by Martha Carr
He had grabbed Ned and held him at gunpoint for a moment until Wallis had shown Oscar the thumb drive that held the Circle’s plan to rise from the ashes. Ned had escaped and Wallis had squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for Oscar to finally kill her.
Harriet Jones still had other plans for her daughter, and they didn’t include dying. She had made her way into the house and shot Oscar in the gut, chatting with him while he died, telling him how much no one would miss him. Wallis tried to get her wits about her and call for an ambulance. It was too late though and Oscar died but not before Wallis saw the lengths her mother was willing to go to make sure no one bothered her family.
She may have looked as cool as could be as Oscar grunted and slowly bled out in their bedroom but Wallis saw the anger barely perceptible in her mother’s face. Harriet was angry enough to kill and would do so whenever necessary.
It wasn’t too long after that, Harriet had strongly suggested they redecorate the room as if that would be enough to loosen the grip of the memories.
“Mom?” Wallis called out. “Are you upstairs?”
Wallis heard the quick, careful steps of her mother’s heels. She rarely wore flats.
“Stop yelling like a fishwife, please. What is the matter? You never call me ‘mom’.” Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?” she asked again.
“There’s someone outside that may be watching the house. You know anything about that?” Wallis took Joe off of his leash and he immediately ran to a front window and started barking again. Harriet looked at Joe and her mouth became a determined straight line of deep red lipstick.
“No, but I will,” she said, quickly grabbing her purse that was resting on the front table. Wallis noticed there seemed to be a certain heft to the leather bag.
“Are you carrying a gun with you all the time?” she asked, “Even in my home?”
“Successfully growing old in Management with any sense of dignity requires the occasional target practice,” Harriet said.
“Not at people, not as a way of life and definitely not in my home,” said Wallis, grabbing her mother by the arm. “No gunfire in my neighborhood, not one single shot.”
“I’ll do my best, dear.”
“When did you become Annie Oakley?”
“You’re dating yourself, dear. I’m more like… Who am I, Ned?” she yelled toward the stairs.
“So I got these lungs from you,” said Wallis.
“Robocop,” came the answer from somewhere upstairs. “Not all of your parts are original.”
Wallis was sure she heard a short laugh and a gurgle from someone in the kitchen.
“I should go check on Norman,” she said.
“Hmmm,” said Harriet, raising one of those perfectly drawn eyebrows. “I’m going to let that one go because it’s true,” she said, patting her artificial hip, “and because it’s the first time I’ve seen you even attempt a smile in a very long time.”
“The car is to the right, across the street about a block down. You can’t miss it,” said Wallis.
“It’s probably some fool Watcher,” said Harriet. “I’ll set him straight.”
She watched her mother walk quickly up to the top of the driveway and survey both directions.
“Be careful, Mom,” whispered Wallis.
Wallis knew that Harriet really didn’t care for Management and their tactics. That only added to her frustration when Harriet would go on about the importance of honoring your roots. They had gotten into an argument the last time her mother stopped by the office to drop off a set of commemorative dessert plates of the newest royal, Prince George.
“What roots, Mother?” Wallis had blurted out, when Harriet had insisted that their roots were just as good as the British royal family. “The ones that have thought up more than one way to kill every one of us? I’m pretty sure the Windsors gave all of that up well over two hundred years ago. What’s our problem?”
“You’re a Jones, they’re good people, and you’re also a Carter from my line. My side of the family is English, from royalty.”
“Management royalty, Mother.”
“Yes, well, maybe that’s true and the more obvious kind of royalty too. That matters, you’ll see.”
“How do you manage to overlook all of the rest?” Wallis asked, exasperated.
“I have no choice, dear. They’re my kin. You don’t get to choose who shows up for Thanksgiving dinner. You just set another place at the table. Trust me, I’d have all kinds of ideas if that wasn’t true.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t overlook what they’ve done.”
“Some,” Harriet said firmly. “Some of them have done, Wallis, and they were punished, all of them. I saw to that,” said Harriet, her voice rising with every word. Wallis had touched a nerve. “It’s very easy to be so idealistic, dear when someone else is keeping the peace. It’s okay, even better that you go on about the business of living. But don’t disrespect those who do all of the heavy lifting that makes it possible to make a little meatloaf without having to actually kill the cow.”
“I’ve heard the other stories. I heard what happened years ago,” Wallis said, quietly, not willing to let it go completely.
“That was another time, another place. It’s different now,” said Harriet.
“Then explain to me how Alice Watkins died,” she said, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Harriet was about to say something when Wallis’ assistant, Laurel had interrupted and said there was a phone call for Wallis. Harriet slowly put down the small plates and quietly left, gently shutting the front door to the office without another word. Wallis wasn’t sure her mother was angry or thought it better to give things a little time.
Wallis didn’t hear from her again till her mother stopped by this morning, unannounced. Harriet rarely ever called first.
“She’s too smart to warn us first,” said Norman, when they saw her cream colored Cadillac pull into the driveway.
She had brought by a small wooden bowl for Ned, big enough to fit in his hand and was telling him it came from a tulip poplar that had been started as a sapling on the grounds of the first Jones to come to America.
“He helped bring a sense of order to a new country,” said Harriet, holding the young man’s chin in her hand. Ned was still as thin as a reed but he was already taller than his grandmother and Wallis could see how much he loved her.
That’s why she decided a walk was the best choice.
Ned never really got over the shooting. He had immediately stopped sleeping in his bedroom at the top of the house and slowly migrated all of his things into the guest bedroom closer to his parents. Sometimes he would cry out in the night like someone was chasing him and Norman would have to hold him tight to convince him it was only a nightmare. None of it was real.
Wallis hated that part because it was a lie.
Most of it was real.
They were just doing their best to hold the barbarians outside of their lives. There was no way to ever know if today was the day they would no longer be able to do it.
Wallis stood in the doorway, trying to hear anything that sounded out of place, wondering if her mother was okay.
“What’s going on?” asked Norman. He was drying his hands with the dish towel from the kitchen.
“My mother has become our one-woman neighborhood watch. Did you know she carries a gun?”
“I assumed she did,” said Norman, looking uncomfortable.
“That was two years ago. I didn’t think she carried one all the time. She should have been back by now. Why is it I feel a little better with a senior citizen as our muscle?”
“Because she has small firearms training and not much restraint when it comes to her family,” said Norman, trying to smile. “You know, she’s not the only one looking out for us.”
Wallis let out the breath she was holding. “I’m going to go check on her,” she said.
“We’ll go together,” said Norman. “A family stroll to check the property,” he sa
id, trying to make a joke.
When they got to the street Harriet was standing in the road by herself looking in every direction like she was trying to see every corner.
“What is it, mother?” Wallis asked.
“He gave up a little too easily,” said Harriet. “There must be some kind of backup,” she said, as she looked over to the Blazney house.
“No way,” said Wallis. “You think the new residents are Watchers of a more permanent variety?”
“It would be a lot easier to keep an eye on things if someone could take a walk around their own neighborhood,” said Norman.
Wallis looked at the two of them and realized she had been missing the opportunity.
“We need to talk,” she said. “The three of us have to start working together and come up with a plan.”
“That’s my girl,” said Harriet. Wallis noticed Norman trying not to smile.
Chapter Seven
The new numbers were due back to the agent who acted as a courier for Maurel by the end of the day. The issues weren’t on the end of the older systems manager who was known around the office as Maurel Samonte but the program wasn’t cooperating. The entire computer system was frozen and even seemed to be deleting newer information.
Maurel wasn’t her real name. It was only the latest role she had been given as an operative for the Circle. Her favorite had been playing Madame Bella but that was already a few years and a couple of identities ago. Training told her not to look backwards. Too easy to make a slip that way.
There had been countless names in the thirty-five years she had assumed different identities in order to help further the cause. Frankly, for Maurel it was about trying to keep a certain balance in the world and she had seen enough of how Management did business to know that if they ever were able to operate without any checks the planet would be divided up into a modern form of monarchies. It would appear as if there was an entire middle class that was living a fairly decent life but it would come at the price of being able to choose to opt out or dream bigger. Life would become very defined.
That was already the fate of families who put their children into the private feeder schools that supplied Management and grew up to take their place in the corporate, political or military rank and file. They were even spilling into the media and sitting on early morning talk show couches. It wasn’t a bad life, unless someone had a different idea about how their life ought to look or wanted to openly express a different kind of opinion. There was no out clause except openly joining the opposition and hoping no one cared enough not to kill them off.
In her latest assignment with the Circle, she had been the document manager for the Kroton system within Westin Fullerton, Incorporated, for almost a year. She walked in knowing how the corporate game was played. The larger the corporation, the more narrowly defined someone’s role was and they were expected to stay within those lines.
Management operatives who had sipped the Kool-Aid did particularly well in large corporate settings.
People were rewarded with lives that played out a lot like roadmaps with very few surprises.
Maurel at least knew how to play the part.
Previous roles in her years as an operative had put her in a cubicle before and she knew that time didn’t change the way humans got along in close quarters. She was sitting at her desk, waiting for the technician on the phone to fix the problem so she could get back to work.
The off-site technician was mostly trying to placate Maurel. He wasn’t really concerned with whether or not the problem was fixed today or even tomorrow.
He had no way of knowing a simple computer glitch was getting in the way of a Circle operation or that he was talking to one of their oldest agents.
Maurel Samonte was on a schedule and needed to get the information on enemy troop movements in the escalating civil war from the files where it had been left by the eyes and ears the Circle had in place to different locations on the server where it could be found by the officers in the field who needed it. Sooner rather than later.
The war was mostly being played out only a couple of states to the north. There were rumors that it was starting to spread into the heartland of America.
From the information that was gathered, Maurel could see that was true but it wasn’t her job to confirm gossip for other operatives or to even comment in any way. Her main focus was to be a modern version of a digital telephone operator right under the nose of Management.
Maurel was the only one the Keeper trusted enough to be able to stay calm while sitting among Management’s people all day and still focus on what needed to be done. The orders had been delivered by an agent in person and told to her verbally so there would be no record. She was given the background on her new role and placed in the position by a temp agency that knew how to sell her to the company. After that, Maurel made herself invaluable and before long she was absorbed into the company. She didn’t know if there was a backup plan in case they had let her go after a few months. That wasn’t part of her job and Maurel knew that to be a good agent meant to always have a singleness of purpose.
The purpose might have looked to outsiders like a moving target with every new set of orders but once the path was set, she followed them to the last line. This time it was to keep the information flowing in the right directions behind the scene.
To follow the new orders though, she had to take on a new life again with all that entailed and let go of any sense of schedule or order she had managed to create for herself. It had taken her awhile to even find a decent cup of coffee. There was a cafeteria on the first floor but Maurel thought that the coffee they brewed in large urns lined up against a wall, tasted like swill. It was one of the few things that she was unwilling to just go with the flow to blend into a crowd.
Fortunately, being snobby about coffee had become an American pastime. She found a small hole-in-the wall run by a young couple from Panama that had a much better brew.
She was used to being moved around like more of an asset to a cause than a human being who might mind picking up everything and changing her identity, the way she looked and even her name. She was an expert at appearing friendly at work without revealing too many details while learning the small things about others.
There was one real friend she had managed to make on an old assignment. It was a very rare occurrence and Maurel was hoping to see her again someday. Wallis Jones was special and had done what was necessary to keep her family safe. She wasn’t tied to a cause or trying to prove something even after she found out about her own legacy. Maurel respected that, maybe even admired Wallis.
One day Maurel hoped their paths would cross again but until then there would be no contact of any kind, no mention of being from anywhere other than Central Illinois and farmland. No long conversations about it that might lead to too many questions. Just a short answer and a nod before getting back to work. If necessary, Maurel would retreat into what looked like a bad mood and put on her ear buds till the person found someone else to bond with and moved on.
That was protocol.
An operative was always set up to be from somewhere not too far away from where they were currently stationed that was populated enough so that not knowing everyone wouldn’t be seen as odd. That way if someone had a cousin or an old friend who was from there, there was a natural cover.
The childhoods of the Management people around Maurel were vetted to make sure she wasn’t building a past that came too close to anyone who was already there.
Then her background was slipped into the database of an old high school and the appropriate civil records in case anyone wanted to look. When the assignment was finally over the same material would be erased as if she had never been there. Her real records were wiped clean a long time ago and even Maurel rarely thought about the memories that once belonged to her.
It was all just a label anyway.
“Hey, how long has it been like this?” asked the young technician. Maurel thought he
looked bored. He kept trying different things to fix the system and to get her computer to work again.
Maurel made a point of not offering too much assistance. He couldn’t know that she knew more about how the system worked than he did and was a specialist of sorts, trained by the Circle to do more than one related job.
At the same time that Maurel was compiling a digital history of the thousands of documents and presentations that flow through any corporation, she was also tasked with being a monitor at one of the six world-wide locations where the Circle maintained servers. Each monitor was to ensure the safety of information that was gathered from all over their territory. Most covered several countries.
Maurel’s territory overlapped a nearby system that went from the Carolinas and included Kentucky and Ohio as it cut through North America from the mid-Atlantic stretching throughout Canada. Each server gathered a different set of data.
All but one of the locations were located in favorable geographic areas where the Circle had the political and legal clout to help protect their assets.
They were more secure than the Federal Reserve and contained assets far more valuable than money. The online clouds were full of metadata gathered on thousands and thousands of subjects sent in by various Circle operatives all over each region. Phone records, troop movements, family histories, GPS records from cars and smart devices and even shopping habits. All of it had a special tag included that denoted Management, Circle or no affiliation and affected how the data was sorted and then mined.
The other locations were the ones that sat in neutral areas that looked far more nondescript and were mostly surrounded by Circle families or no one at all. The one exception was where Maurel sat every day for at least eight hours. She was the only operator at risk monitoring the only information reserve that sat in enemy territory. It was all deemed necessary because of the value of the special category of information that she could steal from her employer.
Only the Keeper and the top cell in the Circle knew the location of this particular server or the identity of its operator. The records that were kept on the other locations only listed five areas. Maurel’s region, number six, was kept hidden from almost everyone.