The Liar's Lullaby (15 page)

“Certainly. I’d be grateful for any information the president can give me, and I’m aware that his time is valuable.”
Suck-up.
“But time is also of the essence to the investigation. Speaking to the president directly will be of even greater value than having an e-mail exchange.”

Obote reeled off an e-mail address. “I’ll forward your request to the appropriate people.”

“Thank you, Ms. Obote.”

Obote ended the call. Jo held the phone like it was glowing red. She wondered whether Obote would go back to filing her nails and moving tiny armies around the board in the game of Risk she was playing on her desk, or whether black helicopters and parabolic microphones and men with tiny earpieces were even now being moved into position outside her house on Russian Hill.

Maybe this was how paranoia began.

 

 

W
HEN JO PULLED into Gabe’s driveway, the evening star was skimming the western hills. His two-bedroom home in Noe Valley was tucked beneath a live oak on a quiet street, packed in among houses filled with young families. His 4Runner was in the drive. The leaves of the live oak rustled in the night wind. She rapped on the door.

When Gabe opened it, his face was shadowed. Even without seeing his eyes she knew he was exhausted.

She held back. “Bad time?”

He pulled her inside, wrapped her in his arms, and buried his face in her hair. “Never.”

The lights were amber. The house smelled like strong coffee. His laptop was open on the living room coffee table.

“How’s Sophie?” Jo said.

“Sleeping like a zombie. Moaning and puking.”

Arm around her shoulder, he headed to the living room, dropped onto the sofa, and pulled her down beside him. On the wall hung prints of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hindu Kush, beside watercolors Sophie had painted in bold greens and blues. Next to the computer, a marked-up chapter of his dissertation slumped across a copy of Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or
. He stared at them vacantly.

Whenever Jo asked him why he’d chosen to study theology, he gave her facile reasons. “I was a good little altar boy” was his favorite.

But few air force enlisted men chose to study Catholic moral theology as a career plan. His courses provided a respite from the rough world where he worked. But she suspected that something personal underlay his quest to unpeel the universe. Perhaps it was a longing for connection, or an ache he wanted to soothe. He wasn’t mystical. He didn’t bow to doctrine, or pine for stigmata. At times he tunneled into his studies, attempting to connect with an eternity that surrounded the broken world of time and space he was stumbling through.

Sometimes she liked that. But sometimes she felt a grabbing sensation in her chest, and wished that, instead, he would bury himself in her life.

And Gabe’s pensive side was at odds with his professional life as a pararescue jumper. At Moffett Field, the motto of pararescue was written on a hangar wall in letters six feet tall: SO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE. On the back of those words, he threw himself bodily into the abyss, day after day.

His chief master sergeant had once joked to Jo that a PJ’s job boils down to “recess with toys.” In search and rescue work they skydived, drove snowmobiles and Jet Skis and ATVs—sometimes straight off the loading ramp of a transport plane. They scuba dived, and jumped out of helicopters and fixed-wing military aircraft. They didn’t earn movie-star salaries. They weren’t famous like Delta Force or the Navy SEALs. They ate adrenaline for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes they got thrown onto the front lines in combat, performing rescues and surgery on the battlefield.

Sometimes they flew five hundred miles offshore to rescue sailors from a burning ship. She laced her hand with his. His face was drawn.

“The merchant tanker was sinking when we reached it. Fire started in the engine room but had spread out of control by the time we arrived on scene,” he said. “Three crewmen were already dead. Fire, or drowned belowdecks. Eighteen others had gone into the water. Only half of them got into their survival suits beforehand. And three-quarters couldn’t swim.”

“Bad day at black rock,” she said.

“We rescued four.”

“Thank God.”

He nodded. But Jo sensed that more was coming. She hung on to his hand. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Dave Rabin got hurt.”

“Bad?”

“A bulkhead failed from the heat of the fire. It blew out and caught Dave in the back of the head.”

“Where is he?”

“ICU at the General. In a coma.”

Against her instincts, she didn’t try to salve him. She simply held tight to his hand. Gabe didn’t add anything to his brief report. He didn’t want to talk about it. Like so much. Like his past, and his air force days.

She knew that he didn’t want to show weakness in front of her. And he didn’t want Jo to be afraid for him. He wanted her to stand behind him. And she was a physician—to speak reassuring words about Rabin’s condition, about his chances of survival and recovery, would have rung false.

Gabe ran his hands roughly across his face. Finally he turned to her. The lights were warm. His eyes seemed fraught and yearning. Without a word he stood and led her upstairs.

He shut the bedroom door. The lights were off, the window open. Beyond plum trees and crowded rooftops and the city’s knitting yarn of phone and electrical wires, the western sky had deepened to indigo. Overhead, the stars poured down.

He picked her up and swung her onto the bed. He rolled on top of her, raked his fingers into her hair, and kissed her.

He hauled her sweater over her head. She fumbled his T-shirt off. He pressed her against the pillow and worked his way down her body, kissing her neck, her chest, her ribs. He unbuttoned her jeans and kissed her belly button.

In the half-light from the window she saw the bruises on his neck. They extended in an angry line down across his clavicle and along the right side of his chest. She saw the old scars by his hip, the ones he didn’t talk about. The ones she was still waiting for him to explain.

Jo tried to slow him down but he seemed famished. He threw off the covers and wrangled her to the center of the bed.

He didn’t look at her but put his head next to hers and wrapped himself around her. His heart pounded against her chest. A part of her wanted to speak, to pause, to savor his body against hers, to tell him what he meant to her, how she ached for what he was feeling. But in the dark, adrift on pain and regret, he wanted only to prove that he was still alive. They made love fiercely, clinging to each other, their bodies growing hot. At the end she reached overhead to grab the headboard and steady herself. He threw himself against her over and over, his eyes shut tight, and she bit his shoulder to stifle her own cry.

Afterward, he held tight for a minute, chest heaving. He rolled away and lay on his back, spent. Then he pulled her against his side and stroked her hair.

Finally, in her ear, he whispered, “Thank you.”

She wanted to say,
Stay with me. Don’t leave. Let me in. Be mine.
But as he stared at the ceiling, she shut her eyes and said, “Any time.”

T
HE MORNING SUN BURNED AGAINST THE SILVERY SHEET METAL OF trucks parked at Blue Eagle Security. At a desk in a corner of the garage, Ivory hunched over the computer, drinking a Mountain Dew. Her feet, planted wide beneath the desk in her black work boots, tapped in time to the jitters in her head. She read Tom Paine’s latest message.
Tasia warned us. She came to the concert armed with the jackal’s gun. She raised it high.

Ivory whispered the rest: “ ‘She could not have shouted a louder message: True Americans will not go quietly.’ ”

The desk area was grubby, a cubbyhole stuffed with paperwork and maintenance logs. Keyes loomed beside her. Saw she was logged on at Tree of Liberty. “You want to get your ass shit-canned?”

“I’ll delete my browsing history. Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

But she glanced around. An armored car rumbled out of the parking lot, stinking with diesel exhaust. Keyes waved to the driver.

Ivory tapped the screen. “That break- in at Tasia’s house yesterday, it was the government. The cops have beefed up street patrols, looking for this intruder. It’s a perfect excuse to set up roadblocks. Then bring in the National Guard.”

“You positive it was the cops that broke into Tasia’s house, and not a night crawler fan?” Keyes said.

Ivory flushed. Why did he have to embarrass her? Her face felt red-hot. She covered her cheeks with her hands. She hated color. She was white from her snowy head to her polished toenails and bleached everywhere in between. She was pure.

Tasia had been pure too, a blonde, golden. “Tasia could have been a member of the Valkyrie Sisterhood. She should be avenged.”

Keyes spun her around in the chair and put his hands on the arms. “This is not about your white trash prison gang. It’s about stopping this city from becoming a prison. It’s about keeping this country free.”

She looked at the floor. Nodded. San Francisco sat, like the striking surface of a match, at the tip of a peninsula. Seven miles long by seven wide, it was surrounded by killer surf, frigid riptides, and vicious currents. Block the freeways heading south, blow the bridges, sink the ferries, and you cut it off. This place wasn’t goddamned Malibu. It was a fortress. And right there in the bay was Alcatraz, the perfect concentration camp.

She saw that it worried him. She saw it in his strong face. He stared past her at the computer screen.
To quote Thomas Paine: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Ivory didn’t know what had gone down when Keyes worked for the security contractor overseas. But Keyes had gotten fired after Robert McFarland was elected. Keyes thought McFarland might turn men like him into scapegoats for a repudiated foreign policy. Shoot ragheads, come home with booty—follow an honored tradition, and face prosecution. Meanwhile, McFarland bowed to foreign kings. Keyes carried millions of dollars in his truck, and who did it go to? Arabs and Jews. The ragheads sold America their oil, the Zionists pocketed the interest on the deal, and it all went through the Federal Reserve Bank here in San Francisco.

That’s one reason he refused to pay taxes, which also had the government on his back. But he had that look in his eyes again, the anger.

“Move,” he said.

She scooted out of the way and he took over the keyboard. He typed a message to Tom Paine at Tree of Liberty.
“To quote Thomas Paine: ‘The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.’

J
O WOKE EARLY, and alone. Outside the window, morning fog cloaked Noe Valley. She found Gabe downstairs in the kitchen, halfway through a pot of coffee. He was holding his cell phone. He tapped it against the butcher-block table, as if doing so would make it ring.

“Any news on Rabin?” she said.

He shook his head.

When she got home, she headed into her office and checked e-mail. She had no messages from the White House. But what was she expecting, a bouquet of helium balloons?

She sat down at her desk, powered up Tasia McFarland’s cell phone, and waded deep into the frightening e-mails she had received from Archangel X.

The first one was sent in February.
Hi, Tasia. Huge fan here. I just read that you’re going to be on the Bad Dogs and Bullets tour. Fantastic!! Is everything I read in the fan mags true? (Haha.) When will your new album be released?

It was signed
NMP.

Tasia took three weeks, but she replied.
Hi NMP—glad you’re a fan. New album out March 30. Thanks, Tasia.

Thirty minutes later NMP wrote back.
Wow, is that really you? I assumed a celebrity would have minions writing her e- mail. Thx re album. But what about the fan mags? All the gossip true? NMP
.

Tasia hadn’t replied. And for six weeks, there were no messages. But on April 30 Archangel X wrote:
Holy cow, I just heard the new single. It’s amazing. Your voice sounds so fresh. But what I really can’t wait to hear are your duets. Kimber Holloway? Searle Lecroix? That’s got to be some powerful music. Peace, NMP.

Five days later Tasia responded:
Great, thanks!

That two-word message, apparently, turned on the tap. Twenty minutes after Tasia sent it, NMP wrote back an epistle that Jo could only classify as a
cri de coeur
. The cry of a twitching, chilly, overheated heart.
Since my messages make you happy, I have to tell you, this tour is something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

NMP went on to elaborate about
“My long-time intricate love of music that germinated in childhood and flowered throughout a painful adolescence.”
The tone became increasingly intimate—as though NMP thought that Tasia’s pro forma response to fan mail made them confidantes.