The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

So then I got serious, and took another audio clip from the section of the tape just before the dialogue. I analysed the frequencies of the background wind, then set up a band-pass filter. I ran this on the other section of the tape, and it started to sound clearer. A little more refining and slowly the noises began to coalesce into words. Un craunen? Vren ouwnen? When I’d done all I could, I got some headphones out of the laptop bag and put them on. I set the track to loop and closed my eyes.

After about forty times through I got it. ‘The Straw Men.’

I stopped the loop; took the headphones off. I was pretty sure that was it. The Straw Men. Problem was, it was meaningless. Sounded like an indie rock band – though I doubted that the people on the tape had earned a living through under-produced caterwauling. The members of bands don’t live together in ski resorts. They build themselves mock-Tudor mansions on opposite sides of the planet, and only meet up when they’re being paid. All I’d done was add another layer of inexplicability to what was captured on the tape. I watched the video again, running it off the DVD just in case the different format helped me to notice something new. Nothing struck me.

I sat in the chair for a while, staring into space, feeling the night catching up with me. Every now and then I heard the sound of someone walking past my door in the corridor, and from outside came the occasional swish of cars or floating fragments of distant conversations between people I didn’t know and would never meet. None of this meant anything to me either.

At just after six my cell phone rang, jerking me out of half-sleep. I picked it up blearily.

‘Yo,’ said a voice. In the background there was the sound of other voices, and muffled music. ‘Ward, it’s Bobby.’

‘My man,’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘Thanks for the tip. Place in Billings worked out just fine.’

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘But that’s not why I’m calling. I’m in some place, what the fuck, the Sacagawea I think it’s called. Kind of a bar thing. Kind of. On the big main street. Huge-ass great sign.’

Suddenly I was awake. ‘You’re in Dyersburg?’

‘Sure am. Flew in.’

‘Why the hell did you do that?’

‘Well, thing is, after you called, I was kind of bored. Picked up on something you said, did a little poking around.’

‘Poking around in what?’

‘Some stuff. Ward, get your butt down here. Got a beer sitting waiting for you. I got something to tell, my friend, and I’m not doing it over the phone.’

‘Why?’ I was already packing up the computer.

‘Because it’s going to freak you out.’

Chapter 10 (#ulink_b43e041b-ca0e-558a-9da2-d07487f2a1e5)

The Sacagawea is a large motel on the main drag. It has a huge multicoloured neon sign that can be seen from about half a mile in either direction, drawing the unwary like a magnet. I’d stayed there for about ten minutes once, the first time I’d come to visit my parents. The room I was given was a museum-standard tableau of cheap ’60s design and had carpets like an unloved dog. At first I thought this was kind of funky, until I looked closer and realized it simply hadn’t been redecorated since around the time I was born. On discovering there was no room service I checked the hell out again. I won’t stay in a hotel without room service. I just won’t stand for it.

The lobby was small and damp and smelt strongly of chlorine, presumably because of the tiny swimming pool in the next room. The wizened old twonk behind the reception desk directed me upstairs, doing so without recourse to speech but with a curious look. When I got to the bar I could see why. It wasn’t humming with life. There was a service island in the middle, a lone waitress, and a rank of archaic slot machines over on the side with equally superannuated people placidly feeding coins into them. As a species, we really know how to live. A long bank of large windows at the front of the room gave a view over the parking lot and the drizzle of traffic tootling up and down the street. A few couples were dotted around the room, talking loudly, as if in the hope this would goose the room into having something approaching atmosphere. It wasn’t working.

Sitting at a table up against the window was Bobby Nygard.

‘What the fuck is this Sacagawea shit?’ was the first thing he said.

I sat down opposite. ‘Sacagawea was the name of the Amerind maiden who hung with Lewis and Clark. Helped them work deals with the locals, not get killed, that kind of thing. The expedition passed by not far from here, on the way to the Bitterroot Mountains.’

‘Thank you, professor. But are you allowed to say “maiden” these days? Isn’t it kind of sexist or something?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘And you know what? I don’t give a shit. It’s better than “squaw” anyhow.’

‘Is it, though? Maybe not. Maybe it’s like “nigger”. Assumed as a badge of pride. Absorption of the terms of the oppressor.’

‘Be that as it may, Bobby. It’s good to see you.’

He winked, and we touched glasses. Bobby looked pretty much the same as he ever had, though I hadn’t met him face-to-face in two years. A little shorter than me, a little broader. Cropped hair, a face that always seemed slightly flushed, and the general air of someone you could take a baseball bat to without him being overly bothered. Used to be in the Forces, and sometimes still seems as if he is – though not the kind of army you see in the news.

After we’d taken a drink, Bobby set his glass back on the table and looked around the room. ‘Kind of a shithole, I’d say.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘Fucking great sign outside. Got me in its tractor beam. Why? There a better hotel in town?’

‘No, I mean why did you come to Dyersburg?’

‘I’ll come to that. Meantime, how you doing? Sorry about your loss, man.’

Suddenly, maybe because I was sitting with someone I counted as a friend, the death of my parents hit me again. Hit me hard, and unexpectedly, as I knew it probably would every now and then for the rest of my life, regardless of what they had done. I started to say something, but didn’t. I just felt too tired and confused and sad. Bobby clinked his glass against mine once more, and we drank. He let a silence settle for a while, then changed the subject.

‘So. What are you doing these days? You never said.’

‘Not much,’ I said.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Not much as in “Don’t ask”?’

‘No. Just nothing worth talking about. There may be a job or two I haven’t tried yet, but I doubt they’ll be much different. Seems that I’d always rather be working something on the side, and employers still don’t understand what a key role that is in a modern economy.’

‘Timidity and commercial short-sightedness,’ he nodded, flagging for another couple beers. ‘Ain’t that always the way.’

After the waitress, who was young and depressed-looking, got us our drinks, we chatted for a while. That former employment I mentioned was with the CIA. I worked for them for nine years, which is how I met Bobby. We got along immediately. Most of the time I was in the field, though by the end I was doing a lot of media surveillance. I left when the Agency introduced annual lie detector tests a few years back. Lot of people left the service then, indignant at the implied distrust after they’d put themselves on the line for their country. Me, I got out because I’d done some things. Not terrible things, I should add. Just the kind of things they put you in prison for. The CIA may not be the world’s most straightforward organization, but they prefer their employees to avoid actual felonies most of the time. I’d used a few contacts to make a little money, bled a little cash out from between the cracks. There were some incidents. A guy got killed. That was all.

Though he now lived in Arizona, Bobby still worked for the Company on and off, and was in contact with a few old mutual friends. Two of them were now working to infiltrate militia groups, and hearing this made me glad all over again that I’d left the firm. That’s not the kind of work you want to get into. Not if you value your life. One of these guys, a skinny nutcase called Johnny Claire, was actually living in one of the groups, a collection of ineffectively socialized gun fanatics holed up in a forest in Oklahoma. Better him than me, though Johnny was weird enough to hold his own in any company.

‘Okay,’ Bobby said, when armed with another beer, ‘are you now going to explain how come you’re out here in the sticks and suddenly conceive of a need to digitize some home-video footage?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, admiring the way he was pumping me without revealing what was on his own mind. A trick of the trade, now evidently habitual. When we met he was spending a lot of time in interrogation rooms with citizens of Middle Eastern countries. They all talked in the end. From that he’d sidestepped into surveillance. ‘Not definitely. And certainly not until you finally reveal why you hopped on a plane and flew across three states to buy me a beer.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Let me ask you something first. Where were you born?’

‘Bobby …’

‘Just tell me, Ward.’

‘You know where I was born. County Hospital, Hunter’s Rock, California.’ The place name rolled off my tongue as easily as my name would have done. It’s one of the first things you learn.

‘Indeed. I remember you telling me. You got all upset about the fact that nobody uses the apostrophe in “Hunter’s” any more.’

‘It pisses me off.’

‘Right. It’s a scandal. Now. When we spoke earlier today you told me about your folks, and you said something about the video having something to do with your childhood. So there I am, when we’ve done talking. I’ve got nothing to do. I’m surrounded by computers and I’ve surfed the Web all I can bear and I’ve already had my handjob for the day.’

‘Nice thought,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping that wasn’t while you were on the phone to me.’