Paradox Bound: A Novel

by Peter Clines

  Eli’s picture should be up on the board, Zeke realized. It needed to be. Eli was a fugitive. He’d aided and abetted. And he was an asshole who’d been making Zeke’s life suck since third grade, whining about every joke or noogie or dodgeball that came his way.

  Every Monday morning Deacon cleaned the whole board off, sorted in the new posters, and put them all back in alphabetical order. He tacked them up. Real tacks, the flat metal ones, not plastic pushpins.

  Zeke entertained the idea of rearranging the posters now to make space for Eli’s poster. This was a federal matter, after all. That’s what the voice on the phone had said. There’d be a poster.

  He imagined himself prying at the tacks, wedging his nails under them and pulling until they slid out of the corkboard. He could have the board stripped in twenty minutes, put back together in maybe half an hour. Eli’s poster would go in the bottom row, but if Zeke swapped it with the FBI Most Wanted guy, Quilt, that’d put Eli up at the end of the second row. It was a good spot. Visible as soon as someone walked into the station.

  Maybe they’d get extras of the Eli poster since he was local. Or he could make copies. Some wanted posters only named the one big crime somebody was wanted for, but hopefully Eli’s would list everythi—

  “Hello, Officer Miller.”

  Zeke spun around and reached for his sidearm. People should know better than to sneak up on a cop. If they wet their pants at the business end of a Smith and Wesson, well, that’s how people learned to respect the uniform.

  But he was on punishment desk duty. In Sanders that meant his holster was empty. A shotgun sat in a quick-release mount behind the counter for emergencies, but right now “behind the counter” wasn’t the side he was on.

  All this rushed through his mind as Zeke registered the man standing behind him. Just a few feet behind him. He hadn’t made a sound coming into the station or walking across the small lobby.

  The tall man wore a dark suit with a matching hat, like in Dragnet or one of those shows about people back in the sixties. He had one hand in his coat, and Zeke’s thoughts went back to the shotgun as the hand came out holding…a leather square. The wallet flipped open to reveal an elaborate silver badge with gold details and a glossy red-white-and-blue inlay. Zeke registered the letters US and DEPARTMENT OF something that began with D before the man snapped the badge holder shut with a casual display of badassery.

  “I’m Fifteen,” said the man. All the sharp edges were gone from the man’s voice, like his words were coming through a handkerchief or scarf. “We spoke on the phone the other day.”

  Zeke’s mind cleared and he remembered the call and the agent. Then he remembered Eli’d ruined any chance to look impressive on the federal level. Zeke bit back his anger and stuck out his hand. “Good to meet you in person, sir.”

  Fifteen looked down at the hand, and for a second Zeke thought the agent was going to leave him hanging. Then the man reached out and closed his fingers around Zeke’s. He had a strong grip. Not in a macho, asshat, scoring-points way. A solid, dependable grip. He pumped Zeke’s hand twice, then released it. “I’ve come to hear your report on Eli Teague.”

  Zeke’s survival sense awoke in the back of his mind and crept forward. “My report?”

  The tall man pulled a long, old-fashioned notepad from inside his suit jacket. “You were instructed to keep Mr. Teague under surveillance. To make sure he didn’t leave Sanders.”

  Zeke’s stomach flopped. His survival sense growled, warned him this conversation was a bad place to be. “Hey—”

  “And yet, two days after you and I spoke, Mr. Teague was seen in Boston, speaking with a known collaborator of our fugitive, one often used to pass supplies and messages between insurgent groups.”

  “Look, I did the best I could. I tried to keep an eye on him, like you said, but he’s a sneaky bastard. Always has been.”

  “So you knew this, but still didn’t take precautions to stop him from getting away.”

  A statement, not a question. Zeke had heard things phrased this way many times in his life. By his parents, his teachers, his assorted bosses. Always with that same tired-but-not-surprised tone.

  Something settled over Zeke. His skin tingled. His pulse slowed. The noise that always cluttered his mind cleared away. Even his growling survival sense quieted itself. The word “epiphany” would mean nothing to him, but on some primal level Zeke understood this was a major moment in his life. The next few minutes would have a profound effect on everything that happened afterward. He needed to be straight and come clean and not spray his usual stream of protective bullshit over everything.

  “No,” he said. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t know what he was going to do, because I was just thinking of him as some wuss from school who was pounding my ex, y’know? I wasn’t seeing the big picture.” He paused for a moment. “I wasn’t given all the information so I could see the big picture. Maybe if I’d known what was really going on, I could’ve done my job better. But I did the best I could with what I had.”

  The agent seemed to consider this. As he did, Zeke noticed the mask the man wore. A transparent one with eyebrows and cheeks and lips painted on the plastic. Probably some special government-issue thing. It seemed weird he hadn’t noticed it before, but maybe that was the point of it. It made it hard to pick out the details of the agent’s face.

  Fifteen had his eyes closed behind the mask, like he was thinking. He stood rock still. It was almost as if he’d started daydreaming. He turned his head toward the wanted posters. “Are you a citizen of the United States, Officer Miller?”

  Zeke twitched. It’d only been eight or nine seconds of silence, but the agent’s voice startled him all over again. Like it was coming from nowhere, even though the man was right in front of him. “What?”

  Two fingers flipped the notebook closed. “It’s a simple question. I need to make sure before we continue.”

  Zeke nodded. “Yeah, I’m one hundred percent American. All the way back to my great-great-grandpa. My family’s been in Sanders almost the whole time.”

  “Were you born here?” It was a we’re-all-friends-here question. One to keep him at ease.

  “Yeah. Well, Wentworth-Douglass down in Dover. It was the closest hospital.”

  Fifteen gave two slow nods.

  Zeke had to admit, the whole mask thing was a little creepy. Now that he was really looking at it, it looked like one of the cheap-ass masks they sold at CVS around Halloween, or the big costume stores that opened over in New Hampshire every September. He’d seen people wear those a few times, once when some losers had tried to rob the Cumberland Farms store on the south side of town. They didn’t hide shit. This one, though, blurred all the agent’s features so the only thing Zeke could see was skin tone.

  Definitely some kind of government-issue thing.

  “I would like to offer you,” Fifteen said, “an opportunity for personal advancement.”

  “A…what?”

  The agent slid his notebook back into his coat, pulled out a white square, and—

  The big man was three steps closer, pressing the square over Zeke’s nose and mouth. Zeke tried to slam the hand away, but it was like hitting a heavy bag at the gym. Something sharp burned his eyes as something sweet tickled his nose and throat.

  “Congratulations, Officer,” Fifteen said as the lights dimmed. “You’ve been selected for service.”

  13

  A few miles rolled by under Eleanor’s wheels. On the dashboard, the rotating cylinder drifted back and forth between sixty and sixty-five miles per hour. The broad, flat desert stretched out around them, marked here and there by distant hills.

  Harry drummed her fingers on the steering wheel again. She did it a lot. For a while Eli tried humming different songs under his breath to see if anything lined up with the beat of her fingers. Classic rock. Pop stuff. Country. Movie themes. Even a few children’s songs he remembered from grade school. Whatever she tapped to was either very obscure or c
ompletely random.

  A mile marker approached them and flashed by.

  “Back in 1764,” Harry said, keeping her eyes on the road, “a group of British colonials became frustrated with the Empire. With their lack of representation in their own government. Britain had a Parliament at this point, but the American colonists had very little say in it.”

  “And taxes,” said Eli. “They were upset about taxes.”

  “Not as much as you’d think. It wasn’t the tax itself—they understood the need for it, and taxes were actually quite low at the time. People simply didn’t like having no say in when it was levied or how it was used.

  “Effectively, they felt like they were being oppressed by foreigners. That they were a country ruled by Britain rather than part of Britain. And, with several of them, this notion took root. That the American Colonies were a separate country.” The cadence of her voice shifted, relaxed. The words came out at a comfortable, practiced pace. “The idea grew and eventually it occurred to them that they could be a separate country. That they could declare independence.”

  Eli nodded again.

  “Looking back with the benefit of history,” Harry continued, “this seems pretty straightforward. It’s what you and I grew up with and were taught in school.”

  “Wait,” said Eli, “you were taught this in school?”

  “Of course.”

  His eyes went up and down her colonial outfit. She looked at him for a moment, then understood. “I was born in 1885, Mr. Teague, I just like the coat.” Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “But we’re getting off point. Don’t interrupt.”

  “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying, independence seems like a straightforward idea in hindsight. At the time, though, this was revolutionary. In several ways. Nothing like this had happened before. Oh, conquered countries had rebelled, overthrown their rulers, and reasserted themselves. Stolen lands had been stolen back or abandoned to the original owners. But for a colony, an established extension of a country, to just declare itself independent…it simply didn’t happen. It hadn’t happened in hundreds of years of colonial expansion.”

  “I know all this,” Eli said. “More or less.”

  “I’m setting the stage, so to say.” Harry leaned on the steering wheel and the Model A followed a curve in the road around a tall, rust-red hill. “It’s one thing for a group of educated aristocrats and upper class to come to this conclusion, but how do you get the farmers and merchants and blacksmiths behind this idea? Keep in mind, many of them were only four or five generations away from feudalism. The idea of nations overall, let alone declaring independence from one of the oldest empires on the planet, was simply beyond them.”

  “That’s silly,” said Eli. “People weren’t stupid back then.”

  “They weren’t,” she agreed. “I’ve met many of them. But you’re looking at it with hindsight again. It seems simple and straightforward to you and me, but they lacked the proper framework.”

  “So they had to come up with a great sales pitch,” said Eli. “And they did.”

  “Not precisely. They did have a…” Harry worked the term on her tongue. “A sales pitch. Thomas Paine and others continued to push the idea of unfair taxes. But again, most people were used to the idea of unfairness and taxes. They accepted it as a simple truth of the world.”

  “So what did they do?”

  She let another half mile slip past them. “They created a dream.”

  He waited a moment, then waved her on.

  “They needed something to inspire people,” Harry explained, “for the citizens to rally behind and believe in. Something which could be the base for their whole idea of a fledgling nation. And Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea of forging a dream.”

  Eli shifted his jaw from side to side. “Okay…”

  She took another breath. “Franklin was a scholar and a high-ranking Freemason. While he was in Europe, he used his status as a Grand Master to gain access to certain historical documents and religious texts. With these, he designed a ritual, a conjuration of sorts. When he returned to the Americas in 1775, he gathered some of the founding fathers from other lodges to perform it with him.

  “They summoned Ptah, the Egyptian god of creation. The blacksmith god. And they came to an accord, which resulted in him forging a dream for them. The American Dream.”

  She glanced at his face. Eli stared back at her. Another sign appeared on the road ahead. It rushed forward, passed, and vanished behind them. He never registered what it said.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said.

  “I can’t say if it’s the precise, gospel truth. I can only say it’s how the story came down the Chain to me.”

  “This is…that’s ridiculous. Every part of it is nonsense.”

  “It’s all true.”

  “Why not throw Santa and the Easter Bunny in there?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Mr. Teague.”

  “Absurd?” He shook his head. “The Freemasons aren’t some mystic cult. They’re a service organization like the Shriners or…or Rotary Club. I did night shifts at the Cumberland Farms down in South Berwick every summer through college. They’d stop in all the time after meetings.” Even as he said it, Eli pictured the line of rumpled businessmen showing up one after another to buy convenience-store coffee or gasoline.

  “A service organization which goes back thousands of years,” she said. “One that many of the founding fathers happened to belong to.”

  He shook his head. “It’s nonsense.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re saying the American Dream is an actual, physical thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s an actual thing that a group of Freemasons had a god make for them so they could convince everyone in the country to leave England?”

  “That’s the gist of it, yes.”

  He stared out at the desert. The shadows of hills and stones and lumpy cacti stretched longer as the sun sank behind them. “That’s completely nuts.”

  “And yet,” she said, “like the Garrett carburetor, still true.”

  Eli crossed his arms. The Model A ate up another mile of highway with its tires before he spoke again. “So the whole American Revolution happened because of an Egyptian god?”

  “Such a silly idea, I know,” said Harry. “If it was true, there’d be giant obelisks in the nation’s capital, pyramids on the currency, noticeable things like that.”

  Eli opened his mouth to respond, then shut it. “Is this dream in Washington?” he asked, half a mile later.

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Philadelphia?”

  “No.”

  “Where is it? Can we go see it?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no one knows where it’s gone. It was stolen from the place it was kept. I’m searching for it. Many people are.”

  “Right,” he said. “You’re all searching for the American Dream.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “I did tell you it was a lot to take in all at once. And we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “How,” he started. The sentence died after the one word. “Why do you…did you make all of this up?”

  “Of course not.” She frowned and gave him a disappointed look.

  “So where’s it all coming from? Where did you hear this?”

  She sighed and focused on the road. “Around. Down the Chain. The person who brought me into the search told me most of it.”

  “Most of it?”

  “People talk. They trade information.”

  “So all of this is just stories you’ve heard?”

  “Not just stories. People have been observing and testing this for hundreds of years.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “Yes, hundreds. We travel in history, Mr. Teague. We’ve spent more years searching for the dream than the country’s actually existed.”

  “How�
��s that even possible?”

  “It’s a big country,” she said, “with a lot of history behind it. If you’re going for square footage, it has an amazing amount of history for such a relatively young nation.”

  “How long have you been searching for it?”

  She glanced at him. “Just over nine years.”

  He blinked. “How old are you?”

  “A gentleman shouldn’t ask such a thing of a lady.”

  “I don’t think I’m much of a gentleman,” said Eli, “and I’m really getting the sense you’re not much of a lady.”

  “And there’s that wit again.”

  “My point is, you can’t be much older than me.”

  “I turn thirty in a few months,” she said. “More or less.”

  “More or less?”

  “It’s hard to keep track when you don’t see the months in order. I may be thirty already. No more than that, though. Maybe just twenty-nine.” She glanced away from the road to meet his eyes. “I was nineteen when I first went on the road.”

  “That’s young.”

  “Old for the time I was raised. I had friends who were married at eighteen. My parents were worried I’d be an old maid.”

  Eli let a mile go by, and then another. “So, you’re searching for the American Dream.”

  Harry nodded. “Yes.”

  “And the car, Eleanor, is a time machine. Like in Back to the Future.”

  “What?”

  He waved a hand at the dashboard. “Is that what all the switches are? Controls or something?”

  “That’s the ignition. I don’t want to risk losing a key, and we…I needed some way to safeguard her against hijacking.”

  “So Eleanor is…”

  “Just a car. With some modifications to the engine and the ignition.”