After the Rain

“Nuclear,” Nina said, letting the suddenly frivolous cigarette drop from her fingers and grinding it under her heel. There are different levels of adrenaline boost: there’s the surge of competition; there’s getting shot at and shooting back. But now she felt a solid jolt of very major high-end juice. A whole different order of magnitude.

“They got one, here?” The idea dried up all her spit.

Hollywood paused, licked his sweaty lips. “When we took off the cuffs, he said, ‘Hiroshima,’ and did, like…” Hollywood made the sign of a mushroom cloud in the air with his hands. “And he said it’s already in the mix. I get the impression he’s giving it up because he thinks it’s too late for us to stop it.”

They locked eyes. Nina could feel her pulse throb in a vein in her throat. “Sporty,” she said.

Not usually this dry, my voice…

“He gave us the name of a smuggler,” Hollywood said, going past her, opening the side door to the van, coming out with an AAA road atlas of the United States.

“No fooling. We got a name,” Nina said, leaning forward.

“Damn straight. And a location: Langdon, North Dakota.”

“Jesus? That’s…”

Hollywood thumbed through the atlas, held it up. “Canadian border. Wheatfields. Doesn’t get more wide open. And, Nina, they’re getting sneaky on us; it ain’t an Arab. I mean…he’s not a Middle Eastern type. Some of the new security must be working, because it sounds like they contracted the job out. It’s one of us. An American.”

Nina bit her lip, thinking. “Once Rashid talks to the suits…”

Hollywood nodded and held up his cell phone. “Yeah, we’ll lose the jump. I had to phone it in. They’re skeptical. Some desk-bound commando actually told me that interrogation was a bit over our pay grade. So fuck ’em. I say we just go with it.”

Nina narrowed her eyes. “On our own?”

“Absolutely. We can’t leave it to the headquarters pogues, not after what happened on 9/11…”

Their eyes locked, more intimate than illicit lovers: WE CAN DO THIS THING.

Hollywood said, “They put us way out on our own. So why not run with it. What do you say?”

Nina clicked her teeth, grinned. “Just grab our go-bags and hit it. Get out ahead of this thing. What’s the name?”

“Shuster.”

“We dump Rashid with the advance party. Go in hot and hard,” Nina said flatly.

“There it is. Just you, me, Bugs, and Jane. And the Hardy Boys for backup. Question is, how?”

“We’ll think of something,” Nina said.

Chapter Two

He sat in his car, a silly smile on his face because he was staring at a wrecked phone booth. The door was off. The side panels splintered. Weeds grew in the cracked concrete floor. A phone booth in the middle of nowhere. But it still worked. And there he was, on the empty prairie waiting for an Arab terrorist to call.

In just a few months his life had turned into a movie. It happened like this: these Arabs were sneaking some explosives across the border, and, by accident, he had stumbled onto their smuggling operation.

At first they were going to kill him. Just step on him, like a bug. On his knees-staring up into the barrel of a pistol-he talked fast to save his life. What had been a private fantasy became his salvation. His would-be killer had listened, then he’d lowered the pistol. He’d invited him to sit down, drink some coffee, talk some more.

He showed them how he could provide access for an attack that would be deadlier than 9/11. And how it couldn’t be done without him. But he wanted something in return. To prove their sincerity, he demanded they help him settle one old score. It was the beginning of the plan.

It wasn’t just the million dollars they were going to pay him. Now that his potential had been revealed, he wanted a new identity. A new life.

Soon, maybe tomorrow, he would leave this desolate flat land. He looked around. The rest of the country liked to laugh about how this was nowhere. Well, all the smug fuckers out there with their Fargo jokes better get ready for a big surprise. All his life he’d been taken for granted. No one had a clue that he was changing.

The idea jolted through him.

Sugar rush.

Charon drained the can of Coke and tossed it into the passenger-seat foot well, where it clattered on seven other empty cans.

Charon was his future name. Billy Charon. William Samuel Charon, exact future address as yet unknown. He’d had to come up with a name fast for the new identification they were providing him. He smiled broadly.

His new afterlife…as it were. There’d be a lot of talk about afterlife when the time came. His would be much more pleasant than a lot of other people’s.

The Mole was not real happy with the name. It was unusual and would draw attention. But Charon insisted on it. People from North Dakota weren’t dumb, after all. They had the highest high school graduation rate in the country. So he’d read a few books, even Greek mythology and some stuff about comparative religion. He’d picked Charon, not just because it was apt, but because he liked the antique implications. Specifically, as pertains to this project, he enjoyed the irony of how the name preceded, and so trumped, the current intermural fuss between the Christians and Islam.

But he believed in giving credit where it was due. He did take comfort from a line of the Koran. The one about he who kills one innocent person kills the whole world. Now that he had killed his first person, it helped him get over the problem of magnitude.

As he waited he turned the Pearl Jam CD up so loud the drums and guitars made the inside of the car jump. Too much, too loud. Back off. Remain calm. Like the Mole always said, don’t draw attention to yourself. He tapped off the stereo.

In the sudden quiet he stared out the windshield at the panorama of sky. Far to the south two white pencil- thin contrails streaked across a solitary patch of blue: F-16s heading home to the Air Force base at Grand Forks. The rest of the sky was massive, stonelike. Endless piles of veined marble clouds. Far to the north, he could make out the dark ribbons of a rainstorm.

He was parked on the cracked concrete apron of an abandoned roadside attraction called Camp’s Paradise Country Club: a miniature golf course, gas station, and general store some optimist had created back during the Missile Time. A few hundred yards away, next to an overgrown railroad siding, a collapsing grain elevator tilted against the sky like a North Dakota tombstone. All his life he’d been hemmed in by this horizon; blue and green bands of monotony in the summer, gray and white in the winter. Now he was going to be free.

And rich.

He’d go somewhere that wasn’t flat, somewhere that wasn’t so hot or so cold. Somewhere with an ocean.

Charon checked the digital clock on the dashboard, put the air conditioner fan down from four to one, and cracked the window so he could hear the pay phone ring in the booth several feet away. In fact, someone had used it already today because Charon saw their tire tracks in the orange mud and also saw that they’d dropped a jelly doughnut on the booth’s damp concrete pad, in front of the broken door.

Dropped it and left it and now a mob of big sturdy black ants swarmed on it.

He wondered how long that doughnut had been out there. Probably only an hour or so, it didn’t look that old. Self-consciously, he looked around. The urge started in his eyes and descended into his mouth, and he felt the saliva start at the back of his tongue.

He licked his lips and stared at the pastry.

The insect activity seemed to burst from a bulge of jelly on the side of the pastry. He squinted. The way the