I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  “I can’t be sure,” Mike says, “but from where I’m standing, it looks like a test.”

  “A test of what?”

  “Your loyalty.”

  Sweat breaks out under my arms.

  “My loyalty is intact,” I say, my voice rising.

  “Is that so?” he says.

  I think of Francisco in the woods, his body crisscrossed in cut marks.

  I killed him to protect The Program, and now I’ve found the same chip in me that caused him to go crazy.

  I don’t say any of this to Mike, but I’m unable to control the anger in my face.

  Mike watches me and remains silent.

  It’s a classic interrogation technique. Don’t incriminate the suspect. Let guilt and silence work on him until he incriminates himself.

  It’s not going to work on me.

  I match Mike’s silence with my own.

  I use the time to think through the various scenarios. Is Mike simply carrying out instructions from Mother and Father?

  Or does he have his own doubts about me, doubts not shared by Mother and Father?

  At the end of my last mission, Mike knew I had balked when it came to killing the mayor’s daughter, Samara. He treated me like a friend, saying he would withhold the information from The Program.

  But maybe he lied. Maybe he told them everything, thereby creating a jigsaw puzzle of doubt with me as the center piece.

  Mike sighs. Then he stands and starts to pace in the room. He moves in an unconscious pattern when he’s thinking. I’ve seen this before from him. The only sign of weakness I can detect in him.

  “Loyalty,” he says, picking up the thread of the conversation, “we’re taught that it’s a fixed thing, a point in space that never changes. But that’s not my experience. To me it’s like a river. It ebbs and flows. If you’re lucky, it continues to flow powerfully from the source. If you’re not, the source gets choked off and the river dries up.”

  Mike licks his lips. He watches me.

  “What’s it like for you now?” he says. “The river, I mean.”

  “It’s not a river for me,” I say.

  “I see,” he says, like he doesn’t believe me. “So what is it?”

  “Why are you here, Mike?” I say.

  “I told you, I’m the messenger.”

  “And the message is coming from the top?” I say.

  “Where else would it be coming from?”

  I look at Mike, trying to determine if he’s telling the truth.

  Truth and lies. Loyalty and deception. It’s not easy to determine now. Not after doing what I did to Francisco. Not after the last three days.

  “The measure of a soldier is not what you do when you’re being watched,” Mike says. “It’s what you do when no one is looking. When you don’t know where you are and your mission gets cloudy.”

  “The mission is everything,” I say.

  “The new mission,” he says. “What story do you want to tell when it’s all over? Is this the story of the time you had doubt and proved yourself, or is it a different story—the story of you betraying your country?”

  “I know what the story will be,” I say.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Mike says.

  MIKE WALKS ME DOWNSTAIRS, THEN FOLLOWS ME AS I DRIVE AWAY IN THE TRUCK.

  He tails me for miles, following several car lengths back as we head east out of Manchester. I take a left at the Nottingham Road turnoff, and I see Mike wave in my rearview mirror as he continues on in a different direction.

  I think about Howard in the adjoining suite while I was talking to Mike. More than fifteen minutes passed while I was with Mike, long enough for Howard to get away.

  I imagine him at the train station in Manchester, on his way to someplace far away.

  Suddenly a voice in the truck whispers, “Is it safe?”

  I jam the brakes, the truck skidding to a stop.

  Howard pops up in the backseat.

  “What are you doing here? You scared the crap out of me,” I say. I’m breathing hard, surprised to see him.

  “You don’t get scared—” Howard starts to say, and then he stops in midsentence, his mouth dropping open. “The chip,” he says. “It works.”

  I put my hand on my chest, feel my heart beating too strongly.

  I take a breath, attempting to slow my heart rate, but it doesn’t work.

  This is why I was sweating with Mike in the room, why I had the strange feelings I was having around him.

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” Howard says. “I had to find someplace to hide.”

  “In my truck?”

  “If they thought you were inside, why would they search an empty truck? There was a blanket in the back, so I lay down and covered myself. I didn’t think you’d jump in and drive away with me.”

  There’s a certain logic to Howard’s approach. I have to give him credit.

  I put the truck in gear and get it back on the road.

  “Are we going home?” Howard says.

  “I’m not. Not yet. I have an assignment.”

  “From that guy?”

  “You saw the guy?”

  Howard nods.

  “Did he see you?”

  “No,” Howard says. “I saw him out the window as he passed by. I’m sure he didn’t see me.”

  I breathe out, relieved.

  I’m trying to think of what I can do with Howard, how I can get him to safety. I can’t leave him by the side of the road. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and Mike could be watching us remotely.

  “For now, stay out of sight back there,” I say.

  He lies down across the backseat.

  The road only narrows from this point on. I have to make a decision about Howard. Leave him hidden in the back of the truck while I drive into Camp Liberty and hope he’s not discovered, or leave him on the side of the road where I can pick him up later.

  “I’m going into Camp Liberty on a mission, and I can’t bring you, Howard. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Can I pretend I’m your assistant?”

  I smile. “It’s not that kind of a mission.”

  We’re half a mile from the encampment now. One more bend in the road, and it will be in sight.

  “I’m going to pull to the side of the road,” I say. “I want you to hop out and hide in the woods until I come for you.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m not really a woods kind of guy,” he says. “I’ve lived in Manhattan my whole life. I don’t even like Central Park.”

  “Do you have a phone with you?”

  “I’ve got the iPhone,” he says.

  “If you don’t see me by nightfall, walk back down the road until you get a signal. Call the police and tell them you were hiking and you got lost. There’s only one road in and out, so they should be able to find you without a problem.”

  “I can do that,” he says, obviously nervous about it.

  I pull to the side of the road. I shut off the truck, and I sit there for a moment breathing in the fresh air and pine scent of the woods.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” I say.

  “I volunteered, remember? I wanted to work with you.”

  “Still, it was selfish of me, and I regret it.”

  Howard reaches over the seat and pats me on the shoulder.

  He says, “You said something before you fell asleep last night. I wanted to ask you about it.”

  “What did I say?”

  “About your father. You said he was alive and you wanted me to help you find him.”

  “I said that? I don’t remember.”

  “You said someone named Mike told you.”

  I exhale slowly. I’ve given Howard a lot of information, more even than I realized.

  “The guy you saw walk by the truck earlier. That was Mike. He told me my father might be alive when I saw him in
New York last month. But he could be lying.”

  “We should find out,” Howard says.

  “It will be dangerous,” I say.

  “I can take care of myself,” Howard says. “Especially online.”

  “What about Goji?” I say. That’s Howard’s girlfriend, the Japanese girl in Osaka with whom he’s been carrying on a long-distance romance.

  “She doesn’t know anything about what I do for you,” he says.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” I say. “I want you two to meet someday. I don’t want you to do anything else for me that might risk your life.”

  “But we’re friends,” Howard says. “If friends don’t help each other, who will?”

  Howard’s code of friendship. It’s so simple. No games, no testing, like The Program. Just friends helping each other.

  “If Mike said he was alive, that means you thought he was dead?” Howard says.

  “I saw him die. Or I thought I did.”

  “How?”

  “Mike killed him. On orders from The Program,” I say.

  “Orders,” Howard says. “That’s how we’re going to find your father.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “The Program lives on the Web, right?”

  The Program exists online, that’s what Howard discovered on my last mission. He found a network of young hackers, some as young as twelve years old, gathering data, uncovering the bytes of information that lead to the targets to which I am assigned.

  “Once something is online, it can be found,” Howard says. “Even after it’s erased, removed, eradicated. If they gave the order, we can find that order. Or some evidence of it.”

  “Ghosts in the machine,” I say.

  “And I am a ghost hunter,” Howard says.

  “What do you need to know?”

  “We can start with his name.”

  My father’s name is buried inside with the rest of my past, kept out of my consciousness, where it cannot harm me. If I tell Howard, I set him on a course of investigating The Program. That is tantamount to treason.

  But what is a chip inserted into me against my will? What is sending me on a mission then withdrawing support, protecting The Program’s interests at the expense of its own soldier?

  I take a breath, and I pull my father’s name up from the depths of my memory.

  “Dr. Joseph Abram,” I say.

  I haven’t said his name aloud in a long time. It feels strange in my mouth, like a foreign language.

  “A medical doctor?” Howard says.

  “No. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester six years ago.”

  “I’ll find out everything I can,” Howard says.

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s assuming I get out of these woods tonight without being eaten by something.”

  “You’re too skinny to be eaten,” I say. “That’s a lot of chewing with very little reward.”

  “You’re not making me feel better.”

  “Be careful, buddy.”

  “You, too,” he says. “See you soon.”

  He gets out of the truck and scurries into the woods clutching his blanket. I hate to leave him alone out here, but I have no choice.

  A DOWNED TREE BLOCKS THE ROAD, HALF A DOZEN ARMED BOYS ON GUARD BEHIND IT.

  This is not the roadblock from the other day. This is a hastily erected barricade, more substantial, more dangerous. What’s worse, I don’t recognize any of the boys guarding it.

  There’s no way to drive around the roadblock. There is a cliff on one side, dense forest on the other, and the tree covers the space in between.

  I sort through options:

  I could back up, abandon the truck, and set out on foot.

  I could try to talk my way through.

  I could abandon the mission.

  Three options. Two are bad; the third is unthinkable.

  I make my choice.

  I slip the knife from my pocket and push it up the sleeve of my right arm, using the elastic of the stretch fabric of the hoodie’s wrist to hold it in place.

  Then I pull slowly forward. I’ll start by talking, and I’ll do what I have to do after.

  Guns rise as the truck comes near. The faces behind them are grave. A taller boy steps forward, looking through the windshield. I keep both hands on the steering wheel where he can see them.

  Something changes in the tall boy’s expression, and he calls out to one of the boys behind him. I see a walkie-talkie pop up. A message sent, a message received.

  “Turn off the truck,” the tall boy says. He has a tactical model pump-action shotgun, modified with a stock and pistol grip. He points it at me.

  I look down the black shotgun barrel. Then I look at the boy behind it, staring at me, searching for a reason to pull the trigger.

  I turn off the truck.

  I feel the weight of the knife inside my right wrist. If I turn and snap my arm, the inertia will drop the knife into my hand. One and half seconds to turn, a second for the knife to drop and settle, another half second for me to depress the switch that releases the blade, and two seconds to travel the distance from the window to the boy’s throat.

  Five seconds.

  But it only takes two seconds for his mind to register the threat and depress the trigger of the shotgun.

  I don’t move.

  I register the tightness in my chest, my dry mouth, a sick feeling in my stomach.

  This feeling. I remember it from a long time ago, a distant echo of my childhood.

  It is fear.

  Howard is right. The chip works.

  Or rather, it doesn’t work, because it’s taped to the outside of my chest right now, where it can’t affect me.

  I will myself to look only at the steering wheel in front of me, but I’ve lost impulse control. My eyes shift left to once again look down the shotgun barrel. I imagine the round chambered down below, and my mouth goes dry.

  A moment later the boy with the walkie signals.

  The shotgun is lowered.

  “Move over,” the tall boy says. “I’m driving us in.”

  WE DRIVE INTO LIBERTY.

  I see the panel vans from the night of The Hunt, their sides modified with NORTHEAST ELECTRIC stencils.

  Why are they making them look like power company trucks?

  A boy and a girl with guns stand guard by the vans. They nod to my driver as he passes.

  As we come closer to the encampment, I see more teens with guns. Heads snap around when they hear the truck coming.

  Everyone is armed, everyone tense.

  We pass the first set of buildings, and then the main square comes into view.

  I see a backhoe parked in the center of the square, its shovel raised to maximum height as if it’s in the process of digging something.

  There is no operator in it. The backhoe is still, parked in the upright position. As we drive closer, I see something else. A rope tied haphazardly around the shovel with a life-sized doll hanging from it like a party favor.

  It takes a second for my mind to register what I’m really seeing.

  It’s not a doll. It’s a body. Sergeant Burch’s body.

  His head is canted at an unnatural angle, the rope tight around his neck.

  He’s been hanged.

  Teens walk under the body, their pace quickening slightly, eyes cast toward the ground.

  I last saw Sergeant Burch sneaking out of the woods before I left the parking lot. Now I’m sure he’s the one who was passing messages to the FBI. Someone else was sure of it, too, and ordered him executed.

  Miranda steps out the door of a building. She stands there in jeans and a loosely buttoned blouse, her red hair flowing free down her shoulders.

  The driver stops the truck and motions for me to get out. Miranda approaches. She looks at me without speaking. I note that she doesn’t have a gun.

  “We thought we lost you,” she says.

  “Lost and
found,” I say. “I’m back.”

  “Why did you run away?”

  “I got scared after your father—”

  I look at the ground, wanting her to think I’m experiencing a painful memory.

  I’ve done this a thousand times, emulating emotions I’ve seen in others, feigning emotional states to make people believe what I want them to believe.

  I’ve done this a thousand times, but now is different.

  Because now I feel real pain, not for Moore or what he was trying to do before he lost his way, but for Francisco, my brother in The Program.

  The brother who I killed.

  Suddenly my breath is gone. My mouth opens, gasping for air, but I can’t find any.

  I feel Miranda’s hand on my shoulder.

  “We all got scared,” she says, her voice gentle. “I’m still scared.”

  She gestures toward the backhoe in the main square.

  “I saw it when we drove in,” I say. “Sergeant Burch. What happened to him?”

  “Lee accused him of something, and people went crazy.”

  The area has emptied around us. We stand alone, an arm’s reach from one another.

  “There are things going on that you don’t know,” she says.

  “Can you tell me?”

  “First I have to ask you something. Why did you come back?” she says. “For real.”

  “I had a feeling,” I say.

  She searches my face for more. “What kind of a feeling?”

  “A feeling that I might be needed.”

  She reaches out and touches my shoulder. Briefly.

  “Come inside,” she says. “We have to talk about some things.”

  I follow her through the door of a building I’ve never been in before. She leads the way down a long, dark hallway.

  “Where are we going?” I say.

  Suddenly I hear a whooshing noise behind me, followed by a propulsive bang as the twin prongs of a Taser-like device hit me from behind. My brain registers it in a second, faster even than the electricity passes down the wire into my body. I relax my body before it hits, knowing that fighting will only make it worse.

  I’ve been Tased as part of my training, and I know it’s possible to ride it out like a storm, coming out the other side weakened but not incapacitated. But as the electricity surges through me, I realize this is not a standard Taser. It’s some kind of adapted, hypercharged device that takes over my body and shatters my consciousness.