“I’m not clucking.” It was getting dark outside and Fletch’s mind was settling on pizza. “I’m expostulating.”
“Listen to me! It was arranged that if he did not succeed immediately in attracting Kriegel, Jack would be out of there in six hours.”
“Out of prison?”
“You’re forgetting something. In prison, once he had Kriegel’s attention and support, no one would dare touch him. Not in any way. Jack was as safe as if he were at home in bed.”
“Horseshit.”
“Nothing happened to him.”
“You know that?”
“I do.”
“So what was his ‘ulterior motive’?”
“You can’t figure that out?”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
“To meet you. On your own turf. To do as you used to do. Still do, I guess, if I view my GCN correctly. And to do it to you.”
“Do it to me.”
“He didn’t want to approach you as a slavering kid. He didn’t want to meet you as a pedestrian while you were on horseback. He wanted to meet you while he was working on his own big story, see if he could suck you into it, see if he could make you go along with him, if he could interest you in what he was doing, in him. Apparently he did, at least to some extent. He wants your respect, too. Surely you can see that.”
“You’re a weird mother.”
“I have one other suspicion regarding his motivations.”
“What?”
“I think he was scared shitless by what he was doing. I think he wanted you with him.”
Fletch remembered Jack standing by the car last night. He had something to say. He didn’t say it.
Did Jack know the truth between father and son could only be bridged by the mother?
What Jack did say was, “Trust me.”
And Fletch had answered something like he would store the request.
Now Fletch knew who Jack was.
And he knew something, specifically and generally, about what Jack wanted from him.
Fletch exhaled two lungfuls of breath.
“I haven’t …” Fletch cleared his throat. “I haven’t much experience … at responding to situations like this.”
Crystal asked, “You want to know what Jack thinks of you now, Fletch?”
“No.”
“He thinks you’re senile.” Crystal laughed. “He says you forget all the stories I tell about you.”
Fletch looked sharply at the curtain. “You couldn’t know that, Crystal, unless he’s talked to you, recently.”
“He called this morning. From Camp Orania.”
“He took a chance telephoning from there, didn’t he? And how come he can get through on the phone to you and we couldn’t?”
“He’s my son. He knows the appropriate password. And you don’t.”
“You could have saved a hell of a lot of bother.” I’m hungry!
“Jack says he’s doing very well. He’s videotaped the camp and everyone in it. He spent the night copying all of the files out of The Tribe’s computer system, files from around the country and around the world. This afternoon, he was to attend some kind of a planning meeting. That must have been interesting.”
“He told you about making everybody puke while Kriegel was speaking?”
“Oh, yes.” Crystal laughed. “Shades of his father.”
Fletch did not ask if Jack had told his mother that the night before he had killed a man, to save the lives of Carrie and Fletch.
“Stop selling him to me,” Fletch said. “I’ve got the point.”
“Last night he even discovered a list of people targeted for assassination by The Tribe. Guess what.”
“What?”
“Your name’s on it.”
Fletch thought. “I suppose it would be.”
“Irwin Maurice Fletcher.”
Fletch sat forward in the oversized chair. “Those sons of bitches know Jack’s my kid.”
“Do they?”
“He’s in danger!” Fletch jumped up. “I put him in danger! Shit! End of story! To hell with Blythe Spirit! Goodbye.”
Fletch left Crystal’s room.
IN A MOMENT, he returned. He leaned against the doorjamb. “Crystal, what are you doing here?”
“Slimming,” she said.
“Jack tells me you’ve been coming here twice a year for years. And you’re still slimming?”
“This time they’re recommending I stay here, maybe, for good.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sick, Fletch. I’ve got a problem.”
“You realize you referred to your being incommunicado here at Blythe Spirit as your ‘ultimate line of defense’?”
“Okay. I did. So what?”
“Ultimate line of defense against what? Me? Jack? Living? Why do you need it?”
“You know all about addictions now? You got a better idea?”
“Always.”
“Tell me.”
“First: trust us.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Second: lower the food thermostat in your head.”
“Oh, Fletch. What do you know?”
“I know I’ll be back.”
23
“Time to go, “Fletch said quietly. “Time to get you out of here.”
“Uh?” Jack’s head raised from the pillow. He looked at Fletch in the door. He sat up on the cot and swung his feet onto the floor. “I’m ready to go.”
For a long moment Fletch had stood in the door of the little office in the log cabin headquarters at Camp Orania looking at his son. Jack was asleep on the cot against the wall. The room was lit only by the desk light. Dressed in shorts, T-shirt, socks, and sneakers, Jack was sprawled on the cot, his face squished on the pillow. He slept soundly. His hair was tousled. To Fletch he looked so young. Fletch wondered how his son had looked when even younger, as a boy, a child, a baby, asleep, awaking, awake, playing, listening, laughing, crying, happy, angry, bored. Standing in the door just watching his son sleep, Fletch realized something of how much he had missed.
It was dawn, Monday.
Sitting on the edge of the cot, Jack shook his head. “I was wondering how I was going to get out of here.”
Fletch said, “There is a thick fog.”
Fletch had had to fly from Chicago back to Nashville through Atlanta at that hour of the night. He had left his car at the Nashville airport.
He had eaten three sandwich suppers since leaving Blythe Spirit.
In the fog the drive from Nashville to Tolliver, Alabama, had been slow. Even though Route I-65 was a good, clear highway, he had not dared drive faster than the speed which would allow him to stop safely within half the distance of his visibility.
Finding the entrance to the timber road into Camp Orania proved a challenge. In the fog he went by it three times before finally spotting the sentry box a few meters down the road.
He stopped at the sentry box, prepared to say, “Code name: Siegfried.” No one came out of the box to challenge him.
Once in the main area of the encampment he parked the station wagon in the woods, facing outward, toward the main road.
The only light was in the front right room of the headquarters log cabin. He crept onto the porch, through the screened door quietly, and pushed open the door to the office.
Fletch asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
Jack said, “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Dawn light was penetrating the fog.
From somewhere in the camp there was the sound of one man, alone, roaring with what might have been laughter. It was a high sound, sporadic. It sounded nervous, uncertain, crazed.
Fletch said, “I guess Leary is up.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “He’s been mixing coke and booze and God knows what else.”
“Not what he needs.”