by Alan Orloff
Amanda was one of the few people on the planet who understood his desire to leave the trash behind. She knew him better than most people, of course, but he appreciated the extra support nonetheless. He was infinitely proud of her, and he knew his pride would have paled next to the pride Rina would have had for her grown-up daughter.
“I think that ship has sailed.”
Amanda reached over and patted his hand, and he noticed his liver spots were getting larger. “Don’t give up. That’s what you always told me, right?”
“That’s right. Keep your head down, and keep plowing ahead. A good strategy.”
“Yeah.” She gave him a smile that King had seen many times over the years, one that meant she knew he was giving her the brush-off. “How’s your food supply holding up?”
King shrugged. Amanda might nag him constantly, but if she didn’t come by once a week with a few bags of fresh food, all his meals would consist of SpaghettiOs and Double Noodle soup, both dishes topped with crumbled saltines. Stale ones. “Okay, I guess.”
“I know what that means. I’ll stop by tomorrow, bright and early, with some fresh produce.”
“I don’t believe in bright. Or early,” King said. “But thanks.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a few things I’d like to do while I’m here. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Sure. What?”
“I’ve been putting it off for a while, but I guess it’s time I went through some of my old stuff in the attic.” Gosberg’s talk about King’s Attack on America notes had left him wondering—what if there was something important hidden in his old files? He’d remembered that when his basement flooded a few years ago, he’d rescued a bunch of boxes and hauled them over to Amanda’s. Maybe he could just take a quick peek, just to make sure he wasn’t withholding something vital.
“Seriously? You’re going to clean up? Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” She reached out and put her hand on King’s forehead. “Don’t seem feverish. What’s going on?”
“Going on? Nothing.”
She eyed him but didn’t probe further. “Well, hallelujah. Don’t let me stop you. If you need any help, just holler. I’m sure I can find my blowtorch somewhere.”
“Thanks, but I can do it myself.” King pushed his chair back and cracked his knuckles.
“I’ve got some laundry to do, but if you really need some help, let me know. I’ll do just about anything to get that attic cleaned out.” She rose. “Oh, and be careful going up the stairs, okay? They’re a little rickety.”
Chapter Seven
Peter Gosberg admired the efficiency of Will Slattery, the DoD project liaison. The two men had worked together for four years, and Gosberg had never once seen Slattery come to a meeting unprepared. He didn’t know when the man found time to sleep, but at this particular moment, in this particular situation, Gosberg was grateful for Slattery’s dedication.
Technically, Slattery was the intermediary to the DoD’s Office of Accelerated Technology Development (OATD), an ultraclassified stepchild of DARPA. He reported to Colonel Hanson Locraft, the Director of OATD, but he showed up in the lab darn near every day, checking on their progress and helping to fight the inevitable fires that arose when developing just-emerging technologies.
In addition to Slattery’s can-do attitude, Gosberg also appreciated the buffer he provided between the project’s administration and the day-to-day science. Gosberg found working with the DoD to be frustrating, exhausting, and painful—on a good day. As a researcher, though, he had to put up with that necessary evil or take on the near-impossible task of scraping up private funding for projects with ten- or twenty-year success horizons.
“I’ve transcribed the notes from the debriefings, and I’ve cued up the security camera footage.” Slattery tapped on his laptop’s keyboard as he spoke, multitasking as usual. His linebacker physique was at odds with his soft voice.
“Thanks. If only we’d . . .” Gosberg trailed off, once again chastising himself for the events that transpired. If only . . .
Slattery looked up. Serious. “Listen, Peter, we can’t second-guess ourselves. Despite what happened, I think we should emphasize the positive results.”
“I don’t know. I think Locraft will go ballistic.” The science part of the experiment had succeeded; they’d gotten results beyond their wildest dreams. Unfortunately, Gosberg wasn’t sure Locraft would concur. How successful could an experiment be if things went to total shit and people got killed? He felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. About his brother-in-law’s suicide, for his poor sister, for all the hard work his group of scientists had accomplished over the last six years. And now, to have it all in jeopardy.
Gosberg’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at the text message. “Okay. Ehreng is bringing Locraft back now.” Slattery occupied himself with his laptop while Gosberg simply stared at the wall, steeling himself for the inquisition.
A few moments later, the door opened, and Locraft marched in, escorted by the gangly Ehreng.
“Thank you, Chris. You can go now.” Ehreng shut the door, but no one spoke further until Gosberg flipped the security switch on the wall so their conversation would be secure.
Locraft wasn’t in uniform today, opting for dark slacks and a short-sleeve white shirt, no tie. Gleaming black dress shoes. His gray flattop seemed level enough to shoot pool on. “Okay, fellas, I’ve been out of country, in the wilds of the Philippines, so my information about this incident is a little sketchy. Start from the very beginning, and take me up until . . .” He glanced at his watch. “21:40.” Locraft displayed a poker face, but Gosberg could only imagine the fury that roiled beneath the craggy surface.
“Four days ago, we got a directed donation. Specifically for our project. He—”
“If our project is classified, explain how that came to be, Dr. Gosberg.”
Just the first of the tricky parts. “He was my brother-in-law, Cole Tanner. A decorated veteran of the Gulf War. An honest-to-goodness American hero. Lately, though, he’s had a tough time. Suffered from PTSD, among other things. In the course of our, uh, family discussions, he intimated he was familiar with the goals of our mission, if not explicitly with the details. Anyway, he took his own life with the instructions that we were to use his body for our research. Once a patriot, always a patriot, I guess. Said if we tried to ‘get fancy’ and revive him, he’d kill himself again . . . and take my sister along with him. So . . .” Gosberg held out his hands as he held his breath, eyes never straying from Locraft’s pockmarked face.
“Took his own life?” Locraft asked. “Didn’t that screw up his body?”
Gosberg bristled at Locraft’s callousness. Cole had been in a lot of pain to go to such extreme measures to escape it, and all Locraft cared about was his damn research. “Well, he knew what he was doing. He—”
This time, Slattery interrupted. “Tanner used a nerve agent. Major Maranski in Bio Defense at Detrick identified it as Bivex-N14.”
“I’m not familiar with that one,” Locraft said. His breathing had become shallower but more rapid.
“It’s a ‘designer’ combo-toxin that never made it out of the experimental phase. One toxin attacks the motor functions, causing reversible paralysis, the other sedates the cerebral cortex function with associated temporary global amnesia. Without the antidote, it causes death. With the antidote, the victim could be resuscitated for questioning. In other words, a weaponized version could be used as any other bioagent—to kill—but if someone of vital strategic importance had been dosed with it, you could revive them using the antidote and question them after they regained their memory.”
“So you revived him, right?”
“We gave him the antidote, and he regained motor functioning, but . . . well, this was an experimental agent. We found out why it was never weaponized. You see, the neural component was never successfully synthesized—it caused permanent total global amnesia. Which, of course, made interrogating the subjects completely useless. It’
s as if their bodies still worked, but their souls were gone forever. Essentially brain-dead. Supposedly, the experimental stock was destroyed, but . . .” Slattery shrugged.
“How did Tanner get a hold of it?”
“Cole Tanner was an expert in wet work, one of his generation’s most lethal killing machines. He must have commandeered some of it for his missions. Of course, no one’s admitting anything.”
Locraft chewed on that for a while. After a very long silence, he said, “Continue.”
First hurdle cleared. “There was nothing else we could do, so we accepted Cole Tanner as our Subject Foxtrot. Seven hours later, we had him hooked up to our Optic Nerve Adapter and proceeded to get our baseline measurements. Everything looked great. All within experimental ranges. On Friday morning, we began the test downloads.” Gosberg paused and nodded at Slattery. “We’ve got all the clinical data, if you’d like to see it. Along with checklist observations and all the other documentation. I can assure you, we had this thing under control.”
“Things were going great, until they weren’t?” One of Locraft’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “Go on.”
Perspiration beaded on Gosberg’s forehead, but he refrained from backhanding it away. Didn’t want to look nervous. He took a breath and glanced at Slattery, who looked as calm as if he were sitting on the beach watching the waves crash. “We continued downloading data until an incident occurred at just past eleven thirty on Saturday night, during an electrical storm. And . . . and . . .” Something tightened in Gosberg’s throat, and his words turned into a coughing spasm.
Slattery jumped in. “The electrical storm knocked out the power. We’re equipped with a backup generator, of course, but there was some question as to whether it was functioning properly.”
“Jesus H. Christ. Will you get to it already?” Locraft’s poker face had puckered.
Slattery began again, but Gosberg cleared his throat and waved him off. “The power was out for less than ten minutes. The real problem arose when it came back on. There was a huge power surge, and the spike proved to be problematic. It damaged the data exchange interface, which corrupted the download process. Unfortunately, we believe it might have injured Foxtrot’s brain as well.”
“Can’t you examine him to be sure?”
“Well, here’s the thing. We can’t because he’s no longer here. He . . .”
“Who isn’t here?” Locraft snarled.
“Foxtrot.”
“What? Where is he?”
“He left.”
“He left?”
“Yes, sir. Escaped might be a better word.”
“Your test subject escaped? You want to explain to me how a dead man escapes?” Locraft raised his voice, and in the small room, it sounded like he was using a bullhorn.
“Well, he wasn’t technically dead. His ‘soul’ was erased.”
Locraft glared at him.
“We don’t know for sure, but we think the power surge brought him out of the medically induced coma. Then he disengaged himself from the equipment and . . . left.”
“Just walked right out the door.”
“Yes, sir. More or less. Here.”
Slattery hit a few keys, then turned around his laptop so the colonel could see. “This is the footage from a security camera.”
Gosberg didn’t have to watch to know what Locraft was seeing. He’d observed it a dozen times, in slo-mo, and he knew how worthless it was. And how embarrassing.
“All this shows is a man dressed in a lab coat leaving the building.”
“Yes, sir,” Slattery said. “That’s all we have, unfortunately.”
“Nothing from inside the building?”
“When we designed the facility, there was no need. After all, our subjects are dead. We were only worried about trying to keep people out, not keeping them in.”
“And that’s Tanner? Or Foxtrot? Or whatever the hell you’re calling him?”
“Yes. He grabbed a lab coat and his pants and walked right out the back door.”
Locraft’s face had darkened. “Where were the lab techs during all this?”
Time for the next hurdle. “Weekend night shift, so we had two techs on duty. When the power went out, the generator kicked in, but it was sending some error messages. One tech went to go check it out, and that’s when . . . when . . .”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Gosberg. Spit it out.”
“I’m afraid to say the other tech was killed during the escape. All of this transpired in a matter of minutes.”
“Holy Grandmother of Judas,” Locraft said. “Let me get this straight. The dead guy is now alive, and the living guy is now dead?”
Gosberg nodded, and in his peripheral vision he saw Slattery’s head bobbing, too.
Locraft banged on the table with his palm half a dozen times before speaking. “Why didn’t you alert me to this sooner? Hoping it would all go away?”
“We wanted to keep the fatality quiet, for obvious reasons. And we’ve been working around the clock to try to locate Foxtrot on our own. Frankly, we figured his body would be found and reported by now. Considering that he was recently deceased, we figured he wouldn’t be in very good physical health.”
“You figured he wouldn’t be in good physical health? He’d been dead for two days!” Locraft’s face had taken on an even deeper hue. “Christ.”
“It gets worse,” Gosberg said, worrying about how this might go. If Locraft decided to pull the plug on the project, six years of work would go right down the drain, sucking the careers of his dedicated research group along with it. “Our fugitive believes he’s a Russian operative whose mission is to destroy America.” Gosberg explained the note signed with the name Dragunov, the screwdriver attack, and the connection to King’s thriller, Attack on America.
When Gosberg was finished, Locraft shook his head. “Our guy thinks he’s a Russian spy? Un-fucking-believable. Was there some particular reason you were downloading popular fiction into his brain?”
“No. Our protocol specified ‘content-blind’ data, so we aimed to maximize quantity, and we already had an agreement in place with Mason University for another project that granted us complete access to their fully digitized library. Their collection is mostly academic, but there’s also a selection of fiction, including all the works of their professors and staffers.”
“So just an unfortunate coincidence?” Locraft rubbed a hand across his scalp. “What happened to his original self, the Cole Tanner part?”
“This is the first experiment of its kind,” Slattery said, taking over for Gosberg. “The Bivex-N14 induced permanent global amnesia. That much is fairly certain, at least based on the results of the Bio Defense section’s experiments. Beyond that, it’s all speculation. I’m pretty sure none of their test subjects experienced this particular set of circumstances. We think his personality and memories have been erased, and we think we started with a blank slate, but there’s no way to be sure—at least not without our subject around to ask him. To be safe—just in case Cole Tanner’s personality returns—we’ve got a team watching his house.”
“Good,” Locraft said.
“And there’s been another incident,” Slattery said. “A bus blew up today outside National Cathedral. Two killed, eight injured. We believe it’s the work of Tanner. We’ve—”
Gosberg raised his hand. The Cole Tanner he knew would never blow up a bus of American citizens. “How about if we refer to our fugitive as Dragunov, okay?”
The others exchanged glances, then Slattery nodded. “Fine, Foxtrot is now Dragunov. Officially, we’ve declared the bus explosion an accidental engine malfunction so we don’t panic people, but if something else happens, there’s a limit to how much stuff we can cover up, even in the name of public safety.”
A kernel of something seemed to ignite behind Locraft’s eyes. The colonel stared at Slattery, then shifted his laser gaze to Gosberg. One eyebrow twitched. “Do we have any idea where he might strike next?”
/> “No, sir.”
“Maybe we can head him off at the pass. In the book, where’s Dragunov’s next attack?” Locraft asked.
“Well, here’s the thing. The download was interrupted after chapter 6, so the events occurring after that point in the book would never have made it into Dragunov’s mind. And up until Dragunov attacks the White House in chapter 18, King uses a lot of fictional names and places, so, bottom line, there’s no real way for us to predict Dragunov’s actions,” Gosberg said. “In addition, we believe he may have suffered some brain damage during the power surge. Hard to tell how substantial it is, though. Not without more information.”
“What a fuster cluck,” Locraft said, shaking his head.
“I took a writing class once, a long time ago,” Slattery said. “The teacher believed that each book had a perfect ending—an ending that took place only because of all the prior groundwork the author laid. Sort of like launching your characters and story on a specific vector. Maybe we can think in those terms.”
No one spoke as they absorbed the enormity of that task. They weren’t talking about tracking an object that followed the immutable laws of physics, using the equations and launch angles and velocities that defined its trajectory. In this case, they were dealing with words and nuances and ambiguities. Subjective interpretations. They might as well have been trying to use the collected works of Walt Whitman to design a Mars lander.
Finally, Gosberg spoke. “Along those lines, I’ve already contacted King to get his help. He created the character of Dragunov. Maybe he can shed some light on his character’s traits and inclinations.” Gosberg didn’t add that, so far, King wasn’t interested in cooperating. He’d take another crack at him soon.
Locraft cleared his throat again. “So to sum up: We have a man with special ops training who believes he’s a Russian operative. And his mission in life, his sole reason for being, is to destroy our country, and he’s off to a decent start, killing civilians. In addition, he’s got a wealth of information programmed into his brain, which we thoughtfully downloaded there for him. And we have no idea where he is now or where he’ll strike next. That about right?”
