.”

“I bet you will,” said Lang. “It's cold and I'm old: can I get my coat?”

He nodded toward the Caddy's trunk.

“Sure,” I said. Tossed him the keys. Watched him walk away from us.

Russell casually stepped to the far side of the stolen Volvo. His eyes rode Lang, and no matter what direction we faced, the silver-haired man held all of our attention. He disappeared behind the huge, rising white trunk lid of the Caddy.

“Now is when,” whispered Zane. “This is his first chance to counter-attack.”

Lang was 21 counting-down beats away from
taking too long
when the Caddy trunk boomed closed. He wore his Navy Pea coat, unbuttoned and hanging open to show his empty belt as he walked towards us with the Colt .45 in his hand—held by its barrel. He walked straight to Zane.

“Hold onto this,” Lang told Zane as that white-haired warrior took the pistol from a silver-haired spy. “We'll all feel better, and if I need it, I know where you are.”

The spymaster walked through our huddle, circled the Volvo past Russell, opened the front passenger door and climbed in. Shut the door.

I said: “Let's roll.”

53

Night riding toward the dawn of Day Nine.

“Whatever happens now,” said Hailey in the white Caddy's back seat with Eric as we hummed over a dark highway, “all this will be over. When we show up at that bank, we walk onto Lang's runway. We're out of control tomorrow.”

“If we get tomorrow,” I told her.

“Tired,” whispered Eric. “Heartache.”

“I know, Baby,” said Hailey. “I know.”

She'd never called him
baby
or any endearment before. We'd reached some end.

Or some beginning.

My hands trembled on the steering wheel. The gauge needle reading
3
⁄
4
full felt like a lie. Our rush felt like we were running on fumes. The car smelled like sweat, cold coffee, old Styrofoam, gun steel, mud clumps fallen off filthy shoes. Cari rode shotgun. I narrowed my eyes at the yellow dotted blackness beyond our windshield, told myself I could smell her lilac shampoo. But it was just my imagination.

“We'll be OK,” I said, my glance at Cari telling everyone I was talking to her. “And a lot of that is because of you, all you've done, how great you are to—”

“Victor, don't.” Cari's eyes rode the road. “I tried to bag you. Barely missed.”

Tires hummed, but I wouldn't give up. All she had to do was see what was meant to be. Eventually. Inevitably. But I backed off, made a cliché joke that wasn't: “Well, there's always a chance you could get it right now.”

“Always. Never.” Cari shook her head. “Those are two of your favorite words. But they mean the same thing. You need a bigger vocabulary about certainty and time.”

“
Now
is
won
spelled backwards,” I said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Don't ask me,” I said. “I'm crazy.”

“Cari,” said Hailey, “what happens if we get something from the bank?”

“I figured that out when we were driving across the city,” answered the sane person in our car. “By now, there's a burn on Lang. But also now, there's two of us besides—with—you maniacs. Seven voices are a lot to not listen to. And Lang…

“What I saw driving through town was the Capitol dome. Glowing in the dark. My guess is that's where we'll push this to the next level and get out of the gunsights. Lang spent time there as a liaison between the Hill and the Agency, knows people.”

“Oh great,” I said. “Congress is crawling with people I trust.”

“Turn on TV camera lights and they'll crawl over broken glass to get there,” said Cari. “Lot of them are fickle butterflies chasing bright lights. But there are worker bees inside that white dome. Soldier ants who get things done. More heart and guts than you think. If nothing else, on Capitol Hill we can pull people with clout onto the bull's eye that made your doctor dead. The more people Kyle Russo needs to control and the more powerful they are, the harder it is for him to operate—and make us pay for it.”

Memory whispered through Eric: “You can't kill everybody.”

The road rumbled. Perhaps 10 minutes in front of us rolled another stolen car with two madmen and one silver-haired spymaster.

“We've got time to kill,” Zane told Cari when he cell phoned her from somewhere ahead on the dark highway. Red taillights of cars not containing him and the others made occasional dots in our windshield. “We're taking exit 32 towards Parkton. Follow, but hang back, let us find a place to coop until dawn and the bank opens.”

We were on the exit ramp when he called again.

“Go through town,” Zane said. “Take a road on the right marked with a ‘wildlife sanctuary' sign. Follow it to ‘waterfront access parking.' You should be here in fifteen.”

“Imagine living in a place like this,” said Cari as we cruised down a Main Street three blocks long with stores that had clung to that pavement since the Beatles. No more than a hundred homes stood behind those fronts. “You're not at the beach. You're not on a farm. You're not in the city. Your town doesn't have a real center, a heartbeat to keep it going, make it different. Everything you see around you fades every day. Strangers drive past you on Main Street on their way to the rest of the world. What do you do?”

“You turn on the TV and live in the same nowhere that a billion other people do,” I said. “Or make your own reality. Or get out. But I'm more worried about dying here than living here.”

“There's the bank,” said Hailey.

We cruised past a tan brick box with glass windows, a trimmed lawn, a parking lot where an electronic lettered sign flashed the time: “2:37”.

“Dillinger would love that bank,” I said. “Smoked windows, easy getaway.”

We followed the road through trees until it dead-ended in a paved parking lot where, at the far end, sat the stolen Volvo. Beyond that parked car, the darkness shrouded horizon rolled with blue-black water. The front passenger door of the Volvo opened and John Lang stepped out, wrapping himself in his Navy pea coat as he replied to our guys inside the Volvo, closed the door and jogged over to direct me to park the Caddy on the other side of a lamp pole's cone of white light.

Cari lowered her window as I killed the engine.

Lang leaned in: “Feels good to stretch.”

And he opened the door for Cari.

As she climbed out, so did I.

Hailey led Eric out of the backseat to stand by Lang. I walked towards the white beast's swooping tail fin so I could join them on the other side of our car. Smelled the cold water, spring trees at night, garbage from a dumpster, firecracker smoke.

Cari asked Lang: “How's Zane?”

“Hold up a sec, then you tell me.” Standing beside Cari, Lang called out: “Vic: Zane thinks that since here we'll need an official presence, I should take charge.”

“Go ahead,” I said. Cari stared at the Volvo and the way she did that made me want to look away, look out at the dark rolling water. “You be the boss.”

As I circled around the white Caddy, Lang said: “Eric, Vic says I'm in charge, so you follow all my orders. Hold on to Hailey so she can't run or shoot or take command.”

What?
Whirl look—see:

Hailey wrapped in a bear hug by Eric.

ZAP-CRACKLE!
Cari spasms crashing to the broken asphalt as—

Zing! Oww burning fire sting
my left cheek, reach up pull out… a dart.

Lang stood pointing a monstrous long black finger at me.

Gun! Charge him draw
—The Glock cleared my holster and my right arm swung up and the Glock flew from my suddenly limp fingers as my legs turned to rubber and my charge wobbled side to side and time/space stretched like silly putty and Lang is six feet away as my left hand swings up to grab/strike/deflect—

I flopped over my own momentum, flipped through the night—
black clouds stars swirling spinning dizzy
—slammed on my back, head bouncing on stones to
white light
.

Back, 'm back. Eyes can see. Roll in my sockets. Jaw slack, mouth open. Drool on check. Wipe… My hands, arms, legs,
me
: glued to parking lot asphalt.

ZAP-CRACKLE!
Noise nearby.

Lang's voice says: “Two zaps ought to do Cari, don't you think Eric? Don't answer. The pleas in your voice annoy me. Keep tight hold on Hailey, even now that I've got her gun. Like Vic said, she is not the boss. I am.”

My legs are not connected to life. My arms belong to someone else.

Shoes walked away on asphalt pavement. My eyes rolled.

Cari lay stretched out near me. She trembled like a soundless epileptic.

Volvo door opens.
ZAP-CRACKLE!

Something dragged across pavement. The shape of hunched-over Lang. Gravity thumped a weight near me on the broken surface of the night. Shoes walk away.

Volvo door opens.
ZAP-CRACKLE!

Something else dragging across pavement.
“Shit!”
says Lang. My head moved. Lang dumped Russell a yard from my open palm. Russell smelled smoky from the flash/bang grenade Lang popped in the parked Volvo. Lang used getting his coat from the Caddy to loot the weapons' vest, grab one of the grenades, the tranquilizer gun, a stun gun with which he ‘zap-crackled' the flash/banged Russell and Zane, and then Cari. Now Lang had given them all a second zap.

Suddenly he looms over me. Silver hair glistening in the cone of light.

Kneeling—sitting, he's sitting on my loins—
breathe, hard to breathe, can't
—

John Lang's face. Handsome, lean, late 50's face. Framed by the dark cloak collar of a Navy pea coat. He's staring down at my slack jaw look. His weight flows off me. On to his knees and hands. Peering down at me. Face to face.

Closer. His face coming closer—
can't move, can't
—Is he going to kiss me?

Vampire
. Closer, like he's—

But he turned his face to the side. His eyes swept with his skull off to my left as the side of his face lowered closer, closer...

His ear suctioned to my forehead.

54

And I knew.

The press of Lang's ear suctioned to my forehead crushed my skull on stones.

“I can't hear the voices in your head,” Lang told me as he rose to his hands and knees and peered down at paralyzed me like a jaguar over his prey. “Are yours a chorus or a lecturer? Do they speak in sentences and paragraphs? Shout out words? Or are they more like… a vast knowing that shimmers in you?”

“Laglle-lyvpht!”
Drool trickled down my cheek.

By the white Caddy, trapped in Eric's grip, Hailey yelled: “What do you want?”

Lang stood, turned towards her. “What do any of us want?”

Eric sobbed. Held her tighter. Obeyed the command of our boss.

Finger, my left little finger twitched.

Lang told Hailey: “You want to kill me. Now
shh
, or Eric will feel fire.”

“Afftha-afco.”

“Something to add, Vic?” Lang checked his watch. “About 25 more minutes before you're functional, but that doesn't mean you just have to lay there and be useless. Hey, make a contribut-ion.”

“Eez
…'e
.”

“‘
Crazy
?' Is that what you're trying to say?” He shrugged. “That's as good a word as any. Though once you name a thing, you limit your understanding of it. Of course, understanding is over-rated. Let go of ‘
why
.' Embrace…
wow
.”

Call Dr. F's murder and all it triggered a mad dogs' mess.

Not an internal, off the shelf, renegade conspiracy subverting America.

Not an external, evil doers' attack on America.

All this was mad dogs being manipulated and mauled by one of their own.

Lang stepped over me.

Foot, my right foot twitched.

He left my field of vision. My skull rolled on the asphalt. Zane lay crumpled near the heap of Russell. Electricity expert Eric once told Group Therapy that a stun gun could neutralize a normal person for 20 minutes. Zane and Russell had been flash/banged, then zapped with a stun gun. Twice. They were down for a long count.

The tranquilizer gun's neurotoxin glued me to the pavement. I could move my eyes, turn my head, feel twitches in one finger and one foot.

A Caddy door opened. Closed. I rolled my head that direction.

Found Lang smiling as he used the ignition key to open the Caddy's trunk.

“Victor,” he told me as he rummaged in the trunk, “this is your fault.”

No! Not true!

Jaw, my jaw moved like I wanted but I couldn't control my tongue.

“You were my find.” Lang tossed his Navy pea coat onto the parking lot asphalt. “I'd been a Trouble Boy in Asia, too. So I kept an eye on you as I moved up in the Agency, at the Counter-Terrorism Center, to that jumble called Homeland Security.”

He lifted the weapons vest out of the trunk: “In 1917, German submarines terrorized the East Coast. The scandal of our unpreparedness prompted the federal government to reorganize what the politicians and press called
‘a clumsy mess of secret service agencies.'
One thing we've always known how to do is draw absurd charts.

“The point is,” he said sliding into the weapons vest, “if the more things change, the more they remain the same, then why be realistic?”

Lang clicked shut the snaps on the weapons vest. Grinned. “How do I look?”

Arm, left arm pulsing. My lips tingled, but let out: “
'ee. Mmm… eee
.”

“‘
Me'
? Don't be so self-involved.” Lang replaced the stun gun in its vest pouch. He velcroed the tranquilizer gun in its straps near two looped-on flash/bang grenades. “If we talk about just you, you'll miss the big picture.

“But it's not a big picture. When your eyes open, you realize it's tides of movies. Swirls of
is
and
was
and
might be
. If you hear the trillion whispers, you can surf on them. Learn how to shape the waves. The surfer no longer rides, the surfer rules.”

In the dark night of that parking lot, a silver-haired man in a weapons vest leaned from side to side, black
gung fu
shoes gripping the asphalt as he surfed a tsunami, his arms waving not for balance but to stroke the experience.

Like the
bagua
adept he was, Lang swooped through a circle, spinning and twisting from surfer to dragon and back again to all of them as a man in a weapon's vest.

“You fell into a hole in Maine,” he told me. “I got elevated to the inner circle of the National Security Council in the White House where my hands can do… oh so much.”

Foot, can't move either foot.

Out of my mouth came: “See you. They'll see you 'razy.”

Lang smiled. “No, all our wise men tend to look out at the world and only see mirrors.”

My tongue licked my lips: “Dr. Friedman.”

“Couldn't derail the idea to bring a shrink into our midst. Tried to for months. Precedent: during Watergate, national security executives secreted a shrink on the NSC staff because they feared Nixon was nuts and walking around the White House where it's easy to squeeze triggers—even on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dr. Friedman's CIA file called him a ‘spotter.' He might have spotted me.”

Lang walked into the cone of light.

Said: “I couldn't risk that. Getting locked up. I wasn't going to let Dr. Friedman make me into one of you
mad dogs
. Hey, I'm a lucky man. I like who I am.”

My arms tingled.
Flex them
.

“Friedman was going to temporary duty in Maine before meeting me,” said Lang. “I knew I had to kill him where there'd be a safe, logical explanation for his murder. New York is a classic killing ground, but he was coming straight to his new job. I had to stop him from showing up where I was. Plus, the five of you were perfect to frame. I found someone to deal with him, a military nurse who was a junkie. Persuadable out of patriotism plus fear of jail and her own permanent termination. Trainable by a vet who thought he was working for SAD.

“In a world where people accept only what someone says they ‘have a need to know,' a visionary voice assumes awesome power.”

Something rubbed the pavement with a harsh sound.

I craned my neck, forced my shoulders off the asphalt to see—

Cari, trying to stand, her right hand pawing her empty holster.

Velcro ripped open as Lang strode to her. Said: “Relax.”

Lang shot a tranquilizer dart into Cari's leg.

“Agent Rudd,” he said as he pulled the dart out of her limp body and set it on the pile he'd made of our gear, “just lay there and listen like a good spy.”

He re-strapped the tranquilizer gun on the vest beside the grenades, drew the stun gun from its pouch, gave Zane and Russell each a third zap.

I struggled up on my elbows. Legs attached to my numb body stretched dead before me. I saw Eric hugging Hailey tight as they stood near the white Caddy, tears running down their cheeks.

“Your fault, Vic,” said Lang. “Even if the lower echelons would have called Friedman a murder, nothing too bad would have happened to you obvious suspects.”

“Say' you.”

“Yes,” said Lang. “As your creator, says me.

“And this!” He waved his arm. “I loved your escape! I was rooting for you to vanish, I really was. But did you heed my warning? Did you run? No. That was stupid.”

“Stubb'rn.”

“Words words words!” he said. “What silly things they are. We need to work.

“Besides, Vic,” said the man who'd molded me into the mad dog I was, “I'm finally giving you what you want. You rebelling and breaking out of the Castle is your third suicide. Only this time, you get to succeed.”

There it was: dead-on truth. All I had to do was lay there and I'd get what I'd sought for so long—freedom from the pain of responsibility. All I had to do was forget about everyone else Lang had trapped in this dark night. All I had to not think about were the global millions who this maniac spymaster of the world's only empire could caress with his cold crazy hands.

“We never get to pick our time,”
I'd told Derya.
“We only get to pick what we do.”

And as Lang held my only living friends and me in his trap of that parking lot night, he said: “Do you know what we have here?”

His gesture swept over everything: The cone of light where he stood and where I sprawled on my elbows. The pile of pistols and gear beside the shocked-out heaps of Zane and Russell. Cari slumped to even greater numbness from the neurotoxin than me. Hailey trapped in Eric's embrace beside the white Cadillac.

“What we have here,” said Lang, “is an answer to evolve. All we need to do is take what we've got and spin it to a productive truth.

“Frenzy foils forensics,” he said. “Five escaped mad dogs. One innocent hostage, a brave CIA agent, kidnapped, killed in the line of duty. Our connections, the Maine asylum reports marking you as the pack's leader. Stolen cars, you stormed my house. Shot it up. Snatched me out here. Why? Who knows, you're all crazy.”

Stall
: “They'll check y'r hard-drive. Look for oth' tracks.”

“Good!” said Lang. “Role play me to be sure we've got it right. But don't worry. The only reason for gumshoes to check my machine is to match the bullets to guns you mad dogs fired. Plus, I bet Russell destroyed my computer drives. I built those trapdoors, and when I triggered them by doing the routine any intruder would have used, those systems got wiped. The SAD building—no one knows you were there. Those matrices, your index cards somebody might shuffle into a pattern that shows I'm Kyle Russo. I'm thinking… Why not a fire?”

See it! Vision! A chance. The five of us hanging from the crane. A pillar of smoke above a mall. A wreck on a dark night highway. A ghost movie projected on an apartment ceiling. But the new movie had a ticket price figured in blood. No matter how the minor plot details spun out, I'd have to pay the price. And so would my only friends on earth.

Then and there, I realized the bottom line of being alive:

Sometimes all any of us can do is choose which crazy wins.

Lang said: “Let me spin you and the real world… an explosion.

“A frantic gun battle as Agent Rudd and I break free. She's the hero. Grabs a gun, blasts away. I get one, too—not mine, that's too easy. I've kept my prints off all but the barrels on your pistols, though it's long odds that that matters. Especially if there's some kind of explosion and fire.

“Wait!” Lang's eyes blazed. “Afterwards, I do the spy thing and valiantly clean the scene up while I'm waiting for rescue! Clean it up to cover this mess all under wraps, no reporters, no Congressional snooping! And that brilliant, responsible effort on top of all the other evidence, that makes this a pure, credible, desirable truth!

“Our only big question is,” he said with a frown, “who dies first?”

Numb from the waist down, my arms too poisoned to do more than prop me on my elbows, I said: “You do.”

Ever so slowly, his face turned from whispers of a future to see me staring up at him from the asphalt parking lot of now. And he said: “Really.”

Drawing a deep breath meant breaking steel bands circling my chest, but I did it and as loudly as I could said: “Essential nature.”

A frown scarred his image. “Is this your mad dogs' illusion? That it's my essential nature and therefore…
what
?”

But the fight to regain my breath robbed me of the power to reply.

“Or are you asking
when
?” said Lang. “
When
did I realize my essential nature? I was always… unique. Ironically, the sniper shot of my self-awareness happened after our last meeting. Are you still trying to succeed with suicide?”

Words spit from lips: “Essential nature!”

“That's what I'm telling you! My awakening came in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House the night after 9/11 while smoke and dust swirled around New York, across the river at the Pentagon, in that Pennsylvania field. The best minds in our marblized politics were huddled around the Sit Room table and every one of them wanted to know
why.

“Out of me burst:
‘Why not?'

“Believe me, I had to dissemble that careless wisdom to stay in the room!”

For the third time, I forced out: “Essential nature!”

“Of what?” Lang yelled. “Of visionaries like us? Of a spy? The essential nature of a spy is to deceive and manipulate, to lie and die.”