Measure of Danger

by Jay Klages

  He and the other four Associates at the table, Daniel, Walter, Hank, and Lin, sat in silence. No one else was eating the barbecue pork sandwiches. Across the table, Walter looked the same as he had since they’d left the clinic—scared shitless. Daniel stared at the table with his lips pursed. Hank looked calm and thoughtful. Lin had slid even closer to him on his right, grasping his knee like she was trying to move away from Carol’s ghost still sitting beside her on the bench. That was okay with him.

  A Sentry whose nametape read WHEELER approached the table.

  “Hey, listen up,” Wheeler said. “Mr. Owens and Mr. Pierce realize it’s been a very tough day for you all. Following dinner you’ll be released to your rooms until eight. From eight to ten, there will be an open bar in the rec room, and Mr. Pierce will join you around nine.”

  Kade tried to keep a blank look on his face.

  Oh joy.

  “And just a reminder,” Wheeler said. “Please head directly back to your rooms following the meal. We’re still under an enhanced surveillance order. Any deviation and you’ll be cuffed and the whole nine yards. Thanks for your cooperation.”

  In the next five minutes, they all rose from the table and filed out the door, walking back to their rooms in a silent gaggle. Kade took a closer look at the door labels on each side of the hall during the walk back. First, the café, kitchen, and a storage room. After the first right turn, HVAC, the employee lounge, both employee health clinics, six training rooms, another four storage rooms, and a number of unlabeled doors in the mix.

  After the final right turn, he passed five room doors before reaching his own. When he paused there, he saw Hank go to his room two doors down, across the hall. Daniel and Lin continued to theirs, across from each other, four doors down. Lin turned and looked at him before she went inside. With sixteen rooms in this hallway, it seemed there were a lot of empty rooms. He doubted they put Sentries and Guardians in the same area.

  He let the door shut behind him, then turned the knob and opened it a crack to see if it had locked behind him, and it hadn’t. He was again able to flip the dead-bolt lock, so he locked the door from the inside. Every second of early warning was important.

  Surveillance up, but Chapter physical security posture has been lowered.

  Two hours until mandatory reverse happy hour.

  He paced for a bit before heading toward the desk computer station. He sat down and awoke the screen with the mouse. Even without logging in, a yellow inverted triangle containing a black exclamation point blinked on the screen, followed by a warning:

  You are 1 day overdue in downloading the required Daily Update.

  This was the first alert of this sort he’d received, and now, since the chipset in his head was no longer functional, he wasn’t going to attempt a download. He wasn’t sure how long it would be until another alert would trigger a human follow-up. Someone from AgriteX technical support would come and investigate why he was not taking the download.

  He decided to log in so he’d seem at least halfway compliant. Then, if he needed to, he could come up with an excuse that there was something wrong with the system and he just couldn’t process the download. Maybe that would buy him twenty-four to forty-eight hours. He didn’t have much time before someone would want to run diagnostics on the computer, or perhaps on him.

  Then there was the whole Verax test. They either knew he was lying and were deciding what to do with him next, or he beat the test again. Logic tilted toward believing he beat the test; otherwise they would’ve just killed him as they did Carol. It seemed he’d dodged another bullet.

  It had been about eight hours since he’d activated the emergency transmitter. At this point he figured it didn’t work, the battery had run out, or the signal couldn’t penetrate the walls of the headquarters and reach the relay box. Otherwise, he would’ve expected the FBI to have moved in. There had to be a reason the technology was ineffective. He needed to believe that.

  He thought about his escape plan again, went over the scenarios in his head. Making a move tonight was out of the question since there was now a planned after-dinner activity. He brainstormed anything he could do to further support his plan and create a better chance for success. Could he cause an additional disruption or distraction while he attempted to escape? He stared at the computer screen.

  Yes, maybe I can do something.

  Maybe some simple cyber warfare is in order.

  He could create a simple computer virus in a more mainstream system, but it had been a number of years since he’d played around with viruses and hacks. This would be a challenge—the Chapter didn’t run the typical operating systems, e-mail programs, or applications he could easily exploit. The Chapter OS didn’t leave much available to him, and he’d only practiced coding a few simple programs in the test environment.

  The remaining option appeared to be changing some personal preferences and settings, and he assumed everyone else had that option too. In those options you could do some simple things like changing defaults—word fonts, font size, brightness and contrast of text compared to the background in the field of vision.

  Background brightness.

  He logged into the main program and acknowledged the download reminder with a click to make it disappear. He then went to the Personal Settings menu, then to Background. Underneath that header, the default setting was No Color. There were two other possible selections: Black and White. The choices didn’t make much sense.

  Who would ever want their vision-screen to be all black or white? It has to be transparent for a person to see anything.

  That gave him an idea: if he could change his own vision settings from No Color to Black or to White, then he would be blinded. It would be like having a blackout or a whiteout. He almost wished his program was still active to test it. With a little more time, he might be able to figure out how to impersonate an administrator and set a global default to either blackout or whiteout everyone on the program after their next download. But there was no way he was going to figure that out in the next thirty minutes. He logged out, found his way over to the easy chair, and flopped down in it again. Someone would come by to get him for the open bar, so he shut his eyes.

  There was a knock on the door twenty minutes later and he got up to answer it, since a Sentry would have just come right in. Hank was standing there with the first-ever pleasant look on his face. A nice surprise.

  “Hey, want to go have that drink?”

  Kade gave him a fist bump. “Yeah, thanks.”

  They walked down to the rec room, Kade again observing no Sentries in the hallway. A janitor operating a noisy buffing machine on the hallway floor ignored them both.

  “Where is everybody?” Kade asked. “The place seems deserted.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some kind of big outdoor project today.”

  “Yeah.”

  They could hear classical piano playing in the rec room as they came down the hall, and when they entered the room, Kade was impressed that Lin was the one seated at the piano bench. She looked up and he smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She still appeared shaken.

  Toward the back of the room, a stainless-steel cocktail bar on wheels had been rolled in and was staffed by a bulky man with a thin black beard, someone who he thought was a cook or server in the café. Daniel and Walter were playing pool near the back.

  “Bar?” Hank prompted.

  “Sure,” Kade said, and followed Hank’s lead.

  Kade quickly judged that there wasn’t going to be a critical turn of events this evening that would force him to try to break out. He’d made it through the Verax, and Pierce was just trying to calm the Associates down. It seemed all Sentries and maybe some Guardians were active outside, making it more dangerous to operate on the ground out there. So he’d have a few drinks to try to bond with the remaining Associates. Maybe a weak rationalization, but that’s what his gut was telling him.

  Hank ordered a scotch on the rocks, and Kade took
two bottles of an IPA microbrew he’d never heard of. He followed Hank back to the pair of couches by the pool table where the men all exchanged terse hellos. Hank dropped onto the couch, while Kade walked over to Daniel with a sudden thought.

  “Hey, can I talk to you for a sec?”

  “Sure,” Daniel said, and Hank took over his pool game.

  “A few questions for ya,” Kade said.

  “Okay, but let’s play some foosball.” Daniel moved over to the adjacent game table.

  After they started whacking the ball around, Kade asked, “You ever seen the inside of L-FAC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was just wondering about the inmates firing guns and stuff. Like, wouldn’t a state inspection fail the facility for safety?”

  Daniel nodded. “Hard to believe, but with non-lethal rounds, it’s legally permissible. The prison seems to do a careful dance around the semiannual inspections, and they always ace them. Fire drills, laundry, food service, whatever—they nail it.”

  “Okay, didn’t mean to prod. Just seemed dangerous.”

  Daniel won two games while Kade’s concentration was elsewhere.

  “I’ll be back,” Kade said. “I think Lin needs some cheering up.”

  Daniel nodded like that was a good idea, but added, “Be careful with her.”

  He walked over to the piano and sat down on the bench to Lin’s right.

  “Just going to watch, if that’s all right,” he said.

  She glanced back without saying anything. His brusque conversations must’ve permanently turned her off. He put his coaster and extra beer on the music rack and drank from the bottle in his hand.

  The melody was gentle, a blend of melancholy and hope that perfectly fit the collective mood. He wasn’t familiar with classical piano, but was enjoying the song and watching her delicate fingers. The first very cold beer slid down his throat within a few minutes and he started on his second.

  “What are you playing?” he asked when she’d completed the piece.

  “Chopin.”

  “That sounded really nice.”

  She turned to look at him and the expression in her eyes said thanks.

  It happened like an involuntary response. He slid his hand from the bench across the small of her back to her opposite hip and kissed her for a few seconds. Her lips were soft and wet and tasted like the cold vodka cranberry she was drinking. He leaned in again and she seemed more into it this time. When she sat back, she drew her breath in and sighed.

  “Yeah, okay . . . great timing, Sims.” Her head turned back to the front, and she started playing again like she was exerting some kind of discipline upon herself. “I could’ve used some companionship before now. I was happy when you showed up. It made all this . . . different. I was hoping it might get even better.”

  “Sorry.”

  She played another piece, this one more somber, while he drained his second bottle. He went and got two more rounds of drinks for both of them over the next half hour. The music seeped into his bruised spirit and absorbed some of the stress he’d corralled in his mind. These were the first waking minutes since the mission started that he wasn’t thinking about his predicament.

  He was thinking about kissing her again when Joshua Pierce entered from his left into the room. Lin stopped playing and he got a feeling in the pit of his stomach like he was woken out of a wonderful sleep by a horrible-sounding alarm clock.

  Pierce had one Sentry with him, a sturdy brunette. After a short private conversation, the two went to the bar together and ordered a drink. It looked as if Pierce had a whiskey drink and the Sentry ordered a club soda or Sprite.

  After a couple of minutes, they motioned for everyone to gather around in the lounge area where four couches were positioned facing one another around a low center table. Lin joined Kade on one couch; Daniel and Walter took another; Hank sat alone; and Pierce took the one across from Kade. The female Sentry stood on the periphery of the room. Pierce looked around as if he was trying to get a read on everyone’s temperament.

  “I hope you’ve had some time to kick back and relax,” Pierce said. “We try to do this when we know there’s been a great challenge or we’re celebrating a milestone.”

  Kade sat back and rubbed his eyes.

  Celebrating survival—that’s fucked up.

  Pierce took a sip out of his cocktail glass and smacked his lips.

  “We have another milestone to announce that’ll be important to you. We’re relocating you all to another one of our facilities. It’ll either be in Montana or Nevada, but we haven’t made the final decision yet. The two locations are identical as far as ongoing operations.”

  “Except for the climate,” Kade said.

  Pierce nodded with a sniff and shot him an annoyed look.

  “Do you all have any questions?”

  His mind was now back in high gear. If he was relocated, the FBI would have no idea where he was. There’d be no further chance for support. He also was reminded that Alex was wounded or dead, and the terrible feeling of guilt crept back.

  “Why are we moving?” Daniel asked.

  “We’re running out of adequate space and we have security concerns,” Pierce said.

  “Is it because of what happened with Carol?” Walter asked.

  “It was due to many factors,” Pierce said. “We just want to make sure you all continue to develop in an environment with minimal disruption.”

  “When do we find out where we’re going,” Lin asked, “so we can let our personal contacts know where we’ll be?”

  “Relocation will be this Saturday at noon. We’ll let you know our destination on that morning, and then you can make your phone calls. That applies to all but one of you.”

  The pause got everyone’s attention.

  “Hank—you won’t be going with the rest of the Associates. You’ll be going home Friday.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Wednesday, June 26

  11:17 p.m. (PDT)

  AgriteX

  Pierce arrived at the vault door of Owens’s office five minutes after receiving an instant message on the Chapter internal network asking him to stop by. He stood in front of the surveillance camera and pulled the door open after he heard the whir of its motor disengage.

  Pierce wasn’t surprised he was being summoned at this late hour, given how close they were to launch, but when he smelled the smoke and saw Owens with a joint this late in the evening, he read it as unusual. Owens normally preferred a vaporizer pen in order to avoid the noxious smoke. Again, always one to use the latest and greatest technology.

  “Hey, Marshall.”

  Owens sat behind his large cherry-toned pedestal desk. The office was windowless, but the illumination was comfortable and had the feel of natural light.

  “Hi, Rick, could you please shut the door behind you?”

  “Sure.”

  Pierce felt a split second of fear—first, from being shut in the most secure room in the headquarters, and second, from being called by his true first name. Owens was only one of two people who knew his real name at the Chapter. Dr. Heather Drakos was the other. This secrecy was kept so Pierce could operate completely off the grid. Everyone else knew him by his fake name, Joshua Pierce, which accompanied his AgriteX chief operating officer title and his special assistant title in the Chapter.

  In his roles for both the legitimate and underground organizations, Pierce never signed any official document, never had his picture taken, and never made a public statement. He also hadn’t spoken on a phone in the almost five years since Marshall had recruited him.

  Pierce paused and stared, waiting for Owens to speak. Is Marshall questioning my loyalty?

  Owens looked serious but pleasant. He took a drink from a mug of steaming tea with lemon in it.

  “I’ve been meaning to have this conversation for many months,” Owens said, “and I’ve put it off—for practical reasons and out of pride.”

  Pierce moved to the dark brown
leather couch in Owens’s work area and took a seat next to the front of the desk.

  Owens took another slow drag on the joint.

  “You already know the transition plan. I’m confident you can carry on the mission if something happens to me.”

  Pierce nodded like that was a no-brainer, and Owens continued.

  “Well, something is happening to me now, or has been happening. I’ve kept information from you. Two things. First is my health. I learned that I have a brain tumor. It might be a result from the first protocol, from years ago. It’s not clear.”

  Pierce exhaled in a whistle.

  “Yes,” Owens said. “A rare side effect in the older protocol. Mine may not even be related. I learned about it months ago and said nothing about it to anyone here at the Chapter, because I wanted to see how it progressed. I wanted to make sure no one was concerned about their leadership. I’ve soldiered through. Figured I’d retire and disappear after Phase One. Then have this conversation. But the arc of my life isn’t agreeing with me.”

  “I understand the need to show strength,” Pierce said. “You’ve been our heart and our brain.”

  “The wake-up call came when I had a seizure two nights ago, late,” Owens said. “The Sentry on my security detail that night got Heather. She was able to stabilize me.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “So she knows everything. If I’m incapacitated with another seizure or my condition degenerates more before launch, I’ll pass on full command of the Chapter to you. And I’m telling you right now that I’m officially retiring after Phase One. You’ll head the Chapter when the dust settles. I’ll move on and soon be gone. I’ll be lucky if I get a couple of months on a quiet beach somewhere. Maybe Panama.”

  Pierce now looked floored. “I’m sorry, Marshall. You successfully fooled me.”