by Jay Brandon
Bruno’s eyes as he watched the screen were more narrowed. He had a heavy, jowled face, but his body wasn’t as uselessly plump as it first appeared. When Bruno’s eyes narrowed a good observer could see a much thinner, hungrier man within. Tonight he wore black, blending into the big, black leather chair, almost into the dimness of the control room where he sat. As he stared at the screen he was almost reduced to a pair of eyes.
“Come on, Jack, the lady or the tiger. Which is it?” As nothing continued to happen, Bruno smirked. “Your legendary people skills aren’t much use here, are they?”
Jack saw no obvious other way out, except the way he had come. But he didn’t trust those doors. His training had taught him, whenever there are two ways to go, find a third.
The ceiling was low in this room, composed of large soundproofing tiles. By jumping as high as he could, Jack could touch the tiles, even push them up a little out of the metal grid holding them. No way he could get up into there, though.
He looked around. No tools to work with, not one. The room was absolutely barren of adornment. Jack only had two things to work with other than his brain and his body. Maybe it was game-playing that had taught him to look at objects in different ways, or maybe it had been his own inherent instinct. At any rate, it had taken him only moments to realize that sometimes a doorknob can be used as something other than a doorknob. The doors were so close together that their knobs were only a couple of feet apart. Jack put his right foot up on the knob on the right, jumped, pushed his hands right through the tiles of the ceiling, found the other doorknob with his left foot, and stood there for a second recovering his balance. Then he jumped off the doorknobs up into the ceiling.
It took him a moment to assure himself that he was stable. He put the tiles carefully back into place, and began crawling.
“Damn it!” Bruno yelled, jumping up from his chair. “I should have put the damned tiger up in the ceiling.” “The tiger” was merely an expression. He probably didn’t really have one on the scene, though his unseen listener couldn’t be sure.
Bruno ran around the room frantically, bringing screens to life, checking other sensors. He did not have cameras up in the ceiling, or any other way of tracking Jack’s progress. There was really nothing Jack could do up there—Bruno thought, but then he hadn’t thought Jack could get out of the two-door room any other way, either. It took him only seconds to consider and discard all the weapons at his disposal. Then he turned to the corner of the room. “You’ll bring him,” he said coldly.
Jack was crawling through dimness, feeling pleased with himself even with no idea where he was going, when he heard a scream. It was piercing, maddening, a scream of terror and pain. And he was quite sure it was Arden’s scream, though he had never heard her so much as raise her voice. The scream froze him for a moment, but not with indecision. When he unfroze he started crawling quickly, toward the source of the scream.
After some distance he slowed and halted. He was afraid he was giving away his position. Worse, he knew he was about to do something very stupid. He stopped, catching his breath, and took out his phone. The screen showed he had signal. Quickly he punched in some numbers. After a moment he got Rachel’s voice mail. Could she be sleeping? More likely she was using her phone.
Jack wasn’t even aware of the tenderness in his voice as he spoke. “Rachel, it’s me again. Listen, there’s something else you have to do. No, two things, and I hope to God you know what they are, because I can’t tell you from here. There are also some people you have to watch out for, starting with Professor Trimble. You’d be surprised to hear about the other two, I think—”
But before he could finish, the tile below him splintered and gave way. Then the whole ceiling around Jack collapsed. The collapse hadn’t been caused by his weight, though. Metallic arms reached up and grabbed him from his exposed position. The arms pulled him out of the ceiling then dropped him. He landed standing, then fell on his ass. His cell phone skittered away somewhere under the rubble around him. Jack coughed and blinked. The large room in which he sat seemed bright by comparison with where he’d been, though in fact it was dimly lighted. The wall in front of him was covered by a large console, with at least a dozen screens and as many keyboards, plus a vast array of buttons and switches. The room had an angled ceiling that ended high at that end, with a catwalk up on the wall above the console.
The rest of the room was furnished rather like an old-fashioned study, or a parody of one. Heavy, overstuffed leather furniture, a thick coffee table, floor lamps.
There were no people in sight. Then the one chair at the console turned, and the fat, bald man in the chair sat smiling at the dishevelled drop-in visitor.
“As you’ve realized by now, I just needed to make you hurry through the ceiling, so your noise would give away your position.” He flipped a switch close at hand and the scream rang out again, nerve-shredding even though it was only a recording. The man flicked the switch off again. “I don’t actually have her here now, though I did have to make her scream the first time we met. I thought it might come in handy to record it.” He sat beaming at his visitor, with his hands folded in his lap. Jack had never felt such warm regard.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Hello, Bruno.”
“Please don’t act as if you’re not surprised to see me.”
“I mentioned your name to people three days ago.”
Bruno narrowed his eyes, studying the man he hadn’t seen in a dozen years. Then he smiled in satisfaction. “No, you didn’t. I am a complete astonishment to you.”
Jack shrugged.
“You had forgotten me completely, hadn’t you?”
“No one could forget you, Bruno. I’ve thought about you often, believe it or not. I’ve always wondered when I’d be seeing you again.”
“Liar.”
Jack shrugged again. What he’d said was true, though. He had first met Bruno half their lifetimes ago, at Bruton Academy. Bruno had realized what the place was before Jack had, but in the end Jack had been inducted into the inner mystery and Bruno hadn’t. As a consequence, Jack thought, Bruno must have harbored the belief all these years that the Circle was something other than what it was: that it was the conclave of the Secret Masters of the World. That naked yearning for power as much as anything was what had kept Bruno out. But Jack had always suspected, as he’d said, that Bruno wouldn’t forget them.
He walked a little, which didn’t seem to bother Bruno at all. He didn’t even swivel to keep Jack in the center of his attention. In fact, he was looking past him, with a slight frown.
“How did you get the money out of our treasury to fund your project, Bruno? How’d you turn Professor Trimble?”
“Oh, that was easy. I’ve been cultivating him for years. He actually thinks I’m part of your group, Jack. Part of the ‘Inner Circle,’ so deep undercover that I don’t attend meetings or have contacts with anyone else. He believes he’s working for the good of mankind, whatever that means.”
“And the technology? For your miracle planes and spiders and all?”
“For the Night of Terror?” Bruno smiled. The fact that Jack knew so much about him obviously didn’t disturb Bruno. “Well, I’ve always been good with machines, Jack, I don’t know if you remember that. Good enough that I could meet some of the people who are really good. All that technology, as you called it, is stuff that’s been on drawing boards around the world for years. There are more mad scientists than you’d think. They just didn’t have the funding or the motivation actually to build the things before I came along.”
Jack wandered closer to the console, until he was close enough to touch it. He pressed a couple of switches, changed camera angles on screens. Bruno didn’t move to stop him. Jack didn’t hear much sound beyond this room, either. No scurrying army of minions. Except for his equipment, Bruno seemed to be alone.
Jack turned his attention to his old classmate. Aside from balding, Bruno didn’t look much older than he’d
looked as a chubby teenager. His eyes were black and deep and hard to read. He continued to chuckle, but something smoldered far down in his eyes. Jack sighed. “Bruno, let me tell you something true. I thought they did you a favor when they didn’t bring you into the Circle. I thought you could accomplish so much more in the real world. Really become something. Famous like you wanted, instead of the invisible creatures we are. Like vampires behind the—”
Bruno’s fist slammed down on the console. The whole room seemed to shake. It was a large fist, Jack noted, with tremendous force driving it. The metal console was actually dented under it.
And now the hatred had appeared on Bruno’s face. The flesh seemed to fall away, exposing sharp cheekbones and a thin nose, the face of someone eaten up by obsession. The smile was gone completely. “What would have been the point?” he snarled.
Jack gave him a look of non-comprehension. Bruno stood up, half a head taller than Jack. “Do you know what it’s like to feel the whole world shimmery and insubstantial around you because you don’t know the real truth of it?”
“Actually, yes,” Jack said quietly.
“To feel that whatever you might accomplish is overshadowed by someone whose name you’ll never know? To think that even if you conquer the world, it will only be because someone else planned it to happen?”
“We’re really not that good.”
Bruno leaned into his face. “Now you’ll be nothing. I’ll be part of the Real History. I’ll be controlling it.”
Bruno recovered some of his composure, straightening up and smoothing down his black jacket. “Yes, I know everything,” he said, trying to smile again. But he was looking past Jack again, all around the room, up into that dark space above the ceiling.
Jack knew now too, knew how high the stakes were here, not just for him personally, but for the world. He’d known that intellectually for days, but here in this room he felt the pulse of hatred so strongly it almost knocked him backwards. Enough hatred to smash everything to pieces. “You’ve done all this just to destroy us?”
Bruno laughed. “Not just to destroy you, Jack. To expose you and humiliate you. The Circle was designed to protect America’s place in the world. Now America has no place. Once the President gets here and is assassinated, America’s isolation will be complete. The world will come in to feast on the corpse.”
He sat again. Bruno obviously wanted to tell his story. “In less than fifteen years I’ve put together a better team than yours, Jack. Yes, some of them are washouts like me, but not as many as you’d think. The Circle has overlooked some powerful talents in the world. And I’ve trained them. In many ways it’s better to have a solid foundation of belief than to know the ‘real’ history.” Unfortunately, Jack could not only hear the quotation marks in Bruno’s voice, but Bruno made them in the air.
“Your precious Circle was a failure anyway, even without my speeding up the process. Look at the world you were protecting and tell me they were fulfilling their mission.”
Jack thought he sounded like a lapsed Christian, a man losing his religion and angry about it; angry at God for not existing.
“I created David Wilkerson, you know. The National Security Advisor? I guided him to power right under your noses, right past all of you. I even wrote his silly paper years ago, the one that brought him to the President’s attention. I’m sure he doesn’t remember it, but I did.”
Jack realized that he was very unlikely to leave this room alive, but on the off chance he did he needed to gather as much information as possible. Lie to me, he thought at Bruno. Show me what a lie looks like.
“Arden brought me here,” Jack said slowly. “How long have you been cultivating her?”
Bruno smiled again. “Longer than you can imagine, old pal. Where is she, by the way? I thought she’d be following you. Well, no matter.” That accounted for his looks past Jack and around the room. For the first time since he’d fallen out of the ceiling, Jack had an inkling of hope. But then Bruno resumed his story. “First I was her stern but kind-hearted math teacher at finishing school. Since then I’ve been feeding her information little bits at a time. She is completely mine.”
“It’s too bad you can’t trust her completely. She could have been even more of a help to you.”
“I do trust her completely,” Bruno said. His face was absolutely still as he said it. Nothing flickered. Then he gave the tiniest of smirks. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether I trust her. How did you know, by the way?”
That was good, Jack thought. First a lie, then the truth. Bruno would never trust any human being completely.
“She was too good,” Jack answered. “Always there when I needed her, always rescuing me when things seemed hopeless. Of course, I didn’t trust her from the beginning, because she’d been assigned to me. Then tonight she told me I couldn’t get in touch with Rachel and that she’d rely on Don Trimble. I’d already suspected him, partly because he’s the treasurer. And he told me he hadn’t talked to Arden. She said they have. They needed to coordinate their story. Trimble hasn’t bothered to get in touch with Rachel, either, even though he’s been here for days. He’s obviously working for a different team.” He studied Bruno’s face. “So is Arden. So she’s been yours all along? Ever since she was in school in Switzerland?”
Bruno’s smile was so self-satisfied it could almost live on its own, lift off his face and hover in the air, a UFO of smugness.
So Arden had been bombarded from all sides, for years, to believe that Jack is the villain. “She was even told you couldn’t be trusted by her beloved grandmother. Who, you may have noticed, has been MIA for a while.”
Jack stared. He was beginning to lose himself. This had been an intellectual exercise until now, a game, even with the world at stake. Because the world didn’t matter, only the people you cared about. And Gladys Leaphorn was like an immortal, a repository of so much history and wisdom she was irreplaceable.. Murdering her would be like going into an art museum swinging a flame thrower. He didn’t believe even Bruno capable of that. “You didn’t—” he sputtered, but broke off at the transformation of Bruno’s face.
Bruno’s voice remained smug but very hard. He stared at Jack, waiting for him to attempt something. All boyishness had left his expression. “Not until I no longer needed her,” he said grimly. “I know, you think I couldn’t do it. I think I could. After all she wasn’t my beloved headmistress, not in the way she was yours. Anyway, I found people who could do it.” Offhandedly he added, “Arden thinks you’re responsible for her demise, by the way.”
Jack wanted to leap at him and get his hands around his throat. In fact he felt sure Bruno was waiting for that. He wanted to goad Jack out of intellectual response. Instead Jack did something off-kilter. He closed his eyes for a moment, putting Bruno’s existence and everything he’d said out of his mind for a moment, then took his modified PSII off his belt. Jack’s fingers scampered over the keys. Yes, he had a connection.
Bruno went back to smiling. “Yes, I have wireless here. Go ahead, check your sources, Jack. Find out how thoroughly everyone mistrusts you. I don’t think you’ll even get a response from Rocky Mountain headquarters.”
Jack allowed his shoulders to jerk a little as Bruno revealed even more of what he knew. He had obviously devoted his life to a study of the Circle. What a waste.
Jack found his screen filled with angry invective. The National Security Advisor felt he’d been cheated. At an earlier time in his life, like ten minutes ago, Jack would have grinned at the mental havoc he’d caused. Now he just replied with a short message: you’ve been playing the game, imperialist. I’ve been playing you.
And he signed off for good. “Nothing,” he said aloud, just to give Bruno another grin.
“So now what?” he asked, dropping the game so that his hands dangled loose at his sides.
“I thought I’d just let you go,” Bruno said. “Let you go try to stop me. Like one of your games. See how ineffectual you are.”
/> “I’ve already stopped you. You just don’t know it yet.”
Bruno blinked, staring at Jack’s calm face. “You mean your little riots that are about to break out? Crowds chanting for America to re-engage with the world? Are your friends busy writing the signs now? It won’t matter, Jack. That will just be the punctuation on your failure.”
That shot hurt. Jack didn’t disguise the fact. His shoulders slumped a little more, and his eyes began moving around the room more frantically, looking for some way out or a way to sabotage this madman’s plans, even while continuing to talk to him.
Jack’s voice turned gentle, almost pleading. “It doesn’t matter, Bruno, what you do to me. There are still so many of us, some much smarter—”
“Such as, say, Craig Mortenson?” Bruno purred. He sat down again, the better to enjoy his old acquaintance’s reaction.
Jack stopped moving, stopped breathing, almost stopped living. He absolutely believed what Bruno was implying. The smirk confirmed it. He had murdered Craig Mortenson. Jack could see the scene played out in his mind. Not the scene that had actually happened, but something similar.
The thing was, each of the Circle members was so vulnerable, individually. They had the world’s best network ever. But they had no armies, no Secret Service, no individual bodyguards. It would be so easy, really, to take any of them out. If anyone knew who they were. If anyone even knew to look. Bruno had exploited that weakness.
Jack’s eyes were wet. His head hung down. But he continued to study Bruno from under his brows. “So then Alicia too?”
“Yes,” Bruno said. “Also dead, a little later in another place.”
But Jack had seen, not a flicker in his eyes, but the absence of a flicker. Bruno holding his face immobile. So it was a lie. At least in Bruno’s mind, Alicia Mortenson still lived. Jack didn’t understand how that was possible. If Alicia had been there she would have tried to prevent the murder, at the cost of her own life if necessary. If she hadn’t been there, she would have hunted down everyone responsible by now.
