Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “Then run,” he said in a fierce whisper. “If you’re not mixed up with them yet, run away, right now, as fast as you can. Don’t bother packing. Take anyone you love with you and go. Get far away and don’t come back, do you hear me? Just run.”

  I watched with fascination as spittle flew from his mouth. He was either thoroughly terrified or completely unhinged. I honestly couldn’t decide which.

  “Okay, I hear you. But . . . who are these guys, really? Do you know where I can find them?”

  Buck suddenly got this cagey look. He leaned away from the glass.

  In a louder, stiffer voice, he said, “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about them.”

  His eyes were casting about this way and that, but in a deliberate manner, like he was trying to tell me: Look around.

  And then I got it. He thought the place was bugged.

  “Oh,” I said. “Look, don’t worry about that. Just say I’m your lawyer. I’ll represent you pro bono.”

  “Fine. My old lawyer quit on me anyway. You’re my lawyer. How does that help?”

  “Because now this conversation is protected under attorney-client privilege,” I said. “They couldn’t use what was said here against you. It would be illegal.”

  “Great. Illegal,” he said derisively. “If you actually think that would stop them, then you belong in here with me.”

  “Buck, please, I need some help here. Just . . . give me the basics here. Like, where is the Praesidium located?”

  He studied me again—in a way that did not feel tinged with insanity—then said, “You’ll either take the advice I just gave you or you’ll find out the hard way. Your choice.”

  “Is the reason you’re in here . . . is it because of them?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, adding a derisive snort. “You got that right.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  He looked at me, grimaced, then shook his bristly, lumpy head.

  “Nope,” he said. “Sorry. I’m not going there. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Please?” I said, aware I sounded pathetic. “Look, if someone could have helped you before you got to this point, wouldn’t you have wanted them to? Please.”

  I looked at him imploringly. Our eyes locked for a moment, and I thought for sure I was reaching him.

  Then he looked away.

  “I . . . I’d like to, okay? But . . . you have no idea what it’s like in here,” he said. “There are guys who’d finger-paint with their own crap all day if you let them. Then there are others, they’re more like animals than people. The only way to keep control of them is to drug them so bad they don’t even know which way to drool. And the staff, shoot, some of them are worse than the patients. They do these strip searches for quote-unquote ‘contraband’ and I swear they get off on it. I can’t spend the rest of my life in here, and the only way I’m going to get out is . . .”

  His voice trailed off. He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples.

  “I’m sure it’s horrible. I understand,” I said. “Look, I’m just a guy trying to understand what’s going on here. Maybe we can help each other. I’ll be your lawyer. I’ll help you get out of here. And in the meantime, if you can give me some idea what I’m up against . . .”

  He opened his eyes and unleashed a large sigh.

  “I have a storage unit behind the NAPA Auto Parts in Hudgins,” he said. “It’s called the Lok-N-Key. I’m number two fifty-seven. It’s mostly just junk in there. But there’s a box. It’s in the well of an old piano. Take the lid off the box, dig under the sheet music, and you’ll find . . . well, some reading material. If you’re going to be my lawyer, you’re going to need to see that stuff anyway.”

  “Right, do you have a key to the unit, or—”

  “Maisy will help you out. Her number’s on the sign. She runs the place. Just let her know that I said you’re my lawyer and it was okay. Tell her . . . tell her it’s probably a good thing we never went to homecoming together. That way she’ll know we talked.”

  “Got it.”

  “Just read the stuff. That’s everything I know anyway. And maybe when you come back we can talk a little more. But for now . . . sorry, friend. I should probably go.”

  He was already standing up. I had a thousand more questions for him. The first one that came to me was, “Wait, why did you ask me to take off my shirt?”

  “Because I wanted to see if you had one of these.”

  His fingers went to the sleeve of his scrubs, which he lifted. The letters P and R, inscribed in a box—identical to the key card—had been seared into the flesh of his inner left arm.

  He walked over to the door and tapped on it. As soon as the guard opened it, Buck announced in a loud voice, “So like I said, the Praesidium doesn’t exist. I thought it did once. But I was wrong.”

  CHAPTER 8

  NATE

  The number to call for assistance on Lok-N-Key Self Storage’s sign connected me directly to the one and only Maisy, to whom I explained my circumstances.

  She sounded skeptical but was soon pulling into the parking lot in an ancient pickup truck. The woman who disembarked outside storage unit number 257 wore mud-stained boots, lived-in jeans, and a flannel shirt.

  “So you really talked to ol’ Buck, huh?” she asked.

  “I did. He said to tell you that he’s glad you never went to homecoming together.”

  Maisy chortled. “Yeah, me too.”

  “What was that about, if I may ask?”

  “Our families figured out we were distantly related and put the kibosh on it. That happens around here.”

  She was already fumbling with a large key ring and muttering to herself about which one to choose. So obviously the homecoming line had been convincing.

  “How’s he doing, anyway?” she asked.

  “About as well as you’d expect,” I said honestly. “I don’t think the company in there is very pleasant.”

  “Well, he should have thought of that before he went and killed someone.”

  So Buck was a murderer. That explained the high-security unit.

  “Yeah, who did he kill, anyway?” I asked. “We sort of got interrupted before we could get to that.”

  “His neighbor,” she said, inserting a key into a padlock and then frowning at it when it didn’t work. “Don’t get me wrong, everybody hated the guy. He was a real jerk-off. Buck probably did the world a favor. But he still shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Why did he, then?”

  “I dunno. The paper said it was something about a property dispute. You’d have to ask Buck. I don’t think he’s really crazy or anything, but maybe temporary insanity took hold of him. Here. This is it.”

  She removed the lock and rolled up the garage door to the unit. A wall of musty, stale air hit me. We both took a moment to survey what was inside. There wasn’t much. An old lawn mower. Some hideous green couches. Empty bookshelves. A few floor lamps. Several stacked towers of boxes, some of which had gone marshmallow shaped from the humidity.

  And a piano with a sheet covering it. I went over to it; lifted the sheet; and, sure enough, there was a banker’s box in the well. Upon lifting the lid, I saw sheet music.

  “I think this is what Buck sent me to find,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. “Well, I don’t have time to stay out here all day while you read whatever is in there. How about I just leave the lock with you? You can close up when you’re done. I’ll swing by later to check and make sure you did it right.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Her pickup truck was soon rolling away. I found an old lawn chair to sit in, set the box on the ground in front of me, and dug into its contents.

  After excavating a layer of sheet music, I found a disorganized pile of legal papers. I skimmed through them, picking out the pertinent facts and assembling the narrative of Commonwealth v. Robert “Buck” McBride.

  The prosecution had exploited the property di
spute between the two men to claim that Buck had committed murder to gain “a pecuniary benefit”—the precise language used in Virginia statutes to define a capital crime, which meant it was punishable by death.

  This may have just been a negotiating ploy by the commonwealth. During law school, I’d worked at a free legal clinic that did some death penalty work, and my understanding was that “pecuniary benefit” meant murder for hire.

  The discussions between the prosecution and Buck’s lawyers were not in the documents. Was it possible that this was when Buck had started talking about the Praesidium? Had Buck started yammering about how this secret society had approached him and coaxed him into killing his neighbor to prevent some catastrophe?

  I had no way of knowing just by looking at the paperwork. But at some point, Buck had been offered the option of pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, which he’d accepted.

  NGRI, as it’s known in legal circles, is not the Get Out of Jail Free card that it is sometimes portrayed to be. Once Buck pleaded NGRI, a judge would have mandated that he report to a mental hospital. And he wouldn’t be able to get out until he convinced his doctors—who would then have to testify before a judge—that Buck was mentally competent.

  Which explained why, after his initial shock at seeing that PR logo, Buck didn’t want to say anything about the Praesidium.

  I can’t spend the rest of my life in here, and the only way I’m going to get out is . . .

  . . . to keep his mouth shut and act like the Praesidium didn’t exist.

  This was all just a theory, of course. There was no mention of the Praesidium anywhere in the official documents—or, it seemed, anywhere else in the box.

  At least not until I reached the very bottom of it. There, I found a tiny notebook. The first few pages were filled with small, neat handwriting.

  Vanslow DeGange

  b. 1925

  Poor. Mother was seamstress. Father unknown.

  Gypsy (not PC—called Romani now)

  Grandmother, great aunt were fortune-tellers

  Had many visions as boy/young man

  Mother, grandmother called them his “special thoughts.”

  Warned him never to share outside community

  US Army 1943-46

  Assigned to Special Engineering Detachment (SED). Genius at fixing radios.

  Promoted to Sergeant

  Stationed at Los Alamos

  Los Alamos as in . . . the Manhattan Project? I lowered the notebook for a moment and gazed into the trees in the distance. Vanslow DeGange had worked on the Manhattan Project?

  Over a hundred thousand Americans did, of course. Almost none of them knew what they were actually making. It wasn’t a stretch that a young man who had demonstrated a special aptitude for fixing radios would have been sent to Los Alamos. I continued.

  First major vision, late June 45: the bomb wasn’t necessary.

  Had foreseen Japs would surrender Oct 45 b/c of pending US invasion of main island

  Tried to convince SED colonel not to use the bomb

  Colonel pretended to take it up chain of command. (Probably did not.)

  Bomb goes off. DeGange devastated.

  Vows never to rely on others again. Will recruit his “own Army.”

  Decides to found Praesidium

  Has vision regarding White Chuck No. 8 silver mine, Bedal Wash

  Buys stocks: IBM in 40s, Disney in 50s, McDonalds in 60s, etc.

  So this was the Praesidium’s alleged origin story: Vanslow DeGange found himself at Los Alamos and realized they were making a weapon of mass destruction that—according to his read on the future—didn’t need to be deployed. But he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him because, ultimately, he was just a poor gypsy boy who repaired radios.

  This failure launched him on the quest to create his own future-fixing organization. The Praesidium. And he had no trouble funding the venture, because making money wouldn’t be that difficult for a man who could see the future.

  Even White Chuck No. 8, the stamp on the bottom of my gun, made sense. That was where he began to amass his fortune.

  It actually sounded strangely plausible—if you forgot for a moment the whole thing was completely implausible.

  Then I read on, and it took a turn toward the ridiculous, because the next entries were supposed case studies, times when the Praesidium had intervened in world affairs. Success stories, as it were.

  And the first one was a whopper.

  Case 1: John F. Kennedy

  Killed because: Would have attempted to sneak nuclear missiles into Turkey, despite promising not to do so. Limited but devastating nuclear conflict with USSR would have resulted.

  Lives saved: 2 million.

  I sat there, blinking at the page a few times.

  The Praesidium had killed Kennedy?

  Really?

  And yet . . . well, I had read a few biographies of Kennedy. All the Camelot stuff aside, he was a fairly belligerent guy. Some of his biographers suggested he exhibited classic sociopathic behavior, and that the only reason he went into politics instead of crime was that he had a rich father. There was the Bay of Pigs; his escalation of our presence in Vietnam; the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was as close as the US and the Soviet Union had ever come to nuclear war.

  Was it out of the realm of imagination to say that Kennedy would have eventually pushed too far?

  Mr. DeGange is sometimes able to foresee when eliminating one person in the present can avert a much larger catastrophe in the future, thus saving many lives.

  No, stop. This was absurd. And it only became more so with the next alleged intervention.

  Case 2: Martin Luther King

  Killed because: Would have succeeded in uniting Black Power movement in early 70s. Disturbance in Gary, Indiana, would have triggered unrest across nation. National Guard response would have led to small-scale civil war.

  Lives saved: 8,000.

  I was aghast. How could anyone claim killing a peace-loving humanitarian was good for the world? What would the Praesidium take credit for next? Gandhi?

  And yet . . .

  King had reached the nadir of his popularity by 1968. He was trying to organize something called the Poor People’s Campaign, which smacked too much of socialism for mainstream America’s tastes. If there was a time to kill him before he started becoming powerful again, that was it.

  It wasn’t inconceivable that once he returned to racial themes, he would have been able to use his celebrity and charisma to unify the heretofore-splintered African American political organizations. And, sure, King never would have condoned violence. But once he brought everyone under one banner, could it have created a group too unwieldy for King to control? Possibly.

  Or I was possibly losing my mind. I read on all the same.

  Case 3: Terry Nienhuis

  Killed because: Would have recruited Norman Borlaug to work for DuPont, taking Borlaug away from work with Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico that triggered “Green Revolution”—dramatically raising plant yields and saving developing world from starvation.

  Lives saved: 1 billion.

  I had never heard of Terry Nienhuis. And a quick Google search suggested no one else had either. His death, whenever it happened, had gone unnoticed by the wider world.

  Was this the kind of precedent Rogers would claim in asserting I needed to kill Jenny? That sometimes the person to be sacrificed wasn’t a world leader but rather some relatively anonymous small cog who would unwittingly throw a much larger machine dangerously out of whack?

  The notes ended there. I snapped photos of each page, in case I wanted to refer to them later. Then I closed up the storage unit as I had been instructed.

  As I drove back to Surry to pick up the girls, I tried to make sense of everything.

  This was only speculation, but I could imagine Buck’s scribblings were notes he had taken while he was being indoctrinated into the Praesidium. Perhaps this was the rah-rah speech that preceded
the branding with the PR logo.

  Except if that was the case, I still wasn’t buying it. That a secret society founded by a billionaire veteran of Los Alamos had killed Kennedy and King and God knows who else? Come on.

  More likely: The notebook had been planted there by Lorton Rogers. Buck McBride was another Praesidium employee—or some kind of adjunct—who had been paid to perpetuate this whopper of a story. That brand on his arm was really stage makeup.

  Perhaps he was simply a past associate of Rogers’ who really had killed his neighbor and pleaded NGRI, and now Rogers was using him to bulwark this extravagant fiction.

  But how could Rogers have anticipated I would even follow the digital bread crumbs that led to Buck in the first place?

  Unless . . . well, I had once posted a comment about reverse image searches on a mommy blog I followed. Had Rogers scoured the web, found that, and known I would do the same with the key card logo, which would eventually lead me to Cult InfoShare—which was a fake website being run by the Praesidium—and then to Buck McBride?

  Under this scenario, was I actually supposed to steal that key card? Had that, in fact, been a little too easy?

  Or there was another possibility entirely:

  Buck McBride had had a past encounter with Lorton Rogers and the Praesidium—who were working some entirely different scam than the one they were perpetrating now—and they had twisted him so thoroughly he’d wound up going insane. All these stories about Kennedy and King were merely instruments of that manipulation.

  Making these notes little more than the ravings of a madman.

  CHAPTER 9

  JENNY

  Once again, Jenny made her mad dash away from work so she could get some mommy time before the girls went to bed.

  And, once again, Nate was acting aloof and strange. He had dumped the girls in Surry most of the day but was insisting this was not a sign he needed more help on the home front.

  At least he’d managed to get the faucet fixed this time.

  Jenny tried to put it out of her mind. Still, there was something gnawing at her all through the evening. And the next morning, right from the moment her alarm began its soft chirping at 5:30 a.m., she was gripped by this unplaceable dread.