The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Where was Skyler?

  Jude scanned the lobby quickly. There he was, over by the opposite wall, still in that ridiculous shirt he'd gotten from the Arizona hospital. He was looking at some framed photographs on the wall.

  Jude walked over and stood next to him. The photos were of agency officials, arranged in a hierarchical pyramid by title. Top ranking officials were at the top. At the summit was the FBI director, on the line below the deputy, then assistant directors, then division heads, and so on. Two out of the twenty were women. Skyler was staring at them. Jude turned around, looking behind the metal detectors for Raymond; he didn't want to be taken by surprise when he appeared.

  Then he heard something—a quick intake of breath, suggesting shock. It came from Skyler. He looked to his side. Skyler was standing frozen in position with his arms hanging down and back. He was staring at the wall—at one particular picture on the wall.

  Then he turned quickly and looked dead ahead at Jude, and his eyes said it all: he had seen something frightening.

  He bolted for the door.

  Jude went after him and saw him running across the lobby toward the front exit. Skyler bumped into a woman's shoulder so hard that she spun halfway around. People turned, their mouths open. No one made a move to stop him. Jude dashed after him, tried to catch him before he reached the doors. But he was not fast enough. He looked through the glass. There was Skyler outside, balancing on one foot, comical almost, as he was desperately deciding what direction to run in.

  "Jude! Jude!"

  The sound came somewhere from the distance behind him, but he ignored it, cutting it off by plunging ahead to the door. He pushed the door with all his might, and in another second he was outside, back on the humid sidewalk, watching Skyler running up the street.

  He ran after him, but couldn't catch him.

  Two blocks, three, four. Skyler wasn't slowing down. Jude watched the top of his head bobbing up and down among the crowd on the sidewalk. Several times, Skyler turned back to look and saw Jude coming and still kept running.

  Strange, thought Jude. He almost seems to be running away from me.

  But he wasn't. Quite the opposite. Skyler wanted to make sure that Jude, too, was running away.

  Jude found this out a few moments later when he arrived at a park, stopped to catch his breath, looked around and couldn't see Skyler anywhere. Then he heard his name being called softly.

  He Joined Skyler, who was sitting on a bench partially concealed by two rhododendron bushes, breathing in great gulps of air.

  "What happened?" Jude exclaimed. "Why did you run off like that?"

  "The photo," explained Skyler. "The one of the deputy director. Eagleton."

  "Yes."

  "I've seen him before. On the island. He was one of those who came that day to see Dr. Rincon."

  ¨

  The funeral was tastefully done. It was held in a white clapboard Congregational church on Lake Drive.

  The turnout was larger than Tizzie had expected—her parents must have known more people than she had realized. Many were elderly, sweet-looking women in bonnets and white Easter gloves, and men with wrinkled faces and perfectly pressed trousers; they knew by heart the rituals and protocol of funeral attendance. The odd thing was how few of them Tizzie knew.

  Her father was too ill to come, which made it more difficult for her.

  Afterward, the participants came back to her parents' house to pay their respects. A huge buffet was laid out—all kinds of salads, deviled eggs, bowls of tuna fish, sliced ham, coleslaw, loaves of unsliced bread and angel food cake—more than enough to feed everyone. Tizzie had no idea where it had all come from. She had the odd sensation that somewhere behind the scenes, professional funeral-givers were poring over plans and pulling strings.

  She couldn't eat. It wasn't that food was totally repellent to her, just that she couldn't find her appetite. She had gone through the service flawlessly, standing and even singing the hymns at full voice. She didn't feel flooded with emotion and close to tears. She felt the opposite—empty, hard. Aside from those gruesome but uncontrollable efforts to visualize the cadaver inside the casket, her thoughts were not about her mother. She was thinking almost the whole time about her father.

  And so that is why afterward, with the people coming and going downstairs, she abandoned her post of greeter at the door and ran up the stairs to what used to be their bedroom. How many times as a little girl had she turned that beveled glass doorknob to gain admittance to the inner sanctum? This time as she turned it, she could almost feel herself regressing, turning small as the years peeled away, like Alice in Wonderland.

  Her father could be seen in the dim light, resting on his back in bed, a head propped up on a sea of pillows. He barely registered her presence. She sat down on the edge of the bed, more roughly than she intended, in part perhaps to shake some life into him. But there was precious little. She buried her face in his neck and caressed the thin yellow-white hair on his brittle skull.

  It was at that moment that she became aware of someone else in the room.

  He coughed slightly from the depths of the easy chair in the shadows in the corner. And it took no more than that for her to know instantly who it was—Uncle Henry.

  "And how are you, my dear?" he asked. "How are you holding up?"

  She thought the inquiry insincere and not deserving of an answer. Nor did she want to give him the satisfaction of having startled her. She sought refuge in silent stoicism.

  Uncle Henry reached up and turned on a standing lamp. The light it threw struck her in the eyes and did nothing to illuminate him, as he sank back into the depths of the chair.

  "I know it is hard on you. It's hard on all of us. Your mother was not the most"—he waved his hand in the air, searching for the right word—"impressive person perhaps to the outside world. But to those of us who knew her, and loved her, she had her qualities."

  Tizzie's father stirred a little, moving one leg.

  "And it's especially unsettling when a member of the elder group goes, one of the original circle, so to speak. And so much before her time."

  This last sentence was delivered almost in a whisper.

  He paused, then picked up the tempo, almost like a preacher.

  "Still, we must not look back. We must move on. We must think of the living. Those who have their lives before them, or who are still holding on to life..." She could feel his gaze shifting to the bed. "Like your father here."

  "What are you trying to say?" she demanded, her eyes flashing.

  "Nothing that you don't already know." His voice was harsh now, bracing in the face of the truth. "He is not in good shape. He is not doing well."

  "I do know that."

  "Do you really?"

  She was puzzled by the turnaround. "Of course."

  "Then why don't you try to do something about it?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Why don't you help us? We're the group that is trying to help him. We're trying to find a cure for what killed your mother. Don't fool yourself—she did not die of old age."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "Come on, Tizzie. You saw how quickly she aged. She seemed to gain thirty years in just the last five. Have you ever seen anything like it?"

  She remained silent, just shook her head.

  "And your father has contracted the same thing."

  "Is it a disease?"

  "Perhaps. We have several people working on that question. A vaccine for what ails him. Someday, maybe, you will join them. You have skills in that department."

  "Is that what you want me to do? Research?"

  Uncle Henry coughed, bringing up some phlegm, which he removed with a pocket handkerchief.

  "Not now. Right now there's something much more valuable that you can do. We have enemies. We need to know who they are and what they are doing."

  Tizzie's heart sank.

  "What can I do?"

  "Very simple. You can
tell us what they've found out."

  "What they've found out?"

  He suddenly raised his voice. "Don't play at being stupid—not with me."

  "I won't. You want me to spy on people—on Jude."

  "Now you're acting like your father's daughter. We want you to report on Jude... and others."

  "Skyler."

  "Precisely."

  She looked over at her father, so frail in his bed, the brown of his freckles standing out against the white of the pillows.

  "And it will help?"

  "Without question."

  "Then I will," she said.

  "Fine."

  "When... what do I do?"

  "Downstairs in the study, you will find some paper. Simply write out everything you know—where they've been, what they've done, what they've said. Take your time, wait until the people leave, which will be shortly, in any case. I'd like it by this evening."

  "I will."

  "That's good, dear."

  "I'll tell you everything. We were all together... out west... in Jerome."

  "Fine. Write it all down. There will be more to do later."

  Uncle Henry put two hands on the armrests and pulled himself up. He shut off the light, and the room turned dim.

  "Will you help my father?"

  "Yes, dear. Along with others. We must all do our bit."

  He walked to the door and looked back.

  "You should comfort him. I think he knows you. It's touching to see you two together."

  "Good-bye, Uncle Henry."

  "Good-bye, dear. I'm glad you told me about your gallivanting around the country with those two boys. It's good to reestablish trust with the gift of honesty. We already knew it, of course."

  She heard his footsteps going down the stairs. It was hard to tell if his remark about trust had been sarcastic. He'd delivered it as if he were talking to a little girl, the very same one who had turned the glass doorknob.

  ¨

  Jude was excited by their accidental discovery. The implications were staggering.

  He took Skyler into a small bar on K Street, where they took a corner booth, so they could think it through. He ordered them each a tall beer.

  So Frederick C. Eagleton, the powerful deputy director of the FBI, an upstanding member of the establishment, was involved in this... this what?... this conspiracy.

  Eagleton wasn't exactly a household name, but he was known to politicians and journalists and anyone else who followed the power game in Washington. Not since Hoover had there been a director with absolute power; some had even been figureheads. But the deputy director—that was a different matter. The deputy didn't come and go at the pleasure of the President. He was as constant and ubiquitous as the civil service, surviving from one administration to the next, accumulating more information, building the files, performing and receiving favors. If the director was a figurehead, then the deputy was the iron hand behind him, the one who pulled the wires and pushed the buttons. What some of those wires and buttons did, Jude didn't care to guess.

  If Eagleton was involved, who else was? God only knew how big this thing was. And if it's a conspiracy, what holds it together? If there's a web, how far does it extend, and who is the spider sitting at the very center?

  Rincon, of course. But how does he do it?

  Jude sipped the beer slowly.

  And exactly how was Eagleton involved? Had he been bribed to give the Lab protection? Was he in their pay? That didn't make sense. If he was on the payroll, why would he have made the trip to the island? That wasn't something an employee does. The way Skyler described it, it sounded more like a pilgrimage, a journey of faith. He went there with all the others to sit at Rincon's feet.

  But why? What could Rincon offer them?

  There was only one answer that made sense: longer life. Some people would do anything for it—especially people in power.

  But the numbers didn't add up. Eagleton was middle-aged, sixty years old, give or take a couple of years. According to what Hartman had told them, he would be far too old to have a clone made at his birth. Sixty years ago was before World War II. The concept of cloning wasn't even dreamt of back then. The technology for it was nonexistent. The only people with clones were children of the Lab, in their early thirties.

  Like me, he thought.

  Jude was at a dead end. He pushed the question aside. It would have to be solved later.

  He took another sip and looked at Skyler. He was getting used to seeing him across a bar table.

  God, they had been lucky to spot that picture. That one little piece made a whole section of the puzzle fall into place. Eagleton's involvement accounted for the FBI's interest in the case. It explained the phone taps, the agents tracking them in Wisconsin, maybe even the tails he was convinced had been hounding them.

  On closer inspection, the discovery raised a question. His old friend Raymond, where did his loyalties lie? He could be anything—friend or foe. Who knew what side he was on? Who knew which side anybody was on?

  Jude had a sudden insight. He raised his beer glass and tapped it against Skyler's.

  "You know," he said, "this guy Raymond, this FBI guy we were going to meet—he's been after one thing. All along he's been wanting to meet you. He wants to hook up with you. He asked me to bring you to him. And now we know why."

  "We do?"

  "Certainly. Don't you see? You're the key. You're a Rosetta stone."

  "What?"

  "It's a stone that helped them decode hierogly—"

  "I know what the Rosetta stone is. I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "You're someone who can help them break the code."

  Now Jude was speaking faster in his excitement.

  "If Eagleton's a member of this group, this conspiracy, then undoubtedly there are others. They're tied into it in some way and for some reason we can't fathom. But nobody on the outside knows who they are. They need to have some way to identify them. And you're it. You're the way. Because you're an eyewitness, don't you see? You saw them all together that day on the island. The whole congregation."

  "No kidding. Don't remind me."

  "I've been so stupid. Here you are, this font of information, so valuable the FBI is dying to get hold of you, and all this time you're sitting right next to me."

  "I'm glad you finally see my value."

  "C'mon, this is important."

  Jude put down his glass with a bang.

  "Don't go away. I'll be right back."

  He was gone in a flash, out the front door. He soon returned, having visited a newsstand down the block, a stack of magazines and newspapers under each arm.

  He spread them out on the bar and opened them at random. They were chock-full of pictures.

  "Here, flip through these. See if anybody looks familiar."

  "You're joking."

  "No, give it a try."

  And while he did, Jude read through The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Mirror, and some other papers.

  One bit of news caught his eye. There had been another one of those "body-snatcher murders," the body found mutilated beyond recognition, the visceral organs missing. This one was the third. It had been discovered in a woods in Georgia, not far from the others. The story got good play in the Post, but merited only four graphs in the Times, and he couldn't find it in the Mirror at all.

  I'll bet the odds are good that the mutilation includes a quarter-sized piece of flesh missing from the inside right thigh, he thought. And it's typical of the police not to let that information out—they're holding back something they assume is known only by the killer.

  Just then Skyler found something of his own. He gave a little cry, not very loud but enough to turn a few heads at the bar stools.

  "Here's one," he said, lowering his voice. "Look at this."

  The heads at the bar lost interest and turned away.

  Jude looked. Skyler's finger was resting on the forehead of an internationally known e
ntrepreneur, an investment banker named Thomas K. Smiley. Smiley had reason to smile: at the age of thirty-five he had invested in a start-up software company. He wasn't the brains behind the company, he was the money behind the brains. It had done well for him in the rat race: it had gotten him out of the starting gate and given him a lead that he'd never squandered. He'd bought up companies left and right, carefully selecting the ones that needed an extra infusion of cash to bring home the prize. He had the Midas touch, and by sixty, his accumulated fortune was comfortably in the nine digits.

  The photo showed a handsome man with a widow's peak and a tan, smiling at the opening of a charity ball at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A long-haired socialite hung from his arm.

  "I saw him that day. I'm sure of it. He flew down in a small plane. I'd recognize him anywhere—same cut of the jaw, same cocky smile. He expected everyone to wait on him—and they did."

  "Bull's-eye. Two down—and God only knows how many to go!"

  Two more beers and Jude was dragging Skyler off on his latest brainstorm.

  They caught a cab. It was raining, the kind of late-summer halfhearted drizzle that doesn't cut the humidity but just seems to merge with it. Here and there on the sidewalks, umbrellas sprouted.

  "So why are we going there?" asked Skyler.

  "Oh, just a little stroll through the corridors of our nation's government."

  They pulled up at the Capitol and took the tourists' entrance off the main rotunda. It was already late afternoon. A small line waited to go through the metal detector. They were sightseers, weary and short-tempered in dealing with their children, who were pulling on their skirts and pant legs, dangling from their hands and whining.

  At first they had no luck. Skyler stared at everyone who walked by. They poked into offices and wandered around the hallways. They pretended to examine busts of famous lawmakers while eavesdropping on lobbyists. They found a reference room and searched the photographs in a bound volume called the congressional directory. They even followed a throng of representatives who led them to an underground electric train, which they took to the Samuel Rayburn Building and back.