The Grid

by Nick Cook

  Gapes was attached to the Activity. He had some kind of special intelligence role within it. The Activity was tasked with hunting down terrorists seeking or armed with WMDs. The mythology said the Engineer was a bomb-maker.

  I’m now in the helicopter that brought me back from the cabin, flying over that impenetrable black forest.

  Dr Kate Ottoway. The dead white matter tracts in Gapes’s brain. The voices and hallucinations. His medication. The clinical insights I’d received as I’d gazed into that void – the thought it had produced and I’d then dismissed: the parts of the brain that Buddhists shut down when they meditate, the parts of the brain mediums engage when they go into ‘state’ …

  Something finally clicks. Gapes’s knowledge about me; his pronouncements about my nature. Things he couldn’t possibly have known by anything other than the most extraordinary means.

  His employment by INSCOM wasn’t an accident.

  They needed him.

  They recruited him.

  Because he was psychic.

  23

  AFTER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF NON-STOP RAIN, SUNLIGHT, AT LAST, streams between the bare branches. Beyond the terrace, the ground drops away sharply past the swimming pool and the one-hole golf course toward a line of trees.

  Hart and I are at Aspen Lodge, the President’s Camp David retreat. It is the day after the Sit Room briefing. We have a kitchen, a sunroom, a living room where we’ve installed our temporary HQ, and four bedrooms, each with its own en suite. If we need anything, all we have to do is pick up a phone and ask.

  The revelation that Gapes was producing psychic intelligence for the Activity has unlocked a wealth of new data. For the past day and night, Christy’s team has worked to uncover all the elements of the Activity’s ultra-classified WMD-hunting mission. It hasn’t been easy. As Christy said in the briefing, each layer of secrecy conjures up another. And there are legal procedures for accessing each one. Special Access Programs aren’t so called for nothing.

  Each file we uncover is couriered to us from D.C. Our task is a delicate one. Our work has been rewarded with an official role in the ongoing investigation. My skills as a psychiatrist are sought in a bid to rapidly unlock the secrets of the cabin, now that we think we know what we are dealing with. But we must also continue to protect the President. No one must know about his vulnerability; about No Stone Unturned. Which is why, while answering to Cabot and Graham, who are leading the official investigation inside the White House, Hart and I will only go so far in revealing what we know.

  As before, we will report our findings to the inner circle – Thompson, Reuben and Christy – before sharing them with anybody else. Hence our current seclusion.

  After our analysis of the existing data, a ninety-minute drive on Monday will take the two of us to Fort Meade, headquarters of Army Intelligence and Security Command, where Gapes worked. Christy Byford has arranged for us to meet and interview General Zan Johansson there.

  Thanks to the marathon efforts of Christy’s legal team in the last twenty-four hours, we’ll also be debriefed by Major Cal Offutt, one of Gapes’s monitors during the years he spent with the Activity. Both Johansson and Offutt have effectively been subpoenaed to tell us everything they know. Project Element is so black, merely identifying and acquiring these files is an ongoing struggle.

  The key point is that Gapes joined the program a decade ago, around the time the Activity and its hunt for WMDs transferred to JaySOC.

  This part of the project – a subset of Element – had been codenamed ‘Chronometer’. Remote viewing – RV – was America’s psychic-spying program. Initially sponsored by the CIA in the early seventies, it transferred to the Army, where INSCOM ran it through the eighties, moved it to the Defense Intelligence Agency before, finally, it was transferred back to the CIA, where it died a death in 1995. Upon termination and declassification, an official report made it plain to whoever came calling that there had never been anything in it.

  This part was a lie.

  INSCOM and the CIA were so desperate that, one year after 9/11, in their hunt to find bin Laden and his co-conspirators, they resurrected it.

  In 2005, a small group of viewers left Fort Meade, where they had been based for the best part of three decades, to attach themselves to the SEALs and Delta Force. New recruits had been selected, too, via a program to evaluate veterans returning from Afghanistan, Iraq and other recent theaters of war – the data having flagged up a correlation between psychic ability and certain categories of brain injury.

  With Gapes, it got one of the best – until the helicopter crash that killed three members of the Activity and left him with burns that should have killed him outright.

  This is the part I don’t get.

  Instead of letting him go, they dug their hooks into him more deeply.

  I get to my feet and wander over to the window.

  If we don’t get a break before Thompson’s State of the Union in a week’s time, there will be no peace initiative – the Jerusalem conference will be canceled.

  I turn from the window to The Raising of The Cross and Ascension, the paintings from the panel section of the sanctum Gapes had marked ‘God’. They are projected on the President’s eighty-five-inch, wall-mounted, flat-screen TV.

  ‘You know how much those are worth?’ Hetta says.

  ‘They’re priceless.’

  ‘I got to tell you I never really understood that – priceless. Priceless. Doesn’t everything have a price?’ She frowns and shakes her head.

  Miss Literal is determined to take her frustrations out on me today.

  Whatever you believe it to be worth, The Raising of The Cross is an extraordinary work of art. The ray of light shining down on the broken Christ is almost too vivid to look at. As soldiers struggle to raise Him, a mysterious figure in a turban looks on – whether at us, or the scene that’s unfolding in front of him, I can’t be sure. In the foreground lies a freshly dug grave.

  Along with Ascension, the painting Gapes hid beneath it, it’s hung in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, a gallery famous for its Old Masters. There are no obvious links to Gapes, nor do psychologists agree on any hidden meanings, except, perhaps, for one – that The Raising of The Cross is a metaphor for Rembrandt’s struggle with his religious beliefs.

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, more to myself than to Hetta, ‘Rembrandt is the turbaned figure. He’s also one of the soldiers raising the cross. So, both observer and participant.’ I pause. ‘A remote viewer.’

  Hart and I both battle with the idea of psychics producing data of value to the intelligence community, but we also acknowledge the military would not have spent millions if it hadn’t been underpinned by results. I can hear Ted van Buren’s voice at times like this. There are things out there that science is still struggling to explain.

  I start again from first principles.

  We have four layers of code. Four layers of unfolding revelation.

  The first is what Hetta calls the welcome message: I saw the face of God. You shall too. Bear true faith. Hope. Pray.

  I look at the face of Christ on the cross, and at Rembrandt’s light, blindingly bright again, streaming through a break in the clouds, surrounding Him as He is lifted heavenward by angels. In the foreground, on the edge of darkness – the chasm that separates us from the risen Christ – the disciples are awestruck.

  One of them, arms spread wide, is so overcome he seems to tumble backward, straight out of the painting toward me.

  What is it that I’m not seeing?

  I stare at a large sheet of paper Hetta has pinned on the wall next to the TV. On it, she’s written, ‘Layers 2 and 3’:

  Panel 1. (Rembrandt) Crucifixion > Ascension = God.

  Panel 2. POTUS > ‘Church’ = Threat.

  Panel 3. Engineer (Mugshot) > ‘15ski’ = Proof.

  Panel 4. Cain’s Life > Fetal Scan (Hope pregnant) = Mac.

  Panel 5. Skyline > Church of St Mary Magdalene (Russian Orthodox) = Jerusalem.


  The Jerusalem panel is of particular interest because it seems to suggest Gapes knew about the conference. If this is so, bizarrely, he seems to have known about it before Thompson did.

  Much of the imagery is religious, Hetta points out, except for Panels 3 and 4.

  I agree – up to a point. There is a possibility, I suggest, that Panel 4 could signify a more spiritual interpretation of ‘birth’.

  Hetta thinks about this for a moment, then jots on the page:

  Panel 4. Cain’s Life > Fetal Scan (Hope pregnant/hippy shit/birth?) = Mac.

  Panel 3 remains devoid of religious or spiritual meaning, leaving the five panels without any discernible thread.

  Except for the two that have a Russian linkage.

  And how the Engineer fits is anybody’s guess.

  Layer Four is the stolen imagery from the main body of the cabin: the photos of the individual we’ve dubbed Napoleon, the planetary shell and the bunker facility in the desert compound.

  We’re no further forward on them either.

  ‘If he wanted to tell us something, especially about a threat to POTUS, why hide it?’ Hetta says. ‘And in code, but not good code?’

  I have no idea. I also don’t know why he had six evenly spaced lesions on his head, or why he chose to tell Steve at the Settlement about his plans for breaking into the church, only to use an espionage tool specifically designed to conceal break-ins.

  Most of all, I don’t know why he had a painting of Jack, which, unlike the one in my guest room, looked as if Hope had finished it.

  We’re still going around in circles several hours later when I hear a helicopter.

  I get to the window as Marine One thunders over the lodge and touches down on the edge of the golf course.

  24

  THE PRESIDENT HAS HAD THIRTEEN ASSASSINATION DREAMS. THE first, like a first panic attack, is the one I need to examine most closely. He flew to Camp David alone yesterday, and we will have him for the whole morning today, if we need it.

  He’s in the kitchen at 7 a.m. in jeans and a polo shirt, a sweater over his shoulders, finishing his breakfast. He tells me he’s slept well. Since I prescribed the Prazosin, he hasn’t had a recurrence of the dream.

  We’re alone. Hetta has gone to the range to put in some practice on her .357. I settle him in an armchair next to the fireplace. A stool in front of it allows him to lie back comfortably.

  The detail of dreams, which can reveal causes and triggers, can be lost over time. Which is why I need to take this route. I know he’s under when I tell him his right arm is as light as a feather and his hand starts to lift toward the ceiling. I ask about the first dream, ask him to describe where he is.

  ‘I’m in school.’ He sounds a little drowsy, his voice younger, his accent a little more Texan than the world has become used to.

  ‘Good. Tell me what you see.’

  ‘I’m in class. Carpentry class. Makin’ something. We’re in the basement. Thick walls. Old place. Don’t like it. Dark as hell.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m, ah, fourteen.’

  ‘Who’s with you?’

  ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘A box.’

  ‘A box?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Put my tools in.’

  ‘Your tools?’

  ‘Carpentry tools.’ He pauses. ‘The box ain’t finished yet.’

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘Think so, yes. Feel I need to finish it. Have to.’

  I’m writing this down when his face clouds.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Somebody’s coming. Footsteps. I can hear footsteps.’

  ‘OK, stay with it. Tell me exactly—’

  ‘The door’s opening. It’s him. Jesus, he’s got a knife. He’s coming for me. He’s lifting it. I don’t want to be here.’

  He opens his eyes, sits upright and puts his hands to his face. ‘God almighty, Josh.’

  ‘It was real?’

  ‘All too real.’

  ‘And the guy with the knife?’

  ‘Same as the guy in the Sit Room. Him. The Engineer.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Never been surer of anything.’

  ‘Then we need to talk about this.’

  There’s no end of stories online about Thompson’s modest roots. He is the epitome of the American dream: the poor kid from a Southern Baptist family who went to the big city, and made a stash as a corporate lawyer before deciding to go into politics.

  ‘I grew up with kids who weren’t raised like we were. When I started hanging out with guys who liked doing the things kids do – music, girls, a beer or two – my folks did what a lot of churchgoers did at that time in that neck of the woods: they sent me away to an all-boys boarding school, the Southern Cross. And when I say boarding school, I’m not talking about something you pay for. This place was run as a charity with a contribution from the state.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not something I talk about much.’

  I wait.

  ‘The principal was a preacher, Pastor Green. He used to say woodwork was the Lord’s work. Kept Proverbs 23:13, inscribed in copperplate, above his desk. “Withhold not correction from a child, for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”’

  The school was a converted warehouse – an ex-meat-packing factory. Thompson describes the maze of rooms beneath it. In one of them, they held carpentry classes on Saturdays.

  ‘We had to make this box. Nothing fancy. Maybe thirty centimeters by twenty, fifteen deep. With a lid. To teach us dovetail joints. When we mastered the box, we could go on to bigger, better, more complicated pieces.

  ‘Green put the older boys in charge of the classes and one of ’em, son of a bitch called Arturo, took a real dislike to this puny kid, Kit Harper. Every time Harper assembled his box, Arturo would pick it up, look at it, laugh, and smash it to pieces.’

  Harper never complained, because Green had some saying in copperplate for that too. Until the day that Thompson told Arturo and Green they could both go to hell – and the pastor beat him so bad he ended up in the sanatorium.

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘My dad took me out. Sent me to a different school.’

  ‘And Green?’

  ‘He went to jail for embezzling church funds – not soon enough, though, for Kit Harper. He threw himself under a train.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two months after I left.’

  ‘Mr President?’

  He raises his eyes.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Gapes would have placed the word “Church” beneath images of you on the campaign trail?’

  We’re so close, I see his pupils constrict.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘What did you major in?’

  ‘Theology and law. My doctorate’s in theology.’

  I sit back. I still don’t know what an Islamist bomb-maker is doing in his dreams, but I believe I know what he represents.

  He is the darker side of Thompson’s nature, an avenging angel righting wrongs he couldn’t right as a fourteen-year-old.

  And I have a further suspicion, after we have talked it out some more – that the Engineer, with his knife, his assault weapon and his bomb belt, isn’t coming for Thompson. He’s coming for Arturo and Pastor Green.

  25

  TRESCO IS TWO AND A HALF HOURS FROM WASHINGTON, BUT only an hour and a half from Camp David. A thought had been triggered by something Thompson had said – about the box in his dream having been half finished. I let Hetta know I’d be back by dinner.

  The sun has slipped behind the trees by the time I pull up in front of the cottage. It has turned cold. The temperature on the dash says three below. Wood smoke from the chimney hangs in the air.

  It is ten years, incredibly, since I drove the U-Haul here, packed w
ith Hope’s stuff.

  I climb the steps and knock on the screen door.

  It opens and she’s there, in jeans and a rollneck sweater. She’s changed her glasses – they’re smaller than they used to be. She has mitts under one arm, an apron under the other.

  I feel the heat of the wood-burning stove on my face and smell baking.

  Pam’s face is more lined than it used to be. Her trademark Marlboro Reds have taken their toll. She gives me a long, hard stare, then steps forward and hugs me.

  ‘Josh!’

  I’m almost knocked off my feet by Poppy too.

  ‘Not surprised?’

  ‘Dog stopped her damn barking soon as you stepped out of the car. Only one person she does that for. What brings you here?’

  ‘Came to see you.’

  She takes a drag on her cigarette and smiles. ‘Bullshit.’

  It’s a minute or two before my mother-in-law lets me go.

  ‘I’ll put on some coffee. You staying?’

  ‘Not long. I should have called. I’m sorry.’

  Pam ushers me inside. A rack laden with cupcakes is waiting to be iced by the sink. She orders me to take a seat and reaches for a pot of coffee.

  A pan bubbles on the stove and a half-knitted sweater lies on the table. She makes them for each of her ‘old folk guests’. There are jigsaw pieces on a tray next to it, and next to that, a sudoku puzzle, a crossword and a book on homeopathy. I never could believe her energy and, even now, in her seventies, she still has plenty of it. She’d be up before everybody else, the last to bed, and in between, she’d tend to the every need of ‘her family’, the Five Pines’ twenty residents.

  Pam trained as a nurse and has a gallows humor that sustained me during my years as a medic. What she has isn’t much – a small nursing home that’s become part of the community – but it’s hers. She’s worked hard. And she loves it too much to quit.

  ‘Knew you’d come. Just didn’t think it would take quite so long.’

  I hear myself apologizing again.

  ‘Got yourself into some trouble last week, I read.’