Act of Darkness(48)

“What the hell was that?” Dan Chester said.

Gregor would have thought Dan Chester was trying to distract him from Senator Fox, except that there was a that to pay attention to. It started as a high-pitched whine, a Dr. Strangelove prophecy on the new music of a new war, and ended in a thunderclap. A moment later, the wall of glass doors that lined the back of the house was full of colored light.

“The fireworks.” Janet Harte Fox jumped off the arm of her mother’s chair, appalled. “Oh, my God. Dan contracted for them with a service. We didn’t tell them to call it off. I can’t—”

“To hell with the fireworks,” Dan Chester said. He was out of his seat, too, but moving in the other direction, toward the front door. “That’s someone coming up the drive.”





[3]


And, of course, there was someone coming up the drive. As Gregor found out a few moments later, standing under the portico at the top of the front steps, it was Carl Bettinger, veteran agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, long-time colleague, and the Bureau’s resident specialist in domestic subversion.

As far as Gregor could tell, Carl Bettinger had come out of nowhere for no good reason at all.





TWO


[1]


IN MOST PLACES, FIREWORKS are not set off until full dark. Gregor remembered that from a detail he had pulled his first year out of training, in the days when legal demarcations between law enforcement agencies were not as rigidly observed as they were today. It had been the Fourth of July then, too, and Lyndon Johnson had been president. Gregor couldn’t remember what else had been going on, but he got the distinct impression that the country had been a mess. Whatever. The country was still a mess. On that long-ago night in Lyndon’s only full term of office, the powers-that-be had decided the mess could be cleaned up at least a little by a celebration. A day of communal euphoria and bad food had been planned for the people willing to spend their Independence Day around the monolith totem of the Washington Monument. Gregor had been assigned to night duty near the monument itself, watching to be sure no one used the sound of exploding fireworks as a cover for murder or sabotage or worse. He had hated the whole night, from beginning to end. He had felt incompetent. In the dark, it was impossible to see anything, and it got more impossible once the fireworks began to explode over his head. He felt silly, too. Most of the people around him were drunk. The only trouble they were likely to get into was coordinational. They were going to trip over their own feet and fall into the fountains, or trip over somebody else’s feet and fall flat on their rear ends. Most of all, he felt cheated. His decision to join the Bureau had been a complicated one. He had spent a year of nights thinking it over, and a year of days talking it over, with his wife and his mother both. His yes had come out of a tangle of idealism and practical common sense—a tangle that would never be untangled in the twenty years he spent on active duty with the Bureau. That night, not only was the tangle not untangled, it was as hard and heavy as a boulder and sitting on top of his head. There were a lot of sacrifices involved in joining the Bureau: sacrifices of time in training; sacrifices of autonomy during the period of probation, when he was forced to be subject to the authority of people much less intelligent than himself. He hadn’t taken on any of these things to spend his nights on the Esplanade, dodging drunks and worrying that his walkie-talkie was going to be lifted by some idiot in a red-white-and-blue crepe paper hat.

Now he stood under the portico on the front steps of Great Expectations, watching the reflections of lights exploding high in the air but far at the back of his head, watching Carl Bettinger walking toward him and a black-and-white with flashing lights pulling in behind Bettinger’s blue Ford—and it all felt wrong. The sky wasn’t dark enough yet. The reflections that reached him were less like fireworks than feeble sheet lightning. Bettinger wasn’t straight enough. Gregor remembered him as “the man with the perfect posture,” much the way Homer had always reported Achilles to be “brave,” but the Bettinger who was coming toward him was stooped and tense, as if he’d been wound tight for so long he had lost the resilience necessary to keep a shape. Then there was the black-and-white. Gregor knew he was probably projecting—he had to be projecting—but the flashing lights looked angry.

Carl Bettinger reached the steps, walked up them, and stood looking at the wide double doors. They were open because Dan Chester had left them open, but Dan Chester had disappeared. Carl Bettinger seemed to be taking them personally, as if, no matter what else he had to put up with, he shouldn’t have to put up with double doors.