by James Renner
“Scopes?” she asked, looking to him. He didn’t blink.
“He’s a … private contractor.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “I didn’t know I was trespassing. I was only trying to find a friend and…”
“Jack Felter?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Because we’re looking for Jack, too. He kidnapped an NSA agent in New York earlier this afternoon.”
She was stunned into silence.
“It’s terribly important we find Jack, Ms. Brooks. We don’t want anybody getting hurt.”
“That can’t be right. Jack wouldn’t kidnap anyone.”
“I assure you, what I’m telling you is the truth. All I ask, in return, is for you to do the same.”
She nodded.
“What do you know about this mental patient, the boy, Cole?”
“He was my husband’s patient. Tony Sanders.”
“What do you know about the boy’s condition?”
“Condition?”
“His delusion.”
“Nothing.”
“Let me speed this up,” Agent Carr said, wiping his forehead. “What do you know about the Great Forgetting?”
“The what?”
“Don’t be coy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man in the Panama suit grunted.
“What do you know about fluoride?” Agent Carr demanded. “What do you know about HAARP?”
Sam saw it then. Tony really had stumbled onto something. There was some nugget of truth in the boy’s strange stories. Certainly the whole thing couldn’t be true. But a piece of it? Could the kid have picked something up from his father, the details of a covert NSA program or something? Whatever it was, she knew her best chance of walking out of the Gate House was to play dumb.
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I promise.”
Agent Carr sighed. “Have it your way, Ms. Brooks.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a Walkman cassette recorder attached to a tiny handheld radar dish. He put the seashells in his ears and lifted the device so that it pointed at Sam’s head.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A forgotten toy.”
He fiddled with a knob on the Walkman, and then, suddenly, Sam’s head filled with a palpable hum. It felt like she was standing in front of a tall speaker that was pointed at a microphone in some punk rock club, as if her thoughts had folded back on her in a loop, building feedback behind her eyes. Agent Carr dialed down the knob and the pressure slagged off a bit.
“What do you know about the Great Forgetting?”
“Nothing, I told you,” she said. But then an image flashed in her mind. She was back in Dr. Kimberly Quick’s office. Did you ever hear Tony talk about a place called Mu? she had asked. And that’s when Quick had told her the basics of Cole’s theories, how the government was brainwashing people with chemicals and rewriting their memories through radio broadcasts, about a secret island off the Alaskan coast.
“You lied to me, Ms. Brooks,” said Agent Carr.
“You read my mind,” she whispered.
“That’s right.” He pulled out the earbuds and secreted the radio back into his pocket. He opened her file and wrote some notation in the margins of his report.
“Can I go?” she asked.
Agent Carr laughed. “No.”
“I’d like to call a lawyer, then. I have rights.”
“This is a United States military tribunal. You don’t have any rights.”
“Am I being charged with something?” she asked. Her heart thumped rapidly against her chest. She could see her blouse rising and falling with its momentum. Her underarms dripped perspiration.
“Treason,” he said. “Your sentence is ‘identity modification.’ Effective immediately.”
“This is some kind of joke.”
Scopes grunted.
“No joke, ma’am.” Agent Carr finished writing, then crossed to her chair and cuffed her hands together. “Come with me,” he said. He pulled at her shackles, leading her out the door. Scopes followed.
Tears welled up. This was a bad dream. She would wake up soon, back in bed, sweating with fear, thankful to be home.
“Who was the man who came with you?” asked Agent Carr as they walked down a wide concrete corridor lit by flickering fluorescents. “That fat guy.”
“His name is Nils,” she said.
“Well, we had to kill him, I’m afraid. He tried to break down the Gate House door. Put up quite a fight for a minute.”
She started to cry. Agent Carr pulled her down a thinner hallway that ended at a door with a frosted-glass window. Upon it was etched DELIVERY/PICKUP. He brought her inside.
It was some kind of post office, a small room crammed with boxes and envelopes. Laminated memos were taped to the walls. A poster near the counter showed Uncle Sam towering over a ruined city. NEVER FORGET WHY WE FORGOT! it read.
Set into the wall beside the counter was a giant glass tube running through something like an MRI machine lined with panels and readouts. Agent Carr pushed a button and a door opened on the tube with a hiss of trapped air. A long bed lay within. Not an MRI, she realized. It reminded her of the machine she used to pick up her prescriptions at the twenty-four-hour drive-thru in Ravenna. It was a vacuum tube. Big enough for humans.
“No,” she said. She was no longer crying. She was much too terrified to cry.
“Get in,” he ordered. Scopes pulled a revolver from a holster and aimed it at her chest.
Sam stepped up to the tube. Scopes pushed her, hard, with the barrel of the gun.
“Lie down,” said Agent Carr.
Sam climbed inside and lay flat on her back. “Please,” she said.
But Agent Carr was done with her. He sealed the lid. There was a loud FOOOOMP! and then she was being launched down the tube at something near the speed of light, or so it felt to her.
4 A fisherman found the fat man’s body and called ranger Bat Hadley. By the time the ranger got to the Gate House there were a dozen smelly anglers moping around the remains, taking pictures. That was all he needed, a photo of a dead guy in his park.
“Christ,” he said when he saw the body sprawled beside the creepy wooden door of the NSA outpost.
“You know him, Bat?” asked a woman with a chipped front tooth.
“Yup,” he said. “It’s that cop from Franklin Mills.”
The detective had been shot at close range, between the eyes. But something funny had happened to his arm. It looked gray and deformed, and when Bat kicked it with his boot it dissolved into fine ash and blew away in the breeze.
5 They met at a rest stop at the base of Big Indian Mountain, a green child of the Catskills range. Nils transferred their gear into the trunk of Sam’s car and then climbed in the back. They left the truck behind. Jack was touched to see that Sam had gone through the trouble of boiling eight gallons of water. That would come in handy if they really were traveling all the way to Alaska.
He drove the winding switchbacks of Big Indian with Cole riding shotgun so he could navigate the TacMars. For a while the road was paved and lined with heather and Russian thistle. Great maples provided a thick canopy. Streams meandered down slopes, feeding Esopus Creek. There was a path on the side of the road for hikers and riders. Soon deciduous trees gave way to knotty pines. At a dirt trail nearly hidden by ferns, Cole told Jack to turn.
“We used to get this feeling in the bush, sometimes,” the Captain said quietly. “That feeling in your gut that says to turn around. The men who ignored it and pushed on usually stepped on a Bouncing Betty or something and that was all she wrote. Like the voice of God shaking your insides and telling you to go home.”
Jack didn’t stop. A little ways down the trail, the road got muddy and threatened to suck in the tires. Jack parked and they got out. It would be completely dark in three hours. He wondered if there was enough time to find Sam and get back
before sunset.
The path ended in the mire, a great flat bog that smelled like damp death. Dead lumber jutted from stagnant pools like the rotted teeth of the mountain herself. A thin, noxious mist obscured their feet. A million crickets played a discordant lullaby. Nils picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chucked it into the nearest mud pool. It hit the earth with a wet smack, like a lover’s kiss, and then disappeared.
“That’s not good,” said the Viking.
“I remember the way,” said Cole. “Stay close. Walk where I walk.” The boy stepped onto a patch of high grass. Jack took the Captain’s hand, lending support, and Nils followed. Their progress was measured in inches. A couple of times Cole muttered a curse and made them double back. Jack sensed they were coming to the other side, when the Captain stepped into the mire.
“Fuck a duck!” he shouted.
His father’s right leg was sunk up to the knee. The earth belched and his leg slipped deeper.
“Help me!” Jack yelled. He pulled at the Captain, both arms wrapped around the old man’s delicate torso. Cole grabbed the back of Jack’s shirt with both hands and tugged. Nils bent at the Captain’s legs and yanked, hard.
“Ow!” the Captain said. “You’re going to pull off my foot, you dumb ox!”
For a long, terrifying pause, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the Captain’s leg began to slip free. They repositioned and pulled again. The leg popped out all at once, sending them backward, onto the ground in a pile.
Jack let out his breath and began to laugh with giddy relief. Nils and Cole laughed, too. The Captain suppressed a smile. “I feel like a scoutmaster again,” he said. “In charge of one of those ‘special troops,’ the ones that take the short bus to camp and sing shit in the middle of lunch when nobody wants to hear them sing.”
Cole found the tree five minutes later. Jack could see that it wasn’t a normal oak. The bark was too polished. Plasticine, maybe.
“You guys realize who we are?” asked Cole.
“What are you talking about?” said Jack.
“We’re the characters from The Wizard of Oz. The good guys from the story? The Scarecrow,” he said, pointing to the Captain, “who needs a new brain. The Tin Man,” he said, pointing to Jack, “who needs to get his heart back, and the Cowardly Lion,” he said, pointing at Nils.
“Hey!” said the Viking.
“So who does that make you?” asked Jack.
Cole shrugged.
“He’s a friend of Dorothy’s,” the Captain grumbled. “Hey, Toto, open the goddamn door so we can see what’s inside.”
Cole pushed the panel. It clicked open easily. “We are the music makers,” he whispered, typing the code. “We are the dreamers of dreams.”
“For fuck’s sake,” said the Captain.
“Uh,” said Nils, “I’m taking a lot on faith here. But could someone please explain to me who built a fake tree in the middle of a swamp?”
6 Here was the long corridor Cole had traveled with his father in some long-ago, better world. It stretched forever both ways, a current of cool air ripping through the tunnel, black cables snaking down the walls like veins. They followed the boy, quieting their footfalls with careful steps, afraid the sound would carry to the beasts that lurked inside.
Cole felt crummy for manipulating Jack. He did. But he knew if he had told Jack what he really wanted he could never have gotten him to bring him here. He’d had three years to plan it and he’d played him good: pushing them eastward by feeding Jack scraps of information, getting him to New York. He knew that if he got Jack to New York, he could talk him into coming here. Sam’s kidnapping, that was serendipity.
They came to the intersection of a long-abandoned reception area. A sign on the wall read SECURITY/GULAG/STORAGE. Somebody had scribbled black Magic Marker over SECURITY and had written Maestro above it. Cole went to the panel in the wall and pushed it open, revealing nine CCTV screens that showed live feeds from different sections of the Underground.
“Do you see her?” asked Jack, peering over Cole’s shoulder.
There was only one place Sam could be. Cole found her immediately. His heart sank. Now Jack would want to run to rescue her, and they couldn’t. Not until he got what he’d come for. He might never get another chance.
“There,” he said, pointing at the corner screen. The feed was in shades of green and white. It showed a sterile room. In the middle was a dentist’s chair surrounded by medical implements. Two men were strapping Sam down with some effort.
“Oh my God,” said Jack. “Where is this?” He looked at the display under the screen. “Identity Mod? What’s that mean? Where is this?”
“What the fuck?” asked Nils, pointing to another screen, which showed a cafeteria. Two Hounds were playing Ping-Pong. Their bare chests were strangely shaped and hairy. They did not look entirely human.
Cole did the first thing that came to mind. He nudged Nils. “Look,” he said, pointing to the defaced sign above them.
Before Jack could stop him, it was out of Nils’s mouth. He didn’t know any better. “Who is the Maestro?”
At the sound of the word all the screens abruptly changed. All nine monitors now showed their group, footage taken from a camera hidden in a corner above. A mechanical alarm sounded, the kind that builds in intensity as if cranked by hand. “Intruders,” a calm female voice announced from hidden speakers. “Section 9-G.” Wooooop! “Intruders, section 9-G. Security breach. Grimpen Mire stairwell.” Wooooop! “Unauthorized discussion of state secrets. Keyword: Maestro.” Wooooop! “This is not a drill.” Wooooop!
“What did I do?” said Nils.
“Come on,” yelled Cole, darting down the corridor, away from the exit. “This way! Hurry!”
They ran. For at least a mile they ran, Jack supporting the Captain with a tight arm around his waist. At another intersection Cole halted briefly, getting his bearings. Behind them a group of Hounds (would you call them a gang, Jack wondered, or a shrewdness?) bounded after them, pushing off the walls for extra momentum.
“Jesus Christ!” the Captain shouted.
Cole led them to the right and immediately down another hall to the left. It was a dead end.
“Shit, man. We’re trapped!” yelled Jack.
“No, we’re not,” said Cole. He stepped to a beige panel set into the concrete wall. It was a call box, the kind you might find outside a cheap apartment building. He pushed a button. There was a sharp buzz and then an automated voice, the same pleasant feminine voice that had alerted the Hounds to their presence.
“Password,” she said.
“Open sesame,” Cole replied.
There was a click and another buzz and then the wall slid into a niche in the concrete with a sound like Lazarus’s tomb unsealing. They ran inside and Cole touched another button that caused the wall to slide back. There was a thunk as it closed, and then the clankity-clunk sound of heavy locks falling into place.
They stood there, panting, against the door. And then the occupant of this room addressed them. It was a voice Cole had not heard in a long time.
“Hello, Cole,” said the voice, a man’s voice, though slightly effeminate—the voice of a poet. “We knew you’d come back. We just didn’t think it would take three years.”
Cole turned, the atomizer he’d stolen from Jack in his right hand. He pointed it at the Maestro. This. This was all he’d ever wanted. Murder. Justice. Revenge.
FIVE
TO SERVE MAN
1 “Wake up.”
Cole rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock beside his bed. It was 4:00 a.m. His father was a shadow in the dark room, outlined by the light through the open door. “What’s going on?” asked Cole.
“Get dressed. Don’t wake your mother.”
Cole pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and looked out his window to the void of the Atlantic Ocean. Not even a hint of sunlight on the horizon. They’d gone to see Wicked last night, for something like the fifth time—his father was suddenly n
uts about it—and had eaten a late dinner at Gaby’s.
As they stepped into the early morning, his father ruffled his hair the way he used to when Cole was little. His dad was dressed not in his suit but in khakis and a simple polo. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to Big Indian.” His father handed him a coffee, another sign that all was not normal. He didn’t like Cole drinking caffeinated beverages or anything with a lot of chemicals in it, really. They took 95 through the Bronx, then across the GWB into Jersey. A schooner sat on the Hudson, sails wrapped in white string lights. It had been forever since they’d sailed.
“Lots of people get lost in their jobs, I think,” his father said. “Things become routine. You do what your boss asks because that’s what you get paid to do, right? You don’t question it. There were young men who guarded the Jews at Sobibor. When they signed up to work there, it was just another labor camp. By 1942, they were gassing the prisoners with carbon monoxide. Their job didn’t change overnight, it changed slowly. It became the new routine. Like every job, it must have even seemed boring to some. See what I mean?”
“What are we doing?” asked Cole.
His father sighed. “I think we made a terrible mistake. I think we were wrong to forget. I’m not helping anybody. Cole, I think I’m the bad guy in this story.”
“You’re not a bad guy.”
“You wait and see what happens to the world after another thirty years of this, of all these terrorist attacks and retaliatory wars. If we’d remembered we’d already done it, maybe we wouldn’t be so eager to kill each other again.”
“Where are we going?” asked Cole.
“We’re going to talk to the only man who knows how to stop it.”
* * *
Up the mountain, through the mire, into the Undergound, its catacombs lit with dirty light. Cole followed his father down the corridor and around several turns. They walked for half an hour before they reached the intercom. His father chuckled. “The most important secrets in the world are kept behind this door and they picked the oldest password in history.” He leaned to the panel. “Open sesame,” he said.