by Jay Brandon
“Come back here!” General Reynolds yelled, but his voice no longer had command. Barker gave the senior officer nothing but his back as he strode out of the room.
In the outer room, he said, “Start packing up, soldier. You’ve got an hour and this location will no longer be secured.”
General Reynolds had spent a long career making contacts that would serve him well at just such a moment as this. He knew more powerful people, in and out of the military, than any ten other general officers. But when he started making calls he found no one would take his.
He was a general without a command.
At 7:46 that evening there was a knock on the door of Bentley Robbins’ Georgetown apartment. Dennis Wilkerson already had a reputation within the White House of arriving late to appointments, so Bentley smiled now at the older man’s obvious eagerness. He looked around the room at the half dozen other young men and women in attendance, and he didn’t have to say “Ready?” or “Places” or anything else to announce that the play was on. They knew their parts. These young people held the positions they did at such early ages partly because of their extraordinary ability at sucking up. And at planting ideas and letting a superior think they were his or hers. They smiled confidently, then their faces went eager and admiring as Bentley opened the door.
A man and woman in suits stood on the threshold, so close they were already almost in the room when the door opened. They must have been standing with their noses pressed against it. They could have been brother and sister, with matching firm jaws, brown-eyed stares, and squared shoulders. Neither smiled.
Bentley didn’t lose his welcoming smile, though it grew slightly puzzled. “Are you here with the Advisor? Or do you need to do a security sweep before he comes in?”
“Bentley Robbins?” the woman said, as if he hadn’t spoken. Bentley nodded. “Step into the hall, please, sir.”
Before he did, Bentley turned and swept the room with a glance that snagged on each person there. Two of them were his best friends since high school. All were close confidantes. The momentary meetings of eyes conveyed specific messages to each individual. They nodded imperceptibly in return.
Then he stepped out into the hall and the man in the suit stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. A young woman stepped forward from the group, extending her hand and smiling graciously. “Would you like coffee? Maybe a cookie? We’re just having a—”
The man in the suit shook his head so minimally they could barely see the movement. “I want to see everyone’s credentials,” he snapped. “Now.”
One of the young men stepped forward, having sensed quickly that this man was old-fashioned in his sense of purpose and probably in other ways as well. Having a female partner grated on him. He would have been more comfortable in the FBI of the 1930s, with all-male agents and only the occasional female secretary to break the solidity. All this Jamie sensed about him as he came toward him saying, “I’ll handle this, Susan. I’m at the State Department, sir. Here’s my ID. If you like we can get my boss on the phone right now.”
The man didn’t answer. He just held out one hand like a traffic cop, halting Jamie, and with the other hand moved his jacket off his hip so they could all see his gun.
Out in the hallway, Bentley had shifted his smile to a concerned, eager-to-be-helpful expression. “Ma’am, I don’t want to make trouble, but can you identify yourself, please? Is there a security problem? I thought there might be when I invited the National Security Advisor to my apartment. I thought we might need some sort of preliminary clearance. But since the Advisor didn’t seem concerned I decided not to worry about it. Should I have, Ms.—?”
She just stared at him. “Let me see your ID, Mr. Robbins.”
His eyes narrowed fractionally. “How about if I see yours, Officer? Since you already know who I am, you could put us on an equal footing. I do have security clearance, you know. After all, I work at the White House.”
“That may not be true by morning,” the robotic young woman said, a remark that hit Bentley hard.
“What?!” he yelped, a sound of outrage that could be heard within the apartment. The woman smiled ever so slightly.
“Now. The ID,” she said sharply.
Bentley frowned as he fumbled for his wallet, abandoning any attempt to win her over, going instead to intimidation. “We’ll see about this shortly. As soon as Mr. Wilkerson gets here he’s going to be very—”
“Stop!” the woman suddenly shouted. “Drop it! Drop it now!”
“What? What?” Bentley looked genuinely baffled. “My wallet? Here—”
He dropped the wallet as instructed, but too late. The woman in the suit had drawn her gun. Dropping into the approved knees-bent, two-handed stance, she aimed it at his chest.
“Wait,” Bentley said, but before his voice could rise she fired, careful that the bullet go between his hands so there would be no defensive wounds. She was good, and it was a very short shot. The 9 mm. bullet went into the young man’s chest, slamming him back.
As Bentley lay gasping on the floor, the young woman reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a knife. Bentley’s eyes fluttered, the most alarm he could show. He couldn’t lift his hands in defense.
Holding the knife in her right hand, the woman cut the left arm of her suit jacket, drawing blood from the arm underneath. Then she slashed the knife across her left cheek, making no sound as the skin parted and blood welled out. She knelt quickly, opening Bentley’s barely-resisting fingers and putting the knife’s handle into his right hand. If he’d had his senses about him he would have recognized it as a knife from his own kitchen.
But the young man had nothing left, no sense, no last words, no time. The young woman pressed his chest, pushing out his last breath. Bentley gasped, tried to draw another, and died, on the floor in the hallway outside his starter apartment. He sent no last message, left no clue, and died without understanding why.
The young woman stepped quickly over the body and barged into the apartment, staggering as she crossed the threshold.
“He resisted,” she said shakily. Her colleague drew his gun. The remaining people in the room gasped and one screamed as they saw Bentley’s legs outside the doorway. Jamie broke for the bedroom door, pulling out his cell phone, and the male agent dropped him with a shot to the spine.
The others, sobbing and broken, allowed themselves to be rounded up and taken away.
In the Colorado compound, quiet efficiency had turned into uproar. People yelled into phones and at each other. There were only fifteen or so people in the room, but there seemed to be more arguments than that going on. The Chair herself was on two different speaker phones while talking fiercely to Janice Gentry. Her granddaughter Arden, who seemed to have assumed a role as her deputy, was disagreeing quietly with Alicia and Craig Mortenson.
Jack walked briskly from one computer screen to another, pressed a few keys, changed screens, then got on his own cell phone for thirty seconds. Reholstering it, he stepped up into the Chair’s immediate eye-contact range, and said in a voice that cut through all the others without being loud,
“How many people are you going to lose before you stop this?”
“Stop what?” Gladys Leaphorn snapped. “Breathing? This is why we exist, young man, to come to the aid—”
Jack interrupted. “Wilkerson’s being used as a magnet to pull us in, out of hiding. He’s unapproachable now. I don’t even think he knows he’s being guarded, but the same thing’s going to happen if anybody else so much as says hi to him. He’s radioactive, Gladys. You have to find another way.”
His use of her first name, which Jack had never done before, stopped her from immediately putting him in his place. She blinked, then twice more, and started thinking rather than reacting.
Jack looked more thoughtful too. “Of course, since he is the magnet you could try to—”
“Yes, thank you, Jack, I understand the principle of reverse polarization.” They were saying
that they could create a fake approach to the NSA, then follow or capture the people who responded, trying to work their way back up the chain to whomever was behind the larger crisis. Because they must be connected. The NSA was the source of the withdrawal policy, so it followed that the people protecting him also wanted the policy protected.
No one else in the room needed to be told the facts, either. “He’s right,” Craig Mortenson said quietly. “We need surveillance, not just —”
Discussion broke out anew, replacing the arguments. The Chair beckoned and Jack leaned even closer to her.
“Do you want to be involved in this?” she said very quietly.
Jack stood and looked around the room. He was not a spy and he was not a diplomat, and the people in this room were connected to the most skilled operatives of both varieties. He looked back at the Chair and shook his head.
She acquiesced immediately. “Go east,” she said. “I think that will be safest, heading right into the vortex and then spinning off again. After that either Miami or—well, make your own plans. You will anyway.”
She had understood what Jack was going to say next, or possibly slip away without saying: he was going off on his own, to try to deal with this problem in his own way.
“Take Arden with you,” Leaphorn added offhandedly.
“No!”
Arden stepped close to him and took his arm. Jack pulled away from her. “No,” he repeated, speaking to Gladys, pleading with her.
“Don’t then,” the Chair shrugged. “You know you won’t shake her.” She turned away. She had just spent a minute and a half on Jack, an extraordinary compliment in the midst of the greatest crisis the Circle had ever known.
Jack turned to Arden. She beamed at him. He started to speak, discarded that thought, then another, and finally said, “I am in charge.”
She shrugged, making wide eyes. “Of course. I don’t even know what we’re doing.”
He turned and began walking away, shrugging her off again. But before he got many steps away he turned back, raising his voice again. “Madame Chair?”
Everyone turned to look at him, not just the Chair. “You know what this means?” Jack said. “Bentley’s murder, the cone of protection around Wilkerson, the capture of anyone who makes even the most subtle contact with him?”
Gladys Leaphorn hesitated for three seconds, a very long time for her brain. Then she nodded. So did Alicia Mortenson, looking more frightened than Jack had ever seen her. In fact he had never seen her look anything but calm and gracious, until now.
What these events meant was that someone had been prepared to fend off exactly the kind of approaches in which this group specialized. That they had been outed. Someone knew about the most secret society that had ever existed in America.
Jack turned and strode out of the room, for the last time, leaving behind most of his real family.
CHAPTER 5
Exit Interview
Your group seems to have included a lot of professors, the interviewer said. I suppose part of their mission was to indoctrinate young minds with whatever belief system your organization held.
Not at all. They taught whatever they taught straight. We were top-heavy with teachers because that was a good job for us.
To spot new prospects?
No, because you get summers off. And if you’re a college professor there are sabbaticals, especially if your dean is in on the secret. You know our greatest tool, the one thing that has allowed us to operate? Tenure.
Jack caught himself speaking in the present tense again, and felt stabbed in the heart anew. He stared down at the small, spindly table between the interviewer and him, until she wrote three figures on the scratch paper. As he pondered them, she said, But your organization did recruit. You didn’t just reproduce.
He shook his head. There are a few second- or more generation members, but membership isn’t hereditary. Sometimes it skips a generation. Those are rather sad occurrences, I imagine, when parents have to keep a secret life hidden from their children.
Happens all the time, the interviewer said drily. But recruiting does go on in schools, doesn’t it? Did, I mean.
By this time the subject of the interrogation had given up any pretense of resistance. He could have been making up everything he said, but he didn’t hesitate or balk. His voice remained absolutely dead, as if he had already joined his colleagues in the grave.
Most of us were recruited in college. That’s when most people get away from their families for the first time. Your family may be lovely people or monsters. It doesn’t matter. The first test is that you escape them, that you have the ambition and drive to work your way past the high school counselors, have the grades, the desire. College is when the world opens up for the first time.
Some few have been recruited straight out of high school, or earlier. Those are usually the real leaders, though in school they may have been troublemakers, goths, writers of underground newspapers, or dropouts. These usually turn out to be either the best of us or total busts, who have to be quietly shepherded into careers or halfway houses, and let go.
And when were you taken in by this group?
If Jack heard the double meaning in the interviewer’s question, he didn’t give any sign. I was recruited in fifth grade, though I didn’t know it. I was one of those kids in the back row, who seldom lifted my face out of my Gameboy, except occasionally to mutter the answer to a question no one else knew, or to say to the girl passing in the aisle to sharpen her pencil, “Nice dress, Sally. Forget what your stupid friends say. They’re not good enough for you anyway.”
Why would you say such a thing, if you were such a loner? How did you even notice?
That was my mutant power, Jack said. It was the first thing like a joke he had said in this interview, but his voice remained flat. I couldn’t stop it. I just knew what people were feeling. I overheard conversations even if I didn’t try. And I couldn’t stop myself from trying to make someone feel better. I couldn’t not say something. Sometimes it worked, sometimes Sally would smile secretly for the rest of the day. Sometimes she or someone like her would just stare at me like I was a freak. But my teacher noticed. A gamester with dual-track thinking and underground social skills caught the attention of my fifth-grade teacher, who happened to be one of us. Or actually Them, at the time. She pulled some strings and I was sent to Bruton Hall, a prep school. That’s where my real education took place. I suppose Bruton’s been destroyed too?
Yes, the interviewer said flatly. Then she wrote in her notebook. Jack coughed slightly and looked away, though he remained expressionless otherwise.
Of course the Chair had been right. Jack couldn’t get rid of Arden. So he grudgingly accepted her company, or appeared to do so. They took her blue Continental, and Jack caught a lightly-travelled state highway, heading southeast. After a couple of miles Arden said, “You probably didn’t hear her, but Granny suggested you head due east. And I believe the nearest large airport is southwest, in Albuquerque.”
Jack didn’t answer. After another mile Arden said, “I can understand why you’d do the opposite of what she says, just because she said it. Maybe that’s what she intended, you know?”
“Yes I do.” In the rear-view mirror was a slowly-gathering, beautiful sunset. Jack kept looking back at it, making Arden turn to stare, until he finally stopped the car on the side of the road. They stood there not speaking for ten minutes, until the last brilliant colors suddenly fell out of the sky, then Jack kept driving.
By the time they reached Texas by then, and the night grew black and glittery, until a streak of stars was blotted out as something flew overhead, not very high above them, but so fast they couldn’t follow it. Jack stopped the car again and stared, but there was nothing to be seen. Arden stood beside him. “Rocket?”
Jack was thinking about diverting to New Mexico. The Circle maintained a lab near Roswell, and Jack knew they must be working on the possibility that these flights were of extraterrestri
al origin. Maybe they’d made contact years ago, maybe the aliens were already among us.
That would explain Arden.
“What?” she asked about his smile, and Jack was glad to know he’d had a thought she hadn’t read.
From the airport in Lubbock, Texas, he called home. Arden stood close enough that she could hear both sides of the conversation on his cell phone.
“Hi, Mom. Just called to see how you’re doing. Happy Mother’s Day.”
“Mother’s Day is six months away, Jack.”
“Well, I’ll probably forget it when it comes, so I wanted to say it while I was thinking of it.”
“Thank you, son. And happy Earth Day to you.”
Arden could hear Jack’s own tones in his mother’s light, lilting voice, and wondered if he could.
“Are you by yourself, Jack? Have you met a nice girl yet?”
Jack glanced at Arden. “No, not any nice girls. Besides, Mom, I’ve been telling you for years. I’m gay.”
“Oh, Jack, if only I could believe that. If I thought there was a chance of you settling down with some nice young man, you don’t know the peace of mind that would bring me.”
“All right, I’ll bring him by the next time I come home. Listen, Mom, he’s Thai, is that okay?”
“Jack, I’m so proud. Because I brought you up to love everyone and have no prejudices. Except of course against the Portugese. Not one of them can be trusted.”
“And I’ve never forgotten that,” he said.
Then Jack walked a few steps away from Arden. She gave him the privacy, but noted from his shoulders and head that the conversation with his mother grew more serious. He turned back toward her as he said goodbye, and put his phone away.
Neither of them said anything until they stood in front of a board announcing departing flights. This was a small, regional airport, their choices were limited. “Dallas or Houston?” Arden asked, as if they were about the same.
