The Fury and the Terror Page 8

  "Tom," Bertie said pleadingly.

  He glanced at her, took a breath, took another, finished his drink, studied Bloodsaw.

  "Tell Katharine there's nothing more to be said. She never wanted me to marry her daughter. Let her blame me all she wants, I don't give—"

  "It's something else," Bloodsaw interrupted. "Something very urgent, as I said. She needs for you to listen."

  "She hates my—"

  Bertie said, "Tom? Go."

  Sherard and Bloodsaw walked out of the British Airways terminal into late-afternoon glare and airport miasma. The other two lawyers were five servile paces behind them.

  Two black limousines and two black Suburbans were parked at curbside. Strict no-parking area, but both limos had United Nations DPL plates and small plastic American flags on the front fenders. There were six NYPD motorcycle cops watching over the vehicles, deployed with a State Department security detail in the Suburbans.

  Otis Bloodsaw, in spite of his years, could still cover ground in a hurry. Sherard had to concentrate to keep up on his bad leg, and the effort aggravated a deep-lying ache. Sherard had taken the lawyer on a photo safari nine years ago, in the Yambio region of southern Sudan, near an area of Congo that was now a bloody war zone. Primeval forest alternated with glistening savannahs, numerous glades of tall swaying bamboo. A lot of tracking had been necessary to find the elephants Bloodsaw wanted to photograph, but he had stood up well to the hours on foot.

  One of the State Department security men opened a back door of the second limousine. Sherard glanced at Bloodsaw, who motioned him inside.

  "Please take the jump seat, Tom," Katharine Bellaver said. "It's easier to talk face-to-face. Also, you might want to stretch out your leg. It's the left one that was so badly damaged, wasn't it?"

  "Yes." Sherard made himself as comfortable as possible, not taking his eyes off Katharine. He was one of those men who, because of their builds—flesh close to the sturdy bones—look taller than they actually are. As it was, he stood almost six-two with a three-quarter-inch lift in the left boot to equalize the length of both legs. "How have you been, Madame Ambassador?"

  "No need to be so formal, Tom."

  He'd last seen her three months after Gillian's funeral, at the cemetery in northern Westchester County near the farm where he and Gillian had spent much of their time when she wasn't in Washington. He was just beginning rehab then, determined to walk again but barely able to stand upright with the aid of aluminum crutches. The pain like being burned alive at the stake. They had barely spoken. Absorbed in their grief, but not united by it. The bad blood was flowing once more.

  In the limo Katharine sat to Sherard's right on the red velour seat, her head beside a midnight-dim window. She wore her lushly silvered hair in a psyche knot. Otis Bloodsaw leaned in to thank Katharine for their lunch at the Ambassador Grill, nodded good-bye to Tom. The roar of an outbound jet was reduced to muffled thunder as Bloodsaw closed the door. A chauffeur and security man in the front seat were vague presences behind soundproofed glass.

  "I heard the President was coming to the U.N. tonight," Sherard said to Katharine. "I'm surprised you could spare the time to look me up."

  "Doofuses sometimes win, Allen Dunbar is living proof. I'm meeting him here, at JFK, in forty-five minutes. But he is not and never should be the true President of the United States. Unfortunately for our country Clint Harvester, a man whom I admire as much as I despise his wife, is unable to resume his duties. The stroke spared his body but left him with an infantile brain and a vocabulary of six or eight words, most of them scatological. This is not something you want to gossip about, Tom. The situation is far too serious."

  "I'm not a blabbermouth, and I seldom take an interest in politics. Does sound serious, however. Anything to do with me?"

  Katharine sighed and pressed two fingers beside her mouth, to quell an agitated muscle there. "No, I wanted to see you because I've been thinking a lot about you, Tom. Since Gillian was murdered."

  Sherard said nothing.

  "Tom, is it ridiculous of me to say now that I've ... had longings, after all these years of our ... hostilities?"

  "I don't know," Sherard replied, feeling uncomfortable but not too surprised. "What do you want me to say, Katharine? We had an affair. More like an idyl. Three weeks together, in the bush. But I was twenty-three, and you were—

  "Much, much older," she said, with the beginning of a smile she covered gently with her hand, an old-fashioned gesture, an affectation, but never mind: it had captivated him a long time ago and he didn't find it unpleasant to discover that he was still susceptible.

  "I didn't think about the years you had on me. You were quite simply the most vital woman I had ever met. I'd had a few girls, in Nairobi, away at school in the States. None of those ... encounters had ever prepared me for someone like you. The seduction of Tom Sherard. That was a rousing success, wasn't it?"

  "Africa. The last, secret glow of a spent day. The night wind begins. One loses one's sense of inwardness; the soul is released to the stars. Huddled close to the warm stones that surround the fire pit, there is food and wine and talk. And more wine, until one is cozy-drunk, well fortified against the night chill."

  He recognized the lines, from the book about her experiences that Katharine Bellaver had published some years later. A modest best-seller. He had not been included in this memoir. She was including him now.

  "I loved the notion that your eyes never left me when I went off to piss bare-assed in the shadows. You were such a lean, serious boy. So angry when I became the least bit reckless, trying to get great photos that I hoped the Geographic would use. I think I may have been ... trying too hard to prove myself to you."

  "Would have put quite a dent in my reputation to have a client trampled underfoot in elephant country or dragged to the bottom of a swamp by a flat dog."

  "'Elephants don't fancy being stared at,' I believe is the way you put it. Close call. You were pale to the tips of your ears. And so angry that you stuttered."

  "No, the stutter was from sheer terror. A white hunter who claims never to have been afraid in the bush is either hopeless braggart or a madman."

  "Remember what you said I ought to do if I wanted to sneak into their midst for some close-ups?"

  Sherard thought for a few moments, and startled himself by laughing. She hadn't put that in her book, either. "I said that you must first strip naked, roll yourself in fresh elephant dung to disguise your natural odor, then creep on your belly for a hundred yards until you could shoot the angles you wanted."

  "Of course I took that as a dare."

  "I was convinced you were flaming nuts when you came running into camp waving your Nikon over your head, with that ecstatic smile, oblivious of the flies and midges. Dried shit darkening your hide. Except for the butch haircut you'd given yourself, and the painted toenails, you could have passed for a Noruba woman. I was exhausted and terrified again, because I'd tramped everywhere and hadn't found you."

  "And is that all you felt?" Katharine asked, her voice a murmur, wanting to tease the answer from him.

  "You know better. I was . . . ungodly aroused. A thoroughly unorthodox seduction technique. Nevertheless I knew I was going to have you before another night passed." He cleared his throat. "After a lengthy scrub and shampoo, needless to say."

  She took a few moments, as if the mood she had deliberately created possessed her too powerfully. She chose a different mood, with appropriately downcast eyes. "I was so lost then. You must have recognized that. My husband had died, and my daughter was . . . well, you know. Stunned by events, as unreachable as an autistic child."

  "Katharine, God knows we were an unlikely pair. The aphrodisiac effects of the African bush on newcomers is almost a sure thing. You offered yourself to me. I took you. I was never in love with you."

  "You've let yourself get too thin, Tom."

  "But I fell in love with your daughter the first time I clapped eyes on her. Getting off tha
t plane in Nairobi. Hesitating, stalled by heat and light. Lowering that neat, cropped head of hers to slip on sunglasses. As pretty, and remote, as a Degas dancer. You sent Gilly to me, hoping a hunt would be the tonic for her it had been for you. What the hell did you expect? That I wouldn't make love to her?"

  "Go on. Be a bastard." But there was rueful acknowledgment in her tone, the momentary elevation of her chin.

  "Then you had the bad grace to call me a fortune hunter, and other bitch epithets. You shut both of us out of your life. God, but that wounded Gillian. You've never known how much."

  "Wrong. But I've always been difficult and obstinate. Was I jealous? A twinge or two. For the most part, please understand, I reacted out of fear. Not wanting Gillian to grow up. I got that from a Park Avenue shrink I went to and was able to tolerate for a couple of months. What a loathsome profession. Anyway. I talked myself into believing you really were an asshole to take her away from me."

  "Your opposition only made us more sure of ourselves."

  "After what she'd been through, I didn't want Gilly marrying anyone. I didn't think there could be a man who would understand how different, how very exceptional and altogether fragile my daughter was."

  "You refused to accept that I could be good for her. As for Gillian's ... talent, and the problems it might cause. Right, that was beyond my ken, but I wasn't afraid of it. I was raised in Kenya. My father's chief tracker, who was Bertie Nkambe's grandfather, taught me lessons other than bushcraft. I learned there was more to native forms of worship and ritual than superstition stemming from primitive ignorance. I reckon it takes only one full moon in Africa to disabuse the most hardened skeptic. We are awash in an ocean of telemagical sympathies that infuse all living things. Katharine, I'm on my way home. I need to go home, or go mad from rage. You didn't send for me to hash over old times. Why don't you tell me what you really want?"

  "I want my granddaughter. I'm very much afraid harm will come to her, as it came to Gillian."

  "What are you saying? Gillian couldn't have children."

  "After the first one, no. It was a difficult birth. She couldn't run the risk of becoming pregnant again. Things were done to ensure—"

  "What child? When was it born? Gillian and I shared everything, we wouldn't have lasted otherwise."

  "Gillian didn't know."

  "That she'd been pregnant, given birth? Oh, come on."

  "It happened. Try to take this seriously, Tom."

  "Do I look amused?"

  Katharine had had expert work done to her face: lasers, silicone. The surgery had frozen her looks at a certain unguessable age, immune to the years that ordinarily would have been clawing at her. All mask now, suitable to the status she retained in her social tribe. But her eyes had not changed; they were pale but spirited, always up to something, her gaze moving through air like a welder's flame, torching away resistance to her desires and needs.

  "All right," Sherard said, hating what was coming; but he had to hear it. "When, and where?"

  "Her daughter was born in the sanitarium where Gillian was being treated for the deep depression she slipped into after the events at Lake Celeste. Seven pounds two ounces. The correct number of fingers and toes. Adorable. The sun was coming up. I was tired to the bone. As physically used up as if I had been in labor. I looked out a window, at an Indian-summer morning in an old-world place of stone cottages, purple vineyards, a mist-shrouded river, geese on a wild spree across the sky. I thought, Eden. And that's what I named the child."

  "Who was the father, then?" he asked, impatient with her.

  "I can't be sure. I believe it was either Peter Sandza or his son."

  "Robin Sandza?"

  "She must have told you about him."

  "Gilly approached the matter, over a period of many months. The telling was difficult, her memories fragmented. This is all I know. Gillian believed that she and Robin Sandza were, her description, 'psychic twins.' Born at the same moment, to different mothers, during a solar eclipse, while other potent conjunctions of the planets were at their most effective. That eclipse may have been the catalyst for Gillian's ... for the 'gift' both children shared. They were to have been fraternal as well as psychic twins, she said, but the scheme went awry. The other baby you carried, Gillian's identical twin, strangled on his umbilical in the womb while Gillian was being born."

  "The ethereal entity that became Robin Sandza had to find a different mother, and quickly; someone already far along in labor. Robin's mother was quite beautiful. She died young, of complications from an infected tooth. Peter Sandza was a covert MORG agent. He had to leave the raising of his son to his sister Fay, who was living a life of religious drudgery with an impotent fanatic. I learned much of this long after the events that took place at Psi Faculty."

  "And there's some evidence that Gillian had sex with Robin's father?"

  "Only supposition. Gillian wasn't able to tell me anything."

  "Could she have recalled, under hypnosis?"

  "I wasn't willing to put her through that. Why should I have? She'd had the baby, which she was in no condition to care for. At the time it seemed that she might never ... get her mind back. I already knew most of what had taken place. Peter Sandza and Gillian were on the run. He was desperate to find his son. Before they reached Psi Faculty they put up at an inn in Mount Carmel, Connecticut, then at a ski lodge called Shadowdown, which was not far from the Psi Faculty campus in the Adirondacks. I'm certain that they spent at least two nights together, sharing a room. In both places where they stayed, Sandza registered Gillian as his daughter. Of course he wasn't going to let Gillian out of his sight; she was the key to his recovering Robin.

  "By then Gilly, in a variation of the captor/hostage syndrome, may have been emotionally dependent on him. They'd dosed her heavily with hypnotics and psycho-suppressive drugs at Paragon Institute. Virtually canceled her identity. That was my fault, for leaving her there. But I did so because I was terrified of my own daughter, unsure of my sanity. I had bled like a slaughtered pig. I needed to be sedated. Dr. Irving Roth and his associate from Paragon, a young Chinese woman, came to our house in Sutton Mews. They'd been highly recommended to my husband. I learned from Dr. Roth that Gillian had the power to make me, to make almost anyone, bleed, when she was in a psychometric trance. Roth put our dilemma in terms Avery and I could understand. He said, 'Are you familiar with the short story about the man who traveled in time and changed the fate of the world by accidentally stepping on a butterfly? When the man returned to his own time he found that because he'd been careless in a prehistoric epoch, the world was now a grotesque, savagely distorted place with nothing beautiful in it anymore.

  "'Gillian,' Roth said, 'as she flashes back and forth in time according to her clairvoyant visions, is like the man who crushed the butterfly. Her very thoughts can significantly affect reality as we know it.'"

  "We've come a long way since then, in our understanding and uses of the paranormal."

  "Uses and misuses. The world has become the savagely distorted place Roth predicted, although none of it was Gilly's fault."

  "She wanted to do good. To be of help, when the others sought her out. I didn't like it. MORG was still there. The opposition was too powerful. I was afraid something would happen to her. It happened."

  He felt savage pain, deep in the unprotected heart. "Tell me about Peter Sandza."

  "MORG also had his son. The other half of the twinship. They had convinced Robin that his father was dead, that he was virtually an orphan. The better to bond with him, gain control. They did their best to eliminate Sandza. But he was as ruthless as the men MORG sent after him. A trained assassin, with the cunning of a hunted man. I visited both of the rooms in which they slept together. I have no psychic ability, but—I could imagine it happening, deep into the night. His own need. Gillian's beauty, her youth and vulnerability. Gillian was barely fifteen. I forgive him for that. I truly hope . . . it was Peter Sandza, because the alternative . . . too dreadf
ul. I've never wanted to think about Robin coming to her. So corrupted. Driven insane by the collective efforts of the researchers at Psi Faculty to enhance his already-considerable paranormal talents."

  "But Gillian told me that she and Robin never met. They were only in touch through psychomorphic channels."

  "They knew each other intimately."

  "How?"

  "When Gillian came home from the hospital, after she'd had her first clairvoyant experience and fainted on the ice rink in Central Park, she was changed. A different child altogether. Sullen, evasive, brooding. She locked herself in her room for hours at a time, practicing her flute. Then she would listen to rock music, so loud I thought it would bring the roof down. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I made Avery pick the lock on her door. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the drapes were drawn. Quite dark in the room. Gillian lay across her bed, partly covered by a sheet. She was naked. She didn't appear to be breathing. I panicked, thinking she had died. Avery wouldn't let me touch her. My husband was a respected anthropologist. He told me she wasn't dead. Neither was she there, and he warned me not to disturb her body. He said that she was in a state of ... tonic immobility. A deep trance. The loud music was one aspect of the ritual that allowed her astral body to travel. Avery had a great deal else to say, about the metapsychical systems of tribes he had studied on three continents. About material bodies and astral bodies. He mentioned a word, the first time I had heard it. Doppelganger."