There was also the matter of the woman, Tina Jefferson, whom Roscoe had been instructed to tell the girl to go to while he talked to the assassin. Who was this woman? What purpose would she serve?
There were too many questions unanswered. Roscoe was used to that, used to taking things on faith…and maybe that’s what he was supposed to do now. In a world of uncertainties, faith provided something solid on which to stand.
One thing was certain. Cardinal Roscoe needed to wave down a cab ASAP if he was going to make it to the airport to be on the next Delta flight from La Guardia airport to Atlanta.
Chapter 6
Tina Jefferson sat in her sweat pants and a t-shirt on the sofa. She sipped English breakfast tea while reading the Sunday paper, going through the Help Wanted ads. A large black cat jumped up onto the sofa and immediately rubbed his head against her bare feet.
"Hi, Teddy," Tina greeted her cat.
She had been laid off almost immediately after moving to Atlanta, and now it’d been three weeks since her last pay check. She hadn’t quite warmed up to the city, although she did realize that it was supposed take a person two years or so to get used to a new place, before it started to feel like home. Going out once in a while would help, she also realized. Not that she missed Dallas all that much, but at least there she knew her way around, where to go and where not to go. Going through Help Wanted ads took a real effort. Tina disliked few things more than having to look for a job.
Thinking like that made her even less interested in reading the Help Wanted ads. Maybe she should switch gears and look through the Personals. God, she’d been in Atlanta six months had been on only one date, agreeing to meet a guy for coffee after he asked her out while in line at the supermarket. Wasn’t that some sort of cliche or something? The guy had been nice enough, even good-looking, but boring. All he could talk about was the stock market. Tina had tried to turn the conversation towards literature. She told him that one thing she liked to find out about a man was what books he’d read recently, and what he thought of them. This guy spent the next fifteen minutes talking about an investor’s guide he’d read the week before.
And nothing since then. Maybe it was because she’d cut her hair and kept it short since moving to Atlanta. Guys seemed to like women with long hair more than short hair.
That, she decided, was what she needed. A nice man to take her out to dinner, to the symphony once in a while, to a movie or a play every Friday night, and to the Moon twice a week. Not to mention candlelight dinners, and long walks together, holding hands…
Tina knew she was going to get herself even more depressed than usual if she kept thinking along those lines. She needed a good distraction.
As if on cue, the doorbell rang.
It was a familiar sound. Tina worked from home and the responsibilities of her job meant that she’d gotten to know her FedEx delivery guy, Matt, pretty well. He was cute, had nice legs and buns due to the rigors of his job. Too bad he’d turned out to be gay. But she enjoyed his company and even got him to hang around for a cup of coffee once in a while.
So the sound of the doorbell had a Pavlovian effect on her, lifting her spirits. She sprung up from the sofa, forcing Teddy to move off her feet. His rest disturbed, he meandered off down the hall.
Tina went to the front door and looked through the peephole. At first, she could see no one, but then at the bottom of the view she saw a little girl. It was a neighborhood girl. She lived in a house that was on the other side of the woods behind Tina’s house. Her name was Sam, if Tina remembered correctly.
Angus Becker had last set foot in the United States of America almost six years before, in Los Angeles. It had been his one and only visit, and now he was back, this time in Atlanta. He’d been all over the world, on every continent. In many ways, the U.S. was the strangest country on the planet. Nowhere else had Becker seen so many people who had it so good yet believed otherwise. The so-called ‘poor’ people in America might have been considered among the wealthiest inhabitants of certain villages in Africa, South America, and Asia. Nowhere else were so many individuals capable of so much consumption on a casual, daily basis, in terms of fuel, food, and time.
He wondered if Americans, as a group, were consuming human civilization straight into oblivion. If that were the case, though, he would have been sent to kill as many of them as he could…instead of the few he’d been actually been sent to eliminate. It was his job, after all, to weed out the few rotten tomatoes so that the remaining majority might thrive on the vine, as it were. Of course, most of those he’d been sent to kill weren’t even Americans.
As he sat in a Waffle House, trying not to let the concentrated stench of fried breakfast foods and grease ruin his appetite, he reflected on this. He sat in the smoking section and puffed on a Marlboro while he sipped his weak, American coffee and watched a parade of overweight Americans come and go. Fat and lazy, he thought… The definition of the average American. He wondered if America’s empire could last a thousand years, like Rome’s. The way he saw things, the absorption of American culture by the rest of the world and the chronic influx of immigrants into the U.S. was having the effect of diluting America’s identity as well, spreading it around like manure in a garden.
A battle-scarred waitress brought Becker’s food to his table. The woman looked like a war veteran, with a faded green-black tattoo on her right forearm and pinched skin around her lips from years of smoking and drinking. Becker looked at his plate. He’d ordered the waffle, figuring that if the place was called Waffle House they should at least be able to do that right. It looked edible, at any rate. He dug in.
His employer had told him that this would be his last job. He could do whatever he wanted when it was all over, go wherever he wanted. But once this job was through, he’d be retiring for good. He’d complained to his employer that he didn’t want to retire, he liked his work. He wouldn’t know whatever else to do with himself. But he didn’t have a choice in the matter. This job was his last. His employer told him not to concern himself with his own future, that he’d figure it all out when the time came. He’d know what to do. Everything he’d been told by his employer had been true so far, so he had no reason to doubt it.
He contemplated retirement. He wasn’t old, barely thirty-four, and he wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself. Maybe he could go back to freelancing… There was always a need for someone like him to hunt down poachers in Kenya or drug lords in Colombia. Not even his employer could manipulate civilization into a society completely free of such people.
His employer… Becker grinned mischievously. Around him sat fat Americans stuffing their faces with cholesterol-packed fried eggs and ‘scattered, smothered, covered’ potatoes, and not one of them realized what was happening in the world around them. It wasn’t just these people, though. It was people all over the world, from Presidents to Generals to CEOs.
Becker thought of them as zombies. They didn’t really exit. Rather, they existed but inhabited a world that was not real. Becker lived in the real world along with a very, very few others who knew the truth. It was knowing the truth that set them apart, elevated them above zombies.
Even among the non-zombies there were those who knew a higher truth. And among those who knew that higher truth…there was Angus Becker, who knew the highest truth of all.
Tina opened the door.
"Hi," she said to Sam, who was breathing hard and sweating. Sam just looked at her. Her brown eyes were wide, there were scratches on her arms and legs, she wasn’t wearing shoes. Something was wrong.
"Are you okay?" Tina asked.
Sam didn’t respond. Tina wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do in a situation like this. She’d seen Sam a number times before, in Tina’s back yard petting a deliriously happy black cat named Teddy. She should at least invite the child in.
"Do you want to come inside?" Sam nodded.
Tina let her in. Sam stepped in and stood just inside the doorway. Had she been chased?
Tina looked around outside, but didn’t see anyone else.
"Is something wrong?" Tina asked as she closed the door. She gently led Sam further into the house until they were in the living room. Sam nodded. "What is it? What happened?"
"Mommy and Daddy," Sam said, but her voice was barely loud enough to hear, and she sounded on the verge of crying. She seemed unbelievably small and fragile. She was still panting heavily, apparently from running through the woods.
Now Tina remembered the father calling for Sam one evening, at dinnertime, when Sam had been in Tina’s yard petting the cat. He’d come by, exchanged pleasantries with Tina. Seemed like a nice enough guy, if a little distant.
Sam was visibly upset. Tina felt like if she could calm the girl down she could find out what was going on. "Sam, do you want some juice to drink?" Sam nodded.
Tina poured her a glass of cold apple juice and gave it to her, watching as Sam held the glass with two hands and gulped half of it down. When she was done, Sam handed the half empty glass back to Tina. Tina put it on the counter, figuring Sam would probably want more.
"Sam, where are your Mommy and Daddy?" Tina asked.
"At home." Sam looked down at her feet.
Tina scratched her head. What did that mean, then? Had Sam run away? Was she in trouble?
"Can you tell me what’s wrong?" Tina asked.
"Mommy and Daddy," Sam said again, still on the verge of crying but somehow holding it back.
"What about Mommy and Daddy? Are they mad at you?"
Sam shook her head.
Tina sighed.
"Sam, you have to tell me what’s wrong if you want me to help you. Okay?"
"Okay." She didn’t say anything, though.
"Did something bad happen?" Tina asked her.
Sam nodded. Okay, that was something. Something bad… A cold spike went through Tina.
"Is it a fire, Sam?" she asked. "Is your house on fire?"
Sam shook her head no. Tina breathed out a sigh of relief. Not long ago, on the news, she saw a report of a family that lost their house because their six-year-old son had not understood that he needed to tell someone as soon as possible that it was on fire. He’d just run all the way back to his school because he was scared when he saw the flames rising up some curtains in the living room.
What else could it be, if not a fire?
Chapter 7
Henry stood just beyond the perimeter of the back yard, in the woods. It was already hot. His right arm burned as sweat soaked through his shirt and into the wound. He ignored it. He’d seen Sam emerge from the woods behind a house, then he lost her. Now he wasn’t sure what to do. He could just leave. If he turned around and went back, got in the car and went to the airport, and then back to Hong Kong, what would happen?
But he knew he wouldn’t do that. The anonymous caller had sounded sincere. Maybe they knew that Henry had been sent to kill the girl, mistake or no, which meant that her life was still in danger. If he couldn’t do the job, his employer would find out and send a replacement, someone who could do the job.
Henry was committed now to saving the little girl’s life. He owed her that much, didn’t he? After having killed her parents, what else could he do? After all the years of killing… He was practically numb to the killing of adults. He didn’t feel much for Mr. and Mrs. Rohde, little more than a passing sorrow that they had died needlessly. But the girl, Samantha, he could not let die. His daughter would never have peace if he did nothing.
Something flashed in his peripheral vision, and for a moment he thought it might be the girl. But it wasn’t… It was his wife, Catherine, wearing the dress she’d been wearing on the bus in Cairo, and his daughter, Constance, wearing the bright little sun dress she’d been wearing that day. Catherine held Connie’s hand, and they regarded Henry with expressions of pure sorrow. He knew they weren’t real. They were apparitions, ghosts of the past. But why was he seeing them now? He’d seen them before, when he was at his lowest he would see them all the time. For a while he drank to try and make them go away. When he started working for his employer and got to act out his vengeance, the ghosts appeared less frequently, maybe once or twice a year. It had been eight months or so since he’d last seen them.
He stood there and watched the phantom images of his wife and daughter until a dog barked somewhere and made him look away. When he looked back, they were gone. It took him a moment to force the demons back, the ones that always threatened to consume him whenever he began to dwell on what had happened in Cairo.
Henry couldn’t be sure which house Sam had gone to, or if she’d just kept on going past the houses. His instincts told him it was a house right on the edge of the woods, and more than likely the one he was standing behind now. A few houses down a dog sniffed at the air inside a fenced in yard. It looked like a pit bull. It didn’t see Henry. He eased back further into the woods, then went in the other direction, opposite the house with the pit bull.
A few houses down he cut through a side yard, hearing a woman’s laughter in the house the yard belonged to. Life was going on. Normal life. The kind of life he’d left behind…rather, the kind of life that had been taken away from him.
He went around front, to the street. There was no sidewalk. Dogwoods bloomed on either side of this street just as they did on the other street. It was almost an exact replica.
No sign of Sam Rohde anywhere. The fact that she’d run directly through the woods in a straight line towards that one house made Henry think she knew someone there. He walked towards the house where he was sure Samantha Rohde had gone. A white Toyota Corolla sat in the driveway. A bumper sticker on the back of the car read Support Amnesty International. The yard needed mowing. Boxwoods that needed trimming blocked the front window.
Henry stood in front of the house. He read the name on the mail box. Jefferson. He tried to think… How best to approach this? Telling the truth was out. The whole truth, anyway. He’d already lied to Sam, told her that a "bad man" had killed her parents. He decided to keep to that story. Maybe it was a rationalization, but it was a good one. Maybe it was true.
Yatin Kumar stepped out of Starbucks on West 57th, and headed towards Fifth Avenue. It was a bright Sunday morning in New York City, but he didn’t mind spending it at the office. Sunday was an excellent day to go to the U.N. and get some work done without being pestered by meetings and phone calls and more meetings all day long. The streets of Manhattan were quieter than usual on Sunday mornings, and Kumar liked to walk the entire distance to the U.N. from his apartment on the Upper West Side. It was a long walk, but he stopped for breakfast partway and took his time, meandering, until he got to Fifth Avenue, at which point he’d walk the rest of the way in earnest.
Today he intended to put a few hours in at the office, then get dressed for the party that evening at Ambassador Dahl’s house on Long Island. It would be a political power trip for most people, but Kumar wasn’t going to press the flesh with the power brokers of the world… The Ambassador’s daughter, Annika, would be in attendance. His sole purpose for going was to meet her, and to let her fall in love with him.
He passed Rockefeller Center and paused to look at St. Patrick’s across the street. Catholicism had always intrigued Yatin Kumar. Annika Dahl was a Catholic, although not exactly devout. According to Oracle, she did not necessarily believe any one religion held all the answers. She also believed one chose one’s own purpose in life.
Kumar couldn’t agree more, and he knew what his life’s purpose was. In fact, he felt he’d already achieved it with Oracle. Now he could concentrate on the aspects of his life that he’d ignored for so long: love, happiness, a family, and the joy of seeing the lives of so many people improved by his creation. He looked forward to being able to sit back and watch a new era unfold before his eyes, with Annika Dahl by his side.
Henry approached the front door quietly, listening for voices inside. He thought he heard a woman’s voice, but he wasn’t sure. If it was the wrong house, he’
d just pretend to be a concerned uncle. He wouldn’t be able to try more than a few houses before someone got suspicious and called the police. He couldn’t let that happen. Dealing with the authorities would not be easy without his employer’s help, especially once the police entered the Rohde house.
He stood before the door, listening, didn’t hear anything, and finally decided to just go ahead and knock. He did, three solid raps, and waited. He wondered if this marked the beginning of the end of the life he’d known for the last five years. It was a life that had given him stability, if not happiness, had given him a sense of purpose, if not a sense of well-being, and had given a measure of comfort, if not warmth.
As he waited for the door to open it occurred to him that it might not be locked. If he tried the door and someone inside noticed, he wouldn’t get another chance at another house to find the girl. Whoever lived there would call the police. But his gut told him this was the house.
When Sam heard someone knock on the front door of Tina’s house, she knew it was the man with the gun. Tina started towards the door, but Sam held onto Tina’s sweats and stopped her. Tina looked at Sam.
"Maybe it’s your Mommy or Daddy," Tina said.
"No." Sam shook her head. "It’s not."
"Well, let me just look through the peephole, okay?"
Sam nodded and followed close behind Tina as she walked down the hall towards the front door. As they approached the door, however, it opened. Tina stopped, then took a step backwards, running into Sam.
The Oracle Paradox Page 4
