I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  She doesn’t say anything, so I don’t, either.

  I try to piece it together. What are they planning?

  We make one stop at a gas station, and I notice Francisco pulls a baseball cap low over his forehead before he gets out to pump gas. When he gets back in the car, he has a bag full of energy bars, beef jerky, and trail mix. He tosses it back to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Lunch for everyone,” he says. “It’s the best we can do.”

  “Anything is better than nothing,” I say.

  I haven’t eaten in over a day, and I missed breakfast because I was talking to Moore, so I dig into some trail mix, eating slowly to replenish my energy without shocking my system.

  “Okay, time to do some reconnaissance,” Francisco says.

  We head out of Manchester, driving east for several miles until we pass signs for Lake Massabesic, just east of Manchester.

  “It’s up ahead,” Lee says.

  “I can read the signs,” Francisco says.

  “You’re not from around here, so I’m just making sure.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” Francisco says.

  “Enough,” Miranda says. “All this dick swinging is boring the crap out of me.”

  The road is mostly empty, but Francisco drives cautiously, obviously unfamiliar with the territory.

  “Where are you from, Francisco?” I say.

  “Lots of places,” he says.

  “He was a stray,” Lee says, “until my father took him in.”

  “That’s not nice,” Miranda says, putting her hair into a bun and tucking it under a nondescript baseball cap. “We’re all in this together.”

  She passes a similar cap back to me, motioning me to put it on.

  “It’s not nice, but it’s true,” Lee says.

  Francisco keeps his cool in the front seat. Instead of responding to Lee, he says simply, “It’s time to focus on the task at hand.”

  Lee slips on a baseball cap as Francisco takes the turn off for Lake Shore Road. We drive for a few miles, hints of the lake popping up through brief clearings in the forest.

  “We’re going to drive around twice, nice and easy,” Francisco says. “Keep your eyes open.”

  We do two laps around the lake, and then Francisco slows, searching for something on a nearby road. A moment later he finds it, a wooded cul-de-sac hidden from the main road. He pulls in and turns off the engine.

  Miranda reclines her seat back. Lee rests his head on the side of the van and pulls his cap over his eyes like he’s going to sleep.

  “What’s happening now?” I say.

  “Now we wait,” Francisco says.

  “For what?” I say.

  “For nightfall.”

  THEY NAP THROUGH THE AFTERNOON, BUT I DO NOT.

  I use the time to sort through my mission timeline, attempting to look at it both from The Program’s perspective and my own.

  Twenty-four hours since I began the mission at the community center, and Moore is still alive. From my perspective, the mission has been delayed, but not abandoned. If anything, I’m getting closer to the inner circle, more comfortable there, integrated and accepted.

  But what is The Program’s perspective?

  I haven’t talked with them or received any communication since I stepped out of Father’s car.

  It seems like they have disappeared, but if something has gone wrong with my iPhone or the comms link, perhaps I’m the one who seems to have disappeared. The thought is troubling to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.

  I hear a crinkle of paper, something being unwrapped. I look over at Lee. He’s awake, surreptitiously peeling and eating a chocolate bar, gobbling it down a square at a time.

  He notices me watching him.

  “What?” he says, his mouth full. “It’s an energy boost.”

  “Where did you get it?” There were no chocolate in the bag Francisco brought us.

  “I smuggled it from camp,” he says.

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out another one.

  “You want?” he says. “Our secret.”

  “I’ll pass,” I say.

  An alarm goes off from some kind of timer in the front seat. Miranda reaches for it and turns it off. Then she stretches and yawns loudly.

  “Who would have thought that changing the world would be so boring?” she says.

  “Did you guys get some rest?” Francisco says.

  Lee and Miranda answer in the affirmative. I join them, even though it’s not true for me.

  “Let’s get started,” Francisco says. “Everybody ready?”

  Lee finishes off the chocolate bar in one big bite then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I’m ready,” he says.

  “What about you?” Francisco says as he turns toward Miranda.

  She nods.

  “I need a verbal confirmation,” he says. “You know the protocol.”

  “Ready and willing,” she says unenthusiastically.

  “And you, Daniel? Are you ready?”

  “Don’t I have to know what we’re doing before I know if I’m ready?”

  “Are you ready to trust us?” Francisco says. “That’s all we need for now.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Then let’s go,” Francisco says.

  He hops out and opens up the back of the van. He pulls out a single duffel bag that he slings over his shoulder.

  “Do you have your comms?” he asks Lee.

  “I’ve got them, and I’ve checked them,” Lee says.

  “Check again,” Francisco says.

  “I checked already.”

  “We can’t afford any errors,” Francisco says.

  “There won’t be any errors,” Lee says, and I see his hand balling into a fist. He grudgingly pulls a cell phone from his pocket, checks for signal, then types a text into the phone.

  A second later, a text comes back with a faint ping.

  “You see? It’s working,” he says, and stuffs the phone back into his pocket. “The only time we get cell phones, and I can’t even download any apps.”

  Francisco sighs. He turns to Miranda. “What’s our timeline?”

  Miranda presses a button on her digital timer.

  “Thirty minutes,” she says.

  “What’s the timeline about?” I say.

  “That’s how long we have to get in place and accomplish the mission,” she says.

  “Mission?”

  “The Hunt,” she says.

  “T-minus thirty,” Francisco says. “That means we have to hustle.”

  With a hiss of air through his teeth, he starts up the side of the road, motioning us to follow him.

  THE ROAD IS DESERTED.

  I sense the lake to our right, a low-slung stone wall defining the boundary of the property around it. We pass the occasional cabin to our left, and Francisco diverts us into the woods out of sight, switching back to the road only after we’re a good distance away. Only once do we spot headlights coming toward us down the lake road, and Francisco quickly moves the group behind the foliage until the car passes.

  As we get closer to whatever our destination is, Francisco staggers us so we’re not as obvious of a group, or as large of a target. I use the opportunity to drop back a little ways to where Miranda is.

  “You guys have done this before,” I say.

  “A few times a year,” she says. “For two years now.”

  “Same group?”

  “Different groups. But they usually keep Lee and I together.”

  “It’s like a camping trip of some kind?”

  “It’s no camping trip,” she says. “It’s a hunting trip.”

  “No talking, please,” Francisco says.

  He’s fallen back within earshot.

  He stops the group by putting up a fist, then he points from his eyes to a spot in the distance.

  A utility road opens out of nowhere, marked only by a single rust
ic wooden sign:

  MANCHESTER WATER WORKS

  WATER TREATMENT PLANT

  “What is this place?” I whisper.

  “It’s the water processing plant for the city of Manchester,” Lee says. “The lake provides drinking water for one hundred and sixty thousand people. All of it passes through here to get purified before it winds up in their homes.”

  “What are we doing here?” I say.

  “We’re just taking a tour,” Lee says. “An unauthorized, nighttime tour.”

  “Don’t look so serious,” Miranda says. “This is the fun part.”

  Without another word, she hops over the stone wall and disappears into the darkness. Lee does the same, then whistles for Francisco and me to follow.

  ONE SENTRY DRIVES THE ROAD AT NIGHT.

  That’s what they tell me. One sentry, every two hours or so, unless something draws his attention before that time. It’s our job to make sure nothing draws his attention.

  We come to the locked side door of the treatment plant building.

  Miranda pulls a small kit out of her pocket and leans down in front of the lock.

  “We’re going to break in?” I ask Lee.

  “That’s right. We sneak in, find what we’re looking for, and leave undetected. That’s how The Hunt works. They can never know we were here. Or else our team loses points,” Lee says.

  “So this is a game?”

  “We’re scored on our performance, then the scores are tabulated and added to our game profiles back in camp.”

  “The game I played last night.”

  “The one you tanked on. Yeah,” he says with a smile.

  “Keep it down,” Francisco says.

  “Yeah, I’m trying to concentrate,” Miranda says.

  She holds a miniature flashlight in her teeth while she expertly works the lock.

  A minute later, the door opens.

  “We’re in,” she says. “Sixteen minutes.”

  “Let’s do this,” Lee says.

  We slip inside and close the door behind us. I’m surprised that I feel the same rush I do when I embark on a Program assignment. The danger, the excitement of possible discovery, the need for a focus so intense that it shuts out every other thing in your life to the point where all of your problems seem far away.

  I look at Lee and Miranda, and I recognize the expression on their faces: the excited buzz of doing something forbidden.

  Then I look at Francisco, and I see something else.

  He is calm.

  He glances over to find me looking at him, and his entire physicality changes in an instant. His shoulders rise and his jaw tightens, his body taking on tension.

  It happens so quickly, it’s easy to think I misread him in the first place.

  Francisco hisses under his breath, drawing our attention, and then he guides us to a wall, pointing down a hall and up to the ceiling, where a camera is mounted in the corner.

  “No motion detector,” he says. “Just a digital recording system, but an older one that rotates and records with a slow frame rate.”

  The frame rate is not unusual for a security camera. Regular video records at thirty frames per second or greater. But most surveillance video runs at six to ten FPS to save energy and storage space. Although playback will have a herky-jerky quality, it’s still easy to make out the motion of the figures on the video, the way they’re dressed—

  And their faces.

  The good news is that Francisco knows about the system and where it’s located. It’s not only old, it’s badly placed, midway down the hallway and against the wall, sweeping left and right. That makes it easy to wait until it’s aimed away and move below it.

  We pass down the hallway until we’re clear of the camera. Then we move into the main chamber of the water treatment plant, a massive room filled with complex machinery and the computers that monitor it. Francisco pulls out an iPad mini, bringing up a schematic of the building before focusing in on the room and the machinery all around us.

  “We’re looking for this,” he says, pointing to a piece of machinery on the screen.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “It’s the chemical feed system. That’s where they add the chloramine,” Lee says.

  Chloramine. I’ve heard that term before. It’s a compound of chlorine and ammonia that some municipalities use in their drinking water as a disinfectant in place of pure chlorine.

  Lee says, “They feed the chloramine into the water in late-stage treatment to kill all the nasties.”

  “Why do we need to find that?”

  “Maybe we want the nasties left in there,” Lee says.

  And he smiles.

  Francisco interrupts him. “We find it because that’s the game,” he says. “We don’t ask questions.”

  I don’t like what I’m seeing here. Not at all.

  Nobody would imagine a terrorist threat in the middle of rural New Hampshire, in a place safe from just about everything except the weather and wildlife. But a hundred and sixty thousand people is a tempting target. And how many targets like this exist throughout the United States?

  The scope of it is staggering. If you were to disturb the water supply for a city like Manchester, then every water supply of this size and greater would suddenly need to be protected. The cost in security, man hours, and structural upgrades would be prohibitive. How can you protect every municipal water plant, every Department of Public Works, nuclear facility, university laboratory, electrical facility? Trying to do so would bankrupt the U.S. economy.

  “Six minutes, guys,” Miranda says.

  “What happens if we’re late?” I say.

  “We lose points if we’re late, and we can’t let that happen,” Miranda says.

  “Over here,” Lee says.

  He’s tracing a piece of machinery along the wall, following a large pipe across the room, where it disappears into the floor.

  “Damn, it’s in a separate room,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  He starts down a metal ladder.

  BELOW.

  That’s where we find it.

  The chemical feed system, the last stop before the water is distributed into the community.

  Miranda uses her phone to take a picture of the machinery. “We got it,” she says.

  I see her check the photo and close her camera app.

  “So we can go now?” I ask.

  Miranda shoots a nervous glance toward Lee. “Not exactly,” she says.

  Francisco puts the duffel bag down at his feet.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  I get no response.

  “A minute forty-five seconds,” Miranda says, studying the timer on her watch.

  I look at the duffel bag.

  “What’s in the bag, Lee?”

  “Something we add to the system,” he says.

  I look at the feed pipe in front of me, the top of it with a latch and round handle that turns like a metal steering wheel. Pop the latch, and you have an opening directly into the system.

  “What are we adding?” I say.

  Lee and Francisco look at each other. They don’t answer me.

  “A minute fifteen,” Miranda says.

  Lee pulls thick gloves from out of a side pocket of the duffel bag. He holds the gloves out to me.

  “For you,” he says. “You’re the guest of honor.”

  “What do I do with those?”

  “Put them on. You’re going to be handling a hazardous substance.”

  “I thought this was a game,” I say.

  Lee shrugs, noncommittal.

  “Leave him alone,” Miranda says. “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “He’ll find out soon enough,” Lee says to her, then turns back to me. “If you’re with us, you’ll put them on.”

  “I can’t be with you unless I know what we’re doing.”

  I look at Miranda, but she won’t meet my eye.

  “We’re poisoning the water supply
,” Lee says. “So now you know.”

  I glance at Francisco. He’s watching me carefully.

  “Why?” I say.

  “Because those are my father’s orders.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “I don’t question orders. I carry them out,” he says.

  The way he says the words, it’s almost like they’re coming out of my own mouth.

  I look at the gloves being dangled in front of me.

  Is this real, or is it a game?

  Judging by the serious expressions on the faces around me, it’s no game.

  My mission is to take out Moore. Anything I do is in service of that goal alone.

  If helping them commit an act of terrorism would bring me closer to Moore, then in theory I should do it.

  But why was Moore targeted in the first place, if not to prevent something like this from happening?

  Without being able to talk to The Program about this, I’m going to have to make a judgment on my own.

  As I look at Lee holding out the gloves, I realize I already have.

  I can’t stand by and watch these people poison the water supply, even if acting against them will destroy any chance I have of completing my mission.

  Miranda is peering at the timer on her watch. “One minute to go.”

  “Well?” Lee says.

  I look at the gloves, but I don’t reach for them.

  Lee grunts and snatches them away.

  “Never send a boy to do a man’s job,” he says, putting them on himself.

  “Slow down,” Francisco says calmly. “We don’t do anything until we get the signal.”

  Lee glares at him. “Unzip the duffel bag, Franky.”

  “Not until we have confirmation,” Francisco says.

  Lee is sweating, the veins in his neck popping out. Francisco, on the other hand, is relaxed, his gaze steady and unblinking.

  “Goddamn it,” Lee says. “Open the bag.”

  “Wait,” Francisco says calmly.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Miranda says, her voice tight with tension.

  “I hate you,” Lee says to Francisco. “You’re not even one of us.”

  “I am one of you,” Francisco says. “Your father trusts me with his life.”