Seventeen

Bobby drove to the end of Cathy’s street. The Droid told us to take a right onto Route 9, away from the center of Pittsfield. A city center without a Starbucks? I knew there was a reason I’d never been to Pittsfield. Route 9 turned down a hill and presented a broad vista with a large industrial plant across the road. Train tracks ran alongside the road then behind a mammoth office building that featured a big black and red sign. The sign said Global Defense Systems, with the G, D, and S forming the GDS logo.

Bobby said, “That’s where I’ve got a meeting.”

“With who?”

“Whom.”

“Thank you, Dr. Grammatico. With whom are you meeting?”

“John Tucker’s boss.”

“Want me to come?”

“You up to it?”

“Sure.”

“You know, you might be useful for catching bullshit. You’re an engineer like John Tucker.”

“No, I’m not an engineer like John Tucker, or like my father for that matter. The stuff they designed flew through the air and blew shit up. My stuff just gives your computer a virus. If my dad were here, he’d explain the difference very clearly.”

“He didn’t approve of your life choice?”

“No. It almost ruined Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be a software engineer,’ and all hell broke loose. You’d think I’d told him I was joining the Hare Krishnas. He called me an ingrate and a loafer. Said I was wasting an MIT education.”

“What did your mother say?”

“What she always said. ‘You should listen to your father.’ She was useless.” I looked at the smokestacks that marred the blue sky. “Thanks for bringing it up.”

Bobby pulled into the GDS driveway. “You sure you’re up for this? We can get coffee after.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Bobby stopped the car in front of a traffic barrier that lay across the driveway. The guard heaved himself out of the guard shack and approached the car.

“I’m here to see Paul Waters,” said Bobby. Security theater raised its head again as Bobby gave the guard his driver’s license. The guard looked at Bobby, looked at the license, handed it back, and opened the guard gate. We rolled through.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked.

“Security. You can never be too careful.”

“Security? He looked at your license and saw that it matched your face. What does that accomplish?”

“It gets him to open the gate,” said Bobby.

“But it didn’t do anything for security.”

“Not my problem.”

Bobby parked the car and we entered the lobby, asked for Paul Waters, and did the rigamarole with the front desk. Soon we were wearing unintelligible photocopies of our driver’s license pictures and standing in Paul Waters’s office.

Paul Waters sat among towers of paper that spoke to a career that had stalled in the 1990s. It was clear that he had rocketed up the org chart for all of one rung, gotten stuck due to a lack of either will, smarts, or political savvy, and remained firmly in place. His office was an archeological treasure. IEEE Spectrum electrical engineering magazines were piled three feet high against the wall. One of the bottom editions had slipped out of the pile. The ancient headline read Ballistic Missile Defense. It’s back! My dad might have read that article.

Waters had the paunchy body of a man whose muscles had atrophied to the point where they could only support his minimal daily activities: sitting, walking to meetings, sitting, and drinking coffee. He had eschewed one flight of stairs for the elevator. I suspected strenuous activity, such as heading outside for a fire drill, would kill him.

His desk held model missiles, family photographs, and a white coffee mug, stained to an indelible brown. The mug said Paladin Missile System. I remembered my dad drinking coffee from a mug just like it.

Waters peered at me. “You said your name is Tucker? Is that your last name?”

“Yup.”

“JT and his dad, John Tucker, both worked for me. Are you any relation?”

My face turned hot, flushing red with unexpected shame. I considered the simple lie of denying any connection but couldn’t see how it would help solve this puzzle.

“Yes. John Tucker was my father. JT was my half brother.”

My shoulders relaxed. There it was. Spoken out loud. It was easier than I had imagined. It had not killed me. I sank against the vinyl of Waters’s guest chair, adjusting as the truth seeped through me.

Waters said, “Oh yes, you’re the son from John’s previous marriage.”

A gasp slipped past my lips at this new layer of my father’s lies, this one designed to inoculate the people of Pittsfield if they should ever meet me—the other Tucker boy.

Waters continued, “I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a terrible thing, to lose a brother.”

My reality tilted. Here was a world that had existed alongside my own for more than thirty years, a world in which Cathy Byrd was my father’s wife and my father’s son was named John Tucker Jr. A world in which Aloysius Tucker was the “son from a previous marriage,” a guy these people might treat with respect, but who was the unfortunate result of my father placing his seed in the wrong vessel, the spawn of an ill-considered and ill-fated matrimony.

Somewhere outside my head, Bobby Miller was telling Paul Waters that Cathy Byrd was dead and Waters was covering his mouth in surprise and Bobby was asking him if he knew of anything that could explain the two murders and Waters was saying that he knew of nothing. Their words slipped through my ears and over my brain. They didn’t stick. They couldn’t stick. I was a ghost, a fly on the wall, a man who phased out of this reality and into his own. This wasn’t my world, this wasn’t my reality. I couldn’t be here. I needed to be somewhere where my history still mattered, where my reality was the only reality, a reality where John Tucker Jr. didn’t have football trophies or graduation gowns. A world in which my babysitter was just the distant memory of a young woman who took care of me when my mother ran errands. A world in which there wasn’t a house full of photographs of my father standing alongside his young clone, and the young clone wasn’t happily sharing moments of triumph with his buddy—a wisp of a kid who had appeared over and over, always standing next to JT. Who was that kid?

My trance broke as Bobby nudged my arm. “Tucker, we’re done here. You got any questions?”

I blinked and looked from Bobby to Waters, who regarded me with pale eyes set under soft lids.

Waters said, “Are you okay?”

I thought about the wisp of a kid in all those pictures and asked, “Who was JT’s best friend?”

Waters looked down at his desk and nudged a model of a missile so that it was square with the desk. “Oh, him. Yeah. Between JT getting murdered and him quitting, I’m stuck. I’ve got no one to pick up the pieces for the Paladin.”

Bobby said, “Who?”

“Dave Patterson. JT’s best friend. He almost got fired, but he quit first.”

Bobby asked, “What do you mean he almost got fired?”

“Well, I really can’t go into that. It’s against company policy.”

Bobby leaned his forearms on Waters’s desk and folded his hands. “Paul, the FBI is investigating some serious security issues with the Paladin. So I need you to tell me what you meant.”

“I can’t. It’s confidential.”

Bobby asked, “Security confidential or human resources confidential?”

“Human resources confidential.”

“Fine. So spill it. Why did they fire Dave Patterson?”

“It’s confidential.”

Bobby nodded. “So when I leave here and meet with your boss and ask him the same question, do you think he’ll give me the same answer? Let’s say he does. Let’s say he backs you. What do you think will happen when I go through channels and notify the Department of Defense that there are serious concerns regarding the security of the Paladin project?”

“What concerns?”

“Serious concerns. Do you think that the information you’re keeping from me will remain secret when the Department of Defense starts its investigation?”

“Well—”

“Let me give you a clue. It won’t. What will become clear to your boss and his boss is that a shit storm got started because Paul Waters didn’t share important information with an FBI agent. Because, believe me, everybody will know that I asked you.”

Waters nudged the model back into square. “I could get into trouble if I tell you.”

Bobby said, “No, Paul, you won’t. Because if you tell me now, nobody will know it came from you. It will be our secret. Right, Tucker?”

I nodded. What the hell. What’s another secret?

Waters sighed and said, “They were going to fire Dave Patterson because of security violations. He shared his password with another engineer. He just did it to save time, but he got caught doing it twice and they were going to fire him.”

“So he quit first?”

“I told him to quit. If he got fired for a security violation, he’d never work in defense again. There’s only one other company in town that does defense work, and they wouldn’t have touched him with a ten-foot pole.”

“Who’s that?”

“General Dynamics. He started there last week.”

“How about the guy who got Dave’s password? Does he still work here?”

“No. That was JT.”

“Figures,” said Bobby.