The Big Dark Sky (5)
Harley Spondollar watched all this with amazement and interest that for a while displaced his fear. Gradually, however, a profound uneasiness gathered in him.
In the half-light that preceded sunrise, the icy blonde with gray eyes returned. She escorted Spondollar through the gate and around the ruins. He asked questions as she shepherded him, but she ignored him. He almost used the C-word and several lesser insults on her, but intuition warned that he might deeply regret doing so.
Although his house was gone, the concrete patio behind it remained intact, and the Suburban was parked on it. Beside the vehicle stood a four-foot-square white folding table and two white wooden folding chairs. The blonde instructed him to sit in one of them. He said, “What if I don’t?” As if speaking to a stubborn dog, she said, “Sit.” While in the custody of the police, he had been allowed to urinate behind a tree, but his bladder felt half-full again, and he considered her shoes as a target. Once again, with some disappointment, he yielded to intuition and sat in the chair.
As the woman departed, the sky filled with peach light in the east, and a man came around the front of the SUV. He was tall and slim, his face and hands the color of tea, his hair and eyes jet black. White shoes, white suit, white shirt, bright-red necktie. His smile was whiter than his clothes. He appeared to be from India.
He seemed to float down into the chair. He carried a sheaf of papers and a white ballpoint pen, which he placed on the table. His fingers were long, well manicured. His hands moved with the grace of a close-up magician’s hands. He was the epitome of elegance. During Spondollar’s chaotic life, he’d made attempts at elegance, sought to develop good taste and acquire refinement, but he had never pulled it off. He hated those who, like this guy, were naturally graceful, lithe and trim and confident in their skin.
“Mr. Spondollar, I am told that your cell phone was in the house when this event occurred. Is that correct?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is not important. Was your cell phone in the house?”
“Shit, yeah. Destroyed with everything else—the house, the garage, my car. What does that matter? What happened to my house?”
“Mr. Spondollar, are you wearing an Apple watch, any health-monitoring device, or any device that has internet connectivity?”
“I’m in perfect health, a bull, no reason to monitor anything. My watch is an off-the-shelf piece of shit. What’s it matter?”
“It matters that you’re not putting out any GPS locator signal, so your attacker can’t target you, might even think you’re dead.”
“My attacker? What attacker?”
Raising one eyebrow, casually gesturing toward the mound that had been a house, the stranger said, “You don’t think what happened here was a spontaneous, natural disintegration?”
The eyebrow was so subtly ironic, the gesture so economic and elegant that Spondollar wanted to grab the red necktie, yank, and slam the guy’s face down hard into the tabletop.
He restrained himself. “What the hell happened to my house?”
“I am not at liberty to say, Mr. Spondollar. This is a matter of national security and of the greatest secrecy.”
“Let me see your ID. Who’re you with? The FBI, the CIA?”
“I myself am not an agent of the government. I’m part of a rare cooperative effort between the federal government and the private sector. Both are required to meet a unique threat.”
“What unique threat?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to know, Mr. Spondollar, because if you knew, you’d never sleep well again.”
“I don’t have anywhere to sleep even if I could.”
“I’m here to take care of that. We will spirit you away into a witness-protection program and provide you with a new identity that can’t be traced. We will—”
Spondollar interrupted. “What’ve I been witness to? I haven’t been witness to shit except what happened to the house, and I don’t even know what that was.”
“It’s called a witness-protection program only because it functions like one. We will move you to Arizona—”
“Hey, you know, I’ve got a life right here.”
“And quite a life it is,” the stranger said without the least offensive inflection, smiling and nodding as if he truly believed that Spondollar had deep ties to this town and was a treasure to his neighbors. “Therefore, we will reimburse you for twice the value of this property—–what it was when the house existed. We will provide you with a better house in Arizona, without a mortgage. We will pay you a monthly stipend of four thousand dollars for life and also make a cash settlement equal to twice the funds you currently have in the bank and in an investment account.”
“Are you nuts? That’s a fortune.” He leaned forward in his chair and pointed an accusatory finger at the stranger. “So you must want something from me. What is it you want from me?”
“We want to limit collateral damage. If you were to try to go on living as Harley Spondollar, you would be attacked again, and there might be collateral damage. May I be frank, sir?”
“Be what you want.”
The man in white leaned back in his chair. “We have no special affection for you, Mr. Spondollar. However, if you went to the bank to withdraw funds, the transaction would involve a verification via the internet. Before you received a cashier’s check, you would be destroyed along with the bank and everyone in it. I don’t know anyone in the bank branch you use, but as a fellow human being, I do have special affection for them.”