Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand
They waited in the car until they got a call from Dispatch saying there was no answer on either the land line or the cell phone in Bernard Lang’s name. They were cleared to enter the house using the victim’s key.
Inside they found Lang’s favorite color had been applied here as well. The living room featured a contour sectional sofa in yellow Italian leather. The walls were white, the floor mahogany, but there were splashes of yellow here, there and everywhere, including the drapes, a Mexican scatter rug, two vase lamps, and a larger-than-life painting of a tanned male ass on a bright yellow beach blanket.
“Suppose he’s married?” Hutchins joked.
Money was in evidence, literally. Aside from the leather furniture, high-tech entertainment system including 60-inch flat screen TV and Bose speakers, there was a display cabinet of rare coins, a couple of which looked to be gold. Out on the deck, a hot tub overlooked more yellow flowers in a landscaped garden sloping steeply downhill. Over the tree tops, they could see Richmond on the other side of San Pablo Bay. Starrett figured the place was worth three or four million.
While Hutchins checked out the lower half of the house built into the side of the hillcrest, Starrett looked around the main floor. The dining room had a massive teak table and chairs for eight. In the kitchen were brushed steel appliances and a refrigerator the size of a walk-in closet, purring like a contented cat. It was a far cry from his Sausalito bungalow downwind of the tidal flats, where his old fridge gurgled and heaved in the middle of the night like an asthmatic hippo on life support.
He inspected a message pad on the granite kitchen counter, saw a few names and local numbers, nothing that triggered suspicion.
Downstairs, the master bedroom had a king-size bed with yellow sheets and pillowcases. Huge mahogany dresser with a big jewelry box lying open – rings and bracelets and chains in gold and silver, several expensive watches. Mirrored walk-in closet, packed to the scuppers with clothes. Ensuite bathroom done in yellow tile.
At the end of the hall were two more bedrooms, one set up like an office with desk, computer and bookcases. Hutchins was in the other room which had a lived-in, smoked-in feel to it, from the casually-made-up bed to the scatter of magazines on the floor. Two guitars, one acoustic and one electric, flanked a stool in a corner.
Hutchins sat on the bed, flipping through a bunch of brochures and other loose documents he’d found in the night table drawer. Along with a baggie full of weed, to which he silently drew Starrett’s attention.
“House guest?” Starrett said.
Hutchins shook his head. “Too much personal stuff. More like a roommate, I think. Some kind of bowling freak by the looks of this. Got a brochure here for a national tournament this week in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Along with flight itinerary via Southwest Airlines...”
“Man got a name?”
“Reservations in the name of Dave Munson.”
“Anything with a hotel indicated? In the absence of next-of-kin, he’s the logical place to start with notification.”
“Not that I can see,” Hutchins said.
“Let’s go back to the office. I’ll call the phone company, see if they’ve got a cell number in Munson’s name.”
Chapter 11
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Roughly in the middle of the Land of Enchantment, where I-25 intersected I-40, Albuquerque sprawled in a westward slope from the Sandia Mountain ridge to the Rio Grande. The old Route 66 that ran right through the city was now little more than a memory preserved by nostalgic route signs and tacky souvenir shops along Central Avenue, the ancient route of passage now subsumed by the I-40 that took people to Arizona or California much faster. South of the Interstates’ crossing, several affordable motels catered to budget-minded tourists and working professionals on limited expense accounts.
Visible from the southbound traffic on I-25, a neon sign flashed beneath the desert-clear night sky: Roughrider Motor Inn. On the west side of the motel court a black Dodge Ram pickup and a white Chevy Cavalier were parked so close together a coyote couldn’t squeeze between them.
Inside Unit 12, a trail of running shoes and combat boots, jeans and shirts, socks and underwear, led to a king-size bed where two naked men in their thirties made out, their sweat-glistened bodies illuminated only by the flickering light of a muted TV. On the bedside table an alarm clock radio displaying a few minutes past eleven thumped out some rockabilly rap music, to which the lovers provided the occasional counter-point of appreciative grunts and expletives. Next to it lay a cell phone that was turned off, thus rendering it unavailable for an incoming call from California or anywhere else.
From atop a dresser a smoky red-and-blue bowling ball peered through the open flap of its tote bag, silent witness to its owner’s transient pleasure. Etched in its satin finish were the words Triple Storm Xpress, a name that evoked powerful natural forces, coming quickly.
Chapter 12
Toronto
Axel Crowe rode the streetcar from Queen Street West across the city to The Beaches, almost an hour between his place and Guruji’s. Occasionally he drove his car but often used public transit. Aside from minimizing his eco-footprint, the trip gave him time to observe and think. Tonight he had a lot to think about.
Guruji had cut him loose.
Crowe had seen it coming from a distance. Traditional wisdom held that when Jupiter and Rahu, the ascending node in the Moon’s orbit, occupied the same sign, rifts developed between teacher and student. The phenomenon was called Guru-Chandala Yoga. Guru was the teacher, while Chandala were people who hunted animals or traded in skin and bones. Although not taken literally, it implied a difference in values that ran the gamut from dietary to intellectual, moral, sexual and spiritual.
Metaphysics aside, there was a mundane element. Crowe had studied with Guruji for fourteen years. For thirteen years he’d rented apartments in the Parkdale neighborhood where a former mental institution had been closed due to budget cuts and many of its inmates set free on the streets. Now it was more of an artist’s community, although sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. He’d lived there because Guruji lived there, a matter of convenience since they’d spent so much time together.
During those years, he’d learned many things from Guruji – astrology, palmistry, ayurveda, numerology, philosophy, and vaastu, the Vedic science of spatial dynamics. He’d also sacrificed many things – eating meat, drinking alcohol, sleep, ego. And there were things he’d been forced to confront – his aggression, ambition and lust...
A year ago he’d bought a house in The Beaches. It was a neighborhood he loved – the small-town ambience of Queen Street East where the big box stores were unable to wedge themselves into the heavily-treed blocks of houses a stroll away from Lake Ontario. There was a park that ran along the shore, a bicycle path and boardwalk, the beach…
Below the surface, a secret motivation had lurked. He’d needed some distance from Guruji. For the last seven years he’d been under a spiritual injunction to minimize his sexual activity. It was all part of the program, Guruji had lectured him. You cannot let your little head do your thinking. You must show him who is boss. Until you master this on your own, I am the boss. You have a choice to make. If you want to learn subtle things, you must become a subtle person. No meat, no alcohol, no drugs, no sex.
At first, there’d been slippage – one step back for every three forward. Meat, drugs and alcohol were never a problem but when it came to the opposite sex, it was a struggle. Crowe liked women. He’d always had more female friends than male, been as willing to share his feelings as assert his opinions, more interested in discussing psychology than sports, as intuitive as he was logical…
To forbid himself the pleasure of their intimacy was like denying a part of human experience. But he did so for seven long years. When he moved to The Beaches, however, things changed. Parkdale had been a confinement, a starvation diet. The Beaches had given him a newfound freedom, like a college student moving out of
But he was never completely out of Guruji’s sight. He could run but he couldn’t hide. Never mind that his birth chart in Guruji’s hands rendered him an open book. Guruji’s intuition was so powerful that wherever he turned his attention a glaring spotlight revealed naked truth, warts and all. To associate with Guruji was to give up all disguise and pretense.
Crowe didn’t kid himself that moving across town would allow him a secret life. Maybe it was just the remnants of his ego that risked defying a rule laid down years ago. Had lust corrupted their relationship or was it Nature’s way of saying, time to move on? His actions had in turn prompted Guruji’s response. He would have the rest of his life to digest the ramifications.
The great irony was, today he had not succumbed to desire, despite the temptation of a certain redhead. But he’d struggled with it. He’d tried to be strong and he knew that Guruji knew, yet still Guruji was on his case… It was an exercise in futility trying to understand his guru, whose Tantrik ways had always remained an enigma. So it was now with mixed feelings – both remorse and relief – that Crowe contemplated his future.
~~~
Crowe debarked at Kew Gardens and walked up Wheeler Street. His old Saab was parked in front of 18 Wheeler, front wheels angled into the curb to keep from rolling down the steep hill. Once red, twenty years of sun had faded it to the color of rust, conveniently disguising the decay under the rocker panels and the wheel wells.
Crowe unlocked the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The house was divided into two apartments, one for him and one for a tenant whose rent paid the mortgage. It was a pricey neighborhood, but reasonable when compared to the section south of Queen Street that lay within a stone’s throw of the lake.
The apartment had a spacious feel. A large living room doubled as his office. In the middle was a single bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. In back was a kitchen with a walkout to a large deck. Large windows at either end of the apartment provided direct sunlight early morning and late afternoon.
Crowe dropped his knapsack and went out onto the deck. He looked westward to Toronto’s downtown skyline – the CN Tower and the office skyscrapers clustered around Front and Bay Streets. To the south, Lake Ontario was a flat plane of darkness sparkled here and there by the lights of boats.
A cat meowed and jumped down from a patio chair. “Hey, Kosmo, how’s my buddy?” Crowe stroked the large grey cat that belonged to his tenant downstairs.
He went inside. The light on his phone was blinking. He checked his messages. A request for a consultation from a local client. Confirmation from another client in New York that she’d pick him up at the airport tomorrow morning. Another consultation request from a client in Vancouver.
He went to his bedroom and checked his overnight bag. Packed and ready to go, his passport lying on top. He went to his desk, logged onto the Air Canada site and printed his boarding pass. He checked his email and found more queries from potential clients. A Dallas businessman negotiating a lucrative government contract. A British diplomat facing a bitter divorce. A natural healer in Chicago contemplating study with a shaman in Peru.
Ten years ago, Crowe had been doing readings for students trying to choose a career, and New Age housewives seeking purpose in life. Thanks to Guruji his skills had improved and his reputation spread by word of mouth to three continents, such that a steady queue of clients now awaited his counsel. Not that he was perfect, not by a long shot. He couldn’t hold a candle to Guruji’s 99% accuracy. Maybe if he’d remained celibate the rest of his life…
Crowe picked up his acoustic guitar, a Gibson he’d bought in university. He went out on the deck and played a few blues ballads for Kosmo. As usual, the cat made a lousy audience, twisting and turning in his chair like he couldn’t get comfortable, rubbing his paws over his ears, finally retreating down the fire escape to the relative silence of the back yard. Crowe hung up his guitar. Obviously his singing left something to be desired.
Chapter 13
Washington, DC
A light rain fell on the District of Columbia, rendering the streets as slick as many of the politicians and professional bureaucrats who’d staked out Washington as their turf. Dimly seen through the drizzle, the navigation lights of a low-flying helicopter blinked as it clattered across the sky toward Capitol Hill. The weather forecast called for heavy thunderstorms overnight and traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue was thin. Tuesday night was not a social night in Washington and most mandarins were in bed with their wives or concubines. In the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, however, the office lights were still on.
In his office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, FBI Director Robert Bueller sat at a semi-circular mahogany desk that supported a tall stack of files at one end and, moving clockwise along the curve, five other stacks of descending height, his own little mountain range of information. As he scanned one of the day’s active files, overshadowed by the familiar vista of hundreds more to read, he realized his Sisyphean workload was costing him both his marriage and his stomach lining. Although visits to the best restaurants in Georgetown and gifts of jewelry temporarily assuaged the former, the only relief for the latter came from bottles of pink liquid stored in his desk drawer.
His phone rang. He glanced at the number and saw it was a call he’d been expecting. “Evening, George.”
Eight miles away in Langley, Director George Gann of the CIA sat in his own office behind a granite-topped desk the size of a snooker table. Lined up on it like fighters on the deck of an aircraft carrier were several briefing files, each with color-coded flaps identifying them as urgent reading and/or handling by the Director. “Hey, Bobby. I’ve got Mack Horton, Los Alamos security chief, on the line.”
“Go ahead,” Bueller said.
Eighteen hundred miles and two time zones away, Mack Horton sat alone in his Los Alamos office. Horton was a veteran of two wars, in one of which he’d caught shrapnel in his left knee. Although the VA surgeons had given him a titanium-and-ceramic replacement joint, the wound had ended his military career. Luckily he’d done a stint in Army Intelligence which, aided by a good buddy network, had got him into the National Laboratory five years ago.
“Tell us what you’ve got,” Gann prompted.
Horton cleared his throat. “Twenty-eighteen hours Mountain Daylight Time, a car bomb went off in the parking lot of Site Twenty-seven. Sole casualty was Dr. Walter Cassidy. He was a team leader for several interrelated projects combating internet-based terrorism. A mathematics genius who also had management skills, he was a rarity in these parts. It’s a major loss to the projects he was engaged in.”
“Anything of significance in the way he was killed?” Bueller asked.
“Our technical guys are still sifting through the wreckage. They found fragments of an MP3 player and an ignition circuit wired to his vehicle’s cigarette lighter. Pretty low-tech, but simple and effective. We’ve seen hits like this in Baghdad, Beirut, Jakarta...”
“An MP3 player?” Gann said.
“One of Cassidy’s team members was only thirty feet away when this happened. He heard a loud blast of Arab music just before Cassidy’s vehicle went off in all directions.”
“Anything on the origins of the explosive?”
“Too soon to say. We’ve got a hundred pounds of debris now undergoing chemical analysis. We’ll know more tomorrow.”
“So no suspects?”
“Too soon to do more than speculate.”
“Anything compromised?” Bueller said.
“I don’t think so,” Horton said. “I got State Police to secure Cassidy’s house in Santa Fe till my guys got there. In the meantime I’ve put all our facilities on Red Alert. Until we know what’s happening, we need to play it safe for the sake of the projects.”
“Can’t be too prudent,” Bueller agreed. “Anything else?”
“Not tonight.”
“Thanks, Mack,” Gann said. “Keep us posted, will yo
“Yes, sir. Good night.”
Horton hung up. Bueller and Gann stayed on the line.
“What the hell is this, George? Some new counter-offensive in the war against terror? Is al-Qaeda going after our people the same way you’ve been targeting theirs? And taunting us with their music?”
“If so, it’s a double twist. Number one, it’s rare to see anything like this on domestic soil. Number two, it’s not a typical target. They like to hit politicians and military. This would be a first for scientific personnel. But Cassidy’s too low profile to merit that kind of attention.”
“Too low? Your man in Los Alamos called him a genius. Is that hyperbole, or is he really an Einstein?”
“I don’t know.” Gann referred to a three-page resume before him. “He’s got degrees up the yin-yang but so do lots of our people and no one’s blown up their cars… yet.”
“Maybe they’re just trying to get at us any way they can, poke their fingers in our eyes, show us they can come right into our back yard like we’ve done in theirs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your people never caught any wind of this?”
“Nothing that merited a report. But I’ll kick some butt tonight and see what’s what.”
“You’ll call me in the morning?”
“Sure.”
“Who’s going to tell the White House?”
“I’ll do it.” Gann looked at his watch. “They’re always up till midnight anyway, watching Letterman.”
Chapter 14
Santa Fe, New Mexico
In an upper-middle-class subdivision of the city’s north side, local residents coming home after an evening out found the entrance to the Piños Verdes cul-de-sac blocked by a New Mexico State Police cruiser. Two officers checked for ID and asked the residents to go straight home and not linger on the street. Even if they did dawdle a moment in their driveways to gawk, there was little to see.
Two black Ford Explorers were parked at the end of the street, blocking the view of both the carport and the front door of the ranch house. Even if a curious neighbor walked down for a closer look, another State Police car was parked crosswise in front of the two Explorers where a pair of state troopers served notice that the scene was off limits.