Maybe they kept the dead man between them because Jane still had second thoughts about involving this father of four in such a dangerous enterprise, and because Gilberto, for all his talk of semper fi and a debt owed to Nick, had doubts of his own.
Solemn and silent on the table, the decedent was a barrier to impetuous action, a reminder that they might die in the course of a kidnapping. Jane’s love for Nick was so intense that his death had not diminished it, and though Gilberto’s gratitude and admiration were less piercing emotions, Jane’s late husband served as a touchstone by which they both could test their commitment to what was good and true in a world of darkness and lies. But a touchstone had value only if they acted with reason, from a sense of duty, rather than because sentimentality overtook them. Jane knew—perhaps, so did Gilberto—that a touch, a hug, even a handshake in the early minutes of this reunion could twist honest sentiment into sentimentalism, inciting him to make a fateful decision on the wrong grounds.
“I appreciate you’d do this just for me,” she said, “just for Nick. But if they discover you helped me, they won’t care that all you did was drive. They’ll take you out. You need to understand what they’ve done, what they want to do, how much they have to lose.”
She looked at the dead man’s face, so eggshell white after his embalming, lips fixed as if they had never formed a smile, eyelids paper thin as though half worn away by all the distressing sights against which, in life, they’d been closed. Nick had been cremated. She preferred fire, too, if after her death a body could be found.
“These bastards, this conspiracy, cabal, whatever you want to call it—they have a computer model. It identifies people likely to steer civilization in the wrong direction, people in the arts, journalism, academia, science, politics, military….”
Gilberto frowned. “Wrong direction? How does a computer decide what’s the wrong direction for civilization?”
“It doesn’t. They decided when they designed the damn computer model. All it does is identify targets. They say, just erase enough carefully selected people, those likely to achieve positions to influence others with wrong ideas, then over time we’ll have Utopia. But it’s not about Utopia. It’s all about power. Absolute power.”
Gilberto had come back from war with an enduring sadness from which was born a gentleness and a desire to avoid all conflict. But anger enfolded the gentleness now, and his mouth was set tight when he said, “Just erase. Erase. Always the nice words for murder.”
“Joseph Stalin reportedly said, ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ You have a problem with that?”
“They’re gonna kill a million?”
“Eventually more. Two hundred ten thousand per generation, in the U.S. So eighty-four hundred a year.”
“They told you this?”
“One of them did. You’ll have to take my word for it. He’s not available to confirm it. I killed him. In self-defense.”
Although he’d been to war, Gilberto was shaken. War half a world away was different from battles in the streets of his own country. He put his hands on the steel table and leaned into it for support.
Jane said, “The people they kill are on something called the Hamlet list. Once they identify the targets, they go after them when they’re most vulnerable. When they’re away from home at a conference or traveling alone and can be drugged, sedated one way or another.”
“ ‘Sedated’?”
“They don’t want it to look like murder. They sedate them and program them to commit suicide. Nick was on their Hamlet list. He cut his throat with his Marine Corps knife, his Ka-Bar, sliced so deep that he severed a carotid artery.”
Gilberto stared at her for a long moment, as if to determine what brand of crazy she had embraced. “Program them?”
“Life is sci-fi these days, Gilberto. And it’s not a feel-good family movie. You know about nanotechnology?”
“Microscopic things. Maybe machines so small they’re invisible. Something like that.”
“In this case, constructs made from a few molecules. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—suspended in a serum, injected into the bloodstream. They’re brain-tropic. Once they pass through the capillary walls into brain tissue, they self-assemble into a larger network. A weblike control mechanism. Within hours, total control is effected. The subject doesn’t know anything’s happened. He seems himself. No one sees anything different about him. But days later, weeks, whenever, he gets a command to commit suicide…and obeys.”
“If I didn’t know you,” Gilberto said, “I’d think you were a candidate for a psych ward.”
“Sometimes lately, I’ve felt like one. Nick didn’t know what he was doing. Or maybe he knew and couldn’t stop himself, which makes me sick.” She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. “Suicides of successful, happy people have soared for two years, people with no history of depression, with every reason to live. Sometimes they take other people with them.” She opened her eyes. “You must have seen the story about the woman in Minnesota, Teacher of the Year, not only killed herself but also the governor and forty-some others. I know for a fact she was controlled by these people, as Nick was.”
“You have proof of all this?”
“Yeah. So who do I trust with it? The FBI isn’t entirely corrupt, but some people in it are part of this conspiracy. Same with the NSA, Homeland Security. They’re salted everywhere.”
“Go to the press?”
“I tried. Thought I had a trustworthy journalist. He wasn’t. I have evidence, a lot of it. But if I give it to the wrong person and he destroys it, everything I’ve endured has been for nothing. And there’s even worse than the Hamlet list. Much worse. Not everyone they inject is programmed for suicide.”
“Then what?”
“Some people under their control seem to have free will, but they don’t. They’re used ruthlessly. As programmed assassins. Others are flat-out enslaved and used as cheap labor.”
She hated death, the thief that had robbed her of her mother and her husband, but when she looked at the corpse between her and the mortician, the cold, wax-pale face suggested an enduring peace that might be envied by those who lived with a nanoweb woven across and through their brains.
“I’ve seen men guarding an estate of one of the Arcadians—as they call themselves—a pack of men in slacks and sport coats, normal at first glance, but like trained dogs, living in conditions as crowded as kennels. Their personalities and memories wiped away. No internal lives. Programmed to carry guns and provide security, to track down and kill intruders. They’re like…machines of flesh.”
If she had any doubt that he believed her, it was resolved when he made the sign of the cross.
“Machines of flesh,” she repeated. “There are high-end brothels for wealthy, powerful people who fund this conspiracy. I managed to get into one—and out alive. The girls are beautiful beyond words. But they have no memories. No awareness of who they once were or of a world beyond the brothel. No hopes. No dreams. No interests except staying fit, desirable. Programmed to provide any sexual pleasure. Totally submissive. Never disobedient. No desire is so extreme they won’t satisfy it. They’re soft-spoken, sweet, apparently happy, but it’s all programmed. They’re incapable of expressing anger, sadness. Somewhere deep inside…what if there is something left in one of them, some palest shadow of real human feeling and awareness, some thread of self-respect, some fragile hope? Then her body is a prison. A life of unrelieved loneliness in a solitary hell. I’ve dreamed of being one of them. I wake up shaking as if with malaria. I’m not ashamed to say I’m terrified of ending like that, stripped of all free will. Because once the control mechanism assembles in the brain, there’s no removing it, no way out except death.”