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 extraterrestrial 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.
Jack stood lost in thought for a moment, as if doing a math problem in his head, then led the way to a ticket-dispensing machine and bought two tickets to Houston. The flight was without incident, but Jack’s mind was filled with that plane, or rocket, that he hadn’t quite seen, so fast it could have been created by imagination. It remained that way in his thoughts: just ahead, eluding even his mental vision, until it dropped over the horizon.
“I wonder where it landed,” Arden said. “I wonder what it dropped.”
Jack was wondering something else. “If the President is doing what they demanded, why are they launching another attack?”
Houston Intercontinental Airport is vast, a city. Jack got lucky. The airport lived up to its name: there was one flight to London leaving in two hours. A late flight, overnight, which left them walking the airport for only half an hour or so.
Arden asked questions about their destination, and Jack answered evasively or not at all, until she stopped. The Chair had known what she was doing, and Jack had known what she was doing too. These attacks on him might be unrelated to the larger problem, but they had to be resolved. He needed to be away from the Circle until they figured out who was trying to kill him.
Also, of course, Gladys Leaphorn didn’t trust him. Not only had Jack been attacked, he had been seen in places he had no explanation for being, countries where he had denied setting foot in recent times. Maybe the Chair believed him, maybe she didn’t, but she wanted him gone. With Arden watching him.
At some point he would have to ditch Arden, but he couldn’t do that too soon. When it was time for Jack to bolt it would be full-out, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.
At a concourse intersection in the terminal was an old New England pub, authentic in no details. Jack and Arden sat at a table just inside its doors, eating limp salads and watching people go by, when suddenly Jack bolted upright. The next moment he was gone. Arden barely had time to grab her purse and catch up to him. Jack was moving fast but not calling attention to himself, glancing at his watch like a man late for a plane. But then he ducked behind a pillar and looked out. Arden just stood in the terminal, staring in the same direction but seeing nothing to alarm her. Jack pulled her back.
“See that man? The one at the water fountain. Now he’s turning. Look.”
She looked. Then she stared. Across the way was a man in rumpled, faded denim and matching jacket. He wore an elaborate wristwatch and a cell phone holster. His light brown hair appeared on both his head and his cheeks, which were stubbled, perhaps deliberately, perhaps from long travel. The man looked around the terminal sleepily.
It was Jack.
That is, it could have been Jack. It could have been his brother. “Do you have—?” Arden began.
“One brother, but he doesn’t look like that.”
Jack stared quickly around the terminal. If this man was here to replace him, he would have to be part of a team. His partners would have to capture Jack, or kill him, while Denim Man stepped into his shoes.
“First of all, I wouldn’t dress like that,” Jack said, watching the imposter critically. “Well, maybe unless I was going to a convention. But I’d never wear a watch like that.”
“Unless you had to stay in touch with your entourage,” Arden said, then shook her head, cutting herself off. She put her hand on Jack’s arm. “Could we be coming down with a touch of paranoia, love? It’s been going around lately.”
“Yes, it tried to kill me in Reno, remember? Two paranoias, with weapons. And I’ve supposedly been seen in places I swear to you I was not.” He stared around. “How did they know I’d be here? Did they have a GPS tracker on your car? But we left your car.” He suddenly stared at Arden with obvious suspicion.
She shook off his look. “All roads lead to Houston,” she said. “This is one of the busiest airports in the world. It makes sense that you’d come here. Or maybe they just have a double for you stationed in—” She stopped herself again. “This is ridiculous. Look how many people pass through this place. There’s bound to be one who looks a little like—”
“Yeah, point out your evil twin.” As he said it, Jack thought that Arden herself was the evil double. Maybe her innocent twin was somewhere here, waiting innocently to be replaced.
“I’m going to talk to him,” she said suddenly.
As she walked out the set of her shoulders told Jack that she expected him to call her back in an urgent whisper, but he didn’t.
He just watched. He didn’t watch Arden, except from the corners of his eyes. Even with those limited glimpses he took in her act: walking distractedly across the busy terminal, glancing up at the departures sign, a woman obviously killing time before a flight. Then she saw the man in denim, registered surprise, and rushed up to him. No subterfuge, meet-cute opening line, no time for him to prepare a defense.
Jack was concentrating on everyone else in the terminal: who seemed to be watching the little scene, what men were too hard-eyed to be travelers, who was too little encumbered with carry-on luggage. He didn’t spot anyone, became suddenly afraid that they were observing him, with better covers than he had, and skulked back deeper into the crowd.
He still couldn’t pick out any half-concealed watchers, which kicked his paranoia into such powerful overdrive it was like a heavy coat hanging around his shoulders. Then abruptly Jack shrugged it off and was moving quickly across his side of the terminal. He ducked into a line of departing passengers, which started a minor ruckus, until he stepped out again on the other side, making an angry gesture as if he’d been ejected.
Meanwhile, forty yards away, Arden had captured Denim Man’s attention. He was following her on a parallel course with Jack’s, the man talking and trying to keep up with Arden, who danced just ahead of him but looking back and smiling, leading him on. And she had managed to give Jack a little signal at the same time that he interpreted as her needing his help.
There are all kinds of little niches in an airport. Empty courtesy counters, lounges from which a plane isn’t due to depart for hours, empty kiosks, a shoeshine stand. This late at night, many of these things were abandoned, and there weren’t nearly as many passengers as there would have been earlier in the day. Maintenance people and security guards were tired and less observant, too. Arden and her prey didn’t seem to draw anyone’s attention as they slipped into a darkened alcove. Jack stood looking all around, waiting for someone else to follow them in. When no one did, he slipped across the terminal, again looking at his watch—this time for real—and stood just outside the alcove. He heard a smooth voice with rough edges say, “What flight are you on, babe? Do you belong to the mile-high club?”
“It’s been so long I think my membership’s lapsed,” Arden answered flirtatiously. “Where are you headed?”
“Miami. Land of—”
“No!” Arden squealed, like a teenager spotting a TV idol. “That’s too lucky. What flight number? Let me see.”
Jack heard sounds of a small scuffle that involved more than an exchange of papers, then Arden’s voice came much more urgently. “Jack!”
“Yeah, that’s my name, luv. How’d you—” the smooth, edgy voice was saying as Jack rushed into the alcove. The man looked up quickly: hair more blond than Jack’s, probably streaked, more wrinkles around the eyes, unless Jack hadn’t studied a mirror closely enough lately, but definitely his face, Jack’s face. It would fool anyone outside his immediate circle, meaning it would fool almost anyone.
Those eyes narrowed, and without a moment’s hesitation the man swung his right fist, catching Jack in the jaw. Jack was already skidding, trying to stop, and the punch knocked him straight to the ground. He lay there looking groggy and moaning.
Denim Man returned his attention to Arden, with an angry expression not all that different from the leer that had shaped his features a moment earlier. “So you must—” he began, reaching for her.
She hit him with her stiffened fingers in the solar plexus, just below the breastbone. She encountered muscle, hard and unyielding. This man only resembled Jack superficially. Under the clothes he was a very trained fighter.
The blow stopped his breath for a moment, but he grinned at her and caught her hand. His other hand came up quickly, aimed at her chin.
And then Jack, who lay flat on his back, his legs stretched out between his standing attacker’s legs, simply brought his foot up as hard as he could. It made a satisfying crunch. The man was wearing some sort of protection, like a catcher’s cup, but Jack had good leverage and his foot drove the cup up into the man’s crotch, almost as effectively as if the man had been wearing nothing. Denim Man grunted hard and crouched instinctively, trying to protect himself.
And Jack brought both his knees back against his chest and kicked out into the man’s gut, just as Arden swung her stiff hand at his neck, hitting his windpipe.
Both blows were effective. For a moment the man hunched, trying to protect himself everywhere at once, then collapsed.
“Hurry.” Arden was already on top of him, going through his pockets. She found an ID case in a jacket pocket and pulled it out. “Look.”
Jack did. He saw his own picture and name on a California driver’s license. The picture looked more like him than the imposter did. He noted the address, in Riverside, sure it was fake but memorizing it anyway because he couldn’t stop himself. Arden didn’t find anything else useful except a ticket and boarding pass that weren’t for a flight to Miami at all, but for theirs to London. “Liar,” she sneered at the unconscious man.
Jack stared down at the face that was not quite his. He had an urge to kick the man in the head, stomp on his ribs. The urge made no sense at all. It was totally instinctive. This was his replacement, which made Jack unnecessary. Self-preservation made him tremble with the desire to smash this thing into unrecognizability. The same urge those people felt when looking at replicas of themselves growing in pods.
“Let’s take him—” he began, while Arden said, “Is there anybody—” and they both knew what the other was going to say. Jack wanted to get the man some place where they could interrogate him, but Arden didn’t think they had the time, and wondered if they could just immobilize him some place where some of their people could pick him up later.
During the second that they evaluated each other’s plans, both became unworkable. Two uniformed and armed security guards suddenly stepped into the alcove from the terminal, looked down at the man on the ground who had obviously been attacked, shouted, “Hey!” and began going for their guns.
At the same time there was a clicking sound and a door at the other end of the short alcove unlocked and opened. A much beefier maintenance man came in, gaped at the scene, and stood blocking the door.
Arden was still crouched down on the floor, where she’d been going through Denim Man’s pockets. Her face a mask of distress, she said, “Help me, please! He’s diabetic!”
The three men reacted completely differently, which Jack noticed in less than a second. One security guard paid no attention to what Arden had said, continuing to go for his gun. The other froze for a moment, uncertain. And the maintenance man started forward, looking only at the man on the ground.
That told Jack everything he needed to know. The two security guards were confederates of the fake Jack, in on the subterfuge. One of them still had some humanitarian instincts, or maybe, just maybe, he was authentic, as the maintenance man seemed to be.
“Listen to her!” Jack snapped, and kicked the fake guard in the hand. Then he grabbed the maintenance man’s arm, pulling him forward. He was a big guy, already moving forward, and his momentum turned into a lumbering fall. He sprawled into both security guards as Jack grabbed Arden’s hand and said, “This way!”
She was ahead of him, already leaping toward the closing, locked door through which the maintenance man had come. Arden caught it just before it clicked back into place, and she and Jack slipped through it, quickly closing it behind them. Something slammed into it just as it closed. A fist hammered on it.
They were in a service corridor of bare steel walls, carts, tools, and discarded signs. Without speaking to each other Jack and Arden raced in the direction of their own gate. As they ran they had to jump over thick cables in places, some of which seemed to connect nowhere. It was a little scary to see how haphazard this place looked behind the scenes.
“We can’t get on that flight,” Arden panted. Jack had been tipping back and forth, but she made up his mind.
“We can’t not! They want to trap us here. We’ve got to take off.”
“It’s already boarding,” Arden said, and he had no clue how she knew that.
There was pursuit behind them. They both began opening doors along their way, trying to leave false trails. One of the doors turned out to be to a closet. As Jack thought about ducking into it he glanced into the closet and saw clothes. A maintenance worker’s gray coverall and cap. He grabbed them.
“What—” Arden began, then shut up. “Out that way,” Jack said, pushing her, and she went out a door. Jack lingered. He could no longer hear anyone following him. They must have figured he’d done the smart thing by now and gotten out of this confining tunnel. Showed how stupid they were, thinking him smart.
“We’re going to continue our boarding of Flight 1549, overnight service to London’s Heathrow Airport. This flight is about three-quarters full, so please use all the seats available. If your carry-on luggage won’t fit in the overhead compartment, please ask a flight attendant…”
The passengers all glared at her spiel, one they had heard their whole lives. They crowded toward her like carnivores around a wounded zebra, ready to pounce. Assholes, the flight attendant thought. Do you think you’ll get there any sooner just because you get on the plane first? The worst thing about a flight attendant’s job was too many alpha types on airplanes, wanting to push ahead of everyone else even if there was nothing to be gained by it. The flight attendant lengthened her speech a little just to raise their collective blood pressure. She plastered a smile on her face.
Then the rush began. They thrust boarding passes at her, crowding almost shoulder to shoulder. She smiled at each one as she held the pass under the laser light that registered the passenger’s name and seat.
The line wasn’t halfway through when a maintenance worker appeared at the flight attendant’s shoulder. “Sorry, Jane, spot check. It’s not registering on board.”
“What? What do you mean, not registering? They’ve all beeped—”
“But they haven’t recorded,” the maintenance man mumbled. He wore a cap and kept his head down, already messing with her scanner. “We’re going to have to get all those passengers back off and run them through again.”
The line groaned, a big sound in the late-night airport, following by mutters that sounded threatening.
“No, please,” the flight attendant said urgently, under her breath. She was about to explain further to the maintenance guy when the next passenger in line thrust her boarding pass at them like a sword. She was a pretty young woman, but not at the moment, with her features contorted by anger.
“I’m in a hurry, miss,” the bitch snapped.
The maintenance man barely glanced at her as he said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t slow us down while we’re trying to do our jobs.” In that moment he became the flight attendant’s hero. The angry young woman’s jaw dropped, she had no response, and a few of the passengers behind her even grinned at how effectively the man in the coverall had shut her up.
“There, I think that’s got it,” he said a moment later, becoming everyone’s hero. He took the angry young woman’s boarding pass (two of them, as a matter of fact, though no one noticed), scanned it (them), said, “Yup,” just like Clint Eastwood, and disappeared into the departure tunnel.
The bitch turned in the doorway, holding everyone up, glaring at the crowd, saying, “Wait, I dropped my ticket.” People tried to push past her but she was immovable until someone grabbed the ticket folder off the ground, thrust it at her, and she went through into the boarding tunnel.
Which had given Jack time to discard his maintenance worker’s coverall and cap and join the line of boarding passengers. Arden caught up to him and said under her breath, “Thanks. You just made me the most hated person on this flight.”
“You probably would have accomplished it on your own anyway. But I’d advise you not to drink anything that flight attendant offers you.”
But the ruse had worked. Arden’s and the fake-Jack’s boarding passes had been scanned, and anybody watching the departing passengers would not have seen Jack boarding the plane. If anyone checked the computer records later they would show that the imposter had boarded the plane and Jack had been left behind in Houston.
He hoped someone would be dumb enough to fall for that. It was going to be a long flight.
Jack had never been able to sleep on an airplane. He wasn’t afraid of flying, exactly, he just didn’t believe in it. He knew the theory—the shape of the wings, speed plus lift, all that aerodynamic theology—but his body still knew it made no sense that an object this heavy, carrying so many people and tons of luggage, could remain aloft. At least not without his concentrating very hard, keeping the plane in the air through mental effort.
“Why don’t you play your game?” Arden asked. She had noticed the hand-held player that Jack had clipped to his belt, through all this.
“I can’t get on-line up here. That’s the only way it’s interesting for me any more.”
“Playing with strangers?”
Jack nodded. “Trying to figure out an opponent when you have no clues about him or her except the way he or she plays. In fact I’ve played a few times when I’m pretty sure the opponent was several people taking turns.”
“Or a schizophrenic.”
“Even better.”
Arden settled back with a magazine. Even with their business-class seats made into mini-beds, Jack couldn’t relax. Too much on his mind. Hanging up here in the air, giving his enemies hours to prepare for his arrival in London, set any kinds of traps for him they could devise, or simply have him arrested for assaulting Denim Man and stealing his identity—which had been Jack’s to start with, but he might have a hard time explaining that—any of these was a possibility. All that kept him edgy, even after the double bourbon and water he’d ordered from the smiling flight attendant. Arden had glanced at her thirstily but then declined, with thanks.
“This was a bad idea,” he muttered.
“I believe I said let’s not get on board, but you overruled me. Anyway, it’s too late now. It’ll be fine. I’ll probably have to save you again once we land, but I’m getting good at that.”
Jack lay there groggily next to her, thinking that maybe she had rescued him too easily. Maybe these had been ploys designed for Arden to gain his confidence. He needed to pay careful attention to her, she might be leading him straight to destruction. But if that was the goal, Jack’s death, that could have been accomplished by just not letting her save him. So either she was on his side after all or she was an opponent with something more devious in mind than his mere destruction.
So his thoughts circled and barked at each other. After awhile, for rest, he replayed the conversation with his mother. He pictured her standing in the kitchen of their home in Fort Wayne, with the three windows and the yellow curtains, then realized that he was picturing his mother younger than she was now, and that the kitchen might well be a different color by now. He hadn’t been home in a while. But he did stay in touch. It had been more than half his short lifetime—he was twenty-six—since he had lived with his family, but they still grounded him in reality.
The mental idyll didn’t last long. Inevitably he began worrying again about the reception he would face when he landed, and about the woman lying beside him. He also thought about her grandmother, the Chair, and what plans she had for him. Jack tried to remember how long it had been since he had trusted someone. Far too long. But he was lucky, he always had his family.
Arden glanced at him as if he had spoken. So he did. “Where are your parents?”
She gave the strangest answer to this commonplace question he’d ever heard: “They’re dead, I think.”
He just lay there blinking at her, thinking he had mis-heard, or that she hadn’t heard his question right. Arden stared overhead. In a soft voice, as if to herself, she continued, “At least I’m pretty sure Mom is. She would have gotten in touch with me by now otherwise. Dad…” Her voice trailed off as if that one word said worlds.
Jack looked at her profile: smooth cheek, straight, strong nose, one clear blue eye, not meeting his. “You were estranged?”
Arden laughed very quietly. “We were never—what’s the opposite of ‘estranged’?—we were never really connected. I used to think that’s how all fathers were, kind of—well, not there, robotic.”
“Caught up in business?” Jack was good at reading people, beyond good, but he was getting nothing from Arden except sadness. He didn’t have a clue to her thoughts. Maybe she could stop the subliminal signals people give off. At any rate, there was very little emotion in her voice.
“He didn’t have a business. That was part of his problem, I realize now. Never really found himself. He and Mom just drifted from place to place, carrying me along. I used to be afraid I’d wake up one morning or come home from school one afternoon and they’d be gone. Then I started hoping for it. Finally one day it became true. I was too much for them to keep up with. They left me with a friend in St. Louis, one I had never met. Mom looked deep into my eyes and cried and said they’d be back for me soon. But they weren’t. I’d hear from them once in a while, but in the meantime I was growing up in one home after another where I didn’t have quite the status of a step-child.”
“Foster care?”
“More or less,” she answered.
This would account for her near-telepathic ability to read people. A child in a stranger’s home has to be that sensitive, to read signals the sender tries not to send. Arden’s first lessons must have been very harsh.
But something was missing from her story. “Your mother is Gladys’s daughter?” Jack asked.
Arden nodded. “But they didn’t have much contact. I almost never saw Granny. And Mom didn’t tell her where I was when she left me. It took Granny a few years first to realize I was missing, then to find me. That was when she put me in the boarding school in Switzerland, when I was twelve. Which was heaven.”
Yes, the Chair would not have had a place for a young girl in her complicated, secretive life. But she had found a safe place for her, and where Gladys had monitored her closely from a distance, Jack guessed. Arden had obviously thrived in the Swiss finishing school. But the years between eight and twelve are very, very long. They must have seemed forever to the young Arden, lost in America.
“I heard from Granny regularly when I was in Switzerland. She was evaluating me, of course, although I didn’t know that then.”
The school Arden had attended wasn’t quite the European counterpart of his own Bruton Academy, but it did have a small gifted and talented department, consisting of one teacher and a handful of students who didn’t know they were all being groomed and observed.
Now Arden was reading his thoughts. “I never heard of any of you people until Granny swooped in a couple of years ago and carried me off. But I dreamed of you. I longed for the Circle. Sometimes I think I’m still dreaming, that I imagined all of you simply by wanting it so bad. Wanting there to be something more than what I saw around me every day.”
“We all felt that way before we were gathered in,” Jack said. “You know that.”
She nodded. “I do.”
He felt as if she’d opened up to him, but her story had large missing elements. After a minute Jack asked, “Was your mother ever—?”
“Was she considered for the program? I think so. Pretty sure. But I never got the chance to ask her about it and Granny won’t say a word. She clamps down completely if I bring up the subject.”
The phrase “clamped down” meant a great deal when you were talking about Gladys Leaphorn. She had an emotional side, Jack guessed, but she could cut off everything—emotion, her own thoughts, a group discussion—more effectively than anyone else on earth.
Arden continued, “I always thought Dad was the restless one, moving from job to job, but now I think it may have been Mom, wanting to be part of something she imagined like I did, but never got invited to join. Probably taking up with Dad ended her possibilities of learning about the Circle forever. I think she sensed it, though. Probably that’s one reason why…”
Why she hadn’t been closer to her daughter, Jack thought. She envied her own child’s possibilities.
At least that was how he finished up the story in his own mind. Arden didn’t talk any more. He wanted to put an arm around her, but in the narrow confines of the airline chair-beds she might take that for an advance. And he had no intention of advancing on her. He did feel he’d gotten to know her much better. He continued to think about her and her life story for the next hour as he skimmed in and out of sleep. Those thoughts kept him preoccupied from the larger ones.
It wasn’t until some time later that he realized she might have made up the whole estranged-parents story just to put him off guard.
It was a little after noon, British time, when they arrived at Heathrow. Jack and Arden stood awkwardly in the aisle of the plane, feeling strange with no luggage. They had no story, either, and no defenses. Police might well be waiting for them as soon as they stepped out of the exit tunnel. They both watched the flight attendants, trying to decide if they’d gotten any security calls during the flight, but if they had they were good at concealing their thoughts. The one who had taken their boarding passes in Houston still glanced at Arden hostilely when her back was turned. Only Jack saw that.
“Listen,” he whispered urgently as they were in the tunnel, “if I get arrested, there’s an address in Chelsea…” He tried to give Arden the beginnings of a plan. She just frowned at him and took his arm as they came out into the light.
“Well, if we’d had the extra three days I thought we were going to have we would have seen ‘Spamalot,’” she said angrily.
Jack answered defensively, “Is it my fault the kid runs away and freaks out the nanny? What is this, number four? I’m not the one teaching Mary that she’s in charge, that she should be on the transatlantic phone to us every time…”
“If we would just stay away one time and not let her get away with this nonsense, it would do her worlds—”
The two men in black suits watching the deplaning passengers glanced at the arguing couple and looked away, as people always do. A woman and man having a spat in public put up an invisible barrier that repels others. The two plainclothes police—Jack was sure that’s what they were -- gave them a close look for a moment but couldn’t hold it as Jack’s face grew angrier and Arden tilted her chin at an imperious angle. She spoke in a clipped sort of upper-class twit accent, not exactly British perhaps, but certainly European, giving off a flavor of travel in expensive places.
“So just let her be homeless for a while, you’re saying,” Jack said in a low but incredibly hostile voice as they walked past the two men. Maybe they weren’t bobbies at all, or probably they were looking for someone else, but if they had been waiting for an American man traveling alone Jack and Arden had slipped by them for the moment. They hurried down the terminal.
He was mad at her. Jack wanted to strangle Arden. In their few seconds of role-playing he had felt real anger, as if they were a little-to-like couple who had been confined together too long. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and he saw a flash of hatred there, too. Then Arden grinned.
“That was exhilarating, wasn’t it, babe?” She took his arm. “Next time let’s play a young couple who have just fallen in love and see what that feels like.”
Jack and Arden got through customs quickly, having no encumbering baggage. The rest of the passengers streamed toward the exits with their suitcases, greeting relatives. Jack headed back into the airport. Arden followed him without asking questions as he took a couple of turns and ended up at a row of lockers. Barely glancing at the numbers, he found one and opened it with a combination. Inside sat a large black gym bag, on end. Jack unzipped it to reveal clothes, a shaving kit, other items.
“You keep a bag in Heathrow?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Jack was rummaging in the space behind the bag and came out with a few still-wrapped flat packages. He glanced at each one critically, then at Arden’s hips, finally tossed most of the packages back and handed two to her.
“Panties?” she said, noting that he’d guessed her size correctly. “And stockings?”
“Really that part of my life is in the past. I don’t keep nearly the selection I used to have. Here.” He also came up with a small pink kit containing a few cosmetics and other sundries.
“Pink?” Arden said critically.
“Yeah. Don’t chicks still like pink? Come on.”
They made their way to a ticket counter. While Jack waited in line Arden ducked into a women’s room and came out sans packages, though her pink carrying kit now bulged. Jack rose considerably in her estimation when he didn’t glance below her waist or make any remark at all. He just matter-of-factly handed her a boarding pass.
“Prague?” she said. “We’re not checking out the Jack-sighting here in London first?”
He just shook his head, didn’t ask whether she had overheard the conversation with her grandmother or whether Granny had shared information with her.
This flight was very short, little more than a hop, the plane not even half-full. Arden and Jack spent the time in near-complete silence, Jack lost in thought that turned into dozing. Arden stared at the seat back in front of her or out the window, feeling the tug of the continent where she had grown to adulthood. Only other expatriates know the way she felt, not a homecoming but more as if falling back into a very vivid and recurring dream. For Arden the feeling was stronger and stranger because she had spent her whole childhood on the move, never settling anywhere, so America was as much a concept as a reality to her. She had no home, never had had one until she’d found the Circle, and she knew how she was thought of there. Arden sat blankly, waiting to … become.
Before they even left the airport in Prague, Jack found an internet connection and got on his game. Instantly he was absorbed, paying no apparent attention to the passing people or anything in the real world.
“You really are addicted, aren’t you?” Arden said, standing beside him with her arms crossed.
“Czechoslovakia isn’t very wired, I don’t know where I’ll find another connection. And it’s late in the time zone where I’m playing.”
She didn’t care for an explanation. After a few minutes, when it became clear that Jack wasn’t going to stop soon, Arden walked away. The passengers in the airport terminal were mostly men, most of them wearing suits and a large proportion of them foreign to the country where they found themselves. She could tell by looking, by the way they walked, their wristwatches.
Arden had come to Prague a couple of times while she was in school, when it was supposedly flowering in democracy, but couldn’t claim to know the country well at all. She found a phone and checked in, but didn’t talk long. She was staring out the large terminal windows when she sensed someone coming and turned slowly.
The man wore jeans, a universal standard, and a red polo shirt. His hair was dark and long, and he walked purposefully, unlike a European, but with an awareness of others that kept him from brushing shoulders.
It was Jack.
For a moment she was surprised, because she hadn’t recognized him. His hair was wet, she realized now, he had obviously combed it with water and changed his shirt, changing his appearance subtly enough that he seemed different. Maybe he was. She didn’t know him well enough. Maybe this was another doppelganger.
“Somebody shoot you with a zombie dart?” He snapped his fingers in front of her face.
No, this was Jack. She grinned at him and didn’t explain why. Outside, before they got into a cab, she did ask, “Where’s your headquarters here?”
“Good question,” he said, and to the cab driver something in Czech, a language she didn’t know. She started to ask a question, realized Jack wasn’t saying anything else in front of the cabbie, and sat silent for the rest of the way into city center.
They checked into a hotel on the edge of Lesser Town, the old part of the city. Adjoining rooms: they presented themselves as business associates with a company Jack made up as he signed the register.
“Which would be more convincing if either of us had a briefcase or a laptop,” Arden murmured as they walked up the two flights of stairs to their rooms.
“Airline lost our luggage,” Jack said.
“Even our carry-ons?”
“Okay, we’re very careless business travelers.”
They opened their hotel doors, glanced in, neither felt the need of saying anything about the rooms. Arden said, “I’m going to go correct the lack of clothing and luggage situation. Want to come?”
Jack shook his head. “I’m a little beat. I’ll just crash here for a while, then I think there’s an internet café a couple of blocks from here.”
Arden didn’t say anything, didn’t remind him that he’d claimed to her grandmother not to have been in Prague for three years. She just nodded, went into her room, emerged five minutes later, and went off to look for Prague fashions.
Jack did crash, though he hadn’t intended to. As soon as he lay down for a moment jet lag wiped him out. His dreams were Kafkaesque, invaded by Prague, so waking in the dark felt like continuing to sleep. He moved slowly, having trouble remembering where or when he was. Then he suddenly snapped to consciousness, on high alert that, he knew from experience, would not let him sleep any more tonight.
It was late, he knew nothing about Prague nightlife any more, but he went out. The hotel felt unbearable, for some reason. The night was cool and pleasant and frightening. His sleep had given whatever enemies Jack had here plenty of time to prepare something for him. So here he went, walking into it.
The old castle dominated the landscape as he walked uphill into Lesser Town. He had always loved that name, thinking the houses and even inhabitants would be diminutive. In other cities it would be called Old Town, because that’s what it was: the original city of Prague, founded in the ninth century, though the area had been settled since Roman times. It had stayed the same for centuries, Jack had read, peasants and merchants supporting the inhabitants of the huge castle, everyone knowing their place. But since the collapse of Communism the modern world had made inroads even here. Nightclubs stood shoulder to shoulder with centuries-old hostels. Jack heard the music but had no desire to go in.
He wondered where ‘he’—his double—had been spotted in this sprawling old city. What had he been doing?
For that matter, what was he doing now? Walking dreamily through the old continent, waiting for lightning to strike. Jack suddenly felt very far from home. He was never troubled by homesickness, probably because he hadn’t had a home in so long, but suddenly he had a fierce longing to be back in America, just for a few minutes. What’s happening to my country? He felt like a traitor, who had fled when the trouble started.
Jack hadn’t touched his cell phone in hours, almost a day, which wasn’t unusual for him. Sometimes he forgot it when he went on trips. His friends had always accused him of being an eighteenth-century kind of guy, even given his current occupation. Now he felt as if he’d travelled back in time to his rightful place.
Lesser Town was not quite deserted as midnight neared, but the streets felt heavy with sleep. Still, an occasional car passed, music drifted out of a few doorways. Jack stopped at one, read the sign in Czech over the door, and realized his walk had not been random. He went in.
The room inside was low-ceilinged, smoky, and so big he couldn’t see the far walls. There were wooden tables with spindly old wooden chairs, filling the room but not cramming it. On the walls that he could see were posters, some of them peeling off, announcing rallies and concerts and even a chess championship. The lighting came from sconces on the walls and lamps on tables. There was no bar and no stage, though up at the front of the room a woman crooned softly. She had no microphone, and might have been a patron suddenly struck with an urge to perform.
Jack walked across a painted concrete floor. There were about a dozen people in the room, scattered among all those tables, some of them sitting alone, only two or three paying apparent attention to the singer. Jack sat at a table by the wall, near one of the sconces. There was no menu and no waiter appeared. Some of those people at the tables had cups sitting in front of them, but they might have brought their own. Jack sat quietly for five minutes, soaking up atmosphere, and finally walked over to a counter at the side of the room opposite the singer. He tapped his fingers quietly on the countertop, and suddenly a man popped up, a rotund man wearing an apron, who appeared old at first in the dimness but then revealed himself to be no older than Jack. The young man had a round face divided by a thin black moustache, and wide eyes that gaped blankly at Jack for a long moment.
“Coffee?” Jack said. “Or maybe a brandy?”
The man stared as if he didn’t understand, then suddenly said, “I’ll bring it to your table.”
Jack walked slowly back. No one seemed to have looked at him. This place seemed to be a sort of European opium den, each person sunk into his or her own concerns, including even the singer, who stared upward and made no eye contact with her audience.
In a minute the man from behind the counter arrived at Jack’s table bringing both a coffee cup and a brandy snifter, which Jack actually sniffed as it was set in front of him. The waiter remained standing, staring down at Jack.
“Welcome to Erenray’s, señor.”
Jack smiled to himself.
The waiter didn’t leave. “We don’t often have Americans in here,” he said, in an accent that was hard to place. Certainly not Spanish, as his greeting had implied.
Jack glanced around. “I’ll recommend it to my friends when I get back home.” He pushed the other chair out with his foot. “Why don’t you sit down, make me feel welcome.”
The waiter declined, but did lean forward over the chair back so their conversation was a little more intimate. “Things are going very badly for your country,” the waiter said, in a completely neutral voice that expressed neither sympathy nor satisfaction.
Jack nodded. “But I think they will get worse before they get better.”
The waiter frowned. “How can they get worse?”
Jack spoke as if viewing a scene. “Rallies celebrating American withdrawals from various places in the world, turning into anti-American riots. Counter-demonstrators. But then, who knows what will be left in place once America withdraws?”
“You have some idea?” the waiter said.
Jack nodded. “A worldwide terrorist network that has succeeded in pushing America out of the world. Then what? Will they just disband? Go back to their homes and children and tend their orchards? What will come after the pax Americana?”
Jack didn’t answer any of his own questions, just sat there musing like a young doctoral candidate in history talking about the thirteenth century. The waiter looked down at him with troubled eyes.
Jack stood up, but before he exited said one more thing: “Have you seen me in here recently?”
The waiter’s look of puzzlement was answer enough. Jack moved carefully away from the table, having touched neither of his drinks. As he walked he suddenly felt observed, though no one in the café seemed to be looking at him. He stopped for a moment, then changed direction. Stopping at the next occupied table, he spoke briefly to the two men sitting there. They answered back, looking at him curiously. Jack did the same thing at the next table, and the next. At one table he simply rapped his knuckles on the tabletop in a complicated little riff. The woman there looked up at him and nodded, which was nice. Jack smiled.
Before he stepped back outside he turned to look at the singer as well, giving her a long, significant look. She lowered her eyes from the ceiling and looked back. Then Jack turned quickly and went outside.
The nighttime city street seemed different just from the short time he’d been inside, as if a major building on the block had been razed and replaced. The streetlight flickered, and the buildings shimmered like a stage set. Jack looked left and right, saw no one and no cars in either direction, and walked straight across the street. Over there he turned left, back toward his hotel, and walked quickly, shoulders back and arms swinging like a tourist out for a hike. He kept up that pace for a block, which brought him to a shopping district, where the shops had awnings and wide picture windows. Jack slowed as if window shopping. He didn’t hear anything, but still had that feeling of being watched. He walked along idly for a moment, then darted around the next corner.
That set off noises. Footsteps came running. Moments after Jack rounded the corner, two men jumped around the same corner from the direction he’d come. One of the men was short and heavy, with very broad shoulders. The other was taller and thin, with hair long enough to sway as he ran. They came to a stop together and stared down the empty street. “Which way?” the shorter one asked in French, and the other answered in a strangely-accented English, “That doorway. Look.”
There was a deeply-recessed doorway just past the shop under whose awning they stood. The bulky Frenchman jumped with surprising speed toward the doorway, drawing a gun as he did so. He waved it in a small half-circle, stepping all the way into the recessed doorway, and saw nothing but a door, plain and nondescript like a service entrance. The man turned and said one negative syllable to his companion.
“Maybe he picked the lock,” the taller man said. He continued to speak English, but in an odd accent, one difficult to place. As his companion bent to examine the door’s lock and knob, the taller man lit a cigarette and stared around the silent block thoughtfully.
Above him, Jack lay stretched in the awning. He had swung himself up into it as soon as he’d rounded the corner. It was a scary hiding place because his body weight made the awning sag, and if it began to tear or he otherwise gave himself away he would be helpless. There was nowhere to go from here.
But it made a good observation post, and that was what he’d wanted, just to check out who might be following him. He’d half-thought he knew the answer, and he was right. He looked down at the thin man with the longish hair as the man lit his cigarette and Jack got a good look at his face. He recognized it.
It was Jack’s face.