by Ted Krever
Nine
“We’ll wait for Marat,” Goatee Man said. Marat, apparently, was Old Leatherskin the Lightning Bearer. I was quickly developing way too much familiarity with sinister nicknames. Marat appeared a moment later, though, once again, I didn’t see him arrive, despite watching for him in all the mirrors. All at once, he was just there, taking the back seat.
“Can’t you just levitate up to the house?” I said. I felt safe with sarcasm—if they were going to kill me, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
“You can drive now,” Goatee Man announced and—how about that!—I could. “If we all arrive together, Max—you know him as Max, don’t you?—Max will be more cooperative.”
“You know him?” I felt somehow that I already knew the answer.
“We were schoolmates,” he said, “a long time ago.”
When we reached the house, Max was standing in the driveway waiting. He was making no effort to get away and I instantly felt guilty. Goatee Man got out of the car as soon as we rolled to a stop. I could see the jumpsuits climbing back to the top of the hill. One of them held out one of those plastic ties but Goatee Man waved him off.
“You won’t try to strangle me, will you, Maximka?”
“If I’d known it was you, Pietr—” Max began.
“You wouldn’t have resisted so?”
“I would have run first thing this morning.” They were both smiling their most horrible smiles—they must have taught bad smiling at that school of theirs. It was like a pair of grizzly bears circling a dumpster.
Max took a seat in the back of a black SUV. Goatee Man took the passenger front and someone shoved me into the back next to Max. A jumpsuit was already at the wheel.
“You didn’t wake me,” Max accused me.
“If you’d been alive at the time, I would have,” I snapped and he shut up. The van rocked off the lawn and joined a procession down the driveway onto the road.
“That was clever—the trance,” Goatee Man said. “I haven’t seen that in years.”
“You’ve been surrounded by feeble minds,” Max answered. Goatee Man turned to me and offered his hand.
“I’m Jonathan Tapir,” he said, smiling.
“You’re who?” Max said.
“That’s my name now,” Goatee Man said.
“If I’m Max Renn,” Max replied, “you’re Pietr Volkov.” He leaned back in his seat. “So—is this a Russian operation? Ironman Putin wants us back to work?”
“Patience,” Volkov counseled. “It’s far more interesting than that. But I can’t deny my partner the pleasure of explaining it to you.”
“Partner?” Max exclaimed but Volkov held a finger to his lips with an arch smile. We drove, following the river, listening to Bob Dylan’s radio show on satellite. The highways kept getting wider and the traffic thicker through countryside and suburbs and, all that time, nobody said a word. I concentrated on being someplace else in time. I was vividly remembering Tess in the back seat of her car when I caught Volkov’s bemused smile in reflection and that was the end of that. Surely, everybody in that car was furiously trying to read everyone else’s thoughts—if you’d had a think-o-meter, we would have been around 14 on a 10 scale.
Finally we banked onto a cloverleaf and across a thickposted bridge and there was the Lincoln Memorial glistening in front of us, the Washington Monument and Capitol like puzzle pieces behind. We paused alongside the Memorial, letting an unruly line of people cross the street and filter down the incline to the Mall—all manner of families, dragging their kids or grandchildren, banners bobbing in the bright midday light: Downsize the Bomb-Makers and Who Are We Fighting? The near end of the mall was full of people, several thousand moving out to join clusters at the other end, moving toward the Monument and the White House, up there in the distance somewhere. They were working their lungs, several competing slogans in the air at once. Then the van turned along the Potomac and into the parking lot of the Kennedy Center.
“You’ll turn around, please?” Volkov asked politely, holding up a pair of the hand ties. “I’m afraid it’s necessary just for the moment.” Max turned around and Volkov slid them on and pulled them tight. I followed his lead and was surprised how tight they were. A moment later, he placed a pair of the funny goggles on each of us.
It was a strange device. I could see through the smoked lenses and hear despite the plug ends over my ears. All I felt was a kind of pressure at the top of my skull and a sensation as though all the little unheard voices in my head—the ones you don’t hear until they go away—had gone silent. Not that they really disappeared, mind you, they just seemed muffled. I’d need a degree in Idon’tknowwhat before I could get any more specific.
The parking lot was full at 2 in the afternoon and we drove through, under the building, to a backstage entrance. There were two guards at the doorway, dressed in business suits but it wasn’t hard to imagine them in blue nylon jumpsuits. When the doors opened, Marat the assassin was there, too, appearing out of nowhere again like usual. I looked into his eyes for a moment and then away—you wouldn’t want to look any longer than that. They were dead blank.
One of the guards led us up a staircase and through a warren of backstage passageways and dressing rooms. He stopped before every opened door, every change of hallway, checking—for what? Who was going to care about us at the Kennedy Center? Somebody took the glasses off me when we reached the third floor, though they left Max’s on.
Finally, we came out of a stairwell into the huge backstage area, risers and dollies and flats of scenery piled up all around and Volkov led us unnecessarily through the clutter toward the front. I say unnecessarily because it was immediately obvious where we were going—there was only one voice now in the whole place and we were headed straight for it.
We stopped in the wings. The auditorium was packed, a well-heeled crowd rapt, the stage lights glinting off pearls, expensive watches and cellphones, all those tiny cameras reflecting back onto the stage where, prowling like seven thousand hours of television, Jim Avery smiled.
I’d been several days in the company of people who couldn’t smile to save their lives and now here was Avery, blinding bright at center stage and with the look of a man who knew—knew—that you couldn’t take your eyes off him. And when he turned his back to the audience for just a moment and faced us, closeup, the reason was in plain view—nervous tension that couldn’t quit, that percolated fulltime beneath that demanding smile—the constant awareness of mastery, of grabbing the audience and holding them, not letting go for even a second, of his determination to hold off that unruly second for as long as it took. Max was alongside me—his expression said he hadn’t expected this, but that wasn’t the same as saying he looked surprised.
“So,” Avery emoted into the spotlights, dragging out the word to comic effect, “So-you know this-I have a standard talk I give. I start with notes and wing it-in Trieste and Bucharest. By the time I’ve gotten to Tokyo and Paris, I know what I mean to say and it doesn’t change much after that. ”
Avery took a pause, a theatrical moment of taking in the audience from one end of to the other.
“But every year, this one is different. Because this is not your average audience. When this audience gets mad, you call the Vice President at his undisclosed location—and he takes the call!”
(Laughter from the audience)
“Most people dream of hitting the jackpot. You people own the casino. Which is the only role worth having in a casino, by the way. So—if you’re so powerful, so accomplished: Why spend money to watch me talk? Not even sing.”
More laughter. This time, though, Avery’s smile was harder, tougher, his eyes piercing.
“This year, we know why you’re here. Because the world’s gotten shaky for everyone. Even you guys. Fabled businesses have got the heaves, basic systems—water, power, investing—all look questionable. The best information money can buy is full of half-truths and gossip. Nothing’s a sure thing anymore. And you guys
have gotten used to the sure thing.”
The gaping hall was dead silent. No polite conversation, no jokes, no competition for attention. He had them and, as close as we were to him, it was clear he knew it. Now the ease slipped out of his voice—the tone got sharper, more challenging.
“Which is the problem. You’ve forgotten where you come from. Chaos, turmoil—they’re opportunities! Those are just the conditions that made you. I always talk about Hope but you know Hope isn’t Kumbaya, why can’t we be friends? Hope is how you get knocked down ten times and get up eleven. No hope means the best idea in history doesn’t get built. Hope is what told you, years ago, that you could conquer the world.
“ Hope’s come easy for you guys for quite a while now,” Avery said, holding his laser smile with a satisfaction that had to be the dead opposite of the way his audience felt. “Well-guess what? You’re going to have to dig a little deeper for it now.”
“So say it with me:” Avery called. “I have hope” and the audience responded in unison, once and again, a second, third and fourth time, volume rising, the words ringing through the hall. “I have hope. And this one: It’s MY World. Again: It’s MY World.” They chanted every phrase he prompted, over and over, several thousand voices including mine.
How many times had I heard Avery give this speech on TV? When I couldn’t sleep at night—when I was afraid to try—I’d sit in the living room of Dave’s house and watch him stalk back and forth across some stage somewhere in the world talking like this. But, this close, I felt the raw power he had to lift a person’s spirit. The thought that kept turning over in my head was: I have every reason to feel good about myself. There I was, at the edge of the stage, in plastic handcuffs, surrounded by Pietr Volkov and ten guards, feeling buoyant somehow, thrilled, transported. I felt the power of Avery’s message filling me up.
“Funny how it works, isn’t it?” Avery said, flashing that famous smile (The Billion Dollar Smile-Newsweek) as the chants died away. “They’re just words and I can’t pretend they’re all that articulate either—yet just saying them lifts our spirits. What vision do you carry inside you today? What World are you creating right now? Tonight? Tomorrow? When hope fuels our visions, we start making them real.”
“We should move on,” Volkov said and the guard led us to the back of the stage and opened a door-in-a-door—a normal-sized door set into a huge unload-the-tractor-trailer door. On the other side, where you would have expected scenery or at least machinery—or, since Avery worked alone on a bare stage, a wide expanse of empty space—we found a room filled with people, mostly young people in the lotus position, eyes closed and breathing deeply.
As we passed a whiteboard in the front of the room, I read:
Here. Now. Your Assigned Seats
The World Crushes the Average Person But I Am NOT Average
The Rules Don’t Apply To Me—I Can Accomplish Anything
I Have Every Reason To Feel Good About Myself
We funneled through a side door to a row of dressing rooms—the guard showed us into the second. It looked like the ones I’d seen in the movies—a small table set against a mirrored wall, a love seat, several chairs and a bathroom door. I would have taken the room for a spare except for the opened basket of fruit and two trays of organic cookies, each individually wrapped in plastic with hippyish hand-lettered labels. The guards let us sit and even removed Max’s goggles but not our hand ties. I certainly wasn’t comfortable but nobody had waved a Glock under my nose in a while and I took that as an good sign. Improvement’s where you find it.
And then, all at once, Max straightened up and looked around like a shot, startled. I looked around too in reaction, wondering what I’d missed. Max turned to Volkov and said, “It’s quiet.” His eyes were wide as though something miraculous had happened. “No voices. I can’t hear anything.”
“Yes,” Volkov breathed. “It’s peaceful, isn’t it?”
“How do you do it?”
“White noise generators,” Volkov explained. “Like the ones that suppress noise in headphones—whatever noise they detect, they send out the opposite waveform and nullify it. We’ve retuned ours to work on brainwaves. Just like the goggles we gave you on the way over. We knew you’d show up eventually, Maximka—we prepared.”
So, I thought, we’re disarmed. Then again, so are they, except for the guns.
And then the door opened and Jim Avery walked in. “Max!” he said, holding out his hand. When he saw the plastic ties, he glanced at Volkov and then upward—I thought immediately of the white noise machines. “Are those necessary?” he said sharply.
“Not here,” Volkov shrugged.
“Then let’s get them off,” Avery said pleasantly, as though they’d forced us to wear clown hats or something. He held out his hand to shake, saying ‘Jim Avery’ as though I wouldn’t know who he was. He was as tall in person as he looked on TV and shiny, like his cheeks had that wax they put on apples. But he didn’t wait for my name.
“I’ll eventually find a way around your machine,” Max said, nodding toward the ceiling. “You won’t hold me long.”
“Max,” Avery cooed, the TV smile appearing like a flare over a battlefield, “you seriously think we planned to hold you with plastic ties? And an anti-noise machine? Give us a little credit.” He sat opposite us, the back of his head appearing in twenty mirrors, like salt-‘n-pepper tulips. “The machines keep us from interfering with our kids in the back room. They’re busy ‘influencing’ our guests for another few minutes while they file into the parking lot. If you’re paying for a seminar on Hope, you’d better leave feeling hopeful, don’t you think?”
He gestured at Max’s wrists. “As to the ties, I simply knew you wouldn’t come any other way. Miriam shouldn’t have made such a fuss in Raleigh—I was very stern with her about that. My plan is for us to have a good talk. I’m not going to hold anything back with you—I think you’ll be very impressed with what we’re doing. You’ll listen to what I have to say, won’t you? Without trying to escape?” Max thought about it for a moment and then nodded. Avery glanced at Volkov. “We should go,” he said and a moment later, we were out in the hall, surrounded by bodyguards and hustling toward the back of the building.
It occurred to me to run—I’d made no promises—but the guards were still all around us and, as soon as we stepped outside, there was Marat, Old Leatherface with his flickering fingertips. I saw Max look him up and down while we piled back into the big black SUV; it quickly rolled down the driveway past the few remaining cars and out toward the same bridge we came in over.
“I can’t tell you the impression you made on me, those years ago,” Avery told Max, watching his reaction like the performer he was. “I remember you lamenting there was nothing positive you could do with your gifts,” he continued, pointing out the tinted windows at the last stragglers leaving his lecture. “This is just a tiny part of what we do, Max, but I think we help. People come to me in distress and anxiety. Whether their anxiety is real or imagined, it can be crippling. And they leave feeling good about themselves. They can’t help it.”
“You might even say they have no choice,” Max replied, smiling as loosely as he knew how. I’d seen all his smiles by that point. “Where’d all this come from, Jim? You certainly weren’t so chipper as the Senator’s Chief of Staff.” Avery’s smile vanished suddenly; the words came out of his mouth clenched, struggling for air.
“I worked for Alan Hammond for eighteen years. My first job out of college was with his campaign. He promised I’d succeed him—several times, he promised. I made the same mistake with Alan that lots of people made over the years—I thought he could deliver. The instant he announced his retirement, he became the old geezer mumbling to himself in the back of the room. None of the people who made the actual decisions cared a damn what he thought or what promises he’d made.”
We filtered onto a highway heading west—it might have been the same highway we drove in on, though I
couldn’t tell for sure—and then, after a few minutes, smaller local roads, grubby vistas of gas stations, motels, fast food joints and slow-moving traffic heading South in glum orderly columns.
“I’d been with him sixteen years when the bottom blew out. I’d shot my wad on a dead end. Do you know what that feels like?” he raged, voice rising but not really even seeking an answer, talking really to himself. “I flipped. I swore to myself that nothing like that would ever—ever—happen to me again. I was going to find something rock-solid to build the rest of my life on. Something I could control, some valuable resource that couldn’t get voted out of office, couldn’t forget its promises—something the smart money hadn’t bought up already.” He tried to recover, laughing out the window but going nervous about it a moment later, as though recognizing the admission in it.
“When you work for a lame duck, nobody’s logging your time anymore. Nobody cared if I showed up at the office. So I got in the car and drove, drove whichever direction looked good at the crossroads.” He counted the suburban streets stacked up across the hillsides. “That’s where I discovered the power of real fear—fear for yourself, fear for your own life.
“See, when you’re in government, you’re always worrying about out there. Social Security needs help and the terrorists are out to get us. But those things are happening out there, to somebody else. Now, with Alan useless and no idea where I fit in the world, for the first time, it was me. All my doors opened over a cliff.”
All at once, Avery’s ease returned—the big smile flashed across his face again. “So I drove. And once I’d driven around a while, I discovered that gnawing fear just made me a good American. Out in the world, eating in diners and staying in local motels and filling up where the price was good, I met people who hated their jobs but worked eighteen hours a day because they were afraid of losing them, people who were using credit cards to pay credit card bills or their groceries, people who knew their choice was to pay their kid’s college or get sick but not both. This wasn’t out there anymore—this was just normal life. Fear was what everybody lived with all the time.
“And the good news for me was, even though they were desperate for things to get better, people had no real hope it ever would. Because they knew what I’d just discovered—that big business and government don’t live in their world. People like me never come in contact with that fear, don’t know it exists—we’ve got a safety net. And since people in government and business are the ones who make the laws, how could it ever get better? The man pumping gas or selling iPods knows how the world works. We have the helicopters and bodyguards and photo ops; they have the bills and the insecurity and twenty different ways to go completely off the tracks.”
We were off the main roads now, into an area of Virginia dense with trees and constantly overflown by low-hanging airliners. Avery sat straight in his seat and sized up the view through the smoked windows. “And that’s when I figured it out: the really scarce natural resource is Hope. Most people are starving for it. Better yet, the winners—the imperial few—aren’t used to anything going wrong anymore and they have so much to lose. So nobody’s confident, not for long. Everybody falters, shudders—even if they don’t, everybody fears. So they all need Hope—and I can provide that. That was my answer and fortunately I was able to figure out what to do about it. I’m a cartel, Max,” he said, his smile going even brighter. “I’m the OPEC of Hope.”
The van headed into a walled-off industrial park, passing four or five boxlike glass structures on its way to a bunkerlike building with slit windows scarring its concrete face. I recognized the place from the picture I’d torn out of the paper: L Corp headquarters.
We pulled under an awning in front. Bodyguards ringed us immediately, opening the car doors and ushering us into the lobby. Attendants in familiar jumpsuits bustled behind a brushed aluminum counter with inset computer monitors and one of those free-standing security scanners like the airports. One of the bodyguards opened the gate for Avery. A very attractive blonde met him immediately and pinned a security badge on his lapel, then handed another to Volkov, who grinned and pinned it to his own jacket.
“Sam, we need two more badges for our guests,” Avery said and the blonde gave us the once-over. From her expression, we must not have looked too impressive, which wasn’t real surprising, considering we’d been in the same clothes since Florida.
“What grade?” she asked.
“Full grade,” Avery answered. “This is the House that Renn built—and that,” he gestured, “that is Renn.”
Sam the blonde gave Max another pass now, with that same awestruck look they all had who knew his name. She pulled two yellow badges from a cabinet at the back wall, pinning one to Max’s collar—they seemed to be having a staring contest the whole time—and handing me mine, just to let me know how I rated. We followed Avery through a pair of electric swooshing doors like in Star Trek and down an antiseptic hallway cluttered with projectors and monitors on roll-away carts and handtrucks piled with fold-up chairs. “It’s a mess,” Avery conceded. “We’re expanding rapidly. We’ll have a new headquarters next year but until then we’re overflowing.”
“This is part of Your World?” Max asked. He had that wide-eyed look he’d had in the dressing room—apparently this place was also wired for white noise. Which didn’t make me feel any more secure.
“Oh no,” Avery tutted. “Your World is a non-profit charitable foundation, with headquarters three blocks from the White House. Your World supports personal growth and discovery around the world. L Corp’s business is more…pragmatic, shall we say. The two have no connection, as far as anyone can tell.”
“So then, how is this the house Renn built?” Max asked.
We were filing down the corridors of what seemed to be a technical university. Classrooms lined both sides of the hall, filled with young people (actually, only a little younger than me, I guess, but they hadn’t had my life), expensive computer-aided whiteboards, chairs and floor mats—lotus-style seemed to be all the rage. One of the doors opened as we passed and the sucking sound said the room was airtight and soundproofed, even though there didn’t seem to be much sound to muffle.
“When you burst in on Alan and me,” Avery reminisced to Max, “the first time, years ago, you said you were Renn and I remember the terror I felt in that moment. I checked later and found that Alan felt it too. And what hit me just the next day, when I thought back on it, was that the fear was there before I even remembered who Renn was. You were a footnote in intelligence reports, the great missing Soviet asset and there were rumblings you’d been sighted but there were always rumblings. So you weren’t the first thing on my mind yet the fear was just overpowering.
“When I sat in on your debriefing, you talked about how you did it—how anytime someone came across your name, even just on paper, you could send a shock of fear at a distance, without them knowing you were doing it, without you even knowing you were doing it.”
“It can be useful,” Max nodded, “to make an adversary afraid of you before you face him.”
“Well, when I figured out my calling,” Avery said, “I went looking for you. This was after 9/11, after you’d gone missing and no one could find you.” He turned and smiled at Volkov. “But I put the word out in the right places, apparently. One day, Pietr walked up to me on the street and said, ‘I know what you’re looking for and why you can’t find it.’”
“He wanted an army of mindbenders!” Volkov smiled. “Like we live on every block, Max—imagine!”
“Well, it’s what we have now,” Avery insisted and you could hear the pride in his voice.
“Feeble-minded ones,” Max grumbled and Volkov shrugged.
“Feeble-minded ones are easier to use,” he said. “And, the truth is, they’re all we need.”
We were passing another classroom door. I moved closer to the wall, where I could get a glimpse inside as we passed. The teacher was up front, monitoring the class though nobody was
doing much of anything—the group of them eyes closed, palms up, humming like cats on a windowsill. The whiteboard up front read:
20 Minutes
40.02588N, 105.24102 W
Everything I’ve Ever Built Is In Danger; Who Will Protect Me?
The Borgen Takeover Bid Makes Good Business Sense
“This is where Jim is a genius,” Volkov said and Avery smiled modestly, a man who’d won the game and was now above praise. “He realized what was needed.”
Max’s forehead looked like a topographical map all of a sudden. It must have been a weird experience for him, having to guess at answers. “What? Feeble minds? How can these shallow ones read anybody reliably?”
“The mistake,” Avery said quietly, “is in the terminology: mindreader. The important skill for business isn’t reading people’s minds—it’s the other side of the equation, influencing the thoughts of others. That’s worth money. Lots of money.”
We passed another classroom. The whiteboard read:
20 Minutes
53N25, 2W55
Who Can I Turn to when No One Cares?
Labour is Still Better for the Working Man
Avery led us through an open door into an empty classroom. You could see it had done its duty recently—coffee cups and notepads were scattered across tables pushed out to odd angles to leave room for squatting on floor mats. The whiteboard was partly but not completely erased. What remained was:
20 mi
3 5’ 19.1” N, 122 05’ W
othing Lasts Forev
he Royal Fam Provides Stabil
“I explained to Jim how few prime talents there were,” Volkov shrugged. “But, the more we talked, the more I realized that what he wanted to do didn’t require real power. Twenty or thirty drones at a time could do the job. And better maybe, since they can attack a multitude of frequencies at the same time.”
“So when people walk out of my seminars feeling better, really hopeful, liberated, inspired, fearless, at a time when the world is going down the crapper,” Avery added with real enthusiasm, “what’s that worth? All through the seminars, we’re sending them the message: You Are Special. Others May Fail but You Won’t. You Can Do It. We clear away the roadblocks inside, which are the ones that really bite, don’t you agree?
“At the same time, we’ve offered our more practical services for hire. That has proved to be very profitable.”
“Influencing votes in Congress,” Max murmured, without sounding very distressed.
Volkov looked almost condescending. “Your thinking is outmoded, Max,” he said, shaking his head. “Government is not even a player anymore.”
“Everything is business now,” Avery interrupted. “Government, Media, Religion—it’s all business, competing for attention, for mindshare. Most of our work is influencing consumer attitudes and spending, stockholder’s meetings, Nielsen ratings, neutralizing or misleading competitors, cerebral placement for new products—”
“Cerebral placement?” Max said.
Avery shrugged. “It’s the marketing buzzword,” he said. “There’s a section of the brain, the—what’s it called?” He clicked his fingers a few times.
“Orbitofrontal cortex,” Volkov interjected.
“—Right. If you plant a product suggestion there, you’re home free. That part of the brain just bypasses all rational judgment or vetting. It’s an automatic purchase. Saves an incredible amount of money in advertising and PR.”
“And you’re telling me that’s funding this whole enterprise?” Max said and the skepticism in his voice seemed to set something off in Avery.
“I don’t think you realize the scope of what we’re doing. Remember five years ago, when the analysts started saying real estate had peaked, that it was a bubble about to burst? That anybody who got in after that was going to get killed? Yet people kept buying—adjustable-rate mortgages that were built to explode, right? You think that just happened?”
Avery was up and pacing around now, feeding on his own pitchman energy. “SUV’s—they drive like trucks but they go off-road. Except that almost none of their drivers ever even bother. They get half the gas mileage of cars. Gas went from $1.50 to $3.50 a gallon in less than three years and sales of SUV’s kept growing—at twice the profit margin of cars. You think that was an accident?” He had abandoned his composure now and was waving his arms around like a traffic cop.
“Think of the power, Max, to show a client you can move an entire marketplace like that! We started with a staff of five and twenty part-time drones. Now we have over five thousand in forty locations. Geneva and Shanghai open in the next two months.”
“But you haven’t mentioned the most creative part of your work,” Max said, in a light tone that didn’t sound like him. “Making nuclear plants malfunction and the Mayor of Copenhagen bark like a dog in front of witnesses.”
Avery’s smile didn’t waver but he glanced at Volkov, who responded quickly. “A child’s tricks,” he said. “We used to change the instrument needles in the lab from a half mile away, Maximka, just for fun. You remember.” Max nodded, though there was no nostalgia on his face. “There was no real harm done.”
“I don’t think we had anything to do with the Mayor of Copenhagen,” Avery mused. “At least none that I know of.”
“Well, let’s just say you benefit from instability anywhere in the world,” Max offered. “When people doubt their officials, utilities, religion, the institutions that make them feel safe, that’s an opportunity for the OPEC of Hope.”
“A lot of what’s unfortunate in the world,” Avery answered, “is fortunate for us.” He shrugged. ”The world is filled with misfortune. That only shows how much we’re needed.”
“Don’t you think somebody’s going to catch on eventually?” Max pressed. “Some ambitious prosecutor? Scandal-sheet reporter?”
“We’re protected,” Avery said.
“From everybody?” Max burst, looking amused and skeptical at once. At this, Avery and Volkov struggled to suppress self-satisfied grins.
“I told you he was a genius,” Vokov said. “Jim knows how the game is played.”
“We had our own rider,” Avery confided, “in the Homeland Security Bill. Our work is national security and classified top secret—anything we do, no matter who the client or even if there is no client. We can’t be prosecuted.”
“Can’t even be charged,” Volkov crowed. “No congressional oversight, no subpoenas, no grand juries. Offer that to a client and see them light up. It’s beautiful.”
“What congressman proposed that?”
“Well, no one’s name is on it,” Volkov answered. “But the Majority and Minority Leader both think they put it in, so no one is going to ask questions.”
“This is Pietr’s territory,” Avery said and there was a medal and a caution in the phrase.
Max stared at Avery for a long moment. “And you really think you can keep this quiet? Over time? With all the people who’ll know? With all the people who’ll be watching?”
Volkov rose instantly at this. He wasn’t a tall man, not next to Avery but he pulled himself up to his full height and there was fire in his eyes. “How do you think Bush won in Ohio?” he said, his voice rasping. “All those precincts where the exit polls said Kerry won—exit polls that are dead accurate, time after time, suddenly all wrong? Those people told the pollsters who they meant to vote for. Once they got inside the booth, that’s not the button they pushed.” He glowered at the bunch of us skeptics. “Of course people were watching. There were articles in high-profile publications, preaching to the choir. They were roundly ignored.” He leaned over the table and rapped on it with his forefinger. “People need to feel secure to challenge power. When they’re frightened, they have their own problems to worry about.” He paced back and forth a few more times before finally acknowledging Avery glaring at him. Then he took his seat again sullenly.
“That all might change after the next election,” I sa
id. Volkov looked at me like he hadn’t considered I could speak on my own. But he answered the point, though he answered it to Max.
“We work for both parties. Everyone wants us deep and dark.”
“The point,” Avery concluded, “is that we’re protected. From the top down.” He jumped up to the whiteboard, eager to change the subject.
“We recruit on college campuses, smart kids who need some extra money or want to start paying off their student loans. Who complains about getting paid for meditating on different subjects a few hours a day? Most of our persuasion targets require no more than twenty minutes at a clip, so we can service fifty clients a day just out of this office. Our work is all billable hours, like lawyers and accountants. We’re all over the world and, as you can see, growing fast.”
Max was smiling now, not a happy smile—he didn’t seem to have a happy smile—but an intrigued one. “Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “It’s brilliant. You’ve got the world on a string. What do you need me for?”
Volkov started rubbing the side of his nose, as though he’d suddenly developed a boil. “We have…other work,” he said. “Sensitive jobs, the kind you can’t give to drones. Some of which you’ve already figured out, some of which you know nothing. I have built a small crew I can trust. I know what they’re capable of and I know they will be discreet, they will not act rashly and they will not be caught. You are the Crown Jewel of the Soviet system, Maximka. You could choose your own jobs.”
“I’ll get Bin Laden for you,” Max said. “I could do that.”
“Come on, Max,” Volkov moaned. “It has to be something they’ll pay us for.”
“No one would pay you to find Bin Laden?”
“Finding him isn’t an issue,” Avery sighed. “He’s off-limits.”
“C’mon, Max, think like a grown-up,” Volkov urged. “When there was that whole flap about wiretaps without court orders, we cleaned up—they farmed out all the important cases to us. Remember—no oversight.”
“More to the point,” Avery said, “is it so terrible to help Company A get Company B’s peanut butter recipe? Or to find out how much they plan to bid for that big contract? To tip off the cameraman when and where Angelina and Brad are getting married? Or where they’re arguing? You’d be amazed at the return on smalltime stuff like this.”
“Or it might be a little more…gritty,” Max said, his expression dark. “Yes?”
Avery wanted to settle the waters, to smooth the room but Volkov was squirming, full of energy and fight, though it wasn’t at all clear who he was fighting. “Max,” he said, rising as though he couldn’t remain in his seat another second, “you don’t have to be a miserable stunted monk running from the world, hiding in back alleys and paranoid about everyone who wants to speak to you. You could be a consultant to a major corporation, with a nice house in the suburbs and a wife and kids, a Mercedes, vacations—a normal life.” I must have snickered—Volkov turned on me as though I’d pulled a gun out of my pocket. “Don’t laugh unless you know what it means to never be normal, to never be able to be normal!” and the anger and frustration in his voice were close to the bone. “You wanted that once, Max, you wanted it badly—I haven’t forgotten how badly.”
“I made a mistake,” Max said gravely. “I haven’t forgotten either.”
“Maybe you couldn’t do better at the time,” Volkov’s voice softened. “I’m not judging. But now—” he glanced at Avery, who nodded, “—now Max, twenty jobs a year. Twenty! You choose! Some of them, you’ll probably come in here or to one of our other centers, control someone for twenty minutes at a distant location or send out a suggestion and be finished. Sometimes there’ll be a little travel, first-class, on us, with layovers. Three quarters of a million dollars a year plus an expense account and bonuses for jobs we particularly want your help with.” Volkov tried to muster a look of sympathy, without quite putting it across. “I remember your scruples, Max—that’s not a problem. Surely there are twenty jobs we could all agree on?”
The two men stood across from one another, leaning over the table like rams about to butt horns. I don’t think either of them was aware of it. Max bit his lip; he was doing a slow burn and I started looking for the storm cellar. “Twenty jobs,” he mulled. “And not Bin Laden.”
“I told you, he’s—”
“Off-limits, yes, you said that. What kind of job were you doing in Florida two days ago?”
“We had no job in Florida,” Avery added.
“Yes, you did,” Max continued, voice rising. “They were your guys. Same van, same guns and headsets, same feeble-minded approach.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Avery insisted. He glanced at Volkov but received no glance in reply.
“Your men killed Dave Monaghan, two days ago in Florida. If there’s any chance of us working together, I need to know why.”
“Who’s Dave Monaghan?” Avery asked, now staring hard in Volkov’s direction, still without response.
“I’m sorry,” Max said, turning toward the door. “We can’t do business on this basis.” He looked over at me. “Time to go,” he said quietly.
Volkov finally found a way to look Avery in the eye, fleetingly. “Let us talk a few minutes, Jim,” Volkov said. “Privately.”
“You said he—”
“We’ll come to your office. Just a few minutes,” Volkov was the one trying to soothe things now. Avery, glaring at Volkov, stepped deftly between Max and the door.
“We’re doing great things here, Max,” he said. “I want you to be part of it.” He clapped him on the shoulder, reassuring and turning him away at the same time. Then he went out, closing the door behind him with a resounding thunk.
Volkov watched the door close and seemed to expand in the chair. He had been solicitous and respectful, second banana, with Avery around; now he was filling the empty space, the man in charge.
“So,” Max sighed, “nothing changes, eh, Pietr? You don’t tell Avery everything?”
“Your friend was a mistake,” Volkov said impassively. “If he was important to you, I’m sorry.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“I don’t know—I didn’t even know his name until you mentioned it to Miriam.” He shrugged, a big theatrical shrug, a Russian shrug if I had any idea what that was. “Someone exceeded his authority. Someone decided he was a threat. Why? I don’t know. I am sorry, truly.”
“He was shot through the head and then they blew up his house, made it look like a gas explosion. The guys who did it were under suggestion. Don’t tell me this was some local apparatchik going off on his own.” His eyes narrowed. “You have some operation on the side, something Avery doesn’t know about.”
“Jim was in politics for sixteen years,” Volkov muttered. “He’s very comfortable with what he doesn’t know.”
Max leveled a finger at him. “It’s the old game—he’ll only be comfortable as long as you succeed, Petushka.”
Volkov drew himself up again, as though on rails. “How can we fail?” he asked. “Who do you think will stop us? If you tell people, straight-out, what we do, they’ll think you’re joking or deranged. They’ll laugh at you. Meanwhile, we’re backing candidates—who will win—in Kenya, Estonia, South Korea and France—this year. We already have elected friends in high places in twenty-two countries. Who will stand against us?” He leaned over the desk again, a plaintive note in his voice. “Max, all your life, you cling to ambivalence. Nothing makes you happy. Be what you are. Use what nature has given you.”
“Dave said the opposite,” Max responded. “He said just because we could, didn’t mean we should. He said we had too much power to give it to governments. Now you want to offer it to corporations!”
“Dave Monaghan was a cancer,” Volkov spat. “He’d have us all bank tellers, begging for scraps.”
“Ahh, you do remember him,” Max said and I could see something in him relax. “That makes this so much easier.”
&nbs
p; I didn’t see Volkov touch any buttons or trip any wires but, all at once, the door opened, four very colorful-looking guards appeared and took positions around the table. There was a tall bullet-headed guy, a very skinny black man with very cool-looking dreads and tattoos and a kind of drowned-rat in a sweatshirt and rippling muscles. Marat followed them in but Volkov waved him off, annoyed. “We’re fine,” he said and the white-haired assassin turned, glowering and left.
“Max,” Volkov said, his voice deepening, “think about this. What is this wonderful life you have, out among the alligators, not using the skills you were bred for? Making nothing of yourself? Sincerely—I’m asking as an old friend who’s concerned for you.”
Max looked at him for a long time before answering. “That’s done, one way or the other,” he said finally. “I have nothing to go back to, whatever happens.”
Volkov beamed, though it only proved again that none of them knew how to smile. “So then, there’s no problem. Join us! We’ll be comrades again, doing great things.”
“They’re not great things, Pietr.”
“It’s a brilliant system.”
“Sure. You’re a great businessman. You plant bombs with one hand and sell bomb shelters with the other. What could be better?”
Volkov’s eyes were wary now. “Don’t mock me, Max,” he said. “We’re serious here.”
“I’m serious,” Max said.
“You admitted you have nothing to go back to.”
“I’ve spent too much time looking backwards,” Max nodded. “ But now I’ve finally found that positive use for my skills.”
Long pause, the two of them staring each other down, no one willing to be the next to speak. Finally, Volkov said, “And that would be?”
“What you just said: Standing against you—there’s something positive I can do.” Max was actually smiling, as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. “Probably better than anyone.”
“Stand against me here?” Volkov spat. “In my own building? With white noise generators and guards? You won’t get three feet.”
“We’ll see.”
“And how do you expect me to respond? Lock you up? Imprison you?”
“That won’t work—not for long.”
“Then what? Kill you?”
“Would you?”
“I could call Marat back—he’d do it without a single conscious thought. Don’t make me choose.” It was a plea and a threat at the same time.
“Alright—here’s another idea: let me go.”
Volkov coughed out a laugh, a deep laugh of real surprise. “I forget, sometimes, what a fantasist you are,” he said. “This is the real world, Max. You must join us. You know we can’t let you wander around now that we’ve had our talk.” He waited several long seconds for Max to reply. Max just stood, waiting—for what, I didn’t know. When it became clear he wouldn’t be offering any reply, all the emotion drained from Volkov’s face. “This will not end well,” he threatened.
“That’s correct,” Max agreed and looked me in the eye. And gulped. His eyes were wide on me and I knew right away that it wasn’t a casual move, that there was a message in it. He nodded—c’mon, you can get this—and gulped again. And somehow, I did—I got it. I gulped myself, gulped in a deep breath and held it. Max held out his fingers to Volkov; they crackled with electricity.
“No!” Volkov yelled to the guards. “Stop—”
That was as far as he got. Max snapped his sparking fingers, there was a flash of light and a loud crack in the room and all at once the others were gasping and gagging and staggering around like drunken sailors. The guards keeled over onto the floor almost immediately. The fire alarm was squawking, red lights flashing and sprinklers sprinkling. Volkov lunged for Max, but he gasped and slumped over halfway through the motion. Max reached out to catch him, searched his pockets for a moment and then dropped him flat on the floor. He stuck Volkov’s cardkey in the door lock and we ran into the hall.
“What the hell happened?” I demanded as the hall filled with drones and guards exiting in response to the flashing alarms and sprinklers.
“Oxygen burns,” Max said, “if you know how to ignite it.”
A burly guard rushed up the hall.
“Ozone!” Max yelled, pointing through the door window. “They keeled over! I saw them! You need a mask!”
“Shit! 10-45 in R36!” the guard shouted into his headset. “Bring masks! Gas masks!”
One second later, the overhead speakers began advising all personnel to evacuate in an orderly fashion, please; move directly to the exits and do not open any closed doorways. Not that it made anything more orderly—the hall was packed, the crowd pushing and shoving toward exits far down the end, more nervous and insistent by the second. Max pulled me out of the stream and down a narrow side corridor. “Tauber’s here,” he said, pointing.
“How do you know?” These rooms looked like storage closets, certainly nothing big enough for a man.
“Remember I came here? When they were chasing you around the hillside? You were jumping off the balcony and I was hovering over this place, all eyes and ears and no body.”
He stopped in front of the fourth closet and slipped Volkov’s keycard into the lock. Crammed inside was what was left of Mark Tauber once the pack of wolves had finished with him. His cheeks, arms and legs were bruised blue and full of cross-cuts, chunks of his hair seemed to be missing and his nose looked more crooked than I remembered.
“Feel like a ride in the country?” Max asked and Tauber started, as though expecting someone to hit him. One of his eyes was puffed closed—it was painful to look at. But he broke into a crooked smile as he realized who we were. Maybe one or two of his teeth were missing too, but they hadn’t been that great to begin with so it was hard to tell.
“I could use a little fresh air,” he croaked and we helped him to his feet and out into the flow of staff rushing out of the building.
When we burst into the afternoon air, Max led us around to the front parking lot, the executive section with the high-zoot machines. He pulled Volkov’s keycard from his pocket— a very fancy car key hung from the ring—and pushed the red button. A BMW nearby gave an answering chirp; we jumped in. “Pietr always liked nice cars,” Max said as we sped for the exit gate.
~~~~