The Oracle Paradox

by Stephen L. Antczak

  Why had Sanchez needed to die? Cornwall needed to remind himself of that, in order to make himself believe it, even if only superficially. He knew the argument, of course.

  The political analysts, the pundits, so-called experts on affairs of state…all of them had been wrong in their assumption that Sanchez would be swept into office on his popularity with the people. Had Sanchez survived to see the votes counted he would have been in for a severe disappointment. He would have lost to the incumbent.

  And that would have been just the beginning.

  He would have called for a recount. When the recount came out the same, he would not have accepted it. There would have been a coup, and Sanchez would have usurped the power of the legally elected President, plunging Mexico into civil war. The sudden, massive influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States would have sent the U.S. economy spiraling, while the flames of war in Mexico would have spread south. Within six months of the elections all of Central America would have been in bloody chaos.

  Had Sanchez been allowed to live.

  Peter Cornwall believed none of it, of course. But it was the prognosis from the same source that, over the course of the last five years, had spun out different tales of Fate for other, similarly doomed, souls. Perhaps some had been truly evil, others not. It didn’t matter. Good and evil were not variables for this equation. What mattered was the effect they would have on the world, and the innocent lives that would suffer as if punished for allowing the existence of such men and, yes, such women.

  The five permanent members of the Security Council had allowed the souls of these men and women to be extinguished. Supposedly the world was a better place for it. It was a matter of sacrificing the few for the good of the many. Therefore it had to be right.

  Right?

  Early on Peter Cornwall had believed so, yes. But now…

  Nevin Cardinal Roscoe read the news of the Generalissimo’s assassination with a less grim, and more amazed, expression on his face as he sat in a small café in the Place de la Bastille in Paris. Although it had come sooner than expected, it happened just as Augustine had chillingly predicted only a few months before. The implications were enormous for the Church, and possibly for all of humanity. But the Church faced a more immediate crisis. The Church had to decide where it stood in regards not to the assassination of Sanchez (it was easy to oppose the assassination in of itself) but in regards to the forces at work behind the assassination. The mechanism behind the Generalissimo’s death, as it were, signified the beginning of the conflict between God and Machine, as the Cardinal saw it.

  Roscoe wondered if Augustine would appreciate the irony of the Church’s situation. Probably not. Thank God.

  He sipped his espresso, found it to be cold, then glanced up at a clock on the opposite wall. He’d been sitting there in the café thinking for over an hour, he realized. His flight to Rome took off in a few hours. It was time to get moving. He did not relish the debate to come when he arrived at the Vatican later on that night. Since Augustine’s prognostication of the Generalissimo’s destiny had come to pass, it was only logical to assume that the child’s would, too. And if the Catholic Church would not act for the sake of an innocent child… Cardinal Roscoe did not want to think about what he would do then. Faith in God, he reminded himself, was stronger than faith in the Church. He knew his faith would be tested. He hoped he could remember that when the time came.

  Tina Jefferson watched the news of the death of Generalissimo Jorge Luis Sanchez with a passive expression, until she remembered that she had something like eighty percent of her retirement money tied up in Mexican stocks. She quickly clicked from the news to her broker’s web site. The active stocks were represented by blinking ticker symbols. They were all blinking.

  "Son of a gun," she said. The numbers were rolling down before her eyes. She could salvage some if she acted quickly enough. Thinking fast, Tina decided that the death of Sanchez would throw Mexico into long term financial chaos and those stocks probably would not bounce back anytime soon. It was his strong arm that had stabilized the economy there and given Mexicans a good taste of what the United States had been experiencing since the early Nineties. As she clicked the SELL button on her screen she fretted that she’d be lucky to get out with her original investment intact.

  Before letting herself get too angry about it, though, Tina reminded herself that at least she was still alive. Sanchez wasn’t. It worked, thinking about things like that, putting her problems into perspective. So she lost some money, big deal! Actually, it was a lot of money…but still, what of it? In a way she felt guilty. A man had been killed, murdered, and here she was worrying about how it affected her stock portfolio. Maybe it was a good thing, losing that money. Maybe she’d needed reminding of what was important, really important, in life.

  Tina realized she needed something to remind her of that all the time. She’d been living alone for so long, working from her home office on her computer, telecommuting and not getting that daily interaction with real people. Maybe she was losing her humanity, becoming like one of those A.I.s for which she wrote peripheral programs. Maybe she should follow up on that job offer in Atlanta. She’d been hemming and hawing over it for weeks because they said they would want her to come to the office every day, at least for the first few months. She’d been hoping she could continue freelancing in Dallas and live off her stock market earnings, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. Not that sitting in traffic every morning and afternoon, and inhabiting a cubicle for eight hours a day, would renew her humanity. She needed something that would give her a return on her emotional investment.

  The news went to a commercial break. Tina picked up her remote to press the mute button. The commercial was for cat food.

  And it hit her like a bolt from the blue. What would give her a return on her emotional investment? A pet, and not just any pet. A cat!

  Chapter 3

  Sitting outside at a sidewalk café called the Lionness on Hertzog Boulevard in Cape Town, South Africa, Angus Becker took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. The sun burned down on him through a cloudless sky as he sipped cold Perrier from a glass. Next door to the Lionness stood the Nico Milan Opera House, and within was the de facto leader of the New Afrikaans Resistance Force enjoying a Saturday afternoon performance of songs from Othello.

  It was actually Becker’s favorite opera, and it incensed him that he couldn’t be in there absorbing the performances instead of sweating outside while he waited for Hans de Smit to emerge. It had been no great surprise to Becker when he received the commission to kill de Smit. He’d read a few op-ed pieces about de Smit and the latest ultra-right Afrikaans movement. If even half of what Becker had read was true, which was the average his employer told him to expect from such sources of information, then de Smit needed to be gotten rid of for the good of everyone else in South Africa. And, since Becker was the one sent to do the job, apparently it needed to be done in a very loud, very…colorful manner. That was Becker’s style.

  He finished his Perrier just as one of the doors to the opera house opened. A white man wearing a dark suit and sunglasses stepped out. Following him was another white man in another dark suit and sunglasses, and then a third white man wearing a lighter, brown suit and his trademark safari hat…de Smit. Becker reached down and unzipped the long canvas bag sitting on the ground by his chair. The three men walked down the marble front steps of the opera house towards a waiting limousine. Becker pulled a pump-action riot shotgun out of the canvas bag and stood. Without hesitation he walked quickly towards the men coming down the stairs.

  A little girl sat in front of her brightly colored computer in Atlanta, Georgia. The monitor was pink, the keyboard orange, the mouse green, the CPU box yellow, the speakers purple, and the printer sky blue with white polka dots. On the screen was an animated frog named Ribbet. Ribbet was telling the little girl a story.

  The story was about a little boy who saw a roach
in the kitchen, and the boy ran around trying to stomp it, knocking over his bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice and stepping on the dog’s tail and the cat’s tail in the process, until he finally squished the thing with his foot. The boy then started crying. Ribbet asked the girl why the boy was crying. Was it because he had knocked over his favorite cereal and juice, and there was no more left? Was it because he had inadvertently hurt his dog and cat? Was it because he suddenly realized that he had just killed a living creature? Or was it because he was afraid he was going to get into trouble for making a mess?

  The little girl thought about this problem for a long time.

  "He’s afraid he’s going to get into big trouble," the girl finally said.

  Then Ribbet asked her how much she liked the story. There was a smiley face, an almost-smiley face, an expressionless face, an almost-frowny face, and a frowny face. The little girl knew what to do, she’d done it many times before. The faces represented how much she liked or didn’t like the story. She picked the almost-frowny face because she didn’t like the story all that much, but she didn’t hate it, either.

  Then Ribbet asked her what she’d do if she saw a roach run across the kitchen floor while she was eating breakfast.

  "Watch it," she said.

  "You would not want to step on it?" Ribbet asked in his croaky voice.

  The little girl shook her head. The computer had a camera and microphone plugged into it. She knew Ribbet used those to see and hear her.

  "Then what would you do?" Ribbet asked.

  "I don’t know… Just watch it, I guess" the girl responded. "Maybe later, after I was done eating my cereal and drinking my juice, and if the dog and the cat were outside, and I saw it…then I might step on it."

  Chapter 4

  Six months later…

  Henry Porembski looked down the barrel of his silenced 9mm at the big, brown eyes of a little girl. She had her father’s eyes. They flickered to look at the silencer on the end of the gun, and then back at Henry’s face. She looked at him without fear, as if she could see his soul.

  "How old are you?" Henry asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  "How old are you?" he asked her again.

  "Eight years old," she said. Her voice was very small and shy.

  Behind her, on a colorful plastic computer screen, an animated frog danced a jig.

  "You’re eight years old?" Henry asked her.

  She nodded. He didn’t know what else to say. Don’t be afraid? She didn’t seem to be afraid, but she probably was. She should be, he thought. Henry was afraid. He was afraid because now, all of a sudden, nothing made sense to him. Nothing. His world had suddenly shrunk down to the size of that bedroom.

  It was a mistake. It had to be. Otherwise…the implications were too much for Henry to comprehend at that particular moment. He was utterly lost. He was beyond rational thought. All he could think was that it was wrong. He had a sudden desire to go back in time just a few hours to that morning when everything had seemed right, when he’d had a purpose and believed in what he was doing, believed it was for the good of all mankind… If he could go back, maybe he could figure out what had gone wrong and fix it. If he could go back just a few hours, maybe he could make it so everything was right again.

  Earlier that day…

  As the Delta 747 landed at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, Henry woke from a long nap. It was the best he could hope for on a plane, since he could never truly sleep during a flight. Outside the sun was shining brightly. It was late afternoon in Atlanta. He’d been plane-hopping his way from Hong Kong for weeks…first to Jakarta, Indonesia to rid the world of an international child pornography ringleader; then to Istanbul, Turkey to eliminate a Russian mafia godfather; then to Barcelona, Spain, to kill a popular, young Basque separatist; and from there to Santiago, Chile, to end the life of an exiled follower of Peru’s late, former President Alberto Fujimori; and now to Atlanta. He didn’t know who his intended target in Atlanta was, but he’d find that out in the usual manner.

  He had no luggage, just a key to a locker in the north terminal where the baggage claim area was located. He went straight there. In the locker was a sports bag. He took it, then went to the automobile rental window where he gave the pleasantly smiling woman his confirmation number. Within minutes Henry was driving out of the parking lot in a blue Ford Taurus, then heading up Interstate 85 towards downtown Atlanta. His instructions were to check in at the Marriott Marquis downtown, where he would acquire the information he needed to complete his mission. Once completed he would go straight to the airport and board a flight direct to Paris, France for six more months of vacation.

  As he drove he turned on the air conditioning. It was the middle of September, and still summer hot. The car cooled off considerably by the time he arrived downtown.

  The Marriott Marquis was the largest hotel in Atlanta. Nestled within the skyscrapers of the busy Peachtree Center shopping district, on Peachtree Street, the wide, circular driveway hummed nonstop with the engines of taxi cabs and limousines. Henry opted for valet parking.

  He went inside through a smoothly revolving brass door, then up escalators to the main lobby. The interior of the hotel was open all the way up to the ceiling, ribbed by the floors that supported the guest rooms. The effect was like stepping into a science fiction movie set in an idealized, yet impersonal, future world. Henry stopped after a few steps from the top of the escalator. The soft ping of elevators announcing their arrival was constant. One man was being checked in at the front desk. A bellhop loaded the man’s matching six piece set of luggage onto a cart. Life seemed normal in the Marriott Marquis.

  He went to the counter to check in, and there was a package waiting for him at the concierge desk. It was about the size of a briefcase and heavy, wrapped in brown shipping paper and packing tape. He took it, and the sports bag he had retrieved from the airport locker, up to his room on the eleventh floor of the hotel. In his room he loosened his tie, took off his grey pinstriped coat and hung it up in the closet, then entered the combination to the electronic lock on the briefcase. It clicked open and he pulled out a laptop computer, a small inkjet travel printer, and a thin package of glossy printer paper. He plugged the computer into the power outlet and phone jack beneath the desk near the window, then plugged the printer into the computer. He turned the computer on and while it booted up he started the small coffee maker in the bathroom.

  He connected to the Internet and went straight to a web site without a domain name, just the numbers of an IP address. He typed in his name and password, then a second, different, password, then clicked the OK button. A dialogue box popped up that said ERROR. He clicked on the CANCEL button, and the computer seemed to shut down, but a moment later the screen came back up. He typed in his name, password, and second password, and again the ERROR box came up. This time he simply moved it out of the way and clicked the OK button again. The ERROR box disappeared and the screen turned a familiar yellow with black letters that read HELLO, HENRY.

  Directions to a house appeared on the screen and Henry printed them out. Then a portrait photograph of a man, a woman, and a child. The man was Caucasian, the woman Hispanic, the child looked more like the woman although she did have a hint of the man’s features. A name appeared at the bottom: Sam J. Rohde. Henry’s target.

  He tasted something like bile at the back of his throat as he regarded the family portrait. The man looked like a nice enough guy, and undoubtedly his daughter loved him unconditionally. Henry was going to destroy that. It didn’t feel good. However, if he was being sent to eliminate that little girl’s father then he had to believe the world would be a better place without him, and therefore a better place for the girl.

  The smell of freshly brewed coffee permeated the room. Henry poured a cup as he printed out the portrait. He then opened the sports bag and took out two generic 9mm automatics, a fat silencer, four clips of ammunition, a pair of nylon shoulder holsters for the guns, a
n envelope containing fifty hundred-dollar bills, a fake I.D., credit cards, a Bowie knife in a leather sheath, a change of clothes, and a key to another locker at the airport. He looked at the fake I.D. long enough to memorize the name: Henry Kellog, of Lisle, Illinois. The fake I.D. was there only in case of an emergency, if the local authorities were to get involved. It had not happened yet, not in over five years, but it could.

  Henry unplugged the computer and printer, storing them in the case. He undressed, showered, and got dressed again in the new clothes. He removed the fake I.D. he had been using up until then, along with the associated credit cards, and put those into the case with the laptop. The case would be stored in a different locker at the airport, to be picked up by some other agent of Henry’s employer.

  He had met one, and only one, other person who worked for his employer, and had only met him a few times in the beginning of Henry’s employment. It’d been years since then and he had not seen the man since. The man had recruited Henry the day after the first anniversary of his family’s murder at the hands of Egyptian Islamic terrorists. He’d seemed to know Henry almost better than Henry had known himself. He’d promised that Henry’s new line of work would go a long way towards making Henry overcome his feelings of helplessness against the faceless murderers of his loved ones, and in a more general sense against the faceless murderers of the loved ones of good and honest men all over the world. He was right, Henry felt empowered, although the pain and anguish were still there, especially in his dreams. But Henry did feel like he was making a difference, doing more than most people could ever hope to do in the constant, chronic, and seemingly hopeless war of good against evil.