by Seth Fried
My breathing felt unsteady as I removed my necktie and wrapped it around my palm. I could feel my pulse where it was hurt. When I noticed how fast it was, it went faster. There was an old panic welling up in me, a childish sense of helplessness at the world’s ability to go suddenly upside down.
Something jostled me and I looked up to see a group of agents rushing past. One of them noticed me standing there and shouted, “Come on!” The urgency in his voice broke through my fear and I joined them as they dragged a desk out of the secretary pool. We used it to ram down the heavy double doors to a conference hall where we could make out people crying for help.
The rest of that day was a confusion of darkened corridors as we agents divided ourselves into groups and rushed through headquarters, prying open doors and tending to people’s injuries as best we could. I eventually found the agency’s director, Theodore Garrett, just outside his own office, improvising a bandage for a young woman’s hand out of one of the spare dress shirts he kept in his desk. I tried to get him out of the building, but he just gave me a serious look and told me to make myself useful.
Even after the north lawn had become a frenzy of strobing lights from the arriving ambulances and fire engines, Garrett refused to leave. Around two in the morning I brought him a mug of instant coffee. He was standing under a work light in the main entryway to the first subbasement, talking a team of firefighters through a map of the floor’s access tunnels. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he had a determined look on his face that caused even his mussed white hair to inspire confidence. The left side of my face had started to swell up from where the shards of my phone had lodged themselves and when I approached him with the coffee it seemed to take him a moment to recognize me.
When he did, he dismissed the firefighters and took my head in his hands, tilting it back so he could get a better look. He whistled the way he did when I showed him troubling data from a town where the employment rate was starting to stagnate or where the high school test scores continued to drop. It was an oddly comforting sound, indicating that things were indeed bad but it was nothing he hadn’t seen before.
“Can you still see out of this one?” he said, waving a hand in front of the eye that was nearly swelled shut.
I told him I could and he stepped away.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, like a father playing down a scraped knee.
Strangely, it did make me feel better.
He took the mug of coffee, then thanked me. The dark hall was cluttered with upended chairs and dented waste bins. From the floor above us we could still hear shouting and the rhythmic banging of doors being smashed in.
Garrett sighed and looked down. His foot was resting on a printout bearing the cryptic block of text that had appeared on my phone. Before the building lost power this message had shown up on computer monitors all over headquarters. It was spit out again and again by copiers and printers. Garrett moved the printout right side up with the toe of his shoe and examined it.
“‘La urboj estas frostigitaj.’” He recited the words slowly and then took a sip of coffee.
“What does it mean?”
He ignored the question.
“It’s in Esperanto.”
“You know Esperanto?”
“I don’t,” he said, “but I know someone who does.”
* * *
Within hours, we started to hear the news coming from the city of Metropolis. While the attack on headquarters in Suitland was in progress, over three hundred miles away the agency’s Metropolis station had already been burned down and its underground data center in the West Side had collapsed in on itself, leaving a building-sized sinkhole in Eleventh Avenue. Both incidents took place during the station’s hours of operation and yet first responders reported no casualties at either site. Then of course there were the drones.
It didn’t take our technicians long to identify that the havoc at headquarters was the result of a virus that was uploaded to the agency’s supercomputer. OWEN managed most of our day-to-day operations in Suitland, everything from the building’s lights and security passcodes to the automated espresso machines in the break rooms. The rest of our surveillance fleet was unaffected, but the virus had deactivated our drones over Metropolis in midflight, causing over seventy of these titanium orbs, each roughly the size of a basketball and covered in carbon-fiber strakes, to fall from the sky over the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, crashing into buildings and wounding over a dozen people.
In the days that followed there was a fair amount of public outrage directed at the agency. Garrett accepted full liability and started arranging for the USMS to pay hospital bills and damage settlements. Despite being the director of one of the most powerful government agencies in the country, Garrett saw himself first and foremost as a public servant. He always made it clear that his driving passion in life was shortening people’s commutes, haggling with zoning boards for more parks, finding the government loopholes that would send funds into the coffers of community centers and public libraries. He spoke of every city in the country with an affection and familiarity that suggested he had family there. He could tell you if the museum was any good and what parts of town to avoid after dark, where to try the pancakes and where to try the pulled pork, what kind of winter they had last year, and if it looked like the school levy was going to pass. Garrett was in his late sixties, but usually bounded around the agency like a much younger man, putting his agents to shame with his sheer exuberance. Now he was sitting in his office making call after call with his shoulders slumped and his face frozen in an expression of stunned, inarticulate grief.
I came to the agency as a civil engineer with no grasp of policy and Garrett had taken it on himself to mentor me personally. I did my best to pay back this generosity through my devotion to the agency and as a result I often found hand-drawn cartoons in our break rooms of me gingerly sniffing air from a jar labeled “Garrett’s farts” or sitting in Garrett’s lap as if he were a department store Santa and telling him that for Christmas I wanted a personality. But the other agents could think what they wanted. I genuinely admired the man and he was the closest I’d come to making a friend at the agency. It pained me that I had no idea how to assist or comfort him during the difficult times that were now upon us. The idea that he even needed comforting was in itself a disorienting thought.
To make matters worse, our station chief in Metropolis, Terrence Kirklin, had gone missing and was now being sought in connection to the disappearance of Sarah Laury, the mayor of Metropolis’s eighteen-year-old daughter. Even with government drones raining from the sky, the news cycle was dominated by concern for Sarah, a bona fide American sweetheart. She had been a favorite of the press since her infancy. In the popular imagination, the fact that one of the most powerful families in Metropolis had adopted a child through the city’s own foster system had all the charm of a fairy tale. By the time she was eight years old, the iconic photograph of her volunteering in a soup kitchen (smiling with her hair in blond ringlets, ladle filled with soup, the homeless man in the picture also smiling) was already being sold on postcards in souvenir shops in Archer Square. At age sixteen, she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the equally iconic photograph of her receiving an Olympic gold medal in individual show jumping (hair straightened, bangs, the bronze medalist looking up at her with something like awe). By seventeen, she had retired from the sport as well as a brief modeling career in order to focus on her studies and philanthropic work.
Her story had always been important to me personally. As an orphan myself, I found it encouraging to see one of my own become such a success. Though, at the agency she had recently become a bit of a controversial figure after leveling a spate of public criticisms against her father’s administration and attending a few fringe political rallies throughout the city. It was unfortunate, since Mayor Laury was known for being pro-infrastructure. And
now, as if her public repudiations of her own father weren’t troubling enough, she had apparently taken up with a bureaucrat who was over twice her age.
Shortly after Laury went missing from the residence hall at Newton College, the young socialite uploaded a video to the internet in which she declared her love for a public servant named Terrence Kirklin. She then requested that the authorities not attempt to find her. Laury did not appear to be under duress and seemed quite sincere in her sentiments. But it wasn’t long before the media started speculating that she had undergone some sort of brainwashing. This belief was most likely influenced by the fact that Sarah Laury was a blond-haired, green-eyed beauty, whereas Kirklin was known to the public only in his connection to the agency that had accidentally imploded a portion of Eleventh Avenue and sent a fleet of drones raining down over the city. Kirklin was also six foot five with a goatee and an eye patch over his right eye from an injury he had sustained in the Coast Guard. Whole television segments were devoted to the fact that he was suffering from male-pattern baldness and was perhaps a bit overweight. In person Kirklin was, though not quite handsome, a striking older man. He was tall with an intense, quiet way about him. But in the picture that the press used, Kirklin’s bare scalp was shining awkwardly bright. The dark hair around his ears, usually well-groomed, was stringy and unkempt. His good eye was bloodshot and his lips were parted in a way that made him look demented.
For the agency, Kirklin’s abrupt absence was a problem in itself. Certainly, everyone had always known him to be a moody and defiant station chief. His annual meetings with Garrett were dreaded in Suitland for their tempestuousness: One year, the two got into a shouting match over optimal sidewalk width that ended with Kirklin throwing a small bookcase through the window of Garrett’s office. Nevertheless, he was without question the best station chief the agency had ever seen.
For two decades he had managed the infrastructure of a city roughly the size of Rhode Island during a period of rapid and sustained growth, the population swelling to 35 million people. More electricity, water, and freight flowed in and out of Metropolis in a single day than it did in the entire state of South Dakota in six months. Kirklin’s combined system of turn restrictions, one-way streets, pedestrian crosswalk intervals, street-cleaning schedules, temporary through streets, detours, bus lanes, and bike lanes was a mad symphony that allowed more people to move simultaneously across the streets of Metropolis than was ever thought possible. Kirklin liaised with every public office, utility, and public benefit corporation within the greater metro area. As a result, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported that in the last decade life expectancy in Metropolis had increased by 2.7 years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, pollution and commercial growth in the city had gone down and up, respectively. Dealing with the loss of such a man would have been a nightmare for the agency during the best of circumstances, let alone during the crisis in which we now found ourselves.
The turmoil in Metropolis and Suitland prompted our board of directors to form an oversight committee that put the majority of our projects on hold while they conducted an audit of Garrett’s leadership. Already they were trying to keep any investigation of the cyberattack private despite Garrett’s requests for outreach to the FBI. After the PR disaster of the crashing drones, they were anxious to keep any details of the attack from getting picked up by the press as a potential data breach. When these severe-looking men and women weren’t interrogating Garrett, they could be seen wandering through headquarters, taking in all of the fallout from the attack with colicky disapproval.
Garrett asked me to meet with him in his office later that week, and I expected a war council of sorts, an urgent discussion on how to defend the agency against the destructive influence of the oversight committee. As I took my usual seat, I noticed on his desk one of the printouts with the block of text produced by the virus. After Garrett had tipped me off about the line in Esperanto, I’d typed it into a translation engine, which rendered it as: “The cities are frozen.” A vague threat or warning I didn’t understand. Before I could ask him about it, he told me the committee had instructed him to step down as director by the end of the month.
For a moment the floor attempted to switch places with the ceiling, but I surprised myself by rising from my seat and saying with confidence, “No.”
Garrett looked up at me with a question on his face.
“I can put together a dissent channel,” I said. “Give me some time to write the memo.”
“Sit down.”
“I know the agents don’t like me, sir, but everyone will sign it if they know it’s for you.”
He waved me off.
“Henry, if there’s so much as a whiff of opposition, they’ll gut this place. Do you understand?”
“Without you, this agency—”
“Stop,” Garrett said. “We’re talking about an irreparable loss of institutional memory. Not just the people who sign that memo. Anyone who’s ever sat in on a meeting with you is out the door. The agency as you know it will be finished.”
I was standing in front of his desk. I wanted to leave and put together that memo without delay, but didn’t see how I could without his permission.
“Sir, what am I supposed to do?”
He looked up at me until I sat back down.
“You don’t want to hear this,” he said, “but their decision makes sense. You don’t have all the facts.”
I asked him what the facts were and he told me not to get ahead of him. He then surprised me by taking a pack of cigarettes from his desk and offering me one.
“This is a federal building, sir.”
Garrett laughed and wagged a finger as if he thought I might say that, then lit the cigarette with a book of matches from his blazer pocket. I’d never seen him smoke before and the tobacco smelled stale.
“Do you remember an agent named Stuart Biggs?” he said.
I did. He’d been an undistinguished agent in Sewerage with a geekish demeanor that was extreme even for the agency. In other words, he had as few friends as I did. When I was alone with him in the elevators he once told me, apropos of nothing, that a lifelong dream of his was to revolutionize sewer systems using electric turbines he called waste mills.
“Bit of an odd duck,” I said.
Garrett nodded.
“I suppose that’s why no one noticed he was reassigned to Metropolis eight months ago.”
Garrett took another pull on his cigarette and let me take in this detail. Kirklin never accepted transfers from Suitland because he assumed the agent in question would be sent by Garrett to keep tabs on him. He liked to recruit his agents from Metropolis, specifically from programs for troubled youths, a stark contrast to the tweedy men and women that composed Garrett’s core staff in Suitland. My first two years at the agency, I had sent in requests every few weeks for permission to contribute to various projects being run in Metropolis. After my twentieth rejection, I received a note on Kirklin’s letterhead asking me to tell Garrett he said hello.
“That seems strange given Kirklin’s paranoia.”
“He wasn’t paranoid,” Garrett said. “I was spying on him.”
Garrett put his cigarette in the side of his mouth and pulled a file folder as thick as a phone book from a shelf behind him. He seemed to admire its heft before dropping it onto his desk.
“Whenever I tried to sneak candidates directly through Kirklin’s recruitment process, he’d end up having them shadow his interns. So last year I entered Biggs into the station assignment pool with an internal note that I didn’t think he was right for policy work. Kirklin hired him a week later. Since then I’ve had Biggs monitor Kirklin’s behavior to report on anything strange.”
He pointed to the file folder on his desk.
“This is January to February of this year.”
&n
bsp; “Biggs was comfortable with this?”
“He was excited to work in Metropolis. I also approved some sewerage project in Tucson for him. I thought he was going to do a cartwheel on his way out. But now he’s gone quiet along with the rest of Kirklin’s people. We need someone to make contact with him. The attacks in Metropolis and on headquarters are connected and I think Biggs might know enough to convince the board to open our investigation to outside law enforcement.”
Garrett ashed his cigarette into a mug bearing the agency’s seal. I didn’t appreciate the gesture, but I told myself that these were difficult times. He wasn’t himself.
“That means I need someone in Metropolis,” he said. “It has to be someone I trust, because the board can’t know I’m going around them on this. And this Biggs thing has to be worked fast. Because whatever this is”—he held up the printout of Esperanto—“it isn’t over.”
I started to understand why I was sitting there. Despite my unpopularity, I knew the staff at headquarters down to the mailroom. Every once in a while Garrett liked me to help him pull a name for an assignment. To find Biggs he’d need an agent with experience in the field and enough discretion to keep the board from finding out, but one young enough to be unphased knocking on strange doors for an out-and-out goose chase. It’d be tough putting together my recommendations on such short notice. And with the board challenging projects left and right, no one was going to want to leave their desks until they were sure their portfolios were safe. Garrett didn’t need to know the details, so I just told him I’d take care of it.
He thanked me with a rasp in his voice I attributed to the smoke. As I excused myself and rose to leave, he started to go through Biggs’s file.