Crack-Up (41 page)

I caught up with the impersonator as he stood in front of the door to the stairwell.
 
“In here,” he whispered.

“Kill him,” Darth said.
 
“Kill that son of a bitch.”

“Ssh!” I said.

We stood just inside the stairwell.
 
The concrete chasm was brightly lit.
 
I noticed steps leading up.

“They go to the roof,” said the impersonator.
 
“There are two Secret Service agents stationed up there now.
 
Once the building clears we’ll move across the hall, into one of the administrative offices.
 
You’ll be using your own Vaime Mk2.”

It was a favorite souvenir of mine, a sniper rifle from my early days in the Service, when I’d spent a year as one of the sharpshooters stationed on rooftops.
 
I kept it locked in a closet at home.
 
I could only assume the cabal had burglarized my townhouse for it.

“My own ammo?”

The impersonator nodded.
 
“NATO 7.62 millimeter.
 
You know how to use glass cutters, don’t you?
 
The windows don’t open in this building.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back,” he said and left, the heavy door clanging shut behind him.
 
I sat down on the cool cement floor, my back to a cool cement wall.
 
My heart was beating fast.
 
I would have to still it some or it would disturb my aim.
 
I felt exposed waiting there.
 
I guessed it wouldn’t be for long.

“You should’ve broken his neck,” Darth said.

“Shut up,” I said.

He did for awhile.
 
But I knew it wouldn’t last.
 
“Wait until he brings you the rifle,” he said.
 
“Then you’ll have him.”

“Have him?
 
What do you mean?”

“Take the rifle.
 
Take control.”

“Huh?”

“Take the rifle, take control.”

I stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling the presence of my brethren on the roof.
 
“What do you have in mind, exactly?”

“Point the rifle at plowboy,” Darth said, “as soon as he hands it over to you.
 
Then all you have to do is stick it in his back, and march him up the stairs.”

“To the roof?” I said.

“To the roof!”

“To the agents?
 
Why would I want to do that?”

“Plowboy will talk.
 
To save his own ass.
 
You’ll find out who he’s with!”

“Who the cabal is, you mean?”

“Of course!
 
You stupid dumb-ass!”

“But I made a deal with the cabal.
 
They’re going to help me and my family.”

“Wrong!
 
Wrong!
 
Wrong!
 
They’ll never lift a finger for you!
 
They’re just using you again!”

Darth’s strange power of suggestion had begun working on me again.
 
“My God, you’re right!”

The stairwell door flew open.
 
The impersonator rushed inside, holding the rifle.
 
My rifle.
 
He aimed it at my torso.

“You and your friend thinking about double-crossing us, are you?
 
I don’t think so, Mister Ward.
 
Now move it.”
 
He swung the barrel of the rifle toward the door, pointing with it.

I got myself up off the floor and stepped forward.
 
As I turned to exit, Darth shouted, “Take him!”

So I sprang toward the impersonator, feet first, aiming one of my bare heels at his jaw.
 
But he ducked and I missed him clean, crashing into the wall.
 
I rolled on my back, then jumped into a defensive crouch, but found myself inexplicably alone.
 
No impersonator.
 
No rifle.
 
He’d disappeared.
 
Disintegrated.

“He wasn’t real,” Darth said after awhile.

I nodded.
 
“But he was once.”
 
My mind replayed the phone call from my supposed father, and then that day soon after on the boardwalk outside my office.
 
“I think.”

I sat down on the bottom steps leading to the rooftop and bawled.
 
Up until a few moments earlier, I’d been keen on killing another innocent man—or so I thought I’d better presume in my muddled state.
 
And this time it’d been the president of the
United States of America
.
 
Yet my tears were tears of self-pity as well as shame, I’ll admit.

Now I had no cabal to help me or my family, and on the other hand, I couldn’t prove anything about the cabal in the hope of transferring some of the blame for the death of John Helms.
 
I couldn’t even decide if there had ever really been a cabal.

Darth said, “Pull yourself together.”

But I couldn’t.
 
I felt hopeless, helpless, clueless.
 
And then, suddenly, I felt nothing but panic.

“What if there really is a cabal?” I said.
 
“That would mean they’ve given up on me and found themselves another assassin!”

I jumped to my feet and raced up the stairs, where I found the door to the rooftop locked.
 
I banged hard on that door—and for a long time too—and screamed for help at the top of my lungs.

Meanwhile, I thought about the weather.
 
Bullets fly the straightest through cold, dense air without any wind—true air, it’s called—so the conditions for rifle fire aren’t optimal today.
 
It’s scorching outside and there’s a hot breeze too, and probably thermals rising up off the concrete, which means the sharpshooters are going to focus on buildings within about a seven hundred foot radius of POTUS.
 
Which means, given the building’s vantage point and the sight clearance, that there has got to be agents on this rooftop!
 
Damn it, open the hell up
!

When at last a Secret Service agent opened the door from the other side—pointing a rifle at my midsection—I said to him:

“I’m Argus Ward.
 
I’m here to save the president.”

Chapter 42

A judge returned me to DC’s maximum security psychiatric ward, where I fell under the care of Doctor Woods again.
 
She and the rest of the staff—the guards, in particular—paid me the extra attention a former escapee deserves, but at first I couldn’t help concocting sinister reasons for their stares and whispers.

Meanwhile, I ignored Darth as much as I could, though we did fall into a long, nasty spat one afternoon—all afternoon, actually, during lunch in the cafeteria, during rec time in the yard, and even during one of my counseling sessions with Doctor Woods—when he kept speaking gibberish to me and claiming it to be Greek, or Tagalog, or Swahili, and so on, and when I’d insist that it was only gibberish, he’d berate me for my ignorance of foreign languages and cultures, or invent some twisted native custom or ritual to sicken me with.

In ten day’s time, though, Darth was gone—gone forever, I hope, without denying some odd, mixed emotions about that son of a bitch—gone with all the rest of my unnatural cares and suspicions.
 
Once again, pills and therapy had demystified my world, made it safe again, predictable again, gloriously tedious.

I came to fear only the future.
 
My future.
 
My family’s future especially.

Meanwhile, I began sorting out the recent past.
 
It wasn’t long before I’d made up my mind about the impersonator.
 
He’d been real once, when he—or perhaps another, older man—phoned me to feed and focus my paranoia, when he’d pretended to be my missing father and warned me about John Helms.

He’d been real too, most probably, that day when he’d appeared on the boardwalk outside my offices, staring in at me, spurring me down the path of mental disintegration.

But when he next returned, weeks later, in the seafood restaurant, revealing himself as not my father, sharing his aims of presidential assassination—his and his powerful cabal’s—I’d spoken with a man who was not flesh and blood, but merely my own hallucination.
 
And so he’d remained from then on . . .

Eventually, I replayed all the events since my ordeal had begun with the naked flight attendant, separating fact from fantasy, sense from nonsense.
 
I had help this time, thankfully.

My first visitor was not Keisha Fallon this time, nor my wife, but Secret Service Director Nathan Pitt.
 
We talked seated at one of the circular orange tables in the visitors area.

He confirmed for me that we’d truly met recently in his home—after I’d defeated his security system, surprised him in his study—and that what I remembered him telling me was all true too.
 
The marriage of massive databases.
 
The new science of predictive analytics.
 
Data miners unearthing secrets of the heart and mind, if not the soul, calculating propensities for future behavior.

“Is choice just an illusion?” I asked him.
 
“Is there only predestiny?
 
Or is there really such a thing as free will?”

Pitt, I think, took my philosophical concerns as a sign of ongoing recovery.
 
He changed the subject.

“We’ve very nearly completed our internal reviews—and so has the FBI, and the
CIA
—and it looks like I was right.
 
This was no inside job, Argus.
 
We’re not dealing with any rogue element within the federal intelligence community.
 
Because none of our secure intelligence databases were ever breached or misused.
 
Only the feeder from outside.”

“The Wall Street consortium’s?”

He nodded.
 
“Financial Datacorp’s.
 
It’s online, so it’s not nearly as secure.
 
It gets hacked all the time.”

“You’re telling me the one database alone would be enormous enough for our unsub to do the required data mining?”
 
Unsub
, by the way, stands for
unknown subject
, i.e., an unknown suspect.

“No question, Argus.
 
We found proof.
 
You know what ‘log files’ are, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.
 
They’re automatically generated activity reports for network system administrators.
 
They report on every user connected to an online computer system—who they are, how long they remain, what they do.
 
“You found a trail?”

“A vapor trail, you might say.
 
Because every time our unsub would hack into Financial Datacorp’s system to run his data mining algorithms, he’d erase the web logs before leaving, removing every trace of his activities.
 
But one time he forgot.”

“Forgot?
 
Altogether?”