The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  Talk to your bank, call the Federal Trade Commission and the FBI.

  “And the FBI took a real interest, too,” Rostock remembered. “I was pleased. I drove out Roosevelt Road later that same day.”

  Rostock in a small interview room with table and chairs. And when the agents arrived he wasn’t waiting for questions. He told them everything he thought they might conceivably need to know, probably far more. His wife, the fact that he had no kids. The fact that he was one of six survivors of the famous Air France Flight 801.

  “They took note of that,” Rostock said, looking across the table at Catherine.

  “Yes, people do,” Catherine said, taking a sip of wine.

  Rostock finished his appetizer in silence, then set his fork down. The waiter approached, quietly this time, having noticed the focused intensity of their conversation. He took their empty plates and withdrew.

  “They were friendly, these agents,” Rostock said. “But when they started in on their own questions, I could feel something change in the room.”

  They were asking about his work, the exact nature of the research, the partners with whom he collaborated. They were asking about the car he drove and whether he had a Registered Traveller card for travel between the U.S. and the U.K. These questions went on and on, and it was only deep into the second hour that it finally occurred to Rostock that they were less interested in a theoretical third-party identity thief than they were in Rostock himself.

  “I was slow on the uptake,” Rostock said now, with a sigh.

  He remembered the turning point. The moment he realized they were trying to make his answers jibe with some existing theory about other things that had already happened. He stopped talking, mid-sentence. He’d just been explaining in more detail his core research area. He was telling them about the study-in-progress in partnership with Johns Hopkins—two thousand women, double-blind tests, multiple universities involved, high profile, high potential. He’d told them about cancer markers, their potential usefulness relative to the mammogram. He shook his head, recounting to Catherine these details, aware now of how oblivious he’d been, trotting out statistics and describing the impact the work might have.

  “I suddenly heard myself talking, volunteering all this information. And I stopped.”

  What was he doing? He had no criminal history. He’d been a Boy Scout, for crying out loud. A Boy Scout raised by a decorated Second World War hero who had himself gone on to become a well-known District Court judge. They sided with the law, the Rostocks. His uncle had been senior in the NYPD, a detective with awards and famous cases to his credit. His son, Rostock’s cousin, was with the FBI himself, a Special Agent in Charge, no less. Rostock and his cousin weren’t close, but those were the facts. He was copped-up. He was law-side.

  “Mason,” Rostock said. “My cousin’s name was Mason Hill. SAC Hill. I didn’t mention it, because I suddenly realized that they would know. They knew all about me. I had a cousin senior to them. But also everything I’d been telling them, they knew already. My research and reputation.”

  “So what did you do?” Catherine asked. She felt a certain nervous energy passing through her. Rostock was animated, even agitated. She guessed he didn’t get this way often. But she also understood why. There was a familiar sense of mounting pressure in the situation he was describing. She knew a bit about that, mounting pressure and suspicious glances from people who seemed to know as much about you as you did yourself.

  Rostock threw himself into their hands. He said he didn’t understand what was going on, but he suspected it was more than just his stolen ID and a fraudulently obtained credit card.

  They nodded and left the room, then came back fifteen minutes later with a file of papers. Rostock remembered looking at the bulging envelope with a growing sense of emptiness in his chest. A stolen identity induced a certain sense of having lost control. That file, fat with data, hollowed him out.

  Catherine heard that. Hollowed out. She thought of an empty space that appeared behind her heart. She suppressed the feeling that it might be opening in her now, releasing its flickering images and distracting sensations. She forced herself to listen and said nothing.

  The agents produced the picture of a building for Rostock, which they said wasn’t that far from where he lived himself in a condominium that had been made by sub-dividing one of those old limestone Hyde Park mansions. Bridgeport, they said, west of Armour Square Park where the White Sox played. None of that meant anything to Rostock. He’d never lived in Bridgeport. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been up there.

  The agents turned pages. Moved on to other questions. Did he take any prescription medications? Did he have trouble with any colleagues at work? Did he own or possess any firearms? Did he use pornography? Had he recently shaved off a beard?

  That last question marked a moment. He said no, because he hadn’t. At which point the younger detective produced another photograph and slid it across the table. It was Rostock at the door of the same building they’d just shown him, an innocuous building on an innocuous Bridgeport street. Or, it could have been him, it looked an awful lot like him, only with a beard.

  “It wasn’t me. I didn’t know the place. I’d never worn a beard. I’d never worn the hat the man was wearing.”

  Catherine was staring at Rostock, the first moment in the conversation when she was forced to consider whether this man might be unspooling. His speech had sharpened and sped up. He was rocking slightly in his chair. His hands kept picking up and setting down his cutlery as if remembering and forgetting what they were doing in an endless, looping cycle. She hadn’t been having such a great year herself, but maybe Rostock had come out of the Irish Sea really damaged: invisibly but intractably.

  And he had a copy of the photograph with him too. Catherine really didn’t want to see it. But he took it from an inside breast pocket and slid it across the table towards her. There it was. She looked up at him and down again at the print. Undeniable.

  “All right,” she said. “That does look like you with a beard.”

  “Unsettling,” he said.

  “I can imagine,” she said. But internally she was already reassuring herself. So the guy looked like Rostock. Maybe it was him. Maybe this whole evening was founded on Rostock’s delusion. Maybe the dignified Dr. Rostock was nuts.

  Mains arrived. Rostock waited until they were on the table and the waiter had again left them. Then he said, “That’s when they asked me if I had a lawyer.”

  He kept sounding sane the moment immediately after Catherine started to wonder otherwise. Now he was tucking into his beef short rib, knife and fork in those elegant hands. He seemed to have calmed entirely. She had to hand it to him as far as dinner companionship went. He certainly wasn’t boring.

  “So did you?” she said, finally.

  Rostock didn’t have a lawyer other than the one who’d drafted his long-ago will. But he was panicking. So he rolled the dice and asked if he could talk to his cousin.

  Of course, that was a gamble. Pulling rank is always risky. But he was going to try anyway because he’d watched these two for several hours at that point. And Rostock thought he could read at least one thing about them. They were confused. It’s a moment of discomfort for medical researchers also: the feeling that your theory is wrong, that you’ve been over-investing in a wrong approach, a flawed line of inquiry.

  “I simply wasn’t the guy they were looking for. I wasn’t the guy in that photo,” Rostock said. “And they knew it.”

  His cousin called back quite quickly, speaking first to the two agents, and then to Rostock when they passed him the phone and left the interrogation room. “It just isn’t me in the photo,” he told his cousin.

  “Yeah,” his cousin said. “I think they’re starting to realize that.”

  Rostock under those winking fluorescent tubes and yellowed paint. He told them he wanted to go. That they would eventually have to release him. You’ve changed your card numbers? All passwords h
ave been deleted?

  Rostock said yes, all that had been done.

  Another pause. “Okay. Then they’re going to release you. And for now, yes: that’s it.”

  Rostock said thanks and goodbye, hung up. Five minutes later he was out on the street driving home, blinking in the bright sunshine, half wondering if he’d imagined the whole thing. It had been a whirlwind of a day, during which his whole life had seemed poised for radical revision. Then it all swung back to normal, but in such a way as to leave the normal slightly askew.

  Halfway home, as if to punctuate that sense of things gone strange, his phone rang. Cousin Mason on the line again, this time sounding as though he was calling from outdoors somewhere, like he’d left the office to take a smoke break.

  “Sorry about that,” Mason said. “Couldn’t get into the details right that moment.”

  “So what is this all about?” Rostock asked.

  Well, quite a lot in fact. Turned out the Bridgeport address had been of interest to the police for several months, as it was the location of a computer the Internet activity of which had been under surveillance. Rostock’s cousin paused there. Rostock guessed he was smoking.

  “Way off the record,” his cousin said. “About what your doppelgänger is doing.”

  Rostock glanced up at Catherine, looking steadily across the table. “You know, it was the first time I’d heard it presented in those terms. Doppelgänger. Someone actually out there whose similarity to me was a near-mathematical truth.”

  Catherine felt a creeping embarrassment. She sympathized. Dr. Rostock had clearly struggled and she knew a thing or two about that. But she realized that she’d agreed to meet Rostock hoping that he might have something for her, something she could really use. And now it seemed that there was only tragedy and madness in his story. And she found herself clearing her throat, taking a long sip of water, thinking of her train back tomorrow and DIY and all that needed tending there.

  Rostock was still talking. And his story was getting worse. The computer in Bridgeport had at least one other federal agency taking close notice. Hacking. Online trespass. Data theft. Seemed like the person involved had a special interest in medical databases. The first report, in fact, had come from the system security people at Johns Hopkins where Rostock himself worked.

  “You can appreciate,” Rostock said, “this news made me most uncomfortable.”

  Catherine nodded mutely. But she was struggling to decide exactly how much of Rostock’s story she could afford to believe, to take on personally, to care about. She realized that her heartbeat was slightly elevated, a lick of anxiety passing through.

  “Ever heard of the Deep Web?” Rostock asked her now.

  Rostock hadn’t either, but his cousin brought him up to speed. The Deep Web was good at black markets: pharmaceuticals, firearms, varieties of pornography. Things people would want to know a respected university medical researcher was buying. His cousin wondered if he knew anyone who had recently acquired a grudge.

  “And did you?” Catherine asked.

  Not that he knew. So he changed his passwords. He signed the consent for the FBI to search his home. He watched them look through his closets, dust his keyboard for fingerprints, examine his bookshelf, opening books and shaking the pages. Then he watched them leave and he never heard from them again.

  Catherine staring, transfixed. Then, seeming to wake. “Well,” she said. “What an ordeal.”

  “And it’s wasn’t over,” Rostock said.

  She’d been afraid of that. But she couldn’t leave now.

  The situation for Rostock was still far from stable, he said. The people at Johns Hopkins were asking hard questions. His own lab had reported data anomalies. Rostock told them about the identity theft, although nothing about the Deep Web activity. People seemed more or less placated, but still the questions were there. And after a couple of weeks, he was officially suspended from the research project. Temporary, everyone said. Just temporary. He decided to retire. Make it easier on everyone.

  “I am my reputation,” Rostock said. “Professionally speaking, as a researcher, it’s my single asset. The thing I’d built over all those years. Someone was targeting that single thing I really owned.”

  A month passed, two months. Rostock wasn’t sleeping. He was using pills, which seemed less and less effective. His cousin had got him a copy of the photograph the agents had shown him. He’d find himself up in the wee hours staring at it, wondering unimaginable things.

  “It wasn’t even that the guy looked exactly like me,” Rostock said. “He didn’t. But there was something of me in him.”

  He was questioning his own sanity by this point. Wondering if it were possible that he’d done these things himself. Stolen money from himself. Tried to sabotage his own work. Done awful things online. Was he crazy?

  Rostock reached the breaking point standing in his own living room one evening, three in the morning, staring down through the trees and out onto the boulevard. A bottle of sleeping pills in his hand. “I wasn’t going to do it,” Rostock said, pausing, knife and fork trembling above his plate. “I didn’t believe I would ever get to such a place, such despair. But there I was. And there was someone out there, some entity that had turned on me and forced me there.”

  He didn’t know about the others at that point, but he committed in the moment to finding out. Nancy Whittle. Adrian Janic. Patricia Langston. Douglas Marshall. He didn’t know yet that all of them were gone already, but he’d soon enough learn the truth. Depression. Paranoia. Isolation. The feeling of being followed. The feeling of having been somehow split in two.

  “I’m following myself. I will catch myself. And then we’ll see who wins. That was Marshall’s last statement to the world. The others seem to have experienced something similar.”

  He went so quickly from frightened to angry, Rostock said. I will catch myself. Then we’ll see who wins. It was a call to confront, he thought. It was a call to defeat this other being. Move towards the entity. Move towards it and do not let it scare you into silence and inaction.

  Catherine was staring at Rostock, hand over her mouth, not trying to hide the fact that she was now concerned. But he didn’t notice. He’d gone somewhere outside the room. He was speaking with a quiet urgency, a low intensity of tone, quite unlike his voice when she’d first arrived. He sounded absolutely mad.

  “Confront and defeat,” Rostock said.

  Catherine was feeling the need to slow things down, to stabilize. “I’m not following,” she started.

  But Rostock couldn’t even hear her. You had to enter their place, he was saying. You had to look them in the eyes. You had to threaten them and only then did they disappear.

  Catherine was sitting back in her chair, wondering how far this might spiral. “Threaten who?” she said.

  So here it came. Rostock had done his research all right. He knew the history. He knew the lore, the variations on the theme. Doppelgänger. Ankou. Fylgia. Fetch. In ancient Egypt they called the mystic double the ka. In Norse legend it was the vardøger. They turned up in Icelandic lore, Russian, Chinese. Virtually all cultures since the beginning of recorded history had spoken of the phenomenon, people who found themselves facing the deadly, ill-willed opposite. The nearly identical evil twin.

  “I’m a scientist, Catherine,” Rostock said. “You think I don’t realize this sounds crazy?”

  It sure did, Catherine thought. But it wasn’t in the end as crazy as what came next. She listened and felt it like a punch to the solar plexus. It seemed, Rostock said, that theirs was a particular kind of double. Theirs. This thing he believed they shared. Theirs was a double spawned at the moment of tragedy when one friend lives and another friend dies. It was the double for survivors. Part of the Celtic tradition, this one: a category of fetch known in Gaelic as the ion dubh.

  “The ee-on dove,” he said, enunciating the words very carefully, “are black birds.”

  Her hands were on the edge of the table now,
gripping it as if for balance.

  “I saw them, Catherine,” he said, voice wavering, throat seemingly constricted with emotion. “I was surrounded by them as I fell. Thudding wings and cold bodies. Feathers close. I saw and I felt the ion dubh.”

  Here he waited for her to answer, his eyes expectant, intensely so, wide and shining but for that flaw, a glint of metallic black. And Catherine, whose heart was now pounding so that she thought it must be visible, thudding up through her clothes, sat staring at this stranger, held miserably in that shared moment and memory.

  But refusing to be snared. She would not listen to the end of this story. She didn’t want to know what confronting, threatening, what defeating meant to Dr. Rostock. She wished intensely that she didn’t know any of what he’d told her.

  “I think I need to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. A sudden, urgent necessity, nothing at all to do with needing a toilet.

  She left the dining room. Slow steps, she told herself. Do not run. She splashed cold water on her face and looked in the mirror. She retreated to a stall and sat on the closed seat top, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose, concentrating on just that feeling, the central pressure there.

  Then she went back into the dining room to find the table empty, the dishes cleared, the bill paid. And Dr. Michael Rostock gone too. Vanished into that frigid Chicago night.

  CLOUD GATE

  NO ANSWER VAL. NO ANSWER PHIL.

  Catherine was in a taxi, eastbound on Lake Street into the heart of the city. She wanted desperately to talk with someone, anyone really with whom she could imagine a trusting closeness. Kalmar came to mind strongly, her now elusive Warehouse mystic, who’d put his hands on her hips, tried to pull her close, but whom she had resisted. Other decisions meant other lives. And in another life she would have heard his voice now, low and soothing in her ear.

  She had the taxi stop under the El tracks in the Loop and began walking down State Street, no destination in mind. There were white flurries stirred up by passing traffic, icy puddles in the street. She was forced to step indoors just to take off the biting chill, where she found herself almost immediately overheated. Tropical humidity in the perfume section at Macy’s. She felt short of breath and unable to see clearly. Her eyes were dry and her head hurt. So outside she went again, into the blasting, arctic November streets, the sidewalks shooting their concrete chill directly up through her shoes. Down State through the crowds. Jostled at the shoulder, forced to step aside. Loud, bawling groups of people seeming to consist only of goateed men talking far too loudly and large women in Canada Goose parkas, aggressive and unaware.