by Allen Zadoff
When I’m done, I stand in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do next.
“Maybe you should sit down,” Howard says.
I realize I’m rocking on my feet, unsteady.
I look at the chair. It doesn’t look right to me. There’s something about chairs that I do not like, something dangerous flagged in my memory.
I sit on the edge of the bed instead.
“I’ll get you some water,” Howard says.
“I’m okay,” I say, but he goes anyway, rushing to the bathroom and coming back with a glass of water. I drink it down in one long swallow, and he gets me another. I drink that, too. I hand him back the glass.
“It’s done,” I say.
“Done?”
“My mission. I finished.”
“Moore?”
“He’s dead. That means you can go home, Howard, and I can go…”
I try to think of where I will go next, but I have no place to go. Without The Program giving me instructions, I have no direction.
“I have to tell you something,” Howard says, his face growing troubled. “The reason I was texting you.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to you.”
“Listen to me,” he says. “I decoded the micro SDHC card.”
I forgot about the card, the one I took off the leader of the freelance team.
“What did you find?”
“The card contains a file with information about the location of your safe house.”
“Who would have access to that information?” I ask.
Howard doesn’t say anything.
I think about the chip, the sophistication of the design that Howard described to me. The idea of hiding a device inside another device. It’s The Program’s MO.
“Of course, The Program had the information,” I say without Howard asking, “but they would never share it with anyone outside our circle.”
He opens his laptop and turns it toward me. “The data on the card was encoded with a digital watermark. I tracked it back to an anonymous communications control hub.”
“What does that mean?” I say.
“It’s the same hub that is the source of the secure numbers I got from your iPhone.”
My mind is racing, trying to find a flaw in Howard’s logic.
“The Program,” Howard says. “It hired those men to go to the safe house.”
“That’s impossible,” I say.
The Program is my employer, my commander, my life.
They’re not good people, Francisco said.
He tried to warn me. He tried to give me an option.
“You’re sure?” I ask Howard.
“I triple-checked,” he says. “The Program transferred all the information to the SDHC card.”
I sit there trying to think of a reason why.
“What do we do now?” Howard says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Howard’s face goes pale.
“But you always know,” he says.
I lean back on the bed. My body feels heavy.
“Are you all right?” Howard says.
“I haven’t slept,” I say. “I can’t think straight.”
I lie down on the bed. I try to keep my eyes open, but it’s a struggle.
I suddenly see my father’s face in front of me. He’s leaning over me, tucking in the covers around me.
I open my eyes to find Howard pulling a blanket over me.
“My father,” I say. “You have to help me find him.”
“You mean your commander from The Program?”
“No. My real father,” I say. “Mike told me he was alive at the end of my last mission.”
“Who?”
I try to make Howard understand me, but for some reason I can’t communicate properly through the fog.
“Help me.” That’s all I can say.
“I’ll help you,” Howard says. “Whatever you need.”
Exhaustion overtakes me, and I fall into a deep sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
I OPEN MY EYES NOT KNOWING WHERE I AM.
A strange room, a strange city, a mission I can’t remember.
The room is lit by the laptop screens that line the desk. I hear snoring across from me.
I sit up in the bed, and I remember.
I am in a hotel room in Manchester. Howard is sleeping in a chair across the room from me, his face glowing blue from the computer open on his lap.
Then I remember other things. Things that I have done in the last day. Things that have been done to me.
I slip out of bed, looking for some way to judge the time. I peek out between the blinds and see it’s nighttime. The position of the moon tells me there are a few hours left until dawn.
I walk quietly to the bathroom in the adjoining room. I close the door and flip on the light.
I’m still wearing my clothes from Liberty: a T-shirt and camo pants.
I lean over to turn on the water, and I wince in pain. I take off my T-shirt. There are black-and-blue marks forming along my ribs from the fight with Francisco. Damage under the skin that is only now showing.
I feel along the length of my ribs until I find the source of greatest pain. I wince as I probe there, but I determine that nothing is broken. I reverse the process, feeling along the other side. Then I run my hands up my chest, across my shoulders, performing an impromptu battlefield wound assessment on myself.
I finish without finding any serious injuries, but I keep going, probing where there is no pain, in the flesh between my elbow and humerus.
Francisco said I would search there for the chip, and he was right. I need to know.
I examine the area, but I do not find anything.
If something was implanted in me, there will likely be a scar, even a tiny one. Yet there are a thousand places to hide a chip on the human body. I see an illustration of the body in my mind, and I chart the places where the chip might be, assigning each one a percentage of likelihood. I focus first on areas of soft flesh bordered by hard structure that could keep a device anchored in place.
Next I use the schematic to search my body, feeling for gaps, probing as deeply as I am able with my fingers.
I don’t find anything.
I lean across the sink to get closer to the mirror, and something hard knocks against the porcelain. Something inside the pocket of my camos.
The knife from the freelance team’s truck.
I flick the button and a silver blade slides out.
I press the blade in the joint between the humerus and elbow. A half inch deep, then slightly farther. I detach myself from the pain, placing it far away from my consciousness, as I’ve been trained to do.
I feel flesh and skin, but no foreign bodies. I slit down, opening the wound farther toward my wrist, making sure not to nick the radial artery. I probe for a minute with the tip of the knife, but I can’t find anything.
Next I check the inside of my elbow, the bony growth with an indentation in it. I push the blade in there, more gently this time. I don’t cut deeply, just enough to pop through skin and the thin layer of fat beneath. Again I probe with the blade.
I find nothing.
I strip off the rest of my clothes, stand naked with the blade ready in my hand.
I glance up and catch sight of myself in the mirror—a boy with crazed eyes, blood flowing down both arms, holding a knife.
I am insane, I think. Just like Francisco.
But I can’t stop thinking about the chip, where it could be, how such a device might have been implanted.
Suddenly I think of Dr. Acosta at the hospital the other day. The strange MRI scanner. The pain and heat I felt—not everywhere, just one specific location.
Under my scar.
If The Program implanted me with something in the past and wanted to cover up the scar, what would be the best way to do it?
Camouflage a scar inside a scar.
I think back to the fight years ago that ended with a knife blad
e inside me. I remember the way The Program brought me to a clinic afterward, how I was cleaned up, the shots I was given. The minor operation to close the wound.
How I was sutured afterward.
A scar inside a scar.
Dr. Acosta said it was an MRI that had been adapted for special use. Could it be used to adjust a chip that was already inside me?
I press my thumb against the scar, remembering the sensations I felt there, deep inside my chest.
I rinse the knife with water, and I use it to slice open the scar tissue on my chest.
Blood pools in the wound and drips down into the sink. I probe first with the knife, then I use my fingers to separate the skin, watch a pink slit open in my flesh. The pain is intense now, but I am trained to deal with pain.
I feel it, but it does not stop me. I do what I have to do.
I lean in close to the mirror and peer into the wound.
There, on the muscle of my pec, is a fistula of flesh growing out from the muscle. I prod it gently with the knife tip. It is hard inside.
Flesh grows around a foreign object in the body, forming a protective shell. I know this from my biology studies. I cut through the flesh, a nick that opens the internal scar tissue.
I see something shiny there, a faint blue glow inside it.
It’s a sterile Gorilla Glass tubule, the size of a fat grain of rice.
I look again, making sure I’m not imagining it. I tap it with the edge of the knife, feel hard glass.
It’s real.
I take a deep breath. Then I reach inside myself, and I pull it out.
I wash the tube in the sink, drain the blood from around it. I hold it up to the light. I see something that resembles a miniature chip with a tiny antenna coil wrapped around it. The entire device is sealed into a neat and nearly undetectable package inside the tubule.
It was glowing when it was inside me, but not anymore.
A short double wire extends from the bottom of the tube. That’s the part that was inside my muscle when I pulled it out.
Francisco was telling the truth.
The Program was inside of me, hidden in the last place I would look: the scar above my heart.
I step back from the mirror. The blood runs down my body and drips onto the floor at my feet.
I don’t feel any different. Maybe Francisco was wrong about the purpose of the chip.
Suddenly I hear a noise behind me, and I spin around.
Howard is standing in the doorway, watching me. His face is pale, and he’s shaking.
“What are you doing to yourself?” he says, his voice quaking.
“Francisco was telling the truth,” I say.
“Who is Francisco?”
I hold out a bloody palm with the tubule in it.
“He was a soldier,” I say. “Like me.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
HOWARD USES VODKA FROM THE MINIBAR TO STERILIZE THE CUTS.
Then he takes a roll of duct tape from his bag, and I use it as a battlefield dressing to close the wounds. It’s a temporary measure, but it will stem the flow of blood and allow the body to begin to heal until I can get to a drugstore and find more appropriate dressings.
When we’re done cleaning me up, we sit down in the room, and I tell Howard what I know about the chip. I tell him what Francisco said about its neurosuppressive quality, the effect it has on throttling fear.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Howard says.
“But it’s possible?” I say.
“There have been a lot of experiments studying the effect of magnetic fields on the brain. But there’s nothing functional at this scale. This would be a level of sophistication years beyond anything available now.”
“It makes sense,” I say. “If you want to create the perfect soldier, start by taking away his fear.”
“How do you feel with it outside of you?”
“The same as I did before.”
“So maybe it was bullshit. Or maybe he was wrong about what it does.”
“Maybe so. But he wasn’t wrong about the chip being there. So what else could it be?”
“Let’s take a look,” Howard says. He powers on his computer, then places the tubule on the lighted Plexiglas device he used to scan the SDHC card earlier.
A moment later, a magnified picture of the tubule appears on the computer screen. Howard points to it. “There’s a computer chip located here. And do you see the little wire coil that surrounds half of the chip?”
“What is it?”
“It could be a power source. Or an antenna.”
That’s when the hotel phone rings, the noise echoing in the quiet of the room.
Howard looks at me.
“Don’t touch it,” I say.
The phone continues to ring.
“You have to get out of here,” I tell Howard. “They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?”
The Program. A freelance team. Moore’s people.
Whoever it is, it will be trouble.
I don’t have time to explain it to him.
“Grab everything and get it into the other room,” I say.
I imagine them downstairs, whoever they are, inquiring at the front desk about which room we’re in. If the desk is good, they won’t give out that information. But in Manchester, in the middle of the night, it’s probably a young guy who wishes he weren’t here. A young guy who doesn’t want a hassle, who isn’t above providing a little information when forty dollars is slipped across the counter.
Maybe they asked him to call to make sure I was in, or maybe he knew something was up and called after they left. Either way, it’s not a coincidence. Not at five AM.
Howard starts pulling plugs from outlets, slapping his laptops closed and stacking them to carry to the other room.
“Wait until you hear the door to this room open,” I tell him, “then get out as quickly and quietly as you can. Hide somewhere in the hotel, and don’t come back here no matter what. Wait until there’s no movement from upstairs or in the parking lot, then get yourself back home to New York. Take the train if you can, but if you need it, there’s a black truck in the back of the parking lot. Keys in the front wheel well.”
“What will you do?”
I shake my head, unwilling to answer.
“If something happens to me—”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Listen,” I say calmly. “If something happens and for some reason you don’t hear from me, I don’t want you searching for me. Destroy any evidence of our communication. It’s the only way to keep yourself safe.”
“Holy shit holy shit holy shit,” he says, starting to panic.
I grab him by the arms.
“You’re going to be okay, Howard. I promise you.”
He takes a deep breath, looks me in the eye. I see his body relax slightly.
“Be careful, Daniel.”
“I will.”
He rushes into the other suite, and I close the door behind him.
I spend sixty seconds fixing the room, straightening cushions, checking for anything that might give away Howard’s presence.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, bare-chested with my wounds taped up.
I reach up to my chest and carefully peel back the tape there.
I press the tubule into the adhesive, then I put the tape back over the wound.
The chip is no longer inside me, but it’s hidden against me, safe, until I can examine it further.
I throw on a T-shirt, realize it will not cover the cuts on my arms, and grab a hoodie from the closet and zip it to my neck, hiding the wounds.
I hear a door open and close down the hall.
Whoever they are, they came by stairs, not risking the elevator.
I turn out the lights, and I sit in a chair at a diagonal from the door.
My breathing is fast, much faster than normal. I take a moment to center myself, relaxing my shoulders and willing my breat
h to slow as I’ve done a thousand times before.
It doesn’t work.
My breathing turns rapid and shallow, my chest moving in a strange way. Something is wrong with my body. It seems to be reacting without my being able to control it.
It takes enormous concentration to get calm and centered. I only have time for three deep breaths before I hear it.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
IT’S NO LOUDER THAN A WHISPER.
The sound of a lubricating spray being squirted into the door lock followed by a tool being eased into the mechanism. The knob is jiggled briefly, and the door opens.
A figure enters the room, moving with the ease of a shadow.
I know the posture, the powerful way he propels himself through the world.
It’s Mike.
He stares at me, and I stare back, unblinking.
He steps deeper into the room and closes the door behind him. My breath catches in my chest.
“You don’t look good,” he says.
I wipe sweat from my forehead.
The glow of the hotel sign comes through the blinds, illuminating Mike’s profile in front of the doorway. He looks huge inside the room.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” I say.
“No, it’s something else,” he says. He studies me curiously. “You look afraid. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
I will myself not to react to his comment. I make my face calm, breathe slowly and evenly. I touch my forehead again, and my hand comes away wet.
“Why are you here, Mike?”
“It’s not a social call, if that’s what you were wondering.”
“That’s good, because I didn’t have time to buy party favors.”
“You’re still funny,” he says. “Even under duress.”
“I’m not under duress. But you obviously are. You’re sneaking into a hotel room in the middle of the night.”
“I didn’t know what I’d find in here.”
“You found me. Now why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”
Somehow he has moved closer to me without my realizing it, every step a chess move.
Francisco was right. You can know Mike yet not see him coming.
“The Program sent me,” Mike says simply.
I stand up, bringing my body to a state of readiness. I want Mike to view me as an operative like him. Dangerous like him.