Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “But still. You’ll let me know?”

  “Of course.”

  Barry smiled at her. “It’s probably nothing.”

  Jenny wasn’t so sure.

  CHAPTER 12

  NATE

  Before I departed Dominion State, I let it be known with the hospital’s legal department that, as Mr. McBride’s attorney, I planned to make a formal inquiry into his cause of death.

  I just didn’t believe—in some very firm spot in my gut—that Buck McBride had killed himself.

  There were the logistical difficulties: he was confined to the high-security unit at a state hospital, where they took myriad precautions to prevent patients from harming themselves; he was searched regularly for contraband; he wasn’t even allowed to have a belt or shoelaces.

  But it was more than that.

  If I took him at face value—an admittedly dicey proposition—he had clearly been looking forward to getting out of Dominion State Hospital someday. His reticence about the Praesidium was because he didn’t want to jeopardize his chances at freedom.

  Would a man with that kind of future focus really kill himself?

  I doubted it. Somehow, Lorton Rogers and the Praesidium had murdered him and made it look like suicide.

  For someone with essentially unlimited resources, it wouldn’t really be all that difficult. The simplest way would be to pay someone on the inside to do it.

  A guard. An orderly. Rogers had probably supplied one of them with the same anesthesia he’d used to zonk me. From there, it would be pretty simple. A staff member would know where the security cameras were—and, more importantly, where they weren’t. Then it was just a matter of smuggling in a rope, drugging Buck in his sleep, and stringing up his inert body.

  As to why?

  Simple. Dead men tell no tales.

  Assuming Buck was being paid to mislead me—as part of CP&L’s grand scheme—he had now served his purpose. Rogers had him killed before I could come back for a follow-up conversation, at which point Buck might have screwed up and said something that made me realize this was all a scam.

  My chest felt heavy. Even though I had never touched the rope, I felt like I was responsible for this death. I had fallen into the trap Rogers had set for me.

  Except, well, how did Rogers know I had even gone out to see Buck in the first place? It’s not like he could have followed me yesterday. I had gone out to Surry first. I would have easily noticed a tail. Unless . . .

  Were they tracking me electronically? Like with a GPS device they had installed on my Range Rover?

  I was still on Dominion State Hospital grounds as this was all coming to me. Just to get away from hospital security cameras—and so no one would see Mr. McBride’s attorney crawling underneath his car—I drove out, then pulled off at a nearby condominium complex and began searching my vehicle.

  The GPS itself could be incredibly small, but it would need some kind of transceiver, which would be roughly the size of a small cell phone. I scoured my car’s cabin, the engine compartment, the wheel wells, the entire undercarriage.

  And that’s where I found it, attached to one of the struts. I pried the thing off and studied it for a moment. There were no markings on it, nothing that identified it as belonging to the Praesidium.

  I thought about trying some clever counterintelligence measure—attaching it to an out-of-state truck, making them think I was heading down to South Carolina or wherever. But I really just wanted to be rid of the damn thing.

  So I spiked it on the asphalt, stomped on it with my heel, then tossed the shattered remains in a nearby dumpster.

  Two minutes later, I was back underway, pointed toward Richmond and the girls, when my phone rang. The number came up as Unavailable.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, Nate. I see you found our tracking device.”

  It was the smooth, FM-radio-deejay voice of Lorton Rogers.

  “Yeah, I did,” I said, the anger immediately rising in me. “Why did you kill Buck McBride? Hadn’t you done enough to destroy his life already?”

  “Buck McBride?” he said, like this astonished him. “You mean our Buck McBride? He’s dead?”

  “Don’t play stupid. Yes he’s dead. He supposedly killed himself early this morning, but I know you’re responsible somehow. Did one of your henchmen manage to break into the hospital or did you just pay someone to do it?”

  “We had nothing to do with Buck’s death, I assure you,” he said. “We haven’t had any contact with Buck in years.”

  I swore at him.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Of course I don’t. You’re nothing but a killer and a liar.”

  Rogers absorbed the insults silently. “I assure you, if we had wanted to kill Buck, we would have done so a long time ago. We considered him to be effectively neutralized. He couldn’t talk about the Praesidium without risking his own chances of ever being released from the hospital. How can I convince you of that? I don’t want this to be a distraction for you.”

  “A distraction? You don’t want me distracted from killing my wife. Oh, that’s very, very considerate of you. Thanks so much for that, Rogers.”

  “You like to use sarcasm, Nate. That’s fine. I suppose I would, too, in your situation. And I know up to this point we’ve had to use . . . a certain amount of coercion. But that’s not really how we like to go about things. I want us to have an open, honest relationship. Are you really that interested in Buck McBride? Ask me anything. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Open?

  Honest?

  This guy was too much.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just for grins, go ahead. Tell me your version of the Buck McBride story.”

  “Very well. Buck was one of us. I’m sure he told you as much. We approached him in the same way we approached you. We needed him to kill his neighbor.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “The man was a pyromaniac. Mr. DeGange had foreseen that he was days away from setting a devastating fire at a nightclub in Norfolk that would have killed something like two hundred people.”

  “Okay, great. But then why didn’t the Praesidium just kill this neighbor? Why involve a third party like Buck McBride?”

  “For the same reason we’ve involved you. Mr. DeGange doesn’t just see who needs to die, he sees how they need to die—in the neatest, cleanest way possible.”

  “You mean neat and clean from the Praesidium’s perspective,” I said.

  “Well, yes. I suppose that’s true. But think about the bigger picture. Mr. DeGange uses his gift to save lives. Sometimes in the hundreds. Sometimes in the thousands or millions. That’s important work. He can’t risk the organization being compromised. We were sloppy with that early on—this was before my time, mind you—and have since refined our operations. We are now scrupulous about keeping the Praesidium away from any potential suspicion. We simply cannot lead the authorities to our own doorstep. Not even once. Any law enforcement attention we attracted would severely hamper our ability to do our work.”

  “So you goad Buck into doing the killing—to make it look like it’s just a guy murdering his neighbor—and then you hang him out to dry and let him go off to a mental hospital? Charming. You should definitely put that one on the Praesidium membership brochure.”

  “I assure you, that was Buck’s own fault,” Rogers said. “We had planted evidence to assure Buck would be acquitted. We had hired the best lawyers for him. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. And then when the prosecutors came up with that nonsense about this being a death penalty case, Buck panicked. His mother wasn’t well, and he worried that the stress of such a case would be too much for her. When the prosecutor dangled ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, Buck took the deal before we could talk him out of it. That’s the truth. Why, what did Buck tell you?”

  There was nothing in the paper
work Buck had left behind to refute Rogers’ version of the events. There was also nothing to support it.

  “Buck didn’t say much, to be honest,” I said. “Though I did find his notebook—or, I should say, the notebook you planted there.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course not. It was the Praesidium’s greatest-hits album—JFK, MLK, Terry Borlaug, or whatever that guy’s name was.”

  “Really? Buck wrote that all down?”

  “Ah. Now you’re going to tell me he broke the rules and that I never should have seen all that?”

  “No, you would have learned about it eventually. We give all our members a . . . I guess you would call it a history lesson. We usually just save that for a little later. It can be pretty overwhelming for people if we start by upending so much of what they think they know.”

  “Well, here we are. And since we’re being ‘open’ and ‘honest,’ what I want to know is: If your Mr. DeGange is so great, why has there still been so much bad stuff in the world over the last sixty years? Where was Mr. DeGange in Syria or Cambodia? Where was he when Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda? Where was he on 9/11? Why didn’t he find a way to head off the novel coronavirus before it got out?”

  “Mr. DeGange is not omniscient. The further something is from his thoughts, the less likely he is to have a vision regarding it. And the Praesidium is not omnipotent. The coronavirus sprang forth on the other side of the globe, where we have no real presence. Furthermore, some atrocities, like the Rwandan genocide, cannot be averted simply by removing one person or even a group of people. They have developed a historical momentum over a hundred years or more that make them essentially unstoppable. By the time Mr. DeGange felt those ripples, those deaths were already inevitable.

  “There are also times when Mr. DeGange says even the worst catastrophe is ultimately, for lack of a better word, necessary,” Rogers continued. “In the case of 9/11, it was terrible, of course. An absolute tragedy. But it also resulted in the downfall of Saddam Hussein, who had already killed fifty thousand of his own citizens and would have murdered many more. Would you save three thousand Americans if you knew it would result in the death of an additional fifty thousand Iraqis and another fifty thousand Kurds? Because that’s the kind of math Mr. DeGange has to do all the time.”

  “Yes, that must be very hard on him,” I said, still in full sarcasm mode.

  “I realize you still don’t believe me. It’s okay. You will.”

  “He’s foreseen that too?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Look, if your Mr. DeGange is so clever, why doesn’t he give me some lottery numbers. I saw on a billboard I just passed that the Mega Millions is up to a hundred and seventy-eight million.”

  “This is not a parlor game, Nate,” Rogers lectured. “Mr. DeGange is not going to pull your card out of the deck or make a quarter appear from behind your ear either. His gift is not attuned to frivolous matters like the lottery.”

  “Because his gift doesn’t exist.”

  “No, it’s because there’s nothing life and death about the lottery. Two million people lose a dollar so one person can make a million. The rest goes to the government, and then everyone moves on.”

  “Fine. Great. So why don’t you tell me about a place where there is a ripple? You’re asking me to believe Vanslow DeGange is this great death-seeing prophet and you have a bunch of stories about catastrophes you’ve supposedly prevented. How about your soothsayer actually says some sooth about something that hasn’t already happened?”

  “You want proof, am I hearing that right?” Rogers said.

  “Yes. Proof. I want your guy to make a prediction—one prediction about the future that actually comes true, and that I can verify myself.”

  “Very well. Sit tight. I’ll consult Mr. DeGange and call you back.”

  “Fantastic.”

  I continued driving, wondering what kind of machinations I had just set off within the halls of CP&L.

  Were they right now ginning up some reason the great Vanslow DeGange would be unable to demonstrate his powers? Or were they, in fact, trying to arrange for him to make a “prediction” they would then make come “true”?

  Like, say, that a citywide power outage would happen. Or a transformer would blow up. Or tonight at nine o’clock my lights would blink three times. Something CP&L could manipulate.

  I had merged onto the interstate and traveled maybe a dozen miles when my phone rang again.

  Unavailable, calling back.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “There is a man named Marcus Sakey,” Rogers said.

  “Okay, what about him?”

  “He’s a bum. Sorry, I know you’re probably not supposed to call them that anymore. He’s homeless. Transient. Whatever the right word is. What little money he is able to panhandle, he converts into alcohol. His primary occupation is staggering around the city and rummaging through garbage bins for food.”

  “Sounds like a winner. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “At 11:16 this evening, he will be struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

  I felt a jolt, almost like I was the one being hit. “Oh God. Where?”

  “It will happen within a few blocks of your home. Mr. DeGange was explicit that I couldn’t give you any more details. You might attempt to intercede.”

  “Well, of course I’m . . . why aren’t you interceding? I thought you guys were all about saving lives. You’re really just going to let this man die?”

  “I realize you’ll find this to be more cruel calculus, but Mr. DeGange decided a long time ago that he would essentially allow individual deaths so that the organization could focus its time and energy on mass-casualty events,” Rogers said. “Besides, this is a quicker, more merciful end than Mr. Sakey probably deserves. He has spent most of his life abusing his body. He should have died years ago.”

  “That doesn’t justify letting him get run over like a piece of roadkill.”

  “I’m sorry, Nate. You wanted proof. That’s your proof. Maybe the next time we talk you’ll be a little less cynical about Mr. DeGange.”

  “He’s a human being, for God’s sake,” I yelled. “Don’t let this happen. Please.”

  But Rogers had already hung up.

  CHAPTER 13

  JENNY

  One of the things Jenny had always prided herself on was her ability to ignore all distractions and focus on the task at hand.

  She was doing a fine job of it, plowing into some work for one of her non-CP&L-related clients, billing hours, ignoring Code Orange, ignoring whatever was going on with Nate, when she got one of those texts she couldn’t ignore.

  It was the burner phone: Hey, can you do 2:30?

  Again? So soon?

  No. She really couldn’t.

  She absolutely didn’t have the time.

  And yet . . .

  Her thumbs punched the usual three-letter reply: Yes.

  Which opened up a new conundrum.

  Code Orange might have still been outside. Lurking. With that bag. And that billowing red shirt with who knows what underneath. And those ill intentions that Jenny swore weren’t just her imagination.

  Then there was the other problem: Jenny had told Barry she would ask for an escort if she left the building, but she couldn’t allow Barry to know about this particular errand, and she didn’t want any of Barry’s “guys” knowing about it either.

  She didn’t want anyone knowing about it. The risk of exposure was too great, and the consequences of exposure would be . . .

  Well, disastrous.

  And, yeah, she could just try to sneak out and make a run for it. But she knew Barry had those cameras. If he or one of his employees saw Jenny, how would she explain herself?

  There was no good solution here.

  That left her with only bad ones.

  Like a disguise. It didn’t have to be elaborate. Ju
st something that would get her past the cameras.

  Looking around her office, she spied a Richmond Flying Squirrels baseball cap hanging on the back of the door. She had bought it the previous summer, when CMR had sponsored an outing to a game. The flying squirrel logo looked more like an angry vampire bat.

  She grabbed the hat and some sunglasses from her purse, then told her assistant, “I need some air. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  In the lobby, she quickly braided her hair into two pigtails, then shoved the hat on her head and tugged it down low. She donned the sunglasses and looked at herself in the reflection of the glass.

  She was still a six-foot-tall woman—not exactly inconspicuous—but there wasn’t much she could do about that, except the one thing she had always tried not to do. Hunch over.

  So that was Jenny as she made her departure from CMR headquarters: pigtails, hat, sunglasses, stooped gait.

  She spun through the revolving doors, then cut at an angle across the plaza, through the fountains, with an elongated stride that had her covering ground even faster than usual.

  All the while, she kept swiveling her eyes, looking for a flash of red shirt or a tuft of orange hair.

  Nothing yet.

  She didn’t know where Barry’s cameras were. Probably everywhere. So she just kept her head down and hoped the hat was doing its job.

  Once she made it to the sidewalk, she turned toward The Commonwealth Hotel and kept her legs churning.

  Lest she look suspicious or draw attention to herself, she didn’t want to look behind herself, which was where Code Orange would likely be coming from. If Code Orange was anywhere at all.

  But it didn’t seem like she was. After two blocks—at which point she reasoned she was out of range of Barry’s cameras—Jenny turned around.

  She had the sidewalk to herself.

  Heaving a sigh, she completed the trip to The Commonwealth without incident.

  Had this really all been nothing? Why did she feel so spooked?

  She rode the elevator up to the usual room, waved the key card at the door, and there he was as usual, lounging on the bed with his perfect hair and his movie star jaw, just grinning at her.