by David Beers
That was fine; He wouldn't need it for long. Just to get him a few miles down the road to the beach.
* * *
On the fifth call—not ring, but call—someone finally answered. Allison wouldn't have stopped calling even if it meant she walked around with the phone on her ear all day and night. She was going to get in touch with this guy.
Jeffrey Dillan.
She read his book the night before, downloaded it and then stayed up all night consuming it. She was actually impressed at the depth and the truth he wrote with. He hadn't shied away from anything, finding fault in everyone, finding love in them too. She searched for more books by him, but couldn't find anything besides newspaper articles he'd written before he published The Devil's Dream.
Now the prick wasn't answering his phone. He knew what was going on and Allison knew this was his correct number. She could have probably given the phone call to someone she managed, but having Dillan feel snubbed in their first interaction probably should be avoided.
"Jesus Christ, what?" The voice came over the phone.
"Mr. Dillan?"
"Yeah, you got him, now can you tell me why you needed to call a million fucking times?"
"This is Allison Moore with the F.B.I. I'd like to speak with you if you have the time."
"I don't," he said and the line went dead.
Allison pulled the phone away from her face and looked at it, almost not believing what just happened. Okay, she thought and dialed again.
"Goddamnit. Woman. I don't have the time to speak to you," Dillan said after the first ring.
"That may be true, Mr. Dillan, but if you need me to make the time for you, I can get you under protective custody within an hour and you'll be right next to me. Given that you're nearly a national treasure because of your book and the fact that you might be number one on Brand's list to kill, I don't think that would be much of a problem. Then, stashed away in the hotel room we provide for you, you'll have all the time you need to talk to me."
The line didn't go dead but no voice came back through.
"Does that sound better?" Allison asked.
"Don’t think you can just grab me like some in bullshit novel. I don’t care about all of your surveillance techniques or whatever else you have, you understand that? I’m rich. As fuck. You know what that means? It means my voice shouts louder than the normal jokers whose rights you violate. It means I’ll have more lawyers knocking down whatever door you sit behind than you can possibly imagine. So don’t threaten me, ever. Now, what do you want?"
"I'm going to need to be in contact with you, perhaps daily. As I'm sure you're aware, Matthew Brand escaped and I've been assigned the case. That means, just so you understand the magnitude, that there are approximately one-hundred and fifty thousand state and federal officers looking for him right now, and I'm in charge of them all. I think that you might have as much information about Brand as anyone else and I'm going to need that information. Access to your notes. Access to you. Around the clock even."
Laughter came through the phone.
"I destroyed the notes on Brand years ago, and as far as access to me, I'm actually about to take a vacation. You're more than welcome to come along, as your voice sounds like you'd be pretty decent in bed, but I won't be able to make it out there to Phoenix to speak with you people."
"That's really the way you want to take this?"
"How about we take it this way? This is your phone number, right? I can call you back on it?"
"Sure."
"My lawyer will be calling you back within five minutes."
The line went dead for the second time on Allison.
Chapter Seven
"Can I talk to Mom?"
Jerry turned the wheel of his SUV and the vehicle rounded the street corner slowly.
He hated the question. If he never heard it again, his life would be much happier. Allison left two days ago and Marley kept asking Can I talk to Mom? It's not that he didn't want her calling; the reason he hated hearing the question was because of the answer. No, she couldn't. It was something they had agreed on when Marley was born. They couldn't let her think that she could talk to her Mom whenever she left, because Allison wouldn't be able to answer all the time.
Allison called once a day, at the same time, and the whole family was able to speak with each other. Marley seemed to understand that a year ago when Allison had left, but things were different this year. At ten, she was questioning.
Jerry slowed the car down and then stopped at a red light. Another ten minutes and he would drop her off at school. Hopefully there she would forget about her Mom for a few hours and then Allison would call tonight.
Except Jerry didn't want that. At all. He didn't want to tell his daughter no, that she couldn't speak to her Mom and had to wait for the appointed time. He didn't want his daughter to stop questioning the rules laid out before her. What he wanted was for Allison to start paying attention to her family more than her job.
"You want to call her?" He asked, looking to the passenger seat.
"Can I?" A smile bloomed across her face.
Jerry looked forward again, the light green. He pressed the accelerator and the car rolled into the intersection. What was the harm in her calling?
"Do you think she'll be busy?" Marley asked.
The harm was that Allison would be busy. That Mom wouldn't answer and that light in their daughter's eyes would dim as quickly as it ignited. The harm was that he was about to actively, for the first time, go against something Allison and he had agreed on ten years ago without consulting her.
"You miss her don't you?"
Marley turned from looking at Jerry to staring out the window. She was quiet for a few seconds.
"Yeah. I mean, I know she's busy and she's doing something good for everyone, but I just want to talk to her for a little bit. I just want to tell her I love her."
Jerry gripped the wheel a little tighter.
"Sure, babe. We can call her. I'm sure she wants to talk to you too."
He pulled his phone out and dialed his wife's number.
* * *
Allison looked down at her vibrating phone.
Jerry.
She thought it more likely to see the President's name on her caller ID than Jerry's when she was out on assignment. Something had to be wrong. The lawyer could leave a message.
She hit answer and put the phone to her ear.
"Hey, is everything okay?"
"Yeah, everything is fine. Marley was just asking to speak with you."
She said nothing, letting the understanding that her family was alright sink in, her heart relinquishing its increasing pace.
"You're kidding, right? You can't be serious."
"I am." It was all he said and Allison knew Marley was right next to him.
"Put her on," Allison said, feeling like she would curse if she spoke with Jerry any longer. She listened to the rustling as the phone changed hands.
"Hey, Mom!"
"Hey, honey, how are you?" She asked, her voice automatically changing tone.
"I'm good. Me and Dad are just heading to school."
"Dad and I, babe."
Marley sighed. "Dad and I. What are you doing?"
"I'm talking with someone about the bad guy I'm chasing. Why didn't you wait until I could call this evening?"
"I don't know, I just asked and Dad said yes. It's not okay?"
Allison closed her eyes and turned her head down toward the desk. "It's okay, it's just I'm really busy right now trying to find this bad guy. That's why we normally wait until the evenings, right? So that I can hear about your day?"
"I guess," her daughter said, the excitement in her voice almost completely drowned.
"Okay, babe, I have to get going, but I'm going to call you tonight. Is that okay?"
"Yeah, it's fine. I love you," Marley said. Allison thought Marley might be near tears, but that might be what needed to happen to make sure she didn't ask again. She
couldn't call during the day. She had to understand there were certain times they could talk.
"I love you too. Can I talk to Dad again?"
More rustling.
"Hey," Jerry said.
"We're going to talk tonight about this."
"Fine."
"Love you." Allison said, only habit making the words come out.
"Love you too."
She placed the phone back down on the desk and waited for it to tell her she had a voice mail, that or for Dillan's lawyer to call now. There were things she needed to be doing beyond talking to her daughter, like waiting on this call. Making Jeffrey Dillan and his lawyer understand the importance of his commitment to this investigation was almost at the top of Allison's list.
A number she didn't know popped onto her phone's screen.
"Agent Moore."
"Hi, Agent Moore, my name is Frank Stone. I'm Jeffrey Dillan's lawyer. He said I would be calling, I believe. How are you doing today?"
Allison immediately saw a fat man in her mind, someone sitting behind a large desk with a wall of scholarly books next to him. She saw his chin shake as he spoke, and knew that the last time he'd done any serious exercise was probably in the nineties. His voice sounded like all that fat had done nothing to shake his confidence, but actually built on it, as if his greatness was validated by his ability to eat while the rest of the world starved.
"I'm well, Mr. Stone. He did say you would call, right before he hung up on me. It's important to me that both of you understand he will be helping with this investigation, regardless of what I have to do to make it happen."
Frank Stone laughed.
"Calm down for just a second, Agent Moore. You haven't even heard what he's willing to do yet and you're already talking about injunctions and such."
"Go ahead."
"Well, it's pretty generous, actually. He's willing to help, over the phone, of course, because he has had his current vacation scheduled for quite some time. In exchange for access to his notes and his mind, all he's asking is access to what you know as well. Things that you find out about Brand. What the doctors may have discovered about him while he was behind The Wall. Where he's at, what he's doing, et cetera. He wants to know the case, and not the case that you'll be feeding the media, but what is actually going on."
"He wants to write another book." Allison said.
"Well, I'm not privy to the future, all I know is what Mr. Dillan asked me to deliver to you. Does the agreement sound acceptable?"
"To me? No. Not at all. I'll need to run it up the ladder though and see what others think."
"Certainly, certainly. Well, feel free to call me back whenever you have the details sorted out. Take care, Agent Moore."
Then the prick was off the line just as Dillan had been, leaving Allison still holding her own phone to her face.
Jesus Christ, was this guy going to be worth it?
Before she could even consider answering the thought, someone knocked on her door. She placed the phone down, looking up to see Dr. Riley. He'd left with her last night at around midnight and had walked in with her this morning around six. The forty-hour work week was over for Dr. Riley, at least until they caught Brand. She thought Riley understood he needed to come up with some reasons for how Brand walked away from The Wall or he would be out of a job soon.
She waved the doctor inside.
"How are you?"
"I'm well," he said, sitting in a chair across from her desk.
"What can I help you with? Got any news?"
"Well, we haven't unmapped everything. To be honest, we haven't unmapped that much over the past day. But if you think about it, the man was in there for ten years, and looking at it all now, apparently his brain had virtually become one with the system. We never even considered that a possibility, and we're checking the other two inmates now. So far they're showing up nothing. You mind if I pull out my computer?"
"Of course not."
Dr. Riley opened his bag and lifted the laptop from it, placing it on the desk so that they both could see it. It fired up immediately to a computerized image of a man lying in one of the Silos.
"Is that him?"
"No, no. This is just a mock-up of what happened. It's fairly accurate though. Seeing this through a visual is much better than me trying to tell you what happened."
"Okay, let's see it," Allison said.
The man in the image was floating, a pale gas circling him, exactly the same as the men outside.
"Now, this is what the human eye sees if it's looking at the Silos. But this," he pressed a button on the computer, "is what is actually happening."
Tiny wires grew out of the egg's casing. They extended inside, about ten in all, fitting into the man's nose, his mouth, his ears, trying to squirm their way into the holes on his head.
"That gas, it's used as a preserver, but it also contains electronic pulses that you're seeing as wires here. The pulses travel through the gas, always one way, and it allows us to keep the prisoner's brain from waking up. We can slow the brain down if we need; we can speed it up, actually stimulate it. The brain may try to tell the muscles to move from time to time, not out of any action from the individual, but from an instinctual need to move when the muscles have been dormant for too long. Instead, the brain will make contact with one of the electrical pulses and the signal to the muscles is discarded. You see? We are actively keeping the brain from dying and the body from living with the gas and the pulses."
Allison nodded. "All you're going to see when you look at it is the gas though?"
"Yeah, exactly."
"And the street is supposed to be one way."
"That's the way this was theorized. We can see inside their head if we need, although we rarely need to. In the beginning, I used to look a lot at Brand as he was so different from the rest and I was curious what went on up there. As time progressed though, our technology adapted and his mind slowed down in its ability to think and dream. Or that's what I thought was happening at the time. We simply never imagined that the...pulses, I guess, could go both ways. Now watch."
He pressed another button.
The lines that had moved inside the man's face were orange and they remained. However, coming back out were purple tendrils, growing from the man's eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Some even stretched out of the pores on his face. They doubled, then tripled, the amount of chords that had entered him. Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty tendrils coming out of the man's face. They grew around his body, encircling it in a cocoon before firing off into the egg itself. Attaching themselves to the glass.
"What was that?"
"That was, I believe, the course of three to four years of work where Brand sent his own electric pulses, actually built out pathways from his head that traveled along the gas just as we had designed ours to do. I don't know if he learned it from us, by somehow feeling the pulses we sent at him, or if he did it on his own. Regardless, we never saw it happening." Dr. Riley leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen.
"Yeah, doc, but what do those pulses do? The one's he is shooting out from his face, how do they matter?"
"I think they allowed him to hack the entire system. It took him five years, but with constant two way communication with his mind—what we thought had slowed down—he was able to compromise everything and in the end let himself out."
Allison looked at the tiny lines hanging in the Silo. Brand mapped the entire system. He knew it well enough to take control, to use it for himself.
"In all of that, did we get any more insight into his mind? Since he knew us in and out."
"Yeah, of course our pulses alone do that—although not as well as we'd like apparently—but the access he gained gave us access to his thoughts. The problem is we don't understand how to read them yet and that could take some time."
"You need help?" Allison asked.
"The F.B.I. have brain surgeons and computer mathematicians?"
"We can get you whatever you n
eed. Make a list."
* * *
Allison was sure police work was happening somewhere. Somewhere outside of her office, through the glass doors and outside of this building, police were trying to catch Matthew Brand. Allison was a glorified press agent at this point. She was making calls on Jeffrey Dillan's behalf, to get him the best deal she could. There were reports to look at, maps to see, and other real calls to make, but instead she dialed up Art's number to see how much information she could give this asshole.
"Hello," he said, sounding like his mouth was full of food.
"I talked to your writer pal. Then I talked to his lawyer. He's a real swell guy."
"Told you. What did his lawyer say?"
"That Mr. Dillan would be on vacation for the foreseeable future and that we should contact him, the lawyer, with our answer, not Dillan. He said if we share our day to day case information with Dillan, then he'll work with us on the criminal profile. He'll share his papers, which Dillan said had been thrown out, and his knowledge."
"Seriously?" Art hadn't stopped eating just because Allison was on the phone.
"Yeah. That's his deal."
She listened to him chewing while he thought.
"You give him stuff when he asks for it. Not before. And you never give him everything. Use your discretion."
"Lawyer said he's not coming back from vacation. He's going to be on some island accepting my collect calls."
"Obviously not ideal, but there isn't much we can do. If we told him no, we'd limit ourselves a lot and that could lead to unnecessary deaths. Could also lead to press leaks that we denied help that in turn could lead to my job. We have to work with him, just make sure you are in control of this relationship."
