Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Jenny studied him, sitting on the edge of the bed. For perhaps the first time in this conversation, he wasn’t lying.

  But she was now detecting something else. Exhaustion. His face was lined in ways it usually wasn’t. It wasn’t merely crooked. It was like it was an extra degree or two out of joint. Lopsided.

  Nate’s presence had always been a calming one in her life. He had this insouciance about him—this air that, yes, the girls were hard work, draining in ways not even their early years as associates had been, but he was still basically content with his life, safe in the knowledge that everything was somehow going to work out okay.

  That was gone. This was a man under strain.

  “Has someone tried to threaten you?” Jenny asked quietly.

  Nate seemed to have something stuck in his throat.

  “No,” he finally choked out. “It’s just . . . I worry, that’s all. I worry you’re getting involved with people who have no moral compass and no conscience, and they’ll stop at nothing to win.”

  “And therefore you want me to drop this case.”

  “Right. Exactly. Look, you say there’s a vote today? Let’s just agree on this: If the members of the executive committee vote this thing down, don’t fight it, okay? Accept their wisdom and move on. Is that a fair request? Can we make that the favor I’m asking for?”

  “It makes no sense for them to drop this. We’ve already made a huge investment in time and resources—”

  “But if they do, you’ll respect the decision. Is that fair?”

  “Sure. Fair deal.”

  “Okay,” he said, then practically bounced off the bed. “I’m going to check on the girls.”

  “Wait a second,” she said quickly.

  He paused in the doorway. Jenny felt like there were still too many unanswered questions. And she—a woman who had taught herself not to back down from anything—found herself in the strangest of mindsets:

  She was afraid to ask them.

  Because she truly didn’t know how he’d react. And that was scarier than having him lie to her, scarier than all his erratic behavior of late. For the first time in their thirteen years, she wasn’t entirely sure of Nate Lovejoy—solid, dependable, calm Nate. And it terrified her.

  But rather than confront him, rather than do anything that might push him further away, she instead felt this desperate urge to bring him closer.

  “I love you,” she said. “I hear what you’re saying about this case, and . . . just remember, no matter what happens, I love you. Keep that first and foremost in your heart, okay?”

  CHAPTER 30

  NATE

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Jenny—ever-intuitive Jenny—had been able to sniff out my conversation with Dickel, or that she was circling around the truth of why I wanted her to drop the lawsuit.

  Still, her revelation about the executive committee vote gave me hope. There were nine of them, all partners who were more senior than Jenny.

  Dickel was the only one I knew well. The rest were high in other regions of the CMR atmosphere, places I hadn’t interacted with much, if at all. It would be weird for me to call and lobby any of them to vote against my wife.

  Dickel would just have to be persuasive on his own. He probably had either leverage or plain dirt on at least four other committee members. If he was willing to twist arms, he might just be able to—

  I didn’t dare get too optimistic about it. But maybe this was my out, the wrinkle in the currents that Vanslow DeGange had overlooked. This executive committee was effectively my Supreme Court. All I needed was five votes and my problems were over.

  Not long after Jenny left for work, taking her protection detail with her, Rogers appeared on our back porch.

  He was attired in his usual manner—as the older guy in the dentist’s office who felt like his semiannual cleaning was worth putting on a crisply ironed dress shirt.

  I let him into the kitchen and pointed toward the living room, where I was once again letting a screen watch my children.

  “Just keep your voice down,” I said. “You want some coffee?”

  “That’d be great,” he said.

  As I asked him for his cream-and-sugar preferences, he sat on a stool at the peninsula. I couldn’t believe I was being hospitable to a man who had kidnapped me, threatened my children, and wanted me to kill my wife. At the same time—and this must have been some bizarre form of Stockholm syndrome—I felt like I needed him.

  He was the one person in my life who actually seemed to know what was going on.

  I slid a coffee mug toward him, and soon he was unspooling his version of Candy Bresnahan’s story.

  She had been a longtime member of the Praesidium, predating Rogers’ arrival by a year. He told me things I already knew or had guessed about her husband, whose drunken spilling of toxic waste was, in fact, going to poison hundreds of people had he not been stopped.

  The environment had since become an important issue to Candy. Although, lately, Rogers had been worried about her mental state. She was showing signs of dementia—not just the forgetfulness but also the irritation and agitation known to accompany it.

  In her lucid moments, she had been hyperfocused on Jenny’s case, demanding that the Praesidium move to take her out. Not trusting in me to get the job done, she had decided to do it herself.

  “So, basically, she went rogue,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “The last thing she said to Jenny was something like, ‘This has to end.’”

  “That’s what she thought she was doing. Ending the looming global warming crisis.”

  “Why wasn’t Vanslow DeGange able to see this coming and stop her?”

  “We’ve had this problem a few times in the past,” Rogers said. “The Praesidium is kind of Mr. DeGange’s blind spot. He’s concentrating so hard on things outside the group, he doesn’t really focus on us. He assumes our past loyalties—and the way we’re bonded to him and each other—will keep us in line. And most of the time he’s right. Except, every now and then, a Candy Bresnahan slips through the cracks.

  “Candy wasn’t . . . well, it’s not like we have ranks in the Praesidium. You’re either with us or you’re not. But in the unofficial pecking order, she had been slipping for some time. She definitely wasn’t being trusted with bigger assignments anymore. I think it bothered her. I can’t pretend to be in her head, but it’s possible she saw this as a way to reestablish herself as a useful contributor and bring up her stock.”

  Which meant the Praesidium—as unusual as its mission and methods may have been—was just like every other human organization: prone to politicking and infighting.

  “Where are you in the pecking order?” I asked.

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere in the middle, I’d say. Maybe a little higher. I’m viewed as reliable. Mr. DeGange trusts me. Though I’m perhaps not as talented as others. I’m certainly not seen as anyone special. When I told you killing me wouldn’t help you, that’s accurate. I’m replaceable.”

  He took another sip of his coffee.

  “You never did tell me who you killed to become part of the Praesidium.”

  I saw a brief flash of an expression I couldn’t entirely diagnose. Maybe sadness. Or regret. Or anger. Rogers’ personality was as buttoned down as his shirts, so it was hard to get a read on him.

  He took a long sip of his coffee, set it down, then reset his face.

  “My younger brother,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He made an ambiguous gesture with his right shoulder. “He was a good kid. He really was. He just got . . . mixed up with the wrong people at a time in his life when he was really impressionable. My parents didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have. Maybe I couldn’t have stopped it, but . . .”

  “What was it? Drugs?”

  “Well, partly. But mostly it was ideology. You’d never guess it,
looking at me, but my brother was this latter-day hippie. Free love. Peace on Earth. Everything was a conspiracy between the government and the corporations. It was like he came along too late for the sixties and was trying to make up for it. He actually did join a commune out west. Then he drifted for a while. By the time he came back home he had been . . . radicalized, I guess you could say. He was convinced that capitalism was the root of all evil and that our government was a corrupt handmaiden of capitalism that needed to be overthrown by violent insurrection. This was early nineties, so there wasn’t really an internet as we know it now. But there were these bulletin board systems that people could log into and anonymously post all sorts of crazy stuff. Including how to make bombs.”

  Rogers was sharing this story like he had told it before. Was this the way members of the Praesidium got to know each other? Sit around and talk about who they had killed?

  “I was approached by a man who told me my kid brother was going to bomb the Mall of America the weekend before Christmastime. It would have killed close to two hundred people, according to Mr. DeGange. I had doubts about Mr. DeGange—it’s crazy, right? But ultimately I wasn’t as difficult to convince as you are. I knew my brother had been hanging around with people who had twisted his mind and that he had way more fertilizer socked away than my mother’s vegetable garden needed.”

  “Why you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Why were you the one who had to kill him?” I asked.

  “Oh. My brother didn’t have a lot of friends. He had turned pretty paranoid about outsiders. He was living in this man cave my parents had built for him—a detached garage with living quarters over it. It wasn’t easy for anyone else to get close. By the time Mr. DeGange sensed the ripple of what was going to happen at the Mall of America, there wasn’t a lot of time. I was the only one who could get access. So I did what I had to do.”

  “Did you . . . end up going to jail, or—”

  He shook his head. “I was given a device to plant in the garage. When it detonated, it set off all the other bomb-making material my brother had, blew the place sky-high. The authorities pretty quickly concluded he had accidentally killed himself with one of his own bombs.”

  “And then you ran off and joined the Praesidium,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say I ran off. You have to keep it secret, sure. My mother is still alive. As far as she’s concerned, I have a job with an educational consulting firm that involves a lot of travel. It’s not like being part of the Praesidium means you have to sever all ties with the world. Some, like Candy, decide to do it that way. But that’s their choice. Basically, I was given the same talk that you’ll be given once this is over.”

  “Which was?”

  “A combination debriefing and job offer, I guess you’d call it. It was explained to me that I was not to share anything I had learned about the Praesidium—certainly not about Mr. DeGange’s abilities, not even that the group existed—and there would be consequences if I did.”

  “Consequences like . . .”

  “What do you think?”

  “They’d kill you if you talked.”

  “Actually, it’s more interesting than that,” he said. “It was explained to me that I’d likely be silenced before I talked, because Mr. DeGange would know it was coming.”

  “Punished for a crime you hadn’t even committed yet.”

  He made another ambiguous move with his shoulder.

  “And then the job offer?” I asked.

  “That I was eligible to join them if I wished.”

  “And obviously you did.”

  “I was a high school English teacher, divorced, no kids. I liked my job fine, but it wasn’t anything special. What the Praesidium was proposing just seemed more interesting, more fulfilling.”

  “And what, exactly, was the proposition?”

  “You mean what would the offer be for you?” he asked, smiling slightly.

  “No, I—”

  “Just relax. It’s not something we can talk about yet anyway. The time will come. Suffice it to say, the Praesidium takes good care of each other and we’ll take good care of you.”

  He reached out and patted my arm.

  “I actually can’t stay,” he said. “If you need to talk more later, just call this number.”

  He slid over a piece of paper where he had written ten digits.

  “Is this your number?”

  “It’s . . . I guess you’d call it an answering service. If you need to leave a message for a member of the Praesidium, they always know where to find us. But maybe I shouldn’t call it an answering service, because believe me, you won’t get any answers out of them.”

  He stopped to smile at his own thin attempt at a joke.

  “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I have some business to attend to.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  He smiled again. “Not yet. But I suspect you’ll learn about it soon enough.”

  It was the weirdest sensation, this feeling of near normalcy that descended over the house after Rogers left.

  I was alone with the girls. Just like I would be on any other Friday.

  Except if Vanslow DeGange was to be believed—and I was having an increasingly hard time doubting him—this would be a Friday unlike any other.

  I’m always aware of the time, especially on Fridays, because it means we’re so close to the weekend—two days when I don’t have to be as much of a single parent as I am the other five.

  On this Friday, I found myself even more aware of the clock, especially when forty-seven minutes past the hour rolled around.

  Because at 10:47 I was eleven hours away.

  And at 12:47 I was nine hours away.

  And so on. I spent most of nap time pondering free will—or the lack of it—dreading what the future had in store for me, asking myself whether it was already preordained.

  Was I, in fact, a man in full control of his actions? Or was I just another leaf being blown along by the breezes of fortune?

  I found myself thinking about the lessons of big data when it came to this question. Trying to use data to predict when one person will be involved in a traffic accident is a hopeless exercise. The chances are so small each time the person gets behind the wheel it’s impossible to say with any certainty that, yes, this is when it will happen.

  Furthermore, when you look at any one accident, you can usually pinpoint the cause. A person made a decision to text while driving, or drive too fast, or have that extra drink, or run that red light.

  It looks a lot like free will in action. Haphazard. Chaotic. Unpredictable. The human animal in all its quirky glory.

  But when the frame of reference is pulled back far enough, the picture changes. The data shows a certain number of people absolutely will be involved in accidents each year. And a certain percentage will be caused by texting, or speeding, or drinking, or failure to obey signals. The results are remarkably predictable, with a high degree of confidence, and they only vary by so much year-in, year-out.

  From that perspective, we don’t seem to have free will at all. We look like a bunch of mindless electrons, slavishly fulfilling the needs of the data set. Oh, sure, you can’t necessarily say what any one electron will do. But the entire system behaves very neatly, according to equations that are relatively easy to calculate. Insurance companies do it all the time.

  It makes you question whether the individual has any say in it at all.

  Then again, according to that classic statistician’s joke, the average American has one ovary and one testicle.

  Once the girls woke up, I was yanked out of these meditations and back into fatherhood, all while continuing to eye the clock.

  At Parker’s insistence, we were having a tea party. We all got dolled up—me in a top hat and a clip-on bow tie, the girls in hats and old costume jewelry—and huddled on the floor around the tiny tea set that my mother got Parker for her last birthday.

  Cate w
asn’t quite all in on drinking nonexistent tea and eating air scones. She mostly fussed with her jewelry over Parker’s objections (“No, Cate-Cate, that’s not a toy!”), until—inevitably—she destroyed the necklace she had been yanking on, sending little plastic pearls bouncing all over the floor.

  Parker immediately began howling about the broken necklace. Once we collected all the parts of it, I saw it was actually an easy fix. I just had to get a tool from Jenny’s jewelry box.

  That’s how I ended up in our bedroom, rooting through Jenny’s stuff, where I found something that definitely didn’t belong among all the baubles and trinkets.

  It was a thumb drive, artfully camouflaged behind Jenny’s charm bracelet.

  What was a thumb drive doing there?

  I pulled it out of her jewelry box, holding its string between my thumb and pointer finger, letting it dangle in front of my eyes.

  According to the clock by her bedside, it was exactly 2:47 p.m. Seven hours to go.

  It gave me an involuntary chill. Had I been fated to find the thumb drive at this exact moment? Was the broken necklace not a random accident but, rather, another move in a prechoreographed dance?

  Stuffing the thumb drive in my pocket, I went back downstairs. I fixed the necklace, which calmed a teary Parker. I put Cate behind the plastic barriers in the corner—over her vociferous protests—and told the girls Daddy needed to go potty.

  I took my computer into the bathroom and set it on my lap, using the toilet as a seat. The thumb drive had just one file on it—a video.

  It was called Lovejoy Trip.

  My screen was soon displaying an image of a gray Range Rover—my Range Rover—shot from high altitude. It was driving down a suburban road I didn’t immediately recognize, even though I presumed I was the one driving.

  The camera seemed to be following along. It must have been attached to a drone.

  There was a time-and-date stamp on the bottom right of the screen, which told me this was Thursday morning. Suddenly, I recognized exactly where I was, and I knew where I was going.

  This was my drive to the Matthews residence.

  I thought back to all those wrong turns and double backs I had performed. I had been looking in my rearview mirror the whole time. I never thought to look up in the sky.