Puppets

  "It's important to stay hydrated," Mr. Smith reminded him, mothering a bit. "You should drink at least a pint every fifteen minutes when you're exercising."

  Three pulled the nipple valve on the bottle and sucked it down.

  "You and me, we've got a tough job, don't we?" Mr. Smith asked commiseratingly. The sadness came over him again, the resignation. All these reminders of human fallibility. Maybe all of life's efforts were in vain. He took a drink from his own water bottle and went on, "No, it's not easy to take on a whole society's ills. We're heroes, but nobody knows it. That's why we've got to stick together. That's why we've got to give it our all."

  Three had heard this all before, just one facet of the conditioning process, the "we're a team" angle. You wanted every nerve, every fiber, of the subject's psyche to be allied with the program. Sometimes it meant dominating him utterly. Sometimes it meant confiding, being sympathetic, and even eliciting his sympathy in return. They had just finished two hours of the dominance-relationship routine, so now it was time for the paternal-intimacy thing.

  But more than that, Mr. Smith was feeling acutely aware of the night wrapped around the house, pressing against the walls, isolating them and giving the sealed room a secret, urgent, lonesome feel. He felt in need of some semblance of normal human intimacy. So, yes, these confessionals did double duty. The world owed him that much.

  "I mean," Mr. Smith went on, "imagine yourself in my shoes. You're young, you're full of idealism, you're patriotic. You study medicine and psychology with the goal of serving mankind, you join the army to help your country in its hour of need. And your country says, Yes, welcome aboard, do we ever need you!"

  He paused and gave Number Three a look.

  Three knew that look, knew the drill. "That must have been very gratifying," Three said. His breathing had calmed now, but his voice was raspy. He cleared his throat.

  "Oh, let me tell you! It goes straight to your head! You're entrusted with secrets, you're given challenging assignments—very, very heady for a young man. When I started, I was young enough to believe they knew what they were doing, that it was necessary, it was right. Young enough to be flattered I was allowed to be part of it."

  Pause. The look. Three quickly cleared his throat again and said, "At first, anyway. Those bastards."

  Mr. Smith nodded. "Exactly! I could accept that in wartime normal rules of behavior, ideas about 'right' and 'wrong,' get bent. So I did my job. Our team molded killers, and I could believe in it. The war was going badly, the enemy often operated out of neighboring countries that we couldn't overtly attack. And the Russians and Chinese were helping the North Vietnamese, they were absolutely loving the tar baby we were stuck in, but we couldn't strike at them directly. But maybe that's not something your generation can understand—the frustration.

  "It must have been terrible," Number Three put in. "Can't really blame the armed services for wanting a solution."

  Mr. Smith thought that was a little glib, a little too eager. He didn't change his posture or his voice, but internally he went on high alert. Three was tricky as a weasel, maybe he was hoping to lull Daddy, get the jump on him, knowing he often got kind of carried away at this point. Mr. Smith drew his legs under him as he went on.

  "So I did what they wanted," he went on. "It was only later that I realized how bad it was. How I'd been deceived. For one thing, our subjects didn't work well. Half of them would go out and we'd never hear from them again, or they'd kill once or twice on target and then drift. Or they'd kill civilians, lots of them, My Lai was only one of dozens of disasters. I had a hard time with that. Yes, I had moral aversions. And, hey, just from a practical standpoint, that stuff was making it hard to keep the project hidden. And then, then, we began getting reports that some of them were killing our own guys. I questioned my superiors about this, they told me to forget about it. I argued that we'd lost our scientific objectivity, maybe it was time we had a moratorium and assessed the real results. But like everything else in that war, bad news was not allowed. 'Do your job,' I was told. 'You don't know the whole story. Trust us.' So I kept on. I was patriotic. I was loyal. I did my duty."

  Mr. Smith felt his control slipping despite his wariness of Three. A knot formed in his throat at the unfairness of it. The way he was treated! He glowered at the face of Morgan Ford, the wise-guy good looks, smart-aleck deadpan. The projected image didn't respond, so he turned his glare to Number Three. Time for some normative conversational input from the subject anyway.

  Three took the cue. "Those dirty bastards." He almost seemed sincere. "So what happened? When did you realize something had to be done?"

  "I'll never forget the day. Never. You have to understand, I hated the Vietnamese, I hated the antiwar movement in the U.S. But I still felt there had to be limits. I was still idealistic enough to believe our country's domestic life had to be kept out of it. Our civil government had to be immune from military influence. So one day, I'm in my lab, and I get assigned a new test subject, a big, healthy convict fresh from some penitentiary. Very high secrecy, new program priorities. When I was given my orders about how to structure the conditioning, I realized this guy wasn't being programmed for work in Vietnam. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia."

  Mr. Smith remembered it all too well. Reading through his lengthy directive, he'd realized how stupid he'd been, how easily led by the nose. Fight there, sitting numbly on one of the steel lab stools, he felt the fabric of his life unraveling. All his commitments and beliefs and loyalities. A long series of compromises, each made in good faith, each with just enough rationalization and justification to continue. But adding up to the insufferable.

  Plus the whole program was a scientific and medical disaster! The killers they manufactured were going on the fritz, nobody really knew how to do this! But no one wanted to hear it! And now he was supposed to build a killing machine to be let loose in the United States?

  "But I didn't have much leeway, see," Mr. Smith explained. He was tired of worrying about whether Three was going to try something, he didn't care. He got up, took out his Asp, flicked it to full length. He paced up and down, slapping the stainless-steel baton into his left hand. The next part he liked to tell without excess emotion, businesslike, stoical, showing how much he'd endured without complaint: "I knew I couldn't say anything. Because it was too big, too secret. Coincidentally, it was right then that my girlfriend got killed in a very questionable car wreck back in the States. Lynn, Lynnie—sweetest girl. Murdering her did double duty, for them. One, I was heartbroken, my last tie to normal reality was severed, I had nowhere else to go, the program was now my only home. Plus it made it perfectly clear what would happen to me if I squawked. So what did I do?"

  Number Three had flinched when he'd stood up, that was gratifying. Now he looked up at Mr. Smith, cowering. "Um, you, you didn't have a choice. You went on with it. You had to martyr your moral sensibilities. You had to disregard your scientific skepticism. They controlled you. They manipulated you."

  Mr. Smith nodded. Three was good, a bright young man. Too bad he had no spine to go with it, no staying power. But at this point, it didn't much matter. His programming would stick long enough for a final mission.

  "You got that right!" Mr. Smith went on. The bile was backing up in his throat, thirty years of bitterness, choking him. "I did as I was told. Yes, sir! Right away, sir! I went into my lab and laid the foundation programming for eight months. Then, at last, they gave me the targeting materials, always the last stage—the photos, tapes, bio materials. This was 1971, the U.S. was in chaos with the antiwar movement, a crisis of national identity, there was this peacenik making presidential noises. George McGovern. He was to be the target. I was creating a killer to eliminate a United States senator and probable presidential candidate! At last I was in the inner circle, among the guys doing the dirtiest of the dirty. Five years inside and the sacrifice of the girl I loved were the price of admission." He stamped past Number Three, then whirled on him. "You gotta under
stand, I hated the peace movement! But by then I hated my superiors, too. For killing Lynnie. For what they were doing to my life, to science, to the American principles we were supposed to be fighting for. For fucking cornering me, controlling me! And when I got the McGovern materials, I started thinking about the last eight years. We were always given secret directives, none of us ever knew what targets the other guys' labs were being assigned. Still, I knew the program had been running for at least ten years before I got there. So I had to wonder about the assassinations, JFK, the other Kennedy, King? I mean, all of a sudden this rash of domestic political hits, in the same few years? It doesn't look fishy? Doesn't look coordinated? Give me a fucking breakl I thought, 'My God, we've taken it on ourselves to decide the future of the United States!' Somebody had, anyway. Some small secret cabal, unelected, unknown. The arrogance—that was what did it for me.

  Mr. Smith stopped, glared at Three. Through the wall he heard whimpering, which would be Number Four, hearing the rising passion in his voice and feeling the conditioned-in fear mount. That was nice. But Three had been quiet for too long.

  "Time for a normative verbal response," Mr. Smith said sweetly.

  His tone scared Three, who barked quickly, "So you decided something had to be done! A form of protest that nobody could ignore!" A voice hoarse with fear.

  Right answer. Mr. Smith resumed pacing, his shadow briefly eclipsing the huge face of Morgan Ford projected on the wall.

  "Correct. Very good," he said. "So I deliberately skewed my new subject's targeting. He was sent off to do his job, fucked up, had to be cleaned up later. And then the Pentagon Papers thing blew up, all the secret bad news of the war came out, there were congressional probes and armed services reviews and news reporters up the wazoo. It got too hot for comfort, our labs were disappeared and the program got vanished. We were all reassigned or sent home. And the war ended about a year later."

  Significant pause.

  Taking the cue, Number Three said, "But that wasn't the end of the story. That wasn't the end of their manipulation of you."

  The right response again. But it was too easy, Three was being facile again and it enraged Mr. Smith. "No, it was not," he said, acting mollified. "No, it was not. There's no happy ending here." He let a benignly paternal expression come over his face, and then without warning, he lunged at Three, whipping the Asp toward his face.

  Three dodged with surprising quickness and scrabbled backward across the floor. Mr. Smith swung the Asp again, so fast it whistled in the air. It hit the lawn chair and sent it flying, the tube aluminum crimped at the point of impact. In another instant Three was on his feet, legs wide, ready, chest pumping.

  Another whistling swing of the Asp made contact, but only on the forearm, Three had defended himself well. A feint, another hit, partially deflected. Three was wincing from pain, but did a feint himself and then attacked. Mr. Smith anticipated it, sidestepped, clipped the back of his head with the Asp, sending Three sprawling. That must have hurt, too, but Three was up again in no time, face flushed with rage.

  This was good. Three was in good form. You always had to keep their reflexes sharp.

  "Excellent! Very good," Mr. Smith said. He frowned at Morgan Ford's impassive face on the wall and turned back to Three. "So now let's get back to some serious work."

  42

  MO PICKED UP THE women and they drove into the lowering sun over to Fort Lee. Rebecca arranged it so Rachel sat in front next to Mo, presumably to let them bond or fight it out or whatever. It was fairly strained.

  "So—where'd you guys go yesterday?" he asked casually.

  "Movie."

  Just out of politeness you could answer with more details, Mo thought. Like even the name of the movie, to give a guy something to go on here. He tried again, "That one friend of yours, she looks kind of Goth—"

  "See, Mom? I told you, everybody has this prejudice!" Rachel whirled to face Rebecca accusingly, as if this were part of a continuing discussion. "Cindy wears black and leather, and we all know what that means, don't we? Columbine High School! Kinky sex and murder!"

  "Wait a minute," Mo said. "Now you're being prejudiced about me—you know what I'm going to say. How? Because I'm a law-enforcement type?"

  Rachel faced him confrontationally. "So what were you going to say?"

  He actually hadn't been planning to say anything, he'd just been randomly tossing off possible starting places. But he improvised, "That she's pretty. That her Goth things one of my cousins, in Pittsburgh, is into that. She just graduated high school with honors and got a full scholarship to Smith. Majoring in ecology."

  Actually, Mo hardly knew his mother's sister's kids, and the girl wasn't as Goth-identified as Rachel's Cindy looked. He only knew any of this from his aunt's annual family newsletters.

  But Rachel took it at face value. She cranked herself around in the seat to say to Rebecca, "See? It's like I was telling you! I mean, the Goths are totally like the smartest, most nonviolent kids I know!"

  So now Mo was on her side. In the mirror, Mo saw Rebecca shrug, bemused by this turn of events, keeping her distance.

  Then something happened that he would never have expected. Rachel flicked her gaze at him and then frowned critically at her own hands. "You're right. I was being prejudiced. I'm sorry. It's very hard to catch."

  So she did take after her mother that way. The honest self-appraisal. Maybe there was hope for the kid.

  They got to the bowling alley at six o'clock, parking in the mostly deserted shopping-center parking lot. The fading facade of Star Bowl was lit with watermelon light from the westering sun, bright against the dirty sky of Manhattan beyond. Mo hit the men's room as the women checked in. When he came out and went to the desk to get his shoes, he looked over the lanes and spotted them immediately: two yellow-haired heads above the vinyl back of the booth at their lane. Rebecca's hair was bundled carelessly back, so that strands of it fell onto her face. Rachel seemed to be gabbing away, more kidlike than Mo had ever seen her. So probably there were parts of her she didn't reveal around him. That was instructive.

  The old guy at the counter sprayed some Desenex into a pair of shoes that looked like roadkill and handed them over.

  Rachel was okay, they had a pretty good time. Mo felt like he was getting the hang of it, handling the ball better. There were only two other lanes in use. It was a beat-up sort of place, the vinyl benches burned by cigarette butts, the wallpaper on the end wall coming loose, tacked at the top but starting to balloon inward. But he could see where you'd like the old-fashioned feel: the long,-low room, the waxy smell of the varnished lanes, the out-of-date high tech of the overhead scoring lights and ball returns, all in this rounded, passe futuristic style.

  They bowled a game and then took a break and went back into the dimly lit bar and grill. An older woman, maybe the wife of the guy at the front counter, got them Cokes and bags of chips, and they sat in a vinyl booth that smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Rachel tried to teach him how to talk with a Midwestern accent. His attempts were found very amusing. He reminded her they were being ironic here.

  Rebecca wasn't saying much, but she looked good even in a place like this, lit only by beer signs. When Rachel went to the bathroom, he reached across the table, took her hands, asked her how she was doing.

  "I'm okay. I like seeing you, Mo. Even if our dates are chaperoned. God, you have won Rachel over! It's hard to explain how happy that makes me."

  Won over seemed like maybe wishful thinking. The kid was loosening up a little but was still hanging pretty tough.

  "But something's on your mind," he said.

  "I don't really want to talk business tonight. But, yes, there's something about our basic thesis that's been troubling me. From a psychological perspective."

  "Okay—"

  Rebecca glanced back toward the bathrooms to make sure Rachel wasn't coming. "Geppetto. Whether it's Flannery or whoever, we believe the puppet-maker got his training during some secret mind-c
ontrol project in the Vietnam era. Right? And he has some agenda, some statement to make, that has no doubt been conflated seamlessly with a trauma he experienced in his past. But, Mo—the Vietnam War ended, what, twenty-seven years ago!"

  "So the problem is—?"

  "If the first of Geppetto's subjects was Ronald Parker, or even the one in San Diego that Erik worked on before he was assigned here, in 1995—what took him so long? What was Geppetto doing with his agenda and his bottled-up trauma for twenty-two years? Or, conversely, what happened in 1995 that triggered Geppetto to start up?"

  Good question. And good questions were windows into solutions. Mo was holding both her hands in both of his as he thought about it. And then Rachel was there, sliding into the seat next to her mother. "Am I interrupting something?" she said caustically. "Excuse me."

  Still, they bowled another couple of games, had a pretty good time. They headed out at nine o'clock, the last customers to leave, and the old man locked the door behind them.

  They weren't yet at the stage where it was confortable enough for everybody for Mo to drop Rachel at her dad's house. So he drove back across the bridge into Manhattan, not saying anything, feeling the pressure mount again. Rebecca's question had brought it all back. The dump, he was thinking. Tomorrow was Monday, he and St. Pierre would begin looking into junkyards, and they'd start digging into Dennis Radcliffs past to see how Geppetto had acquired him. Maybe they'd find a line to Geppetto. But it felt weak. And he wanted to get to work right away, now, tonight.

  When they got to Rebecca's building, he said, "Rachel, I'm going to kiss your mother good-night, and I don't care if you like it or not. If it makes you feel better, I'll give you a kiss, too." Rachel looked affronted for only an instant, then said, "Maybe some other time, big boy." A vamping voice that still dripped with disgust, but so well done they all three laughed. When they got out, he waited until they were safely in the lobby before he pulled away.

  Into Brooklyn. The thousand strands of the old bridge, the scintillating lights in the looming dark of the cities on either side of the river, then off at Flushing Avenue, down into the dark maze. Brooklyn streets at night. It was 9:48 on Sunday night, not the best time to barge in, but he'd been wanting to do this for almost two weeks. Not that he exactly believed in Mudda Raymon's prophecy ability and all that. But he couldn't deny she had gotten certain things right: the puppet-puppet, the dump. Could have meant nothing or anything—except that both ended up being relevant. Maybe he was being superstitious, but he found it easier to believe in intuition, even magic, than that much coincidence.