Even his tour guide, Mr. Thomas Oliver Goldsmith, seemed a bit off, and he was the one the school chose specifically for the diplomat’s job. If their hand-picked representative specimen couldn’t even come off as normal and balanced, what did that say for the rest of them? Goldsmith struck him as a true believer, but Pete could tell the kid was smart enough—naturally smart, as opposed to medication-enhanced smart—to know there were chinks in the armor of this place. He scrolled through the digital windows of his Tabula 6000 to the files containing the first stages of the Stansbury story he planned to send to his editor in chief. The San Angeles Times would run it in three days, the same edition that would herald the likely victory of the school’s bid for one trillion taxpayer dollars per annum. His shorthand notes read:
Goldsmith (protective of school, but honest) … Headmaster = moral conscience & spiritual heir to Doc Stansbury … Security Detail/Capt. Gibson = ???… Potential whistle-blowers/inside source/turncoat list pending …
A flip to another screen:
Perhaps the only things more extraordinary than the achievements of Stansbury School are the souls who inhabit it. From the students—referred to within this literal ivory tower as “specimens”—to the administrators to even the janitors, the pursuit of excellence is the religion of this formidable utopia. But while religions have their deities, they also have their devils …
The words ended there. A bit dramatic, to be sure, but basically to the point. Now, about that devil … Pete had the perfect, yet surprisingly elusive candidate in front of him. He flipped open a blue folder and thumbed through several blurry color pictures shot with a telephoto lens: President Judith Lang in San Angeles exiting the Boeing building, Lang dining at a café with three congressmen, Lang exchanging documents with an unidentified man at Penn Station in New York City. Underneath the photos were logs of the phone calls she made during her stay at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. just last week. His Tabula beeped. The caller identification display showed a Capitol Hill area code. It could only be him, Pete thought.
“Yes?”
“Is that fancy scrambler working?” came the voice of Senator Bloom. “Lord knows you invoiced my office enough for it.” Pete glanced at the long, thin, silver attachment plugged into his Tabula. It had a small pea-size light that glowed green.
“I never said I was a cheap date, Senator. And the line’s secure.”
“How’s my rascal on this fine mornin’?”
“Working hard as always.”
“I believe it. You’re the only one I know who’s gotten inside that place.”
“Just because reporters don’t have any loyalty doesn’t mean we’re not resourceful. Besides, you’re paying me too well to hit dead ends.” He heard Bloom guffaw.
“Must be nice havin’ two salaries.”
“Hell of a way to keep your pool heated.”
“Tell me what you’ve got on everyone’s favorite ball buster. She was fixin’ to tear me a new one yesterday and that was just over a simulcast.”
Pete glanced through his Lang file. “She’s pretty close to clean. I’ve had Harris tracking her for two months now and he’s got zilch. This place is a monastery. No one comes or goes without the school’s knowledge. There’s not one vice available to anyone. The lady doesn’t socialize outside of her job, and that’s a twenty-four-hour gig as it is.”
“I’m not writing checks to charity, damn it. I want dirt. Everyone’s got a history, and—”
“You’re right. So stop busting a gut and listen. My man Harris rounded up a couple of Stansbury alumni.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll find out,” said Bloom cryptically. “Pray continue, Pete.”
“So Harris heard through the grapevine that Lang might’ve had a lover back when she was at Amherst. Nobody knew too much about it, because the guy was a professor and she was a student. Apparently Lang wanted to keep it hush-hush because it was against the school’s policy, but she was also worried people might think he was going easy on her. See, the rumor is that her lover had graded her exams at one point.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“Get a list of the professors she had at Amherst. Get Harris to track them down before the vote. If he can weasel something out of the guy, we might be able to cause a stink.”
“That was only the first part of the rumor, Senator. Second part is, the guy’s dead.” Pete listened to the ominous silence on the other end of the phone line and decided he’d better wrap this up sooner rather than later, to keep in the powerful man’s good graces. “Here’s another unsubstantiated Lang rumor: she got knocked up at some point by this mystery man but didn’t have the kid.”
“Nice start, but this whole business is coming a day late and a dollar short,” said the Senator, his voice rising. “Time’s running out. Frieda Mark’s the chair of the committee, and what she says goes. And she wants us to vote on this tomorrow. I’m doing my best to buy us more time, but the president himself has let everyone in the party know—including yours truly—that he wants the Stansbury bill on his desk ASAP. I’ve got some tricks left in me, but I can’t buck the democrats and my own people and get away with it for very long. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get me more dirt. I want enough ammo to start a goddamned muckraking war if I have to. Big guns, Pete, a nice mud bomb to sling at her or the school. You read me straight? Huh? You still there?”
Pete thought back to his notes on the school, recalling a single shorthand sentence: Potential whistle-blowers/inside source/turncoat list pending … “I’m cultivating a source. Someone inside that’ll spill with something we can use.”
“A specimen?”
“Yes.”
“Cultivate faster.”
“I’m on it.”
“What are they like, Pete?”
“Who?”
“Those brilliant little boys and girls of hers.”
“They’re … they’re really something else, Senator.”
“When all the dust settles,” Bloom said thoughtfully and slowly enough so that Pete could practically hear the gears turning in his old mind, “are they going to end up on the good side or the bad?”
His brain flashed back to his notes one more time: Goldsmith (protective of school, but honest) …
“I’m not sure, sir. I’m just not sure.”
13
The first thing Cooley felt coming out of his druggy, sedated daze was thick wool covering his face. It smelled like disinfectant. Its elastic fabric jammed his nose to the side, causing an uncomfortable build up of snot. The tightly woven material pressed up against the pores of his cheeks, still half wet. Perhaps worst of all, a dense web of saliva gathered around his dry, cracked lips because the fit was so snug he found it difficult to close his mouth and swallow. Add to this the ocean of black caused by his eyes being pressed shut and one would start to understand the experience of wearing a Stansbury security detail hood while awaiting peer review in one of the disciplinary level’s ten examination rooms.
Finally, Cooley regained his consciousness and, after deducing that his current situation was not a dream, tried to piece things together. He recalled Riley with a gun, followed by Riley on the floor. The security detail was in the bathroom. That officer went through the window. Cooley himself slid down an iron ladder five floors to the street. There was a monorail in the distance that seemed reachable, but a sharp, sudden burning sensation in the back of his neck cut the whole adventure short.
He flexed his wrists and felt the hard plastic of cable ties binding him to a chair. His ankles were bound to the chair’s legs. No matter which direction he shifted, Cooley could not seem to get comfortable. He tried to relax his muscles and the chair’s back dug into his spine. He slumped his body forward to take the pressure off and the cable ties dug into his wrists. The chair was not level. Someon
e had stuck very short legs in the front and long legs in the back so the person seated in it would be perpetually squirming.
“It was designed that way,” came a young man’s voice. The thick hood made it difficult for Cooley to tell which direction it was coming from. “Maximum discomfort.” He heard leather soles scrape against the concrete floor, getting closer. The hood shifted half an inch and the friction was a welcome sensation against Cooley’s stale, suffocated skin. Then the darkness rushed past like thick water, as the wool scratched against his face and he reflexively spit out the collected drool and sneezed, snot flying everywhere. Cooley could feel it sticking to his nostrils and chin. After a moment, his vision settled, focusing on the sight of Goldsmith standing on the opposite side of a bolted-down steel table. Goldsmith set the hood down. There was a box of tissues, but he did not offer him one.
He squinted at the valedictorian through the glare of no fewer than nine bright lights shining on him from different strategic points in the cold, spare room. Goldsmith loomed tall, almost larger than life. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses came off as blank, almost clinical. His hands rested comfortably in his pockets. The emblem on his blazer gleamed so brightly that it seemed electrically powered. It was as if the nervous tics Cooley always saw on him in elevator pods, waiting in line for meds or shuffling through the atrium, never existed. The guy’s face was a portrait of rectitude, a canvas empty of self-doubt or hesitation.
Cooley glanced around the room for a clock. He was dying to know what time it was and wondered for how long he was out, and thought of asking but didn’t want to give Goldsmith the satisfaction or control of withholding an answer to such a simple question. Goldsmith sat down in a folding chair on the opposite side of the table and Cooley was silently relieved. Gazing up at him with that yellow hair and all the spotlights was like staring at the sun.
“Look,” Cooley began, working the grogginess from his vocal cords, “I don’t know what happened back there. I don’t want any trouble, all right? I just want to get through the next four … well, I guess it could be three now … four or three days and graduate, okay? I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Goldsmith shifted his gaze from Cooley to a manila folder on the table. He opened it and started to scan its contents.
“Hey!” said Cooley, raising his voice just a tad. “Where’s Riley?”
Goldsmith didn’t look up.
“Where am I?” Nothing. “What time is it?” Cooley’s voice broke slightly and he knew it was audible, knew that Goldsmith heard. Goldsmith glanced up at him like he had been waiting his whole life to get the two of them in a room just like this, on his terms.
“In 1953, the CIA began a series of experiments for a top-secret program known as MK-ULTRA. The most famous of these involved sensory deprivation,” he said, looking like a prissy tour guide but sounding like he was telling a ghost story around a campfire. “The lack of information initially caused stress in the men who volunteered. Simple things like date, time, and location were withheld from them. Soon, they found it unbearable, and their need for physical and emotional stimuli grew exponentially. Minutes began to feel like hours. They slowly lost touch with reality and started to focus inward, producing delusional fits, hallucinations.” Goldsmith caught Cooley’s eye and gave him a slight smile. “None of the volunteers lasted longer than three hours.”
“I want a lawyer,” said Cooley. How the hell am I gonna afford a lawyer, he thought. Bunson. Bunson’s dad knows lawyers. And lawyers protect people’s rights. “I’ve got rights,” he said out loud.
“You don’t. You’re an orphan on a full-ride scholarship and the administrators of this school are your legal guardians.”
“Just like you, right?”
“Like me. We owe this place everything—”
“Fuck that. You owe this place—”
“—and burnouts like you stand in the way of human progress.” Goldsmith’s tone got a little bit sharper. Cooley decided to hit that nerve again just to mess with the officious little prick.
“Is it fucking progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork? And when was the last time you saw the light? Real light from a blue sky that—”
“I’m asking the questions,” said Goldsmith, having regained his cold, efficient delivery. Cooley watched him glance briefly at the mirrored wall over to the side and started to understand that the deck was stacked against him from the beginning.
“Fine. I did it. Okay?”
“Did what?” asked Goldsmith.
“I snuck off campus.”
“Why?”
“Some specimens took … I mean, I took some dopazone hits and—”
“Which specimens?”
“Just me.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Cooley. I was thinking that you might have been referring to the eleven specimens that were expelled this morning for drug use and possession. But please continue.”
For the first time since the hood was removed Cooley was genuinely scared, and he knew it was showing clear as day. He thought of the looks on his friends’ faces during their final gyrobus trip away from the tower, the yellow rain as it streamed down the windows, and the happy barking of Trigger when Bunson arrived home, juxtaposed with the hollow, sad stares of his once-proud mother and Bunson pere. Cooley thought of his departed friends, both hating and loving them for being so stupid. Why’d they have to do the things he did, say the words he said, think the way he suggested they should? “Why couldn’t you have gone easy on them?” he asked Goldsmith. “Four days till commencement. Guys you grew up with—”
“You said you did ‘it,’ Mr. Cooley. Please elaborate.”
“Fuck you!” He felt spit hanging from his trembling lips. The bindings around his wrists broke the skin and drew blood. Not that he cared at that point. “Just boot me. Get it over with. ‘Cause I’m gonna be waiting the moment you set foot outside of the tower and—”
“You can elaborate for me or the police, Mr. Cooley.”
“I needed purified urine samples for a drug test that I thought was going to happen tomorrow. Or today. I don’t even know what fucking day it is … I went to Riley because he’s sober and pays the bills by selling his piss.”
“The security detail says they found you in his bathroom while he was in convulsions. There was a laser syringe on the scene, the type popular with users of drugs like—”
“Smack.”
“You just said he was clean.”
“He must’ve fallen off the wagon! He was acting like a … Look, anyone dumb enough to shoot up old-school street smack has an OD coming.” Cooley went silent and studied the floor. “Is … is he okay?” he asked without looking up.
“Mr. Riley is dead.” A moment passed. Goldsmith suddenly stood up and grabbed Cooley by the hair, yanking his face upward. Their eyes met. Goldsmith’s were still calm despite what he was doing. Like he was a surgeon making an uncomfortable but routine exam. “It wasn’t an OD and you know it,” he said. “That syringe was filled with an unidentified poison and the entry mark shows it wasn’t self-inflicted. Your prints were everywhere, all over the syringe and the body. You attacked a detail officer and fled the scene to—”
“I didn’t kill him!” Cooley shouted. Goldsmith let go of his hair and held up the manila folder.
“Your blood tests don’t show a trace of meds, and you’ve got a history of violence and delinquency.”
“So?”
“You’re a textbook unbalanced specimen, Mr. Cooley.”
Goldsmith set down the folder and wiped off the hand he used to grab Cooley’s hair on his trousers. Cooley could feel those ghoulish eyes roving over his sweaty face, looking for any trace of guilt or weakness his bodily functions might betray. It occurred to him that Bunson’s Stansbury computer account had probably been terminated and he didn’t have the Bunson family’s home phone number or the faintest clue how to get in touch with him. Or how to get in touch with any of the other guys. Just like that. Twelve y
ears of his buddies gone. Twelve years erased. Cooley was eighteen. Eighteen minus twelve equaled six. No family. No friends. He was six years old again. He thought about how long those twelve years felt and wondered if he was ready to go through another twelve to build a new life from scratch—but this time, without the full-ride scholarship to blow.
What was the point? Everything seemed inevitable, he thought. Like the story had already been written by the gods of Stansbury. No point in fighting it. But wait. Maybe that’s how they wanted you to feel. Maybe they were assuming you’d quit. But what if you didn’t? What if you screwed up their precisely laid chapters and disobeyed the careful instructions written on their pages? Sure, he thought, it’d be easier just to go along with everything, but two words raced through Cooley’s mind over and over again: fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you … Stick up for yourself, you pathetic bastard. Don’t let them talk circles around you. Make it hard. Make it a bitch. Give them hell on behalf of Bunson and the guys. He was going to speak for all of them, look Stansbury’s perfect theories and plans in the eye and say it loud: fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you …
“I didn’t do it,” Cooley said, breaking the silence and matching Goldsmith’s calm, controlled tone. “Strap me to the lie detector, the polygraph. Shoot me up with the truth juice and let me babble on record for hours. I didn’t do it. I know you don’t believe me, and you guys think you have this all figured out, but I dare you to do it. I fucking dare you.”
Prodigy Page 15