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

‘What?’

‘I backed up his hard disk onto a ffiz! cart. It’s the one thing I haven’t really checked.’

I sat back down in the chair next to Bobby and slotted the tiny cartridge in the machine. Soon as it was mounted I got a Find Slip onscreen and typed in ‘straw men’. Hit return. The machine chirped and whizzed for a while.

NO MATCHING ITEMS FOUND.

I tried it with ‘straw’ only. Same result.

‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘The bar beckons.’ I stood, expecting him to join me. Instead he started doing something with another Find Slip. ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Getting Find to index the contents of all the text files on the disk,’ he said. ‘If this straw thing is some big deal, it would make sense that there’d be no file by that name. You’d want to be less obvious about it. But it might appear inside one of the files.’

It was a reasonable point, so I waited. The ffiz! has a fast access time, and the process only took a couple of minutes.

Then it told us: the text was still nowhere to be found.

Bobby swore. ‘Why the hell didn’t he just leave a letter or something, just telling you whatever the fuck he wanted to say?’

‘I already asked myself that question a billion times and the answer is that I don’t know. Let’s go.’

He still didn’t get up. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know you’re doing this for me, and I’m grateful. But in the last twenty-four hours I’ve discovered either that my parents were insane and that I once had a twin or they were really insane and pretended I had. I’ve had nothing to eat in days. I stupidly had a cigarette this morning and now I want about a hundred more and it’s taking all my mental energy to resist. I’m done here. I’m going to the bar.’

He turned his head toward me, but his eyes were far away. I’d seen that look in him before. It meant he couldn’t even really hear what I was saying, and wouldn’t until he’d run his course.

‘I’ll see you there,’ I said, and left.

Chapter 11 (#ulink_d9575e5a-6415-5944-8679-23ec4979a082)

I remember feeling proud of something when I was young – the fact that mosquitoes didn’t bite me. If we went on holiday to the right kind of area, or I went on a school trip at the wrong time of year, I discovered that most people found themselves covered in little red bumps that itched like hell – no matter how much they futzed around with creams and sprays and nets. I didn’t. I’d get maybe one bite, on the ankle. Kind of a strange thing to be proud of, you might think, but you know how it is when you’re young. Once you come to realize that you’re not the centre of all creation, you’re so keen to find some concrete way of differentiating yourself that just about anything will do. I was the boy who didn’t get bitten by insects. Take note, ladies and gentlemen, and have a little respect: there goes No-Bite Boy, the Mosquito-Free Kid. Then, one day when I was in my late twenties, I realized I’d got it wrong. Chances were that I got bitten just as much as everybody else. The only difference was that I didn’t have as strong an allergic reaction, so I didn’t get the bumps. I was still ‘special’ – though by then I was old enough to realize this wasn’t any great distinction to have, and also to be more concerned with hoping that I wasn’t actually so different from other people – but not in the way I’d thought. I got bitten like the rest of you, and No-Bite Boy was vanquished there and then.

As I sat there in the bar and waited for Bobby, this memory was hard to dislodge. My family, my life, was something I suddenly didn’t understand. It was as if I’d noticed that I saw the same buildings in the background of my life, wherever I was, and had finally begun to wonder if it was a film set. As a matter of fact, I did generally see the same buildings. Since the Agency, I had never really gotten a mainstream existence on track, and seeing Bobby had made me realize this far more acutely than ever before. I did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that; some of this had been illegal, and some of that had been violent. Most of it was hard for me to even remember. It blurred. I lived in motels and restaurants and regional airports, talking to strangers, reading signs written to people in general and never meant just for me. All around me seemed to be people whose lives had content, who looked like the folks you see on television. Contextualized. Part of a story with the usual beats. Mine seemed to have none. The ‘this is where you came from’ section had just been abruptly scrapped, leaving an undisclosed number of empty pages.

My barman was on duty, and once again proved an able and efficient ally. He got over the whole ‘previous incident’ aspect of our reunion by bringing it up right away.

‘Going to get your gun out later?’

‘Not if you give me some peanuts.’

He got me some. He was a good barman, I decided. The place was free of corporate androids, and the only other guests were a very old foursome in the corner. They’d looked up at me grimly when I came in. I didn’t blame them. When I get to their age, I’ll resent young people, too. I resent them already, in fact, the slim little fresh-faced assholes. I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don’t even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they’ll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they’ll wind up married to a movie star. They’re out the other side of all that, onto a flat, grey plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don’t blame them being a little out of sorts. I’m just surprised more oldsters don’t take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that’s going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess – with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon.

After a while the group in the corner seemed to accept that I wasn’t going to start playing a new-fangled musical instrument or challenging conventional sexual mores. They got on with their business, and I got on with mine: we co-existed, two species warily sharing the same watering hole.

Nearly two hours later, Bobby came striding in. He caught sight of me slumped in my booth, signalled to the barman for two more of whatever I was drinking, and came over to join me.

‘How shit-faced are you?’ He had an odd look on his face.

‘On a scale of one to ten,’ I said breezily, ‘I’d have to give myself an F.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve found something. Kind of.’

Suddenly feeling tense, I sat up and saw that he was holding a small sheaf of paper.

‘Got reception to let me use their printer,’ he said. ‘Where the hell are the drinks?’

At that moment the barman appeared with them. ‘Any more nuts?’ he asked.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Just the two of us.’ Then I laughed for quite a long time. I’m pretty sure I was laughing. The barman went away. Bobby waited patiently for me to get a grip. It took a while. I think that for just a moment I was on the verge of losing it.

‘Okay,’ I said eventually. ‘Shoot.’

‘First thing is I had another look on the Net. Still no record of the Straw Men as an actual thing, but I found encyclopaedia references to other meanings of the term “straw man” – something about guys who in the last century would stand outside courts with straw in their shoes – didn’t really understand that part – indicating they’d give false testimony for money. And another reference regarding lack of conscience – I guess a straw versus flesh thing.’

‘In other words, dummy guys in illegalities,’ I said. ‘As discussed. So what?’

‘Then I looked right through the disk,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Ran a low-level media scan, checked for hidden files, partitions, the works. Nothing. Then I looked through the software, of which there ain’t much.’

‘Dad wasn’t a nerd,’ I said. ‘That’s why I didn’t bother to look through the computer in the house.’

‘Right. But he did use the Net.’

I shrugged. ‘Email, occasionally. Plus he had a site for his business, though someone else maintained it. I used to go look at it once in a while.’ It had seemed easier, somehow, than calling them on the phone. Since I’d dropped out of college, they’d never really known what I was doing. They certainly didn’t know the reason I hadn’t finished the course, or who I’d gone on to work for. My parents never gave the impression of being political people, but they’d been there in the 1960s, as the video I’d found made more than clear. You were there in the Summer of Stupid Pants, then you took certain attitudes on board. Finding their son was working for the CIA would not have gone down big. I’d hidden this from them, not realizing this meant I was hiding everything else. Of course that now seemed a little bizarre, given what they’d been withholding from me.

Bobby shook his head. ‘He had Explorer and Navigator on his disk, and he obviously used both a great deal. Huge cache, and about a zillion bookmarks in each.’

‘For what kind of thing?’

‘You name it. Reference. Online stores. Sports.’

‘No porn?’

He smiled. ‘No.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘I went through every single one. Even the ones that seemed like nothing, just in case he’d covered up by renaming the bookmark to cover what the link actually led to.’

‘You’re sneaky,’ I said. ‘I always said so.’

‘So was your father. He had renamed one, in fact, hidden in a folder of a hundred and sixty bookmarks for what I can only regard as the dullest facets of the realty business. It was called “Recently sold Mizner/Intercoastal lots”. Mean anything to you?’

‘Addison Mizner was an estate architect in the 1920s and ’30s. Built a bunch of prestige property in Miami, Palm Beach. Italian villa-style. Very sought-after and outlandishly expensive.’

‘You know some wacky stuff. Okay. But the link didn’t lead to a site to do with land or houses. It led to a blank page. So I thought shit, dead end. Took me a few minutes to realize that actually the page was covered with a transparent graphic that had a hidden image map. When I worked that out I got through to another set of pages, with some pretty odd links.’

‘Odd how?’

He shook his head. ‘Just odd. Looked like the usual home pages, complete with excessive detail, bad punctuation and rancid colour use, but all the material seemed very anodyne. There was just something hinky about them, almost as if they were fakes.’