The Truth Machine

by James L. Halperin

  No one realized then that Randall could memorize every story the first time he heard it. Only gradually did Ed and Liza come to recognize how exceptional their child was.

  As Randall and Leonard gained intellectual and social ground, Liza became increasingly concerned that her older son would soon need no mothering at all. At five, Randall had been dressing himself for more than three years. Now he unfailingly fed and cared for Tabitha, the Armstrongs’ cat, and often made sandwiches and prepared breakfast for himself and the rest of the family. Even before he was Leonard’s age, Randall had demanded very little attention and had started helping Liza and Judith around the house in numerous ways.

  But if the Armstrongs had expected their second child to ripen similarly, they were in for a shock.

  An irresistibly cute three-year-old with bright blue eyes and wild dark hair, Leonard Armstrong was simply a master of infernally clever mischief. Indeed, he was every parent’s worst nightmare: a fearless child with a hyperactive, virulently curious mind, constantly probing to see how everyone and everything would react if he threw something unexpected into the equation. Leonard often endangered himself, once going so far as to start up the riding mower to chase Tabitha (not that he had any prayer of actually catching her); he ended up stalled in the middle of the street, trying to restart the machine as traffic came to a screeching halt.

  Although Randall usually greeted his parents’ friends with some reticence, Leonard would barge into the family room and perform startlingly authentic imitations of his favorite cartoon characters, Foghorn Leghorn3 being his best.

  Because Randall had proved such a prodigy, every mental and physical move Leonard made was monitored in near test-tube fashion. By all accounts he had the same talent for memorization, or was at least in the process of developing it. In many ways he was brighter than Randall. Astonishingly clever with numbers and all things mechanical, he taught himself how to operate the family televisions and VCR at an earlier age than had Randall. Leonard would sometimes play tricks on his brother and their parents by reprogramming the VCR or turning off the audio with a hidden remote control.

  When he was 23 months old he could tell time, even on the analog clocks that during the 1990s were still in use in most homes and businesses. Soon thereafter, he taught himself the rudiments of bridge by watching his parents play in neighborhood duplicate tournaments. But he seemed to have no interest at all in learning about letters until just before he turned three. It was then that Randall (whom Leonard called “Petey”) finally convinced him; only minutes later, he had taught his little brother the alphabet. Leonard never learned to read at Randall’s level, but within days was capable of reading children’s books, street signs, and the like.

  Unfortunately his potential for mischief grew exponentially with this new skill. Liza was soon scheduling Leonard for interviews with behavioral specialists in Boston, and testing him for Attention Deficit Disorder with a local psychologist.

  Although often irritated by his brother’s pranks and the attention they gained him, “Petey” rarely felt any jealousy. He was devoted to Leonard and sensed a connection more powerful than blood: someday an intellectual equal might ascend to his side.

  Randall went to bed at 7:30 p.m. without being coaxed, and gently rocked himself to sleep. Unlike most five-year-olds he looked forward to sleeping, because every night he would have the same dream.

  In that dream, he could fly. And in Randall’s dream world, his powers were such that when he flew, any of the neighborhood children he invited to join him were able to fly as well, so long as he wished it so. (His fortunate companions always included Leonard.) The children gratefully joined Randall as they soared over their rustic Concord neighborhood, waving and greeting the amazed onlookers below.

  CHAPTER 3

  TWO WORLDS COLLIDE

  Concord, Massachusetts

  June 7, 1995—Japanese government prosecutors announce the indictment of Shoko Asahara, leader of the “Doomsday Cult.” Asahara was implicated by his lieutenants in the March 20 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system that injured over 2,000 commuters.—The North Atlantic Treaty Organization suspends its air strikes on Bosnia, as the Serbs continue to hold hostage or surround hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers. The UN Security Council deliberates the total evacuation of its peacekeeping forces from Bosnia, but even that option would require a major military effort by NATO participants.—The International Red Cross accuses both sides in the Chechen-Soviet War of human-rights violations.—In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 169 people, the United States Senate passes the “Comprehensive Terrorism Prevention Act,” by a vote of 91-8. President Clinton urges the House of Representatives to act swiftly on the bill.

  He had already overcome nearly all the obstacles for delivering the medicinal bark of the Cinchona shrub to save the ailing natives in record time. Randall Armstrong concentrated intensely. He was about to break his own record at “Amazon Trail,” his favorite video game.

  He bit down lightly on the back of his tongue, which consequently now jutted out of his mouth. Lately Randall had convinced himself that the farther back he bit, the better he could think.

  Suddenly Leonard burst into Randall’s room. “Let’s play soccer, Petey.”

  “Okay. Just wait about 10 minutes. I’m almost finished.”

  Randall took the game seriously. When he played it, he pretended he was no longer a five-year-old child; he was transformed into a fearless hero, using sharply honed skills to help rescue those least able to help themselves. Although he realized this was fantasy, he believed that someday he would do just that. To Randall, “Amazon Trail” was no mere game; it was training.

  “Okay,” replied Leonard.

  Randall was surprised that his brother gave in so easily. He had figured on Leonard throwing a fit, in which case he would have saved the game and come back to it later.

  Perhaps Leonard’s acquiescence had been a ruse, or maybe he simply grew impatient. Whichever, about 45 seconds later he crawled behind Randall’s Apple Macintosh desktop computer and unplugged it from the wall socket. In 1995, home desktop computers had no internal power source, so this permanently ended the game.

  “You little creep. I hate you. I wish you were never born!”

  Unfazed, Leonard just laughed.

  Randall fumed for a second or two, but almost immediately, as usual, he felt his anger start to dissipate. Then he began laughing too. Leonard can be a royal pain, he thought, but he’s never dull.

  It was a beautiful Monday morning, typical of late spring in New England: bright green trees and lawns, warm but not hot, almost no wind, a cloudless sky. Randall loved being outdoors at this time of year. The air smelled wonderful and everything looked brighter, sharper somehow, as though his eyes had more receptors.

  He was capable of comparing any images he had seen simply by flashing back through them in his memory. He realized that in the bright daylight he could perceive details and features in the scenery that had escaped his discernment at other times. More pixels, he thought to himself.

  (Note: The image quality of primitive “television” screens of the late 20th century was measured on the basis of pixel density.—22g CP)

  Judith, the Armstrongs’ nanny, kicked the soccer ball gently to Leonard. He circled the ball and appeared ready to kick it to Randall. Then apparently he decided it would be more interesting to kick it in the opposite direction into the next-door neighbor’s yard. Not yet four years old, Leonard wasn’t capable of exerting much force on a soccer ball, but his coordination was exceptional. He kicked it perfectly through the hedge and off the Armstrongs’ property. Then he doubled up in laughter.

  “Come off it, Leonard,” Randall called, trying to hold back his own laughter. “Go get the ball. It’s not that funny.”

  Leonard got up and staggered three steps before falling down in another laughing fit. Even when Randall found himself saying, “Please, Leonard, go get the ball,” he
thought to himself, he really does have a great laugh.

  Leonard finally scurried through the same hole in the hedge that the neighbor’s cocker spaniel often used.

  The soccer ball was about 15 feet from the hedge and some 5 feet from a single human landscaper4 planting roses along the west side of the neighbor’s house. Leonard had never met an adult without his parents present, and had been carefully warned not to talk to strangers.

  Still, predictably enough, he immediately greeted the new workman. “Hey, what are you looking at, mister?”

  “Boy, you better get away from here.”

  “Boy?” Leonard replied in his best Foghorn Leghorn. “I say now. Lookee here, son. You watch who you’re calling boy around here. I mean, I say, how big are men where you come from anyway? I say. . . .”

  The workman, Daniel Anthony Reece, Jr., felt a familiar anger well up inside him, a rage he had experienced often. Receiving Leonard’s innocent words as a challenge, the damaged temporal lobe of his brain produced a fury unchecked by his enfeebled hypothalamus.

  Glancing hastily from side to side, Reece saw nobody else. He lunged toward the boy and bashed his face with the back of his right fist.

  Leonard fell to the ground, unconscious.

  Randall began to get restless.

  “Why does it take him so long to do one simple thing?” he complained to Judith.

  Finally he became impatient enough to follow him.

  Slipping through the hedge wasn’t as easy for him as it had been for Leonard or the spaniel. Halfway through, on all fours, he saw his motionless brother being carried under a stranger’s arm, and watched, frozen in horror, as the man tossed Leonard into the back of an old green Chevrolet pickup.

  Randall tried to scream, but his lungs suddenly seemed empty. He couldn’t even whisper. Still, the stranger, sensing his presence, turned his head and glared at him. Randall would never forget any detail of the encounter: the hateful face, the awful thud of Leonard’s body in the truck bed, or the license plate number of the truck as it drove away.

  Crawling back through the hedge to his own yard, his voice returned and he sobbed to Judith, “A m-m-man took Leonard away in a g-green truck. Leonard wasn’t even m-m-moving! We have to call the p-police.”

  Judith ran to the Armstrongs’ telephone. It was a typical late 20th-century model: a stand-alone unit with push-buttons and no visual monitor, usable as a two-way audio unit and not much else.

  Out of breath and terrified, she punched 9-1-1.

  The primitive telephone was attached to the wall with a cord, the transceiver portion ineffective unless held within an inch or two of the user’s ear and mouth. A recording advised that all operators were busy, so Judith listened, “on hold,” for the longest 50 seconds of her life. She was trapped there, unable to do anything but wait.

  “Please pick up. Come on. Please!”

  At last a woman’s voice answered, “Concord emergency. Hughes.”

  “I want to report a kidnapping.”

  “Your name?”

  “Judith Sonntag.”

  “The victim’s name and your relationship?”

  She shivered and answered, “Leonard Armstrong. I’m his nanny.” At least the words were coming out right.

  “When did it happen and where?”

  “Less than five minutes ago. A man in a green truck abducted him. He’s only three years old and he might be hurt.” She gave the operator the address and described the boy.

  Randall tugged at her sleeve. “I remember the l-license plate.”

  She repeated the license plate number and description of the kidnapper to the operator.

  Then she bit down hard on her lip and forced herself to call Ed Armstrong’s office. Randall waited on the couch, siting like a stone, staring at nothing.

  Judith hugged him hard.

  “They’ll find him. He’ll be okay. He has to be okay.”

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, a law enforcement arm of the United States Department of Justice formally disbanded in 2034, didn’t always handle abduction cases. However, the landscaper’s pickup truck had been registered in New Hampshire, so the vehicle had crossed state lines. Therefore the FBI was notified by the Concord Police Department.

  Within two hours, FBI Special Agent M. R. (Mark) Burns and a female FBI officer, whom Burns referred to only as “Tilly,” arrived at the Armstrongs’ house. Burns had only two months of duty remaining until his retirement from the Bureau, a retirement he intended to spend spoiling his own two grandsons, who were about the same ages as Randall and Leonard. He noticed the house had once been professionally and tastefully decorated, but today every floor of every room visible from the foyer was covered with toys, puzzles, and papers—testimony to the fact that adults didn’t entirely run the place.

  Ed and Liza Armstrong, who had both arrived home nearly an hour earlier, met the two agents at the door. Liza, quaking and crying, apologized for the mess.

  “Tilly” was a very attractive woman, slender but shapely, with long, straight brown hair, brown eyes, and the button-nose of a prep school cheerleader. Her full name was Marjorie Ann Tilly. Burns and others in the Boston office joked that she was a little like the rock stars of that era—Madonna, Prince, and Sting—referenced by only one name. Although her scores at the mandatory FBI marksmen qualifying sessions were consistently among the lowest, Burns believed her uncanny investigative and technical abilities more than compensated. “Over 37 years with the Bureau and Tilly’s the best partner I ever had,” he often said.

  Tilly was particularly well-suited for dealing with my primitive forerunners. She understood computers well, and always seemed to know how to tap the proper databases for the right kernels of information.

  (Note: Although today misunderstandings between man and machine are rare, in 1995 interaction was much more difficult. People communicated with us mostly by typing instructions on a keyboard and operating a track ball or “mouse.” We could not yet adapt to individual habits and styles of our owners, or even respond to speech.—22g CP)

  Burns, barely more computer-literate than Harry, the Armstrongs’ beta, was impressed by her versatility. “She can make her Dell 486 sing and dance,” he’d often said, “and I’ve never worked with anyone who gets along better with people or thinks on their feet like Tilly can.”

  While Burns walked next door to interview the neighbor, Tilly immediately asked to speak with Randall. She found him where Liza Armstrong said he would be, sitting on his bed. He held a small brown and white cat gingerly to his chest as he gently rocked back and forth. Tilly was shocked by how young Randall was; having spoken to him on her car phone, she had expected a much older child.

  “Randall, I’m Special Agent Tilly from the FBI. Please just call me Tilly.”

  Randall nodded.

  “The license plate number you gave us checked out. When we catch this guy, it’ll be because of you.”

  “It’s b-because of me Leonard went to get the ball from Mr. Caldwell’s y-yard. If I’d gone to get it m-m-myself, Leonard would st-t-till be here.”

  His body continued to sway. Rocking was the only way he could soothe himself—and his burgeoning guilt. He did not mention to Tilly, or to anyone else, that earlier that day he had told his brother he hated him and wished he’d never been born. He played those words back in his mind—over and over again.

  “Randall, listen carefully. You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s nobody to blame except the man who kidnapped your brother; you couldn’t possibly have known there was anything dangerous in your neighbor’s yard. The important thing is that you and Judith immediately called for help. Because of you we were able to trace the truck. We think we know who kidnapped your brother and we’re going to find him.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by Tilly’s cellular phone. “Tilly here.”

  “Ms. Tilly, this is Alphonso Carter.” No further introduction was necessary; Tilly, like most of her colleagues at the Boston o
ffice, knew of Dr. Carter. “I just received a fax from your office. Unfortunately I am very familiar with the man you believe is your kidnapper. Mr. Reece left Massachusetts State Prison 75 days ago. I have been giving him free counseling since he left, and he has shown up every week until last night.”

  “You think it was Reece?”

  “I am virtually certain it was.”

  “Dr. Carter, do you think the boy’s still alive?”

  Tilly’s face showed frustration, then anger, and finally powerless resignation, as she listened to Carter’s response: “No,” he said. “I hope I am wrong, but I honestly doubt it.”

  Burns received the call at 12:47 a.m.

  Two hours earlier a Carlisle police officer had spotted the partly hidden pickup truck on a dirt road by Walden Pond. Backup had arrived within minutes, and Reece, asleep in the cab, was easily captured. It took the officers about 45 minutes to convince him to take them to the child, and another hour to recover Leonard’s body. Under the most relentless questioning, Reece continued to claim he couldn’t remember hitting the little boy, but assumed he had and therefore panicked.

  Burns woke Tilly, who had been napping on the couch, and told her the news. She volunteered to tell the family; Ed and Liza were still awake in the study.

  She took one of Liza’s hands in both of hers. “I’m so sorry. Leonard is dead. We’ve recovered his body and we have the killer in custody.”

  Liza tried to speak, but could think of no words to say. Ed broke down, barely getting his question out between sobs, “Do they know for sure it’s our boy?”

  Tilly nodded.

  Ed ran to the bathroom and vomited into the sink. When he finally returned he hugged both women. “How can we ever tell Randall?”

  “I’m here to help if you need me,” Tilly assured them. She had never been assigned to a murder case, but had lost a four-year-old niece to leukemia and understood what trauma the death of a small child could inflict on a family. “I give you my word, my job here isn’t over until you tell me it is.”