Mad Dogs E-Book

James Grady

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Five deranged CIA killers break out from a secret insane asylum for retired agents... James Grady revolutionized thrillers with his first novel 'Six Days of the Condor'. Now Grady breaks out of all genre limitations with 'Mad Dogs', a stunning novel launched from a totally original creation: the CIA's secret insane asylum for retired agents. Five deranged CIA killers, all of them dependent on their meds, and deep in the woods of Maine, are forced to break out when someone murders their psychiatrist. Like the central character of 'Motherless Brooklyn', they operate under somewhat skewed perceptions of the real world. Their training, however, has prepared them to survive in an unfriendly world - even if that world is the Boston to Washington corridor as they chase down the real killer.

Leseprobe

MAD DOGS

Five deranged CIA killers break out from a secret insane asylum for retired agents...James Grady revolutionized thrillers with his first novel ‘Six Days of the Condor’. Now Grady breaks out of all genre limitations with ‘Mad Dogs’, a stunning novel launched from a totally original creation: the CIA’s secret insane asylum for retired agents.

Five deranged CIA killers, all of them dependent on their meds, and deep in the woods of Maine, are forced to break out when someone murders their psychiatrist.

Like the central character of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’, they operate under somewhat skewed perceptions of the real world. Their training, however, has prepared them to survive in an unfriendly world - even if that world is the Boston to Washington corridor as they chase down the real killer.

JAMES GRADY

James Grady is theNew York Timesbestselling author ofSix Days of the Condor,Shadow of the CondorandMad Dogs. He has worked as a screen-writer for CBS, FX, HBO and major studios. Grady’s been both A US Senate aide and a national investigative reporter. Grady’s writing honors include France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir (2001) and Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal (2003).Six Days of the Condorwas made into a classic Robert Redford movie (Three Days of the Condor). He has two children, lives with his wife inside Washington, D.C.’s beltway.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

for James Grady

‘Wonderful... supremely entertaining and a sad,

important look at America today’

–Washington Post

‘Grady is a master of intrigue’

–John Grisham

‘James Grady writes it straight, pure and hot as lava’

–Stephen Coonts

‘Grady is a master of blending real life and fiction’

–John Marks, co-author of ‘The CIA and

the Cult of Intelligence

‘James Grady is a master of Washington intrigue’

–Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

‘What a pleasure to be in the hands of a master storyteller. James

Grady’sMad Dogsstarts off with one of the best first sentences I’ve

read in a long time and goes full-throttle, pedal-to-the-floor right

up until the final page. A great, great read.’

–author of Mystic River

‘A stunning thriller, compassionate but unsentimental, brutal

and disquieting. In a mad world, who is really in charge

of the lunatics?’

–Sunday Telegraph

‘Mental is not the word for this book, brilliant is.’

–Independent on Sunday

‘Hilarious and ingenious, this is a caper with a wicked difference’

–The Guardian

‘Mad Dogsis the literary equivalent of a supercharged Hemi,

a rock-and-roll road novel that roars out of the gate and never

slows pace. James Grady, the king of the modern espionage

thriller, is back with a vengeance’

–George Pelecanos

‘Totally original’

–Irish Independent

‘His first novel (Six Days of the Condor, 1974) may still

be his best, but this one gets points for sheer weirdness. ‘

–Booklist

‘Could this new novel from a veteran writer/reporter

be the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest of the

cyber-generation? Indisputably, it belongs in every

suspense collection.’

–Library Journal (U.S.)

Thank U Very Much

Sources, inspirations, givers, beacons, touchstones: Robert Baer, Tim Bernett, Natalia Aponte Burns, John Burdett, Barbara Carr, Lou Campbell, Eileen Chapman, Susan Collins Marks, Tom Doherty, Johnny Fago, Leora Freedman, Bonnie Goldstein, Harry Gossett, Rachel Grady, Chris Harvie, Jeff Herrod, Irina, Terry Little, Joe Lansdale, Lonely Planet Publications, Karl Mailer, Serif Mardin, Marlon Mark, Matrix, Lou Mizell, Dan Moldea,The New York Times, Mona Okada, Jay Peterzell, Mike Pilgrim, John Pomfret, Presque Isle (Maine) Public Library, Linda Quinton, Bob Reiss, Cari Rudd, Bruce Sayre, Derya Samadi, Ricki Seidman, Yvonne Seng, Nat Sobel, Jeff Stein, Simon Tassano, Richard Thompson, The Stone Pony,The Washington Post, James Wagonner, John Weisman, Bill Wood.

This one’s for:

Bob Dylan

Billie Holiday

Bruce Springsteen

Richard Thompson

Brian Wilson

howling on the highway.

The pure products of America

go crazy—

William Carlos Williams

“To Elsie”

Outside the street’s on fire

in a real death waltz

between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy.

And the poets down here

don’t write nothing at all,

they just stand back and let it all be.

In the quick of a knife,

they reach for their moment,

try to make an honest stand.

Bruce Springsteen

“Jungleland”

1

We should have realized that something was dangerously wrong during our Tuesday Morning Group while Russell lied about garroting the Serb colonel.

“Get this,” said Russell as sunshine streamed past the jail bars over our windows and drew parallel shadows on the Day Room’s lemon wood floor. “That whole scene was like a flipped coin spinning in the air, one side ordinary, one side surreal.”

Like us then: five men and one woman perched on circled metal folding chairs.

“There I was,” said Russell, “walking another patrol in the Balkan slaughterhouse. Main Street buildings were smeared smoke black. Busted windows. Rubble littered the road. We tramped past a fire-bombed Toyota. Every step, something crunched under your boot. A laptop computer. A woman’s purse. Three ropes dangled from a street lamp, but they were cut empty, so the rumors about a clean-up were probably true.”

“What isn’t true?” said Dr. Friedman.

Dr. Leon Friedman had brown hair. Emerald eyes inside gold metal glasses. As he had for each of the 14 days he’d spent with us, he wore a tweed sports jacket. That last day, he had on a blue shirt, no tie.

“Place like that,” said Russell, “everything is true, nothing is true.”

“I see,” said Dr. Friedman.

“No you don’t,” I said. “Not if you’re lucky.”

“’Xactly,” said Zane, who looked like an albino Jesus.

“We’re listening to Russell now,” said Dr. Friedman.

Russell was fronting his rock star look: midnight lens aviator shades, a black leather sports jacket over an indigo T-shirt emblazoned “WILCO” for the band, not the military response he’d been taught. He wore blue jeans, retro black & white sneakers.

“Make it late May, 1992,” said Russell. “We were jazzed to get somewhere safe.”

Hailey picked scabs into her ebony skinned arm, mumbled: “No such place.”

Russell ignored her. “That once-was-Yugoslavia town smelled like gunpowder and burned wood. Rotten garbage and rats, man, I can still see bad ass rats with red eyes.

“The restaurant had cardboard over two windows but a sign that read ‘OPEN.’ When the Colonel swung the door in, a bell tinkled. He turns to us nine guys, says:‘We take turns.’Then he beckons me and his two favorite goons, a couple of thrill-kill boys Milosovic sprang from prison and made ‘militia.’ We go in. The place has a handful of customers, all true Serbs like us, and fuck everybody else.”

The white Styrofoam cup trembled as Russell raised it to his lips. “Where was I?”

Dr. Friedman said: “You just said,‘Fuck everybody else.’”

Russell swallowed more coffee. “I mean, where was I in my story?”

“Ahh,” said the therapist: “Your story. Of your spy mission.”

“Got it,” said Russell. “The maître d’ glides through the restaurant like he’s skating on ice. He’s hairless. Pale as a bone. Milky eyes. Stone cold. Four werewolves in army fatigues with AK-47s walk in and ding his bell but he doesn’t blink. He’s wearing a black bow-tie, a white shirt, blue jeans, a black tuxedo tails coat like Dracula. Plus, one hand ballerina waitress style, he’s balancing an empty tray.”

“Sounds like an LSD trip,” said Dr. Friedman.

“Doc!” Russell grinned. “Who knew you’re such a rebel!”

“I have an interesting father. What about you?”

“Nah,” said Russell, “Dad never did nothing that could get him in trouble. He never had to. And he isn’t in the story—in the restaurant, that was just me, all me.”

“And who else?” asked Dr. Friedman.

“I told you: Colonel Herzgl, the fat fuck. Smelled like garlic and vodka. They claim vodka doesn’t smell, that’s another lie. Believe me, it smells, and I… I…”

“You’re in the restaurant,” said Dr. F. “With Colonel Herzgl, his men.”

“And the maître d’. Who glides up to us through the tables holding his empty tray, Nazi pin on his lapel,man, he lets us fall into his milk eyes.”

“Colonel Herzgl glares at him, says:‘You got crap on for music.’”

“Tunes are coming from a boom box on the bar, and the Colonel is dead-on right: it’s crap. Some accordion flute zither ethnic bullshit. Colonel Herzgl is an Elvis freak. He’s carrying a torch for a bloated icon who bought it in a… ah… in a bathroom—”

Dr. Friedman blinked. And I caught him.

“– who bought it in a bathroom while Herzgl was still a Commie punk in Belgrade. Now he’s got this one lousy tape, the soundtrack fromViva, Las Vegas!Not the worst Elvis movie, not even his worst bunch of songs, butman: after the first 40 times you hear it and get ordered to translate it and teach the Colonel to sing along…!

“Colonel Herzgl gives the Elvis tape to the maître d’, who leads us to a table and on it is a bottle of that plum brandy.Rakija. No glasses. We sit, pass around the bottle.”

“Please say you didn’t put your lips where theirs were!” said Hailey.

“Shit, yes! You think I’d bust cover by playing the snob?” said Russell. “So the maitre d’ says: “Potato soup,” which is all this war zone café has, except forrakija. Off he goes. A few swigs later, and boom box, Elvis blasts outViva, Las Vegas!”

The Ward Room door swung open, pushed inward by a rolling mirror metal box.

The meds cart rolled across the sun-swept floor. I checked out the nurse driving it who, like Dr. F, had rotated in while the regular staff were on furlough.

The substitute nurse was a pretty woman who’d walked miles of hospital corridors. She wore the uniform: white slacks and top with a black cardigan sweater. Wore her brown hair pinned in a bun. She unlocked the meds cart, stacked tiny paper cups on the metal top, checked her clipboard.

Dr. Friedman said: “What did it smell like?”

“Why do you want to know that?” said Russell.

“We know what outside the café smelled like—gunpowder, burned wood, smoke, rubble. What did it smell like at that table?”

“What difference… There’s thatrakijaplum brandy. Plus us four unshowered army fatigue guys. And kind of a salty smell. Potato soup from the kitchen, the—”

“What kind of salty smell?” asked Dr. Friedman. “Like… tears?”

“‘Like tears,’what the hell difference does that make, it’s all about what I do. And now, with Elvis blasting‘Viva, Las Vegas,’I finally got my chancetodo.”

The nurse shook pills into a paper cup.

Dr. Friedman said: “You finally got your chance to dowhat?”

“To kill Colonel Herzgl.”

“But that wasn’t your mission. You weren’t an assassin.”

“Don’t you tell me who I wasn’t!” yelled Russell. “I was who I was and I did it!”

Dr. Friedman stared at the trained warrior. “Tell us about your official mission.”

“My official mission was, like,over, man! None of the factions—not the Muslems, not the Croats, for sure not those damn Serbs, none of them got squat from the caches Uncle Sam’s bad boys had snuck into Yugoslavia during the Cold War. None of them had the missing suitcase nukes. Don’t you think they’d have used them? They all wanted total annihilation, and there’s no better way to go total than nuclear.”

“So why were you still there?” said Dr. Friedman.

“How could I leave?” Russell shrank on his chair. “That place went from skirmishes to slaughterhouse in a blink. What was going on outside that restaurant, what I’d had to see and play along with as the rock ’n’ roll Serbian-American kid come back to find his roots and help his heroes… Over there, being crazy was the rule. If you weren’t when it started… How do you think I ended up here?”

“You tell us.”

“I killed the Colonel.”

“Why?”

“Because I could. I couldn’t stop anything big, but if I iced that one fat fuck monster who I’d latched onto when I still had a sane mission… Before I bugged out, I could put him down for… for all the horror he did. Was going to keep doing.”

“When Elvis kicked in with‘Viva, Las Vegas,’Herzgl said,‘I not wait.’He tells me,‘You next,’and walks through the dining room to the bathroom.”

“Did he go alone?”

“What do you mean,‘Did he go alone?’ Of course he went alone! What do you think, that we were a bunch of Kansas schoolgirls on prom night?”

Russell shook his head. “They wouldn’t listen to me. Didn’t believe me. Phones worked. Not everywhere, but… I’d reported to my Case Officer in Prague. Hell, I called Langley direct! They insisted I was ‘off mission.’ Or ‘overloaded.’ I was to ex-filtrate stat. Good job. Mission over. Come home and… They wouldn’t believe me.”

“That was only at first,” said Dr. F. “Then satellite photos, other sources—”

“‘At first’ is where you start. You gotta get to ‘at last’.”

“So you stayed.”

“I went into that bathroom.” Russell blinked. “That was my chance. I told the two goonsfuck the Colonel, I had to go now. They laughed. Nobody looked at me as I walked through the dining room. The bathroom was through a set of swinging doors, down a hall. The bulb in that hall was burned out, so it was a long dark tunnel. Stank. Urine, rats,rakija—I know you want to know how it smells Doc, no need to thank me.”

But Friedman said nothing to interrupt. Sensed the roll. Knew it was coming.

“I put my right hand in my fatigue jacket pocket,” said Russell. “My knife and AK-47 were back at the table, but two days before, the day they burned up the schoolhouse full of kids, I found a steel wire about a yard long, stuck it in my pocket. Figured I could rig a grenade trip to get the Colonel and his whole squad. But that was me being optimistic, not practical. Walking to the bathroom, I was the zen of practical. I had one end of the wire cinched around my right grip before I hit the swinging doors. Ten steps down that long dark tunnel to the closed MEN’s room door,Viva, Las Vegas, and by the time I get there, the other end is cinched around my left grip.”

“Two ways to go in for a whack,” Russell told us. “Blitz or sly—sly ninja or sly bold like Skorzeny, march in banners flying.”

“I’ve always been a Skorzeny man. I burst into the bathroom singing Elvis over the tape of Elvis, and Herzgl, why he loved it. He was at the mirror. The stall with… The stall with,um…He was boogying with his back to me as I sang and thenwham!”

Russell twisted in his seat as he pantomimed fliping the wire loop around the Colonel’s neck from behind and garroting the thrashing Colonel.

“He was tough and it was hard. For you, Doc, I could smell his garlic and sweat. The flesh on his neck burned like acid on my hands.”

Whoa!I thought:“the flesh… burned like acid.”That was a new detail. A key sensory memory. Bravo Dr. Friedman! In two weeks, you’d moved Russell off the same-old-same-old to the reveal of a touch of flesh.

“Of course I left the wire,” said Russell. “Walked out to find out I’d fucked up.”

“How?” said Dr. Friedman.

“The fire exit was locked! Nowhere to go but back to those two Serb militia pricks—who, luckily for me, had pulled the big joke and eaten my bowl of potato soup.”

Nurse coughed: “Time for their meds.”

Fuck her, I thought. Maybe Russell is on the edge of a breakthrough.

Dr. F’s negative wave to the nurse agreed with me.

So I asked: “Did anybody say anything when you came out of the bathroom?”

Giving Russell a chance to bust the lie himself. To see it himself.

“Yeah. They all laughed at me ’cause I wasn’t going to eat.”

White-haired Zane picked up on my riff: “What did they say about you?”

But Russell just shrugged. “They said,‘Tough luck, American!’Them eating my soup gave me an excuse to get pissed off, grab my gear, and storm out of the restaurant. I got outside, marched right through the other six guys, turned the corner—and ran like hell for three days. Rode a black ops Navy carrier chopper out. Told the Agency what I did, and now here I am.”

Zane looked at me. We could have busted Russell. But that was Friedman’s job. Besides, if you don’t bust somebody else’s lies, maybe nobody will bust yours.

Russell said: “The funny thing is, I don’t feel anything about killing him. Just… nothing. Of course, I won’t listen to Elvis anymore. I guess that’s why I’m here.”

“I don’t think so,” said Dr. Friedman.

Russell arched his eyebrows above the black lens of his sunglasses. Grinned. “Doesn’t really matter what you think, now does it, Doc? You’re leaving us.”

Nurse said: “Dr. Friedman? Our schedule.”

He nodded. She passed out water cups and our meds like candy for the movie: uppers, downers, smoother-outers, sugar pills in Hailey’s cup, a rainbow of pebbles geared to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome with icings of schizophrenic disorders.

“We’ve got one last Group this afternoon,” said Dr. Friedman. “I’ll see some of you individually before then, but I’m leaving here before dinner.”

Eric raised his hand to blurt out that it was meatloaf night, but didn’t get the nod.

“There’s something we need to talk about this afternoon,” continued Dr. Friedman, “and we should all look forward to that. Have a nice lunch.”

He smiled as he left the Ward. The nurse collected our empty pill cups. I watched her thick brown hair in its pinned bun, watched her round hips in white slacks as she pushed the cart out of our Ward. Russell and Zane, even Hailey and Eric watched her: the substitute nurse was new and thus interesting, though she’d kept a professional distance from us. Then the Ward door closed. Locked. We drifted to our private rooms not knowing that we had less than five hours of safe time leftbefore.

We should have known.

Thetellwas there for us to see.

We had the training. The experience. But we missed it, each and every one of us.

What the hell. We were crazy.

2

Crazy is why we were all locked up at RAVENS Castle.

Actually, the whole truth includes Our Special Circumstances.

“Our” being “us”: Russell, Zane, Eric, Hailey, and me.

“Special Circumstances” includes that we’re Code Word Access/TOP SECRET.

RAVENS is one of America’s first and most secret “black sites”, an acronym that appears in no directory of Federal programs and decodes as Research And Verification Epidemiology Network Systems.

Sounds like Horrible Scary Infectious Death Disease. Which is what it’s supposed to sound like. Nobody likes to linger around a door with that plaque. Of course, that door is itself almost impossible to find, because it’s for a phantom facility in a nowhere place called Waterburg, Maine.

Waterburg is a rural crossroads. A gas station, one motel, a few houses—and a big square red brick hulk set back from the road, with the RAVENS plaque screwed next to the double-locked front door. The “medical facilities” reputation of RAVENS accounts for the nurses and doctors who live in normal Maine towns and commute there. The doctors and nurses park their cars behind the RAVENS brick building, ride a blue bus through the woods to work in the Castle.

The Castle is a looming complex built by a timber baron who went bankrupt. Our home hides in woods where the aspens and birch trees grow thick around a chain link fence topped with razor wire. The Castle is a hospital. An asylum protecting us from the world and the world from us.

Our Ward held only the five of us in that spring of America’sempire daze. We each had a private bedroom with bath, a sitting room with a TV and bookshelves. Paintings had to be approved. Knick-knacks and art transformable into a weapon were taboo, but truthfully, all art is a weapon.

Like Harvard, the Castle is hard to get into.

First, you must be one of Uncle Sam’s Intelligence or Security Officers, Executives, Analysts, Administrators, Operatives, or Agents.

A spy.

Then you have to go crazy.

Where else can Uncle Sam put us? Some cut-rate maniac barn with a revolving door where anybody can get in and snatch Globe Changing Secrets from a drooling mouth, then cycle back out to go Over To The Other Side? Some “normal” insane asylum where if we toldactual realitythey’d call us crazy but if we toldcover stories, we’d be set free to run wild in the streets?

America needs RAVENS Castle.

Where on that April Tuesday after our Morning Group when Russell lied about garroting the Serb colonel, Dr. Leon Friedman came to my private room for my last Individual Session before the bigoh-ohchanged everything.

3

First he knocked on my open door.

Said: “Hey, Victor, may I come in?”

I shrugged: “I’m just a guy who can’t say no.”

“If only that were true,” he said as he entered my quarters. “You’re not Eric.”

But I didn’t take the bait. Didn’t turn my back on him as I sat in my comfy red leather chair and let him take the lumpy faded blue sofa.

From down the hall came the rolling scream of Russell singing Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

Dr. Friedman said: “Do you like that song, too?”

“Let’s say I identify with it. We all do, not just Russell.”

“Speaking of Russell,” said Dr. F, “what did you think of his story in Group?”

“Good story. He lied.”

“How do you know?”

“Come on, Doc, we all know. Knew the first time he told that story years ago.”

“How doyouknow?”

“The wire. We knew he lied because of the wire.”

“Because…”

“Because if you use a wire to garrote an oaf like that fucking Colonel Herzgl, the least that’ll happen is that the wire will cut your bare hands. As you strangle the guy, the wire cuts into his neck, slices his jugular, sowhoa, we’re talking a waterfall of blood spraying the walls, the bathroom mirror, on him, on you. Russell would have been all bloody and cut when he came out of that bathroom. He said he walked back to the table where the Colonel’s two goons were waiting, and that they didn’t say boo. They might have been stupid. They might have been drunk. They might have hated the Colonel. But they’d have noticed blood on the American who supposedly just went to the bathroom. Self-preservation would have made them askwhat’s-up-with-that?But Russell says they didn’t. So his story is a lie.”

“All of it?”

“We know he won’t do Elvis. Know that his cover was lead guitar and singer in an Oregon bar band touring Europe, playing third-rate dives. Belgrade was where he activated his cover, his ‘Serbian roots’ quest. Infiltrated the slaughterhouse team.”

“What’s the true heart of his story?” asked our shrink.

So I thought about it. Said: “The bathroom.”

“Why?”

“Because in the story it was the kill zone. The hot spot. The powerful place.”

“Like Malaysia was for you?”

Should have seen that one coming.I said: “If you want to talk about Asia, walk down to Zane’s room. He got the secret Congressional Medal of Honor for service there. His war was long gone before I showed up. Now all he’s got is that hunk of metal in his dresser drawer plus what turned his hair white and scares him awake at night.”

“What scares you awake at night, Vic?”

“Look, this is our last time together. Doesn’t make sense to get into all that now.”

“It makes perfect sense. This being our last time makes it safer for you to get into it with me than with Dr. Jacobsen when he comes back.”

“Like you won’t pass notes on to him? Passing notes gets you detention.”

“You’re the one who’s detained, Vic.”

“The Castle is a pretty good place to be trapped.”

“But Vic, isn’t life about freedom? Choosing?” He watched me say nothing. The second hand swept a circle around his watch. “How do you feel about the others?”

“Very carefully. None of them like to be touched.”

“I don’t think you’re a joke. But if you treat me like I am…” He shrugged. “So again: How do you feel about the other four people on this Ward?”

“They’re fried, each and every one. On a good day, they’re frazzled. On a bad day, they’re batshit. They can piss me off or make me laugh. But we get each other better than any of you doctors or nurses, maybe because we’ve been thereandoff the edge. You haven’t. We’re locked up. You’re not. There’s us. Then there’s all of you. The five of us, the four of them… They’re who I’ve got left.”

“Sounds like family.” He waited for me to say something. Filled my silence with another question. “What’s your role in this family? Father?”

“Don’t lay that on me. Uncle Sam is our father.”

“So you’re all his kids.” Dr. F shrugged. “Are any of you going to grow up?”

“And suddenly get ‘not crazy’? Hey, you tell me, you’re the doctor.”

“Are you still thinking about suicide?”

“Who doesn’t? Who hasn’t?”

“But you’ve tried it. Twice.”

“What, are you saying… You don’t think I am—I wassincere?”

“No. I think you were—excuse the expression—dead serious about suicide.”

“So the CIA must be right and I am incompetent.”

“Bullshit. You’re the most competent crazy I know.”

“Then why couldn’t I kill myself?”

“You’re a hard man to kill—even for you. But the more important question is why have you stopped attempting suicide?”

“Maybe I’m waiting for the right moment.”

“Or for the reason not to.”

Our eyes pointed at each other through a waterfall of silence.

Until Dr. F glanced at his watch: “Now I have to go listen to Hailey run down symptoms that aren’t there.”

“She picks her own scabs to prove she’s right about being sick,” I said.

“If you know that about her…”

“Other people are easy.”

“Of course. Why do you think so many screwed up people become shrinks?”

“Hey, Dr. F: are you screwed up?”

“Not anymore.”

When he left, he closed the door behind him.

Our Ward is on the Castle’s Third Floor. After Dr. F left, I stared through my shatterproof window, looked out over the naked trees, watched white clouds drift across a blue spring sky and felt a lone tear trickle down my cheek.

4

“So here we are again. Final session. Our last chance.”

Call the speakerprophet. Call him the man with the right questions for wrong answers. Call him Dr. F, like we had since the first morning we pulled our folding chairs into a circle in the sun-drenched Day Room for Group, like we did that Tuesday afternoon when we all gathered together for the last time.

“This afternoon,” he told us, “I want to talk aboutallof you.”

“Clinical practice isn’t my specialty,” said Dr. F. “I apply psychiatry to crisis management and international analysis for the CIA. Soon as I get back to D.C., I will start as a watchdog and profiler for the National Security Council. I won’t even have time to go home to New York. I had two weeks between postings, but when I heard about the staff training furloughs here, rather than go sit on the beach at Hawaii—”

“You’d sunburn, Doc.”

“Good, Russell, looking for the bright side of a closed-out option.”

Russell pushed his sunglasses up his nose. “I’m so bright I gotta wear shades.”

“Too bad being smart isn’t enough,” said Dr. F. “Anyway, the chance to sharpen my clinical skills, the chance to get to know—”

I interrupted: “To get to know us broken tips of the ‘national security’ spear.”

“Always the poet, Victor. But now I want to talk about all of you through the prism of my organizational analysis, not my—”

“Not yourpsycho—analysis,” said Zane. “Us being psychos.”

“Don’t limit yourselves,” said the real doctor. “You’re more than psychos. Right now, you’re the inmates who have taken over the asylum.”

The substitute nurse unlocked the Ward door and entered. She carried a batch of files. Took a chair outside of our circle. A quick glance showed me her reflection trapped in the dark screen of the Day Room’s turned-off TV.

“We haven’t run things for a long time,” said Zane. “Especially around here.”

“You got the keys, Doc,” said Russell.

“And you all like it that way.No, don’t interrupt.”

Dr. F’s gold metal glasses reflected five inmates coiled on metal chairs.

“My field isgestalt dynamics, how groups function, with a specialty of the aberrant individual in a high stress environment. But,” smiled Dr. F, “the description in my CIA file is better. In our shadow world, they call me aspotter.”

“Like for a sniper?” said ex-soldier Zane.

“More like a shepherd, but this isn’t about me, so let’s get through this so nurse and I can get to the Route 1 motel and pack before we go back to…” Dr. F smiled. “Back to the real world.”

“Whoa, you found it?” exclaimed Russell.

“Hey,” I said: “Call Dr. F the peerless spotter.”

“Peerless spotter!” obeyed Eric.

“Call me a taxi and I’m out of here,” said Russell.

“You’re a taxi!” chorused Zane with Eric.

Hailey said: “Go where you gotta go.”

CLAP!Dr. F’s hands slapped together. He yelled:“Shut up!”

Dr. F’s face burned red: “I bust you on being inmates who’ve taken over the asylum, and to avoid dealing with that, you try to riff away the time we’ve got left!”

The visiting shrink shook his head. “Crazy people see with powerful clarity. Distorted vision, sure, but clear. And you’re the most insightful and yet the blindest patients I’ve ever had. Look at the five of you.”

Eric swiveled his head to comply.

Russell pushed his sunglasses on tighter: “We already looked at me today.”

“Oh really?” said the shrink. “Was that you we saw? Or your story?”

“Stories are what we got,” I said.

“What you’ve all got,” said Dr. F, “is your lives made into stories instead of your lives full of stories. OK, Russell, we did you today, so we’ll skip you now. Hailey?”

The Black woman gave our substitute therapist her poker face.

He said: “Do you know why you keep muttering, ‘Gotta be worth it’?”

“Because that’s true.”

“Truth is irrelevant if you use it to drown out meaning or if you inven—” Dr. F shifted to a softer word: “If youusedrama to hide what you don’t want to face. I know the horror that happened to you in Nigeria and I know the horror you did, but you’ve got to face it. Face it without… the protection of judgment.”

“Doesn’t matter what you think I have to do: I’m dying.”

“How convenient. But you look fine.”

“Appearances are deceiving,” she snapped.

The therapist said: “So who are you fooling?”

Her ebony skin glowed with anger.

I said: “In the land of the blind, the one eyed person is crazy.”

“All our eyes work, Victor,” said Dr. F, “but good diversion. I was done with Hailey anyway—unless she’s got something new to say to us.”

She glared at him.

Dr. F swung his gaze to Eric. That bespectacled, pudgy engineer stiffened to attention in his chair. Waiting. Ready. The therapist opened his mouth—found no words, closed it. Knew he had to say something about everyone or no one would listen.

“Eric, two days ago, Victor said he agreed with Mark Twain that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, and then pointed out thatEricrhymes withIraq.”

Dr. Leon Friedman’s shaking head broke free his smile.

“If I were a poet like Victor,” said Dr. F, “maybe I’d have more than a notion of the connected sense of all that. But notions are key now—for you. You beat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq way back before our first war there, but they turned you into a robot. Yet I have to believe that somewhere in you, there’s a notion of Eric as a free human being.”

Dr. Leon Friedman told the pudgy hero in thick glasses: “This is not an order, but try to imagine a notion of space between commands ofdoordon’t.”

“’Xactly what the hell does that mean?” said white-haired Zane.

“Exactlyis what you’ve got, right soldier?” replied our therapist.

As Eric frowned. Took Dr. F’s suggestion as an order. Eric’s hands cut a square frame in our circle’s air like a mime building the notion of space.

While Eric mimed his work, Dr. F worked on Zane.

“All you’ve been through,” Dr. F told that white-haired soldier. “Bombs. Heroin. Slaughter beneath your boots. Jungle heat that now makes you melt down. You fought since Vietnam so you can carry that weight and never cry. That’sexactlywho you are.”

“What’s your point?” snapped Zane.

“Congratulations. You won. Look what you got.Exactly.”

Zane angled his head toward Eric: “I’m not him. You can’t tell me what to do.”

“I wish I could,” said Dr. F. “We’d drive out of here together.”

“But now it’s time for you to scoot back to the real world,” I said.

“Before I get to you, huh Victor?”

I became ice.He was only an image in my eyes. A sack of red water.

As he said: “Zane, you and Vic here rhyme.”

Zane argued: “He ain’t my generation. Plus, I never tried to kill myself uselessly. And I don’t zone out.”

“But you’re both crazy from responsibility,” answered the therapist. “Though you cling to your weight and Victor uses his to dig his own grave.”

“I did what I did,” I said.

“And if you did anything differently,” Dr. F asked me, “in Malaysia, with 9/11, would anything be different now?”

“The names of the dead.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But you did what youcould.”

“So that’s not enough to justify me going crazy?”

“That’s more than enough. But you’ve got to move off of paying for what was possiblethento buying what’s possiblenow. You’ve got to look for that.”

“Or get shocked into seeing it? Like this little ‘blitz therapy’ session, Doc? Shock therapy—sorry, Eric—call it whatever you want, didn’t work. For any of us.”

We stared at the doctor who’d spent two weeks doing his best.

Russell said: “We’re here.”

“And we’ll be here after you’re gone,” said Hailey.

“’Xactly.”

Sunlight streamed through Eric’s invisible notion of space.

“Is that what you want?” asked our shrink. “Don’t you see? You’re set in your situation and thus resist challenging your troubles. You resist working on getting out.”

“I shouldn’t leave,” said Hailey. “I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying,” said Dr. F. “How and when… Who knows?”

“None of you is close to ‘cured.’ I don’t know if you can ever reach that point. But I want you to open your eyes. Who knows what you’ll see—with therapeutic help.”

“Plus getting stoned,” said Russell. “Everybody here must get stoned.”

“Meds are tools,” said Dr. F. “The work is up to you.”

“Bottom line us, Doc,” I said.

“No, that’s your job. Always has been, always will be. No matter how out of control the world is, you’ve got some ability to draw your own bottom line.”

“You’re supposed to be a shrink,” argued Russell, “not a philosopher.”

“Sometimes the only difference between those jobs is that I write prescriptions.”

“And orders to lock people up,” I said.

“Do any of you want me to write an order for your release?”

None of us said a word.

“What I am writing is a strong recommendation that your treatment shift from maintenance to management designed to get you out of our custody.”

“So you’ll get credit for lowering the budget,” said Hailey.

“Do you think I give a shit about the budget? My job is to spot when the emperor is naked and say so. To take risks. And here, that seems appropriate.”

“So what will happen to us?” asked Russell.

“Nothing bad, nothing dangerous, nothing soon,” lied Dr. F. “And nothing that I won’t monitor with your regular staff. Even with my new duties at the NSC, I want you all to feel free to reach out and get in touch with me whenever—”

Eric leaned forward in his chair, his arm stretched toward Dr. F.

Who said: “I mean later, Eric. Via e-mail.”

“Ohsure,” said Russell. “In between Israeli-Palestine clashes, war in Iraq, the atomic bomb in North Korea and who knows where next, narco wars in South America and Burma, evil doer hunting in the hills of Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Des Moines, genocide in Sudan, Russia rattling empire dreams, resurgent Nazis in Europe, the clear-cut Amazon causing snow storms in L.A., Pentagon budget battles, Congressional inquiries, press scandals and White House state dinners with boob job Hollywood blondes,sure,you’ll find time to check in with us Maine maniacs.”

Dr. F shrugged. “Who wants to talk about this new program?”

Our circle of chairs now had two sides: us, and Dr. F. He felt that too, had known the risk and taken it rather than coasting out easy. Got to give him credit.

“Well,” he said after three minutes of silence, “if I’m the only one who’s got anything to say, we might as well not waste the group’s time.”

The five of us stood as Dr. F said: “The nurse has paperwork for me. I’ll sit here in the Day Room in case any of you want to come back, talk more.”

Without a word, we turned and walked away. Write-offs and walk-aways came easy to us. We were trained and experienced.

Still, I looked back. Saw him sitting there, alone in the Day Room as the nurse walked toward the Ward door. Saw a pile of files on one chair beside Dr. F. Saw him take a fountain pen from inside that tweed sports jacket. Saw him push his gold framed glasses up his nose and turn his emerald eyes toward the file open on his lap.

Inside my room, I shut the door. A moment later, I heard Russell in his room blasting the Barenaked Ladies’ acoustic cut of:“Lying In Bed (Just Like Brian Wilson Did).”Blasting it loud, cranked up so that no one would mistake his playing a ballad about artistic crack-ups aspassiveaggression.

Then I zoned out. Dr. Jacobsen called it disassociation. Laymen might mistake it for a nap, sitting in a chair, eyes draped, oh so completely gone.

Until abruptly I blasted back.

Was sitting there. My chair. My room. My books. My…

Eric. Standing in front of me, shifting back and forth from foot to foot like an anxious third grader locked out of the bathroom.

My door was open. Eric opened my door! Came in without being told to! Never before, neverimaginablebefore, and now…

Now he stood in front of me. Shifting from shoe to shoe. His face twisted, pale.

“Oh-oh,” said Eric. “Oh-oh!”

5

Dr. Friedman sat on a metal folding chair in our sunlit Day Room.

Dead.

My guts told me that the moment Eric led me into the Day Room, though I wasn’t certain until I pressed my fingers into the rubbery flesh of Dr. F’s neck, found no pulse.

Down in his lair, Russell had moved on to the Beatles’ White Album. The sound of“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide ’Cept For Me And My Monkey”poured into the Day Room where Eric and I stood beside the sitting corpse.

Then I spotted the smudge of blood in Dr. F’s right ear.

“Eric: go get all the others! Now! And only them!”

Two minutes later, five of us stood staring at the slumped body of our therapist.

“Gone before he thought,” said Russell.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the blood smudge in Dr. F’s right ear.

Zane held his long white hair back, leaned over and looked. “There it is.”

“Somebody went to school,” said Russell. “Sorry Dr. F.”

Hailey said: “What is it?”

“DAST,” said Russell.

DAST—Defense Against Subtle Termination. A secret training program run jointly by the Pentagon and the Agency. Trouble Boys like Russell, Zane and I cycle through for training. Like the military’s DAME program—Defense Against Mechanical Entry—DAST obscures what it teaches. DAME may teach how to defend against mechanical entry, or as you might call it,burglary, but it for sure turns out lock pickers and safe crackers. DAST teaches “defense” against “subtle termination.” Learning tricks the opposition might use to kill you in Bangkok gives you a better chance of getting in and out of such a town alive. Of course, knowledge you pick up along that educational path… Assassination is illegal for U.S. spies.

“Not a perfect job,” said Russell. “Whatever was rammed through Doc’s right ear up to his brain pan kept its path open long enough to let blood trickle out. Maybe in the boonies this could be passed off as a stroke, but here, the coroner will know the score.”

“’Xactly,” muttered Zane.

“He’s not the one who’s supposed to die,” said Hailey.

“Logic says one of us killed him,” I said.

“Means, motive, and opportunity,” said Russell.

“He wanted to change everything,” said Zane. “He told us so.”

“Him sitting down here,” I said. “Alone. We all had the chance.”

“None of us wanted what he did,” said Hailey.

“Well Dr. F,” said Russell. “Looks like you won. Everything’s changed.”

The pat Russell gave the dead man’s shoulder was meant to be congratulatory.

Dr. Friedman tumbled out of his chair to sprawl on the floor.

“Sorry!”Russell gave us hisshit-happensshrug.

“What a brilliant murder,” I said. “We’re trapped here as the perfect fall guys. We’re certified dangerous and crazy. Nobody will believe we’re innocent.

“So did we kill him?” I asked.

I stared at their faces—Russell, Zane, Hailey, Eric. They stared at mine.

Together we said:“Nah!”

“So,” said Hailey, “if we didn’t do it, who did?”

“Here’s the more urgent question,” said Zane. “Are we targeted, too?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “If the CIA buys the killer’s frame and calls us guilty, they’ll bury us. If we miraculously convince the Agency that we’re not guilty, then someone else is—and we’re witnesses, extreme liabilities to the killer or to a cover-up.”

“Oh boy,” said Eric. “Oh boy.”

We whirled to look at the Ward door. Locked shut.

Zane said: “One hour to dinner.”

“Meatloaf,” said Eric.

From Russell’s room came:“While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

“We are,” said Zane, “in trouble.”

“Exposed,” said Hailey. “Endangered.”

“You know what else?” I said. “Pissed-off. Some hitter wrecked our Ward, set it up so Admin will blunder around like a herd of elephants. Chain us up. Transfer us. Dope us more. Sure, a killer here means some spy has penetrated America’s top secrets. That’s a huge security risk, but what pisses me off is that a mechanic nailed our Doc.”

Hailey asked: “Was it something we said?”

“If it was,” said Zane, “even worse. Then they’re truly after us.”

“Ghosts.” I shook my head. “They always get you.”

Russell said: “The inmates won’t run this asylum anymore.”

“Whatever happens will be terrible,” said Hailey. “Won’t respect who we are. What happened to us. What’s going on with us. Our fate.”

“Whatever the big bad is, it’s coming for us,” said Zane.

“They promised safe here,” said Eric.

“Big surprise,” said Russell. “They lied.”

In physics, critical mass is obtained when the minimum number of individual elements to create a transforming process coalesce in one time/space continuum.

Consider us. Five maniacs. Spies. Trained, experienced professional paranoids who’d been programmed to Do Something. Scarred beyond repair, but still, Once Upon A Time We’d Been Somebody. Forces with which to reckon. Now locked in a castle. With the corpse of a guy who’d earned our respect. Whose murder we were set up to take the fall for. With Keepers scheduled to catch Our Whole Situation in less than an hour. We had nothing to gain but all that we had left was on the line to lose.

Physicists, psychiatrists and snipers talk about the trigger. The event that starts the chain reaction. When I think about our trigger, I hear the sudden wave of silence rushing into the Day Room that April Tuesday afternoon as Russell’s CD player shut off.

There we stood.

Five maniacs staring down at a corpse.

With no theme music.

“Two choices,” I said. “We either stay here and suffer what gets done to us…”

“Or?” said Russell.

“We bust out of this place.”

6

“Wild,” said Russell. “But we gotta take the Doc with us.”

“He’s dead!” I yelled.

Zane said: “Nobody gets left behind.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Well,” said Hailey, “technically…yeah.”

“Think of it as poetry,” argued Russell. “A great lyric. You can’t just walk away from a killer line because it’s inconvenient.”

“Think of it as strategy,” said Zane. “We take him with us, we fuck with The Bad Boys’ set-up. What could be smarter than that?”

“Or more fun?” said Russell.

Hailey sighed. “Victor: if it was you lying there, what would you want?”

In a blink, I saw it.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re right. We’ve got to take Dr. F. We need him to get past security.”

And I told them how. Said: “Get your GODS, link up back here in 15 minutes.”

“Wait,” said Russell.

“Now what?”

“You forgot.” Zane’s eyes pointed up through the ceiling.

Eric nodded as Hailey told me: “Good people say good-bye.”

7

RAVENS Castle has five floors.

First Floor is Administration, doors with electronic locks, the Keepers’ lounge, the Computerized Monitoring System installed before the secret black money that creates the Castle’s budget started being siphoned off to fuel the war in Iraq.

Second Floor is the Medical Unit with an operating room where you can get a face switch, a fingerprint graft, a bullet removed. You can stay on Second Floor and never know about your upstairs neighbors.

Third Floor belongs to Wards Able, Bravo, and Crazyville.

Able is for short timers. The temporary hysterics. Spy Plane/Jungle Crashcrispy crittersadjusting to burn scars they can never tell the truth about. Pentagon ApocalypseBluesboyzhaunted by mushroom cloud/plague dreams. Able Ward houses thejust passing throughswho the doctors will beableto recycle.

Bravo is for the broken but bandageable. Battleground Beirut Bravehearts who went batshit but who can get by after six months or so of Castle therapy. Bravo veterans take their bandaged act home and lead “a productive life” sitting in their living room clothed in cover lies, waiting for their cried-out wife to finally walk out for good and leave them watching flickers of the TV or their NSA monitored computer, leave them waiting for the mailman to deliver their secret pension check.

Crazyville is our country. All the Wards have locked doors, but to get out of Crazyville takes knowing extra keypunch security codes. Took the five of us days to spy out those codes. Pros like us should have busted the codes sooner. But don’t forget, we were crazy. Functional but so far gone nobody figured we were ever coming back.

Fourth Floor is Main Street. The dining room with its serving line. Main Street has a “cyber room” to let you surf the Internet—our Keepers track every wave. Russell had “a thing” in 2003 with a Security Monitor who got so intrigued by the list of songs he snagged through file sharing programs that she finessed a security review to meet him, and fell into the darkness of his sunglasses. She cried when Admin caught her, swore the sex was consensual, that she’d never known the slamming surge of being bent over her desk by anyone except Russell, but still they shipped her out to sanitizing duty at an Alaskan NSA listening post. Next to the cyber room is a gym with weights, Eric’s treadmill, and Hailey’s mirrored ballet studio that Russell, Zane and I used forgung fu.

Fifth Floor of our Castle is a long corridor of locked doors.

My black shoes stepped with nary a sound on the Fifth Floor’s sunlit green tile. I eased my way down the corridor from the stairwell exit. Scents of ammonia and tears floated around me as I pressed against Door Number Six and oh so softly, tapped it with our secret knock, slid open the observation slot. He’s one of those people who even his lovers call by his last name, so I whispered: “Malcolm!”

Wait for it. Wait/NO TIME GOTTA EVAC OR THEY’LL—Wait.

Finally, unseen, he said: “You’re Victor.”

“Right.”

“Last visitor was the woman. Hailey. Two breakfasts ago. I had a lemon poppy seed muffin went purple smoke.”

“We meant to visit more often.”

“Life gets busy. Visits are hard.”

“No excuse.”

“But true. You were the first. Snuck up here. Took me,oh, awhile to figure you were real—did not eat yours!Before you, was decades of secret lonely. Thanks.”

“Yeah, well it was good for us, too.” Locked alone in that padded room, he couldn’t see me smile. “Sneaking up here kept us sharp. Kept usus. Plus, we could have been you. Always gotta remember that. We could be you.”

“Does that work the other way around?”

“Sure,” I lied. Switched back to true. “Besides, we like you.”

“I’m such a charmer.”

“Malcolm, we’ve got to go.”

Silence of a dozen heartbeats. I leaned on the locked steel door.

Then he said: “Who?”

“The five of us. Hailey. Zane. Russell won’t be able to sneak his Walkman up here to play you more songs. Eric, I wish we could have let him come up here alone so you could have gotten to know him better, but we didn’t dare because,ah, because…”

“Because in a freak I might have triggered him.”

“Yeah. Listen, we got dropped into a hit—or it got dropped onto us.”

“How many down?”

“One—so far.”

“Seven bodies fell on me. The first time. Do you remember 1974? Nixon?”

“I was still wearing diapers. Sorry about this, but we got a run.”

“You mean a mission, not flee.He’s talking to me! Put your tits away!When?”

“We’re all but on the road.”

“I did seven runs. Really six, because that first one wasn’t supposed to exist but—Was too my fault! And the airport bathroom!Victor?”

“Yeah?”

“Run hard.”

“Hang in there, Condor.”

“They took my belt away when they locked me up.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes we do worms and Sten gun!Can I help?”

In 40 minutes, the understaffed Keepers were scheduled to head toward Ward C so they could escort us to the elevators for the ride up to Main Street’s meatloaf.

“Can you count 3,000 beats, then scream? Start everyone up here screaming?”

“Sure.”

As I raced toward the stairwell door, his count echoed behind me: “Three-thousand. Sixty four. Two thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine. Two thousand, nine hundred, ninety three. Forty seven…”

8

When I got back to the Third Floor, everybody had their GODS in the Day Room.

GODS: Get Out of Dodge Soonest. The gear you grab when you gotta go. I.D.s. Cash. Credit cards invisible to hunters’ computers. Clothes for cover, camouflage, and comfort. Protein pills and vitamins. Weapons are a hard call. You’re a spy, not a cop or a soldier. You must protect your cover and weapons get you noticed. Plus weapons wipe out wits. When you strap on a gun or slide a shiv in your sock, you think you’re twice as tough as you’ve ever been. You load your brains into the gun, so your first thought becomes:squeeze the trigger.

Took me three minutes to grab my GODS. Paranoia propels preparation. We kept all our gear ready to go in plain sight of the Keepers. If they realized we were maintaining Op alert status in the safety of our homeland insane asylum, that awareness became simply more proof that we were crazy and right where we belonged.

What I stuffed into my black nylon computer case bag:

One set of underwear and socks, a polypropelene skiing shirt.

One toiletries kit—soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant. Like airport security guards, our Keepers rationed our razors, fingernail clippers, or scissors.

One notebook and two of the permitted felt-tip pens.

One leather flight jacket that held my wallet with $84 and my expired California driver’s license.

One first edition of William Carlos Williamsgreatest hitsthat hid a snapshot of shy Derya on a roof, her cinnamon hair floating in the breeze of Kuala Lumpur.

One hand-sized souvenir of New York city that I didn’t get there.