Cookie Cutter Man (11 page)

There was no sign of a television.

Daniel dragged a chair into the living room where Bailey was
back upright, sitting on his haunches, and dumped him into it. He had to pull
Bailey back into it by his tie when the older man began to tip. Daniel slapped
him twice across the face to wake him up.

“You’re fucked!” Bailey shouted, spraying blood from his
mouth. The expression on his face was that of a man who isn’t quite sure where
he is but is positive he doesn’t like it.

Daniel backhanded him, and then stared into his dead eyes,
which were the weak cornflower blue of a thousand corporate logos.

“Don’t like it too well on the other side, do you?” Daniel
asked, shaking his head. “I’m supposed to be the one in the chair, that right?
Getting a confession or something beat out of me? It’s over for you, see?”

“What do you want?” Bailey moaned.

“We got some questions, and you better hope you have some
answers.”

Bailey started to whine about something but Daniel had no
time for the incessant squawking of an oversized tattle-tale child. How would
he get him out of here? He couldn’t very well carry him, and he wasn’t about to
try and walk him out. Daniel looked out the window and down at the assembling
crowd of residents on the street. He heard sirens in the distance, probably
fire and ...
ambulance
.

Daniel smiled and pulled the walkie-talkie off his belt.
“Send me the ambulance.”

Bailey started to moan again. Daniel re-clipped the
walkie-talkie and turned on him.

No, he wasn’t sure yet if he could kill this man, say cut
his throat ear to ear, but Daniel found hurting the bastard didn’t turn his
stomach in the least. And maybe he was enjoying it, just a little?

This is in your head, Daniel.

“No it’s not.”

He’s no more real than I am.

“We’ll see about that.”

“Who are you talking to?” Bailey screamed

“Shut the
fuck
up!” Daniel punched the G-Man in one
eye, then the other, closing them both. He smoked a cigarette, admiring the way
Bailey’s eyes were swelling up and turning purple. There was a knock on the
door, followed by Simon’s voice.

“Somebody call for an ambulance?”

“We’re going for a little ride now,” Daniel said, then
thumped Bailey a good one across the temple with the butt of his gun. The chair
tipped over backward and took the agent with it.

Daniel opened the door and Simon and Ebin came in dressed as
paramedics. Simon was carrying a little black bag and Ebin the folded-up
stretcher.

Simon pulled a syringe out of the little black medical bag
he was carrying and checked the dosage, and injected Bailey with about a
quarter of the contents.

“What’s that?” Daniel asked.

“Sedative,” Simon said. “He’s out now, but we don’t want him
waking up when we’re carrying him through all those fucking people downstairs.

“We have time to look around?” Daniel asked.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Simon said. “We gotta move, though.”

It turned out to be a wasted effort. The only personal items
in the apartment were toiletries in the bathroom and the clothes in the
bedroom. There were no pictures on the wall, no photograph albums. There were
no books, and no CD’s. It was as bland and empty of personality as a hotel
room.

“OK, let’s get out of here,” Daniel said. “Ready?”

“Let’s do this,” Ebin said.

Daniel nodded, and they loaded Bailey onto the stretcher. In
the confusion on the street, they simply carried him out the front door, Daniel
climbing in the back of the ambulance as though he were family, and no one even
asked a question.

The agent remained unconscious all the way back to the large
Victorian house that he would never leave.

Bailey’s eyes rolled wildly within his swollen face.

“Who do you work for?” Ebin asked.

A slow, high-pitched sound escaped the G-man, and they
realized it was laughter. Ebin grabbed the pliers off the bench and squeezed
Bailey’s hand between them. Daniel grimaced when he heard the dry-twig snapping
of bones over the screams.

“Which agency?” Ebin held Bailey’s face so there was no
place for the agent to look but up into his empty grey eyes.

“N ...
not
an agency!” Bailey sputtered.

“Goddammit, you’re
going
to tell me!” Ebin held the
bridge of Bailey’s nose in the pliers. “Tell me or I squeeze.”

“I
am
telling you!” Bailey said. His eyes crossed
trying to look at the tool his nose was clamped in, then fluttered and his head
began to droop. “We’re not
controlled
by the government! We’re
above
the FBI, the ... oh man I think you really broke my hand.”

“I’m gonna cut it off if you don’t tell me the name
right
fucking now
.” Ebin applied some pressure to the pliers, enough to get
Bailey’s attention.

“
The Company!
It’s The Company! I’m not a fed ...
I’m a goddamned ...”

“The C.I.A.?” Ebin asked.

Bailey shook his head and sobbed.

The Company? Daniel was lost. “What’s The Company?”

Nobody answered.

“Ask him for a name,” Jared said quietly.

Ebin turned to Bailey, who was utterly broken. He constantly
sobbed when he wasn’t spilling his guts. He had another hour to live, tops, and
he knew it. What an hour it would be.

“Tell me.” Ebin flexed his grip on the pliers.

“You know I ... I c-can’t.”

Ebin grinned a little and squeezed the pliers. The crunch
echoed in the tiny room and blood flowed out of Bailey’s nose like a faucet. He
screamed until his voice collapsed, and he was screaming a name.

“O’BRIEN! HIS NAME IS O’BRIEN!!”

Daniel thought he could sit through to the end, but he was
wrong.

Bailey answered several questions in a row without
resistance, snuffling blood through his obliterated nose, but eventually,
naturally, as his years of training demanded, he balked.

Daniel didn’t even know what question had been asked; all
sounds and sights in the world ceased to exist for him. All but one.

Ebin ripped open Bailey’s white Oxford shirt and used the
pliers again. He squeezed and twisted and Bailey turned so pale he was nearly
translucent. Ebin squeezed and twisted a little more, and squeezed and pulled,
and yanked the left nipple off Bailey’s chest; it made a meaty ripping sound.
Bailey went into a seizure of some kind, the small and ugly hole open wide and
vomiting blood down his rib cage, and Daniel promptly left the room. That had
been about 10 minutes ago.

Now there was a gunshot, and Rob walked out of the
interrogation room.

“That didn’t take long,” Daniel said in a quiet voice.

“No steel in their kind, my friend. Most of them crack like
a fucking egg after 20 minutes or so.”

Daniel wondered if he was referring to those that were part
Fort Bragg and part Radio Shack. “Did Ebin get anything else out of him?”

“He told us everything,” Rob said.

“Do you think he’s ... you know ...”

“Modified? Like Wills?” Rob nodded. “Probably, but don’t
quote me until after the autopsy.”

“What was he saying about the
civilian factor
? Ever
get that out of him?”

“Well, he didn’t actually know anything concrete, it was
just a rumor. Something about how these, uh modifications won’t be just for
agents anymore. He said the creator is stemming away from the government, going
public.” Rob pushed his glasses back up his nose. “But then again, it was only
a rumor.”

Daniel lit another smoke and changed the subject. “What’s
The
Company
? I thought that’s what people called the C.I.A., but he seemed
pretty adamant it wasn’t them.”

Rob sighed heavily, looking Daniel in the eyes. “To tell you
the truth, I didn’t think The Company existed. Nobody did. Just a ghost story
for the paranoid, you know?”

“Yeah, story of my life.”

Rob gave a little smile, and then continued. “Jared told me
about it when I first came out here from New York. I don’t think he even really
believed it, not completely. But he said The Company was puppet-master to the
Feds. He called it ‘the ghost in the machine’.”

“What else?”

“That’s really all I know. But I got the feeling Jared will
tell us when it’s time.”

“All yours, buddy.” Ebin wheeled the body of David Bailey
out into the corridor; still strapped to the chair he died in. There was a
bullet hole where his heart used to be.

“Duty calls.” Rob pushed the chair down the hall to do his
autopsy.

Ebin turned to Daniel. “Lasted longer than I thought you
would,” he said with a smile and shook a cigarette out of his pack.

*****

The surgical saw whined its high-pitched song as it went to
work, cleaving off the perfect bowl of bone, skin, and hair. Rob set the
instrument aside and pulled off the top half of David Bailey’s skull. The brain
glistened under the glaring overhead lights. With Lawrence Wills he opened up
the chest cavity first, but most of Wills’ brain had been power-washed off some
Portland side walk nearly 24 hours before they even got the body, so he hadn’t
gotten a chance to look at it.

Whistling
Mack the Knife
, Rob sliced a thin layer of
brain off the outer cortex of the left lobe, laying it on a glass slide like a
strange bit of toast, and put the slide beneath the microscope. The whistle
dried on his lips like a funeral dirge when he dialed the grey blur into
perfect focus.

The slice of brain was laced with tiny filaments, millions
of them threaded across the specimen in a circuit-board pattern.

And they were moving.

You know this isn’t real
, the voice in his head said.

He swallowed the dry lump in his throat and stared. The tiny
organisms were shivering ever so slightly; billions of microscopic epileptics
embedded in the brain.

Under a black light they had a dull blue glow. But they were
fading, dying as the host had died. Rob aimed the black light at Bailey, still
in his chair. The brain lit up like a dim cobalt bulb. The entire cerebral
cortex was threaded with some kind of organic bio-circuitry. He was a living
computer-had been, anyway.

Rob stimulated the slice of cerebrum with a mild electrical
charge and the circuits glowed brighter, coming most of the way back to life
for about a minute before starting to die again.

Rob sat next to the body and tried the same experiment on
the actual brain. The circuitry blazed and Bailey’s left arm twitched violently
under the thick leather binding.

“Intevesting ... veddy veddy intevesting.”

Rob cut away the back of the skull to get a peek at the base
of the brain. It was made of entirely foreign material. At some point in his
short life, David Bailey’s medulla oblongata had been excised from within the
confines of his skull and replaced with this. It looked a lot like silicon, but
Rob couldn’t be sure until he ran a few tests on it. Four thick wires plugged
into it from the spine, two on either side. Rob pulled them out and the blue
glow died immediately.

With the overheads on again Rob examined the
pseudo-oblongata closer ... there were no holes. No female receptacles for the
wires to go into; yet he had just unplugged them. Confused, Rob took one of the
wires and poked it against the slick surface. The material displaced itself to
receive the plug, and then bonded to hold it secure.

Would something else plug in, like a video monitor? Rob
spliced the line on a monitor and pushed it into the gelatin-like substance. It
flickered, but the screen remained black ... or did it?

Rob cranked the contrast up and the black turned to a deep
maroon, stitched with capillaries. He was looking at Bailey’s closed eyelids as
the light shone through them. Shaking with excitement, Rob went around the
table and thumbed open the eyes.

“Just like the pigeon,” Rob said to the empty room. He
turned and looked at the back of Bailey’s head, cackling with excitement.
“You’re nothing but a goddamn pigeon!”

Rob pulled the plug on the brain, the monitor went black. He
plugged it into the other side and it came alive, but in a different way.
Instead of a clear digital representation of what was in front of Bailey’s
glazing eyes, the world appeared on the monitor in infra red. He moved the plug
again and it was a thermographic image.

The fourth position was just left of center and toward the
bottom, and at first the image came up normal. Then a targeting reticle
appeared on the screen, in the center of what would have been Bailey’s field of
vision, had he been more than a video camera encased in cooling meat.

Rob realized he was holding his breath again and let it out
slowly. “Ho-ly
shit
.”

He took his glasses off, admiring the way the overhead
lights gleamed off the silver frames and a spider scurried across one of the
lenses. He folded the bows and put the glasses in his shirt pocket.

One hour later, Jared was in the room. Rob told him
everything, and then showed him.

He set up a target in front of Bailey’s body on a track,
unstrapping the cold left hand.

Monitor plugged in, the targeting scope appeared. Rob
applied a small charge to a cluster of circuitry in the brain. Immediately the
left arm popped up, the hand holding a gun that wasn’t there.

“Fuck!” Jared took a step back from the body as Rob removed
the charge, causing the arm to fall, lifeless once more.

“Watch this.” Rob gave Bailey’s brain another zap and moved
the target left, via remote. The arm came up and tracked the target across the
room, trigger finger convulsing.

“What are you gonna tell the others?” Rob asked.

“Everything, I guess, but it’s not gonna make their lives
any easier. It’s not doing a lot for me, either.” Jared shook his head and
stared at the twitching arm. He thanked Rob for the presentation, commended him
on his work, and went upstairs to his quarters where he lay on his bed in the
dark for a very long time.