The Guardian Angel

by George Lazăr

  “Mr. Bolden, we target our services toward a select clientele, and by that I mean the small percentage of living humans who possess the wealth required to afford our rates. In some cases we have to start early. In your case specifically, circumstances forced us to start at the beginning. You were the unborn heir to an important fortune, Mr. Bolden. What’s more, we suspected you’d have the skills to increase that fortune. Letting you die in the womb would have been bad business. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Bolden reconsidered the tragic circumstances of his birth. His mother’s decision. His father’s undying resentment.

  “I’d say our gambit paid off nicely,” Folder said. “Your space-waste venture has been wildly successful – and it even better days lie ahead, I assure you. Allow me to congratulate you on the idea. It’s a great achievement, lifting tons of waste into outer space every day, keeping the planet clean…”

  “In fact, at the moment , there are only about twenty or so tons” Bolden mumbled automatically. “It will take a while for the Elevator to reach the capacity I contracted and ...”

  He caught himself rambling about his business and stopped short. Why was he telling this man anything? Sudden bitterness overwhelmed him.

  “Are you here to blackmail me, Mr. Folder?”

  “Perhaps you’re having some difficulty concentrating, Mr. Bolden. As I just explained to you...”

  “Actually, I think I’ve had enough of your explanations,” Bolden said, retrieving his keys from his pocket and activating the locks on his sports car, which beeped softly as it woke up, quietly releasing the latch on the gull-winged driver’s side door.

  “I think you’re missing the main point here,” the colonel said, raising his voice as Bolden walked away from him. “Call it whatever you wish, Mr. Bolden, but this is now necessary protection for you. Your company, Green Clean, will provide you the necessary funds for, but this time, for the first time, your survival depends on your decision.”

  Bolden spun around and advanced on the colonel aggressively.

  “You know what, Folder? That sounds like a threat. I don’t like being threatened.” Bolden’s brash display of testosterone had no visible effect on the soldierly older man.

  “Like I said, Mr. Bolden: Call it what you wish. But understand this: you’ve gotten by so far on superficial surveillance and pure luck that we identified you as a potential customer three decades ago. But your close call as a child was only Level One. You hit Level Two in Paris. And from here on out, the risks in your life are going to expand at a rapid pace.”

  “Levels?” Bolden asked. “You make it sound like a video game.”

  “Our terminology pre-dates the video-game industry, but it’s an accurate parallel. Under normal circumstances, a level ends in an incident that typically results in the subject’s death. If the subject is one of our clients and he survives, that means we’ve done our job. If the subject doesn’t have our protection and survives, that means he’s extremely lucky. But our data shows that luck doesn’t hold. And it certainly doesn’t work at higher levels.”

  Bolden stepped away, fists on his hips as he stared into the middle distance. When he turned back to Folder and leaned in close to him, his eyes were intensely focused.

  “So someone – or some force – is trying to kill me?”

  “It is not that simple,” Folder replied calmly. “Look, there are things you want to know. I could try explaining them to you, but it’s likely you wouldn’t believe me, which is why I came here today. I’m here to invite you on something of a tour. Let me lay everything out for you, and then I’ll let you judge for yourself. I can guarantee your safety so long as we’re taking care of you, and when we’re done, I’ll bring you back here or drive you wherever you want. No matter what decision you make.”

  Folder gestured politely to a well-appointed limousine parked nearby. As if on cue, the headlights flipped on and the limo’s smoothly powerful engine started with a muffled roar. Bolden, driven by an instinct more powerful than his will, nodded to the strange character who was now his host, locked the door to his sports car behind him, and walked toward the waiting black limo.

  ***

  They had been driving for a quarter of an hour. The colonel had given no instructions to the driver, who was separated from the passenger compartment by thick, darkened safety glass. Ensconced in a comfortable leather seat, the movements of the vehicle a distant abstraction, Bolden floated in vague pleasure of artificially scented air. Would he regret this decision? The answers Folder promised seemed worth the risk.

  Eventually Folder tired of the comfortable silence.

  “We’re not the only ones trying to cheat death, you know. It’s an ancient pursuit, and only the methods differ. We like to believe that ours are unique, of course. Certainly more efficient.”

  Bolden shook his head. “Semantics.”

  “I watched over you when you visited the pyramids at Giza,” Folder said, grinning. “All those pharaohs, each with a pyramid, each built for the pharoah’s personal afterlife. In relative terms, the cost of each of those pyramids to the ancient Egyptian economy was roughly equivalent to the entire Apollo manned space program. That’s a lot of moonshots, all so a few powerful men could cheat death. ”

  “Like I said, Colonel,” Bolden replied. “Semantics. Life after death still requires dying.”

  “Now you’re the one playing semantics. The ancients couldn’t extend life the way we can today, so they tried to cheat death by seeking a continuation of life beyond the grave. That’s why practically every religion promises eternal life. God’s Heaven, Allah’s Paradise, Buddha’s Nirvana. And let me tell you, religion makes a fantastic business plan: One extended sales pitch with no deliverables, and your customers pay all their bills in advance. Nice work if you can get it. ”

  Bolden skipped back to the first part. “You were following me on my Egypt trip?”

  Folder laughed out loud. “You know, for a smart guy, you don’t listen particularly well. It’s what I’ve been telling you. We’ve been tailing you since childhood. You’re an investment. If the Device reported a sudden spike in your immediate death risk, it wouldn’t do us much good to be a continent or two away, now would it? We can’t protect you if we’re not near you.”

  Bolden’s eyes trailed off to the landscape scrolling past the window of the limo. “I’ll admit to some skepticism.”

  Folder leaned forward slightly toward him from the opposite row of the compartment. “Forty years, Ian. That’s how long I’ve been following you.” He relaxed in the seat, but his eyes remained intensely fixed on Bolden. “I probably know you better than any human being on the planet knows you.”

  Bolden avoided Folder’s steady gaze. “It’s just hard to believe.”

  “Have a little patience,” Folder said. “You’ll see all the evidence you need. And you’ll understand why we did this.”

  The colonel glanced out the tinted window. They had passed through the New York suburbs and were driving west on Interstate 80. “Anyway, we don’t deal in eternal life. And we’re not proposing a religion.”

  Bolden stared out his window as well. The scenery was moving fast. Folder offered him a drink, but Bolden waved it off. The colonel unscrewed the top on a plastic bottle of distilled water and took a sip.

  “Personally, my favorite historical methods were the personal ones, the secular ones. Can’t live forever? Then be remembered forever,” Folder continued. “I like the painters: Rembrandt, Picasso, Leonardo… you can probably name more than most, what with that art collection you inherited. If you could afford it, you could commission a great painter to paint your likeness, and centuries later people would peer into your eyes and remember your name. Nowadays, anyone with a camera can do something similar. Some photographers do an even better job of capturing the soul of a person.”

  “Maybe it’s time you told me more about that Device,” Bolden said.

  The colonel smiled broadly. “Right now? In a car?
That would be bad salesmanship. We’ve arranged you a tour for all that. So how about I tell you a story instead?”

  Bolden shrugged his shoulders. Folder continued.

  “When I was a teenager, my history teacher arranged a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. I’d never been more than a few hours outside a little town called Louisville, South Carolina, and that old history teacher talked his head off for months about all the wonderful things we were going to see. We rode the Greyhound bus all night to get to New York, and we were so excited we barely slept. Got to the city early, so we sat on the steps of the museum, waiting for it to open.

  “Even now I remember what that Egyptian temple at The Met looked like to me then. You’ve seen it. They ‘rescued’ it ahead of the completion of the Assuan dam, said it was a ‘gift’ of the Egyptian people, brought it to New York and built a special wing just to house it.

  “But what I remember from that trip isn’t the temple or anything I saw behind glass cases, but the pictures taken before the temple had been shipped to America. The curators exhibited them near the temple so we could imagine how it looked like before it had been rebuilt and restored by the museum.”

  The colonel stopped speaking and gestured toward a button on his armrest.

  “Sure you don’t want something to drink?” This time Bolden agreed, and Folder pressed the button, which released the recessed door to the compartment’s small bar. He removed a chilled bottle of mineral water and filled a short glass halfway. Bolden took it and drank.

  “So anyway,” Folder continued, “ I remember those ancient stones were covered in inscriptions, some carved, some scratched, some painted. Not the markings put there at their inception, but evidence of all the time that has passed since then. Hieroglyphs from various dynasties, along with strike-throughs and revisions by later pharaohs intent of erasing all mention of their rivals. French graffiti left by Napoleon’s soldiers. And so on. Dozens of generations left their mark on those stones, and consciously or not, they were trying to transcend time, too. I think it’s some special quirk of human nature.”

  Bolden fiddled with the empty glass and decided to play along.

  “Nice story. But here’s the thing: inscriptions on ancient stones have nothing to do with saving lives in the 21st century. Are you going to tell me about modern medicine now too? Because, as you apparently already know, I’ve already been to Egypt and I’ve already had some gene therapy. So I hope this field trip you’ve organized isn’t some tour of a clinic.”

  “No, it’s not a clinic. And go ahead, dismiss medicine as irrelevant, even though its more than doubled our life expectancies. There’s a thriving market now for the extension of life beyond natural death: Cryogen, Eterngen, companies that offer preservation of the body in liquid nitrogen. If you’re on a budget, they’ll even freeze just your head for you. That’s one hell of a bet, isn’t it? All that expense and trouble invested on the off-chance that someone in the future will figure out a cure to your illness and come up with a way to re-animate frozen bodies. It’s pure scam, and yet people have been dropping fortunes on these companies for years.”

  Bolden considered cutting in, but relented.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t wonder about these things. You went to a fortune-teller in Paris, which just confirms your membership in the human race. As a species, we’re hard-wired to look into the future, and we’ll try just about anything that reveals a pattern: sheep guts, snake bones, tea leaves, dice, tarot cards, ouija boards, runes. We’ll try spiritualism, white magic, black magic, paranormal celebrities like Uri Geller, because – hey, if a guy can bend a spoon with his mind, why can’t he look into the future?

  “So that’s what makes us different. We don’t guess. The Device is grounded in science, even though our understanding of that science remains incomplete. Here’s the way I look at it. If you build a technology, and the technology works reliably, the science is good enough. And the more it improves, the better the technology gets. Which is why we can probe the future of behalf of people like you.”

  “Yes, you’re quite the altruistic little boutique service, saving the lives of the super rich. Tell me, does your introduction always begin with a swanky black envelope?”

  “Oh, no,” the colonel laughed. “Although that is one of my favorites. The people from the contact bureau...”

  “The contact bureau?”

  “Yes, the contact bureau. They establish the method by analyzing a subject’s behavior over a long period of time. In your case, the bureaus figured the envelope would arouse your curiosity. They also correctly predicted that you’d would take the advice of a fortuneteller.”

  “See, and that’s where your smug little story breaks down,” Bolden countered. “I went to a fortuneteller, yes, but didn’t follow his advice. I simply asked him if that black envelope had been cooked up as a scam by anyone he knew. And for the record, he didn’t mention a word about your psychiatrists.”

  “Psychologists,” the colonel corrected him. “And yes, the profile they’ve worked up for you tends to be spooky in its accuracy. Makes it easier for us to protect you when we have a detailed projection of what you’ll do in particular situations, but don’t get me wrong. It’s not perfect. Nothing ever goes quite according to plan. Not in life. Not in Guardian Angel operations.”

  “So I’m assuming this meeting was also part of the analysis. They picked you specifically to convince me?”

  “Obviously. How am I doing so far?”

  Bolden didn’t reply. He stared out the window without actually seeing the scenery, and though he meant to speak several times, he wound up riding in silence, with only his own thoughts for company.

  Chapter 5

  From start to finish the limo trip was a two-hour drive, and during the second half of the trip the colonel made a show of being unavailable, opening his briefcase, donning a pair of steel-framed glasses and reading through stacks of papers that he occasionally marked with a gold pen.

  Bolden regarded him obliquely. How much of Folder’s story could he logically accept?

  He wondered how he could explain any of this to Danielle, who had arrived in America only the day before on his private jet. Bolden felt like he’d already stretched his credibility explaining the bank shootout and his lawyer’s campaign to hold the French police at bay and keep his name out of the press. For days the only thing keeping him out of court and an embarrassing media frenzy was the French government’s need to dispose of hundreds of tons of radioactive waste produced by the country’s 59 nuclear power plants. All signs pointed to the French forcing him to trade an unpleasant waste-disposal deal for protecting his name, but again, fate took a hand. Someone leaked his name to two persistent journalists, but the nearly simultaneous arrest of a high-profile serial killer managed to redirect their badgering attentions.

  He had hoped to travel incognito with Danielle to the Caribbean for a few weeks of holiday, had hoped to forget what had happened, had hoped to lie low while the roving eye of the global media wandered off to more recent stories and scandals. Folder had certainly interrupted all of that.

  The limousine slowed to a stop at a fence-line security checkpoint.

  “Former military base,” the colonel explained. “All those Department of Defense cutbacks a few years back made old military properties quite the bargain. We’ve picked up a few of these, but this one is a gem. Isolated, no unwanted visitors, and amazingly well-equipped. Underground levels and infrastructure, too. Highly secure.”

  Folder gathered his papers and placed them in his briefcase along with the gold pen. He removed his glasses and placed them in a leather case that snapped shut smartly. “Some people prefer computers, but I have grown accustomed to paper,” he explained.

  The passed through the security check without incident and, after a short drive, pulled into a huge hangar. The enormous sliding doors behind them whirred to life, enclosing them in an immense darkness.

  They climbed out of
the limo into a dimness pierced only by a few mercury-vapor lamps which were placed at the corners of the building, close to the hemi-cylindrical roof, and which looked like white, incandescent spots. Bolden’s eyes hadn’t adjusted to the low light yet, but Folder took him by the arm and led him towards a dark rectangle, the size of a pool table, which began to descend a few seconds after they had stepped onto it.

  The platform stopped about 20 meters down, connecting audibly with an underground level that opened onto a corridor of tinted glass, with doors at either end. Folder turned right, stopping after a few steps and motioning for Bolden to follow. Three times they passed through identical tinted-glass doors, each of which swung open when Folder produced a small security card on a golden chain from the watch-pocket of his old-fashioned suit. Each door demanded the card be swiped through a slot in the electronic latch, followed swiftly by a scan of Folder’s thumbprint on a small dark glass positioned nearby.

  Bolden wearied quickly of the repetitive ritual and was going to comment on it at the fourth door when Folder stopped in the corridor, turned to him and said “Welcome to the Bolden Sector.” He tapped a code into a touch-sensor keyboard etched into one of the walls, and in a matter of seconds the opaque quality of the wall faded as the glass became increasing transparent. They gazed upon a room where about a dozen people were working, most sitting in front of consoles filled with twinkling lights and screens. The command desks were arranged in four rows and reminded Bolden of the control rooms for American manned space missions. The consoles without staffers seated in front of them were covered with white protective foil, and the residual opacity in the wall glass limited Bolden’s ability to see the faces of the people inside, or to pick out details on the devices they were monitoring.

  “So here’s you team. Only 12 of them on this shift, apart from the field teams, and the numbers decrease during your normal sleeping hours. Of course, if you sign a full contract for our protective services, we’ll be expanding your team considerably.”