The Cause (3 page)

Pelletier told me he wouldn’t forget it. On leaving, he tapped me on the shoulder with a meaty palm and called me a patriot. Left me a number to call and said I was to state an identifier and repeat a witty phrase he had come up with which I had to memorize.

Now, thinking about it all, I needed the bus ride for quiet
contemplation. As a cluster of woods swept past the window in a deluge of green, my father’s whisper settled in my head, a voice rattling from years
ago—Do right by your country and right by your family and life should be okay
. The words were coming through garbled. Perhaps it was the booze talking. His face appeared in the window’s reflection. Shadows of speeding trees whizzed by in a swirl of green, blurring together with the image of his face and then suddenly everything evaporated into my own reflection. Then my mother floated into the window lighting a candle—Christmas, New Year’s, his third missed birthday, their anniversary. Days where an overwhelming absence filled an empty house. Days when a vaporous omnipotent presence swept through the hallways. Maybe the candle was for me—that possibility hadn’t escaped me—the flame burning with photospheric intensity to signify her disapproval. Anger and betrayal. Two words made of ash smoked up in a flame, because how could a mother loathe a son for such an accident?

The bus came to a stop and several passengers stepped off. The bus driver’s eyes in the mirror were blue. He was probably six feet tall and a south paw. I noticed I was sitting in the closest seat to the exit. I watched what buttons the driver pushed and thought CIA boot camp had taught me something.

I was the one forsaken by my mother, more so than my brother, the drug dealer. I was the son who mistakenly killed his own father responding to a 211—who failed to recognize him through a
Scream
mask and a gangster’s baggy pants and a checkered green-yellow flannel shirt, who wasn’t even supposed to be there, the neighborhood not part of his regular beat. I was the son who would hear the radio call and race to the scene only a couple of blocks away. Who didn’t even bother flipping the switch of the siren. Who crept in like a SEAL on ambush, and saw a figure through the window waving a pistol at a clerk. This boy who would grow up in a minute, crouching down behind the door of his cruiser in a kneeling Weaver stance armed with a
Glock 19 pointing straight for the glass door, waiting for the cling of a bell. This son would watch a single man grab a paper bag and flee out of a dime store, would say
halt
but not really want it to happen, and would finally shoot when the figure turned around with weapon in hand.

And then the masked man would struggle to get up from the blast, so unlike a hero, sternum caved in like a mule kick to the chest. There’s not any air left to breathe is there? The boy still there would kick the man’s gun aside, point his weapon at the perp’s head.
Go on
, pull the trigger on this lowlife. No witnesses, and who would fucking care?

The cynic creeping out, the new man being born from the boy.

The wound spurts blood in the air like a little blowhole. The perp coughs and blood flows out of the mouth behind the mask. The boy removes it so the perp doesn’t drown—there’s an ounce of humanity left in him still. But then, there he is. It’s like staring in the mirror down there.
What the fuck
, you scream.
Holy fucking shit, Pop. What have you done?
You throw your gun across the parking lot like it’s a curse. He coughs again. Blood drains out of his chest like a burst balloon. “It’s not your fault,” he says through a raspy cough, throwing blame far away into the parking space where you have tossed your gun. “I had to do something. No other way. Forgive me.” And there you are, applying pressure to the chest wound, figuring out how bad it really is.
Why, Pop? Why?

He grabs the shiny copper badge on the dark, navy-blue uniform, rubs it softly between his fingers, the blood on the tips already drying in the soft wind. “No time for talk,” he says. “Listen. Tell your mother I’m sorry. Tell her I love her.”

Pressing on the wound only makes him howl. Then he’s slipping away.
Stay with me, Pop. Stay the fuck with me
. His eyes flutter, turn inward and gaze up at the sky. “I’m proud,” he says. “You’re a better man than me. That’s all I hoped for.” He gasps. “Remember,” he says. And then he coughs out the words that
would stay with me forever: “Do right by your country and right by your family and life should be okay.” I bent down to grasp him in my arms, his head falling limp until I braced it under my arm. We couldn’t have been closer right then, his blood painted all over me. Yet we were universes apart—him floating away, me wishing to vanish with him. With my mother it would be a distance too great to contemplate, a void of silence and space. Wailing sirens came blaring down the road, but by the time they got there he would already be dead, and it would only be the first set of tears the cynic would shed.

The diesel bus engine droned on, and the world refocused. The headache was back. A couple of kids nattered at each other in the back of the bus, and their mother was squawking at them to behave. I saw the derby-capped bus driver’s yawn through the thick convex mirror, left hand moving to the mouth to cover it. The humming of the motor vibrated the window against my scalp, and I used this time for rest, for absorbing what had to be done. In the end, it was a chance for a rebirth, my Homeland the new father to fight for. I would go to The Abattoir.

Near the base, I used a payphone and called a secret number. “A-507 entering the Panopticon,” I said. And because the moment burned within me, I added, “I’ll do it for free,” then hung up. I was back on The Farm by mid-morning and packed up my things. Later, as I was walking between the barracks and shooting range, I saw Hassani walking over to his car and ran to catch up to him.

“I’ve decided to go,” I said.

“I never really had a doubt you wouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why would you want to be left behind now when you’re out there giving it your all?”

“It might not be enough.”

“It certainly won’t be enough,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means The Abattoir will test you in more ways than you can imagine.”

I smirked at him. “I think I can hack it.”

Hassani took out his keys from his pocket. “Physically maybe.”

“Mentally too, man.”

“Maybe. But what you have to ask yourself is if Isse Corvus is going there for the right reasons.” He looked at me as if he had just decoded my phone conversation to Pelletier. Missing the pencil mustache and the ridiculous cowlick he had going the night of the Timothy Skies dinner, the purposeful stare of interrogator Bloom appeared.

There was a Sentinel drone up in the sky, and involuntarily I took a quick glance at it before snapping my eyes back into his. “And what reasons do you think those should be?”

“Well, that’s entirely up to you. But they shouldn’t be anyone else’s.”

I shook a finger at him in jest. “Have you been digging into my psych profile?”

Hassani smiled. “A dog doesn’t need to dig a hole to sniff shit if it’s lying right there on the sidewalk.”

I laughed. “As always, the Hassani snout sniffs one thing, but out of the mouth comes the bullshit of another.”

Hassani opened his car door. “Think about it.” He held out his hand and I grasped it.

“Thanks for everything you did for me out here. You were in my corner.”

He shook my hand. “You’re welcome. Good luck out there.”

The next morning at 0400, we were taken from Camp Peary in tinted-windowed vans. Most of the guys I was tight with during training were in my vehicle—Brock, Split, Conroy, and Mir. Brock and I were the only brothers out of the thirty-eight going. Bunker was conspicuously missing. Did he have a change of heart?

We drove in the van quietly digesting talk-show chitchat
about Detroit from
The Sunday Morning Sun Show
. Rioting again, the city completely lawless, another day of a tick-tocking clock until the whole city would explode. Funny how quiet we were that day, lulled to sleep by smooth, rational radio voices telling us how well-contained the situation was, praising the National Guard for their forbearance, castigating the unruly crowd of looters, each sound bite of street chaos clipped of high-toned protest-whistles and low-toned rolling tanks. The squeaky voice of host Barry Winterburn rubbed in our ears. Mir, sitting next to me in the backseat, yawned while fingering a tattoo on his arm of Lisbeth Salander, the classic chick from
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
. Up front, Conroy was looking out of the window at the Department Of Citizens’ freeway banners racing
by—Be On The Winning Side of Red, White, and Blue—Join Today
and many other adverts from President Donnelly’s PR Tsar.

“Ten dollar gas,” Mir said, pointing out the window at a gas-station billboard. “Do you believe this shit? It was nine dollars last week.”

“I hear they’re going to tap the rest of the SPR,” Brock said.

We fidgeted in the leather upholstery, the itch of collapse on the fringe of our thoughts, how other cities seemed to be catching the cold. While the days of rioting passed through the media innocuously, Detroit had fallen deeper and deeper over the previous weeks. The mainstream news lurched away from it, averting the camera’s eye to newly uncovered celebrity affairs. But the Internet told a different tale, one where a wall of immutability stood firm with static policy and deadlocked government. One blog wrote an article titled,
From Bankruptcy to Oblivion, A Hard Look at the Last 10 years of Detroit
. It received 13 million hits. But the politicians had written it off, sweeping the city out of the headlines as much as they could. The population seemed willing to go along. Save what can be saved. Amputate the rest.

The vans rolled on.

The low-browed Conroy sat picking a thumbnail. Sitting on the window side of the middle backseat, shoulders slumped and yawning, was Brock. Brock was a Brooklyn brother ex-Notre Dame linebacker. Then there was bushy-haired Stanford Mir, crooked-toothed like a British schoolboy growing out of baby teeth. Out of the alchemy of an ugly smile, he forged charisma. Outsiders would say he was charming—but none of them knew he was nicknamed the Peepshow Perv. He was a boy who loved his porn, kept it pinned up over his walls. Then there was me. Full-ride MS UCLA grad in neurology and computer science, studying neural nets and writing a thesis on neuromorphic processors. Would go to work in the Silicon Valley for a while afterwards. Those were the days when Cerberus had one head in his job, another in his Black Hat role in Anonymous, and the third playing in his off-time with the genetic algorithms that would make the core of Rose, an artificial intelligence program. All of us in the van had excelled with our college educations, all in different disciplines—but recruitment paths to The Company were all strangely different.

Conroy pointed through the windshield. “Take a look at that.”

A sign on an overpass read,
THIS IS THE ONLY COUNTRY WE’VE GOT
.

On the next overpass, there was a woman dressed in rags dangling out over the ledge staring down at traffic. Her feet straddled over a CCTV cam and everyone in the car had a sense of what was coming next. Another sign next to her read,
WHY WON’T OUR GOVERNMENT STOP PISSING ON IT
. We were in the middle lane and our driver merged left. As we passed, I caught a glimpse of her. Eyes wide and scared, caught up in the river of passing cars.

“Did she jump? Did she jump?” Mir asked, peeling around to try and gaze behind us. I wasn’t going to look back. Why look backward when you’re moving forward?

“No,” I said, “but she probably will, and you don’t need to be
looking.”

This was the new form of protest. The papers called them the Windshield Bugs, a group of homeless who had formed a suicide pact to jump when traffic got the heaviest. The banners never lasted long. Before attending to any accident or crawling traffic around the corpse, the first thing the police would do would be to rip down the signs.

Looking back at that moment now, I remembered how those jumpers had disgusted me. I couldn’t condone their method of protest. I thought their actions were destructive instead of constructive. The show of civil disobedience wasn’t helping solve any sort of problem.

We arrived at a large hangar on the outskirts of the Norfolk airport. The vans unloaded, and we hopped out and made for the entrance. Bunker still wasn’t there. No one had seen him.

Inside the hangar, a beaten-up F14 was stripped down to its dull metallic skin, stabilizers taken off, cylindrical like a dead barracuda with the tail chopped off. With all the drones in the air, who needed it? It looked like one of those birds destined to end up in the airplane graveyard out in Tucson. Looking at it reminded me of the little excursion I took after the astronaut Timothy Skies’ launch dinner. Under the moonlight, the dead war birds scattered about the dusty desert, wings still boldly spread out under sparkling star glitter. But in reality they were unaware of history’s juke, left behind to wilt under sandstorms and tumbleweed. It made me wonder about the manner in which we were going to be stripped down and disassembled, and whether any of us would come back feeling young and indestructible like we did now.

The guys were grouped into different circles talking. Many of the discussions at The Farm were themselves conversational exercises. Today, conversations crashed into one another, a traffic jam of voices in apprehension and excitement about what was coming. We were in jeans and tees, stripped of usual field gear. It
loosened the atmosphere and everyone spoke freely. In my group, Split was speaking about the secretive leader of The Abattoir. Split called him The Conductor. Mir said his name was C.

“Like
A-B-C?”
Conroy asked.

“Who knows?” Split said. “But Burns told me the tag Conductor goes back to his asset days.”

“Burns doesn’t know shit,” Conroy said.

“Heard it had to be clean,” Brock said. “Couldn’t just clip the target, so the guy walks around town posing as some retarded conductor dude. Tooled around the same office building for ten years until he could get a clean hit.”