The First Horseman

by John Case

  He ‘talked,’ of course, and later wondered why it had taken him so long to do so. But it didn’t make any difference. There was always another question, and if Solange was skeptical of an answer, the rag went back in his mouth and the Pepsi shot through his nose.

  And then, when Frank had given up hope that this would ever end, Solange stopped it. ‘They’ve had enough,’ he said sharply, as if to rebuke the others. He approached Frank and gave his shoulder a squeeze. ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘No more pain. That’s it. It’s over.’

  Frank knew he should have felt revulsion at Solange’s touch, but instead he felt gratitude. He knew better. But that’s what he felt.

  ‘Bring them some clean clothes,’ Solange ordered. ‘And ask the doc to give them some Xanax or something, just to take the edge off.’ And then he was gone.

  Half an hour later they were escorted through the halls like two oddly subdued houseguests, to the mansion’s former ballroom, a large chamber with a gleaming wooden floor and barrel-vaulted ceiling. The room had been converted into a large office. The walls were arrayed with pie charts, maps, bar graphs, satellite photos. There were desks, computers, telephones, ranks of filing cabinets. The horse logo was on virtually everything.

  Frank and Annie, hands secured behind them, were led toward a desk where Solange sat, working on a computer. He did not glance up at their approach. They stood and waited. Above Frank, on the cork-boarded walls, were a series of false-color photographs of what seemed to be wheat fields, shot from above. In each case, a circle had been inscribed on the photograph, a wedge shape marked into the circle. In each case, the wheat seemed afflicted – either diseased or else suffering from drought. The severity of the affliction varied, from a few speckles of brown on a healthy-looking crop to, in another case, a field of wheat that seemed to have collapsed into a dark smudge, as if it had melted. Each bore a date and information scrawled in grease pencil in the photograph’s margin. Frank looked at the notations.

  Puccina Graminus 272 – 4017/9

  Puccina Graminus 181 – 2022/7

  Puccina Graminus 101 – 1097/3

  Puccina Graminus 56 – 6340/7

  Solange finished whatever he was working on and turned off his computer. He glanced up at Frank and Annie, and smiled warmly. ‘Ah. Here you are. Looking much better.’

  ‘What is Puccina Graminus?’ Annie asked. Her voice sounded odd to Frank, somehow robotized. That was the effect of the tranquilizers; he assumed he would sound the same way. Certainly he felt odd, not exactly tranquil, but weirdly disconnected, as if he were pretending to be himself.

  ‘Wheat-stem rust,’ Solange said. He gestured at the photographs. ‘Those are some early field trials. We’re like horse breeders, looking to create the fastest and bestest Puccina Graminus. So far – fifty-six is our Secretariat, but it’s early days yet. Apart from the wheat rust, we’re also working with various corn blights and rice blast. Those are the major food crops.’

  Annie frowned. She tossed a quick look at Frank. Despite her dead voice, despite the clear evidence of her ordeal, he was heartened by the lively awareness in her eyes. Otherwise, she looked as if she’d been stranded on a life raft for several days. Her skin was chapped and reddened, her lips blistered, her eyes limned in red. ‘But why?’ she said. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘To redress the balance,’ Solange replied. ‘To weigh in on Mother Nature’s behalf against a species which has tipped the balance against every other. You’re a scientist. You ought to understand. The “green revolution,” with its hybrid wheat and disease-resistant corn and rice, supports a population that’s laying waste to the planet. We don’t need it. And nature doesn’t want it.’

  ‘So,’ Annie said, ‘you create plague and famine.’

  Solange didn’t answer her. Instead, he looked at his watch and sprang up. ‘Time to go,’ he said, and the whole strange parade – the shackled Annie and Frank, the silent and ever-present phalanx of guards, followed the ebullient Solange toward the elevator.

  ‘You mentioned famines and plagues?’ Solange said. ‘But why not? If one man can create a vaccine against influenza, and that’s natural, why is it unnatural for another to create a superflu? If we had time, I would love to show you why it’s necessary. I could show you the numbers, the projections, the damage that the earth will sustain. Then you’d see that it is necessary to interfere with a species that is metastisizing out of control. You’d see, and you’d join us. And you’d be useful in the labs, I don’t doubt that – although,’ he frowned, ‘I can’t really envision a role for Frank. But –’ He clapped his hands together. ‘– we don’t have that time.’

  Frank’s heart started beating faster when they got into an elevator and he saw one of the kids press 3B. It was the floor where they’d been tortured. Indeed, they walked down the same corridor. Annie’s footsteps picked up pace as they passed the room, and Frank found himself holding his breath. But Solange kept going past it. They went through two sets of green safety doors with wire mesh in the glass windows before Solange turned and walked down a short corridor. One of the guards pulled a key ring out of his pocket, unlocked two separate dead bolts, and held open the heavy door. Solange stepped in and they followed.

  Soon, they found themselves in a square room with cinder-block walls and a raked gravel floor – like a Zen garden’s. There were two rattan chairs and, between them, a small rattan table, upon which stood a bud vase holding a single sprig of lilac. One entire wall of the room consisted of a set of white enameled doors, each of which bore a decal of the white horse against the big blue marble of the earth.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Solange said, gesturing at the chairs. They sat down. At a nod from Solange, the guards unshouldered their weapons and aimed them at Frank and Annie.

  ‘I apologize for the drama,’ Solange said, ‘but folks do get upset. We’ve learned to anticipate that.’

  Annie shot Frank a terrified look, and both of them stared at the guns until Solange noted their focus and rushed to reassure them. ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll give you a few hours to meditate, and cleanse your minds, before we put you in Bertha here,’ he said, patting the enameled door as if it were the hide of a prized steer. ‘She’s solved one of our most persistent people problems. I only wish we’d had her for the Bergmans.’ He pulled open the doors. The room itself was so spotless and austere that Frank was surprised to see that the interior of the refrigerator, or whatever it was, was quite dirty – streaked with soot and dirt, clumps of what appeared to be ashes on the floor.

  Frank struggled to make sense of what Solange had just said. What did he mean, ‘for the Bergmans’?

  ‘It’s a microwave chamber,’ Solange said. ‘Basically, it boils away the liquid, and then it’s a form of rapid dessication. You end up as a little pile of soot.’ He reached up behind him, rubbed his finger against the interior wall, and then showed them a dark and oily smudge. ‘Well, this is your friend Ben Stern.’

  Even though he felt the drug pressing him down in his seat, even though moving through the air was like moving through water, even with the guns pointed his way, Frank surged to his feet and lunged toward Solange. ‘You psycho fuck,’ he said.

  Solange ducked to the side and swung at him, hard. And again. His blows were powerful, and Frank was helpless, his feet rooted, his hands shackled behind him. Finally, he took a punch in the stomach, which doubled him over. The guards shoved him back into the chair.

  Solange was laughing, a rolling chortle, laughing in genuine shoulder-shaking amusement. Finally, he stopped and shook his head. ‘I give him enough drugs to stop an ox and he comes at me.’ He sighed. ‘Very impressive.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Annie asked. She spoke in the labored cadence of a stroke victim, each word emerging separately.

  Solange looked nonplussed. ‘I told you. It’s a disposal problem.’

  ‘No!’ Annie said. ‘I mean the Spanish flu. Wheatstem rust.’

  Once again Solang
e looked startled. ‘Because I am the First Horseman. Aren’t you paying attention?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Frank demanded.

  Solange looked at him. ‘Revelation.’ And then he began to speak, but in a different voice, a voice that was powerful and nuanced. A preacher’s voice.

  ‘And I saw the Lamb open one of the seals, and I heard the noise of thunder, and one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

  And I saw and beheld a white horse: and he that sat upon him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering.’

  The guards were starry-eyed.

  ‘God sends me forth to conquer, to conquer, yes to conquer a species gone amok, spiraling out of control, a species destroying its earthly paradise.’

  Frank couldn’t help himself. He turned to the guards. ‘You believe this shit?’ Then he turned back to Solange. ‘You’re the craziest motherfucker I’ve ever heard in my life!’ And then he started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He was so scared, it was either that or cry.

  Solange stared at him, and for a moment Frank thought he was going to kill him, there and then. But just as Solange took a step toward him, a cell phone chirped in his pocket. It was such an unexpected, incongruous sound, it seemed to go straight to the middle of Frank’s head. Solange plucked the phone out of his pocket with an annoyed look.

  ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘What is it?’

  He listened, for perhaps an entire minute, and during that minute Frank could sense Solange losing interest in the room, in him, in Annie. It was as if his awareness were palpable and its sudden absence made Frank feel oddly abandoned. Solange frowned, removed the phone from his ear, pushed down the antenna, and strode to the door without another glance at them. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’

  Solange shrugged. ‘Let them think about it,’ he replied.

  Frank heard the dead bolts shoot home, first one, then the other.

  Because the floor was gravel, it took a long time to smash the bud vase, which was quite thick. When they finally succeeded, it was a relatively simple matter to cut themselves loose. But as they soon found out, there was no way out of the room – which was locked from the outside.

  There was nothing else they could do, really, except hold each other. Frank told Annie that when the door opened, he’d take out the first person who came through it. They’d have surprise on their side, and maybe he could grab the guy’s gun. Or something. It wasn’t much, but in fact it was the only thing, the only thing they could do.

  Then they slept, lying on the floor next to each other.

  Annie dreamed of Stern and whimpered in her sleep.

  Frank dreamed of Carlos.

  And he was still dreaming when he heard a noise like distant thunder, a series of concussive shocks that made the fluorescent light rattle and the door shudder. He thought at first that it was part of his dream. Either that or he was starting to hallucinate. But Annie heard it, too, and woke up and stared at him. They wondered if the pharmaceutical labs were exploding.

  And then the noise stopped, and soon they were dozing again.

  Suddenly, an amplified voice exploded around them. ‘STAND CLEAR OF THE DOOR.’

  The men who came in were in flak jackets with FBI imprinted in huge letters on their backs. They wore helmets and gas masks and were heavily armed. They were not friendly, either, and did not understand that Frank and Annie were victims, not Temple followers hiding out in some inner sanctum.

  It took quite a long time, really, to make that point.

  Nor was Neal Gleason, when they were finally face-to-face with him, happy to see them, or even pleased that they’d survived.

  Gleason’s blue eyes were bloodshot and he looked like a man who hadn’t slept in several days.

  ‘I guess you got the message,’ Frank said.

  ‘Somebody tipped them,’ Gleason said. ‘They must have someone in the Lake Placid P.D. Because they were the only ones who knew about the raid.’

  ‘Who got away?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Solange,’ Gleason said. ‘Solange and his Special Affairs team.’

  29

  HE SAT IN the great room of the Headmaster’s House, watching over Annie as she slept through the sleeping pills she’d been given. He wanted to work on the story, of course, but writing was impossible. He wasn’t Victor Hugo. He needed a computer, or at least a typewriter. Even a telephone. He could dictate the story.

  But the phone in the great room was dead, and the one in the hall was off-limits. An ATF agent sat outside the great room with a wire in his ear and an Uzi in his lap, making sure no one came or went without Neal Gleason’s approval.

  It took a while, but Frank finally got an explanation – of sorts. ‘I’m supposed to protect you,’ the agent said in a peeved tone. ‘Okay?’

  ‘No,’ Frank told him. ‘It’s not okay. I don’t want protection. I want a fucking ThinkPad.’

  But that, of course, was precisely the point. Gleason didn’t want him to write a story – not, at least, while Solange was on the loose. So he was left to browse, to pace, and to stand at the windows, watching the scene outside.

  Which was strangely sinister, a surreal tableau that, if painted by Bosch, might have been called, ‘Eden Invaded.’ A helicopter sat in the meadow next to the pond, its rotors turning slowly, while German shepherds towed ATF gunmen up one path and down another. Marines in biohazard suits wandered in and out of the labs, looking like advertisements for Intel, while FBI agents in matching windbreakers piled computers and filing cabinets into the back of a large white van. Otherwise, the campus seemed deserted, with the Templars confined to dormitories, waiting to be questioned.

  Eventually, Frank tired of the view and sat down at an elaborately carved desk in an alcove off the great room. Its four clawed feet rested on a vintage Kilim beneath a portrait of Edward Abbey. A nineteen-inch Toshiba monitor sat on the desk’s surface with its cables dangling toward the floor.

  There was no CPU.

  It would have been nice to have gotten a look at Solange’s hard disk, Frank thought. But maybe there was something else . . . a notepad, a floppy, a calendar – anything.

  One by one he opened the drawers of the desk and looked inside. But there was nothing. A couple of pens, some pencils and paper clips, an empty notebook, and a ream of Iroquois laser bond. A map of New York City, a pair of scissors, some thumbtacks, and empty note cards.

  He unfolded the map and looked at it. Nothing, he thought. No marks or pinpricks. No hand-drawn lines. It’s just a map. With a sigh, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

  He sat that way for a long while, and then, suddenly energized or just impatient, he sat up straight. Sweeping the map from the desk, he took out a piece of paper and began to write. Who says I’m not Victor Hugo?

  He passed about fifteen minutes in this way, and then looked over what he’d written – half a dozen variations on the same lead paragraph. Okay, so I’m not Victor Hugo, Frank thought. I’m the writer in The Shining, the one Jack Nicholson played. Crumpling the pages into a ball, he tossed them into the wastebasket.

  Solange’s wastebasket. Which was half full.

  Was the FBI really so sloppy? Could they have possibly overlooked the wastebasket?

  Apparently.

  Getting to his feet, he dumped the contents of the basket on the desk and began to sort through it. There wasn’t much. A laser-printed copy of last week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The first two pages of an essay entitled ‘The Politics of Dystopia.’ Crumpled Post-its with messages like ‘Call Nikki,’ ‘Tues. intvw. w/Futurist,’ and ‘Query Belinda @ recruitment tables.’ There was an empty bottle of Evian water, a crumpled box of Lakrits mentholated lozenges, and fragments of what turned out to be a four-by-five, black-and-white snapshot.

  The picture had been torn in half three times. Reassembled on the desk, the eight pieces combined to form a photo of a little house
. Or not quite a house – a construction shack. Or something like a construction shack. Whatever it was, it sat in the middle of an industrial urban nowhere, as anonymous as a slab of cement. Its blasted surroundings might have belonged to parts of Yonkers or Anacostia, East L.A. or South-side Chicago. Hard to tell. Harder still to guess what it meant to Solange (if, indeed, it meant anything).

  He was still puzzling over the picture when an FBI agent came through the door with a bag full of chicken salad sandwiches and cans of Mountain Dew. ‘If I could just get a statement from you and your friend,’ he said, ‘we might be able to move things along.’

  ‘You mean, we could leave?’

  ‘That’s up to Neal,’ the FBI agent said, ‘but until we get your statement, I don’t think anything’s going to change real quick.’

  And so he woke up Annie – it was mid-afternoon, after all – and when she was ready, they told the Bureau’s man what they knew. Or most of what they knew. When Frank mentioned the Chosen Soren organization, the agent suddenly stopped taking notes. With a sigh, he recapped his pen and got to his feet, saying he’d be right back.

  In fact, it was two hours before anyone came, and when someone did, it was a large and fashionably dressed woman with a Hermes attaché case and a gravelly voice. ‘Janine Wasserman,’ she offered, shaking hands with Frank and Annie. ‘I’m helping the FBI.’

  ‘That’s nice of you,’ Frank replied, ‘but I was hoping to see Gleason. We’d like to leave.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be on your way in a little while,’ she said. ‘But so long as we’re waiting, I was hoping you’d tell me about the North Koreans.’ With a smile, she found her way to a green leather wing chair and sat down. ‘Do you mind filling me in? I can promise it’s for a good cause.’

  Frank and Annie looked at each other. Finally, Frank said, ‘There’s not that much to say. We think they’re bankrolling Solange.’