XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation

by Brad Magnarella

  A piercing wail returned Reginald to the cemetery. Madelyn’s coffin gave a small shudder, and Reginald realized it was being lowered. More wails sounded from Madelyn’s mother. She doubled over as though she were being stabbed in the gut. A part of Reginald wanted to feel satisfaction for her pain. Madelyn’s mother had been his biggest detractor, all but disowning Madelyn over her daughter’s love for him.

  But Reginald could find no pleasure in a pain they shared.

  Wiping his eyes, he turned and hurried across the lawn the way he had come. He needed to get back to D.C. He had a meeting with the person who had ordered Madelyn’s murder.

  Only Halstead didn’t know ol’ Reggie was coming for him.

  13

  Washington, D.C.

  Wednesday, January 11, 1961 — Six days until Eisenhower’s address

  12:20 p.m.

  Reginald dropped a dime into the slot and had the operator connect him to a switchboard in Chicago, Illinois. A fresh operator’s voice came on. He fed her a number and the payphone the requisite change. “One moment, please,” she replied.

  The line clicked and clunked, the signal wending back east, then into a warren of hidden switches. Reginald studied his face in the payphone’s metal housing. He was a black man again, but older. Gray flecked the hair at his temples. Liver spots ringed his eyes. He made a few minor adjustments then shifted his gaze to the traffic passing on U Street.

  The line began to ring in a series of computerized tones. It was the emergency line to Hal’s office.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Reginald said.

  “What are you doing? This isn’t the protocol.”

  “I just wanted you to know I’m safe. I’m in the Midwest.”

  Halstead exhaled. “Go to the bank. There’s a message waiting for you.”

  And let you pinpoint my location? Sorry, Hal. “Can’t you tell me now?”

  “No.” He imagined Hal looking around. “No, I can’t.”

  “Promise me one thing.”

  “What is it?”

  Reginald’s throat tightened. “Promise me you’ll take him alive. And then promise to give me an hour with him. Alone.”

  Hal didn’t say anything. Reginald pictured his brown mug of whiskey tipping to his lips.

  “I will get my hour.”

  “Just get to the bank,” Hal said. “It’s important.”

  Reginald hung up.

  Outside the payphone booth, he squinted into the light. The day was warm for January, the sidewalk crowded with lunch goers: men in business suits, women in floral dresses. A block away, beyond the jazz clubs, a line stretched from Ben’s Chili Bowl. They called U Street the “Harlem of the South,” but Reginald wasn’t there for the culture. He needed a place close to his target where he could blend in.

  He glanced around. Even in the bright light of day, no one gave this aging colored man a second look.

  He limped south toward T Street, tipping his tweed cap perfunctorily at the ladies. He had phoned Hal for two reasons. First, to make him believe he was far away, and second, to hear Hal’s voice. He had known Hal long enough — eight years, almost nine — to decipher his sober inflections (a skill Madelyn had taught him). Worry had edged Hal’s first words, followed by relief, probably at the knowledge seven hundred miles separated them.

  But what about Hal’s insistence he retrieve that message?

  Reginald frowned as he peered around. A ten-minute bus ride would take him to a Humboldt Bank in downtown D.C., but he had destroyed the identification he would need to access the account. And now a part of him wondered whether Hal really did have a message for him, one that might—

  “Bullshit,” he spat, causing a group of little girls to stop skipping long enough to watch him pass, ropes falling slack in their hands.

  “Man said a bad word,” one of them whispered.

  “He just crazy,” said another.

  But the bad word was the right one. Hal had given them their new identities. Hal had sent them to the safe house. A house that just happened to be hiding an assassin.

  Reginald climbed the steps of a wooden row house on Wallach Place where he’d rented a room. The furnished room was on the first floor with a window that opened onto an alley, should he need to come and go unnoticed. The landlord promised to leave him to himself as long as he paid his ten dollars a week. Reginald had given him forty for the month, which the landlord, a potbellied man in a stained wife-beater and suspenders, had chuckled over in apparent appreciation.

  “Got a good feeling about you,” he’d said before hobbling back upstairs, his thick hand clasping the folded-over bills.

  Now Reginald unlocked the door to his room. He lowered the shade on the window in the back. The metal bed frame squeaked underneath his reclining weight. He pried his shoes off with his toes and relaxed his disguise, becoming young Reginald Perry again.

  In the last four days, he’d slept maybe twelve hours. He needed some rest.

  He set the alarm clock on the bedside table for four in the afternoon and closed his eyes. He saw Madelyn. She peered at him over her shoulder, blond hair swimming around her dark eyes. Her lips were hidden, but the angle of her cheek suggested a smile, and that killed Reginald.

  I’m close, baby, he thought toward her. So close.

  She continued to watch with that inscrutable smile.

  Then I’ll be joining you, his thoughts murmured. He reached for her shoulder and, missing, fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  Halstead’s office was in one of the tall buildings in north Arlington. Many of the new defense contractors had set up shop there. Viper Industries had an entire skyscraper to itself. Reginald had arrived by bus, a white woman, and ducked into a parking garage. Hal’s secretary usually left at five o’clock, so Reginald waited until quarter after.

  By the time he entered the building’s front door, he had become a seventy-year-old woman with a bird face and too much makeup. It was his second time playing a secretary that week.

  The guard on duty stood from behind his desk. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Nance.”

  “Afternoon,” Reginald said. “Just need to grab something from the office.”

  As he clacked toward the elevators, he could sense the guard’s indecision. Despite knowing Mrs. Nance, failing to verify her identification could get him canned. The guard began to extend an arm. Reginald-as-Mrs. Nance made a show of noticing his naked ring finger.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not married yet. Handsome young fellow like you.”

  The guard’s arm hesitated as he flushed. “Just waiting for the right one, Mrs. Nance.”

  “Well, don’t wait too long. Before you know it all the good ones will be taken and you’ll be left with old widows like me.” Reginald winked and lowered his voice. “Not that I’d mind.”

  The guard chuckled uncomfortably and waved him toward the elevators.

  Halstead’s office was at the end of the hall on the twelfth floor, its door unmarked. Officially the Champions Program didn’t exist. Congress didn’t even know about it, which was probably what had made the Program so effective. The mandate was simple: prevent Soviet expansion without triggering World War III. The missions had covered half the globe and included a few forays into the Soviet Union itself. The successes piled up. More than preventing Soviet expansion, the Champions had helped roll it back, squeezing the Soviets from Eastern Europe.

  When the Russians discovered the United States was deploying “super humans,” they countered by developing their own team in ’58. The result, Artificials: part human, part machine, all of them hideously deformed. When Henry “Titan” Tillman brought a building down on them in Berlin, the Program considered it a mercy killing. Hal had actually hugged Henry and the others after that mission, saying they had turned a corner, that they would soon be kissing the Cold War goodbye.

  So why was Hal abetting the Soviets now? Why did he want the Champions dead?


  Time to find out.

  Reginald crept past Mrs. Nance’s empty desk and tried the door. Unlocked, which meant Hal was still in. He relaxed his hold on his surface molecules, and the hand holding the doorknob transformed from an aging woman’s to a young black man’s. Reginald wanted his boss to see his face. The clothing around him morphed from women’s to men’s.

  No more hiding.

  He reached inside his pocket for his snub-nosed pistol.

  The door behind him opened.

  Reginald spun to find Mrs. Nance stepping in from the hallway, clutching the paper towel she’d used to dry her hands. Her blue eyes squinted from behind a pair of wing-framed glasses, then relaxed in recognition.

  “Reginald,” she said. “You scared me half to death. Are you here to see Director Halstead?”

  “Yeah.” He released the pistol grip and drew his hand from his pocket. “I’ll just let myself in, if that’s okay.”

  Mrs. Nance shuffled toward her desk, dropping the paper towel in the trashcan. “I don’t know that he’s expecting you.” Her tone scolded. Since filling the position two years before, she had treated Reggie, Madelyn, and the other Champions as school-aged children. Of course, she didn’t know who they were or what they could do. Her duties consisted of answering the telephone and managing Hal’s appointment book.

  “He’ll want to see me,” Reginald said.

  She shrugged as though washing her hands of responsibility and began thumbing through the appointment booklet. He almost asked her what Hal had been up to these last few days, but he could ask Hal himself, face to face. He’d be able to see whether Hal was lying.

  Reginald pushed the door open.

  Halstead sat across the room at his desk, one hand massaging his forehead, the other holding a phone receiver to his ear. His heavy eyes met Reginald’s, then drifted lower, coming to a rest on the pointed pistol.

  “I’ll look into it and call you back,” he said and hung up.

  “Hands on your desk,” Reginald said, locking the door behind his low back.

  Hal complied. “You didn’t go to the bank today, did you?”

  “I’ll ask the questions.”

  “I didn’t know,” Hal said.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That someone was waiting in the house.”

  “Well someone sure as hell did. Who?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  Hal flinched beneath the flashing gun butt. A gash appeared in his left eyebrow, and Reginald watched it fill with blood. The blow would have shattered his boss’s skull if Reginald hadn’t pulled back at the last instant.

  Hal wavered to his feet, pressing a balled-up handkerchief to the gash.

  “Sit down.” Reginald’s voice shook as he aimed the gun at his chest. He ventured a peek toward the locked door. Mrs. Nance’s presence complicated things. If she heard shots, she’d call security.

  “Goddammit, Reggie,” Hal mumbled. He inspected the handkerchief and pressed it back to his brow. He didn’t hold out his other hand defensively. Neither did he sit down. “I know you’re upset, but use your head for a minute. Why would I want you and the others dead?”

  Reggie searched Hal’s eyes. “You tell me.”

  “I spent the last ten years assembling this team, training you—”

  “And now that you’re working for the other side, time to close up shop, right? Eliminate the competition.”

  Hal shook his head. “I could no more hurt you than my own children.”

  I love you, Reggie, but you refuse to listen. You refuse to learn from your mistakes.

  The backs of Reggie’s knees staggered at Madelyn’s recollected voice. When he spoke again, his voice sounded far away, not his own.

  “I was going to be a father.”

  Hal stared at him. “Madelyn was pregnant?”

  Reginald nodded once.

  “Christ, Reggie.” Hal’s lips grimaced like he was going to be sick. He sank back into his desk chair. “Listen, before you shoot me, you need to know what I’ve been trying to tell you for the last three days. The skin they scraped from under Madelyn’s fingernails … the skin’s pigmentation … In the space of an hour, it changed from Caucasian to brown.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Our investigators think the skin is yours.”

  The revelation jolted Reginald. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know anyone else whose skin would do that.” Hal inspected his handkerchief again. The soaked-up blood looked dark orange. “I also know you didn’t kill her.”

  Something like relief swam through Reginald. And something else was happening: the longer he watched Hal, the less certain he became that his boss had been involved in the assassinations.

  “I’m fighting for you, Reggie. You have to believe that. But they’re saying you left evidence at the other crime scenes as well. Hair, more skin cells — all with the same peculiar molecular properties.”

  “So I’m being set up.”

  “Looks that way.”

  The arm holding the gun sagged to Reginald’s side. Fuck. He remembered their annual medical exam. The last one had been in October, three months earlier, their doctor siphoning, scraping, snipping — blood into test tubes, cells into Petri dishes, hair into plastic bags.

  “Doctor Iglarsh?” Reginald asked.

  “He checks out, but the security at his lab not so much.”

  “Someone broke in?”

  “Could have broken in.” Hal examined his handkerchief again. “That’s the argument I’m pushing.”

  Reginald pocketed the gun and sat heavily. “Who and why? The Soviets have the motive, but not the means — not on U.S. soil. Not without collaboration from someone who knows the ins and outs of the Program.”

  “Yeah, but there’s been no contact between our guys and theirs.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Hal nodded.

  “So what makes me a suspect?”

  “You’re a shape shifter. You’re hard to track. And let’s face it, Reggie, your self-appointed missions into Eastern Europe don’t exactly help your present case. Someone could construe that you slipped off to meet with Soviet agents. In fact, someone already has.”

  Reginald’s gaze roamed the desk, coming to a rest on the speaker.

  “It’s one way,” Hal said, seeming to read his thoughts.

  Reginald stood and began pacing. Hal was right. Couple his questionable history with his unique cellular makeup, and he looked guiltier than sin. Which meant whoever had picked off the Champions and left him holding the smoking gun knew them. Intimately. But if Hal wasn’t behind it — and Reginald was almost convinced now that he wasn’t — then who?

  He reached one side of the room and doubled back, a cornered animal.

  “Where’s your number two?” Reginald asked.

  “Kilmer? He’s in South America, and forget about it. I vetted him myself.”

  “How many people know about the Program?”

  “All the nuts and bolts?” Hal blew out his breath. “Five.”

  Reginald cycled through them in his head: Director Halstead; Assistant Director Kilmer; Wolfson, the head of security — and the one no doubt charged with investigating the murders; their mission leader, Colonel Antilla (who the Champions jokingly called ‘Antilla the Hun’); and…

  Reginald squinted, unable to come up with a fifth.

  “Eisenhower,” Hal said.

  “The president?”

  “It’s classified, but yeah, he’s the one I report to.” Halstead opened three fingers of the hand holding the handkerchief to his brow as though to say, We’re not exactly following standard operating procedure anymore. “The other two and Kilmer report to me.”

  “So Kilmer’s above suspicion. What about Antilla and Wolfson?”

  “They check out, too.”

  “So that leaves…”

  Halstead must have read the sudden shift in Reginald’s thinking. He st
ood and held an arm out. “Now wait a minute. We don’t know anything. I told you we’re looking into it.”

  Reginald had already started for the door, but now he stopped and spun. “Why?”

  Hal didn’t answer.

  “Why, goddammit? I lost Madelyn and our child. I deserve to know.”

  “We’re going on the assumption it has something to do with the president’s military connections.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Cold War has made the emerging defense industry a lot of money.” He cocked his eyes toward the window. “I’m sure you’ve seen Viper Industries’ new building? Thing cost almost a billion.”

  “Dollars?” Understanding clicked in Reginald’s head. “And with the Champions threatening to end the Cold War, we were threatening those billions. Remove the Champions and the sieve stays open. Congress keeps on writing checks. The green keeps gushing into their troughs.”

  “Something to that effect. But listen,” Hal said quickly, “we don’t know anything right now. These are just working assumptions. Just like the assumptions others are forming around you and the murders.”

  “Only those assumptions are bullshit.”

  Hal examined the handkerchief again and, apparently convinced the blood flow was staunched, dropped the handkerchief into the wastebasket beside his desk. He was going to need stitches.

  “You’ve got to get back into hiding,” Hal said. “At least until I’ve cleared you of suspicion.”

  “What chance is there that I will be cleared?”

  “Reggie, we don’t know it’s the president.”

  “You’ve convinced me it is.”

  “I’m ordering you back into hiding. How’s that?”

  You’re always doing this, always going against the chain of command — sometimes just for the sake of it, I think — and it never ends well.

  Madelyn’s voice again.

  Reginald set the gun on Director Halstead’s desk. “I’m sorry about your eye.”

  “Reggie,” Halstead said, his voice low with warning.

  He left the office as Reginald Perry, the building as a nondescript contractor, and Arlington as an elderly black man on his way back to his rented room near U Street. If he stepped off the bus and hurried toward Wallach Place with less than his practiced limp, he’d have to be forgiven.