Freebird

by John Raymond

  Again, the audacity of his idea pierced him with its simplicity. He had spent many months with Michael Holmes, traveling the globe as his bodyguard, and in that time he’d come to understand something of his employer and his worldly domain. Primarily, he’d come to see how phenomenally small the domain was. Not in terms of distances and hectares. Those sums were enormous. But in terms of the groups in which Holmes plied his power, the rooms in which Holmes meted out his influence. Within that small world, no one conducted the theater of corporate power as unassumingly as he. In Persian Gulf hotel suites, Corn Belt football stadium skyboxes, and Benelux leadership conferences, he quietly sowed some of the most destructive ecological and humanitarian mischief on the face of the earth.

  If Ben accepted the Mission, the termination of Michael Holmes, the event would surely send a chilling message to the oligarchs who controlled the world’s fate. When they read the note he would write, they would understand the significance of what they were facing. If you are a global leader trafficking in rapacious, exploitative behavior: you are a tier one target. If you are a purveyor of gross inequality toward your fellow man: you are a tier one target. For all your treachery, all your greed, you will pay a dear price. You might be Americans, or quasi-Americans, as the case may be, and you are entitled to your pursuits. But know that a vengeful, armed soldier is watching you.

  The idea was incendiary, he realized, and very possibly insane. But in the clarity of the desert, the idea had come to him with force. Some change must occur. Some sanity must be asserted. The decent people of the globe must impose their will on Michael Holmes’s junta. And there was but one inarguable instrument of change in the world, and that was violence.

  Watching the flux of travelers in the concourse, the gradual infill of his fellow pilgrims to the nearby seats, Ben scrutinized the Mission for flaws. He had to comprehend whether his tenets were sound, because, unlike other missions, which came down from the head shed, this one sprang from the moral chambers of his own mind, and he had to be sure there was no mere vendetta here, no adrenalized, soldierly ego being stroked. Did the Mission make sense? He wasn’t entirely sure. Did he even believe in the will of the people? He wasn’t sure about that, either. But it was at this point that the plan deepened into a richer, more tragic conundrum. What if the people were not even aware of their own will? What if it was the duty of an able soldier to show the people their collective destiny? From this angle, he could feel a distinctly giving, merciful, paternal love driving him.

  The Mission could still be worthless, he realized. It was very possible he was on the verge of a terrible, life-ruining mistake. But he had to believe the Mission merited further investigation, at the very least.

  Muddled voices came through the speakers, interrupting his thoughts, and soon the docile herd massed again to begin boarding. Ben joined them and shuffled his way into the plane, still not having shared a single word or glancing eye contact with another human being. He took his seat beside the window and girded himself for the coming sojourn. He would go and see and by seeing arrive at a decision. He would harvest and mull. And as the pull of the plane’s g-force drew him back in his seat and the plane’s body began its long drive into the flesh of the night, he closed his eyes and reminded himself again that no one in the entire world had any idea what he was plotting.

  He emerged on the other side of the night over Philadelphia, waking to peer down on its sprawl of brownstones and refineries, just brightening along the red rim of the horizon. The plane circled the airport two times, and as the wings banked he could see the white glints of day refracted on a thousand sheets of glass below, the ground a sprawling, beveled armor, a bronze frieze.

  Michael Holmes lived and worked in New York these days, but Philadelphia would serve as Ben’s base of operations. It seemed the safer, less scrutinized bet. If to buy a plane ticket was to date-stamp his life, he might as well date-stamp a false address.

  As much as possible, Ben had been careful thus far to leave no tracks. Over the past weeks, using a handful of library computer terminals across the San Fernando Valley, he’d done his initial intelligence gathering, careful always to limit each search to four or five queries. He knew the masters of the Internet could draw any signal out of the noise once they knew what they were looking for, and the churning attentions of the government’s Web surveillance program were never at rest. Once the Mission was completed, a hundred “Michael Holmes” searches conducted at the Pasadena Library would most certainly ring a bell in one of those mirrored office buildings in suburban Virginia, piquing the interest of some Mountain Dew–swilling twenty-five-year-old with a top secret security clearance. The last thing Ben wanted was to attract the attention of those mole people, and thus he’d labored to bury his pattern as deeply as possible.

  As such, his information was partial at best. He had some rough idea of Holmes’s current habits, but nothing precise. He knew that Holmes currently commuted every morning from his mansion somewhere on Long Island to his new offices in midtown Manhattan, and that must mean he drove along the Long Island Expressway at least twice a day. Considering his aversion to eating in restaurants or attending parties or even going to the movies, one could surmise he lived almost wholly inside this narrow pipeline. Thus, Ben’s first objective was to map Holmes’s pipeline.

  Exiting the airport, he immediately used his debit card for a cab—Ding! Here I am, it said—and he used it again to pay for a hotel room downtown. Ding! He made a few more purchases with his card—Ding, ding, ding—laying out a plausible binge of provisioning for a day of vanilla tourism. Water. Newspaper. Walking map. The hotel room he got was adequately clean, which was all that mattered, but he didn’t stay long enough to settle in. Hitching a small backpack over his shoulder, he walked directly to the bus station in Chinatown and bought a ticket on the Dragon bus—the transport line connecting Chinatown to Chinatown along the Eastern Seaboard—paying cash for a ticket to Manhattan.

  Nothing dinged. No one in the world—not his own sister or father, not a single caffeine-addled government mole person—knew this transaction had occurred. He wondered, folding his ticket in his breast pocket, just how long the powers that be would allow cash money to exist. Surely not much longer. It was too clean, too anonymous. It allowed for far too much unsupervised spending. Waiting for the bus to board, he struggled to remember a world without the incessant, compulsory, electronic watermarking, but already he found it was almost impossible to recall. What a world that must have been. A world of such fantastical freedom and opportunity for invention. People hadn’t even realized how free they were. The freedom had only become visible as it vanished in the rearview mirror.

  The Dragon bus ride was typically Third World, marred by a broken toilet that leaked powerful shit fumes into the cabin, forcing Ben to use his sweatshirt as a gas mask. Breathing through the fabric, staring out the window at the tumbling roadside landscape, a collage of ruined warehouses, choked streams, and battered fences, he tried, as he often did, to imagine what this place had once been. Before Jamestown, before Plymouth Rock, when the Iroquois and Onondagas wandered the land, what had it been? Out West, at least, a person could still squint out the vague silhouette of what God had made. But here, along Interstate 95, even the silhouette was gone, to the point where Ben couldn’t feel the spirit of the earth at all.

  The industrial ruins got only more putrid as the bus approached New York City, but then, after a switchback down to the river slough, the Holland Tunnel sucked them in, and they zoomed through the incredible tube, emerging on the other side into a living, breathing, heart-pounding city.

  Chinatown was suddenly all around him, the streets thick with people, people walking their kids, people selling bedazzled T-shirts and bootleg Fendi bags, people streaming around honking cars, a city alive with everything that a city should be alive with. The Dragon bus bellowed down Canal, and here was the eternal ghetto of America. Tenements with iron fire escapes. Graffitied trucks double-parked. Di
rty ice cubes melting into the gutter. And everywhere throngs of dreaming human beings, a docile, corn-fed crowd no longer. Ben could almost feel the ghosts of his ancestors entering his body. He could hear the yelps of the Yiddish boys and girls under the twisting laundry lines, smell the boiling chickens in their iron pots, and hear ever so faintly the clatter of mule hooves on the cobblestones. God, he loved this ghetto, the ghetto not only of his people but of all the incoming tribes. For every generation, the same Hudson light had revealed America. Breathe this air and you are American. Feel this sun and you are American.

  Debarking under the Manhattan Bridge, Ben found himself on a Sesame Street block of dented garbage cans and laughing Puerto Ricans, amazed to think how excruciatingly pure that Hudson light had once been. He paused and leaned against a smutty brick wall, letting the light coat him. This was one of the great benefits of being on mission that he’d almost forgotten, this occasional, dumbstruck awe at the world’s reality. He remembered that bowl of mole in San Salvador, still possibly the most delicious taste that had touched his tongue, eaten an hour before offing the dwarven cartel boss. What a gift.

  He bought a pork bun and descended into the fecal-smelling subway tunnel, sliding his dollars into the machine for his Metro card. He ate the bun with his back to the tile, gnawing the bits of dough off the wax paper, watching his fellow passengers arranged across the platform, admiring their silent acceptance of each other’s strangeness. He observed a whole spectrum of small gestures and secret codes passing among them, an encyclopedia of odd clothing choices. He himself would never wear jeans embroidered with giant dragons on the pockets, for instance, but he was so glad that the young Laotian man found them to his liking. Soon the lights were kindling on the tracks, and then came the rushing, shattering noise of the train, and he shuffled through the doors with his fellow citizens and found a seat on the ass-polished plastic bench.

  At the Penn Station exit, he rose onto Seventh Avenue to discover the light was not as wondrous in this part of town. The big, inhuman glass-and-steel buildings didn’t have the same supple bounce as the tenement brick. The canyons were too wide, and the street racket was too impersonal and aggressively corporate. His day’s goal was Madison Square Garden, and it took him a few minutes to isolate the correct monolith. The building was hemmed in among the many similar boxes, but eventually he managed to locate the proper high-rise and count up to the proper floor. He eyeballed the strip of windows where Holmes spent his days. Where Holmes was possibly sitting or pissing or shitting right now. Not that it mattered. Already he knew he wasn’t going to find a decent sight line into the office itself.

  He stood on the sidewalk as the foot traffic from Penn Station parted around him. Even here, bits of old New York were visible. There were midcentury coffee shops and postcard stores. There were shoe shiners and shopkeepers in suspenders. So even here, a spark of love for his fellow man glowed in him. What could rouse these citizens to the same love he felt? What could shake them out of their all-American slumber?

  Only the slaughter of their common enemy, that was what.

  Again it struck him that the Mission was a terrible idea. A monstrous, insane notion. But insane compared with what? he thought. Compared with the continent-sized gyre of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean? Compared with a world of endless war?

  It would hurt nothing to walk the perimeter of the building looking for access points. He pushed through the front glass doors into the main lobby, keeping his brim low, and counted the turnstiles leading to the elevators. He noted the security guards at each gate, the laminated ID cards rising from pockets and purses, and the guards snapping digital photographs of every entering visitor. Handing out their temporary passes, the guards were probably generating more archived information per hour than the last ten thousand years of human existence combined.

  Ben exited the building and wandered to the mouth of the parking garage and peered into the darkness. He could make out rows of steel bars fortifying the walls and layers of antiterror barricades stacked along the traffic lanes. He strolled back to Seventh Avenue and scoped the surrounding buildings again, but the only option he could see was going to be underground, in the brief trot from limo to elevator, and he didn’t want to do some Jack Ruby number. He wanted to survive the Mission, not only because he enjoyed being alive but also because the Mission would succeed only if he remained at large, a looming threat to any multinational executive who transgressed his orders.

  He turned and walked down Sixth Avenue, already recalculating his strategy, seeking new signs. He passed an Internet café with a poster in the window of the great pyramids, an enduring object of civilization and slave labor and a site he had in fact visited with Michael Holmes. He remembered vividly how the camel driver had tried forcing his way into the car, seeking tourist dollars, and how Michael Holmes had claimed he was Canadian, as he sometimes did in the developing world. The man had cried, “Canada Dry!” just as Ben had tossed him onto the sidewalk in front of Pizza Hut. All day they’d imitated the camel driver. “Canada Dry!”

  It might be a sign, he thought. And, seeing as he was currently off the grid, with no one on the planet aware of his whereabouts, he decided the time for his next round of information gathering was at hand. He entered the bleak, mustard-colored storefront, paid the man at the counter, and selected a workstation, and for the next three hours plunged into the digital ether, casting through pages for any new, useful dirt on Michael Holmes.

  Ding, ding, ding. The bells were ringing, but no one knew to listen just yet. Holmes was fifty-eight years old. Caucasian. Six foot five. He’d grown up on a farm in northern Wisconsin, and he’d worked his way through college tending bar at the country-club dining hall. His tenure at Citibank was notable for its unprecedented profit margins in foreign currency exchange. His philanthropy included the ballet, the natural history museum, and children’s cancer research.

  But where did he live? Where did his car get serviced? What was his travel itinerary? The most important information was buried under a shale of useless Holmes-related trivia. Ben continued searching screens and discovered again the fact that Holmes lived on Long Island, but in which town? On which street? He peeled through screen after screen and was on the verge of giving up and going home, all the way home, when a gossamer thread pertaining to Holmes’s real estate dealings materialized. The thread dated to 2003 and consisted of a handful of postings by Long Island residents about their new, mega-connected neighbor. They wondered if he was going to chop down any trees. Or if he was going to decorate for Christmas. Then, via an attached link, Ben jumped to an even juicier page: an aerial image from the real estate company that had ostensibly sold Holmes his property.

  He examined the photo. It was a great mansion on the water, a Tudor thing, with a sprawling, many-chimneyed rooftop and many decks. A giant rear patio led down to a lawn big enough for full football scrimmages. The entire property was encircled by a thick wall clasped by a wrought-iron gate, and the nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away, front door to front door. The home appeared to be accessible only by way of a snaking road connecting to the township of Glen Cove.

  The satellite had passed over the property on a sunny winter day, so the trees were bare, the shadows long and sharp. The address was printed on the page, along with the real estate specs.

  Ben printed out the image. He cross-referenced the real estate photo with other bookmarked images, pulling up pictures of Holmes with his wife on a patio, Holmes grilling hot dogs. The images seemed to correspond. He was grilling hot dogs on a brick patio with gray, choppy water in the background. The article about Holmes’s sailing habit also made perfect sense in the context of this bloated seaside architecture.

  Assume this was Holmes’s domicile. Ben could see now that he had suspected all along that this was his true objective, but for some reason the knowledge hadn’t fully coalesced. Some part of him had refused to understand the simplicity of the Mission. He’d assumed New York City was
the appropriate theater, but the Mission had clarified itself once again, one clarification after another. He could tell by the wooded area across from the front gate, the spacious patches of grass, the copious air space, the pyramid poster, that this was what destiny had decreed.

  He printed out street maps and deleted his search history and wiped down the keyboard with a baby wipe from his neighbor’s unattended bag. Happily, there were no cameras in the store, and when he stepped back onto the street, he knew his image in the mind of the man at the desk was already fading.

  The Dragon bus delivered him back to Philadelphia by early evening, and he used his debit card again for dinner at Sofitel, a hotel restaurant where he treated himself to a bloody tenderloin steak. The coming days were taking a new shape. In the morning he’d use his debit card to lay more stations on his false trail, and then he’d buy himself a cheap car, cash. In this car, he would drive to Holmes’s Long Island neighborhood and begin his next phase of observation and deliberation. If the signs held, he would keep going. He would watch and wait, as he’d been trained, and return to Philadelphia as many times as necessary before making a final move. He would remain open to the ever-shifting winds of intuition.

  Walking back to his hotel, the protein of his meat infusing his blood with strength, he passed Independence Square and crossed the park housing the Liberty Bell. He paused at the glass temple where the bell lived and pressed his forehead to the pane, searching for the darkened shape inside. His breath silvered the glass, and he found himself staring at the dim outline of the cracked icon. A placard said that the Liberty Bell had been cast using the metal of a previous bell in England and that the name had come from a group of abolitionists. News to him.