Mahogany's Dream Read online

  Intelligence reports confirmed that the Kuomintang Executive Committee was planning an emergency meeting in sixteen hours.

  The President sighed. “Bill told me that he signed a lot of these orders, but I’ll personally never get used to it.”

  _________

  Taoyuan, Taiwan

  Seventeen hours later, in a warehouse in the Chung-Li Industrial District, the senior leadership of the Kuomintang Vanguard jabbered at each other like a bunch of old crows. They heatedly debated whether or not to accept responsibility for the attacks, even though their plan had been thwarted. Both sides had compelling arguments. The only point that all sides agreed on was the punishment they faced. In a best-case scenario, nothing would happen to them. In a worst-case scenario, they might be declared enemy combatants, in which event some of them might have to do a few hard years of confinement at Guantanamo Bay.

  Tsang listened to his compatriots with impassiveness. It was hard to believe that these were the same men who only days earlier had boldly planned to usher in a new era. He hadn’t joined in the debate because he recognized that it was a pointless exchange. He knew it was over for them the moment the satellite signal had been cut. Their grand plan had only succeeded in turning the KMV into an imminent threat to the security of America, China and Taiwan herself. He couldn’t figure out why the others had not understood that yet. The most conspicuous sign of their failure was the absence of more than a third of the Executive Committee for this supposedly mandatory meeting. The cowardly and the wise had already fled. He had considered fleeing too, but he ultimately decided that showing up was a matter of honor.

  He caught a glimpse of a shadow passing by one of the windows. He stubbed out his cigarette and braced himself.

  He found it idly curious that his final thoughts before dying were not about his family or his patriotism, but about Dyson Conwell. He thought back to the evening he had found Dyson asleep at his workstation in the lab. The young man had thrashed about, apparently in the midst of a terrible nightmare. When Tsang reached out to wake him, Dyson began talking in his sleep. Instead of gibberish, Dyson recited the exact dialogue from the nightmare that Tsang himself had had the night before. It was the same haunting nightmare about that room in New Mexico that Tsang had been dreaming for the past fifteen years. Hearing it replayed from Dyson’s mouth was an eerie, disconcerting experience. If Tsang regretted anything, it was never asking Dyson about it.

  Just then, a detachment of heavily armed U.S. Special Forces, a Kill Squad, noisily crashed through all the windows. One of the soldiers was a stone-faced man from Hyattsville, Maryland whose young cousin had gone to the Shaw Community Center to be in a Christmas play.

  No one in that meeting would ever make it to Guantanamo Bay.

  CHAPTER

  71

  Six Weeks Later

  Mancini sat in Dyson’s bright living room, thinking that the chair he was lounging in had to be the most comfortable piece of furniture in the whole damn world. Sitting in it was like floating on a cloud. It was so relaxing that he had to start talking to keep from dozing off.

  “You’re a hard man to catch up to, Dr. Conwell.”

  “I used to be,” Dyson said.

  Mancini pulled a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket, wrinkling the plastic wrapping loudly. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Actually I do. Second hand smoke and all that.”

  “Jeez,” Mancini said. “Who’re you? The Surgeon fucking General? How about I’ll smoke then suck the secondhand smoke out of the air like it was Italian water ice dripping off of Britney Spears’ ass? Would that be okay?”

  “I thought this would be a brief formality so you could close your file,” Michelle said combatively. “If we were misinformed, I can ask Reed to contact the Justice Department for clarity.”

  Mancini noted how closely she sat to Conwell on the couch. More than once, she’d placed her hand in the small of his back to comfort him. It was a small gesture that spoke volumes about the two of them. Either Conwell was more than a client or everybody should have this kind of legal support. “That won’t be necessary,” Mancini said. “But tell Reed I said hello. Actually, tell him I said that I don’t know how he lives with himself helping criminals go free for a living. Then tell him I said hello.”

  Michelle just rolled her eyes, reminded anew why she was never interested in practicing criminal law.

  Mancini gazed up admiringly at Dyson’s skylight. “I tell you, if we lived in a place like this, Beth would suck me off every goddamed day.” Still looking up, he cocked his head at an angle like a confused puppy. “Am I drunk again or is that a rainbow up there?”

  Dyson sighed. “I don’t know if you’re drunk, but yes, that is a rainbow. The skylight has a special double pane with enlarged hydrogen molecules that act like prisms for—” He stopped suddenly, catching himself. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  Mancini looked at Dyson. “As I’m quite sure your lovely counselor here has explained to you, I’m here to talk to you about the Hawthorn murder. Just a few questions.” Then he winked at Michelle.

  “Ms. Hillman will suffice, “ she said.

  “Only if you call me Stallone,” he said. “I’ve always thought that sounded much sexier than Mancini.” He grabbed two handfuls of his own girth. “I mean, with a gut like this—”

  “What are your questions?” Dyson cut in. He wanted to get this over with before Michelle lost her cool.

  Mancini asked him a series of perfunctory questions about his relationship with Norma and his whereabouts on the night she was murdered. The detective never came right out and said that the case had already been solved, but it was fairly obvious from the lackluster tenor of his questions that it had been.

  It still pained Dyson to think about the tragedy that had befallen Norma.

  When the interview seemed nearly over, Mancini asked, on a lark, what Norma’s death had to do with National Security. Dyson told him the parts that Aldridge had said were legal to repeat. There were gaping holes in Dyson’s answer, but Mancini didn’t appear bothered. He almost seemed entertained by the story.

  But that’s not to imply that he was not carefully evaluating Dyson’s every word.

  “So what about this dream?”

  “What?” Dyson asked.

  “Mahogany’s dream. You said that when Hillary pulled Mahogany out of a hat, Mahogany whispered her dream in your ear. What was the dream about?”

  Diffidence suddenly colored Dyson’s face. He shifted his weight three times before answering. He stared out the window as he spoke.

  _________

  In her dream, Mahogany came upon a shivering little boy sitting alone in front of a red brick rowhouse.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the boy cheerfully.

  “D-D-Dyson,” he replied, tattering teeth breaking up his syllables.

  “I’m Mahogany,” she announced brightly. “Now I know two Dysons.” While she ruminated on the wonder of that, she happened to notice her new friend’s continuous shaking.

  “Where’s your coat, Dyson?”

  “Inside the house.”

  “Why don’t you go get it?” she asked logically.

  “They won’t let me in.”

  Mahogany stared at him in shock; she’d never heard of such a cruelty. “They won’t?” She paused. Then she asked, “Would you like to hold mine?”

  The boy nodded his head eagerly, too young and too cold to have the faintest notion of chivalry.

  She pulled off her puffy goose down Rittenhouse Academy coat and handed it to him. He wrapped himself in it like it was the Sun itself.

  Mahogany marched over to the window to see what she could discover about the miscreants who locked little boys out in the cold. A big smile broke out on her face when she saw who was inside. She waved excitedly. She turned to the boy and confidently said, “I’ll get your coat. Then we can make angels in the snow.”

  A moment later, Janaya opened the
front door of the house. She gave Mahogany a powerful hug and whisked her inside, ignoring the little boy.

  The living room was tiny, but it was warm and toasty.

  The other Dyson that Mahogany knew, the adult one, was sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead. She greeted him, but he didn’t respond. Spurned, she turned to Janaya. “What’s wrong with Dyson? Is he mad at me?”

  Janaya cupped Mahogany’s plump cheeks. “No, he’s not mad at you, baby. He’s just upset because he has to go back and he doesn’t want to.”

  “Go back where?”

  Janaya smiled broadly and hugged her again. Mahogany thought she looked especially radiant, but she didn’t know why.

  Janaya said, “You’re such a special little girl. I’m so glad to see you again. Will you do me a big favor?”

  “Uh-huh. What is it?”

  Janaya crouched so the two of them were eye level. “The next time you see Dyson, I want you to tell him two things. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? You won’t forget will you?”

  “No, I promise I won’t.” Something occurred to Mahogany. “Why don’t you tell him yourself right now? He’s right there.”

  Janaya pinched her cheek. “Because the next time you see him I won’t be there and it will be your chance to show him how big a girl you are.”

  Mahogany didn’t understand completely, but she said, “Okay.”

  Janaya clasped Mahogany’s hands. “The first thing I want you to tell him is that what’s going to happen to Nanna and the children will not be his fault. Tell him it was written.”

  __________

  “Who’s Nanna and what’s her real name?” Mancini broke in.

  “It was Janaya’s grandmother. Her real name was Doris Parsons.”

  Michelle abruptly stood and stomped off towards the kitchen.

  Mancini watched her go, thinking she had a nice ass for a bloodsucking lawyer.

  “That’s basically everything Mahogany told me,” Dyson said, obviously hoping to abbreviate the discussion.

  “What about the second message?” Mancini asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You said Janaya gave Mahogany two messages for you. I’ve heard the first one, but what was the second one?”

  Dyson zoned out again. He briefly looked over his shoulder to see why Michelle was loudly banging dishes in his kitchen. When he turned back, Mancini was staring at him expectantly. He cleared his throat to speak, but then paused a few more seconds. Finally, he said, “The second thing she asked Mahogany to tell me was that He wanted me to know that the cup was full in the morning.”

  “Who wanted you to know? What cup?”

  When Dyson answered him, Mancini didn’t even bother writing it down. There was no way he was putting that in his report.

  CHAPTER

  72

  The case had been closed for weeks, but there was still one thing that nagged Mancini about it. He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  Jill answered after four rings. “F-B-I.”

  “Hey there,” Mancini said jovially. “This is Detective Mancini from the Philly PD. I spoke to you a while back about a case I was working, the Hawthorn murder.”

  “Hello would have been sufficient, but yeah, I remember you, Detective. How’s it hanging?”

  “Like a python on Viagra.”

  “That’s a visual I didn’t need.”

  “That’s the same thing my wife says when I get out the shower. Anyway, listen, I’m trying to close out my file and I just had one question that I thought you could help me with.”

  “Still working old cases?” she said. “What’s the matter, you don’t have enough purse snatchings to keep you busy?”

  “Not since you shot all of my suspects.”

  “Best way to close out a file. What’s your question, Detective?”

  “I was just wondering if you happen to remember what time of day it was when Mahogany Burrows had that dream.”

  “Eleven Thirty,” Jill said.

  “Wow, you’re good. Mind if I ask how you know that?”

  “The secretary at the Sheriff’s office called my cell phone while I was at the hospital waiting to see if Conwell would make it. She said the little girl we had left there had just woken up from a bad dream and was hysterical. She wanted to know if we could send someone to pick her up. I know what time she called because I kept my cell phone records from that day.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s above your security clearance, Dirty Harry.”

  “Right. I keep forgetting this whole thing is classified. Well, the time is all I really needed anyway.”

  “Great. I’ll let you get back to writing your parking tickets then.”

  “That’s funny,” he said sarcastically. “We should go on a comedy tour together. We can call our act Starsky and Butch.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Detective.”

  After he got off the phone, Mancini pulled a sheet of paper out of a folder on his desk. It was a copy of a Certificate of Death prepared by the Mt. Pocono Medical Center. Dyson Conwell had been officially pronounced dead from hypothermia at 10:13 AM. The certificate had a big red VOID stamp across it because he had spontaneously come back to life at 11:29.

  Mancini put the sheet back in the file. He picked up a cigarette burning in a cheap tin ashtray on his desk. He took a long drag and then exhaled a great plume, letting every thought of the Hawthorn case vanish from his mind along with the smoke.

  EPILOGUE

  Wearing a disguise and carrying a bouquet of flowers, Koxinga walked down the hall of a rehabilitation hospital in West Virginia. The helpful nurse at the reception desk had given him the room number where Dunleavy’s assistant was still recovering from her gunshot wound. Although she had been one of his best American assets ever, letting her live was too much of a risk.

  He peeked his head into the room, where he found the small woman propped up in bed, watching The Oprah Winfrey Show.

  She smiled when she saw Koxinga and his flowers.

  Koxinga stepped into the room and let the door gently shut behind him. Grinning, he pulled a handkerchief embedded with Smart Dust from his pocket and walked over to the bed.

  As he reached out to smother his unsuspecting victim’s mouth, the curtain surrounding the adjacent bed swung back.

  It was Dawa, dressed like a model instead of a maid.

  Koxinga kept his cool. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

  Dawa’s smile was thinner than the edge of a new dollar bill.

  They drew their weapons at the same time.

  __________

  In a Maryland mental institution, Carl Dunleavy was screaming again. The Smart Dust in his chest was celebrating the Chinese New Year, as it will do for the rest of his life.

  __________

  One Week Later

  At a cemetery in Washington, D.C., Dyson and Mahogany stand in the shade of an aged willow tree.

  Michelle stays in the car to give them some privacy.

  Dyson removes two daisies from the dazzling bouquet in his hand. He passes one to Mahogany, and sticks the other in her hair.

  Even though she is crying profusely, Mahogany gives him a big, toothy grin.

  They delicately place the flowers at the foot of Janaya’s tombstone.

  He takes Mahogany’s hand and the two of them, kindred members of a strange guild, walk off toward their new life together. The future is uncertain. The only thing they know for sure is that it will be full of dreams.

  THE END.

  Afterword

  If you happen to be a real physicist, I hope you were able to suspend your disbelief long enough to be entertained. While most of the science in Mahogany’s Dream is very real, some of it is merely science fiction.

  The Kuomintang Vanguard is entirely fictional. Taiwan is not a breeding ground for anti-Americanism or terrorism. It’s far too busy being one of the world�
�s fastest growing economies for that.

  Why do we dream? You may be surprised to learn that no one, not even our most distinguished scientists, really knows. Dreaming serves no obvious biological or survival purpose, yet all “high-vertebrate” mammals do it.

  That brings me to the matter of telepathic dreaming. I’m not a telepathic dreamer myself, but I believe its existence is plausible. The scientific community is split on the issue, though not evenly. Most researchers believe that PTD is not real, or at least not reproducible in a clinical setting, which, for many, amounts to the same thing. Having said that, I believe it may be real for three reasons: First, most of the studies that claim to disprove dream telepathy involve experiments on regular subjects, not people who claim to have PTD. Second, since we don’t yet know why regular dreams occur, we’re not in a position to rule out anything with confidence. It’s possible that PTD is simply a mutation of the normal dream function. After all, MEG imaging clearly shows that the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brain pass outside the skull on a regular basis. Look it up. Third, long before I knew that a brain could produce a magnetic field, I had an unusual but convincing experience that no study will ever debunk. Just some things to think about before you turn in for bed tonight.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to thank the following persons: My wife, Sherkera Cato, for reading my early drafts and tolerating my endless hours at the computer; my mother, Betty Colquitt, for initial research assistance, general encouragement and being my number one fan; my sister Sharonda and my brother Shareef for general support; my friend Kenny (last name unknown) for helping me with some of the Chinese translations (any errors are mine, not his); my friends Darius Brown, Alison Carter Marlow, Jason Moody, Karen Andre, Mike Brown, Akieba Isaac, Morse Hall, Akilah Ali and Collette Ramsey for support and encouragement. And I suppose I should thank the folks at Google.com for making the world’s best research assistant.