The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He slid his wedding band off and eyed the house through it, telescope style. A succinct composition of all he’d allowed to get fucked up. His hand felt naked without the ring, so he put it back on.

  He rang the doorbell twice. No answer. He’d sneaked away from Commission duties to come here. The empty house confronted him with just how much he missed his wife and how large a hole her absence left. He was angry with himself for not taking more care to make sure she was home.

  He entered through the garage and wandered through the house, not quite sure what he was looking for. He stared at Dray’s bottles arrayed on the counter of the master bathroom. Sitting on their bed, he picked up her pillow and inhaled her scent—lotion and hair conditioner. He painted over the new drywall he’d patched into the living room walls. He found his hammer in the garage and fixed the house number out front, swinging the 9 back into proper position and tapping the nail lightly until it came flush with the metal. When he returned to the kitchen, his head was buzzing.

  He left Dray a Post-it on the fridge saying he loved her. He was almost to the door when he turned around and left another on the bathroom mirror telling her the same thing.

  18

  “MY NAME IS Jed. Using my full name, Jedediah, an anti-quated name, is an attempt by the government-controlled leftist media to distance me further from the average American, to make me a zealot.” On the cluster of closed-circuit TVs suspended in KCOM’s ground-floor window, seventeen televised Jed Lanes folded seventeen sets of hands and leaned back in seventeen plush interviewee chairs. An eighteenth screen reflected back the crowd itself, an array of irate and perversely curious faces.

  Rolling his bike before him to split the crowd, Tim shouldered his way through the onlookers and picketers glued to the building’s immense front window. Melissa Yueh had Lane on set upstairs and was warming him up to go live inside the half hour. As a publicity stunt, KCOM programmers had elected to air the pre-interview banter on a closed-circuit network to the crowds gathered outside the building. Another link in the chain trailing back to the limited broadcast of Tim McVeigh’s execution.

  The chants had only just quieted down, so Lane’s words could be heard, but disdain and outrage emanated from the crowd like heat. LAPD kept up a strong but unintimidating presence, the dark blue uniforms interspersed among the viewers and protesters at regular intervals. Just inside the lobby, KCOM security guards were checking IDs closely before moving visitors and employees through two airport-style metal detectors.

  The minuscule detonator was wedged up beneath Tim’s bike seat. He had stuck nine flat magnets to the side of the chain stay and secured a tubular remote device the size of a lighter to the right pedal’s toe clip, disguised as a reflector. In addition to wearing eyeglasses, he’d let his scruff grow into a short beard and mustache, and he’d wedged a piece of Big Red at the gum line behind his bottom lip to alter the shape of his chin. A backpack slung over one shoulder, fake ID card flapping from the waist of his khakis, gold cross dangling from a necklace, he turned the corner and headed for shipping and receiving. A flick of his arm brought his watch out from cover: 8:31.

  He picked out Robert’s picket sign among the others across the street:CHILD KILLER FANATIC. Something was wrong—the sign’s flip side, the slogan reversed, was to serve as the go-ahead. Robert continued to chant and follow the circling picket line, but Tim noted his tension in the thick cords of his neck.

  Robert tilted his sign toward the shipping and receiving dock. Two new security guards had taken over in the wake of Lane’s posse’s entry. One patted down a courier at the base of the ramp, the other holding the bike to the side. They waved the courier through but kept his bike outside, despite his protests.

  Plan A aborted.

  Tim crossed the street and ditched the bike up against a garbage can after removing the hidden devices. He stood still for a moment, mind racing. On the ground by the trash can was a discarded guest pass, dated today. He smoothed it against his thigh. Joseph Cooper. That would do. New guards, after all, provided as many opportunities as disadvantages. Readjusting the backpack on his shoulder, he walked down the street and ducked into Lipson’s Pharmacy and Medical Supplies. The sole worker rustled with boxes in the back. “Be there in a minute!”

  Seconds later Tim rolled out in the wheelchair previously displayed in the window, his backpack hooked over the seat back. His full-fingered biking gloves, which he’d worn down on a belt sander last night to give them a tatty authenticity, doubled nicely as protective padding against the fast-turning wheels. They also ensured a print-free entry.

  Tim zipped over the crosswalk and headed straight at the new guards, flashing the guest pass when the taller one raised a meaty traffic-cop hand. “Hey, guys. I’m consulting with some editors up on eleven this week. I tried to get in at the entrance, but they told me to come around here today. Couldn’t get me through the metal detector with this baby”—he patted the side of the wheelchair lovingly—“but they said you could wand me down here.”

  After shooting his colleague a quick, uncomfortable glance, the guard waved the wand near Tim, but the detector went apoplectic with all the metal from the wheelchair. Tim kept his hands on the tops of the wheels, hiding the detonator and remote wedged into the spokes. The other guard searched Tim’s backpack, digging through the clothes inside as if kneading dough. Tim was thankful for their awkwardness and evident fear of offending him—they hadn’t even asked him about his outfit.

  He smiled shyly at the detector’s frenzied beeping. “It happens, man. You should see me at an airport. They practically call in the national guard.” He shot a wink. “Would you mind givin’ me a roll up the ramp?”

  To his credit the guard patted him down first—and well—checking the small of his back and running his hands down the lengths of Tim’s legs. In his thoroughness he even removed a silver dollar from Tim’s pocket and studied it before returning it. Tim’s long-sleeved Lycra biking shirt hugged his chest, making him acutely aware of the thin layer of perspiration covering his body. The intensity reminded him of spinning up for a live op or kicking doors with the service.

  Finally the guard nodded and shoved him brusquely up the ramp. “Elevator code’s the first five numerals of your floor-access code. They gave you that, right?”

  “Yup. Thanks, bro. Appreciate it.” Tim eased his way over to the service elevator, punched in the code Betty had retrieved, and forced a smile at the guards while he waited. His muscles relaxed a notch when a ding announced the doors’ opening. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he rolled inside and threw a sigh after the doors banged shut.

  The elevator was a typical service cattle car—mesh walls, high ceiling, bolted hatch. A TV monitor pointed down from the right corner. “—any idea the crap the Clinton-Gore regime left us to sort through,” Lane was saying. “Them and their fuckdamned socialist associates, subverting and destroying our cultural institutions.” He had a booted foot up on the edge of the news table.

  “When the interview goes live,” Yueh said, “you’re going to have to watch your language.”

  “Of course I will,” Lane said. “I don’t expect I live in a free country.”

  Tim hit the button for the tenth floor, then removed the detonator and remote from the spokes and collected the flat magnets from where he’d stuck them behind the seat back. The wheelchair accordioned neatly, and he leaned it against the wall. He tugged off his Lycra shirt and replaced it with a nondescript blue button-up, then removed a dry-cleaned shirt from the backpack, the wire hanger slightly bent from the guard’s groping.

  He stepped out onto the empty tenth floor and shitcanned the folded wheelchair and backpack down the garbage chute to his right. As the elevator doors slid closed, he pulled the silver dollar from his pocket and held it out into the narrowing gap, trapped between his index and middle fingers. The doors slammed shut on it and stopped, the connectors just shy of engaging. He checked his watch again: 8:37. The ser
vice elevator wasn’t due for use again until the graveyard janitorial shift rode up to the sixth floor, around 9:15. In case there was an emergency response before then, he preferred to have the car out of commission.

  Slinging the dry-cleaned shirt over his shoulder, the plastic wrap rustling against him, he poked his head out in the back hall. Infrared motion strobes every ten yards along the ceiling, virtually no blind spots. A perfect opportunity for Robert to hang Tim out—if he hadn’t rendered the strobes bad-operating as promised, Tim would be trapped by a screaming alarm on the tenth floor of a building stuffed with cops, guards, and private-militia goons. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out into the line of the first two lenses. The green pinpoint dots atop the units shone steady—no blinking to indicate either strobe had been tripped.

  The first door he encountered was a facing push-handle as Robert had reported; the floor had been designed to protect mostly against inward-moving intrusions. Tim removed the stack of flat magnets from his pocket and worked the top one off with his thumbnail. It was thin and silver, shaped like a stick of Wrigley’s. He went up on tiptoe and located the mag strikes by the intruding shadow that interrupted the lit seam at the top of the door. He slid the magnet between the two mag strikes until he felt it pulled; when he released it, it snapped into place, covering the top strike.

  He pushed the door open and passed through the jamb, glancing up at the magnet clinging to the top mag strike, ensuring that the connection hadn’t been broken. He moved from the hall through an enormous room filled with partially dismantled cubicles; they rose shadowed from the darkness like an elephant graveyard, a requiem odeum for the dot-com bubble burst. It turned out he encountered only five more doors; the three leftover magnets he stuck behind the print tray of a discarded Hewlett-Packard.

  He leaned against the stairwell door, listening for the footsteps of Susie-Take-The-Stairs, the exercise-minded receptionist from eleven. 8:42. She was running late for her nine o’clock shrink appointment five blocks over; she’d called this afternoon to confirm. Tim waited, controlled his breathing, faked patience. He had an 8:49 checkpoint upstairs, needing to pass Craig Macmanus in the west-east-running hall as Macmanus headed back to his office to answer the emergency page the Stork was going to send his way. By 8:45 Tim figured Susie-Take-the-Stairs had either canceled her appointment, decided to stay on site for Lane’s interview, or taken the elevator.

  Whistling casually, he popped open the door to the stairwell and stepped on the tenth-floor landing. The door swung shut behind him and locked. As if on cue, the door opened one floor up, and he heard the cushioned tap of Reeboks heading down the stairs. He hugged the railing, raising the dry-cleaned shirt high on his shoulder so it blocked half his face.

  Susie swept by, a blur of curls and nylon. “Hi! Bye!”

  Tim murmured a greeting and kept moving. By the time he reached the eleventh-floor landing, he had the hanger out from the shirt and untwisted, bent into an L terminating with the hook. He slid the hook beneath the narrow gap at the bottom of the door and rotated it until he felt it grab the handle inside. He tugged and got a satisfying click. Easing the door open, he entered the empty back kitchen.

  The TV on the counter showed Melissa Yueh leaning over Lane as a tech affixed a mike clip to his shirt. “Just relax and make eye contact with me, not the camera. We’re gonna get you your earpiece in a few minutes here so the producer can talk to you while we’re live.”

  Several of Lane’s militia groupies stood in the background, bodyguards with oversize arms and no idea where to put them. They were working hard at looking tough, trying to ignore the cameras and doing a bad job of it. A feisty production assistant moved them out of the shot, and they shuffled clumsily under his command, cattle driven by a sheepdog.

  Tim triple-folded the hanger and stuffed it and the shirt into the trash bin beneath the sink. He pulled a Baggie, a plastic earpiece, and a single thread of dental floss from his back pocket. He pried open the earpiece, nestled the tiny detonator within the wiring, and snapped it shut. Dropping the earpiece into the Baggie, he then sealed the bag, knotted the top, and tied the dental floss around it. He swallowed the Baggie, holding the end of the floss. The floss pulled taut, holding the Baggie midway down his throat. He waited for his gag reflex to cease, then strung the floss between two of his molars.

  Grabbing two small bottles of Evian from the fridge, he stuffed them into his back pockets and stepped into the hall. 8:46.

  A stiff-postured LAPD cop and a tired KCOM guard sat on stools in front of a metal detector that led into the main corridors. Tim nodded and stepped through. The detector beeped loudly.

  “You carrying a cell phone, keys?”

  Tim shook his head.

  The guard slid off his stool and wanded Tim, starting at his feet. When the wand reached his throat, it gave off an intense beeping. The guard stared at the gold cross resting on Tim’s Adam’s apple, rolled his eyes at the cop, and waved Tim through.

  Tim turned into the men’s room just past the guard station and ducked into a stall. Plucking the dental floss from between his molars, he gagged up the Baggie. It slid out, slick with saliva. He removed the earpiece, dropped it into his pocket, and flushed the Baggie. He stepped back out into the hall at precisely 8:49.

  Craig Macmanus, all jaw and toothy grin, was barreling down the hall with a coworker, glancing at his beeper and winding up a joke about bicycling nuns. Tim timed the lowering of his head to fake-check his watch and brushed against Macmanus’s side, lifting the ID and access-control cards clipped to his leather-weave belt.

  “Oops. Sorry, Craig.” Tim kept moving, not turning for a face-to-face. His hands worked quickly to remove Craig’s ID card from the clip and replace it with his fake. The hall was completely empty, save three TVs suspended at intervals from the ceiling. Tim reached the forbidding double doors at the hall’s end and flashed Macmanus’s access-control card at the pad. The red light blinked green, and he stepped into the inner sanctum.

  Here in the interview suite, impervious to binoculars and the probing eyes of window washers, Tim was on his own. Lane and Yueh were positioned at an immense wooden table, Charlie Rose style, and PAs were scurrying about, adjusting lighting and wincing under Yueh’s orders. A black digital clock suspended above Yueh’s head counted down to airtime—less than five minutes. The guard in the small booth to Tim’s right was munching a powdered doughnut without apparent appreciation for caricature. Tim flashed his ID card, and the guard gave it a cursory glance, leaving a sugary thumb whorl over Tim’s dour photo.

  A tech wearing headphones fussed with a control board, the cables and wires threading back beneath a folding table to his side. Tim headed in his direction, brandishing one of the Evian bottles.

  “Someone called over for water?”

  The sound tech waved him off, barely looking up. Tim spotted an open metal briefcase on the table, a few pieces of gear nestled within its gray foam filling, including Lane’s earpiece; as he’d guessed, Lane’s men, extensively experienced with death threats, had brought all their own equipment for Lane’s use.

  “I’ll just leave it here.”

  Another arm wave, this one vicious.

  As Tim set the bottles on the counter, he quickly swapped earpieces.

  “Live in two,” someone shouted.

  “Diffuse the fill light!” Yueh shrieked. “You’ll have my pores looking like potholes.”

  One of Lane’s no-neckers, his forearm decorated with a bald eagle tattoo, swept past Tim, heading for the metal briefcase. As Tim walked toward the door, he gestured for the guard to wipe powdery residue from his chin. Back in the sterile hall, he got Yueh screaming commands in stereo, her voice moving through the walls and shrilling from the monitors overhead. The first note of the KCOM jingle announced the show’s start, granting the building blissful respite from her stridency.

  By the time Tim reached the front elevator, this one smooth and slick with a TV screen embedded in the brushe
d-stainless-steel panel, Yueh’s on-air honeyed tone was pinch-hitting. “…haven’t seemed to express much remorse over those children and men and women who died.” Her brow furrowed slightly, approximating genuine puzzlement.

  Tim stood to the front of the car, in the security camera’s blind spot. The interior was exclusively metal—no mirroring through which a second camera could be monitoring.

  “Those people were working for a fascist, tyrannical cause. The Census intrusion is a communitarian strike against principled individualism, against the free, independent, constitutional republic that men like me are fighting to reestablish. A list of our citizens, available to whoever digs through a federal filing cabinet…” Lane snickered, his fingers rasping across his patchy beard. “Do you think our Founding Fathers had this in mind? How much we make? What ethnicity we are? Where we live? There’s a war going on in this country, in case you haven’t noticed, and the Census is more ammunition for our so-called leaders. They’re launching a full-scale offensive against American sovereignty and rights—God-given rights, not government-granted rights.”

  “Census data isn’t available to other branches of the government, Mr. Lane. Surely you’re exaggerating the—”

  “Did you know, Ms. Yueh, that the Census list was used in 1942 to round up Japanese-Americans and throw them in internment camps?”

  Her smile clicked on like a flashlight, but the split-second delay showed she’d been caught flat-footed. Tim couldn’t resist a smirk. Score one for the bad guy.

  He slid his thumb along the silver remote device in his pocket. It had a flip top like a lighter, which hid a single black button. He’d estimated its range conservatively—it would extend at least ten strides from the building’s front doors.