As they traversed the access way toward the containment dome, Bussard sneezed, and the zeroid dutifully offered him a “God bless you, sir.”
Dillon grinned behind his mask. This guard at least had not begun deaf as the first Zero Team had. Bussard had specifically brought in deaf guards, because it was already well known how Dillon’s words could be the key to a man’s soul. The right word whispered in the right ear would fix the most damaged mind. And the wrong word could take that same mind and shatter it in a psychotic detonation. All Dillon had to do was divine the right thing to say by studying the patterns of a person’s behavior. Damage and repair, destruction and creation; all facets of Dillon’s formidable gift. But it wasn’t Dillon’s willful acts Bussard was interested in. All Bussard cared about were the effects that Dillon could not control; the incandescence of his presence, which renewed life, and had once reversed the flow of a mighty flood.
And so Bussard assigned deaf men, his thinking too narrow to realize that they would not remain deaf for long in Dillon’s presence. The fact that they had kept their audition a secret from Bussard was a victory Dillon wished he could share with them.
“There will not be a repeat of last week,” Bussard had told him, and vowed to personally walk Dillon’s little Via Dolorosa each day, to make sure Dillon didn’t find the key to the new man’s soul and win him over. This man was chosen for his absolute lack of physical ailments, so that he would have no evidence for guessing Dillon’s identity. Dillon suspected Bussard would have caddied him himself, if his ego had allowed it.
Bussard got a few strides ahead of them and glanced back to look at him. For a moment, Dillon got a rare glimpse of Bussard’s face. The shape of his care lines, the knit of his brow, some discolored skin on his neck. Enough for Dillon to divine something from his history, but not much.
“There was a fire when you were very young!” Dillon said. Bussard stopped in his tracks.
“What did you say?”
“A fire, and something awful about a younger child. A baby sister, I think.” Dillon gloated. “One of these days, I’ll read you down to the bone, Bussard. You can count on it.”
Bussard didn’t spare the rod this time, and zapped Dillon so suddenly the zeroid got a brief jolt of the shock as well before he could pull away. Dillon’s jaw locked with the jolt, biting a gash in his tongue. By the time the painful current subsided, there was blood filling the inside of his mouth. He held his mouth closed, the pain sharp and severe. He then swallowed the blood, and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, bearing the pain as it diminished, and the gash zipped itself closed, perfectly healed.
I’m a sadist’s dream, thought Dillon. Torture with no down time.
His eyesight cleared, revealing a figure standing halfway to his cell. Dillon recognized him right away. He was a hard man to miss. Elon Tessic sauntered forward in his signature white suit and black T-shirt.
“Hello, General,” Tessic said, with the hint of an Israeli accent.
Bussard stopped in mid-stride.
“Sir?” questioned the zeroid, decidedly confused as to why a civilian was strolling around the most secure installation since Alcatraz—and a foreigner, no less. Bussard summarily dismissed the zeroid, and Dillon heard the clip of his shoes exiting the way they had come.
Tessic casually strode forward. “I want you to know, Dillon, that shock treatment was not in my original design of the chair. This was a modification added by the general.”
Bussard pushed Dillon anxiously toward his cell. “What’s your business here, Tessic?” Dillon knew he should have hated Tessic—after all, Tessictech had conceived and built Dillon’s beyond state-of-the-art prison. But Tessic was a fly in Bussard’s ointment, and for that reason alone Dillon couldn’t help but appreciate the man.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Tessic said, “so I thought I’d make a social call.”
“Your unannounced visits are becoming a nuisance.”
“Then ask me to leave.”
“Leave,” demanded Bussard.
“No!” Tessic burst out in hearty laughter at the sheer joy of being the only person in the entire installation who could tell Bussard no. Dillon snickered too, knowing that Bussard would not jolt him again while Tessic was here. Bussard had to suffer Tessic’s insubordination because he was the crucial linchpin in the loop. And besides, Tessic had more friends on the highest rungs of the military ladder than Bussard did. Enough to get him a season ticket to the greatest show on Earth. Having designed the chair, the cell, and half the military’s hightech weaponry, Tessic’s perk was the right to come and go here as he pleased.
Tessic surfaced every once in a while for a few days at a time, sitting in on Dillon’s therapeutic sessions, even though he had no discernible ailments himself. And when there was no one scheduled for Dillon’s time, Tessic became his only audience, engaging Dillon in conversations of politics, technology, baseball. Supervised small talk, really. Then he would leave, and Bussard would develop a heavy thumb, bearing down on the red button at the slightest provocation, punishing Dillon because he could not punish Tessic.
Now, as Bussard jostled Dillon over the heavy threshold of his cell, Tessic followed them, to Bussard’s further irritation.
Inside, Tessic sat down in the chair. “Why don’t you go?” he said to Bussard in a casual tone calculated to raise the general’s blood pressure. “I’ll lock up.”
“I don’t think so.” Bussard set Dillon in the center of the room. “I might have to stomach you, but I don’t take your orders. You stay, I stay.”
“Suit yourself. Pull up a chair.” But of course, there was no other chair.
Tessic leaned forward, peering into the eye slits in Dillon’s mask. “You surely must despise us all,” he said. “But you must remember, you asked for this seclusion. You wanted your power contained.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Too late for that,” boomed Bussard from the threshold.
Tessic ignored him, and squinted his eyes to peer in the face mask, as if looking at Dillon through a fish tank. “The thin holes in the mask were designed to limit your perceptions of the people around you—and to prevent them from seeing your eyes. But still I see them. Perhaps nothing could close those eyes completely.”
“The door is due to close,” insisted Bussard, his impatience growing.
“Who are you trying to fool, general? It won’t close until we have left.” Tessic turned to Dillon again, peering in through the metallic shell his Research and Development department had designed. “I want to know you,” Tessic said. “It is important to me that I do. I wish to know your hopes and your dreams. Your nightmares.”
Nightmares? thought Dillon. How about his waking visions? There was only one now, snared within the white noise the world offered him whenever he was out of his cell. It would unexpectedly swoop down the throat of the cooling tower with the wind. Suddenly he would see himself in a ruined room, standing beside a man in a plush leather recliner, a light shade of purple. There was a TV before them, with a bright image. A diving competition. The Olympics, perhaps. Three figures on a high diving board. A man, a woman, and a child. The absurdity of the vision could only be matched by its intensity, and a certainty that he should not be trapped in the Hesperia plant. That he needed to escape at all costs.
But he didn’t tell Tessic this, nor would he ever share it with Bussard.
“My nightmares?” Dillon said. “You’re in them. Everyone is.”
“Really. So we are all part of your nightmare?”
“No . . . but you’re all subject to it.”
“I see. That explains why you searched for sanctuary.” There was neither judgment nor doubt in Tessic’s voice—just a desire to understand. Perhaps, thought Dillon, so he could build an even more effective prison for him. But to be honest, Dillon had never read that in Tessic’s intentions. “You cannot contain the breadth of your powers,” Tessic said. “But here, we
do it for you.”
“I would rather learn to contain them myself.”
“What if you cannot? What if, like radiation, you forever need concrete and lead to rein you in?”
Dillon was uneasy with the thought. “Radiation doesn’t have a will. I do.”
Tessic chuckled. “Very Zen of you to think the power of your will can control a field of energy. But I’m more of a Western thinker.”
“It’s more than just an energy field. I can focus my powers when I need to. There are things I do by choice.”
“Yes, so the world has seen.”
The world. One benefit—perhaps the only one—of being here was that he was cut off from the world. He didn’t have to witness the ongoing effects of the choices he had made.
“What’s it like out there?” Dillon asked “How bad has it gotten?”
Tessic shrugged. “More than a depression, and less than Armageddon. I still wonder why you set out to do this to the world.”
Why? Should he tell him about the parasite that hungered for destruction? That the fall of Hoover Dam was intended to stem the destruction, like dynamite at an oil-well fire? That the attempt failed, and only made things worse? He might have told Tessic, but Bussard was listening intently to the whole conversation, and Dillon didn’t want to dish out any more information for him to broker.
“I didn’t intend it. . . but it comes with the territory,” Dillon said.
To Tessic’s credit, he accepted Dillon’s answer.
Dillon thought once more of the vision, and the uneasy feeling it gave him. He shifted his eyes, hoping to see how far away Bussard now stood, but all he could see when he moved his eyes was the dark blur of his own mask. He spoke quietly, hoping only Tessic would hear. “I can’t be kept here. There’s something I need to do.”
“What?”
“I would know if I were set free.”
Tessic sighed. “That’s impossible. You know that.”
Bussard moved into view. “Tessic, I’m losing my patience.”
“You never had any, General.” Tessic leaned closer to Dillon. “If there’s anything I can do to make your confinement more bearable, you let me know.”
A dozen things went though Dillon’s mind, but it was no use. Anything Dillon asked for would be vetoed by Bussard—because although Tessic could walk freely through the compound, that was really all he could do. A fly in the ointment—and all the power of one.
Dillon looked past Tessic to his tray of food. “I’d like someone to eat with,” Dillon said.
Bussard snorted at the suggestion, but Tessic nodded. “A dinner date, then.”
Dillon smiled and wondered if Tessic could see it though the small mouth slit. “I’ll see what I can do.” He left, and Bussard lingered a moment longer to scowl, then exited as well.
As soon as the sensors registered their exit, the vault door began its closing sequence, electrostatic pistons pulling it sealed. Dillon waited until he heard the familiar sound of the triple lock mechanism, then counted to five, and his exoskeletal chair popped open at the seam, releasing him at last. Such was the failsafe Tessic had designed—only one lock could be open at a time, and the vault door would not open again unless Dillon was seated and sealed in his chair.
Dillon stretched and shook his legs, forcing circulation to return. Tessic was a complicated man. A genius with far more going on inside than Bussard knew. Dillon longed to read him, and figure out what Tessic was about—it had to be more than money and power. But the mask muffled sounds and limited Dillon’s view. He could barely read anyone now.
He thought back to his first encounter with Tessic six months ago, when he had first been interned here. Dillon had been cocky even within the shell Tessic had forged for him. “You know, I can get out of this place any time I want,” he had told Tessic.
The man had just raised his eyebrows. “In that case I look forward to your escape.”
At that time, Dillon was arrogant enough to believe there was no security in this world he could not breach, pulling order out of chaos until all locks flew open. Tessic had proved him wrong.
And yet the man didn’t gloat over Dillon’s imprisonment the way Bussard did. He was neither proud nor ashamed of his accomplishment.
Dillon took a deep breath. There was one thing to be said for his confinement. Not only did it keep his powers contained like a genie in a bottle, but it kept the outside world from getting in. Once that vault door was closed, he could not feel the withering of the world around him. There was no white noise, and no visions. There was only himself, a singularity, separate and apart.
He pushed the shackling wheelchair to the far corner of the room, out of his sight, then sat in the armchair, and pulled the tray closer to him. Everything seemed in order there: something brown, something green, something else obscured by gravy. Then he noticed the curious pastry. A fortune cookie. His first thought was that it came from Tessic—but Bussard’s eyes had never left the man—he couldn’t have slipped it onto the tray. The cookie must have been left by the female officer who brought his meals. There was a fortune sticking out from the edge of the cookie, and Dillon slid it out without breaking the delicate shell. The fortune held two words, handwritten. It read:
“Favorite food?”
Smiling, Dillon found a pen in the scant supplies of his desk, and on the blank side of the fortune scribbled “Veal Parmesan.” Then he slipped it back into the cookie.
6. 9906753
Transcription excerpt, day 199. 13:49 hours
“Do you think we have a purpose, Maddy? Or are we just like those praying pigeons, picking out patterns in something that’s totally random?
“You’re the master of patterns, aren’t you? If anyone would know, it would be you.”
“Some patterns are too complex for even me to see.”
“Or maybe it’s just so simple, you keep looking past it.”
* * *
Maddy found General Bussard’s office to be as spartan and cold as the man himself. Only his own chair was plush and padded—the chairs on the other side of the desk were so rigid, they cut off circulation to one’s legs.
“I’ll make this brief, Lieutenant Haas.”
Maddy had been expecting some sort of dressing-down. It was clear that Bussard was not happy with her performance and her integration—or lack thereof—into the team. After Gerritson’s death, she had remained cold and aloof.
Bussard tapped a lead pencil on his blotter, not making eye contact, which was unlike him. It was the first clue that this meeting wasn’t going in the direction she had assumed. “Apparently our efforts to see to our guest’s comfort have not gone far enough,” he told her. “Or at least that is the opinion of General Harwood, and the Joint Chiefs.”
It was all Maddy could do to suppress her grin. So even the führer had a master. Now she realized that if Bussard was going to be brief, it was to minimize his own embarrassment at having to actually admit that he had superiors. She was, in effect, watching him squirm, and she had a front-row seat.
“General Harwood feels our guest might need some human contact—and that we might be able to use such contact to get information from him that he has been unwilling to share.”
“They don’t consider contact with you human enough, sir?”
He read her smirk, and chose to relent rather than retaliate, chuckling slightly. “I suppose my bedside manner is not my strongest point.”
“I sincerely hope, sir, that you’re not calling on me for my ‘bedside manner.’ "
This time Bussard held her in eye contact. “He’s restrained, Haas. And by my observations, so are you.”
Maddy gave him the slightest nod.
“You will continue with your current duties, but now, when you bring your meals to him, you will bring your own as well, and wait there until he has been returned to his quarters. As his chair won’t release him while you’re there, you’ll have to feed him. You will be wired with a video s
urveillance device, and in this way you will develop a supervised rapport with him. Then, once you’ve gained his trust, you will ask him the questions we provide you.” Bussard took a breath, weighing how much information he should ration out, then finally he said: “Our guest is none other than Dillon Cole.”
And although Maddy already knew this, she reacted with requisite shock. “My God!”
“God has nothing to do with this,” snapped Bussard. “Remember that, Lieutenant Haas. And also remember that if you repeat his name or the details of your assignment to anyone else in this facility, you will be severely dealt with.”
* * *
On the morning of her new assignment, Maddy left her quarters just after dawn, wearing a sweatsuit. A daily run was one of the few liberties military personnel were allowed at the plant; it was one of the few activities not under intense scrutiny, and therefore Maddy’s favorite time of the day. Maddy fell into stride by the time she rounded the north side of the reactor building, and followed the path into a patch of woods corralled within the facility’s inner fence. Occasionally there were others on the path, but they always kept a respectable distance, like planes in a holding pattern. Today, however, she was joined by an unexpected companion. A golf cart pulled up alongside her from a connecting path, as if the driver had been waiting there for this ambush. Maddy moved to the side to let him pass, but he did not. He instead matched her speed.
She recognized him right away. Tessic. His overcoat was layered upon an expensive white suit that bespoke more pleasure than business. He looked as if he had walked right out of a fashion magazine.
“I’ve come to congratulate you, Lieutenant Haas.”
The thought of the Elon Tessic pursuing her in a golf cart was ludicrous. Here was a man whose company built everything from surveillance satellites to fighter jets. What possible business could he have with her? “Congratulate me on what, Mr. Tessic?”
“On your new assignment.”
Maddy slowed her pace down to a walk, taking a moment to size him up. His hair was only slightly graying, and his skin seasoned by the Mediterranean sun. Somehow she had thought he would look older. His smile seemed pleasant but unrevealing. “Why would you care about my assignment?”
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