We crept up on Gettysburg like Lee’s Army, coming out of the South up what is now called Confederate Avenue. The sun rose through haze on the hill by the university, dense lines of trees setting off the old town below, the long straight streets marching into the distance, columns of upright woodframe and brick houses bearing the bulletholes of the battle that made America. We’d been driving all night-East, West, Southwest, Northeast-we were on our third car since Virginia.
“Wow!” Tauber breathed out as soon as he got out of the car.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t feel any old-time mindbenders,” he said, “but there’s sure a whole lot o’ them — L Corp-lotsa fuzzy, dim signals.” He moved around a bit, as though the signal might improve facing a slightly different direction. “But nobody like us. Nobody like Ruben.”
“I don’t know,” Max cautioned. “There’s an odd one. Not a mindbender signal but powerful. Very deep-like an 8 Hz tone.” Tauber seemed to be trying to reach for this without success.
“Can you read it?” he asked.
“Not in a way that makes any sense,” Max said. “But-if he wasn’t here, why would they be here?”
“They’re waitin’ fer us,” Tauber said. “We’ll have to be careful.”
“If you can’t be careful, you have to be quick,” Max said.
He drove through town, feinting in one direction and then another. We didn’t see any suspicious SUV’s or jumpsuits but the two of them kept watch out the windows all the same, tense and twitchy. “The signal’s very strong,” Max said, “but it’s not organized, if that makes any sense. It’s not focused at all.”
“Some kid? Practicing the remote viewing he learned on MySpace?” Tauber asked.
“No,” Max said. “This isn’t some lonely geek conquering the world. This is pain and confusion and… I don’t know, something else…”
“Where’s it coming from?” I asked, just as it became obvious. Max turned off the road under a huge brick archway into a cemetery, a vast cemetery stretched across a rolling hillside, intersected by stone walls and rows of gravestones like an old man’s ragged yellow teeth.
“This is it,” Tauber said in a hushed voice.
“What?”
“They fought here. Lincoln gave the speech here.” A note of awe and pain was in his voice.
“You’ve been here?”
“Not me,” he said. “My great-grandaddy. 26 ^ th North Carolina. Died here, Cemetery Ridge. Pickett’s Charge.” There was pain and pride in his voice.
We drove the treed lanes. Max seemed to know where he was going without being in any hurry to get there. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“What’s up?” Tauber asked finally.
“I’m trying to suss out what’s going on here,” Max answered, his voice really sober, almost mournful. “I’m trying to get a sense of what we’re walking into. It isn’t Ruben.”
“How do you know?”
“The signal’s female.”
“Yep, that lets Ruben out. Marjorie?”
“Maybe.” He listened a little longer. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he shrugged finally and nosed the car around some trees until we could see the little rise ahead holding ten or fifteen people communing over an open grave. I didn’t see the priest but we could hear the blunt music of one voice prompting and a group responding. Max parked at the bottom of the rise, where the road ended. We started up the hill but we didn’t get far.
The sudden rumble made us all turn. Two familiar black SUV’s were tearing down both entry roads simultaneously. They stopped and emptied and then there were six of them to three of us, all of them wearing the LED goggles with earpieces. The leader came out last-Miriam Fine, looking even more fetching in the tight blue nylon jumpsuit than she had in her gray suit and pearls. Her eyes winked at me from inside the goggles-though I knew, when I thought about it, that I couldn’t actually see in there.
“Well, this is convenient,” she said cheerfully. “I come to wrap up one loose end and the other drops into my lap.” She motioned at the open van doors. “Take a seat-we’ll all go for a drive.”
“Not happening,” Tauber said before Max could get a word out. “I’ve already had yer hospitality.” His eye was still half-shut and deep blue.
“Why don’t we discuss it?” Max asked. The offer took Tauber by surprise and didn’t seem to suit Fine any better.
“Over there?” she offered, pointing to a dense copse of trees across the road.
“I like you better with witnesses,” Max answered, glancing at the burial party twenty feet up the hill. “You can’t erase that many, can you? We’ll talk here.”
“The Russians were right about you,” Fine shook her head. “You’re no spy. You’re negotiating? With what?” She whipped a Glock from the hip pocket of her jumpsuit and held it to my forehead. “We’re wearing the glasses-send any suggestion you want; we can’t hear it. But everyone knows what I want.” Her posse-all men around my age, gazing at her adoringly-pulled their Glocks from their side pockets and leveled them at us. I was soooo weary of guns. Fine’s cold steel tingled at my forehead and somehow I still couldn’t help but stare longingly at her. She felt so good to be in bed with…or she would’ve if we’d ever been there.
“What you will all do now is lie on the ground, arms out.”
“You gonna carry us outta here?” Tauber cracked.
“As long as you cooperate,” Fine said, looking around at the gravestones dotting the hill. “If not, we’ll leave you in an appropriate place.”
By the time she finished the sentence, it became clear she was struggling, though it was hard to tell with what. She was fighting her own words, face grimacing and sounds spewing out of her in a rush, forced past some unseen barrier.
One of her boys-gymrat muscles and a bright red Mohawk-stepped forward and leveled his pistol at Max. “Make it stop or I’ll shoot!” he screamed in his ear. Max’s eyes were as wide as the rest of us. He shook his head very slowly back and forth to say Not me.
A moment later, Mohawk Boy’s arm began to quiver like a diving board, his gun swinging up and down a tiny distance but an impossible speed. At that moment, he couldn’t have pulled the trigger if he’d wanted to. He stared wide-eyed at his own body shaking itself apart.
When I thought that phrase- shaking itself apart — it was just an expression. A moment later, it became reality. With a crack and a shriek, I saw something bulge up under the skin around Mohawk Boy’s elbow and his lower arm went limp; a moment later, something much bigger jerked upward through his shoulder blades and his whole arm fell. He cried in pain and reached over to grab his limp, useless right arm.
Fine pushed the muzzle of her gun right into my forehead. “I said Stop!” she yelled at Max but he just shrugged helplessly.
Mohawk Boy’s arm hung limp at his side, but his gun hadn’t moved-it remained suspended in mid-air, shaking itself to bits, piece after piece splitting off, spitting away as though spontaneously disassembling. A moment later, the unruly stream burst high into the sky-all eyes following-and spiraled in a disorganized stream into the open grave at the top of the rise.
There was a new expression on Fine’s face-and nothing I could have expected. If the rest of us were mystified, Fine was suddenly angry with herself, guilty even, like this was something she should have foreseen.
Following her glance, I couldn’t miss the reed of a girl marching downhill out of the crowd of mourners. Tall, long face full of freckles, strong nose and dark hair glinting chestnut in morning light. Her expression was fierce. And nervous. Maybe even frightened. But determined. Let’s say she was hard to read. At very least, she was confusing to read.
Mohawk Boy was suffering pretty loudly. He made a kind of bleating noise and the girl threw a piercing glance at him; immediately there was a loud crack at his knee and he buckled to the ground. This time, the bone actually poked through the skin. The other L Corps all predictably leveled their guns at her for a moment, until they leapt out of their hands and performed a lovely ellipse, high into the air and down into the grave, following the remains of Mohawk Boy’s pistol.
“ No more guns,” the girl ordered, in a voice shaking, barely under control. “ No more fighting.” She stopped and glanced at us and her gaze wavered uncertain for about a fifth of a second. Then she turned her attention back to the L Corp crew, whose goggles, cell phones and car keys flew into the air and joined their other toys in the now-crowded grave above. A moment later, the pile of earth next to the grave began to pour with rising force into the hole.
Mohawk Boy was writhing on the ground, crying out and trying to push his bones back where they belonged. He kept staring at Fine, pleading, but Fine ignored him-her angry frustrated gaze remained locked on the chestnut-haired girl, who coolly returned it. I saw a flash of something almost like amusement on her face for just a moment. “Take your clothes off,” she ordered, in the tone of voice the librarian used to tell you no talking in the stacks.
“You don’t-” Fine began but her jumpsuit began unzipping on its own and her shoelaces immediately unraveled and tied themselves together until she fell helplessly over onto the grassy hill. The girl gave the others a sharp glance and they proceeded without further argument to unbutton and unzip.
“When you’re finished,” she told them, “you can walk back to your hotel.”
She turned her attention to us. “That should slow them down-I have a bag in my trunk,” she said, pointing to an old Honda parked a few yards away. “We should go before they call for reinforcements, right?” We all scrambled up the hill to her car, while she collected the L Corp clothes and threw them into our trunk.
Tauber drove-it was his turn. I rode shotgun, Max and our passenger slid into the back seat. She seemed in a daze for several minutes, just staring at the seatback in front of her. When she started to recover herself, she drew up into some kind of parody of perfect posture. All at once, she really was the sexy librarian.
“They’re from something called the L Corporation,” she said finally, the words arriving in spurts. “It’s supposed to be some kind of consulting group but-”
“We’ve met,” Tauber said, adjusting the rear-view mirror to get a better look at her.
“The operations head is Pietr Volkov,” she added, staring at Max. “You should know him.”
Max nodded. “Again, we’ve met-just recently, in fact.”
Her eyebrow went up. “You think in English.”
“I was raised to be an American,” Max smiled his best smile, which was still not so hot. Another lull followed-the young woman seemed to drift away from us again. Then, all at once, she looked around startled and thrust her hand at me like an insurance agent on the make. “I’m Kate Crowell,” she said. “You were with Dave Monaghan?”
“Yes.” Here was another one who read your mind as deadpan as Max. By now, that was only a little shock.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “When did they kill him?”
“Three days ago.”
“First thing in the morning,” she said, although it was a question, not a statement. I nodded. “That’s when they ran my father over. Outside the supermarket. Stolen car, hit and run.” Her voice cracked in the middle but she just pushed past it.
“Did they catch the driver?”
“I just did.”
“The guy back at the cemetery?”
“Yes. He did it.” Each word seemed to come out of her as a separate effort.
“So you broke every bone in his body,” Max said, a judgment in his voice.
“I didn’t,” she answered, voice quivering. Every eye in the car must have gone wide at that, because she gathered herself up in protest. “I didn’t do anything.” She turned with a forced brightness to Tauber. “You’re Mark-you knew my father.”
“Yeah,” Tauber said, “he was a good ‘un. One of the best.”
“That’s not what you mean to say,” she said and waited for more.
“He…he was a full dose. An adult portion.” Tauber’s cheeks colored as he laughed and she followed, though everything she did seemed a little vacant. The way it would be if you’d just buried your father.
“And you-I know all about you,” she said, returning to Max.
“I doubt that.”
“My father went down to Washington when they debriefed you. The program was over but he still had a few friends-he pulled strings just to watch. He was so excited-he was going to see Renn!”
“He just wanted to see the horns on my forehead,” Max flashed his horrible smile again. “He was interested in seeing someone else like him-someone else like you.”
“You’re somethin’, sweetie,” Tauber crowed. “You’re just what we’ve been needin’.”
Kate started at that, throwing an alarmed look around the car.
“Whoa-wait a minute,” she said, hands raised in protest. ”Let’s get something straight. I don’t do this stuff. My dad’s been calling me for weeks to do research for him-I’m in school in Philadelphia and he’s useless on the Internet- was useless.”
Her eyes fluttered. She tucked her chin up and plunged ahead.
“He and Dave Monaghan worked themselves up about this whole L Corp business. They went into spasms about something every couple years. Except I guess they got it right this time. So I have his research and the notes I took for him. I’ll share them with you. But after that, I’m going back. To School. Where I belong.”
“That’s what I said the other day,” Max told her. “That I wasn’t getting involved.”
“We need ya,” Tauber drawled. “This is a big fight we’re in. With what you did back there-”
“I have no idea what I did back there!” Kate burst and shrunk back into her seat, defiant and guilty at once. “Look, I’ve seen what happens to…people like you. Nobody wants you running loose. Nobody trusts you.”
“People like us?” Tauber said. “Honey, we’re people like you.”
“I am a graduate student in Museum Planning,” Kate insisted, talking right over him. “I have a life and a boyfriend. As soon as I finish my thesis, I’ve got six good institutions that want me.”
“You are the possessor of very powerful forces and senses, more powerful than 99 % of the population. If you don’t-” Max paused, looking at his lapel. A funny smell filled the car.
“I spent my whole childhood getting disciplined,” Kate rattled on, “for things I didn’t mean to do. My parents got in the way of every good date I had, because they thought I gave boys crushes on me. I didn’t even know-”
“Stop,” Max said.
“What good is it anyway? The things you find out, no one even wants to know. It’s like-”
“STOP!!”
Kate flinched. “Stop what?” We all seemed to notice the smoke at the same time.
“You’re burning a hole in my shirt,” Max said. A little plume of blue steam was rising from the corner of his breast pocket.
“I’m not,” Kate whispered, pulling her head back into her shoulders.
“You may not be aware of it,” Max said, “but…you are,” and he tamped the smoke out with his finger.
Kate gulped hard and jerked her head sideways into the window. “Dammit! I’m not…Shit!” She clamped her arms across her chest. “I’m- beyond all this!” She dissolved into tears, drawing herself into the corner of the chair. Max offered a hand on her shoulder, but of course he didn’t have the touch for it and she wasn’t interested anyway.
We headed north through Harrisburg. The highway whittled down a few lanes due to construction and we crawled for a while. Max probably could have made everybody pull out of the way if he wanted, but it seemed like everyone needed to breathe, to regain a sense of the world around.
“Are we going somewhere?” Tauber asked finally.
“I’m not sure yet, just keep moving,” Max said. “They don’t know where we’re going.”
“Well, neither do we,” Tauber answered, “so they’re on the money.” Max shot him a look.
“Where’s the rest of your team?” Kate asked, ending a long silence. “Who else is working with you?”
Long pause.
“It’s-it’s just us,” I said.
Recognition broke over her face in waves. Disbelief came first. She searched our faces, to confirm we were serious. Then she started to laugh, almost against her will. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” Max sighed. That was when reality swept over me all at once. I’d been so caught up in what we were doing, in the energy and activity of it, I’d lost track of just how crazy the whole idea was. The ring in her question was reality and it wasn’t pretty.
“Do you know who these guys are?” she demanded. “I mean, anything these companies say in public record is meant to mislead and L Corp admits to thirty billion annual revenue. They opened the doors six years ago, supposedly for political consulting but last year wasn’t even an election year, at least not in this country. So it’s either Defense or they’re selling drugs-who else makes that kind of money that fast? They had a couple guys camped around my house the last few days-I figured, if they were trying to get inside my head, I’d get inside theirs first. They’re serious, they’ve got big resources and big backers and some big deal happening really soon.”
“Tomorrow,” Tauber said.
Kate’s eyebrows went up like exclamation points.
“You know that? For a fact?”
She kept looking back and forth from one to the next of us. You could feel the air leaking out of the car. She stared out the window, tapping her knuckles against it like a drummer.
“I have an apartment,” she said finally, “in Philadelphia. Dad never visited me, so they couldn’t have gotten the address from him. You should be safe there overnight.” She made a disgruntled count of the company. “Someone’s going to have to sleep in the bathtub,” she announced.
Her apartment was in what looked like a very dignified old garage. “It’s a mews,” her voice echoed as she opened the huge door-someone had built it some time ago to fit the ornate archway on the street. “We’re tracing back the documents-I know it’s at least two centuries old but that’s as far as we’ve gotten.” The neighborhood was one of those arty places where everything looks a little rundown but one neighbor stacks huge paintings in his window while the sound of a jazz band drifts out of the next.
The TV was on when she opened the front door. The two spooks, Tauber and Max, immediately went stiff and cautious, moving through the place door to door, throwing open and checking each room thoroughly before relaxing. Kate walked calmly past them into the kitchen to make coffee.
“Steve leaves the TV on all the time-when he’s here, when he’s gone. It’s his imaginary friend.”
“Steve?” I asked.
“My boyfriend.”
“You live together?” Max demanded. The tone of voice said he wasn’t convinced there was no threat. “He stays here even when you’re gone?”
“Well-he and Morgan were here. They’re away this weekend.” She hesitated for a moment. “She’s my roommate-Steve’s with her too,” she said with a little hesitation.
“So he’s the apartment boyfriend,” I remarked and Tauber shot me a look. Kate just nodded and went back to her coffee. “Do you have tea?” Max asked and she nodded and ran water into a kettle.
“They won’t barge in on us?” Max asked. “The roommate and…your boyfriend?”
“They’re gone till Monday,” Kate answered wistfully, kindling a questioning look on Max’s face.
There was an artist’s easel propped against a corner, holding a book of drawing paper. Max tore off a page.
“We’re going to spread out on the table,” he announced, setting Kate scrambling to move a pile of academic journals onto the floor before he could upend them. Max spread the paper across the surface. Kate pulled out a speckled journal out of the side pocket of her suitcase and opened it to a page marked by a yellow stickie.
“These are my father’s notes from his talks with Dave, my notes from our conversations and my research. I can’t promise they’re word for word but the gist should be right.”
The pot started to whistle. Kate turned but Tauber held up his hand. “You stay, sweetie,” he said. “I can make tea-and coffee.”
“My hero,” she answered. She opened her book and started reading out loud. Each major point she made, Max jotted on the sheet, lines drawn between known connections and dotted lines between suspected or hypothetical ones. It was a familiar list-L Corp, using mindbenders to bolster candidates and business clients, an army of low-level mindbenders to send out mental suggestions and the Big Scheme coming soon.
“There’s not much new here,” Tauber said when she’d finished. The table was a nice mess of papers and coffee mugs, doodles on art paper and lots of names with arrows pointing at other names pointing at question marks, mostly because we didn’t really know a whole lot more than we did before.
“What did you do to the shooters at the cemetery?” Max asked again. When she didn’t answer immediately, he explained, “You made their guns fly away. They got naked without a peep.”
“Can’t you do that?”
“I want to know how you did it. Their goggles were supposed to hold down outside influences like us.”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You usually make guns fly around without knowing what you’re doing?”
“I don’t usually deal with people with guns!” she answered, again as though fighting to get the words out. Or fighting to control herself.
“So you took their guns-and cell phones,” Max said. “And goggles. And clothes. And you broke the killer’s bones.” Having seen her temper, I wouldn’t have kept pushing this point but that didn’t stop him.
“I–I didn’t,” Kate protested again. A long moment passed, the two staring each other down across the table. Then she added, “Not on purpose. He really did kill my father! It was in his head. He drove the car himself, so no one would botch the job. He ran over him twice to make sure he couldn’t survive and then just drove off.” The tears were brimming but she fought them off stubbornly, heroically. A long moment passed in silence.
“But not on purpose isn’t the same as I didn’t do it, is it?” Max said finally. “What did you know when you marched down that hill into the face of six people with serious guns and bad intent?”
“I knew I was sick of guns,” she answered fiercely. “I knew you were coming from Dave.”
“How did you know that?”
“He told my father that, if anything happened to him, you’d be coming.” This was a shock to me but Max just smiled, as though it confirmed something he’d already been thinking.
“And what else did you know?” he said, voice softening.
“Why is it so important?”
“If you’re really fooling yourself that you didn’t make those things happen, I need to know it.”
“You don’t need to know anything about me.”
“And if you broke his bones at ten feet without meaning to, I would think you’d better know it. People like us can’t afford illusions about ourselves.”
“Why? The psychiatrists are all booked up?” She was building up a slow boil again; I started looking for a soft place to land.
Max eyes flared. They seemed to draw up into his skull. I felt his voice coming at me through the floorboards.
“Our illusions have consequences. They have a way of becoming real.”
Kate’s face went paler, if such a thing were possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where is this boyfriend of yours? Where’s your roommate?”
“I–I told you. They-they went camping. They made plans… a long time ago.”
“You just buried your father.”
“You can’t expect them to feel the way I do.”
“I could expect them to go to the funeral for your sake.” Kate’s jaw was set but her eyes were nowhere near as confident. “Does Morgan share Steve with you when she’s around? Or are you the only one sharing?”
Max was inches from her now. His voice was so soft, I couldn’t believe I really heard it. I saw his lips moving but the words seemed to come from inside my head.
“Your feelings run very deep; they frighten you. Millions of people with the depth of a coat of varnish are frightened by their feelings. And you carry oceans-so I understand your caution.” He stared into Kate’s eyes like he was pulling her inside-out through them. “But instead of learning to deal with the power of them, you’ve gone into hiding. You’ve taken partners who don’t touch anything in you and given them free reign. It’s safe-you know they’re only using you for sex and company-you’re in no danger of feeling anything that could get out of hand. Your career keeps you at an academic distance from all of human history. You’ve got the illusion of a life but no nourishment. The longer you bottle those feelings up, the more powerfully they’ll spill out in the end.”
His eyes were hard on her and for a moment she looked stung, almost shamed. But then her face turned defiant. She took him on and stared him down.
“Funny-from what I’m reading, you’ve spent the last twenty years hiding-from everything.”
Max didn’t bend. “I said I understood-I didn’t say I was different.”
The place was quiet for a long moment before Kate gave out a long sigh.
“Okay,” she admitted, “when I came down the hill, I knew I wasn’t going to let them kill anyone else. And I knew I could do something about it.”
She was confiding now instead of confronting. But her voice gained strength as she went.
Tauber came out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and refilled the cups.
“Well now, that’s the thing, ain’t it? Knowin’ you can do somethin’ ‘bout it. There’s somethin’ big comin’ down in the next day or two and we seem to be the only ones in the world who can do somethin’ ‘bout it.” He clicked his cup into hers. “Yer daddy’d be with us if he was around.”
She was wavering, still conflicted. “They’re defense contractors. Let the government squeeze the purse strings-they can stop them.”
“They don’t need the government’s money.”
“They’ve got Jim Avery!” I burst.
“ Your World? On TV?”
“He’s the bankroll,” Tauber said.
“Hmph!” Kate puffed. “That’s some bankroll.”
“They’ve got all the connections in the world,” Max said, looking intently at her again. “No one will ever investigate your father’s death-or Dave’s. They’ll be papered over. No justice for them if we don’t make it ourselves.”
You could see this pound its way into her. She’d been holding herself in ever since the funeral and now every feeling in her simmered just an inch beneath the surface. Max sat up and his voice was straightforward, unemotional.
“I’ve spent twenty years,” he said, “hiding from what I am. Sounds like you’ve done the same. And we see the results: I’ve lost my best friend; you’ve lost your father.”
Kate was struggling now. “There’s got to be an answer,” she whispered. “There’s got to be hope.”
“Ya want Hope? Avery’ll sell it to ya, sixty bucks a barrel,” Tauber said with satire in his voice. “He’s the OPEC o’ Hope.”
Kate wheeled around so fast, we all jumped in place. “I’ve heard that!” she hissed. “Where did I-? From the man in the car! When I got home from… identifying Dad’s…body, I went into the kitchen to make coffee and I got this weird headache, like the back of my skull was hot. A probe. Dad used to probe me in high school, to make sure I hadn’t gone over some boy’s house.” Her voice wavered again and now she kept talking despite tears rolling down her cheeks. “It was the guy in the van parked across the street.”
“You can handle probes?” Max asked.
“I was a good girl,” Kate answered, lifting her chin. “When my parents made me promise never ever to do something, I only tried it a couple times.” She flashed a sly smile, almost despite herself. “Besides, I had to learn so I could go over the boy’s house, didn’t I?” Her smile faded fast. “So I followed the probe back to the guy across the street and started riding his thoughts, letting them carry me, for hours at a time.”
She saw Max’s eyes on her and she reddened.
“I had a hard time making friends, okay? I was the eerie girl in middle school who talked to herself and commented on what people were thinking instead of what they’d said out loud. Eventually, you make use of your advantages. I started getting into boy’s heads. It got me a better class of dates.” She laughed and placed her cup in the sink. “Anyway, when I got inside the guy across the street, I found out about the big operation-he’s doing security for the flight.”
“There’s a flight?” Tauber asked.
“Definitely,” Kate answered. “More than one-he’s in charge of his and two others. And there’s more besides.”
“Then they’re not goin’ to Langley,” Tauber concluded.
“Langley? That’s CIA, right?” Kate said. “It’s always in the movies.”
Max nodded. “This whole thing’s tied up with the CIA somehow. But nobody’s flying from Herndon to Langley-it’s ten miles.”
“What was weird was, he was doing security and they didn’t give him the details. All he knew was, it’s soon-”
“Tomorrow-”
“-they told him to bring his passport and warm weather clothes for a week. And they told him, This is the big shot. We won’t get another chance like this for years.”
“A chance for what? Did they tell him that?”
“To kill hope. That’s what they said, to kill hope everywhere.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Tauber said. “If they kill hope, what’s Avery got to offer ‘em?”
The room went silent for awhile. Then I heard myself speaking. “What he’s offering is a fix,” I said. They all turned to look at me and damned if I had any idea what I wanted to say but that didn’t stop the words from coming.
“My outfit had a local guy, a translator, in Najaf. He was real useful when we first got there and everybody was friendly. Six months later, everybody-Sunnis, Shiites-started targeting his family because he was helping the Americans. We had to smuggle them all to Jordan. He applied for a visa to the States and our CO promised to help him get it.
“And then word filtered down that they-whoever ‘they’ were-weren’t processing visas, not fast, and then not ever. Which didn’t stop him from showing up in my quarters every couple days, bugging me about it. ‘Are they helping me? We getting a visa?’ What was I supposed to say? ‘It’s America,’ I told him. ‘They’ll do the right thing.’ After the fourth or fifth time, no way either of us believed it.
“But it ate at me. Why didn’t he go to the CO? Why me? The answer is, because I’m not tough-never been. He came to me because I’d tell him what he wanted to hear. I gave him his fix, his hope for the week. I felt like a pusher, too. Who made me a spokesman for America?”
I could feel the memory burning inside, like it had just happened, like it was happening right now. My fists and teeth were clenched tight. “That’s what Avery’s doing-offering everybody their fix.”
We filtered around for a while, aimless, each of us wandering around the room, uncertain of the next step.
“It makes sense,” Max finally said. “It’s what Avery told us-supply and demand. If they kill hope, he’s got this huge organization designed to offer it-for a price.”
“And it’s so much safer sellin’ measured portions to them that can afford it,” Tauber said. “Real hope’s messy. Unruly. Bad business.”
“But what does the CIA have to do with it?” Kate asked.
“Five minutes talkin’ to them’ll kill any hope ya got left,” Tauber cracked and we all smiled. But the joke didn’t get us any closer to an answer.
The TV was in front of me; I wasn’t thinking of escape or boredom. I wasn’t interested in what was on. If there’s a TV in front of me, I pick up the remote and turn up the sound. Thirty seconds later, I change the channel. It’s what I do. It’s the way I survived Iraq and a year in the middle of a swamp and probably my childhood. So now I did it again, just out of habit.
“Preparations continued for tomorrow’s G8 Summit in Rome,” the announcer droned, trying to sound important if not exciting. “Demonstrations were held on four continents today in support of Indian Premier Aryana Singh’s proposal for worldwide nuclear disarmament. Rome police are out in force, covering the major squares and thoroughfares to keep the demonstrations from spiraling into unruliness.”
“There, ya see?” Tauber cracked. “Unruliness! Them bastards have hope!”
“Tomorrow’s arrivals of foreign dignitaries have been moved to Rome’s Ciampino Airport, a rigidly-secured military facility. Authorities have assured foreign governments that…”
My eyes must have gone huge. Kate saw it from across the room. “What?” she demanded.
“We’ve got it all wrong,” I said and Max slapped his forehead across the room, reading me.
“Got what wrong?”
“Everything. CIA!”
“They’re behind it?” Tauber barked. “Against it?”
“Neither. It’s not the CIA. It’s just CIA-the airport is CIA!” I ran to Kate’s computer and punched up Google. “I flew into Ciampino once on leave. The airport code-the three letter ID on your luggage?” I waited a second for the information to display. “Ciampino is CIA.”
“And IAD?”
I scanned down the list. “Dulles.”
“They’re flying to Rome tomorrow,” Tauber said. “From Dulles to the G8.”
“To kill hope,” Kate murmured, staring at the TV, where Singh was addressing a raucous crowd from a balcony in New Delhi.
“We seek a new world,” her voice echoed across the square. “In our lifetime, we have seen walls dissolve between East and West. Now it is time to continue that work, to push down the walls of fear between us, to keep pushing until no more walls are left. This is a long road but, as the philosopher says, every journey must begin with a first step.”
The crowd cheered.
“Them bastards have hope,” Max repeated quietly. “We’re going to need passports.”