by Jen Blood
“He’s evil,” Will says. “I don’t care what you say.”
“Isaac loves us,” I say. Will stops, serious the way only kids can be.
“I love you,” he says. He’s eleven years old. I just turned eight. “Isaac will kill us all. You’ll see. He’s a bad man, Erin.”
“Isaac loves us,” my father says. “There’s something wrong with Will. He doesn’t believe. You believe, don’t you, Erin? You just need to forget the dark spots. Move beyond them.” Over and over in the night.
No sleep, for those days.
No food.
“We’re bleeding the darkness from you,” my father says. “The way they did for me. You love this place. You love Isaac. Isaac loves you. He would never hurt us.”
I’m so tired, my stomach empty. The room is dark and closed off—I don’t know how long I’ve been here.
“I do,” I say. “I love Isaac. I love Payson Isle.”
“And you love me, don’t you?” my father says. There’s something sad and frightened and lonely in the words. “You still love me, Bean?”
“I do, Daddy. I still love you.”
“Allie’s okay. You don’t have to look for her anymore—she’s right here. You see her?”
And I do, then—in the dark and the cold, my stomach shriveled from hunger, mouth parched. She sits beside me with her thick glasses and her pretty dress, hair braided the way it always has been.
“She’s okay?” I say.
“She’s okay,” my father says. “And Isaac loves us. Will is wrong—he’s a mean-spirited boy. He has the devil in him. You won’t listen to him again. You understand me, Bean? Isaac loves us.”
“Please let me out,” I say. My voice quavers, tears in them now.
“You believe? Say it again, Erin. Isaac loves us.”
“He hurts people.”
My father stands suddenly, and I can see his anger. “Isaac loves us. I can’t let you go until you believe that. You have to believe,” he says. He crouches down beside me. Cups my cheek in his hand. “You have to believe me, Erin.”
He stands, even when I call out for him. Opens the door. I see light outside. Someone is waiting. Isaac. My father closes the door.
He leaves me in the dark.
I was still standing on the path when the world rushed back, realization with it. I’d remembered the bit about Isaac killing Allie when I was in Mexico last year; had known that the child I remembered that last year on Payson Isle wasn’t real. I just didn’t know the details—and had no idea what my father’s role had been in all of it. My stomach curdled; a seismic ache rocked my temples. All of it had been lies. Will Colby—the boy I remembered as cruel and hateful—had tried to warn me. We had been friends.
My father was the real monster, protecting Isaac every step of the way.
How many lies do you believe?
“Erin?”
I whirled, nearly coming out of my skin. When I saw who it was, I almost lost it all over again. “Are you really here?” I said.
Mitch Cameron smiled. He seemed to find nothing strange in the question. “It seemed like you could use a hand.” He studied me for a second when I just stood there, still shaken, tears falling. “You’re remembering.”
I nodded, brushing ineffectually at my eyes. “Yeah. I’ve gotta tell you, I can think of better ways to spend my time.”
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine you can.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked after a few seconds, gradually forcing myself back to reason. Whatever had happened in the past, however shitty it seemed now, it couldn’t be undone. But maybe we could do something about the future.
“Not long,” Cameron said. “A few hours.”
“Did you hear what happened to Diggs’ father?”
“I did.” Any trace of a smile vanished. “I told you two not to come back here.”
“You’ve seen the list; you know what’s coming next. You really think we could have stayed away?”
“J. will think the same thing, if they don’t already. You’re playing directly into their hands.”
“You said you’ve only been here for a few hours,” I said. “So does that mean you weren’t the one to kill Reverend Diggins, then?” He didn’t look surprised at the suggestion, though he shook his head.
“No. It wasn’t me.”
“But you know who did,” I pressed, reading him. “Don’t you?”
He didn’t say anything. What Diggs had said about my mom ran through my mind briefly before I chased it away. Kat wouldn’t do this.
“Jenny?” I said.
He wouldn’t look at me. “She left again, a couple of months ago. She didn’t say where she was going—just that she was going to stop them, once and for all.”
“And taking J. down means killing anyone who might kill for them?”
“To her?” he said. “It’s possible.” Probable was more like it. Jenny had been working with J. since she was a toddler, as far as I could tell. Bred to be a psycho, in other words. Of course, I wasn’t so sure I didn’t fit into that category myself these days.
“But you don’t think killing their operatives will stop them,” I said. “This isn’t the right approach?”
“Not now. The people who kill for J. now—the operatives on those lists—are just puppets, most of them brainwashed with no idea who or what they’re really killing for. It was different before.”
“Before what?” I asked.
“When Mandrake was in charge. Then, those doing the killing were closely tied to the organization.”
“Like you,” I said. In addition to his initials, I suspected that it was Cameron’s social security number on at least half a dozen of the entries on the list we’d decrypted, including the fire on Payson Isle. “So that changed with new management?” He nodded. That brought me back to the question that had been fueling Diggs and me for the past year. “So, who exactly is this new management? Who runs J. now?”
“I don’t know,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.
My eyebrows shot up. “Seriously? You’ve worked for them your whole life. How could you not know?”
“After Mandrake was killed, everything changed. Secrecy was paramount. Triggers were selected outside the project, and trained for one mission only. Operatives had little contact with one another, and no contact at all with the highest echelon of the organization.”
“So how the hell are we supposed to stop them, if even you don’t know who we’re trying to stop?”
He leveled a long, heated stare at me before he dropped his gaze. “You’ve forgotten—you’re not supposed to stop them. You’re supposed to leave that to me.”
“Okay. Well, then how the hell are you supposed to stop them if you don’t know who you’re trying to stop?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he said reluctantly. “Come on, let’s go back to the house. I’m curious to hear what kind of plan you’ve come up with.”
I didn’t tell him that, so far, we didn’t really have a plan so much as the blind belief that some action was better than no action at all. A belief that, thus far, hadn’t proven completely accurate.
We started down the trail, retracing my steps back to the house with Cameron beside me. He actually looked good—better than what I’d seen from him in the past, anyway. He was still on the thin side, but his face had lost that drawn look. Life running from J. agreed with him.
“Have you heard anything from Kat?” I asked. “Is she here, too?”
“I convinced her to stay put.”
I paused to look at him. “So you’re still in touch, then.”
“Yes.”
Was that a blush on Mitch Cameron’s face? “Are you two together?”
“That’s none of your business. If it were, though, I would tell you that Katherine remains devoted to Maya…despite the distance.”
“And the fact that Maya doesn’t know if Kat’s alive or dead.”
“Your mother has ne
ver been the most rational woman.”
Maya was a world-class neurosurgeon who had been my mother’s girlfriend before our whole world got up-ended last year. As far as I knew, she still had no idea what had happened to any of us when we all vanished after Cameron’s daughter blew Kat’s house up. Dating anyone in my family should come with hazard pay.
“You two are close, though. Friends,” I said. “How’s she doing?”
He smiled, just faintly. “You mean is she still drinking?”
“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
“The last I knew, no. Again, not that it’s your business. She stopped while we were running last year. To my knowledge, she hasn’t had a drink since before Coba.”
“If anything was going to drive you back to the bottle, I guess it’d be knowing your ex blew his brains out in front of your kid.” It was meant to come out pithy—instead, I just sounded overly dramatic and a little nuts. “Sorry. Forget I said that.”
“She was more concerned about you, actually,” Cameron said. “Is more concerned about you.”
Strangely enough, that didn’t seem implausible. If all the other memories of my childhood were just fantasy, who knew what Kat’s role had actually been in those years. Sure, she’d beaten the tar out of me more than once—it was hard to just sweep that under the rug. As far as I knew, though, at least she’d been honest with me.
Cameron and I reached the path up to the boarding house, and stopped. Or Cameron stopped, rather. I turned when I realized he wasn’t beside me anymore.
“Are you coming?”
He frowned. Almost shivered. “I hate this place.”
“Have you been here a lot? I mean…besides the obvious.” When he’d set the Payson Church on fire with thirty-plus people inside.
“A few times.”
“When?”
The front door opened behind me before he could answer. I turned. Diggs stood there, looking wary.
“Looks like you picked up a friend,” he said.
“You know me and strays,” I said.
“Hello, Diggs.” Cameron walked up the path to join him.
“You got Solomon’s message, I see,” Diggs said.
“I did. I thought I’d come see what kind of trouble you two have gotten yourselves into this time.”
“Just trying to save the world,” Diggs said. “And failing miserably. Same old shtick.” He opened the door and stood aside so we could enter.
“Considering your track record,” Cameron said, “have you considered getting a new act?”
Chapter Twelve
With no one to trip over in the boarding house, we set up camp in the meeting room again. Diggs sat beside me, casting an uneasy glance my way every so often. Despite our fight earlier, he kept no physical distance between us. I could still feel the frustration that radiated from him, though.
“Our big question is whether something will still happen if the operative J. had in place and the secondary operative were both taken out of play,” I asked after the niceties—however brief—were out of the way. I directed the question at Cameron, and tried not to reflect on the fact that phrases like “primary and secondary operatives” and “taken out of play” were now part of everyday conversation.
“Losing those two individuals won’t have an impact on the final mission,” he said without hesitation. Another theory shot to hell. “As team leaders, we were trained to come up with contingencies if something happened and the trigger was somehow disabled.”
“The trigger was disabled?” Diggs repeated. “These are people you’re talking about.” He stood and walked away. “They’re not weapons. It was my fucking father who got run down the other night, Cameron. You screw with these people’s heads, and you turn them into killers. Let’s tell it like it is.”
Cameron didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like he could argue the point. Considering what he’d done for the organization over the years, the number of lives he’d taken, Mitch Cameron knew all too well about J.’s methods.
“We’re all agreed here,” I said. “J. does horrible things. But now the most important thing we can do is stop them before it happens here. So, how do we find the other ‘triggers’? Or whatever you want to call them,” I added, in deference to Diggs.
I looked at Cameron. He hesitated.
“We can’t let this town lose more than it already has,” I said when no one answered. “First Payson Isle back in 1990, then the shit-storm I brought here pursuing this whole thing a couple of years ago… Diggs’ father. The Reynolds. The least I can do is try to save this friggin’ cesspool now. How do we stop it?”
“I don’t know,” Cameron said. Definitely not what I was hoping for.
“Well, think,” Diggs said. “The primary and secondary ‘triggers’ have been decommissioned. What happens next? They haven’t programmed half the town, right? How many potential psychotic assassins do we have floating around a town with less than fifteen hundred people in it?”
“I told you,” Cameron said. He didn’t sound quite as patient as he had before. “I don’t know.”
Diggs sighed, that frustration once more at its tipping point, and leaned across the table to push J.’s list toward Cameron.
“Explain this to me,” he said. “Your initials—MC—are everywhere on this thing. The social security number belongs to the guy who actually does the killing, right? We figured that much out: November 1978, that social belongs to Jim Jones. Oklahoma City, 1995—that’s Tim McVeigh’s social. So this entry here—August, 1990… That’s you?”
Cameron stared at the list for a moment before he shook his head, never meeting my gaze. “No. That’s not me.”
“But you were the one who set the fire…right?” I said. “I mean—you did it. That’s what you’ve said all along.”
“I did. That wasn’t the original plan, but I was the one who lit the match. Everything happened too quickly. I went in. Did what needed to be done.”
“Setting fire to a building with more than thirty people in it,” Diggs clarified.
Cameron looked at him coolly. “Yes.”
“If the social security number doesn’t belong to you, who does it belong to then?” Diggs pressed. “It shows up a few times here.”
“You weren’t able to trace it?”
“No,” I said. “We tried to find out, but kept running into brick walls. There are a few socials that are like that. We’ve had someone working with us on it, but even he can’t get the names.”
Again, Cameron went quiet. He wouldn’t look at me. That heavy, awful ball of dread that seemed to be nesting in my intestines lately set up camp once more.
“Does it belong to my father?” I said. “All those other entries, after the fire on Payson Isle—my father was responsible for all those?” We’d looked into every atrocity, until we knew the details cold: ritual killings, mass shootings, unexplained disappearances, fires… We just didn’t know who every perpetrator had been.
But now it looked like we’d found one more.
“If you look at the dates for that operative,” Cameron said, “you’ll note that he wasn’t active between 1979 and 1990. When he was on Payson Isle, your father truly had severed ties with J. We caught up to him when Rebecca Ashmont began asking questions, though. Dexter Mandrake gave the order. I spoke with your father shortly before the fire. He was meant to be the trigger.”
“But he backed out,” I said.
“He ran,” Cameron agreed. “I was the team leader. It was my job to see that it was carried out.”
“So the team leader—we were right, that’s what the initials at the end of each entry stand for, then,” Diggs said.
“That’s right.”
“The initials at the end of the entry for Littlehope in April,” I said. “They’re LW. That’s the person in charge of the whole thing? If this guy’s triggers are disabled, he’s the one who has to make sure the plan is carried out?”
“In essence,” Cameron said.
“Half the things that happen over the next five years have those initials attached,” Diggs said. “Dozens of locations around the world… Dozens of different social security numbers, all representing human beings about to go off like time bombs. So who the hell is this LW?”
“I don’t know,” Cameron said. “There are tiers within the project, varying levels of responsibility. At the top is the project leader: Dexter Mandrake initially, before he was replaced.”
“By whom?” Diggs asked.
Cameron looked away, clearly pained.
“You can’t seriously have no idea,” I said. “You must at least have a theory. For Christ’s sake, Cameron—just give us something, would you? The only thing I can think is that you’re still protecting them.” He had no response for that, but it was clear from the way his eyes hardened that the words had an impact. “Will you please just say?” I finally prompted.
He stood and pushed back from the table. “Honest to god, sometimes you remind me so much of your mother it’s maddening. I’m not protecting them, you idiots, I’m protecting you. Which is what I’ve been trying to do for the past year, and you’re making it damned near impossible. An all-expenses-paid life in Australia, and what do you do? Turn around and come back here.”
“Forgive me for having a conscience,” I said. “And stop trying to protect us—I don’t want protection. I want these assholes to go down, once and for all. I’ll keep going at it with or without your help, so why don’t you just tell us what you know already.” He still didn’t say anything. “You really don’t have a clue who the head of the project is?”
There was no hesitation when he nodded this time. “No, I honestly don’t.”
“And the team leaders?” He looked away. “Cameron? Stop lying to us—you have to know this. Who are the team leaders?”
He turned around, paced for a second or two, and then returned to the table. He sat down so roughly he almost up-ended the bench.
“Fine. You really want in on this? Then we do it my way. No more running off half-cocked, no more half-assed plans that put everyone in jeopardy.”
I looked at Diggs for confirmation. He nodded infinitesimally.