(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  The homeless man rose in the park. He was a chunk of a black man in grease-stained jeans and a parka. He stretched and immediately went to work—even the homeless have to be ambitious down here, Remy thought, Type A panhandlers—and his outstretched hand only drove the flow of passersby further afield. Most held a single hand up to stop him from asking, though a few shook their heads and eventually one man was distracted into kindness, digging in his pocket absentmindedly as he talked on his cell, as if the beggar were a tollbooth.

  Two more rejections, and then the homeless man hooked another one, a young Middle Eastern man. Remy raised his head. The man…was Kamal, Assan’s brother, Subject Number One. He was sure of it. Wearing a blue blazer and tan slacks, Kamal seemed like a thinner version of Assan…like a higher branch of the same tree. He was carrying a brown package, wrapped like a sandwich. He glanced nervously around the park. Kamal tried to shake off the homeless man, who grabbed his arm and seemed intent on telling Kamal something. Finally Kamal nodded and continued walking, until he reached a park bench, where he sat stiffly, as if waiting for someone. He set the sandwich on the bench next to himself. Remy checked his watch. It was three minutes to eight.

  At eight sharp, a second figure approached the bench where Kamal was sitting. It was Bishir, the agency’s man inside the cell. He was wearing a windbreaker. He sat down and pretended not to speak to Kamal. After a moment, Subjects Number One and Two stood up, moments apart, and began walking toward the street. This time, Bishir was carrying the sandwich. They walked next to one another, but moved stiffly, trying so hard not to draw attention that they looked ridiculous.

  Remy scrambled down the steps and fell in behind the men. They walked slowly across the street and paused at a grade school, arguing about something in front of its fanciful brick and iron fence. Kamal gestured at the section of fence that looked like a ship on gently rolling seas, and Remy touched his pirate’s eye patch and felt himself go cold. Not a school. They wouldn’t try a school…

  They began walking and Remy moved behind them again. As they turned a corner, he saw the agent Dave sitting in a parked car with another man he didn’t recognize. Was the agency in control of all this? Did Remy need to follow Kamal anymore? A moment later, Kamal and Bishir disappeared down the stairs of a subway station. Dave and the other agent hurried behind them.

  Was that it? Had Remy done his part? Perhaps it was possible after all—that if he just went with events as they presented themselves, things would work out. Traffic was beginning to pick up. Maybe he could even get some breakfast—

  Then Kamal came out of the subway entrance across the street. Alone. He walked quickly down the sidewalk, breaking into a kind of skip-run. Remy looked around in vain for Dave, and now Kamal was rushing down the block. Remy ran across the street, trying to look like someone late for a bus, and stayed half a block from Kamal, whose head swung regularly as he moved, like a lizard. Remy felt frantic with confused adrenaline. Was he supposed to stop Kamal? Was something happening? Would he recognize it if it did?

  He stayed behind Kamal, keeping an eye out for Dave, but the agent was nowhere to be found. Had Kamal lost him? Subject Two turned north, then west, south, and finally east again—a completed circle around the block. Remy stayed back at least a half block, trying to look nonchalant, which was difficult at the pace Kamal was setting for him. He paused here and there, ostensibly to check his watch, and kept moving down the block.

  Kamal hurried toward a cluster of public buildings. Remy felt a surge of angry hopelessness. Everything here was a potential target. Cupolas and arches and pillars, the breathless neoclassical mass at the end of the block: Any of them would work, Remy thought, all of them packed with people and symbolic weight. He thought of a map of downtown tourist attractions he’d seen once, and he thought: The whole city is a target. Ahead of him, Kamal stopped suddenly, looked back over his shoulder, and took a sharp left, disappearing into an ornate building Remy had never really noticed before, wedged between all of these larger structures.

  Remy hurried to catch up, but he didn’t know if he should go inside, and he didn’t want to lose Kamal, who might come right back out. Instead, Remy drifted into a small park across the street, where he could see the whole building. He stood behind a tree and took in the face of the grand building, which he noticed now was like a kind of coded map. Three arches on the first floor gave way to a row of three-story columns and then a wedding-cake topper lined with statues of men—famous men Remy didn’t recognize, men looking down on him in judgment, men waiting for history to occur. Even towering over the street, the men seemed real, down to the wrinkles in the sculpted folds of their coats. Above the statues, gaudy dormers poked from the roof, home to cherubs and eagles and shields, a symbolic, indecipherable alphabet that sparked in Remy an old wish for more education, enough to illuminate the significance of the ship’s prow, or the soldier and maiden on one side and the Indian and Pilgrim on the other, staring down at him with a sepulchral patience that was as terrifying as anything he’d ever felt.

  Something buzzed at Remy’s waist. He patted himself down and found a cell phone on his belt. He opened it and put it to his ear.

  “There’s a game show I’d like to pitch,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the phone. It was the old Middle Eastern man in the wool coat. Jaguar. “Name That Sacred Text: Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out…. Idolatry is worse than carnage.”

  “Where are you?” Remy asked. He looked around the park and his eyes went back to the statues on the building before him.

  “Here’s another one,” Jaguar said. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath. Okay, so which is which?” He made a buzzing noise. “No, I’m sorry. The correct answer is that there is no difference, except maybe over whether we were created from dirt or from a blood clot.”

  “Where are you?” Remy asked again.

  “And speaking of graven images, here’s something I don’t understand,” Jaguar said over the phone. “All those people who genuinely believe they saw Satan in the smoke that day. Don’t you find it just a little bit demoralizing, to be fighting ignorant, dark-ages zealotry when half of the people you’re fighting for believe the devil lives in a cloud of smoke and ash?”

  Remy put his hand on his gun again and edged around the park, looking behind trees. “Where are you?” Remy asked between gritted teeth.

  “I’m right where you told me to be.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here.”

  Remy spun around. “Who are you?”

  “Please,” he said over the phone. “This isn’t the best time—”

  “They said you’re organizing and funding a cell here. That you are buying explosives.”

  “Ri-i-ight,” the man said, as if this were obvious. “With the money you gave me. I’m sorry. Did you need a receipt?”

  “The money I gave you?” Remy began to feel off-balance again. He recalled the envelope of cash. “But…they said you were…”

  “That I was what?” he asked.

  “…Jaguar,” Remy said quietly.

  “Jaguar? No. Really?” The man scoffed. “That’s awful. God, is the entire agency made up of morons? Look, I appreciate that you don’t want to endanger your work by telling those amateurs about me…. But come on—Jaguar? How could you let them do that to me?”

  Remy slumped against a tree.

  “What about Iceman. Or something that reflects my education—Doc, for example? Tell them that I find Jaguar culturally and racially offensive. Tell them you’re worried that I’ll file a civil rights complaint. That ought to scare those officious assholes.”

  “I don’t—” Remy touched his forehead, trying to put it together. “Are you saying that…you work for us?”

  “Us?” He laughed. “I’m sorry, but your idea of us tends to be a little bit fluid, my friend. Either you’re with us or… what? Y
ou switch sides indiscriminately…arm your enemies and wonder why you get shot with your own guns. I’m sorry, but history doesn’t break into your little four-year election cycles. Are you with us?” The man laughed, winding down. “May as well ask if I am aligned with the wind.”

  “Look. I just need to know—” Remy squeezed his good eye shut. “Are you…” He couldn’t find the words. “…trying to hurt people?”

  “Which people?”

  “Innocent people,” Remy gritted.

  The man laughed. “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

  “I’m going crazy,” Remy said.

  “Yes…I used to think that,” said the man on the phone. “The sorrow would come over me. Like a fever. And I would scratch at my own face, tear at my skin until the pain and the rage felt like one thing…then, I used to wonder if I’d gone crazy. But other times—” There was a rustling, and then he said, “Okay. Your boy picked up the package. He’s on the move again. Your turn.”

  Remy spun around the tree and saw Kamal leave the ornate building, this time with a larger package, in a shoulder athletic bag. Remy began following him again on foot, though he was unsure what to do. He still had the phone at his ear.

  “Other times,” Jaguar said over the phone, “don’t you wonder if they’re all crazy? With their stone pilgrims, and their marble soldiers, with their virgins in paradise and their demons in smoke? Sometimes I think I’m the last sane person on Earth.”

  And then—

  REMY SPRINTED down an alley, around a pile of cardboard, a bicycle rack, and some plastic garbage cans. He came out on the narrow street, between the fire escapes of two old tenements with glossy new entryways. He stopped and looked around. Was this where he was running? Something, the activity, his racing heart, caused the flecks in his good eye to swarm like bees. His left eye—black as a painted window—throbbed behind the gauze. Remy stared around at the street in front of him, panting. He looked left. And then right.

  And then Kamal burst around the corner to his left, looking over his shoulder as he sprinted down the sidewalk, carrying the athletic bag like a huge football. As Remy watched, the man darted between two parked cars and ran into the street. Remy stood tensed on the sidewalk, in the middle of the block, unsure what to do—until he saw Markham dart around the same corner, waving a gun and sprinting twenty paces behind Kamal, but losing ground on him. Remy stepped around a parked car. Kamal saw him and tried to veer, but Remy jumped, hit Kamal full with his shoulder, and knocked the smaller man to the street. The athletic bag skidded beneath a car. Kamal started to get up, but Remy was on him, pushing him facedown to the blacktop, a knee in Kamal’s back. Remy grabbed Kamal’s wrist, and he said calmly, “Give me your other arm.” Beads of sweat clung to his cheek. Kamal pulled his other arm out and Remy wrenched it behind the man’s back, causing him to groan.

  “Nice work,” Markham said as he came up, panting. He pulled a plastic pair of zip-ties from his pocket and flipped them to Remy, who put them over Kamal’s wrists, pushed the ends through, and zipped them tight. Markham reached under the car and pulled out the athletic bag. “What do we have here? A little present for the great Satan?”

  “You are making a mistake,” Kamal said, his face pressed against the street.

  “The only mistake I made was not shooting you in the ass when you ran away from me,” Markham said. “And I heard you throw like a girl.”

  “A mistake,” Kamal repeated, pushing his lips back over his jutting teeth.

  And then Remy heard tires screaming and a car barreled around the corner and squealed to a halt in front of them, bucking like a horse before it finally stopped. It was a dented silver gypsy cab with brand new tires. Remy watched as two thick guys in sweatshirts and ball caps climbed out of the car, guns drawn, white wires dangling from their ears. One of the guys was the greasy homeless man from the park.

  “Get the fuck off of him,” said the other man—the familiar agent with the crooked mustache and the BUFF ball cap.

  Markham was still in the street, holding the athletic bag. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Buff held up a small wallet for Markham to read. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing hassling our CI?” he said.

  “What?” Markham looked dumbfounded. Remy almost felt bad for him. “He’s a bureau informant?”

  “Goddamn it, Remy,” Buff said. “We’re this close to penetrating this group of lunatics and you come along and nearly fuck it all up.”

  “You know this guy?” Markham asked Remy.

  “So help me,” Buff said to Markham, “if you endanger our operation, you’ll be pissing through a tube the rest of your life. Do you understand me?”

  Remy, for once, felt ahead of events. You can’t beat this thing, he thought. You can want to do the right thing; you can vow to pay attention, to focus, to connect the dots. But once you start down this path, it really doesn’t matter. Every path leads to the same place, events like water circling toward a drain. Without the slightest hesitation, Remy got off Kamal, cut the plastic handcuffs off his wrists, and helped him off the ground.

  Kamal’s eyes were misty. “These animals killed my brother,” he muttered to Remy. “I wouldn’t help them, so they killed Assan. These are not Muslims. They are animals. I would do anything to stop them.”

  And that’s when Markham finally caught up. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He threw his hands in the air and spun away, like a pitcher who has just walked the tying run. “Is there anyone in this cell who happens not to be a government informant?”

  THE CUBICLES were empty, the lights off. Remy checked his watch. It was after ten—must be nighttime—and the filing room staff was apparently off duty. He stepped up onto a chair and saw that he was in the center of this vast room, with only the pillars every fifteen or twenty feet breaking up the maze of cubicles. At each corner of the room a doorway led out, and above each doorway was a billboard-size inspirational sign quoting The President.

  Remy stepped off the chair and looked around. He was standing in a cubicle. There was a desk with a computer, two filing cabinets, and a wastepaper basket. A frame containing a studio picture of a young man in a flannel shirt with two children was magneted to the desk, next to a stack of paperwork.

  Remy took a document from the stack. This particular piece of paper wasn’t scorched or wrinkled. Like the paper in the airplane hangar, it was more recent, a credit card statement for a woman in Sandpoint, Idaho. There was an entry outlined with a yellow highlighter—a donation to a charity called AfghanChildRelief. Remy thumbed through the other pages, most of them recent receipts.

  Remy folded the credit card statement, put it in his pocket, and continued moving through the cubicles, each identical except for the photos on the desks. Eventually, he came to the end of this big filing room and found himself beneath one of the doorways. Overhead was a quote from The President, calling on his countrymen to “draw your strength from the collective courage and resilientness.” Remy pushed through the door and found himself in long corridor leading to his office. He walked down the quiet hallway, past each dark office. A faint light glowed at the far end of the corridor. He walked past his office and kept going, until he got to the last door in the hallway, the one marked SECURE. A light was on inside, coming from a back room.

  Remy took a breath and opened the door.

  The outer office was dark and empty. It was a reception area, ornate, with a couch and a round desk and walls papered with framed magazine covers, certificates, and photos. A door to the back office was open a crack. Remy moved through the reception area and pushed the door all the way open.

  The Boss was sitting behind a desk as big as a queen-size bed, lecturing his young ghostwriter, who was nodding and taking notes as he droned about “the best examples being the military and organized crime…”

  The Boss looked up. “Hello, Brian.”

  “What are you doing here?” Remy asked.

  The Boss consulted his watch
. “What do you mean? I’m right on time. You’re the one who’s late. Which reminds me—” He pointed his finger at the ghostwriter. “The first rule of effective leadership is to manage your time better than your money. Anyone can make money. Only leaders can make time.” The ghost took it down.

  “How’d you get in here?” Remy asked.

  “How did I get in…where?” The Boss looked from the ghostwriter to Remy and back. “How did I get into my own company?”

  Remy took a step back. He looked around the office. There was a treadmill and a couch, a television and a DVD player. The walls were covered with photographs of The Boss posing with world leaders and touring The Zero with celebrities. In one photo, the Queen was knighting him. Next to that picture was a photo of The President and The Boss shaking hands, above a framed certificate from the Office of Liberty and Recovery lauding Secure Inc., for its “invaluable assistance in the War on Evil.”

  “What’s the matter?” The Boss stood. “Are you sick or something?”

  “Something.” Remy fell into a chair. His mind scrambled back through his previous meetings with The Boss, trying to rewind fragments of dialogue, to find some hint of what he’d known.

  The Boss waved at the ghostwriter, who pushed his glasses up on his nose, gathered his things, and left the room.

  When they were alone, The Boss leaned over his desk toward Remy. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You’re not working too hard, I hope.”

  “I work for you.”