Absolute Liability

by Jennifer Becton

  Art closed the cover and dropped the file on his desk. The corners of several photos slid free. “My God.” He covered his mouth and reclined toward the window. “What...”

  “Remember when he left where he was going?”

  “CIA, wasn’t it?”

  “Right,” Lomax confirmed. “A week ago today he was killed in Japan, in an Agency house north of Tokyo. He apparently took a hooker there for some fun. It turns out she wasn’t a hooker.” The SAC reached across the desk and took the folder. He removed two typewritten pages from behind the photos. “This is from the Agency team that did a hush-hush on this. ‘Victim was bound to the bed with buckled leather straps. There was evidence of damage to every pain/pressure point on the victim’s body, indicating an attempt (result unknown) at information extraction.’ A nice way to say ‘torture’,” Lomax commented, moving to the next page. “Then this: ‘Blood was evident throughout the room, and along a path leading to the shower in the adjoining bathroom. Numerous fingerprints, palmprints, and footprints (most in blood) were apparent and were collected for analysis.’“ Lomax returned the report to its place in the file. “CIA sent the fingerprints to our lab in D.C. and got the results yesterday. The ‘hooker’ was some sick bitch named Keiko Kimura. Ever hear of her?” Art shook his head. “The CIA brief says she’s a former Japanese Red Army terrorist schooled at the finest establishments in North Korea, Libya, Iran, etcetera. A real pedigree type with a specialty in getting people to talk. In ninety-one she dropped from sight and reappeared last year doing freelance work for the money.”

  “Not enriched by the JRA ideology, eh?” Art observed. Revolution was not the path to success for most.

  “You got it,” Lomax agreed.

  Art gestured to the file. “So why do we have this?”

  “We have this so I can give it to you,” Lomax answered, setting the file back on the desk. “High priority, and keep that under lock and key. Assign it out to check on Vince’s connections when he was here. The CIA is trying to rule in or out anything that could have compromised him. Maybe he had an old acquaintance here and said something he shouldn’t have. You know the routine.”

  Somehow the term ‘routine’ sounded distasteful when it pertained to someone you once worked closely with, Art thought. “I’ll have it taken care of.” He took the folder and locked it in his desk’s file drawer. “Do we know why Kimura was put onto Vince?”

  “The new round of trade talks is coming up. Vince was probably trying to get some inside intel on their strategies. Someone on the opposing team probably thought he was privy to ours. The new gold standard, Art. Economic espionage.” Lomax thought quietly, then went on. “One more thing. Somewhat related, in fact. Monday the new code gear will be up and running. NSA put it in this morning. Big damn thing. The Director wants us off the MAYFLY system in two weeks.”

  “That’s a damn short time to get everybody checked out,” Art said.

  “That’s why you’re in charge of it. Monday I want you checked out with the Com clerk so you can set up a schedule to get everybody up to speed. Two weeks.”

  Art nodded. Lomax was very serious. “How does this relate to Vince getting killed?”

  “CIA thinks MAYFLY might be compromised. Everyone’s been using it for five years now—us, State, CIA, Defense. If it is leaky it could put a lot of people in jeopardy. All our office to office Secret and Top Secret stuff gets transmitted using MAYFLY. And worse things can happen to one of our UC’s than happened to Vince if they’re blown.”

  Worse? Art wasn’t certain about that. But dead was dead, and an undercover agent losing his or her cover could easily end up that way. “All right. What’s the new system?”

  “It’s called KIWI. Supposed to be the system. Unbreakable and tamper-proof.”

  “Hmm,” Art grunted, nodding. “I heard the same thing in L.A. when MAYFLY went in.”

  Lomax crossed his fingers and stood. “You wanna grab a beer?”

  Art came around his desk and lifted his coat from the brass tree near the door. “I think my wife has plans for me tonight.”

  Bob Lomax raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Get lucky, number two.”

  Art walked Lomax back to his office and caught the elevator alone. He pressed the button for the basement garage and leaned back against the waist-high hand rail. He closed his eyes and thought of Anne.

  But from another part of his consciousness Vince Chappell stared at him with bloody voids where his eyes should be. Art opened his eyes and looked straight ahead at the elevator door until it slid open. He stepped off quickly and turned right toward his car.

  * * *

  The school bus pulled to the curb on Vincent Street two houses past the intersection with Milford Avenue and stopped before number 2564, a two story craftsman style home with a fading blue exterior and pretty curtains in every window. “Sweetie, we’re here,” the bus driver, a pudgy redhead, called out to her last passenger. All her ‘kids’ were ‘sweetie’.

  Simon Lynch knew that the bus had stopped, so as he did at each stop no matter who was getting off, he pulled his cards through his collar and flipped to the card that said YELLOW BUS on top. Below that he had written, with his mother prompting him: IF TH BUS STOPS AT A BLU HOUS AND TH NUMBR ON TH BLU HOUS IS 2564 GT OUT OF TH BUS AND GO INTO TH BLU HOUS MOMMY WIL B INSID TH BLU HOUS WITH HOT CHOKOLIT FOR SIMON Simon nodded to himself and returned the cards to their place, got up with Dr. Chas’s magazine still under his arm, and walked to the front of the bus. “My mother says to get off here.”

  The driver winked and smiled at him. “Sure enough, sweetie. We’ll see you Monday. Bye now.”

  Simon turned without acknowledging her farewell and stepped carefully off the bus, hand on the silvery rail. This was the part where he’d hurt himself some time ago. ‘When’ wasn’t in the myriad of thoughts as his foot touched the slushy ground, but ‘hurt’ was. His foot had gone out from beneath his body because the ground was slippery once and he’d bumped his head hard on the step of the bus. He cried then, and he had cried when the other doctors—not Dr. Chas—stuck him with needles when Mommy took him to them. That hurt. He didn’t like to hurt.

  “Get going, sweetie,” the driver prodded from her seat, as she had every day since that first one when he’d slipped and cracked his noggin real good. Boy, the tears this one had cried then! Now, each and every day he stepped off her bus, he froze at the bottom like a statue until being urged on with gentle words. “Mama’s waiting.”

  Hot chocolate. Simon liked hot chocolate. He shuffle stepped up the damp walkway and onto the porch. At the top step the inner door opened. “Hello, honey!”

  Simon smiled giddily as the storm door swung out. “Honey is sweet!”

  “Just like my Simon,” Jean Lynch said. She pulled her son into a sidearm hug as she waved at the driver and led him inside. “Daddy had to work a little late tonight, so he won’t be home for a wh—” She saw the magazine under his arm. “What’s this?”

  Simon held it out with both hands. “It has puzzles.”

  “That’s right,” Jean Lynch said. “Dr. Ohlmeyer said he was going to give you something with puzzles in it.” When she said ‘puzzles’ she playfully pinched his nose. “That’s wonderful. Tell you what: you take that into the living room and look at the puzzles. I put your hot chocolate on the table next to Daddy’s chair.”

  “I can sit in Daddy’s chair,” Simon said as a statement of fact. There was almost emotion in his voice, his mother thought. But then why not? Others might not be able to recognize it as well as she, but her son revered his father. Maybe in his own way, but equal to what other sons might feel.

  “You’re right, honey.” Oops.

  “Honey is sweet!” Simon responded.

  Jean Lynch smiled. “And so is my Simon. Now go drink your hot chocolate and look at your magazine. I’ll be in the kitchen. Go on.” She sent him on his way with a gentle touch on his back.

  Simon walked into the big living room that
was at the front of the house and went directly to his father’s chair, a brown upholstered rocker with green towels draping the arms and the headrest. When he sat down, his head twisted until his nose was against the top towel. His nostrils flared and his face lightened. It smelled of his daddy.

  His body began to rock easily. His daddy’s chair followed the motion in a delayed repetition.

  He smelled something else. The hot chocolate, in his favorite blue mug, barely steamed where it sat. Simon laid the magazine on his lap and took the cup two handed and put it to his lips. He drank with a loud slurping sound in beats of three—sssooooooop... sssooooooop... sssooooooop—then pulled the cup away and sighed with satisfaction, “Aaaaaahhhh.” Just the way his daddy did.

  He set the cup back on the coaster on the lamp table and cast his eyes to The Tinkery. They danced over the cover, unwilling to remain still. There were too many colors, and they bled together so that one color was not itself anymore, and then it was another color. In his mind’s eye, Simon saw pictures as unbalanced, imprecise, and unsettling. A picture of a chair was not like looking at a real chair. The world reduced to two dimensions disturbed him.

  Simon flipped quickly past the cover and to the pages of words and letters and numbers. He liked words and letters and numbers. Sometimes they were puzzles, and sometimes they were just words and letters and numbers. When they were just words and letters and numbers he could look at all of them and hear what they were saying. That’s what he did with all the books in the basement—

  —basement. That meant something. Simon stopped and pulled out his cards. He found the one with STORM written on top. IF A LOUD NOYZ SKAIRS YOU AND IT GTS LOUDR AND YU KANT FIND MOMMY AND DADDY THN GO TO TH BASMNT

  Simon cast his eyes upward and listened. After a few seconds he put his cards away and looked back to the words and letters and numbers, their connection to the basement just a thought flitted away. He moved through the pages, sweeping them from right to left to reveal the next, capturing what was meaningful to him in furtive glances.

  Through the words and letters and numbers, page after page, information filtered into his brain, filling the delicate and damaged neural matrix that guided Simon Lynch through every moment of his existence, referencing itself without conscious effort, indexing, cross indexing, adding to the library of knowledge that had been absorbed from reading, from hearing. Squirreling it away like nuts for a time when it might be needed, though it never was...externally.

  Internally it was a very different story, with morsels of information competing with one another in a test for prominence and validation. This occurred constantly, automatically, in streams of words and letters and numbers that occupied Simon Lynch every waking moment, rolling like a waterfall of knowledge behind his eyes as his day marched on. It was less like thinking than processing. Thinking implied choice. Simon had never known a choice in the use of his mind. It functioned beyond the primal instructions for involuntary necessities as a computer. When he woke he was processing. When he ate he was processing. When he did puzzles he was processing. When his father sang to him he was processing.

  When Simon Lynch slept he dreamed of words and letters and numbers.

  He had no knowledge that this was happening, and as he flipped through The Tinkery it went on, and on, and on, and continued even when he happened upon the first puzzle in the magazine. It covered an entire page. Nothing marked it overtly as a puzzle, but Simon knew that it was.

  1839956021PFYRTKLYTE3668493216KLRMAYBPKW9865749102

  66829365403685943638405759376438505047638495058476

  63840473538305645859857659575940362273021854058740

  42083643849036354378302026436498362037463836538392

  76354763826328393643839293764547392032764639829274

  73937639823028373902092735456393203846498393746476

  62623836484945905056985474563838936026736430003263

  62534530326624222936363738881212121430578465489487

  72453637849849464784904764980622025200272532439850

  73535464747456465393023746404630640354395463840563

  89675937915777777742525263435079787978797907853243

  62432738654849463484904764662903764654945649352348

  17292364375498604024845654079059654976985673502016

  73879499432943964398649864949494941964941628394028

  83643840463437840458352653984504573452749457367439

  32638045735373038376438490457476498505674675950739

  78353903026254389450476365485490476476594647459437

  73984037354785904764845057647595639027850837695047

  98464846498690678403847590846498450947494904849849

  63438659686904639437659445223850565595393649363939

  31322056290639739346393528243334996797676343982363

  78365383543836538346438464846498352806097247507234

  26398404363740508325743904693047494374904652849584

  78363490365394363937639362920272574394723453749438

  38353474950670574653783403724527629364895946485946

  90221452627843940450576365484596369362920162539407

  45137304329687697643964398418419688807607640642306

  98743848754378478543787643986901260602106010606644

  87987587549875870554398404634543784940474354749393

  73638430474548404578465398393638494646749353294905

  ATHDKTENVODGDLFOEGFDMFOFGDKDSPQSCBVVCJFDHDSGDSJYYQ

  Simon studied the puzzle for several seconds, noting in that time that there were 1450 numbers in the body of the puzzle, and a mix of 50 numbers/letters at the beginning and 50 letters at the end. These were not part of the numbers, he saw. They told what to do with the numbers, how to split them, where to visualize breaks, the order in which they should be processed, and—he blinked quickly three times as the solution came to him—that there were three numbers of equal length—keys—that he needed to know to process the parts into a final product.

  Simon had those keys, a total of 4350 digits, in four blinks.

  He used the first key to process the parts of the original number. This yielded 700,833 groups of three digit numbers, with one nonsense digit after the 302,412th group. His brain discarded this digit.

  The second key he used to extract a three digit number from the third— 103 —and processed the second key again with the 50 letter group at the end of the puzzle. This yielded yet another number, which told him how to determine which of the three-number groups to discard.

  700,730 of them were gone six blinks later.

  Simon was left with 103 three-number groups. He went back to the third key and processed it with the 50 letter group. This told him how to order the 103 number groups.

  He saw them in order after four blinks.

  There were 103 groups of three numbers left. Simon twisted his wrist and looked briefly at his watch. The time did not concern him.

  Simon knew what to do next. He looked back to the 50 number/letter mix at the beginning of the puzzle. There was a shift key in this.

  He saw the 103 groups in order, processed them, 087 first, shifted, and on.

  The 103 groups yielded letters and numbers in a logical order.

  Simon looked at the puzzle’s body again. He saw a string of 103 letters and numbers.

  IFYOUSOLVETHISPUZZLECALL18005551398ANDTELLTHE

  OPERATORTHATYOUHAVESOLVEDPUZZLE99

  YOUWILLTHENBEISSUEDAPRIZE.

  The string needed spaces. He saw them, and read ‘IF YOU SOLVE THIS PUZZLE CALL 18005551398 AND TELL THE OPERATOR THAT YOU HAVE SOLVED PUZZLE 99 YOU WILL THEN BE ISSUED A PRIZE’.

  It had taken Simon twenty seconds to yield what he saw as an instruction not unlike those written on his cards. He stood and walked in short steps to the telephone in the far corner of the living room. His mommy had shown him how to dial 911 if something very wrong happened. (Simon understood wrong; he did not understand bad) He knew how to dial his daddy’s work if something was wrong. He was supposed to push the buttons.

  That was calling someone.

>   He was supposed to call someone. He lifted the phone and held it next to his face like his mommy had shown him. It was cold plastic and it hummed in his ear. It was supposed to do that.

  Simon knew what to do next. He used a very straight finger and pressed the numbers the puzzle told him to press.

  He was calling someone.

  * * *

  Leo Pedanski was mid bite into the warm bearclaw when the buzzing of the phone brought his eyes up from his linguistics text in a start. Through his thick glasses he looked at the phone. The light above line 2 was flashing. Recording machines to his right began to hum.

  The thirty year old let the sugary pastry hang in his mouth as he slid his activity log close. It was where he was to record any happenings during his thrice-weekly shift at the ‘Puzzle Center’. He looked briefly down at the near blank form. He’d written nothing there in six months.

  “Shee-it,” he said past the bearclaw, then set the tasty morsel aside as line 2 buzzed a second time. Line 2 was the outside line. He could recall distinctly the last time it had showed signs of life. The previous year, just before Halloween, when some Jethro from COMSEC-T had had his wimpy subroutine busted clean. Pedanski had joyously passed the news on to the wannabe that he was no Z-man, and Pedanski should know; he was a Z-man.

  He grabbed a pencil and noted the time quickly on his log, picked up the receiver, and, certain that all the gear was up and running, pressed the button next to line 2 in expectation that he was going to be able to ruin another T-boy’s day. “Hi!” he said excitedly, just as he and his fellow Z-men had practiced. “You’ve reached the Puzzle Center.” At this point Pedanski wanted to laugh. If only they knew how close that was to the truth... “You have solved one of our hardest puzzles, and having done so you will be awarded a two-year! subscription to the magazine of your choice. I’ll need your name and address, phone number, and the number of the puzzle you’ve solved.” Pedanski stared at the trace gear to his front in silence. The silence persisted. “Hello?”

  Stiff paper rustling, then, “I can’t tell strangers my name.”

  What the hell... “Uhhh.”