Chasm

  CHASM

  Copyright 2006 by James Bruno

  CHAPTER ONE

  When he awoke at dawn, slaughtering his family was not on his mind.

  Polishing up his speech to the Yale Club was. Let’s see now. Refugees. Ah, yes. Will have to dig into the refugee issue. Don’t know squat about refugees, even though the State Department says I’m an expert. Time. Time. Time. Not enough. And the deceit…

  One thing that really, really got William Winford Ferret’s goat more than anything else was the way his wife threw his socks into the dresser drawer willy-nilly. Browns and blues and grays and greens and whites all mixed up together. But tossing the argyles into the mélange got to his craw. Argyles, already incorporating a mix of colors, simply did not belong with the rest of them. Any fool knew that. He would talk to her later about it. Calm, Win. Be calm. Old blood Connecticut Yankees kept their cool. Sign of a good diplomat as well as a good husband.

  He closed the bathroom door tightly, yet silently. He tried to lock the door. But the lock was jammed. Why don’t they tell me when things need to be fixed? Lynette must be told once more. And the boys too. And mother. Mother…

  He reached down into the cabinet below the sink and retrieved that can of Edge — the extra tall one for tough beards that said “25% free!” Connecticut Yankees loved bargains. He pulled out one new Schick razor from a crisp cellophane bag. He looked around, out the window. Then breathed easily. He wet his face and applied the lather. Refugees. Must look good before my fellow alumni. These folks are as smart as they come. You can get away with winging it before the Raleigh Rotary Club. But not before Yalees in Washington, D.C. Cream of the cream. Power elite and all that. They can spot a phony a mile away.

  A rivulet of blood sprang from his flesh, just below the chin. He froze and stared at himself in the cabinet mirror. The crimson trickle poured effortlessly down his neck. A tiny, serpentine current progressing without hindrance, aided by wet skin and gravity. How fascinating. Life’s essence oozing forth with the ease of a spring brook in a virgin wood. How horrifying. Unlike a brook, its content was finite. If enough escaped the confines of a body, that body would cease to function, would die. An athletic man, not yet forty, a healthy man with so much to live for, could expire if the outflow were not stanched. Women and children, smaller and weaker than men, presumably would die faster.

  The door burst open with a violent bang. The rat-a-tat-tat echoed off the tiles and exploded into his head. A nebula of primal emotions erupted from his innermost core, uncontrolled, spectacular forces that instantly devoured and neutralized his humanity. Except for one overriding instinct: survival.

  Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat. He saw nothing. He felt nothing. He was subsumed in a brilliant mega-burst of light. It guided him. Told him what to do to survive. The all-encompassing white light held him, steered him, empowered him. At this moment there was no thinking, no morality, no yes, no no. Only survival.

  All fell silent. The violent nebula ceased. A painful cold replaced the powerful, blinding light. A child stood before him laughing. No. Cackling. Mocking. Sneering. At him. At the instant when the urge to survive was to be transmogrified into counteraction, overwhelming counterforce, it stopped. His heart pumped like a piston in a racing engine. The sweat pouring from his brow entered his eyes and blurred his vision. Rat-a-tat-tat was replaced by this cruel, little child’s squeal. A gleeful, high-pitched squeal which, coupled with his bent-over position and flushed face, broadcasted, “I am the victor at your expense. You stupid, unproud adult fool!”

  Reason returned, yet the blunt force of survival lingered. He had to do all he could tocalm it, direct it inward, always inward. Anger supplanted it. His firm grip on the boy’s shoulders and vigorous shaking broke the five-year old’s mirth. The child’s plastic “Terminator” machine gun dropped to the floor.

  “Rup! Rup! Rup! Rup!” The Golden Retriever hopped around them. He sensed the tension. A dog’s barking in such circumstances can signal the need for help or simply its own hysteria.

  “Jeremy, What is WRONG with you!! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?! Don’t ever do that again!”

  The boy scrunched his face up and began to wail. Tears streamed down his freckled face. “Whaa! Whaaa!!” The crying only fed Ferret’s anger. And it got louder.

  “RUP! RUP! RUP!” The dog barked more loudly. It nipped at Ferret’s pant cuffs.

  “All right! All right!” The matron appeared at the top of the stairs. She was wiping her hands, wet with soap suds, with a dish towel. She gathered the boy into her arms and comforted him. “That’s okay. There’s my boy. Aww. Don’t be frightened. Daddy didn’t mean any harm.” She shot a reproving glance at Ferret.

  “Mother, he scared the living day lights out of me.”

  “We’ll talk later.” She lifted Jeremy in her arms and carried him downstairs with the pet in tow. He could hear Lynette’s voice. “What did Daddy do?…My heavens…come here little one…Mommy will take care of you.”

  Ferret shut his eyes. Too much. Escape. I must…”

  “Win, are you all right?” Lynette’s face was the definition of wifely concern. Her neat blonde hairdo accentuated the proper good looks of a generic Midwestern, all-American girl.

  “Yes…” He shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just that Jeremy…”

  “Have you taken your medicine?” she asked in a hushed voice. She reached into the medicine cabinet and took out a small plastic bottle, opened it and looked inside. “Time for a refill. I’ll do it this afternoon on my way to art class.” She shook out one capsule, filled the bathroom cup with water and offered both up to her husband. “Here. Only one gulp and it’s done. Come on.”

  “I really don’t think I need—”

  She popped the pill into his mouth and pressed the cup against his lips. “Let’s do a-l-l gone. Like a good boy.” He swallowed it and washed it down.

  “That doctor. I feel he’s got it wrong. I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

  She placed her hands around his waist. “Darling, he knows what he’s doing. He’s one of the best. Been treating half of Bethesda for years. And forget your male pride and that damn Yankee stoicism of yours. Depression is no shame. Lot’s of people have it. And it’s treatable.” She kissed him, then smiled. “Come on, hon’. Breakfast. Your mother’s making blueberry pancakes and bacon. Your favorite.”

  Ferret hated his job. But with a wife, three kids, his mother, a mortgage on a suburban ranch house and two cars to support and maintain, he didn’t have the luxury of dreaming about a radical change of careers.

  But during the 30-minute commute between the Bethesda neighborhood of Carderock Springs and the State Department, Ferret would dream of what might be or have been. Above all, he’d wanted to be a news reporter. He had developed fact-gathering and writing skills from his three years as an Army intelligence officer. And he had the language skills to qualify him as a foreign correspondent. “This is Win Ferret reporting from Jerusalem.” “And Baghdad braces itself anxiously as the bombs claim scores of innocent victims. Back to you, Brian.” He would practice aloud newsmen’s sign-offs with a dramatic flurry as he drove the 1991 Dodge Caravan down River Road. Then reality would take over again.

  The Office of Special Admissions, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, occupied a suite of offices in the basement of Main State — the headquarters building housing the Secretary, his senior staff and the regional bureaus. Just three blocks from the White House, Main State had all the flourish and charm of a Soviet ministry of mines. The Washington Post’s architectural critic once described it as “modern Mussolini office building minus the grandiosity.”

  “D” Street entrance interior, like all the building’s entrances, hadn’t changed — except for the electronic, I.D.-rea
ding turnstiles — since the structure was completed in 1954. Ferret, clad in a gray-beige London Fog raincoat, trudged in lock-step with all the other gray-coated, attaché case-bearing bureaucrats reporting for work at 8:15 on an overcast November morning. The walls, exterior as well as interior, were also gray-beige. Only glass doors and aluminum trim on the stairwells and chronically malfunctioning elevators detracted a bit from the scheme of common-denominator non-colors. The overall effect was of conformity. People blended easily into the walls. A homogenized universe of unremarkable lost souls.

  The Office of Special Admissions was tucked away in a rear corner. What set it apart from other State Department offices was a security door which opened after one pressed the correct combination on the electronic access box just to the right. As with all employees who had to deal with such devices, Ferret quickly tapped the code by habit; he wouldn’t be able to recall the actual numerical combination if his life depended on it.

  Inside the door, there was a second security check: a human being in the form of a pleasant African-American receptionist named Gerrie. “Good mawnin’ Mr. Ferret,” she drawled. “How’s Lynette and the boys?”

  “Oh, just fine. Fine,” Ferret mumbled. He forced a courteous smile.

  “Ambassador Goldman wants to see you,” she added.

  “Uh, sure.” Ferret felt a headache coming on. He preferred to ease into his work in the mornings. Being confronted with immediate demands while still shaking off vestiges of sleep wreaked havoc on his nervous system.

  “Hey, Win. Those boys still cleanin’ up at the swim meets?”

  “Yeah. You bet,” Ferret answered security chief Pete Boyar.

  “You can be proud of those—” Boyar went into a spasm of coughs. His last overseas tour, three years as head of embassy security in Bogota took a heavy toll on the former athlete. Recurrent malaria, chronic hepatitis, an assortment of parasites and three months as a hostage of the guerrilla group M-19 claimed thirty pounds, his health and the remainder of his youth.

  “Get some rest, Pete.”

  “Can’t.” Cough, cough, hack, hack. “Outta leave. Besides, I’m fine. A Washington tour is just what the doc ordered. Heh, heh.” He managed a cheery grin on his sallow face.

  Ferret liked the security man. But he had an uneasy feeling, the queasy feeling one gets when staring at death directly in the face. Boyar’s complexion was grayish-yellow. He was losing his hair. Dark circles framed sunken eyes. They said that he’d lost two-thirds of his liver to the hepatitis. An M-19 torturer cleaved off two of his toes and one pinky. But better to have been a hostage of political guerrillas. The Medellin druggies were worse. A captured DEA agent several years back was flayed and slowly dismembered over a week’s time before being thrown into a crocodile pit.

  As he did every morning, Ferret hung his coat and set his brief case on the corner of the desk in his modular cubicle. He switched on his computer. “You have unread item(s),” blinked the screen. Ferret checked his email. “Please see Ambassador Goldman at OOB,” it read. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Escape. Escape.

  A metallic noise made him snap to. A little man was adjusting the venetian blinds on the single window in this corner of the suite. “Gotta keep these shut,” exclaimed Boyar’s deputy, Leonard Crudd, in his nasally voice. The diminutive man stood on the window sill. With a flick of his hands, he shut the curtains tight, thus blocking all natural light. Like the final, supercharged rays of an expiring star, the overhead fluorescent lamps now reigned supreme in the sterile office space.

  Ferret looked around him, his eyes flitting in all directions as if searching for an emergency exit. They rested on a terra cotta pot on the window sill. He picked it up and studied the brown stem and desiccated leaves of the near-dead coleus. “Ah Yorick. I knew him Horatio,” he said.

  “How’s that, Mr. Ferret?” Crudd asked.

  “No life,” Ferret murmured.

  “Huh? Oh, right. Yeah, plants don’t grow good in here. But security comes first. Gotta keep this place tight as a drum. That’s my job. Mr. Ferret, please drop by to get your new safe combination and sign new nondisclosure forms. Just routine.”

  In the innermost recesses of his brain, a furious eruption was taking place. Blood was displaced by something much more potent. In his mind’s eye, Ferret saw lava, brilliant, blinding, cosmically hot, spewing skyward in a ballet of savagery, directed only by the forces of nature.

  “Hey, how’s Mrs. Ferret, anyway? Everybody loved her pictures at the art show last week.”

  “Huh?” Ferret struggled to mentally resurface.

  “At the Foreign Service Family Art Show. Remember?” The security man eyed Ferret worriedly.

  “Uh, sure. Of course.”

  “You got a great gal there, Mr. Ferret. Pretty, talented. She can cook good too, judging from her Christmas pies.”

  Ferret regarded Crudd carefully. The stooped, balding nebbish of a man became transformed into an ogrish figure from a Bosch painting. Grotesque and malevolent. A minor keeper of the Gates of Hell.

  Crudd dismissed himself after once again reminding Ferret to report to the security office.

  Ferret took three deep breaths. He then marched back across the suite to the Front Office. He automatically returned the “Good mornings” and “Hi Wins,” though not fully conscious of doing so.

  Brenda Hitz greeted Ferret with a curt smile. “Ah, Mr. Ferret, just in time.” With a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil, she checked off a notation in her desk calendar. A Clairol redhead in a discount-house power suit, Brenda Hitz was Goldman’s “executive assistant.” As computers displaced more secretaries, those survivors fortunate to have landed jobs with senior officials got their titles changed. Typical of great bureaucracies everywhere, this form of title inflation served simultaneously as ego gratification and faux job protection.

  “Please have a seat. The Ambassador will see you in a moment.” Brenda lowered her eyes, pretending to read a terse, overclassified cable on a topic that was of great interest to several dozen government functionaries and a handful of outside academics. As an “executive assistant,” she had to stay on top of the issues, a quest of those who made their existence inside the Beltway, just as recovering the Holy Land was for their forebears.

  As Goldman shook hands with Ferret, he gripped the latter’s upper arm with his other hand and kept direct eye contact. American power purveyors, both real and self-styled, possessed a peculiar form of assertive and perky business manner developed over centuries of selling and trading land rush domains, all manner of bovines, and slaves.

  With his graying temples, Oleg Cassini suit and studied casual air, Goldman was typical of his breed, the soon-to-be retired successful professional still hoping for that one last grab at the brass ring.

  “How’s Cloris?”

  “Mother’s fine.”

  “And the kids? Fine boys you got there. Tell Lynette that she should be working on Broadway or in Hollywood. Her Halloween costumes are the best. We really enjoyed seeing the boys dressed up.” Goldman had no idea the boys’ names, having seen them all of two minutes on his stoop soliciting Halloween treats.

  “Yes. Great family.” Ferret stared at his shoes. “Don’t know what I’d do without them.”

  Brenda Hitz entered and placed a pile of papers neatly stacked in Goldman’s empty in-box.

  He winked thanks to her. “Most of it is cable traffic from Conakry. I just can’t let go. Thought that maybe I could be useful should the Administration want my advice…”

  Goldman had reached the pinnacle of his thirty-year diplomatic career as U.S. ambassador to Guinea, an African country which slid unnoticed into oblivion after the end of the cold war. That he thought that anyone cared about the place or would seek his counsel, no less, underscored the self-importance cum self-delusion that characterized the Washington apparatchik. It was a trait that became especially pronounced in pre-retirement, swan song assignments in the bureaucratic backwaters.

/>   “Well, Win. Back to business. The Dayton Agreement may be history, but much of the responsibility falls on our shoulders to make sure it holds. And we’re doing our part — unheralded and completely behind the scenes, of course. The Secretary has expressed personally his view that Special Admissions has been crucial, that, without us, the whole agreement would’ve been stillborn from the outset.”

  The hypocrisy! Midwives to evil! It’s wrong! It’s wrong!! Ferret betrayed no emotion. On the surface, he took it all in. His honest Yankee’s face remained impassive. Take all of life’s challenges calmly and deal with them. That’s how the Ferrets have survived and risen since they first stepped off the Mayflower, his father used to tell him.

  But the volcanic forces inside began to churn again.

  “This just came in.” Goldman handed Ferret a cable.

  TOP SECRET ULTRA

  280417Z NOV 06

  FROM EMBASSY BELGRADE

  TO SECSTATE WASHDC NIACT IMMEDIATE

  INFO CIA WASHDC

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  JOINT STAFF WASHDC

  SEXTANT CHANNEL

  DISTRIBUTION: CHASM

  NOFORN WNINTEL

  SUBJECT: RESETTLEMENT OF BOSNIAN SERB LEADERS

  1. TOP SECRET ULTRA - ENTIRE TEXT.

  2. FOLLOWING BOSNIAN SERBIAN REPUBLIC (BSR) PERSONNEL TO BE TRANSPORTED VIA C-141 DEPARTING FRANKFURT/MAIN NOV. 30 AT ZULU 2030. ETA ANDREWS ZULU 1130:

  ZINOVIC, BOGDAN; COL. BSR ARMY. DEPENDENTS: MARISA (WIFE), JOZIP (SON), RATKO (SON).

  BAJIC, BRATISLAV; LT. COL. BSR ARMY. NO DEPENDENTS.

  VROZ, ZIVORAD; CIVILIAN, BSR INTERNAL SECURITY SERVICE. DEPENDENTS: LINA (WIFE), DUBRAVKA (DAUGHTER), KATRINA (DAUGHTER); ALIZIA (DAUGHTER).