by John Brown
“The world has changed, Grandpa,” said BDO Bob.
To his burning shame, Benson said nothing either, and yet what could he really do? Defend the honor of an old man and expose himself to enhanced security procedures? Would he be led off, too, escorted somewhere for questioning by entry-level operatives whose big thrill for the day would otherwise be discovering a forgotten penknife or a hidden flask of whiskey? Benson was reminded of those old World War II movies in which a line of passengers would be waiting to board their train. A State security agent would walk up and down the line, giving everyone a cursory examination, his very presence making them skittish. The agent would pull out of the line a particular traveler for no apparent reason, escorting him away. The rest of the sheep would immediately pretend to put the incident out of their minds and board the train, properly subdued and put in their place. The real saboteur, a trained professional, would, of course, escape detection, knowing exactly how to get past security.
Still, Benson had the feeling that he should have acted. He should have done something. He was just like the train passengers in those old movies. Once-proud Americans were learning to be submissive, deferential to any character in a uniform.
Old folks staggered out of their wheelchairs and their walkers, hobbling through the scanners as the Blueshirts motioned for them to come through. An old woman with a vacant expression sat in a wheelchair with oxygen tubes in her nostrils. The guards searched her thoroughly while she sat there, running electronic scanning wands over the oxygen tank, into the wheelchair compartments, and over and under her body before pushing her through.
Jane was boiling.
“Maybe we should’ve just driven to the funeral.”
Benson was about to respond, but was rudely interrupted by a jarring announcement bellowing throughout the terminal: “Attention, citizens. Note your surroundings and report suspicious items or activities to the Authorities.”
The latest generation one-view, full-body scanners had just been installed at National Airport. Producing a precise, lifelike rendering, some studies found them to have somewhat better accuracy in certain cases than images blurred by “privacy software” when it came to identifying smuggled items hidden in body cavities. As the airport nearest to the nation’s capital, security had to be the very best.
Jane entered the scanning booth. She put her hands up as directed, rotating around, first in one direction and then the other, closely watched by a guard issuing instructions throughout.
“Okay, honey, spread your legs some more for me,” the guard said. “Okay, that looks real good, now just hold that position.”
A few feet away, guards hovered around the concealed screening monitor as Jane was scanned. Benson saw them pointing at something. He took a guess and was outraged.
And again, he said nothing, burdened with a terrible feeling of guilt and shame. Speaking up, he told himself, would be a foolish gesture serving only to bring unwanted attention to himself and Jane. They both could be singled out for enhanced screening. But his self-rationalizing wasn’t at all convincing; he was a warrior, supposed to be made of sterner stuff than this — and now it was too late to do anything.
Inside the scanning booth, the screen flashed a message, narrated by a robotic male voice.
“Welcome to F.A.S.T., the Future Attribute Screening Technology demonstration laboratory. Press 1 for English, 8 for other languages.”
Jane pressed 1 and waited.
“Benson, Jane Lynne, you will be asked a series of questions. Please remain calm and absolutely still. Look straight into the screen with your eyes wide open. Do not worry. You will not be harmed.”
The booth became bathed in blue light. Lasers in the four corners of the screen flashed on her face and in her eyes, recording skin temperature, iris movement, pupil dilation, heart rate, galvanic skin response, and so on.
“One moment, please.”
An hourglass symbol spun in the middle of the screen.
“Benson, Jane Lynne, baseline physiological data successfully recorded,” announced the robotic voice. “Let’s proceed. Benson, Jane Lynne, did you show your personal ID to an authorized transportation security professional?”
“Yes.”
The system froze for a few seconds while it evaluated Jane’s response.
“Will you be smuggling an explosive device onboard today?”
“No.”
“Are you from the local geographic area?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have illegal narcotics with you today?”
“No.”
“Are you carrying $10,000 or more in cash or negotiable instruments?”
“No.”
“Do you plan to detonate an explosive device today?”
“No.”
The system froze while the results were compiled. Jane waited, fidgeting and biting her lip, eager to avoid the dreaded secondary screening area.
“Benson, Jane Lynne, congratulations. Please continue through. Enjoy your flight.”
In the next lane, a security guard knelt before a small child.
“Hi kid, what’s your name?”
The little girl remained silent and wary, looking intently at the guard’s face.
“That’s okay,” he said. “Gimme your shoes, okay? And I’ll take your teddy bear and your doll, too. Stand over there in the body scanner where that nice woman just went, okay?”
The girl looked back at her parents standing in line just behind her. Reluctantly, they timidly signaled their guilty approval. The girl went through the same routine as Jane, holding her hands in the air and having her naked image processed, except that the scanning booth robot asked if she was in the custody of her legitimate parents and if they might have explosives or illegal drugs with them today.
A plump, middle-aged woman glided through security, her nose in the air. She wore a business suit and gave the air of being someone important.
“Hey, stop, you!” shouted a security agent. “Put all your stuff on the conveyor belt and remove your shoes and coat and anything in your pockets.”
Filled with sudden wrath, the woman turned on him.
“You blind, you freakin’ moron? You see this goddamn badge, you know who you dealin’ with? I’m a member of Congress, scumbag! I don’t got to line up at no goddamn security! Understand?” she said, holding up her badge.
The guard held up his arms to block her entry. He was having none of it.
“Hold it right there, gran — security!”
Two Blueshirts promptly ran over. Taking a firm grip of the woman’s arms, they walked her away as she fought them, cursing them out with every halting step. Everyone in the long lines turned to watch the spectacle. The woman sagged down and the guards propped her up under her arms, dragging her backward across the floor.
A supervisor rushed over, breathless.
“Hold on, she’s right! Let ’er go.”
The honorable U.S. Representative dusted herself off in exaggerated, theatrical fashion.
“I’ll have your freakin’ jobs, assholes.”
“But I thought he was in great shape,” Jane said.
“He was — on the outside,” Benson said. “Things are not always as they seem.”
The long funeral procession made slow progress down the boulevard. Jared Morris must have made many friends in his relatively short life. They passed a sign at the side of the road. “See Something, Say Something™,” it read, with an illustration of a frightened woman on the telephone looking over her shoulder.
They stood by the gravesite amid the mourners. Jane put her arm around the grieving widow. Benson, however, had no comforting gestures or words to offer. His mood was black; his old friend was being lowered into the ground before his time. Permanent, he reflected sadly. Game over.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” read the clergyman, in somber, even tones. “He causes me to lie down in green pastures.”
Benson’s thoughts wandered off.
All of our little plans seem so urgent, and then we get a shocking lesson on what’s really important, brutally reminded of our own mortality. Nothing is forever. Life is short and the clock ticks on. He would preserve his youth and vigor for as long as he could — not with surgery or hair dye, but with sweat.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; all is vanity and a chasing after wind. All go to one place, all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.”
Watching his wife console Morris’ widow, he admired her ability to reach out to others with genuine empathy. She offered comfort, something it would be difficult for him to even attempt, fearing that it would come off as contrived. One didn’t look into the face of death, as he’d done numerous times, without losing something preciously human. The battle trance that all soldiers know has a numbing effect that allows them to survive and function in the moment, but leaves them to deal with the psychological toll later — or never.
“There is nothing better than to eat and to drink and to be merry. The race does not belong to the swift, nor the war to the mighty, neither do the wise have bread, nor do the understanding have riches, nor the knowledgeable, favor; for time and fate will overtake them all. That is the end of the matter, all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone.”
And with that, the clergyman folded up his Bible and all was silent, a time for private reflection.
Benson hated funerals; he’d had enough of death. If even the noblest of pursuits were like chasing after the wind, what was he supposed to do with his remaining years? Eat, drink, and be merry? There had to be more to life than that. Benson wished that he, too, could have the same conviction that he saw in the clergyman and written on the faces of so many of the mourners; the conviction of absolute certainty, where the universe was divinely ordered and made perfect sense, whether we could understand it or not. A place without lingering doubt, without suffering. A place without fear.
The soldier learns to hide his fears. Anything could be a mine or a bomb that could blow him away if he barely touches it, and if it doesn’t kill him on the spot in a violent explosion, it could blow his limbs off and turn his organs to mush. Years had passed since he was in battle, and while the anxieties had receded to the background, they had never wholly vanished. He was always and everywhere on his guard.
The only people in his life with whom he could open up were Jane, and to a lesser extent, Daniel. But perhaps he was being unduly charitable to himself with this self-assessment. Jane — to say nothing of Dr. Filbert — might well disagree. As for Daniel, he seldom spoke about his military experiences with his son, preferring that he choose a different path in life. He didn’t want to romanticize war or make it seem attractive as some sort of career option.
He went over and gave his old friend’s wife a brief hug, concealing his distress at the sight of her hollow, red eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, quietly.
20
Preemptive War
GUARDS LED BENSON DOWN THE HALL to a room jammed with electronics. His wrists and ankles were manacled to an oversized, black metal chair by two brawny agents sporting the same pseudo-military outfits as the others had before them. A white-coated doctor carefully attached an elaborate device of delicate metal cables to Benson’s head, hovering around him, fussily adjusting and calibrating the apparatus just so. The articulated silver cables reached like tentacles around the top of his head, anchored to electrodes on his forehead and below each ear. The general effect was that of an electronic octopus clinging to his scalp.
Dr. Gannon finished his adjustments and began checking off the items on his list, noting the instrument’s specific settings and the subject’s baseline physiological measures. Benson jerked his head sharply. The apparatus came away, falling onto the floor.
“Damn it all!” Dr. Gannon said.
Angrily ripping the sheets from his clipboard and crunching them up, he threw them at the floor, cursing.
“That took 23 minutes! I shall be forced to start all over!”
“What’s this gizmo?” asked Benson, airily.
“This gizmo, as you call it,” Dr. Gannon’s voice dripped with disdain, “works along somewhat the same general principles as the fMRI. The very latest evolution, a most advanced design.”
He spoke slowly, as though trying, with some difficulty, to converse with a small child.
“Your brain will be electrically scanned by this device, you see. It maps neural activity by imaging hemodynamic response. I don’t expect you will know what that means. No, of course not.”
He thought for a moment.
“If you are lying, you see, areas of your brain will light up on the screen. We’ll know.” The doctor tapped his forehead with a finger. “No escaping the truth, you see?”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Benson turned to face Gannon behind him as best he could, given the restraints on his limbs.
“You a real doctor?”
“I earned my Ph.D. cum laude in experimental biochemistry,” Gannon replied, curtly. “I am a research scientist.”
“That’s not a real doctor.” Benson turned around in his chair to face forward again. “You’re not an M.D., you obviously weren’t good enough for medical school. You’re a fake, a wannabe, an also-ran. And now they’ve got you doing experiments on helpless prisoners with your silly gadget.”
Dr. Gannon’s fists shook in anger. He seemed about to strangle Benson, who paid him no mind.
“I don’t expect it was a top-tier school, either,” Benson said. “I don’t expect you were nearly smart enough. No, of course not.”
With a menacing look, one of the agents came over to calm Dr. Gannon down. Gannon excused himself to go to the restroom. He returned after some minutes, still testy, but resumed hooking Benson up to his brain scanner, grumbling all the while.
The agents gathered around Benson.
“Okay, Mr. Benson, I’m Special Agent Malloy.”
Dr. Gannon retreated to the back, monitoring the dials and controls. Malloy tapped something on a keyboard, reading a screen mounted just behind Benson.
“And this is my partner, Agent Reed.”
“Delighted to meet you both. We must get together for coffee one of these days and trade stories. Maybe you’ll join our prison book group? We’re reading Rights of Man by Thomas Paine this week.”
“Okay, I’m just gonna read the questions and you just go yes or no. Got it? Okay, here we go. Is your name Thomas David Benson?”
“Yes.”
“All right, coming up now … just a minute … and that’s … that’s real good.”
“Do I get a cookie?”
Malloy squinted at the screen as he tapped some more commands.
“Okay, Mr. Benson, next question. Have you had financial or other transactions or dealings with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Myanmar, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Columbia, Algeria, Venezuela, Syria, Uzbekistan, or any other country to which the United States has prohibited transactions?”
He waited for a response.
“Uh, Mr. Benson?”
“I’m thinking. Can you repeat the question?”
Malloy repeated the question with considerable petulance, waiting again for an answer.
“Mr. Benson?”
“I thought Saudi Arabia was supposed to be our good friend and ally. No longer?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. Just a yes or a no.”
“What’s the big problem with Cuba? They make some pretty good cigars.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, either. Yes or no.”
“Venezuela and Columbia grow some really great coffee.”
“I don’t know anything about that. Just a yes or a no.”
“Well, I don’t believe I’ve had dealings with those places, in the strictest sense of the word, but the
way that transactions are linked and routed around the world today makes your question a bit ambiguous. It’s just not that cut and dried anymore. Anybody could be said to have had dealings with someone who had dealings, and so on, if you go back far enough. We are all connected in the great circle of life, are we not?”
“Yes or no,” Malloy said with rising annoyance, “I just need a simple yes or no.”
“All things considered, I think I will go with a qualified ‘no.’”
There was a long silence while the system evaluated Benson’s response. An hourglass symbol spun in the middle of the screen.
“Okay, next question. This time, only yes or no, all right? Okay. Are you acting on behalf of any person or entity listed on the U.S. Treasury Department classified list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons or the U.S. Commerce Department Denied Persons List or Entity List?”
“I don’t have any of those asinine secret lists, and I would guess you don’t either. All right? Okay? Are we done here? My time is valuable.”
“Let’s just skip that question.”
“No, no, no!” Dr. Gannon said, vigorously shaking his head. “I do not approve waiving the established test protocol. I’m afraid I must insist. You must go down the list in order, precisely as prepared.”
Agent Malloy held up a photograph for Benson.
“So you know this guy?”
“Nope.”
“Where did you meet?”
The doctor fussed with some dials in the back, muttering to himself.
“We didn’t meet.”