Motley pivoted towards me; his lips blew hot against my ear. “You said you were running because you needed someplace faraway to hide, right?” His eyes were blue like crystal waters and they seemed to penetrate my mind. I wondered if the almost-palpable scent of my fear wasn’t some kind of perfume to him. Was I twenty minutes and a punched train ticket into the worst mistake of my life?
“Yes,” I answered, “I really need a safe place to hide out for a little while.” I looked away from his intimidating stare, down at my hands, and saw that the spaces under my cuticles were stained red from the cheap hair dye.
“I am also running from something. I haven’t been a free man in a long time, but the attack made it possible for me to run.” His eyebrows pushed together, and he added the word, “Except-.”
“Except for what?”
“Except,” he continued, “our secrets aren’t entirely safe. Not just yet.”
“What do you mean?” I was still too shy to look directly into his eyes. “The cyber hit saw to it that our true identities are gone for good, and as long as we resist the order to re-register on paper we are anonymous forever. The lady on the television said so.”
“There is a disk out there in the world that contains a hard copy of all our Social Security numbers.”
A sharp chill erupted on my neck and surged through my body. It was like I could almost feel the confession note, forceful as a lodestone, inside my shoe and burning a hole through my skin. “How do you know that?” I asked him.
He pressed his finger to my lips, an aggressive reminder to speak softly inside a crowded train car. “Alice, I hope you won’t think negative of me if I tell you that before the attack I was in prison.”
“Prison?” My eyes slowly crept up to look at his eyes, but I could only go as far as the curvy lip scar.
“Two weeks ago a new inmate arrived in my quadrant at Rikers Island. His name was Enoch Sprites. He was a doctor who was freshly busted for malpractice. Dull fellow, personality wise, but he told me something that got my attention. He bragged about being able to download the Social Security number of every single American citizen onto a disk without being detected. He had special access since he worked for a veteran’s hospital. He had been planning some sort of financial scheme before his incarceration. He was very bitter about something, though.”
“What was he bitter about?”
“Enoch lost the disk.”
“Does that mean the disk is out there somewhere in the world?”
“You’re a quick study, Alice. So you can probably see how important that makes finding this disk. It is the last remaining record of the Social Security numbers. It’s actually funny when you think about it. Some amateur, a second-tier criminal, sick of his spot on the workplace hamster wheel, manages to accomplish what even the most powerful government in the world cannot. The government kept records backed up on fancy servers, which were corrupted by the hackers. Even the data stored up in the clouds was ripped to holy shreds. But the simple disk was safe. Somebody is walking around with possibly the only true remaining record of our Social Security numbers in the world inside their pocket.”
“But you don’t know who has it?”
“No. Enoch is still searching for the disk.”
“But how can Enoch get the disk if he’s in jail?”
“Enoch isn’t in jail. He escaped with me.”
“You just escaped?” I asked, my eyelashes beating like moth wings.
Motley cuffed his hand over my mouth. “Quieter.”
“Sorry.” I hushed the apology and steadied my nervous eyes down onto my sneaker where my note was hidden. I was just going to do whatever this guy wanted. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Immediately after the attack occurred, I was able to use the distraction to escape. I am, shall we say, happy to leave my old life behind. But as you can imagine, my knowledge of a disk that contains the only remaining source of my true identity, well, it’s hampering the enjoyment of my new freedom.”
“Where is Enoch now? Can’t he help you find it?”
“As soon as we got into the city, Enoch disappeared. I should have known better than to trust him.”
“You want me to find Enoch?” I asked. A woman shoved through the aisle carrying heavy luggage and a wailing toddler at her hip, and I waited until she passed to say more. “Is this the job you said you had for me?”
“No, Alice. Enoch isn’t what I’m looking for. You and Rabbit are going to find the disk with the Social Security numbers.”
I snuck another glance at Rabbit. He had pale skin and bronze freckles. His neck was bent in concentration and his fingers, which seemed too big and gawky for his underdeveloped body, lurched like spiders over MacBook keys. I looked back into Motley’s eyes, burning blue luminescence at me. “Why me?”
“Because you’re keeping a secret. I could tell just by the look in your eyes, the unsure posture of your shoulders, even before you told me. That’s why I stopped you at the station. I don’t let just anyone come play in my dark web, it’s very exclusive, like the old speakeasies, your knock has to hit the right chord to get you inside.”
“What chord is that?’
“Desperation. You’re running from something, which means you aren’t planning on ever re-registering with the Social Security Administration. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“There’s your explanation. I need someone anonymous.”
Anonymous and desperate. Both of which I was at the moment.
“How will we find this disk?” I asked.
“We will search tirelessly, to the corners of the Earth if we need to. And don’t worry, I have ways of funding our little, shall we call them, adventures.”
A smile pinned onto my lips. “That’s good. The corners of the Earth are good. Far away from here is very good.”
“There is one matter that might make things complicated.”
“What is it?”
“It turns out the United States Government already knows that the disk exists,” he paused to wet his lips, “and they are desperately seeking it.”
“If they find it before we do, they can restore our identities and then it’s all over, right?”
“Exactly. Which is why we must ensure that we find it first. Before the government, before Enoch Sprites, and before anyone else in the world. We will need to be meticulous. Our ducks need to be in a row at all times. But that shouldn’t be a problem. I can tell how badly you want to hide from your secret, Alice.”
I shot my eyes back to the kid in the Yale cap. “Why did Rabbit agree to help you?”
“Rabbit got into a little trouble at school and he would like to keep the past in the past. Lucky for us, he’s somewhat of a boy wonder when it comes to computers. His technical wizardry will prove priceless.”
“How long will it take us to find the disk?”
“Good question. There isn’t a timeline for this kind of work. It’s messy. However long it takes, you will work for me, and then I will let you go, and you can become any identity you wish. I have a way of arranging that. But now that you know about the existence of the disk, you can never walk away until it has been destroyed. The only two options are success or death.”
“According to who?” I asked.
“According to me.” He shuffled the cards in his lap.
I took a hard swallow as the train grunted and pulled away from the station. Once it climbed above ground on the tracks, daylight breathed onto the windows, showing my reflection, and I didn’t recognize myself beneath the twisted crown of red hair. I had an instinct to run away from Motley right then and there, before I got too deep down the rabbit hole, into that dark place he warned me about. It’s an instinct that has never gone away, even after three years of working for him. If it hadn’t been for the terrible secret inside my sneaker, I would have run that first day.
Motley nested into his seat and pulled a pack of Dunhill cigarettes and silver Zippo lighter from his
breast pocket. He sifted a cigarette from the pack and held it out to me. I grabbed it, not sure which end was up, and popped it into my mouth like candy. Motley held the lighter under my lips, hesitating before igniting it to ask me a question. “Do you know what a thumb drive looks like, Alice?”
“Yes. I use them for saving papers I write for my university classes.”
“Good, that means you will know how to identify what we’re looking for.”
“Just an ordinary thumb drive?” I managed to say it without dropping the cigarette from my amateur lips. I was impressed with myself.
His thumb flicked across the gear on the lighter and a hot, wavy flame sprang up. “I prefer to call it the dynamite stick.”
I coughed at my first inhale, curling my chest forward to squelch the burning in my lungs. A ticket taker stopped in the aisle beside our seats. She had boring features and square hair and her coat looked stale. “Excuse me, sir, I’m going have to ask both of you to extinguish those cigarettes. There is simply no smoking permitted inside the train cars.”
Motley didn’t lift his eyes. His hand slithered into his pocket to slide out his wallet. When he unfurled it I saw that it was fat with hundred dollar bills, and it was then that I noticed the glistening gold watch latched to his wrist. He discretely pushed a handful of money into the ticket taker’s hand. Her hand tightened around the money and disappeared into the pocket on her stale coat. I didn’t see her again for the rest of the trip. The light caught the glitter on Motley’s wrist watch a few more times and I began understanding that I was sitting beside a very wealthy man. My hands had stopped shaking by now. I was starting to feel more comfortable. Maybe this might be fun, like a game.
Motley pivoted inward towards me. His hand brushed my cheek. “I like your hair like this, the red really suits you,” he told me. “I think you are going to be very good at this game, and an excellent liar.”
I pulled the cigarette from my lips and inspected the aurora-like tip. “I’m not so sure I’m good at lying.”
“Of course you are. You’re human. Alice, in any of those college classes you take, did they ever teach you about the human brain?”
“A little, sure, in psych class.”
“Did they ever tell you, Alice, any of those fancy college professors, I mean, did they ever tell you that every human essentially runs off of two separate brains? Monkey and reptile. The reptile part, well, that’s our ancient gray matter. It harbors our deepest, most ferocious primal instincts. Greed. Murder. Lust. The monkey brain is newer, it helps us to relate to the group, form emotional bonds, live in gated communities and dress up in Prada suits. Do you know what that makes us all, Alice?”
I shook my head side to side. “I’m not sure.”
“Dangerous psychopaths. Every last one of us. Humans are the only creature on the planet cunning and deceitful enough to cultivate civilization, all while never shedding our evolutionary predator instinct. We are born liars.”
“So,” I began, suddenly conscious of the importance of trying to harden my callow voice, “where do we start looking for the dynamite stick?”
“This won’t be easy, Alice. I’m not the only one looking for the dynamite stick, and the types of people who want to get their hands on it aren’t exactly Mother Teresa.”
“You don’t think Mother Teresa had a reptile brain?”
He smiled at me like I was his muse. “These people will stop at nothing. I’m talking about blackhat criminals. Bedeviling cutthroats. True snakes.”
I nodded along to what he was saying, though back then I never could have understood the miscreants he was referring to. I didn’t know the first thing about this lion of a man with a snake’s soul, or about the dark, sticky cobweb he was draping over me masked as silk. I told myself it was a game. My fingers gamboled the lining of his breast pocket to help myself to another cigarette. “And then there’s the United States Government looking for it too,” I said.
“That’s who I was just talking about, my dear Alice.”
Three Years Later
Chapter One: The Eiffel Tower Incident
RIGHT NOW I’M in a lot of trouble.
The trouble began on top of the Eiffel Tower. It was a night with a mirror ball moon. I was dressed in a black mini skirt and Technicolor stockings. I had showed up for what I thought was an appointment to meet an anonymous contact who had a leak on the location of the dynamite stick. The plan was to hand off a briefcase that Motley had packed with a half-million dollars in exchange for the information.
The plan took a turn for the worse when someone from my past showed up instead. Someone I never expected. It was my first love, a boy from flashbacks of homecoming dances and photo booth kisses. The boy I thought I’d marry. Now he was dressed in a black trench coat and he glared at me with his glowing, starburst irises just before he aimed his gun at me. What the hell was he doing there? By the time it was over, the gun had gone off, and fate, or whatever force ordains our muddling existence, brought me to a Parisian hospital. Had I actually hailed a taxi to the hospital? I must have. The driver practically pushed me out the backseat in front of the ER doors. It was like I was watching everything happen through adrenaline goggles.
I sat waiting despondently for the doctor on a cot that smelled like fetid mothballs while my arm brewed blood from a hole in my shoulder. My eyes were struggling to stay open against the room’s gloomy lighting and the hypnotizing drone of water dripping from buried pipes in the wall. I saw a man enter through my dizzy, kaleidoscope vision. The worst part came when he spoke and I realized that he was American.
“You’ve been shot?” He peeked up from behind his clipboard. “Am I seeing this right? The admittance paperwork you filled out with the receptionist says it happened on top of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Drop the masquerade and go get me a real doctor,” I said.
“I am a real doctor,” he replied. His eyes shot to my right arm, where velvety beads of lush red blood rolled down my anemically pale skin. “And that is a very real bullet wound in your shoulder.”
I glanced down at the pink-lava discharge on my shoulder. “It’s just a grazing.” My eyes trailed back to him. “You expect me to believe that you’re really a doctor?”
He simply smirked and then pulled out the cigarette filter mashed into my hair with cherry red lipstick on it. “Are you feeling steady or should I put an IV in you?”
“I was steady enough to get myself here and sign myself in. But I don’t think you’re really a doctor.”
He moved around the room rummaging for items like a thermometer and a stethoscope. He set his supplies down on the cot. When he stepped under the radiant overhead lamp, my nerves had calmed just enough for me to notice that he had a handsome face shaped by a set of expansive brown eyes, which glistened like mirrored lakes. His brown, wavy hair was a thicket of silk that was hard for my trembling fingers to resist the urge to tussle. “Of course I’m really a doctor,” he said, scrunching his eyebrows. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“I never trust a man with an American accent.”
“Oh?” He sounded enticed, amused even. He was scribbling notes onto the clipboard he had been clutching since he walked in. I wondered what he was writing down.
Why the hell had I come here? Not like I was gonna die from a bullet scrape.
“You probably just thought your bogus medical degree would pass more easily with the French language barrier. Let me guess?”
“Guess away.” He fixed the clipboard to a peg on the wall and wrestled into a white lab coat.
“My guess is that your credentials say you’re a graduate of Harvard Med School, with a 3.8 GPA, just because a 4.0 is too perfect, and thus, suspicious.”
His body leaned over mine to press a cold stethoscope to my skin. “Actually, I went to the University of Illinois and I couldn’t break a 3.6.”
“Very creative.”
“Shhh.” He cupped one of his hands over his ear to spy on my heart be
at. “Heart rate is normal. Good sign.”
I shook my head as if trying to erase all the steps that had led me to this point, to this scene of a handsome doctor with his ear to my chest inside a sterile room. “I’m probably fine. It was a mistake for me to come here.”
“Let me ask you something.” He lifted a tiny tube flashlight from his pocket and scanned my left pupil. “How did a beautiful young woman end up with a bullet wound?”
“Beautiful? Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“Then I guess my strategy of commenting on your lovely green eyes is hopelessly futile?”
“Can I smoke in here?” I asked. A cigarette was bitten between my teeth and glowing red before he could even answer.
“A real doctor would strongly advise you against it, but since I’m an unrighteous fraud who obviously enjoys making a circus of the medical profession, I say go right ahead and light up.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. The overhead light casting over me had an interrogating feel. “Now that you’re nice and relaxed and enjoying that coffin nail of a cigarette between your lips, I will ask you again, why was someone shooting at you?”
“If you must know, I got shot out of the Eiffel Tower, and it was over a business deal.”
“Let me get this straight.” His fingers rubbed at his chin. “Someone shot you off the tallest building in Paris and all you have are some bruises and a grazing on your shoulder?”
“It wasn’t from the top. It was from the first level, where the skating rink is. It’s not even two-hundred feet.”
A stoic nod. His eyes voyaged from the blood on my shoulder, down the length of my too-skinny arms, to my hands. “What are these burns on your hands?” he asked, taking command of my hands and flipping them palm up as my cigarette smoldered between my fingers. We both focused on the deep red welts, shaped like lightning bolts, which etched my palms. “They look painful.”
“They look worse than they are. They’re no worse than a proper rope burn.”
“Are these injuries on your hands old or did you receive them during the shooting incident?”
Generation of Liars Page 2