Black Market

“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” David Hudson was pinioned down and helpless. “Please leave me alone!”

Something very large and black, a huge flapping bird grabbed on to his face. It smelled like burning rubber, but worse than that, it began to crawl all over his face.

“Get it off me! Get it off me! Please get it off me!”

Then a shaft of light-gleaming, beautiful light shone in his deep dark tunnel of terror.

A scream came that seemed very far away… It was his.

Impossible.

Army corpsmen were staring down.

Ours.

Our corpsmen!

“Breathe deeply, Captain Hudson. Just breathe now. Just breathe. Breathe. There, that's good. That's very good… That's excellent, Captain Hudson.

“It's pure oxygen, Captain. Oxygen! Breathe. Breathe. Breathe deeply.”

White cloth straps were holding him tightly, painfully so. Blue and red plastic tubes ran in and out of his nose. More tubes were connected to his arms and legs. Colored wires and rubber plugs were attached to his chest and from there to an icy blue machine.

“Captain Hudson. Captain Hudson, can you hear me? Can you understand me? You're in the Womack Hospital at Fort Bragg, Captain. You're going to be all right. Captain, can you understand me? You're in the Womack Hospital.”

“Oh, please help me.”

He was sobbing uncontrollably for the first time since he'd been a little boy. What was happening? Oh, please, what was this? What was real and what wasn't?

“Captain, you're in the Fort Bragg Center. You're in the JFK Special Warfare Center… Captain Hudson?… Captain?… Just breathe the oxygen! Captain, that's an order Breathe in… breathe out… that's very good. Very, very good. That's excellent, Captain.”

Lying on his back, staring silently up at vague forms and swimming shapes, David Hudson thought that maybe he knew this man.

Familiar voice? Familiar drooping walrus mustache. Did he know him? Was the man actually there? Hudson reached out to touch, but the cloth straps restrained him.

“Captain Hudson, you're in Fort Bragg. This was a stress and tolerance test. Do you remember now?

“Captain Hudson, this has been a drug-induced test. You haven't left this hospital room. You were flashing back to Vietnam.”

None of this happened?

No-there had been a Vietcong prison camp! Hallucinations?

There had been a Lizard Man!

Oh, please, make this all stop now.

“Captain Hudson, you revealed nothing about your mission. You passed your tolerance test. Flying colors, pal. You were really great. Congratulations.”

Mission?

Test?

Sure thing. Just a little pop quiz. Okay.

“You're beginning to understand illusion, Captain. You refused to be interrogated under drugs… You're learning to be illusion's master. You're learning the fine art of deception, Captain Hudson. The art of our deadliest enemies…”

“Horse Latitudes” was playing somewhere in the hospital… in the Special Forces Center. Deception.

“Breathe that good air, Captain Hudson. Just breathe in easily. Pure, pure oxygen. You passed, Captain. You're the best so far. You're the best we've tested.”

Stress and tolerance tests.

The Womack Hospital at Fort Bragg.

Deception.

He was learning to be illusion's master.

Deception.

You passed, Captain Hudson. Flying colors, pal.

Of course-I'm the best you have!

I've always been the best-at everything.

That's why I'm here, isn't it?

That's why I was chosen for this training.

Hallucination.

“Breathe that pure oxygen, Captain Hudson.”

Deception.

23

Riverdale, New York City

Arch Carroll was only barely awake, barely functioning. Familiar home surroundings coalesced:

Books on the mantel-Carroll loved nonfiction and also mysteries: The Brethren, Fatal Vision, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Fate of the Earth.

An oil painting of his father, done by Mary Katherine, hung on one wall.

And there were children. Lots and lots of small children.

They were eyeing him suspiciously, waiting for him to speak his mind, to say something characteristically flip and amazing.

Carroll slowly sipped fresh-brewed coffee from a cracked Return of the Jedi mug. “Sunrise Semester” flickered on the portable TV with the sound off. The horizontal line lazily flipped out of sync with the rest of the room.

The Carroll clan was together for a rare family conference. The menu comprised coffee, cocoa, and Arch Carroll's world-famous pop-up toaster waffles. It wasn't quite 6:00 A.M. on the morning of December 14. Green Band felt dead and buried in his mind.

“Mmff… mmff… Lizzie mmff… Lizzie was a son of a bitch, Dad. While you were gone away.”

Mickey Kevin reported this important news as he chewed gooey, heavily syruped wads of waffle. His mouth flapped open in a rubbery, half-smiling circle.

“I think I told you about that kind of gutter talk.”

“Mmff, mmff. You use gutter talk.”

“Yeah, maybe my dad didn't kick my rear end enough. I won't make that same mistake, okay?”

“Besides, I wasn't a son of a bitch. He was.” Lizzie suddenly glared up from the soggy remains on her plate.

“Lizard! You're not too big to get an Ivory soap sandwich, either. Big bar, right fresh out of the wrapper.”

The most angelic smile lit up Lizzie's face. “An Ivory soap sandwich, Daddy?… Better than Eggo, still-a-little-frozen waffles!” She leveled her father with a deadpan, brutal evaluation of his not entirely home-cooked breakfast offerings.

They all began to laugh, then. Clancy and Mary started to giggle, nearly falling off their chairs. Mickey Kevin did topple off, like a carnival Kewpie doll. Carroll finally gave up and broke into a sleepy smile. He winked over at Mary K., who was letting him run the familiar four-ring circus this morning.

He had been trying to tell them about his almost tragic trip to Europe. He'd been trying to be a reasonably good dad for the four of them… He fuzzily remembered how his own father had done the same sort of thing; telling sanitized stories about the 91st Precinct, right in that very same breakfast nook on Sunday mornings.

Finally, after putting it off at least thirty minutes, Arch Carroll came to the really difficult part of his story-the punch line, so to speak-the core of his tale of adventure and foreign intrigue in England and Ireland…

He was going to try to make this all sound very casual now… No big deal, right? So begin.

“Over in Europe, I was working with someone… They had these special teams of police and financial people. Our best people. We worked in London, then in Belfast, together. A lady was nearly killed there, in fact. Over in Ireland. Her name's Caitlin. Caitlin Dillon.”

Silence. The big chill comes to the Carroll house.

Keep going. Don't stop now.

“Sometime I'd like you guys to meet her. She's originally, uh, she's from out in Ohio. She's pretty funny, actually. Very nice. For a girl. Ha ha.”

Absolute, stone-cold silence…

Finally, a very tiny muffled reply from Lizzie. “No, thank you.”

Carroll's eyes slowly, ever so slowly, passed from face to small, stony face.

Mickey, who looked all soft and vulnerable in his Yankee pin-striped pj's with slipper socks, was amazingly close to tears. Clancy, in an oversized robe that made him look like ET in the movie's beer-drinking scene, was silent and more stoic. His small body was rigid with control.

They were angry and unbelievably hurt-all at the same time. They knew exactly what was happening here.

“Hey, come on, lighten up, okay?” Carroll tried to make it seem a little funny. Bill Murray on “Saturday Night Live,' which he did pretty well, despite the lack of any facial resemblance.

“I talked to a woman who I happen to work with. Just talked. Hello, blah, blah, blah, good-bye.”

They wouldn't say a word to him. They stared at him as if he had just said he was going to leave them. They made him feel so horribly bad.

Come on, it's been three goddamn years.