Four

I sat in a conference room, remembering the soft brush of Lucy’s goodnight kiss. That memory plus the buzzing government-issue neon light combined to foment a foul mood that began in my loins and sat in my gut. Lee was pissing me off, and he hadn’t said a word. I looked at my watch. Past midnight. The Sox would have finished off the Orioles by now.

Lee bustled into the conference room holding a manila folder. He sat in a chair opposite me, scraping it across the linoleum. The pads had broken off and I could hear the metal chair legs gouging the tiles.

“Mr. Tucker. Your father worked at Global Defense Systems?” asked Lee.

“Yup.”

“What did he do?”

“He was an engineer.”

“Agent Miller tells me that you are an engineer.”

“Really. How did that come up?”

“The victim was also an engineer at GDS. Miller noted that your father had produced two of them.”

“My father did not produce two of them. He only produced me.”

Lee sighed. “None so blind …”

“What?”

“Nothing. Your father worked on the Paladin missile. Am I correct?”

How would Lee know that? The Paladin missile was probably the most famous piece of disposable military hardware in history. It was a surface-to-air missile that had been designed to shoot down airplanes, and it would have remained an obscure project if it had been used for its original intention. It got famous when the Army used it to shoot down Iraqi missiles.

I said, “Dad didn’t talk much about his work.”

“Very strange,” Lee said, pulling a plastic sheath out of the envelope. “It was probably just so long ago that you don’t remember it.”

“Don’t remember what?”

“Your work on the Paladin.”

“Shit, Lee, I didn’t work on the Paladin. I was like six.”

“In fact, you did work on the Paladin. It was this work that brought your brother to your door.”

“I told you, he’s not my brother.”

“You want me to believe that he just wound up there randomly?”

“Yes.”

“With your father’s name and your father’s nose.”

“I guess so.”

“Then explain this,” Lee said. “John Tucker had it in his hand when he died.”

Lee slid the plastic sleeve across the table. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The paper had a smear of blood on it, where John must have clutched it after being shot.

The lower right-hand corner bore the logo GDS—Global Defense Systems. This was an engineering document. Across the top were the words Paladin Air Defense System.

The rest of the page was taken up by a single drawing that represented the Paladin Air Defense System in action. Bombers streaked across the sky while a cannon fired upon them from the lower left corner. You could tell it was firing because there were slashing lines, in crayon, from the tip of the cannon to the planes. Wherever the lines met a bomber, a flurry of jagged lines obliterated the plane.

Around the lower left-hand corner, stick figures in baseball caps waved their little stick arms in the air and jumped for joy. They had two dots for eyes, and big smiley faces. Some were in profile, with one dot for an eye and an arc for half a smiley. The cannon itself had an American flag drawn on it in pencil. It was a rectangle with five stars in the upper left corner and lines for stripes.

The artist’s name was scrawled across the lower right-hand side of the drawing, in the large, double-sized print of someone who had just learned his letters. The A was a big teepee with a line across the middle. The T looked a like a little cross, and the R was a P with another line sticking out of it. The signature said Aloysius Tucker. Grade 1.

I remembered this drawing. My dad had come home from work one day and I asked him what he was working on. He said they were making a gun that could shoot down enemy airplanes before they could hurt us. That was in 1984, and the threat of nuclear attack permeated life so completely that even a six-year-old knew that we didn’t want enemy planes hurting us. I had taken my angst and driven it into that picture. Not one bomber made it past my gun.

Dad told me it was a great picture and asked if he could take it into work. I never saw it again, and now I know why. My dad had turned it into part of a secret drawing, a whimsical cover for his documentation.

I rubbed the plastic sheath between my fingers and looked at a new feature in the document. Someone had written on it in red pen that jumped off the black-and-white page. My name, Aloysius Tucker, had been circled, with an arrow pointing to the circle. The other end of the arrow ended in two words: My Brother.

I had no idea who this guy was, and I had no idea why he thought he was my brother. But as I looked at the scrawl that defiled my artwork, a question slipped into my mind: Why did he get the good name?