The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (14 page)

A slingshot. A winch-powered slingshot. The details didn’t matter. Only the damage.

The residents across the river found no consolation in this discovery as they contacted their insurance adjusters. The police responded with nightly boat patrols. Their focused beams raked the tree-studded shore and revealed nothing of interest.

The media speculated at length on the attackers’ identity. An unaffiliated gang. A rogue splinter of the Street Party. A lone madman with advanced engineering skills. An enormous extortion plot.

The months rolled by. The beams relentlessly scanned the shore, draining the city’s public safety budget. The media lost interest. The patrols wound down.

Then it happened again. With increased elevation, range, volume, and accuracy. The
original fusillade had reached only the fourth floor of the affected structures. This one went up a full dozen and shattered nearly two thirds of the windows in each of the half dozen buildings.

Come morning, police found tree marks suggesting three separate weapons of even larger scale than before.

Boat patrols now circumnavigated the entire island on a continuous basis to deny the attackers a beachhead. Residents who were renting moved out. Those who owned saw their investments in mortal jeopardy and screamed for more action.

And they soon got it. A nighttime patrol vessel cruising the east channel took a nasty hit in the stern that extinguished the engine and left the boat dead in the water. A second rock screamed a few feet over the occupants’ heads and sent up a great plume upon impact with the water.

The patrol boats were obviously defenseless against shore fire coming from the mainland east side. The true gravity of the situation quickly sank in. An operation to occupy the river’s east shoreline was out of the question. The city had neither the money nor the manpower.

Then the police union weighed in. Their members were being subjected to unreasonable danger on a long-term basis. They would no longer patrol.

The attackers waited a week and then took out the remaining windows in a spectacular display of marksmanship. Insurance coverage collapsed due to exclusions for civil disorders. Vacancies rose far above sustainable levels and the buildings quickly went bankrupt. By the following summer, they were all but deserted, creating an economic malady that rapidly infected the remaining buildings.

The South War Front was born, and a new class of residents arrived, those paying rock-bottom rents out of minimum wages.

And on this particular night along the War Front, Rachel Heinz and Harlan Green sit in the back of an armored SUV parked on the far side of the streetcar tracks. She looks up at the sparsely populated matrix of lit units on the street side of the nearest building. Johnny’s most likely taken refuge up there, in one of the vacated units on the upper floors facing the river. One with a shattered glass front open to the elements, with mildewed carpeting and warped wooden floors.

But right now, he’s directly across the street in a shabby bar right off the streetcar line, their designated meeting place. The bar’s front door opens and someone nods at them.

“Okay, he’s in there,” Rachel says. “Shall we go?”

“This better be good,” Green comments as he reaches for the door handle. “I’m up way past my bedtime.” An inside joke. In fact, he sleeps only a few hours each night.

“You checked out his credentials?” Green asks as they pass beneath a pallid neon sign that names the bar.

“I did. Dr. John Anslow’s exactly who he says he is.” She omits the fact that they had a romantic history.

Inside, postindustrial décor dominates. Buffed cement floors. A concrete slab for the bar. Minimal indirect lighting. Maybe a dozen tables of chrome and clear plastic. All pointing back to a time closer to the zenith of the empire.

Rachel scans the occupants. Nine men and two women randomly seated and nursing drinks. How many were Harlan’s security people? The Street Party org chart adheres to a pattern of ancient origin. All the staff report to Green through her—except for the palace guard, which reports directly to Harlan.

She spots several pairs of dead pitiless eyes, and has a pretty good idea who’s who. They come to Harlan through the Bird, an individual she’d just as soon forget. Populism has always had its dark side, like Huey Long’s state troopers, and you just had to accept that it came with territory.

She spots Johnny, sitting alone in the rear, idly watching their arrival. He doesn’t bother to stand when they sit down, an omission that undoubtedly rankles Green, although he doesn’t show it.

“So, Mr. Anslow, maybe you can explain to me what I’m doing here at this hour.”

“Rachel’s told you what I’ve got on video, right?” Johnny asks Harlan.

Green nods silently.

“I don’t follow politics much,” Johnny declares. “But I do know that you have a thing against Mount Tabor. It seems to be kind of a big deal with you.”

Like celebrities of all stripes, Harlan Green seems scaled down when encountered close up. He appears about Johnny’s age, a man of medium height with blue eyes and short-cropped, sandy hair. He could easily be a checkout clerk, your car mechanic or insurance agent. Just a guy trying to get by.

Until he speaks, that is. No matter what he says, there is an overtone of utter and complete certitude, a sense of absolute purpose.

“There was a time, Mr. Anslow, when Mount Tabor was a city park. Unfortunately, that’s a time long gone. It’s become a place of fortified wealth and power, owned by an anonymous multinational corporation. It looks out over the ruins of what were once good neighborhoods, neighborhoods now infected with periodic gunfire after dark.”

Green leans in closer. “So, Mr. Anslow, you shouldn’t be surprised if you see some of our people picketing the place. It’s become a metaphor for everything that’s gone wrong in this country.”

Johnny glances at Rachel and settles back on Green. “I need to talk to you privately. Just you.”

“And why is that?”

“It’s confidential. You’ll understand when I tell you.”

Rachel fights the urge to lash out. What the fuck is he doing? Harlan wouldn’t even be here except for her.

Green looks at Rachel, then Johnny. “Five minutes, Mr. Anslow. You’ve got five minutes. And they’d better be very productive.” He turns to Rachel. “Would that be all right with you, Rachel?”

As if she had any choice. “Five minutes,” she reiterates as she caps her rage and stands to leave.

“Thank you,” Green says. As if he actually means it.

Rachel leaves the water faucet on in the ladies’ restroom as she stares into the mirror. She’d heard that running water had a calming effect. Something about positive ions. Good. Right now, she felt anything but positive.

It wasn’t always this way. Early on, Harlan constantly sought her counsel and trusted her judgment. But now he’s disappearing into the mist of some Olympian peak of his own making. She can no longer trust him. The Street Party can no longer trust him. Already, she’s had a number of circumspect discussions with others in the organization about this issue. And they’ve sent signals of concern, heavily coded, of course.

She senses something’s wrong the moment she leaves the ladies’ room and turns the corner back into the bar. Sure enough, Johnny’s no longer at the table with Green, who casually sips a glass of beer.

Maybe he’s in the restroom, she hopes. Maybe not. She strides over to their table and sits across from Green. “Where’d he go?”

“He left.”

“What do you mean, he left?”

“I didn’t buy his story, so he got pissed and lit out. The guy’s obviously a flake.”

“Did he show you the video?”

Green puts on a patronizing smile. “Anybody with a bucket of plastic goo and a little makeup could’ve made that.” He chuckles. “He’s your perfect mad scientist. Right out of central casting.”

“And so what was his story, the one that didn’t wash?”

Green stands to leave with an irritated look. “It doesn’t even bear repeating. Let’s go. We’ve burned enough time on this already.”

Rachel moves to protest, but checks herself. It won’t do any good. It’s all wrong. She can feel it. Her suspicion is confirmed on the way out. All but two of the security people have
already left, a glaring breach in normal protocol. Where did they go?

***

The alarm signal burrows mercilessly into the center of Lane’s somnolent brain, right through the residual alcoholic stupor. When he’d gotten home, he’d finished what he started in the bar downtown. Why not? He had all the next day to sleep it off. And the day after that, and so on, until all his funds were exhausted.

He rolls over and squints at the security screen on his alarm clock. Rachel Heinz. What the hell? He checks the time: 1:30
P.M
. He puts her on audio. “Yeah?”

“I’m downstairs.”

“Obviously.”

“We need to share, just like you said.”

“I’m not in a generous mood right now.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Call me in the morning, okay? But not too early.”

“I saw Johnny today.”

Lane sits straight up. “Where?”

“Right now, we’re being digitized for posterity, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.” She’s right. His building’s security system is recording this entire transaction. “I’ll card you on up.”

By the time he lets her in, he’s risen to a slow simmer. “You knew when I called you, didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

She remains perfectly composed. He has to admire that. No bullying allowed. “Why don’t you ask me to sit down?” she says. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you ask me if I’d like something to drink?”

He exhales deeply. “Right. Have a seat. What would you like?”

“Nothing right now. Maybe later.”

“Okay, now what about my brother? How come you put me off?”

“Because he insisted that I don’t tell you. Just like you’re insisting that I do tell you. So which master am I supposed to serve?”

He looks away from her and out over the years gone by. “Easy. The one that still has all his wheels on the tracks.”

“Okay then. He showed up at my place last night, a real mess. He wanted to cut a deal with Harlan, a sort of quid pro quo.”

“And who got what?”

“He said he knew what was going on over on Mount Tabor. He showed me a video. It was hideous. A badly deformed thing that might have been human, but you couldn’t be sure. In exchange, he wanted the Street Party to give him protection on a permanent basis.”

“Protection from whom?”

“He wouldn’t say. He wanted to deal directly with Harlan. He stayed at my place long enough to get cleaned up a little and left. I set up a meeting, but it didn’t come off like I thought it would. The two of them cut me out of the deck. Completely. I left the table for just a few minutes, and when I got back, Johnny was already gone. Harlan claimed he stormed out because Harlan didn’t believe his story, but I don’t think that’s what happened. I think they cut a deal, and Harlan had him leave with some of our security people.”

“So Harlan didn’t tell you what the deal was?”

She sighs. “You know, there was a time when I trusted him. Biggest mistake of my professional life.”

“And now?”

“And now you and I suddenly have a lot overlapping interests. I want to know what the deal really was, and why Harlan covered it up. And you want to know what kind of jam Johnny is really in, and how you can help him. In either case, we need to find out more about what’s going on up on Mount Tabor.”

“And when you do find out, what happens to Harlan Green?” Lane asks.

She lapses into a moment of icy silence. “I’m going to assume that you never asked any such thing.”

“So be it. Now let’s try and line all this stuff up and see what we’ve got.”

“He showed up at my place with the horrible video and said he knew the truth about Mount Tabor and wanted to make a deal. Then he and Harlan pulled the disappearing act. I think Johnny told him something pretty extraordinary.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Harlan’s slick and calculating. The disappearing-scientist story was way too clumsy. He had to improvise on the fly. So anyway, where does that leave us?”

“On one side, we have the video and Mount Tabor,” Lane responds. “On the other, we have Johnny’s research and the Institute for the Study of Genetic Disorders. What we don’t have is the connection between them.”

“And how do we go about getting that, Mr. Policeman?”

“Money.”

“Money?”

“Are you in a position to dig around in the Street Party coffers and free up some funds?”

“I suppose so. What for?”

“I’m currently unemployed. I need you to keep me afloat until we get to the bottom of this.”

“I think we can handle that. I mean, really, how much does a cop make?”

For the first time, Lane manages a grin.

“Not much.”

***

Johnny can visualize the intricate structure of the molecules. They’re extracted from the hemlock plant and delivered in a dosage of about 100 milligrams, just enough to disable his neuromuscular junctions without killing him.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t what Green had promised; it wasn’t sanctuary. It was imprisonment, confinement of the most hideous kind. It had started with some kind of intramuscular injection as soon as they had him in the vehicle outside the bar. Then a drive through the night, followed by the hemlock.

So now he lies here on his back in the dark, completely paralyzed. Only the sullen hiss of the respirator breaks the silence as it forces air down the tube in his throat and into his utterly passive lungs. And that’s the genius of it. He’s incapacitated in the most profound manner possible, hovering a single degree above death. Only the respirator keeps him alive. No restraints or guards required.

A grand parade of paranoiac scenarios strut their stuff before his prostrate form. A power failure triggers asphyxiation and he dies eyes wide open. A warped medical team performs a vivisection and he can’t even scream. A rodent chews on his motionless extremities and he can only endure.

So why were they keeping him alive? Like a fool, Johnny had told Green all about Mount Tabor, about the stunning breakthroughs. He now realizes that he lost all his bargaining capacity in the process.