Exit Strategy
Page 12
Once inside, Jordan felt safe and unremarkable as he sat in one of the overstuffed white chairs in the Festa Café sipping on a scalding milky latte, waiting for the laptop to charge.
33
RUN
In college Jordan had taken a class on political thought to fulfill his liberal arts requirement. There had been a section on the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt’s description of the banality of evil had struck him as fundamentally wrong. He’d argued heatedly with the grad student teaching the recitation. He couldn’t believe that people could commit evil acts while thinking they were decent and right. It went against the ingrained New England Protestantism in him. Evil was an absolute; it was part of our nature, something to be resisted and fought at every turn. But now, poring over the minutiae of Terry Allison’s life, he wasn’t so sure.
Terry’s in-box was a random mix of JET business, inane forwards, spam and the occasional Exit Strategy communiqué. Hidden in plain sight, Jordan supposed. Who would think to look?
The majority of the emails were so dull and the ES stuff so cryptic, even if someone did happen to stumble on his open mail, they’d think nothing of it. There was one strange thing about the ES emails; they sounded to Jordan as though they were all from Sam but the sender was different for every one—different names, different domains. Jordan figured they must be spoofing the addresses. That would explain why Terry had so much junk; any decent Bayesian spam filter would probably strip out half of his most important emails.
Patiently going through the last month’s mail, Jordan found several that related to him. There was a recent conversation discussing reimbursement for the money Terry had spent on their night out. Terry implied that Jordan had slept with the girl; hard to tell if he knew better or not. Going back, Jordan found a couple of routine status reports (“All good, not very social, seems to accept things”) and one interesting missive from a few days before Jordan’s arrival in Tokyo. This one alerted Terry to Gordon Patterson’s imminent arrival and included a link to his personal file. Without thinking, Jordan clicked on the link. A web browser opened and a screen filled with kanji came up. There was a button at the lower right and Jordan clicked on it. A new window opened saying, “DNS error—page not found,” and a second later, with a swooshing sound like a loud sigh, a Skype chat window popped up from MAS799. Where are you, Gordon?
The cursor blinked expectantly in the reply window. Jordan stared at it. He was such an idiot. They knew where he was now. How long? He scanned the shoppers and tourists, expecting to see armed thugs surrounding him already. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. He typed, Who is this?
The reply was immediate. You know who it is. Stay where you are, we want to help you. Seconds later, Your family.
What about my family? he answered.
We want to help them, keep them safe. You’ve put them in a great deal of danger.
Leave them alone. I haven’t told anyone.
It isn’t safe for them, Gordon. The tone, it had that same silky menace, and the answers came so quickly.
Sam?
Sam is not here right now. But he knows we are in contact. He was very concerned about you and your family.
Leave my family out of it!
It doesn’t work that way, Gordon. Stay where you are.
Suddenly he felt overwhelmingly tired. His shoulders slumped. Okay, he typed, I’m at the Tokyo Dome.
We know. Stay where you are.
MAS799 signed off. Jordan looked around. The amusement park was opening. Lines were starting to form at some of the popular rides. Jordan took a sip of his now-cold coffee. He quit Skype and came back to Terry’s in-box with the dead link to his file. Last looks, he thought.
Maybe Terry had downloaded it. He searched for “Patterson.” The search returned a couple of calendar hits and one email attachment. He opened it. There he was. Gordon Patterson, thirty-nine, male, Caucasian. Corporate-relo. Invol. Family: wife, two kids. High IQ. Special abilities. Referred APrenn, 6–13.
Jordan felt like he was rushing through a tunnel; his ears went dull and felt like they needed to pop. The room seemed to fall out of focus as it surged toward him from all sides. That was impossible. Alex...6–13? Years ago? It didn’t make any sense. Dr. Rosen had given him the number in the darkest days after they lost Elizabeth (say her name). Only to be used in the direst need. If you knew you were going to harm yourself. A permanent solution, but better than dead.
But who had recommended Dr. Rosen?
The last years played back in his mind. Snapshots jumped unbidden into the frame. Alex shutting a laptop when Jordan came in or abruptly getting off the phone, his increasingly infrequent appearances at the Dunster Street building and one image he’d completely forgotten from almost two years ago.
Every year on April 1 Genometry had their annual Fool’s Errand party. It was a tradition that had started when Alex and Jordan were still in school. It was usually a fun night of sophomoric pranks and too much alcohol. This particular party had been a good one. All the research assistants were there with their dates and friends. A couple of new investors had just come in so there was fresh money, Jordan’s research had turned a promising corner, so spirits were high. Alex had actually relaxed. He’d had a few beers while helping clean up the office the afternoon of the party, then he’d done tequila shots with one of the investors, a young Korean kid from San Francisco.
Later that night Jordan had gotten into a long debate with one of the researchers about the implications of some of Ventner’s work. He’d gone to refill his beer from the keg in the lab and had seen Alex with his arm draped familiarly around Stephanie’s waist, deep in conversation with some VC guys from New York. There was nothing overt but something about the casualness, the ease of his posture, the possessiveness of the way he held her, cut like a razor through whatever alcohol Jordan had consumed and set off small alarms deep in the oldest part of his mind. At the same instant Alex saw him and smiled, waving him over. The moment had passed. Jordan told himself he’d imagined it but now he wondered. Alex, Stephanie, Sam...how did it all fit together?
A loud scream brought him back to the present. There was a rushing sound and more screaming. He looked out the window. There was a steel tower one hundred and eighty feet high and twenty-four people were strapped into harnesses and hurtling down the vertical coaster’s front track in free fall. He needed more time. He needed to figure this out. Something stank.
He shut the computer and grabbed the power supply, wrapped both in some dirty shirts and jammed them in the bag. He ran out of the coffee shop and toward the escalator. He got on behind a family with a stroller. Halfway down he saw a small disturbance below, at the line for one of the rides. A bulky man in a familiar tight blue windbreaker, standing a head taller than the thronged Japanese, was wading through the queue, pushing people aside while scanning the park. Jordan tried to shrink down behind the family but it was too late. Dennis’s eyes met his and the recognition was instant. He yelled and tore for the up escalator.
Jordan swiveled and forced his way through the knot of people behind him. He saw Dennis pushing people aside and taking the escalator steps three at a time. His face was bright red and he was yelling into his phone. Jordan ran in the other direction, frantically scanning the concourse for somewhere to hide. The shops were nearly empty; the only crowded areas were the lines for the rides. The most crowded was for the Thunder Dolphin, the biggest coaster at the park. Jordan threaded his way into the middle of the serpentine line, mumbling apologies in his most formal and apologetic Japanese. People gave him dirty looks but no one pushed him out of the line. He stooped as low as he could and shuffled along with the group. He heard Dennis pass, feet away, twice, still barking into the phone. Finally Jordan’s cohort passed into the enclosed loading area and he was able to stand without fear of being seen. He scanned the area, looking for another way out but there wasn’t one. Th
e only way out was up.
Jordan hated roller coasters. Haden had fallen in love with the Matterhorn at Disney World on a long-ago trip and Jordan had ridden it with him over and over again. Thunder Dolphin made the Matterhorn look like a backyard play set. It rose two hundred and sixty-two and a half feet into the air, all twists and loops of spidery steel like a suspension bridge that had been uprooted and splattered across downtown Tokyo in an old Godzilla movie. It arched over the Spa LaQua building, whipped through a hole cut in another steel building and finally shot right through the center of the great hubless Ferris wheel, the Big-O. With a resigned sigh, Jordan took a seat in a middle car, slumping as low in the seat as he could, the backpack clutched to his chest.
The train glided smoothly out into the sunshine. As unobtrusively as he could, he scanned the area but saw no sign of his pursuers. The cars made the steep ascent effortlessly, with none of the clatter and sway he remembered from Disney World. The track was narrower than the car, so when Jordan looked down over the side all he saw was the park and the dome receding at a horrible vertiginous rate. Looking out he saw all of Tokyo unfolding as the coaster rose. He could see the tall needles of Akihabara and the Mori Tower beyond and all around the skyscrapers and motorways that seemed to aimlessly sprawl in every direction.
From the top he could see to the harbor and beyond. He felt it in his stomach. The first couple of cars had crested the top and only the weight of the rest kept them from hurtling straight down. As the last car came up the rise, there was that moment of suspended gravity, of utter weightlessness, before the plunge. This was the part he hated most. Then with a sickening falling away, they were over and beginning the acceleration down. The incline seemed impossibly steep. Jordan couldn’t help but press himself back into the seat with all his strength, fighting the car’s seemingly inevitable need to flip slowly over and crash to the ground, killing them all. Then they were falling; his body floated away from the seat no matter how hard he tried to press it down.
His heart seemed to swell in his chest as he willed himself to give in to the momentum of the ride. It felt like the train had completely separated from the tracks in that first plunge, then with a hydraulic whoosh and a stiff shudder of rubber on steel it surged up again and into the sky, lunging over the spa building and sweeping around in a wide-banked turn where the car turned almost upside down before heading for a solid steel wall that only revealed its opening at the last possible moment. The cars streaked through the gleaming circle, then plunged to the bottom again for a pair of rapid twists that surely should have thrown the train from the rails before pressing the riders back against the seats for a straight vector right through the center of the massive Ferris wheel. Riders in the Ferris wheel were laughing and pointing at the coaster as it came. Suddenly Jordan become aware of one man on the Ferris wheel, who was staring straight at him and screaming into his phone. As the car streaked past, ten feet from the man, Jordan recognized Manny.
Shit! He had to get out before the ride was over. He’d be a sitting duck once it came in. He scanned ahead. There was no way; he’d be killed. The train finished its last swerving run and Jordan felt the braking mechanism engage. They were heading into the loading area. He pulled the knapsack out from under the restraint and realized he had enough room now to squeeze his shoulders through. The other three riders in his car looked at him in shock and some fear as he twisted free of the padded restraint. Slinging the knapsack on his back, he stood up. Twenty yards until they passed into the loading building. With a deep breath he climbed onto the back of his car and jumped to the next. The riders were yelling at him and waving him away with their hands but he paid no attention and stepped over them from seat back to seat back before jumping to the next car and then the last. He jumped off the back of the last car and onto the track as the train disappeared into the darkness. Hanging on to the track he lowered himself as far as he could, then started to make his way hand over hand to the next stanchion. Then there was a bellow from above.
“Down there!” Jordan didn’t need to look. He let go and dropped the ten feet to the cement below. He tried to roll but the impact knocked the wind out of him and shuddered his shins and knees. He hobbled to the elevator bank and pressed the up and down buttons. When the first one came he pressed the button for the lower parking lot and jumped back out. He waited for the second one and took it back up to level three. Down was out; he hoped they’d assume he’d gone that way.
When he got out at three, he looked around; it seemed clear. He needed somewhere to hide. Staying as close to the wall as he could, he limped around the retail level.
From his left he heard the yell. “Manny, over there!” He saw Dennis on the up escalator, pointing straight at him, then he heard pounding feet coming from around the corner. He was trapped. He heard singing. The Wonder Drop flume ride ran through the middle of the mall and there was a blue canoe with three schoolchildren heading for the big waterfall drop-off. Manny had rounded the corner and had slowed. His mouth was set in a tight smile.
“Come on, Gordon,” he said. “No more running, okay?”
Dennis had reached the top of the escalator and was closing from the other side. His face was bright red and he looked pissed. The canoe was wriggling into its slot before taking the plunge. Manny followed Jordan’s eyes. His smile faded and he sped up. Jordan climbed onto the railing; his legs were shaking. The canoe paused at the top of the falls and began to slip over.
“No!” Manny yelled, breaking into a sprint. Jordan jumped. It was farther than it had looked and he was a couple of feet short. He hit hard on the back of the canoe, one foot in and one out. His knee exploded in pain where it had slammed into the hard molded plastic. The schoolchildren screamed. Jordan held on for dear life as the canoe made the three-story drop and slammed into the pool at the bottom. Jordan was knocked clear by the impact. He flapped to the edge of the shallow pool and dragged himself out. Bystanders were staring in stunned silence. His eyes met Dennis’s three stories up, peering over the railing. Dennis shook his head. A hint of a smile played at the edge of his mouth for a split second, then his eyes went hard and he turned toward the escalator.
At his first step, pain shot from the knee all the way through Jordan’s jaw. Limping and soaking wet, he made for the exit. The commuter train was just at the corner. If he could make it there. The crowd parted for the madman and Jordan hopped and hobbled across the plaza and down the stairs. He made it down into the train station without hearing any pursuit. He swiped his commuter pass and let himself be swept into the late rush hour herd as it funneled up to the platform. The train came quickly. It looked completely full but Jordan knew better. When the doors opened the oshiya in their black uniforms started pushing people onto the train. Some used long staffs, others their gloved hands and shoulders. It never ceased to amaze Jordan how many people they could pack into an apparently full train. He let himself go slack as the oshiya did their job. He was pressed into the car and arranging his limbs as more passengers were packed in front of him when he heard a loud grunted “Fuck” from the far end of the car. The last few riders were shoved in and the doors were starting to close.
Pitching his voice as high as he could, Jordan cried out, “Chotto matte kudasai, chotto matte,” and waved his hand at the oshiya at the nearest door. The guard reached in and pulled Jordan from the car as the doors shut. Already people were lining up for the next train. Water puddling at his feet, Jordan watched the train slowly glide by, picking up speed. Dennis’s face was pressed to the window, sweat streaking the glass. He saw Jordan and he smiled grimly and shook his head.
34
FRIENDS
“Nice to meet you, too, Sam,” Stephanie said, shaking the proffered hand. She felt like she’d met him before but she couldn’t place him. Just a regular guy, kind of like a high school chemistry teacher with his sensible rims and the dated hair. He pulled out a chair for her and she sat down.
“No, no,” Sam said. “I was just leaving. Alex and I had our little catch-up. He’s all yours. By the way, Dr. Parrish, I have to say, I knew your husband and I am so sincerely sorry for your loss. Jordan was a remarkable man.”
Stephanie flushed scarlet around her neck and jaw. She looked down at the table. “Th-thank you,” she stammered. There was an uncomfortable silence. She felt Sam watching her. “How did you know him?” she asked finally.
“We did some security upgrades on the Cambridge office a few years back. I remember your husband being pretty annoyed when I kicked him out of his lab.” Sam smiled. “But he managed to be gracious in the end.”
“Mmm.” She nodded. “So, security? That’s what you do, then?”
He smiled. “I know, sounds racy, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s actually pretty dull, though. We put in fancy locks and alarms, sometimes cameras. Not quite Q Division.”
She laughed. “And how do you know Alex?”
“I’ve known this young man since he was a boy. His father and I were friends a long, long time ago. I still try to check in whenever I’m in town.” He smiled at Alex, who nodded and looked away. “Anyway, hate to meet and run but I’ve got to hit the road. Plane to catch. Always seems to be these days.” He stood up, smoothing his hair over in a reflexive gesture and slipping into his overcoat.
“Say, could you do me a favor?” he said, fumbling in the coat pocket. He pulled out his phone and passed it to Stephanie with raised eyebrows. “I should bring back a picture of Alexander for the wife. She’ll let me hear it if I don’t.”
“Of course,” Stephanie said. Sam walked around the table and put an arm around Alex, smoothing his hair again. “Alex, smile,” Stephanie said as she centered the image on the display. She took three shots and proclaimed the second the best.