The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  Now the Caddy shot through the tunnel underneath Boston, overhead lights flashing over the windshield, flickering in the darkness inside the car. Cait held the gun across her lap as if she were in charge, like Lynch was her hostage, and he still made no comment. She glanced over her shoulder, relieved to see a fringe of Leyla’s hair leaning out past the edge of the rear-facing car seat. Amazingly, and wonderfully, the baby had fallen back to sleep. After changing her diaper, Cait had strapped her into the car seat so conveniently supplied by Lynch, but she’d had to adjust the buckles. Along with the Cheerios and stains on the seat, that had made her feel better. This was somebody else’s car seat, not something Lynch had bought just to carry Leyla McCandless.

  Cait wrinkled her nose. When she’d been holding Leyla, the baby’s diaper had already been leaking and Cait had a urine stain drying on her shirt. She wished for something else to wear, but right now baby pee was the least of her problems.

  Lynch clicked on his right turn signal and slid the Caddy over for the exit onto the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  “It’s time, don’t you think?” Cait said.

  “Time for what?” Lynch replied as he guided the Caddy up the ramp and out of the tunnel, heading west.

  “Time for you to tell me what makes you different from the men I killed tonight.”

  “At gunpoint?” Lynch kept both hands on the wheel, his own gun reloaded and stashed back in a holster he’d slid under his seat.

  “I’m not pointing it at you.”

  “But you will if you have to.”

  Cait had no idea what to make of the guy. “Yes,” she said. “If it means protecting my daughter.”

  She could see Lynch’s jaw working, like he was chewing on the gristle of long-nurtured hate. He nodded slowly, then cut his gaze toward her.

  “Good. The dead sons of bitches back there on your lawn make it clear you’re willing to pull the trigger on your enemies, but you’re gonna have to do a lot of thinking about who your friends are from now on.”

  “And you’re one of them?”

  The engine purred. Cars swept by in the fast lane but Lynch ignored them, keeping the speedometer pinned at sixty miles per hour, neither fast enough or slow enough to draw attention. In the glow from the dashboard, his silver hair made him look almost ghostly.

  “No. I’m not your friend,” he said at last. “But I could be. And I’m definitely Leyla’s friend, whether you want me to be or not.”

  Cait lifted the gun from her lap, shifting to take aim. “Explain that.”

  “You won’t shoot me while I’m driving. We’d all die.”

  “I can take the wheel.”

  Lynch risked another glance at her. He let out a long breath. “I’m honestly not trying to speak in riddles—”

  “You’re doing a hell of a job.”

  “It’s just hard to come up with the words and make them sound like anything but madness.”

  Cait surprised herself by laughing. “This whole thing’s been madness. By all means, let’s not stop now. Talk to me, Mr. Lynch. Who the hell are all of you people and what do you want with my daughter?”

  Cait glanced into the back again. Leyla’s sleeping head tilted out past the edge of the rear-facing car seat. A rush of love and fear filled Cait as she realized that she herself would never sleep that deeply again. Whatever this was, it had altered the course of their lives.

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘War’s Children’?” Lynch asked.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe.”

  Lynch nodded, forging ahead. “My father was a GI during World War II. His unit was part of the Allied invasion of Sicily in ’43, and that was where he met my mother.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You want an answer,” Lynch said. “This is it. So are you going to listen?”

  An eighteen-wheeler roared by, close enough to make her flinch. Lynch kept both hands on the wheel, stiff-armed, staring at the road ahead.

  “Go on,” Cait said at last.

  “She was German, a secretary for the Luftwaffe. After the Allies defeated Rommel in Tunisia, they started bombing the hell out of Italy to soften them up for attack. My mother was injured in the bombing of the airfield where she worked. Half the building came down around her but she made it out with a broken arm and some busted ribs; ended up in the hospital. When the Allies hit the beaches in July, it wasn’t long before the Italian and German troops beat feet for the mainland, but she was there in the hospital when the Allies rolled up, and that was how my parents met.

  “I was born in September of ’44, and the killers came for me on Christmas day.”

  A chill trickled down Cait’s spine. Her fingers flexed on the grip of her gun.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lynch still didn’t look at her. “My mother died protecting me. When my father came home to bury her, he was approached by two men who talked what he thought of as a lot of nonsense. They told him that the birth of certain children could alter the fates of nations. ‘War’s Children,’ they called them. In every significant military conflict in the history of the world, there have been children born of parents whose peoples were enemies.”

  The fates of nations, Cait thought. Jesus, let me out of this car.

  As though he could read her mind, Lynch smiled thinly. He shot her a sidelong glance. “You killed a whole lot of people tonight. I thought you wanted to know why.”

  Cait looked back at Leyla, then shifted and stared out the windshield, studying the view ahead, the red lights on the backs of the cars that dotted the road in front of them. She thought of the Middle Eastern men who’d come after Leyla—Iraqis, Saudis—and the dark-suited bastards Lynch claimed were Feds. She thought of her brother, of Auntie Jane, of men trying to grab Leyla and dark sedans doing surveillance on Badger Road.

  “You’re saying this is all true?”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t,” Lynch replied. “It doesn’t matter, really. The people who are after Leyla believe it. Or, hell, maybe some of them don’t. Probably some are only hedging their bets just in case it’s true. But they’ve murdered more than sixty children since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, and those are just the ones I’m aware of.”

  Cait felt sick. “But why?” She hated how small her voice sounded.

  “The Americans who came after you tonight work for very powerful people. I hate to use the phrase secret society because it sounds like something out of a Victorian mystery or a bad comic book. Cabal. Conspiracy. Over the years, my friends and I have taken to calling them ‘the Collective.’ I’ve also heard them referred to many times as the ‘Herods.’ ”

  “After King Herod—”

  “Exactly,” Lynch said. “Herod had been put in place by the Romans to rule over Judea. The Romans were an occupying force, the enemy. According to the story, Herod had been given a prophecy that an infant had been born who would one day rise to become King of the Jews. As he understood things, the only way for someone to be King of the Jews was if he himself was no longer King of Judea, and if Rome no longer controlled the region. This would require the withdrawal or defeat of Rome. To serve his own interests, and those of the empire, he gave the order to kill all newborn males so none of them would one day grow up to become King of the Jews.”

  Cait stared at him. “It’s a Bible story.”

  “It’s also history. And if you did the research, you’d find that there are scholars who believe early Christian leaders co-opted the story; that the slaughter of the innocents wasn’t about a search for Christ at all. The infants killed all had something in common. They each had one Jewish and one Roman parent.”

  A trickle of dread ran down Cait’s back.

  “I can’t say for certain if it was the first time a series of such executions was carried out, but it certainly wasn’t the last. The Herod Factor has come into play during many of the world’s major conflicts over the past two thousand years. The Napoleonic Wars saw the murder of h
undreds of children born of parents from opposing sides. French and British. French and Spanish. French and Russian.”

  “Two hundred years ago,” Cait said.

  Lynch’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “And seventy years ago, during World War II, and forty years ago, during Vietnam. And on and on.”

  “And you’re saying all of this has been done by this group? The Collective?”

  “Their influence is enormous, but it’s the same thing on the other side. Radical Middle Eastern extremists. We have the Collective and they have their own jihadist Herods. What they have in common is that, for various reasons, they don’t want this war to end.”

  Cait couldn’t listen to him anymore. “You’re saying babies like Leyla could end the war? She’s an infant!”

  Lynch flexed his fingers on the wheel. “Who knows how long this war could last? It’s not over territory, Cait, it’s about ideology. It could be centuries before it’s really decided one way or the other, and that’s how they want it. They want to exterminate each other—except for the ones who are just in it for the money that war generates. But you’re right. They’re not really after Leyla because they think she’ll be some great future diplomat. The whole mythology around War’s Children suggests that they—that we—have a destiny bred into us. The power to bring about peace, to lend wisdom and understanding to both sides in a conflict. The Collective believes her mere existence is enough to lessen the hostility and aggression between the enemies without them even being aware of her. Like the wings of a butterfly in chaos theory, she will have a ripple effect on the war, an almost mystical influence—and so will the other children born of a union between enemies.”

  Cait lowered her gaze, staring at the floormat. The gun had gotten cold in her grip. “Mystical? Seriously?”

  Lynch shot her a dark look. “Let me ask you a question. Have you run into people who look at you with disgust, or even hatred, when they find out your daughter’s father was Iraqi?”

  Cait hardened. “There are bigots everywhere.”

  “Absolutely,” Lynch agreed. “But what about everyone else? What about people who are just afraid of the simmering potential for war to strike close to their hearts and their homes? What about people who are ignorant, and don’t know any better than to be afraid or filled with hate toward anyone and anything related to the culture they’ve come to see as the enemy? When they meet Leyla, they see an innocent child. And when they understand what you have endured, and that you loved her father, some of them start to think differently. Tell me you haven’t seen it. Tell me that you don’t know exactly the effect she can have on people.”

  Cait started to reply, then gave a shake of her head. She wanted to deny it, to argue, but a chill began to spread through her body. How many times had she noticed people reacting to Leyla precisely the way Lynch described? Dozens, at least.

  “You can say it means nothing,” Lynch told her. “That one child can’t change the fundamental beliefs of a nation or a culture. But that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s about calming fears and making people think, and those things ripple outward, Cait.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s crazy.”

  “And yet …”

  Cait said nothing. In her mind’s eye she could see the thoughtful faces of people Leyla had affected, and a part of her did believe that such encounters could effect subtle changes on a community. Leyla was only one child, but the conflict between the United States and radical Muslim factions in the Middle East had been going on a very long time. How many children were there in the world now who had been born with one parent from either side of that conflict?

  “You understand how hard it is to believe all of this?” Cait asked.

  “I do,” Lynch said. “But I’ll tell you this much. They believe it.”

  A minute or more passed with only the sounds of the engine and the tires on the road and the soft breathing of her sleeping child to interfere with the silence between them. Her mind raced, trying to find a way to refute Lynch’s story. True or not, if the warhawks and industrialists and religious zealots who thrived on this war really believed that babies born of parents from warring cultures could bring about the end of that war …

  Could it be? How else to explain all that had happened to her and her family this week?

  And friends. Oh, Miranda. I’m sorry.

  Cait bit her lip and fought back tears. Her left hand shook, though her gun hand remained steady. It always had.

  “So how come they didn’t just kill Leyla? They could’ve done it almost anytime they wanted.”

  As the words left her lips, she knew that Lynch would take them as acceptance of his wild story, but she had to ask. Sean was dead and his friend Herc had been unable to help, but she knew that there were layers of secrecy behind the curtain of reality, which the rest of the world wasn’t allowed to see. If the ruthless men who hid their actions behind that curtain believed this fairy tale, she would put nothing past them.

  “You made them sloppy,” Lynch told her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Collective are usually careful and methodical. They cover their tracks so well that in most cases no one even knows a murder has taken place. But someone’s finally figured out their m.o. If you’ve seen the reports about the crib deaths in the Midwest that are being investigated as murders—”

  “I have.”

  “—then you know what I mean. How many children have appeared to have ‘died in their sleep’ but were actually killed by the Collective? I don’t know the exact number, but there have been dozens. That’s the sort of subtlety they usually operate with. But now that someone’s connecting the dots, their usual procedure is unworkable. Right now the authorities think they’re dealing with a serial killer. The Collective are in no real danger—they will point the investigation away from themselves, as they always have. But they need to figure out a new way of doing things, at least for a while.”

  “So coming after my baby in broad daylight, in my aunt’s driveway, that’s their new m.o.? They hit my house in force, Lynch, pretending to be federal agents. There’s nothing fucking stealthy about that.”

  “Some of them might have actually been federal agents. As for the way they came after you tonight … that’s what I meant about you making them sloppy. Even so, it wouldn’t have been so hard for them to cover it up. You served in Iraq, and while you were there you became pregnant with the child of an Iraqi. How difficult would it be for them to spin that story for the public to make it sound like you were a traitor, working with terrorists?”

  Cait wanted to be sick. “Nizam was no terrorist.”

  “You’re mistaking the evening news for the truth. The two are not at all the same thing.”

  Cait shuddered. “They saw me on the news,” she said.

  “The jihadist Herods certainly did. They use Collective tactics with most of their victims in the United States—slipping into the children’s bedrooms during the night, committing their crimes, and making their murders look like natural death. But they don’t always play things as carefully and cleanly as the Collective. If they can make it look like a random child abduction, something the cops can attribute to pedophiles or lunatics or black marketers, they have no problem doing it ugly.”

  Cait frowned. “There was a newborn taken from its parents right in front of a hospital up in Maine.”

  Lynch nodded. “Bangor.”

  “That was them?”

  “It was. And from there, they came here. It had to be ugly, and in a hurry. They had seen you on television, talking about the attack on your aunt and daughter, and the death of your brother. The news report played up that you’re a single mother, that you fell in love in Iraq, and that Leyla’s father is Iraqi. That set them off.”

  Cait could see it. If they thought that Channel 7 might continue to cover her story, that Leyla might appear on television in future reports, they would have wanted to put a stop
to it immediately. So would the Collective.

  “If the Collective really have the power you say they do, if they could make it look like I was a terrorist, then I get how they could come after me like this tonight and kill whoever the hell they wanted. But what about these jihadists? How are they going to spin the news?”

  Lynch smiled grimly. “You’re not thinking, Cait. They would try to make you and Leyla vanish, of course. But if they failed, if it got messy, or even if they succeeded and there was too much coverage on the local news talking about you and Leyla, well, the Collective are there to clean up their mess.”

  “They’re enemies,” Cait said. “Why would they …?”

  But she got it. Of course the Collective would clean up the mess. The extremists wanted to kill each other, but they also wanted to be able to keep killing each other. The Collective would cover up the jihadists’ actions for the same reason they would cover their own. The Herod conspiracy had to remain a secret or the people on both sides of the conflict might demand an end to the war in such numbers that peace would result. And peace was the worst nightmare for the extremists on both sides. They needed hatred and fear.

  No matter who killed Leyla, Cait would be painted as a domestic terrorist.

  Or she would have been, if they had gotten away with it.

  “If any of this is true, it still doesn’t explain why this Collective had cars outside my aunt’s house at two o’clock this morning, and why they tried to snatch Leyla about eight hours later. I made the eleven o’clock news last night for a skirmish I had with this football asshole, but there was no mention of Leyla during that report. That wouldn’t have sent a flag up.”

  Lynch nodded thoughtfully, braking and checking his rearview mirrors as he took a corner.