The Hill of the Ravens Read online

  “As a March hare,” agreed Redmond. “I haven’t been able to figure out the ins and the outs of it from his disjointed ravings in the book, which seem to cover a period of some years. There are two possibilities,” Redmond went on musingly, rubbing his chin. “As much as I have puzzled over his scribblings, I honest to God can’t tell which one is correct. The first possibility is that he set the whole thing up as a complex revenge for her rejecting him, that he planned from square one falsely to implicate her for his own crime and betrayal. The second is that he didn’t intend for it to play out that way, as far as Trudy being blamed for his own act of treachery, but somewhere along the line he screwed up. He had constructed in his own half-coherent mind some bizarre scenario whereby Murdock would be removed from the scene by the FATPOs and he would catch Trudy on the rebound, possibly after rescuing her in some knight in shining armor scenario. The only way to get at Murdock was to go through the rest of the Column. The fact that more than fifty Volunteers would die alongside his rival evidently meant nothing to him. He was living in the world of his own private obsession and nothing else was important.”

  “Damn!” swore Palmieri, clenching his fists.

  “Trudy would find herself in a tight spot, but one that he planned to get her out of and thus earn her appropriate gratitude,” continued Redmond. “Although we still don’t know exactly why Trudy didn’t show up at her post at the aid station, think of what it must have been like for her on that terrible morning! Remember, her cell phone was down, and she had no way of checking anything Nash told her. All Trudy knew was that the whole Column was gone and anyone who survived might have been an informer. Where else would she turn? He set this whole thing up so that Trudy would be forced to turn to him as a matter of survival. Turbulent and violent times such as revolutions can present a lot of opportunities like that. This man staked it all on one big chance to become Trudy Greiner’s knight in shining armor, saving her from a charge of treason and elevating her to revolutionary heroine status, and then reaping his reward, or so he thought in his mind. But something went wrong…jeez, I wish I knew what it was! I wish I knew what he said or did in those dark morning

  hours so long ago. I suspect it is a horror story, but only she can fill us in now. Somehow he convinced her that she would be accused for what was about to happen and that her only hope was to E & E. Maybe he asked her to go with him…Christ, who knows? But for whatever reason, Trudy ran. Maybe she just took her own E & E route and planned on reporting back later on, but then realized she was being blamed for the ambush at Ravenhill and she had to get the hell out of Dodge to save her own life. Like I said, there’s some gaps yet, and some of them may never be fully answered now that Nash has been used as a chew-toy by Bruno. But at some point later on, Nash painstakingly fabricated the million-dollar documents that framed her for the betrayal he himself had committed. Whatever he originally intended, in the end the swine deliberately made sure Trudy took the fall for him. An ironic twist if he originally intended to be her rescuer and hero.”

  “No, I can’t see it that way,” disagreed McBride. “The bastard knew damned well what he was doing. I told you that Coleman actually had a hand-drawn map describing the best terrain for setting up the ambush. Someone actually scouted the lay of the land ahead of time, and it wasn’t Monkey Meat. Someone who is capable of deliberately assisting in the murder of his own comrades in that way is not capable of being motivated by…romance, however twisted a version of romance. My wife and I had a turbulent relationship, but neither one of us ever worried one second about all those loaded guns in our house. We both knew there was never any need on either of our parts. You can sometimes hurt the one you love, may God forgive you, but you never destroy them. Destruction isn’t love, it’s hate.”

  “I tend to agree. Then there was that whole fraudulent bank transaction,” said Nel. “Maybe Nash did that later, after she refused him, to make sure Trudy would catch the blame and she’d be too afraid to come back and accuse him. But I don’t think so. It’s too much of a piece with the cold and methodical planning he showed over setting up the ambush. At some point he created these hoax computer printouts, dated them August the first, then somehow arranged for the first court of inquiry to ‘discover’ them. He deliberately had her accused and convicted and tried to cause her death, but more than that he caused her to be slandered and vilified for all her life as a traitor. That is not love, Colonel. That is hate.

  Black, overwhelming hatred of another individual that transcends every last boundary of reason or justice or right. The hatred of true madness.”

  “But surely Trudy must have known that Nash betrayed her as well as Murdock?” asked Palmieri. “Why didn’t she come to the Party and denounce him?”

  “Well, we’ll have to wait until she gets here to ask her, but I don’t think she did know it was Nash at the time,” said Redmond. “In fact, she may not know it even now. Nash must have been the one that met her, delayed her from her post, and then after it hit the news that the Column had been destroy told her that she must be suspected and she needed to lie low. Even now she may not be aware of what he did. In her letter she never did claim that she actually had any new evidence, just that she was tired of it all and she was coming back to face the music. To this day, she may think that Corey Nash was indeed her knight in shining armor, the man who saved her. God, what a horrible thought!”

  “But if she has no new evidence, no way to prove her innocence, why is she coming back?” asked Leach in wonder.

  “Because this is her Homeland,” said Redmond. “Because by virtue of her blood she has the right to live here and to die here.”

  Morgan was shaking his head, “Don…Jesus, Don, you don’t mean to tell me that after almost forty years it turns out…?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Don, his face absolutely deadpan. “The butler

  did it.”

  * * *

  After the others left in bemusement, Don rounded on Morgan. “God damn it, what the hell did you do to me?” he roared. “Why? What have I ever done that you should do something like this to me? You knew, didn’t you? You knew all along it was Nash!”

  Morgan sighed and sank into his chair. “I…had an idea.” “John, you have to tell me!” commanded Don. “Did you know

  it was Nash? Have you nursed this viper in the bosom of our family for a whole generation? All this time did you let a sister of our race live in hell, disgraced and vilified by her own people, solely in order

  to save yourself from scandal and political embarrassment at failing to detect a traitor that close to you?”

  “I’m sorry you think me capable of that, son,” said the old man sadly. “I’m a bad man, Don, but not that bad.”

  “You are capable of whatever you feel is necessary, as am I, as are we all. We’re Volunteers and it is the way we chose long ago. Did you know?” repeated Don.

  “Did I know?” replied Morgan softly. “No, Don, I did not know. Not for certain. As I hope for the salvation of my soul, that is the truth.”

  “You suspected. And you still did nothing.” It was not a question or an accusation. It was simply a statement.

  “Can you prove that, copper?” laughed Morgan bitterly. “Legally, no. To a moral certainty, yes,” said Don. “GELF

  dogs are programmed to respond to the digitally authenticated voice commands of certain individuals. They cannot attack any person whom they recognize by smell and sound and voiceprint as a command-authorized human being. The animal’s mind will not accept such an order. You ordered the dog out there to kill Nash and he did so. That means that Nash was not command-authorized for that GELF. I now recall that while you had our own family dog Baskerville command-authorized for all of our family, including yourself, you did not authorize him with a voiceprint for Corey Nash, your lifelong aide and companion in arms to our family. That indicates to me that you knew, or at least that you suspected, that someday some occasion might possibly arise when we might have to be prot
ected from Nash.” There was silence for a time.

  “The suspicion was there, yes,” admitted Morgan. “When did it appear in my mind? I honestly don’t know. Some time back. What caused that suspicion? A word, a glance, a thought? I don’t know. Just one day it was there and it has gnawed on me ever since. There was never any proof, and I did not seek any.”

  “You didn’t seek any? Mother of God, why not?” shouted Don in incredulous rage. “Fifty-two Volunteers, sir! Fifty-two men and women of our race butchered by ZOG because one man among us was a dysfunctional nut of the kind we should have purged from Day One! What did the Old Man tell us from the beginning? Never try to get mileage out of creeps? How much mileage did you get out of

  Corey Nash down through the years? Enough to justify fifty-two dead white men and women? How…damn you, John! How could you?” Redmond was on the verge of breaking down into tears.

  Morgan spoke to him in a voice of stone. “Do you seriously believe, Don, that you can say to me one single thing, that you can utter to me one single reproach or accusation or denunciation that has not burned into my brain and my heart and my soul, night after night for years? Whatever you think it may be your duty to curse and rail against me now, I assure you, hit war already done. A thousand times over. A million times over.”

  “Why did you do nothing?” demanded Don. “How could you let Nash stay so close to you, to me, to Sarah, to my children? You must have known what we all knew, that he was never completely right in the head? What were you thinking, man?”

  “I believed, and as it turned out I believed correctly, that he would never again do anything quite so evil,” sighed Morgan. “Although that business with Hillary Clinton came close. That was an accident, by the way. We didn’t…never mind, all that’s gone now. Don, I owed Corey Nash. Owed him big, big time. Did it never strike you as odd that in all the time you have known both of us, I never told you how we met? How he came into the family, so to speak?”

  Don frowned. “You know…damned if you ever did,” he said softly, remembering in surprise. “How strange. During this whole investigation, that thought never even crossed my mind. Nash was just…always there. He was the first person who opened the door at that house in Bellevue when I knocked on it at age twelve to collect my newspaper money. I remember he tried to Jew me down on the price. How did you meet?”

  “You know how Sarah’s mother died?” asked Morgan.

  “Yes,” said Don. “I also know that Sarah ran away from the corrective school where they sent her to be de-nazified and somehow she was able to get back to you up in the mountains, just before you came down to Bellevue to organize Number Two Seattle Brigade where I ended up. Sarah and I have never spoken of it. It is the one off-limits subject between us. Not overtly forbidden, just…closed. She’s never actually said to me that she doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s just that I’ve always known that to speak of it would hurt her more than any possible good that could ever come of it. Over the

  years we have developed an understanding that it’s the one and only topic that we will never talk about. Once a year or so, Sarah makes some passing reference to Vandy, and I pointedly don’t take her up on it. I believe she notices this, but she has never voluntarily offered to lift the taboo, and I have no intention of asking. She obviously wants to keep that one door locked, and I have always respected her wishes.”

  Morgan lit a cigar. His hands were shaking as they held the match. “I was in the mountains for the first time when ZOG tracked down my family. They were in a safe house in Ballard, although it obviously wasn’t as safe as we thought it was. Vandy saw them coming in time to get Sarah dressed and send her running out the back door, but they caught her anyway. That was early days, they didn’t have the special camps set up then, so they took Vandy and Sarah to the King County jail. The Federal section was notorious. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had a…they had a special treatment there they would inflict on women Volunteers…there was this one Jew FBI agent…”

  “Sir, I know what happened,” said Don. “You don’t have

  to…”

  “Did you know they made Sarah watch, in case she knew

  where I was and she’d betray me to save her mother?” asked Morgan, staring out the window.

  “Yes, sir. I know. It is a matter of historical record. Odd, isn’t it? Everyone in this whole country knows what happened. Yet Sarah and I are the only ones who pretend we don’t. And no one speaks of it. No one, not ever, not for forty years. My God, what a mighty and magnificent compassion and respect we receive as a family, from an entire nation! It fills me with awe every time I think of it! How could anyone not love this land and this people?”

  “Well, there are some details you don’t know. When…it happened…Corey Nash was in the same jail, on the floor above,” went on Morgan tonelessly. “He’d gotten caught heisting some wheels for the NVA, but the idiots pegged him as an ordinary car thief and he was waiting in the bull pen to get bailed out by a Party bondsman. Some Seattle cops were taking him down for out-processing, they got another call for something or other and they tossed Corey into a holding cell on the Federal block until they could

  get back to him. Then they forgot about him until noon the next day. An open holding cell. No walls, just bars. Right next to where lay what was left of my wife and my child.”

  “Ah, I think I understand…” said Don with a nod. “FBI Special Agent In Charge Bruce Goldberg. He liked to play with electric drills into the skull and turkey basters of acid. Do It Yourself lobotomies, he called them. One of their most notorious and brutal counter-terrorism operatives. I remember. He and his entire family were found dead in their home several months later. The family was shot, Goldberg had been burned to death with the necklace. So that was Nash who did that? Yeah, that sounds like his style. I can see why…”

  “No, it wasn’t Nash!” snapped Morgan. “Shut up and listen to me, God damn it! Christ, boy, do you think that I would leave a personal obligation like that to anyone else? That Goldberg job was me and Tom Murdock and O. C. Oglevy. No, what Nash did in that prison cell…it was nothing less than holy. Sacred, touched with the divine spirit of human mercy and compassion. Kind of odd that we can speak of Nash in such terms, eh? But we can.”

  “Tell me,” ordered Don softly.

  “Somebody had left one of those old Styrofoam coffee cups in the cell he was in. You remember those? It was raining, and Nash was able to get up onto the cell’s bunk and stick the cup into an outside corner of the barred window where there was a little drip. It wasn’t much, but throughout the night he managed to refill that cup again and again. Sarah dragged her mother over to the bars and time and again, Corey Nash held that cup of water to what remained of Vandy’s mouth, and she was able to drink a little. And in between times, while he waited for that slow drip from the rain to fill the cup in the barred window, Corey Nash comforted my ten year-old daughter, who was by then quite out of her mind. Sarah had become a child again, a little baby, and Nash sensed this. She was talking baby talk, curling up in the fetal position, on the verge of shutting down her brain and leaving us forever. So he sang to her, every children’s song he could think of, London Bridge Is Falling Down, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Barney the Dinosaur and Great Big Gobs Of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts, the Alphabet Song, anything. He told her every story he could think of. Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk,

  Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and he held her hand through the bars. It wasn’t me, it was Corey Nash who was holding Sarah’s hand in the dawn when her mother died before her eyes. Somehow, Nash kept Sarah with us in her mind. He also managed to get into Sarah’s head an address and phone number in Seattle. Afterwards, when she got away from them, Sarah didn’t come looking for me. She came looking for Corey Nash. Nash brought her back to me, past the Fatties and the cops and the Homeland Security and the FBI. From that moment on I lived in his debt. Please try to understand that, Don. You have to r
emember, this was in the time of It Takes A Village, when white children were being stolen away every day. I had already accepted in my mind that Sarah was gone forever from me, just like her mother. You have Cindy El, you have Eva, so can you understand what that means. I had accepted in my own mind that my beautiful girl was gone forever, taken from me by the Beast, to live the rest of her life at the bottom of a latrine, for all the world to piss and shit on. I think I went insane for a time, and I probably would have gone Oglevy’s way. I’d have been dead myself soon after. And then one day up there in the Olympic mountains I saw Sarah rise from the dead. I saw Corey Nash walk into camp, and he’s leading my little girl by the hand. He returned my child to me, returned her from the dead. Don, whatever you may think of me, that is a debt that one never, ever forgets or betrays.”

  “That was what? Six months, ten months before I met Sarah?” whispered Don in wonder. “She never said anything. Not then, not to this very day.”

  “Now you tell me how the hell I was supposed to call that man in here and accuse him of treason to his face without any proof at all? Based on nothing more than a funny feeling, a nagging baseless suspicion?” asked Morgan. “What if I was wrong? Worse, what if I was right? What was I supposed to tell Sarah?”

  “So you put it off. You put it off for almost forty years. Until Trudy Greiner came back and you couldn’t put it off any more, and then you dumped it onto me,” said Don.

  “Yes,” said Morgan. “I put it off until Trudy Greiner came back and I couldn’t put it off any more, and then I dumped it onto you. It is the only act of cowardice I have ever committed in my life. For what it’s worth, I’m damned sorry about it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Sarah will forgive you for taking Corey from her,” said

  Morgan. “I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive me.”

  “And now I get to go home and tell her,” said Don wearily, standing up to go. Morgan stood up as well.