The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  “So where are they all?” Jordan asked.

  Cait shot him a look of disbelief. Didn’t he see? Didn’t he understand? She held Leyla to her, wishing she could summon fury but only able to muster despair. Lynch walked over to the recently occupied cubicle and turned on the computer there. As she watched, he moved across the large room to a master control for the television array. A cacophony of voices echoed from the walls, CNN, Fox News, BBC, MSNBC, Al Jazeera via some kind of satellite uplink—and how the fuck did he do that?

  Mesmerized, she could only watch as he crossed to the nearest of the whiteboards, picked up a red marker and drew thick X’s through the photos of three men. He paused in front of two others, then drew question marks on them. Even from here, Cait recognized one as having been with the government agents who had tried to take Leyla from her last night.

  Last night. By now the sun would be rising outside. Here in the warehouse, daylight—sunrise—meant nothing. There was only darkness here.

  At last, Lynch turned his gaze on them. But he was back in his element. Preoccupied. Distracted. He gestured toward the rear of the room, past the television array.

  “There are bedrooms and showers back there. You’ll probably find something clean to wear if you poke around long enough. Clean sheets. There’s food in the kitchen, but I wouldn’t vouch for any of the dairy in the fridge.”

  Leyla nattered happily, bouncing in her mother’s arms and tugging her hair.

  Cait went to Jordan, kissed the baby, then handed Leyla to her friend. He scooped her up, staring first at Cait and then at Lynch, who seemed to have dismissed them.

  Cait ran at him.

  “No, Cait! We need him!” Jordan yelled.

  “Fuck that,” she growled.

  Lynch saw her coming. The way he moved, she knew he had been well trained. He knew how to fight. His mistake was going for his gun. She gripped his wrist, stepped in, and launched a side kick at his armpit that deadened the arm completely. Tearing the gun from his hand, she tossed it across the room even as she spun around and struck the old man in the chest and gut. Even at his age, Lynch would have been a formidable opponent, but she brought him down hard and landed on his chest, pinning him with her knees, her hands on his throat.

  Her tears splashed down onto his face. “You bastard,” she said, choking on her sobs. “Crazy son of a bitch, you lied to me?”

  “No,” he rasped. “They were … The Resistance is real.”

  “Bullshit!” she screamed. “Then where are they?”

  He clawed at her hands, unable to catch his breath, and she eased up enough for him to respond. Those steely eyes regarded her, full of loss and sadness, and she knew then that he was just as much adrift, just as terrified as she.

  “Gone,” Lynch said. “There were dozens of us once. Some were killed. Some bought. Some were too afraid to die. But I … I’m one of them, you understand? I’m a War Child, just like your little girl. I have to stop these bastards. I have to kill them, to save as many of the children as I can.”

  She sat back, feeling cold and hollow inside, the significance of it all settling in. She slid off of him, sat in a tangle on the carpet and stared at her hands for several long seconds while Lynch coughed and wheezed. Cait glanced over at Leyla and Jordan.

  “Then there’s no one,” she said, shaking, breath hitching with the force of her tears. “We can’t hide for long. They’re going to get my baby. We’re going to … to die.”

  She couldn’t speak after that. Lynch tried talking to her but she didn’t hear him. She could only stare at Leyla, her beautiful girl, and try to keep breathing as sobs wracked her body. Jordan brought the baby to her and Cait held her. She and Leyla lay together on the dusty carpet, the baby’s head cradled in the crook of her arm, and she cried, staring in horror at the shadowed corners of the room.

  Like death, sleep tried to claim her. Eventually she succumbed.

  She dreamed of hollow-eyed Iraqi orphans, of dark-veiled Baghdad mothers with empty arms, and a burning taxi in the aftermath of a roadside bomb.

  She dreamed of screaming.

  Josh lay in bed with his cell phone tucked between his ear and the pillow. He had managed a little more than three hours of sleep and his eyes burned with the need for more, but it would have to be enough.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ve gotta hit the shower if I want to surprise the satellite geeks this morning. I’ll call you when we’re done there, check up … yeah. You sleep. Get some Z’s for me. Right. Bye.”

  He moved the phone, ended the call, and lay there for a few seconds with it clutched in his hand. Reluctantly he forced his eyes open. He couldn’t risk falling back to sleep. He’d brushed his teeth and showered before climbing into bed because he’d felt so grimy, but he wanted another shower and they needed to get moving.

  “How is she?”

  Startled, he turned to see Chang standing in the open doorway of his bedroom, and the sight of her made him catch his breath. She wore a faded Coldplay concert shirt he had pulled out of his closet for her to sleep in. Though oversized, the cotton fell just right, clinging wonderfully to her curves. Her legs were bare and shapely and her hair in fetching disarray.

  Josh sat up in bed, sliding back to prop himself against the headboard, aware of how little they were both wearing. He was shirtless, clad only in a pair of boxers.

  “Hospital-wise, she’s doing all right,” he said, trying to keep his cool, unable to take his eyes off of her. “She says she looks a little beat-up but they got the bullet out, no problem, no bone or muscle damage to speak of. She needs rest, but I give her until noon at best before she breaks out of there, guns blazing.”

  Chang came into the room, her bare legs, and the shape of her breasts beneath his T-shirt, making his mouth go dry.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I know how worried you were.”

  “Case-wise, though, she’s not so good.”

  Chang frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Voss says the shooter was FBI.”

  Chang’s gaze shifted around as though searching the empty spaces of the room for an answer.

  “Friendly fire,” she said. “It sucks, but when things get chaotic, it happens.”

  “No,” Josh said. “It was the first shot fired.”

  The corners of her eyes crinkled in pain. “She’s sure?”

  Josh nodded. “We don’t want it to be true, either. The Bureau was our first home, you know? But she’s sure.”

  Chang seemed to deflate. “Jesus.” She sat on the edge of his bed, the hem of the T-shirt riding dangerously high. “SOCOM was bad enough. Who is this? Who’s working against us like this? Who has this kind of reach?”

  “Black Pine?”

  “Maybe. They were in a hurry to move those bodies last night. But if so, they’re not working alone. And what’s it all about?” Chang asked.

  Josh studied her face, his focus split between the case and her presence there, so close to him.

  “Babies,” he said.

  Chang glanced away, then nodded. “The Rolling Stone thing—the Herod Factor—that’s what you’re talking about?”

  “I know. Paranoid conspiracy bullshit,” Josh said. “But what if it’s not? All of the details here are pointing toward that article being dead-on. Someone is killing kids born of parents whose people are enemies, exactly what the anonymous source in that article was talking about. Then, once we start digging into it, people with more influence than God start interfering with our investigation, and now my partner’s been shot.”

  “It adds up,” Chang agreed. “I wish it didn’t. Hell, it shouldn’t. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” Josh said. He frowned deeply, then turned to her. “When we were in the state police barracks up in Bangor, I started looking into some of the claims made in that article. Back in the 1800s, the first time the French went to war in Indochina, it didn’t last long, but the conflict didn’t
end then. War never quite went away, flaring up regularly, until the French finally left the mess to the Americans to clean up. That went on for about a hundred years, and there were plenty of times that peace seemed possible, but then something would happen to prevent it.

  “There was a radical group in Indochina made up of people who wanted not only to drive out the French, but to exterminate them. They were ruthless and determined, and they called on the people to rise up. One of the other things they called for was the public humiliation of any woman who gave birth to a child with a French father, and the drowning of their children.”

  Chang stared at him, searching his eyes. “You didn’t think maybe you should have shared this before?”

  Josh shrugged and threw up his hands. “To what end?” He let out a breath and looked away. “I’ve been telling myself that it’s all coincidence. It probably is. If you sift through history, you can find evidence to support almost any theory. Maybe the extremists in Indochina in the nineteenth century actually drowned babies who were half-French and maybe they didn’t. But even if they did, that doesn’t mean it’s all connected.”

  He turned to find Chang studying him closely.

  “But you think it is. Don’t you?”

  Josh scratched the back of his head and gave her a nervous smile. “It’s not just the French in Indochina. It’s the Carthaginians and the Romans, Napoleon and the Russians, and don’t get me started on the Crusades. I assume you’ve heard of the Children’s Crusade?”

  “Of course,” Chang said.

  “According to one account, after a century of sending Crusaders to the so-called Holy Land, the Church rounded up the children who’d been born of European knights and Islamic women and marched them off to die.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Chang said. “I’ve never heard that version before.”

  Josh gave a small shrug. “Neither had I. But it’s all history, which means no one agrees on what really happened, or why. That’s what I’m saying. Unless you’re dealing with who won a war or who controlled a region at a given time—when you’re dealing with the why of things—you can make history say whatever you want it to.”

  Chang shook her head. “Now you’re confusing me. Do you believe all of this, or don’t you?”

  “I think it’s crazy,” Josh replied. “But I think some of these guys—the ones whose entire worldview and business model is predicated on war—need it the way farmers need rain for their crops to grow … and then I start thinking maybe it isn’t so crazy. And it only makes it worse not knowing who to trust.”

  Troubled, she gazed at him, face framed by sleep-wild hair. “Do you trust me?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know. You’re FBI. Are you going to shoot me?”

  She whacked him in the arm, trying not to smile. “I think I might.”

  Josh laughed softly, aware of the way her hand came to rest on his arm, and the flash of pink cotton as the T-shirt rode up even higher.

  “I also think we both need to clear our heads a little before we can really make sense of all of this,” Chang went on.

  “I know,” Josh said, nodding. “Sometimes I get a little intense.”

  “This is a lot to take in, for both of us,” Chang said. “But I like intense.”

  Their gazes locked, her hand still resting on his arm, and it seemed his heart had begun to beat so loudly that they should both be able to hear it. For long seconds they simply stared, then she crawled across the bed to him.

  “Nala,” he said, hesitant.

  She straddled him, bent to brush her lips against his, slid her hand behind his neck to kiss him more deeply, her body so warm on top of him.

  “Shut up, Josh.”

  He didn’t argue.

  Cait woke calling her daughter’s name, terrified by the absence of Leyla’s weight in her arms. It took her a second to realize that sometime during the night she had been moved to a musty-smelling bed in a windowless cubicle. Light streamed in from the corridor. Still in her clothes from the night before—the longest night of her life—she shot from the bed, tangled in the sheets, and broke free to race for the door.

  The corridor showed her she was still in the warehouse, the bedroom a kind of sleeping cube—a modular piece amongst a row of similar cubes.

  “Leyla!” she called, running down the corridor, glancing into each room she passed.

  “Right here, Momma,” Jordan said from ahead.

  She entered a kitchen to find him sitting at a small table, holding Leyla cradled in one arm while he gave her a bottle. Cheerios were spread across the table and scattered on the floor, but Cait presumed some had made it into the baby’s mouth. A wave of relief went through her and she exhaled, smiling at the sight of the strong, quiet soldier so comfortable with her baby in his arms.

  “Sorry I panicked,” she said, going to them. Leyla’s eyes locked on her but the baby didn’t reach for her, which surprised, delighted, and saddened her all at once. Jordan’s warmth and the fresh bottle were apparently all Leyla needed.

  “She’s all right,” Jordan assured her. “We thought we’d let you sleep. Now that you’re up, though, there’s coffee.”

  Cait looked around, saw the coffeepot, and felt doubly grateful.

  “What time is it, and where did you get this stuff?” she asked as she went to pour herself a cup.

  Jordan glanced at her. “Not me. I woke up and Lynch was gone. Maybe fifteen minutes later he waltzes in with milk, OJ, and a box of Cheerios. He got some kind of baby oatmeal and some applesauce, too. I found a can of coffee in the cabinet. No idea how long it’s been there, but it tastes all right.”

  Cait didn’t bother with sugar or milk, just took a sip of the black coffee and relished its bite.

  “Want me to take her now?” she asked as she returned to the table.

  “No, just enjoy your coffee. Wake up first. The little princess and I are getting to know each other better.”

  Cait smiled and sat down. “Thanks. So, speaking of Lynch, where is the crazy fuck?”

  Jordan must have heard the brittle fury in her voice, and he looked at her so kindly that it nearly made her cry. But she had done enough crying last night to last the rest of her life. She had been a soldier. She had seen friends and enemies and innocents die, had watched people bleed out, had watched life seeping from a young boy’s eyes, had seen a father blow himself to pieces. And she had killed. Her daughter had needed her to leave all that behind, to open her heart again after working so hard to shield it. But now Leyla needed the soldier as much as she needed the mother, so for the first time, Cait would have to learn how to be both.

  “He’s watching all those news channels. He hasn’t said much. I think he’s embarrassed.”

  “That’s something, at least. If he’s got enough brains to be embarrassed, it means he’s not as insane as I feared.”

  “Are you all right?” Jordan asked.

  The moment the words were out of his mouth they both realized how ridiculous the question was, and Cait snickered.

  “Not even close. Lynch saved my life last night, probably more than once. But the guy is delusional. What ever organization used to exist is gone. Nobody’s riding to the rescue. He’s got his computer and his TVs and his list of baby-killers, but I don’t know what any of that’s going to do to keep us alive.”

  Leyla pushed the bottle away. Jordan tried to get her to take it again but she wouldn’t. Cait took a long sip of coffee and then set down the cup and reached for her daughter.

  “Come to Mommy, sweetie,” she said.

  Hoisting Leyla to her shoulder, she patted the baby’s back until she was rewarded with a tiny burp. She closed her eyes and inhaled Leyla’s smell, kissed her face and her neck, then just held her until the baby started to squirm. Then she sat Leyla on her knee and began to gently bounce her, eliciting a gurgling laugh.

  She could hide her for a time, but it would be no life, always waiting for the moment when the doors would be bro
ken down and the gunfight would begin again. They had been very fortunate last night, but she had no doubt that they would not get that lucky again.

  “Poor Ronnie,” she said with a sigh.

  Jordan nodded sadly. “Don’t beat yourself up, Sarge. I loved Ronnie, too. He was one of my best friends. But he should’ve talked to you first. What he did was stupid, and he knew it, or he would have told me about it before we got to you.”

  Cait wrapped her arms around Leyla and rocked her back and forth. “I’m still going to miss him.”

  “You and me both. But we can hurt over him dying after we figure out how to keep ourselves alive.”

  She picked up the bottle. “You’re a good friend.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself, Sarge.”

  She smiled as Leyla reached for the bottle, and guided it to her mouth. “You know I hate it when you call me that?”

  “I’m aware,” he replied, one corner of his mouth lifting in an amused grin.

  Cait shook her head, forcing her smile away. “You haven’t called me ‘Sarge’ for a really long time.”

  “We were home,” Jordan said, his own smile slipping. “Now we’re back at war.”

  Cait couldn’t argue. It just seemed to be taking her longer to adjust to their new reality than it had taken Jordan.

  “You’re right,” she said. “And it’s time to start fighting back. I’m going to need Lynch’s computer. And I’m guessing he’s got a whole lot of guns stashed around here somewhere. We’re going to need those, too.”

  Jordan leaned toward her, brow furrowed, all seriousness now. “You saying you have a plan?”

  Cait thought about that. What few traces of lightness she had mustered in her heart vanished.

  “Not a good one. This thing is so big, there’s no way to know who is and isn’t a part of it. We could join Lynch’s hunt, but my face has gotta be on every TV and computer screen in the United States by now. My life is over. And there’s only one way I can think of to get it back and make Leyla safe.”

  Jordan leaned forward and gave the baby a little tickle. She kicked at his hand and he laughed softly. Then he looked up at Cait, his grim expression returning. “Just tell me what you need me to do.”