Cookie Cutter Man (12 page)

He had a headache.

*****

It was around six o’clock when Daniel walked through his own
door. The apartment felt empty. He went into the bedroom, partly to put his
case away and partly to check if Echo’s clothes were still in the closet.
Satisfied, Daniel went out to the living room as the phone rang.

He let it go. He hadn’t answered the phone since the night he’d
torn the place apart looking for bugs. The machine picked up.

There was nothing at first, no message, and then it got
louder. White noise was coming through the machine, followed by distant voices
and the clink of silverware on plates and ice in a glass.

“What the hell?” Daniel said.

He leaned a little closer to the machine. Two voices were
clearer than the others; one male, the other female. There was the steady din
of background noise and music that was instantly associable with every bar in
the country. The female voice he suddenly recognized as Echo, and at first
wondered if she might be calling from work on a cell phone or something. Then
there was a loud crash and the tinkling of broken glass, and he heard himself
say “Oh shit!” and could still remember the way he’d jumped when the waitress
at Phatty’s had dropped the tray. Clear as day he heard Echo ask him if he was
all right and he heard his own mumbled reply that yes, he was fine, then
beep!

Daniel rewound it and sat on the couch in a daze. He tried
to remember the people that had been seated near them that night. Someone had
recorded them. But which person had it been? And why? Was it a warning, a
threat? Maybe this time it was a joke. Teresa had been over with her boyfriend
for drinks and lines several times in the past, maybe this was the dizzy
bitch’s idea of fun. Had there been an agent sitting close enough to kill them
without Daniel even suspecting? It could have been anyone. He got off the couch
and paced through the front room like a caged beast, sweating and clenching his
hands into fists.

You’re letting your guard down, Daniel. You can’t ever
relax again, or the boogeymen will be there waiting for you
. The stranger
broke off in a fit of wild laughter.

“What do I do, what do I do?” Daniel asked himself.

Somewhere in the building a door opened and slammed shut
again, and he locked his. He sat on the couch and smoked some pot, trying to
calm himself. When nightfall came he didn’t turn on any lights, instead opting
for a single candle. He kept seeing a beetle crawling across the wall, out of
the corner of his eyes. Every time he turned and focused on the spot, there was
nothing there, but he kept the flyswatter close by, just in case.

There was a rattle of keys and the door popped open, slamming
against a chain lock Daniel didn’t remember ever having.

“What in the
fuck
?” came Echo’s voice from the hall.
His heart still pounding from the surprise, Daniel got off the couch,
cautiously, and crept to the door. A long pale tentacle slipped in through the
gap that the chain allowed, the muscles rippling beneath the rubbery skin as it
crept toward the chain, searching. Daniel felt his eyes grow in his head and
tried to blink it away. When he opened his eyes again the tentacle was still
there, sliding across the door, the blunted tip of it inching toward the chain,
searching, always searching, the suckers on the bottom of the tentacle a deep
blue, almost black in their center as they opened and closed like little
mouths. The walls began to breathe and the shadow of the tentacle cast by the
guttering light of the candle was almost too much for him to bear.

Oh what the fuck, Daniel thought, and whacked at it wildly
with the flyswatter, the sharp slap of contact ringing off the walls.

“Ow! Fuck!” Echo said from the hall, pulling her arm back
through the gap.

Daniel pushed the door closed and leaned his weight against
it. He peered out through the peephole and saw Echo looking at the red mark on
her wrist. Her nails were the same blue-black color the suckers had been.

“That hurt you dick!” Echo said, and knocked loudly like a
cop on the heavy wooden door.

Daniel undid the chain, and let the door swing wide.

“What the shit, man?” she asked. “What’s with the chain?”

He shrugged and went back to the couch, carefully peering
between the blinds as he sat down.

“Daniel?” Her voice was far away and unimportant. He stared
blankly toward the telephone, wondering if he had erased the message or not.

Bright light flooded the room when Echo flicked the switch.
“What’s going on?” she asked, louder.

Daniel opened his mouth to speak, the words dying silent
deaths before being born, a kind of verbal miscarriage that took place when he
looked to the carpet next to the door. There sat the cardboard and clear
plastic packaging the chain lock had come in, and the necessary tools for its
installation. Daniel had to choke back sudden tears when he realized he’d just
spent the last hour putting the new lock on the door ... and had forgotten
about it.

You JUST put it on! You don’t remember that?

When did I buy the lock?

“What’s wrong, baby?” Echo was sitting next to him now. “I
come home and you’re locked up in here, hiding in the dark, and you won’t talk
and you’re scaring me! What’s
happening
to you?”

“I can’t—” He stopped. What can’t I? I can’t tell what’s
real any more, but damned if I’m telling her that. Daniel stood to leave—

Where would you go?

—and she grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down to the
couch.

“Daniel, baby, I want to help you, but you have to tell me
what’s wrong.”

He sat in his own miserable silence.

“What is it?” Echo asked. “Is it your head? From when you
hit the sink?”

He stayed quiet and she finally spoke what had been in the
back of her mind for quite some time. “You
know
you see things—”

“I see bugs. That’s all.”

Bugs, and government agents, and
—

“But—” she dropped her hands to her lap.

“Bugs! This isn’t a hallucination, OK? I see
bugs
.
Flies
and shit. That has nothing to do with it.”

“That’s not normal, Daniel.”

“I know, but it’s me.”

“What if it’s getting worse? It could get worse!”

“It’s not.” It was, but it was only bugs he saw, dammit!
The rest was real.

“Go to a doctor! A specialist, or maybe a—”

She dropped the word before it spilled from her lips.

“A what?” His head began to throb.

“A
what
? A shrink? Is that what you want?”

She mumbled something he didn’t catch.

“What was that?”

“I said I think you’re sick, baby. You’re not the person I
fell in love with, and I want him back.”

Daniel opened his mouth and stopped. What could he possibly
say? She was right.

Instead of speaking he went to their room. His fingers were
numb and he fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, but got it off, balled it up,
and threw it toward the hamper. He took off the rest of his clothes and stood
in front of the mirror on the closet door, looking himself in the eyes and
noticing how his pupils were different sizes since he hit his head, the one on
the left much bigger than the one on the right. Daniel sighed heavily and got
in bed, but it was a long time before he was able to sleep.

*****

The next morning Echo lay in bed, shamming sleep, waiting
for Daniel to leave. He kissed her lightly on the forehead and when she heard
the front door close she opened her eyes. She stared up at the ceiling and it
blurred through her tears as her mind circled; Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.
Desperate to take her mind off him, she got out of bed and started cleaning the
house.

Cleaning, though she didn’t particularly enjoy it, had
always allowed her a kind of mental retreat, as she was able to focus solely on
the task at hand. She washed the dishes and vacuumed and dusted. On her knees
in the closet she was separating the laundry to put a load in the hamper when
she pulled one of Daniel’s balled-up shirts from behind the hamper. Within the
bundle of cloth she felt something hard, something solid. With no other thought
than wanting to avoid putting whatever it was through the washing machine, she
opened the balled garment and, brows furrowed, pulled a pair of eye glasses out
of the shirt pocket. They had a silver frame and there were tiny brown flecks
dried onto the lenses.

“What the hell?” Echo said, not aware she had spoken aloud.
She opened the bows and after a moment of hesitation, held them up to her eyes.
The lenses were nonprescription.

Her shoulders slumped and she slid back off her knees so she
was sitting against the closet door, staring at the glasses, not understanding
them. It was like finding a tube of denture cream or a bottle of self-tanner in
his clothes; just not an item that had any bearing on their day to day lives.
They seemed foreign, alien almost.

Echo stood and started going through Daniel’s clothes
hanging on the rack until she found another shirt like the one the glasses had
been in; a short-sleeve button up mechanic’s shirt with a pocket on the left.
She folded the bows closed and put them in the pocket. Her head was still
fuzzy, as though she’d just woken up or been hit in the head. She pushed the
glasses from her mind and went back to sorting the laundry, though not with the
same manic energy as before.

*****

They looked up from the tape Daniel had taken from the
answering machine, having listened to it three times.

“What do you make of it?” Daniel looked around the room at
the others. This was so far the largest meeting he had attended. Jared and
Simon were there, of course, and so was Rob. Ebin and a couple agents Daniel
hadn’t personally spoken to were sitting at one end of the room. One was named
Kismet, and he was a crow, a ghost. He sat in the corner, olive-skinned with a
huge mane of black hair, completely anonymous. He looked like any other slacker
you might see in a coffee shop or walking up the street.

The other was a female operative named Isis. The two had
just returned from a six-month tour of duty in Portland.

“They know,” Jared said. All eyes were on him.

“What do you mean?” Ebin asked.

“They know,” Jared repeated. “They don’t know everything,
far from it, but I think they finally noticed us.”

“How can you be so sure?” Simon asked.

“I’m
not
sure, but we have to assume the worst to be
prepared for it.” Jared looked around the table. “We pop two of their guys,
Copper’s missing, Daniel kicks a pigeon-cam, and now we get this message on his
machine.”

“H-how’d you know about the pigeon?” Daniel asked. He could
feel his face grow red.

“Don’t worry about it. And if they do know about us, I want
you to know that it’s not your fault. We’ve gone undiscovered far longer than
we had any right to as it is.”

Daniel breathed easier as Jared continued. “Next order of
business is David Bailey. You’ve been briefed, I assume?” He looked to Isis.
“As you all may or may not know, she’s the one who originally spotted Lawrence
Wills in Portland; and the one that shot him. When was this?” Jared asked her.

“Six days ago,” Isis said.

“Yes.” Jared steepled his fingers and fixed each of them in
turn with his chameleon gaze.

“Six days ago our Portland office contacted us and told us
they had our man. This brings us full circle to one David Bailey, recently
deceased. He claimed to have worked closely with Wills on two separate
occasions. On the day he was brought in, and the other a day before.

“Lawrence Wills is dead. He’d been dead for five days, but
Bailey swore it was him. He was not in the position or the state of mind to
lie. He referenced Wills by name. We showed him a picture, and Bailey
identified the man in it as Lawrence Wills.

“Bailey also disclosed the location of one of the offices he
shared off and on with several other agents, including Wills. And we’re
still
getting sightings on him from that A.P.B. we put out.”

“So what? This guy has a brother? A twin?” Isis asked.

“We think he may have been cloned,” Jared said. There was a
shocked silence that erupted into several arguments, and it took Jared and
Simon a couple minutes to regain control of the meeting.

“Recently the British Parliament legalized the cloning of
human beings for embryonic research,” Simon began. “Bailey said this was a
front. He led us to believe that the American government had been working very
closely with a British scientist for the last 20 years or so, and had been
attempting to clone a living human since the mid-’90s. Normally I’d say that
was a crock of shit, but because of what Bailey told us, Jared and I believe
that would be very unwise.”

“We need to find out more,” Jared said. “If they can clone
an agent and rebuild him, evolve him with this biomechanical technology--”

“--We’re fucked,” Simon finished. “Unless we find a way to
stop it.” The two of them laid out the plan for the others. Isis and Kismet had
worked together before and were well experienced, so they were paired off.
Simon was to go with Daniel and Ebin. Rob and Jared would be the disembodied
eyes and ears of the operation.

“Friday night we mount our first large-scale offensive
against our enemies,” Jared said, with pride in his voice and a gleam in his
eyes that said he had been waiting for this a very long time. He had the air of
a general addressing his troops before a battle he is sure they will win. “In
the meantime, Simon, I want you to go with Daniel to his house and have a look
around.”

Jared then turned to Daniel. “How attached to your apartment
are you?”

“We got like, two months left on the lease, I think. Why?”

“I think it’d be best,
safer
, if you moved. We know
some people that can provide you with an apartment, one that won’t be bugged.”