The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  Voss sat at a booth in the back, where the wall was papered with vintage photos of local girls who had posed for the annual Finnerty’s Heart Attack Calendar, which raised money for the widows and children of D.C. police officers killed on the job. Her shoulder still hurt, but Josh had teased her mercilessly. Less than a year earlier, he had been shot in almost the same place and she had mocked him for not moving a little faster. Now he tormented her for catching the bullet. Her doctor had called her lucky, said the damage had been minimal, but she still felt like pieces of her were tugging themselves apart anytime she shifted position.

  She knew she was already healing, and quickly, but she promised herself she would dodge better next time.

  Several televisions were bolted to the wall behind the bar. Two of them had sports running in silence, but the nearest one showed CNN. An image of the Black Pine building flashed by, and then the anchor appeared with a photo of Dwight Hollenbach behind her. The words King Herod? were superimposed beneath the picture. With Shelby dead, the media needed a villain to be the face of the conspiracy, and Hollenbach fit the bill nicely. General Barnes from SOCOM—Lieutenant Arsenault’s boss—was an older man, balding and jowly, and looked too much like someone’s kindly grandfather. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Graham of Florida, had taken his own life only hours after the standoff in Hoboken had come to an end. Dozens of participants in what was now being called the “Herod Conspiracy” had been uncovered, but Hollenbach was being painted as the man behind the curtain.

  Voss knew it was bullshit, and she suspected the media knew it was bullshit, too. If anyone had been pulling the strings, it was either Shelby or someone they hadn’t gotten to yet. But the American public needed a villain as much as they needed a hero.

  Nobody would dare pitch Matthew Lynch as the good guy; his final act had been to aim a weapon at police officers and federal agents, provoking FBI snipers into killing him. The investigating agencies were still trying to figure out if any of those shooters were the same guys who had fired at Cait through the broken windows of Shelby’s office, or who had shot Voss in Hartford. But, for the moment, Lynch’s death was considered a righteous shooting.

  Detective Monteforte had become a media darling. She had been suspended from duty with the Medford Police Department pending the conclusion of an investigation into her participation in the events at Black Pine, but Voss felt confident that she would be cleared and fully reinstated. Homeland Security’s official report would reveal that the plan executed by Cait McCandless and Detective Monteforte had been conducted in cooperation with the ICD and FBI agents working to expose the Herod Conspiracy. The media dissected the hell out of the irony involved in Black Pine taking part in acts that could be construed as domestic terrorism.

  Monteforte had already hired an agent, who was shopping a book about the case, though she had agreed to let the ICD vet the manuscript before she delivered it to her publisher. With the money she would get for the book, it didn’t really matter if she got her job back. But Voss knew Monteforte didn’t really care about the money. Writing about what happened was the detective’s way of dealing with the death of her partner and the shock of what happened in Leonard Shelby’s office. All the media interviews were a kind of therapy, as well as a way to continue to report the version of the story they had all concocted.

  What the media wanted most, of course, was Cait McCandless. That was the real story—the soldier mother who had done whatever it took to keep her baby safe—but Cait was nowhere to be found. And that was the way it would stay.

  Voss slid her empty beer glass around on the scarred wooden table and glanced back at the TV above the bar. CNN was showing the video of Cait beating the shit out of that football player in Boston for the millionth time. That video would be the bane of the young woman’s life. It had gone viral online even before the rest of this had happened. A lot of people would recognize Cait McCandless’s face, and that was a dangerous thing—both for her and for her daughter.

  Josh stepped back from the bar with a glass of beer in each hand. Careful not to spill, he navigated his way through tables and chairs occupied mostly by cops. Voss noticed a couple of guys give Josh a dirty look. He was in street clothes—jeans and brown shoes and a decent shirt—but they had a sixth sense in Finnerty’s and had sussed him out as a Fed. The local police were not warm and welcoming to federal agents of any stripe who came among them when they were off duty.

  “Ice cold,” Josh said as he set down the two frosty beer glasses and slid into the booth across from her.

  Voss thanked him and smiled, lifting her glass. Josh did the same and they toasted, clinking glasses quietly.

  “To Cait McCandless,” Voss said.

  “To luck,” Josh replied.

  They drank. The beer went down smooth and cold enough that Voss took a long second gulp before setting the glass back on the table and studying Josh’s face.

  He frowned. “What?”

  She had a lot on her mind, but some of it she didn’t want to talk with him about.

  “Do you believe it?” she asked.

  Josh frowned. After a second he raised his glass and took another sip of beer. “You mean the whole War’s Children thing?”

  Voss cocked her head, arching an eyebrow. The whole point in coming to Finnerty’s was so they could relax over a beer and talk about things in a place where they could be sure no other federal agents would overhear them.

  Josh took a long drink, and when he put the glass down it was halfway drained.

  “I ran across all sorts of things when I was digging around in this case, a lot of small, pretty much forgotten bits of history—”

  “Footnotes,” Voss said.

  “Exactly. Footnotes,” Josh agreed. “I found enough of that stuff—about kings and governments ordering the killing of children, officially or in secret, or sprees of unexplained child killings—that it’s hard to ignore. But learning something like this can change the way you look at the world. This is the lens I’m looking at that research through. So maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. But I keep thinking about that Rolling Stone article.”

  Voss nodded. “Me, too.” She took a sip of beer and glanced away. “The guy who wrote that article is dead. But the editor—the guy who commissioned it, and who was the only other person to know the name of the source—he’s still alive. I put Turcotte on it. Took a while, but we found him.”

  Josh stared at her. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not,” Voss said.

  “What was his name?” Josh asked.

  Voss arched an eyebrow. “Matthew Lynch.”

  For several long seconds, Josh just stared at her. Then he laughed.

  “Still, that doesn’t make it true, does it? I mean, we’ve pretty much established that Lynch was a lunatic.”

  “He was right about the Herods, though. On both sides of this conflict,” Voss reminded him. “Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s all true—the mystical stuff—but he sure as hell believed it.”

  “People believe all sorts of crazy shit,” Josh said, glancing around to make sure no one was paying them any special attention. “Whole groups of nutjobs believe the Holocaust never happened, or that the moon landing was a hoax. I don’t know what to believe anymore, but does it really matter if any of it is true? From our perspective, the only thing that matters is that there are a lot of dangerous people out there who believe it enough to kill for it, and we have to stop them.”

  Voss ran her thumb over her glass, wiping away a swath of condensation. “I’m not sure you’re right about that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “We’ll never catch all the Herods. And the other side has their own crop of killers who believe this shit. From what little we already know, it goes back a very long time. Maybe hundreds of years, all those generations of people who believed it enough to commit abominable acts.”

  “People murder
for their faith every day, Rachael.”

  Voss nodded. “Yeah. They do. And I know you can’t judge the truth of something by how many people believe it. Hell, you can get the public to believe almost anything if you want to badly enough. Modern politics is based entirely on that truism. But what if they’re right?”

  “The Herods?” Josh asked.

  “Yes. What if the mere fact of these kids’ existence somehow alters the cultural consciousness or whatever? What if just by being born, they change the world on some metaphysical level that can undermine war?”

  Josh held his beer like he wanted another sip, but didn’t raise the glass. “You believe that?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Why?”

  Voss laughed dryly. “Seriously? Aren’t we all looking for some evidence of a higher power at work? I mean, I can’t tell you if I believe in God, but it would be a comfort to know there’s something more than this. We spend our lives fighting to be right and do right, and to find a little love and kindness. Wouldn’t you like some reassurance that we’re not alone?”

  Josh gave a small shrug. “It wouldn’t hurt my feelings any.”

  “I’m serious, Josh.”

  He seemed troubled by the question, joking to make light of it. Voss sipped at her beer while he contemplated. After a few seconds he leaned forward, reached out with his glass and clinked it against hers again.

  “You’re not alone, Rachael.”

  Voss merely stared at him, unblinking, barely breathing. A loaded silence had descended upon them and she was afraid to break it for fear of saying something that would lead them into confusion. Josh seemed to be studying her, searching her eyes for something he wasn’t even sure was there. They had always been direct with each other; this awkwardness was new.

  She broke the tension by lifting her glass and taking another sip, then glancing away. When she glanced back at him, she managed to smile.

  “Shouldn’t you be going? You don’t want to be late for your first proper date with Nala.”

  Josh seemed like he wanted to say something, but instead he pulled out his cell phone and checked the time. She could tell by the look on his face that it was later than he’d thought.

  “You’ll be okay getting home?” he asked.

  Voss arched an eyebrow. “I’m not an invalid.”

  He laughed and nodded. “All right. Just wanted to be sure.”

  “Besides,” Voss went on, “who says I’m going home? Maybe I’ll pick up some young boy in blue and play the handcuff game.”

  “Have fun with that,” Josh said, downing the rest of his beer before he slid out of the booth. She liked the fact that he did not seem completely certain she was joking.

  He reached for his wallet, but she waved him off.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Tell Agent Chang I said hello.”

  Josh hesitated and, for a second, Voss thought he might break their new, unspoken rule and start the conversation they’d been avoiding. Then the moment passed.

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  She watched him leave, weaving through the tables toward the door. When he had gone, she signaled the waitress for the check, paid, and left without even finishing the rest of her beer. Perhaps another night she would be in the mood for picking up a strange man in a bar, but that didn’t seem likely. Regardless of Josh’s assertion otherwise, tonight she would be alone.

  As for Josh and Nala Chang, well … the idea of the two of them dating seemed not to sit very well with Turcotte, and anything that bothered Ed Turcotte was all right with her. Or so she kept telling herself.

  Cait lay on her belly on the warm tile floor, sticking out her tongue at Leyla and blowing raspberries. The baby was on her hands and knees on the thick playmat her mother had put out, a set of plastic keys in her hand, but now she pushed her legs out behind her, going down on her stomach like Cait. Leyla grinned, drooling, and laughed at her mother’s antics.

  “Silly girl,” Cait said, stretching forward to press her forehead gently against her daughter’s.

  She pulled herself into a sitting position, bracketing the playmat with her legs, then propped Leyla between them. She grabbed the tower of multi-colored plastic rings that the baby seemed to love. The idea was for Leyla to put the rings onto the conical tower in order of size, but it had quickly become obvious that throwing them was much more fun. Fortunately, she didn’t usually manage to throw them far.

  “Baseball is not in your future,” Cait said, nuzzling her daughter’s cheek.

  A familiar sorrow seized her. Baseball really wasn’t in Leyla’s future. America wasn’t in her future. This was home now. And it was going to take some time to adjust.

  With a sigh, she picked up Leyla and rose, propping the baby on her hip. Leyla still had the green ring and she bopped her mother on the head with it, making Cait smile. Then the baby started slobbering all over the plastic ring and Cait could only shake her head in amusement. It would take some getting used to, yes, but as long as she had Leyla with her and safe, nothing else really mattered. Wherever they could be together, that would be home. They would build a life together, the two of them.

  Cait went to the window and looked out at the cobblestoned street below, the whitewashed buildings just across from hers, and above their orange-tiled roofs, the view of the harbor afforded by her second-story window. Brilliant blue, the sea glittered in the sunshine, dotted with the white sails of pleasure craft and a handful of the village’s fishermen, getting a late start.

  As new beginnings went, it truly was a beautiful one. Fifty miles north of Dubrovnik on the Croatian coastline, the village was small and quiet enough not to attract a large number of tourists—just enough to help the economy, and nearly all of them from elsewhere in Europe instead of from America. Even so, Cait had to be careful. She’d dyed her hair a very boring brown and would keep it that way, and she was letting it grow. Remembering her nightmarish ride with Lynch, she had suggested glasses, and Agent Hart had agreed. An optometrist would know they weren’t prescription just by looking at them, but no one else would think twice.

  The American government had financed her relocation, but only Agent Hart and his partner, Agent Voss, knew where she was. The building she and Leyla lived in belonged to her, free and clear. No mortgage. Although as far as the locals knew, her name was Catherine Shaughnessy. The small but well-kept row house was on the village’s cobblestoned main street, where most of the shopping was done. She and Leyla lived on the second and third floors, while the first floor would become her shop.

  It wouldn’t be enough for her to simply live here. An American mother who did not need to work to support her baby would invite too much speculation. Better to define herself than to give others cause to wonder. As a girl, she had spent far too much time in her aunt’s chocolate shop, and so Catherine’s Candies would open within the month.

  This was a beautiful village. It would be a good life, for both of them.

  Leyla laughed at some sort of babies-only joke and pressed the drooly plastic ring against her cheek. Cait nuzzled her and the baby laughed again. If anything had happened to Leyla—

  She stopped herself, unwilling to allow herself to consider it. Everything and everyone else in her life had been stripped away. Her job had been interesting, but not something she loved. Nick Pulaski had been calling her, but she did not return those calls. She felt badly for that, but other than her aunt and uncle, there weren’t many other people she felt she owed a good-bye. Most of the people she loved were dead.

  Miranda had been buried four days after her death. Cait had not been able to attend the funeral. Agent Hart even refused to allow her to send flowers. Anything he thought might lead someone to her and Leyla, she would avoid.

  She had wished that Auntie Jane and Uncle George could have come with her, but they had Tommy, and a life in Medford. Josh Hart had promised to pass a message to them for her now and again. She missed them horribly—b
oth Auntie Jane’s warm chatter and Uncle George’s contented silence. Other than Leyla, they were all the family she had left.

  Hart and Voss had done a great deal for her, but the real miracle they had performed had been acquiring Sean’s ashes. Cait kept them in a ceramic jar on a bookshelf in her bedroom. Her brother’s ashes were all that she still had of the life she’d left behind.

  And then there was Jordan. She had thought of him constantly since arriving here, hoping and wondering.

  Leyla started babbling, then went back to gumming the ring.

  “You hungry, baby? Time for lunch?” she said, thinking that afterward Leyla would nap and then she could get some work done down in the shop, where she was putting up shelves and painting.

  Only the noise and the paint fumes had convinced her to let Leyla out of her sight, but since their arrival here she had not been farther from her daughter than the baby monitor would reach.

  She glanced once more at the picturesque view out the window, then looked down at the people moving along the cobblestoned street below. Just before she would have turned away, she noticed someone approaching her door and an icy ripple of fear went through her. Then he stopped and glanced up at the number above the door, and she saw his face.

  “Oh, my God,” Cait whispered, stepping back from the window. She looked at Leyla, pressed their noses together, and felt elation fill her. “He’s here!”

  She rushed down the stairs with Leyla on her hip. At the bottom, she unlocked the dead bolt and the chain, then pulled the door open and stepped out.

  The building had two doors—one for the apartment upstairs and one for the shop. Jordan stood with his face against the shop window, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he tried to peer inside.

  “You came,” she said.

  He turned, and that boyish grin spread across his face and lit his eyes.

  “How could I not?” he said, looking sheepish and almost embarrassed. “When Agent Hart gave me your invitation …”

  Cait glanced around to make sure no one was watching them. “You’re really here? I mean, here?”