by Martha Carr
“How are they so sure?” asked Mark. He noticed that both Jake and Leonard suddenly weren’t making eye contact with him, or with anyone else. He realized he was probably the only one who didn’t know what would make George Clemente come out of hiding.
“So, is someone going to tell me?”
“We probably should’ve told you sooner,” said Jake. “But, it wasn’t our secret to tell.”
“So, tell me now.” Mark was trying to keep the anger out of his voice. He had worked so hard to get out of the organization. Suddenly, he realized how much danger that put him in to be so far out of the loop. He was playing blind.
“Well?”
“Tell him,” said Tom.
Jake hesitated, which surprised Mark. He didn’t know there wasn’t anything his son wouldn’t tell him. He had trained his children himself, especially after the war had come through their front yard. He thought Jake knew the importance of sharing all pertinent information with the family so that they could all stay safe.
“George Clemente has a son. A son he doesn’t know about who’s on our side.” Jake hesitated again, cleared his throat and swallowed hard before finishing his sentence. “He’s even a member of the Butterfly Project. He’s been instrumental in figuring out what George Clemente is up to. He was the only other living person who knew that Clemente had notes, handwritten notes about what he had been up to and what he was planning. He was the only one who knew how to steal them,” said Jake.
Mark slowly took in a breath, letting it all sink in, as the wave came over him of just what his son and his friends had been up to these past few months, all without his awareness.
He didn’t manage to avoid the war between Management and the Circle after all. If anything, he put his family at risk by acting like it was even possible.
“I take it he now knows he has a son,” said Mark, quietly, the edge still in his voice.
“He knows he has a son, he knows his son stole the notebooks, and he knows that his son ran to Chicago to be near Ned Weiskopf,” said Jake, looking directly at his father. It was as if he was determined to stand in his truth.
Mark looked at Tom and saw how startled he was at the entire revelation. “I take it you didn’t know exactly everything that was going on. Not a good sign when it comes from the Keeper.”
Tom looked older than his forty-seven years. Taking on the weight of being the Keeper, and getting caught first in a bomb blast, losing his brother Harry, and then constantly having to move around to protect the secrets of the Circle had taken its toll on him. He was turning gray early, at least for one of the Weiskopf men.
“I’m afraid times have changed, Mark.” He seemed resigned to the fact that he didn’t know everything, and wasn’t in control of much anymore. “It wasn’t like the Butterfly Project was asking my permission, and I’m not sure that they needed to. Frankly, only a handful would’ve known to ask me in the first place. Isn’t that the point? The Keeper is a secret. It doesn’t matter. The world will belong to them soon enough. They found a different way to get things done and frankly, I think they may be right. The days of a small, select group of people making the decisions for the masses appears to be over. I think it’s a good thing.”
“Isn’t that how we got to the Great Relief?” asked Jake.
“Then it looks like were all traveling to Chicago,” said Mark, suddenly calm. It was like an old muscle for him. Whenever he had a mission in front of him his heart rate slowed down, his instincts took over and he was able to focus more easily.
It’d taken him years but he finally saw the truth and accepted it. Once you are in, all the exit doors closed. It didn’t matter if the Circle said you could make a choice. Circumstances kept making the same one for you.
It only took a day for Mark to prepare himself to close up the house, and collect everything he would need in Chicago.
Everyone had a go bag already ready to go. Mark had never lost every instinct he had as an operative. After all, he had belonged to one organization or another since the age of thirteen.
Ruthie was the only one who kept asking questions about why they were leaving. She had been so young when they arrived, this was the only home that she really remembered in any detail. She kept asking when they were coming back, but after the third time she changed it to if they were coming back.
It was as if she knew.
Mark stayed up late working out the details for the trip. There were things about Chicago in particular that made him nervous. It was George Clemente’s home turf, which meant he knew every backroad, had connections that no one else knew about, and could make quick decisions more easily.
Mark had run a few operations out of Chicago over the years but he had never lived there. At one time, there had been old Circle contacts there that he thought of at least as friends but he had gone out of his way to contact no one from his past life. He couldn’t be sure if they were even still alive. After all, there had been a war between when he left and now, and he hadn’t checked on anyone.
He took a good look at himself in the bathroom mirror, a towel around his waist and realize he let himself go, even if only just a little. There were just a few extra pounds around the middle. If he was about to face the one man who was determined to take over the world and was coming pretty close to accomplishing what should have been an impossible magic act then he would need to be ready.
Fortunately, the locals wouldn’t miss them. He had kept to himself most of the time he had lived on Haskill Mountain, coming down only to visit the diner every now and then to make an appearance. He didn’t want to look like a hermit to draw suspicion but he didn’t want to make friends and draw too many questions that he wasn’t about to answer.
It was strange seeing Fred Bowers again. He realized he had never known him even though he had sat next to him, talking to him, giving him orders for years.
Now, Bowers was part of the White Rose resistance and was known to go around dressed in a cassock and a collar.
Mark shook his head as he stuck out his chin thinking he didn’t look too bad for someone in his mid-forties.
“Well, this will have to do.”
There was a knock at the bathroom door. “Yes?”
He heard a shuffle of feet and knew it must be one of his boys. They were the only ones who would hesitate to talk and the sound was of someone too large and too heavy to be Ruthie. He waited until they started to talk. It was their usual method of communicating. If one of the boys had something tough to say, they would often wait for a closed door to say it through.
“Dad?” It was Jake.
“I was trying to do the right thing,” said Jake.
“I know, son.”
The bathroom door moved slightly against the frame, and he wondered if Jake was leaning his hand against the door. He touched the door with his hand, pressing his palm against the wood, wishing he had found a way to give them all a normal life. But, as it turned out no one in Jake’s generation was getting a normal life. Maybe that was written in the stars a long time ago too.
Mark realized he was just a support player trying to make things easier for all those who were coming after him. Most of them would be members of the Butterfly Project. He saw that he had a chance to accomplish what he could never do alone, all the years he had been in the Circle.
“You know, Jake. You are a good man,” said Mark, swallowing hard to stop himself from choking up, and not getting out the words. “A good man knows to take it just one day at a time, to do the best he can and when he has to, to tell the truth, no matter how hard it is. You let your integrity guide you,” he said, his hand still pressed against the door. “You will never fail you. But not everything will go your way,” he said, more quietly.
He slipped on a robe and slowly opened the door and looked at his grown son standing there, still a teenager but already a man. Jake looked so much like him in that moment. Determined, and trying not to show he was afraid, probably more for others than for himself.
“Don’t let yourself ask magical questions,” said Mark. “You know the kind. What’s gonna happen next? How will it end? Stick to the next thing that’s right in front of you. That will always serve you.”
Jake bit his bottom lip and looks like he was in pain. Mark waited for him to get up his courage to say whatever it was he needed to say.
“Dad, you sound like you’re not going to be there with us. I have to ask this magical question. Do you think you won’t survive?”
Mark startled for a moment, mostly at the honesty of the question.
“I’m going to do my damnedest,” he said, as he grabbed his son into a tight embrace and squeezed his eyes shut, doing his best not to picture the future in any of the magical answers.
Chapter 5
The White House sat on an eighteen-acre plot of land, facing north along Pennsylvania Avenue. Together with the green expanse of the ellipse to the south, was what was known as the president’s park that covered fifty-two acres. Directly across from the White House was Lafayette Square Park, another green expanse, and beyond that the Willard Hotel. Underneath all of it ran the tunnels that were so deep into the ground the average bomb would not be able to disturb them, even though the original builders in the 1700s couldn’t have known that would be an asset when they built them.
The Great Relief had made it easier for the current president, Ellen Reese to strengthen the security of the White House without wondering what others would think. She didn’t have to worry about the optics. Workers could come and go through the tunnels without being seen.
Recruits for Management were put into White House uniforms that resembled an upscale police force and they ringed the exterior of the White House fence that enclosed the eighteen acres, standing at every ten feet looking out, talking to no one.
Just beyond the south lawn designed by Thomas Jefferson and used mostly as a helipad by recent presidents, was I Street and the popular Metro stop, Farragut West, surrounded by mostly empty ten and twelve-story office buildings. The president had insisted on clearing out any office that had a clear view of the White House for the time being. National security was her common excuse.
No compensation was offered to any of the businesses but threats were made quietly about not being patriotic and having their names announced during a national press conference if they didn’t quietly move their day-to-day operations to a place less convenient.
All of it was to make the president feel safer.
But Ellen Reese was still worried. She had a lot to answer for and very few allies left. Even though she had done everything George Clemente had asked of her, and she had every reason to think that he still needed her, she knew it wasn’t wise to rely on his unending patronage.
The interior of the White House had one hundred and thirty-two rooms, including sixteen family guestrooms, one main kitchen, one family kitchen, and thirty-five bathrooms. That didn’t even include the offices or the storage rooms, the ten rooms on the ground floor, the one main corridor, the six restrooms, the eight rooms on the state floor, the six bathrooms and one restroom on the second floor or the twenty rooms on the third floor. There was a total of six floors with almost fifty-five thousand square feet.
So many places for someone to hide. The thought kept her up at night.
Ever since she changed sides from the Circle to whatever side George Clemente could be called, and helped Rodney Parrish slip into the hotel and kill her former boss, President Ronald Haynes she hadn’t slept very well. Instead of celebrating being the first woman president she wondered every day how she would leave office. Maybe it would be feet first.
Now there was the Great Relief. She hadn’t seen that coming at all. She stood in the Oval Office looking out the double doors at the Rose Garden. It was a beautiful day, with just enough clouds in the sky to break the sunlight and make the roses stand out.
The pundits and all of the morning news shows wanted to know what she was going to do about the vanishing act of the world’s debt. It annoyed her every time they asked.
As if there was anything she could do about a worldwide calamity. She wanted to say that the faster we all got on with everything, the faster this would be over. But her media consultant said she would just come off as churlish, which she got as a polite translation for bitch.
She nervously tugged on the edges of the matching tunic that was a part of her uniform, a pantsuit that was hand sewn just for her. That was another thing that bothered her. Ronald Haynes never had to worry about anyone mentioning what he was wearing or how his hair was doing. Yet every week, every late-night talk show host had some joke about what her hair was doing in the wind as she got off Air Force One or some crack about where she bought her pantsuits.
She let out a sigh. “No respect for the job,” she mumbled.
“Ma’am?”
She turned around to find Richard Bach standing there in the center of the room quietly watching her. There was a permanent layer of creepiness about the man that he couldn’t shake no matter what he did. He was a snake oil salesman in a nice suit, she thought.
“What is it?” asked the president.
“Secretary Gifford is asking a lot of questions. He’s starting to ask them in public and the man looks like a rebirth of Mark Twain. Everyone wants to pay attention to him. He knows how to handle the media, hanging on his every tall tale. He just keeps repeating the same sentences over and over again until they have to use them as a soundbite. Even figures out a way to answer their questions with the same answer.”
The President came away from the French doors and sat down in the new chair she had specially ordered just for her that looked like more of a throne on wheels than an actual chair. She draped her arms over both sides, crossing her legs and arched an eyebrow before answering.
“That’s his job. If he wasn’t doing it, that’s when we all need to worry. He’s hoping to stir up enough dust that someone will finally answer them. All he has is a suspicion. He’s following the trail of appointments on the thirteen Circuit Court. The man isn’t stupid, I’ll give him that. It’s for the best. Let everyone keep staring at him,” said the President. “If that wasn’t part of the plan, you can rest assured he’d already be dead.”
The door to the Oval Office suddenly opened and Wilmer Bough, the new vice president who had been pulled from the eighth congressional district in Illinois, out of obscurity, came striding into the room. It’s the way he entered every room. The new Vice President was an average height and average size and wore average suits, managing to fade into every background till everyone forgot he was there. He was constantly using it to his advantage.
President Reese wondered if that’s why George Clemente had chosen him in the first place. Vice President Bough was loyal to a fault to anyone who was currently paying him, and thought nothing of repeating whatever he’d heard to his most current benefactor. His ability to be seen as even less than harmless, as an empty space, tended to make everyone drop their guard and say too much.
Richard Bach’s just like him, thought the President. He rarely said anything when the Vice President was around and instead observed. It was one of the few things she admired about Bach. The only other thing she admired was that he too could be bought.
Her stomach soured for a moment as she realized the same could be said of her. After all, she had traded one shadow government for another, for the sake of a job promotion but she knew, if given the chance she would do a good job of leading the country. Now, she just had to hope she would get the chance.
“What is it Mr Bough?” asked the President.
The Vice President glanced at the couch as if he was wondering if he was invited to sit down but he seemed to think twice and stood where he was. “George Clemente has decided not to go to Europe just yet. He’s headed to Chicago. There’s some unfinished business he needs to take care of and he’s decided that he’s the only one who can do it, and it has to be done now.” He said it all in one long breath, endin
g in a short wheeze.
“Is there a reason why he couldn’t tell me himself?” asked the President.
Richard Bach had floated over to one of the couches and sat down in the corner as if he was trying his own version of fading into the background.
All I have around me are aggravating men, thought the President. Really, I need to hire a few more women, she thought, as she looked at the Vice President, wondering how long Clement would let him live. Surely, not forever.
“He wants you to move to a bunker,” said the Vice President.
The President immediately bristled and slapped her hand hard on the desk, not startling anyone. Her quick temper was well known already in the house.
“How many times have you said that to me?” asked the President. “How many times? More than three? That’s the rule we use around here. The rule of three. Did you think I forgot? Do I look stupid to you?”
“Ma’am, I’m required to ask you,” said the Vice President, as he fumbled with his tie, smoothing it down over and over again. The President noticed how the tie hung over his ample belly not quite reaching his pants.
“How many times are you required to tell me? Enough. There is no more secure place than where we are standing. Besides, due to the Great Relief no one is really looking at me anymore. They’ve even put off the congressional hearings surrounding President Haynes assassination. There are only two things everyone cares about and that’s the water supply and if the debt is coming back. None of that has anything to do with a bunker.” The President held up her hand to stop the Vice President from saying anything.
“It’s ironic that on a planet that is seventy percent water that it’s even possible to convince anyone that we are running out.”
Richard Bach cleared his throat, bawling up his hand into a fist and pressing it against his lips. He did it again and waited for the President to invite him to speak. She wasn’t sure if she liked this new tic. It was just one more irritation.
