He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his thumb along the edge of his wedding band. What else did he have left? His wife had been taken from him, twice—first by the disease he didn’t know how to combat and then by the authorities he was too old to fight. George felt so alone, he just stared at the door, waiting. Then he began to think.
He couldn’t stay here. Patsy wasn’t coming back here. He would have to find her. He would do it, even if it killed him.
He noticed a hum coming from the little refrigerator against the wall. The power was still on. Maybe there was something in there to eat. He remembered the old laptop he had in the cabinet. What was the point of taking precautions now? He pulled it out of the cabinet. If the Rangers busted in now, he didn’t care. He brought the computer into the bathroom, wrapped it in a towel, placed it inside a camp-issued shirt, and put all of this into a canvas bag. He put in some underwear too, and as many water bottles as would fit. Patsy had a habit of collecting things, and the kitchen drawer was full of stuff. He stuffed some things that looked useful into the bag, and then he left.
It took George almost an hour to make it to the top of the grove. He knew he would be harder to identify in the dark, but he was tired, and he lay down on the ground. He saw a half dozen flak-jacketed Conglomerate Rangers headed in his direction, but they didn’t see him and the Rangers kept going.
He didn’t know how long he hid there. He was high enough to see the lights in the valley below, and he wrapped his arms around himself and hoped it would be light soon. All he wanted was to find Patsy.
The Break-In
Why don’t we just launch a grenade at the Clock Tower Building right now?” Dee said.
“We don’t have a grenade,” A said, “and we don’t have a launcher. And, I may want that office someday.”
They were suspended inside a maintenance car on cables beneath the roadway on the Brooklyn Bridge. The gondola car was used by painters and made of meshed metal speckled with a million little dots of beige and gray paint. When it was too dark to paint a bridge, the unused gondola served as a secure conference room for the two Dyscard leaders. Here they could talk about their troubles without the other Dyscards around to hear.
Now was the time to move, before it became difficult to do so. They rappelled down the stones and dropped down on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time they reached Canal Street, the night’s starless sky had turned slate-gray. They walked single file, hunched down into their jackets with their collars up, headed for Ward’s Island. It was too hot to be wearing coats but all the Dyscards did. They needed a place to keep their stuff as they moved around.
IT HAD BEEN about fourteen hours since the chairman’s driver had dropped Christine off at the med center. Besides a dozen cups of coffee, Christine hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day. It was a humid evening and she walked home from her train stop too tired to be anything but oblivious. When she was near her building, she saw a red light flashing in front of her, and a half dozen blue and white NYPD squad cars were parked in a herringbone pattern. She took a deep breath and walked on.
When she reached her stoop, a cop stopped her to say this was a crime scene. When he realized who Christine was, he called ahead, took Christine by the elbow, and led her into the building. His grip made sure she wasn’t going anywhere but with him.
There were cops on every floor, and there were a few standing outside the door to her apartment, which was open. Almost all of the cops were talking above the squawk of their radios, but everything got quiet once they saw Christine.
The place had been ransacked, things scattered everywhere, her possessions in shambles.
“Who did this?” Christine said.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” a familiar voice said. It was the investigator she had faced in the Cruz affair, and she immediately knew who had ransacked her home. It hadn’t been a robbery; it had been a search.
She put her hands on her hips and felt the messages inside the pockets of her pants. She straightened herself up and said, “I have nothing here anyone would want to rob, and as I look around, it does not appear that I have been robbed.” She looked directly into the eyes of the investigator and pointed to the computer and the TV screen. She wondered if she should contact the chairman. It was possible that he was involved.
The investigator paused a moment before he said, “We’ll have a few questions for you.”
The so-called questioning lasted several hours. In between rounds of questions, Christine took a visual inventory of her apartment and possessions. Everything had been turned over and tossed around. They must have made a racket. Christine wondered what type of threat it had taken to keep her neighbors uninvolved.
She was glad she had the hard drive in her bag tucked beneath her arm. She would have to inspect the place to see if they had installed any cameras.
When the cops finally left, the only thing Christine wanted to do was collapse. The bed had been stripped and the mattress flipped. There was nothing to sit on that hadn’t been broken. It looked to Christine as if the cops had gotten so frustrated at not finding anything that they had taken it out on what little she had.
She checked through the mess and straightened up what she could. She didn’t come across any cameras or bugs. She walked into the bathroom and closed and locked the door. She ripped a piece of toilet paper from the dispenser and closed the toilet lid. “Men,” Christine said as she stood on the lid. She ran her fingers along the molding and inside the light fixture. She checked the bulb and then stepped down and ran her hands along the tile. No sign of any device. She sighed as she looked into the mirror. “What a wreck,” she said. She opened the medicine cabinet. Nothing was left; it had all been knocked to the floor.
When Christine was finished in the bathroom, she looked for her old laptop and found it where the cops had thrown it, a useless-looking item.
She opened her phone and called the chairman’s car. She had never done this before but she wanted to see his reaction to the break-in. She didn’t know yet if she should blame him for it.
“I need to see you,” Christine said, and closed her phone.
Only then did she realize that whoever had broken into her apartment hadn’t broken in at all. They must have had a key, because it looked as if they had walked right into the place. She went downstairs and out the service entrance. The chairman’s town car was waiting. She wondered if he had been waiting there all along. As soon as she got in, she said, “My apartment was broken into and ransacked. But I was not robbed. The only thing missing was the hard drive from my old laptop. I found the police in my apartment when I got home.” The driver had gotten out of the car to hold the door for her. She stopped now because the driver was back in the car, and while he was not able to speak, she didn’t want him to hear this. Instead she looked into the chairman’s eyes, waiting for his reaction. And his reaction surprised her. His expression did not change, nor did his mannerisms. He just returned Christine’s stare. Then he picked up his phone and said, “Attorney general.”
He waited a second but kept his eyes on Christine. The attorney general herself must have answered the phone, because the chairman said, “I need to know about a current investigation in Manhattan.” There was no sense of a question in the tone of his voice; this was a demand. “Salter, Christine, doctor. I want to know who authorized this investigation, if the DA is involved, on down to the resident precinct.” He hung up.
“You think I am behind this,” he said, looking at Christine. “Why would I terrorize my doctor before I put myself into her hands?”
The phone rang and interrupted them.
“What did they find?” the chairman said. Then, “Good,” and he hung up.
“The break-in was an NYPD operation. Seems they were following up on an open case. My question is, why are they still investigating you over Gabriel Cruz?” He raised his eyebrows as he waited for her reply. Christine hadn’t said anything yet when he asked, “
Has Cruz been in contact with you?”
Christine had to assume that the chairman and the NYPD knew that Gabriel had been in contact with her. Perhaps Gabriel had been being followed when he went to her apartment; the cops would have reported his movements. She panicked at the thought that the chairman knew that she had been in touch with an enemy of the state. His eyes did not waver, or blink.
“Yes,” Christine replied. “Regardless of his subversive activity, Cruz was the best geneticist in the leading genetic facility in the country. He was my top technician, and the genetic grafting procedure was his strength. I wanted to review my notes with him, on your behalf, and with your identity protected, of course. In return I offered him immunity from prosecution, as bait. But instead of contacting me, he came to my apartment when I was not at home. Too bad,” she said. “We could have caught him. Shame the police didn’t.”
The chairman’s hand reached for the phone again. “Attorney general,” he said.
This is it, she thought. They got me. She looked out the window. They were heading across town, and she wondered where they were going to bring her. The chairman said, “Tell the district attorney to close the Salter investigation. Here is what you will do. Inform the district attorney that the investigation has been transferred to the Feds. Do that, and then close the case. Work it up, get it done, and close it down. Today.” He hung up, looked at Christine, and then signaled to the driver to take Christine back home.
“There will be no more attempts at contacting Cruz?” he said.
CHRISTINE SAT BY the window with the e-mail from her grandfather in her hand. She felt that she should be crying and she felt too tired to cry. Her emotions had moved past sadness. “Maybe I’m next,” Christine said to the mess that made up what was left of her apartment.
She retrieved the laptop, installed the memory card from her phone, and watched as little lights on the laptop blinked in a syncopated rhythm and the screen lit up.
She stared at the mail icon. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see any more messages. There weren’t any.
“WELL, I DIDN’T see that coming.” Ichabod was referring to a request that he deliver twelve babies from the Lexington Avenue station to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. They were back at Ichabod’s workshop.
“So, what’re we going to do?” John asked.
“Make room for the babies,” he said, “and a place for supplies.”
“WHAT DOES THAT mean?” the chairman of the Conglomerate party asked himself out loud from his desk inside the Clock Tower Building. He was alluding to the fact that a rogue investigation into Salter and Cruz had proceeded, without his office being informed. Who was behind it and why? He could think of several candidates who would like his seat as chair of the Conglomerates. “I have a war on many fronts,” he said. “All the more reason to seek the energy of youth.”
Then there was the missing hard drive from Salter’s old laptop. It was missing when the cops got there. Somebody had gotten there before the cops. Why? And how could he not know about it? Not one but two break-ins at Salter’s apartment and he wouldn’t have known about them if Salter had not told him. What else was going on that he did not know about?
The chairman was a detail-oriented leader, and that was how he had been effective and successful. He needed for this genetic procedure to proceed, and soon. He wanted his power back and he felt he was running out of time.
When Salter had summoned the chairman, it had angered him at first, but when she had told him what had happened to her apartment, delivering that message to the chairman himself, he had been impressed. Her behavior showed loyalty, intelligence.
The chairman stared at the back of the glass clock face.
Angelo
It was three days since he’d lost Patsy and two days since he’d left camp, and George was dehydrated and delirious and he knew it.
He had headed north and he was sure of it this time. He had met people along the way. Some were looking for lost loved ones, as he was, and other people were just lost themselves. George feared Patsy was among such a group. He had come across some situations where the stronger were taking care of the weaker. He had gotten his hopes up at every group he saw, but no Patsy. He was beat, and after all the years of sleeping with Patsy, George found sleeping without her was impossible.
What he had heard from the program on the computer and from the deliveryman was confirmed on the road to find Patsy. There was a place where the Coots who had become unmanageable, or economically tapped out, were deposited. The camp was said to hold a large population of the broken-down. If it was the largest such community in the area, it would be the largest in the nation. Everyone was frightened of succumbing to a debilitating disease, and everyone feared being alone among strangers. He was afraid that this was where Patsy had been taken.
“I’ll find her,” George said.
GEORGE SAW A group of people trudging along ahead of him. When he caught up to them, he saw that some of them were far along in their problems. George saw that he could probably be of some assistance, and this group might get him closer to Patsy.
“Can I come with you?” George asked.
“Sure,” one of the men said. “I could use some help. Follow us. I’ll lead and you bring up the rear. I’m Angelo,” the man said, shaking George’s hand.
A pair in the group started bickering. Angelo heard the disturbance and went back, motioning for George to take the lead. Funny place for the guy bringing up the rear, he thought.
“Where are we going?” George said.
“Straight ahead,” Angelo said.
Heat
It was too hot to think; something was wrong with the air-conditioning. Christine wanted to contact Gabriel, but how was she going to do that? She let her phone ring twice before she answered.
“Yes.”
“What do you know about air-conditioning?” the chairman asked.
“What do I know about air-conditioning?” Christine repeated in disbelief. “I know I wish I had some.”
“You too,” the chairman said.
“Con Ed must be cutting back.”
“This is one more reason why we need to move our procedure ahead.”
Christine’s heart stopped. “I will have to make arrangements.”
“I want to do it tomorrow,” the chairman said. He had already terminated all services to the Coots; he had cut them loose. He had ordered power brownouts in the East in preparation for the shutting down of the power grid. He would still have the element of surprise in his favor, but he also wanted to ensure that he would not be surprised.
“I will need forty-eight hours,” Christine said, “to blend the vitamin and herbal supplements with the sedative for maximum results. I want you at your best when you come back. I’d prefer to have that amount of time to assure potency.”
“Forty-eight hours it is, no longer,” the chairman of the Conglomerate party said, and hung up.
He pulled out the drawer of his desk and removed a pad and pen. He printed the word “Coots” across the pad and drew a line down the page diagonally through the word. He put the pen down and folded his hands.
He felt he had effectively dealt with the elder problem. He was the architect of the Family Relief Act and had guided the legislation that had assumed all of the Coot assets and transferred them to the Conglomerate coffers. The chairman picked up the paper and tore it in half.
“Let the strong survive,” the chairman said, “or not.”
He imagined himself remade. He ran his hands through his sweaty hair and wondered what Christine Salter would think of him when he came back from the operation. He pictured Salter, wet and cold and on the backseat of his town car.
CHRISTINE WINCED. “FORTY-EIGHT hours,” she said. She looked down at the pad where she had written “48 hours,” as if she’d needed to be reminded of it.
“Forty-eight hours,” Christine repeated. “And if I keep saying it, it’ll be gone in no time. Why didn’t I ask for more
time?”
She wondered if she could set the chairman up for treatment and then just slip away while he was under sedation. No one knew about the procedure except the chairman’s driver, and it wasn’t as if he were going to tell anyone.
“Forty-eight hours,” Christine said, though she knew that wasn’t true any longer. It was less.
THE CHAIRMAN WROTE “Dyscards” on his pad and drew a line on an opposite angle from the one he had drawn across “Coots.”
He had officially authorized power conservation during peak periods, and his intention was to begin his campaign against the Dyscards by causing a power crisis to the city’s populace and blaming it on the Dyscards. This would make it easier to direct emotion against them. The chairman was glad he had not contacted Con Ed about his decision to shut down the electrical system: he would give the northeast corridor no warning.
He picked up his pen and wrote “Imminent Threat” on the pad. Then, “Operation Lockdown.” He looked up and out at the backward clock face.
“Forty-four hours,” the chairman said. That would be when the chairman of the Conglomerate party would inform the administration of the imminent threat posed by the Dyscard insurgency, and of his decision to assume control of the nation’s utilities and services, and to cut off the energy to the northeast corridor.
True, they were attacking the Dyscards only on one front, New York City, but that would allow him to raise the alert status to red, which would legally unleash the Conglomerate Rangers into known Dyscard population centers throughout the country. Once they were in, they were free to interrogate the local leadership to determine their role in the insurrection, or their level of cooperation in the fight against the threat. The chairman would prohibit media coverage in order to control what citizens could see of his reaction to the domestic terrorism and to allow his plans to proceed unimpeded by the public’s attention.
The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future Page 17
