by James, Mark
Jenny and Diane Huff hugged and Duane reached out and put his hand over them.
He turned to Mac. “What now, Mr. Osborne?”
“As we discussed, you are required to sign these papers and can never discuss their contents. Only a few people are aware of these details, but the president was firm that he wanted you to know. The country trusts that you will keep its confidences.”
“We will,” Duane Huff said.
“Please, follow me,” Mac said, walking through the door as the Huffs and the guards silently followed.
Halfway down a corridor, they came to the only other door they’d seen.
Mac stopped. “This facility is entirely emptied, except for rotating maintenance staff, security personnel and him. Mikhael Présage is this prison’s only true inhabitant.”
“Why?” Diane Huff asked.
“Do you remember the private prisons operated by Wanhauser Corporation?”
“The torture scandal, right?” Duane asked. “But wasn’t that out in California?”
“Correct,” Mac said. “This facility was being constructed at the time. It was to be a state-of-the-art prison facility. The federal government took Wanhauser over when the executives were indicted and it’s been mothballed ever since. Until now.”
Mac looked at them. “Are you ready? We can still stop here.”
They looked at each other and nodded.
Mac depressed a remote control and a panel began to slide away.
Jenny Huff hesitated and then slowly moved in front of the viewing window.
The cell was bright with a chair bolted in the center. In the chair was a man, sitting upright in mustard-yellow prison clothes. His right eye was covered with a black patch and his left arm hung in a sling. He didn’t move, only stared straight ahead as if they weren’t there, staring at something that only he could know.
Looking into that single, snow-blue eye, Jenny Huff felt nothing, only the continuing void of where Dan had once been. Seeing this man changed nothing. Présage was only a body now, a dead mind, an exhibit in a macabre zoo.
“He’ll never be able to hurt you and he’ll never leave here,” Mac said.
Diane Huff leaned over and started to sob. Duane took her in his arms. He looked over her shoulder, “Thank you, Mr. Osborne. I think we’re ready.”
Mac and Duane Huff shook hands and Jenny hugged him. “Thank you, Mr. Osborne.”
“I hope it helped in some small way,” Mac said, searching her eyes.
She could only offer a sad smile.
“These men will escort you out. They’ll take you to your hotel. I’ll see all of you later this afternoon at the White House.”
They turned and began walking down the long hall to the door in the distance, not saying anything, walking away and holding to each other like people from a funeral.
Before closing the panel Mac looked once more at Présage, at that blank, one-eyed stare. He turned to a sound as Dr. Harrington walked up beside him.
“I know what the psychiatric panel concluded,” Mac said, “but tell me again, he’s not in there, right?”
“Clinical catatonia,” Dr. Harrington said quietly. “The EEG’s are negative, every other test too, the lasers cauterizing the wounds as they penetrated, but still causing massive damage to the frontal lobes. And which, of course, is the part of the brain that we think from. The MRIs were conclusive on the extent of the damage. What we’re looking at is only a corporeal shell. Lights out, no one home.”
“Too bad that he didn’t have a living will,” Harrington noted wryly. “Maybe we could have then pulled the plug. Now he’s a $22,000 a day headache. The law is screwy sometimes.”
Mac laughed at the thought, of how easy it would have been with a living will. “You know,” he said, “when we conducted the post-event background investigation, everyone said that they really didn’t know him. Charming, but remote. And his friends – if that’s what you’d call them – none of them knew each other, each in a bubble.”
“Sociopaths are like that,” Harrington said, “they compartmentalize their relationships. It’s easier to control people that way. Easier to keep track of the little lies. I looked back at his history. I’d say, Borderline Narcissistic Disorder.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s see if I can recall the literature, what the eggheads like me like to say, ‘…a personality disorder marked by symptoms of dramatic emotive pretense and a grandiose sense of entitlement…’ Something like that.”
Mac laughed, “Sounds like a lot of politicians I know.”
“Well, it’s true, many people have sociopathic traits, but only sociopaths that are psychopathic become killers.”
“And if they kill a lot of people we categorize them as serial killers, right?”
The doctor thought for a moment before answering, “Yes.”
Mac looked back at Présage, “But what if they do it legally? What if the killer gets away and he writes the history, or rewrites it?”
Harrington said nothing. He had no answer.
“And then, what if they want to kill the whole world, what do we call them then?”
Harrington turned, “I don’t know, Mac. We don’t have a name for that.”
†
After Mac and Dr. Harrington left the prison facility, Présage continued to stare at the glass, through it, like a corpse staring into nothing.
Outside, there was only the silence of the immense building: the hum of its power plants resonating through the steel, the distant sound, like softly brushed cymbals, of a storm outside.
Inside, the killer was standing in his dream with his arms out and his head thrown back, naked and basking in the searing red light from the Blood Moon above. He opened his eyes: sand, brush and cactus – a desert. He could hear a far off sound, the wind, a voice in the wind, telling him to walk towards the distant black mountains, that something was waiting there.
He takes a step and then another.
48
Jack was an early riser and had never been one for watching television in the morning, liking the quiet before things stirred. Perhaps it was the part of him that’d been alone too long that bristled at those too-early sounds. But now it didn’t seem to bother him. A lot of things were suddenly that way. A small shadow had left him, or been pulled from him, like a ghost leaving an old house. The little things just didn’t matter anymore, as long as there was her.
He stirred the cream into the coffee as Lani came down from the bedroom. He reached into the cabinet for another cup. “Hey, sleepy head. How’re you feeling?”
She smiled, “Sleeeepy…” and wrapped her arms around him, feeling his warmth through the robes and remembering last night. “What time was it when you finally came to bed?”
“Sorry about that. I was just about to turn off the set and on comes Tombstone. You know, Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer. So, I said to myself, only a few minutes more, up to the part where Russell hauls Billy Bob Thornton outside the saloon by the ear – I love that scene. Well, you can guess the rest. Three hours and a thousand commercial breaks later...”
She began spooning in the sugars.
He looked over, remembering the scotches he’d had along with the movie. “Sorry I woke you up.”
She smiled, “Don’t be, it was delicious. You can wake me up whenever you want.”
“Hey,” he said, somewhat sheepish, “you know what they say, pirates and rum…”
She moved over to the living room. “Do you mind if I turn on some television? Wanted to see if there was anything more on the freighter.”
“Go ahead, watch whatever you want. How about I whip up some eggs, some special ‘Maryland cottage’ eggs?”
“That sounds great.”
Jack had just installed one of the newer Wall-Screens and when she pushed the remote the entire teak wall morphed into a gigantic image. She’d never seen one in person and it caught her by surprise. “This 5D stuff is amazing,” she said, flipping the
channels. “It’s holographic. The people look like they could walk right into the room. It’s kinda spooky.”
“Just wait, in a decade they’ll have no screens at all and the holograms will be right in the room with you. They’ll look back on our Wall-Screens like we were swinging stone axes. I’m throwing mushrooms in my omelet, any requests?”
“Just cheese. You know, Henri called back yesterday on my cell, I forgot to tell you, after you talked to him. You were out on your hike. He wants to see us next month in Paris. I said, fine. I went ahead and booked the flight and the hotel, the one you mentioned, okay?”
“That’s fine. Maybe we could drive down to Nice after that?”
She found the channel she’d been looking for, but it was still showing yesterday’s news and so she left it on mute. She looked over and saw a newspaper at the other end of the couch, still in plastic. It had been so long that she wasn’t quite sure what it was at first.
“The drive south sounds great. Hey, you still take a paper, a real paper. It’s actually kinda fun – you know, actually touching paper. Look at this, Jack. There’s an article on all of those movie stars and musicians. They broke ground on those theaters yesterday. You know, maybe we should have gone…are you still thinking about taking Clooney up on his offer?”
After the shock from the bombings had calmed, some of the major movie actors and actresses had formed a foundation to fund reconstruction of the bombed theater houses. In each town, they dedicated a memorial to the victims, each a black obelisk with water running down in front of the names. George Clunét had gone to Macomb, Iowa; Shira Scarlett to Nebraska; Ben Carlton Adams to Minnesota. At the groundbreakings in the twenty nine towns, the stars and the townspeople had then gone inside a makeshift tent and watched a movie together, the newest and last John Hanks movie – about a coming leader, a message of hope – made right before Hanks’ death.
She turned the page. “Jack, it says here that everyone is going to the Hanks movie today – everywhere, all over the country. The movie houses are simply packed. You know, maybe it’s finally over…”
“White or wheat?” he called out.
She smelled the bacon.
“What are you making in there? Smells like a buffet.”
“Omelets and toast with the jam you like so much, black bacon and sliced up mango, orange juice with champagne – all out on the lanai. State your poison, white or wheat?”
She was just about to answer when an image from the muted Wall-Screen caught her eye. She looked closer and became drawn to the enormous image: over a million people, nearly all dressed in white, stretched out in a throng surrounding the reflecting pool and in front of the Washington Monument. They appeared to be sitting, listening. At the opposite end of the massive crowd and beneath the Lincoln Memorial was a small platform where a man was sitting in a chair, facing them. He had a single microphone in front of him.
“Jack, have you seen this? I read about this guy in some French magazine on the plane. He was over there, in Europe, now he’s here. It looks like it’s all happening pretty fast.”
“Who?” Jack asked from the kitchen, “And second question, what’s he selling?”
“I don’t know. They’re calling him the Blue Sky Messiah, not sure why. The article says he wrote a book, but he claims he didn’t, so nobody is quite sure. Hold on a second.”
She pulled over her laptop and began searching. “Here it is. It’s called – hold on, it’s a long title…A House in the Woods: On the Evolution of Consciousness of Man, Not-Man and the Earth.”
Jack laughed from the kitchen. “That’s a solid mouthful for a Messiah, don’t you think? Here’s Cosmic Rule No. 521: if you’re at a party and someone even utters the word consciousness run for the hills!”
He took the plate of mango out to the lanai and she swatted at him as he went past. He started to whistle a refrain from the Eagles song, Learn to Be Still.
She recognized the lyrics and the joke. “Pretty dark, Jack…”
Coming back through, he kissed her cheek and whispered, “You know what happens to all those starry-eyed Messiahs…”
She reached to swat him again and missed.
She hit the volume and a voice came on. It was startling how quietly the man was speaking. Even more so, that the enormous crowd was so quiet to hear him. It was transfixing. “Jack, you really should listen to this. It’s interesting.”
You can’t see the Light until you step
from the shadows. The Light of your
mind, your heart, which you co-create
with the world…
Jack could hear some of the words from the kitchen, pausing while uncorking the champagne. There was something about the voice, as if he’d heard it before.
He carried two of the plates on one arm and the champagne bottle and carafe of orange juice in the other. “Come on, let’s not let it get cold.”
She hesitated, looking at the screen and then back at Jack juggling the plates. She hit the mute and caught him at the screen door. “Here, let me take some of that.”
They walked out onto the lanai and set everything down on the table. She noticed the crystal champagne flutes with an orchid in a small vase in the center. “Looks fantastic. What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. Just us.”
He pulled her chair out and poured the orange juice into the champagne.
He paused and looked around, taking it all in. The waves on the bay were changing slowly from light to dark and back again as they moved in from the open ocean. From the jagged mountains, mists fell down in veils, evaporating as they hit the sunny beaches.
“Look at this,” he said, his voice low, nearly reverent. “My God, what a morning. I really missed it. Maybe your Messiah should talk about this?”
He picked up his champagne glass. “Here’s to paradise.”
She touched her glass to his, holding it there. “Yes, our Eden.”
A scarlet red honeycreeper flew past and into a large tree, an‘I’iwi.
“Did you see that?” Jack said. “I’ve never seen one so low off the mountain. A good sign.”
She paused, looking all around: at the waves, at the mountains, at the azure in the skies.
“My God, it’s beautiful…”
†
They were feeling guilty from their breakfast and the champagne and chided each other into a hike on the Kalalau Trail – two miles through lush jungle tracing a narrow trail up and down sea cliffs and then two miles back after dipping their sore feet in a stream below Hanakapiai Falls.
Arriving back in mid-afternoon, they threw themselves into the showers, Lani standing under the water for what seemed like an hour. Afterwards, they relaxed and tried to watch a movie, but instead dozed off, Lani bundled into the cushions on the couch, Jack splayed out on the floor.
“Jack…Jack…” she said, nudging him awake.
“Holy smoke, I really passed out.” He sat up as all of his old football injuries cracked at once. He smiled, “Hope you know what you’re getting here. Just an old creaking ship.”
“Yeah, but you’re my old creaking ship,” she laughed, walking into the kitchen to get some water. “Boy, I’m thirsty. Maybe we haven’t recovered all the way from our, um…adventures.”
They hadn’t come up with a word to generically describe what they’d been through and he smiled at the attempt, “Adventures? As good as any.”
They were still full from breakfast and decided to have cheese and bread on the lanai where they could watch the last light on the waves. He poured Mai Tai’s from a pitcher and sat down next to her, looking out to sea.
As the sun disappeared, she turned towards the house, “Did you hear that? I think it came from inside.”
She crooked her head, “There it is again.”
Through the screen door, Jack could hear sounds coming from the living room, a soft crackling followed by distant voices.
He retrieved a piece of carved wood that he kept by the
door and she followed him as they slowly moved inside, first checking the kitchen and then walking down into the sunken living room.
Standing in the middle of the dark room, they listened, Lani noting that the television had somehow been turned off.
Suddenly, the Wall-Screen activated and they spun, startled. The screen glowed with a familiar image: the Oval Office, so large that it felt as if they could step right into it. The Oval Office was empty and Jack wondered if it was only a photograph.
That is, until Mac walked into the middle of the image and sat down facing the president’s desk. He looked back over the couch, straight at them, “Hey, buddy!”
On cue, the president’s chair spun around and President Walker smiled, “Hey Jack. Hi Lani.”
Jack and Lani looked at each other.
“Caught ya, didn’t we?” Mac laughed.
“Alright, I’ll bite,” Jack said, intrigued. “How did you two get inside my new TV?”
Walker looked over at Mac. “Alright Mac, how did we get inside his TV?”
“Hey old friend,” Mac beamed proudly, “after all you’ve been through you’d think that nothing would be a surprise, at least where satellites and governments are concerned. What, you think the NSA only taps the Internet and people’s phones? Your laptop there – it’s tapped straight into the TV screen, right? Just trying to save the world and all, one TV at a time.”
“Listen, Jack,” the president chimed in, “the First Lady was after me again today on when you two were coming into town. The Japanese premier is due here at the end of next month and it would be good cover for our own get-together. You took off so fast we never had a proper celebration.”
Lani looked up at Jack, “How about after Paris?”
“Thanks again for the invite,” Jack said. “Actually, we’re visiting Inspector Garneau next month in Paris and thought about driving down south towards Nice afterwards. No reason why we couldn’t stop back through D.C. on our way home.”
