Two Days Later
It took Jack two days to reach headquarters, because he took a very circuitous route, a couple of hops by plane, mostly by cars. It took him that long to get over the idea that he was the most wanted man on earth. He managed to follow the evolving story of the attempted assassination, and never heard anyone suggest, even through back channels, that there had been a second assassin. Still, the Secret Service might be the least of his worries.
One worry was that during the two days he was on the run he couldn’t reach anyone. Not anyone on the inside. At headquarters he only got the ominous message, “The number you are trying to reach is not in service.” That was all right, they might have turned off the phones, changed numbers, even closed down the operation for the time being. But he couldn’t reach any of them on their own lines, either. Not the Chair, Alicia Mortenson, Janice Gentry, his old friend Ronald.
He did manage to raise Rachel, who was back in Israel. She filled him in rapidly on events in Salzburg, assuming he already knew them. “Didn’t Arden—?”
“I haven’t talked to her since you and she—”
“I assumed she came to find you.” Rachel sounded puzzled. Jack knew that she was playing back in her mind her last conversation with Arden, in precise detail. Not just the words and facial expressions, but the tells and tics as well. “She said she had to leave. Even left her mother after just being reunited with her. Where did she go, Jack?”
Not to him. Maybe back to headquarters. Maybe to find her grandmother. Maybe that had been a lost cause.
Rachel said, “I’ll—”
“No! You stay away, Rache. You and Stevie may be the last of us. You have to—”
“Stevie and I have to regenerate the Circle? Not through reproduction, I hope.”
Jack laughed. Good old Rachel. They finished each other’s sentences, even in their heads, and she was the only person on earth who could reliably make him laugh, even now.
Jack began to have long thoughts as he drove down the empty western highway. Obviously Rachel was having them too. As her voice began to fade on his cell phone she said, “I feel that an age is ending. This is what—the fourth age?”
“But there will be a fifth.”
“Yes, and you know what, Jack? There will be two people just like you and me in it.”
“I plan to be there myself.”
“I knew—”
“I know—”
“—you were going to say that,” the finished together. They laughed, on different continents, as he lost her signal completely.
Then Jack drove alone. He felt like the last survivor of a worldwide catastrophe, though in fact life was returning to normal all over the world. America was dominant again, and safe, at least for today. The Circle had succeeded.
So maybe everyone had just adopted the safety plan. Don’t answer your phone. Separate. Disappear into your normal life, or a new one you already had in storage.
Two more hours of driving left him feeling very alone. Headquarters came into view, or at least it should have. The headquarters “building” looked like a desert mesa from the outside. Parking was underground, and in fact the road died away five miles from the entrance. The last slow driving was over scrub land, dry cracked earth that would reveal no tracks. Jack sensed no activity. His cell phone remained dead, even though the Circle had had its own disguised tower out here.
And he should have seen the mesa by now, but he didn’t. Was he so addled he’d gotten lost? It would be easy to do out here in the western vastness. But no, he recognized a tree, and an unusually-shaped boulder. He was almost at the front door.
Jack’s car drifted to a stop and he got out. “No,” he whispered.
Ahead of him was a canyon. A huge hole in the ground. A new one. Right where the mesa had stood.
Jack ran. The wind whipped at him, nothing to block it for hundreds of miles. It could have lifted him off his feet and flown him away. At the edge of the canyon he fell to his knees and skidded to a stop.
The edges of the hole were ragged and black. Nature hadn’t scoured this. Jack peered over the edge in the dying light. Roots had been blasted apart. The sides of the hole were black and flat, almost glassy. This was what was left after a huge explosion. Earth had caved in at the bottom, but Jack could see evidences of human life. Electronic parts, burned papers, pieces of furniture. A woman’s shoe.
He was crying though he didn’t know it. Crying and furious. All this brilliance destroyed. Again he heard Bruno’s words. I have so many back-up plans you couldn’t count them. He had been intent on destroying the Circle any way he could. If humiliation didn’t work, he would throw away subtlety and use bombs. He had had enough technology left for one huge strike.
Jack slammed his fists down and screamed out over that canyon. “NOOOOOO!!!” Echoes captured the cry and made it their own. Jack put his forehead down on the ground and wept uncontrollably.
That was when the man and woman dressed in black appeared behind him. They must have been in the underground parking area all along. For FBI agents, they showed amazing empathy and were surprisingly gentle. “We’ve been hoping one of you was left,” the man said.
“You’ll have to come with us, sir,” the woman added.
Jack let them lift him up and escort him away.
“And that was the end,” Jack said. He had just brought his interrogator up to date, as of five days ago when he’d been captured, or arrested, or whatever he was.
“That’s everything?” she said. Her voice didn’t hold the sympathy of the agents who’d arrested him. She sat there as if she’d been hoping the tale had a bigger finish, and he had disappointed her. This was an interrogation technique, he knew, but it still irritated him. He had just told her that his world had come to an end and the real world was going to be a much more dismal place as a result, and she acted bored. He thought she was overplaying her role.
In fact, that wasn’t quite everything. He hadn’t told her about Rachel, or Stevie, in fact hadn’t named any names at all, just given a broad outline. He was prepared to take personal details to his grave, or into lifelong prison.
In a more cheerful voice he said, “Nothing else except to add that everything I’ve said is a lie. I was just hiking through the desert when those agents grabbed me and I made up a story to keep my brain occupied.”
The woman didn’t smile. She wrote three symbols on her pad. Jack waited a moment, feeling the vibrations of her fingers tapping out another message, then answered her on the paper. After he did she wrote a K with a slash through it. Jack nodded.
They were sitting staring at each other when the door slid noiselessly to the side and a woman in a wheelchair rolled into the room. The door closed behind her. The woman pointed a small control in her hand at the room’s video camera and clicked.
Jack jumped to his feet. The woman in the wheelchair looked at him impassively. “We never talk,” she said. “Never. Not under any circumstances. We never reveal ourselves to outsiders. Never for any reason. Isn’t that the first thing you were taught?”
“Mrs. Leaphorn!”
She nodded, her expression bored at his obviousness.
“I thought you were dead,” Jack said happily.
“Even then we don’t talk.” Then she relented and gave him a little. “I wasn’t arrested, just isolated. After half a century in government service, I have a reputation as a consultant. During the crisis, our government in its wisdom wanted me consulting. And the security here makes Langley look like an outdoor playground. I couldn’t get word to anyone. Luckily, I did have enough pull to have you brought here.”
“But not to stop—”
Gladys Leaphorn shook her had minutely. Apparently she didn’t trust that she had turned off all the surveillance in this room.
Jack looked at the interviewer. The Chair had already said too much in front of a civilian. Looking at the woman in the chair opposite him, Jack said, “Go Hornets?”
The woman nodded.
“Damn.” He turned his attention back to Gladys. “But people got away.”
She gave him another tiny nod.
“So what Bruno told me about Craig Mortenson—?”
“That, sadly, was true. Craig is dead. I think.”
“You think?”
Gladys wore a little frown, the way she did when confronted with something inexplicable. For an old Indian shaman, she had absolutely no supernatural beliefs. “Alicia says he’s not dead. Oh, his body is certainly deceased, we’ve confirmed that. But Alicia escaped, as you surmised. And after she dispatched his murderers, she would not leave without her husband. She says she didn’t. Alicia says she caught Craig’s dying breath, and took his mind into her own. No one ever understood their symbiosis. Now it’s complete. She says Craig was tired of his body anyway, and is quite happy in hers.”
Jack was staring at her. Gladys shrugged irritably. “You should hear her talk to herself. But it’s a harmless psychosis, and makes her happy.”
In a toneless voice, Jack said, “Alicia told me where the conference was going to be. That college in Virginia. That’s how I was able to set up there before anyone else.”
“How could she have known that?”
“She said she and Craig figured it out.”
They both stared into space. Then the Chair shook her head and her eyes drilled into Jack again. “But none of this excuses what you’ve just done, Jack. You can’t be trusted.”
Jack stood perfectly still. He wondered if she was going to arrange his death. That’s probably what it would have to be. Mere lifelong incarceration wouldn’t keep him from talking. She had the power to do it any number of ways.
He could tell from Gladys’ expression that she hated what she had to do. “I kept listening for some sign that you knew, that you were just leading us on, knowing we were the ones interrogating you. But I never did.”
The woman in the chair sat up straight. She had begun taking off her makeup, removing implants from inside her mouth. Her face slimmed down. She took off the lifeless wig, shook out her hair, which was much shorter than the last time he’d seen it, but the same light brown. She removed contact lenses and her eyes were their old piercing blue. Arden stood up and unselfconsciously reached up under her dress, pulling out the padding. Jack just watched her.
“He did know, though,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What?” Her grandmother’s head snapped toward her.
“He was dropping clues all along, Granny. Didn’t you catch any of them?”
“When?”
“Oh, please. That part about making love to me. The detail.” She rolled her eyes. “Implying that I wasn’t very good at it. Please. That was to goad me out of my role.”
Gladys was thinking hard. “No. You’re making excuses for him now.”
Arden said nonchalantly, “Plus he’s been playing me the chess match I won against the computer when I was in school in Grenoble. Move for move.”
Gladys sat there, only her eyes moving. Obviously she’d been seeing the scribbles on the pads and hadn’t bothered interpreting them. Now she ran back in her memory all those moves of the last three hours. “My God, you’re right.”
Arden said, “It is only the deep respect in which I hold you that prevents my saying, ‘Duh.’”
Jack stood at ease, letting the women work it out. Gladys Leaphorn obviously hadn’t been persuaded. “You told him,” she accused her granddaughter. “You gave him some kind of signals. You winked at him.”
“I did not! Run the tape.”
“I’m sure you would have it altered somehow by the time we played it back. But it doesn’t matter. He has proven he can’t be trusted.”
Jack finally stepped in. “What are you going to do then, Granny? Mind-wipe me?”
Gladys sounded disgusted. “I doubt it would take in your case. You would be left a drooling idiot roaming the streets babbling insanities. Questions would be asked. No, Jack. You are out.” She shot a look at her granddaughter. “Both of you. You deserve each other. You will never again be privy to our councils. The Circle is dead anyway. You are the last remnants. We are disbanded.”
Her eyelid flickered, so swiftly it could never be caught on videotape.
Jack hung his head. He put up a little argument, but Gladys Leaphorn was adamant.
Arden said, “I guess I have to re-frump.”
“Put it on,” her grandmother said. “When you look like that you become one of the women men don’t see.”
“Really?”
“Just do it.”
Arden reconfigured her disguise, lifting her skirt to put the padding back on. Jack watched her without pretending to do otherwise. She sighed as she reinserted the contacts and cheek pads. Then the three of them left the interrogation room. No agents waited outside. Gladys escorted them out of the secured area, flashing her badge a few times—sure enough, the men glanced at Arden then she seemed to become invisible to them— to a waiting car that had no driver. “Go,” Gladys said, and turned and rolled back into the building without ceremony.
Jack drove. In a few miles they came to a small town, and abandoned the car. They walked toward a tiny train station. If there wasn’t a train due soon, Arden would get a car for them.
She transformed herself back into Arden again. This time Jack watched appreciatively as she reached under her dress and pulled out the padding.
“Thanks for the signals,” he said as they started walking again.
“Thanks for entertaining me with that BS about me being lousy in the sack.”
He turned and looked at her in surprise. “Such language from a nice schoolgirl. I have never used such a crude expression in my life.”
“But it’s what you meant.”
“No, I didn’t.” He put his arm around her. “I think you have talent. And enthusiasm, which—”
“Shut up.”
“All you need is—”
“Practice,” they said together, then Arden added, “Then let’s hurry up and get to a large population center so I can—”
“Oh, right. As if anyone could—”
“There would be—”
He laughed. She jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. They were both laughing. By the time they got to the train station they were interrupting each other’s sentences after one or two words. It sounded as if they were talking in code.
— THE END —