by Blake Banner
Now he turned to look at me. After a long moment he said, “Do you?”
I got to my feet and walked over to the window. There I stood looking down at the human infestation, the millions of tiny cells swarming over the sidewalks, spilling into the traffic, dodging the cars—those larger metallic cells that swarmed through the city’s arteries, spewing poison into the air, transporting the human infestation over the face of the Earth. I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mason.” I turned to face him. “I was surprised at the violence of his reaction when he discovered I had destroyed the institute’s research. I got the feeling he was more interested in getting his hands on it than exposing Omega. I might be wrong. He’s never liked me. We have bad chemistry.”
Mason shrugged. “He’s not easy to like. If he hates you so much, why’d he choose you for the job?”
“He was acting on advice from somebody who knows my background.”
He nodded. “Why’d you agree to do it? Why were you there? What was your agenda, Walker? I’m damned sure it wasn’t the same as Gibbons’s agenda.”
I took a moment before answering. “OK, Mason. I had two objectives, neither of which was homicide. First, I wanted to destroy their research. What they are doing has no positive application and is not worth preserving. Second, I wanted to get information, an insurance policy. I want out of this game, and I wanted to get Ben Smith and Omega off my back. I figured if I could get enough information, I could use it as insurance.” I shrugged. “If at the same time I could help Gibbons to bring them down, so much the better.”
“But you told Gibbons you’d get in and out without causing damage.”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I told him it probably couldn’t be done. But he only listens to what he wants to hear. He assumes people are going to do what he tells them to do. He’s an asshole.”
He smiled. “I can’t argue with that. I think he is now also your enemy.”
I thought about that for a moment. He was probably right. I said, “Frankly, Mason, I don’t care. I’m through. This is not my fight anymore.” I returned to my chair, dropped into it and sighed. “I want to talk to Senator McFarlane. I killed her husband last night and she deserves an explanation.”
He frowned and gave a small laugh. “You’re under arrest, remember?”
“Bullshit. A, you can’t make it stick. B, two gets you twenty the DA has already told you you can’t hold me, you have to release me. C, you never intended to hold me anyway. You just wanted to talk to me away from Gibbons.”
He smiled. “You’ll be a loss to the cause. You’re smart.”
“Maybe. The cause didn’t want me, and now I have a different cause.” I crossed my arms, studying Mason’s face, wondering about him. “Gibbons was a good man, but power corrupts good men just as much as bad ones. Honestly, I don’t know if he is in bed with Omega. If he is, he’s playing a very deep game. If he’s not, there is nothing to stop him turning his own, weird fraternity into something just as ugly as Omega. Either way, you should keep an eye on him. Now tell me something, Mason.”
“What?”
“Is this you, or the Bureau?”
He took a moment to think about the question, and his answer. “Both. It’s an official investigation, but the part that relates expressly to Omega is need to know only, and I am very careful about who needs to know.”
“Talk to Dr. Marni Gilbert, away from Gibbons. You should also know that Ben Smith interviewed me twice, trying to convince me to join them. He interviewed me at an office in the Pentagon.”
He sat forward, frowning, “In the… Jesus Christ!”
“On the second occasion, former President Dick Hennessy was part of the conversation.”
“Holy shit, man…”
I nodded. “And the office where he died, in that explosion…?”
“Don’t tell me, that was the office where you had the meeting.”
“Yes. I’m telling you this because you need to know how far this infection has spread. I believe we have allies in Dr. Marni Gilbert and Senator McFarlane, and maybe still in Professor Gibbons, but the bottom line, Mason, is that people…”
I trailed off. I couldn’t think of an adequate adjective to describe people. He snorted and gave a small laugh, then smiled at me.
“Don’t be too judgmental, Lacklan. The word you’re looking for is ‘human’. People are basically human.”
He had a point. I returned the smile. “I’m going to go.”
He handed me a card. “Stay in touch. If Gibbons contacts you again, please let me know. If anything comes up I think you should know about, I’ll contact you.”
I stared at the card for a long moment, not wanting to take it, not wanting to stay involved. Finally I reached out, took it and put it in my pocket.
“You know where McFarlane is?”
He nodded. “She’s with Gibbons, and Marni Gilbert.” He wrote something on a piece of paper. “That’s her cell.”
NINETEEN
She agreed to meet me at Columbus Circus, by the USS Marine Monument. She was already there when I climbed out of the yellow cab at two PM. She watched me approach with no expression on her face and for a moment I felt self-conscious, aware that I looked a wreck. I was unshaven, dirty and had a wound in my shoulder that had been patched up by paramedics, but not yet seen by a doctor.
I stopped in front of her, with the crowds milling around us. After a moment she said, “Same old Lacklan. You look awful.”
“I don’t feel great, if that’s any consolation.”
She shook her head. “I don’t blame you, if that’s what you mean.”
“You want to grab a coffee, or some lunch?”
“Let’s go to the ball fields.”
We started to walk. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either. Spring was trying to assert itself, but winter hadn’t quite let go yet. I shoved my hands in my trouser pockets and watched my feet as we walked. “I don’t know where to begin, Cyndi. It was not my intention…” I stopped, hesitated, then started again. “I didn’t go there with the intention…”
She interrupted me. “I’m going to be honest with you, Lacklan. I am conflicted.” She looked at me, watched me a moment while we walked. “You saved my life—I’ve lost count of how many times. I came to rely on you, emotionally, in a way I have never relied on anybody. Not just that, I watched you, day after day, put your own life on the line to protect me. That has a deep impact on a person.”
I nodded. “And then I round it off by…”
I trailed off. Neither of us finished the sentence. We walked on in silence, skirting the softball fields. Eventually she said, “I want you to tell me exactly what happened, how he died.”
So I told her, not exactly, not in every detail, because there were things I did not think concerned her, but I told her about Ogden, about the fact that he had made a phone call when he heard me blowing out the lock in his door, and that the call was to Ben and her husband. I told her that they tried to take me down to the basement, and what they intended to do to me down there. And finally, I told her how her husband had died, in the blast from the C4 I had placed on the ceiling.
By the time I’d finished we had arrived at the café. I sat at a table outside and she went in and got a cappuccino and a quadruple espresso for me. When she returned and sat, she shook her head and said, “I have to say, Lacklan, I don’t understand why you destroyed all the computers. You took weapons with you. That I understand because your experience and your instincts told you to expect armed guards. But you also took C4 with you, and that tells me you intended to destroy what was there.”
I smiled a lopsided smile and frowned at the same time. “I’ll answer your question, Cyndi. But first I’d like you to answer one of mine. Your husband died last night. You’re sitting in front of the man who killed him, and after I told you the story of how I did it, your first question is, why did I destroy the computers? Not, was his death quick? Did he suffer? Am I certain that he wa
s actually with Omega? None of that…” I trailed off.
She sat staring at her cup.
“Cyndi, what’s the deal with you? Are you Omega?”
She closed her eyes, sighed and shook her head. “No, Lacklan, I’m not Omega, and neither is Gibbons.” She opened her eyes and drew breath, like a mother trying to explain math to a stupid child. “Not everybody is like you. For you everything is simple, clear cut, straightforward: Kill or be killed, live or die, tell the truth or lie. But for the rest of us it is all a million shades of gray. I’m a politician. I loved my husband. I will miss him, and when I am alone tonight I will cry for him, as I did last night, and the night before, and every night since I discovered that he tried to have me killed.
“But as a politician I can also see that there is a hell of a lot more to this—a hell of a lot more—than just my personal loss.” She stopped, watching me carefully to see if I had understood. “Yes,” she said suddenly, “I need to process the fact that probably for years my husband had been lying to me consistently. I need to process the fact that he was probably instructed to marry me because I was a potential threat to Omega.” She leaned forward, her eyes wide and bright. “I have to process the fact that the man I loved ordered my assassination!” She sat back again. “But that is my private life, and I am a Senator of the United States, and my first duty is to my constituents and my country.”
It was a convincing speech and I was inclined to believe her. I sipped my coffee. “OK, Cyndi. You’re right. I took the C4 with intent. I told you when I agreed to take you to the meeting with Gibbons that I didn’t work for you. I don’t work for Gibbons either. I don’t work for anybody. That is something that Gibbons has trouble understanding. He seems to think the whole damned world is there to serve his vision. He told me expressly not to kill anybody, to leave no trace of my having been there, et cetera, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera.” I shrugged. “In his mind, and in yours, that meant that that was what I had to do. But inot in mine. I answer to nobody but myself, Cyndi. And myself told me that there was one supremely important thing that had to be done in the John Richard Erickson Institute that night, and that was to destroy all the research that they had done. Because that research is not useful, Cyndi, to anybody. There are no ‘right hands’ for that research to fall into, only wrong hands.”
She drew breath. I cut across her and raised a finger. “That research serves only one purpose: the purpose of enslaving human minds. There was only one thing to do with it: destroy it. And that’s what I did.”
I sipped my coffee and set the cup down again. I watched her a moment, then said, “People who see things in a million shades of gray can convince themselves that, for example, when obedience leads to the absence of suffering, control of a person’s mind is justified. I like you, Cyndi. I actually like you a lot. But it is not hard for me to imagine a situation where you would put that research to use, for the good of humanity. It’s even easier for me to imagine Gibbons doing it. So I went there, to the institute, with the intention of destroying that research so that it would never fall into your hands or his.”
She stared at me for a long time. “You think it is better to suffer than to be obedient?”
“The only thing we have is the freedom of our minds. If you take that away, you take our souls, our very existence. I said it to you once before, Cyndi, on Route 66, when we were talking about humanity’s last cry of freedom. It is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
She frowned. “I remember. You were quoting John Milton. But those words were uttered by Satan, Lacklan, when he was cast out of Paradise.”
I gave a small shrug. “Lucifer, the Bringer of Light. Let’s not get into a theological argument. What’s in a name? I hate Omega not because they are called Omega, but because they intend to rob humanity of its freedom. No…” I shook my head. “That isn’t it either. What they plan to do is to rob Joe, and Pete, and Mary, and Sarah of their individual freedom to be themselves and make their own choices about who and what they want to be and do. You know? When you start talking about groups and classes of people, like the French, Americans, Blacks, Whites… or even Humanity, you dehumanize them. You can talk about what’s good or bad for them like they have no say in the matter. But when you bring it down to the individual, to the man or the woman whose brain you are going to cut open, program and alter, whose freedom and humanity you are about to steal, then it changes.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you did when you decided to destroy that research?”
I laughed out loud. “I stole Humanity’s right to choose to lose the right to choose? Only a politician could come up with reasoning that twisted, Cyndi.” I shook my head. “Take my advice, before you become one of Them, take some of those shades of gray and make them black or white. Sometimes you have to be absolute. Sometimes you have to define a limit beyond which you will not go. Some things are just not acceptable.”
We were quiet for a long time, listening to the sounds of early spring around us. Eventually she said, “You think Gibbons wanted to get his hands on that research to use it?”
I shook my head, then shrugged. “I have no idea. He seemed pretty mad that I had destroyed it. But I can’t pretend to know him that well.”
She heaved a big sigh. “I have to go.” But she didn’t get up. She remained sitting, looking at the trees. “Lacklan, can we be friends, please? You are like this primal, bestial being, so absolutely certain of what you know. I think, if I have you there, to reach out sometimes, you could keep me grounded.”
I smiled. “I’d be honored to count you as a friend.”
She stood, gave me a kiss on the cheek and walked away. I didn’t get up. I didn’t move. Because I knew that he would show before long, and he did. He came walking toward me up the path, with his vigorous little legs pumping at the ground under his big, tweed jacket. He had an angry frown on his face, but that didn’t mean much. He always had an angry frown on his face. He stopped in front of my table. I smiled at him.
“Hello, Gibbons. I wondered if you’d show yourself. I’ve been aware of you hiding in the bushes. What do you want?”
“Was it you who alerted the press?”
“You know that I did. I called them last night when I called the sheriff.”
“You destroyed the labs, you called the sheriff and you alerted the press.”
“Yes, Gibbons, and if you were not such an egomaniac, you would have known from the start that that was exactly what I was going to do.”
“They are all over the site, filming from the air, with vans set up. And now somebody has leaked the experiments to them…”
I smiled and wondered if that was Mason. I said, “And isn’t that a good thing, Gibbons? I’d ask you to explain why that’s a bad thing, but I’m afraid you would, and I really don’t give a damn anymore.”
He narrowed his eyes at me like I was the embodiment of some paradox. “Have you no conception of how badly you have set back our fight?”
I leaned back in my chair and laughed up at the blue sky. “No, Philip! I have no idea, and I don’t give a rat’s ass, either. You got lost, pal! You know the warning in Japanese Budo?” I sat forward and stared at him. “The Zen masters tell you, ‘Don’t look into your enemy’s eyes, lest you become your enemy.’ Do you understand that, Gibbons?” I pointed at him. “What you’re fighting against has become more important to you than what you’re fighting for. What the fuck is wrong with you, Philip? You’re complaining that the press are nosing into Omega? Can you not hear how stupid that is? You’re complaining that research they were doing into how to enslave people’s minds has been destroyed? That is, to you, a bad thing? These are your problems? You better take yourself away and do some fucking soul searching pal, because there is something seriously wrong with your vision.”
He pointed a trembling hand at me. His voice was shrill. “That research could have been invaluable in our struggle! We could have used it against them! For the first time in decad
es it would have given us the upper hand over them! And you, with your barbaric, animal stupidity, you have set us back years!”
I frowned at him. “Does Marni realize how far gone you are, Gibbons? You need help. You seriously need help. You’ve lost the plot, pal.”
He shook his head and half screamed, “Stay away from me! You stay away from me! And stay away from Marni!”
I stood, and the chair fell back behind me. I stepped over to him, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him up to within an inch of my face. Then I snarled at him, “Stop! Stop telling me what to do! Stop telling people what to do! Now fuck off out of my sight, you clown!”
I shoved him. He staggered back, fell on his ass, scrambled to his feet and ran. Several people were staring at me. I flapped a hand at them and walked away. I was going home. At long last, I was going home.
I made my way first to the apartment I had in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. I ordered a rental car, and while I waited for it to be delivered, I had a shower and a shave, changed the dressing on my wound, and put on some fresh, clean clothes. Then I went down, collected the car and drove the two hundred miles back to my house in Weston. On the way I called Abi. She sounded happy but worried.
“I’m so relieved to hear from you. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. It’s over. Really over this time. I’m on my way home. Are you there or are you still in Boston?”
“I’m home, we all are.”
I smiled. “Primrose and Sean are with you?”
“Yes. They can’t wait to see you.”
She hesitated a moment.
I said, “What is it?”
“Nothing. They love the house. They are thrilled at the news.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
By the time I pulled into the drive and parked, there was already light in the windows, and the sky was turning from dusky gray to a darker blue. The door opened as I climbed out of the car and Abi ran to greet me. We kissed and when I looked up, Primrose and Sean were in the doorway, looking sheepish. I gave them each a big hug and Sean said, “This house is so cool! You must be really rich!”
