The Goodbye Man

by Jeffery Deaver

Of the hundred people in the Square, not a soul made a single decibel of sound.

  “In a flash . . . an oncoming car crossed the centerline and rammed us. Head-on.”

  Gasps. Cries of “No!”

  “Three people died.” He shook his head. “Three people . . . And I was one of them.”

  29.

  You’ve heard of near-death experiences, right? Sure you have. You read about them all the time. See them on TV. Don’t you?”

  More nods, whispers of “Yes.”

  “The doctors told me later that what I experienced wasn’t near-death. It was death itself. I actually died.”

  This stirred up hushed buzzing from the crowd.

  “They’d never seen anything like it before. Well, naturally.” A broad smile. “I’ve got to do things different. Anybody can get near death. But I was the real deal. That’s me. I don’t fool around. The docs, they’d given up on me. Then what happened?”

  A Companion near Shaw whispered, “I came back.”

  Eli: “I came back.”

  The man beside Shaw, a Journeyman, knew Eli’s Discourse so well he could recite it. He wasn’t alone. The audience contained a dozen other lip-synchers.

  “Those doctors, they told me later they’d never seen anyone fight so hard to come back to life. I was one for the textbooks, they said. Some of them wrote about me. I’m in famous medical journals. Oh, they changed my name, of course, so I wouldn’t be mobbed, but I’m there.

  “And do you know why I fought so hard?”

  “Tell us!”

  “Why, Master Eli?”

  Many of these responses seemed to be coming from the Inner Circle Companions. Premeditated, of course, though they gave the impression of spontaneity.

  “Why did I fight so hard?” A whisper once more: “Why did I come back?” Pointing now to the Companions in a slow sweep. “For you. Because I had learned something in that terrible experience. I had learned how to bring an end to your unhappiness.

  “Right then, coming out of the anesthetic, staring at the light above the operating table”—he lifted his hands high above his head—“I knew what I had to do. I had to give up pursuing money and success. I would use all my talents from school, from sports, from business and turn them to a new life goal. To eliminating the sorrow and mourning and the loneliness that I saw all around me. And it doesn’t matter how successful you are. In Hollywood. On Wall Street.”

  Eli fired a smile toward Shaw.

  “In the forestry business.”

  Slick . . .

  “So I sold my companies—at huge profits, by the way. I got every last penny, so I could fund this place. I traveled the world to study philosophy . . .”

  Another voice near Shaw was speaking simultaneously with Eli: “. . . religion and science and medicine. I worked day and night . . .”

  “I once worked twenty-six hours in one day! How did I do that? Can you imagine how I did that?”

  Whispers, “The time zone.”

  Eli laughed. “The time zone. I gained two hours flying east to west. I studied all the time. Study, study, study. Some of the beliefs I rejected, some I liked. Everywhere I went I looked for people who were happy and those who weren’t. And finally . . . finally I learned the secret to overcoming depression and anxiety and that feeling of loss. And I created the Osiris Foundation.”

  A wave of clapping, begun by the well-oiled Inner Circle, as coordinated as the Rockettes at Rockefeller Center.

  Lifting both his arms, quieting the audience. “Do you know why I’ve named our group after Osiris?”

  “Tell us!” came a shout.

  “We love you, Master Eli!”

  “Ancient Egypt, 2500 B.C., Osiris was a god, murdered by his brother, who cut the body into pieces and scattered them over Egypt.”

  Shaw half-expected the audience to start booing Osiris’s evil brother but they remained silent.

  “Now, get this. Are you ready? Osiris’s wife and her sister traveled the country, found the pieces and bound them in cloth—that’s where the practice of mummification came from, by the way. So Osiris . . . after the parts were put back together, he became even more powerful. He became god of fertility and of the underworld. He controlled birth and death. What a gorgeous man!

  “That’s why I named our family the Osiris Foundation—because Osiris was dismantled and then reassembled into someone new. Someone stronger, more content, happier. I mean, hey, the god of fertility? He’d have to be pretty happy with that job, wouldn’t you think? Sign me up for that one!”

  Eli was eating up the laughter.

  “Well, that’s what I’m going to do for you. I’ve created a way to take you apart and reassemble you into the person you should be. Happy, content, productive, loving and loved. And how do I do that? Somebody tell me. I want to hear it!”

  A chorus shouted, “The Process!”

  Fierce clapping, not in rhythm to Beethoven or any other piece of music. Just feverish applause.

  “And what does the Process help us do? What does it help us get back to? Somebody knows the answer! Somebody out there. The Process helps us get back to our . . .”

  “True Core!”

  “See, I said you were the best! I knew it! Our True Core. Some people call it your soul, some people call it your spirit . . . But those words carry a lot of baggage. Let’s get rid of that and call it your True Core. It’s who you really are, who you were born as. You can look at it like a beautiful garden that over the years has been built on. Now there’s an ugly concrete building, dirty clapboard walls, covered with a rusty tin roof. Graffiti. There’s trash in the yard.

  “But the garden’s still there, the roots living under the ground. The Process tears down the clapboard, cuts up the roof, jackhammers the foundation, carts it all away. It opens up the garden once more.

  “Through the Process you ‘true up.’ That’s what I call it, tearing down that ugly building and starting over. Like Osiris.”

  A chant: “True up, true up, true up!”

  The whisper beside Shaw: “From the Yesterday, a better Today . . .”

  Eli called out, “From the Yesterday, a better Today . . . From the Today, a perfect Tomorrow.”

  “You’re our Guiding Beacon!”

  “We love you!”

  Eli raised his arms over his head again, shouting, “The best . . . is yet to come. The best . . . is yet to come!”

  The ICs whipped up the frenzy: “The best . . .”

  The crowd responded, “. . . is yet to come!”

  Eli strode off the stage, to his two awaiting bodyguards. Then he vanished. Anja and Steve rose and followed.

  The call-and-response chanting filled the valley and, somehow, Shaw felt the words resonating in his chest.

  “The best . . . is yet to come!”

  30.

  Never be obvious.

  In other words: keep a low profile. This is how Colter Shaw was presently following Victoria through the camp.

  At the end of the Discourse, he’d noted her eyes wide with adulation, staring at Eli. When he walked from the stage, she turned and clutched her notebook to her chest, then headed to the woods bordering the eastern side of the camp.

  Shaw had followed. He watched her in the reflection of windows. Watched her in his periphery. Watched her shadow when he couldn’t watch her actual form.

  She now entered the woods and started up the hill, on the top of which was the bluff overlooking fifty miles of majestic panorama, anchored by soaring peaks. Victoria’s head was down, framed by ringlets of hair.

  She was climbing steadily to the bluff. The steep incline didn’t slow her. Shaw followed with sufficient distance so that if he happened to step on one of the branches or crisp leaves he was trying to avoid, she probably wouldn’t hear.

  Shaw himself now heard a s
nap; the sound was from behind him. He stopped quickly, crouched and looked back. Though the foliage was thick—sage, holly and serviceberry—it wasn’t so dense that it would obscure the pale blue tops or gray tunics of a Companion or an AU following. Still, he saw nothing. He waited a moment longer. No more noise, no motion. If anyone had been following him, he or she had vanished . . . or had gone silent.

  Should he double back and see? No, he decided.

  He glanced up the hill. Victoria was no longer in sight.

  He continued east, climbing toward the grassy bluff on the other side of the woods. When he got to the top he spotted her on one of the benches overlooking the view. Her notebook was open, though she wasn’t jotting in it. She was staring out.

  Deciding not to walk onto the bluff from the same trail she’d used—she’d think he was following her—he retraced his steps a dozen yards, once again looking for anyone surveilling him. He saw no one. He found another path up to the bluff and hiked up this one, emerging on the bluff well to Victoria’s right.

  He walked close to the edge himself, surveying the cliff once more. In the full light, he decided, it was still a bad one for climbing, certainly for a descent. You’d have to rappel. He reflected that the surface was similar to that of Echo Ridge, which he had never climbed but had in fact executed a high-speed rappel to get to the base. He never was quite sure why he did. The body that lay, shattered, in the dry creek bed below was long past saving.

  Turning, he glanced Victoria’s way. Her eyes were on him. Her reaction was curious. She looked down to her notebook quickly. His impression was that she felt guilty, as if she’d been caught daydreaming when she should have been writing in the journal.

  Shaw squinted and walked closer. “You . . . from last night.”

  “Novice . . .”

  “Carter. And you’re . . .” Frowning at his feigned defective memory.

  “Apprentice Victoria.” They did the shoulder salute; hers was reluctant. She wasn’t pleased at his presence.

  He said, “Didn’t remember. This whole place is kind of weird. Or maybe I’m not supposed to call it ‘place.’” Her gray eyes were mesmerizing.

  “What do you mean?” Her voice was abrupt. She wasn’t nearly as timid as last night, though Shaw wasn’t the dangerous Hugh or all-powerful Eli.

  “Somebody called the Foundation something like that last night and got corrected.”

  “There’s no rule about not calling the Foundation the ‘place.’” She returned to her journal.

  He looked over the distant mountains. “This isn’t a coincidence. Me coming up here.”

  “I know. I saw you looking at me at the Discourse.”

  “Just wanted to say sorry. I screwed up. Got you in trouble.”

  Silence bled between them.

  Shaw finally said, “That curfew—ten o’clock. Do they really have bears and wolves here, you think?”

  “I don’t know. You hear howls sometimes.”

  A moment passed. “Anyway. Screwed up. Sorry. That Hugh—I met him. He’s pretty . . . tough. Wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.”

  She didn’t stiffen at the mention of his name—which Shaw had dropped to begin to build an alliance between them. But her eyes stopped scanning her notebook for a moment.

  Victoria then softened. “There weren’t any serious consequences. I was careless. It was my fault.” She glanced down at her open notebook, which was filled with dense jottings, a few sketches too. Clumsy ones. Her handwriting was abysmal. “Last night at the table, I had a thought about a Plus. A good one. It felt important and I was concentrating on that.”

  “A ‘Plus’?” And hadn’t somebody referred to a “Minus” too?

  She was confused for a moment, then nodded. “Oh, that’s right. You haven’t met with your trainer yet.”

  “No. That’s next.”

  “You’ll find out. I can’t say anything. We can’t give away any of the Process to a new Companion.”

  He sat. He wasn’t close but her shoulders narrowed.

  “This is all pretty strange,” he said.

  Colter Shaw was taciturn by nature but he found that being talkative was a helpful tool in his reward-seeking efforts. Chatting put people at ease and gave him a chance to gauge reaction to his words, maybe exposing subjects to probe. He continued to ramble. “I’ve never done, you know, group therapy. And this place seems so . . . I don’t know what to call it. Focused, maybe. Intense. I thought it’d be more casual. Free to come and go, maybe play some Frisbee.”

  “Master Eli feels that to true up you can’t be distracted. You need to be contained for the Process to work. He says the genie gets his power from the lamp he’s confined in.”

  “I like that,” Shaw said. He fell silent and looked at the distant peaks. The view was similar to the vista as seen from Echo Ridge, though there the mountaintops in the distance were like rotting teeth. Here, they were gentler, their light gray summits rising above skirts of green forest. He pivoted toward her.

  “He’s something, Master Eli. I get restless usually. Don’t like to just stand around. But I could listen to him for hours. And that experience he had, the death experience.”

  “Oh, Master Eli is the smartest and most generous man in the world.”

  Which were, Shaw believed, the exact words of blood-spattered Adelle.

  “This better work. I don’t have a lot of options, you know. I’ve tried everything. Meds, shrinks. Nothing really works.” Shaw lifted a hand and let it rest on his thigh. He sighed.

  Don’t overact.

  Victoria asked, “All your life? Have you had problems all your life, or did something happen?”

  He told her about Carter Skye’s lifelong issues—wrong side of the tracks, dabbling in drugs, fights, glancing involvement with gangs when he was doing day labor. “Been in jail. Have to tell you.”

  She had no reaction to this.

  He told her that what caused the nosedive recently was the death of his father in a tragic accident. If she’d asked, he would have assigned the tragedy to a car crash, not the truth: a tumble from ten stories in the air. That would be a bit close to home.

  Victoria didn’t ask.

  “I hope this works.” He watched her face closely. “Guy I knew told me about it. Adam Harper. You know him?”

  “No.”

  Shaw couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. There’d been the slightest of hesitations before the word. If she in fact had not known him, that would be a setback. He’d hoped to learn more about the young man and what had happened in his stay at the camp.

  His death was a question that had to be answered . . .

  She absently riffled the notebook pages. Her fingernails were pink. “The Process’ll help. Just takes work.” Her face grew animated. “Master Eli’s Second Discourse is this afternoon. It’s so . . . inspiring. You’ll see. Everything’ll be made clear.”

  “Why’re you here?” Shaw supposed it was okay to ask. Journeyman Quinn had urged them to share last night. Maybe being candid was part of truing up.

  She answered without hesitation. “I’m the director of a private library in Portland. I’ve loved books all my life. I have a degree in library science. One in philosophy too.”

  One of Shaw’s father’s hobbies, a curious one certainly but—to Ashton—exciting. Shaw, as Skye, asked, “You . . . I mean, they give you a degree for that?”

  Victoria continued without responding, “I was married to a great guy, had a beautiful son. Everything was going . . . perfectly.”

  Shaw had already spotted the past tense verbs.

  “Last year I was visiting my mother. She’d had surgery. Don and Joey were home. They were watching a movie in the den. A superhero movie. So they’d shut the lights out. They think—the police think—that the man who broke in thought the place wasn’t
occupied. They’d paused the movie to get some snacks. He walked into the house. He got spooked when he ran into my husband and son. He started shooting. He didn’t need to. But he did.”

  Her voice was as emotion-free as Adelle’s when she’d told him about losing her baby.

  “Goddamn. Sorry. How’re you . . .” His voice faded.

  “Then came the drinking. Some painkillers too, but mostly the bottle.”

  And here Shaw had been joking about bartenders last night.

  She said, “I have days, hard ones. Really hard. It all comes back to me.”

  Like when she saw Adam, lying dead on the rocks below her. He could picture her face.

  “But I’m working on it.” She tapped the notebook.

  He was going to continue the conversation, get to know her better, but he’d lost track of time. The heavenly tones sounded and the voice gave the hour and echoed: “Novices, report to your trainers.”

  When he hesitated, she looked slightly alarmed. “You can’t be late. That’s rule—”

  “Twelve. I’ve learned some of them.”

  He’d hoped for a smile.

  Shaw waited a moment but she’d returned to her notebook once more, and he had ceased to exist.

  31.

  Walking down the hill, along the path bordered with trees and bushes, Shaw noticed a golf cart pull up to the back of Building 14.

  What was inside the structure?

  He veered off the path and crouched behind a dense boxwood, which radiated its characteristically tart smell. The three men inside climbed out. He was curious why they were not wearing amulets though their outfits were the regulation blue and black uniforms. That was a breach of the rules.

  One looked up and down the grassy area behind this building and the dorms. He nodded. Another unlocked the back door, while the third, donning work gloves, picked up a cardboard carton from the back and carried it inside. They all marched in and the door closed.

  He was still curious if there might be weapons inside. The box seemed heavy and was being carried gingerly; ammunition?