Mayhem and Madness

by J. A. Dauber

  And that’s when the real cat-and-mouse game began.

  On his part: Dropping hints about Dad. How Dad was doing. What he was doing to Dad. Tantalizing her, torturing her, making her pay. But also—in his own weird, emotionally manipulative way—trying to court her.

  On her part: Giving him hope that it was working.

  She saw my face, and said quickly, “Not that it would. Ever. But I had to make him think it would. That his alpha-male behavior was attractive. That it proved I’d chosen the wrong guy.”

  And it had worked. Enough to keep my dad alive, which was the main thing, the only thing. “I had proof of life as of a month ago,” she said. “On our dadiversary. He always makes sure I get a picture of your dad then. Every year.”

  And I could see, in her face, maybe for the first time, the sheer weight of what she’d been dealing with.

  I had had no idea.

  No idea at all.

  “And when the Bloody Front started up, it was even worse,” she said. “It was so clearly Leonard—it had that Clapham Junction setup written all over it—but there was nothing I could do. Not without putting your father at terrible risk. Those victims are on my conscience as well.”

  I thought about telling her that I understood. But I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t tell her about Caroline. Not yet. It would have turned the whole conversation upside down, and I needed to hear the rest.

  And also, the weight of that was mine to carry around. Mom would have made me feel better. Or tried to, anyway. And I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted—needed—to ache.

  Mom was still talking. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did I do the right thing? Sitting on my hands for years? All those people the Front hurt, killed…they were strangers. And it was your father—” She stopped, covered her face for a second. Then kept going. “But the scales were tipping. I couldn’t stand by anymore. And I was getting ready to act, regardless of the cost, when a new element entered the picture.”

  Me.

  She had known almost immediately. Long before the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “You have motion sensors downstairs?” I said.

  She looked at me. “You didn’t straighten the picture in the guest room properly,” she said, “when you put it back. And then since you never put anything away in the lab, it was easy enough to spot—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  She lit a cigarette and went on.

  “I’d made it clear you were off-limits right away,” she said. “From the very beginning.” And for whatever reason—maybe because he understood it would be a deal breaker, that there’d be no way for him to ever come back into her good graces if I got hurt—he went with that. But once I started with the suit, it was a new ball game. Mr. Jones made it clear that if my mom told me the true story, he’d kill Dad right away. My mom made it clear that if Mr. Jones put me in real danger, all bets were off.

  “Of course, as it turned out,” my mom said, “we were both lying.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “You didn’t tell me anything!”

  “Who do you think sent you the message in the library?” she said.

  “Wait,” I said. “That was you?”

  “I couldn’t sit you down and tell you the whole story, could I?” she said. “Leonard was watching us. But I had to do something about the control override. In case he went back on his deal. I knew you’d figure it out, even though I couldn’t write anything explicit,” she explained. “What if one of those federal agents crawling all over the school spotted you with instructions for operating the Mayhem suit?”

  I didn’t figure it out on my own, though. I had help, I thought, a lot of help. I saw Caroline, smiling in triumph, the code-cracker, and the hurt and anger rose up in my throat and it wanted to spill out, but I shoved it back down. “Why did you use Klingon?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Honey, it’s because you love Star Trek!” she said. “You’ve always loved Star Trek, ever since you were a little boy!”

  I was tempted to reply that I did not love Star Trek, and that I hadn’t even thought about Star Trek for years, how she really had not been paying attention, but I didn’t want to get off track.

  “In the meantime, I was working my contacts,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been so distant lately.”

  Lately? I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “You didn’t think I was actually dating someone else, did you?” she said.

  “I, um, didn’t know,” I said. And that led to an awkward moment.

  I think it was probably around this point, by the way, that I realized why he’d introduced himself to me as Mr. Jones. I’d always assumed it was his way of indicating it was an obvious alias. Like, don’t even bother to think I’m trusting you with anything close to my real identity. But now…well, like I said, I’m a classic rock fan, and he knew that. He knew tons about me, long before that first meeting, long before I started talking to him about anything personal.

  I think it was an inside joke to me, without my knowledge. An inside joke at me, I guess, is a better way to put it. I think it was taken from that Dylan song. The one where someone’s being told there’s something happening, but that he doesn’t have a clue what it is.

  Three guesses what that guy’s name is.

  Anyway, I could see my mom working herself up into a soliloquy about how Dad was the only man for her. I deflected by going back and telling my side of the story. How I discovered the suit. How Mr. Jones discovered me. How he had me commit a bunch of crimes so I could—and now I realized I had to put this in air quotes—“train to save my dad from the Bloody Front.” I saw Mom nodding along. “How much of this do you already know?”

  “Some,” Mom said. “And some more of it, I guessed. But not all. So keep going.” She paused. “Remember. Everything he does—everything he has you do—has a purpose. Some reason behind the reason. Maybe some of the banks he had you rob were business competitors. Maybe he was helping out a rogue state whose assets were frozen. Whatever it was, it was about him. Not you. But he was keeping his side of the deal—you weren’t in any danger. Then. Keep going.” So I kept talking, about Logan and the Bloody Front attacking him at the football game. About the midair talks about my love life, although I kept that vague.

  My mom nodded and said she’d expected he’d try something like that. He knew, after all, that my mom, best-case scenario, came as a package deal—with me—and he was trying, in his own twisted way, to set himself up as my new dad. That was why she’d sneaked down and left those photos on the computer: to remind me of my real family. Although she was sure, she added, that Mr. Jones’s tactics wouldn’t have worked.

  I was sure, too. Pretty sure. I mean, some of those discussions…they were real. Or they seemed that way. I could imagine Mr. Jones’s plan playing out. Somehow, tragically, Dad doesn’t make it. At the hands of the Bloody Front? Too simple. Maybe in the course of a rescue. Mr. Jones puts himself across as another victim of the tragedy, someone who’s lost a friend. We bond, in our shared grief. And then who knows? Maybe he confesses, one day, that he’s finally ready to see my mom again. Face-to-face. Only with my blessing, of course.

  Of course.

  And that’s when I realized, with all this talk about romance, that Mr. Jones must have told the Front to go after Logan. Of course he did. So I’d have a shot with Rebecca, and he could give me romantic advice.

  And he did it before I ever told him about Rebecca. Learned about her from reading my texts to Caroline, I guess.

  I feel sick. He’d been lying to me and manipulating me all along. Every single step of the way.

  But Mom was saying something. “So that means you talked to him about Caroline?” she asked. “Before me.” And I gulped and said that I didn’t want to talk about that right now. She didn’t press me.

  I did te
ll her I’d found out about Mr. Jones’s link to Clapham Junction, but not exactly how. And then I told her about what happened in Clapham Junction, but not that Caroline had been there. Or what had happened to her. I just…I just couldn’t. Not yet.

  But I did tell her about my mistake—my horrible mistake—in blowing open the door and being responsible for those deaths. I did tell her that. And she hugged me. “It’s not your fault,” she told me. “They brought it down on themselves.” Which I didn’t believe, not entirely, but it helped. Maybe.

  “I knew you were there, from the news reports,” she said. “By that time, though, you’d been spotted elsewhere, so I was sure you’d gotten out.”

  Then she stopped, for a second, and said, “So it’s gone. They’re all dead.” And I nodded. Her face didn’t look sad, or upset, or even bothered by that. It was like…a general’s face. Some soldier pieces had been taken off the board. Nothing more.

  I could have imagined that face on Mr. Jones.

  But then her expression changed, and she was asking about the scientist. “The plan she mentioned. Did she say anything else? About the details?” I said all I could remember her saying was that if Mr. Jones didn’t carry out the plan this way—whatever that meant—he would do it some other way.

  And my mom agreed with that, 100 percent.

  I kept going with my side of the story. She had known I was still alive thanks to the constant news updates, although once they’d dug through the building rubble, all she knew was that I’d escaped.

  “Mr. Jones had gone to Plan B,” my mom said. “Once you’d discovered his secret. He knew it would get back to me.” The minute she found out that he was still involved with the Front, it was game over for sure. He knew her well enough to know that. So that meant cutting his losses.

  Which meant trying to tie up loose ends, one teenage loose end in particular.

  But in a way that gave him plausible deniability. Hence the terrorists hunting me in Jeeps. If they were able to get me before I got back to my mom, then he could deny everything, including his Bloody Front connection.

  “But why he had Assassin turn around…that’s what I don’t get,” my mom finished.

  I told her my theory that he was worried that if I captured Assassin he’d reveal Mr. Jones’s plan. She looked doubtful. “Maybe,” she said. “But people like that don’t crack so easily.”

  “Well, maybe it had to do with the hard drive after all,” I said.

  “The what?”

  And I realized I hadn’t mentioned it. I told her about the scientist’s computer, that I thought it might tell me—us—where Dad was, maybe even have actual evidence connecting Mr. Jones to the Front, and she gave me another gigantic bone-crushing hug and told me that I might have done it!

  “But it’s in pretty bad shape,” I said. “Maybe we should turn it over to Homeland Security or something like that.”

  Mom was already shaking her head. “Leonard has moles and double agents everywhere in the government,” she said. “He’d find out what we knew as soon as we did, maybe even before, and he’d move to neutralize it. We’d lose our leverage. And then he’d have no reason to keep your dad alive.

  “Besides,” she continued, and she got that expression on her face again, “this is something we have to do.”

  * * *

  But by we, it turned out, Mom meant her. And her alone. I was supposed to spend the rest of whatever-this-was being babysat by one of her friends while she took care of business.

  Nope. No way. Not happening. I cut her off in the middle of a sentence about how this was for my own good or something—I don’t know, I was so mad about the idea I wasn’t listening.

  “First of all,” I said, “this is my fight, too. It has been for months. You can’t just leave me out of it. And second of all, I’ve done a decent job taking care of myself up to now. Besides, there’s no way your PTA friend or whoever it is will be able to handle it if Mr. Jones or Assassin comes calling.”

  “First of all,” she said, “you have not done a pretty good job taking care of yourself. Yes, by some miracle, you’ve managed not to get yourself killed. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t made mistakes. Rookie mistakes. And we can’t afford more of them.”

  I guess given everything that was going on, she didn’t feel like she had a lot of time to be gentle with me.

  Or maybe that was her being gentle.

  I don’t know everything Mom does. Like Mr. Jones, she knows a lot more than she lets on. But either way, she was right that I’d made mistakes. Clapham Junction and Caroline came back to me like a punch in the stomach and I couldn’t speak.

  She could tell she had me on the ropes. So she went on. “Do you really think so little of me that you think I’d put you with the neighbors? These are not friends from the subdivision. These are not friends from work. These are friends from the old days.”

  There was a pause before those last two words that said…a lot. “You mean other criminals,” I said.

  For a second—just a second, but it was there—I was a little afraid. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize my mom. That would have been ridiculous. It was that I didn’t recognize the look my mom was giving me. Hard. Blank. I had never seen it before. It was almost like a body snatcher had taken over her face. “I’ve never been into labels,” she said.

  She explained that there were people out there, people she’d come across over the years, who shared some of her ideas. Her…philosophies. And a few of them had certain skills and qualities that would come in handy. Like tremendous computer expertise. A fanatical devotion to being off the grid. And a few of them owed her the kinds of favors that needed repayment. A no-matter-what, no-matter-when kind of repayment.

  “Mom, who are you?”

  I just blurted it out, standing there, listening to her, looking at her. This woman I’d known all my life. Who I’d seen practically every single day.

  And she said something funny to me. “All parents are strangers to their kids,” she said. “Our only hope is that when our children grow up they’ll get the chance to see us, really see us, as the people that we are.”

  And then she told me I had thirty minutes to pack.

  Which I’ve spent dictating this into my phone.

  Which if my mom knew about, I’m sure she’d freak out. After all, Mr. Jones—sorry, I’m never going to call him Leonard—might be hacking into this thing as we speak. I should probably be writing it longhand or something.

  But I mean, come on.

  NOW. SATURDAY. 1:57 P.M.

  Okay.

  Of all the places I expected to begin our journey of revenge, the bathroom of a comic book shop was not in the top ten. Or even the top fifty.

  But here I am.

  Not to use it or anything. Just hiding out from my mom and Kaz while I catch this up.

  So.

  TWO AND A HALF HOURS AGO

  While I packed, I came up with my plan.

  Or “plan,” in quotes. I was coming up with it on the spot, so cut me some slack.

  The “plan” was that while we were on the road to Mom’s friend—she wouldn’t tell me much, but this person was apparently a superhacker—I would annoy her until she changed her mind about letting me help. This was a strategy that had worked in the Great Xbox Christmas Coup of Two Years Past, so I was hoping lightning would strike twice. On the other hand, I still don’t have a dog.

  I knew that this was serious. I knew she wouldn’t agree to anything that would put me in danger, for example. I’d never be able to talk her out of that. I mean, part of the reason she never agreed to the dog was because she was afraid I’d get mugged walking it around the subdivision late at night…although, just saying it out loud now, I guess there were other reasons she didn’t want me out and alone, rather than worrying about petty crime in a safe neighborhood. Huh.

>   But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do something to help. Maybe remotely guiding the suit—I’d gotten a lot of practice with that over the past month or so. Or, if she was committed to flying off and bringing Dad back herself, I could be working on the files on the hard drive back at the lab. I don’t know. Something.

  I launched into my opening speech—family and taking responsibility and so on. But before I got more than a sentence in, I noticed that my mom was holding, not a backpack or a small duffel, but the large red suitcase from the storage closet. She must have gotten it before I even made it home.

  “Here,” she said. “Pack for a few weeks.”

  And I realized we had been having two very different discussions.

  I mean, on the one hand, I got it. Tremendous danger, Mr. Jones, Bloody Front. My dad. But…I don’t know…I hadn’t thought it meant leaving for good.

  And yet, somehow, my mom did see it that way.

  I was about to object. Strenuously. Vocally. But then my mom made a mistake.

  It was an understandable one, given the circumstances. A reasonable assumption.

  She said, “Look, I’m sure you’ll miss Caroline. And she’ll be upset, too. But we’ll figure out a way for you to tell her you’re okay.”

  And at that point all I could do was shut up, run back to my room, and load up the suitcase. Call it…I don’t know. Penance.

  As I was repacking, Mom walked in—without knocking, I should add. I showed her the three-quarters-full suitcase to say, See, I’m not arguing anymore, but that wasn’t what she was there for. She was heading for my closet.

  I started to ask her what she was doing. She didn’t answer.

  And then she reemerged, holding up a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of sparkling, shimmering diamond stones.

  Yes, I’d kept some. Mr. Jones’s routine of It was a test, and we’ll get to your dad any day now had always smelled. I didn’t know why, but I knew it did. So I gave him everything except the stash I’d “dropped” on my way back over the Midwest as I’d “swerved to avoid a flock of geese.” It was a routine that had seemed to work, so why mess with it? And he’d bought it without a murmur—I think he was already weighing the diamonds in his head, figuring how much he’d made, and blocking out everything else. I hadn’t known if or when I’d need them, but it was better to have and not need than to need and not have.