The Program

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Tim’s phone rang, and he flipped it open. “Hello?”

  Freed said, “Your last Dead Link’s a ghost.”

  “Wayne Topping?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t exist. Nothing came back. Just wanted to let you know.”

  When Tim hung up, Will was staring at him. “You did say ‘Wayne Topping’?”

  “The name ring a bell?”

  “Yes. That’s the alias that Danny Katanga used. Our PI who went missing.”

  Tim blew out a breath. “TD’s got a file on him. The kind of file that means he’s probably dead. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  The stagnant heat leaked from the room, the door swaying with the April breeze. The patch of sunlight thrown through the window stretched and turned gold against the worn carpet. Reggie laced his hands and stretched. At the hour mark, Will took to pacing. Only Dray was calm.

  Tim had finally come to grips with Leah’s being lost when a faint cough announced her presence. She stood like a waif in the doorway.

  “I accept it. I accept they used mind control on me.”

  Will let out a muffled noise of relief.

  “But I have to go back. They’ll make hell for Tom if he goes up without me.”

  “How do you know I’m going back up?”

  “I saw how excited you got about the mail thing. I’m not an idiot. Trust me, if you go back alone, they’ll know something’s wrong.”

  “I’ll say your parents kidnapped you.”

  “They’ll suspect you. And they’ll find out.”

  “You can’t be reexposed to that environment,” Bederman said. “There are too many triggers there. You’re fragile.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  “I think you’ve taken enough risks,” Tim said.

  “So have you.”

  Will rose and walked to the door. When Leah didn’t move, he waited by her side. Tim could see that it was killing him to act patient, but he did.

  Finally Leah said, “Maybe you’re right.” She crossed and hugged Reggie. “Thank you.”

  Reggie held her for an extra beat, his eyes shut.

  She moved to embrace Bederman, but he leaned back and took her hands instead, squeezing them warmly. She hugged Dray next, then stopped in the center of the circle, facing Tim. “I... um, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Me neither.”

  They looked at each other a moment longer, and then she followed Will out.

  FORTY

  Pants loosed around her hips, Dray lay sprawled on the bed, arms stretched to the headboard, shoulders propped on a bank of pillows. Tim’s face pressed into the warmth of her bare stomach, her C-section scar a smooth ridge against his cheek. He closed his eyes, and he listened.

  “I was thinking we should turn the study into a nursery,” Dray said.

  The skin of her belly was impossibly soft.

  “When you get back this time, maybe we really settle. I mean, no more life and death, no more secret missions and undercover ops. We’ll be a nice, dull-as-hell family in Moorpark with a nursery painted blue and yellow. And we’ll talk about diapers and how we wish we were rich enough to afford a nanny, and we’ll shut it out, the whole world. It’ll just be us three, and everything will be safe. A made-for-TV life.”

  He kissed her stomach, then laid his cheek on it again.

  He thought he heard a heartbeat. Was it possible to hear a heartbeat already? It must have been Dray’s. Or his own.

  She took a deep breath. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve got enough left to make another run at a blue-and-yellow nursery.”

  “You do.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Are you still here?”

  He knew she could feel his smile against her skin—he felt her stomach tense on the verge of laughter. “Don’t,” he said.

  That sent her over the edge, her laughter bouncing his head. He made pained groans and objections, as if the abdominal tumult were inflicting great abuse on him. Finally she quieted, sniffling a few times.

  Dray was never big on tissues.

  She watched him curiously as he stood and pulled on his shoes, but she didn’t ask where he was going. He paused by the door. “Ginny’s bottom lip disappeared when she smiled.”

  Dray made a soft hum, a noise of pleasure and longing mixed together. He said, “Remember her laugh when she really got going?”

  “The hiccupping one?”

  “And when she colored the bottoms of her feet with Magic Marker and ran around on the new carpet? That expression she’d get when we’d ground her—the slanted eyebrows? Furrowed brow?”

  “The demon-spawn scowl.”

  They looked at each other, smiling.

  “Yeah,” Dray said. “I remember.”

  Tim’s hands sweated, as they always did when he approached the front walk. The bordering lawn, uniformly green, rose to the precise level of the concrete. Like Tim’s lawn used to. He stood in the night chill, the parked Blazer at his back, and gathered his courage.

  After hitting a snarl of traffic—L.A.’s eternal antidote to sanity— he’d found himself in Pasadena, then at the house.

  It struck him that The Program’s regression drills didn’t depend on implanted memories alone. Most people had pain that could be accessed and exploited, exposed nerves to pluck like harp strings. TD sniffed out the hollows in which trauma was buried; he cracked people wide, and they welcomed him like a conquering god.

  Tim stepped up on the porch and rang the doorbell. A snowball plant rose from a terra-cotta pot, the perfect bulb of the crown picked clean of dead foliage. A single brown leaf lay on the soil.

  The even cadence of footsteps. A darkness at the peephole, then his father opened the door, blocking the narrow gap with his body. “Timmy.” His eyes flicked over Tim’s shoulder at Dray’s Blazer. “You brought the truck for your mother’s desk?”

  Tim had been steeling himself, but he felt a sudden calm. “Why do you always want to bring me down a peg?”

  Easing out on the porch, his father plucked up the solitary dead leaf and folded it into a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. He returned to his post at the door. “It’s nothing personal. I make it my business to oppose self-righteousness.”

  “So you started on me when I was five.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s bullshit. It was personal. Why me?”

  His father looked away, and in that instant Tim saw him with detach-ment—a man in his fifties standing in the doorway of another suburban house. His father kept his eyes on the street, his face pale. “Because you thought you were better than me.”

  A car turned onto the street, its headlights bleaching the house.

  He cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on Tim. “Why don’t we haul that desk out for you so you can get on your way?”

  “I don’t want the desk.”

  If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. He nodded definitively, a single dip of the chin. “Where’s your music, Timmy?” He crossed his arms, a union-boss show of opposition. “This is your big scene, isn’t it? You sat at home, dreamed it up, dreamed up how you could take a big stand against your old man, and here you are, your moment in the sun. You deserve a musical score, don’t you think?”

  A beep sounded—an annoying rendition of some classical motif. Tim followed his father’s gaze down to the electronic monitoring bracelet at his ankle.

  The parole officer’s beckon.

  Tim’s father glanced back up, a ripple of chagrin disrupting the inscrutable mask.

  The halting melody followed Tim back down the walk.

  As Tim folded clothes neatly into his overnight bag, Dray watched him morosely over the top of the paperback she was pretending to read. He’d already touched up his disguise, trimming his goatee, plucking his false hairline, giving his hair a touch-up rinse.

  He finished packing and joined Dray beneath the sheets.

  In less than eight hours, he’d be sitting in the passenger seat of
Randall’s van. He rehearsed his story in his head, trying to make Leah’s desertion plausible.

  They made love deliberately, taking nothing for granted. Each touch seemed heightened—she shivered when he kissed the edge of her wrist, the inside of her elbow, the point of her jaw.

  They fell asleep in a warm tangle.

  FORTY-ONE

  The phone rang at six-thirty, jerking Tim from a deep sleep. He’d no sooner pressed the receiver to his ear than the marshal let loose with a string of Mediterranean expletives. After a few disoriented seconds, Tim caught up with his stream of discourse.

  “This morning I find my niece—God bless her—zoned out on the couch, phone bleating in her hand and Betters’s video in the VCR. She called in and signed up for the Next Fucking Generation Colloquium— put two grand on my wife’s goddamn Visa.’“

  Tim sank his teeth painfully into his lower lip; a chortle here could prove fatal. Beside him Dray shifted and groaned unhappily.

  Tannino didn’t pause long enough for Tim to respond. “Bring me something back, Rackley, however small, to get us on that fucking ranch. Once we’re there, we’re gonna go full bore on his ass.”

  Looking crisp and mean in her uniform, Dray stood in the driveway as Tim backed the Hummer out of the garage. The steam from her coffee mixed with her clouding breath to shroud her face. A furious knocking on the passenger window made him punch down on the brakes. Leah gestured emphatically at him, running around to the driver’s side.

  When Tim rolled down his window, she said, “I want to go. The mail goes into TD’s cottage, and only Lilies, Protectors, and Stanley John are allowed in there. You can’t get your hands on that stuff. You need me.”

  “It’s not safe for you up there.”

  “You don’t get to decide that for me. You said it was my choice. I trusted you.”

  “Leah—”

  “No, wait a minute. Since I’ve been off the ranch, I’ve been mostly upset and scared. But you know what? I’m sick of it. And the more I think about it—him, everything—the more pissed off I get. Now I want to go back there. And you can’t stop me.”

  In the rearview, Tim noted her taxi pulling away from the curb. “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “What about Will?” Dray asked.

  “I left him and Mom a note explaining.”

  “A note,” Dray said. “Swell.”

  The Hummer idled and shot exhaust. Leah appealed to him with earnest eyes.

  “Get in,” Tim said.

  Leah fidgeted in her seat, her foot twisting around the back of her calf as if scratching an inextinguishable itch. They passed a long school bus filled with chanting students waving pennants—just another away game in paradise. Leah watched it recede into traffic. “Do you know what it’s like? To leave something that means everything to you?”

  His back pocket still felt empty without his badge. It had been presented to him on a Georgian dais at FLETC graduation, and he’d silently pledged to hold and honor it until it was sunk in Lucite and holding down the stubs of his pension checks.

  The clouds broke furiously, unleashing torrents of rain. They fought through clots of traffic and minilagoons, moving from one freeway to another until they finally exited. Leah’s silent discomfort grew more pronounced as they neared the Radisson.

  She let out a terse little laugh, then stared bitterly at the dash. “When they make you smile all the time, you know what? You start to believe it.”

  Wet gusts buffeted the windshield. Tim turned right into the circular driveway. Up ahead, a familiar, disproportionate form cut a block from the gray downpour. As the Hummer crept near, ducked valets scurrying alongside it, Randall appeared—the large head, the swollen arms, the jagged mouth with spaced, glinting teeth, so much like a child’s sketch.

  He raised an arm in silent greeting, and they stepped out into the deluge.

  FORTY-TWO

  Through the welcoming fanfare, through the full-body hugs and Skate’s rooting in their pockets and bags, through the ceaseless kettledrum, the age regressions to abysmal childhoods, the group breathing, the weepy confessionals, Tim and Leah kept close, their shoulders brushing when they stood, their heads pressed together during floor-squirming exercises, Leah panting and sweating and pressing her nails into the soft underskin of her arm, Tim’s voice staying slow and steady beneath the wails and shrieks and the low-resolution rumbling of the storm outside. In fine form, TD strode the stage, his voice a teasing build of outrage that roused the crowd to spurts of chanting, until all at once the spotlight plucked Tom Altman from the profusion of bodies writhing and twisting in orgiastic frenzy. Sean, Esq., bore the documents to him, overlapped on a silver tray like a spread of hardwood-smoked delicacies, and as Tim bent to press the tip of the fountain pen to paper, the crowd climaxed into riotous applause.

  When the sweaty burden of continual embrace at last lifted and the fluorescents flickered on, Tim stood stunned and blinking, his clothes gripping him like a cowl of seaweed, Leah going pale at his side as if she were barely holding on.

  She laced her hands behind his neck, doing a drunken girl’s slump into his arms so he bore most of her weight. Her mouth found his ear, whispering between pants, though he couldn’t make out all the words.

  “... couldn’t... without you... don’t know... hold out long...” At once Janie was by her side, prying her off, sliding her neck beneath her arm. “You two are mighty close now—great Gro-Par bond. Someone taught you well.”

  Tim met Janie’s silent-comedy wink with a weak smile. When he turned, he nearly collided with Randall’s chest. Skate slid around to his other side.

  “TD wants you in DevRoom A,” Randall said.

  Leah looked panicked at the prospect of his leaving, but he tore his eyes away and followed the Protectors.

  Neither touched him, but they trapped him in the space between their bodies as they escorted him from the auditorium. They threaded through several paired Pros exuberantly rehearsing their recruitment tactics for the Next Generation Colloquium.

  “I bet you never got anywhere by turning down new opportunities!” an East Asian girl implored her role-playing opposite.

  At the far wall, Stanley John berated a muster of Pros for being brainwashed idiots—desensitization training to make them impervious to future persecution.

  Skate led them down the hall. When he pulled the door open, Tim stepped inside, unsure what to expect now that Tom Altman had ostensibly signed away control of his holdings. TD awaited him, his armchair pulled in to a card table, a deck in his hands.

  Always a shtick.

  The door eased shut behind him. The Protectors had gone.

  “Please.” TD shuffled the deck, cut it one-handed, then shuffled again. “Sit.” His hands blurred, and the first two floors of a house of cards appeared. “You’re now a true member of the Inner Circle. A founding father.”

  Tim did his best to plaster a pleased smile across his face.

  “Let me tell you what you have here.” Even as he turned his gaze to Tim, his hands moved swiftly, confidently—within seconds eight more cards held firm in a tilted lean. “Endless possibility. Zero boundaries. Success—you know as well as I do—is a house of cards.” As TD spoke, he pointed to each level in turn. “Belief is on the bottom. Then actions. Then emotions. Then thought. And finally... the result. But”—his finger snapped upright—”the minute you have a doubt...” His eyes staying on Tim, he flicked a bottom card, and the impressive structure tumbled. TD’s pupils were like obsidian—compressed darkness, sleek and impenetrable. Tim felt them probing his brain, and he broke eye contact, though the heat of TD’s glare didn’t subside.

  “That will happen to The Program if we flinch. It would have happened to your company if you showed weakness. It could have happened at any point during your negotiations to sell, right?” He looked to Tom for an answer but continued talking. “The Program is reaching critical mass. It can grow five times, ten times faster if you and I run
the business aspect of it together.”

  He directed his attention back to the cards, which drew themselves into his hands like metal shavings before a magnet. “Give it some thought.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Though the storm had quieted, the sky stayed murky, like churned-up water. Leah followed Randall down the curving trail, her adrenaline quickening.

  Every step brought her closer to TD’s bed.

  Her mind was clear, but her body had shown itself willing to betray her. In the Growth Hall, her breath had moved through her as if directed by another entity. She’d grown sweaty and languorous, desirous of dissolution. Swept off by the rising trumpets, she’d almost surrendered to the thunderous chants, the lulling monotone. The stronger she’d fought, the more painful it had felt, like flailing offshore with a cramped leg.

  After dinner she’d managed only a few minutes alone with Tom in their room before Randall’s summoning knock.

  Walking down the corridor of brush, she willed herself under control.

  The Teacher’s cottage drew into view. Across the clearing, the usual smoke twisted up from the stovepipe of the shed. Through the open door, she saw the soles of Skate’s feet, bare and stained, pointing up from the cot. The dogs arose with ferocious snarling, startling Skate back to life. Leah froze, but Randall’s hand grasped the back of her neck, squeezing gently as he steered her forward. Wearing a stretched pair of underwear, Skate hunched over the dogs in the shed, ordering them into submission. They yelped and snatched at each other.

  Randall delivered her to the front room of the cottage and left her with trembling legs. She heard TD’s raised voice above the deafening blast of the four-nozzle shower, dictating orders to Stanley John. Lorraine was probably in there with them, either extracting hair from the soap between latherings or on her knees beneath the spray, prepping him for Leah.

  In its place beside the door sat the white plastic bucket, U.S. POSTAL SERVICE emblazoned on it sides. She raised the top envelope from the stack, reading the return address: Office of the U.S. Marshal. 312 N. Spring St., G-23. The envelope was a Day-Glo, yellow—hard to miss.