By Wednesday afternoon, the basic facts of the crisis are known, though the dimensions of the threat are not yet understood.
Booth Hendrickson, of the Department of Justice and esteemed associate of David James Michael, airborne from D.C. to Louisville in a Bureau Gulfstream V jet, is then lifted from Louisville alone in an eight-seat executive helicopter. When the pilot settles the chopper in a meadow on the outskirts of Iron Furnace at 2:20 P.M. Wednesday, Hendrickson is met by one of the adjusted people of that town, Stacia O’Dell, the concierge at the Iron Furnace Lake Resort. Stacia serves as his chauffeur in a Mercedes S600 bearing the license plate IFLR 1.
Earlier, by telephone, Hendrickson accessed the woman’s nanomachine implant by inviting her to play Manchurian with him. He programmed her to believe that his name is John Congrieve and that he’s the CEO of Terra Firma Enterprises, which owns the resort. She is to escort him wherever he might wish to go, while having no curiosity as to his purpose, for this is said to be sensitive corporate business.
The first place he wishes to go is to the private school for problem children.
As they enter town on Lakeview Road, Stacia says, “It’s a sad thing when little children are afflicted like that.”
“Yes,” he agrees, “very sad.” Curious as to what she might say, he asks, “What is their problem as you understand it?”
“Personality disorders. There’s more and more of that lately.”
“Absolutely. But I wonder why that is. Violent video games? Filth all over the Internet? All the wrong lessons in the movies they’re making these days? The schools failing them?”
“Oh,” she says, “maybe a little of it’s about that. But mostly it’s because there’s not enough caring these days.”
“Caring?”
“For one another. Parents caring about their kids. Neighbors caring about neighbors. All for one and one for all, you see.”
“I do see, yes.”
“Everyone for himself is such a terrible dead-end. I mean, when everything is me-me-me-me, you’re bound to have some children become confused, disordered. It’s very sad.”
“Would you say that Iron Furnace is a caring town?”
Her expression of concern melts into a smile. “Oh, yes, we’re a closely knit community. There’s caring, unity, a sense of belonging. Just look around, you can see it, the way everything is. Yesterday this event planner from Atlanta, Mr. Moses, the nicest black man, he said our little town is like a bejeweled Fabergé egg.”
She glances away from the road to gauge whether he’s taken well what she has said, her apple-green eyes conveying earnestness that might move someone unaware that she is an adjusted person.
“You’ve really got that right, Ms. O’Dell. You surely do.”
At the estate where the children are held, he asks her to remain in the car, under the portico roof. Of course she will wait dutifully, patiently, perhaps even until she dies of thirst.
A woman named Noreen Klostner answers the door, and Hendrickson asks her to play Manchurian with him and then to use the whispering room to summon the other seven staff members.
When everyone is seated in the dining room, he accesses them and tries to ascertain how they could have been so delinquent as to allow the children to escape unnoticed. Yes, the locaters in the shoes. But once the kids crept through the house in their stocking feet—where did they go? Nobody knows. Where are they now? Nobody knows. They can’t be hiding anywhere in Iron Furnace, because groups of citizens have searched everywhere for them. The oldest boy might have been able to drive. But no vehicle is missing from the garage. And what has happened to the security video? Nobody knows. Where are the discs that were removed from the recorder? Nobody knows. The eight sit at the table, blank-faced. For an hour, Hendrickson pulls their strings, uses every tool provided by their control program to extract from their memory the events of the previous night, with no success. They share a period of amnesia beginning at dinner and continuing until they had gone to bed, as though something went wrong in their programs all at the same time.
Because these adjusted people are incapable of lying to him or of concealing vital information by any manner of deceit, the usual techniques of a tough interrogation are of no use to him. Yet out of habit, he finds himself using intimidation and inducing fear, even brutally, repeatedly slapping two women until one is bleeding from the lips, the other from her nose. He is chagrinned to have resorted to such primitive measures, not because they are so primitive but because there is no chance they will work with creatures like these.
Just as Hendrickson is about to terminate the session in disgust, a fearful man named George Woolsey, sitting at the head of the table, declares, “I’m not here to hurt you. Do you believe me?”
Hendrickson goes to him, stares down at him. “Hurt me? What the hell are you talking about? Of course you can’t hurt me. You belong to me.”
George Woolsey’s face is sickly pale, and his eyes regard his interrogator much as the eyes of a helpless, tethered horse might track with terror the encroaching flames of a stable fire. He says, “Don’t be afraid, George. Not of me.”
“You’re George, you dumbass,” Hendrickson says. “What’s wrong with you?”
Woolsey’s voice is thick with misery. “What’s happened to me?” Before Hendrickson can respond, Woolsey says, “Don’t you know, George?” And then: “Something’s happened. What was isn’t.” And finally: “Come back into the dining room, George. Sit down with the others.”
Hendrickson studies Woolsey. Something has just escaped the black hole that swallowed his memories of the previous evening. “You’re repeating a conversation, aren’t you? From last night.”
Woolsey says nothing.
“Answer me, George. Who told you they weren’t here to hurt you?”
Woolsey rolls his eyes, his breathing quick and shallow.
“Dredge it up, damn you. Remember. Last night, who said they weren’t here to hurt you?”
“She did.” Woolsey wasn’t looking at anyone at the table.
“She? Who was she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me about her.”
“She was…”
“She was what, George? Tell me.”
“She was kind to me.”
“What else?”
Woolsey works his mouth, as if seeking an answer, but he isn’t able to find one.
“Tell me something else about her, George. Something, damn you, anything.”
“I don’t. I can’t. I don’t know.”
Someone had been here the previous evening; and the children are now with her. Someone who knows how to access these people and control them and make them forget. There are factions among the Arcadians, as there are factions in any organization, but Booth Hendrickson is stunned by the possibility that one of them might turn traitor on the others.
He presses Woolsey for a few minutes, to no avail. “All of you, be calm, go to your rooms. Wait till we come to deal with you.”
Because he doesn’t free them with the phrase auf Wiedersehen, they rise from the chairs as if they are a convocation of the living dead, solemn and silent, their eyes forward but seeming to gaze inward toward some devastation. Two women drip blood from their battered faces, the red droplets shimmering on the carpet and on the limestone floor, as though having come unstrung from some beadroll and here portending Hendrickson’s fate.
He can’t look up from those scattered scarlet beads as he makes a phone call to summon specialists from certain laboratories in Virginia. They will need to conduct forensic exams of the keepers of the children, as if those eight adjusted people are hard drives that have crashed.
When he returns to the car, Stacia O’Dell smiles and says, “Everything hunky dory?”
He doesn’t reply but sits thinking for a moment. Iron Furnace is a valuable asset to the cause, a place that allows them access to many influential people who can be programmed either to serve the shaping of the better world to come or to commit suicide at some moment in the future that is specified by the computer model as an ideal expiration date. But the usefulness of the town is jeopardized by the eight children on the loose. He senses that the answer to the mystery of their escape is within his reach, that he has overlooked something that still eludes him.
“Let’s go, Ms. O’Dell.”
“Where to?”
He hesitates, then says, “Back into town. I’d like to have a look around.”
It is another fifteen minutes before Stacia O’Dell once more mentions the black event planner from Atlanta, Martin Moses, who has compared Iron Furnace to a jewel-encrusted Fabergé egg.