by James, Mark
At the B&B, he began drawing her a bath, lighting a candle and placing a towel where she could reach it.
Sitting on the bed with the laptop he could hear the soft sloshes from the bathroom. Throughout his life, his friends and colleagues had always chided him, saying that he was the type who needed to work and would die in a chair. But it wasn’t true. They didn’t look close enough. Underneath, there was only her. The rest was only changing scenery.
Would he die before Elise, or would God take her first and leave him alone and sick at the end? Until this year, he’d never thought of such things. Yet he’d learned that time isn’t constant; that the sand runs through faster and faster, immune to the sun and the wind, indifferent to their desire to stay together forever. He looked down at the new brown spots on his hands – spotted like his mother – as his fingers struck at the keys.
Elise had loaded a new program into his laptop allowing him to manipulate geometric figures and he stared at the star next to the pentagram, each so similar, their meanings so different.
He hadn’t told Elise, not yet, about the dreams he’d been having lately, about the strange star over the strange sea.
The dreams were always the same. He would find himself standing on water in his bare feet, an ocean stretching in every direction. Everything is quiet, so quiet, like the lull before time. He feels as if he’s watching himself in his own movie. Yet, strangely, he only realizes this later, when he wakes and thinks back on it. In the dream, he hears a soft sound as a bird flies over, a white bird, and it causes him to look up. In the sky it is always the same – the star, white like the bird, even whiter. Within each successive dream the whiteness seems to be growing. In the dreams, this is his only thought. And with that thought, he always awakes.
He hears Elise rise from her bath, knows she is putting out the candle. His Elise, what would happen to him if he ever lost her?
He doesn’t know why he’s suddenly had this thought.
†
Sometimes, the killer’s mind was a storm. At others, it rested placid, like an infinite ice sea.
Today, he was nothing.
As was his recent practice, he was taking a shortcut through a suburban neighborhood – looking at the mass of projected normalcy, the knotted desires to please, the coveting of others and their things.
Desiring to be perfect.
This was one of his skills: watching people, watching their minds move. He could see them – their level of consciousness – in the construction of their sentences, in its syntax, in the pauses.
It revealed them.
He drove past a small ranch house, circa 1978, with its pastel paint and shrubs squared on the edges. On the front lawn, an Asian father in a windbreaker smiled and pointed a camera at his son, perhaps only twelve years old and beaming in a crisp white Little League uniform and holding up a cheap award statue that was too heavy for him. At his knee, his mother had been unable to remove all of the grass stains the boy had earned through the summer. It was the last game, all of the boys and the parents showing up for team pictures, the leaves just starting to blow across the infields of America, a coming winter in the air.
The boy and his father skirted across the street into the park towards the ball field, joining the others. At the other end, near the aging tennis courts, a young girl squealed on a swing set, spotted by her mother. On the far road bounding the park, three boys played street hockey, quickly sliding a homemade chicken wire-and-wood goal from the street as a car passed.
It all made him think of his father and of that last look. About how the newspapers had talked about the strange yachting accident, about how his parents’ bodies had been caught by the gulf current and not recovered for a month, by then bloated and half eaten by algae and other sea things.
His father should never have threatened him; his mother should have stood by him.
“I don’t even know you!” his father had yelled.
As the yacht sunk and his parents had frantically tried to grab hold of something, anything, and as the current pulled him away, he recalled that last searching look, his father finding the answer in the killer’s smiling eyes.
The killer had looked back, whispering, “Bye, daddy.”
They’d found the boy killer ten days later on a makeshift raft, barely alive: The Miraculous Raft Boy! the newscasters had trumpeted for four days.
The Well Baby, the Winslow Boy, the Lindberg Baby.
He had been The Raft-Boy, famous in all mother’s eyes, infamous in God’s, smiling back from the fronts of the newspapers.
†
She sat on the floor in a corner curled up like a little girl, a perfect marble.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Osborne,” the doctor said, somewhat defensive. When Mac said nothing, the psychiatrist walked away down the hall.
Mac looked back into the room: white, sterile, the only color her bronze face above the white medical gown, her blackening hair.
Aisha continued to stare at a spot on the ceiling only known to her.
Mac had attempted three interrogation sessions since her torture by the GMA and nothing had changed. The doctors assured him that she was still “in there” – the brain scans showed it. And yet the doctors – walking away, always walking away – could offer nothing more. She was in some type of self-imposed trance, catatonia.
Deep inside, Aisha stared at the ceiling and at the growing star that had saved her from the water.
20
Iceland fell back behind them as the clouds and the whitecaps returned.
Jack looked down from the window of the private jet at the receding world of ice, fire and rock, his mind slowly drifting into other places. Below, the ocean stretched out nearly endless, a universe unto itself. They were moving into the unknown.
“Where exactly in Scotland?” Lani had mumbled, the moment before she’d fallen back asleep.
He looked over at her. After the refueling at the isolated airstrip outside of Reykjavik, she’d talked about the glaciers and the wondrous Icelandic sights she would never see. He’d almost said to her, I’ll bring you back someday.
Within the white noise of the plane’s engines, he drifted back to the cottage. “What do you mean, a castle?” he’d asked Mac as they sat in the bleached-white Adirondack chairs on the cottage’s rear deck, the soft calls of the gulls and the idyllic breeze betraying what was to come, the black helicopter sitting on the sand like an otherworldly spider.
“More like a large manor house, back in some old woods, abandoned now. There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign on the gate…but that’s not true.”
“What’s not true?”
“It’s not actually for sale. Another ruse. The forest is the key – isolated, not listed on the King’s registry. You’ll be safe there, at least until we find a place to move you next, if we have to.”
If we have to…
Jack had squinted at his friend, letting the words hang.
“I’m sensing some drift here, Mac. Are events moving away from us? Because, you know how well I react to not being in control. And, by the way, you look like hell.”
“Yeah, this Iranian mess is keeping me up late. And, this too. I’m juggling balls. Some very important balls.”
Mac smiled, “But, as the president always says, let’s get it done…” Just as quickly, his seriousness returned, “First, though, let’s run through a few things, so you’ll know what you’re heading into.”
Mac had outlined the flight through Iceland and into Inverness, Scotland, then the late evening limousine ride to the King’s manor house. He handed over the laptop, “A gift from Josh Rendel. You remember Josh, he went to that B-ball game with us about five years ago. About the same time you were flying through D.C. on your way to Paris. Or maybe it was London. Anyway, he’s DOD’s resident wunderkind and this little device will allow you to keep in touch sans GMA snooping. Email, Internet access, all the usual, but screened out from the surveillance grid.”
“Sure, I remember Josh. Entirely
stealth?”
“Well, for now. Josh says it could eventually be traced by an expert, but given that it’s such new encryption technology he estimates it should be good-to-go long enough for us to resolve this and get you both back home.”
Jack looked over, “Another infamous DOD guesstimate?”
Mac laughed, “Probably.”
“It has to be one good little toy, though,” he continued, “as it comes from Josh and he’s hardly ever wrong. I have an identical unit and Josh has the other. You can contact either of us.”
Jack looked down at the nondescript gray case, remembering how any computer he’d ever owned had been a virus trap.
“Don’t sweat it, Jack. Josh is a genius and this is his brand new baby. Which reminds me, try not to lose it – it costs 3.6 million. Each.”
The plane bucked from turbulence and it pulled Jack back from his thoughts.
Next to him, Lani stirred and settled back.
He looked over – a face so familiar, so new. Should he tell her, say the words she wanted to hear – I’ll bring you back someday? Trust me, it’ll all be fine?
He couldn’t – the future was too unknown. There was no use denying where they were. They were on the run, truly the hunted.
Admittedly though, some part of him – perhaps, a part he’d never admit to – actually felt challenged by the events they were wrapped within. Not through some misguided enthusiasm, but through a sense far more primal, as if a distilled adrenaline was infusing him, preparing him.
He turned, closing his eyes.
It was then that he felt that rare whisper, as a subtle wind through his mind.
He had sensed it before: when he’d been twelve years old, standing in his yard looking up at snowflakes, in that moment when you stopped counting; when he was twenty-one after the car accident, as he stared at the hospital ceiling expansive like an ocean; and after Maura, when he’d climbed over the crest of the Twelve Bens mountains in Ireland at dawn, his first time without her and a lone bird had flown by.
This whisper was like a dream you couldn’t hold onto, as if mere reaching caused it to fall away.
After all of these years, he still couldn’t say what it was.
†
The HAARP installation had lain dormant since President Walker disabled it at the beginning of his first administration, six years before. Unbeknownst to the president, however, the two hundred and forty-six enormous satellites, tied together operationally as one, had come to life.
Six months earlier, Vice-President Palmer and three select members of his staff, including Terrence Garb, had flown to the remote Alaskan location with the task of ensuring that the final stages of mothballing the facility were accomplished and that the research scientists who’d lived there for twenty years were transferred to other appropriate projects. It was another of the minor, menial jobs that Walker assigned to him, perhaps to embarrass him, reduce him, or simply to get him out of town, or so Palmer thought. It was the irony of it all that Palmer loved.
That same six months ago, Palmer and his aides had stood before Dr. Emil Norbert, presenting him with Presidential Executive Order No. 7224-09, embossed with the presidential seal and containing instructions for the immediate reinitialization of Project Charybdis.
“Time is of the essence,” they’d said to Norbert in tones not to be questioned.
Norbert was thrilled! He and the other scientists had been packing their personal possessions over the previous two weeks. Their dream, the dream, was coming to an end, all of their research for naught. His wife, Frannie, and the other scientists’ wives, had been crying, you could see it in their eyes as they passed in the hallways, the hanging heads in the cafeteria and the sudden old stories being told. All around there had been this draining despondency, a recognition that their world was ending. They’d become like family, as close as any. Suddenly, his head was down too.
Then the vice-president had come!
“I must emphasize,” Palmer said, staring into Dr. Norbert with the full portent of his office, “the sensitive nature of this project. You should take particular note of the language in paragraph six strictly limiting both you and your staff’s contacts and communications.”
“But what if Mr. Osborne calls? He used to do that from time to time,” Norbert stammered, nearly in awe of his political hero, Palmer, the only administration champion of Project Charybdis over the past six years.
“It is critical, Dr. Norbert, that your contacts be only with myself. This facility is sealed to Level 8-M, do you understand? You’ll also note that the fail-safe codes have been changed and authority transferred from the NSA to the vice-president’s office, pursuant to the president’s direct instructions in the order. Dr. Norbert, the president has indicated that Project Charybdis has become of the highest importance. We’re counting on your dedication and patriotism. Again, do you understand?”
Norbert had nodded, his only real concern being the survival of his child, Project Charybdis, and that their perfect world, nestled in their beautiful Alaskan wilderness, would go on. He felt an enormous weight lift from him. He wife would be thrilled. She would surely cook his favorite dinner, eggplant parmesan, or even rub his feet like she used to. Maybe, she would even let him touch her.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Vice-President. We’re all very excited. The country can count on us.”
†
Jenny Huff wouldn’t accept it, it existing too close to the bone.
“But, you must!” Diane Huff had countered, pleading with her distraught daughter-in-law. “That’s what Dan would’ve wanted. You know that. There are still the children!”
They’d been standing on the back lawn dressed in black, delaying the ride to the church a final time. Dan’s adoptive father had converted to Islam, but Dan had chosen a different path.
From the pulpit, Pastor Conrad looked down into Jenny Huff’s eyes and paused in his eulogy, “He was everyone’s friend, dear. Always there for everyone…his beaming, never-ending smile. We must accept this, Jenny…it’s God’s will.”
What kind of God would possibly will this?
Jenny watches as the casket lowers into the ground, her senses seeming to stop, the soil gritty in her glove. Vacantly, she accepts the final condolences from old friends as they walk away, back into their lives.
No, no, no…
He’d been so alive – how could someone run five marathons a year and then die of something that no one could explain?
Where had he gone?
No! Never!
Earlier that week, Sheriff Grotjan had consoled her in practiced tones, “Ma’am, I’m bein’ straight out honest, we’ve got no definitive explanation. The coroner said the truth; it was simply his time. We all have our time, Ms. Huff. Please know this – and Dr. Bohannon is sure on it – the blood vessels, they simply gave way.”
She watches a wren climb into the birdhouse that Dan had put up last spring; when she could hear the chirps of the babies within, begging their mother, all grown now, all gone.
Jenny Huff sits alone in a chaise lounger in her back yard, an empty one next to her. She was driven home from the funeral in jolts, her time skipping by. She is wrapped tight in a blanket, coiled in the black dress. Frost is on the ground.
An elderly neighbor they’d never known looks up from his year-end raking. He holds her gaze, something in his eyes.
The wind picks up and blows leaves from his pile. He slowly looks away, gathers the errant leaves and goes on.
21
The car lurched over the dark hills as they sped towards the Scottish manor, the moonless night turning every hill and vale into its own absence of color. Lani sat beside him, rested and alert from her sleep on the plane. They didn’t know the driver; at the airstrip outside of Inverness, he hadn’t offered his name.
“The trip from the Inverness airport to the manor will take longer,” Mac had said at the cottage. “We’re going to keep you away from the larger towns. The Surveillance-Net is
going up. Keep to the small roads.”
Jack looked out and saw lights surface and fall back below the hills like buoys beneath waves.
“Tell me about who we’re meeting, his expertise?” Lani asked.
“It’s a Mr. Guilford. At least that’s what Mac said to call him. A freelancer. The NSA and CIA use him on odd jobs. Or rather, ones they want deniability on. Mac said he’s an odd chap – not sure what he meant. Essentially, Guilford is a stealth applications expert, except that he reverse engineers given technologies.”
“Reverse?”
“Guilford was an MI-6 Agent specializing in stealth surveillance and capture. He retired several years ago. When aggressive surveillance technologies began proliferating, he jumped back into the game from the outside. He invented contra-technologies and then sold his ideas and gadgets to the highest bidder. It seems that being a spy-out-in-the-cold is a growth industry these days.”
“Ronin…” she whispered.
“Exactly,” Jack said, “modern day samurai without homes – lost warriors. Though, it appears, not so lost anymore. When the world’s governments began watching everyone and everything, the old operatives came out of the shadows to meet the demand. Capitalism at its most primal.”
The car slowed and passed through a rusted gate with its sign, Voil Manor, obscured by ivy. Wending their way through the rows of trees – dark silhouettes against a darker night – they pulled around near the front door. The trunk lid released.
Exiting, they looked up to the manor looming above, forgotten by time. Jack examined the exterior, noting the flaked surfaces and dead ivy reaching to the third floor.
Lani laughed, “Pinch me, I think we might have landed in a 1930’s horror movie.”
Jack appreciated that Lani was trying to make the best of things. He helped the driver haul their bags to the front stoop.
“Unfortunately,” he said, smiling back, “the first lines in that movie script are, beggars can’t be choosers…”
