The Language Of Cannibals

Epilogue

Jack Trex's The Language of Cannibals stood propped up, unwrapped, against the trunk of an elm tree down by the river, along with the other wedding gifts.

"I'm a paramedic with the volunteer ambulance corps in Cairn, so after the shooting at the Community's mansion I was on the scene a few minutes after the police. But I ended up a hospital patient myself. When I saw and heard about what had happened, when I found out that my son was a. . killer, I collapsed. The doctors thought I'd had a heart attack. It wasn't that, but I spent the night in the hospital, under observation. My roommate was one of the Community members who'd been wounded in the shoot-out. She gave me all the details of what had happened, and what she could remember of the conversation between the three of you after Jay here had come to your rescue. She finally told me you'd left just before the police arrived, and that she was pretty sure you'd taken canoes out onto the river and that Gregory was with you. If you'd escaped by way of the river, I knew there was only one place you would have any chance of reaching and hiding out in without being spotted, and that was the quarry. The questions were why you had left the mansion, who or what you were hiding from, and what you hoped to accomplish. And, of course, why you had taken my son. I felt a need to find out what had happened and the reason why you were hiding. I felt responsible for what Gregory had done, since I should have taken steps to straighten him out years ago."

We were sitting at one of a dozen linen-draped tables set up in Jay Trex's riverside yard where the wedding reception, hosted by Cairn's Vietnam veterans, was in progress. Across from us, Jay Acton was leaning back in his lawn chair, practicing chords and idly strumming his father's guitar, which Mary was teaching him to play. Jack Trex seemed to harbor no resentment toward the former KGB operative, indeed seemed to be very fond of him, and I wasn't sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was Elysius Culhane, not Acton, who had stolen his son's soul-and Acton hadn't so much stolen Culhane's soul as probed, twisted, and manipulated the darkness that was already there. Also, the affection might have been due to the fact that Jack Trex was nothing if not patriotic, and it was thanks to Jay Acton that the largest and most insidious KGB operation ever mounted against the United States was being rapidly closed down; we tend to forgive a great deal in those onetime enemies who slip over to our side.

I sipped at my Scotch, said, "You did everything you could for your son, Jack," and wondered if it was true. "Culhane manipulated and stroked him in ways you never could. Gregory was determined to go his own way, and that was the direction in which Culhane steered him. In the end, we all have to be responsible for our own behavior. If it wasn't for you, Garth, Mary, Jay, and I would be dead, Dan Mosely would probably still be Cairn's chief of police, and the KGB would still be using people like Elysius Culhane and your boy to damage the country. You picked one hell of a good time to weigh in."

Jack Trex shrugged his broad shoulders. "Like I said, I felt responsible; I felt I had to do something, even if it was only to find you and my son, try to understand just what the situation was, and help you if I could. I guess I was also looking for a way to help Gregory, although I didn't know what help I could be to him any longer. I had the feeling that something very important was at stake, and that's why I dressed in my old uniform. I guess it gave me courage, maybe even a feeling of. . legitimacy.

"I'd played all over the quarry when I was a kid, so I knew my way around up there. In fact, up there where I was is very close to the site where the veterans have a Watchfire every Memorial Day weekend. There's a trail leading down from the top to the ledge I was on. I didn't want to be seen-by you or the police-and that seemed the best route for me to take to get into the quarry and look around without being spotted. I was already on the ledge, resting and checking out the quarry through my binoculars, when you people came down out of the rocks and took up your positions. I almost called to you then, but I wasn't sure what your reactions would be, and I figured it was just better to wait and see what it was you were up to.

"I saw Elysius Culhane murder my son, and it threw me into a kind of state of shock; it felt like I was paralyzed. I still can't remember clearly what I was thinking while I stared at my son's corpse in the road, but the next thing I knew Dan Mosely was down there with your brother and Mary, Jay was handcuffed to the door of the patrol car, and you were on your way down that rock chute to join them. The rest-well, I couldn't hear everything that was being said, but it didn't look right for Mosely to be holding the guns on Garth and Mary the way he was, and I couldn't understand what all the rest of the cops were doing waiting down at the bottom of the mountain; I know a little something about police procedure, and I knew they wouldn't be there unless Mosely had ordered it. It was clear to me that Mosely wanted you to keep coming down, Mongo, but for some reason you'd changed your mind and were staying put-even if it meant that Mosely was going to shoot your brother and Mary. Nothing Mosely was doing by now looked much like standard police work to me. I'd talked to you, and I knew you were a good man. I figured you had good reasons for what you were doing. Then I heard Mosely starting to count, saw that he intended to kill your brother and Mary, and I made my decision." He paused, smiled faintly, continued, "I was hoping having that leg of mine land next to him might distract him for the half second or so I needed to get a clear shot at him, and it did."

"Thanks for trusting me, Jack," I said quietly.

I had not even been aware that Jay Acton, absorbed as he seemed to be in his guitar playing, had been listening to our conversation. However, he now laid the Gibson gently down on the grass, pulled his chair close to the table, leaned forward on his elbows as he spoke to the Vietnam veteran.

"In the KGB, Jack, there are always watchers watching the watchers, which may explain what Mosely was doing in Cairn. We think now that the KGB, by manipulating the ultra-conservatives under their control, maneuvered to get Dan Mosely, another one of their plants, and a trained assassin, the chiefs job primarily because of me. I'd been successful in planting the idea for a death squad in Culhane's mind and then actually getting him to act on it. The KGB considered Culhane's death squad the prototype for right-wing terrorist squads they wanted to see formed all over the country; the squads would, of course, serve Soviet interests whether or not they were ever discovered, since in no case would there be any direct link to the KGB. So this prototype death squad was of immense interest to the KGB, and it turns out that they weren't too pleased with the fact that I was the operative who'd augmented it. I was suspect- all plants are suspect, but some more than others. The truth is that I've been ambivalent about a lot of things, and particularly about my relationship to America, for some time. I didn't know that my superiors were aware of my feelings, but they obviously were. Their answer was to send a trusted KGB officer and assassin to keep an eye on the embryonic death squad, as well as me. Mosely, whose real name was Sergei Kotcheloff, was a product of the American Academy system in the Soviet Union, a system I spoke to Mongo about. He was infiltrated into this country when he was in his early twenties, and part of his legend included a distinguished service record in Vietnam. That part of his false background enabled him to easily get a job with the NYPD, and he used his position as a police officer for twenty years as a cover for his real job, which was to carry out assassinations in and around the metropolitan area as the need, as the KGB saw it, arose. It was Kotcheloff who killed Mongo's friend, and then my father, in an attempt to keep the whole thing from unraveling. When the death squad failed to kill Mongo, he figured he still had a chance to protect the operation if he killed me, to prevent me from talking if I was captured. It seems possible now that Kotcheloff himself, without Culhane ever being aware of it, was giving direct orders-or suggestions-to members of the death squad, but now we'll probably never know for sure."

Jack Trex was hearing the whole story for the first time; I knew it, so I excused myself with a curt nod and rose from the table as Jay Acton proceeded to fill Jack Trex in on the details of everything that had happened since I'd come to Cairn to ask questions about the death of Michael Burana.

I got a fresh drink from the bar set up near the house, then made my way around the perimeter of the yard, nodding to one of the four hulking, grim-faced, no-nonsense Secret Service agents who had been assigned as our bodyguards, and who accompanied us even to the bathroom; their birth records and childhood histories had been examined under a microscope. Down by the rickety dock, my brother, resplendent in the tuxedo he had chosen to wear, was holding the hand of his wife, resplendent in the simple cotton dress and sandals she had chosen to wear, as they spoke with a group of Vietnam veterans and Cairn police officers. Mr. Lippitt, his totally bald head gleaming in the bright sunlight of a perfect autumn afternoon, was standing just behind Garth, beaming like a proud parent as he kept patting my brother on the back.

I had never seen Garth looking so happy-certainly not in the many years that had passed since his poisoning with nitrophenyldienal, and the subtle character changes that had taken place as a result. I dared hope that by marrying the woman of his dreams, Garth would finally escape some of his demons. I knew I was going to sorely miss my brother's presence on the Frederickson and Frederickson premises, but I couldn't have been happier for him.

I paused by the pile of wedding gifts, stared into the haunting depths of Jack Trex's painting as I reflected on the past six weeks that Garth, Mary, Jay Acton, and I spent in the confines of a safe house in Arlington while the KGB operative was debriefed and the machinery to dismantle the massive KGB penetration of a segment of American society was begun. The operation was code-named Operation Cannibal, after Trex's painting.

Edward J. Hendricks had been picked up immediately; under the loving care of a meticulously vetted joint Operation Cannibal team of CIA-DIA-FBI interrogators, Hendricks had broken and provided valuable information leading to others. He hadn't cared to return to Russia, and in exchange for a promise of a false identity-another false identity, as it were-and relocation under the FBI's Witness Protection Plan, he had agreed to cooperate fully in flushing out the remaining KGB operatives who had penetrated the American right wing.

There had indeed been a senator, who'd managed to get away, and seven representatives, who hadn't. With the eager cooperation of every conservative group in the country, birth records and childhood histories of tens of thousands of people belonging to their organizations were being checked; to date, twenty-eight KGB operatives had been uncovered, and the investigation was continuing. It had been decided that it was in everyone's best interests, and the nation's, to keep publicity surrounding Operation Cannibal to a minimum, and thus far no news organization had tumbled on to just how massive the conspiracy had been, or how much of American foreign policy for the past thirty years had been secretly manipulated by the Soviets. However, I suspected it was only a matter of time before some enterprising reporter got on to the whole story, and I wondered what the electorate's reaction would be when it was realized that 90 percent of everything on the ultraconservative agenda for three decades and more had been considered a godsend by the KGB, and had been actively promoted by the Soviets as a way of keeping the United States off balance, politically weak, and internationally discredited.

Now the Soviet system was crumbling under its own weight, but the collapse owed no thanks to the men who had squandered the lives of countless numbers of people in so many countries, and wasted so much national treasure, pursuing policies of anticommunism that the communists had considered advantageous to them in the long run.

I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't KGB whisperers who had caught the ears of the people who'd sent America into Vietnam. And, if so, why the Soviets hadn't heeded the very lesson they'd taught us when the specter of Afghanistan beckoned. Could the OSS-CIA have instituted a similar program of plants in Russia after the war? I doubted it, but the very thought was enough to make my head start hurting all over again.

"Mongo?"

I looked up from the painting, was surprised to find my brother standing beside me, an odd, strained, expression on his face; I hadn't heard him come up. Down by the dock, Mr. Lippitt was engaged in animated conversation with the cops and veterans, but Mary was looking at us.

"Are you all right, Garth?"

"I need to talk to you alone."

I nodded toward the river, and we walked together across the lawn, down an incline to a pebble beach. I could feel the presence of two Secret Service agents at our backs, but they remained up on the edge of the lawn, out of earshot.

"I should have asked you before," Garth continued quietly as he picked up a fiat stone and skipped it across the water, startling some ducks. "But I knew you'd be honest, and I guess I was afraid I might not like the answer."

"Garth, what the hell are you talking about?"

He turned to face me, swallowed hard, said, "Do you think I'm healthy enough to be doing this thing?"

"What?"

"You know the problems I've had since I was poisoned with that spy dust shit. Do you think I'm doing the right thing? Am I well enough to marry and settle down in Cairn, maybe adopt some kids? I guess maybe I'm looking for a little reassurance."

Suddenly I felt tears well in my eyes. "Of course you're well enough, you idiot. Don't you know you're the most spiritually healthy person I know, outside of Mom? I'm not certain Cairn is ready for you, but you're certainly ready for Cairn. Besides, if Mary ever tells me you're going spooky on her, I'll be right up here to kick your ass."

Garth smiled broadly, and he seemed relieved. "Some people on the town board asked me if I'd be interested in becoming Cairn's chief of police."

"That's great news, Garth," I said evenly. "What did you say?"

"I told them I'd have to confer with you regarding my status with Frederickson and Frederickson."

"Ah, well. I managed to carry on for quite a few years without your assistance, dear brother, and I'm sure I can do it again."

"That's funny; I don't remember you ever being able to manage without my assistance."

"I'll ignore that and continue with what I was going to say. I rather like having you as my partner. We've done all right, and you have enough equity in the brownstone and the business so that you shouldn't have any financial worries if you want to be top cop here-or if you want to do nothing at all except make-love and sail all day. On the other hand, Cairn is only an hour away from the city. It isn't a bad commute, and we could even hook up a computer terminal for you here so that you wouldn't have to come in to the office every day. What I'm saying is that you have all the options; I want you to do exactly what you want to do, what will make you happiest."

Garth nodded. "That's what I wanted to hear. I just wanted to make sure it was all right with you if we remained partners and I worked out of Cairn."

"Done."

We walked together back up the incline into Jack Trex's yard, where my brother's bride, at everyone's urging, had borrowed Jay Acton's guitar and was preparing to give an impromptu concert.