Origin - Season One

by James, Nathaniel Dean

  The last folder on the drive was named “notes.” It contained about fifty plain text files. Francis double-clicked on the first and waited for it to load. What appeared on the screen was this:

  August 1 1988 – Preliminary inquiries confirm the unsuitability of western-based launching platforms on grounds of security. The political situation also discounts Russian facilities. This leaves only the Chinese, who present a number of other problems, primarily technical reliability.

  He closed the file and opened another at random:

  August 7 1994 – Third test of receiver array completed with mixed results. Decoding is causing the buildup of excess heat. This may be overcome by conditions in orbit, but the risk is too great. Will have to get Bonn to re-design the board using additional processors.

  He read two dozen more of the short diary-like entries looking for anything that might provide a clue: a name, a location, or just a reference to something he understood, but it was pointless. As fascinating as the entries were, none of it made any sense. At least not to Francis.

  Exasperated, he shut the computer down and took a seat on the bed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, but it must have been days. His mind racing, his body exhausted, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 30

  Penn Hills, Pennsylvania

  Wednesday 19 July 2006

  0400 EDT

  “Sir, I need you to hold the board below your chin.”

  Mitch swayed slightly and closed his eyes again. The lights in the room were far too bright, making his already-pounding head feel like it might actually explode. He had to focus all his attention on not throwing up, which meant one steady breath after another. Everything else was a distraction.

  “Mr. Rainey, you need to hold the board a little higher!”

  The woman was losing patience with him. She stepped forward and the board in his hands rose until it bumped his chin. The stirring began somewhere in his bowels and worked its way up to his stomach. His mouth was suddenly flooded with warm saliva. He took a deep breath in a last-ditch effort to hold it down – then his torso contracted and he keeled over, dropping the board as he fell to his knees.

  The policewoman realized what was happening, but she was a couple of seconds too late. The first salvo hit the floor a foot in front of her polished, black rider boots and covered everything below her knees in a thick slimy coating of partially digested Big Mac and chocolate milkshake. She took a step back, slipped, and almost sat down in the mess before pinwheeling her arms and recovering.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said and moved toward the door.

  Mitch raised his head and looked at her through wet, bloodshot eyes. Before he could say anything he was firing a second salvo. This one went straight into his lap. The sudden stench of stomach acid and vodka hit him like a prizefighter’s southpaw and he began to dry heave. It felt like someone had poured lighter fluid over his abdomen, set it on fire and then kicked him there a few times for good measure. The policewoman was shouting to someone through the open door but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Someone else came into the room, but Mitch made no attempt to look up. A large hand grabbed his left arm and pulled him upright. “Sir, you need to sit up and lift your head.”

  It was a man’s voice and the tone was one of concern, not anger. Mitch opened his eyes and raised one hand toward the ceiling.

  “Lights,” he said. “Turn off the lights.”

  A moment later the strip lights in the ceiling went out.

  “Is that better? You think you can keep it down?”

  Mitch nodded. The man put one foot to either side of him, one hand under each of Mitch’s arms and pushed him along the floor until his back was resting against the wall.

  “I’m going to leave you in here until we can get a doctor to have a look at you,” the man said. Mitch raised a hand in a gesture of thanks, then leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes again.

  He could remember everything right up to the blue lights in the rear-view mirror, and then the film went blank. He remembered stopping at a McDonald’s somewhere near Hancock, crossing the border into Pennsylvania; he remembered the liquor store in Somerset and the woman behind the counter. She had tried to sell him an extra bottle at a twenty-five percent discount. If she had tried just a little bit harder, he thought, he might be dead now instead of just wanting to be.

  Once he had decided to get drunk, and damn the consequences, it had been the advice of his friend, and now partner in crime, that he had taken. Mike had once joked that, god forbid, should he ever become an alcoholic it was going to be vodka or nothing because vodka was all kick and no hangover. If Mitch ever saw Mike again, he would have to ask him where that unhelpful piece of total bullshit had originated.

  The plan had been to call Mike back at some point. Mitch had stopped at a rest area just off the interstate somewhere in the Kooser State Park to make the call. But his nerves had failed him and he had gone back to the car for the bottle and started drinking, which had really been ‘Plan B’ all along. And it had worked. Only when he finally did try to call, there hadn’t been a single bar of reception on his phone.

  That most useless of all tricks, hindsight, strongly suggested that that was where he should have called it a day. Instead, he had gotten back in the car, put the bottle between his legs and set off to meet his destiny in the town of Penn Hills. By the time he saw the blue lights of the highway patrol motorcycle, the bottle was empty, his head was somewhere in the upper stratosphere and his Volkswagen was doing about twenty miles an hour with two wheels on the road and two in the dirt.

  It might have been five minutes later, or it might have been five hours, when the door opened and the lights came back on. Mitch guessed it must have been somewhere in between because his head still ached like a bitch, but his stomach had settled and the lights no longer felt like laser beams. A man was standing in front of him with a black case in one hand, dressed in the orange coveralls of a paramedic. He walked around the mess in the middle of the room and knelt beside Mitch. “Sir, how are you feeling?”

  “Like an idiot,” Mitch said.

  “Sure. And how about physically? Are you having any trouble breathing?”

  “No.”

  The man took a pen light from his breast pocket and pointed the beam into both of Mitch’s eyes. He produced a syringe and before Mitch could protest, stuck the needle into his upper left arm and pressed the plunger.

  “That should make you feel a little better,” the medic said.

  “About myself?”

  “No; that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own,” the medic said. “If you want my advice, try speaking to the families of any of the 17 thousand people that died last year in this country from DUI-related accidents.”

  Mitch had no answer to that. He’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself to consider that side of it. It was a sobering thought.

  The medic stood and closed the case. “The good news is you’re fine. You’ll probably feel like shit for another day or two, but that’s par for the course when you drink yourself stupid.”

  The paramedic turned to the police officer standing in the doorway. “He’s good to go.”

  Mitch looked at the cop and did his best to appear ashamed of himself. It wasn’t hard. Aside from once or twice in his early college days, he didn’t drink as a rule and had never been in trouble for it in his life. He’d been too busy saving up for much-needed hardware to have either the time or money to indulge in much else. Of course, that was probably the case with half the child-murdering drunk drivers this guy had arrested, Mitch thought.

  “I guess you’ll want that mug shot now,” Mitch said. He felt a little lightheaded, but when he stood up the feeling passed. Whatever the medic had given him, it was doing wonders for his headache, which had settled down to a dull throb.

  “We’ll need to get you cleaned up first,” the cop said and handed him a pair of folded light blue
coveralls. There was also a pair of pull-on slippers with a zip-lock bag on top. “I need you to put your personal possessions in the bag. The shower’s downstairs.”

  Mitch followed the man out the door to the end of the hall, through a set of double doors and down two flights of stairs. They walked past a block of cells which were all empty and the cop pointed to a door at the end of the room. Mitch took out his wallet and put it in the bag, then fished a handful of loose change from his pocket and threw that in, too. The cop pointed to his watch, and Mitch took it off and handed it over.

  Half an hour later he was showered, dry and sporting a whole new look. He knew what he had done was bad, but the jail suit made him feel like a convicted felon. Every eye that glanced his way seemed to suggest they knew he was either a rapist or a pedophile, but couldn’t quite work out which. A woman sitting on a chair against the far side of the large open-plan office – she looked like a prostitute at the tail end of a long and fruitless career – winked at him and held up her cuffed hands. She was dressed in a pair of leopard-skin Spandex bottoms and a dirty white T-shirt that made her shoulders look like a coat hanger.

  “Hey, honeybunch, I’m doing blow jobs for dime bags if you’re interested,” she said and began to laugh, exposing dry, white gums with only two or three teeth left. Mitch looked away. The cop behind him laughed. The woman seemed to take that as a cue and stood. She began grinding her bony hips and stuck out her tongue.

  “I’ll fuck everyone here for a buck a pop,” she said and cawed with laughter, which quickly turned into a coughing fit. A man in jeans and a black T-shirt with the letters PHPD printed on the front turned to her and said, “All right, Wanda, that’s enough. Sit down.”

  She sat and pouted her lips to suggest she was hurt by this rebuke, but when Mitch looked over at her she winked at him again.

  “Take a seat right here,” the cop said. “Detective Lawson will be in in a minute.”

  Detective Lawson turned out to be Miss Lawson, a squat, stocky, square-jawed woman with short, brown hair who was either busy infiltrating a lesbian crime syndicate or gay herself. Mitch thought the latter was more likely. She sat down at the desk and opened the file in her hands.

  “Says here you’re with the Bureau,” she said and looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Were you on some kind of sting operation?”

  The sarcasm in her voice was unmistakable. Mitch guessed that Miss Lawson was not just a woman-lover, but also a man-hater. Her eyes seemed to accuse him not of drunk driving, but of having the audacity to be alive.

  “I’m a technician,” he said. “Down in DC.”

  “And you’re what? On vacation?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Sort of on vacation?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitch said. “I had a bad day at the office. I needed to get away for a bit. It’s hard to explain.”

  “So you thought you’d come up here and drown your sorrows on the interstate. That about the size of it, Mr. Rainey? I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re bipolar.”

  “Look, I’m not going to justify myself. It was an idiotic thing to do and I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Well, that’s all right then,” she said. “I’m guessing your people down in Washington will want a slightly better explanation, though.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  She was about to say something else when a man stepped out of the office at the back of the room and said, “Brenda, can you come in here for a minute?”

  She looked back at Mitch and stood up.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she said and gave him a smile that suggested she would love it if he tried.

  A minute later she was back with two uniformed officers. One of them produced a set of handcuffs. “I need you to stand up and put your hands behind your back, sir.”

  Mitch got to his feet and did as he was told. The officer put the cuffs on and tightened them until Mitch felt the circulation to his hands stop.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Mitch said.

  Neither officer said anything. They each grabbed one arm and led him back towards the door he had come through. Brenda gave them a wide berth and only took her hand off the butt of her pistol when they were gone.

  They led him back down the stairs and into the cellblock. A third officer held the door open to one of the cells and Mitch was pushed inside.

  “You going to take these things off?” Mitch said.

  “Shut up,” one of them said, and they both turned to leave.

  “Hey! My hands are turning blue!” Mitch shouted after them.

  He had no idea what had just happened, but whatever it was, it had clearly changed the mood. The idea that this was all leading back to what he and Mike had been up to hadn’t even occurred to him. But it did now.

  He sat down on the bunk, first trying to think, then trying not to. There was really nothing to think about. For all he knew, Mike was sitting in his own cell somewhere, arriving at the same conclusion.

  At some point, overcome by mental and physical exhaustion, he managed to fall asleep.

  When he opened his eyes again, there was a full-on argument going on outside his cell.

  “I don’t give a shit what he’s been accused of,” someone said. “He has rights.”

  Two uniformed officers were standing on the other side of the bars. One of them was carrying a tray of food.

  “He’s a damn terrorist,” the officer holding the tray said.

  “Suspected terrorist. This isn’t Guantanamo. Take the damn cuffs off him and give him the tray. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with the captain.”

  The officer with the tray turned to Mitch and said, “Turn around and approach the bars.”

  Mitch did and the man removed the handcuffs. Mitch walked straight to the toilet. His hands felt like two lumps of lead and he ended up getting as much piss on the floor as in the bowl. When he was done he turned around and said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” the cop said and dropped the tray onto the floor just inside the cell. Mitch walked to the bars. The other officer was sitting at the desk reading something.

  “What have I been accused of?” Mitch asked.

  The man looked up and frowned. “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Mitch had no idea how long he had been going out of his mind when two uniformed officers he hadn’t seen before opened the door to his cell and stepped inside. One of them was holding a Taser.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been told about me,” Mitch said. “But I used to get beat up by girls at school.”

  The stony expressions on their faces didn’t change.

  “Stand up,” one of them said.

  “Where are we going?” Mitch said.

  The man grabbed his arm, forced Mitch to his feet and ushered him to the door. When he passed the officer with the Taser, Mitch opened his mouth to ask again. He only managed a single word before something pinched his stomach just above the navel and his body began to spasm. His knees buckled under him and he collapsed to the floor. The fillings in his teeth felt like they were vibrating and his field of vision shrank until he was seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope.

  He was vaguely aware of being picked up by the arms and dragged, first across the room, then out a door and into fresh air. Somewhere about a million miles away a car door opened, and he was pushed inside face-first. There were voices, but they were muffled and impossible to understand. His legs were pushed into the car and the door slammed behind him. He twisted his head round and saw the blurry image of someone getting in behind the wheel. Again, he tried to ask where they were going but his mouth refused to open. The last thing he heard was the engine starting. Then his eyelids grew heavy and he felt as if he were falling down a deep well, perhaps into Wonderland, or maybe into hell.

  Chapter 31

  New York, New York

  Wednesday 19 July 2006

  1200 EDT

&nb
sp; Mike woke up in his bed around noon with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. He reached below the covers, found his service pistol and was relieved to see he’d at least had the sense to engage the safety.

  All the news networks were busy with the killings in Vermont. Nobody knew where Gerald Ross was, but it was being assumed that he had either been kidnapped or committed suicide on learning of his wife’s death. At least that was what the thinking heads were telling their talking counterparts. Mike, thanks to the assistant director, and now Mitch and his illegal fact-finding mission, knew better.

  He tried to call Mitch twice, once at his office and once on his cell. The woman who picked up the phone at OSD said he hadn’t called in, but might have just overslept. Apparently Mitch did that a lot. His cell went straight to voicemail.

  He made his way to the kitchen and found a loaf of Wonderbread, so named presumably because it was four days old already and still looked fresh. He was doing a test run with an unbuttered slice when the phone rang in the hall. It was the assistant director.

  “Mike, how you feeling?”

  “Fine. Everything all right?”

  “Actually, I was calling to ask if you’d heard from Mitch Rainey today. No one’s seen him at OSD and his cell seems to be turned off.”

  “I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday,” Mike said. “Anyone been to his home?”

  “Someone’s on their way there now. I just wanted to check with you. I know you guys are friends.”

  “No, I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday,” Mike said.

  “Okay. I’ve got to scoot. You take care.”

  “Sure.”

  Mike put the phone down and finished the slice of bread. He returned to the TV to find a young Ivy League professional being interviewed on CNN. According to the presenter, he was a “counter-terrorism expert” with one of the big think tanks on Capitol Hill. Mike watched for a minute, musing at the way the man leaped from one absurdity to the next with characteristic lack of humility. He turned off the TV, cursing under his breath.