METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Her father had spent his life studying it. And ultimately, he’d given his life for it. He’d made a comfortable home for himself on the bestseller list with his books. And between his firm, rational approach to parenthood and the impact of spending the last four years of her childhood in a foster home once an angry fundamentalist had gunned her father down after a debate, she’d grown up strong and hard. “Folks will ask you to believe in a lot of things,” he’d told her. “But you’ll always do best just believing in yourself, Tatertot.”

  She shook the memory of him away, surprised again that she could smell the strange elixir of his cologne and sweat in her recollection. She took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  Rodriguez’s fingers flew. “Good. I’m pushing the contract over now. Once you execute it, you’ll have access to uni-trans and to a credit line for expenses. I’ve booked you on a flight to Seattle for this afternoon and authorized you to access his apartment and his co-lo server.” She slid a glasses case across the desk. “I’ve loaded this pair up with access to any database you could need. And at least a dozen ways to reach me, day or night.”

  Charity took one final drag on the cigarette and then crushed it out, watching the smoke vanish. “I’ll find him.” She stood and they shook hands.

  “Good,” said Rodriguez. “And welcome aboard, Oxham.”

  * * *

  George Applebaum glanced from the suitcase to the phone. Outside, a Portland autumn expressed itself in a wide gray palette. He felt the weather pressing him, squeezing him. He’d wondered for the last day and a half exactly what he’d gotten himself into, but he also knew he’d go through with it. He had to see for himself that it was true and he’d know the moment he looked the man in the eye.

  Finally, he picked up the old cell phone they’d given him and punched in the numbers. He heard a familiar voice pick up on the third ring.

  “Brother Frost.” His old friend sounded hoarse and it gave his southern drawl a gravelly resonance.

  “Billy, George Applebaum here. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  The pause spoke volumes, but Frost recovered quickly. “Brother George. It’s good to hear your voice.” He coughed. “I’ve heard the news. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I had no idea those boys were up to such mischief.”

  “It seems they surely were.” Applebaum eyed the suitcase and forced himself to the script they’d suggested when they dropped it off. “I’ve had a lot of people coming around asking questions. I thought I’d better give you a shout.”

  “I’m glad you did. I’ve been meaning to call but I just been busier than a fat boy at the barbecue. Those fellas have people here who are just beside themselves with the fruit of their wickedness.”

  Frost’s sincerity impressed him. “Well,” George said, “I was hoping to talk with you more about that, Billy. There were some things that didn’t add up with those boys. You know they were attending here, right?”

  More silence on the other end of the phone. “Of course I know, George,” he said. “I sent them your way. I thought it’d be good for them get a … broader view of the Kingdom. As to talking, I’m not sure how much help I could be.”

  George counted to three, feeling the knot in his stomach tighten as he followed their script. “Some of these visitors I’ve been having seem to have another idea, Billy. I was thinking I’d come out your way and we could discuss it.”

  This pause was the longest. “I think,” Frost said slowly, “that would be a fine idea, George.” Then, as an afterthought: “Bring your Bible and your rod. We’ll grab us some fish and some fellowship while you’re here.”

  “That sounds good. How’s day after tomorrow?”

  When they hung up, George looked to the suitcase again. They’d asked him to pack a bag after that first meeting and the next day, the woman—Abigail Hunter—had come by to pick it up. They returned it this morning.

  “It’s all ready to go,” her nameless sidekick had told him, patting its handle.

  George was still holding the phone when it rang. “Hello?”

  The woman’s voice sounded nearby. “You handled that well, George. Really well. How are you feeling?”

  He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know.”

  The sincerity in her voice was nearly convincing. “You’ll be fine. And what you’re doing is going to save a lot of lives.”

  You know she’s right. He didn’t want to believe it, but even back in school, he’d seen a parting of the ways coming as a result of Billy’s extremism. The idea that his friend might be sending young men off to bomb government conferences was a stretch but not too far a stretch based on some of their late night talks in college. In those days, he’d been angry over abortion, over gay rights, and even over magic in books and movies. “When the end comes,” he used to say, “they’ll all get theirs.”

  George forced himself back to the conversation. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all we can ask,” she said.

  After Hunter hung up, George looked out of the window. For a while, he watched the gray grow darker. Then he stood and shuffled off to the parsonage’s garage to rummage around for a rod and reel he’d not touched in at least a decade. Day after tomorrow, he would climb into the church’s single antique hybrid car and make the two hour drive to Cathlamet.

  * * *

  Charity leaned forward in the chair, watching the man’s face. “So how long again has it been since you’ve seen Matthew Rodriguez, Pastor Hill?”

  This one’s a snake. His narrow eyes blinked and his plastic smile flashed on. “Like I said before. Two or three Sundays back. Delightful young man.” He winked and raised his eyebrows with an air of certainty. “He found the Lord here, you know.”

  She bit her tongue. “He also seems to have made at least one rather sizeable donation just before disappearing.”

  The man blushed. That caught him off guard. “I wouldn’t know about such things. I do the preaching. Other folks do the counting.”

  Of course. She hadn’t expected Hill to be forthright or even helpful. But he was a starting place, along with the ex-girlfriend she’d be visiting later that day and a handful of close friends she’d pulled from Matthew’s rather large e-print of posts, emails and transactions. A trail that completely vanished two weeks ago with his donation to the church she now sat in.

  Charity stood and smoothed her pants suit. She extended her hand, bracing herself for his clammy grip once again. “Thank you for your time, Pastor. I’ll be in touch if I have more questions.”

  He nodded. “Happy to help. I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  She let herself out of the church and walked to her rental car across the only bit of asphalt that wasn’t in disrepair. It seemed business was good for Pastor Hill and his Lighthouse Bible Temple. Here in the wilds of what had once been a community called Shoreline, his was the only bit of level, pothole-free ground. She’d driven past federal Department of Reclamation work crews on her way from SeaTac International Airport, but they’d not made it this far north of the city proper.

  Her glasses chirped and she took the call. “Oxham,” she said in a flat voice. She continued to the car and unlocked the door with her thumb.

  “Ms. Oxham,” a woman said, “welcome to Seattle. There is a diner six blocks north and two blocks west. I’m sending the address.” Even as she said it, Charity’s phone chirped again. “I already have a booth for us.”

  Across the street, a young man in a tattered army poncho paused long enough to light a joint before hefting his pack and walking away. She watched him go. “Who is this?”

  “Abigail Hunter,” the woman said. Then, the phone clicked in Charity’s ear.

  Has to be Patriot, she thought as she slid behind the wheel and started the car. It came to life quietly and she eased it out of the parking lot and onto the road, going slowly. She synched the car up to her glasses and let it drive. Five minutes later, she pulled up to the curb
in front of a run-down diner.

  Abigail Hunter wasn’t hard to pick out. She and her companion—a slender blond man—were the only ones in suits. They sat side by side in a booth at the back of the restaurant. The woman’s blonde hair was short and pulled back from her face. She smiled as Charity approached and extended her hand from where she sat.

  “Senator Rodriguez’s office was kind enough to let us know you were coming,” she said after they’d all shaken hands. Her companion smiled but said nothing.

  Charity sat and a waitress hurried over with an extra mug and half a pot of coffee that smelled burnt and strong. At Charity’s nod and smile, she filled the mug and moved off. “Patriot, Inc., I assume?”

  Hunter nodded slightly. “Yes.”

  “Capt—” she paused and corrected herself. “Senator Rodriguez didn’t tell me Patriot was already involved.” What she didn’t say was that she wasn’t sure why the senator would hire her in addition to Patriot.

  The woman shook her head. “We’re pursuing a series of ongoing investigations. Matthew Rodriguez’s disappearance is related but only a small part of a larger whole.”

  “Ongoing investigations into …?” She waited for Hunter to fill in the blank.

  “My partner and I have been temporarily assigned to a private foundation and we’re very interested in what Matthew Rodriguez is up to … and who he’s been up to it with.”

  Charity’s eyes narrowed. “A foundation? Philanthropy and whatnot?” It wasn’t unheard of that agents or officers might be attached to private sector business. Edgewater and its affiliates were corporations with bottom lines in a world in desperate need of organized strength and investigative capacity. But she’d never heard of a charitable foundation hiring guns and eyes.

  Hunter nodded. “It’s … complicated. But yes. There are many groups whose work is at odds with our employer’s mission. Some of those groups have taken it upon themselves to go outside the law to bring about the changes they’d like to see. We are gathering intelligence on those threats.”

  “So the foundation is financing its own investigative work? What about local or federal law enforcement?”

  “We work closely with our partners at Edgewater and with any of the local jurisdictions that aren’t actually being investigated themselves.” Hunter stirred cream and then sugar into her coffee as she talked. When she looked up, her eyes were hard. “I wish it weren’t true, but many of them have already been compromised.”

  Charity lifted her own mug to her mouth and sipped. She didn’t like the sound of this. “Compromised?”

  “A quiet war is being waged, Sergeant Oxham, by an unhappy group of people whose frustrations are manifesting themselves … violently.”

  Those people had always been around, she knew, and some of those voices had gotten quite loud during the decline the United States had experienced for most of the last sixty years. The economy had collapsed first, followed soon by the loss of international credibility after a series of poorly considered military ventures. Then, there was the gradual unraveling of domestic tranquility as a depressed nation began acting out on itself. The crime rate had skyrocketed, demonstrations had gone violent and even a few coups had been put down by a bi-partisan government losing its grip.

  Andrew Shockney and his new Green Party changed all of that. In the last ten years, they had gained a significant foothold in bringing scattered city-states together. Before Shockney, those city-states had operated in relative autonomy within the shell of state lines that no longer made sense, creating alliances and collectives that functioned economically and geographically. Cascadia was the archetype for these regional entities. Sandra Rodriguez was a part of that; a decorated war hero turned Green politician. Thinking of her brought Charity back to the conversation.

  “I’m not sure what this has to do with Matthew Rodriguez, Agent Hunter.”

  The line of Hunter’s mouth went firm. “The church he was attending—Lighthouse Bible Temple—is actively recruiting male college students at the University of Washington for an organization called The Sons of New Jerusalem, a terrorist group committed to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government—and worse, an end to the One World Movement and its resulting treaties.”

  Oxham put down her coffee. She could get her mind around the former but not the latter. It had taken decades of persistent effort to make the progress they had and even now, there was much more to do. “Why would anyone want to stop that?”

  Now, her male companion broke his silence. “If you’re familiar with your father’s work, you can probably guess the answer.”

  But Abigail Hunter didn’t make her wait. “These particular cultists have a vested interest in the end of the world as scheduled,” she said.

  Yes. She remembered her father’s anger during one of those botched Middle Eastern wars because so many of his research subjects expressed hope and joy that it might bring about Armageddon. “One woman,” he’d once told her, “made a big production over how she’d be riding back on a white horse beside Jesus to teach those fucking sinners a lesson.” She sighed.

  “And you think Senator Rodriguez’s son is a part of this movement?”

  “We do,” Hunter said. “Yes.”

  That explained why Sandra didn’t know about Patriot’s involvement here. She could see the path now clearly. “And you already know where he is, then?”

  She nodded. “He is in training right now on the Olympic Peninsula. In a few days, we suspect he’ll be moving south to a small town on the Columbia River. I’m sure you understand why we wanted to wait and be more certain before upsetting his mother with news like this.”

  Charity Oxham leaned forward. “Let’s be honest here,” she said. “You’re waiting because you want to learn as much as possible before someone like me comes in and pulls him out of the mess he’s landed in. You have your fingers in a lot of pies; pull any one too soon and you lose the entire bakery.”

  Hunter nodded. “Yes. And our pies are nearly done. We’re really close.”

  “What do you want?”

  The woman smiled. “We know where he is and where he’s going. We’ll share that freely with you. We just want you to coordinate with us before taking any kind of action.”

  “For national security purposes,” Charity added.

  Hunter shook her head. “No. It’s far bigger than that at this point.”

  Charity didn’t believe it, despite the woman’s sober tone. And this meeting, regardless of the information they’d given her, left her feeling less interested in Sandra’s promise of a potential transfer to Patriot, Inc. These two were shady at best and didn’t improve her opinion of their employer.

  It brought her back to her earlier question: What kind of charitable foundation hired guns and eyes?

  “Okay,” she finally agreed. “I’ll coordinate with you.” She pushed her coffee away. “But I do intend to find Matthew Rodriguez and pull him out of whatever it is he’s gotten himself into.”

  They both stood. “Excellent,” Hunter said. “We’ll send you what we can … when we can.”

  Charity shook their extended hands, noting their grips were cooler and firmer than her own. She watched them leave, in the only other car in the diner’s rough asphalt parking lot. Everyone else here was a local, either pedestrian or cyclist. After they’d gone, she climbed into her own car and dialed up one of the secure voice mails Sandra had provided her.

  “I have a solid lead,” Charity said. She wanted to say more but didn’t. Instead, she hung up and nudged her car to life and pointed it back to the smart roads that would carry her back to her waiting hotel.

  * * *

  The Oregon side of the Columbia had kept up with the times for most of the first half of the century. Smart roads equipped with historical narratives about the area carried tourists with relative ease between Portland and Astoria. At one time, these lands were laid bare by out-of-control logging but two generations of attention, and the skyrocketing price of ship
ping wood to Japan, had brought back the forests.

  George Applebaum relaxed and watched trees move past. He’d just left Saint Helens, the last real patch of civilization on the road to Astoria. But long before reaching that quaint tourist town, he’d cross into Longview and brave the Washington highway leading to Cathlamet.

  At least the car can drive until then. He didn’t leave the city much, especially not with the church’s single electric car leased for his benefit. And how long had it been since he’d taken an actual vacation?

  “Have fun,” Sister Rebecca had said when he left the office that morning.

  “I’ll try,” he said around a smile as fake as the ones he offered from the pulpit.

  What he drove to knotted his stomach. Not for the first time, George wondered exactly what the agents had done with his things. Brushed it with pixie dust no doubt. He was certain they had turned every personal item he had into a camera or a microphone or a transmitter beacon pointing them toward his friend.

  No, he realized. Not friend. If Billy Frost was willing to use and implicate George’s church in his plans, he was no friend at all.

  “Pedestrian ahead,” the car whispered, following highway protocols, and George looked up to see the hitchhiker. At first he thought it was a young man wearing camo pants, a green t-shirt and a ball cap, carrying a large backpack. But as he drew closer, he realized it was a woman, tall and skinny, with blond hair poking out in a ponytail.

  George looked away. Even under different circumstances, he wasn’t the sort to pick up hitchhikers. Especially young women. To this day, he still followed the seminary’s strict recommendation that he only meet alone with women with his office door ajar and Sister Rebecca within earshot. He looked back to the girl.

  Her thumb was out and she held a sign in the other hand.

  Cathlamet, it read.

  Back in the old days, he’d have called it the Spirit moving him. He didn’t know what to call it now. Intuition, maybe. Whatever it was, it prodded him and he took the wheel of the car. “Manual,” he said, pressing his thumbs into the sensors to unlock it.