by Allen Zadoff
“Oh, and when you call Moore,” I say, “how about you put it on speaker. You know, transparency.”
Francisco chews the inside of his lip. I notice he doesn’t take his phone out, doesn’t even make a move to do so.
“I never overrule Moore. I share my opinion with him,” he says.
“So you’re just an adviser,” I say, pushing him a little further.
“A security adviser,” he says. “My job is to protect him. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep him safe.”
“I’m no threat to him,” I say. “In fact, after what I did tonight, you might consider me the opposite.”
Francisco drags deep on his cigarette. I see him studying my face in the soft glow of the cabin.
Finally he exhales and flicks his cigarette butt out the window.
“Point taken,” he says.
He starts the truck.
“Finally,” I say.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE MAKE OUR WAY UP A TWISTING MOUNTAIN PASS.
Francisco navigates by memory, faster than anyone should be able to safely manage on this route. Eventually he slows to make a hairpin turn, and suddenly the road descends steeply for nearly a mile into a deep valley. At the bottom the forest falls away, leaving an open area of a hundred yards in all directions.
This doesn’t look like the boundary of a normal kids’ camp. It looks like the perimeter of a military facility. Cover keeps an encampment safe; lack of cover exposes the enemy. Together they make up the yin and yang of a good defensive perimeter.
We descend into the valley and drive through the clearing, and the wooden sign for Camp Liberty briefly lights up in our truck’s headlights.
“Home, sweet home,” Francisco says.
It’s so dark in front of us I can barely make out a scattering of buildings spread across several acres, their profiles appearing and disappearing in the gray-blue moonlight peeking through the clouds.
I wasn’t given a map of Camp Liberty in my briefing, because I’m not supposed to be here, so I’m going to have to find out everything I need to know on the ground.
Francisco seems to know where he’s going. He pulls forward and brings us to a stop, a building rising out of the darkness.
“Ride ends here,” Francisco says.
“Sorry if I was a little bit of an asshole earlier,” I say, offering him an olive branch.
“A little bit?” he says, obviously not interested in taking it.
“Okay, then. See you around,” I say.
“Guaranteed.”
I open my door. A flashlight beam comes toward me out of the darkness. It shines in my eyes, briefly blinding me.
“You made it,” Lee says.
The truck pulls away behind us.
“It wasn’t the most enjoyable ride I’ve ever had,” I say.
“Sorry we left you like that. It wasn’t our call.”
“I figured,” I say.
“And Franky’s not exactly the life of the party.”
“Franky? That’s what you call Francisco?”
“He’s an okay guy once he warms up to you.”
“How long does that take?”
“I’m still waiting,” Lee says, and I laugh. “Anyway, he’s head of my father’s security detail now, so I’d rather he do his job than be a friend.”
I note his use of the word now. Maybe Francisco got promoted recently?
“Follow me,” Lee says. He starts walking through the darkness, turning his flashlight beam back toward the ground so I can see where to step. “It’s easy to lose your bearings out here.”
He’s right. Without the flashlight, I wouldn’t even see my feet hit the ground.
“By the way, I’m kind of worried that I didn’t get through to my dad yet.”
“Your phone won’t work up here.”
“Because of the mountains?”
“We have a central jamming unit. It makes the one at the community center look like a toy.”
In my briefing Mother told me the compound was cut off from all communication.
“Why do you have to jam if you’re way up here?” I say.
“Nothing in or out,” Lee says, suddenly serious. “It’s for our own protection.”
“Protection from who?”
“Enemies,” he says, pointing the flashlight in a sweeping gesture toward the mountains. The way he says the word, it sounds ominous.
“So there’s no way I can call my dad?”
“We can get a message through to him if that would help.”
I shake my head.
“I guess it can wait until tomorrow,” I say. “I sent him a text earlier, and it’s not like I’m going to be here forever.”
“Who knows?” Lee says. “You may want to stay after you see what we’re up to.”
“It must be awesome,” I say.
“You’ll have to decide that for yourself,” he says. “Follow me.”
Lee guides me forward with the flashlight. He knows the place by heart, his footing sure despite the lack of illumination in the camp.
“So here’s the plan,” he says. “I’m going to show you where you’ll bunk for the night, and we’ll give you the tour in the morning.”
I hear something in the distance, a rhythmic pounding like a hammer hitting metal accompanied by the faint echo of industrial sounds. Clanging steel, machinery, engine noise.
“That’s a lot of noise for a deserted mountain,” I say.
“That’s the workshop,” Lee says. “It operates twenty-four-seven.”
“What do you make there?”
“It’s one of the ways we earn money. Outsourcing electrical components.”
“But I thought you only had kids here, right?”
“Mostly.”
“What about child labor laws?”
“Ask my father that question,” Lee says. “He’d love to discuss the subject with you.”
“Is that a sore point between you two?”
“Don’t get me started.”
We walk deeper into the camp. There’s no sign of any people, only the strange metallic pounding that continues to echo through the valley.
“How many kids are here at a time?” I ask.
“We generally take no more than two dozen for each camp session. But there are no session kids right now. Only permanents.”
“Permanents?”
“Kids who live here full time.”
I think about the English teacher with wild hair shouting about Moore taking her daughter. Is this what she meant?
“Kids can live here without their parents?” I say.
“Don’t be so surprised. It’s like military school. Or any other kind of boarding school. You know what that’s like from Exeter, Daniel.”
He says my name and for a second, it doesn’t register that he’s talking to me. I’m trained to take on identities one after the other, but adjusting to a new name still has a lag time associated with it. Changing names is not as easy as people might believe. Your name is your identity, and you’ve heard it since birth. You associate everything about yourself with your name on a very deep and unconscious level.
I am Daniel, I remind myself. That is my identity now. Daniel Martin.
My own name, my real name, is buried in my consciousness. I neither use it nor access it.
“You okay?” Lee says.
“Thinking about something,” I say. “It’s not important.”
As we walk through the dark, I can just make out the shapes of vehicles parked away from the buildings and facing toward the road. Another security precaution. Keep vehicles and their gasoline tanks away from wooden structures, turned outward, keys in the ignitions, ready to start at a moment’s notice. There is no time for U-turns in a battle.
Is it possible this camp is being prepared for attack? The idea seems ridiculous, but the evidence is mounting. I’ll know a lot more tomorrow when I examine it in the light.
Lee says, “My dad wanted to welco
me you himself, but he’s in meetings now.”
“It’s late for meetings, no?”
His tone turns serious.
“We have to discuss what happened earlier. And other things…” he says, his voice trailing off.
He looks like he wants to say more, but he stops himself.
He turns right at a small building and continues on a path that takes us farther away from what seems to be the central area.
“Just so you know, this kind of thing—the attempt tonight—doesn’t happen to us on a regular basis.”
“But it’s happened before?”
“There have been threats,” he says. “Nobody has gotten that close. Especially not someone—”
“Someone what?”
“Someone we know.”
I imagine the scenario tonight. The English teacher has a daughter at camp, so they pass her through security without a thorough search, not expecting she has a gun in her purse.
“I can’t stop thinking about that moment,” Lee says. “How did you know she had the gun? You were on her practically before she got it out of her bag.”
“Like you said before, I’ve got a real talent for this security stuff. Maybe I should join the Secret Service.”
“Seriously.”
“Okay, truthfully? My dad has a carry permit, so I’ve seen him take a pistol in and out of his work bag, like, a thousand times. It’s hard to miss the gesture when you’re used to it. My eye caught it.”
He nods, processing the information.
“As for jumping her,” I say, “that was pretty stupid. And pretty lucky.”
“It should have been me,” he says.
He pauses, staring into the dark.
“I saw the gun, too,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “But I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Most people wouldn’t know what to do.”
“I’m not most people. I’m Eugene Moore’s son. He expects better from me.”
The statement tells me everything I need to know about Lee. A powerful father, and a son who’s not living up to his potential, at least in his father’s eyes.
I was reading Lee wrong. The questions he was asking had nothing to do with me. They were about him and his guilt.
“I was just acting on instinct,” I say, trying to make him feel better. “Who knows what I would do if it happened again?”
“Maybe you’d do the same thing.”
“Yeah. Or maybe I’d poop my pants.”
He laughs. “That would clear the room, huh?”
“Whatever gets the job done,” I say.
“All kidding aside, maybe my father could use you on his security brigade. He needs another body up there.”
“For real?”
“He’s short a guy,” he says, his voice low.
“How did that happen?” I say.
Lee does a quick circle with the flashlight, making sure nobody is close enough to overhear us.
“One of his bodyguards had to leave.”
I think about the soldier from The Program. He was in this same camp four months ago, and now he’s dead. Could this have anything to do with what Lee is talking about?
“This bodyguard,” I say. “He wasn’t doing a good job?”
“He wasn’t loyal,” Lee says, his voice turning cold. “So he was dealt with.”
I don’t say anything.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Lee says. “I’m just letting you know there’s an opening.”
Lee turns his flashlight toward a medium-sized square building set apart from the other structures. “We’re here,” he says.
The front door is locked, and Lee flips open a metal plate next to the door to reveal a digital keypad.
He moves to block my sight line with his body. I back up like I’m giving him his privacy, but I shift subtly so I can see over his shoulder. He holds the flashlight under his arm and types in a four-digit code.
9 6 6 4
He turns the handle, and the door opens.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” he says.
“I get my own place?”
“Pretty cool, huh? I’ll get you settled, then I have to go over to the meeting.”
“I hope you guys have cable,” I say.
“We’ve got better than cable,” he says.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“ARE YOU A GAMER?” LEE SAYS.
We’re standing in what looks like a hotel room at a three-star property. A stripped-down space, but clean and obviously designed for guests. There’s a large bookshelf filled with titles, but that’s not what Lee is referring to. He’s pointing to a sixty-inch LCD screen that fills the wall in front of us. It looks enormous in such a small room.
Even better is what’s on the shelf underneath it. A state-of-the art gaming system, its wires running back through the wall and up out of sight into the television screen.
“ ‘Gamer’ is a little bit of a stretch,” I say. “But I play once in a while.”
I’m thinking of Zombie Crushed Dead!—the MMORPG world where I meet Mother for emergency conferences, the anonymity of thousands of players serving to obfuscate our operational communications. In fact, if I can get online here—
“I’ve got a game going right now,” I say. “Can I log in and play it?”
“You mean out in the real world?” he says, pointing up and out. “No can do. It’s an intranet setup. We only play each other.”
“That’s how you guys spend your time? I’m surprised your dad lets you play games. Mine hates when I do that.”
“It’s not just a game. It’s training,” he says. “I helped to design the whole thing.”
“You programmed it?”
“Not myself. But I supervised the programmers. And I’m the one who came up with the idea behind the scenarios.”
“So it’s like a flight simulator?”
“That’s a good comparison. It develops hand-eye coordination, strategic thinking, and familiarity with military maneuvers. ‘Serious play,’ my father calls it.”
“So you go back to your rooms and play each other?”
“Only some of us have them in our rooms. But we have a couple game centers in common rooms around the property.”
“Not a bad deal.”
“Actually, it’s a trade-off. We don’t have computers, iPhones, or tablets of any kind.”
“But you’ve got this.”
“We do. Everyone in the encampment has a profile programmed in. Our characters have physical attributes and skills based on our real-world talents. As we train in real life and get stronger, our characters get stronger.”
“Sounds amazing,” I say.
“You have a profile, too.”
“I do?”
“Preprogrammed, based on your application. And a few other things we know about you.”
What do they know about me?
Lee says, “The game tracks your score and compares it to everyone else’s in the encampment. Ranking is everything here. You’ll see.”
“I can understand why you guys want to live here,” I say, smiling.
“Not yet, you can’t,” he says, suddenly serious. “But I’m going to show you. If you’re interested.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’re here,” he says. “In fact you’re guaranteed to be here at least until morning.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have to lock you in tonight. Standard operating procedure. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I say. “I can’t see shit out there anyway. Where am I going to go?”
He laughs.
“See you in the a.m.,” he says, and goes out.
I hear him walk down the hall. The exterior door opens and closes, accompanied by the sound of a lock clicking shut.
As soon as I’m sure he’s gone, I take out my iPhone.
I move around the room looking for any indication of a signal, trying different angles and heights
, testing the limits of the jamming system. The phone stays in search mode, unable to connect to a cell tower, to Wi-Fi, to anything.
No signal of any kind.
I look at the sixty-inch screen mounted on the wall. If I can’t explore Liberty tonight, I can explore the game they play, acclimate myself to the culture. Maybe kick some online ass in the meantime.
I power on the system in my room. An avatar appears on-screen—a generic boy, roughly my height and size, rotating in space. On the back of his shirt is written DANIEL X, as if he’s wearing a sports uniform with his name stitched there.
I click the character, and I’m presented with a series of game scenarios:
Laying Plans
Waging War
Tactical Disposition
The Use of Spies
The Attack by Fire
I think about where I’ve seen phrases like this before, and it only takes a second for me to remember. The Art of War, Sun Tzu’s classic text of military doctrine written in the second century BC. I studied it as part of my training.
I’m guessing this game is based on the military principles in the text.
I click to open LAYING PLANS, and I’m presented with a colorized map. I study it for a few moments, and I realize I’m looking at the planning schematic for the encampment. I see the main road coming in through the mountain where I drove with Francisco. Camp Liberty is designed as a large oval shape surrounded by mountains. One main road coming in, and a smaller service road exiting from the side. There are two larger buildings: a long rectangular house dead in the center of the configuration and another building that I haven’t seen yet, set far back from the other structures, neatly tucked into the side of the mountain. The main building is surrounded by several smaller structures set at random intervals around it. I try to determine which structure I’m in, but it could be one of several.
I study the map more closely, and I see notations for defensive positions set up around the encampment.
Laying Plans
This scenario represents the positioning of forces to maximize the defense of the encampment. But why would they need to defend a camp for kids? Defend it from whom?
Maybe I can find out.
A dialogue prompts me:
Are you ready? Y/N