The Harbinger of Change

by Timothy Jon Reynolds

  It was getting dark when they pulled into the Pine Chalet. Vera parked the car and told Matt to wait. She went in just like she had done several weeks ago. She was glad to see the white-haired Abigail still working the counter.

  Abigail and her late husband Chuck had run this place for the last forty years, and she hadn’t been quite ready to give up the ship after his passing.

  Vera had come up to check the plane and reconnoiter, which was how she had found Abigail. Nowadays, Abigail couldn’t see so well due to cataracts, so customers often helped her with the paperwork. Vera thanked her, and as she was heading out old Abigail said, “Terrible what happened today, isn’t it?”

  Vera turned and said sincerely that it was “a most horrible act, and I surely hope whoever did it is brought to justice.” That seemed to please Abigail, so she turned and lumbered back to her chair, which was two feet in front of the blaring TV. When they got to the room, Vera told him to shower and wash his hair while she went out for some things. After getting his clothing and shoe sizes she left, but not before noting he wore a size 13 shoe. Good looking and probably well endowed too, not bad . . .

  Matt was stunned. She left? He couldn’t believe she left? He could just walk away, make a 911 call and play it from that point. Then he would have the deal to make. He knew that was important. He also knew how things worked, and they would have to believe him. The evidence would dictate it.

  Then he turned on the TV, and his mind changed as quickly as this whole thing had started, not five hours before. Homeland Security had gone through his house, and although they refused to confirm anything on the TV news, all of a sudden it seemed they were labeling him as a Timothy McVeigh wannabe—like he was some kind of maniacal individual, who was extremely dangerous and should not be approached under any circumstances. In a thought of dark humor, Matt thought that he should be afraid of himself after watching the news because they had him cast as such as badass.

  Of course, his mind immediately flashed to Jan playfully commenting about his man cave. “You better hope nobody sees all this stuff, or they’ll think you’re a nut,” she had once said.

  The news was circling again back to the start, where they were profiling him as a domestic terrorist, who was now armed and extremely dangerous. They were warning the public not to have any contact with the two of them, and to immediately call in sightings. This can’t get any worse.

  He looked at the phone, but didn’t pick it up. He hadn’t forgotten about his captors, or the fact that they knew who he was and had already made a veiled threat against Jan, a threat he was sure they would carry out if he picked up that phone. Damn it!

  Thinking of any way out, he believed he picked up on something earlier. He was no intern when it came to women. He’d had steady girlfriends since the ninth grade, and he knew a look when he saw one. She liked him somehow. If he was going to stay, he needed to use her little tell to his advantage, but he had to make it look spontaneous, as she was way too smart to try to fool. As he imagined her flowing hair he thought, not that it would be hard. He was going to have to create a moment, something he could get in her head with, but what?

  * * *

  Anyone who saw him now would think he was asleep sitting up. Pablo was always conscious of the outside world during his frequent visits to the past. Although his own form of transcendental meditation made him seem out of touch with his environment, he was not.

  On the day James had lost to Pablo at chess, he had revealed a past that was difficult to fathom. This American was the heart of America’s military ingenuity and military defenses. James was truly a living legend, and he knew where all the bones were buried.

  Pablo remembered that he and Lebuff had sat stunned. What this man had just told them seemed impossible. Yet there he was, speaking of things that only someone who did them could actually know about. A quick Google search had confirmed his identity. He even had his own Wikipedia page.

  This man was what Lebuff had known Pablo would grow up to be, and the two of them were there, together by fate, in the same place at the same time. Not for long though, as James had also told them of the pancreatic cancer, and the news he had received just yesterday of it spreading. Apparently, no one knew this information except the three of them and James’s doctor, and it was sworn that it would stay that way. They had both promised that they had never seen nor heard of James Haberman.

  Pablo had asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Well,” Haberman had replied, “I was going to go back and deal with good-byes, then finish a project for a friend, kind of an important one.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes, was, as I was doing it as an auto-response, because that is who I am. I’m the guy they can count on until the end. That’s what I was programmed to do—you know, do your patriotic duty and go to the grave waving the flag. It appears life has just thrown me a curve ball though, and I’m going to go with it. So with your teacher’s blessing, I would like to work with you, one on one. And let’s see what you got, kid.”

  Lebuff hadn’t been able to say, “Yes” fast enough. Then he had added, “What a tragic and wonderful opportunity. Life never ceases to amaze me.” He had said this quite unexpectedly, and then run over and hugged them both for a long time.

  * * *

  Vera pulled out of the parking spot and drove toward town. But a block down she quickly turned left into a nearly vacant hotel parking lot and backed into a spot under a pine tree. After retrieving the rifle case from the trunk, she partially rolled down the back window and assembled her rifle in record time from the back seat. Within seconds, Vera had the door to their room under scope. Being careful to avoid detection and keeping the door covered, she used a series of quick glances to ensure she was clear. It was deserted except for the cars passing by on Highway 50, which was also nearly deserted.

  She waited twenty minutes, but no cops, and he didn’t try to leave. That was a good thing because it meant he was on board, which also meant that she didn’t have to kill him and clean up the fallout from that move. She was also relieved for another two reasons: first, she might still need him to get out of here; and second, well, that was something else. That “something else” had been bothering her for the past hour, and of all the inappropriate times for it to pop up?

  * * *

  Ken looked at his caller ID and observed Sarah was calling him. I wonder what she has, thought Ken. “Beck here.”

  “Okay,” Sarah replied, “based on the info you gave me, I checked the two hundred sightings over the past hour, and narrowed it to the Sacramento area as you instructed. Of those, I found one in Stockton from a doctor who was driving home. He said a black Mustang cut him off very aggressively, and then when it got caught at a red light, he pulled up to tell the driver off. The doctor says it was a guy, with a really hot chick in the back seat. He also says, it was our hot chick.”

  “Did he remember the intersection?”

  “Yes, it was them for sure, as we have the camera footage from the traffic light.”

  “Stockton, huh? Okay Sarah, let’s find these guys. Let me know what else you come up with. This kills my idea, but at least I’m physically in the neighborhood to get on this.”

  6— Simpatico

  Still sitting in his trance in his corner office, Pablo’s reflections of the past continued. Those three months with James had been unlike anything he had ever experienced. For the first time in his life he hadn’t needed to explain his references, he was able to toggle back and forth between languages, and he was completely understood.

  James had been amazing, and he had seemed stronger lately. Perhaps having taken on a pupil (or more like a dependent) had been healing him somehow? Pablo had read of such miracles. James had opened doors that would have taken years of teachers and schools to open, and he had done it in days, sometimes hours, not weeks or years.

  Back then, Pablo had been sure he knew what heaven felt like as his mind had spent every day absorbed in the
amazing world that James provided. Every night, as Pablo had lain in bed, sleep had come in fits, as his head spun in a million directions trying to process all that James had taught him in that day’s lessons.

  A bird brought Pablo out of his deep thoughts, momentarily. It was doing a very acrobatic, very graceful dive for a fish in the Guaya River. Pablo smiled at the thought of how many of his technological advancements had come from watching natural acts such as this bird.

  He fell back into thought, and immediately went back to the day when he had found out about his family’s murder.

  Earlier that same day, something else significant happened, as Carmen Ardourel had asked him to the dance that coming Friday. He had thought she had always seemed happy when she was around him, now he knew why. Pablo just wished he had known then, that for the last time in his life, at age sixteen, he was going to fall asleep to a world of peace, innocence, and wonderment of things to come, and wake up to another reality altogether. And I never even got to kiss the girl.

  He had learned a great deal the night his life changed forever, both about human behavior and about James Haberman. He had later found out that James had written a letter to Sandy Burroughs that night.

  He let his mind roam to James, and to his thoughts that night as James told him what was going through his mind at that time, during one of their many long talks. It had been essential that James understood Pablo’s need for all information, and thankfully, James had. So he had meticulously recreated happenings to satiate Pablo’s need.

  Pablo had known that James sometimes missed Bill Westinghouse, and his old job. James had loved the challenges and the pride he felt for bettering his country. Leaving had been hard. In the first place, it had been a challenge that took years of planning. At Conceptual, the employees’ financials had been watched very closely, and it hadn’t been easy funneling a hundred million dollars into Zurich. Of course that had been working on Plan Number One, the “get-more-money-than-anyone-needs” plan.

  Plan Number Two had been his breakdown story to cover his needed sabbatical. He had needed time to become someone else, and to make that person rich. That had been before his yearly physical turned up some problems with his white blood cell count, and it was a good thing he had used his own doctor for that test. His original plan had been to be back in place before they got too desperate and started hunting hard for him. He had figured Bill could hold them off for at least a year. He might have stayed and tried to fight the cancer in the U.S., if stem cell treatments had been available.

  After James had left them no choice by being gone so long, they brought in Cooper to complete his project. James thought it had been very possible that Cooper could do it based on the data the team already had knowledge of, which of course, was everything but his crucial battery discovery.

  This had been one of the worst hardships for him, because in his entire lifetime, James Haberman had never started a project and then failed to finish it. There had been no reason to feel guilty—he had given his all for the U.S. But he had felt guilty nonetheless. His mind had molded civically, and that had been all he had ever known.

  His former team had the concept, and Cooper had had a competent enough mind to make it happen, so James had never really understood one hundred percent why he had always felt so guilty. Perhaps, it had something to do with his patriotism, and perhaps it had something to do with him always having to be the best.

  James had conceded that he initially had plans to introduce Pablo to his American friends once he was done training him. His plan had been to send Pablo to Westinghouse, with Burroughs in tow to explain it all. Then he would have been a hero—a posthumous hero, but a hero nonetheless. The U.S. would have benefited enormously if his successor had worked for them.

  Pablo had known of the accolades James had been using when referencing him, and he had known that James felt shame because he had been constantly fighting the urge to compete rather than teach. Deep down James had confessed that he had known the competition would be one-sided. He had often said of Pablo, “Once this kid absorbs all there is, he will be at a level that mankind could only look up to and genuflect.” Pablo had known that James had never felt that way about anyone in his entire life.

  As a hobby, James had built an empire by setting up a puppet company in the Bahamas and then investing in the stock market. Being on the inside of all the major military breakthroughs and contract dealings, he had amassed a hundred million in two years. He had also been one of the pioneering minds behind the Internet. He had been there in the beginning, as the boys at the CIA recruited him and secretly placed him in DARPA unbeknownst to Westinghouse.

  The CIA had him set up some back doors to certain entities that they deemed “problematic” if they were ever to fall into enemy hands. For every backdoor James created for them, he created one for himself too. No one had been at his level at the time, so who was going to catch him? Of course no one would have ever uncovered this information, since it was only he and Bob Thompson who had known exactly what he was doing for the Agency. No one else had known, otherwise they would have both been in jail.

  Only, what Bob hadn’t known was that James was rogue, and it hadn’t stopped once the desired institutions were obtained for the CIA, as that had not been the way James Haberman was wired. He had been wired to never stop until the game was over. So James hadn’t stopped until he had them all! He had even had NORAD and the Energy Grid System for the U.S. Nothing had been out of his reach, not even the CIA.

  So when James Haberman had proclaimed, “The kid’s a prodigy,” he hadn’t meant he would someday win a Nobel Prize or some piddly shit like that. What James had meant was that one day Pablo would cure cancer, or complete the EMP Project and make ICBM’s a thing of the past, or invent time travel, something HUGE!

  James’s letter to Sandy Burroughs had been very specific on how the lad was to be taken care of, and how he and his family would never want for anything, ever again. Unfortunately, it was a letter James would never send, because at 2:14 in the morning, just as he was finishing that letter, his phone had rung and scared the bloody hell out of him.

  It had scared him not only because of the hour, but because not many people had had his number. It couldn’t have been good news—no good news came at two in the morning. He recognized the area code as local. Ah, probably a wrong number. He had answered, “Yes?”

  During one of their many long talks about things past, James had told Pablo numerous times how that call started, and it was certainly apt how Jeremy had begun.

  “It’s Jeremy. You might want to sit down.”

  Already feeling weak, James did what he was told by Jeremy. He sat.

  “Is it the boy?” he had asked before Lebuff could speak.

  “James, I don’t know how to say this, or what to make of it, but we just received word that Pablo’s entire family has been wiped out by a band of what appear to be mercenaries. They spared no one.”

  Stunned silence had followed. Finally, James asked Jeremy, “Why?”

  “We don’t know. The only way we found out was because we donated old books and supplies to Pablo’s former school. His old principal called and told us the news.”

  James’s head had started working and he had thought of something he had learned once upon a time. If you want the truth, follow the money.

  “Jeremy, I never asked you this before, but how does an impoverished boy from Ecuador afford to go to school here? Scholarship?”

  Truthfully, Lebuff hadn’t known. The teachers hadn’t really cared. Sure, they had been able to deduce who was from money and who wasn’t, and Jeremy had recalled that Pablo was somewhere in the middle, but that had been all he remembered.

  “I don’t know, James.”

  “Well, you need to find out and give me a name—quickly! I have some work to do right now, but I’ll be waiting for you to get back to me.” James’s voice held urgency.

  “I don’t like the tone of your voice, James. Do you k
now something I don’t?”

  “No, but who’s to say whoever did this doesn’t want to finish the entire job? Find me that name, Jeremy!”

  * * *

  When Pablo got like this, he could sit for hours and contemplate on his past, running away with his thoughts. It was especially easy when he came here and saw the very river his uncle had died on. Of course, his thoughts naturally drifted to his tio and his last day on the planet, a day Pablo had researched at length.

  He could see Julio laughing and having a great conversation with his father, who had just gotten news about how well their Pablito was doing in France. He had bellowed to Julio on the other end.

  “He’s doing the same thing there as he did here, he’s rewriting the books. I heard they just gave him an award for Drama. He’s apparently quite the actor, too.”

  Julio had chuckled heartily, “We sent him there to rule the world and he got a drama award!” They had both laughed a good long one while picturing their Pablito doing the play in tights. Julio had yawned and said, “Okay, my brother, it’s time for me to go, please tell the family that I said ‘hi.’”

  Julio had pocketed his phone, feeling really good at the moment. He had poured himself a double shot of rum and squeezed out a lime in his mouth for the after-wash. He had gulped it, and as he pulled it away, expelled an audible “ah” of pleasure. At the last second he had observed the Ninja in the reflection of the small mirror off to his left. Well, it sure looked like a Ninja, was the last thought he had ever had, his reactions were stupefied by alcohol.

  Before he had been able to turn and verify his initial assessment, the specially sharpened garrote wire had been around his neck. In one deft move, within one second, the attacker had tightened the wire and had jammed his knee in Julio’s back. The next second, his decapitated head had shattered the glass table into a million pieces. His attacker had stood over the body, the stump still spurting blood at an alarming rate, and said, “That’s for Fernando, Puto.”