CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Spiders and Spies
Elliott stood behind a clump of pampas grass examining Guinda’s house. He had begun a new life there such a short time ago. Today’s few hours had been so jammed with a lifetime of trials that he hadn’t paused to consider the toll on his body—and on his mind. His physical agony clawed to the front now that he had lost the momentum of dueling with assassins for his next breath.
This was the letdown, both physical and mental. The battles for his life, and for whatever he believed in, lay in the swirling eddies at his stern. Before him lay a fog. And a gnawing guilt.
Trembling legs were the first sign of what was happening to his whole body. Some benches stood in the garden and beckoned him. One was partially hidden from direct view of the second floor deck that adjoined Guinda’s living room. He moved painfully toward that bench, instinctively looking around to see if anyone, or anything, was watching. The truth, in fact, hid well beyond such a token security check. A silent and nearly invisible sentinel lurked behind a bush on Guinda’s front porch at her downstairs entrance.
It had watched him since he entered the garden, moving like a jackal, always stealthy, always shadowed. It could wait like a practiced sniper. It could observe endlessly with a patience and a vigilance that few humans could even comprehend.
Elliott plopped down on the bench and surprised himself with a guttural sigh. The sentinel edged further out from behind the bush to a better position. Its interest in Elliott was as intense as Elliott’s interest in Guinda, but of a profoundly different nature. Its interest was based on a voluminous data set created by a bureaucrat motivated only by getting a paycheck. All that effort was being expended on Dr. Elliott T. Townsend, anarchist.
Elliott tried to relax those battle-weary muscles, but anxiety wouldn’t allow it. His focus was stuck on Guinda and his role in whatever had happened to her. Was I attracted to her just as a woman? he wondered. Or as a comrade in some struggle, this silly adventure we cooked up.
He shook his head. It wouldn’t clear. An adventure. Is that all this is? But it’s gone so wrong.
He studied the windows and the French door to the deck for some clue. I have to do something. Can’t just give up now. But what? Just go to the front door and knock? Call the police? Something.
“What if they haven’t killed her yet?” he mumbled to himself. He bolted upright in his seat. “What if … what if she’s a prisoner? But what if that wasn’t Guinda I talked to this morning? That’s for sure. I don’t know who, or what. But it wasn’t Guin.” He stared at the deck, but with just a glimmer of hope.
Suddenly a figure appeared at the window. Elliott crouched. He couldn’t tell much about the man at the window except that he was smoking a pipe.
“Sherwood,” he muttered.
Elliott could tell he wasn’t speaking, just standing and blowing great clouds of smoke against the glass where it mushroomed. Then a moment later he disappeared. Elliott stood up and took a step toward the house before pain stopped him.
As he moved, the sentinel stepped forward, ready for a confrontation, but still hidden from view. It lowered its body like a stalking cat, processing and measuring, not quite thinking. Each time Elliott took a step forward it inched its body closer and lower, always keeping its cover, always coming closer to that instruction buried deep in it’s operating program. One line of computer code would change it from surveillance mode to attack mode—a simple one-line instruction that meant life or death to Elliott.
The window again went blank. Elliott’s torment surged. He weighed his options. The answer was inside that house.
“I’ve got nothing to lose,” he whispered. “I’ll just go up to her front door. It’s still her door. She still lives there. If I do nothing, they’ll just track me down and kill me, and I’ll never know.”
He began to take another step toward the door and the waiting sentinel, but he was interrupted by the French doors swinging open. A wave of smoke broke over the threshold. Slowly a figure emerged with the escaping flood. It wasn’t the same figure he just saw at the window. Elliott first squinted and then rubbed his eyes imploring them to work younger.
“Guin!” he shouted taking a painful step forward, a step mimicked by the sentinel.
Guinda looked down into the garden and had no trouble recognizing the figure. She also had no trouble seeing the object slowly creeping down the steps from her front porch.
Elliott took more steps toward her shouting, “Guin, I thought you were dead!”
The sentinel’s intentions became obvious to her. She watched each painful step Elliott made toward her, and she watched the sentinel reach the bottom step, creeping lower to the ground, waiting for the proper time to spring. It stopped and waited as Elliott repeated each agonizing step that brought the spider closer to its attack sequence.
“Guin, are you okay?” came the cries from Elliott as he reached the center of the garden.
Sherwood joined Guinda on the deck and watched the melodrama unfold. Guinda looked at the spider below. It was ready. She looked at the battered man dragging himself across the garden toward her and toward it. Her face showed no emotion. She stepped to the railing and shouted, “Townsend, stop!”
At the sound of his name, he stiffened. “What?” he shouted back.
“Stop where you are.”
“What’s the matter, Guin?” Elliott said as he managed two more steps toward her.
The sentinel’s fang now throbbed, and its body was fully crouched. Its eight feet were dug into the flowerbed beneath the bush. It waited and watched and calculated.
“You’re in great danger here, Townsend,” she said with precision. “You’ll be killed if you come any closer. If you value your life, stop where you are.”
The footprint of her words pierced his brain and then ripped into his heart, but he reacted only to the latter. “I want to make sure everything is okay, Guin. I’m coming up.”
Sherwood stepped forward. “Burns was speaking the truth when she said you are in very grave danger, Townsend. You better stop where you are. The next step might be your last.”
“I’ve come this far, and I’m not leaving until I come up there and see Guinda!” He took his last step forward.
“Stop, Townsend! I don’t want you to come up. Don’t be a fool! Listen to Sherwood!” She turned abruptly and disappeared inside.
Elliott froze as he watched her vanish. When he first saw her in the doorway, his sense of danger evaporated because they once more owned that danger together. As the precision of her command crystallized, he realized that he now owned the danger alone. The empty space beside Sherwood attested to this new reality. But it was new only to Elliott. He’d converged on Guinda with the values of a bygone era. He’d embraced her as a woman, as a peer, and interpreted her acceptance of him in the light of that same lost age. The fossilized values of a dead century had blinded him to the exigencies of today. She was a child of the media and may have questioned that parentage but could never reject it. This congruence burst upon him. Guinda had never been a part of his world.
The loss of Guinda collapsed his view of this game. He suddenly lost interest in pursuing it to a solution. He’d once more betrayed himself. The memory of Ms. Dobbs’ eyes piercing his soul competed with the loss of Guinda Burns. But the reality of his present position could not be denied. He stared at the grass before him and reprimanded himself for being such a fool—such an old fool.
“Go sit on your park bench, Townsend, and I will come out and talk to you,” Sherwood said.
Elliott slowly obeyed. He had nothing left now but a blunted craving. Guinda had been his partner in the most exciting excursion of his life. But there was more. He was devastated by her betrayal of her principles—or were they his principles? In a sense, she had remained more faithful to her principles than he to his. No, it wasn’t just principles and adventur
es. He felt foolish, like a high-school boy who finds that his secret love has other interests. Could it simply be adolescent jealousy?