He’d chosen several potential victims among the rabble. If you settle on only one, sure enough the lucky bastard’ll get himself behind a street sign or a bystander and then you’re stuck scrambling for a target of opportunity. With the exception of the cute female cop he’d singled out, all the ones he’d picked for that day were young blacks, clean-cut Cosby Show types whose yearbook pictures would look just great displayed below the tragic headlines.
The chants were growing louder and angrier, the individual confrontations at the line flaring higher. Olin Simmons picked up Thom Hollis’s rifle and brought the preset scope up close to his eye.
A line of burly men in the back let out a bloodcurdling rebel yell and pushed hard against the crowd in front of them, driving like the Packers’ defensive line against the training sled. At the same time a lit pack of firecrackers dropped to the pavement and the sharp reports sparked the beginnings of a panic among the pinned-in crowd. The surge of human pressure passed forward like a wave and the hapless protesters at the front were forced off balance and stumbling through the barricades.
As the police fell back a few of them were knocked from their feet and their partners responded with batons and fists and pepper spray. Some raised their guns, a spinning canister of tear gas was fired into the midst of the mob, and a regiment of more heavily armed reinforcements ran in to aid their brothers in uniform.
Olin Simmons took aim and shot the first young target in the side of the head, and then he took out a second victim before those around the first had even begun to react. He shifted immediately and found his woman cop, fired once, and then shot her again for good measure as she was going down.
At the unmistakable sound of gunfire most in the crowd would have run away if they could, but they couldn’t. They were now caught up in a shared mentality of fear and rage and had ceased to be individuals at all anymore. Whatever their plans for this march had once been, all ideals were forgotten with that first scent of blood. A roar went up from the thousands in the mob, a stirring primal sound completely out of place on those formerly civilized midwestern streets.
Now the violence would play out on its own; no more was required of the man who’d started it. As new shooting erupted and the police line fell and the mob stormed across the fragile barrier between chaos and law and order, Olin Simmons was already gone.
Chapter 27
In the morning Noah found himself feeling well enough to get up and around. After checking his vitals and joining him in a light, bland, institutional breakfast, Dr. Ellen Davenport accompanied him outside for a chat and a breath of cool, fresh air.
Older and happier times were revisited as they walked together. The things that had happened since were left for another day. The grounds were quite tranquil and uniformly green, something like a golf course but without all the fun. When the edge of the property came into view, though, the sight stopped him dead in his tracks. You can gloss over a lot of things with tasteful landscaping but a high electric fence, manned watchtowers, and coils of concertina wire are features that speak louder than even the best-kept shrubberies.
Upon turning around for the journey back, Noah was treated to yet another sobering view. Their walk had taken them far enough away from the building they’d left to see it from higher ground and in the context of its surroundings. He’d awakened that morning with a lingering suspicion left behind by a bad dream, and this sight confirmed that it was true.
“What’s wrong?” Ellen asked. She must have seen the look on his face.
“They brought me back. This is the same place where they held me before.”
He’d seen it only once from the outside and that had been on his way out, months earlier. The complex had obviously expanded since then. New construction was under way here and there: one strange windowless building bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, a deceptively bright and inviting welcome center, a strip of sterile shops and generic eateries, and what looked like a set of his-and-hers, cookie-cutter dormitories that were a perfect match for several others in the line. The hospital wing where they’d emerged was only a small part of the overall development.
“I don’t understand,” Ellen said.
“Didn’t anybody tell you anything about all this?”
“No. Your father said that you needed help, and that was all I needed to know. What kind of an operation is this?”
“It used to be called a fusion center. There are a lot of them around the country but this one’s apparently becoming a whole new breed. You’ve been to Disney World, haven’t you?”
“Sure.”
“This place is like Epcot,” Noah said. “You know, the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow? It’s just like that, only from hell.”
The walk back was considerably more introspective.
When they came to his room he closed the door and sat Ellen down in the corner as far from the ceiling camera as he could manage.
“I want you to go back to New York now,” Noah said, “and then get on with your life as best you can.”
“My life is fine, Gardner. I want to make sure you’re okay—”
“Listen to what I’m saying. I’m not okay. I don’t think I’m ever going to be okay again. I appreciate you coming here for me; you’re the best friend I’ve got and that means more to me now than I can ever tell you, but this is a bad place and you need to get out of here as soon as possible.”
His tone seemed to strike her even harder than the words themselves.
“All right,” Ellen said. She looked hurt, and he was sorry for that. “They’re redoing the floors in my apartment; I’d planned on being away for a while. I can’t go home tonight or tomorrow, but I’ll make all the arrangements to leave in a few days.”
“Good. It’s for the best.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t even stop by and see you again before I go?”
He nodded. “I don’t want you to be in danger, and I hope I get a chance to explain someday.”
• • •
At precisely 7:50 a.m. a perky male junior executive dropped in to accompany him to his rehab work assignment. The man waited outside the room while Noah showered and shaved.
When he finally opened his door to the hall he was provided with one last fashion accessory. The young man who’d been waiting had been joined by a security guard, and together they fitted Noah’s left ankle with an electronic tracking bracelet. It was formfitting enough so one’s socks could be pulled up over it and was otherwise black and featureless, except for an intermittent green light and a yellow Talion logo on its side.
“This is just for your safety,” the young man explained. He fiddled with his smartphone as the guard worked silently, and soon the small screen displayed a page full of data, an up-to-the-second status report on the new subject. “We can tell where you are and how you’re getting along, twenty-four hours a day. Like they say, if you’re not doing anything wrong there’s nothing to be concerned about, right?”
“Absolutely,” Noah said, as he finished replacing his shoe.
“We all have one here. You’ll get used to it before you know it.”
There were a number of moving color-coded lines and bars on the screen, and his escort cheerfully explained the purpose of several of them. Heart rate, stress level, oxygenation, psychogalvanic reflex—a rudimentary lie detector—and a blinking red dot on an overhead map that denoted his location to within a few feet.
“What’s that one?” Noah asked, pointing it out.
“That’s your blood alcohol level.”
“Well. What will they think of next.”
“It’s not that a little drink or two isn’t allowed. A reasonable amount of anything legal is okay. We just wouldn’t want anyone to overdo it. No smoking, of course.”
“Of course.”
On the walk to the place where he’d been assigned to work, his escort gave Noah the guided tour, complete with an approved company line on the purpose and function of the
complex. The weasel-worded language required continual mental translation, but this was the gist of it:
Despite the crumbling U.S. economy, money was no object for initiatives such as this. It was only right that the taxpayers should fund it; it was a big part of their future, after all. The place was evolving from the simple information-gathering site and detention center it had once been. It was now to embody the vision of an ideal community, a new approach to the concept of human society: peaceful, sustainable, tightly regulated, and when necessary, enforceable. It was designed to provide a perfectly level (and carbon-neutral) playing field for its residents in every approved aspect of their lives. All were taken care of, and all made their assigned contribution to the common good.
From each according to his abilities, in other words, and to each according to his needs.
The thousands of inhabitants already there were of two distinct types. The staff were only a small percentage of the total population. His guide stumbled a bit with his verbiage when describing the majority. They weren’t prisoners—at least not by the strictest definition. They hadn’t been arrested or charged with any crime and none were represented by counsel or awaiting trial. Still, this didn’t change the fact that none of them could leave. But then again, why should they ever want to?
Of those two available residence classes, Noah’s own new status was apparently yet to be determined.
Their destination was an old and stately five-story building that seemed out of place in its chillier surroundings. Skeletons of new structures were rising on either side but this one, it appeared, was being preserved as it originally stood.
Once inside they took an elevator to the top floor and then proceeded down a long hall with media and research rooms distributed along either side. These rooms were not unlike those in which he’d been forced to toil away when he was confined here before: dry rows and columns of identical desks and gray half-walled cubicles arranged in a highly functional and completely impersonal workspace. The difference now was that these rooms were all unoccupied and they appeared to have lain empty for quite some time.
The door at the far end of the hall had a hand-lettered sign affixed above it that read simply THE FIRST CIRCLE.
When they reached the watercooler the man accompanying Noah pulled him aside and said, “I should warn you about this pair you’ll be working around. Warn is too strong a word; just be aware that they’re likely to seem a little eccentric. When the departments in this building became obsolete these two were the only ones we weren’t able to reassign elsewhere. There are . . . special circumstances with both of them. And with you, too, I guess; that must be why they’ve assigned you here. In any case, if they get to be too much for you just let us know and we’ll try to make other arrangements.”
“Sure thing.”
As they approached, the sounds of a heated conversation were clearly audible. His escort sighed and slid a keycard through a reader and as the lock clicked and he opened the door the bickering within stopped abruptly.
“Noah Gardner,” the man beside him said, “this is Ms. Lana Somin, and that gentleman over at the typewriter is Ira Gershon.” He pronounced the word typewriter as though the presence of such a quaint contraption was a bottomless source of amusement.
Both those names were vaguely familiar. The first thing that struck him about the girl was that she was obviously a minor; she couldn’t have been a day older than fifteen. She was thin as a dime and pale like she’d never seen sunlight, dressed in faded black jeans and a fashionably ripped Wu Tang T-shirt.
The man was a grandfatherly senior citizen, but even at this first impression a boyish spirit seemed to shine through unaffected by his years. It took only a moment to realize how he recognized that face. Ira Gershon had been a longtime local anchor on the television news when Noah had first moved to Manhattan as a boy.
The girl didn’t bother to acknowledge Noah’s existence and she spoke instead to the man standing beside him. “I can’t really handle another day of this old guy,” she said. “I’m gonna do something desperate if you don’t let me out of here.”
“As we discussed,” Noah’s escort said, smoothly ignoring the girl completely, “let me know how it goes today. The front office will be interested to hear how you’re getting along.”
“Wait a minute, what is it I’m supposed to do here?”
“Just come on in and have a chair,” Ira Gershon said. He still had the voice of a man born for broadcast. With the sweeping gesture of a gracious host he directed the new arrival to a nearby desk. “Sit down right here, son. I’m on a bit of a deadline but as soon as I finish up with this copy, we’ll figure it out together.”
Chapter 28
They’d set up a workstation for Noah, and while all office activities were no doubt closely monitored, his access to the Internet didn’t seem to have any obvious restrictions. As the other two returned to their work he performed a few searches to try it out. The first subject was a young woman named Lana Somin.
The term hacker gets tossed around a lot in the media but this girl certainly fit both the original as well as the pop culture definition. Though she’d been given up for adoption at birth, she came from a family of certified geniuses, and her particular gift, as one of her lawyers had put it, was in the field of creative exploration. She was a whiz at breaking into places, digitally speaking, and she did so just to see if she could. After a bit of looking around, without stealing or even disturbing anything, she would promptly back out, cover her tracks, and leave the same way she came in. Her favorite places to go were those massively secure electronic fortresses that held themselves out to be impenetrable.
When she found a weakness in a security system she would venture in just far enough to record proof of the exploit and then inform the company involved that they had a problem. Many of them actually appreciated the service. If they disregarded her repeated notices or otherwise indicated that Lana should mind her own business, she shared her discoveries on a private blog for discussion among her anonymous online community.
Then someone had taken what they learned from her and done some serious crimes—a rash of identity thefts, wire fraud, targeted phishing scams, and the wholesale exposure of access codes and passwords to millions of user accounts. Some of these incidents got the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, and it wasn’t long before Lana Somin was taken into custody.
Her otherwise clean record, her age, and the rules of evidence being what they were, she still might have avoided prosecution, but her foster parents had flipped out and cooperated fully with the authorities. She was tried as an adult and convicted, and the sentencing judge had really thrown the book at her. The whole process hadn’t taken more than a few months, beginning to end.
The articles Noah scanned suggested that she’d been sent to some sort of a juvenile facility to serve out her punishment. Evidently there was more to the tale than that.
Ira Gershon’s presence in this place remained more of a mystery.
It had been well over a decade since he’d last been on television and much longer since his heyday back in the golden age. That was centuries ago in Internet time. Though he’d once been a trusted nightly presence in millions of homes there simply wasn’t much about him anywhere on the Web. There were a few pictures from his younger years, mostly with Gershon as the second face in a shot featuring someone else from the hall of fame of his profession: Paley, Murrow, Cronkite, Collingwood, Smith, Sevareid, Huntley, and Brinkley.
Some people have come to think that all information is waiting out there free and clear, that everything that’s ever happened and everyone who’s anyone is just a Google search away. But the universal library’s being continually pruned and revised; more and more, knowledge is being systematically narrowed down, filtered, and sanitized, limited to only those things granted a permit to be properly remembered.
Noah’s last search concerned The First Circle, the wording of that sign over the door outside. r />
He’d gotten the reference to Dante right away. In his Divine Comedy the First Circle of hell was on the borderlands of damnation, a place of mild despair without torment. Being sent there for eternity was considered a small measure of mercy, a lesser sentence granted to virtuous pagans while still denying them access to heaven. The sign here, though, was no doubt an even more subversive slap at authority, sent by way of Solzhenitsyn. In his book by that same title he’d written of Stalin’s treatment of select, valuable prisoners rounded up in the purges. They were spared the more brutal conditions of the gulag provided they continued to obediently bow down to the will of the regime.
The old-fashioned clatter of the typewriter ceased with a last ding and a carriage return. There was a sharp ratcheting sound as a sheet of paper was pulled up and out.
“All right, new guy,” Ira said, “how about if you proofread this piece for me? Let’s see what you can do to pull your weight.”
“Okay.” Noah took the three pages and picked a red pencil from the assortment in his desk drawer. “You know, I used to watch you on the news every night,” he said, as he began to read.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. I was pretty young to be a newshound then, but there was something very comforting about your delivery. I trusted everything you said.”
“Back then I did, too.” He indicated the story in Noah’s hands. “I hope you know to be a little more discerning now.”
As Noah began to read the piece he understood what Gershon had meant. This text was obviously nothing more than a load of talking-points propaganda for consumption by the wire services. Beyond the slanted content, though, there was another, more obvious problem.
Early yesterday in Chicago, what began as a peaceful march for fiscal reform and social justice erupted into a show of violence and brutality unlike anything seen in the city since the Days of Rage in the late 1960s. When the smoke had cleared four people lay dead, including one police officer. Scores of others were wounded, some critically, in what organizers are calling a bloody wake-up call and a rallying cry for the many similar citizen groups arrayed across a troubled nation.