Mindbenders (17 page)

“I’ll eventually find a way around your machine,” Max said, nodding toward the ceiling. “You won’t hold me long.”

“Max,” Avery cooed, the TV smile appearing like a flare over a battlefield, “you seriously think we planned to hold
you
with plastic ties? And an anti-noise machine? Give us a little credit.” He sat opposite us, the back of his head appearing in twenty mirrors, like salt-‘n-pepper tulips. “The machines keep us from interfering with our kids in the back room. They’re busy ‘influencing’ our guests for another few minutes while they file into the parking lot. If you’re paying for a seminar on Hope, you’d better leave feeling hopeful, don’t you think?”

He gestured at Max’s wrists. “As to the ties, I simply knew you wouldn’t come any other way. Miriam shouldn’t have made such a fuss in Raleigh—I was very stern with her about that. My plan is for us to have a good talk. I’m not going to hold anything back with you—I think you’ll be very impressed with what we’re doing. You’ll listen to what I have to say, won’t you? Without trying to escape?” Max thought about it for a moment and then nodded. Avery glanced at Volkov. “We should go,” he said and a moment later, we were out in the hall, surrounded by bodyguards and hustling toward the back of the building.

It occurred to me to run—I’d made no promises—but the guards were still all around us and, as soon as we stepped outside, there was Marat, Old Leatherface with his flickering fingertips. I saw Max look him up and down while we piled back into the big black SUV; it quickly rolled down the driveway past the few remaining cars and out toward the same bridge we came in over.

“I can’t tell you the impression you made on me, those years ago,” Avery told Max, watching his reaction like the performer he was. “I remember you lamenting there was nothing positive you could do with your gifts,” he continued, pointing out the tinted windows at the last stragglers leaving his lecture. “This is just a tiny part of what we do, Max, but I think we help. People come to me in distress and anxiety. Whether their anxiety is real or imagined, it can be crippling. And they leave feeling good about themselves. They can’t help it.”

“You might even say they have no choice,” Max replied, smiling as loosely as he knew how. I’d seen all his smiles by that point. “Where’d all this come from, Jim? You certainly weren’t so chipper as the Senator’s Chief of Staff.” Avery’s smile vanished suddenly; the words came out of his mouth clenched, struggling for air.

“I worked for Alan Hammond for eighteen years. My first job out of college was with his campaign. He promised I’d succeed him—several times, he promised. I made the same mistake with Alan that lots of people made over the years—I thought he could deliver. The instant he announced his retirement, he became the old geezer mumbling to himself in the back of the room. None of the people who made the actual decisions cared a damn what he thought or what promises he’d made.”

We filtered onto a highway heading west—it might have been the same highway we drove in on, though I couldn’t tell for sure—and then, after a few minutes, smaller local roads, grubby vistas of gas stations, motels, fast food joints and slow-moving traffic heading South in glum orderly columns.

“I’d been with him sixteen years when the bottom blew out. I’d shot my wad on a dead end. Do you know what that feels like?” he raged, voice rising but not really even seeking an answer, talking really to himself. “I flipped. I swore to myself  that nothing like that would ever—
ever
—happen to me again. I was going to find something rock-solid to build the rest of my life on. Something I could control, some valuable resource that couldn’t get voted out of office, couldn’t forget its promises—something the smart money hadn’t bought up already.” He tried to recover, laughing out the window but going nervous about it a moment later, as though recognizing the admission in it.

“When you work for a lame duck, nobody’s logging your time anymore. Nobody cared if I showed up at the office. So I got in the car and drove, drove whichever direction looked good at the crossroads.” He counted the suburban streets stacked up across the hillsides. “That’s where I discovered the power of
real
fear—fear for
yourself
, fear for your own life.

“See, when you’re in government, you’re always worrying about
out
there
. Social Security needs help and the terrorists are out to get us.  But those things are happening
out
there
, to somebody else. Now, with Alan useless and no idea where I fit in the world, for the first time, it was
me
. All my doors opened over a cliff.”

All at once, Avery’s ease returned—the big smile flashed across his face again. “So I drove. And once I’d driven around a while, I discovered that gnawing fear just made me a good American. Out in the world, eating in diners and staying in local motels and filling up where the price was good, I met people who hated their jobs but worked eighteen hours a day because they were afraid of losing them, people who were using credit cards to pay credit card bills or their groceries, people who knew their choice was to pay their kid’s college or get sick but not both. This wasn’t
out
there
anymore—this was just normal life. Fear was what everybody lived with
all the time
.

“And the good news for me was, even though they were desperate for things to get better, people had no real hope it ever would. Because they knew what I’d just discovered—that big business and government
don’t live in their world
. People like me never come in contact with that fear, don’t know it exists—we’ve got a safety net. And since people in government and business are the ones who make the laws, how could it ever get better? The man pumping gas or selling iPods knows how the world works. We have the helicopters and bodyguards and photo ops; they have the bills and the insecurity and twenty different ways to go completely off the tracks.”

We were off the main roads now, into an area of Virginia dense with trees and constantly overflown by low-hanging airliners. Avery sat straight in his seat and sized up the view through the smoked windows. “And that’s when I figured it out: the really scarce natural resource is Hope. Most people are starving for it. Better yet, the winners—the imperial few—aren’t used to anything going wrong anymore and they have
so much to lose
. So
nobody’s
confident, not for long. Everybody falters, shudders—even if they don’t, everybody
fears
. So they all need Hope—and I can provide that. That was my answer and fortunately I was able to figure out what to do about it. I’m a cartel, Max,” he said, his smile going even brighter. “I’m the OPEC of Hope.”

The van headed into a walled-off industrial park, passing four or five boxlike glass structures on its way to a bunkerlike building with slit windows scarring its concrete face. I recognized the place from the picture I’d torn out of the paper: L Corp headquarters.

We pulled under an awning in front. Bodyguards ringed us immediately, opening the car doors and ushering us into the lobby. Attendants in familiar jumpsuits bustled behind a brushed aluminum counter with inset computer monitors and one of those free-standing security scanners like the airports. One of the bodyguards opened the gate for Avery. A very attractive blonde met him immediately and pinned a security badge on his lapel, then handed another to Volkov, who grinned and pinned it to his own jacket.

“Sam, we need two more badges for our guests,” Avery said and the blonde gave us the once-over. From her expression, we must not have looked too impressive, which wasn’t real surprising, considering we’d been in the same clothes since Florida.

“What grade?” she asked.

“Full grade,” Avery answered. “This is the House that Renn built—and that,” he gestured, “that is Renn.”

Sam the blonde gave Max another pass now, with that same awestruck look they all had who knew his name. She pulled two yellow badges from a cabinet at the back wall, pinning one to Max’s collar—they seemed to be having a staring contest the whole time—and handing me mine, just to let me know how I rated. We followed Avery through a pair of  electric swooshing doors like in Star Trek and down an antiseptic hallway cluttered with projectors and monitors on roll-away carts and handtrucks piled with fold-up chairs. “It’s a mess,” Avery conceded. “We’re expanding rapidly. We’ll have a new headquarters next year but until then we’re overflowing.”

“This is part of
Your World
?” Max asked. He had that wide-eyed look he’d had in the dressing room—apparently this place was also wired for white noise. Which didn’t make me feel any more secure.

“Oh no,” Avery tutted. “
Your World
is a non-profit charitable foundation, with headquarters three blocks from the White House.
Your World
supports personal growth and discovery around the world. L Corp’s business is more…pragmatic, shall we say. The two have no connection, as far as anyone can tell.”

“So then, how is this the house Renn built?” Max asked.

We were filing down the corridors of what seemed to be a technical university. Classrooms lined both sides of the hall, filled with young people (actually, only a little younger than me, I guess, but they hadn’t had my life), expensive computer-aided whiteboards, chairs and floor mats—lotus-style seemed to be all the rage. One of the doors opened as we passed and the sucking sound said the room was airtight and soundproofed, even though there didn’t seem to be much sound to muffle.

“When you burst in on Alan and me,” Avery reminisced to Max, “the first time, years ago, you said you were Renn and I remember the terror I felt in that moment. I checked later and found that Alan felt it too. And what hit me just the next day, when I thought back on it, was that the fear was there before I even remembered who Renn was. You were a footnote in intelligence reports, the great missing Soviet asset and there were rumblings you’d been sighted but there were always rumblings. So you weren’t the first thing on my mind yet the fear was just overpowering.

“When I sat in on your debriefing, you talked about how you did it—how anytime someone came across your name, even just on paper, you could send a shock of fear at a distance, without them knowing you were doing it, without you even knowing you were doing it.”

“It can be useful,” Max nodded, “to make an adversary afraid of you before you face him.”

“Well, when I figured out my calling,” Avery said, “I went looking for you. This was after 9/11, after you’d gone missing and no one could find you.” He turned and smiled at Volkov. “But I put the word out in the right places, apparently. One day, Pietr walked up to me on the street and said, ‘I know what you’re looking for and why you can’t find it.’”

“He wanted an army of mindbenders!” Volkov smiled. “Like we live on every block, Max—imagine!”

“Well, it’s what we have now,” Avery insisted and you could hear the pride in his voice.

“Feeble-minded ones,” Max grumbled and Volkov shrugged.

“Feeble-minded ones are easier to use,” he said. “And, the truth is, they’re all we need.”

We were passing another classroom door. I moved closer to the wall, where I could get a glimpse inside as we passed. The teacher was up front, monitoring the class though nobody was doing much of anything—the group of them eyes closed, palms up, humming like cats on a windowsill. The whiteboard up front read:

20 Minutes

40.02588N, 105.24102 W

Everything I’ve Ever Built Is In Danger; Who Will Protect Me?

The Borgen Takeover Bid Makes Good Business Sense

“This is where Jim is a genius,” Volkov said and Avery smiled modestly, a man who’d won the game and was now above praise. “He realized what was needed.”

Max’s forehead looked like a topographical map all of a sudden. It must have been a weird experience for him, having to guess at answers. “What? Feeble minds? How can these shallow ones read
anybody
reliably?”

“The mistake,” Avery said quietly, “is in the terminology: mindreader. The important skill for business isn’t reading people’s minds—it’s the other side of the equation,
influencing
the thoughts of others. That’s worth money.
Lots
of money.”

We passed another classroom. The whiteboard read:

20 Minutes

53N25, 2W55

Who Can I Turn to when No One Cares?

Labour is Still Better for the Working Man

Avery led us through an open door into an empty classroom. You could see it had done its duty recently—coffee cups and notepads were scattered across tables pushed out to odd angles to leave room for squatting on floor mats. The whiteboard was partly but not completely erased. What remained was:

20 mi

3   5’ 19.1” N, 122 05’    W

 othing Lasts Forev

 he Royal Fam    Provides Stabil

“I explained to Jim how few prime talents there were,” Volkov shrugged. “But, the more we talked, the more I realized that what he wanted to do didn’t require real power. Twenty or thirty drones at a time could do the job. And better maybe, since they can attack a multitude of frequencies at the same time.”

“So when people walk out of my seminars feeling better, really hopeful, liberated, inspired, fearless, at a time when the world is going down the crapper,” Avery added with real enthusiasm, “what’s that worth? All through the seminars, we’re sending them the message:
You Are Special. Others May Fail but You Won’t. You Can Do It.
We clear away the roadblocks inside,  which are the ones that really bite, don’t you agree?

“At the same time, we’ve offered our more practical services for hire. That has proved to be
very
profitable.”

“Influencing votes in Congress,” Max murmured, without sounding very distressed.

Volkov looked almost condescending. “Your thinking is outmoded, Max,” he said, shaking his head. “Government is not even a player anymore.”