Project Antichrist

by Pavel Kravchenko

  Brome looked at me long and hard, then turned around and disappeared in the hallway. The door closed and locked.

  “Shit,” I said and fell, like a raindrop from an awning, back into the sofa.

  “It’s me, you and the gun,” said Paul.

  “I have wine,” I mumbled.

  “I’ll pass. Don’t feel like puking tonight.”

  “I do.” And with that I got up and rolled to the bathroom.

  When I returned to the living room I was afraid Paul wouldn’t be there. But he was, only he moved from the armchair to the sofa.

  “Got a pillow and a blanket?” he asked me. “I’m pooped. I think I’m going to sleep over.”

  When I brought the beddings he was crouching near the TV.

  “Where’s the ‘Power’ button?”

  “It doesn’t have one.”

  “I thought only the cheap models didn’t have one.”

  “Maybe I overpaid.”

  “So how do you turn it off?”

  “I don’t. It’s got some kind of floor sensor system…”

  “Want me to break it?” It was tempting, but sounded like too much trouble.

  “No,” I said. “Although… I don’t know how you’re planning to sleep here.”

  “Step out of the room,” he said. I did, watching him from the hallway. He threw the pillow on the sofa and lay down on his side, lifting his feet from the floor.

  “Sleep.”

  For a few seconds nothing happened, then the dancing images died silently. The room became submerged in night.

  “Damn,” I said. “I never knew you could do that. So how does that work? Is it pressure or optics of some kind? Or does the command work all the time?”

  In reply to my excited queries, Paul snored.

  “Goodnight, then,” I said and, still thinking about it, went to bed.

  I woke in darkness with the hangover’s band and dance troop parading back and forth through the desert between my skull and my stomach. But it wasn’t the hangover that had woken me up, I realized, staring at the blue rays flashing on the walls of the bedroom.

  My phone was ringing.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The bedside clock showed 00.23.

  “Take a message,” I groaned and fell back on the pillow. The phone slumbered for a moment, then began to ring again. Muttering obscenities, I sat up.

  “Pick up,” I said. “This better be good.”

  “Mr. Whales?” an excited, high-pitched, male voice called out. “Mr. Whales!”

  Strategically, I had no monitor in the bedroom, so I imagined a short, rotund fellow with a red beard in a green suit.

  “What time is it where you at?” I demanded, none too friendly.

  “My name is Dr. Coughlin. Dr. Young might have mentioned me to you. We worked together at Freedom Corp.”

  “He didn’t. How did you get this number?”

  “Could you please come to the monitor?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to make sure it’s you.”

  Through the raging headache, I registered a weary thought: you’re calling my number, who else will it be? And then, as I placed my right hand carefully on the side of my face, I thought, Trust me, it’s me. But what I said was, “And if it’s not me, will you call back the morning after… never?”

  There was a pause. Optimistically, I imagined the little mythical creature was considering it. My hopes were dashed quickly.

  “Please, Mr. Whales,” the voice implored. “It is the matter of life and death.”

  It was really hard to care, but somehow I made myself stand up and go to the study.

  “Monitor on,” I moaned and descended into the chair. “All right, see if it’s me.”

  The face on the screen was pale, gaunt, and continued far up the forehead. The man, of about fifty-five, wore glasses in a transparent frame and stared past the camera. He was in the dark, and in the background shadows flew by, right to left. Dr. Cocklin was driving.

  He glanced down; the monitor must have been safely built into the dashboard. When he did, I saw that his remaining hair was gray. He gave a nod and looked up.

  “Mr. Whales,” he said as gravely as he could in that voice. “Dr. Young has been kidnapped.”

  “So I heard,” I said. He glanced down at the monitor again and stared at the camera in astonishment. I felt uncomfortable, because he seemed to have completely lost interest in the road.

  “You… heard?” he finally managed.

  “Never mind that. Why are you calling me? If you know where he is, you should call the cops.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would compromise me. They own the cops. I have seven grandchildren.”

  “Who owns the cops?”

  “Time is short.”

  “So start making sense. Who kidnapped Dr. Young?” I figured I could call Brome myself.

  “Freedom, of course.”

  “Freedom Corp.? You mean the pill makers?”

  “I think you know they are much more than that. They brought him to the facility in Long Grove earlier today… yesterday, actually. I don’t think you have much time.”

  “Why does he have any time at all?”

  The man glanced down. “I don’t understand.”

  “Why is he alive? You said he doesn’t have much time, so I’m guessing you mean they will soon kill him. If they want to kill him, why haven’t they?”

  “No, no, they will not kill him. If they meant to kill him, he would already be dead. A suicide, senseless homicide, plenty of options, really.”

  I shuddered; something moved in my stomach, as though alive, and I was also thinking back to the earlier conversation. As I did, I listened to the sounds from the living room. There were none.

  “What are you talking about, then?” I asked.

  “I said you don’t have much time.”

  I stared blankly.

  “Wait, so you’re calling to—”

  “You have to get out of town, the sooner the better. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Pack up right now. Better yet, don’t pack. Just leave.”

  “Just leave?” I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. When I opened them a minute later, the pale-face was still there.

  “How did you figure to call and warn me?” I asked him, as it occurred to me suddenly.

  “Ben told me to.”

  “Ben told you to? You mean Dr. Young? You spoke to him?”

  “No, no. Of course not. I saw him from a distance.”

  “So how did he—”

  “I was on my way to the garden for a break and saw them escorted out of the elevator. I might have been the first — and only — live human being who was not a guard they saw at the facility. It gets quite deserted there… Anyway, as soon as they spotted me, the girl jumped on one of the guards and screamed ‘Help!’ and while they were subduing her, Ben mouthed a single word to me, which I recognized as ‘Whales.’ It wasn’t too hard to deduce—”

  “Stop!” I shouted.

  He tensed immediately, mouth open in mid-word, eyes darting from camera to monitor to the road and back with desperate speed.

  “What is it?” he whimpered.

  I leaned forward, placed my palms over my face and rubbed my eyes like I wanted to erase them. The hangover became a distant throbbing in the center of my skull. I tried to peer out of the window, but there was nothing to see, just the room and me all over again.

  “Mr. Whales?”

  “What the hell is going on?” a voice demanded behind me. Paul was squinting in the doorway. In his hand he had the gun I’d left on the table. I looked at him over my shoulder, then at the man on the display.

  “The girl,” I finally said. “Who was the girl?”

  The man’s face relaxed somewhat, although his eyes remained wary. The camera mounted on my display allowed him a view of the weapon in Paul’s hand. Paul’s sincerest scowl didn’t help the mat
ter either. I just waited, knowing the answer and prolonging the idleness before I would have to think of its implications.

  “Never seen her before,” Coughlin replied. “Skinny, short hair, good-looking, I think. Wore something red, if I recall correctly. I really couldn’t study her for too long, you understand.”

  “I understand.” I looked up at him. He glanced down again.

  “You know her,” he stated rather than asked. When I didn’t immediately respond he started shaking his head. “You cannot be thinking of going in there to get them out. They’re gone. You can’t help them. Leave. Save yourself.”

  “Did anyone hear me ask what the hell was going on just now, or was I still dreaming?” Paul entered the study fully, frowning at the doctor and stuffing the gun behind the waistband of his pants.

  “I appreciate you calling me,” I said to the man on the screen. “Go home to your grandkids. Drive safely. I need to think about things.”

  “There’s nothing to think about,” he insisted. “You cannot break in or out of the ‘Tomb.’ Even if you do, you might be facing more than just men…”

  “Good night, Dr. Coughlin.” I cut the connection.

  “Well?” Paul inquired from the top of the desk.

  “I think they got Iris,” I told him, while dialing the number of her apartment. In reality, though, I knew they got Iris. The phone rang forever. No answer, no machine, no hope.

  “Fuck,” I groaned. Paul studied the life lines on his hands.

  I felt bad about Dr. Young, too, but he seemed to have been mixed up in all sorts of queer stuff. That church of his, the house, the weapons, acquaintances like Lloyd and so on. The fact that he had once worked for Freedom, also. Of course, none of that meant he deserved it or anything, maybe just that he kind of had it coming, you know? In other words, if Dr. Young had been the only one captured, I would probably have followed Coughlin’s advice, with shame, sincere regret, but not much of a hesitation.

  But Iris… Iris was my fault. Iris was just a bored girl who helped out a fugitive TV star and, probably, the only reason she stuck around was simply because she liked me. Look where that’s gotten her, I thought.

  While I guzzled “Stoli” and chatted about being in love in the comfort of my four-million-dollar condo, Iris, still in her short skirt she’d worn earlier to our date, was likely being tortured in some cold basement.

  I inhaled deeply and looked up. Paul was nodding, an unfamiliar, grim expression on his face.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Make something up and we’ll try it.” He jumped off the desk.

  “I’m just a talking head, Paul. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Begin by calling friends you made recently. Still got that fed’s card?”

  I followed him out of the study.

  “I think we will have to make do without assistance from government agencies. I’ll be damned if I trouble the very Special Agent Brome at this hour, or any hour for that matter, with my nonsense. Let the man have his Christmas.”

  Outside the window, in the darkness between my reflection and lights from the Michigan shore of the lake, the rain had been forgotten. It began to snow in large, clueless flakes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  At three in the morning there were few cars on the highway. Brome counted eleven and as many city trucks cleaning the snow that had started without waiting for a forecast. Now the snow looked like it was never going to end, but then, this was Chicago.

  He had known he would be coming back to the city even before Whales called him. Had known he couldn’t just walk away pretty much the same time he’d found blood in Dr. Young’s pantry. Must be my “inner hero,” he thought. It was a good try, what he said at Whales’s, though. He had almost believed it himself. Would have believed it, if he hadn’t thrown up the medication that morning. Then again, if he hadn’t puked the tabs he wouldn’t have gone to the “Church of God” in the first place. The church with the open back door and furniture on its head and blood, just enough to be acknowledged, in the back room.

  It was to get away from these thoughts that Brome counted cars and trucks. Annoying, persistent thoughts that always ended in the idea that somebody had expected him to drop by Dr. Young’s that afternoon, when he, himself, went there following a sudden impulse. Actually, thoughts didn’t end there. They continued on to his subsequent visit to Whales, and he had to wonder whether that also hadn’t been planned by someone else. And that could mean his eventual return… Nonsense. He was going too far. Even after his suspicions regarding his sanity had been reduced significantly — although not eliminated all together — by Whales’s story, this was too much. In fact, it might have been that story, so far out there and fitting so well with his observations that night at the ruined house, what caused most of these mental wanderings. If you believed something like that, and he did, simply because he had been there when it happened, you naturally began to look for conspiracy signs in every spoonful of cereal. Brome shook his head. Stick to the facts, agent. Let’s just stick to the facts and leave paranoia for the CIA.

  And yet, and yet…

  There weren’t enough cars on the highway at three in the morning.

  He thought of his little girl. She was sleeping when he got home, tiny pink soles of her feet sticking out from under the blanket she had kicked up. He sat on the edge of the bed, tucking in the blanket and smoothing it over for a long time. She didn’t wake up. Her ceiling was the night sky. In the corner above the window, crescent moon was trying to hook Venus. Milky Way sprinkled its dust through the middle. The Sky Ceiling didn’t come standard. It had cost him a good buck a couple of years earlier. He heard the new model was the sky that moved. Falling stars, wispy clouds and everything. Ridiculously pricey, but he was considering splurging for it. Annie loved to sleep under the stars.

  Maybe after all this is over.

  He kissed her forehead and went to the bedroom. There he changed out of his fed clothes, refastening the holster onto a black turtleneck sweater, then hiding it under a navy-blue cashmere coat. Grace didn’t wake up either. An ugly thought occurred to him that he should check if they came up with a newer model that wakes and strikes up a small conversation when you walk into the room in the middle of the night. His face turned crimson from shame. He bent and kissed her cheek and she moved in her sleep and made sounds.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he whispered.

  “Hmm,” she replied without waking.

  Still disgusted with himself, he went down to the study and wrote a note:

  I got an urgent assignment. Will be out of town for a couple of days. Go to Florida on Thursday instead. I will meet you both there as soon as I’m done.

  Love, Oliver.

  He hid the note in his pocket just in case and spent some time scrolling aimlessly through Internet pages. Then he woke up to find his phone ringing.

  Now, as his “Chrysler” carried him silently through the first blizzard of winter, he wondered if he should have added “Don’t call the office.” Because Grace might do just that when she found the note. Or, on the other hand, she might not, but would if he had added the specific instruction not to. No matter. Either way it was out of his hands now. Even if she called the office, he hoped she trusted him enough to take the baby to Florida, regardless of what she found out.

  He also hoped he would keep his promise.

  From the car he sent a request to the FBI data base for the file on Dr. Coughlin. It took him a few minutes to sort through the entries and find the right one. He put it on audio playback and listened as more trucks appeared around him.

  Dr. Coughlin’s file reported nothing unusual. Graduated from UIC in ‘04, PhD in ‘09. Stayed in the Midwest ever after. Married to his college sweetheart. Three children, two girls and one boy. All three presently married. Diabetes, cured in 2024. Works for Freedom Labs since 2011. Salary, 220000 dollars per year. Golf once a week. Drives BMW’s. Likes fishing, garde
ning and chess. DUI on Christmas, 2015, two parking tickets since. Catholic, republican.

  Brome glanced at the pictures, arranged in the chronological order of receding hairline. Pale face, glasses, no cheeks, no smiles. He looked like a regular, non-mad scientist. Much more so than Dr. Young. With a sigh, Brome dismissed the file. He stared straight ahead through the blur of wipers that had just switched to maximum speed. The new Japanese models, he thought, don’t need wipers.

  The road curved and the downtown rose in front of him, sudden and whole, like an iceberg floating east, too close to avoid. Thinking again of his daughter under the ceiling of unmoving night sky, Brome sped towards the iceberg’s eastern tip.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I called the fed around 2. Of course I called the fed. There was no one else to call. All my friends were in attendance. Took me that long only because I’d said I wouldn’t. So after I’d vomited, Paul and I spent an odd hour in the living room with our feet up. Paul in grim, concentrated silence; me in painful awareness of my own empty procrastination. I was an all-in poker player unable to reveal, or even to face, the bluff that had been called.

  I was supposed to come up with a plan. It was the girl who meant something to me. So I tried and tried, and then pretended to continue trying for a long time. But with one gun and the seventh place in the in-campus BF5 tournament between us, Paul and I weren’t exactly the “Alpha” team. Going up there immediately and storming the place in the middle of the night had crossed my mind, but only as a means to end the whole ordeal quickly. I was ashamed, but still I was mute.

  So around two o’clock Paul took the matters in his own hands.

  “Just call the fed,” he said. And I did.

  I dialed Dr. Coughlin’s number as soon as I hung up with agent Brome.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  “Mr. Whales.”

  “Dr. Coughlin, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I haven’t slept.”

  “Tell me how to get in.”

  “First let me reiterate that the very idea is ludicrous…”