by PJ Manney
She pulled into a parking spot across the street. He began to get out of the car.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“What’s your problem, lady? If you couldn’t recognize me, do you think a bunch of overworked nurses would?”
“You’re wearing a hospital gown. And socks. And you look like a truck hit you.”
He sagged back in his seat.
In a gentler voice, she said, “I’ll go in and report back. Lie down.”
Peter arranged himself as best he could over the floor hump and foot wells until Talia returned. But she started the car and pulled into traffic as though he didn’t exist.
After a few miles, he sat up. “So . . . ?” Her silence made him nauseous. “You’ve got to tell me, Talia. Please.”
She refused to look at his reflection in her rearview mirror. After a while, she spoke.
“I spoke to a Mrs. Manela and told her I was a friend of the Bernhardts and heard about the tragedy. Mrs. Manela agreed it was all very sad and assumed since I was there, I hadn’t heard about your father. She said the executor of the Bernhardt estate came to tell old Mr. Bernhardt that his son had died and his wife was missing, presumed dead, and that the executor would take care of him from now on. They knew each other, so she didn’t think much about it. No one thought he’d understand, but the news hit your father hard. Mrs. Manela spent most of that day and night with him, since he couldn’t stop crying. He went into cardiac arrest around 3:20 a.m. They tried to save him, but he was dead before they got him in the ambulance.”
Pop’s heart had literally broken. How could he have understood? Had everyone, including Peter, misdiagnosed the extent of his illness? And he had let it happen because he trusted his best friend so much, he left his own father to Carter’s care. Why didn’t Carter just let him live the rest of his life in ignorance? Did he want Paul to die?
Or maybe Carter had meant to kill Paul and eradicate the Bernhardts for good. But it was Peter’s fault. He had asked Carter to take care of his family if the worst happened to him. And the worst had. And Carter had done his worst.
It was all his fault. Spindly arms wrapped around bony ribs as he rocked in the backseat.
“She also never believed you were a terrorist,” Talia continued. “You were too kind and sensible a young man for that.”
After rocking for another minute, he said, “Everyone I love is dead . . . I should have died on the yacht . . .”
“You can’t think like that. It’ll destroy you,” she said quietly.
He wasn’t listening. His head ached from overload.
“Peter, who came to see your father?”
“Carter Potsdam. Our executor. And our executioner. I want. To find. The motherfucker. And kill him. Right now!” Spittle and tears flew from his face. The same uncontainable rage that had gripped him after Amanda’s miscarriage overtook him again. All he knew is he wanted to kill, or be killed. Nothing else mattered.
“That’s it,” said Talia. She flipped her turn signal, changed lanes to the right, pulling off on the freeway’s shoulder, and threw the Mustang into park. She twisted around to confront him. “You can get out right here and let an eighteen-wheeler nail you for all I care. Otherwise, the only place you’re going is home to bed. Then we’ll figure out what to do. You’re in no position to do anything to Carter Potsdam. You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
But where was home? Peter Bernhardt not only didn’t have a home, he didn’t exist anymore.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Battered, orphaned, widowed, homeless, penniless, and anonymous, Peter needed an afterlife. Talia took him to a small apartment on Masonic Avenue in the Haight in San Francisco, one block from the celebrated intersection of Haight and Ashbury. The famous neighborhood was ground zero for the Summer of Love in 1967 and its hippie movement and drug culture. But a combination of dereliction and gentrification over the last two decades had thrown upper-class yuppies cheek to jowl with ’60s holdouts and the homeless. The Haight did less sheltering of revolution these days than it did the marketing and selling of it.
He looked at the building. The first floor was brick, with arched windows and an arched front door. Above that, the top two floors were classic San Francisco. Queen Anne-styled wood, each floor with four sets of bay windows facing the street. It was painted a sickly flesh tone, with rust-and-blue-colored trim.
“Should I wait for you to bring me clothes?” he asked.
“This is the Haight. You’re part of the scenery.”
He unfolded himself from the backseat and tried to stand, but his knees buckled under him. He fell on the car roof for support.
Talia looked scared. “Jesus, I’ve never seen anyone so pale. Lean on me.”
The front door had a dozen buttons to buzz apartments, but the apartments didn’t have names on them.
“Is it empty?” he asked.
“Nah. People here like their privacy. When they aren’t baring their souls to the world.”
Of course, she lived on the top floor, only accessible by stairs. All Peter could think of was the song from that Christmas perennial, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, “Put One Foot in Front of the Other.” When he started to hum it to take his mind off the pain, she laughed. He rumbled like a tone-deaf Tom Waits.
She opened her door, and one of her many ancient cell phones rang. He staggered to an armchair and collapsed into it.
She flicked it open. “Yeah . . . Look, Steve, I’m sorry, but . . . No . . . Yes . . . No, he’s okay . . . I promise I’ll tell you everything . . . He’s not gonna die on my watch . . . Fuck you! . . . He’d be dead now if he . . . terminate McKinley . . . Make sure you find all the records and match them . . . And I’ll need all his meds . . .”
They bickered like lovers. Or ex-lovers. Peter raised his hand. “Ask for D-cycloserine.”
“He wants D-cycloserine, too . . . under Angie’s at CVS . . . Bye.” She sighed and closed the phone. “What’s D-cycloserine?”
“Chronic pain doesn’t just come from physical trauma. It’s also from emotional memory of pain. We have chronic pain because we remember it. D-cycloserine wipes out the emotional part of my pain memory so I won’t have pain for the rest of my life.”
“Handy.” She yanked cushions off the living room sofa to pull out the convertible bed inside.
“Why is Steve Carbone helping me?”
“He owes me favors.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“First sleep. Then the third degree.” She grabbed sheets and blankets and made up the sofa bed. “It’s a comfortable mattress. The bathroom’s over there.” She rummaged in the kitchen and came back with a box of crackers, peanut butter, a knife, and a plate. “This’ll help. The cupboard’s pretty bare, but anything you can stomach, feel free to eat. Now lie down and rest. I’m going to deal with the car and get supplies. You’re going to be here for a while.”
He just nodded, afraid to speak or he’d blurt out his deepest fear: If she left him and didn’t come back, he’d be the most alone person in the world.
Face pinched with concern, she grabbed her bag and left.
It was very quiet, which only made his mind create thoughts to fill the emptiness. Horrible thoughts. About dying wives and fathers. He had to concentrate on something outside his head or he’d go insane.
He struggled to stand and tottered to the bathroom. There was a full-length mirror behind the door. He took off the raincoat, the cardigan, the hospital gown, and the grippy socks to appraise his emaciated, scarred, and ravaged body for the first time. Enormous skin graft scars surrounding cloned skin ran down his right leg and another circled his midsection. Incision and plug scars where bullets had been removed peppered his legs, arm, and side. Today he’d added a new layer of cuts and abraded skin. There was no fat and little muscle. He was all sinew, bone, and scar tissue, like a death camp survivor welcoming the Allies at the gates of Auschwitz.
All he had left was th
is ruined body. And his mind. And somewhere, Talia claimed she had his Cortex 2.0. He still felt fuzzy without it, like mental connections were severed from some brain injury. Even as a poor kid, he had never felt this deprived and beholden. The only thing more rock bottom was death. But he had a choice. Die. Or do something about it. He wondered what Amanda would want him to do. Amanda . . . she was dead . . . The thought obliterated everything else in his brain, memory chip and all. He curled up on the bathroom mat and wept, and eventually passed out.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Peter woke up, still nude, tucked into sheets and blankets on the sofa bed. Talia was cooking in her tiny kitchen.
“Smells good,” he croaked.
“Thanks. Ready in a few minutes.”
“How’d you get me in bed?”
“You don’t remember me helping you? You’re a lot easier to maneuver than three months ago.”
“Sorry. I passed out from the sight of me.”
“You needed it. It’s tomorrow. You slept over twenty-four hours.”
“Oh shit . . . sorry . . .”
“No apologies.” She plated some penne with meatballs and tomato sauce with generous amounts of garlic and basil. “I guarantee this is better than hospital slop.”
A white terry cloth robe was left at the foot of his bed. As he maneuvered it around himself under the sheets, he saw she’d cleaned all the small wounds from his escape and bandaged them. His modesty was irrational, since she had handled his naked body yesterday, but he needed to preserve a little dignity. He stood with the robe wrapped and tied, but the rush of blood to his feet made him stagger.
“Whoa!” She caught and gently guided him to a small table with two chairs. He pounced on the pasta.
“This is awesome . . .” he said with his mouth full. “In some alternate universe, you’ve got a gaggle of fat, happy kids and a very satisfied husband.”
Her mouth smiled, but her eyes were sad. He had a talent for hitting buttons he didn’t know she had.
Peter changed the subject. “You know everything about me and I know squat about you.” He shoveled another forkful.
“Eat slow. You’ll make yourself sick.”
“Wrong answer,” although he did take time to chew.
“You want to know why you?”
“Start there.”
“You were the next wonder boy. You didn’t have one—you thought up two revolutionary technologies. They wanted them, so they went after you with every weapon at their disposal.”
He remembered seeing Lobo in the camp amphitheater and the free associations that he couldn’t suppress. “Do you think they were behind 10/26?”
“Good question. There’s some connection. There are no coincidences with the club. And you’re the most important catch I’ve seen. Brant and his gang were determined to own it and you. I tried to stop you, but I failed, because I . . . I realized you weren’t like them, and I felt bad for you . . . So I didn’t do everything I could to stop you.”
“How did you even know to follow me?”
“I use my job as a business journalist to find out who the next club members are likely to be. You were obvious, because you were a genius. And damaged goods they could manipulate.”
He didn’t believe her. Only club members knew he was a club target. “What would have happened if I had followed you upstairs at the Hay-Adams?”
“Usually blackmail. Most guys cooperate if I threaten that the media will receive high-def footage of them sodomized by a dominatrix. And loving it.”
He was skeptical she could pull that off.
“But you were surrounded like the president,” she continued. “Bodies and bugs everywhere. Only you couldn’t see them. The mark never does.”
“So is the club a complete sham?”
“No. It started for all the reasons they say. But it’s morphed since the creation of the military-industrial-congressional complex after World War II into something so . . . callous . . . evil . . . it’s hard to get your head around.”
“Congressional?”
“That’s what Eisenhower meant to say in his farewell speech when he tried to warn everyone about how the country was changing for the worse. By including Congress, he was acknowledging the corruption of the budget process and their creation of a permanent war economy. The Phoenix Club got a hold of his final draft and made him take out the word. Must’ve had something pretty big on him to make an exiting president and war hero afraid enough to agree.”
Dulles’s face hovered above Peter’s plate while the sauce looked like gore on the Persian carpet . . . He shook his head to rid himself of the visions.
“I know, scary,” she continued. “How many people today in any position of real power can honestly compare themselves in motivation, ethics, or accomplishment to the Founding Fathers, who created the club? Zero. Those guys were an amazing bunch of human beings. We’ve only seen a handful of leaders in this country since then who deserved to kiss their dirty boots. I guess the founders didn’t have a lot of power to begin with, so with all their intelligence and idealism, they somehow achieved the impossible—a successful revolution and a relatively painless transition to a democratic republic. But the club changed lockstep with the times. The later power mongers perverted the vision.”
She still wasn’t telling him what he needed to know. “Are you part of some underground movement?”
“Not like you think. There’s no organization or group. I’m really on my own, but there are a couple dozen people I’ve discovered over the years who are sympathetic and helpful, with their own axes to grind against the club. Or just like to get paid well. Mercenaries have their uses, like dragging initiation survivors out of sea caves. But they’ve all been loyal so far, and that’s what counts.”
“But why do all this? What’d the club do to you?”
Talia got up, collected the dirty plates, and took them into the kitchen. “I . . . have reasons. And they’re just as valid as yours. But they don’t involve you.”
“I disagree. I need to know everything. It all involves me now, and the more I know, the better I can plan. For instance, I don’t think Talia Brooks is your real name, any more than Angie Sternwood was. What is it really?”
“I’m good at changing identities,” she admitted.
“But you’re avoiding my questions. Big Gov and Big Biz don’t like it when you screw with their antiprivacy matrix. How’d you swing it?”
“Not now. Soon. Now lie down.”
“You’ve got to tell me some time.” He stood, feeling slightly less like a beetle crushed under a boot heel, and shuffled back to bed.
She might talk a good game, but Talia could also be a cog in the club’s elaborate plan to co-opt him again. Or she might have her own agenda, working for people he didn’t know and couldn’t trust. Like how did she and Dulles fit? Was she connected to 10/26? Or was that yet another misdirection from the club? What he didn’t know could hurt him. Very badly. Like it had already.
If what little she said was true, something terrible had happened to Talia. So terrible, she would spend the rest of her life trying to avenge the wrong. But she only stuck the club with pins, removing a few from their grasp. The club still ran the country. They still plotted. They still killed. If he joined her one-woman campaign and made it an army of two, what could they accomplish?
“So now what?” he asked.
“I have friends who create identities. We can move you to Buenos Aires. Johannesburg. Kuala Lumpur. Pick any distant place and make a fresh start.”
He imagined it for a moment: An engineer? In Lima? Drinking coffee in a plaza café, always looking over his shoulder. Waiting for the bullet. And he’d still be him. With the same memories. The same rage. And the same responsibility . . .
And what was in it for her? Was this charity? Or something else?
“I can’t. The club’s got big plans for my tech,” he told her. “They’re already using the Hippo 2.0 and Cortex 2.0 for torture, br
ainwashing. And my bots . . . Carter said Chang worked for the terrorists and the club. That means my bots are a weapon. This is my fault. And I have to stop them.”
“Maybe they did it already?”
“I doubt it. Something big would have changed. What I know of their plan so far was very methodical, patient. It took years. And they assumed if I passed the final initiation, I’d help them. It was underway by the time I launched Biogineers. It might still take years to complete. The only way to find out is to get back inside . . .”
“You mean sneak in?”
“No. Join.”
She paused at the sink, but said nothing.
“If you’re so good with new identities, you can help me create a new person, completely airtight, with all the right hooks loaded with tasty worms to bait them. They’d reel me in again. I know it. They’re like an armored tank. You shoot bullets at it all you want and get nowhere, but if you get close enough to lift the hatch, all you need is a single grenade inside and . . . total annihilation. That’s what I’ve got to do.”
“You’re going to blow up the club?”
“Figuratively. But if I survive, I will personally kill each of the fucking bastards that pretended they were my friends and destroyed me . . . If I don’t get myself killed, by the time I’m done with the Phoenix Club, they’ll be rewriting the history books.”
She looked afraid as she wiped her hands on a dishtowel. Taking it with her, she sat on the edge of his bed.
“I’ve known these men for years. They’re nothing more than con artists with power. They pretend to be one thing, while robbing you blind. Except instead of taking your wallet or granny’s retirement fund, they fleece entire countries. To take down a grifter, you have to be a grifter, because hustlers are suckers for hustlers. Their egos are so puffed up, and they think they’re so slick, they’re blind to their own spin thrown back at them. So you’ve got to be a better con than they are. You think you’re capable of that?”
