Then they were surrounded by more black-clad guards and the van was guided down a corridor as wide as a two-lane street to what looked like a huge auto repair shop. They were hustled out of the news van, frisked, their pockets emptied of identification and anything that might be used as a tool or a weapon, and then deposited in a cell that was really just a cage set against one wall of this room inside the mountain.
Since then they’d been sitting on the edge of the single cot chained to one wall, breathing exhaust fumes as black vans came and went. They had watched as a group of men with power tools descended on a dusty station wagon covered with faded decals from vacation spots across the country. The mechanics stripped the station wagon down to the bones of its frame and axles. They knew their beloved ACTION TEAM 3 news van would probably be next. It was parked beside the County Sheriff patrol car on the far side of the room. Their personal effects were sorted by a man in a dark suit who, as Ravi said, walked, talked, and probably even shit like a Federal Agent. They knew they were in a situation when their wallets were sealed in Ziploc bags and carried away. Brian, ever the newshound, had tried asking a few questions of the man stationed outside their cell and got no response.
“What the fuck are we gonna do?” Ravi asked.
“I don’t know,” Brian said, slowly turning his new ring around and around his finger. “I’m becoming concerned.”
“Jesus, Bri,” Ravi laughed. “Drop the cool act. You may not have noticed, but the camera’s no longer on my shoulder.”
Brian gave Ravi a weak smile. “Sorry pal. This is starting to get to me.”
“Me too, man. Me too.”
* * *
Will was trying not to think about cigarettes and coffee and craving both when the door opened. A plump man with thinning, receding hair came into the room. He was younger than Will. He wore a sheen of perspiration like a mask. His oversize lab coat billowed around a short stout frame. He was holding a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook in the other. Will fell to his knees and said, “I am forever in your debt.”
The pudgy little man forced a nervous smile as the door closed behind him. He adjusted his wire-frame eyeglasses. The lenses were small but incredibly thick, and his eyes appeared to have no whites, just two little islands of pupil in seas of watery blue.
Will took the paper cup and sipped the coffee. It wasn’t half bad. He took the smokes and matches and sat on the bed. There were only two matches left. This little piggy wasn’t stupid. He lit a cigarette and puffed away. The man made a polite little coughing sound and stepped back.
“My name is Lawrence Tupper,” he said. His voice was like his eyes, weak and watery.
Will’s eyebrows rose and fell. He knew this.
“I believe I’m the reason you are still alive.”
“Oh yeah?” This was news. “I didn’t see you out on the road trying to take a bullet for me.”
Tupper shook his head and actually wrung his hands together. “I know, and I’m sorry about all of that. I’ve advocated all along that we simply bring you into custody, but Doctor Mondani and Executive Director Kraft feel strongly that you should be eliminated.”
“Old man Kraft is still the XD? Jesus, he must be a hundred years old by now.”
“Yes, Randall Kraft is still in charge of the Compound,” Tupper said. Without a lot of conviction he added, “Mr. Kraft is a remarkable man.” He looked Will up and down. “Excuse me for being so blunt, but you are rather filthy. I think I’ll prescribe a nice hot shower.”
Before Will could say any more Tupper bustled past him into the bathroom, opened the frosted glass door of the shower stall and set a hand on the faucet. “The water here comes from an underground stream. If you let it run a few minutes the water coming fresh out of the ground will be very refreshing as it is loaded with minerals. Shall I tell you about them?”
Will could see where Tupper was going with this. “Yeah.” He stepped into the doorway of the small bathroom with his back to a ventilation grill set high in the wall and the camera that was probably behind it.
Tupper turned on the water and faced Will, who looked over the little man’s shoulder and saw another grill high on the bathroom wall. “Now we can talk,” Tupper said, looking at his feet. “The audio equipment in the cameras is woefully out of date. If we each look at our shoes and mumble they won’t be able to make out our words.”
Will looked at his sneakers. “Gotcha.”
“In the Compound Archives are the records of Doctor Edmund Stern. Not the abridged, edited balderdash perverting his original impetus and intentions, which many of us following in his footsteps have been exposed to, but his actual notes, journal entries, laboratory workbooks, items of that nature. I’ve read through a great deal of it and I’ve come to realize that we have corrupted his work.”
“No shit.”
“He wanted to know if you could live a simple, normal, full life after being, well, asleep for twenty-five years. He wanted to know if you could still function at an average level, mentally and physically. Could you handle stress? Could you feel joy? Could you fall in love, father children, hold down a job, pay taxes, balance a budget, live a life? And the same went for Eicher’s clone. Ms. Norman.”
Will looked at Tupper and opened his mouth to speak, but Tupper held up one hand, lowering his face and speaking urgently.
“Please, Mr. Hill, let me finish. Although Stern was not in charge by the time Ms. Norman was conceived, he strongly insisted that the top priority should be her overall wellness with an examination of her potential for bearing a child. A great worry was her sanity. Would she inherit her progenitor’s mental illness, or could she overcome it with the right support? These things Stern wanted to know. Would nurture win out over nature? Stern’s recommended course of action was not followed. You were trained to kill from an early age and have not lived what one would call a normal life. Ms. Norman suffered abuses at the hands of Lionel Eicher almost from the moment she was conceived. Her DNA was tampered with. Her childhood, as we have attempted to reconstruct it, was hellish. She had no love. No support. We already know how your life has affected you—“
Glancing at Tupper, Will said, “I’m a little off kilter?” Tupper saw a gleam in Will’s eyes and took an unsteady step back, and then they studied their shoes again.
“There’s no way to know how these things will affect her. And now that you and she are renegades, at least in the opinion of the Compound, it is thought preferable by all that you both disappear, since we do not know what you will do in the future. People don’t talk about the Compound. We discourage them from doing so. And yet you two are out there, free, and, well, unstable. This is important, since as you may know President Clinton continues to open the government to the people, letting them know more and more about previously restricted research and hidden budgets.”
Will blew smoke and nodded. “That’s when the shit hit the fan for me. After Clinton took office, a few years back.”
“And so an old order from John F. Kennedy was reinstated by Kraft, a demand that all evidence of past explorations into suspended animation and cloning, including research data and any physical evidence, be destroyed. It’s bad enough that the Compound has for years been conducting research in areas that are now hotbeds of ethical debate. Add to that the fact that the scientists who perfected this research were originally trained and funded by the Nazi party under the direction of der Führer and you can see why Kraft is afraid for the safety, for the very existence, of this agency. He and many others at the Compound see you two as a terrible threat. You aren’t just a story in the National Enquirer or the subject one of those silly pseudo-science television shows that purport to expose Bigfoot or extraterrestrials. However much we might deny work done here in the past, you and Ms. Norman are living proof of our endeavors, and the Compound simply does not want you two to talk about us. Ever.”
“You’re being pretty straight with me,” Will said. “What’s
your story?”
Tupper looked sheepish. “Science is my first and only love. I would like to see if Stern was right. I believe he was. I believe that you and Ms. Norman can overcome the enormous obstacles you have encountered and have the potential to live normal lives.” He shuffled his feet and then said, “I’ve been working for the Compound seven years now. For seven years I’ve studied your files and for seven years I’ve wanted to meet you, and Ms. Norman. Dr. Mondani and Mr. Kraft wanted you dead the moment our people found you. Dr. Zane may have preferred that outcome as well, although his opinion rarely counts for anything since he was the man who in essence lost you more than once. Mr. Kraft found your escapes from the Compound and Compound West during Zane’s tenure unforgivable. Since his unfortunate breakdown Dr. Zane has been ... demoted. I’m sorry to admit to you that he has been much more satisfied with the work of Dr. Mondani, and me.”
“What I don’t understand,” Will said, “is how you guys zeroed in on us after all these years?”
Tupper’s face actually burned red with embarrassment. “That was me. Me alone, I’m afraid. I was working on a project and knew not the true extent of its importance. I heard that our mechanical research and development department had spent years trying to activate a few old remote tracking devices. I did it just to see if it could be done, and in doing that I found you and Ms. Norman.”
“What tracking devices?”
Tupper pointed to a tiny rash on Will’s left forearm He poked it with a fat finger. “You’ve felt that little bump just under the skin?”
Will nodded. “I always thought it was, I don’t know, a scar or something.”
Tupper shook his head. “In May of nineteen sixty-seven, you and Ms. Norman believed you had received booster shots, simple immunizations. What was actually injected under your skin was a 333X2 tracking module which almost immediately began to malfunction, mainly because the transmitters trying to locate them were so primitive. These were the first RFID chips, very advanced for that era. By nineteen ninety-three the Compound thought the units were beyond any use, and by ninety-four all were convinced they had expired. I was able to locate the modules about a year ago, and in the last few months I’ve managed to boost the strength of the signals going to and from them. They are not entirely accurate, but they do get us awfully close. Quite efficient for something the size of a fleck of pepper. It has been itchy in the last few weeks, has it not?”
Will nodded, rubbing his arm.
“There you are,” Tupper admitted. “I’m the reason you are here, yet I’m also the reason you are still alive. Today I was able to impress upon Dr. Mondani the importance of your survival, and Mondani in turn was able to placate Mr. Kraft’s lust for your instant removal from the face of the earth, and convince him that it would be better to at least run you through medical a few days in a row and interview the both of you to learn whatever we can from these theoretically failed and dangerous experiments. To buy you time, you understand.”
The fact that he could already be dead wasn’t a priority for Will “Is Jeannie here?”
“Yes. Doctor Mondani was beside himself when, after years of searching for her, he learned that she’d been living and working virtually just down the road.”
“That’s synchronicity for you,” Will said.
Tupper shook his head like an eager schoolboy.
Will asked, “Is she okay?”
“As far as I know. I’ve only heard second hand. I haven’t actually seen her.”
“Is Kraft here with Mondani?”
Tupper nodded.
“Jeez. This must be big.”
“The biggest thing ever. Kraft rarely ventures West. The future of the Compound is at stake.”
“Why tell me this, Tupper?” Will asked. He had long ago ruled out the possibility of getting any help from the Compound.
“Two reasons,” Tupper said, raising a pair of pudgy fingers. “First, I have a genuine interest in seeing Stern’s work fulfilled, an interest that is purely detached and scientific. Medically. Genetically. Sociologically. Can the two of you survive and thrive? Can you show that man can overcome the limitations he is born with?”
“The other reason?”
“The second reason is, uhm, personal.” Tupper’s face reddened further, as if his body were being squeezed in the coils of a great snake, with every drop of blood forced up into his skull. “Your origins, and Ms. Norman’s, are known to only a select few in the Compound, including me. I like the music of Elvis Presley. I like the movies of Marilyn Monroe. I’ve read a great deal about both of them, and consider their lives to be modern tragedies of almost epic proportions. Their lives could have been so different, so much better, if only ... well, if only this and if only that. Their lives had such promise. I think you and Ms. Norman could fulfill that promise. Become more, and yes, less than they were. Not stars, not famous, but good, solid, decent people. I almost feel it is owed to them, that America should give them a second chance, since America took a hand in destroying them. All of their positive potential can live again through the two of you.”
Will thought about this. Tupper was confirming what Will had suspected about Jeannie, and what he’d secretly understood to be the truth of his own origins. His brother had been weak and Will didn’t like to think of himself as having come from the loins of some half-wit hillbilly. He was Stern’s son. He didn’t give a shit about fulfilling promises, and he was pretty sure Jeannie felt the same. He just wanted to live his own life.
“So what’s your plan?” Will asked. “Are you going open the front door and let us walk out of here?”
Tupper shook his head furiously as if Will were serious. “Oh my goodness no, that would be impossible. But I know you’ve escaped from the Compound and Compound West, and I’m sure you will at least attempt it again. What I will try to do in that circumstance is provide a distraction, if and when it is needed.”
“Can I see Jeannie?”
“Oh, I’m afraid that would be difficult.”
“I want to know she’s okay. I need to know.”
“She’s fine, I can assure you. She’s being held in a room just two doors down from you.” Tupper looked at his watch nervously. “I’ve been here too long. I should go. There’s no telling who is monitoring us.” The man shuffled to the door.
“Send her to me. Just for a moment.”
Tupper shook his head again. He held up a finger as if remembering something important as his other hand dipped into one pocket of his lab coat. “I believe this is yours,” he said, holding out the faded ribbon with a pattern of cornflowers.
“Give it to Jeannie,” Will said.
Tupper nodded and slipped out the door.
* * *
Jeannie was sitting on the edge of the bed in her room, her prison. The woman who called herself Stella was standing by the door.
“What’ll it be?” Stella asked again.
Jeannie took a breath. “Okay,” she said, listlessly.
Stella’s smile was luscious.
When Jeannie had gotten over the shock of driving inside the mountain, she realized things had gone from bad to worse. The petulant guy driving the car had pulled to a stop, wrenched open his door, and disappeared. Jeannie and Stella sat a moment, and then their doors were opened. She stepped out into a circle of ten men in black jumpsuits. One of them came forward to frisk her, fingers twitching. Stella held him off by growling, “She’s clean.”
Jeannie was marched down a flight of stairs. Down a corridor. Around a corner. The male guards were replaced by women who looked as hard as nails and were wearing the same black jumpsuits. They arrived in what looked like an infirmary. Jeannie was taken into an examination room. The guards and Stella remained. One of the guards stepped forward about to place the end of a device the size of an electric razor against her neck when Stella held up a hand.
“That’s a stun-gun,” the dark-haired woman said. “It delivers a disabling shock and a nasty burn. You can avoid it b
y not struggling.”
Two of the guards held her arms while a third undressed her with quick motions. Jeannie looked Stella in the eye the whole time. She saw how much effort the woman put into composing herself. Stella’s face was a mask. But Jeannie saw how hungry Stella’s sparkling black eyes had become.
A gray-haired woman in white appeared, a doctor with all the bedside manner of a machine. She led Jeannie behind a partition and examined her with brutal efficiency, giving only a moment’s attention to the bruise on her forehead caused by Stella. The exam was relentlessly thorough, and to Jeannie it seemed to last forever.
She was sent back to the circle of female guards, to dress while they watched dispassionately, Stella less so.
She had been ushered into her cell and when the door had closed she and Stella were alone.
“Your boyfriend?” Stella said, backing Jeannie into a corner. “The one with the pretty mouth? He shot two of my partners. I was very close to one of them. One word from me and I can put you right in the shit with him. Or I can help you. I’m the one who will tell them if you’re worth anything.” Her voice softened considerably. She crossed her arms and looked down on the nervous little rabbit before her. She saw that the roots of Jeannie’s hair were almost white. “I’m the one who can keep you alive. I’m the only one who cares about you.”
Jeannie didn’t answer.
“I can also put in a good word for your boyfriend. Otherwise he won’t last long.”
“What do you mean?” Jeannie asked, afraid for Will.
“I mean he used to be one of us, sweetie, and we don’t take kindly to people who turn against us. That’s treason against the government of the United States. He’s racked up more kills than I could ever hope to match. He’s was one of the best assassins America ever had. Well, one of the best who’s still around to tell about it. And he was paid well for it too.”
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 24