The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future

by Thomas Nevins

  And it had started from there. Cruz’s résumé was impressive, as was his work, and Christine soon offered him a position on the genetic manipulation research team, which he accepted with the proviso that he would still be able to work in Prenatal. As Prenatal was the business producing revenue, Christine saw this as an additional advantage.

  Neither of them had expected what had followed. And, as Christine thought about it now, it was because neither of them had been prepared for the attraction between them that it had been able to happen. It was part of their lives before they knew it. Christine hadn’t come across too many people who could keep up with her, and at times she found Gabriel a step ahead. She enjoyed that and it had turned into an intellectual competition between them that she anticipated with pleasure. Then, one morning, Christine woke up thinking about Gabriel before she had even opened her eyes. She was looking forward to seeing him at the center later that day, and she wasn’t sure if she was looking forward to the rapport they shared, or to sharing a space with such a handsome man. Christine made a mental note that she would have to keep that feeling in check, but she took extra time getting dressed that day anyway.

  That had been a few months ago, and Christine was still working on keeping her feelings under wraps. Nevertheless she was really looking forward to tonight, and even more to what might happen after.

  “THE SECOND SUBJECT is in the facility,” the agent said, his eyes on the monitor. “The first has exited. Repeat. Male subject is in the facility. We are at go.” And that was all that he said, because that was all his teammates needed to know to go into action. The grumbling agent in the cold hole clamped into the power source, ready to incite the surge into the system that would allow their planned cover to commence.

  All but two of the firefighter agents left their posts at the truck, got onto the freight elevator, and rode up to the Pool. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The agents dressed as the New York Medical Center maintenance staff closed off University Street between the park and Kips Bay Plaza, restricting traffic below. Meanwhile the agent in the back of the van set in motion the program that would override the security cameras by providing the cameras with images previously recorded. As long as the team didn’t have to take too long and force the computer to repeat prerecorded images too many times, no one should be able to tell the difference. By the time anyone would be able to tell the difference, this team would be gone.

  THE LIGHTS FLICKERED as Gabriel stepped onto the elevator. He was startled; he thought of the Con Ed van he’d seen outside. Then there had been a fire truck parked on the corner, he now recalled. If it had been an emergency, like a fire, there would have been more than one fire truck and he would have seen firefighters. Something in him went on alert. But Gabriel had a lot to think about, and getting onto the floor and through his shift as acting director for the evening was paramount. And then there was the rest of the evening ahead.

  THE NEW YORK Medical Center security officer at his post in the basement scanned the bank of monitors; nothing appeared out of the ordinary. The elevator car that carried Gabriel upstairs appeared to be empty, so the security officer’s eye traveled right by that monitor. The operation had indeed begun.

  The men dressed as firefighters abandoned their mock inspection and fanned out across the floor of the Pool. The employees were alarmed. The security officer at his station in the basement of the building checked in on the Pool as he scanned the floors, and saw nothing but the staff at work.

  The office manager for the Pool looked in Christine’s empty office. She knew it was empty, but that didn’t stop her from hoping Christine would be there. The elevator doors opened just then and Gabriel walked out.

  “Thank God you’re here,” the woman said.

  Gabriel knew he wasn’t receiving a blessing from the woman. He thought about Christine and watched the firefighters approaching him. What was going on? Suddenly he realized that if there were a real fire, he would be smelling smoke, he would be hearing the alarm. Wouldn’t you know it? Christine wasn’t going to believe this, he thought. An inspection—tonight, of all nights.

  “What’s going on?” Gabriel asked the office manager, who just pointed at the firefighters. Then Gabriel noticed that one of the firefighters was carrying a stretcher.

  “Can I help you?” Gabriel asked.

  “Cruz, Gabriel Cruz,” the lead firefighter said, and he wasn’t asking Gabriel for confirmation. “Come with us.” Then Gabriel realized he was surrounded. And that this was no inspection.

  “Why would I want to do that?” Gabriel said. Was this even the fire department? The police, or something worse? He thought of his subversive work, the kids he had saved. Then he knew why they were here.

  Gabriel back-kicked the knees of the firefighter carrying the stretcher, which went flying out of his hands. Gabriel grabbed the stretcher in the air and brought it across the jaw of the firefighter standing adjacent to the one who had just gone down. He used his leverage and jabbed the stretcher into the crotch of the man standing opposite. Only a couple to go, Gabriel thought.

  The office manager was screaming. The rest of the staff was too, but Gabriel didn’t hear them. He looked to the fire exit before he brought the handle of the stretcher up into the throat of the man directly in front of him. I may just get out of here, Gabriel thought, and just then a fire extinguisher that had been ripped from the wall bounced off Gabriel’s head.

  CHRISTINE DIDN’T NEED to pass through the foyer of the party host’s home to feel out of place. The color scheme throughout the apartment was beige, brown, and cream. The room had walnut woodwork and terra-cotta tiles. Christine hadn’t noticed her hostess right away, as the woman was dressed in a pantsuit to match her décor. Christine had felt the woman’s eyes taking her in as Christine turned toward her.

  “What a lovely room,” Christine said in hopes of establishing some kind of social footing.

  “But look at you,” the hostess said, eyeing Christine up and down. “That dress is very…red,” she said, and then she waved Christine into the room. “C’mon in. Everyone is here. Almost,” she said, “Though no sign of Gabriel yet.” She winked.

  There was a gathering of about a dozen people mingling in a corner. They too were dressed in a variety of browns. As far as she could see, no one had a skirt on and most of the women seemed covered up from neck to toe. Conversation stopped as most of the men and all of the women looked at Christine, her legs and her neckline.

  “Where did you get that dress?” a woman asked, leaning her head back in order to look down her nose at Christine. Christine had the feeling the woman wanted to know where Christine had bought it so that she would never shop there. But it didn’t matter, as the woman did not wait for Christine to respond.

  “Where’s Gabriel?” the woman asked, as Christine began to wish her pager would go off and she could tell Gabriel to meet her at her apartment.

  EVEN AFTER GABRIEL had been hit on the head with the fire extinguisher, he still kept his ground. They held him up and punched him. The squad leader had lost control over his men, and his men had lost control over themselves.

  “The fire exit’s locked,” the office manager yelled.

  “I can’t get a signal,” someone else shouted, holding up a phone, while another worker motioned at the security cameras to indicate what was going on.

  The security officer at his post in the basement continued to scan the screens of the bank of monitors before him. He kind of liked working these holiday shifts; nothing going down, or up. It was as quiet as church.

  The firefighters punched at Gabriel until one of them pointed to their boss, who had caught his breath, and the squad leader said, “Inject him, you idiots. Stop beating him.” But Gabriel was out cold.

  They injected him anyway, and the squad leader said, “Help me up. We’ve got to get him out of here. Get him onto the stretcher. And then give me his cell.”

  One of the agents turned Gabriel’s pockets inside o
ut and handed the contents to the leader, who dumped everything into a plastic bag. He retrieved Gabriel’s phone, flipped it open, and punched a pattern into the screen before he typed a brief message, snapped the phone closed, and dropped it back into the plastic bag.

  “Let’s go,” the squad leader said as he pointed to the freight elevator. Two of the agents took either end of the stretcher, with Gabriel strapped onto it; one agent assisted his commanding officer as they all hustled into the waiting freight car.

  CHRISTINE’S PAGER WENT off—her wish answered!—and she jumped. Her hostess raised an eyebrow, but when Christine saw that the message coming was from Gabriel, she was more than relieved. She saw it was a text message. “Return at once,” it said. No greeting, no affectionate sign-off. It was a little odd.

  But she responded in the affirmative. “At once,” she typed on her phone. She apologized to her hostess, said she had to return to the medical center, got her coat, and left. Once on the street, she decided not to go home to change into her work clothes. She’d go straight to the med center. Getting a cab on New Year’s Eve in midtown Manhattan was going to be impossible. Indeed, almost all of the cabs Christine saw were either occupied or out of service, and the normally dense traffic was made more so by the rerouting of traffic around a closed-off Times Square.

  The med center was about thirty blocks from where she was. She estimated that with the traffic, the distance, and the sparse availability of cabs, she could be halfway back to the facility before she saw a free taxi, and so she started to walk. As she started to walk, she wondered; there was something odd about that message from Gabriel.

  BETWEEN THE BEATING Gabriel had taken and the amount of muscle relaxant that had been administered to him, Gabriel might as well have been dead. He was hardly breathing and his pulse was faint. The squad leader from the NSC assigned to bring Cruz in thought he was dead, and panicked. He had not done a good job of it, to say the least. They couldn’t bring Cruz in like this. The squad leader’s mind was racing. No matter how he spun the situation, it wasn’t good. He would have to make a decision as to which scenario would have the fewest negative ramifications, or the squad leader might be thrown to the Dyscards. That gave him an idea. Judgment can be faulty when arrived at in fear.

  “Get him on the truck and wrap him up,” the squad leader ordered. He looked up at the security camera in the hallway and thought of the Con Ed van. They would have seen everything about this screwed-up job! He walked out the fire exit door and saw the Con Ed van idling behind the fire truck. “Wait!” he barked, and his men froze. The squad leader looked down at Gabriel, reached into the pouch underneath the stretcher, and pulled out the blanket that was stored there. He covered Gabriel with the blanket, and once he had the body covered, he pulled up the edge to cover Gabriel’s face and head.

  “Put the stretcher into the Con Ed van,” he said, and pointed in that direction. They would have to get rid of the body, and that was how he was going to do it. Get them to share in the need for a cover-up.

  As he approached, the squad leader motioned for the guy on the street side of the van to open his window, but before the squad leader could say anything, the driver said, “What the hell happened up there?”

  The eyes of the squad leader instinctively scanned the van for indications of a recording device.

  “Don’t worry. We’re not recording you,” the driver said—as if the squad leader might ever believe that.

  “You saw, correct?” the squad leader said, and the man in the passenger seat who had been monitoring the security system nodded.

  “Well, no one told us he was Mr. Martial Arts,” the squad leader said. “Frankly, I will have to write up these men,” he said, motioning toward the unit behind him.

  “Will you mention how you beat the crap out of him?” the man in the passenger seat asked.

  “It was self-defense. He was armed. You couldn’t see on camera,” the squad leader said. “In any case, you’ve got to take him.” The squad leader had rank.

  “Why us? What’re we going to do with him?”

  “We’re compromised,” the squad leader said, pointing back at his team. “The chairman’s office called. They want you to dump him. Nobody knows you’re here. You just came from down there, didn’t you? He’s just another Dyscard.”

  “How come the party office didn’t contact us?” the van’s driver asked.

  “We’re already corrupted. They wanted to leave you pure to finish the job,” the National Security Council squad leader answered.

  “I don’t like this,” the agent in the passenger seat said. He pointed at the squad leader. “Remember,” he said, and motioned toward the screen of the monitor that held the history of the event on the hard drive.

  CHRISTINE HESITATED A moment and looked over at Central Park, a dark field in the valley of neon light. It looked inviting and dangerous at the same time, but Christine didn’t have time for either so she turned and headed down Broadway. There was a contrast of light as Christine headed toward Times Square and the New Year’s celebration.

  At first Christine was too distracted to be cold, but by the time she reached Fifty-fifth Street, the temperature was low enough to take her from her distractions. She wasn’t wearing much of a coat, and when she thought about it, she wasn’t wearing much of anything. She took a deep breath and felt a wave of disappointment. She was angry with her grandmother for recommending a dress like this, and then Christine was angry with herself for being so ridiculous as to blame anyone other than herself, especially her grandmother. She looked down at the dress and herself in it. She had put too much hope into a dress, and into an evening.

  By the time Christine reached Fifty-third Street, she was at the edge of the crowd that had assembled at Times Square. Christine walked across a closed Broadway and took Fiftieth Street across town. She walked through Rockefeller Plaza and it was as bright as a movie set. She turned right on Fifth Avenue. She thought a minute and looked toward Saint Patrick’s Cathedral behind her. The old granite building was so well lit it did not cast any shadow. A Conglomerate Ranger stood guard on each corner and at each of the cathedral’s huge bronze doors. The soldiers carried automatic rifles and wore camouflage flak jackets over their black uniforms.

  In Manhattan, Christine thought, it seems that no matter which way you walk, you walk into the wind. The height of the buildings and the layout of the streets created a maze that the wind chased through, feeding on itself along the way. Christine pulled her satin jacket around her shoulders and shivered. She looked down at her pumps with the three-inch heels.

  “No wonder it’s taking me so long to get anywhere,” Christine said. “Nothing about this has been a good idea.”

  But the wind took away her words even before she had time to hear them.

  That was when she saw someone getting out of a cab. She raised her hand like they do in the movies; she got into the taxi. The driver took advantage of the interior light being on to take a look at Christine as she fell into the backseat and the warmth of the interior of the cab.

  “Where to?” he said.

  “The New York Medical Center.”

  “Well, I’ll take you as close as I can get. Then I’m going to have to drop you off,” the cabbie said. “Police activity over there. They got the whole place sealed off. Still want to go there?”

  “Yes,” Christine said as she looked through her purse. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “They’ll have to let us through.” She waved her I.D.

  The cabbie made a left and headed away from the Times Square area. He made a right on Second Avenue and they encountered police cars screaming downtown. The cab couldn’t go any farther than the intersection at Forty-second Street; a uniformed officer was pulling all but emergency vehicles to the side, and traffic was building behind them.

  “Looks like this is the end of the line, Doc,” the cabbie said.

  “I’ll pay you what I owe you and I’ll walk from here,” Christine said as she ha
nded him her currency card and then opened the door. She walked across Forty-second Street and stopped at the yellow caution tape. She lifted the tape to go underneath. Two armed Rangers in flak jackets and boots came toward her.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” one of them asked.

  Christine reached into her purse and found her credentials. One of the cops took the I.D. and held it to the light before taking a good look at Christine.

  “I guess that’s you,” he said, handing Christine back her I.D. He held the tape up for her to go underneath. Although, she realized, he didn’t hold it up too high, in order to get a better look at her as she bent to get under it.

  There was an obstacle course of squad cars scattered along Forty-second Street as Christine walked toward First Avenue. Most of them were occupied with cops staying out of the cold. Some took notice of her, while others seemed to be writing reports. Christine made a right on First and weaved her way toward Thirty-fourth Street. There was a blockade set up there. Christine had to show her I.D. and answer questions and explain why they should let her through. Even though the officer at the wooden horses didn’t want to, he let her through anyway.

  She passed a police car with the door open. The overhead light was on and Christine could hear the radio bark from inside the car. Christine walked so she could hear what sounded like a crowd roar from the radio. She thought it was static until she heard the sound in the air traveling down from the festivities at Times Square. Then Christine heard the countdown start. “Ten, nine, eight…” She leaned her head toward the car and heard the countdown coming from the radio, along with the soft, plaintive notes of the New Year’s Eve song “Auld Lange Syne.” When the crowd reached “one” and yelled “Happy New Year,” laser lights lit the sky with the year, 2–0–4–8…2–0–4–8.