UnSouled (42 page)

Suddenly the entire crowd is silent.

“Chandler Hennessey and Morton Fretwell. They hunted AWOLs for a while in Denver, but now they’re trolling Minneapolis.” Then he puts the pictures down and gets as close to the microphone as he can. “I’m going to track them down and bring them back here to face justice.” And then, in perfect Arápache:

“Who will help me?”

The silence continues.

“I said, who will help me?”

For a long moment, Lev thinks no one will come forward, but then he hears a single voice—a woman’s voice—from the back of the crowd.

“I will,” she says in Arápache.

It’s Una. Lev hadn’t even seen her here. He’s both grateful and troubled. He was hoping to put together a good old-fashioned posse. If it’s just the two of them, what chance do they have of bringing in these pirates? What chance do they have of even surviving the attempt?

As Una moves through the crowd toward the stage, someone shouts, “C’mon! Clap for the clapper!”

People begin applauding. It starts slow, but it builds until
the crowd is cheering by the time Una reaches the stage. Now any doubts he had are gone. His bid to win over the Arápache people has begun—and if he succeeds, he knows he’ll be able to pull them into the battle against unwinding. He’ll finally have his dam!

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, little brother?” Una asks him over the cheering crowd.

Lev smiles at her. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

Part Six

Akron

TERRORISTS PLAN ATTACK ON BRITAIN WITH BOMBS
INSIDE
THEIR BODIES TO FOIL NEW AIRPORT SCANNERS

By Christopher Leake, Mail On Sunday Home Affairs Editor

UPDATED: 17:01 EST, 30 January 2010

Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, underground trains, and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes, or underwear to avoid detection. But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting “surgical bombs” inside people for the first time.

A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.

Security sources fear the body bombers could pretend to be diabetics injecting themselves in order to prevent anyone stopping their suicide missions.

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the Commons Counterterrorism Subcommittee, said: “Our enemies are constantly evolving their techniques to try to defeat our methods of detection. This is one of the most savage forms that extremists could use, and while we are redeveloping travel security, we have got to take this new development into account.”

Senior government security sources confirmed last night that they were aware of the new threat of body bombs, but were not prepared to make any official comment.

Published by permission of The Mail on Sunday.

See the full article here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247338/Terrorists-plan-attack-Britain-bombs-INSIDE-bodies-foil-new-airport-scanners.html

The Rheinschilds

Dr. Janson Rheinschild sits in a chair, in a room, in the dark, alone. His wife has gone to bed, but he cannot. After spending so many hours in bed, for so many weeks, he’s plagued by crushing insomnia, an unyielding headache, and a hollowness in his soul that he cannot describe.

Were he more shallow, he could be a very happy man—after all, he’s got millions in his bank account. He and Sonia could go anywhere they want and live out their lives in extravagant luxury . . . . But what would be the point? And where can they go that they won’t be reminded of the darkness they leave behind?

Unwinding is spreading. China was the first to jump on the bandwagon, then Belgium and the Netherlands and the rest of the European Union. The Russians claimed to have come up with the idea themselves, as if it were something worth claiming, and in third-world nations, where laws change as quickly as governments, the black-market trade in human organs has grown into a major industry.

And what of his attempt to change all that? What of his “life’s work that would end unwinding”? After one final attempt to get some answers out of BioDynix Medical Instruments, he was slapped with a cease-and-desist lawsuit and a restraining order that prevents him from coming within one hundred yards of any BioDynix employee.

Every day, the very existence of their basement reminds him that Austin—whom Janson and Sonia had come to care about like a son—is gone, and as if this cake needed any further icing, both he and Sonia have been virtually unwound themselves. Before Janson had been ousted from Proactive Citizenry for actually wanting to do some good in the world, they were working on digital footprint removal. It was supposed to be a way to protect one’s privacy on the web by removing unwanted and unauthorized references and pictures of oneself.

But like everything else, Proactive Citizenry found a way to weaponize it.

Now any and all references to Janson or Sonia Rheinschild have been eliminated from the digital memory of the world. Not only don’t they exist, but according to public records, they never existed. Those who know them will eventually forget them, and even if they don’t, those people will eventually die. Janson’s and Sonia’s footprints on this earth will be washed as clean as a beach at high tide.

And so Janson Rheinschild sits alone in his chair, turning all of his anger, his disillusionment, and his disappointment inward, until finally he feels his heart seize in his chest, knotting in the lethal cramp of cardiac arrest.

And he’s glad for it. He’s grateful that at last the universe has chosen to show him some mercy.

58 • Connor

The sign on the highway reads
WELCOME TO AKRON, THE RUBBER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
The dark, threatening skies feel anything but welcoming. Connor finds himself white-knuckling the steering wheel and has to loosen his grip.
Calm down. Calm down. It’s only a sign.

“The scene of the crime,” comments Cam from behind Connor, and then softens it by adding, “Of course, that depends on your definition of ‘crime.’ ”

Grace, still beside Cam in the backseat, is content to decipher personalized license plates and analyze them. “SSADAB.
Dumbass spelled backward. ‘
♥
&SEOUL.’ Some Korean guy who got an Unwind’s heart.” Grace seems immune to the heightened level of tension in the car until they approach a highway patrol car parked on the shoulder.

“Go slow! Go slow! Go slow!” she says.

“Don’t worry, Grace,” Connor tells her. “I’m right at the speed limit.” How stupid if they get caught for speeding and captured at this point.

The woods are now broken by suburban subdevelopments, and as the road rolls by, Connor tries to find the spot where his, Risa’s, and Lev’s lives converged. He doesn’t even know if this is the same freeway. It feels like something not just from another life, but from another world entirely. A world into which he’s just initiated reentry. He feels like Frodo at the gates of Mordor. Who would have guessed that Ohio could hold such dark portent?

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” asks Cam from the backseat. “Akron’s a big town.”

“Not so big,” is Connor’s only response.

Connor knows that Cam’s presence on this journey is a necessary evil, but he wishes Cam were not sitting right behind him where Connor can’t see him, except for suspicious glances in the rearview mirror. Cam’s offerings of information have not won Connor over. There’s something fundamentally underhanded and opaque about the Rewind, or at least about his intentions. Giving him the benefit of the doubt could damn them all.

“I imagine you must know Akron pretty well.”

“Not at all,” Connor tells him. “I’ve been here only once.”

That makes Cam laugh. “And yet they call you the Akron AWOL.”

“Yeah, funny how that works.” Connor is actually from a suburb of Columbus, hours away, but Akron is where he turned
the tranq on Nelson. Akron is where he became notorious. He didn’t even know where he was at the time. He only knew it had been Akron once they gave him the irritating “Akron AWOL” label.

“Center-North!” Connor blurts.

“Center-north what?” Grace asks.

“That’s the name of the school. Center-North High. I knew I’d remember it eventually.”

“We’re going to a school?”

“That’s ground zero. We’re looking for an antique shop near the school. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You sure about that?” asks Cam. “Memory’s a funny thing.”

“Only yours,” says Connor. He punches the name of the school into the GPS and a gentle voice directs them with confident, if somewhat soulless, purpose. In fifteen minutes, they’re on the east side of town. They turn a corner and things look troublingly familiar to Connor.

The school looks exactly the same. Three stories of institutional redbrick that somehow looks as intimidating to him as the Texas School Book Depository had when Connor’s family traveled to Dallas and took a tour of the infamous building where Oswald shot Kennedy. Connor takes a deep, shuddering breath.

It’s midmorning on a Tuesday, so school is in session. It’s just about the same time of day that the fire alarm went off and all hell broke loose. Connor rolls them slowly past. Across the street are homes, but up ahead is a main commercial street.

“Anything specific we should be looking for?” asks Cam. “Any defining characteristics of this antique shop?”

“Yeah,” Connor says, “old stuff,” which makes Grace laugh.

He wonders what Sonia will do when she sees him. Then
a horrible thought crosses Connor’s mind: What if she’s dead? Or what if she was caught and arrested for harboring Unwinds? He doesn’t voice his concerns, because if he doesn’t speak them aloud, maybe they won’t be true.

Connor slams the brakes, nearly running a red light. A pedestrian crosses the street glaring at them.

“Not much of a driver, are ya?” says Grace, then turns to Cam. “Did you know he almost killed Lev?”

“My driving’s fine,” Connor insists, “but this place is eating my brain.” He looks around, waiting for the light to change. “I don’t recognize any of this, but I know the shop can’t be more than a block or two away.”

“So drive around the school in a spiral that gets bigger,” suggests Grace. And then she adds, “Although since the streets ain’t round, it’s kinda a square spiral.”

“That’s called an Ulam spiral, by the way,” Cam says. “A way of graphing prime numbers. Not that you would know that.”

Connor gives him a disgusted look in the rearview mirror. “Is everyone in your internal community an ass?” Connor asks. It shuts Cam up.

They widen their search pattern until Connor hits the brakes suddenly again, but not because of a red light.

“There it is. It’s still there.”

The unprepossessing storefront of the corner shop has an understated sign that reads
GOODYEAR HEIGHTS ANTIQUES
. Being that it’s two blocks off the main thoroughfare, it doesn’t seem to be getting much business. Connor parks across the street, and they sit there in silence for about ten seconds. Then he unbuckles his seat belt.

“Well,” he says, “let’s go antiquing.”

59 • Sonia

She’s not surprised that the Lassiter boy has come here, but she is surprised by the company he’s keeping. That blasted Rewind is the last travel companion she’d expect to see him with. She doesn’t show her surprise though—and she doesn’t show how happy she is to see Connor either. As far as Sonia is concerned, authentic emotions are a liability. They always come back to bite you. Her poker face has served her well over the years, and on many occasions it has saved her life.

“So you’re back,” she says to Connor, putting down a lamp she had just repaired. “And with friends, no less.”

She makes no move to embrace him or even to shake his hand. Neither does Connor. He holds his distance—he too having learned the fine art of defensive dispassion. Still, he’s not as good at it as Sonia. She can tell how relieved he is to be here and how happy he is to see her. Even if he doesn’t wear it on his face, she can sense it in his general aura.

“Hello, Sonia,” he says, then smirks. “Or should I say Dr. Rheinschild?”

This is a surprise. She hasn’t heard the name spoken aloud in years. Her heart misses a beat, but she still doesn’t let the emotion show on her face, and she chooses not to respond to his accusation—for an accusation is exactly what it is—although she knows a nonresponse is as good as an admission.

“Are you going to introduce me to your little posse?” she asks. “Or have you still not learned any manners?”

He starts with the chunky, vague-looking woman who seems
out of place in this trio—although to be honest, none of them really seem to fit together.

“This is Grace Skinner. She saved my life a few weeks ago.”

“Hiya,” Grace says. She’s the only one who steps forward to force a handshake on Sonia. “I hear you saved his life too, so I guess we’re in the same club.”

Then Connor reluctantly introduces the Rewind. Sonia, however, stops him before he speaks the name.

“I know who he is.” She steps closer to Cam, peering through glasses as antique as anything else in her shop—the wage of refusing new eyes. “Hmph,” she says. “No scars at all—just seams. My compliments to your construction crew.”