Also by M. C. Soutter
Charcot’s Genius
Southampton Spectacular
For my sister Madora
Part 1 – Orientation
Monday Night
Two men sat facing each other in a poorly-lit room. They were arguing. They were keeping their voices down, but it didn't matter. The microphones would pick up everything.
“He's going in tomorrow, right?” asked the one with the chiseled face.
“Correct.”
“And we didn't change his name.”
“Right again.”
A small shake of the head, as if this might derail everything. “Kevin? Frankly, it sounds like a cover name.”
The other man, a doctor, raised his eyebrows. “Do you have questions about his actual qualifications?”
“Obviously,” the thin man snapped. “That’s what we’re talking about. He doesn’t have any qualifications, and you know it.”
“Don’t play dumb. You understand how this works. It’s the potential that counts, and Kevin Brooks scored higher than anyone we’ve ever tested.”
“As if those tests can predict – ”
“Especially after we started scrubbing him,” the doctor cut in. “Once we took him under, he was flying. And that’s the best predictor.” He stopped, favoring the leaner man with a grin. “That’s how you were spotted, right? Way back when?”
“I went through seven years of training after that,” the chisel-faced man retorted, glaring at the doctor. “And then I shadowed in the field for another three. What kind of training has the fair Mr. Brooks had?”
“You know the answer to that.”
A nod and a sour smile. “None.”
The doctor shook his head. “How many times do we have to go through this?”
“Once more, I guess.”
“He’s had his mind opened,” the doctor said, spreading his arms wide. “Give him a week and you’ll see. He’ll be ready.”
Chisel-face leaned back in his chair. “Better be. Otherwise, you're leaving our man Billaud out in the cold, right?”
“Don’t try to put this on me, you’re – ”
“I’m not putting it anywhere. I'm the point man on this thing, which means that Pascal Billaud's safety is ultimately up to me. Whether Kevin is up to the task or not, I'm the one who gets blamed. But make no mistake, I'm hoping you're right. I'm hoping your big man Kevin is going to come through.”
“He is a big man,” the doctor said.
“This is a joke to you?”
“It is not. Just watch what my big man can do.”
“I will. Closely.”
Tuesday Morning
“Over here!”
Kevin Brooks opened his eyes and looked around him. Something – some noise, a shout or a greeting, the voice of an energetic young boy outside the room – had startled him. But the noise was irrelevant. The noise was not his problem.
Figuring out what I’m doing here. That’s the problem.
He could not remember coming into this room.
Actually, he could not remember coming into this building.
He was in a classroom; that much was clear. He was sitting behind a large desk, and there were twenty-five smaller, empty desks facing him. Five neat rows of five. There were posters on the walls, each one depicting an educational goal in overly enthusiastic terms.
Hooked on History! Energized by English! Mad about Math!
So yes, a classroom. But figuring this out did not make Kevin feel any better. In fact, he noticed that his breath was suddenly short. There was a tightness in his chest, a feeling very close to panic, as though he had only now realized that some unseen, unknowable danger was now crouching just outside the door. Immediate action of some kind was required.
I’m supposed to be doing something.
This thought came to him with such force, such overwhelming, white-hot clarity, that his breath actually stopped briefly in his throat.
Something incredibly important.
Now, all at once, panic was not simply pushing on his chest. It was flooding through him. His arms and legs were tingling, and his head throbbed with the rush of his own blood. He worried he might pass out sitting right here in this chair, and the total silence of the room somehow made it worse. Because whatever he was forgetting, whatever he was supposed to do, he had no hope of remembering it here. Not in this too-clean, too-orderly classroom with its perfectly spaced desks and its idealistic educational posters on the walls. He had never been here before – he was sure of that – and there were no mnemonic hand-holds for him to grasp.
I need to get ready.
This idea came to him just as suddenly and clearly as the first. It hit him hard, and it seemed to come from somewhere outside his head. It didn’t even feel like his own thought.
It felt like a command.
Get ready.
But for what?
Kevin shut his eyes. He tried to take a slow breath. To calm himself. Ready or not – panicked or not – this way of thinking was getting him nowhere. He was a lost child in a supermarket, running around and crying and bumping into things, and he was only making things worse. He needed information.
So, back to the original problem: what was he doing here?
He was not a teacher. He could remember wanting to become a teacher, true. And then, soon after, he could remember deciding to quit his job; this had happened suddenly, without enough notice to satisfy the higher-ups at the brokerage where he had been working, and they had been upset with him.
Very upset. He could remember that clearly enough.
He could also remember going to the educational testing center in that huge building a few blocks south of Times Square, the one next to Madison Square Garden. He had gone to the 14th floor, and they had sat him down at a computer and simply told him to do his best. Kevin allowed himself a moment to relish the memory. He had destroyed that test. He had destroyed all the tests, in fact. The math, of course: he had majored in Computer Science at UNH, and Comp Sci required all kinds of advanced mathematics. But he had aced the English portions, too. And then the weird stuff afterward. The brain teasers and the logic puzzles, and then even a bunch of questions that seemed borrowed from a state Bar exam. The people at the center had been impressed at his scores, which was nice. They had come over to speak with him.
Very flattering.
Then they had asked him to take a few more tests, this time in a different room. Much more interesting questions in this round: lots of logic stuff again, but some of it involving truly strange hypotheticals. It didn’t matter; none of it had been hard for him, and he could tell they were pleased. They wanted him to take even more examinations. To sit for interviews. On an entirely different floor this time, the 20th, and –
But there his memory stopped. Like a vault whose heavy metal door had swung suddenly shut, his mind would yield nothing more.
Get ready.
Kevin opened his eyes and looked up. There was a large circular clock on the far wall of this room, near the ceiling. It showed 8:15, and that seemed right; the sunlight coming through the windows had an early-morning slant to it. He noticed, too, that the clock’s red hand – the “seconds” hand – seemed to be broken. It was stuck at :07, not moving.
There was another shout from outside, from the hallway.
“What?”
The red hand jumped, and this tiny movement, even from all the way across the room, startled him.
:08.
The shout had the same high-pitched, energetic sound as the first time, but now it came with a different timber. A different boy. Perhaps answering the first call, but what sort of conversation would have
such chasms of silence between exchanges?
Kevin returned his attention to the red hand. It seemed to be stuck again, resting now on :08.
Not a good feature for a classroom, he thought. A clock that doesn’t move.
“It’s over here, you moron!”
The red hand on the clock jumped again.
:09.
“No it’s not!”
:10.
The classroom door opened, and a young boy burst in, thirteen or fourteen years old, stumbling as if he had been shoved. He was lean and springy, and he collided with the side of a file cabinet at the back corner of the room without seeming to notice the impact. He straightened up. He was wearing loafers, khaki pants, a white dress shirt, a blue tie, and a blue blazer. He turned and saw Kevin, and his expression registered the barest hint of interest. He gave a casual wave. “Mr. Brooks?”
Kevin frowned. And nodded.
Shit. He knows my name.
“It is,” the boy shouted, this time at the open door. “This is the right room. Come on.”
As though this were the signal they had been waiting for, twenty-four more boys came barreling through the door like marbles coming down a chute. They ran into each other, ran into the walls, and stumbled over the desks and chairs as if these were obstacles that had been suddenly thrown into their paths. The noise they made was high and loud and happy, like the sound of a pack of good-natured dogs being released into the clover fields for their daily run. Barking for the joy of barking. Shoving and shouting and punching one another on the shoulder and in the stomach, they treated each other with a level of physical disrespect that could be considered a sign of affection only by predatory pack animals and young boys.
They were enjoying themselves.
Kevin watched them with a numb fascination. They looked, he thought, virtually identical to one another. They were all wearing the same khaki pants and the same white shirt and the same blue blazer. Some of their neckties, at least, were distinct. Green ones, yellow ones, different patterns.
He glanced once more at the clock. The red hand was moving just fine now. Ticking along, marking the seconds.
After two minutes of jostling and jockeying for position, each boy found a desk and a seat of his own. And then, after another minute of chatter that filled the room and somehow amplified itself as the seconds ticked by, something in the air shifted. They seemed all at once to notice Kevin sitting behind his desk. They fell silent.
They waited.
Now they watched him carefully, as if he had crept into the room intending to ambush them.
Kevin stared back at them, and then he looked down for the first time at his own desk. There was a phone there, and it was a good-looking device. A slim slab of glass with a crisp screen and no visible buttons. It was already turned on, and the screen showed the date and time in large, blue, clearly visible type.
8:17 AM
9/17/2011
Kevin’s breath caught in his throat again.
September?
It made enough sense. September was when school began. And here they all were, decked out in their pressed white shirts and their blue blazers, watching him, waiting to see what kind of teacher he would be.
Pushover? No nonsense? Stone cold bastard?
It didn’t matter. He didn’t care what they thought. What mattered was that this could not be September. His last memory – going up the elevator to the 20th floor in that licensure building – had been from June. And that left three solid months unaccounted for.
Three months completely gone.
The students were still watching him. Still waiting and assessing. Kevin looked down at the desk again, and he saw a neat stack of papers directly in front of him. The first sheet was dated 9/17, and it said Algebra 1, Chapter 1, at the top of the page.
All of these things had been written out in his own handwriting.
How nice.
He took another breath, and then he stood. He looked behind him, found a red dry-erase marker in the metal tray below the white-board, and turned back to the class.
I may not remember how I got here, Kevin thought. But I can definitely teach an introduction to Algebra.
“Take out your notebooks,” he said. There was a collective rustling as the students did as they were told. He glanced down again at the lesson plan he had evidently prepared for himself. “This should be easy enough. We’re going to start with – ”
Something distracted him, and he stopped and looked up from the desk. One of the boys in the third row on the far right was murmuring something to his neighbor.
“Hey.”
The boy did not look up. Still talking.
“Hey.”
The boy noticed him. He stopped talking. There was a little grin on his face.
Kevin put the lesson plan down and fixed the boy with a cold stare. “I don’t know you,” Kevin said. His voice was very quiet. “And you don’t know me. But let’s make this our introduction.”
“Okay,” the boy said. His eyes had gone very still, but the smile was still there.
“When I’m speaking, you don’t talk. You don’t whisper, you don’t chat, you don’t do a single thing except watch and listen. From the look of the room and your uniforms, this is a private school, which means I can throw you against a wall if I feel like it. I’m having what you might call a bumpy morning so far. Don’t make it any bumpier for me, all right? Because I’ll take it out on you.”
The boy nodded slowly. His smile was gone. The silence in the room was absolute, and Kevin was suddenly aware, for the first time, of his own size relative to these boys. He was a few inches over six feet, and somewhere north of 220 pounds, depending on the day. They didn’t let just anybody play quarterback on the UNH football team, after all.
He could see it in their eyes, could almost see them putting a mental check mark next to his name.
Mr. Brooks: stone cold bastard.
Fine, Kevin thought. That’s a role I’m willing to play with enthusiasm.
“Let’s get going,” he said, picking up his lesson plan again. There was no more murmuring this time.
He got to work.
We Want Him Marked
Kevin Brooks still did not understand what was going on – or where he had been, or what he was doing – but his understanding was, for the moment, irrelevant. His purpose had already been decided for him. And while he was busy teaching his first period Algebra class, six men were making their way down the stairs of a garage a half-mile away.
Unlike Kevin, these men knew exactly what they were doing.
Now the six of them sat hidden, cramped, and hot in the semi-dark of a windowless rear cargo space. They were in the back of a white Ford e250 super-duty van. The small overhead florescent was on, but the black clothes they were wearing soaked up the light and made the shadows seem larger. Nothing moved. The van was parked in the third sub-basement of an underground garage on First Avenue between 58th and 59th street in Manhattan, and the only other person in the garage at that moment was a bored attendant at street level, dozing in his booth, his feet propped up on a small television showing a woman doing calisthenics on an empty beach.
Nevertheless, the six men in the back of the van spoke in low voices. The Organizer was explaining the job.
“You’ll have until next Friday,” he said. “Ten days from now, minus about a half-hour. Go time at approximately 8 AM, depending on arrival.”
They waited silently. After a minute, one of the others raised his head and stared at the overhead light.
The Planner.
“We’ll need a pickup and three more vans,” he said. “Vans should be the same make as this one, but two of them need secondary controls installed. Remotes. Tracked and fully armored. Video inside and out, 360-degree coverage.”
The Organizer was typing quietly on a touch pad he had pulled from one of the countless pockets on his pants. He nodded along.
“We’ll also need workups on every person at
the school,” the Planner went on. “I want them all.”
“Keep going.”
“A schedule for parents’ day itself, obviously. Which classes the boy has, where Billaud is expected to be. But also where his father’s coming from. We want him marked before he even arrives. Typical morning patterns, if there are any. Standard entry point, and a secondary.
“Good. What else?”
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 1