Читать книгу Nathaniel's Chorus - Gary Lightfoot - Страница 9

In Washington D.C, Nathaniel is awakened at midnight when his cell phone rings.

“Hello, who’s this? How’d you get this number?”

“Hey there Foot you awake?” the voice at the other end answers.

“Sir, you do know it’s in the middle of the night.”

“You know me Nathaniel, I do my best thinking at night. Listen son, they’re going to try and arrest you.”

Nathaniel sits up and turns on the table light next to his bed; he clears his eyes and reaches for his writing pad, still lying next to him in bed.

“Okay sir, I’m awake now. What do you want me to do?”

“Nathaniel, I’ve been told that the media received a new tape from the tri-P, they’re going to air it in the morning. Some of the stuff on that tape is pretty bad. Tell you what son, it’s going to be like chum in the Bahamas, there’s going to be such a feeding frenzy by the media that that old chairman won’t know what to do but to delay that arrest move.”

Nathaniel scribbles, Bahamas + chum = no arrest, on his pad, he then says,

“Sir, Branch alluded to aiming his investigation to, as he put it, “highest offices”. How high do you think he meant?”

“Well, son, we both know what his real aim is, so you just keep doing what you’re doing and not worry about tomorrow.”

“Sir, I was sleeping.”

“Ha! You get back to it, I just wanted to let you know what was coming.”

With that, the caller hangs up and Nathaniel attempts to fall back asleep.

Φ Π Ψ

In the back room of Footboards in Long Beach, Nathan is writing on the dry erase board, highlights of the past several days. Nathan begins to think out loud,

“Okay, so let’s take a look at what we have so far, Neil and I are watching the coverage of Nathaniel’s Senate hearing when two guys in black suits confront Neil in Guadalajara. Neil takes the two guys down and finds out that they were actually Feds.”

“Wait,” says Neil, “I only knocked out one; Pedro hit the other guy with his Quince Brandy.”

“You like that stuff?” Chris adds.

“Anyway,” Nathan continues, “two Feds appear in Mexico.”

“Then as you’re driving out of Guadalajara, an old Pontiac starts following you.”

Neil stands up, walks to the dry erase board, circles his description and says, “A Fawn ’67 Catalina with a really built motor, details Junior, details.”

“Right, right. Okay lets keep going.” Nathan continues to think out loud.

“Neil’s able to lose them halfway out of Mexico and arrives in Long Beach ahead of schedule but being chased by a cop who gets hit broadsided by a black van as he slides around the corner in front of the Big Donut.”

Nathan walks around the room thinking, as he does, Chris picks up the photo album on the coffee table and begins to flip through the pages.

Nathan starts underlining the important facts on the board,

“Then today I load up the file/seek program and insert Neil’s thumb drive. We pick up Chris and go to his house where we think that Chris’s computer has been pinged.”

“And then you fixed our computer.” Asela says as she mimics Nathan’s movement of slamming the computer to the floor.

“Ha, don’t worry, we’ll replace it.” Nathan says as he writes down a note that he owes Asela one computer. Chris doesn’t respond, but continues paging through the albums, stopping occasionally to make note of the friends in the photos.

“Then we pick up Neil’s backup drive and find that someone else had been there and replaced the drive.”

Nancy, who had been sitting quietly perks up and looks over at Neil, “Whom did you tell about the Foot brothers secret hiding place? Junior hasn’t even told me!”

Nathan walks over to Nancy’s chair and sits down on the arm. He wraps his arm around her and says, “who do you think?”

Nancy glances first at Neil then back at Nathan then back at Neil, “Have you talked to her?”

Neil shakes his head, as he says, “No I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her she’s probably got people that filter out old friends like me.”

Asela stands up and says, “Her who? People filter? Who you guys talking about?” Asela stops mid sentence and then points at Neil, “you’re still nuts about what’s her bucket, aren’t you.”

Neil holds his hands up, “guys, guys, please. Our brother is about to be arrested and we’re talking about past history.”

Nathan circles the words “lost thumb” on the board, “I don’t think its past with her, she has your drive.”

Neil knows that he will have to find her, but for now he wants to move on with the recap of what they do know. Neil stands up and walks to the board to restart the recap.

“So after the thumb, we start to leave, get bumped from behind by a van and then a cop pulls in front of us. That’s way too convenient.”

Chris looks up from the albums and says, “don’t forget, another Black van.”

Neil writes, “black van” on the board and says, “Right, and that ring that the policeman was wearing was just like the ring that the Fed had on in Mexico.”

“What?” Nathan says, “you mean you saw that same ring on the guys that approached you in Mexico? You’re the one telling me to not forget details?”

“Yep, but it didn’t click until just now.”

“Hey guys”, Chris says solemnly as he continues looking at the old albums, “we’re going to need guys with skills, you know, like some of the guys we had back on the Teams.”

Nathan snaps his fingers, “Nuts! The program, I left running. Nancy, did you notice if the screen was finished before you turned the computer off?”

“Yes honey, I looked before you had called. It finished shortly after you two left to pick up Chris.”

“Did you print the results?”

“Honey, I left it in the printer.”

Nathan pulls the printout from the printer and places it on his drawing table. He starts to read it, stopping to read aloud a few names that both Neil and Chris would know.

“Crap, did you know that Jim died in a motorcycle accident?”

Chris closes the album and says, “I didn’t think Jim even liked bikes, wasn’t it Steve who always rode a Harley?”

Nathan scans down the list and finds the result on Steve,

“Holy cow, Steve became a motorcycle cop and was ran over just last month.”

“Henry was recovering from a heart attack and died when he fell out of a hospital bed?”

Chris hands the album to Neil and then walks over to where Nathan is and looks over his shoulder,

“That’s too weird, all three of those guys died within a few weeks of each other.”

“Who does that leave?” Neil asks as he starts to flip the pages of the old album.

The three old friends continue into the night comparing the list of old friends with mysterious deaths. By midnight in Long Beach, they realize that only a handful of their fellow “Team Tiger” buddies are still unaccounted for. As far as the ones accounted for, most had either died from unusual causes or had recently been arrested for unspecified charges.

Nathan steps back from the drawing table and sits down on the couch, “this is looking too organized, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Chris asks as he joins Nathan on the couch.

“Well think about it. Within a few weeks all these guys die from really strange things? Would you ever dream this stuff up?”

Neil sits in the chair next to the couch and adds to Nathan’s conclusion, “yeah and don’t forget, we might be next.”

Chris rolls his head back and looks up at the ceiling, “I keep thinking about the black vans and that cop with the ring.”

Neil sits up in the chair and starts searching the coffee table, “where’s that pad of paper?”

Nathan reaches to the floor and picks it up, hands it to Neil and says, “You got an idea?”

“That ring, I should have done this hours ago.”

Neil begins to sketch the scene in Pedro’s Cantina in Guadalajara. As he does he first quickly sketches the entire room with the two black suited men on the floor, Pedro holding the neck of the broken Quince Brady bottle, Neil on the floor searching one of the men they had knocked out. The next sketch is of the hand of one of the men on the floor. Without showing it to Nathan or Chris, Neil turns the page over and sketches the hand of the policeman who had placed his hand on The Burb’s door earlier in the night. Neil then tears the two pages out of the pad and places them on the table in front of Nathan and Chris.

“Look at the rings, they are slightly different, but look closely.”

Nathan and Chris each lean in to take a closer look at the two sketches. Nathan recognizes what Neil was thinking of and sits back into the couch.

“I don’t get it.” Chris says as he continues to examine the sketches.

Neil points at the two rings, “I thought they were Fraternity rings. But look closely; the Greek letters on the sides are not a fraternity, or at least not a real fraternity.”

Chris sits back and shakes his head, “I’m sorry guys; my Greek is a little rusty. You’re going to have to spell it out for me.”

“Exactly!” says Neil, “the Greek alphabet, those letters are Φ Π Ψ. You pronounce them Phi Pi Psi, you know, P-P-P.”

“Holy Crap!” Chris jumps up. “Those guys were tri-P?”

Neil moves over to sit where Chris had been on the couch and pulls the two sketches over in front of him. “I don’t think these guys are with the same group.”

Chris continues standing, “What do you mean Neil, you just told me they’re both Phi Pi Psi?”

Neil points to the rings on the two sketches, “they’re the same but different.”

Nathan scoots over next to Neil, “What do you mean bro?”

“Look closely at the rings.” Neil moves the two sketches over in front of Nathan. “The ring on the dude in Pedro’s had this symbol on top of the stone, where the cop’s ring outside of the Big Donut, doesn’t have any symbol on its stone.”

Nathan picks up the sketch of the man in Pedro’s, walks over to the dry erase board and draws the symbol. It’s a triangle with the letter P on the inside. He then steps back and says, “Neil I think you’re right. We’re looking at two different groups. I’ve seen this symbol before.”

Nancy who had been listening from the kitchen area, now walks into the back room and says, “Junior, don’t you think you should tell Neil, what you’ve been up to?”

Asela following behind Nancy asks Chris, “How ‘bout you honey. Confession cleanses the soul.”

Chris begins first and tells Nathan and Neil how he had been called upon shortly after leaving the military to participate in a number of maneuvers. Chris would receive a call, told what type of aircraft he would be flying but he wouldn’t know where until he was briefed just prior to boarding the aircraft. Some of the missions were into Central America; some were half way around the globe. Chris would fly into a field, pick up a team and then fly home. He never asked who or why, only how far and if he would get a crew meal.

Nathan follows Chris and tells of how he too was contacted after leaving the service. He would be told what to search for on the Internet, find the source and then write a program to disable it. Nathan would also write the initial search program to aid in the search for terrorist plots that may be imbedded in normal signals passed between ground stations and satellite transmissions. It was during one of these covert assignments that Nathan first saw the symbol of the triangle with the P on the inside of it.

“About 4 years ago I saw that symbol, it was laid within a transmission from the Middle East to Singapore. I discounted it for a glitch in the program, symbols take on a different pattern in the trans, but the odd thing was, two weeks after that appeared, the CEO from Trans Star Telecommunications was kidnapped during a business trip to Singapore. He was held for 3 million dollars and then later found dead.”

“I remember that,” says Neil, “I was up here painting your new sign. You kept ducking inside saying you were sick or something. Wait wasn’t that the first time the terrorist group, the tri-P claimed responsibility?”

Neil looks at the board, points at the triangle with the P and says, “You’re thinking that, that symbol is the tri-P’s mark?”

“Makes sense doesn’t it?” Nathan says.

Chris puts his feet up on the coffee table and says, “You both don’t make sense. If that’s the tri-P, then who is this?” Chris holds up the sketch of the policeman’s hand in Long Beach.

Nathan looks over at Chris, “Well that’s Phi Pi Psi.”

“That doesn’t make sense Junior, think about it. You guys said that it was something that just you and your high school friends did years ago, right?”

Nathan and Neil look at Chris with blank faces as Chris continues, “If it was something just for kicks back when you guys were in school, how does this policeman have a ring on today with the Greek letters for Phi Pi Psi?”

Nathan visibly shivers as he says, “Holy Balls, what did we start?”

Just then Neil hears a familiar sound, he runs from the backroom and attempts to look out the front window. Nathan and Chris follow behind,

“What is it Neil?”

“That sounds just like the car that followed me in Mexico.”

The three men peer into the darkness as headlights turn the corner and begin to glide toward Footboards. The sound grows and begins to reverberate off the buildings. Nathan hits the master light switch on the wall, turning off all the lights in the building except the light illuminating the sign in the showroom window, the sign that Neil had painted 4 years earlier. As the car approaches, the three men duck out of sight. The car begins to slow, then accelerates and disappears down the street.

Chris rises up to see if anyone else was looking out of the window, he sees both Nathan and Neil kneeling at the window.

“Did you guys see what kind of car that was?”

“Yep,” says Nathan, “a ’67 Pontiac Catalina.”

Neil slugs Nathan in the shoulder, “told you!”

Nathan leaves the lights off, but turns the alarm on and loads everyone up into The Burb. They drive silently to Nathan and Nancy’s house and settle in for a few hours of sleep.