The Collective Protocol

by Brian Parker

  “Can I introduce you to someone?” Juan asked when her list had filled almost an entire spiral-bound notebook page.

  “Yeah, sure,” Reagan answered. “Wait, it’s not like some shaman or something, is it?”

  Juan chuckled, “No, of course not. I’ve got a friend from the NYPD—former NYPD,” he corrected himself. “He came down to the city when I called him about your case. He recently had a similar incident where he swore that someone he’d been talking to was possessed, that’s how we came to know each other.”

  “Oh, great. Now I’m lumped in with those types of people?” her voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “He’s a good guy. I’ll give him a call and go get coffee while we wait for him to get here. Anyone want anything?”

  Reagan shivered as she thought about a supernatural entity stalking her. “Yeah, I’ll take a caramel latte with skim milk,” she said.

  “Sure thing. Anyone else? No? Okay, I’ll be back soon,” Juan said over his shoulder, already walking out with his phone up to his ear.

  *****

  Reagan had already finished her latte by the time the newcomer arrived. He was just an average-looking guy with short hair, clean shaven and a simple conservative pea coat. He was the type of guy that she wouldn’t have looked twice at on the Metro. But there was something beneath the surface that made her look hard at him to determine what it was. It was right there on the edge of her understanding, but she couldn’t quite grasp it.

  “Hi, Jimmie,” Juan said and shook his hand. “Let me introduce you to everyone. This is Detective Alex Simms, Heather Lockhart, and this is the girl I told you about, Reagan Lockhart.”

  Jimmie Rollins dutifully shook the other two people’s hands and then reached out for hers. She unconsciously sat up in her hospital bed and took the offered hand in her own. She was battered with intense memories and past transgressions that no one should have to carry around with them.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  Jimmie motioned towards her hand with his chin. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry,” she replied and released his hand.

  He massaged his hand where she’d squeezed it and said, “Wow, you’ve got quite a grip.”

  Her face reddened and she wished for the protection of her makeup. “Uh, thanks,” she replied awkwardly. “Have we ever met before?”

  “You ever been to New York?”

  “No, but I want to go one day,” she replied enthusiastically. What the hell is wrong with you, he’s just a normal guy, she chastised herself. Something about him made her instantly connect with him, which was absolutely out of character for her.

  “Hmm, I’ve never left the city before,” Jimmie said. “There’s no way that we’ve ever met then. But there is something familiar about you.”

  Reagan couldn’t shake the feeling and she asked an off-the-wall question, “Are you adopted?”

  Everyone in the room turned to stare at her for asking the strange question. “Um… Yes, I am. I bounced around the system for a while and then my parents adopted me when I was eight.”

  He glanced over at Juan with a look that seemed to say, “What the hell?” Juan held up his hand for Jimmie to give it a moment.

  Reagan watched the interaction between the two. It was clear that the new guy already thought she was crazy, but she had a nagging voice in the back of her mind that wouldn’t shut up. The voice forced its way forward and somehow exited her mouth. “Do you know Paige Greene?”

  The former cop took three or four steps backwards until he ran up against the sink basin. “What’s goin’ on here, Juan? I never told anyone the name of the person that I thought convinced me to quit the force. Not even you.”

  “Well, do you know Paige?” Heather Lockhart asked with more interest than she should have had.

  “I… Uh… Yeah, I knew her. We were kids together in a really bad foster home. When the state finally took us out of there, I think Paige was already going insane from the abuse. Like clinically insane, not what people call crazy. She spent time making these voodoo dolls of herself, but she promised that they weren’t her.”

  “It was me,” Reagan muttered. “The dolls were of me.”

  Jimmie looked at her and then tilted his head like a dog hearing its name. “You do look a lot like she did. Do you know her?”

  “She’s my twin sister,” she answered.

  Alex threw up his hands, “When we asked you that question three months ago, you said you didn’t have a twin!”

  “I didn’t find out until the night my father was murdered. William—or whoever he is—told me and then killed my dad. I didn’t tell you this part, Detective Simms. I didn’t want you to think that I was crazy.

  “William knew all these weird things about me, but after he killed my dad, I screamed or something—”

  “The same thing you did at the restaurant?” Alex cut in.

  “I guess so, I don’t know,” she responded, annoyed that he interrupted her. “Anyways, when I screamed, I was sure that a girl who looked just like me stood there talking through his voice. It was like she was a ghost lying over the top of his body. It looked like she was trying to hold on, but when she left, William’s body just collapsed into the coma that he’s in now.”

  “You found out from this girl that you were a twin?” Agent Quintana asked.

  “Yeah. I kept it inside until the other night at the Thai restaurant and I asked my mother about it. She told me that my twin—Paige Greene—was supposed to have died in the hospital before she turned six months old, but she survived somehow.”

  “When we found out that she didn’t die, we tried to find her to adopt her as well, but the State of New York wasn’t helpful and she’d already been placed in foster care,” her mother cried.

  Reagan reached over and rubbed her hand. “This has all been really interesting Agent Quintana, but what does the FBI want with me and with Jimmie? It seems like we happen to have a shared contact in our past—although I’ve never met her. But I don’t know what it has to do with anything.”

  “Jimmie, when did you last see Paige?” Juan asked.

  “I told you, when I was eight.”

  “You’re police report said that you spoke with Paige Greene for a full fifteen minutes before she passed out and claimed to be someone else,” Juan reminded him.

  “Well, yeah. But I must have imagined it or something. We ran background checks on that girl. Her name was Rachel Bennett from Yonkers. She’d never been adopted and there wasn’t any evidence to say that she’d ever even met Paige. The department shrink said my mind must have created some type of alternate reality to help me deal with the things that I’d seen in the Met.”

  “How does the psychologist explain that Rachel asked for you by name?” Juan asked.

  “She… She’s chosen to disregard that part of the report.”

  “Pretty important part of the report. Fourteen men all said that they heard her ask for you by name. Even more strange is that you were on a mission with a completely different precinct than your own and it was with a SWAT team when you don’t have SWAT training. There is no reason that you should have been there and there’s no way that woman asked for you by coincidence. I think you were talking to Paige Greene… And I think you were talking to Paige Greene the night your father was killed, Reagan.”

  “H… How?” Reagan stuttered.

  “My section has run into things of this nature before. Large groups of people throughout history have been led to do things that a sane person would never do. The Nazis, Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide, the Branch Davidians in Waco… In order to keep things in a simple category, we say the leaders are ‘charismatic.’ Closer to home, there have been many cases of ‘mass hysteria’ where entire groups of people have come down with symptoms or behaviors outside of the norm. Remember the Salem witches?”

  “What does all of this have to do with our investigation?” Detective Simms asked.

  “W
hat I’m saying is that what if these incidents weren’t cases of a charismatic person or hysteria? What if these cases were about mind control?”

  “What the hell are you suggesting, Quintana?” Simms demanded.

  “Why would millions of animals begin attacking people at roughly the same time? Hell, the Lockharts were trapped in their home by a horde of skunks—”

  “It’s called a surfeit,” Reagan said quietly.

  “What?” Juan asked.

  “A group of skunks is called a surfeit.”

  “Oh, okay… Anyways, all the homeless people and the military going crazy and killing exactly three people each before killing themselves. That proves something by itself. We don’t know what yet, but there’s no way that 300,000 people all do the exact same thing unless they are under strict control somehow.”

  Juan turned towards his shoulder bag that he’d brought in with him. “Let me ask you guys something. Have either of you ever seen…” he dug through the bag and then pulled out something obviously heavy, “this?”

  He held a metal object about the size of a small desk fan. Reagan was struck by how much it looked like a legless astromech droid from Star Wars. There were several small raised sections across the surface and there were wires running from a panel that flopped open as he held it up. “There was some circuitry inside here, but our analysts removed it and are studying that now. Better safe than sorry, you know?”

  “What is that?” Jimmie asked.

  “We don’t know. We found it down in Alabama near the site of some of the worst animal attacks; it was giving off some sort of sonar signal. Once we confiscated it, the attacks in that area ceased within a few hours. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, so just scan for sonar signals and pick those things up,” Jimmie said.

  “We’ve been doing that. We’ve recovered three so far, the only problem is that if this device isn’t broadcasting when we scan a particular area with a satellite, then we skip right over it.”

  “So, you think that these things have been used in an attack on the U.S.?” Detective Simms asked. It seemed like he needed some type of solid evidence, like the small machine that Agent Quintana held, to make him interested in the story.

  “Without a doubt,” the agent stated. “The president believes it too. Except he’s convinced that it’s either the Russians or the Chinese. He thinks they did all of this to focus the world’s attention on us so they could start a war with each other and everyone else would be too worried about their own protection to intervene.”

  “Hmpf, that’s a pretty wild theory,” Jimmie said.

  “I don’t think it’s far off, except I think the perpetrators are a little closer to home.”

  “The Canadians,” Reagan replied.

  “Bingo, give that girl a cupie doll!” Juan said. When Reagan stared at him blankly, he explained, “It’s a doll that they used to give out for prizes at fairs and things when I was a kid… You know what, never mind. I think that the Canadians are behind this and your girl Paige in Calgary is evidence enough for me.”

  “Wouldn’t that be suicide for them?” Simms asked skeptically. “We’re their biggest trade partners. Without us, they’d fall pretty far down the pole.”

  “I don’t know. Would they? I’ve done some research, the Canadian government has made over three hundred billion dollars in wise market choices in the past two years. They’ve got themselves enough money to make it through a rough patch.”

  “But why?” Reagan asked.

  “Who knows,” Juan answered truthfully. “Maybe they hate our music, our environmental stance, our culture… There are a lot of things to not like about us, but I don’t know why they’d hate us so much. Hell, it may only be a small group of people, we simply don’t know yet.”

  “And you think that Paige is somehow involved?” Reagan’s mother asked, finally getting involved in the conversation again.

  “I’m certain that she’s involved. I don’t know how deep she goes though. Look, the evidence against her is bad enough. Both of you are certain that you talked to her as she occupied a third party’s body and did some horrible things while she controlled those bodies. That shows me that she’s a willing participant.”

  “I think you’re right,” Reagan replied. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I’m in as well,” Jimmie said. “Hell, I took her warning and quit the police force so… I guess that I believed in this whole mess on some level.”

  “Alright! We saw her in a Calgary coffee house just two weeks ago. That seems to be her base of operations.”

  “Wait, she wouldn’t have let someone see her if she didn’t want them to,” Jimmie said.

  “You’re right. Our man on the ground disappeared, but she doesn’t control the security cameras. It’s not very hard for our guys to tap into the video feeds and then it was just a matter of time before we had her.”

  “Freakin’ FBI,” Jimmie muttered.

  “Yeah, well this is the best lead that we’ve got to stop all of this. If you’re feeling up to it, we can be on a plane to Great Falls, Montana by tonight. Since the border is closed, we’ll have to sneak into Canada from there.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “The diversionary war is working splendidly. Better than we could have ever expected,” Brigadier Patel remarked. “They’re going crazy and killing each other by the thousands. No one in Europe is paying any attention to the United States crisis anymore. That was a nice touch with the massacre of the civilians.”

  “I didn’t do that,” Paige countered.

  “Eh? Oh well, they hate one another so much in that part of the world, I’m not surprised then. All they needed was for us to add a spark to the powder keg. Still, it’s a nice job.”

  “Thank you, brigadier.”

  “The PM wants us to move forward with Phase Five,” the officer stated. “Commissioner Dartmouth, is the border secure?”

  “Hmm? Oh yes, it has been for quite some time.”

  “Good. We don’t want a surprise force or group of refugees coming into our country to avoid the chaos that we’re about to visit on them.”

  “How exactly do you plan to spread this message of yours?” Leclerc asked from across the table where he sat alone.

  “The message has already been spread,” Patel gloated. “We’ve had the message implanted on their psyches for over a year. We’ve just been waiting for the right time to have Miss Watkins send out the activation message.”

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” the French-Canadian asked.

  “It was on a need-to-know basis and you didn’t need to know about this part of the Protocol.”

  The intelligence agent threw his chair backwards and stood up to stare out the 25th floor windows. “Really, Leclerc. You of all people should know about the importance of compartmentalizing information,” Brigadier Patel called after him. “If any of us are compromised, the less we know the better.”

  “Oh really, Mark? Everyone at this table knows everything about the Protocol except for me, apparently.”

  Paige looked around the table to the other two members of the inner circle. He had a point, the three of them knew everything there was to know about the Protocol and Leclerc was on the outside of a few of the decisions. Until the general spoke, she didn’t think that it was on purpose. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She kept the little prison where Pammie had killed Blake a secret from everyone. Were there things about the Protocol that even she didn’t know about?

  The CSIS man eventually returned to the table and sat heavily in his seat. “We agree that it is time to advance to Phase Five, but we’ve lost several amplifiers in the last month and we don’t believe there will be enough to blanket the entire U.S. like we’d initially planned.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Patel stated. “As long as the major cities are covered, we can always shift the amplifiers’ location or simply wipe out those communities in Phase Six.”

  Paige squeezed her
eyes shut at the thought of the following phase. Phase Five would be relatively hands-off for her because she’d send out a few activation messages to various parts of the country, but Phase Six was entirely different.

  Phase Six was the final phase before the Canadian Forces invaded America. In Phase Six, she would travel to individual towns and communities and oversee the mass suicide of everyone at their own hands. She’d be mentally imprinted on thousands of people when they committed suicide. Her powers had grown exponentially over the last few months of constant use and she no longer went into shock when one of her hosts died, but she still felt ill. She didn’t know how the death of that many hosts would affect her.

  “So, you want me to go ahead with Phase Five then?” she asked in an attempt to change the subject back to the task at hand. Maybe this phase would be so successful that Phase Six wouldn’t be needed. It was wishful thinking.

  “Yes, I’ve already told you that the prime minister wants us to move forward. However, I do have some concerns about your extracurricular use of the machine. Specifically, the incident right before Christmas. Who is this Reagan person that you’ve been visiting so frequently?”

  Paige shot a glance to Gavin, who shook his head indicating that he hadn’t told anyone. “Don’t be so foolish, Paige,” the brigadier chided. “I built the Neuroactuator; do you really think that I’d allow it to be used without generating a report every time that it’s turned on?”

  She reigned in her temper. Nothing good ever came of her losing her temper. “I understand that you want to know about the machine’s usage, however I also expect a certain level of privacy. I give everything of myself to this country and our shared cause. I should have the right to be able to visit whomever I choose.”