Face/Mask (34 page)

He slid the map across his screen and brought up the view from a camera half a kilometer away which he pointed down the street toward where all the trouble was. The picture looked fuzzier than usual, then Janus realized that he was looking at a cloud of smoke.

“That’s not smog,” he said to nobody in particular, trying to zoom in closer. “Shit,” he whispered, as he saw people running into the frame, some of them knocking others over, and nobody stopping to help anyone else. The red-lit notices scrolling along the bottom of his screen confirmed what he was seeing.

“Normand,” he yelled at his disconsolate friend. “The fuckers did it again!”

Leblanc looked up, his eyes filled with tears, but no longer thinking about his own fate.

“What’s going on?”

“A bomb. Downtown.”

“Christ! Is it like Quebec?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m on the security scanner, and it doesn’t look big enough to be nuclear. But I’m getting reports of a lot of dead. Especially
Cons
.”

“What? Why?”

“The bomb was planted right next door to a detachment. At the Levesque library.”

As he said the name Janus recognized it as the library where Richard and Francis studied. He had to call Terry to see if she had any news from the school.

Richard sat alone in his room, staring at the ceiling. The only light came in through the cracks in his window blinds. He wanted to cut himself off from the outside world, so he’d shut the blinds as soon as he got home. It didn’t matter that he lived over a dozen kilometers from the site of the blast. He couldn’t bear to look outside and chance seeing any more of the horror that he’d unleashed.

Suzanne had told him to not stay within the vicinity after dropping his waist-pack off at the library. She’d said that the blast radius of the bomb would be about 50 meters wide, but there was always a danger of flying objects even beyond that. She’d told him to head for her apartment as soon as he’d finished, and promised him a special celebration when he got there.

But he knew she was just leading him on, as she always had. There would be nothing
special
in their celebration, at least not the way she clearly intended him to envision it. He’d allowed himself to fantasize for too long; all that was left was the ugly reality of what he’d done.

After leaving the library he’d walked calmly away, using his com’s GPS to measure out the 50 meters. He continued another 20 meters past that distance before stepping inside a store, telling himself that he was surely safe there, although still close enough to maintain the thrill of danger. He felt exhilarated from having gone through with his mission, and imagined that a slight risk of danger might even enhance his stature in Suzanne’s eyes.

He might have imagined it, but the clouds blocking the sun seemed to be thinner today. Everything was going perfectly. He’d rarely felt such a high.

He stood casually inside a storefront window, almost hoping for some sort of mild injury he could show off later. According to his com timer there were still 15 minutes before the bomb would go off. But the blast came 10 minutes early, the flash appearing a split second before the heavy boom reached his ears. As smoke and debris rushed toward him he thought to himself,
wait, I’m not ready
, and a human arm, hand still clutching a dangling purse strap, struck the store window in front of him. The arm didn’t shatter the thick glass, but it did manage to crack the pane, leaving a trail of blood on the window as it slid down to the sidewalk.

In his room Richard closed his eyes, and pulled the pillow down over his face, trying to make that image disappear; but it wouldn’t.

He’d wanted to vomit and bent over against a store display, but despite the spasms in his belly, nothing came up. He held onto the wall for balance. All sorts of thoughts cascaded through his racing mind, until he landed on a question that hit him like another explosion:
why did the bomb go off early?

If he’d waited until 10 o’clock like they told him to he would have been killed. There had to have been some sort of mistake; there was no other explanation, although he couldn’t see how such a mistake could occur.

For several seconds after the explosion he remained motionless inside the store while people ran out into the street, some away from the blast, many running towards it, hurrying to see who they could help. Richard waited a long time to see if anybody would pick up that arm, lying just beside the door that he’d have to go through to leave the store, but nobody paid attention to it. There were too many mutilated bodies in the street; too many people lying motionless, or writhing in agony, and, even at this distance, too much blood for anyone to care about one lone arm.

He didn’t know how long he’d stood there. A girl rushed into the store and asked him if she could take some towels to wrap people’s injuries. Richard came out of his daze, realizing that he was standing in a bathroom accessories store. He wanted to tell the girl that he didn’t work there, but her panicked expression and the blood on her hands told him that was irrelevant.

He turned to the nearest shelf and began pulling towels down, handing a pile to her, then grabbing some more and rushing outside with them. He saw two RCMP agents carrying an injured man off the street, and ran over to them. One looked up at him and Richard held out the towels, not really certain what to do with them.

The agent looked at him for a moment, then spoke in a calm voice.

“Just put them down on the sidewalk, son. We’ll be needing them in a minute.”

That had been the extent of Richard’s contribution to the assistance effort. He’d put the towels down and then walked off, speaking to no one. Eventually, he’d found the metro-bus that took him home, although he had only the vaguest memory of that.

Somewhere along the way he pulled an envelope out of his jacket and thrown it into a trash bin. The envelope contained the recorded “manifesto” Suzanne had told him to affix to a street camera not too far from the bombing, where its magnetic signal would piggy back onto the administration’s network. The voice-altered audio recording proclaimed the declaration of principles of something called The New World Collective, a group that was declaring war against the administration on behalf of an oppressed populace. Mr. Robinson had come up with the pretentious name, and he and Suzanne had entrusted the envelope to Richard earlier that day, while beaming like proud parents.

There was no question of going to Suzanne’s apartment now. Special celebration or not, Richard knew he couldn’t face her. In fact, he never wanted to see her again. He’d agreed to go along with her plan, the group’s plan, and at the time their enthusiasm had made him feel so special. Now it was as if he’d woken up from some sort of dream to find himself in a nightmare of his own making.

So he went home, and ran up to his room. He was relieved that nobody was home to ask him how his day went, or why he was home at that hour, or why his face was so pale. He shut his bedroom door and lay on his bed, wanting to cry but unable to. He was terrified of what his father would say when he found out what he’d done.

Jordan Robinson’s eyes were glued to the tall, brown apartment building down the street, the building where he and his wife Suzanne had been living for less than a year. They sat at a window table in a coffee shop, while around them panicked customers ran in and out, arguing about the attack on their city. Robinson ignored them; his attention was on the street, where he saw no unusual activity near his building.

“They would’ve come by now,” Suzanne said. “I’m sure we’re fine.”

“How can we be sure of anything? Anybody walking into the building could be a
Con.
They could be undercover.”

She reached out and squeezed her husband’s hand in reassurance. It had been five hours since the bombing and for the previous three they’d been sitting at this table, watching their building a block away. Jordan was worried that Richard would turn them in, and that RCMP agents would be on their way to pick them up at any minute.

Richard
, she thought with a rueful shake of her head.
What the hell’re you doing alive?
     

They’d watched the news reports on the Vid-bot that morning, all those pompous administration spokesman pontificating about the war on terror, and how those “responsible for this barbaric act would be dealt with swiftly and decisively.”

There’d been no mention of their manifesto, but that was unsurprising: it could be hours or days before they found it on Richard’s body. Until then, everyone would blame the usual Muslim extremists for the bombing. Jordan had actually gotten so excited watching the reports of their handiwork that he’d pulled her down onto the floor in the living-room to make love during the live coverage of the bloody destruction.

Afterward they lay in each other’s arms, listening to the ignorant fools prattle on about a full-scale military incursion into the internment camps to find and punish those responsible. At that moment all was going according to plan, and they felt totally secure. Then Suzanne’s com had given a light whistle and she’d reached over Jordan to pick it up from the coffee table. She had to blink twice to make sure of what she saw. It was a terse e-message from Richard, time-stamped that very minute.

“I hate what I did,” he wrote. “You can never speak to me again.”

She turned the e-message to Jordan who read it and then sat up abruptly. “What the fuck? The kid’s still alive?”

“Well, we knew that was always a possibility,” she said. “He must have gotten mixed up and planted the bomb early.”

“Or panicked, the little shit.”

“Don’t be like that, Jordan. He’s just a boy.”

Jordan got up and started to pull his pants on. “We have to go.”

“What? Why?”

“Don’t you get it? ‘I hate what I did.’ He’s having second thoughts.
Remorse
. What if he decides to turn himself in? What if he turns
us
in?”

Suzanne tried to convince Jordan, and herself, that there was little chance of that happening, but his words had shaken her. She dressed hurriedly and grabbed their “panic bag” from the closet, where Jordan kept it for just this kind of eventuality. They rushed on foot down the block to the coffee shop where, from a safe distance, they could keep an eye on their building.

They told the shop owner they lived in an area that had been cordoned off after the bombing, and that they might have to wait there a few hours before being told where they could go. The man nodded nervously and turned back to the Vid-bot news. Since then, other than excitedly discussing the bombing with anyone who stepped into his shop, they didn’t hear from him.

“This is crazy,” Suzanne complained. “How long are we supposed to wait here without even knowing if he’s gone to the
Cons
?”

“Do we have a choice? If we go underground now we’ll be cut off from everyone we’ve recruited. I don’t want to have to start over.”

“So what do we do? We can’t spend the night here.”

“We’ll find a motel; see if there are any developments tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe Richard will reach out to us.”

“He’ll have to turn his com back on eventually,” Suzanne said. “If I could just speak to him.”

That day had been hell for Janus. When he’d tried reaching Terry a recorded message told him that all personal communication from inside administration buildings had been temporarily suspended by the security services. Later in the day he was given one e-message from Terry. It confirmed that she and their sons were all right, although certain parts of what she said had been redacted.

For crying out loud, now they’re screening my e-messages,
he thought, wondering how things had gotten to that point.

As the head of an essential municipal department there was no way that Janus could leave his post early to be with his family. Technical crews had to clear roads for the first responders; traffic had to be rerouted; new equipment had to be brought online for the parts of the grid that had been destroyed by the blast. The hours flew by and he hardly had time to think of his wife and children.

It was late in the afternoon when several grim-looking RCMP officers walked into his department, accompanied by a man who identified himself as the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Yves Prescott. This was the man who’d so terrorized Normand Leblanc, but Janus found his manner to be calm and professional, despite the stress that could be seen on his face.

“Are you Allen Janus?”

“Yes, Mr. Deputy Minister,” Janus tried to keep his tone calm as he watched the policemen fan out in his department’s offices.

“We thank you for your excellent work today, Mr. Janus, under very trying circumstances, I’m sure. But you are free to go home now. You understand that a forensic investigation is being undertaken of today’s cowardly attack on our city. These men will need to look through all of your camera feeds, as well as examine the city’s power grid for other potential flashpoints.”

Janus wasn’t sure that he understood, but Prescott had already turned away and was consulting with one of the officers.

“So you’ll be logging onto our system then,” Janus said with some uncertainty. Prescott turned quickly toward him and nodded his head, before heading toward Janus’s office with the officer.