Simon Sees

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “And you were willing to risk ruining all that by administering the remaining injections,” Emily suggested.

  “That, Agent LaGrange, is why I was terminated. Once I saw the person emerging, the real Simon Lynch, with all his pain and his possibilities, I told Warren we couldn’t just stop. It wasn’t ethical.”

  “That line hasn’t stopped the worst part of our government from doing whatever the hell it wanted,” Emily said.

  “Warren falls in with those people,” Lead said. “Simon is validation to him. The Simon that he’s created.”

  Half a trillion dollars. That was more than a rounding error, Emily knew. It was an investment.

  “What is Simon being used for?”

  Leah explained the basics of the process, every bit of information she shared seeming to stoke a quiet anger in Emily.

  “Jesus Christ,” Emily said. “You people were pimping him out.”

  The accusation stung, but Leah didn’t hold with it as a personal insult. It was aimed at the collective.

  “Warren said our government used access to a ‘special asset’ as a bargaining chip in negotiations with other countries,” Leah shared.

  Emily looked away from the woman, out the window to the wintry neighborhood. She’d come hoping that Leah Poole might be some help in understanding Simon’s situation. Exposing herself to great risk, the woman had done precisely that, though Emily now had trouble reconciling this new knowledge with any way to actually help the man who seemed more prisoner than patient.

  “So this is his life from now on?” Emily asked.

  Leah nodded, a wash of emotion rising in her gaze. “As long as they maintain the protocol, yes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He will require a repeat of the fifty-first injection every two weeks,” Leah explained.

  “Otherwise he goes back to the old Simon Lynch?”

  “No,” Leah said. “There’s no turning back from what the protocol started. His neurologic functions may depend on a maintenance injection. That was Warren’s plan—to repeat the fifty-first dose every two weeks.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t get that?”

  Leah shrugged. “No one knows. That was another reason why I pushed to complete the protocol. If we’d done that, he’d be free. Forever.”

  She’d shared much about Simon, and some about the man administering the protocol, but there was another who’d been missed in the discussion, Emily realized.

  “What about General Vance?” Emily asked. “Would she—”

  Leah shook her head before her visitor ever finished the question. “Simon is Warren’s project. Everything else is hers. There’s no looking to her for help, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “It was,” Emily confirmed.

  “She has a soul, I’m sure,” Leah said. “But she sold it to the gods of bureaucracy long ago. She has a mandate, and she’s delivering on it. I actually think she despised Agent Jefferson more than Warren, especially after that memo he wrote.”

  “What memo?”

  “I never read it,” Leah said. “But I heard Warren and General Vance talking about it through his office door. To say it was a heated discussion would be putting it mildly.”

  “Could you tell what they were upset about?”

  “Agent Jefferson had apparently sent a memo out of channels to the FBI,” Leah explained. “They were going back and forth about why Warren had let him be alone with Simon, and that Jefferson’s memo was scathing. Stuff about Simon’s treatment, what he was being used for.”

  Emily absorbed what she was being told, though it made little sense. There’d been no mention of any memo Jefferson had written. That would be the sort of information she could have expected from Aguirre-Welsh or Lomax, and almost certainly in the files she’d pored over. Apparently, though, she’d missed something.

  “Do you remember how long ago it was that there was talk of this memo?”

  Leah let her gaze drift for a moment as she thought. “Eight months? I don’t think a year. Somewhere in that range.”

  Emily nodded. She’d wondered just a few minutes earlier what she was going to take away from this meeting, one fated by words whispered into her ear by Simon Lynch. Now, she had something tangible, though it was less an answer than another question in and of itself.

  She had to find this memo and see what Jefferson had written about.

  “Thank you, Leah,” Emily said, standing.

  Leah stood, too, and accepted the gratitude with a nod. “I hope you’re able to help Simon. I wanted to, but…”

  “Best to keep this all quiet,” Emily reminded the woman.

  “It won’t stay that way,” Leah told her. “If you find something, you’re going to act on it. I’m not wrong about that, am I?”

  “No,” Emily confirmed. “You’re not.”

  Leah considered what that meant, for both Emily LaGrange, and for herself.

  “I’ll back you up,” Leah said. “If you find enough to go public, I’ll add my voice to yours.”

  The woman was openly saying that she would risk a prison sentence for the sake of a single man, a single human being, locked away in a government facility somewhere.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Emily said.

  “Good luck, Agent LaGrange,” Leah said. “I’m afraid you’re going to need it.”

  Emily didn’t react to the stark end of their conversation. She didn’t much believe in luck, but, if it existed, she would accept any amount of it that came her way.

  * * *

  He hadn’t seen the sun in four thousand six hundred and eighty-two days.

  Simon Lynch stood at the wall of his room and put his palm against the smooth, cool concrete surface. Beyond it, he believed, was the world. The real world with things like sunlight and wind and rain and cars.

  And people.

  “Simon…”

  He turned away from the wall and looked to the door. Gary stood on the other side, his face visible through the window set into the barrier. His hand rested on the intercom button just outside, letting his voice filter in electronically.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Simon thought for a moment, in ways he had never been able to think almost the entirety of his life, and then shook his head. “No.”

  Gary seemed taken aback by the reply. He glanced around, hoping someone else was nearby to help him with the exchange, but there was no one other than the guards, and they did not speak to him. Only the doctors and their technicians were allowed to address Simon. And the liaison.

  It was no longer Art. Art was dead. Somehow. Simon wondered if he’d had a heart attack, considering the past medical issues he’d had, all things Art had shared during their many visits. Small talk, it was called. Chit chat that was decidedly one-sided.

  “Simon, you need to sleep,” Gary told him. “You have more sessions set up in six hours.”

  Sessions…

  That was what they were called. To Simon, they were mining expeditions. Fishing excursions. Everyone was seeking something as they pricked at his intellect with questions and challenges, hoping the right query would initiate a release of the information they sought.

  One thousand sixteen. That was the number of ‘sessions’ he’d participated in. All but twelve of them before he’d…changed. The recent ones were completed quickly. In his life before those, Dr. Michaels would often have to draw responses from him using communication strategies which, at times, worked.

  Other times, they did not, and Simon found himself unable to share the formulae and solutions which he saw clearly in his mind. Letting the same past his lips, or onto a sheet of paper using the pen he gripped, was sometimes impossible. Dr. Michaels would not express anger on those frequent occasions, but his frustration was apparent. It was easy for Simon as he now was able to draw upon those memories and see them for what they had been. For what this all had been.

  “I’m not a trained monkey,�
� Simon told Gary.

  The way the technician’s face turned pale told Simon that he’d used the expression correctly. Words and phrases he’d heard his entire life were squirrelled away in his brain. In parts of the wondrous hunk of grey matter where they’d been stored like nuts. Now, in this season, he could draw upon them. Call upon all the things he’d heard and seen and smelled and felt since he was a very small boy. These bits of everyday existence, which were commonplace for others, were new to him in their usage and implementation.

  “Simon…”

  “You’ve spoken fourteen thousand eight hundred and twelve words to me, Gary Emmett,” Simon said. “Not once have you said ‘hello’.”

  The technician’s face eased back at the accounting which had been made of his exchanges with their subject. Exchanges over years. That Simon’s brain had catalogued such things did not surprise Gary, but his ability to now express what had transpired inside was unsettling. It was as if he’d been staring at a magnificent statue in a museum, only to see it move.

  “You need to…”

  Simon turned away from the technician as he stumbled over his words. Over the script he’d been trained to use with him. Simple, straightforward instructions. ‘Needs’, to be precise. ‘You need to’ do this, or that.

  Now, though, he was not only thinking in those terms. Or feeling them. ‘Wants’ had crept into not only his lexicon, but into the fiber of his being.

  I want to see the sun. I want to see the moon.

  It would be dark outside now, Simon knew by the time. By the date he knew that the lunar body orbiting the earth would be at ninety-eight percent and waning, just a sliver of it blacked out by positional shadowing.

  I want to see outside. I want to be outside.

  But he knew enough that his wants meant little. Or nothing at all, especially to Dr. Michaels.

  ‘This is your home now,’ the doctor had told him when he’d first arrived and was guided to sit on his bed. Simon could easily recall the number of days ago that had been. The number of hours. Minutes. Seconds. But he did not. As he was able to appraise it now, it had simply been too long that this place had been called his home.

  He wanted out. He wanted to know what was out there for him.

  “I’m Simon Lynch,” he said to the wall. When he’d first felt the veils of his affliction parting after they’d given him the fifty-first injection, he’d been afraid. He’d felt unlike himself. The person he’d been seemed gone. Lost. But, despite that momentary terror, he realized now that nothing had been lost. Something had, in fact, been gained, in the form of a truer self than he’d ever known. “I’m Simon Lynch, and I want a real life.”

  Twenty

  Her flight from Albany to Minneapolis boarded in forty-five minutes. Emily LaGrange opened her laptop where she sat in the corner of the terminal and logged onto the FBI system using the Los Angeles SAC’s access once again.

  What the hell is in this memo?

  It still perplexed her why Jefferson would write an apparently critical report on Simon’s wellbeing, only to off himself months later. So little of his actions made sense as his life spun down toward its end. Emptying bank accounts. Erasing himself from the online world.

  She was letting herself drift off topic again. The pull was great to try to understand Art Jefferson, but her focus had to be on how any of it impacted Simon. If this memo still existed, there might be something in it that she could use to bring those that oversaw the man’s care under scrutiny by some entity which could not be ignored.

  ‘I’m the only hope he has…’

  Sanders and his supposed group was not such an entity. His motives were…unclear, at best. And his apparent hacking of her phone to surveil her added no points in his favor. At the moment, his importance to her was minimal. His claims could not be dismissed outright, but anything he’d said, or might say in the future, would have to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

  Somewhere, though, there had to be someone in an official capacity who could shine a light on Simon’s situation—if Emily could deliver the evidence to back up any claims. And Jefferson’s words might be a start in that direction.

  ‘I probably introduced myself to your class as Frankie…’

  She was a possibility. Emily could hand over to her what she learned. She’d been close to Jefferson, and was a respected member of the Bureau.

  But she was still Bureau.

  “You’re sidetracking again, Em,” she reminded herself quietly.

  She zeroed her attention on the deepest information she hadn’t perused yet. Things buried in files that were buried in files. A general search for ‘Lynch’ returned over three thousand documents, far too many for her to scan right there and then. Search for ‘memo’ yielded two results, both authored by Bureau investigators and related only to Jefferson’s suicide.

  It was turning out that what she was attempting wasn’t even akin to the needle in a haystack cliché. She didn’t even know where the haystack was.

  Wait…

  What if she was only accessing part of the haystack? Maybe just a small corner of it. If she expanded what she was searching…

  “Not just the Jefferson file,” Emily said.

  She backed out of the specific files she’d been granted access to, and those she’d chosen to breach without full authorization, and focused on the main data screen a SAC would use to search for information, for documents, held in the FBI master database. The search box sat empty. It gave her access to the entire haystack, but without the proper terms she would only receive the same useless results as before. She needed something to narrow the search. Something to filter out and zero in on.

  What would he have said?

  That question guided her thinking. He would have used Simon’s name. And his own name. But what else? What about that place would he have…

  “The name,” she said to herself, a possibility rising.

  What had Leah Poole called the facility? And General Vance when she’d greeted Emily.

  “The Ranch,” Emily said to herself.

  She added that to her search terms and pressed enter.

  * * *

  What is she doing?

  That question nagged at Sanders as he sat in his car outside his oncologist’s office and eyed the data logs showing on his laptop screen, and the image from the integrated webcam in Emily LaGrange’s computer. She was deep inside the Bureau’s database, digging. That was not what he needed her to do.

  He’d directed her to Rothchild, one of the last people Jefferson had engaged with. And whom he’d apparently trusted. In concert with the aging hacker, Sanders had hoped that Emily LaGrange would be able to fix on a map the location where Simon Lynch was being held. Instead, she’d taken whatever he’d shared and gone off on a trip to sit with a neuroscientist in New York.

  Leah Poole, Sanders had determined, was a black hole. Enough of her own information had been redacted from federal databases to make her noticeable. She had to be part of the project which held Simon in its grip, but whatever she had discussed with Emily hadn’t been captured by the agent’s cell phone. Nothing had since she’d met with Kirby Gant.

  He cleaned her phone…

  That was a given, and not entirely unexpected. If he’d warned her about the other intrusions available in her life, such as a compromised laptop computer, she wasn’t yet heeding any of those cautioning words. Thankfully.

  It gave Sanders no pleasure to intrude upon the woman’s life as he was. Or to use her for his own purposes. But it was necessary. Mr. Pritchard had always made that clear when it came to protecting extreme innocents. Methods and procedures which might be unseemly were sometimes required. Deceit was often a measure of safety which could not be discarded. His mentor had brought Jefferson into the initial operation to save Simon Lynch twenty years ago, and the man had resisted at first, just as Emily LaGrange had, and was still.

  But she was already running afoul of those rules which were supposed to
guide her involvement with Simon Lynch. In essence, she’d volunteered to serve what Sanders had conceived. Or she’d been drafted.

  Lynch is all that matters, Sanders reminded himself, much as he was certain that Mr. Pritchard had placed the savant’s wellbeing above Jefferson’s.

  Jefferson, though, had been attached to Simon Lynch at the hip. He was his protector. His guardian angel. That was fine…then. It would not be now. If Emily LaGrange was fancying herself as some savior, it would only end badly.

  In the next data that spilled onto his laptop’s screen, Sanders saw confirmation in that fear.

  “Dear God, no…”

  She wasn’t just digging randomly. She’d, somehow, found herself a target. The words of Art Jefferson himself.

  “The memo,” Sanders half whispered in the solitude of his car. “She knows about the memo.”

  He coughed, the spasm joined by a deep pain beneath his lowest ribs. The doctors had told him to expect an increase in discomfort, and the pills they’d prescribed would only do so much, he knew. But he’d never filled the prescription. Anything that would have dulled his mind he’d set aside as a remedy months ago. He needed clarity, total focus.

  ‘I’m ending all treatment.’

  His doctor had received that decision with a shake of his head just thirty minutes ago. There’d been some attempt at convincing his patient to apply for clinical trials. Assurances that new medicines were being developed every day.

  Ezekiel Sanders, though, had made up his mind. He’d witnessed both his father and grandfather suffer through the treatments available in their time, and he didn’t want to endure what they had in the time he had left. He wanted those precious months, or weeks, or days to serve some purpose. A higher purpose than simply prolonging his own waning time on earth.

  Now, though, making any of that a reality was going to be immeasurably more difficult.

  Emily LaGrange, he was realizing, could not be manipulated to give him what he wanted. Not directly, nor easily. She was going to have to walk her own path to reach the decision to help him. If she came to that conclusion at all.