by Allen Zadoff
Something is on the edge of my consciousness, trying to work its way in. Professor Silberstein was my father’s closest colleague.…
Why would he run when he saw me?
“Where are we going to sleep?” Howard says.
“You’re sitting in it,” I say.
“When you said we needed to find a lake, I was thinking you meant a lakeside motel.”
“That would be nice, but it’s too much of a risk,” I say.
“So we have to stay in the car?” Tanya says.
“You can sleep outside. But I’m guessing there will be fewer mosquitoes in the car.”
“I was hoping to sleep in a real bed,” Howard says. “It’s been a while.”
“Soon,” I say.
“Day after tomorrow,” Tanya says.
I toss Howard the key fob.
“It’s going to get a little chilly. Why don’t you pop the trunk and see what you can find.”
“Will do,” he says, happy to have something to do.
“What about me?” Tanya says.
“Help me collect some branches to put around the car.”
“Camouflage,” she says.
“You’re catching on,” I say.
We walk through the woods, scouting foliage large enough to use for cover.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you alone,” Tanya says. “I’m worried about Howard. He’s been through a lot.”
“I’m worried about him, too,” I say. “And about you, Tanya.”
She dismisses the idea with a frown. “I’m tougher than he is.”
I’m inclined to believe her.
“I need to know if you’re really his friend,” she says.
“Why would you doubt it?”
“I know you saved us from that house, and I know you want to find your father. But I don’t know anything about you. Not really.”
“You already know more than you should,” I say. “The fewer details you have, the safer you are.”
“You mean in case they catch us.”
I don’t answer. There’s no need.
I find a large branch covered with pine needles, and I begin to trace our path back to the road, erasing tire tracks and footprints as I go.
Tanya follows along with me, picking up branches along the way. She stops suddenly and waits for me to turn around.
She has a large branch in her hand that comes to a point on one end. It’s sharp enough to be used as a weapon.
“Look, I’m just going to say it. You’re being very nice to Howard because you need information from him now. But if I think you’re going to hurt him in the future, I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him.”
“That’s very noble of you,” I say. “To put yourself at risk for a stranger like that.”
“He’s not a stranger.”
“Really? You were strangers three days ago.”
“Things changed.”
“I’m not following.”
She clutches more tightly at the branch.
“They wanted to hurt me in that room,” she says.
“Hurt you how?”
“Sexually,” she says, her voice low. “It’s not like Howard could have prevented it. Not if they really wanted to. But he stood up to them and he put himself in danger for me, for a stranger as you say.”
It sounds like the Howard I know, foolish and courageous at the same time. It’s a terrible combination for a soldier, but it makes Howard a very special person.
“He protected me, and I’ll do the same for him,” Tanya says. “Do you understand now?”
“I do. And I respect that.”
My answer seems to satisfy her.
I gesture at the branch in her hands. “Now, do you mind pointing that spear at someone else?”
She smiles.
“I’m all Robinson Crusoe and stuff, huh?”
“I was thinking more Lord of the Flies,” I say with a smile.
She laughs and lowers the branch.
We continue backward to the car, erasing our tracks as we go.
When we get to the car, Howard is arranging a pile of items in the backseat. “I found a few things in the trunk,” he says.
It’s meager pickings. A large blanket, a couple of baseball caps, a few tools.
“The blanket smells like gasoline,” he says.
“Better than nothing,” Tanya says.
We settle inside the car for the night, the two of them together under the blanket in the backseat. I lower my window farther.
“Can we close that?” Tanya says. “It’s getting a little cold.”
“Have you smelled Howard? We need all the fresh air we can get in here.”
“I don’t smell any worse than you guys,” Howard says.
“You smell fine,” Tanya says. “Anyway, I stopped breathing out of my nose an hour ago.”
What I don’t say is that I need to be able to hear what’s going on outside, the telltale crunch of someone walking through the woods, the shuffle of feet sneaking up on us in the night.
Better for them not to know the possibilities, to sleep and heal, to feel safe for the time being, even if that safety is an illusion.
CHILDREN CRY IN THE FOREST.
I hear their voices in the woods around me, a high-pitched sound that grows louder until the cries become screams.
I open my eyes.
It’s nighttime. Crickets sing in the forest outside, their calls piercing the night.
I must have been dreaming. I ease open the car door and slip outside, letting the cool air bring me back to reality.
I head into the woods to relieve myself. I’m about twenty feet from the car when I feel my phone buzzing. This is not a dream.
It’s Mike.
“You are a terrible disappointment,” Mike says when I answer my phone.
He says it so quietly, it sounds like he’s inside my head.
“Is it me you’re disappointed in, or your driving?” I say.
“It takes a lot of courage to joke when you’re this close to death.”
My senses are on full alert, monitoring the forest around me. Is it possible that Mike is out there in the dark, watching me?
“I’ve been close to death plenty of times,” I say. “It doesn’t scare me.”
The neurosuppressor chip that The Program planted inside me throttles my fear, all but removing it from my emotional makeup. On the rare occasion fear tries to grab hold, the chip prevents it from gaining purchase.
I experienced part of a mission without that chip, and I didn’t like what it did to me or my performance. That’s why I put it back. The Program doesn’t know I tampered with their chip. In fact, I’m not supposed to be aware of its existence in the first place.
“Nothing can scare you,” Mike says. “I wish I could say the same for your friends. They were very scared.”
“Were?”
“Before I killed them,” he says.
Could Mike have killed Howard and Tanya in the time it took me to walk a few feet into the woods?
“I don’t think they’re dead,” I say. “I think you’re full of shit.”
“Would it make a difference if they were dead? Would it break your stupid allegiance to that kid? Tell me why you’re choosing strangers over your family.”
“I haven’t chosen,” I say. “Not yet.”
Mike is convinced of my motives, but I want him to question himself.
I can hear him breathing on the line. I imagine he’s strategizing now, trying to stay ahead of me. I seize the initiative.
“You could help me, Mike.”
“Help you how?”
“Tell me about my father.”
“I already told you what you wanted to know.”
“You told me that you killed him. Now tell me about the accident on the bridge.”
“It was staged after the fact. A convenient excuse.”
If that’s the case, why was Sergeant Manning killed just days before I got here?
There are no coincidences on missions. Not when The Program is involved.
“My parents are dead, but they weren’t killed in the accident. That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s right.”
“Where are they buried?” I say.
“Are you going to dig up the bodies? Christ, what’s it going to take with you? You need a DNA sample?”
“I need the truth.”
“You’re a confused individual,” Mike says. “I suggest you get rid of your friends’ bodies, then decide what you’re going to do next. Because you are alone out there, Zach. More alone than you’ve ever been.”
“I’m a hunter,” I say. “I’m used to being alone.”
I disconnect the call, and I take off running back to the car.
When I get there, I see Howard and Tanya slumped together in the backseat, under the blanket.
I throw open the door, and I place my hand on Howard’s chest, afraid I’ll find—
He’s not dead. He’s asleep. I feel the comforting rise and fall of his breathing.
He stirs, and his eyes open.
“Everything okay?” he says, his voice heavy with sleep.
“Now it is. Go back to sleep, buddy.”
He closes his eyes and snuggles into Tanya’s side, like a child cuddling with his mother. I watch the two of them as they sleep.
Feelings are dangerous. Feelings put me at risk.
I close the door, then get back into the front of the car and settle into the driver’s seat.
I look at the dark forest around us. I imagine our location on a map grid.
Mike is somewhere on that grid, tracking us.
Howard whispers from the backseat, breaking my concentration.
“Are you up, Zach?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for taking care of Tanya and me,” he says.
“Get some rest, okay?”
“Okay.”
Eventually his breathing deepens and he falls asleep. I listen to him snore for a while and then my eyes grow heavy and I drift off to sleep, too.
I’VE SLEPT TOO LONG.
By the time I awake, the birds are singing and the sun is bright. It feels like eight, and I wanted to be up by dawn. Perhaps I’ve underestimated the toll this mission has taken on me.
I call it a mission, but what mission is it?
Has Mike gone rogue and planned this entire operation without The Program’s knowledge? Or is there something else happening that I don’t comprehend yet?
I check the backseat. Tanya and Howard are still asleep, Howard curled into Tanya’s chest, her arm around his shoulders.
I step out of the car, leaving them to rest a little longer.
The forest is cool, rays of sunlight peeking through the canopy. I walk toward the lake, leaving the protection of the woods to stand on the open bank. I can see the sun shimmering across an expanse of blue-green water.
I hear a car door open and close behind me. I smell her before she arrives, a sweet, warm scent carried by the wind. She smells good for someone who slept in a car overnight.
“Morning,” Tanya says, and she comes down to stand next to me. “It’s nice to have a minute to breathe.”
The two of us look out over the lake, her smell mingling with the scent of water and pine.
“Thanks for talking to me last night,” she says. “That meant a lot.”
“Sure,” I say.
I glance over to find her looking at me with a strange expression on her face. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.
She likes me.
At least I think she does. Women are strange. They share personal things with you, and then they feel closer to you, even though you’ve said almost nothing in return.
A bird takes off from the lake, skimming the water.
“The lake is beautiful,” she says. She reaches out and takes my hand.
Our fingers intertwine as if we’ve done this a hundred times before. Her hand feels good in mine.
The car door slams behind us. I quickly pull my hand away from hers.
Howard shuffles down to the lake, rubbing his eyes. He stops when he sees us, staring for a long moment. Then his look turns into one of recognition.
“Your name was Ben when I first met you,” he says.
“Right,” I say.
“That was in New York. But you had a different name when we were in New Hampshire. You called yourself Daniel.”
“Yes.”
“At the diner you said you were Zach. Is that your real name?”
“It is.”
Howard smiles.
“I remember you,” he says.
A NIGHT’S SLEEP HAS DONE WONDERS FOR HIM.
Howard’s eyes are clearer, his demeanor completely different from what it was yesterday at the diner. He kneels by the lake and splashes water on his face.
“I remember calling you from the hotel room in Manchester.”
“You told me you discovered some information about my father. The last thing you said was that The Program had contacted him.”
“That’s right!” he says, his eyes widening. “There was communication between The Program and your father. But it was backward, as if your father had been initiating, and The Program was responding.”
I glance at Tanya. She’s following the conversation.
Should I send her away?
If I allow her to hear this, I’m putting her in grave danger. On the other hand, she was already a prisoner of The Program. How much more danger can she be in?
I say, “What was my father talking with them about, Howard?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Because you don’t remember?”
“Because I didn’t get a chance to sort through the data. There was a string of secure e-mails. I could follow the chain of communication, who initiated and who replied, but the contents were encoded. I downloaded everything to my laptop so I could spend some time decoding them later. Unfortunately, later didn’t arrive. The Program did. And you know what happened after that.”
“So the data we need is on your computer.”
“Right. And they have my computer.”
“They have it, but they haven’t been able to crack your encryption software, so they don’t know what you have.”
“That’s awesome,” he says. “I wish I had installed a booby trap so it would blow up in their faces.”
“Did they have your computer at the holding house?”
“I don’t think so,” Howard says. “They never brought it into the room to try to force me to log in. That would have been the smart thing to do. Which means they probably sent it to a lab.”
I wonder where computers would be sent and how I might access them. I try to imagine some scenario in which we retrieve Howard’s laptop, but I don’t know the location of any Program facilities, and it’s not like I can ask Mike to bring it to us.
“I think we’re out of luck getting the computer back,” I say.
Howard sighs. “I’m sorry, Zach. I blew it.”
“Not your fault,” I say.
“I’m not following this,” Tanya interrupts. “Your father worked with the people who kidnapped us?”
“There’s reason to believe so,” I say, “but I need real evidence. Howard, what did they ask you about at the house?”
“They wanted to know about the chip,” he says, and he points at my chest, the location of the neurosuppressor that removes my fear.
I think of Howard on my last mission, walking into the bathroom to find me with a knife in my hands, my body covered with self-inflicted wounds as I searched for a chip I wasn’t sure existed.
“Did you tell them you knew about the chip?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “I thought it was better not to discuss you at all.”
“Good job. Anything else I need to know?”
Howard struggles with the question but doesn’t come up with anything.
“You t
old me they were asking you about a facility of some kind,” Tanya says, trying to help him remember.
“That’s right!” Howard says. “They wanted to know about a research facility. I kept telling them I had no idea what they were talking about, but they didn’t believe me. They wanted to know if you’d said anything about it.”
A research facility.
The secretary at the University of Rochester said the psych department had a special research facility downstate.
“Did they mention Corning by any chance?”
Howard’s eyes light up. “Corning. Yes! They asked me if I’d been there.”
One weekend after my twelfth birthday, my father drove me to Corning from Rochester. He said he’d be working there in the future, but I couldn’t tell my mother that he was showing me the place or we’d both be in trouble.
“Your mother doesn’t understand that things are getting better,” he said to me.
“Better how?”
“More money, more opportunities to do the things I love.”
“Why doesn’t she understand?”
“She’s afraid,” my father said. “She doesn’t want anything to change.”
“I don’t want anything to change, either.”
“My father took me to Corning once,” I say. “A long time ago.”
That was a short time before Mike came into my life and things changed forever.
The memory gives me an idea.
“Howard, what would it take to get into the computer again?”
“My computer?”
“No, The Program’s computer.”
“You mean the server. They have the most complex security protocol I’ve ever seen. I’d need a week in a secure location with all my equipment. Then maybe I could hack through their firewall.”
“What if I could get you access directly into the server?”
“If you can get me in, I can retrace my steps. If I get a little time, I might be able to retrieve the information, and we could sort through it together.”
“All right, then,” I say. “I have a plan.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the white security badge I took from Silberstein’s jacket.
I pass it to Howard. He flips it back and forth in his hand.
