by Jay Brandon
She was the exception.
Jack glanced up sharply at the interviewer. She had no gleam in her eye. Her pasty white skin didn’t glow with the excitement of giving away secret information. She was just doing her job.
She? Jack said. He began doodling on the blank sheet again.
The woman whose name you’ve been muttering in your sleep. Arden.” The interviewer pronounced the name very precisely. She was the exception.
After another long pause Jack nodded. She was the exception. She was a step beyond. Maybe several steps beyond. Half a dozen people I know sincerely believed she was the product of genetic manipulation. Or possibly an alien being. “Imagine being her parents,” someone once said, and we all shuddered.
Was she so frightening?
She was perfectly charming. That was part of it. We all lived by manipulating other people, to one degree or another, so that wasn’t what was scary about her. Her ability to insinuate herself into a group was extraordinary, but not unprecedented. That wasn’t why she scared people. It was because she did things that had nothing to do with intelligence. After talking to you casually for one minute, she could tell you that you hated your older brother, and she would always be right. She wasn’t just smart, she was a mind-reader. But somehow you knew it wasn’t ESP, it was her picking up signals you didn’t know you were giving. Desperately you would try to stop, but be helpless. If you were having an affair, God forbid she should see you and come across the room. Within thirty seconds she would be giving you that slow smile, and you would know she knew.
Maybe she wasn’t so smart, maybe she just had a very good network.
She would have had to have satellite coverage. And x-ray vision.
As Arden came across the room in Denver Jack tried to keep his thoughts absolutely blank, and succeeded. He’d gotten good at this since knowing her. Arden stopped and chatted with two or three people, but he knew she was coming his way. And his lone remaining conversational partner, a young woman named Elizabeth Rayona, was hurting his concentration.
“Who is she? When did you first meet her?”
“Last year. Her grandmother introduced us. I said how do you do and she just looked at me for a long few seconds, then said, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Elizabeth turned to him. “What was she sorry for?”
After a long pause, Jack said, “For me. I was sad. I hadn’t told anyone, but an old friend of mine had just gone missing. Not one of us. No one anyone in the circle would know.”
Elizabeth’s voice was growing more concerned. She was facing Jack so she was in profile to Arden, and Jack could tell that Elizabeth was trying to stand straight and not glance aside, but she couldn’t help herself. Neither could he. “And she knew about your missing friend?”
“No one knew!” Jack burst out. “I hadn’t talked about her and I wasn’t giving anything away. But she read me. How I was feeling. And I didn’t want to be read! You know? I didn’t want to be—comforted.”
“So did she—?”
“Hello, Jack,” said a low, luminous voice. Yes, luminous: her voice gave off a soft glow, illuminating the features of her listeners so they seemed to stand apart from the others in the room, in a subtle spotlight. Or possibly that was only in Jack’s imagination.
“Hello, Arden. Do you know Elizabeth Rayona?”
That was a cruel thing to do, after the build-up he’d given Arden, to unleash her immediately on the new girl. But Elizabeth had annoyed him a little by making him talk about Arden.
Arden did not turn her attention immediately to the introduction. Her blue eyes stayed on Jack. He stood perfectly still, neither smiling nor frowning, but looking back at her as if curious about her. “It’s all right,” Arden said to him, then turned to his companion. “Hello, Ms. Rayona. What school did you go to in Phoenix? Private, right? Let me think, was it—?”
“Briarcliff,” the two women said together. Arden laughed. Elizabeth did not. “Do you know anyone who went there?” she asked. It didn’t take mystical powers to hear the anxiety in her voice.
“Let me think, do I?” Arden said, and kept the young woman on the hook as she turned back to Jack. “I waited for you at Heathrow. By the time I got here people knew about your work with the ambassador. Of course, some people around here are a little peeved about your independence—”
“Meaning your grandmother?”
Arden nodded. “—but I’ve told her I thought it was a great idea.”
Arden had a gentle smile, a professional sort of smile, that seemed to have nothing to do with what she’d been saying. Surely enough, she then changed the subject completely. “Did it help?”
Jack stiffened. “Help what?”
“Jack, Jack, there’s no need to be hostile. The day you were in France was an anniversary for you. Did what you did there help?”
Jack turned and walked quickly away. He passed friends, some of whom spoke to him, and several raised their eyebrows, but he didn’t stop walking until a hand grabbed his arm. “Jack!” a hearty voice said, while the meaty hand insistently turned him toward the speaker.
“Hello, Mr. Mortenson.”
“Since you look near death I think you’re old enough now to call me Craig.”
“Take it easy on him, dear,” Alicia Mortenson said. “He’s just had a session with our resident psychic.”
“Someone’s giving her information!” Jack said. “She cannot just read these things from my posture and my face. Someone’s feeding her.”
“God, I hope so,” Alicia said. “Otherwise she’s a mind-reader, and I don’t like that idea.”
She and her husband glanced at each other and chuckled, without an exchange of words. Craig Mortenson was in his late fifties and looked older, with a fringe of white hair around a large bald head. Often he looked sleepy and bored, often irritable, but when he was at his genial best, as he seemed to be now, there was no more convivial host.
Alicia, to whom he’d been married for many years, was probably his age but looked much younger. Thin, elegant, with a firm chin and lively eyes, she looked perfectly at ease in her dark blue evening gown, while Craig looked as if he’d been forced into his tuxedo with a shoehorn.
“The trouble is,” Jack said in a more thoughtful voice, “I don’t know who would know the things she knows to give them to her in the first place. It’s as if—”
As if someone were keeping a file on him, and had been for a long time. Jack didn’t say the words aloud, but Craig Mortenson shook his head gravely. “We don’t do that, Jack.” He was speaking of the Circle.
“By the way,” he added, changing back to his hearty tone, “great work in France. Just what the summit needs. A little precipitous, perhaps—”
“You know very well you’d been saying something exactly like that needed to be done,” Alicia said. Craig shrugged agreement.
“So then I can say I had your approval?”
“Of course, dear,” Alicia said, laying her hand on Jack’s, while Craig only grunted thoughtfully, staring into Jack’s eyes.
But Jack had had enough of having his eyes stared into meaningfully. Abruptly he excused himself. As he walked he saw Elizabeth Rayona crying, shoulders slumped, while Arden hugged her and spoke soft words of comfort. At the bar Jack made it a double.
Exit Interview
I’m sure this circle was quite extraordinary, wielded more than their share of influence over key political figures, made significant contributions that won them favors. Some were even in the diplomatic service, correct? Or had ties there? But now they’re gone, Mr. Driscoll, and I’m quite sure history will proceed without noticing.
Jack closed his eyes boredly. But the landscape behind his eyes was so barren, stretching over the horizon without relief, as his future stretched friendlessly. Only he held the Circle’s legacy now. Over two hundred years of the Real History, never written, never recorded, and over now.
He knew the interviewer was challenging him so he would try to impress her,
but he wanted to say something anyway. The reason for secrecy was gone now, since there would be no more secret intrusions into American history.
We brought down Communism, he said quietly.
The interviewer chuckled. Your group, by itself, ended Communism?
You’re right, I’m exaggerating. One of us put an end to the Evil Empire. Well, two. Craig Mortenson woke up grumpy one morning, read his morning Times, and said, “This is draining valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.”
His wife, knowing exactly what he was talking about, said, “It provides a good training ground for some of our people.”
“That’s not reason enough any more. Plus they’re annoying me.”
So he set about bringing down the Soviet Union. As he sat musing on how to begin, his wife said, “I’d start by getting a list of the College of Cardinals.” “Hmm,” he replied.
That was the first step, rigging the election of John Paul II. I mean, a Polish Pope? Didn’t anybody get the joke? How many Poles does it take to bring down Communism?
It took him more than a decade, and he did recruit a few of us to help, but it was primarily Mortenson’s doing when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Evil Empire. Mortenson was toasted quietly at the next meeting.
Jack shrugged. Well, that’s Craig Mortenson. And the amazing Alicia Mortenson, of course. One of these days the trade imbalance is going to piss him off, and then China better watch its ass.
The interviewer’s voice showed its first trace of humanity as she cleared her throat and said, Well, China can proceed without alarm for now. Mr. Mortenson—
I know, Jack said. Craig Mortenson had been one of the first to die, even before the final cataclysm.
The interrogation continued quietly, the interviewer politely ignoring Jack’s tears. He doodled more on the paper.
Denver
A group of the younger members, including Jack and Ronald, was having a good time near the bar, telling anecdotes about their jobs and recent lunches. People already knew the important facts, but got a kick out of hearing the details that couldn’t be included in an e-mail, the small signals passed when a mind had been turned.
“He’d been drumming on the tabletop ever since he got there,” Bill Wong was saying of a recent lunch with an undersecretary of state who had been his college roommate. “Just happy with nervous energy, you know, and as I talked about how sick I was of people stealing my ideas, or worse yet stealing them but changing them, leaving out the best parts, he was drumming more and more slowly until he stopped. Then a minute later he was just tapping on the tabletop, with his fingers like this.” Bill made both his hands into the shapes of pistols, the kind small pretend cowboys make as they say, kew, kew, his index fingers pointing like barrels. Everyone laughed.
Some older members had joined the small crowd too, and Jack was startled to find Arden Spindler at his side. She smiled at him and didn’t say a word.
“You know,” a young man in a suit spoke up. The young man had been a recruit of a few years’ standing, since early in college, and he had some remarkable abilities in computers, electronics, and surveillance, but in this crowd his people skills sometimes seemed limited. “I’ve been wondering, and maybe one of you older members can tell me, doesn’t this group have a name? I mean, an organization like this, that’s been around so long, you’d think at some point people would start, at least among themselves, referring to it as something. I realize there’s not much structure, and, and we like it that way, I know, but still it would be nice just to say to one of us quietly, ‘Are you going to the meeting of the—you know, the Foundation, or something.”
Most of the people hearing him looked amused, but a couple nodded thoughtfully, and even the amused ones shot some looks at each other, as if maybe they already had their own secret name for the group.
“I believe Aaron Burr wanted to call it the Council,” one older member said quietly, “but others, I think, thought that sounded too much like a secret governing council with tentacles in—well, just not an image we wanted to cultivate, even among ourselves.”
Jack said, “Professor Gentry told us that during the Civil War it was sometimes referred to as the Interdiction Committee, because of course it was intruding into both camps in order to—”
“Too many syllables,” Elizabeth Rayona protested. She had apparently recovered from her brief session with Arden, though there was still a bright sheen to her eyes. “I can tell why that one didn’t catch on.”
The first young man said, “But it does have the weight I think this group deserves. The gravitas, if I don’t sound too stuffy—”
“How about the Hornets?” Arden interrupted. Several people chuckled, and the young man looked offended.
“I’m serious about this, names—”
“So am I,” Arden protested. “I went to school in Europe, I never got the American high school experience, and I always wanted to belong to a team called the Hornets.” She shook her hands as if holding imaginary pompoms. “Go, Hornets!”
Several people echoed her cheer, laughter became general, and the stuffy young man turned away angrily. But a woman old enough to be his mother drew him back in and stood with her arm around him, looking fondly around the group.
“I’ve always thought of us as the Circle,” she said.
Her voice was warm and binding and they realized that’s how they were standing, in a circle. Some nodded, a few put their arms around each other, and the stuffy young man looked comforted. Jack gazed around at their faces, some of them known so well to him, others only familiar from nods or legends. It may have been only in retrospect, when he remembered this scene later, but he didn’t think so: looking around at their small band, he realized he was home.
The feeling was only diminished slightly by his near-certainty that at least one of these people had tried to have him killed.
Ronald clapped his hands together and said, “Let’s sing favorite camp songs! Jack, lead us off!”
People chuckled, and the circle broke apart, but Jack knew the others had felt it too. There was a slight sense of embarrassment as he and Ronald stood together, so that one of them was glad to point and say, “Oh, look, here comes the Chair.”
It was a joke. America has had 44 presidents. The Circle had had twelve Chairs in two hundred and twenty years. The current Chair was 87 years old, rolling across the room in a wheelchair, but that was only temporary, because of hip-replacement surgery. She could still beat any two people in the room at simultaneous visualized chess while reading a novel, and all of them knew it. This group had very little formal structure, and meetings were not called to order, but when Gladys Leaphorn rolled in they all either straightened their posture or self-consciously did not do so. Jack remained stiff-faced as she rolled right up to him. He nodded, clicking his heels together.
“Knock it off, Driscoll,” she growled. “Next time you have a whim to alter the whole dynamic of a meeting of world leaders, you might check with some of us first.”
“Would you have given me your approval, Madame Chair?”
“I don’t know. We would have had to think about it.”
“That’s what I didn’t think there was time for.”
“There’s always time for thought,” she growled.
If she had ever played Halo 2, and been surrounded by hostile aliens, she would have known otherwise, Jack thought. Sometimes you just had to act. “So what do you think now?” he asked casually.
Looking as if she were just now thinking about the idea, Gladys sat for a moment, then shrugged. “Probably didn’t do irreparable damage.”
Jack fluttered his hands over his chest as if his heart were going pitty-pat at her praise. Across the room, his former college professor laughed again.
“But seriously, Driscoll, all of you.” The Chair raised her voice. Gladys Leaphorn was a heavy woman with dark skin and the sharp cheekbones and nose of her Cherokee ancestors, and surprisingly delicate hands. S
he drew attention without demanding it, and even in her wheelchair somehow dominated the room. “Our primary concern right now is the President’s new National Security Advisor, one Dennis Wilkerson. Do any of you know him?”
They all looked at her, not even a murmur going around the room. The Chair sighed. “That’s what I thought. This is ridiculous, unheard of. Alicia, tell us about him.”
Without hesitation, Alicia Mortenson began, “Dennis Wilkerson, age 38. Raised in the midwest, attending several public schools as his father changed jobs as a salesman, finally graduating in Bloomington. Attended Wilkes-Barre College in Pennsylvania, degree in history, then entered the Air Force, where he worked in computers and digital surveillance, serving in Desert Storm but only on the very fringes.”
“Nothing but fringes in Desert Storm,” someone muttered.
“He did achieve a security clearance, but whether he ever saw classified documents is unknown. Released from service with the rank of captain, he worked in the security field in Cleveland for two years, and by security I mean of office buildings. Then he returned to college, at a small school in Virginia that apparently had an accelerated program—”
“—diploma mill,” someone else muttered. “Download it from the ‘net and print it yourself on your home computer.”
“—because he achieved a Ph.D. in only two years, this time in political science. For the last several years he has taught a couple of unpopular courses at Williams College in Missouri. Until Sophie Cohen, a good friend of several people in this group, abruptly resigned as National Security Advisor and the President plucked Mr. Wilkerson from his well-deserved obscurity to take her place.”
“And no one here has ever had so much as a cup of coffee with him!” the Chair said. “It’s intolerable.”
